Let’s go back, about 110 years, to a meeting, say in a small New Hampshire town. I’m conducting it, and I’ll now introduce our special guest. Mrs. Snodgrass Uppington, President of the Kearsarge Association Opposed to Further Extension of Suffrage for Women.

Kearsarge Association was fictional, but this one was real! From the U.S. National Archives

Oh, wait, just one moment. There’s a march going on in the street. It’s so noisy. I’ll have to close the windows. Excuse me just a second, before Mrs. Uppington takes the dais. Mrs. Uppington?

A fashionably-dressed society lady addresses the audience:

Ladies and gentlemen,

Our country is moving forward on a path to ever greater civilization. Advances in medicine save lives. Inventions like the telephone connect us instantly. American business and manufacturing propel us toward unparalleled prosperity.

But dangerous people threaten this march of progress. You’ve all seen them. Loud, strident, rude, mannish and eccentric persons—ugly old spinsters who can’t get a husband—who endlessly harp on a single issue. They write letters to the weary editors of our newspapers. They march in the streets, carrying banners. They put up posters with noxious slogans. I refer, of course, to supporters of the proposition of votes for women.

You may well allow ladies to vote for school board or city councilors. But the agitators want more. They want women to vote at all levels of government—and even for the president of the United States.

Women don’t need the vote. “No taxation without representation!” the suffragists whine. Why, women are represented—in the political field, the battle field, and the corn field. Their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons vote, and women can influence them.

Female suffrage is dangerous. It is tied to socialism, and socialism means distribution of property, free love, and institutional life for children.

If women vote, proponents say, they will help pass laws to raise our health and hygiene standards. Nonsense! Women can raise standards simply by setting a good example, and keeping their own houses clean.

Women have progressed enormously without voting. Votes for women are unwise, unchristian, and a threat to our civilization. Thank you very much.

Well!

I took the language of my fictional Mrs. Uppington’s talk from actual broadsides. Many prominent, wealthy, educated, and civic-minded women held these views. Fortunately, plenty of women (and men) from all walks of life disagreed.

And women from all races. Countless black women, especially university graduates, worked for the cause. Sadly, white suffragists often did not treat them with respect. Ida B Wells-Barnett, the African-American journalist who worked passionately against lynching, was a star suffragist. But in the protest parade in Washington on the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration (1913), she was told to go to the back of the line. She refused and jumped in alongside the white suffragists from Illinois.

Suffragists included working-class women as well as society ladies. In 1917, Leona Hunsinger and Elizabeth Hopkins left their jobs at a lace curtain factory to see the world. They made votes-for-women speeches standing up in the backseat of their Ford.

Annie Tinker was a free thinker in regards to dress. In the 1913 parade in Washington, she rode a horse, decked out in riding boots, breeches, a man’s coat, and silk top hat. Gossip columnists were snide—but today the photographs make her look brilliant.

Remember our fictional Mrs. Uppington’s charge that suffragists were “mannish and eccentric?” That was code for lesbian. Well, lesbians and bisexual women were amply represented in the movement.

Sometimes they’d modify their images to suit the context. The president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Carrie Chapman Catt, helped win over President Wilson and strategized to get the voting act through Congress and ratified by the states. When she chose, she could look like the epitome of respectability. She was married twice, and apparently devoted to both men. But her last companion in life was another woman, Mary Garrett Hay, and it was Mary alongside whom Catt chose to be buried.

Suffragist Molly Dawson lived with her partner Polly Porter on a farm in Massachusetts, where they named their bulls after men they disliked.

We’re familiar with the photos of pioneering feminists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. However, there were hundreds and thousands of suffragists who never got famous. I was tickled to find, in the 1902 Franklin Journal-Transcript, that my great-grandmother, Ida E Everett, had entertained Carrie Chapman Catt at her house for tea. Ida represented New Hampshire on the Executive Committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association that Catt headed. Her daughter, my great aunt Bernice, was also an activist. “Why!” my dad used to say, “they stomped on down to Washington and chained themselves to the White House fence.”

Great-grandmother Ida Everett with my dad and his brother.

We can’t claim credit for the character of our ancestors, but somehow I feel some inherited glory in the thought of Ida and Bernice stomping on down to Washington.

So, what’s next? Did getting the vote solve everything for women? I hear your guffaws. Women’s apathy was a problem. Distressingly, in the election of 1920, only 36% of women went to the polls, compared to 68% of men. But gradually, the percentage of women who voted grew and grew. Since 1960, women have been more likely to vote than men. In the 2018 midterms, says Pew Research, 53% of voters were women and 47% were men.

As a society, we’re still fighting over voting rights, citizenship rights, women’s rights. A hundred years after women first voted in a national election, courageous people are still stomping on down to Washington.  Today, they’re stomping to the polls. Citizens! Keep on stomping!

This post is a version of a talk given to the Kearsarge Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship on September 20, 2020.