To celebrate this year's theme, we are highlighting women writers whose contributions furthered the women's suffrage movement.
On January 8, 1868, Susan B. Anthony and George Francis Train launched the first woman’s suffrage newspaper in the U.S., The Revolution, with the slogan “Women, Their Rights, and Nothing Less.” Between 1878 and 1890, 33 women’s suffrage newspapers followed suit.
- Ida B. Wells was an investigative journalist and suffragist who began her activism in 1884. She was in the first suffragist parade in Washington, D.C., in 1913, as the sole Black woman in the Illinois delegation. She founded and co-founded a variety of civil rights organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Association of Colored Women and the Alpha Suffrage Club.
Ida B. Wells, American investigative journalist, educator, suffragist, and early leader in the civil rights movement.
- Lucy Stone edited the most important journal of the movement, Woman’s Journal. Founded by Stone and her husband Henry Blackwell in 1870, she edited the journal until she died in 1893. By 1915, it had 30,000 readers. This weekly journal kept women across the U.S. informed of the latest news concerning women’s issues and the suffrage movement, from child labor laws to anti-suffrage activities.
- Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was an abolitionist, suffragist, poet, and the first Black woman to publish a short story. She aided the underground railroad and was co-founder of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). She refused to bow down to any discrimination, and used her words to fight oppression in all its forms.
- Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin founded the New Era Club, an advocacy group for Black women, with the help of Ida B. Wells between 1892 and 1894. For the club, Ruffin edited the first newspaper published by and for Black women, The Woman’s Era. She’s considered one of the leading activists in organizing Black women to women’s suffrage.
- Judith Sargent Murray was an essayist, playwright, poet, and letter writer. She considered one of the earliest feminists, and her essay “On the Equality of the Sexes” was published in 1791, a year before Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
*Information from "‘Women, their Rights, and Nothing Less’: Literary Activists of the Women's Suffrage Movement" by Margaret Kingsbury, 2017.
Chicago Theatre Week is Back!
Chicago Theatre Week is an annual celebration of the rich tradition of theater-going in Chicago. As a program of the League of Chicago Theatres, in partnership with Choose Chicago, CTW is in its ninth year and is taking place now through March 7, 2021.
Chicago Theatre Week 2021 will look differently than it has before, with the focus shifted to supporting theaters and engaging with digital content. Find more information at ChicagoTheatreWeek.com.
Watch the Chicago Theatre Week 2021 video below!
Our 2020-2021 season is sponsored by Alan and Susan Becker
First Folio's programs are sponsored in part by grants from the Illinois Arts Council (a State agency) and the Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation.
First Folio Theatre is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
All performances take place on the grounds of the Mayslake Peabody Estate, which is owned and operated by the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County. Indoor shows are presented in Mayslake Hall, a 30-room Tudor Revival style mansion originally built by coal baron Francis S. Peabody. Completed in 1922, the mansion is on the National Registry of Historic Places.
First Folio Theatre is fully accessible with reserved ADA seating available and assisted listening devices available for all indoor performances. To request ADA seating, please contact the Box Office at 630-986-8067.