Suffrage Wagon News Channel
Suffrage Wagon News Channel was a multi-media advocacy project that promoted women’s suffrage history and voting rights. The project focused on the women’s suffrage movement in the United States, with an emphasis on the activities of early 20th-century activists, including the founder’s grandmother, Edna Buckman Kearns. The project aligned with broader left-of-center causes related to women’s interests and voting access, and its founder participated in the left-of-center Women’s March in 2019. As of 2025, the project had not published content since 2018. 1 2
Contents
Background
Suffrage Wagon News Channel launched in 2009 as a platform for news, stories, and views related to the women’s suffrage movement and the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which established a national-level right for women to vote. The project was named after the “Spirit of 1776” horse-drawn wagon used by Edna Buckman Kearns for suffrage campaigning on Long Island and in New York City during the early 1910s, which is now on display at the New York State Museum. 3
Marguerite Kearns, the project’s founder, is the granddaughter of Edna Buckman Kearns and her husband, Wilmer. 1 4
Activities
Suffrage Wagon News Channel published blog posts, videos, audio podcasts, and social media content about women’s suffrage history, voting rights, and related content leading up to the centennial of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which established women’s suffrage in the United States at the national level. The project featured stories on suffrage activism, such as Edna Buckman Kearns’s work with Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party, and highlighted a variety of women’s suffrage activists and male organizers campaigning on their behalf. The project also partnered with organizations like the Turning Point Suffragist Memorial to raise awareness of suffrage history. Content also extended to contemporary issues, including supporting the proposed Equal Rights Amendment and encouraging women to vote. 5 6 7
The project and Marguerite Kearns’s work also heavily promoted suffrage activist Inez Milholland, another notable figure at suffrage protests in the 1910s. 8
People
Marguerite Kearns founded and edited Suffrage Wagon News Channel. Kearns, a self-described freelance journalist and author, previously worked for the National Education Association-New Mexico labor union as director of communications from 1999 to 2009. She authored the book An Unfinished Revolution: Edna Buckman Kearns and the Struggle for Women’s Rights, published by SUNY Press in 2021, which chronicled her family’s involvement in the suffrage movement. The book description notes that the book opens “with ten-year-old Marguerite Kearns listening to her grandfather Wilmer’s stories about how he met her grandmother Edna, a ninth-generation Quaker and ardent suffrage campaigner, and how he fell in love with her” and notes that Marguerite Kearns “becomes an activist herself, and when she marches in a present-day women’s march, she carries a photo of her grandparents participating in a 1914 women’s march in New York.” 9