Finding Justice: The Untold Story of Women’s Fight for the Vote

In late 2015, I came across an old black and white photograph. A woman stood on the back of a flat-bed truck next to a huge bell and a “Votes for Women” banner.

I discovered that the bell was called the Justice Bell. It turned out that a century ago this bell had been a national symbol for women’s voting rights and had been so famous that news of its travel was splashed across the front pages of newspapers in every state. More than a million people had seen it and celebrated it at roadside rallies, parades and community events. This 2,000-pound bronze bell was a replica of the Liberty Bell, without the crack and with the added engraved words from the Preamble to the Constitution, Establish Justice. Throughout its 5,000-mile journey, the women ordered the clapper to remain chained to its side to represent the silencing of their voices. The bell was rung for the first time after the ratification of the 19th Amendment in a celebration on September 25, 1920 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania attended by 10,000 people.

Where is this bell? It turned out it is located only 15 miles from my home. Why have I never heard about it, I wondered. Somebody must know about it. Yet, I could not find anyone—not a librarian, history teacher, or women’s rights leader. When I went to see the bell and spoke with people who worked there, it turned out that even they didn’t know what it was.

By early 2016, I had deepened my research going to historical societies, tracking down the rector of a church who had rescued the bell from the woods in the early 1990s where it had been abandoned for decades, searching through newspaper archives, and uncovering stories of women who had fought for voting rights.

In August 2016, I cofounded a nonprofit, the Justice Bell Foundation (JBF), so I could bring the story of the Justice Bell and the women who fought for voting rights to schools and organizations. In 2019, the JBF partnered with the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts to create a public art project, a Justice Bell replica that travels to museums and other institutions.

During the last five years, I have spoken to many audiences and hundreds of people about my discovery of a lost national symbol for voting rights, and have found that people are flabbergasted by how little they know about the women’s suffrage movement, and nothing about the Justice Bell. It is as if this entire chapter of American history has been written in invisible ink. Ultimately, I decided to make a film about it.

My goal in making "Finding Justice: The Untold Story of Women’s Fight for the Vote" is not only to introduce audiences to their past, but also to inspire them to invest in their future.