The Bridge: A Joint Edition of the Journals of Newport History and Rhode Island History Fall 2020

THE BRIDGE:

Newport Historical Society 82 Touro Street Newport, Rhode Island 02840

A Joint Edition of the Journals of Newport History and Rhode Island History the bridge:

Fall 2020

a joint edition of the journals of newport history and rhode island history

The Bridge: A Joint Edition of the Journals of Newport History and Rhode Island History

www.NewportHistory.org

www.rihs.org

front cover:

Suffrage envoy Sara Bard Field (left) and her driver, Maria Kindberg (center), and machinist Ingeborg Kindstedt (right), during their cross-country journey to present suffrage petitions to Congress, September-December. United States Washington D.C., 1915. [Sept.-Dec.] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/mnwp000424/. back cover:

Petitions from Burillville, 1878 and Tiverton, 1879. Woman suffragists tirelessly circulated petitions throughout Rhode Island urging an amendment to the Rhode Island state constitution between 1869 and the end of the century. Petitions Failed/Withdrawn, 1811-1900, C#0869; C#01179, rhode island state archives.

The Bridge: A Joint Edition of Newport History and Rhode Island History fall 2020

The Bridge: A Joint Edition of Newport History, scholarly journal of the Newport Historical Society, and Rhode Island History, scholarly journal of the Rhode Island Historical Society, replaces Newport History, Summer/Fall 2020, Volume 93, Number 282; and Rhode Island History, Fall 2020, Volume 78, Number 1.

C. Morgan Grefe, Executive Director, Rhode Island Historical Society Ruth S. Taylor, Executive Director, Newport Historical Society Ingrid Peters, Deputy Director & Academic Services, Newport Historical Society Rick J. Ring, Deputy Executive Director for Collections and Interpretation, Rhode Island Historical Society Gayle Bordlemay, Designer Elizabeth C. Stevens, Editor Kaela Bleho, Photo Archivist and Manager of Digital Initiatives, Newport Historical Society JD Kay, Digital Imaging Specialist, Rhode Island Historical Society For a full list of staff and trustees, visit www.newporthistory.org or www.rihs.org.

support for the bridge was provided by :

Dwight and Susan Sipprelle Mr. & Mrs. Richard I. Burnham Dr. Elaine Forman Crane Anonymous Liz Rollins Mauran Jessica Hagen

We wish to thank Phoebe Bean, Jennifer Galpern, Dana-Signe Munroe and Rebecca Valentine at the Mary Elizabeth Robinson Research Center of the Rhode Island Historical Society; and Michelle Farias, Archivist and Special Collections Librarian at the Redwood Library for assistance with research related to this issue.

The Newport Historical Society and the Rhode Island Historical Society assume no responsibility for the opinions of contributors to The Bridge: A Joint Edition of the Journals of Newport History and Rhode Island History. This issue and all issues of Newport History and Rhode Island History are peer-reviewed. Newport History and Rhode Island History are published two times a year by their respective institutions: the Newport Historical Society at 82 Touro Street, Newport, Rhode Island 02840 and the Rhode Island Historical Society at 110 Benevolent Street, Providence, Rhode Island 02906. For information on subscribing or submitting to Newport History, visit www.NewportHistory.org. For information on subscribing or submitting to Rhode Island History, visit www.rihs.org.

COPYRIGHT Š 2020 by the Newport Historical Society, 82 Touro Street, Newport R. I. 02840; (401) 846-0813.

(ISSN 0028-88918 [Newport History] and ISSN 0035-4619 [Rhode Island History]).

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: “We shall neither delay nor rest until the cause is won.” . . . . . . . . . v Elizabeth C. Stevens Defending the “Woman’s Sphere”: The Ideology and Opposition of Anti-suffragists. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 J. Stanley Lemons Uncovering the Lives of Ordinary Rhode Island Suffragists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Elisa Miller “A Crisis in Our Cause”: The Fifteenth Amendment and the Newport Woman Suffrage Convention of August 1869. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Elizabeth C. Stevens The Lippitts of Rhode Island: Anti-suffrage and Female Political Activism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Carrie E. Taylor The Newport Women 1919 Voter Registration Book: “The women know what they want and they know how to get it” . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 Ingrid M. Peters

Executive Board of the Woman’s Newport League. The League, formed in the 1880s, worked against racial discrimination on a wide variety of issues, and for woman suffrage. Executive board of Women’s League, Newport, R.I. Newport Rhode Island, 1899. [?] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/98502151/.

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“Campaign of 1914, Newport, R. I.” Photograph, National Woman’s Party Photograph Collection, 1914.001.071.02. national woman’s party, at belmont-paul women’s equality national monument.

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introduction: “We shall neither delay nor rest until the cause is won.”

q

On January 5, 1920, the night before the Rhode Island legislature voted to ratify the 19th Amendment, R. I. suffrage workers held a “Victory Dinner.” The organizer of the affair, Sara Algeo, a key leader in the final woman suffrage effort, remembered that, although the event was held in Providence at the Turks Head Club, “it was wholly democratic in the happy mingling of men and women of all walks of life, who have stood from the beginning shoulder to shoulder in their fight for women’s rights.”1 Although it contains neither speeches nor toasts, one hundred years after the suffragists’ celebration, this historic combined Summer/Fall 2020 issue of Newport History and Rhode Island History presents various aspects of the narrative of the woman’s suffrage cause in Rhode Island. Articles examining deeply embedded cultural obstacles and the work of organized anti-suffragists in the state frame accounts of the indefatigable labor of Rhode Islanders who worked for the right of women to gain the elective franchise.

At their January 1920 celebration, the suffragists hailed the “fifty year” fight of organized woman suffragists. Indeed, Rhode Islanders had advocated for women’s rights well before woman suffragists officially organized in December 1868.

Providence’s Paulina Wright Davis spearheaded the first national woman’s rights convention in Worcester, Mass. in October 1850, when the culminating resolution called for, “Equality before the law, without distinction of sex or color.”

Among the speakers at the 1850 convention was thirty-twoyear-old Martha Mowry (1818-1899) of Rhode Island who was studying to be a physician.2 Rhode Island could claim perhaps the first publications in the United States devoted to woman’s rights, Anna W. Spencer’s The Pioneer and Woman’s Advocate (1852-1853) and Davis’s The Una (1853-1855).

During the Civil War, Rhode Island women contributed mightily to the Union war effort. Women all over the state formed Soldiers Aid Societies, sewing and preparing clothes for R. I. troops and sending barrels of food and other necessities to the front. Katharine Prescott Wormeley organized soldiers’ wives and daughters in Newport into paid sewing brigades;

hundreds of “needlewomen” in Providence contributed some 29,000 articles of clothing. Wormeley went south to work on hospital ships and battlefields, returning to Rhode Island in 1862 when she was appointed superintendent of Lovell’s General Hospital at Portsmouth Grove, a facility for wounded soldiers.3 After the war, some Rhode Island antislavery and woman’s rights activists, like Elizabeth Buffum Chace of Valley Falls, George T. Downing of Newport, and Paulina Wright Davis, joined the Equal Rights Association, a national group that

Paulina Wright Davis’s publication, The Una, was an early woman’s rights paper. (“The Una — A Paper Devoted to the Celebration of Women,” Providence, R.I., March 1, 1853, RHi X17 3983, rhode island historical society collections).

Introduction v v

Newport’s Katharine Prescott Wormeley was a nurse and hospital administrator during the Civil War. Black, James Wallace, photographer.

Katharine Prescott Wormeley, Civil War relief worker, U.S. Sanitary Commission nurse, and hospital director / J.W. Black, Washington St., Boston. United States, None. [Boston: J.W. Black, Washington St., between 1861 and 1865] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2018653929/.

Paulina Wright Davis was the dynamic first president of the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association. Photograph, n.d.

RHi X17 3324. rhode island historical society collections.

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pledged to work for equal rights for formerly enslaved people and for the right of women to gain the elective franchise.

The earliest extant petition to the Rhode Island Legislature on the subject of woman suffrage, signed by men and women, was submitted in 1867 to the State House.

In November 1868, reformers met in Boston to found a New England association to agitate for the right of women to vote. Rhode Islanders Elizabeth Buffum Chace and Paulina Wright Davis, who attended the inaugural meeting of the New England Woman Suffrage Association (NEWSA), were so energized by the formation of the group that they immediately initiated an auxiliary in Rhode Island (the Rhode Island Woman’s Suffrage Association, or RIWSA). The Call to the state’s first woman suffrage convention was issued in early December 1868. Among the Rhode Island subscribers were several clergymen from Newport, including Thomas Wentworth Higginson, radical antislavery workers like Susan Sisson of Pawtucket, and Phebe Jackson and Asa Fairbanks of Providence, and manufacturer Rowland G. Hazard from Peacedale. The suffragists convened on December 11th at Roger Williams Hall in downtown Providence. Antislavery and woman’s rights notables Frederick Douglass, Lucy Stone, and Abby Kelley Foster spoke to a crowd estimated at one thousand people.4 In the days following the December 1868 convention, workers set to the task of publicity and agitation, arranging monthly meetings and annual events with dynamic speakers, and petitioning the legislature. As seen in “A ‘Crisis in our Cause’: The Fifteenth Amendment and the Newport Woman Suffrage Convention of 1869,” in this issue, a painful schism among woman suffrage leaders at this time reverberated in the fledgling Rhode Island woman’s suffrage organization, although differences failed to dampen the resolve of RIWSA workers.

The fight for woman suffrage in the state was an intensely uphill one. In “Defending the ‘Woman’s Sphere’: The Ideology and Opposition of Anti-Suffragists,” J. Stanley Lemons explains, “There was no need for an anti-suffrage organization because woman suffrage was so wildly unpopular.” In this issue, Lemons describes the deeply entrenched attitudes and customs that prescribed a role for middle-class white women in an enclosed domestic realm, while the brutish public world of business and politics was restricted to men. The early woman suffragists and allies were disparaged and scorned.5 State representative James W. Stillman, of Westerly delivered a

pro-woman suffrage address in the R.I. legislature in February 1869, “under a shower of ridicule and bitter sarcasm.”6 Despite such daunting obstacles, Rhode Island woman suffragists persisted in their agitation.

By 1884, after years of petitioning the legislature, the women of RIWSA, scored a coup when they secured the R. I. State House as the setting for a gala convention that boasted such luminaries as Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucy Stone. At the event, attendees overflowed the assembly chamber and speakers were sent out to the corridors and passageways to address the crowds. The Rhode Island suffragists had come a long way in promoting their cause, their president Elizabeth Buffum Chace observed, but women still had a distance to go to secure the franchise for women in the state.7 Just three years after the State House convention, the Rhode Island woman suffragists’ incessant push for an amendment to the constitution paid off in March 1887 when Rhode Island legislators approved a statewide referendum on woman suffrage. The suffragists and their allies had but three weeks to press their case. A cadre of able workers labored tirelessly.

A fully-staffed headquarters was established in downtown Providence and a suffrage organizer was hired from out of state.

Ninety-two meetings were held in cities and towns throughout

Frederick Douglass spoke at the inaugural convention of the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association in December 1868.

Ritchie, Alexander Hay, Engraver, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Frederick Douglass / engd. by A.H. Ritchie., 1868.

[Hartford, Conn.: Hartford Publishing Co] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2014645333/.

The earliest known petition for woman suffrage in the state was submitted to the R.I. legislature in 1867. Petitions Failed/Withdrawn, 1811-1900, C#0869; C#01179, rhode island state archives.

Introduction v vii

Elizabeth Buffum Chace led the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association for three decades. Photograph of a painted miniature, n.d., RHi X17 4246, rhode island historical society collections.

Sarah Soule Wilbour (1804-1891), of Little Compton, was a dedicated woman suffragist in the first decades of the movement in Rhode Island.

Painting, artist unknown, ca. 1860. courtesy of the little compton historical society; https://lchistorical.wordpress.com/historicalresources/little-compton-womens-history-project/sarah-soule-wilbour/.

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Rhode Island, and several issues of a suffrage newspaper, The Amendment, were distributed. The state amendment failed badly (6889 ayes and 21957 yeas) yet the suffragists pressed on.8 During the arduous struggle to secure the vote in Rhode Island, women of RIWSA collaborated with other women activist groups in the state to work on achievable objectives that would favorably affect women’s lives. The Gilded Age saw a proliferation of women’s organizations and clubs in Rhode Island. For example, Chace led RIWSA to partner with WCTU activists to pressure the R.I. legislature to require cities to hire female matrons in police stations where women were detained.

Suffragists, led by Sarah Doyle, spearheaded the push to admit women students to Brown University. RIWSA’s concern for female factory workers, outlined by Elizabeth Buffum Chace in an address to a national Woman’s Congress in 1881, eventually resulted in an 1893 legislative hearing in Rhode Island in which a broad coalition, including the R.I. Council of Women (a consortium of women’s organizations), and women union organizers from the Knights of Labor participated.

Their campaign prevailed. Fanny Purdy Palmer, a local suffrage activist, was hired as the first Female Factory Inspector in Rhode Island to oversee enforcement of new regulations protecting female and child factory workers.9 While RIWSA workers partnered with other women’s organizations to benefit women and children in the state, the vote still remained elusive. As leaders like Chace began to curtail their activities due to advancing age in the 1890s, a next generation of suffrage leaders emerged. Ellen Kenyon Bolles (b. ca. 1847) who was born in Coventry and later lived in North Providence, was a reformer who was active not only in promoting woman suffrage, but in advocating for the rights of labor and other causes. After the crushing defeat of the amendment campaign in 1887, Ellen Bolles took the lead in a RIWSA campaign to press for presidential suffrage for women.

In 1897, Ellen Bolles demanded that presidential suffrage for women be included in a new R. I. constitution. When the commission ignored her pleas, she sent a protest to the R.I. House of Representatives. In a letter to the suffrage weekly, The Woman’s Journal, in 1892, Bolles stated that, “suffrage...is an inseparable right of citizenship…To make sex a qualification disenfranchises half the citizens of a State in a manner impossible to overcome, and is a discrimination utterly unwarranted by any word or syllable of the U.S. Constitution.”

Bolles’s untiring work continued for years as she agitated on the state, regional and national level for woman suffrage.10

Petitions from Smithfield and Woonsocket, 1879. Woman suffragists tirelessly circulated petitions throughout Rhode Island urging an amendment to the Rhode Island state constitution between 1869 and the end of the century. Petitions Failed/Withdrawn, 1811-1900, C#0869; C#01179, rhode island state archives.

Introduction v ix

In 1887 woman suffragists waged an all-out campaign to win over male voters in a statewide push for an amendment to the state constitution.

Printed, RHi X17 4255, rhode island historical society collections.

During the 1890s, the suffrage impulse was growing in Rhode Island as the Colored Women’s Club movement was gaining traction. Mary H. Dickerson of Newport, an African American who ran a successful tailoring business was instrumental not only in the founding of the Woman’s Newport League, but in organizing a national consortium of Colored Women’s Clubs and in engendering regional and state associations of the clubs. These organizations worked on a broad array of issues, including against lynching and racial discrimination in fields of employment and education.

The Colored Women’s Clubs believed that woman suffrage would advance their goals; their national association had a “Suffrage Department,” which, for a time, was headed by Mary E. Jackson, a Rhode Islander.11 In 1913, leaders in the R.I. Colored Women’s Clubs organization, like Jackson and Bertha Higgins, steered their state organization to formally endorse the cause, thereby strengthening the woman suffrage coalition in Rhode Island.12 In her article, “Uncovering the Lives of Ordinary Rhode Island Suffragists” in this issue, Elisa Miller chronicles the contributions of African-American women and their white counterparts as the suffrage movement in Rhode Island moved into the twentieth century and a new generation took over the helm. Miller’s article explores how new organizations, innovative forms of agitation, inventive strategies, and dedicated workers in Rhode Island infused the movement in the first decades of the 1900s.

The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union was the largest women’s organization in the country with hundreds of thousands of members.

The R. I. WCTU had its own “suffrage department” to work on gaining the vote for women. Rhode Island Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, photograph, c. 1890, RHi X17 4245, rhode island historical society collections.

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Suffragists collaborated with other women’s organizations in a push to secure legislation benefitting female factory workers in Rhode Island. Silk warping machines and employees, Royal Weaving Co., Pawtucket, R.I. Photograph c. 1910, RHi X3 875, rhode island historical society collections.

Due to the efforts of a consortium of women’s organizations, suffragist Fanny Purdy Palmer, was named the first woman factory inspector in Rhode Island.

(Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century: Fourteen Hundred-Seventy Biographical Sketches Accompanied by Portraits of Leading American Women in all Walks of Life [Buffalo: Charles Wells Moulton, 1893], 555. image courtesy of mr. ron, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/ 66439756/fanny-palmer.

Frederic A. Hinckley was a minister, labor activist and ardent woman suffragist who helped run the 1887 Rhode Island campaign for a statewide amendment.

Photograph published in Moses King, Philadelphia and Notable Philadelphians (New York: M. King, 1902), 20.

Mrs. Sarah E. H. Doyle (d. 1890), a devoted woman suffragist was among the first women to run for Providence School Board in 1873.

Photograph album, Elizabeth Buffum Chace and family papers, Ms. 89.12, john hay library, brown university;

Russell DeSimone, “Rhode Island Women Enter 19th Century Politics,” http://smallstatebighistory.com/rhodeisland-women-enter-19th-century-politics/.

Accessed Oct. 28, 2020.

Introduction v xi

Sarah Algeo later recalled that 1911 and 1912 brought “a distinct renaissance in the suffrage movement.” In this stage, she remembered, suffrage activism in Rhode Island was characterized by “propaganda,” with “Parades, pageants, pilgrimages, floats, balls, fairs, theatricals, store windows, movies, luncheons, dinners, teas, out-door meetings, church gatherings…heckling political aspirants, all old devices with some new ones added.”13 Activists kept up the pressure on lawmakers. Algeo apparently marched in the grand suffrage procession held in Washington, D.C. just before the inauguration of President Woodrow Wilson in early March 1913.14

In this era, a part-time Rhode Islander, Alva Belmont, brought energy and enthusiasm to the cause when she put on grand suffrage events at her mansion, Marble House, in Newport. Belmont, who lived in New York, but summered in Newport, opened a “summer headquarters” of the Congressional Union in downtown Newport where workers organized to pressure Congressmen to vote for the woman suffrage amendment. At her mansion, Belmont gave teas and dinners where refreshments were served on “Votes for Women” china to raise funds and recruit supporters to the cause. Belmont also hosted fundraisers, lecture series and talks

Rhode Island women took part in the “Grand Suffrage Procession” in Washington, D.C. on the eve of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration in March, 1913. Buck, G. V, photographer. Woman suffrage parade, Wash., D.C. Washington D.C, 1913. Photograph. http://www.loc.gov/item/2013648100/.

This Rhode Island banner was almost undoubtedly carried in the Grand Suffrage Procession in Washington, D.C. in March, 1913.

National Women’s Party Textile Collection, yellow cotton sateen front, violet cotton sateen back, purple painted letters, 1913.251a. national woman’s party, at belmont-paul women’s equality national monument.

Suffragist membership increased markedly in the nineteen-teens. from the collection of russell desimone.

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Sarah E. Doyle, RIWSA officer, and Girls Principal of Providence High School from 1878-1892, was the driving force behind the admission of women to Brown University.

Photograph, Horton Bros., c. 1900, RHi 17 4258. rhode island historical society collections.

Susan Hammond (Mrs. J. K.) Barney was the first president of the R. I. WCTU who later went on to prominence in the national organization.

RIWSA women collaborated with Barney and WCTU women in successfully advocating for police matrons in Rhode Island jails where women were detained. “Mrs. Barney,” photograph, n.d., RHi X17 4243, rhode island

Ellen M. Bolles was a dynamic leader of the RIWSA effort in the 1890s. Photograph, n.d., from photograph album, Elizabeth Buffum Chace and family papers, Ms. 89.12, john hay library, brown university.

historical society collections.

The summer headquarters of the Congressional Union in Newport, 1914. Alva Belmont is in the back row, standing, on left.

Photograph, National Woman’s Party Photograph Collection, 1914.001.076. national woman’s party, at belmont-paul women’s equality national monument.

Introduction v xiii

by nationally famous figures at Marble House. Newspaper coverage of Belmont’s events increased visibility of the woman suffrage cause in the state and elsewhere.15 Belmont’s work received much publicity, but as Elisa Miller’s informative article attests, the ultimate result—ratification of the 19th amendment by the R.I. legislature—was attained by hard day-to-day and year-to-year effort of a multitude of Rhode Island women.

The first organized anti-suffrage effort coalesced when mainly upper-class Rhode Island women began a campaign against woman suffrage around the turn of the century.

In her article on the Hazard family and women’s activism, Carrie E. Taylor points to privileged women’s public roles in the state and their embrace of anti-suffragism. In his article, J. Stanley Lemons provides biographical details of the women who were drawn into the anti-suffrage movement. Suffragists in the state were irritated by the agitation of the anti-suffragists.

In her short history of woman suffrage in Rhode Island, suffrage leader Agnes Jenks, observed of the Antis: “Some of them are very excellent and useful members of society in many

Alva Belmont commissioned “Votes for Women” china to be used at the July 1914 conference and for other suffrage events. (John Maddock & Sons commemorative plate, made for the “Conference of Great Women,” held at Marble House July 8 and 9, 1914. Gift of Susan Coen, 91.20.1, newport historical society collections.)

A suffrage event at Marble House. At Mrs. Alva Belmont’s house in Newport, RI. Newport Rhode Island United States, 1914. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/mnwp000341/.

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(above) In the early twentiethcentury, R. I. woman suffragists held open-air meetings and handed out souvenirs like this “Votes for Women” pencil. Souvenir pencil from the collection of Dr. Kenneth Florey; “Prominent Suffragists Speak at Rocky Point,” Providence Journal, July 12, 1914.

“For Every Fighter A Woman Worker,” Poster, c. 1917. Both suffragists and anti-suffragists supported women’s work for the war effort during the First World War. RHi X17 4221, rhode island historical society collections.

Gertrude Cottrell Bray of Pawtucket served overseas with the YWCA and Red Cross during World War I. Photograph, The Randall Studio, Gertrude Bray, c. 1917, RHi X17 4257. rhode island historical society collections.

In 1918, suffragist Louise Lyman Peck directed a highly successful state campaign to raise funds for the war effort. Photograph, n.d., RHi X17 4250, rhode island historical society collections.

During World War I, a 1918 Liberty Loan parade is seen passing City Hall in downtown Newport. Photograph, P2519, newport historical society collections.

Introduction v xv

Maud Howe Elliott, Newport resident and daughter of Julia Ward Howe, used her “persuasive power” to bring many Newport women into the suffrage movement.

(Algeo, Story of a Sub-Pioneer, 138; Photograph, Maud Howe Elliott, ca. 1915, P37. newport historical society collections).

particulars, but they show an astonishing moral obliquity when it comes to anti-suffrage propaganda.”16 During World War I, suffrage organizing continued in the state. Carrie E. Taylor observes that both R.I. suffragists and anti-suffragists were active in the war effort. Suffragist Louise Lyman Peck oversaw a statewide campaign that raised over twelve million dollars for the war effort.17 Some Rhode Island women, like Gertrude Bray of Pawtucket, served overseas with the YWCA and Red Cross, nursing and staffing canteens for U.S. soldiers.

Persistent lobbying by Rhode Island women suffragists resulted in the passage of a bill in 1917 granting suffrage to women in presidential elections.

Rhode Island was the first state in New England to do so. If the voter registration records of Newport are any indication, Rhode Island women flocked to enroll when registration for the presidential election opened on July 1, 1919. In her journal, Mary Merchant DeWolf of Warren recorded that she was the very first woman in Rhode Island to register.

Six months later, Rhode Island ratified the 19th Amendment, which went into effect in early September 1920.

The women and men who met in Providence on January 5, 1920 to celebrate the impending ratification of the 19th amendment were well aware of the decades of indefatigable labor and sacrifice that led to that victorious moment— their own and that of the women they called the “pioneers.”

The following night, the recently formed Providence League of Women Voters, founded by suffragists to educate newly enfranchised women, hosted another celebration. Almost five decades before, Anna Garlin Spencer observed that Paulina Wright Davis “lived to experience bitter disappointment… and she died without realizing the reward of her labors.”18 Mary Dickerson (1830-1914) never had the opportunity to vote despite her many years of local, national and regional effort on behalf of the Colored Woman’s Clubs. Elizabeth Buffum Chace died in 1899, without ever marking a single ballot.

Yet the early suffrage workers inspired later generations to continue the fight for women’s equality via the elective franchise.

The determination and persistence of Rhode Island suffragists was summed up by Agnes M. Jenks, who concluded her 1916 account of the obstacles encountered by those seeking woman suffrage in Rhode Island with a vow: “We shall neither delay nor rest until the cause is won.”19 Elizabeth C. Stevens

Editor

Suffragists surrounded Governor Beeckman as he signed the bill authorizing the state’s ratification of the 19th amendment. Photograph. January 7, 1920, RHi X17 3953, rhode island historical society collections.

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(left) Broadside urging Rhode Island women to register to vote. from the collection of russell desimone.

(right) Mary Merchant DeWolf claimed to be the first woman in Rhode Island to register to vote.

As seen in her journal, she registered at the Warren town clerk’s office shortly after midnight on July 1, 1919, the first day that Rhode Island women could register to vote in the presidential election of the following year. Mary DeWolf photograph, courtesy of the warren (r.i.) preservation society;

Mary DeWolf journal, MSS 9001-D B2, RHi X17 4262, rhode island historical society collections.

Endnotes 1

Sara Algeo, The Story of a Sub-Pioneer (Providence, R.I.: Snow & Farnham, 1925), 2-6.

2

he proceedings of the Woman’s Rights Convention held at T Worcester, October 23d and 24th, 1850 (Boston: Published by Prentiss & Sawyer, 1851), 15, 50; Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds., A Woman Of The Century: Fourteen Hundred-Seventy Biographical Sketches Accompanied by Portraits of Leading American Women in All Walks of Life (Buffalo, N.Y.: Moulton, 1893), 528.

3

dwin W. Stone, Rhode Island in the Rebellion (Providence: E G. H. Whitney, 1865), 392-93; “Katharine Prescott Wormeley,” in Edward T. James, ed., Notable American Women 1607-1950 (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), 3: 675.

4

nna Garlin Spencer, “History of the Rhode Island Woman A Suffrage Association” [1893], 2-3. Records of the League of Women Voters of Rhode Island, MSS 21, Box 1, Folder 1.

Rhode Island Historical Society.

5

“History of the RIWSA,” [1893], 4-5.

6

S peech of James W. Stillman, of Westerly delivered in the House of Representatives of Rhode Island, February 25, 1869 published by the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association (Providence: Providence Press Co., 1869); letter of Elizabeth Buffum Chace to the National Anti-Slavery Standard, April 3, 1869.

7

pencer, “History of the RIWSA,” [1893], 5, and Agnes M. Jenks, S typescript, “A Brief History of Woman Suffrage in Rhode Island” [1916], 2. Records of the League of Women Voters of Rhode Island, MSS 21, Box 1, Folder 1, Rhode Island Historical Society; Elizabeth C. Stevens, Elizabeth Buffum Chace and Lillie Chace Wyman, A Century of Abolitionist, Suffragist and Workers’ Rights Activism (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Publishers, 2003), 148.

8

Agnes M. Jenks, “Brief History of Woman Suffrage in Rhode Island” [1916]; Stevens, Elizabeth Buffum Chace and Lillie Chace Wyman, 148-152.

9

Ibid., 87-91, 114-115, 120-132, 152, 158-159; Algeo, Sub-Pioneer, 91-94.

10

Samuel Layton and Elisa Miller, “Ellen Bolles” in Biographical Database of NAWSA Suffragists, https://documents. alexanderstreet.com/d/1010596352. Accessed Sept. 30, 2020.

Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920 (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1998), 92, 103-104; “News from the Clubs, Providence, R.I., Working Women’s League,” The Woman’s Era, vol. 1, no. 1.

March 24, 1897.

11 Rosalyn

12

Algeo, Sub-Pioneer, 152.

13

Ibid., 122.

14

Ibid.,158-160.

15

Ina Bort, “Suffrage on the Menu, Part II: The Marble House Conferences of 1909 and 1914,” http://behindthescenes. nyhistory.org/suffrage-menu-part-ii-marble-house-conferences/ Accessed September 20, 2020.

16

Jenks, “Brief History ” [1916], 4.

17

Richard Aitchson, “Biographical Sketch of Louise (Mrs. Walter A.) Peck,” https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/d/1010113803.

18

Jenks, “Brief History” [1916], 6.

19

Ibid., 6.

Introduction v xvii

The National Anti-suffrage headquarters was located in Washington, D.C. Harris & Ewing, photographer.

National Anti-Suffrage Association.,1911. [?] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/97500067/.

Defending the “Woman’s Sphere”: The Ideology and Opposition of Anti-suffragists J. Stanley Lemons J. Stanley Lemons is Emeritus Professor of History at Rhode Island College. He has published extensively on Rhode Island and Baptist history. Among his works are: The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s (University of Illinois Press), co-author of The Elect: Rhode Island’s Women Legislators,1922-1990 (The League of Rhode Island Historical Societies, 1990), and co-author of the article, “The Independent Woman: Rhode Island’s First Woman Legislator [Isabelle Ahearn O’Neill],”in Rhode Island History.

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he campaign for woman suffrage in Rhode Island began in 1868 with the formation of the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association.

The following year saw the first legislative committee hearings on a petition to amend the state constitution to permit women to vote, but consideration was “indefinitely postponed.”1 On the other hand, the Rhode Island Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage was not organized until 1911. Since over four decades separated the beginnings of the two organizations, two questions beg for answers. Why were the anti-suffragists so late getting organized, and what was happening to cause them to mobilize their forces so late in the struggle?

In the first case: the Antis did not feel the need to organize because the mores and political structure of Rhode Island were firmly opposed to woman suffrage. The efforts of suffragists failed repeatedly against virtually no organized opposition.

The newspapers editorialized against it, and the General Assembly usually dismissed the women’s petitions with little consideration. In 1881, Lucy Stone, president of the American Woman Suffrage Association, reported that suffrage petitions were being more favorably received by legislatures around the nation. She noted: “This is a great gain upon previous years, when, as once in Rhode Island, our petitions were referred to ‘a committee on burial grounds.’”2 In 1887 the General Assembly submitted a suffrage amendment to the voters, and both sides lined up endorsements from prominent men in the state. The antilist was weightier with many prominent lawyers, bankers, manufacturers, and leading clergymen from the most

prestigious churches.3 The issue was never in doubt which is likely the reason why the legislature put it out there to kill it.

The amendment was crushed 6,889 to 21,957 – “the largest defeat woman suffrage ever received.”4 The Providence Daily Journal declared the next day, “Considerations of common sense and practical government have rightly outweighed any mere theorizing or sentiment.” The editorial went on to say: “Nor will the result in any way retard the true progress of Rhode Island women or deprive them of a just consideration in the legislation of the State.” Their interests will be “as zealously guarded by Legislatures elected solely by men’s votes as could have been possible had they themselves been given a direct voice in the making of our laws.”5 As a consequence, Rhode Island suffragists dropped that approach for the next thirty years. Instead they asked only for the right to vote for the president. It finally paid off – in 1917 they won presidential suffrage, making Rhode Island the first state on the Atlantic seaboard to grant that form of suffrage.6 By then, the drive for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution was entering its winning stages.

As to the second question about the timing of an antisuffrage organization in Rhode, the suffrage movement in the nation suddenly picked up speed around 1910. Women in Rhode Island had organized the College Equal Suffrage League in 1907, and if one judged only by newspaper coverage, the suffrage issue became much more visible. Back in the 1890s four sparsely populated western states had enfranchised women. But in 1910 the state of Washington granted women the vote and California followed in 1911. After that, the suffrage tide rolled toward the East. Local suffragists increased

Defending the “Woman’s Sphere”: The Ideology and Opposition of Anti-suffragists v 1

“Our Happy Home.” Images in nineteenth-century periodicals depicted the cultural expectations of the Cult of True Womanhood. Our Happy Home.,1877.

[New York: publisher not transcribed] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2018695197/].

Popular nineteenth-century images like “The Child’s Evening Prayer” reinforced the domestic importance of a woman’s purity and piety. The Child’s Evening Prayer., ca. 1879. New York: Haasis & Lubrecht. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2018756341/.

2 v The Bridge

their education and propaganda efforts to convince the public and petitioned the General Assembly every session. Beginning in 1910, suffragists began staging parades and rallies in cities around the nation, which generated increased publicity.

One of the factors that retarded the formation of anti-suffrage organizations was that they were reacting to developments.

They were essentially defensive in nature. Women who opposed the franchise did not hold rallies or make speeches.

They wrote letters to the editor.

Anti-suffrage associations already existed in New York and neighboring Massachusetts, so in 1911 Rhode Island Antis joined a growing list of anti-suffrage associations around the country. In April 1895, Antis formed their first organization with the awkward name of the New York State Association Opposed to the Extension of the Suffrage to Women.7 The following month saw the organization of the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of the Suffrage to Women. By 1900 six states had some formal anti-suffrage association, and by 1915, these numbered twenty-five, claiming 200,000 members.8 On the other hand, by 1915, woman suffrage associations were everywhere, were approaching two million members, had won suffrage in twelve states and territories, and enjoyed the support of large national organizations such as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the National Federation of Women’s Clubs. Organized anti-suffragists were too little, too late.

A hundred years after the ratification of the 19th Amendment, it might seem incredible that the matter of suffrage for women had been such a controversial issue.

Yet, before the 1840s the idea of woman suffrage was almost unthinkable. About then some women’s rights advocates began calling for the vote, but it took seventy more years to achieve it. Nearly fifty-two years elapsed from the formation of the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association to Rhode Island’s ratification of the woman suffrage amendment on January 6, 1920. During that period, the suffragists tried twenty-five times to get the state to accept woman suffrage.

For most of that long time, the opposition did not come from organized anti-suffragists. Instead, woman suffrage had to contend with a set of ideas that regarded women voting to be a foolish, unnatural, immoral, and even dangerous notion.

These ideas were so common and entrenched that the antisuffragists did not have to make any great effort to defeat suffrage until the twentieth century.

One is struck by the fact that when female anti-suffragists appeared, they scarcely made a single objection to woman suffrage that had not been trumpeted decades earlier. Indeed, many of the arguments went back before the Civil War and were part of the general Victorian culture of the nation.

These ideas included what have been labeled as the “Cult of True Womanhood,” the “Better Half,” and the “Woman’s Sphere.” These were powerful beliefs about the role and place of women in society. What is interesting is that many suffragists shared these same ideas, but used them to expand woman’s sphere rather than to limit women.

The historian Barbara Welter coined the term, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” to describe the reigning idea about women and their place in the era before the Civil War.9 It held that God created women to be different from men, and each had a separate, but complementary sphere of activities and responsibilities. Women operated in the home and men out in the world. A “true woman” was to be pious, pure, domestic, and submissive. She was wife, mother, and homemaker, and the family was deemed to be the fundamental unit of the state, Christianity, and civilization. Anything that disrupted the family threatened everything. So, anything that took women from their proper sphere and responsibilities was thought to be subversive and dangerous.10 The mother bore and reared the children and was thought to be responsible for their Christian upbringing and education. She was queen of the domestic sphere, but submissive to her husband.

If a woman failed in these requirements, she was not a “true woman.” If she ventured into the world of politics and business, she was “unsexed” or “mannish.”11 Such a view held that women must not speak in “promiscuous meetings” (meetings of men and women), must not parade in the streets, must not buttonhole politicians, must not get into public debates. All of these things were immodest and un-ladylike.12 Such cultural prescriptions made it difficult for anti-suffrage women to take on their suffragist sisters who did all of those “un-ladylike” things. The most that one might do was to write an anonymous letter to the editor as “UNA” did in 1869.

She deplored the agitation and denounced women who clamored for woman’s rights. “You are a blot and a mark upon the cause of true womanhood.”13 In 1872 an anti-suffragist woman argued that only the worst sort of women would want to vote which would “make public elections inappropriate for true women.” She declared that “womanhood — cultured,

sensitive and refined—would instinctively shrink from encountering such an element in the body politic; and thus the dissolute, the depraved, and the vicious ‘emballoted’ and bold, would dominate the weak, the timid, and the lazy, and thus occupy the field.”14 Growing out of the “Cult of True Womanhood” was the notion of the “Better Half,” which held that women were actually purer, more spiritual, and more inclined to religion than men. It held that God had endowed women with superior morality so that they could be the teachers of the children. Women were regarded as the civilizers of men and the essential propagators of religion, piety, and virtue. They had the awesome responsibility of raising the sons of the nation to be good, decent, and god-fearing citizens. While women were still regarded as the “Weaker Sex,” needing protection because they were deemed physically and mentally unequal to men, they were spiritually superior. The historian Andrew Sinclair described the new paradigm of women as “inferior animals and superior beings.”15 (This was a wonderful reversal of the ancient view of women as the “Daughters of Eve,” the one who caused the Fall in the Garden of Eden, the one who opened the gates of Hell.)

Opponents argued that woman suffrage would lead to free love and socialism.16 What made such charges believable were various movements and individuals who espoused them.

First, there was Fanny Wright (1795-1852) who scandalized proper society in the late 1820s with her advocacy of sexual freedom, birth control, equal rights, emancipation of slaves,

Frances “Fanny” Wright was a Scottish-born social reformer who traveled and lived in the United States while espousing radical views in the first half of the nineteenth century. Buttre, John Chester, Engraver, and J Gorbitz. Frances Wright / J. Gorbitz ; J.C. Buttre., 1881. Photograph. https://www.loc. gov/item/2003652654/.

Defending the “Woman’s Sphere”: The Ideology and Opposition of Anti-suffragists v 3

liberal divorce laws, and opposition to marriage and organized religion. She was ferociously denounced for all of these ideas.17 The pre-Civil War era also saw a wave of “utopian socialist” experiments, and the most prominent one was Fourierism, based on the ideas of a French philosopher, Charles Fourier (1772-1837). He believed that the solution to the world’s problems was “associationism” where people lived in voluntary, cooperative groups, called Phalanxes, each composed of no more than 1620 individuals. Property was held in common, and the family unit would be abandoned.18 Horace Greeley promoted these ideas in the New York Tribune, and some Transcendentalists were attracted to them. Enthusiasts founded about thirty phalanxes, the most famous being Brook Farm.19 “Socialism,” and its association with attacks upon the family, became part of the arsenal used against women’s suffrage to the very end.

Reinforcing negative perceptions and even more damaging to woman suffrage was Victoria Woodhull (1838-1927).20 Strikingly attractive and dynamic, in 1871 Victoria was the first woman to address a committee of Congress and then was the first woman to run for president of the United States. She became a prominent spokesperson for the suffrage movement, beginning with an oration in Washington where she was accompanied by leaders of the National Woman Suffrage Association, such as Paulina Wright Davis (the first president of the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association). Then Woodhull captivated Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony who wrote to Victoria saying, “Go ahead, bright, glorious, young and strong spirit.”21 Later that year, speaking in New York City, Victoria Woodhull addressed over 3,000 people at Steinway Hall on aspects of “social freedom” in which she spoke at length on love and marriage. In answer to the question whether she was a Free Lover, she declared, “Yes, I am a Free Lover.

I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere.”22 For that she was depicted as “Mrs. Satan” by political cartoonist Thomas Nast in Harper’s Weekly.

Once a scandalized public learned of her free love ideas and her involvement in the Marxist 2nd International Workingmen’s Association, her notoriety firmly tied socialism and free love to suffrage. The consequence was that the National Woman

4 v The Bridge

Suffrage Association, led by Stanton and Anthony, was a seriously weakened entity from then until the 1890s, and the opponents linked suffrage with free love and socialism to the bitter end. Paradoxically, by 1876 Victoria Woodhull had “found religion, denounced promiscuity, declared marriage a divine institution, and divorced her free-thinking, free-loving [husband] for adultery.”23 With such self-inflected wounds and the power of popular notions about the proper role and sphere for women, it is little wonder that the woman suffrage movement had a near-death experience in the 1870s. However, one thing which went far to restore woman suffrage to respectability was the embrace of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union which was the largest women’s organization in the United States by the 1880s and 1890s.

Victoria Woodhull’s brief alliance with some woman suffragists including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, affirmed anti-suffragists’ disapproval of the woman suffrage movement.

Nast, Thomas, Artist. “Get thee behind me, Mrs. Satan!” / Th. Nast. United States, 1872. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/95512460/.

Frances Willard and the WCTU wanted the vote to advance prohibition. Willard’s vision was to make the world “homelike,” and prohibition was described as the “home protection” issue. In a word, she wanted to expand the woman’s sphere to reform all of those things that threatened the family and the home—such as liquor, impure food and drugs, tainted milk, political and economic corruption, poor schools, unhealthy conditions for children, and poor working conditions for women. These objectives were not those of Mrs. Satan but of Christian women. As a result, the WCTU brought respectability as well as a large national organization on the side of woman suffrage. By the 1880s and 1890s women began to win the right to vote for school boards and in other local elections. But, the first anti-suffrage organizations also appeared in 1895.

When women finally were allowed to vote in limited ways for school boards and such, not many did. And so, a stock argument against the further expansion of woman suffrage was that women did not want the vote. Anti-suffragists repeatedly pointed to the example of the Massachusetts referendum in 1895 when all women of voting age were permitted to vote on the question of granting municipal suffrage. Of the 575,000 women eligible to vote, only 25,000 did so, and only 1000 — .001 percent of women voted for suffrage.24 Opponents declared that the franchise was an unwanted burden which would interfere with the essential work of women: The suffrage movement, so far from being a movement of progress, confuses the function of men and women, proposes to put upon women heavy burdening responsibilities in addition to those they already bear and of which they cannot be relieved and urges them to give up the privileges and exemptions which the increasing consideration of men has conceded them and to enter upon an unequal struggle in the arenas of politics and legislation.25 In March 1907, the suffragists again petitioned the Rhode Island General Assembly to grant presidential suffrage.

On the first day of the hearing before the House Committee on Special Legislation, the committee room was packed with a large number of women. The committee chairman called for every woman who favored the bill to stand up, and all except one did so. When the committee began to consider a postponement of further consideration, that one woman rose

Frances Willard headed the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the largest women’s organization in the country in the post-Civil War era. Bain News Service, Publisher.

Frances Willard. , .

[No Date Recorded on Caption Card] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/ item/2014682859/].

to say that she appeared in opposition. The president of the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association, Jeannette S. French, asked the chair whether that woman was a citizen of Rhode Island, and the woman volunteered that she was. French asked for her name, and she said, “Mrs. Charles Warren Lippett.”

She would present an opposing view at the session the next day. Margaret Lippitt, wife of former Governor Charles Warren Lippitt, was the first Rhode Island woman to appear before any legislative committee to voice opposition to woman suffrage.26 Margaret Lippitt returned the next day and was the first person to testify. She declared that there was no organization opposing the bill, but she said that women did not want the bill. She said that intelligent women did not want suffrage because their many obligations would not give them time to study all of the issues of public interest. In addition, the complicated political machinery was in the hands of men so that they would determine the candidates which amounted to “political slavery” for women. Besides, she said, there was no advantage to adding unintelligent women voters to the unintelligent votes of men.27 She was then followed in opposition by Mrs. Alice M. Johnson, the president of Churchill House Corporation, and Rowland G. Hazard, president of the Peace Dale Manufacturing Company and president of the Narragansett Pier Rail Road. His wife, Mary P. B. Hazard later emerged as the principal spokesperson and president of the Rhode Island Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage.

Defending the “Woman’s Sphere”: The Ideology and Opposition of Anti-suffragists v 5

A list of substantial individuals, including former governor Lucius F. C. Garvin and Rhode Island historian Thomas Bicknell presented the pro-suffrage argument. Bicknell, in particular, was outraged by the way the Rhode Island Senate had treated the suffrage bill because he felt that they passed it as a joke. Bicknell said they ought to be spanked. It made no difference: the House Committee on Special Legislation voted to take no action on the bill. The Providence Journal declared, “The annual death knell of legislation granting suffrage to women in the choice of presidential elections was sounded yesterday.”28 The same result occurred in 1909.29 The Providence Journal not only editorialized against woman suffrage, it usually relegated suffrage news to the woman’s or society page. It often ridiculed woman suffrage by reporting (and denouncing) the antics of the English suffragettes who had resorted to violence. It commented on how vulgar and ugly many of the suffragettes were.30 After Canada adopted woman suffrage, the paper reported that a woman wanted to change her vote, but was refused.

The editor opined, “This is the weakness of female suffrage.

No woman should be deprived of her recognized right of changing her mind.”31 When the women anti-suffragists formed an organization in 1911, Mary P. B. Hazard was elected president.

She particularly harped on the socialist connections and even complained that the papers underreported that fact.32 When the editor of the Journal replied that such a charge was unfair, she wrote, “‘The statement that the Socialists expect to gain much from suffrage’ can hardly be questioned since woman suffrage is a cardinal item in the Socialist programme…What do you call those who join for the same cause but allies?”33 Margaret Lippitt sounded the alarm as well, saying that an aspect of suffrage had remained in the background, but was now “showing its ugly proportions in this country as the time seems right. I mean the socialistic side.

Every socialist is a woman suffragist, though every suffragist does not acknowledge that he or she is a socialist. Some do avow it openly.”34 In November 1917 after the great suffrage victory in New York, Mary Hazard declared that Socialists, pacifists, pro-Germans, and suffragists were linked. She said that the victory in New York was caused by the Socialists and German voters: In New York not only the forces of evil, but anti-American forces carried everything before them…Will Rhode Island heed the lesson?

6 v The Bridge

If pacifists and pro-Germans want women suffrage at this time [World War I], do we want it? … Is it safe to admit to the electorate an immense number of inexperienced and untrained voters, when mistakes may cost us dear?35 For some opponents of woman suffrage, the connection of suffrage to socialism was a growing concern as the socialist movement in the United States was cresting about 1912.

Socialists were elected in many places in the country in the decade before World War I, and Eugene Debs won six percent (901,000 votes) of the national vote in the presidential election in 1912. That was the best the Socialists ever did in the United States, and by September 1918 Debs was in prison for opposing the war effort.

Mary Hazard warned of the evil effects of granting the vote to “ignorant immigrant women.” She thought that it was bad enough that immigrant men were allowed to vote, but the naturalization laws automatically naturalized the wives of immigrants. Hazard warned, “Many an immigrant woman, knowing not a word of English, might vote on landing.”

She also maintained that in Colorado (a full suffrage state), “Prostitutes generally vote…Neither is it surprising to learn that the prostitutes vote not once but more than once.”

She asked, “If you doubled the vote, will women be more likely to form correct opinions? If women are less informed, it will be a distinct loss. Does any sane being suppose that the majority of women are better able to pass on such questions than are the majority of men?”36 Margaret Lippitt also raised the specter of immigrant women: It is this foreign element wherein lies one great objection to this bill before you. I ask you gentlemen to walk up Constitution Hill, out over Charles street, over Federal Hill and Atwell’s avenue, through Fox Point or the city dock, and watch the passengers from the Fabre Line steamer, and then ask yourselves if you believe that these ‘women citizens’ will tend to reform and elevate the electorate of the State, or register the intelligent will of the people. Every one of these women is a potential voter to be reckoned with in some part of the United States, and many of them right now in Providence.37 Her comments suggest that she was alarmed by the tide of immigration rising in Rhode Island in the first decade of the twentieth century, especially those immigrants on the ships

R. I. anti-suffragists cited the large influx of immigrants into the state in the early twentieth century as a reason that women should not vote. Immigrants arriving aboard the Venezia (Fabre Line) at the new State Pier on opening day, December 17, 1913.

Print, RHI x35461. rhode island historical society collections.

of the Fabre Line coming directly from Italy. In 1914 over 18,000 immigrants disembarked at Providence, making it the fifth largest port-of-entry in the United States.38 Altogether, the argument most often stated against woman suffrage was one that showed the enduring influence of the Cult of True Womanhood and the Woman’s Sphere.

The fact that the statement of these ideas often came from anonymous women revealed the power that kept many Antis from publicly engaging in unseemly controversy.39 In 1871 an anonymous woman wrote a letter to the Providence Daily Journal. She declared that those women who decry the “injustice of making their sex subordinate to man…impeach the Almighty for making distinctions between the sexes.” She asked, “Do women want the vote?” “Where is the sacred home, the nursery, the domestic altar, at which woman is so often the ministering spirit, if not the actual priestess.” She urged, “Let Congress do its business. Let them deal with foreign affairs and finances. We do not ask for ‘Woman’s Suffrage’; we protest against it being forced on us.

We ask to remain in the sphere in which God placed us.”40 The president of the Massachusetts Society Opposed to the Further Extension of the Suffrage interjected herself into the argument in Rhode Island in 1907 by writing that “women’s responsibilities are different from those of men.”

She asserted that women have all they can do in the care of sick and insane, in the treatment of the poor and in the

administration of charities, libraries, agencies of reform and social work.41 “An Anti- Suffrage Woman” wrote that in Rhode Island the real issue was office holding. “The very women least fitted to hold office are the ones most likely to seek it.…

Am I willing to sacrifice so much that is essential to womanhood for a result not yet proved good?”42 Two weeks later, an anonymous correspondent from Providence wrote: We believe that women should realize and glory in the fact that they were given organization, gifts and powers different from those of men, for a purpose…

It does not degrade women to hold on to that spiritual and moral authority — and not to debase it by grasping at the interior part — that material force which they cannot use without soiling their own.

She quoted another writer who said, “Everywhere and in all things woman is the noblest work of civilization, and her true work is to make it a yet nobler civilization by infusing into human life her supreme womanly qualities, in her inimitable womanly way.”43 Mary P. B. Hazard argued that because women had their own sphere, they stood outside of politics and were free to appeal to any party in matters of education, charity and reform. To give women the right to vote is “to curtail the power of good women, and give new powers to the bad, not

Defending the “Woman’s Sphere”: The Ideology and Opposition of Anti-suffragists v 7

spoke favorably about suffrage, John F. Vichert, the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Providence, did not. He echoed the separate spheres idea, saying that God created men and women to be different: Mary P. B. Hazard was one of the most outspoken Rhode Island anti-suffragists.

Photograph, RHI x17 4256 rhode island historical society collections.

now a political force to be reckoned with.”44 She also declared that the gigantic task for women is to care for, the sick and wounded in the battle of life.

As woman fulfills these tasks well or ill, the State stands or falls…What Humanity needs of women is motherhood, [and] as has been well said, ‘Motherhood, rightly understood, is not a physical fact, but a spiritual relation.’ Any movement that is largely opposed by the mothers of the nation, either physical or spiritual…needs to be gravely questioned to say the least.45 Further she wrote that thinking people would realize that the work of the world can only be done by women doing their share and the men doing their share. She went on to assert: If you decide that she has no distinctive work then you will be a feminist. Most of the women engaged in doing women’s distinctive work in the world think that non-partisanship and freedom from political burdens are essential to its proper accomplishment.46 As a crowning point she told of a Providence woman who could not make up her mind about suffrage, so she asked ten opposed and ten favoring suffrage about the issue.

“On counting up afterward, she found that among the ten who were not suffragists there were 32 children, and among the ten who favored suffrage there were three. Which is the better expert testimony to as to woman’s distinctive work?”47 In 1914, the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Party persuaded a number of the leading clergymen in Rhode Island to preach about suffrage on the first day of Votes for Women Week, April 26 to May 2. While most of these men 8 v The Bridge

Each has qualities and powers which the other lacks. One cannot take the place of the other.

These differences seem to me to exclude competition.

Woman is at man’s side to co-operate not to compete with him. Any society that compels women to enter into competition with men is making poor use of womanhood, and one which that society cannot long afford. She is to be at man’s side sharing and assisting in life’s tasks by contributing the peculiar qualities and powers with which God has endowed her.48 Vichert was theologically conservative in the first place, but one of the leading Antis, Mrs. Katherine Margaret Harkness, wife of Brown University professor Albert Granger Harkness, was a member of his church. Professor Harkness served on the Standing Committee, one of the most powerful bodies in the church composed of a small group of men who oversaw the discipline and order of the congregation. Katherine was herself the daughter of Professor Alexander M. Beebee of Madison University [now Colgate].

During the debate in 1917 to grant presidential suffrage, Representative Luigi De Pasquale of Providence declared that he was against woman suffrage “first, last, and all the time.

I honestly believe the place for women is in the home and not intermingling with the men in the political arena… I contend that women have no place in politics.”49 “All the time” did not last for all time because he later voted to ratify the 19th Amendment. While he appeared adamant in 1917, when the final vote came in 1920, he voted for woman suffrage. Rhode Island ratified the suffrage amendment on the first day of the new legislative session, ending a more than half century struggle.

Who were the anti-suffragists? Unfortunately, other than the names of a small number of leaders willing to break silence and anonymity, the rank and file are unknown.

In 1914 the Rhode Island Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage claimed to have enrolled 1200 in twelve days at the annual food fair of the Butchers, Grocers and Marketmen’s Association, but no list has been found.50 All that remains are the names of eighteen women appearing in the newspapers during the period from 1907 to 1917.51

As seen in this excerpt from a woman suffrage history, suffragists had strong feelings about the work of organized anti-suffragists in the state.

Agnes Jenks, “A Brief History of Woman Suffrage in Rhode Island” [1916], p. 4, The Records Of The League Of Women Voters of Rhode Island, Mss 21, Box 1, Folder 1. rhode island historical society.

Most of these women were from the fashionable social set, married to wealthy men or from wealth themselves.

Only two, Mrs. Lucy T. H. Miller (1856-1937), a voice and music teacher,52 and Dr. Mary Pauline Root (1859-1944), a physician and former missionary, had paying occupations.53 Miller’s husband was a banker and broker, and they lived on the East Side in Providence. Dr. Root’s father owned one of the largest stove and tinware stores in downtown Providence, had served several terms in the General Assembly, was the president of the Roger Williams Building and Loan Association, and was an executive committee member of the Old Colony Co-operative Bank. Most of the other women were involved in many philanthropic, civic, and social enterprises, but were supported by their husbands or family wealth in homes with live-in servants.

Thirteen were born between 1856 and 1862. All were Protestants: nine Episcopalians, five Congregationalists, three Baptists, and one Unitarian. Fathers and other male relatives often were office holders or served on state and local commissions and boards. All came from Republican families, and many were members of those patriotic, ancestral societies formed in the 1890s — the Daughters of the American Revolution (1890), Society of Colonial Dames (1890) and the Mayflower Society (1897). The names of Hazard, Hoppin, Lippitt, Metcalf, and Coggeshall indicated that these women were members of some of the most prominent families of Rhode Island. Two of the women, Harriet Fowler (18601932) and Katherine Margaret Harkness (1861-1953), were

wives of well-known Brown University professors who were chairmen of their respective departments in their careers.54 Margaret Barbara Farnham (1861-1940) married former Governor Charles Warren Lippitt. The Lippitts were a powerful economic and political family as Charles’ father Henry Lippitt was governor (1875-1877) and his brother Henry F. Lippitt became U.S. Senator (1911-1917).55 The Lippitt fortune was made in textiles and banking. Today, one of Providence’s grand mansions is the Henry Lippitt House Museum on Hope Street.

Margaret’s family was also notable. Her father Alexander Farnham was an early president of the Rhode Island Trust Company and one of the founders of the Providence Public Library. Her grandfather John Holden Ormsbee was a clipper ship captain and bank and insurance company president.

Margaret was descended from Roger Williams, Chad Brown, Thomas Olney, Benjamin Church of King Philip’s War fame, and Richard Warren of the Mayflower. She was a leader in the DAR, serving as State Regent 1901-1905, 1907-1911, regent of Gaspee Chapter, founder in 1910 of the Independence Chapter and was its second regent. She was also a member of the Colonial Dames, American Flag Association, Society of Mayflower Descendants, Rhode Island Historical Society, and Newport Historical Society. In the 1920s she became a chairman of the executive committee of the Rhode Island Branch of the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform, which worked to repeal the prohibition amendment to the Constitution.56

Defending the “Woman’s Sphere”: The Ideology and Opposition of Anti-suffragists v 9

Dr. Mary Pauline Root was affiliated with the anti-suffragist cause in Rhode Island. Born in Providence, she was a graduate of Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, served as a medical missionary overseas, and worked for the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Photograph, New Mexico, 1920.

Mary Pauline Root Papers, ACC257, legacy center archives, drexel university college of medicine.

Esther Pierce Metcalf (1860-1925) also came from an old Rhode Island family; she was a descendent of Roger Williams as well as Governor William Bradford of Plymouth. Her father was George Augustus Pierce, a physician, and she married great wealth in the person of Stephen O. Metcalf. He had inherited the Wanskuck Company that owned the Wanskuck Mill which was described as “one of the outstanding woolen fabric industries in the United States.”57 Metcalf had his fingers in a host of business enterprises, railroads, and at least five insurance companies. He was elected to the board of directors of the Providence Journal Company in 1890 and served for sixty years and president of the company for thirtysix years. Esther contributed to many charities and created a fund for the Crawford Allen Hospital at Potowomut, a unit of the Rhode Island Hospital for the care of crippled children, which allowed it to stay open all year round.58 Louise C. Hoppin (1858-1959) was an eighth generation descendant of settlers of Massachusetts and Rhode Island and was part of the well-connected Hoppin family.

Her grandfather, Thomas Coles Hoppin and his brother Benjamin established the family fortune with their wholesale and retail business in Providence and through the West India and China trade. Louise Hoppin’s grandmother Harriet Hoppin was a daughter of Governor William Jones. Her father, Dr. Washington Hoppin, one of twelve offspring of the marriage of Thomas and Harriet, was a founder of the Rhode Island Homeopathic Medical Society in 1854. Her aunt Anna married Governor Elisha Dyer, and her uncle Francis married a daughter of Governor and then Senator Henry Bowen Anthony. In addition, her cousin William Warner Hoppin was elected governor in 1854, 1855, and 1856. Louise was the secretary for the Providence YWCA for eleven years at the 10 v The Bridge

turn of the century and was a founder and later secretary of the Providence chapter of the Red Cross from 1917 to 1934 and the secretary for the Rhode Island Society for Collegiate Education of Women for many years. She lived with family members until the mid-1920s and always had servants in the household. For the last thirty or more years, she lived at the Minden, a residential hotel on Waterman Street. In her lifetime, she made nine voyages to Europe.59 Another anti-suffrage woman who came from wealth and married wealth was Alice Knight Sturgis (1859-1930).

She was the daughter of Benjamin Brayton Knight who with his brother Robert created the world’s largest textile empire in B.B. & R. Knight. They eventually owned nineteen mills in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, including fifteen mill villages employing thousands of workers, and their trademark, “Fruit of the Loom,” was world famous. In 1875 Alice married Howard O. Sturgis of the firm of Sturgis & Gammell, agents for the Berkeley textile mill. Howard became the owner of several textile mills and was on the board of directors of four fire insurance companies. In addition he served on the Providence Common Council for two years, and was a director of the Rhode Island School of Design. The son of Alice and Howard Sturgis married Ruth Hazard, the daughter of Rowland G. and Mary P. B. Hazard. When Alice Sturgis died, James DeWolf Perry, the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Rhode Island, presided at her funeral.60 Being anti-suffragist had become a family affair for the Hazards. The first Roland Gibson Hazard (1801-1888) supported woman suffrage and signed the call for the convention to create the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association in 1868, but his son and daughter-in-law became staunch opponents.61 Mary Pierrepont Bushnell (1856-1936)

married great wealth by becoming the wife of Rowland Gibson Hazard II, the president of the Peace Dale Manufacturing Company, the Narragansett Pier Rail Road, and the Solvey Process Company which later became part of the Allied Chemical and Dye Corporation.62 Mary’s sister-in-law, Helen Hazard Bacon (1862-1925), was Rowland’s sister. Helen married Nathaniel Terry Bacon, an engineer and chemist, who had become associated with the Hazards in the Solvey Process Company and had moved to Rhode Island after marrying into the family. He helped to manage the Peace Dale Manufacturing Company and became the president of the Narragansett Pier Rail Road from 1915 to 1924. They lived in a mansion with three or four live-in servants.63 Another relative was Mary Merrill (1854-1933), a sisterin-law to Mary P. B. Hazard. Mary Merrill was the daughter of a prominent businessman, banker, and paper manufacturer in Beloit, Wisconsin, and she came to Peace Dale to visit her sister Eliza Bushnell who was married to Mary P. B. Hazard’s brother George S. Bushnell. She remained at Peace Dale the rest of her life.64 Anti-suffragist Cora Estelle Holland (1874-1962), was distantly related by marriage to the Hazard family, and was a neighbor in Peace Dale. Her husband, Elisha Holland, was a tenth generation descendent of the Rodman and Carpenter families of Narragansett. Although Cora and Elisha Holland were not wealthy, he engaged in “general farming” and taught music in the schools in Narragansett and Peace Dale.

Both were buried in the Oak Dell Cemetery where the Hazards were laid to rest.65 Alice M. Johnson (1860-1944) was the daughter of Albert E. Adams who served in the Civil War and died in 1867 from tuberculosis which he probably contracted in the army. As a result Alice was raised by her grandparents.

Her grandfather, John A. Adams, was president of Stafford Manufacturing Company, producing cotton yarn in Central Falls. He was also a director of the Equitable Fire & Marine Insurance Company. Alice’s husband was Albert E. Johnson, many years the treasurer of Ballou, Johnson & Nichols Company, wholesale dealers in wooden, tin, and glassware in Providence. Alice was a charter member of the Rhode Island Society of Mayflower Descendants, served as secretary for many years of the National Society of Colonial Dames in Rhode Island, and was a life member of the DAR. In 1904 she was one of the founders and incorporators of

Helen Hazard Bacon was an ardent anti-suffragist. In this undated family photograph, she is shown, seated, next to her son Leonard Bacon and grandchild. Her daughter-in-law, Martha Stringham Bacon, and her husband Nathaniel Terry Bacon, are standing. Box 124, Folder 2, Nathaniel Terry Bacon Papers, james p. adams library, rhode island college.

Churchill House, built to be a meeting place for clubwomen.

She was the first and only president of Churchill House for thirty-five years. Ironically, Churchill House was where the women suffragists often met, and it was named in honor of Elizabeth Kittredge Churchill who was an early suffragist in Rhode Island.66 Another daughter of a textile manufacturer was Alice Wheaton Adams (1859-1926), daughter of Benjamin B. Adams, a partner in Amos D. Smith & Company, manufacturers of wool and cotton textiles. Benjamin had served in the Rhode Island General Assembly and was a member of the committee that built St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in 1862. Although her father died in 1898, Alice Adams lived comfortably with live-in servants until her death in 1926.67 Clara Maine (1858-1941) was the wife of Herbert E. Maine, a successful businessman in Providence. She was always described in the censuses as “keeping house,” but she

Defending the “Woman’s Sphere”: The Ideology and Opposition of Anti-suffragists v 11

In 1914, R. I. anti-suffragists protested “Votes for Women Week” organized by woman suffragists in a letter of protest to Rhode Island merchants. Printed in Sara Algeo, The Story of a Sub-Pioneer (Providence, R.I.: Snow and Farnham Co., 1925), 197.

had servants from the time she married Herbert in 1897 until she died in 1941 at her summer home in Bristol. There was always a cook and at least one more—a “waitress,” “servant,” or “chauffeur.” Herbert was born in North Stonington, Connecticut, came to Providence in 1870, and joined with his brother-in-law Benjamin F. Arnold in the firm of Arnold & Maine, a wholesale and retail grocery business. They prospered, named their firm the New England Grocery Store and expanded into Pawtucket and Worcester. Clara and Herbert lived at 49 Angell Street and were members of the Cranston Street-Roger Williams Baptist Church where Herbert was a deacon for many years and Sunday school superintendent for ten years.68 Helen A. Blumer (1861-1937) was the daughter of J. Thomas Spriggs, a lawyer and member of Congress from Utica, New York. She married Dr. G. Alder Blumer in 1886 while he was the superintendent of the New York State Hospital in Utica. They moved to Providence when Dr. Blumer became physician-in-chief and superintendent of Butler Hospital. Her husband was a nationally known psychiatrist and served as secretary of RISD, president and director of the Providence Athenaeum, president of the University Club, and a director of Swan Point Cemetery.

She oversaw their household on Blackstone Boulevard which included the family and two live-in maids.69 The oldest member of the group was Hannah A. Coggeshall (1839-1921), the daughter of Andrew Aldrich Angell, a prosperous farmer in Scituate, a descendant of Thomas Angell who settled Providence with Roger Williams 12 v The Bridge

Massachusetts anti-suffragists, with whom Rhode Island antisuffragists were aligned before forming their own organization, produced a publication, The Remonstrance. Quarterly publication of Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women. Boston, Massachusetts, Jan-09, 1909. Periodical. https://www.loc.gov/item/rbcmiller001235/.

in 1636. One of her brothers, James Burrill Angell was a Brown professor and editor of the Providence Journal before becoming president of the University of Michigan (1871-1909). Hannah Angell married James Haydon Coggeshall, a businessman and merchant, in 1861. He was a member of the Providence Common Council (1860-1866), an alderman (1866-1872), and then the U.S. Marshal for Providence from 1871 to 1878. Hannah became deeply involved in Episcopal church activities. She was a long-time member of St. Stephen’s Church where she was president of the parish board, was the honorary vice president of St. Elizabeth’s Home and a member of the auxiliary of the Episcopal diocese.70 At age 32 in 1915, the youngest anti-suffragist was Kathryn Cocroft (1883-1968). She was the daughter of an Episcopalian clergyman, Thomas H. Cocroft, who had been the rector of the Church of the Messiah in Olneyville (1884-1897). In 1920, she married Charles J. Harriman who was also an Episcopal priest, and they moved to Philadelphia by 1923. She and her husband were well enough fixed that they had three children and a live-in servant in 1930.71 These women tried to be “true” women even as they were drawn into the public arena to defend what they conceived to be the Woman’s Sphere. Only Dr. Root, Alice Adams, and Louise Hoppin never married. Root spent several years of marriageable age as a medical missionary in India and traveling around in the United States lecturing about her mission work. Then she devoted herself to caring for her aged father.

Hoppin immersed herself in club and community work.

All of the other anti-suffragists married and had children.

Mrs. Hazard had the most tragic experience with her six offspring: one died at childbirth, three (two sons and a daughter) died within one week from scarlet fever, and a third son died of his wounds in World War I. Their view of the Woman’s Sphere included charity and generosity, and the lives of many of these women were filled with philanthropic, benevolent, and religious activities. They took seriously the concept of the “Better Half.” They lost the fight to prevent woman suffrage, but it is interesting that not one word about their opposition appeared in any later account of their lives.

Those whose names we know were clearly privileged, mostly wealthy women, but one wonders about those 1200 women who signed up in 1914. Who were they, and what prompted them to join the anti-suffrage effort? The Antis

Many drawings and cartoons in the 1900-1920 era made fun of women anti-suffragists and suffragists. Rogers, W. A. “O Save Us, Senators, From Ourselves!” 1907. Harper’s Weekly, New York, 2-23- 0:00. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/rbcmiller001806/.

This 1915 cartoon offers a twist on a popular song, “I did not raise my boy to be a soldier.” (“I did not raise my girl to be a voter.”

Soprano solo with vociferous supporting chorus of male voices. 1915.

Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2002720392/).

Defending the “Woman’s Sphere”: The Ideology and Opposition of Anti-suffragists v 13

did not have an organization in Rhode Island until 1911, and aside from letters to the editors of local newspapers and appearing before legislative committees from time to time, there was little evidence of their activity. Until they seized upon the immigrant vote, the local Antis never expressed an idea that they had not borrowed from the anti-suffragists in Massachusetts and New York. While they thought that woman suffrage was a bad idea, they were not alarmed enough to become organized until fairly late in the struggle. After 1910, the national suffrage movement gained momentum and began winning in state after state, and only then were the Rhode Island anti-suffragists driven to organize to try to stop it.

It was too little too late.

Some cartoons, like this 1915 one, depicted the anti-suffragist as having a “‘vision’ of her duty.”

Cartoon, https://www.loc. gov/resource/cph.3b49097/ Just like Joan of Arc. The anti-suffragist has a “vision” of her duty.1915.

Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/ item/2002720393/.

Endnotes 1

See notice: “House of Representatives,” Providence Daily Journal (February 27, 1869), 2.

2

Quoted in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. II, 1861-1876 (Rochester, N.Y.: Charles Mann, 1887), 816.

3

The list of anti-suffrage men had 107 names. These included 31 lawyers, 20 manufacturers and corporation executives, 6 bankers, 3 men associated with Brown & Ives, 8 real estate and insurance agents and executives, 8 clergymen, a number of merchants, architects, and other occupations. The anti clergymen included the current and a former pastor of the First Baptist Church and the rectors of St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral, Grace Episcopal Church, St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, and St. James Episcopal Church, and the pastors of the Central Congregational and Beneficent Congregational Churches.

“To the Voters of Rhode Island,” Providence Daily Journal (April 4, 1887), 1. The pro-suffrage list had 100 names.

They included 17 lawyers, 13 clergymen, 14 jewelers and manufacturers, 8 merchants, 4 bankers and brokers, 3 physicians, 3 bookkeepers, 7 farmers, and a scattering of occupations, such as policeman, judge, painter, printer, carpenter, die sinker, tool maker, and so forth. The pastors were mostly from less prestigious churches, such as the Church of the Yahweh, the Park Street Baptist Church, and the Olney Street Unitarian Church. The most significant pro-suffrage figure was Marsden J. Perry: director of Bank of America and the Union Trust Company, owner of the Narragansett Electric Lighting Co. and the Union Railway Co., owner of John Brown House. “Something Else for the Voters of Rhode Island,” Ibid. (April 5, 1887), 1.

4

Sara M. Algeo, The Story of a Sub-Pioneer (Providence: Snow & Farnham, Co., 1925), 85. Sara Algeo was an organizer of the College Equal Suffrage League of Rhode Island in 1907, president of the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Party in 1917, and the first president of the Providence League of Women Voters in 1919.

5

Editorial, “Woman Suffrage,” Providence Daily Journal (April 7, 1887), 4.

6

Algeo, Sub-Pioneer, 104.

7

The name was changed in 1908 to the New York Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage. For the history of the New York organization, see: Susan Goodier, No Votes for Women: the New York State Anti-Suffrage Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013).

8

Manuela Thurner, “Better Citizens without the Ballot: American Anti-Suffragists and their Rationale during the Progressive Era,” in Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, ed., One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement (Troutdale, Oregon: New Sage Press, 1995), 206.

9

Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” in Welter, Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1978), 21-41. Another term is “The Cult of Domesticity.” See: Aileen S. Kraditor, ed., Up From the Pedestal: Selected Writings in the History of American Feminism (Chicago: Quadrangle Press, 1968), 10.

10

Kraditor argued that the concern for social stability motivated much of the conservative opposition to the entire women’s rights movement, especially woman suffrage. See: Kraditor, Up From the Pedestal, 12-13.

14 v The Bridge

11

Over seventy years later, Cardinal James Gibbons warned that getting involved in politics, even to the extent of voting would “unsex” women, making them “mannish.” He wrote, “The insistence on a right to participate in active political life is undoubtedly calculated to rob women of their grace of character and give her nothing in return but masculine boldness and effrontery.” He said, “I regard ‘woman’s rights’ women and the leaders of the new school of female progress as the worst enemies of the female sex.”

“Gibbons Arouses Suffragists,” Providence Daily Journal (November 28, 1910), 11; “Cardinal Gibbons Opposes Suffrage.” Ibid.

(December 8, 1916), 1. Gibbons (1934-1921) was 9th Archbishop of Baltimore from 1877 to 1921. He was an advocate of labor and labor unions and played a key role in convincing the Pope to allow workers to join unions.

12

True women were “ladies.” The word “woman” was applied to servants, inferiors, and lower-class women. The respectable, dominant women’s magazines of the 19th century had titles such as Godey’s Lady’s Book, and Ladies Magazine, and Ladies Home Journal.

When The Woman’s Journal, the organ of the women’s rights reformers, was begun in 1870, it bore a radical title.

13

UNA, “A Word to the Contented and Discontented Woman,” Providence Daily Journal (November 1, 1869), 1. The italics are in the original.

14

Sarah Cooper, “Woman Suffrage – Cui Bono?” Overland Monthly 8 (1872), quoted by Higgins, “Adulterous Individualism,” 193.

15

Andrew A. Sinclair, The Emancipation of the American Woman (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 254.

16

Lisa Cochran Higgins, “Adulterous Individualism, Socialism and Free Love in Nineteenth-Century Anti-Suffrage Writing,” Legacy 21 (2004): 193-209.

17

Celia Morris, Fanny Wright: Rebel in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984); William Randall Waterman, Frances Wright (New York: AMS Press, 1967).

18

Fourier advocated free love as well, but his American interpreters omitted that aspect in their writings.

19

Mark Holloway, Heavens on Earth: Utopian Communities in America, 1680-1880 (New York: Dover Publications, 1966); Jonathan Beecher, Paul Avrich, Charles Fourier: The Visionary and his World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966).

20

Victoria Woodhull’s life is an incredible story. Born in poverty in frontier Ohio to an illiterate mother and a humbug of a father who was a snake oil salesman, she and her sister Tennessee scammed and slept their way to becoming the first female stockbrokers on Wall Street with the help of Cornelius Vanderbilt. In 1870 they began publishing the Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly to promote Victoria’s run for the presidency. She was the first woman to testify before a congressional committee, and then in 1872 launched her campaign for president of the United States (despite the fact that she was not yet 35 years old, as required by the Constitution). In mid-1872 Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly exposed the sordid, adulterous affair of Henry Ward Beecher and the wife of Theodore Tilton, members of Beecher’s church. In 1877, after the death of Cornelius Vanderbilt, William Henry Vanderbilt paid the two sisters to leave the country, and they moved to England. There Victoria married a wealthy banker named John B. Martin and lived out her life in luxury in the country. The books written about Victoria and Tennessee include Myra MacPherson, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age (New York: Twelve Publishing Co., 2014); Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (New York: Harper Perennial Books, 1998); Mary Gabriel, Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull Uncensored (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1996).

21

Quoted in Nancy Woloch, Women and the American Experience, 3rd edition (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 322. The National Woman Suffrage Association ruptured in 1869 over the opposition of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to the 15th Amendment which enfranchised African-American men. Paulina Wright Davis sided with Anthony and Stanton while most Rhode Island suffragists, led by Elizabeth Buffum Chace supported the amendment and affiliated with the American Woman Suffrage Association under the leadership of Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe and others.

22

“A Speech on the Principles of Social Freedom delivered in Steinway Hall, Monday, Nov. 20, 1871 by Victoria C. Woodhull” (New York: Woodhull, Claflin & Co., 1871), 23, reprinted in Victoria Woodhull Reader, Madeline B. Stern, Paul Avrich Collection (Weston, Massachusetts: M & S. Press, 1974).

23

Woloch, Women and the American Experience, 330.

24

“Vigorously Opposes Woman Suffrage,” Providence Daily Journal (March 24, 1907), 8; “Both Sides of Woman’s Suffrage,” Providence Sunday Journal (January 14, 1912), 20. The pro-suffrage response was to point out that the men’s vote in school elections was equally tiny, but where women had full suffrage, over 60 percent of the women voted. Letters to the Editor, “Woman Suffrage Arguments,” Providence Daily Journal (March 31, 1907), 19.

25

“Vigorously Opposes Woman Suffrage.” Ibid. (March 24, 1907), 8. In the absence of a Rhode Island organization these statements were sent to Rhode Island by the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women.

26

“General Assembly Begins 12th Week.” Ibid. (March 18, 1907), 2.

Defending the “Woman’s Sphere”: The Ideology and Opposition of Anti-suffragists v 15

27

“Women At Odds In Argument of Voting Powers,” Providence Evening Bulletin (March 19, 1907), 7; “Women Oppose Bill to Give Them Vote,” Providence Daily Journal (March 20, 1907), 9.

28

“Woman Suffrage Bill Killed,” Providence Daily Journal (April 11, 1907), 3.

29

[Headlines] “Woman Suffrage Act Shelved in the House” “Indefinite Postponement is Voted with Unanimity.”

“No Voice Raised for it.” Ibid. (March 17, 1909), 6.

30 “Carrie’s

Hatchet in New Fields.” Ibid. (January 17, 1909), 39; Editorial page, “Topics of the Day,” Ibid. (March 15, 1909), 8.

31

“A Woman Voter.” Ibid. (January 25, 1909), 6.

32

The Letter Box: Mary Hazard, “The Suffrage Movement.” Ibid. (November 17, 1912), 10.

33

The Letter Box: Mary Hazard, “Women and Equality.” Ibid. (November 22, 1912), 10.

34

“Only Women Fight Bill for Suffrage: Men Missing at Hearing on Act Pending Before Assembly.” Ibid. (February 14, 1914), 3.

35

Letters to the Editor: “Two Views of Suffrage Victory in New York.” Ibid. (November 25, 1917), 23. Another result of the New York suffrage victory was the transformation of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (also founded in 1911) into a militant anti-radical organization and the change of its organ from the Woman’s Protest to Woman Patriot.

It explicitly charged woman suffrage with being pro-German, and promoting Bolshevism, feminism (free love), and pacifism.

Kristy Maddox, “When Patriots Protest: The Anti-Suffrage Discursive Transformation of 1917,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs (January 1, 2004), 7: 285.

36

“Both Sides of Woman’s Suffrage,” Providence Sunday Journal (January 21, 1912), 30.

37

“Only Women Fight Bill for Suffrage,” Ibid. (February 14, 1914), 3.

38

George Kellner and J. Stanley Lemons, Rhode Island: The Ocean State (Sun Valley, Calif.: American Historical Press, 2004), 76.

Paradoxically, the men (some of whom were husbands of the Antis) who owned the textile mills and other industries welcomed immigrants and opposed efforts to limit immigration.

39

A clear example of this view was stated in 1871 by Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren, wife of Admiral John Dahlgren, when she was invited to appear in an open session of the National Woman Suffrage Association to debate the issue of suffrage. She declined, saying, “We would remind you that in the very fact of soliciting us to ‘hold debate’ on a public platform on this or any other question, you entirely ignore the principle that ourselves and our friends seek to defend, viz. the preservation of female modesty.”

Stanton, et al., History of Woman Suffrage, 2: 495.

40

Letters to the Editor: “Woman Suffrage – Some Considerations on the Negative Side,” Providence Daily Journal (March 3, 1871), 1.

41

“Vigorously Opposes Woman Suffrage.” Ibid. (March 24, 1907), 8.

42

Letter to the Editor, An Anti-Suffrage Woman, “A Woman’s Objection to Suffrage,” Providence Sunday Journal (March 14, 1909), 17.

43

Letters to the Editor, An Anti-Suffrage Woman, Votes Against Women.” Ibid. (March 28, 1909), 17.

44

“Both Sides of Woman’s Suffrage,” Providence Sunday Journal (January 21, 1912), 30.

45

“Both Sides of Woman’s Suffrage.” Ibid. (January 14, 1912), 20.

46 “Feminist”

was a new term that came into usage in the United States around 1910. For those who called themselves “feminists,” the goal was social revolution and complete freedom for women. For conservatives such as Mary Hazard, “feminist” meant the horrors of social revolution. About the origin and meaning of “feminist,” see: Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 14-16.

47

Letters to the Editor: Mary P. B. Hazard, “Equal Suffrage,” Providence Daily Journal (March 1, 1914), 17.

48 “Ministers

to Speak on ‘Votes for Women.’” Ibid. (April 16, 1914), 9; “Preachers Discuss Feminine Suffrage: Pastors Speak Cautiously.” Ibid. (April 27, 1914), 9.

49

“R. I. House Concurs in Passage of Woman Suffrage Bill” “Rhode Island Women Given Right to Vote for President in 1920: House 71-20, Concurs with Senate in Extending Suffrage.” Ibid. (April 18, 1917), 1, 3.

50

“Only Women Fight Bill for Suffrage.” Ibid. (February 14, 1914), 3. Because the suffragists had a booth at the food fair, the anti-suffragists also opened a booth to enroll women in their cause. Dr. Mary Pauline Root and Harriet Cocroft staffed the booth in 1916. See reports of these fairs and the dueling booths: “3000 At Opening of Pure Food Fair.” Ibid. (February 15, 1916), 4; “Record Gathering Visits Food Fair” Ibid. (February 16, 1916), 7; “Food Fair Opens: Propagandists Also There: Suffrage and Anti-Suffragist Associations.” Ibid. (February 19, 1917), 14.

16 v The Bridge

51

The search to discover the identity of even these few was made harder by the newspapers’ misnaming two of them.

“Mrs. Elisha Howland” was actually Mrs. Cora Estelle Holland, and “Mrs. M. I. Merrill” was Miss Mary Isabella Merrill.

Searching census, cemetery, and city directory records for the wrong name or the wrong gender was a trial.

52

Lucy Thurber Hagan Miller was the wife of William Brown Martin Miller, a banker and broker who died in 1900. She was described as a voice and music teacher in the city directories, passport application, and U.S. Census from the 1890s to 1930. She died of “senile dementia and arteriosclerosis.” (R. I. Death Record).

53

Mary Pauline Root, having graduated from Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, was a medical missionary in India at the Madura Hospital from 1885 to 1896. Returning to Providence, she became a practicing physician in the city for many years.

She died in 1944 in South Bristol, Maine and was buried there.

54

“Harriet Fowler Dead At Harmony.” Providence Daily Journal (February 11, 1932), 20; “Prof. Henry Thatcher Fowler, 80, Biblical Scholar, Dies at Harmony.” Ibid. (January 24, 1948); “Professor Albert G. Harkness of Brown University Dead.” Ibid.

(January 30, 1923), 2; Parish Register, First Baptist Church in America.

55

The legacy continued: John Chafee and Lincoln Chafee are descendants of Henry Lippitt.

56

“Mrs. C. W. Lippitt, Dead In 80th Year.” Providence Journal (January 3, 1940), 11; “Charles W. Lippitt Dead In 78th Year.”

Ibid. (April 5, 1924), 1, 4; “Obituary: John Holden Ormsbee.” Ibid. (September 6, 1860), 2.

57

“Stephen O. Metcalf Dead in 94th Year,” Ibid. (September 28, 1950),1.

58

“Mrs. Stephen S. O. Metcalf Dead After Being Ill Three Months,” Ibid. (March 31, 1925), 3.

59

“Miss Louise C. Hoppin, 100, Red Cross Founder, Dies.” Ibid. (September 18,1959), 30; U. S. Census, 1880, 1900, 1910, 1920.

Providence City Directory, 1928 – 1958. Regarding the Hoppin family, see: Representative Men and Old Families of Rhode Island, 3 vols., (Chicago: J. H. Beers & Co, 1908), 1: 8-10, 87.

60

“Service Friday For Mrs. Sturgis,” Providence Journal (December 17, 1930), 2; “Howard O. Sturgis Dead At Bar Harbor, In 76th Year,” Ibid. (July 6, 1920), 1, 2.

61

See list of names endorsing the call for the convention to meet December 11, 1868, Providence Daily Journal (December 8, 1868), 3.

62

“Rowland G. Hazard Dies Suddenly In Santa Barbara, Cal.” Ibid. (January 24, 1918), 2; also see: Mrs. R. G. Hazard Rites Tomorrow.” Ibid. (April 9, 1936), 9; U.S. Census (1900, 1910, 1920).

63

“Mrs. N. T. Bacon, Peace Dale, Dead,” Providence Daily Journal (October 27, 1925), 4; Biographical notes in the Bacon Family Papers at the Rhode Island Historical Society.

64

“Miss Mary Merrill Dead in Peace Dale,” Providence Journal (January 8, 1933), 6.

65

“Mrs. Elisha Holland.” Ibid. (July 11, 1962), 28; “Elisha Holland.” Ibid. (April 14, 1943), 2; U.S. Census, 1920, 1930, 1940.

66

“Mrs. E. L. Johnson, Clubwoman, Dies.” Providence Journal (March 30, 1944), 6; “Obituary: Edward L. Johnson.” Ibid. (September 26, 1914), 10. The Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association announced that Elizabeth Churchill was its “regularly appointed agent…who is ready to lecture on the Woman Question.” Letter to the Editor, Providence Daily Journal (December 11, 1869), 3.

67

Alice Adams, U. S. Census (1910, 1920); Death notice: Providence Journal (November 23, 1926), 3; U.S. Census 1880; Obituary: “Benjamin B. Adams.” Providence Journal (January 22, 1898), 2. Report of his funeral: “Benjamin B. Adams.” Ibid.

(January 24, 1898), 2.

68

U. S. Census 1880, 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930, 1940; “Former Grocer and Prominent Churchman Dead of Heart Disease in 77th Year.” Providence Journal (November 13, 1925), 26. Death notice. Ibid. (August 20, 1941), 10.

69

“Mrs. G. A. Blumer Dead In 77th Year.” Ibid. (August 6, 1937), 17; “Helen S. Blumer Buried.” Ibid. (August 8, 1937), 12; “Head of Butler Hospital and Prominent Psychiatrist.” Ibid. (April 26, 1940), 7. U. S. Census, 1920, 1930.

70

“Mrs. Hannah A. Coggeshall Dead After Short Illness,” Providence Journal (June 30, 1921), 3; regarding James H. Coggeshall, see: Historical Catalogue of Brown University, 1764-1914 (Providence: Brown University, 1914), 144.

71

U.S. Census (1920, 1930); Providence City Directory (1902-1916); Find a Grave Index. Regarding her father, see: “Rev. Mr. Cocroft’s Death,” Providence Journal (June 5, 1897), 8; “Impressive Services,” Ibid. (June 8, 1897), 8.

Defending the “Woman’s Sphere”: The Ideology and Opposition of Anti-suffragists v 17

Members of the Newport County Woman Suffrage League, n.d. Letitia Lawton (left), Cora Mitchel (center), and Emeline Eldredge (right). Photograph, courtesy of the portsmouth historical society.

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Uncovering the Lives of Ordinary Rhode Island Suffragists Elisa Miller Elisa Miller is an associate professor in the Department of History and the Gender and Women’s Studies Program at Rhode Island College.

She wishes to thank the many individuals who contributed entries for the Online Biographical Dictionary.

I

q

n 1925 Sara M. Algeo published The Story of a SubPioneer, a memoir about her work as a leader in the Rhode Island woman suffrage movement. The book also detailed the contributions of many other Rhode Islanders to the cause. Algeo explained that Carrie Chapman Catt, the former president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), had discouraged her from writing the book because she believed that it would be too similar to accounts written by other suffrage leaders. Algeo disagreed with Catt, though, and wrote that “there are few volumes written by the common garden variety of suffragists.

They are all written by the extraordinary, the distinguished, the great.”1 The editors and contributors of the Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States share Algeo’s commitment to documenting the often-overlooked but significant activism of ordinary Americans in the suffrage movement.

The year 2020 marks the centennial of the ratification of the nineteenth amendment, granting American women the constitutional right to vote.2 In honor of this anniversary, in 2015 Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar, eminent historians of American women’s history, created the Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States, an internet database of biographical essays about American woman suffragists. The collection is available at https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/ VOTESforWOMEN.3 The biography database currently contains over 2600 short biographies of woman suffragists from across the country. By the time the project concludes, approximately another 1000 entries will be added.

Dublin and Sklar designed the project as a work of social history, meaning that the entries would focus on the ordinary, and usually unknown, members of the movement, instead of celebrated leaders such as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, or Alice Paul. Most Americans’ knowledge of the woman suffrage movement has been limited and focused on these high-profile leaders. There has been less awareness of and attention to the hundreds of thousands of women who constituted the ground troops of the movement and made the Nineteenth Amendment possible. Who were these ordinary suffragists? What were their backgrounds?

What motivated them to devote their time, energy, and money to the movement? What suffrage activities did they engage in? What was the impact of their activism, in their local communities, states, and in the nation as a whole? The editors and authors of the Online Biographical Dictionary believe that the biographical perspective of ordinary suffragists reveals new understanding and nuances about the suffrage movement that have been lost by a traditional historical focus on national leaders and organizations.

The biographical project focuses on woman suffrage during the period of 1890-1920, when it developed into a mass movement with millions of members, instead of its nineteenth century roots, dating back to the first woman’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848, with far more limited membership and influence. The biographical collection examines three different categories of suffragists: “Mainstream Suffragists of the National American Women Suffrage Association” (NAWSA), “Militant Suffragists of the National Woman’s Party” (NWP), and “Black

Uncovering the Lives of Ordinary Rhode Island Suffragists v 19

Women Suffragists.” Lastly, the project is crowdsourced, with ordinary Americans researching and writing biographical entries about ordinary suffragists. The authors of the biographies are community members, professors, local historians, and graduate, undergraduate, and high school students.

I serve as the Rhode Island state coordinator of the Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States. In total, there are about seventy biographies representing Rhode Island suffragists, primarily from the NAWSA groups that were central to the state movement, but also entries on Black suffragists and militant ones.4 The largest group of contributors to the Rhode Island biographies were faculty and undergraduate students from Rhode Island College. A class of high school students from Massachusetts also researched and wrote Rhode Island biographies. Numerous members of the community who were interested in local history and the suffrage movement, also contributed biographies.

The biographies include Rhode Island women such as Bertha G. Higgins, Enid M. Pierce, Cora Mitchel, Mildred Glines, Anna G. Smith, and Helen Dougherty.5 More famous or earlier Rhode Island suffragists such as Paulina Wright Davis, Anna Garlin Spencer, Elizabeth Buffum Chace, and Julia Ward Howe, were not included. This article examines the Rhode Island suffrage movement of the early twentieth century and how the biographies of these women reveal a new, more diverse, larger, and more influential movement in the state. With their ideas, backgrounds, and actions, the women helped the Rhode Island movement achieve new highs with the 1917 presidential suffrage legislation and the 1920 ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, but also embodied the flaws and contradictions of the suffrage movement with racism and other prejudices.

The Rhode Island organizations affiliated with the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) dominated in history, size, and influence. The Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association (RIWSA) was founded in 1868 and was the only suffrage organization in the state for many years. Smaller regional branches of RIWSA included groups such as the Pawtucket League, the Compton League, and the Newport County Woman Suffrage League. In the early twentieth century, new NAWSA suffrage organizations were created by Rhode Island women. At the 1906 NAWSA convention in Baltimore, Dr. M. Carey Thomas, president 20 v The Bridge

of Bryn Mawr College, led a meeting about establishing a national suffrage organization for college women. RIWSA officers followed up on this sentiment and formed a committee, helmed by Ardelia Dewing Gladding, to explore how to attract more women college students into the movement. By the end of 1907, they had created a new Rhode Island organization, named the College Equal Suffrage League, with Florence Garvin as its first president. Sara M. Algeo, a founding member of the College League, noted that it worked in partnership with RIWSA and “brought it new blood and new members.”6 By 1913, Algeo was the president of the College Equal Suffrage League and came to admire the suffrage tactics and organization of Carrie Chapman Catt’s Woman Suffrage Party in New York. The Rhode Island College League hosted a speech by Catt where she explained the Woman Suffrage Party’s principles and strategies of working as a political machine. The week after Catt’s talk in 1913, Rhode Island suffragists led by Algeo, Sara L.G. Fittz, Helen R. Parks, and Esther H. Abelson formed the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Party (RIWSP) with Algeo as chairman.7 The RIWSP engaged in new suffrage outreach efforts, political lobbying, and created new high-profile events in Rhode Island such as an annual suffrage bazaar that raised money and awareness for the cause. The RIWSP often shared membership and events with RIWSA and both organizations were state branches of NAWSA. In 1915, the three Rhode Island NAWSA groups — the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association, the College Equal Suffrage League, and the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Party — agreed to merge into one organization with the new name of the Rhode Island Equal Suffrage Association (RIESA) with Agnes M. Jenks as president.8 The merger of the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Party into the RIESA ended up being a rocky one. Algeo had disagreed with amalgamation and several months later reestablished RIWSP as an independent organization which she served as chairman again. In subsequent years, RIWSP maintained its independence from RIESA and its affiliation with NAWSA; however, collaborations among the two organizations and their members were common.

One notable difference between the organizations was that RIWSP welcomed Black members and Bertha G. Higgins and Mary E. Jackson were active participants. Higgins joined with Algeo as one of the charter members of the reestablished RIWSP.

In the 1910s, new suffrage organizations that identified as more militant emerged in Rhode Island. These groups, though, had a more limited membership and impact in the state than the NAWSA ones. In 1913, Ingeborg Kindstedt, a Swedish immigrant, and resident of Providence, led a small group of women in creating the Women’s Political Union (WPU). The organization was also referred to at times as the Women’s Political Equality League. The Rhode Island group was modeled after Harriot Stanton Blatch’s Women’s Political Union, a suffrage organization in New York City that introduced more public protest tactics and sought to bring more working-class women into the movement.

The Providence Journal reported that the members of the Rhode Island group were “admirers of Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst,” the famous militant British suffragist.9 Alice Paul and Doris Stevens, national leaders of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, a more militant group devoted to activism for a suffrage constitutional amendment, came to Rhode Island to speak to the WPU members about the Congressional Union. The Rhode Island WPU developed formal affiliations with the Congressional Union and the Women’s Political Union in New York.

The Rhode Island WPU embraced the idea of militant tactics in support of suffrage. At a meeting, a member suggested that they pursue tactics similar to the famous Dorr Rebellion

in Rhode Island in the 1840s, a radical democratic movement that attempted to rewrite the state constitution, implement its own government, and seize an arsenal in order to provide the right to vote to all adult white men in the state instead of only property owners.10 The suffragists of the Rhode Island WPU also embraced more explicitly feminist rhetoric and ideas than the more mainstream RIWSA. In 1914, for example, the members passed a resolution declaring that women had the right to “disobey man, man-made laws and man-preached commandments.”11 These provocative discussions aside, the WPU did not undertake any major activities, militant or otherwise, in support of suffrage in Rhode Island beyond their regular meetings.

Rhode Island WPU leaders, Ingeborg Kindstedt and Maria Kindberg, also a Swedish immigrant and Kindstedt’s partner, gained national attention, though, for a high-profile event in 1915. Alice Paul, Congressional Union leader, asked Kindberg and Kindstedt to deliver a woman suffrage petition with 500,000 signatures to President Woodrow Wilson.

Kindstedt and Kindberg, accompanied by Sally Bard Field, drove by car 3,000 miles from the Congressional Union convention in San Francisco to Washington D.C. The trip lasted for ten weeks and the women met with fifteen governors and twenty-five mayors to promote the suffrage cause along the way.12

Suffrage envoy Sara Bard Field (left) and her driver, Maria Kindberg (center), and machinist Ingeborg Kindstedt (right), during their cross-country journey to present suffrage petitions to Congress, September-December. United States Washington D.C., 1915. [Sept.-Dec.] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/mnwp000424/.

Uncovering the Lives of Ordinary Rhode Island Suffragists v 21

By 1915, national and local suffragists expressed interest in having a branch of the Congressional Union (CU) in Rhode Island. Many Rhode Island suffragists, including those in RIWSA, were already members and supporters of the national CU. Marian Perry and Alva Belmont, prominent Rhode Island socialites, were members of the national advisory committee of the CU and helped fund and establish a national CU headquarters in Newport. Agnes M. Jenks, chairman of RIWSA, also served on the CU advisory committee.

In 1915, Jenks met with Alice Paul, and told her that she was “desirous of having a branch of the Union in Rhode Island, and would [do] everything possible to aid in the arrangements for [a Congressional Union] convention” in the state.13 Jenks worried, though, about the potential negative influence of the WPU leaders in a new CU organization. She told Paul that the WPU was a “moribund association” with essentially only two members—Kindstedt and Kindberg—and warned her that the two women would undermine the Rhode Island Congressional Union branch if given too much freedom and power.14 In March 1916, a small group of women, led

by Kindstedt and Kindberg, received a charter for a new organization, the Congressional Union of Providence, R.I., and Kindstedt served as first president. The new organization held regular meetings, hosted open-air rallies, and brought in local and national speakers on suffrage and related topics. The new Rhode Island CU branch occasionally collaborated with RIESA to conduct political lobbying about woman suffrage with members of the Rhode Island state government.

Both nationally and in Rhode Island, the Congressional Union eventually transitioned into the National Woman’s Party (NWP). In May 1917, Rhode Island women including Marian Perry and Mildred Glines hosted a National Woman’s Party conference to create an NWP branch in the state.

Mildred Gilbert, a national organizer of the party, spoke at the event about the NWP and also met with RIESA leaders and requested their cooperation in the campaign for the federal suffrage amendment. After the meeting, Agnes M. Jenks, the RIESA chairman, announced that the RIESA board supported “working in perfect harmony with both national associations [NAWSA and NWP]” and the importance of a federal suffrage amendment. This note of collaboration between the RIESA and Rhode Island NWP was a departure from the contentious relationship that existed between NAWSA and NWP nationally as the leaders clashed on suffrage tactics.15

Jenks echoed some of these concerns, explaining that RIESA decided to not affiliate formally with the NWP because RIESA members and leaders had reservations about the wisdom of the NWP’s militant tactics, most notably the “present picketing of the White House, which, in this serious national crisis seems extreme action that serves no end, and which conservative Rhode Island women are not prepare to indorse.”16 The NWP did not have many state branches and concentrated its efforts on lobbying for suffrage nationally rather than by state. As a result, the Rhode Island NWP membership and organization remained fairly small and focused their attentions on the federal government and the suffrage amendment. Mildred Glines was a twenty-threeyear-old Rhode Islander and one of the hostesses of the NWP Rhode Island conference. She had been a member of the legislative committee of RIESA that engaged in the campaign for a presidential suffrage bill in Rhode Island that had passed in April 1917. Glines was elected vice chairman of the new Rhode Island NWP and later became its chairman. In 1918, she was spending time working at the NWP headquarters in Washington but under Alice Paul’s directives, returned to Rhode Island with a resolution that Glines drafted asking the state legislature to support the suffrage constitutional amendment. That resolution was passed and Glines returned to Washington, D.C. to lobby Rhode Island Senators LeBaron B. Colt and Peter G. Gerry for their support for the amendment.17

Mildred Glines, chairman Rhode Island, National Woman’s Party.

“Through Miss Glines’s efforts the Rhode Island Legislature has just passed a resolution calling upon Senators to work and vote for the [suffrage] amendment.” Providence Rhode Island, ca. 1917 [to 1918 Apr. 20] Harris & Ewing W. (ca. 1917). photograph retrieved from the library of congress.

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The members of the Rhode Island NWP became more active in the state in 1919 as they collaborated with RIESA and RIWSP in a campaign to convince the Rhode Island legislature to hold a special session to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. Much of the NWP’s lobbying of the Rhode Island Governor and General Assembly, though, was led by Abby Scott Baker, political chairman of the national NWP, instead of local Rhode Island women.18 After the Rhode Island legislature voted to ratify the amendment in January 1920, Alice Paul attended the signing of the ratification by Governor Beeckman and later met with him, along with Agnes M. Jenks, to urge him to encourage other Republican governors and leaders to support the amendment.19 In addition to the militant (NWP) and mainstream (NAWSA) members of the suffrage movement, the Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States has a category on Black suffragists in order to examine and highlight this significant and often neglected group. White suffrage leaders and organizations regularly discriminated against Black women in the movement, ignored the devastating effects of racism in America, and, at times, made direct pleas for suffrage for white women using the arguments of white supremacy. White suffragists such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton helped shape the historical narrative about woman suffrage with their influential, six-volume history of the movement, The History of Woman Suffrage. This history documented and praised the white, mainstream suffrage movement led by NAWSA and its predecessors, the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association, and erased the suffrage support and activism of Black women. We still have much to learn about Black suffragists in the United States and Rhode Island, although historians have demonstrated their significance to suffrage and broader equality movements.20 For most of American history, scholars, politicians, activists, and the public dismissed or overlooked Black suffragists because of explicit and implicit biases that privileged the history of white leaders and organizations.

The efforts of Black suffragists, though, have also been neglected and misunderstood because they often took different forms than those of white activists. As mentioned previously, in Rhode Island, Black women belonged to the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Party, a rare interracial suffrage organization.

This participation, though, was unusual. At the turn of

the century, many Black women, men, and organizations supported woman suffrage as a tool for racial equality, protection, and uplift during a period when racism was especially intense throughout the United States and white supremacy efforts in the South had mostly disenfranchised Black men. In both Rhode Island and the United States, most Black suffrage efforts took place in organizations that were not exclusively devoted to suffrage. Suffrage was only one component, albeit a significant one, of a broader AfricanAmerican movement for civil rights and social reform at the turn of the century. Much of this suffrage activism was done in the local, state, and national organizations of the Black clubwomen’s movement, led by the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). In addition to suffrage, Black clubwomen worked for better conditions of public health, education, careers, homes, and respectability for African Americans.

In Rhode Island, Black women primarily worked for suffrage in their own organizations such as the Rhode Island Union of Colored Women’s Clubs, the Sojourner Truth Club, Colored Women’s Civic and Political League, and the Woman’s Newport League. Roberta J. Dunbar was one of the leading Black activists in Rhode Island at the turn of the century and The Providence Journal referred to her as “one of the best-known Afro-American club women in New England.”21 For many years Dunbar served as president or an officer in

Roberta Dunbar.

“Miss R. J. Dunbar,” The Crisis 13 (February 1917): 174.

Uncovering the Lives of Ordinary Rhode Island Suffragists v 23

organizations including the Woman’s New Century Club, and the New England Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs.

She served as recording secretary for the national NACW from 1912-1917, alongside Mary Church Terrell and Mrs. Booker T. Washington. In addition to her work in Black women’s clubs, she was also a leader in other Black civil rights and community organizations such as the Providence National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Marathon Club.

Most suffrage histories would not include someone like Dunbar. There is no explicit record of her belonging to a suffrage organization or espousing support for the cause.

Her ideas and activism, though, provide strong circumstantial evidence that she supported woman suffrage. Dunbar spoke passionately that Black women held special traits and responsibilities to protect the interests of African-American families and communities.

She was a leader in local, regional, and national Black women’s clubs at a time when they actively supported woman suffrage. She was a colleague and friend with leading suffragists in Rhode Island such as Mary E. Jackson, a Black suffrage leader, and Sara M. Algeo, a white one, and participated in local events with many prominent white suffragists.

Dunbar was an original and active member of the Providence League of Women’s Voters, an organization that emerged out of the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Party as ratification of the suffrage amendment neared. Like many other white and African-American suffragists, Dunbar also became active in political parties after woman suffrage.

For over forty years after the ratification of suffrage, Dunbar was an active member of the Julia Ward Howe Republican Club, a Black women’s political organization.

Other Black women in Rhode Island have suffrage legacies that are easier to trace than Dunbar’s. Bertha G. Higgins was a suffrage leader in both the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Party and Black women’s clubs. Within RIWSP, Higgins led a committee for “colored women” in the suffrage movement. She regularly gave speeches to

Black audiences, in locations such as Black churches, about the importance of woman suffrage to African-American women and the African-American community as a whole. She raised money and awareness for the suffrage cause by partnering with a Black women’s club, the Twentieth Century Art and Literary Club, to put on a suffrage minstrel show of Black singers and music. In 1913, at the annual conference of the Rhode Island Union of Colored Women’s Clubs, Higgins led a debate titled, “Why the Rhode Island Union should endorse the Suffrage movement.” Following this discussion, the members voted to pass a formal resolution of support for the woman suffrage movement. Sara M. Algeo noted that this 1913 suffrage resolution by the Union of Colored Women was “the only endorsement received from any large body of women in the State before ratification took place.”22

U.S. Senate, Resolution of the [R.I.] Union of Colored Women’s Clubs supporting the Federal Woman Suffrage Amendment, 1916. https://www.senate.gov/ artandhistory/history/common/image/RIUnionColoredWomenPetition1916.htm.

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Like Dunbar, Higgins became a founding member of the League of Women Voters in Rhode Island and a powerful advocate for the Republican Party. In 1920, she founded the Julia Ward Howe Republican Women’s Club and worked to encourage Black women to vote, to support Republican candidates in local and national elections, and to lobby Republican politicians on issues important to African Americans, such as civil rights legislation, employment, and social services. Higgins’s political activism in Rhode Island garnered her national attention by Republican leaders and Warren Harding invited her to his presidential inauguration in 1920 in recognition of her support during the campaign and her political influence among African-American voters in Rhode Island.23 Mary E. Jackson was another prominent Black suffragist in Rhode Island and nationally. As with Higgins and Dunbar, she was active in the Black clubwomen’s movement and for many years served as president of the Rhode Island Union of Colored Women’s Clubs. She also was a member of the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Party. She served as vice president in the Alpha Suffrage Club, the influential Black suffrage organization led by Ida B. Wells-Barnett in Chicago, and headed the suffrage department of the NACW. In 1915, Jackson participated in a forum dedicated to woman suffrage in The Crisis, the NAACP’s journal, with Black leaders such as Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and Mary Church Terrell. In her essay, “The Self-Supporting Woman and the Ballot,” Jackson argued that working women needed the vote to protect themselves and that anti-suffrage objections were “protests against progress, civilization and good sense.”24 During World War I, Jackson served as national secretary for African-American women in industrial work for the Young Woman’s Christian Association (YWCA). In this high-profile position, Jackson advocated for woman suffrage for Black women in the context of the American war effort. She claimed that American women were being called to “hold the second line of defense” on the home front during the war and that the country “must by virtue of that call enlist all of its women

African-American women in Rhode Island organized fundraisers to aid the woman suffrage cause. “Colored Players in Suffrage Minstrels,” photograph, The Providence Journal, May 14, 1916.

Mary E. Jackson, photograph, from Sara M. Algeo, The Story of a Sub-Pioneer (Providence, R.I.: Snow & Farnham Co., 1925), 163.

Uncovering the Lives of Ordinary Rhode Island Suffragists v 25

citizens, including colored women.” She continued that the Black woman “must be made to know she is no longer in any sense a ward of America, but a citizen with the rights, duties, and responsibilities of citizenship.”25 In January 1920, Rhode Island suffragists held a banquet to celebrate the state’s ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. At this party, Jackson gave a speech in which she reminded the audience of mostly white suffragists and politicians of the critical work that remained to achieve racial equality. Sara M. Algeo described Jackson’s words as “a flaming sword” about “the wrongs that must be righted among our colored brothers and sisters.”26 Traditionally most Americans have believed that “women got the right to vote with the Nineteenth Amendment,” overlooking that Black women in the South, like their male counterparts, were disenfranchised by legislation, violence, and discrimination. Black men and women in the South really only gained the right to vote in 1965, with the legal protections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 2020, with new political and social pressures to attend to issues of intersectionality and racial discrimination, historians and journalists have emphasized the limitations of the Nineteenth Amendment and the white-dominated suffrage movement.

This correction is much needed and overdue; however, some of the coverage has promoted the idea that only white women achieved the right to vote with the Nineteenth Amendment.

For example, a recent article in Vox claims, “the 19th Amendment was essentially for one group of women and one group only: white women.”27 This new historical narrative erases Northern Black women such as Higgins, Dunbar, and Jackson who worked hard for woman suffrage and wielded significant political power locally and nationally in the years following the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.28 As the evidence of the Black suffragists demonstrates, an important advantage of taking a biographical approach to the history of woman suffrage is that it helps reveal the complexity and diversity of the movement. In recent years, there has been an increasing perception of the suffrage movement as an elite and exclusive group of white, middle and upper-class Protestant women. The nineteenth-century Rhode Island suffrage movement was made up of a small group of nativeborn whites. These suffragists, though, included women, and men, from a wide variety of economic and social backgrounds, with strong connections to the abolition movement, the labor movement, and activist Protestant denominations such as

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the Quakers. The Rhode Island suffrage movement in the early twentieth century did have some suffragists from privileged backgrounds. However, as the Rhode Island movement increased in size in this period, it grew more diverse in the race, class, ethnicity, and religion of its members. It also drew more women who worked, remained single, and were younger than the nineteenth-century pioneers.

Some of the twentieth-century Rhode Island suffragists reflected assumptions about the elite nature of the movement.

They could trace their family roots to the settlers of Rhode Island or other New England colonies in the 1600s and belonged to organizations such as the Mayflower Society and the Daughters of the American Revolution. Various Rhode Island suffragists held family connections to prominent local family names such as Angell, Sprague, Colt, Ballou, Fenner, Hopkins, Carrington, Dorr, Bowen, and Olney. Examples of these elite suffragists include Margarethe Lyman Dwight who grew up in the Dorr Mansion and whose mother founded the Lincoln School, a private girls’ school, for her to attend.

Dwight descended from several prominent Rhode Island families. A great-great-grandfather represented Rhode Island in the Continental Congress during the American Revolution.

Margarethe L. Dwight, photograph, c. 1900, from Dorothy W. Gifford, Lincoln School: The First Century (Providence, R.I.: Lincoln School, 1984), 44. courtesy of the lincoln school.

Her great-grandfather, General Edward Carrington, served as the American Consul in Canton, China. Another greatgrandfather was Sullivan Dorr, who earned his fortune as a shipping merchant. Thomas Wilson Dorr, Sullivan Dorr’s son, and Dwight’s great uncle, was a politician and reformer best known for leading the Dorr Rebellion — a political uprising in the 1840s to expand the franchise in Rhode Island to white men who did not own property.

Anne Hitchcock Sims, a Newport suffragist, was the greatgreat-granddaughter of Ethan Allen, who gained fame in the American Revolution, and her father, Ethan Hitchcock, served as Ambassador to Russia and Secretary of the Interior. In 1905, she married William Sims, who became an admiral in the U.S. Navy and the president of the Naval War College.

President Theodore Roosevelt, the Vice President, and the entire Cabinet of the government attended the wedding.

Other Rhode Island suffragists include Florence Garvin, the daughter of Governor Lucius Garvin and JouJou Edith Converse Colt, a prominent socialite in Washington D.C. and Newport, and the daughter of a U.S. Naval Admiral.

She married LeBaron C. Colt, the member of a family with historical, political, and financial prominence in Rhode Island.

Her father-in-law, LeBaron B. Colt, served as a representative in the Rhode Island General Assembly, a justice to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and a U.S. Senator.

These privileged suffragists, however, are only part of the Rhode Island movement and by the early twentieth century, it included more suffragists with different racial, class, ethnic, and religious backgrounds. Bertha G. Higgins grew up in the rural South right after the Civil War. Her parents were most likely formerly enslaved people and her father worked as either a farmhand or sharecropper. Many of the suffragists grew up in families in which their fathers held working-class jobs.

Helen Dougherty’s father worked in factory jobs in Berkshire County in Massachusetts and Pawtucket. Mary E. Jackson’s father was a teamster and Roberta J. Dunbar’s father worked as a plumber and bartender. Esther Abelson’s father was a Jewish Russian immigrant who worked as a junk dealer and construction worker. Elizabeth M. Barr’s Scottish father was a machinist. Sara M. Algeo’s father died when she was four years old and her mother worked to support the family as a washerwoman.

A few of the modern Rhode Island suffragists were immigrants to the United States, such as Henrietta von Klenze

from Germany, Caroline Dowell from England, Deborah Knox Livingston from Scotland, and Ingeborg Kindstedt from Sweden. Much more common, though, were suffragists who were second-generation immigrants with parents who had emigrated from Europe. For example, Agnes M. Bacon grew up in Central Falls, the child of parents from Ireland.

Sara Algeo’s parents emigrated from Ireland and England.

Esther Abelson grew up in Revere, Massachusetts, the child of Russian immigrants. The second-generation immigrants added new ethnic and class diversity to the movement.

In addition, many of them were Catholic, when the suffragists had traditionally been almost exclusively Protestant.

Esther Abelson was a rare Jewish suffragist in Rhode Island.

These new kinds of suffragists allowed and pushed the movement to reach more diverse groups of Americans.

Abelson emphasized the importance of reaching out to Jewish Americans about woman suffrage and claimed they needed “to rouse the Jewish contingent from its extreme indifference.”29 Sara M. Algeo, the daughter of an Irish immigrant, applauded Sara L. G. Fittz, also the daughter of an Irish immigrant, for “gaining a constituency among the IrishAmerican group” for suffrage.30 Fittz used woman suffrage in Ireland as a way of appealing to Irish Americans in Rhode Island. In a letter to the editor of The Providence Journal, she explained that “Irish women have a vote in Ireland, but not in Rhode Island” and that “100,000 Irish woman householders do vote.” She called on men of Irish origin to “give to their women in America the same political privileges they would have enjoyed had they remained at home.”31 Black women such as Bertha G. Higgins and Mary E. Jackson developed new strategies to reach out to African Americans in Rhode Island, recruit them into the suffrage movement, and fight for woman suffrage for all races. Swedish and Norwegian immigrants in Rhode Island, according to Algeo, were “well informed on the question [of woman suffrage] and almost universally in sympathy,” probably in large part due to the suffrage activism of Ingeborg Kindstedt and Maria Kindberg, Swedish immigrants who ran the Swedish Young Women’s Home in Providence.32 In addition to increasing diversity, the Rhode Island suffragists embodied the “New Woman” trend as women pursued and created new public opportunities in American society at the turn of the century. They were more likely to hold outside employment, to remain single, and to attend college. Middle- and upper-class women who did marry Uncovering the Lives of Ordinary Rhode Island Suffragists v 27

and have children engaged in increasing social and political activism, in addition to their family duties. Nationally and in Rhode Island, as women participated in higher rates of employment, education, and reform, they became more interested in and supportive of suffrage and the movement grew in size and influence.33 Several of the Rhode Island suffragists were legally single but pursued less traditional relationships. Helen Dougherty lived unmarried for many years with Robert F. Hunt who had been her boss while she worked at The Labor Advocate: Newsletter of the Socialist Party of Rhode Island, a socialist newspaper in Rhode Island.

Elizabeth Upham Yates, Louise Hall, Maria Kindberg, and Ingeborg Kindstedt had long-term relationships with other women with whom they shared suffrage activism, homes, and property.34 By the late nineteenth century, more American women pursued higher education at colleges and universities.

Many of the Rhode Island suffragists attended elite women’s colleges, which were hotbeds of suffrage debate and activism.

Annie H. Barus and Louise Hall graduated from Vassar College, Jessie V. Budlong from Smith College, Helen Emerson from Bryn Mawr, Elizabeth Upham Yates attended Radcliffe College and the Woman’s College at Brown University, and Gertrude E. Knox, Mount Holyoke College. Sara M. Algeo went to Boston University and Veva E. Storrs, St. Lawrence College. Henrietta von Klenze earned a B.A. and Ph.D. in Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago.

Both Jessie V. Budlong and Sara M. Algeo received master’s degrees from the Woman’s College at Brown University.

Helen Dougherty, in “Miss Helen Dougherty,” photograph, The Providence Sunday Journal, November 3, 1912. courtesy of the john hay library, brown university, providence, r.i.

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Other suffragists attended less elite schools. Louise Peck, Helen Bowen, and Enid M. Pierce graduated from the Rhode Island Normal School (later renamed Rhode Island College), Alice Worden Cooper graduated from Teachers College at Columbia University, and Sara L.G. Fittz from the Normal College of New York City, in preparation for teaching careers.

At the turn of the century, the Rhode Island suffrage movement had increasing numbers of working women.

Most of these women were employed in middle-class jobs; although many had fathers who labored in working-class jobs, few of the suffragists held working-class positions. Suffrage organizations had only started to make more inroads with working-class women in the period and most working-class women had limited time available to volunteer with the organizations. Rare exceptions were Roberta J. Dunbar and Ellen M. Bolles who both worked as dressmakers; at other times Dunbar worked as a manicurist and hairdresser.35 Some of these women spent their lives as single women with careers; others worked until they married. The most common profession of the suffragists was schoolteacher and women including Agnes M. Bacon, Avis A. Hawkins, and Enid M. Pierce had long careers teaching in Rhode Island public schools.

Frances Lucas began her career as a teacher before assuming the position as principal of the Lincoln School, the private school founded by Margarethe Dwight’s mother. Emeline Eldredge served as superintendent of the Portsmouth school district. In addition to her other working-class jobs, Roberta J. Dunbar became principal of the Watchman Industrial School, an industrial school for Black young people.

Jessie V. Budlong, photograph from the Smith College ’98 Class Book (Florence, Mass.: The Bryant Press, 1898), 27. https://archive.org/ details/class1898smit.

Suffragists worked in other professional jobs as well.

Elizabeth M. Barr and Mary A. Angell were librarians — Barr at the Rhode State Library and Angell as the first woman librarian at the historic Providence Athenaeum. Mabel E. Orgelman worked as a stenographer before becoming owner and manager of the Green Lantern Tea Room in Providence.

Leila P. Andrews worked as a real estate broker and owned rental properties. Mary E. Jackson was a civil servant, working as a statistician in the Rhode Island Labor Department.

Louise Hall was employed as a field secretary, a professional suffrage organizer, for RIWSA and the College Equal Suffrage League. Althea L. Hall worked as a bookkeeper at a manufacturing plant. Sarah J. Eddy became a famous artist, especially known for a portrait she painted of Susan B. Anthony. Isabelle Ahearn O’Neill worked as an actress on stage and in the new medium of film and Agnes M. Jenks also was a stage actress prior to her marriage.

American women participated in increasing activism, careers, and voluntarism for social reform at the turn of the century. This was a common trajectory for women throughout the country but especially prominent in industrial and urban regions such as Rhode Island. The women reformers in this period feared that modern trends including industrialization and urbanization posed great threats to the health, morality, and character of American society and were especially damaging to women, children, family, and the home.

These reformers believed that women had special traits and responsibilities to fix these social ills.

Social reform became one of the most important ways that American women became involved in the suffrage movement.

As with education and employment, reform broadened women’s horizons, brought white middle- and upper-class women into the public and political spheres, and provided an important motivation for supporting suffrage. For many suffragists, the appeal of woman suffrage was that they could use the vote to pressure politicians and political parties to support reform legislation, on topics such as temperance, child labor, and public health. Agnes M. Jenks explained that she joined the suffrage movement after she realized in her reform activism that women needed the ballot “to assure reforms for women and children,” and that they were handicapped in their efforts to gain legislative changes without political power.36 The vast majority of Rhode Island suffragists at the turn of the century were also active in local and national social

reform organizations and viewed social reform and woman suffrage as complementary and interrelated.

One of the largest reform movements at the turn of the century was the anti-alcohol temperance movement.

Nationally and in Rhode Island, there was much overlap in membership, ideas, and concerns between the suffrage and temperance movements. Elizabeth Upham Yates, a future president of RIWSA, explained at a local Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) meeting in 1896, that the WCTU was the “greatest result of woman’s progress” and that “every woman should be deeply interested in the cause of temperance.” She continued that temperance activism and legislation could help solve “all the other important problems now before the world. Immigration, the contest between capital and labor, all involved temperance in some form.”37 RISWA and RIESA members regularly belonged to the WCTU and gave suffrage speeches there.

In turn, WCTU members spoke about temperance and suffrage at RIWSA and RIESA meetings. Local and state branches of the WCTU lobbied the Rhode Island legislature and governor in favor of various presidential suffrage bills and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.

Sara M. Algeo was active in both the suffrage and temperance efforts in Rhode Island. She explained that there was a long, close relationship which always existed between the two national organizations representing suffrage and temperance. From the time of Susan B. Anthony and her disciples Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt, they have been spiritually interlocked. Frances Willard [longtime president of the WCTU]…was heart and soul for suffrage.38 Algeo offered her own unique testament to interrelated suffrage and temperance movements when Jennie L.W. Rooke, the state president of the WCTU, gifted her with two puppies.

Algeo named the dogs “Suffrage” and “Prohibition” and said they were “worthy of the great reforms they signified,” and a “splendid advertisement for both causes.”39 Rhode Island suffragists argued that with the right to vote women would vote for temperance politicians and the resulting temperance legislation would improve American society dramatically. Deborah Knox Livingston was a suffragist and state president of the WCTU in Rhode Island before becoming a prominent leader in temperance and suffrage in Uncovering the Lives of Ordinary Rhode Island Suffragists v 29

other New England states and nationally, including serving as the chair of suffrage for the national WCTU. Speaking at a WCTU meeting in West Warwick in 1912, Livingston called for “the enfranchisement of women,” which she believed offered “the only hope for the enforcement of the liquor traffic” as well as “other great social reforms now before the people of this country,” including child labor, crime, disease, education, and prostitution.40 Livingston wrote a song about suffrage and temperance called “The Advancing Host” that included the chorus: Women want the vote, women want the vote, To bring in prohibition, women want the vote.

Women want the vote, women want the vote, To make a sober nation, women want the vote.41

Sara M. Algeo with her dogs, “Suffrage” and “Prohibition,” photograph from Sara M. Algeo, The Story of a Sub-Pioneer (Providence, R.I.: Snow & Farnham Co., 1925), 250.

Deborah Knox Livingston, photograph from Sara M. Algeo, The Story of a Sub-Pioneer (Providence, R.I.: Snow & Farnham Co., 1925), 109.

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Helen Dougherty, suffragist and Socialist candidate for Secretary of State, echoed Livingston’s ideas about temperance and suffrage. She claimed that whenever, the question of woman suffrage came up the liquor interest fought it relentlessly. There was a reason.

If woman should ever get the right of franchise in Rhode Island you could count upon one thing for a surety, and that is that there would not be a liquor store on every corner; that there would not be so many of them in the congested, wageworkers’ residential districts of Providence as are now permitted to do business. 42 As with temperance, child labor was a common social issue that motivated women reformers and suffragists at the turn of the century. Annie H. Barus was a state leader in the fight against child labor and a suffragist. She was chairman of the Rhode Island Child Labor Committee, a director of the Rhode Island Consumers’ League, and chairman of the Rhode Island Women’s Clubs committee on social and industrial conditions. Barus also served on the National Child Labor Committee as the Rhode Island representative. In public lectures, Barus charged that children as young as five and six years old worked out of their homes for the jewelry industry and that more than 6000 children were employed in Rhode Island factories. She also accused Rhode Island of being a pioneer in child labor, which she claimed first emerged as a problem at Slater Mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, the first cotton mill in the United States.43

As with temperance, Barus and other suffragists believed that women would use the vote to fight against child labor.

She wrote an essay in support of voting rights for women as part of a debate series on suffrage published by The Providence Journal in 1912. Barus argued that women needed the vote in order to protect children, which she considered the special skill and responsibility of women. She explained that, “Potential motherhood in one half of humanity instinctively puts that half on the defensive to cherish and protect the race as against the masculine incentive to utilize and exhaust.” Their innate maternal nature, Barus claimed, was compelling women to ask for the power of the ballot in behalf of children, that they may help control the conditions that surround their labor, their education and their play; that they may efficiently help in solving the questions of the State’s dependents — the aged and the sick — the responsibility for whose care and comfort was deemed their special vocation.

She cited evidence from a study that demonstrated “the 11 countries where children are best cared for are the 11 where women have equal power with men in controlling governmental and social practices.” Barus claimed that this proved the “power of the ballot to aid women in the fulfillment of the special function of their sex — motherhood” and that nature had put “her stamp of approval on equal suffrage.”44 Barus’s ideas about motherhood and suffrage were common ones in the Rhode Island and national suffrage movement. Although some suffragists fought for the right to vote based on the idea of equality with men, a more common philosophy and strategy of suffragists was to argue that women were fundamentally different than men. These suffragists believed that woman were naturally more moral, religious, and nurturing, and that these traits would make them voters who would oppose political corruption and support politicians and legislation to protect society, particularly women and children.45 Sara L.G. Fittz declared that American society was “calling for mothering” and that “the enfranchising of women will be the salvation of the world.”46 Helen Dougherty, suffragist and Socialist claimed, “the natural gentleness and unselfishness of woman’s nature will make her a more valuable voter in matters which affect the home, the child and the public health.”47 Elizabeth Upham Yates testified before a Rhode Island House committee in support of a presidential suffrage bill. She said that at a previous assembly debate on

woman suffrage, a man “said that he hoped the measure would not pass because he was afraid that if given the ballot women would introduce corruption into Rhode Island politics.”

Yates countered that assumption, stating, “Open the doors of your prisons and see 100 men come out for every woman.

Open the doors of our churches and see how many more women you will find there than men.”48 Suffragists claimed that the vote would allow women to protect the family and home in American society. At a 1915 “Woman Suffrage Forum” held by RIWSA, Helen R. Parks argued that woman suffrage was needed “in the interest of pure food laws, including the great question of the milk supply under sanitary conditions, and as to quality.”

She also claimed that suffrage could help with issues including the “proper housing, removal of garbage, and many other instances of municipal house-keeping which affect the home.”

Parks ended her speech by declaring, “the only thing that will help to make the whole world better—the Ballot.”49 Mabel E. Orgelman argued that granting women suffrage would help them improve their homes in other ways. Women’s public activity, she claimed had given them a “broader vision” and a “increased civic interest and civic intelligence.” As a result, according to Orgelman, these women were “raising children who will constitute a more patriotic and more intelligent citizenship than that of today. The interests of the home, of the school and of the child are better safeguarded than ever before and the moral and spiritual forces of the community strengthened.”50 Some of the Rhode Island suffragists who espoused maternalist ideas for suffrage, such as Dougherty and Orgelman, did so despite their own status as single woman without children. As in Annie H. Barus’s quote that all women had their “potential motherhood” that made them instinctively want to “cherish and protect” children, many women believed that motherhood was not necessary for women to represent and exert maternal and nurturing values as reformers and voters—that women naturally had these traits even if they did not actually bear or raise children.51 Most suffragists who used this maternalist rhetoric in support of woman suffrage believed these concepts.

The maternalist ideas, though, were also a useful strategy to counter the claims of anti-suffragists and fears of many American men and women that woman suffrage would hurt women’s roles in the family. Ettie Dunbar was a Rhode

Uncovering the Lives of Ordinary Rhode Island Suffragists v 31

Anna H. Sims with her children, photograph from Captain W.G. Cassard, “Concerning a Naval Family [Family of President of the Naval War College William S. Sims],” The Newport Recruit (January 1919), 15.

Island suffragist who had previously worked as a suffragist in Massachusetts under the name Ettie Lowell. She defended suffrage and women’s domesticity, arguing that, “All suffragists claim that woman’s sphere is in her home by nature, and therefore she knows best concerning the needs of the home,” and that, “women will not be influenced away from the home by becoming interested in political life.” Instead she claimed, “Government is housekeeping on a larger scale — and woman are the traditional housekeepers.”52 Indeed, Alice Stone Blackwell, a national suffrage leader, used Ettie Lowell as an example to discredit the anti-suffrage idea that women voting would hurt the family or turn women away from the home by noting that Lowell was an active suffragist and the mother of ten children.53 In the early twentieth century, the social reform and maternalist aspects of suffrage helped advance the movement in Rhode Island. In this period, the Rhode Island suffragists also employed new public tactics and improved and intensified older strategies of lobbying politicians. The 1910s was a period in which the Rhode Island suffragists dramatically increased the movement’s public profile and influence, culminating in the passage of a 1917 law granting Rhode Island women the right to vote in presidential elections. The presidential suffrage bill was a major accomplishment for the Rhode Island suffragists. It was also a national milestone, as Rhode Island was the first East Coast state to grant women presidential or full suffrage. That the Rhode Island movement accomplished

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this feat was not an accident; they were one of the pioneers of a presidential suffrage campaign. RIWSA members first introduced the legislation in 1892 and suffragists fought for it persistently for the next twenty-five years.

In 1912, RIWSA and the College Equal Suffrage League hired Louise Hall, a suffragist from Massachusetts, to serve as a professional field secretary in charge of organizing.

Hall helped revitalize and modernize the Rhode Island suffrage movement, although she only worked there for several months. She organized and led the first open-air suffrage rally in Rhode Island in downtown Providence on April 11, 1912.

The Providence Journal ran a photograph of Hall standing on a peanut box and giving a suffrage speech to a large crowd.

The article described her as “dressed in a smart walking suit of brown, and holding a large yellow flag on which appeared the lettering, ‘Votes for Women,’” and reported that she explained “the [suffrage] cause from diverse angles of arguments.”

Besides the speech, Hall and two other suffragists carried bags that read “Votes for Women,” sold suffrage buttons and copies of The Woman’s Journal suffrage newspaper, and passed around a large yellow sign advertising an upcoming local speech by NAWSA president, Anna Howard Shaw.54 In addition to the open-air rallies, Hall also initiated daily luncheon meetings about woman suffrage for factory workers to try to attract more support for the movement from workingclass men and women. She arranged for the organization to have a suffrage booth at the 1912 Pure Food Exposition in

Providence and the suffragists continued to operate a booth at the food fair annually for the rest of the decade. The History of Woman Suffrage praised the Rhode Island women’s suffrage activism at the food fairs describing that, “thousands of new members were enrolled, tens of thousands of leaflets were distributed, and publicity work was done. The ‘suffrage map’ was in evidence, showing the many States that had been won, an irrefutable argument against the emanations of the antisuffrage booth.”55 The Woman Suffrage Party in Rhode Island initiated new public events and rallies in the state, canvassed voters, constructed a strong political lobbying infrastructure, established an annual suffrage bazaar at Christmas time to raise funds and awareness for the cause, and sold The Woman’s Journal on the streets. Esther Abelson was in charge of selling subscriptions to The Woman’s Journal for RIWSP and also represented RIWSP at the 1913 NAWSA national convention in Washington D.C. At the convention, Abelson’s role as a “newsie” garnered her national attention, as a photograph of her selling copies of The Woman’s Journal was published in newspapers across the country, including The New York Times.56 RIWSP led a high-profile public campaign for woman suffrage in 1914. NAWSA announced a national week of suffrage events in April and May in all fifty states, culminating with a proposed “Woman’s Independence Day” on May 2. RIWSP leaders and members organized the Rhode

Esther Abelson, from “Women at the Suffrage Convention in Washington,” photograph, The New York Times, December 14, 1913.

Louise Hall speaking at the first open-air rally in Rhode Island in 1912. Photograph from Sara M. Algeo, The Story of a Sub-Pioneer (Providence, R.I.: Snow & Farnham Co., 1925), 128.

“The Rounding Up for the Woman Suffrage Party Banquet,” (1913), cartoon. Politicians featured are Providence Mayor Joseph Gainer, Governor Aram J. Pothier, George W. Parks, and Senator Addison P. Munroe. cartoon, from Sara M. Algeo, The Story of a Sub-Pioneer (Providence, R.I.: Snow & Farnham Co., 1925), 178.

Uncovering the Lives of Ordinary Rhode Island Suffragists v 33

“Woman’s Journal Day” (most likely 1914).

Ingeborg Kindstedt in the center with two unidentified women. Photograph, from Sara M. Algeo, The Story of a Sub-Pioneer (Providence, R.I.: Snow & Farnham Co., 1925), 151.

Island events in collaboration with RIWSA and WPU. The suffragists organized a varied series of events for the “Votes for Women” week, with each day having its own theme.

They arranged with local stores to have window displays with suffrage merchandise and suffrage colors and for theatres to show suffrage films and plays, allow suffrage speakers, and to sell suffrage merchandise. Suffragists held open meetings throughout the state, sold copies of The Woman’s Journal in the streets, threw a suffrage ball with four hundred attendees, and raised money with a rummage sale.

During the “Votes for Women” week, on “Church Day” the suffragists requested that clergymen speak in support of woman suffrage. In Woonsocket, for example, Reverend George F. Beecher of the First Baptist Church, gave a sermon in favor of woman suffrage. He stated that, “Woman has become a wage-earner. She toils in the factory and in the office and in the store. She has entered the professions and is rapidly proving herself to be the peer of man in the realm of public affairs.” Echoing many of the suffragist claims, Beecher drew on maternalist themes claiming, “Our legislation of to-day deals largely with social questions such as pure food, sanitary housing, sweat shops, regulated hours of employment and the white slave trade [prostitution]. It is generally conceded that woman is more sensitive to the distinctions between right and wrong than man.”57 The week wrapped up with a day-long series of events at Roger Williams Park in honor of “Woman’s Independence Day,” including children’s activities, a tree planting in honor 34 v The Bridge

of noted social reformer Jane Addams, entertainment, and speeches from national leaders including Stephen S. Wise, a prominent rabbi and social activist, and local suffragists including Mary E. Jackson, Sara L.G. Fittz, and Henrietta von Klenze. The Woman’s Journal heralded Woman’s Independence Day as “a red letter day in Rhode Island suffrage history.”58 In the early twentieth century, in addition to these new public events, the Rhode Island suffragists developed sophisticated political lobbying. Ever since Jeannette S. French, a Pawtucket suffragist, had introduced the presidential suffrage bill for RIWSA in 1892, suffragists commonly testified before House and Senate hearings at the State House and communicated with politicians. At a 1911 Assembly hearing, Elizabeth Upham Yates pleaded with the Rhode Island legislators to pass presidential suffrage for women.

She appealed to state pride, stating, “Many States have already extended the franchise to women. Shall cultured New England be behind the wild and wooly West?”59 In the early twentieth century, though, the suffragists intensified their political efforts in support of woman suffrage in general but particularly aimed at passing the presidential suffrage bill. In 1905, RIWSA created its own newspaper, The Woman Citizen, edited by Jeannette S. French. The newspaper carried articles about local, state, and national suffrage events and issues and ran from 1905-1913.

When they produced their first issue, the RIWSA members placed a copy on the desk of every Rhode Island legislator.

In 1914, members of the RIWSP and RISWA participated

in a lobbying effort at the Rhode Island State House that The Providence Bulletin described as “Woman suffragists stormed the State House…and made a verbal assault upon the members of the General Assembly.”60 The suffragists “buttonholed” members of the assembly, confronting them in the State House’s corridors, staircases, and elsewhere to try to persuade them about woman suffrage.

Sara L.G. Fittz gave much of the credit for the political campaigns in the 1910s to the organizing skills of Agnes M. Jenks, who joined the Rhode Island movement in 1914 and served as the legislative committee chair and chair of RIWSA and RIESA. Prior to moving to Rhode Island, Jenks had been legislative chair for the New Hampshire Woman Suffrage Association. Fittz explained that Jenks “prepared women speakers, lobbyists, organizers, canvassers, chairmen of committees to command and understand the situation and harnessed every available opportunity that might have a remote bearing on our ultimate triumph.”61 For a threeyear period from 1914 to 1917, according to Fittz, with “the exception of one stormy day, women with sound political sense, instructed in arguments for suffrage, have been present at [all] legislative sessions.”62 Besides interacting with politicians, the suffragists exerted political pressure behind the scenes. They let Rhode Island legislators know that if they killed the presidential suffrage bill in committee and denied the Assembly as a whole from voting on it, that the legislators “should not be surprised if they find [RIWSP] which has been treated in this unstatesmanlike manner stumping the State against their re-election.” 63 The suffragists conducted extensive research into several years of voting records to determine which legislators were their biggest opponents and obstacles. They ultimately narrowed a list to three legislators whom they decided to target for political defeat in 1914 and distributed circulars publicizing opponents of the presidential suffrage bill. One of these politicians was Republican Representative Albert P. Sumner. Jenks referred to him as “an arch enemy to progressive legislation of any sort and is commonly called ‘slippery and incompetent.’”64 Sumner was enraged at the suffragists’ campaign against him and called them “pestilential.” He declared that he had been subjected to “personal attack in 1914 by the women, which I believe was intended to blackmail me into voting for woman suffrage.”65 Despite the suffragists’ political lobbying, the presidential suffrage bill did not succeed in 1914 and in subsequent years, the suffragists ramped up their political tactics. During the

The Woman Citizen (Pawtucket, R.I.) IX, No. 2 (February 1913), front cover. RHi X17 4213. rhode island historical society collections.

Agnes Jenks, Bain News Service Publisher.

Agnes Jenks [No Date Recorded on Caption Card] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2014687861.

Uncovering the Lives of Ordinary Rhode Island Suffragists v 35

1916 election season, suffragists including Agnes M. Jenks, Elizabeth Upham Yates, Nettie E. Bauer, Sara L.G. Fittz, and Mabel E. Orgelman spoke and campaigned for suffrage at Republican and Democratic rallies. They succeeded in getting the state Democratic Party to add support for woman suffrage to its political platform.

Anna G. Smith succeeded Jenks as the RIESA legislative chair in 1916 and led political lobbying efforts for woman suffrage within the state and with the Rhode Island delegation in the United States Senate and House of Representatives.

The Providence Journal described the efforts of Smith’s RIESA legislative committee, noting that they met with every member of the assembly and provided legislators with weekly letters about national and international suffrage news.

In addition, the article reports, the suffragists went “into the districts of recalcitrant members with petitions. They were careful to visit first important officials and citizens of their district.” The Journal explained that “it afforded the women exceeding joy to see a legislator who had declared to high heaven that no man or woman in his district wanted woman suffrage compelled to present a petition signed by hundreds of his constituents.”66 After the Rhode Island state government passed the presidential suffrage bill in 1917, NAWSA leaders brought Anna G. Smith to Washington D.C. to give speeches on “How We Won Presidential Suffrage in Rhode Island”

and to assist in NAWSA’s lobbying in the Senate and House of Representatives for the federal suffrage amendment.

Mildred Glines, future chair of the Rhode Island NWP, was a member of Smith’s legislative committee.

On April 17, 1917, twenty-five years after Rhode Island suffragists first introduced the cause of presidential suffrage, several hundred suffragists packed the State House for the vote on the bill by members of the House. The representatives engaged in a four-hour debate before voting to pass the law by a margin of 71-20, at which point the suffragists “burst into hand-clapping and words of joy, and Speaker Hammill was obliged to call for order.”67 The presidential suffrage legislation was groundbreaking in Rhode Island and the East Coast states. Newspapers across the country covered the event, with The New York Evening Post declaring that, “Thanks to ‘Little Rhode,’ woman suffrage crosses the Alleghanies and touches the Atlantic ocean” and that Rhode Island’s action “has wide significance.”68 Carrie Chapman Catt, NAWSA president, praised the victory and noted that “With Rhode Island we break the solid East and capture one of the strongholds of the antis.” Alice Paul, NWP president, attended the Rhode Island governor’s signing of the bill and said that the victory in Rhode Island “gives us the hope that the National Government will follow this lead and give full suffrage to all the women of the country.”69

Suffragists and Rhode Island senators at the State House in 1914, photograph from Sara M. Algeo, The Story of a Sub-Pioneer (Providence, R.I.: Snow & Farnham Co., 1925), 181.

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Rhode Island Governor Beeckman signing the presidential woman suffrage bill, April 18, 1917. Left to right: Unidentified woman (most likely Ethel W. Parks), Helen R. Parks, Mabel E. Orgelman, Senator Henry B. Kane, Agnes M. Jenks, Governor R. Livingston Beeckman, Elizabeth Upham Yates, Anna G. Smith, Nettie E. Bauer, Representative Richard W. Jennings, Mildred Glines. Photograph. RHi X36143a. rhode island historical society collections.

Rhode Island suffragists were jubilant about achieving presidential suffrage. In an interview with The Providence Journal, Sara M. Algeo asked, “Do you realize that this has come after 25 years of effort and we are rejoiced?” Mary R. Ballou was an elderly suffragist who had worked in the Rhode Island movement for almost fifty years. She stated that, “It marks the beginning of the end of what has been for me a long and often hopeless appearing fight…I hardly expected to live long enough to see old hide-bound Rhode Island take its place at the head of the procession of progress in the East.”

She expressed hope that the presidential suffrage victory would pave the way for complete suffrage rights for women in the near future.70 In explaining the presidential suffrage achievement, Sara L.G. Fittz wanted to ensure that suffragists got proper credit for their activism. She explained, “Our victory was no accident, no intervention of Divine Providence, no miracle, no taking advantage of unsettled war conditions.” Instead, she argued, presidential suffrage was achieved through “the women leaders’ consecration, unselfishness, intelligence, wit, and great sacrifice of time, money and creature comforts.”71 The effective and persistent political lobbying that suffragists engaged in in the 1910s was critical in getting the bill out of committee and getting a wide margin of legislators to vote “yes.”

As we commemorate historic suffrage accomplishments such as Rhode Island’s 1917 presidential suffrage bill and the Nineteenth Amendment, it is also important to recognize and examine the less flattering and more offensive aspects of the movement. In recent years, historians have revealed the complicated history of the woman suffrage movement.

The ideas and actions of suffrage leaders, members, and organizations were often offensive and seemingly contradictory to the stated goal of expanding democracy and rights in America.72 The white-dominated suffrage organizations reflected and reinforced objectionable ideas about race, class, and ethnicity in American society. Examples of the “dark side” of the suffrage movement are evident in the Rhode Island history.

The strongest indictment of the national suffrage movement and organizations such as NAWSA and the National Woman’s Party has centered on the role of racism and African-American women. Some white suffragist leaders made explicit appeals in the South that giving the vote only to white women would shore up white supremacy by providing additional white voters to counter Black voters.

Others strategically were willing to sacrifice or downplay the needs of Black women to appeal to white politicians

Uncovering the Lives of Ordinary Rhode Island Suffragists v 37

and citizens. Still others believed that suffrage was a singleissue movement and racial discrimination was an unrelated and separate issue. Nationally and in the states, suffrage organizations such as NAWSA and the National Woman’s Party routinely discriminated against Black women.

In the dominant suffrage organization in Rhode Island, RIWSA (later RIESA), race was a complicated issue.

The organization did not have any Black members.

The RIWSA suffragists regularly argued that giving women the right to vote would allow them to work to improve various social problems, such as poverty, child labor, alcoholism; however, they rarely expressed concern about or organized against the problems of racial discrimination and inequity in Rhode Island. An notable exception took place at the annual RIWSA meeting in October 1900, when its committee on resolutions proposed several resolutions on racial and ethnic equality.

One resolution condemned the practice of lynching — raciallymotivated extralegal killings. Other resolutions condemned war as evil and criticized the United States for imperialist

A 1917 NAWSA suffrage flyer after Rhode Island passed presidential suffrage. From NAWSA flyers and handbills from the Adele Goodman Clark Papers, M 9, Special Collections and Archives, Virginia Commonwealth University, https://www.flickr.com/photos/vculibraries/24941542555.

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policies in the Philippine Islands. The committee connected the issue of woman suffrage to racial equality in a resolution that stated, “We hope that the agitation of Anti-Imperialism will lead many to see that it is as wrong black or white as it is to disfranchise a man be he Fillippino [sic], Cuban, or Mexican and that the ignoring of the humanity of women by disfranchising them has had a tendency to lower our idea of justice in relation to men of other races.” This was a powerful statement arguing that discrimination against women contributed to discrimination against men from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. The RIWSA members accepted the resolutions but this attention to issues of racial and ethnic equality was anomalous for the organization at the turn of the century.73 As mentioned previously, the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Party was a rare interracial organization that allowed Black women to participate and its white founder, Sara M. Algeo, maintained friendships with Black suffragists and spoke about woman suffrage at the Rhode Island Union of Colored Women’s Clubs. On occasion, individual white suffragists, such as Althea L. Hall from Pawtucket, spoke out in favor of racial equality. In a letter to the editor of The Evening Times, Hall wrote in favor of a proposed civil rights bill in the Rhode Island Assembly. She explained that more than fifty years after the end of slavery, “what we call civil rights are still, in a measure, denied the colored race.” The proposed bill would provide fair and equal treatment in public to all races in Rhode Island. Hall asked, “Does that not seem fair and reasonable to any right-minded person?”74 This kind of attention and support about civil rights by white suffragists in Rhode Island, though, was unusual in this period.

Other white suffragists in Rhode Island expressed frustration at the kinds of American men who had voting rights when white women did not. Their words echoed those of earlier suffrage leaders, most notably Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who believed that white women were treated more poorly than “inferior” groups of men. In the “Declaration of Sentiments,” the statement of purpose from the first woman’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848, Stanton declared that white women were denied rights “given to the most ignorant and degraded men—both natives and foreigners.”75 Stanton and other suffragists’ resentment grew stronger following the creation of the Fifteenth Amendment that granted African-American men the right to vote but

not white or Black women. In 1869, Stanton railed against the proposed amendment, stating indignantly, “Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung, who do not know the difference between a monarchy and a republic, who cannot read the Declaration of Independence or Webster’s spelling book, making laws for [educated white women].”76 Voting rights for all men, including African-American and immigrant men, according to Stanton, created “an antagonism everywhere between educated refined women and the lower orders of men, especially at the South where the slaves of yesterday are the lawmakers of to-day.”77 Elizabeth Upham Yates, president of the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association, attempted to appeal to antiimmigrant sentiment in Rhode Island when she testified at a 1910 committee hearing at the State House in favor of the presidential suffrage bill. She told the committee, “one of the great problems of to-day is the foreign vote. But we would call your attention to the fact that there are 32,000,000 American women here and only 10,000,000 foreign-born men and women. The way to keep the beam balanced is to give the vote to the American women.”78 Yates’ nativist fearmongering about immigrant votes is similar to the argument that some white suffragists made about woman suffrage and white supremacy in the South—that white women’s votes could help counter and dilute any political power by Black men. Yates also made the argument about native-born women checking the power of foreign-born male voters at another presidential suffrage hearing at the Rhode Island State House in 1915.79 In speeches and essays, Sara L.G. Fittz used offensive language to disparage male voters from racial and ethnic minorities. At an open-air suffrage rally in 1914, Fittz declared,

Elizabeth Upham Yates. Photograph from Sara M. Algeo, The Story of a Sub-Pioneer (Providence, R.I.: Snow & Farnham Co., 1925), 101.

The American woman for over 60 years has asked for a voice in their own government. During that time they have seen the ballot thrust, unasked, in the hand of the male negro, given to the Indian without even consulting him, and now Congress has declared the brown men of the Philippines are capable of selfgovernment. And all the time our American women taxpayers, social workers and others, remain in the class of lunatics, idiots and minors.80 Fittz continued this theme in a 1916 letter to the editor in The Providence Journal. In the lead-up to the United States entering World War I, politicians were asking American women to support the proposed war effort. Fittz called this

Sara L. G. Fittz from “How Rhode Island Women Are Sharing in the Campaign,” photograph, The Providence Sunday Journal, October 3, 1920. courtesy of the john hay library, brown university, providence, r.i.

Uncovering the Lives of Ordinary Rhode Island Suffragists v 39

“a mockery, for how can women prepare to defend what they have not—the political liberty accorded to all naturalized citizens, drunkards, and pardoned criminals?” She echoed Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s complaints about the Fifteenth Amendment and the decision to grant Black men the right to vote, claiming, In order to work for the freedom of the slave, women laid aside their own fond hopes of freedom. Their reward was to see the black men, who could not spell or read boosted over the heads of the noblest American women. They saw themselves degraded and humiliated under the feet of their former slaves—now, their political masters.81 Cora Mitchel, a suffragist from Portsmouth, Rhode Island and founder of the Newport County Woman Suffrage League, spoke much more positively about African Americans than Sara Fittz did. However, her positive comments reflected Southern proslavery and “Lost Cause” ideology. In our research, Mitchel is the only Rhode Island suffragist whose family owned enslaved people. Her ancestors had roots in Portsmouth dating back to 1638; in her childhood, her family moved to Apalachicola, Florida where her father worked as a cotton merchant and owned enslaved people. In 1916, Cora Mitchel published an account of her life in the South during the Civil War, Reminiscences of the Civil War. In it she downplayed the family’s involvement with slavery, claiming that her father did not believe in slavery and “owned only three [slaves], and they had come to him imploring him to buy them, as otherwise they would be sold in the open market.” Mitchel claimed that they were “faithful, valuable servants” and treated like “members of our family.”82 Ideas about benevolent slaveowners and loyal slaves were common among whites in the North and South and helped support racial inequality in the United States at the turn of the century.

Suffragists were also deeply involved in Americanization activities in Rhode Island during and after World War I. During the war, xenophobic concerns about immigrants in the United States intensified. Americanization involved various efforts to integrate foreign-born residents into American society by teaching them ideas and practices of language, religion, work, and family to replace their native ones, at times against their will. The decision to participate in the Americanization movement was an obvious one for many Rhode Island suffragists. Many of them already had deep roots

40 v The Bridge

in temperance activism, working girls’ clubs, and settlement houses, all of which worked to assimilate immigrants into American society at the turn of the century.

Agnes M. Bacon, a suffragist and teacher from Central Falls, Rhode Island was a leader of Americanization activities in Rhode Island. In 1919, Bacon and a group of suffragists served on the Rhode Island Woman’s Americanization Committee, a state branch of the NAWSA national committee on Americanization. Some suffragists held nativist ideas about immigrants being a threat to American society.

However, they also feared that concerns about foreigners could undermine the suffrage effort and sought to reassure native-born Americans that foreign-born women could be trusted as voters if woman suffrage passed. The Rhode Island Americanization committee lobbied for a bill that would make English education mandatory for foreign-born residents and appoint a state director of Americanization.

The General Assembly passed the bill in 1919 and Governor R. Livingston Beeckman appointed Bacon to be the first State Director of Americanization. The law instituted new Americanization efforts in school and in the public and mandated that all foreign-born residents up to age twentyone take English language courses. Although the supporters

Agnes M. Bacon, from “Mrs. Agnes M. Bacon New State Director of Americanization,” photograph, The Providence Journal, August 1, 1919. courtesy of the john hay library, brown university, providence, r.i.

of the legislation were suspicious of immigrants, Bacon was the child of Irish immigrants and had taught foreign-born children for many years as a teacher in Central Falls. She was more sympathetic to immigrants than many Americanization proponents, and expressed the hope that Americanization teachers would not demonstrate “race prejudices and religious antagonism” towards their foreign students. Bacon argued that Americanization courses were especially necessary for foreignborn women in order for them to understand American ideals of citizenship and government and to be prepared to vote when woman suffrage passed. Foreign-born women, she claimed, assimilated at slower rates than their children and husbands because they were sheltered in the home and less active in American society. As a result, Bacon claimed that foreign women were “far from being aids in Americanizing their families, [and instead] they often became reactionary forces.” She also expressed a desire that future legislation would force immigrant women to pass a citizenship test before gaining full citizenship rights, such as voting.83 Sara M. Algeo served as chair of the Rhode Island Woman’s Americanization Committee and made the argument that Americanization was especially important to the nation because of World War I. She argued that Americanization would advance national identity and patriotism during wartime and that “a homogeneous, coherent, unified citizenship is a greater security than a heterogeneous mass of unrelated non-Englishspeaking groups.” The Rhode Island population, at the time, she noted, was roughly one-third foreign born. She continued that woman suffrage and Americanization could work in tandem as an added incentive for “loyalty and patriotism on the part of our foreign-born population.”84 Algeo and RIWSP created a pamphlet, Suggestions to the Women Voters of Rhode Island, to advance the cause of Americanization and explain to foreign-born women how to qualify for the right to vote, that they distributed widely across the state.

Much like Americanization, eugenics also gained new prominence and popularity in American society in the late 1910s. Eugenics is a now discredited racial science whose proponents claimed that society could be improved by studying and intervening with genetics of individuals and groups. One strain of eugenics proposed the limiting of ‘bad’ reproduction by ‘lesser’ groups, such as immigrants, African Americans, and the mentally, physically or morally impaired, in order to improve the American gene pool and

society. Rhode Island suffragist, Enid M. Pierce, who was also a supporter of temperance and Americanization, advocated for eugenics. In 1918, Pierce gave an hour-long speech on “cripples” at a People’s Forum meeting in which she drew on eugenic principles to explain the role of heredity in causing physical, moral, and mental disabilities. She claimed that “mental cripples, the feeble-minded, and the insane are on an increase,” and called for legislation to prevent the reproduction of individuals with these ‘flaws.’ 85 On a related eugenic note, Pierce also supported protective legislation to restrict the hours and conditions under which women could work. She claimed that this legislation was needed to protect women’s reproductive capacity, stating “women must have shorter factory hours in order not to be made unfit for motherhood.”86 Ingeborg Kindstedt, as chairman of the Rhode Island CU was also an advocate of eugenics and proposed that the subject, and its theories about marriage and parenting, should be taught in the schools.87 The flaws and shortcomings of the Rhode Island suffragists existed alongside their many accomplishments and admirable traits. Both sides of the movement existed in the state and nationally, and recognizing and examining this complicated history helps provide us a fuller understanding of the suffrage movement and American society.

On January 7, 1920, over fifty years of activism by Rhode Island women culminated in an event where Governor R. Livingston Beeckman signed the state ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment surrounded by suffragists. Four months later, on May 17, the members of the Rhode Island Equal Suffrage Association met to conclude the organization’s business. Most of them continued their political and social activism in Rhode Island as part of the new League of Women Voters organization. Sara M. Algeo documented the final RIESA event. The group’s organizational records, dating from its beginning as the Rhode Island Woman’s Suffrage Association in 1868, were contained in a metal filing box.

On this last day, she wrote, “A procession of women marched through the streets of Providence carrying the records of the organization for fifty years, which were deposited in the archives of the State House with impressive ceremony.”88 Those records and their original filing box are currently housed in the Rhode Island State Archives. The suffragists kept careful documentation of their activism, believed they were doing important work, and were determined to preserve it

Uncovering the Lives of Ordinary Rhode Island Suffragists v 41

in the historical record. The Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States honors this commitment to documenting the history of woman suffrage. By detailing and examining the lives of individual women in the movement, the project helps reveal the broad scope of their backgrounds, ideas, actions, prejudices, and impact. These ordinary women transformed the suffrage effort in Rhode Island into an effective mass movement at the turn of the century that achieved presidential suffrage in 1917 and full suffrage in 1920. For further information on the women mentioned in this article, and additional Rhode Island suffragists, please explore the entries in the Online Biographical Dictionary at https://documents. alexanderstreet.com/VOTESforWOMEN.

“Suffrage Workers Visit Governor Beeckman at State House to Urge Early Ratification of National Enfranchisement,� photograph, The Providence Journal, July 15, 1919. courtesy of the john hay library, brown university, providence, r.i.

R. I. Equal Suffrage Association members deliver the box of their records to the state archives. Despite poor image quality in this reproduction, the historic nature of the occasion is clear. The Providence Journal, May 18, 1920.

The original filing box of the RIESA records, Rhode Island State Archives, Providence, R.I. photograph by author.

42 v The Bridge

Endnotes 1

Sara M. Algeo, The Story of a Sub-Pioneer (Providence, R.I.: Snow & Farnham Co., 1925), 13.

2

Black women in the South quickly lost this newfound right as Southern governments and white citizens used legislation, trickery, and violence to prop up white supremacy and deny Black women the vote in a similar manner as Black men had been since the late nineteenth century.

3

The database is part of Dublin and Sklar’s website, “Women and Social Movements in the U.S., 1600-2000,” a resource of primary and secondary sources on the history of women’s activism in the United States (https://search.alexanderstreet.com/wass).

4

Approximately 80% of the Rhode Island biographies are currently available on the database link listed above and the remaining ones should be available by the beginning of 2021. To search for local suffragists, type “Rhode Island” in the search box on the project’s home page or search by name if you know the suffragist’s name.

5

Note: throughout the essay I have chosen to use the first name of married suffragists instead of the names of their husbands.

Some were more commonly referred by their husbands’ names, though, in the historical documents.

6

Sara M. Algeo, Story of a Sub-Pioneer, 100.

7

Sara M. Algeo, Story of a Sub-Pioneer, 161-162.

8

“Woman Suffrage Clubs Affiliate,” The Providence Daily Journal, June 11, 1915.

9

“Form Women’s Political Union,” The Providence Journal, November 20, 1913.

10

“Criticizes House Attitude on Woman Suffrage Bill,” The Providence Journal, March 26, 1915.

11

“Suffragist Plan Outing at Idlewide Cottage,” The Providence Journal, June 24, 1914.

12

Russell DeSimone, “Rhode Island’s Two Unheralded Suffragists,” Small State Big History: The Online Review of Rhode Island History, http://smallstatebighistory.com/rhode-islands-two-unheralded-suffragists/.

13

“Woman Suffrage Convention Here,” The Providence Daily Journal, May 28, 1915.

14

Russell DeSimone, “Rhode Island’s Two Unheralded Suffragists.”

Sara Hunter Graham, Women Suffrage and the New Democracy (New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 1996); Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007).

15 See

Suffrage Work is Planned,” The Providence Journal, April 21, 1917; “Suffragists Vote Not to Affiliate with Nationals,” The Providence Journal, May 3, 1917.

16 “Federal

17 Inez

Haynes Irwin, The Story of the Woman’s Party (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1921), 342-43.

18 “W.C.T.U. 19 “State

Wants Special Session,” The Providence Journal, July 19, 1919.

House Brevities,” The Providence Daily Journal, January 8, 1920.

20

Martha S. Jones, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (New York: Basic Books, 2020); Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).

21

“With the Club Women,” The Providence Sunday Journal, August 26, 1906.

22

Sara M. Algeo, Story of a Sub-Pioneer, 164.

23

By the 1930s, Higgins became disillusioned with the Republican Party and transferred her allegiance to the Democratic Party.

Higgins strongly supported the 1932 Democratic candidate for President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and changed the name of her political organization to the Julia Ward Howe Democratic Women’s Club. For her support, Higgins had the opportunity to welcome President Roosevelt to Rhode Island when he visited the state in 1936. See Norma Lasalle Daoust, “Building the Democratic Party: Black Voting in Providence in the 1930s,” Rhode Island History 44 (August 1985): 81-88.

24

M. E. Jackson, “The Self-Supporting Woman and the Ballot,” The Crisis 10 (August 1915): 187-188.

25

Mary E. Jackson, “Colored Girls in the Second Line of Defense,” The Association Monthly 7 (October 1918): 364.

26

Sara M. Algeo, “Rhode Island Ratification Day,” The Woman Citizen 4 (January 24, 1920): 27: 763.

27

Anna North, “The 19th Amendment Didn’t Give Women the Right to Vote,” Vox, August 18, 2020, https://www.vox.com/2020/8/18/21358913/19th-amendment-ratified-anniversary-women-suffrage-vote.

Uncovering the Lives of Ordinary Rhode Island Suffragists v 43

28 Biographies

for Roberta J. Dunbar, written by Michelle Valletta and Elisa Miller, Bertha G. Higgins by Elisa Miller, and Mary E. Jackson by Kaylah VanWasshnova are available in the Online Biographical Dictionary in the Black suffragist section at https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/VOTESforWOMEN/bwsintro.

29

“Suffragists Plan Big Meeting,” The Providence Daily Journal, April 19, 1913.

30

Sara M. Algeo, “Rhode Island Women Alert,” The Woman’s Journal 44 (November 1, 1913):1.

31

Sara L.G. Fittz, “Woman Suffrage in Ireland As a Lesson to This Country,” The Providence Sunday Journal, July 25, 1915.

32

Sara M. Algeo, “Rhode Island Women Alert,” 1.

33

See Jean Matthews, The Rise of the New Woman: The Woman’s Movement in America, 1875-1930 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003).

34

Kindberg and Kindstedt lived together for many years.

35

Bolles also worked as a clairvoyant before moving to New Mexico where she was heralded as one of the oldest female postmasters in the United States in her mid-seventies.

36

Record of Meetings—September 10, 1908 - February 11, 1915, Folder 21, Rhode Island Equal Suffrage Association Records, 1868-1930, Rhode Island State Archives, Providence, R.I.

37

“Young Women’s C.T.U.,” The Providence Journal, November 7, 1896.

38

Sara M. Algeo, Story of a Sub-Pioneer, 111.

39

Sara M. Algeo, Story of a Sub-Pioneer, 251.

40

“Pawtuxet Valley: Liquor Traffic and Social Reforms,” The Providence Journal, April 15, 1912.

41

Quoted in Paul D. Sanders, ed., Lyrics and Borrowed Tunes of the American Temperance Movement (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 91-92.

42

“Miss Dougherty, Candidate for Secretary of State, Asks ‘Why Not?’” The Providence Journal, November 3, 1912.

43

“Says Tots Work at Home,” The Providence Journal, December 16, 1912; “Rhode Island Socialists Observe Woman’s Day,” The Providence Daily Journal, March 1, 1915.

44

Mrs. Carl Barus, “Beneficial,” The Providence Sunday Journal, January 15, 1912.

45

Historians refer to this concept about politics, social reform, and women’s nature as maternalism. See Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York: Routledge, 1993); Marian van der Klein et al., eds., Maternalism Reconsidered: Motherhood, Welfare, and Social Policy in the Twentieth Century (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012).

46

“Women Democrats Have Hotel Rally,” The Providence Journal, October 16, 1919.

47

“Will Spread Socialism among the Working Girls,” The Berkshire Eagle (Pittsfield, Mass.), February 20, 1912.

48

“Woman Suffragists Plead Their Cause,” The Providence Journal, April 5, 1911.

49

Record of Meetings—September 10, 1908 - February 11, 1915, Folder 21, Rhode Island Equal Suffrage Association Records, 1868-1930, Rhode Island State Archives, Providence, R. I.

50

Hale, Margaret; Merrill, Elizabeth Goodard; Laughlin, Gail; Powell, Rev. Hannah Jewett; and Burnham; Mabel E. Orgelman, Anna E., “The Letter Box Gail Laughlin Writes on Suffrage Vote” (2018). League of Women Voters (69.129). 66. Maine State Museum, Digital Maine. https://digitalmaine.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1065&context=lwvme

51

Mrs. Carl Barus, “Beneficial,” The Providence Sunday Journal, January 15, 1912.

52

“For Better Homes,” The Boston Globe, September 12, 1909.

53

Alice Stone Blackwell, “Fact and Comment,” The Woman Citizen (September 14, 1918) 3: 312.

54

“Women Urge Vote in Open-Air Talk,” The Providence Sunday Journal, April 14, 1912.

55

Ida Husted Harper, ed., The History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. 6: 1900-1920 (New York: J.J. Little & Ives Company, 1922), 568.

56

“Women at the Suffrage Convention in Washington,” The New York Times, December 14, 1913.

57 “Preachers 58

Discuss Feminine Suffrage,” The Providence Journal, April 27, 1914.

“Kansas Woman Chosen Judge,” The Woman’s Journal 45 (May 9, 1914):150.

44 v The Bridge

59

“Woman Suffragists Plead Their Cause,” The Providence Journal, April 5, 1911.

60

Quoted in “Suffragists at State House,” The Bristol Phoenix (Bristol, R.I.), February 13, 1914.

61

Sara Fittz, “How Rhode Island Won,” The Woman’s Journal 48 (April 28, 1917):97.

62

Sara L.G. Fittz, “‘How We Won Suffrage:’ ‘Inside Play’ of Rhode Island’s Long Campaign Described by One of Its Leaders,” The Providence Sunday Journal, April 29, 1917.

63

Sara M. Algeo, Story of a Sub-Pioneer, 180.

64

Quoted in Sara M. Algeo, Story of a Sub-Pioneer, 210.

65

Woman Suffrage Passes R.I. House,” The Providence Journal, April 18, 1917. Critics of Sumner accused him of being against woman suffrage because he was beholden to the Narragansett Brewing Company and opposed to temperance legislation.

66

“A Half Century with Rhode Island Suffragists,” The Providence Journal, April 20, 1917.

67

“Rhode Island Women Given Right to Vote for President in 1920,” The Providence Journal, April 18, 1917.

68

“The Suffrage Triumph: Rhode Island’s Action Has Wide Significance (from the New York Evening Post),” The Providence Journal, April 21, 1917.

69

“R.I. Suffrage Vote Gratifies Leaders,” The Providence Journal, April 19, 1917.

70

“Governor Beeckman, Prominent Woman Suffrage Workers and General Assembly Leaders Laud Passage of Bill by Rhode Island Legislature,” The Providence Journal, April 18, 1917.

71

Sara Fittz, “How Rhode Island Won,” The Woman’s Journal 48 (April 28, 1917): 98.

72

See for example, Louise Michel Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Faye E. Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Laura E. Free, Suffrage Reconstructed: Gender, Race, and Voting Rights in the Civil War Era (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2020); Martha S. Jones, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (New York: Basic Books, 2020).

73

Record of Meetings—May 17, 1899 - February 20, 1908, Folder 20, Rhode Island Equal Suffrage Association Records, 1868-1930, Rhode Island State Archives, Providence, R.I.

74

Althea L. Hall, “Civil Rights for Colored Citizens,” The Evening Times (Pawtucket, R.I.), April 12, 1920.

D. Gordon, ed., The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony, Volume I: In the School of Antislavery 1840-1866 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 79.

75 Ann

76

Ann D. Gordon, ed., The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony, Volume II: Against an Aristocracy of Sex (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 196.

Carol DuBois and Richard Candida Smith, eds., Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Feminist as Thinker: A Reader in Documents and Essays (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 202.

77 Ellen

78 “Brayton

Eulogized at Suffrage Hearing,” The Providence Journal, March 3, 1910.

79

“Capitol Thronged; Suffrage Debated,” The Providence Journal, March 10, 1915.

80

“Suffragist Hits Eaton and Sumner,” The Providence Daily Journal, October 27, 1914.

81

Sara L.G. Fittz, “Should Women Attend ‘Preparedness’ Meetings,” The Providence Sunday Journal, January 23, 1916.

82

Cora Mitchel, Reminiscences of the Civil War (Providence: Snow & Farnham Co.,1916), 4.

83

“Rhode Island Woman Appointed to Unusual Position,” The Providence Sunday Journal, September 14, 1919.

84

Sara M. Algeo, “Aiding to Enfranchise Foreign-Born Women,” The Providence Sunday Journal, March 17, 1918.

85

“‘Cripples’ Subject of Talk Given at People’s Forum,” The Providence Journal, September 16, 1918.

86 “Mothers’

Pension Law Is Advocated,” The Providence Journal, February 26, 1917.

87

“Change in System Urged,” The Providence Journal, February 20, 1917.

88

Sara M. Algeo, Story of a Sub-Pioneer (Providence, R.I.: Snow & Farnham Co., 1925), 259.

Uncovering the Lives of Ordinary Rhode Island Suffragists v 45

Woman’s rights activist Paulina Wright Davis, first president of the R. I. Woman Suffrage Association, organized the1869 National Woman’s Suffrage Association convention in Newport. Buttre, John Chester, Engraver. Paulina W. Davis / photo. by Manchester Bros.: engraved by J.C. Buttre, N.Y., None. [Between 1850 and 1881] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/97500070.

46 v The Bridge

“A Crisis in Our Cause”: The Fifteenth Amendment and the Newport Woman Suffrage Convention of August 1869 Elizabeth C. Stevens Elizabeth C. Stevens is the Editor of Newport History. She is the author of Elizabeth Buffum Chace and Lillie Chace Wyman: A Century of Abolitionist, Suffragist and Workers’ Rights Activism (2003).

I

q

n August 1869 a woman suffrage convention was held in Newport, R.I. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s comment on the gathering was revealing although it was clearly meant to be entertaining. She combined a tongue-incheek tone with military metaphors to describe preparation for the convention and the suffragists’ arrival in Newport.

Susan B. Anthony, the “Napoleon of the Woman Suffrage movement in this country,” had “ordered her forces” to be in “marching order on the 25th of August to besiege the ‘butterflies of fashion’ in Newport,” Stanton reported in The Revolution, Stanton’s and Anthony’s weekly woman suffrage paper. “Obeying orders,” Stanton related, she and other suffragists from New York, “sailed across the sound one bright moonlight night… and found ourselves quartered on the enemy…” The suffragist “invaders” penetrated the precincts of the fashionable Atlantic House hotel, bringing a number of trunks, filled not with “gossamers, and laces, and flowers,” but with “Suffrage ammunition, speeches, resolutions, petitions, tracts, John Stuart Mill’s latest work, and folios of The Revolution.”1 Stanton’s light, humorous tone masked a deeper reality and her military metaphors may have been more than apt.

Suffrage activism in Rhode Island had coalesced months before when the Rhode Island Woman’s Suffrage Association, an affiliate of the New England Woman’s Suffrage Association, had been organized. Two key Rhode Island reformers, Paulina

Wright Davis and Elizabeth Buffum Chace, were instrumental in the formation of both the regional and state associations at the end of 1868. In the months and weeks leading up to the Newport convention, however, differences among women suffragist leaders and activists led to a painful schism that severed decades-long alliances among woman’s rights advocates in the northeast. Although historians have given many reasons for the split between woman suffrage activists, a major factor in the division was Stanton’s and Anthony’s opposition to the 15th Amendment which would ensure the constitutional right of African-American men to vote.2 This article will examine the role of Paulina Wright Davis, who was president of the fledgling Rhode Island Woman’s Suffrage Association, an officer of the New England Woman Suffrage Association, and chief organizer of the convention at Newport on behalf of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Davis’s contacts with suffrage activists leading up to the convention at Newport reveal the depths of grief and antipathy among former close friends and colleagues.

The convention itself, shunned by most New England woman suffrage leaders, was a largely New York affair, although several Rhode Island women took part in the proceedings. Suffrage leadership in Rhode Island was affected by the schism among long-time woman’s rights activists although ultimately, the RIWSA survived this painful period and created a flourishing presence in the state.

The Fifteenth Amendment and the Newport Woman Suffrage Convention of August 1869

v 47

Background After the Civil War, woman suffrage and antislavery activists were optimistic that the Republican party would reward their loyalty during the war with an amendment to the U.S. constitution granting women the vote. In the years immediately following the war, however, differences among prewar reform allies about tactics and policy simmered.

These conflicts came to a head in a dispute over whether to support the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would enfranchise African-American men, but not any women.

The amendment passed Congress in February 1869 and was in the process of being debated and ratified by the states in the months leading up to the Newport convention.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, leaders of the New York group of suffragists, refused to support the passage of an amendment that guaranteed suffrage to men only, and argued that the 15th Amendment should not be ratified, using racist and nativist language as they spoke and worked against awarding the franchise to Black men only and not to women.

Most radical abolitionist suffragists in the Boston orbit were in favor of the 15th Amendment and argued that, as Wendell Phillips famously said in 1865, “It is the Negro’s hour.”3 As early as 1867, when Lucy Stone was agonizing over whether or not to support the amendment, stalwart Massachusetts abolitionist and woman’s rights leader Abby Kelley Foster wrote her longtime antislavery colleague, “The slave is more deeply wronged than woman…I should look upon myself as a monster of selfishness if, while I see my neighbor’s daughter treated as a beast — as thousands still are all over the South — I should turn from them to secure my daughter political equality.”4 Especially galling to abolitionist woman’s rights activists like Lucy Stone and Abby Kelley Foster, who had endured ostracism, criticism and threats during their decades of working for immediate emancipation of enslaved people and for woman’s rights, was the outright racism employed by Stanton and Anthony to argue their point. Indeed, it was unthinkable that abolitionist women suffragists would turn their backs on their longtime AfricanAmerican colleagues like Frederick Douglass, Charles Lenox Remond, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and many others who had been staunch supporters of woman’s rights for many years. Stanton’s and Anthony’s flagrantly racist and nativist opposition to the 15th Amendment effectively alienated

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Frances Ellen Watkins Harper advocated for woman’s rights and the rights of Black people.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, -1911, 1872.

Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/ item/2002698208/.

African Americans dedicated to woman’s suffrage. As Harper is said to have stated, “When it was a question of race [I] let the lesser question of sex go…”5 Conflict between the New York-based Stanton/ Anthony group and the Boston abolitionists reached a fateful impasse at the annual gathering of the Equal Rights Association in New York City at end of May 1869. Relationships among former comrades were so frayed and feelings ran so high concerning support for the 15th Amendment, that the meeting devolved into a chaotic cauldron of shouting, hissing and accusations.

To opponents of the Amendment, Frederick Douglass, an ardent woman’s rights advocate, explained why the franchise was the difference between life and death for Black men, in a way that it was not for middle-class white women.6 The day after the convention dissolved in acrimony, Stanton and Anthony called a meeting of their allies, deliberately excluded their abolitionist/suffragist sisters and brothers, and declared the founding of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association (NWSA) that would work only to gain suffrage for women. At an early meeting of the fledgling group, Elizabeth Cady Stanton announced that, I have always been in favor of the negro having every right, but when he, ignorant and degraded, was made a voter before the noble, cultivated white women, it was time for [women] to demand something for themselves…It isn’t merely giving suffrage to black men, but giving it to ignorant men of every color landing on our shores.7

Radical abolitionist Abby Kelley Foster (1810-1887) was also a close friend of Elizabeth Buffum Chace. Abby Kelley Foster, -1887; bust., 1899. [Published] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/ item/2007683097/.

This precipitous move paved the way for an irreconcilable split among former devoted colleagues in the prewar abolition and woman’s rights movements. It was Stanton and Anthony who called the Newport Convention on behalf of their new National Woman Suffrage Association. Yet a sliver of hope still remained on the part of Rhode Island suffrage leader Paulina Wright Davis that the convention planned for Newport in August 1869, could be an opportunity for New England women abolitionists to join Stanton’s and Anthony’s “national” woman’s rights organization. At the very least, Davis felt it necessary to make overtures to her New England friends and colleagues in the run-up to the Newport Convention, gestures that would reveal the very depths of antipathy between the fledgling Boston and New York woman suffrage groups.

In the summer of 1869, Paulina Wright Davis straddled both the New York and Boston camps. Paulina Kellogg, born in New York state in 1813, had come to antislavery activism early in her marriage to Francis Wright, a prosperous merchant in Utica, in the mid-1830s. During this time she became closely acquainted with Abby Kelley Foster, a staunch Garrisonian antislavery speaker and later, woman’s rights activist. The two women were so attached that Foster named her only child, Paulina Wright Foster (“Alla”), after her activist friend.8 Wright gained notoriety when, after she was widowed, she took up the study of female anatomy, purchased a life-sized femme modelle from France, and began to travel about the country giving lectures to educate women about their bodies.

Davis recounted that, some women “fled the room, or

fainted when they saw the modelle du femme, a very lifelike reproduction of internal female anatomy.” Her popular “health talks” were well subscribed and some women who attended went on to pursue careers as physicians.9 Lucretia Mott credited Davis, who claimed “equal pay with men for her lectures,” with “making the lecturing field a lucrative and respectable profession [for women].”10 After marrying Thomas Davis, a successful Rhode Island jewelry manufacturer and politician, Paulina Wright settled in Providence in 1849.11 Paulina Wright Davis had impressive early woman’s rights bona fides. Her lecturing work in the 1840s had given her a venue for asserting the right of women to know and control their bodies. Importantly, within months of moving to Rhode Island, along with Lucy Stone and others, Davis had organized the first national woman’s rights convention in Worcester, Massachusetts in October 1850. Speakers at the 1850 Worcester Convention over which Davis presided, included abolitionist luminaries Sojourner Truth, Lucretia Mott and Frederick Douglass. Lucy Stone, William Lloyd Garrison and Abby Kelley Foster were also participants.

The concluding resolution of the gathering was a radical demand for woman suffrage and “Equality before the Law, Without Distinction of Sex or Color.”12 Davis organized another woman’s rights convention in Worcester the following year. In a letter to Lucy Stone written decades after the Worcester conventions, Elizabeth Cady Stanton praised Davis’s “rare organizing talent” and gave credit for the “success of the two Worcester conventions” to Davis, “more than to any other person.” Davis had displayed “rare courage, persistence, and executive ability,” Stanton wrote, “in the face of much opposition and many discouragements, she took the initiative steps unaided and alone.”13 Few accounts of Paulina Wright Davis failed to mention her personal attractiveness and magnetic personality. The first volume of the History of Woman Suffrage recounted of Davis, Her wealth, culture and position gave her much social influence; her beauty, grace and gentle manners drew around her a large circle of admiring friends. These, with her tall, fine figure, her classic head and features, and exquisite taste in dress; her organizing talents and knowledge of the question under consideration, altogether made her so desirable a presiding officer, that she was often chosen for that position.14

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Davis’s periodical, The Una, published for two years in Providence, and for another year in Boston, was one of the first publications in the country devoted to woman’s rights.15 Paulina Wright Davis was a notable presence in Rhode Island. Lillie Chace Wyman, daughter of Elizabeth Buffum Chace, Davis’s reform partner and friend, observed that, “when Paulina Wright came to Rhode Island . . . [she] brought her golden hair, her serenely willful ways, and her determined notions with her.”16 The Davises’ ample Greek Revival house on Chalkstone Avenue in Providence was a gathering spot for a lively assortment of reformers, artists and writers.

On a visit to the area in 1868, the poet Walt Whitman spent a few days at the Davis home which he described as a “sort of castle built of stone on fine grounds a mile and a half from the town.” At the Davis home, the great American poet found himself amidst a “really intellectual,” group “composed largely of educated women,” who conversed “in earnest on profound subjects.”17 The Davises built a new house nearby in 1869, which has been described as a “stately Gothic mansion…on a hilltop near the junction of Chalkstone Avenue and Raymond Street in a thirty-four acre park-like setting.”18 Lillie Wyman thought that, after her marriage, Paulina Wright Davis “dwelt like a sort of foreign princess in Providence.” Although she was not accepted by the business and university elites, Davis “was a radiant figure in its circle of literary, artistic and reformatory people.”19 Among Paulina Wright Davis’s Rhode Island friends and acquaintances, perhaps none shared her zeal for reform more than Elizabeth Buffum Chace of Valley Falls. An avowed Garrisonian abolitionist, Chace, a Rhode Island native, had been active in radical antislavery work since the mid-1830s when she and her sisters help found the Fall River Female Anti-Slavery Society in nearby Massachusetts. The women vowed to fight not only for the immediate eradication of slavery in the south, but for the elimination of racial prejudice in the north. The Fall River female activists proposed to labor for “the enjoyment of civil, intellectual and religious rights and privileges” for both enslaved and free Blacks. When several African-American women attempted to join the Fall River Female Anti-Slavery Society, Chace and her sisters welcomed them, rebuffing those who argued against the admission of Black women to membership.20 After she settled in Rhode Island in 1840, Chace, a birthright Quaker whose forebears were among the earliest settlers of Rhode Island, disavowed her ancestral Quakerism 50 v The Bridge

Elizabeth Buffum Chace (1806-1897), shown here with her granddaughter, Bessie Cheney, worked for immediate abolition of slavery for thirty years and then turned her attention to woman suffrage.

Image, ca. 1880, Photograph album, Elizabeth Buffum Chace and family papers, Ms. 89.12, john hay library, brown university.

when it became clear that Quaker meetings were hostile to antislavery speakers. Chace’s home, a station on the underground railroad, was a regular stopping off point for antislavery lecturers like Lucy Stone, Abby Kelley Foster, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison and Sojourner Truth. Unlike Davis who was childless until late in her life,21 at mid-century, Chace was consumed with raising her own children to be radical activists. She gave birth to five children between 1830 and 1841; all died in childhood before she gave birth to five more children, the youngest born in 1852 when Chace was forty-five years old. Like Davis, Chace was married to a successful businessman, cotton manufacturer Samuel B. Chace, and enjoyed financial security. And like Davis, too, Chace was ostracized by “polite society” in Rhode Island for her radical activism.22 It is not known when Davis and Chace first became acquainted. Elizabeth Buffum Chace’s daughter, Lillie Chace Wyman, recalled that Chace was a confidante during Paulina Kellogg Wright’s courtship prior to her marriage in 1849. When the women met, Wyman recalled, they were “mutually attracted.” Chace’s friendship with Davis,

while understandably rooted in their shared reform interests was more “personal” than most of Chace’s relationships.

“She liked ‘Paulina’ herself and not merely Paulina’ s opinions,” Lillie Chace wrote of her mother. “She enjoyed [Paulina’s] beauty, her soft, social manner and her graceful audacity.”23 Chace apparently attended the 1850 Worcester convention, organized by Davis, that was teeming with antislavery associates.24 No doubt Chace’s experiences in the public arena of the antislavery movement, her abiding friendships with activists Lucy Stone and Abby Kelley Foster, with whom Davis was also close, and her passionate commitment to both woman’s rights and antislavery infused their friendship.25 Woman suffrage organizing commenced in earnest in New England in November 1868. Activists met at Horticultural Hall in Boston to form the New England Woman Suffrage Association (NEWSA). Rhode Island leaders Elizabeth Buffum Chace and Paulina Wright Davis traveled from Providence to Boston for the inaugural meeting of NEWSA. Julia Ward Howe, a newcomer to the woman suffrage struggle, who stopped in at the meeting just to observe, was elected president of the new organization. Paulina Wright Davis was named a vice-president.26 Among the other vice-presidents of NEWSA were Charlotte Forten and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

Speakers included Lucy Stone, Frances E.W. Harper,

Charles L. Remond, and Frederick Douglass. The convention resolved that “Suffrage is an inherent right of every American citizen without distinction of sex.”27 Indeed, Chace and Davis were so inspired by the formation of NEWSA that, upon their return to Rhode Island, the two women crafted a call to a Rhode Island convention to found a state woman suffrage association. The gathering, held on December 11, 1868, at Roger Williams Hall in downtown Providence attracted some one-thousand people. Notable reformers who attended included Frederick Douglass, Abby Kelley Foster, and her husband Stephen Foster. The Rhode Island leaders drew up a constitution, set by-laws and elected officers. Davis was elected president; Chace became chair of the executive committee. By January 1869, the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association (RIWSA), an official auxiliary of NEWSA, had petitioned the state legislature for an amendment to the state constitution that would grant suffrage to women residents of the state, and inaugurated petition drives and monthly meetings to discuss strategy and hear inspirational speakers.28 Despite her affiliations with the Boston-based New England Woman Suffrage Association, where support for the 15th Amendment was near unanimous, and her presidency of the closely affiliated Rhode Island Woman

Published ca. 1871, this poster expressed the hopes that the 15th Amendment to the federal constitution would restore and affirm the inherent rights of African Americans in the United States. Kelly, Thomas, Active, Publisher, and James Carter Beard. The Fifteenth Amendment. Celebrated May 19th,/from an original design

by James C. Beard., ca. 1871.

[New York: Pub. by Thomas Kelly, New York, 1870 or 1871] Photograph. https://www.loc. gov/item/2003690776/.

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Suffrage Association, Paulina Wright Davis was “converted” to Stanton’s opposition to the 15th Amendment sometime in the winter or spring of 1869.29 At the disastrous Equal Rights Association meeting, Davis asserted that she did not approve of the passage of the 15th Amendment without a Sixteenth Amendment granting the right to vote to women.

She had “lately come from the South,” and maintained, that based on her observations, formerly enslaved women in the south would be subject to brutal treatment from their husbands if Black men gained the vote but women did not.30 Davis was elected a vice-president of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association at its formation the day after the debacle at the Equal Rights Association convention, thereby holding positions in the New York “national” organization, as well as the New England and Rhode Island associations.31 As a sign that the talented organizer was deeply committed to the Stanton/Anthony group, when plans for the Newport Convention were getting underway, Paulina Wright Davis apparently loaned funds to Susan B. Anthony, to sustain the publication of The Revolution, which had recently lost its primary funder, openly racist businessman George F. Train.32

Newport Convention Prologue In her preparations for the convention, Davis found an ally in a new friend, Isabella Beecher Hooker (1822-1907), whom she had met at the founding of the NEWSA convention in Boston in November 1868. Hooker, younger half-sister of famed author Harriet Beecher Stowe and popular preacher Henry Ward Beecher, had not participated in the nascent woman’s suffrage movement heretofore, but was interested in becoming an active worker. Hooker later noted of their meeting that she found Davis’s “mere presence on the platform, with her beautiful white hair and her remarkable dignity and elegance, was a most potent argument in favor of woman’s participation in public affairs.”33 Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton wished to court Hooker, not least because they desired a member of the notable Beecher family to take their side, but also to entice Isabella’s sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, to join their movement and write fiction for The Revolution.34 In late July, as plans for the Newport Convention began to coalesce, Paulina Wright Davis arranged a meeting at her house in Providence to introduce Isabella Beecher Hooker to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, hoping that

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an in-person meeting would endear Stanton and Anthony to Hooker. The meeting at Davis’s Providence home succeeded. After spending time with the two dedicated suffragists, Isabella Beecher Hooker decided to throw in her lot with the New York group.35 Following the “delightful visit” in Providence, Susan B. Anthony wrote to Hooker, urging her to “be at Newport.” It would be “just the time to talk up ways and means to storm the hosts that stand in battle array against Woman’s freedom.”36 The choice of Newport as a venue for the convention was both odd and provocative. Odd, because Newport was not known for its loyal cadre of woman’s rights activists, and was better known in the summer as a social playground for wealthy New Yorkers. The city, which had been a summer refuge for artists and writers as well as vacationers of all classes who lodged there in hotels and boarding houses, had been acquiring a reputation as a resort of the first magnitude as immensely wealthy New Yorkers began to build expansive homes in Newport after the Civil War. Stanton claimed that her rationale for holding the convention in Newport was to convert “fashionable” influential women, whose support would mean a great deal to the new suffrage group.37 Yet, the choice of Newport, summer home to Julia Ward Howe, the current president of the New England Woman Suffrage Association, and also permanent home to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a fervent ally of the Boston group, was unquestionably an incursion into enemy territory, as Stanton suggests in her seeming light-hearted account of the suffragists’ arrival for the convention. The very act of Stanton and Anthony, pitching their tents in Newport, a geographic outpost of the Boston group, after Stanton and Anthony had just formed what they claimed was a “national” woman suffrage group, was a provocative act of hostility toward woman’s rights activists in the region.

The Call to the Newport Convention first appeared in The Revolution on August 5, 1869. It was to be held on Wednesday August 25th and Thursday, August 26th. Stanton’s and Anthony’s National Woman’s Suffrage Association had held a suffrage convention at Saratoga, N. Y. in July.38 The Saratoga convention came off “splendidly,” and the New York women hoped to repeat their “success” at Newport.

The Call was signed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton as “President” and Paulina Wright Davis was named as “’Advisory Council for the State of Rhode Island.”39

By the time the Call to the Newport Convention appeared in early August, Paulina Wright Davis and Isabella Beecher Hooker had already embarked on a campaign to convince Boston friends and reformers to attend the Newport Convention. When Hooker reached out to Lucy Stone, the famed woman’s rights and abolition leader could not have been more direct. Stone informed Hooker that the principal reason “why I thought you would not wish to cooperate with those who call the convention in Newport. It is this: they steadily oppose the 15th Amendment.” Further, Stone wrote, “I believe that, in just so far as we withhold or deny a human right, to any human being, we establish a basis for the denial and withholding our own rights.” Although she felt “urgency” for the “political rights” of women, Stone who had endured opprobrium as an abolitionist speaker and when she refused to take her husband’s name after her marriage in 1854, informed Hooker, “by my whole moral sense, by the very essence of my soul. I cannot work with those who work against the negro.” She was “inexpressibly sorry” that the women activists had split. “We might be so much greater power, if we could all work together,” she lamented.40 Hooker’s fledgling attempts to entice Boston friends and woman suffragists to come to Newport, were further undercut in the days after she received Stone’s letter, when the Boston suffragists who supported the 15th Amendment sent out a printed communication to their current and former colleagues in the movement. The document proposed the organization of a “truly national and representative base for the organization of an American Woman Suffrage Association.” The signers, all officers of NEWSA, tactfully asserted that they did not wish to disparage the “value of Associations already existing,” however, they “urgently” sought to form “an organization at once more comprehensive and more widely representative.”

The lead signatory was Lucy Stone, her signature was followed by those of Caroline M. Severance, Julia Ward Howe, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and George H. Vibbert.41 If there was a whisper of hope on Davis’s and Hooker’s part that the Newport Convention could present a united woman suffrage front, those aspirations were now dashed.

Nevertheless, perhaps to display public cordiality, Davis and Hooker continued to make overtures to Boston woman’s rights colleagues.

Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), the principal signer of the circular, and president of NEWSA, lived in Boston and

Isabella Beecher Hooker, younger half-sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher, made her debut on the suffrage platform in Newport in 1869. Photograph of Isabella Beecher Hooker c. 1872. harriet beecher stowe center, hartford, ct.

Lucy Stone, who advocated for immediate abolition of slavery and woman’s rights for decades prior to the Civil War, supported the passage of the 15th Amendment granting Black men the right to vote. Photograph album, Elizabeth Buffum Chace and family papers, Ms. 89.12, john hay library, brown university.

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had deep family ties to Rhode Island. She and her husband purchased an old farmhouse in the Lawton’s Valley area of Portsmouth, in the 1850s, where she spent several months every summer. Howe was not a woman’s rights veteran like her colleagues Paulina Wright Davis and Lucy Stone.

She was famous for her authorship of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Howe claimed that, when she attended the organizing convention of NEWSA in November 1868, she went at the urging of her friend, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, trying to remain inconspicuous in her “rainyday suit,” sitting in the audience. However, she was soon invited to the platform and her “conversion was instant…”

Howe “embarked then on the good ship woman suffrage.”42 She firmly supported the 15th Amendment maintaining in an address, after her ascension to the presidency of NEWSA, “I am willing that the Negro [shall get] the ballot before me.”43 In the summer of 1869 Howe had given talks on woman suffrage at the Unitarian Church in Newport; she and Thomas Wentworth Higginson were close friends.44 Paulina Wright Davis planned to visit Howe in the days before the Newport Convention, but sent her a message instead.45 As a gesture of good faith, Paulina Wright Davis called on Thomas Wentworth Higginson in Newport in early August.46 Higginson (1823-1911), another signer of the Boston call to form a new suffrage society, was a minister,

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, colonel of the first Black regiment in the Civil War, was an ardent woman suffragist who was living in Newport at the time of the 1869 convention. From Lillie Buffum Chace Wyman and Arthur C. Wyman, Elizabeth Buffum Chace and Her Environment 1806-1899 (Boston: W.B. Clarke Co., 1914), vol. 2: facing p. 10.

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writer, and abolitionist who had served as colonel of the first Black regiment of the Union Army in the Civil War. He moved to Newport after the war and lived with his wife in Mrs. Dame’s boardinghouse at the corner of Mann Avenue and Kay Street.47 After the war, working with an alliance of activists, led by George T. Downing, Higginson advocated for the racial integration of Newport’s public schools.48 He was also an ardent woman’s rights supporter who had been converted to the woman’s cause in the early 1850s, and had presided at the wedding of radical abolitionists Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell in 1854 in which Stone and Blackwell read a protest against the legal inequities of marriage.49 Higginson had assumed leadership positions in the formation of NEWSA and RIWSA. Criticized for not including Higginson in the plans for the Newport Convention, Paulina Wright Davis called on him in Newport around August 6th. Davis informed Isabella Hooker that, when she visited Higginson, he was “just as full of bitterness and suppressed malignity as can be.” It made Davis “almost sick,” but she reassured Hooker that, despite Higginson’s hostility, they “would have a splendid convention” at Newport.50 She instructed Hooker not to try to convince her Boston friends to come to Newport “as it will do no good.”

Davis reassured her protégé by maintaining that it was “best… to let them go their own way and in a little while they must come to us… 51 Elizabeth Cady Stanton was so frustrated by Higginson’s “failure to understand” her better, that she wrote Davis she was “perfectly willing that the Newport Convention should be entirely managed by the New England people.”52 In a letter postmarked August 12, Davis let Hooker know that Davis, Stanton and Anthony felt that Hooker should not “waste your strength” to write to the signers of the circular dated August 5th.” If we cannot work without dissention in two societies.” Davis advised her friend, “how can we be agreed in one.”53 If Lucy Stone’s forthright response had dampened Hooker’s and Davis’s quest to entice the Boston abolitionist women to attend the Newport Convention and Higginson’s in-person rebuke to Davis had made her ill, with the circular further proof that hopes of a last-ditch alliance between the two groups were fruitless, a letter to Davis from Hooker’s good friend and Davis’s former years-long colleague, Caroline Severance, written some ten days before the start of the Newport Convention was another blow to unity.

Severance (1820-1914) had been active in the antislavery movement in Boston before the war and was head of the recently formed New England Woman’s Club, a powerful organization of women leaders in Boston, and a founding member of NEWSA.54 Severance had met Isabella Beecher Hooker in South Carolina in 1864; the two women had much in common and Severance became an “adored friend” of Hooker. It was Severance who had introduced Paulina Wright Davis and Isabella Beecher Hooker at the NEWSA convention the previous year. Davis had contacted Severance, asking her to consider attending the convention in Newport.

On a visit to Severance’s home outside Boston, Hooker had also urged her “dear friend” to attend.55 Hooker had further been encouraged by Susan B. Anthony to convince Severance to come to Rhode Island.56 Severance’s response to Davis’s and Hooker’s invitations to attend the Newport Convention, could hardly have been more unequivocal. Severance wrote that, neither Hooker’s verbal invitation nor the further letter from Davis inviting Severance to Newport had indicated “that the Newport Convention is to be called by the NY. Society which names itself ‘National,’” i.e., which claimed to be an organization representing all women suffragists in the country. Severance informed Davis that her own presence in Newport “would be both a personal and official endorsement” of Stanton’s and Anthony’s new organization which Severance “could not conscientiously give.” Further, Severance faulted the failure of Davis to “confer with or invite, your fellow members of the New England Executive Committee [i.e., of the NEWSA], until induced to do so by Mrs. Hooker’s urgent desire for it (as a measure tending toward union) — not even Mrs. Howe and Col. Higginson, residents of Newport having been consulted, or notified of it, until then.”57 In her lengthy missive, Severance further questioned whether Stanton, Anthony, and Davis were sincere in their professed desire to find common ground with their colleagues from Boston. She found fault with Stanton’s and Anthony’s organization of a “national” woman suffrage organization in the wake of the Equal Rights Association debacle the previous May, “without a day’s notice to the old absent friends.”

Stanton and Anthony’s group was not “national,” as it did not “represent by any means the majority” of suffragists. In their opposition to the 15th Amendment, the two women’s actions made “union more difficult” and caused the Boston women

Caroline M. Severance, suffragist and close friend of Isabella Beecher Hooker, was in favor of the 15th amendment. Frances Willard and Mary Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century: Fourteen Hundred-Seventy Biographical Sketches Accompanied by Portraits of Leading American Women in all Walks of Life (Buffalo: Charles Wells Moulton, 1893), 642.

to question Stanton’s and Anthony’s “fitness as leaders and representatives of the cause.” Severance asked why Stanton and Anthony “should bring that organization upon ground already covered by two properly organized and efficient Societies — the ‘R.I. State’ [i.e., RIWSA] and the ‘NE’ [i.e. NEWSA]?”58 These “two energetic societies” were “already in the field” in Newport and both Howe and Higginson were “representing the cause there in various ways.” Severance asked why a ’foreign’ society should come to “ground already so wellprovided, when there were plenty of other areas in pressing need of labor?”59 Finally, Severance expressed her deep disappointment and surprise that her dear friend and reform colleague Paulina Wright Davis, an avowed leader for decades in the woman’s rights effort in New England, would ally with such unsuitable partners, a disappointment that was echoed in the severing of many close ties between woman’s rights activists. “I am very sorry, too, allow me to say, dear Mrs. Davis, with a plainness of speech which I think one old, and I trust, permanent friendship and pleasant relations justify — that you should have decided to take the course you have toward the N. York society, I cannot at all understand.” She found it inconceivable that Davis would align with Anthony’s organization since Davis was already affiliated with RIWSA and NEWSA.” RIWSA was “very much” in Davis’s “hands” and Davis could have discussion there of the 15th Amendment and “invite such

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speakers as you choose.” Urging Davis and Hooker, with their connections to the “New York Society,” to “work together for a union of all our forces,” Severance asserted that the purpose of the recent Circular — was not to split the nascent woman’s rights effort, but “to gather all into one harmonious whole, whose officers and measures shall be the choice of the entire constituency.” Severance ended her lengthy letter “with the most cordial wish that union of effort may be found possible.”60 Davis’s response to Severance has not been found; Hooker wrote her friend defending Stanton and Anthony, asserting “I care nothing for the 15th amendment anyway,” and asking Severance to, “Pray forgive me for disappointing you and believe me always your loving friend.”61 In almost single-handedly pulling together the Newport Convention during August, Paulina Wright Davis made several trips “back and forth to Newport and wrote letters innumerable.”62 Although Stanton and Anthony had been involved, Hooker maintained that “it is really Mrs. Davis who got up & managed & paid for the whole—I mean recd. the monies & paid the bills & took receipts in her business like way.”63 To promote the convention and to insure local press coverage, Davis also determined to “see the Editors” in Newport and “make them understand that it is to be a good gathering.”64 It is not clear what “editors” Davis saw in Newport, but the Newport Daily News ran a prominent notice of the convention in its August 24th edition, announcing that a “large delegation of distinguished advocates of woman’s suffrage will be present and participate in the meeting.”65 When she hadn’t heard back from missives sent to Caroline Severance, Lucy Stone, or Julia Ward Howe ten days before the start of the convention, Davis wrote to Hooker, “I think I am cut dead but some how I am so certain of my rectitude and that of my coadjutors [i.e. Stanton, Anthony, and Hooker] that I feel as quiet and peaceful as though the thing was all settled,” although she was “very tired.” Davis considered “this convention almost a crisis in our cause,” she confided to Hooker.66 As if Paulina Wright Davis did not have enough difficulties juggling the convention arrangements and enduring the “bitterness” from Boston in the run up to the Newport Convention, just two weeks before the convention was to take place, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote that she might not attend, offering to sacrifice her presence for the sake of a more harmonious gathering. She had written to

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Julia Ward Howe, who lived part-time in Portsmouth, R.I. was the first president of the New England Woman Suffrage Association.

Photograph of a painting by John Eliot and William Cotton, n.d., RHi X17 4247, rhode island historical society.

Higginson, Stanton informed Paulina Wright Davis, urging him to be involved in the convention, and offering to stay away if it would be helpful. Stanton wondered why the “abolitionists” who supported the 15th amendment were so “anxious,” because it would undoubtedly be ratified. Stanton opposed the amendment, she asserted, as it would establish an “aristocracy of sex.” But she vowed not to mention the 15th Amendment at the Newport Convention she reassured Davis, “unless somebody asks me to rejoice or puts forward some resolution to that effect.” For her own speech at Newport, Stanton planned “to address myself more particularly to the world of fashion.” Nevertheless, despite her expressed hesitation to attend, Stanton ended her letter assuring Davis that she and Susan B. Anthony would “do the best thing to conciliate and unite our forces.”67 Susan B. Anthony sent a less resigned letter to Davis enclosing the circular dated August 5th. Anthony was incensed that the Boston women had “urgently called for” a new suffrage organization. Anthony directed Davis that they “must go strait forward in the line of absolute right,” underscoring the turmoil and division then roiling woman suffragists in the northeast as the time of the convention neared.68 On Davis also fell the burden of drafting resolutions for the convention. In her August 17th letter, Davis urged Hooker to “[p]repare some resolutions please & let us have the best of suggestions.”69 Davis told Hooker that Thomas Wentworth

Higginson “advised that we make the 15th Amendment the grand feature of the Conven [sic],” which she felt was “sinister advice.” Davis instructed Hooker that “there will be very little said about” the amendment at the convention. She saw Higginson’s “dodge” and she would “avoid it by a counter charge.”70 In her letter of August 12, Anthony insisted that, “We must word our Newport Resolutions so as to go in for a final amendment of Fed. Con. One that shall cover us all poor women — black & white.”71 Although little is known of this process, in a huddle at Davis’s house in Providence just prior to the convention, Stanton and Anthony may have been involved in the preparation of the resolutions. Davis told her acolyte, Hooker, that she wanted “the convention to be artistic and beautiful as it will be I have no doubt.”72 Conspicuous by her absence in the preparations for the Newport Convention was the co-founder of RIWSA, chair of its Executive Committee and Davis’s close friend, Elizabeth Buffum Chace. Chace’s husband, Samuel B. Chace, was in ill health at this time and no doubt she was consumed with his care.73 For Chace, who had spent decades toiling as a radical Garrisonian abolitionist, it would have been unthinkable to ally with a group that opposed the 15th Amendment.

Perhaps it was just as well that the health of her husband provided a needed excuse to stay out of the fray surrounding the convention at Newport. Chace’s antislavery colleague, Lucy Stone, had written Chace in July expressing her anguish that the blatant racism demonstrated by the Stanton/Anthony wing in their opposition to the 15th Amendment, would cast all woman’s rights advocates as racist. “A very large number of woman’s rights women are old Abolitionists, and of necessity rejoice in every gain for the negro,” Stone stated.

But Stanton and her allies could succeed in tarnishing the entire movement. Aside from Stanton, Anthony, Davis and one or two others, Stone informed Chace, “I do not know one advocate of the cause who opposes the 15th Amendment…”

She urged Chace, “Do not let us interfere with the real claim of our cause by allowing the enemy to suppose that we are fighting the very principles, we are seeking to establish.”74 A few weeks later, Stone sent Chace a copy of the NEWSA circular proposing the establishment a new woman’s suffrage organization, asking Chace to give her imprimatur to the group.75 Chace’s responses to Stone’s letters have not been found, but it is clear from her later affiliations that she was in agreement with Stone and other abolitionist friends.

The Newport Convention Stanton, Anthony and their entourage arrived in Newport by boat on the night of August 24th, with their trunks filled not with “gossamers, laces, and flowers,” but with “suffrage ammunition.” The party of “the strong-minded mothers and daughters, wives and sisters, editors, reporters, and the Hutchinson family” took up twelve “apartments” at the Atlantic House on Bellevue Avenue, one of Newport’s principal resort establishments. The suffragists arrived late at night when the “brave men and fair women who had tripped the light fantastic until the midnight hours slept heedlessly on, wholly unawares” of the arrival of the “invaders.” The next morning, the visitors from New York had “baths, breakfast, and a drive on the sea beach,” before going over to the Academy of Music for the opening session of the convention at 11.a.m. 76 After the turmoil that marked the lead-up to the Newport Woman Suffrage Convention, the event itself seemed almost free of controversy. When the first session convened, the New York Tribune reported that, “a crowd of elegantly attired and languidly interested fashionables gradually filtered” into the “pretty little Academy of Music,” formerly a dining hall of the Bellevue Hotel, located adjacent to the Jewish cemetery at the crest of Touro Street.77 Notably both NEWSA president Julia Ward Howe and RIWSA officer Thomas Wentworth Higginson did attend the opening session, although they were not seated on the platform. Neither were they, perhaps by their own desire, introduced as honored guests or asked to make remarks at any time during the sessions.

After describing the fashionably attired attendees and several notable personages in the audience, a Tribune reporter noted that “the audience, becoming impatient at the sight of the empty stage, began a well-bred clapping.” The reporter wrote that eventually, “a charming halo of silver curls became visible and Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s genial face and plump frame appeared with all the dignity of her fifty years and her mission resting upon her.” Paulina Wright Davis with her “still pretty figure, and her white curls, bound in the unique Grecian style, about her shapely head, attracting many admiring glances,” followed Stanton. Also present on the platform were “Isabelle” Beecher Hooker, with her “kindly blue eyes, her shawl of airy black lace and the lilac ribbons of her bonnet.” Susan B. Anthony who joined the group was

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In 1869, Newport was turning into a playground for a wealthy elite from New York and Boston, captured in these early twentiethcentury sketches. Ewer, Raymond Crawford, Artist. A sketch-book at Newport / Raymond Crawford Ewer Newport ‘04 R.I.; drawn by Raymond C. Ewer.

Newport Rhode Island, 1914.

New York: Published by Puck Publishing Corporation, 295-309 Lafayette Street. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/ item/2011649811/.

described as “ever stately and spectacled, ever in black silk with lace fixings.”78 A mixture of Rhode Island and New York suffragists occupied the platform with Stanton, Anthony, and Davis.

From New York, Mrs. E.S. Phelps, a philanthropist who had provided a headquarters for the NWSA in Manhattan,79 Lillie Devereux Blake, a noted author and journalist, and Theodore Tilton, editor of the Independent newspaper in New York City were members of the entourage.80 Sarah Helen Whitman,81 Catherine W. Hart,82 and Elizabeth K. Churchill,83 all from Providence, represented the state association. James M. Stillman, a R. I. state legislator from Westerly84 was also on the stage, as was James M. Scovel, a New Jersey state representative who had gained some prominence during the war.85 Paulina Wright Davis called the meeting to order, announcing that Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as the president of the National Woman Suffrage Association, would preside over the gathering.86 Stanton’s brief opening address was stirring. “Woman Suffrage” was “the greatest question of the age, the enfranchisement of women the greatest step in civilization.”

Women were “being roused all over the world” and the woman suffragists had come to Newport to “urge the fashionable women of the country to consider the movement.”87 Stanton’s remarks were followed by convention business. Rhoda Fairbanks of Providence, was appointed “Secretary, pro tem,” 58 v The Bridge

and “the chair” named a “business committee,” that included Davis, Hooker, Anthony, Tilton, and Scovel. 88 The morning session continued with another “brief address” by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.89 Isabella Beecher Hooker, “seating herself quietly at a little table facing the audience,” read a letter from her sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was unable to attend.90 Paulina Wright Davis, on behalf of the “business committee,” presented “a series of resolutions.”91 Then Theodore Tilton made an address to the gathering. He thought “the sphere of woman was emphatically the home” but “also the ballot-box,” and paid tribute to the cooking and housekeeping skills of famed orator Anna Dickinson, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. After Tilton’s address, a collection was taken (“Mrs. Stanton begged the audience near the door not to run away before the hat reached them”) and the meeting adjourned.92 In the afternoon, the suffragists gave a reception at the Atlantic House. The Tribune noted that, “The audience stared in open-mouthed wonderment at the speakers as they wended their way to the hotel.”93 Higginson “made his appearance” at the reception and “was warmly welcomed.”94 Elizabeth Cady Stanton later wrote that, “Many of the ladies who sought our acquaintance at the hotel, expressed their surprise and pleasure to find that our party had neither hoofs nor horns…”95 Stanton took umbrage at Julia Ward Howe’s absence from the the Atlantic House event, however. Howe had given the

New York suffragists “no social recognition in Newport, not even leaving her card for us at the Hotel, quite unpardonable under the circumstances,” Stanton later complained to Isabella Beecher Hooker.96 Hooker had apparently mentioned Howe’s perceived slight to her friend Caroline Severance, who wrote in October, defending Howe’s absence from the gathering.97 As the evening session on Wednesday, August 25th, the Newport Daily News noted that “the attendance was not large” (the Tribune claimed the gathering was “largely attended”).

The Daily News speculated that the “admission fee of 50 cents” might have presented “a bar to many who would have otherwise enjoyed the occasion.” Nevertheless, the local paper claimed that, “a large proportion of the audience was made up of our leading citizens who paid close attention to the arguments that were presented and seemingly received them with much favor.” The Tribune reporter lavished praise on the attire of the attendees.98 After Elizabeth Cady Stanton called the evening meeting to order, she introduced a “celebrated African explorer, Paul du Chaillu,” who spoke “briefly” on his experience and expressed support for woman’s rights.99 Following du Chaillu’s presentation, a succession of speakers filled out the program. Lillie Devereux Blake, who was making her debut on the suffrage platform, “spoke fluently and well on behalf of woman’s right to the ballot.” Blake was followed by a Rhode Island activist, Elizabeth Kittredge

Churchill, of Providence. Elizabeth Cady Stanton then took the stand and spoke of her many years of experience in lobbying and working for woman’s rights. Stanton opened the floor to questions from the audience, but there was apparently no response. The Hutchinson Family singers presented “two or three of their beautiful songs,”100 followed by an address of Susan B. Anthony “advocating the passage by the next Congress of a Sixteenth Amendment.”101 According to the Tribune, Anthony “caused some sensation,” when she asserted that, “following in the wake…of Chinamen, Negroes, and Alaskans, Cubans would soon vote, and all before women.”

The meeting closed with another song by the Hutchinson Family. Upon returning to the Atlantic House, where an “impromptu hop” was in progress,” the suffragist speakers and their entourage “for some time mingled among” the hotel guests.102 The woman suffragists convened at the Academy of Music the next morning at 11 a.m. The News noted that the “audience” was “larger considerably than that of yesterday.”

After Stanton called the meeting to order and an opening by the Hutchinson Family singers, Paulina Wright Davis was introduced as the first speaker. Davis then offered a series of resolutions. The first measure stated that both the Republican and the Democratic parties had failed the suffragists and called for the creation of a “new party, based upon principle rather

The Newport Convention was held at the Academy of Music, which was just adjacent to the Jewish cemetery on Touro Street. It was formerly a dining hall of the Bellevue Hotel and later, Mount Zion Church. Academy of Music.

Negative, glass plate, P 9547, newport historical society.

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Elizabeth Cady Stanton formed the National Woman’s Suffrage Association in May, 1869, despite opposition from other woman’s rights advocates. Photograph album, Elizabeth Buffum Chace and family papers, Ms. 89.12, john hay library, brown university.

Susan B. Anthony worked closely with Elizabeth Cady Stanton in founding the National Woman’s Suffrage Association. Photograph album, Elizabeth Buffum Chace and family papers, Ms. 89.12, john hay library, brown university.

Suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and their entourage from New York stayed at the posh Atlantic House hotel at Bellevue Avenue and Pelham Street, when in Newport for the 1869 convention.

The building was used to house the U.S. Naval Academy during the Civil War when this photograph was taken. (Photographic Print, P1697, newport historical society.)

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than expedience,“ that would support the enfranchisement of all Americans. Skirting entirely the issue of the 15th Amendment, other resolutions called for admitting girls to high schools and colleges, and for the formation of local suffrage societies that would be “auxiliary to the National Woman’s Suffrage Association. . . throughout the country.”103 The World noted that “by a singular oversight,” none of the resolutions that had been proposed “were put to the meeting,” so it was unclear “what impression the various facts and arguments made upon the audience.…” The Newport Convention resolutions were later printed in their entirety in an issue of Stanton and Anthony’s paper, The Revolution.104 Although the daily New York and Newport papers gave only a small amount of space to Davis’s address, it was published fully, two weeks after the convention, in the Revolution issue of September 9, 1869. She had shockingly maintained that women were uplifted through their association with men, as an enslaved person was “less degraded into brutishness,” by contact with a “refined, educated and exalted master.”

Davis hailed the advance of women in literary pursuits, like Harriet Beecher Stowe, whereas women writers had been previously “sneered at and assailed.” Davis also praised the struggles of women following careers as physicians who had encountered many difficulties in pursuing education and training, and cited Newport’s heroic lighthouse keeper Ida Lewis. Davis concluded her lengthy address by asserting

that, “After twenty-five years work in this cause, I am compelled to say, men and bretheren [sic], your constitutions and laws are unjust and degrading to one half the human race.”105 The Newport Daily News account noted that “Mrs. Davis is a forcible and pleasant speaker and made a good impression.”106 After Davis’s speech and a “thrilling song” by the Hutchinson Family singers, Elizabeth Cady Stanton took over the podium to present the keynote address to the convention.

The Newport Daily News showered superlatives on the New York suffrage leader, finding her remarks to be “most eloquent.”

Its writer noted that, “We…can say justly that it was one of the best prepared arguments to which we have even [ever?] listened.” In her “long and able address,” Stanton argued for women to seek vocations in the professional and public sphere rather than in “fashionable life.” She favored “the broadest and truest democracy,” but she would not support allowing, “the ignorant negro on the southern plantation who has not the slightest idea of our grand system, making laws for” the American woman while “intelligent women are kept silent.”107 Isabella Beecher Hooker’s maiden address to a public gathering followed Stanton’s speech. Hooker apparently “gave an outline of her ideas of the way to which the Bible should be studied in reference to this question of woman’s position.”

While giving a summary of Hooker’s talk, the New York World commented that, “It was somewhat difficult to understand, on the whole, what this lady was driving at.” The World reported that “After other proceedings of an uninteresting character, the Convention adjourned until the evening.”108 At the final session of the Newport Convention on the night of Thursday August 26th, the Hutchinson Family singers opened the proceedings, and Mrs. Sarah Fisher Ames, sculptor of a bust of Lincoln displayed in the U.S. Senate, and summer visitor to Newport, delighted the gathering with “some pleasant dramatic readings in good taste and with credit.”109 Francis De Pau (Frank) Moulton, a New York merchant, was the first speaker of the evening. The Newport Daily News noted that Moulton “spoke well, perhaps, but so far below the range of speeches by the ladies, that the effort, was not a great success.”110 The Reverend Phoebe A. Hannaford, a Congregational minister from Massachusetts, followed Moulton.111 She argued that women should be equal in “the school, the church and the state.”112 James W. Stillman provided the penultimate remarks of the evening. Stillman

had won favor with woman suffragists and other activists after giving a pro-woman suffrage speech in the Rhode Island House of Representatives on February 25, 1869.113 Apparently, due to the “late hour,” Stillman was “listened to with some impatience.” Criticizing the 15th Amendment, according to the Newport Daily News, Stillman argued that it should not be ratified “because it does not include women.” Stillman’s argument “called out” Mrs. Hannaford “who justly rebuked [Stillman] for what she deemed his heresy.” The Newport Daily News thought Hannaford’s “impromptu speech was one of the finest efforts of the occasion, and was received with hearty expressions of favor.”114 It marked perhaps the only incident of friction at the entire convention. Susan B. Anthony invited any attendees who lived in New York to stop by the Woman’s Bureau parlors on 23d Street in the city. After brief remarks from Lillie Devereux Blake promoting equal wages for equal work, the Hutchinson Family sang the national anthem, and “the convention was adjourned sine die.”115 Perhaps the most pleasant event of the New York suffragists’ sojourn in Newport was an outing to lighthouse keeper Ida Lewis’s house perched high on rocks at the mouth of Newport harbor the day after the convention ended.

Lewis, a young woman had made daring rescues and had become famous. Stanton and Anthony had featured Lewis in several articles in The Revolution, and the City of Newport honored her in a July 4th tribute the previous month which thousands of people had attended. The suffragists’ visit to Lewis was almost undoubtedly brokered by Thomas

Ida Lewis, a young lighthouse keeper in Newport, gained instant fame for making several daring rescues; she was visited by suffragists who were in Newport for the 1869 convention.

Photograph, c. 1865.

RHi X3 4196, rhode island historical society.

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Wentworth Higginson, who had acted as Lewis’s escort and spokesperson at the Newport tribute event in July.116 The suffrage party that sailed through the harbor to visit Lewis at her “rock-bound house” at Lime Rock consisted of Stanton, Anthony, Higginson, Theodore Tilton, sculptor Sara Fisher Ames, Abby Hutchinson Patton, and renowned phrenologist, Nelson Sizer.117 “Just now Ida Lewis is the fashion,” Stanton informed her Revolution readers. “No one thinks of visiting Newport without seeing her.” The group chatted informally with Lewis who claimed, “she did not care much to go out when it was calm. She liked the excitement of battling old ocean in a storm.” After admiring the “beautiful little boat with its red cushions and metal mountings,” which had been presented to Lewis by the city of Newport, and hearing tales of Lewis’s exploits, the suffragists took their leave.118 In her final remarks on her Newport visit, Stanton found Newport to be “a charming little town; its look out on the sea is grand; its shores are cultivated lawns, dotted all round with the elegant homes of merchant princes from Boston and New York.” On the way back from the lighthouse, the group took a “pleasant drive through the town and on the sea shore.”

Stanton could not resist commenting on their passing the impressive home of “Mrs. George Francis Train”(an Italianate “cottage” on Bellevue Avenue between Ledge Road and Bailey’s Beach cove), complimenting both Mrs. [Wilhelmina Wilkinson Davis] Train and her “excellent” husband who had financially supported Stanton’s and Anthony’s woman suffrage efforts in the past years.119 It was a fitting closing remark on the New York suffragists’ Newport venture as their association with Train, an openly racist financier, had been a source of outrage and distress for abolitionist woman’s rights advocates in Boston over the past few years.

In its summary of the convention, the Newport Mercury ventured that the speakers’ “arguments were forcible and were it not for the prejudice existing in the minds of most people, we might say they were conclusive.” However, the paper surmised that “most of the large numbers of attendees” were “undoubtedly induced to attend from mere curiosity, as it is a novelty to witness such an assemblage.” The leaders were “fully competent to present the question of female suffrage.”

Nevertheless, the Mercury stated that “stronger arguments” can “be used against” female enfranchisement than “for it,” and that most women did not care to attain the right to vote.120 Elizabeth Cady Stanton felt the Newport Convention was

62 v The Bridge

a success as a reporter had been converted to the cause, a “Young Wall street merchant” (Frank Moulton) had given his first public speech supporting woman suffrage, and the “landlord” of the Atlantic House had taken a subscription to The Revolution.121 Stanton declared that she and her suffragist colleagues had “never received a more quiet and respectful hearing,” as at the Newport Convention.122

Aftermath It is not clear whether Paulina Wright Davis approached her close friend and colleague Elizabeth Buffum Chace about joining the Stanton/Anthony group and aligning RIWSA with NWSA before or after the Newport Convention. Stanton herself had written Chace in April 1869, encouraging her to attend the Equal Rights Convention in New York, and remarking, in an oblique reference to differences over the 15th Amendment, that although “we may differ a little as to ways and means, we are all together in the great principle that the safety of the nation demands that woman’s voice be recognized in the government.”123 Paulina Wright Davis came out to call on Chace in Valley Falls at some point between May and October. “I clearly remember the interview,” Lillie Chace Wyman, who was twenty-two-years-old at the time, recalled some forty-five years later, “—the gracious, beautiful, earnest woman [Davis] talking,—, the other [Chace] sitting mainly in a silence which seemed almost like a heavilyfreighted atmosphere around her.” Wyman thought that Davis’s argument about the 15th Amendment had been “so skillfully phrased,” that Elizabeth Buffum Chace did not quite understand that the “Stanton plan” was opposed to the “passage” of the 15th Amendment. According to her daughter, Chace “saw it rather as a refraining in Woman’s Rights meetings from giving express endorsement to a measure designed to increase the number of male voters in the country, who would probably use their power to keep women disenfranchised.” Wyman claims to have persuaded her mother that she couldn’t desert as a woman suffragist the ideals of racial equality she had so passionately supported as an abolitionist. Chace’s decision to align with AWSA, the “Boston group,” her longtime radical antislavery colleagues, did have a significant impact on the woman suffrage movement in Rhode Island for the rest of the century.124 The affiliation of RIWSA still hung in the balance in the months after the Newport Convention. Davis continued

to hold monthly meetings and carry on the business of the organization. She apparently won a vote in the October RIWSA meeting to disaffiliate with the NEWSA. And she did not attend the formative meeting of the American Woman Suffrage Association in Cleveland in November, although she had been elected as a delegate, but rather stayed in Rhode Island presiding over a large suffrage meeting in Woonsocket.

She planned “to hold meetings in all our small villages along the line of the railroad and get all the subscribers we can for the Revolution,” Davis wrote to Hooker.125 After spending some months away in the winter, back in Rhode Island over the summer of 1870, Davis threw herself into suffrage-related work.126 However, Davis’s energies were increasingly diverted to working directly with Stanton’s and Anthony’s New York group. In October 1870, Paulina Wright Davis organized a gala celebration in New York of the twentieth anniversary of the woman’s rights movement that harkened back to the first national woman’s rights convention in 1850 that Davis, Lucy Stone and others had convened.127 It is not known how Elizabeth Buffum Chace responded to Davis’s attempts to bring RIWSA into the “New York” fold.

In July 1869, while Chace attended to her ill husband, Davis had presided over a RIWSA convention in Westerly, that passed a resolution condemning the passage of the “Fifteenth Constitutional Amendment without the Sixteenth [that would give women the vote] as the basest compromise a republican government could make…”128 And Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony addressed the RIWSA convention, presided over by Davis, held on October 20, 1869. 129 During 1869-1870, Chace was preoccupied with her husband’s illness, spending many hours supervising his care at their home in Valley Falls. In a late October 1869 meeting, Chace’s daughter, Lillie, made a motion against RIWSA’s affiliation with the National Woman Suffrage Association, Stanton and Anthony’s organization.130 The membership voted to send delegates to both the AWSA convention in Cleveland in November 1869, and the NWSA convention in Washington in early 1870.131 During 1870, despite her husband’s infirmity, Chace stayed active. (Samuel Chace died in December 1870.)

As a representative of RIWSA, she visited the state prison and reform schools where females were inmates, and, with other suffrage colleagues, successfully pressured the governor of Rhode Island to appoint a committee of women to sit

Lillie Buffum Chace Wyman, daughter of Elizabeth Buffum Chace, remembered her mother’s conversations with Paulina Wright Davis.

The photograph was taken ca. 1880. Photograph album, Elizabeth Buffum Chace and family papers, Ms. 89.12, john hay library, brown university.

on a board that would recommend improvements in the treatment of residents at those state institutions. At the annual convention of RIWSA held on October 25, 1870, Davis announced her “retirement” as head of RIWSA, and Elizabeth Buffum Chace was elected to replace her.132 At her ascension to the presidency, Chace rallied RIWSA members, urging that, “Petitions to the legislature, appeals from year to year should go up louder and louder, stronger and stronger, until they can no longer deny us.”133 By 1870, RIWSA had affiliated with the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), which had been initiated by the Boston group circular of August 5, 1869, during the run-up to the Newport Convention.134 Its weekly, The Woman’s Journal, edited by Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, and Mary Livermore, was filled with suffrage news from RIWSA for the remaining decades of the century. The Woman’s Journal outlasted The Revolution, which ceased publication in 1872, by many decades.

Chace eventually served for one term as president of AWSA, in 1882-1883. If any members of RIWSA who voted against the 15th Amendment in 1869, were upset by the change of leadership orientation, it is not evident from existing records.

The 15th Amendment was ratified in the winter of 1870.

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Conclusion The woman suffrage convention in Newport, Rhode Island in August 1869 occurred at a critical moment in the fight for woman suffrage in the United States as the fledgling movement split in two, disrupting decades-old friendships and reform ties. Although slim hopes for union remained as plans for the convention progressed, antipathy over support for the 15th Amendment giving the vote to Black men, had made it impossible for the New England group of former radical abolitionists, and the New York group to reconcile. As seen in the speeches and correspondence of Paulina Wright Davis, her support of the racist arguments of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton closed the door to reconciliation with her long-time New England activist colleagues and friends.

The Newport Convention itself, planned by the New York group alone, and efficiently executed by Davis, was effectively purged of most supporters of the 15th Amendment, save for Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Julia Ward Howe, Newporters, who, as suffrage leaders in New England, lent their presence to the gathering, but remained aloof from the proceedings. The 15th Amendment was barely mentioned at the convention, although Davis, Stanton and Anthony all expressed their opposition to Black men gaining the vote before women. Paulina Wright Davis and Elizabeth Buffum Chace, the founders of the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association, who had been friends and close reform colleagues for twenty years, parted ways over Davis’s New York affiliation.

The effect of this rift on the membership of the RIWSA appears to have been minimal, however, and Rhode Island women continued to agitate for their enfranchisement during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Paulina Wright Davis died in Providence in 1876; Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the principal speaker at a memorial service in Davis’s home.135 Despite their principled support for ratification of the 15th Amendment, during the last decades of the nineteenth century many white former abolitionists who were involved with the woman suffrage movement in Rhode Island and New England, did not actively protest the reign of terror that was Reconstruction in the South, nor oppression of AfricanAmericans in the North. There seemed to be little concern among the white suffragists about the voting rights of Black men in the South, or the difficulties of African-American communities in the entire country. African-American woman

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Anna Garlin Spencer (1851-1931) joined RIWSA as a teenager and lived to see Rhode Island women achieve full suffrage. Photograph, Sara Algeo, Story of a Sub-Pioneer (Providence, R.I.: Snow and Farnham, 1925), 81.

Mary H. Dickerson of Newport was a national and regional leader in the Colored Women’s Clubs movement that supported woman suffrage. “Northeastern Federation of Woman’s Clubs to hold Annual Meeting in Brooklyn.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 12, 1902, p. 9. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/28076493/the-brooklyn-dailyeagle/ Accessed September 25, 2020.

suffragists worked with both NWSA and AWSA in the 1870s and 1880s.136 The two groups merged into the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association in 1890, and racism in the succeeding years was endemic in the national woman’s suffrage movement, especially as northern white women sought to appease southern white women’s suffrage societies.

Elizabeth Buffum Chace, president of RIWSA, outlived many of her former radical abolitionist colleagues and a younger generation lacked the antislavery roots that fed Chace’s efforts at anti-racism. In her Anti-Slavery Reminiscences, a short memoir that sought to inspire her children’s generation to adopt the “great cause” of woman suffrage, Chace recalled that she and her daughters withdrew from the Rhode Island Woman’s Club in 1877 when club members refused to admit an African-American teacher.137 Yet it is clear that the Boston suffragists and their Rhode Island counterparts did not make concerted attempts to condemn policies and actions which imperiled the lives, livelihoods, and well-being of African Americans in their states and in the nation.

African-American women in the region organized Colored Women’s Clubs, beginning in the 1890s, to press for redress of wrongs inflicted on their community, and to work for woman’s suffrage to achieve their goals. Newport once more

was on the national suffrage map when successful Newport businesswoman Mary H. Dickerson (1830-1914) founded the Woman’s Newport League, an African-American club that formed to press against the pernicious effects of racism in the North and South. Among other causes, the Colored Women’s Clubs supported woman suffrage. Dickerson became one of the principal organizers of a country-wide consortium, the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, attending their organizing convention in Washington, D.C. in 1896, and later founding the Rhode Island Union of Colored Women’s Clubs.138 Out of this movement, the Colored Women’s Civic and Political League of Rhode Island, led by Bertha Higgins and Mary E. Jackson, provided critical support to the white-led Equal Suffrage League leading up to the ratification battles of the nineteen teens. The story of the African-American women’s clubs in Rhode Island, and their relation to RIWSA, and suffrage has barely been explored.139 It is of interest to note that Bertha Higgins, a later key AfricanAmerican supporter of woman’s right to vote in Rhode Island, gave a nod to the NEWSA women who supported the 15th Amendment, when she organized and named the Julia Ward Howe Republican Women’s Club, which thrived for some years in the early decades of the twentieth century.140

Endnotes 1

Editorial Correspondence, “The Newport Convention,” The Revolution, Sept. 2, 1869, 129.

Carol DuBois in Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America 1848-1869 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), gives a thorough examination of the split in the woman’s suffrage movement. Du Bois claims that historians were still clashing over the reasons for the schism when she wrote her book in the nineteen-seventies. Faye Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle Over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1911) is another excellent source on the topic.

2 Ellen

3

Holly Jackson, American Radicals: How Nineteenth-Century Protests Shaped the Nation (New York: Crown Publishers, 2019), 261. quoted in Dorothy Sterling, Ahead of Her Time: Abby Kelley and the Politics of Antislavery (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,1991), 347-48.

4 As

in Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 32.

5 Quoted

6 Jackson,

American Radicals, 267-68.

Cady Stanton speaking at a National Woman’s Suffrage Association meeting, June 8 [1869], The Revolution, June 17, 1869, 380.

7 Elizabeth

Wright’s close relationship with Foster, see Sterling, Abby Kelley, 159-61. Paulina Wright Davis may have attended the birth of Abby Kelley Foster’s daughter in Worcester in May 1847 (Sterling, Abby Kelley, 241-42).

8 On

The Fifteenth Amendment and the Newport Woman Suffrage Convention of August 1869

v 65

quotation is from Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s remarks on Davis in Paulina Wright Davis, comp., A History of the National Woman’s Rights Movement for Twenty Years with the Proceedings of the Decade Meeting at Apollo Hall October 20, 1870, From 1850-1870 (New York: Journeymen Printers’ Co-operative Association, 1871), 32. For biographical information on Davis, see Edward T. James, ed., with Janet Wilson James, and Paul Boyer, eds., Notable American Women, 1607-1950 A Biographical Dictionary (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1971), 1:444-445; Ann D. Gordon, ed., The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 2, Against An Aristocracy of Sex (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 255n; Lynn Derbyshire, “Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis,” in Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, ed., Women Public Speakers in the United States, 1820-1925, A Bio-Critical Study (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993), 309-318, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Reminiscences of Paulina Wright Davis,” in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 1848-1861, 2d ed.

(Rochester: Susan B. Anthony, 1889), 283. Davis was also a founder and enthusiastic member of the Providence Physiological Society; see its records at the Rhode Island Historical Society, MSS 649.

9 The

10

Davis, comp., National Woman’s Rights Movement, 31. et al., eds., NAW, 1:444-445. Thomas Davis, an antislavery Democrat, served one term in the U.S. Congress and was also a R.I. state senator. https://bioguideretro.congress.gov/Home/MemberDetails?memIndex=D000135 Biographical Directory of U.S. Congress. Thomas Davis, accessed June 24, 2020; “Congressman Thomas Davis and Paulina (Kellogg) Wright Davis,” in Patrick T. Conley, The Makers of Modern Rhode Island (Charleston, S.C.: History Press, 2012).

11 James,

12 The

proceedings of the Woman’s Rights Convention held at Worcester, October 23d and 24th, 1850 (Boston: Prentiss & Sawyer, 1851), 15. The quotation is taken from an account of the 1850 Worcester convention and subsequent conventions in the 1850s. Davis, comp., National Woman’s Rights Movement, 15.

13 Elizabeth

Cady Stanton to Lucy Stone and the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, January 15, 1891, in Ann Gordon, ed., The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 5, Their Place Inside the Body Politic 1887-1895 (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 346.

Anthony and Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 226. See also, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 3, 1876-1885 (Rochester, N.Y.: Susan B. Anthony, 1886), 340.

14 Stanton,

15 Stanton,

Anthony, and Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 246.

Buffum Chace Wyman and Arthur Crawford Wyman, Elizabeth Buffum Chace: Her Life and Its Environment (Boston: W.B. Clarke & Co., 1914), 1:119.

16 Lillie

17 Sherry

Ceniza, Walt Whitman and Nineteenth-Century Women Reformers (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 136-37.

18 On

the location of Paulina Wright Davis’s houses in Providence, see http://www.riheritagehalloffame.com/inductees_detail.cfm?iid=470.

Accessed June 24, 2020.

19 Wyman

and Wyman, EBC, 1: 120.

C. Stevens, Elizabeth Buffum Chace and Lillie Chace Wyman: A Century of Abolitionist, Suffragist and Workers’ Rights Activism (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co, 2003); Wyman and Wyman, EBC, 1:51, 54.

20 Elizabeth

21 Davis

adopted two daughters in the 1860s. See Paulina Wright Davis to Isabella Beecher Hooker, March 12 [1870 or 1871], Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Conn.

22 Stevens, 23 Wyman

Elizabeth Buffum Chace.

and Wyman, EBC, 1: 119.

and Wyman, EBC, 1:121; “E. B. Chase of Valley Falls” was listed among the “Members of the Convention” and also named as a member of the “Committee on Social Relations,” along with Lucretia Mott. Woman’s Rights Convention held at Worcester, 1850, 19, 81.

24 Wyman

25 As

their acquaintance deepened, Wyman noted,Chace appreciated the wider world represented at Davis’s “house parties.”

Wyman and Wyman, EBC, 1:120.

Elizabeth Buffum Chace, 82-83. While Susan B. Anthony, suffrage leader from New York, did attend NEWSA’s inaugural meeting, her colleague Elizabeth Cady Stanton, did not. Stanton’s ascerbic comments in The Revolution reflected the tensions between the “New York” and “Boston” groups. “The Boston Woman’s Suffrage Convention,” The Revolution, Nov. 12, 1868, 296, and “New England Woman’s Rights Convention,” The Revolution, Nov. 26, 1868, 330.

26 Stevens,

27

Ibid.

66 v The Bridge

formation of RIWSA is described in A Brief History of the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association During Twenty-Four Years, From 1868 to 1893 (Providence, R.I.: E.L. Freeman, 1893), 9-13, and in an address given by Arnold B. Chace at the “Golden Anniversary of the Rhode Island Equal Suffrage Association,” reprinted in The Woman Citizen, January 11, 1919, p. 666. See also, The Revolution, “Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Convention,” December 17, 1868, 369, and “The Rhode Island Convention,” and a communication from “Narragansett,” The Revolution, December 24, 1869, 394.

28 The

29 Lillie

Chace Wyman remarked on Davis’s “conversion” in Wyman and Wyman, EBC, 1: 319.

Equal Rights Association, Second Day Proceedings,” The Revolution, May 27, 1869, 322. See also “Paulina Wright Davis on the Fifteenth Amendment,” The Revolution, June 17, 1869, 374.

30 “American

officers of the new National Woman’s Suffrage Association were published in the June 3, 1869 issue of The Revolution, p.345; on the group’s formation, see ibid., May 27, 1869, 328.

31 The

ed., Papers of Stanton and Anthony, vol. 2, 255; In a letter to Hooker [“ca. 1869”], Davis mentions her husband had “paid in $500 for me” for Susan B. Anthony. Isabella Beecher Hooker Papers, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Conn.; Sally G, McMillen, Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic Life (New York: Oxford University Press. 2015), 172-73.

32 Gordon,

33 Barbara

A. White, The Beecher Sisters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 129-130.

ed., Papers of Stanton and Anthony, 2: 256n, 292-293n; Susan B. Anthony to Paulina Wright Davis [1869 July or August], Isabella Beecher Hooker Papers, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Conn.

34 Gordon,

Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: The Bobbs Merrill Co., 1899), 1:331-32; White, Beecher Sisters, 130-132.

35 Ida

36 Susan

B. Anthony to Isabella Beecher Hooker, July 29, 1869, Isabella Beecher Hooker Papers, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Conn.

37 In

her keynote address at the convention in August, Stanton related, that, “The editors of all the New York papers remarked if you can get the butterflies of fashion to consider this question the work will be speedily done. . . .” As reported in the New York World and reprinted in The Revolution, Sept. 2, 1869, 133.

38 Anthony

to Hooker, July 29, 1869, Isabella Beecher Hooker Papers, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Conn. The Saratoga Convention that took place in mid-July 1869, was, in effect, the formative meeting of the New York Woman’s Suffrage Association that was to be a NWSA affiliate. The Revolution, July 22, 1869, 33.

39 “Woman

Suffrage Convention at Newport, Rhode Island,” The Revolution, August 5, 1869, 65.

40 Lucy

Stone to Isabella Beecher Hooker, August 4, 1869, Isabella Beecher Hooker and John Hooker Papers, Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester (N.Y.).

41 A

copy of this printed communication, hand addressed to “Dear Mrs. Davis” is in the Isabella Beecher Hooker Papers, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Conn.

Ward Howe, Reminiscences 1819-1899 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900), 238. In 1871, Howe and her husband, Samuel Gridley Howe, purchased a home, Oak Glen, also in Portsmouth, where Howe died in 1910. On her experience at the 1868 NEWSA founding, see Reminiscences, 375-376. The quotation about her “conversion,” is in Elaine Showalter, The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016), 187.

42 Julia

quoted in DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 188; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage vol. 2, 1861-1876 (Rochester: Susan B. Anthony, 1881), 383.

43 As

44 In

his diary, Higginson noted attending several of Howe’s woman suffrage lectures in Newport during the summer of 1869. Thomas Wentworth Higginson Papers, 1856-1911 (MS Am 1162-1162.9). Houghton Library, Harvard University. https://id.lib.harvard.edu/ead/ hou00293/catalog. Accessed July 13, 2020.

45 Paulina

Wright Davis to Isabella Beecher Hooker, postmarked August 5 [1869], and Paulina Wright Davis to Isabella Beecher Hooker, n.d. [ca. Aug. 6, 1869?], both in Isabella Beecher Hooker and John Hooker Papers, Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester, N.Y. Paulina Wright Davis to Isabella Beecher Hooker, [ca. 1869], likely should be dated ca.

August 6-7, 1869. Isabella Beecher Hooker Papers, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Conn. Davis’s invitation to Howe has not been found. However, an undated fragment of a note may have been part of a larger message to Julia Ward Howe, inviting her.

In the fragment, Davis writes that Mr. Howe’s “presence at the meeting at Newport” was desired. Undated [1869 July or August].

Isabella Beecher Hooker Papers, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Conn.

The Fifteenth Amendment and the Newport Woman Suffrage Convention of August 1869

v 67

46 In

an undated letter postmarked in Providence on August 5th, Davis wrote Hooker that she would call on Higginson “tomorrow.”

In another undated letter, probably sent sometime after the 5th, Davis wrote that she had called on Higginson in Newport the previous day. (Both letters are in the Isabella Beecher Hooker Papers, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Conn.)

N. Meyer, ed., The Magnificent Activist: The Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson 1823-1911 (Da Capo Press, 2000), 1-39; McMillen, Lucy Stone, 127-130; Mary Thacher Higginson, ed., Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson 1846-1906 (Cambridge: Riverside Press: Houghton-Mifflin, 1921). Howe, Reminiscences, 402. Higginson had inscribed the address in the front of his diary for 1869. Thomas Wentworth Higginson Papers, 1856-1911 (MS Am 1162-1162.9).

Houghton Library, Harvard University. https://id.lib.harvard.edu/ead/hou00293/catalog Accessed July 13, 2020.

47 Howard

48

Joey La Neve De Francesco, “Abolition and Anti-Abolition in Newport, 1835-1866,” Newport History (Winter/Spring 2020):26-32.

49

McMillen, Lucy Stone, 127-130.

50 Paulina

Wright Davis to Isabella Beecher Hooker, ca. 1869, Isabella Beecher Hooker Papers, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Conn. The letter can be further dated to “ca. August 6, 1869,” from its contents. In another letter, Davis wrote that Higginson mentioned that Julia Ward Howe and Lucy Stone had considered having a gathering in Newport, yet Howe had written Davis that “Mr. Higginson did not think well of having a meeting there.” Paulina Wright Davis to Isabella Beecher Hooker, [ca. Aug. 6, 1869], Isabella Beecher Hooker and John Hooker Papers, Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester, N.Y.

51 Paulina

Wright Davis to Isabella Beecher Hooker, n.d, Isabella Beecher Hooker and John Hooker Papers, Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester, N.Y. The letter can be dated to “ca.

August 7-8, 1869,” from its contents.

52 Elizabeth

Cady Stanton to Paulina Wright Davis, August 10, 1869, Isabella Beecher Hooker and John Hooker Papers, Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester, N.Y.

53 Paulina

Wright Davis to Isabella Beecher Hooker, postmarked Aug. 12 [1869], Isabella Beecher Hooker and John Hooker Papers, Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester, N.Y. et al., eds., NAW, 3:265-268. Virginia Elwood-Akers, Caroline Severance (New York; iUniverse, 2010); Ella Giles Ruddy, Caroline M. Severance: Mother of Clubs: An Estimate and An Appreciation (Los Angeles: Baumgardt Publishing Co., 1906).

54 James,

Beecher Sisters, 99-100, 129. In her correspondence with Hooker in August 1869, Davis mentions several times that she had written Severance and had not heard from her. See, for example, Paulina Wright Davis to Isabella Beecher Hooker, n.d., “My dearest friend, I certainly cannot go to Boston. . . .” Isabella Beecher Hooker and John Hooker Papers, Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester, N.Y., also, Hooker to Severance August 27 & 29, 1869, Isabella Beecher Hooker Papers, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Conn. See Susan B. Anthony to Isabella Beecher Hooker, July 29, 1869, Isabella Hooker Papers, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Conn. Hooker’s visit to Severance’s home in West Newton is mentioned in Caroline M. Severance to Paulina Wright Davis, August 16, 1869, Isabella Beecher Hooker and John Hooker Papers, Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester, N.Y.

55 White,

56 Susan

B. Anthony to Isabella Beecher Hooker, July 29, 1869, Isabella Beecher Hooker Papers, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Conn.

57 Caroline

M. Severance to Paulina Wright Davis, August 16, 1869, Isabella Beecher Hooker and John Hooker Papers, Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester, N.Y. Severance sent a copy of this letter to Isabella Beecher Hooker, in a letter of August 17, 1869. In her cover letter, Severance gave her friend a number of reasons why cooperation with the New York group was fraught. Isabella Beecher Hooker Papers, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Conn.

58

Caroline M. Severance to Paulina Wright Davis, 16 August 1869, Isabella Beecher Hooker and John Hooker Papers, Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester, N.Y.

59

Ibid.

60 Ibid.

Severance also wondered if Davis felt slighted at not being named president of NEWSA after her years of fighting for woman’s rights in New England.

61 Isabella

Beecher Hooker to Caroline Severance., n.d., postmarked Providence, August 16, Isabella Beecher Hooker and John Hooker Papers, Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester, N.Y.

62 Paulina

Wright Davis to Isabella Beecher Hooker, n.d. [after August 26, 1869], Isabella Beecher Hooker and John Hooker Papers, Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester, N.Y.

63 Isabella

Beecher Hooker to Caroline Severance, August 27, 1869, Isabella Beecher Hooker Papers, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Conn.

68 v The Bridge

64 Paulina

Wright Davis to Isabella Beecher Hooker, postmarked Providence August 5th, Isabella Beecher Hooker and John Hooker Papers, Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester, N.Y.

65 Newport

Daily News, August 24, 1869, 2.

66 Paulina

Wright Davis to Isabella Beecher Hooker [1869?] [Aug. 17], Isabella Beecher Hooker Papers, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Conn. When she wrote to Hooker, Davis had not yet received Severance’s letter of Aug. 16.

67 Elizabeth 68 Susan

Cady Stanton to Paulina Wright Davis, [12 August 1869], in Gordon, ed., Stanton Anthony Papers, 2:256-59.

B. Anthony to Paulina Wright Davis [12 August 1869] in Gordon, ed., Stanton Anthony Papers, 2: 254-255.

69 Paulina

Wright Davis to Isabella Beecher Hooker, [1869?] [Aug. 17], Isabella Beecher Hooker Papers, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Conn.

70 Paulina

Wright Davis to Isabella Beecher Hooker, n.d., fragment. Isabella Beecher Hooker and John Hooker Papers, Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester, N.Y.

71

Susan B. Anthony to Paulina Wright Davis [12 August 1869] in Gordon, ed., Stanton Anthony Papers, 2: 254-255.

72 Paulina

Wright Davis to Isabella Beecher Hooker [1869?] [17 August], Isabella Beecher Hooker Papers, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Conn.

73 Edward

Chace wrote a friend that his father was “in so much pain he can hardly bear to live.” August 10, 1869. Wyman and Wyman, EBC, 1:317.

74

Lucy Stone to Elizabeth Buffum Chace, July 11, 1869. Wyman and Wyman, EBC, 1: 316-17.

75

Lucy Stone to Elizabeth Buffum Chace, August 17 [1869]. Wyman and Wyman, EBC, 1:318.

76 “Editorial

Correspondence,” The Revolution, Sept, 2, 1869, 129.

New York Tribune, as reprinted in The Revolution, Sept. 2, 1869, 132. The Academy of Music existed for only one year; it was later the Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church.

77 The

78

Ibid., 132.

79 Gordon,

ed., Stanton and Anthony Papers, 2: 279n.

Lillie Devereux Blake (1833-1913) would become a regular speaker in the ensuing years. James, et al., eds., NAW, 1:167-69, and Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 3, 1876-1885, 408n.

80 Author

Sarah Helen Whitman was best known as the one-time fiancée of Edgar Allan Poe. James, et al., eds., NAW, 3: 597-99.

Paulina Wright Davis called Whitman, the “first literary woman of reputation who gave her name to the [woman suffrage] cause. . .”

Davis, National Woman’s Rights Movement, 26.

81 Poet

82 Catharine

W. Hart, and her husband, Charles Hart, a lawyer who had served as attorney general of Rhode Island before the Civil War, both signed the call to the organizing convention of RIWSA in December 1868. She was a vice-president of RIWSA at the time of the Newport Convention. A Brief History of the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association, During Twenty-Four Years From 1868 to 1893 [Providence, R.I.: E. L. Freeman, 1893], 10, 11; Proceedings of the Rhode Island Historical Society 1903-1904 (Providence: Printed for the Society, 1904), 56-57.

83 Elizabeth

Kittredge Churchill (1829-1881) was a dedicated woman suffragist who was active in RIWSA between 1869-1880. Churchill was voted onto the Executive Committee of the RIWSA at its inception. Brief History RIWSA, 11; “In Memoriam Elizabeth K. Churchill,” Woman’s Journal, March 12, 1881, 84; in a letter dated Sept. 14, 1885, Frederick Hinckley, a RIWSA activist, wrote that Churchill’s “work. . . made her a tower of strength to the woman’s rights cause. . .” Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 3, 1876-1885, 349. speech was later printed as a pamphlet and used by RIWSA. Woman Suffrage Speech of James W. Stillman, of Westerly.

Delivered in the House of Representatives of Rhode Island, Thursday, February 25th, 1869. (Published by the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association. [Providence: Providence Press Company, 1869]). Paulina Wright Davis praised Stillman in her National Woman’s Rights Movement, 28n.

84 Stillman’s

Miller, ed., States at War, vol. 4: A Reference Guide for Delaware, Maryland and New Jersey in the Civil War (Lebanon, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2015), 237, 563n.

85 Richard

86 New

York Tribune, as reprinted in The Revolution, Sept. 2, 1869, p. 132; Newport Daily News, 25 August 1869, p. 2.

The Fifteenth Amendment and the Newport Woman Suffrage Convention of August 1869

v 69

87

New York Tribune, as reprinted in The Revolution, Sept. 2, 1869, 132.

Rhoda Anna Fairbanks was secretary of RIWSA at its inception in December 1868. (Brief History of RIWSA, 11) The daughter of abolitionists, she lived on Broad Street in Providence where she and her sister, Julia entertained noted reformers and authors.

Lillie Buffum Chace Wyman, “Visitors and Home People in Old Providence,” typewritten manuscript, n.d. [ca. 1923?], Ms. 30.90, Brown University Library.

88 Ibid.

89

Newport Daily News, 25 August 1869, 2.

90

New York Tribune as reprinted in The Revolution, Sept. 2, 1869, 132.

91 Ibid.

92

Ibid. According to the Tribune, the proceeds from the collection amounted to $35.

93

New York Tribune, as reprinted in The Revolution, Sept. 2, 1869, 132.

94 Ibid.

Higginson noted in his diary for August 25th that he had “called on the ladies at the Atlantic House.” Thomas Wentworth Higginson Papers, 1856-1911 (MS Am 1162-1162.9). Houghton Library, Harvard University. https://id.lib.harvard.edu/ead/ hou00293/catalog. Accessed July 13, 2020.

95

“Who Was There,” The Revolution, Sept. 2, 1869, 136.

96

Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Isabella Beecher Hooker, Sept. 9, 1869, Gordon, ed., Papers of Stanton and Anthony, 2: 263.

97 Severance

maintained that Howe “wished very much to speak at Newport,” but was dissuaded by William Lloyd Garrison and others. Caroline M. Severance to Isabella Beecher Hooker, Oct. 19, 1869, Isabella Beecher Hooker and John Hooker Papers, Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester, N.Y.

98

Newport Daily News, Aug. 26, 1869, 2; New York Tribune, as reprinted in The Revolution, Sept. 2, 1869, 132.

Newport Daily News observed that despite du Chaillu’s lack of “proficiency” in English, the audience was attentive.

(Aug. 26, 1869, 2).

99 The

100 Newport

Daily News, Aug. 26, 1869, 2. The Hutchinson Family singers had been providing entertainment at antislavery gatherings and other reform meetings for many years. Scott Gac, Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Reform (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

101 Newport

Daily News, Aug. 26, 1869, 2.

102 New

York Tribune, as reprinted in The Revolution, Sept. 2, 1869, 133.

103 New

York World, as reprinted in The Revolution, Sept. 2, 1869, 133; Newport Daily News, Aug. 26, 1869, 2.

104 Newport

Daily News, Aug. 26, 1869, 2; New York World, as reprinted in The Revolution, Sept. 2,1869 133. The resolutions were published in “Newport Convention,” The Revolution, Sept. 9, 1869, 147.

105 “Newport

Convention,” The Revolution, Sept. 9, 1869, 147-149.

106 Newport

Daily News, Aug. 26, 1869, 2.

107 Newport

Daily News, Aug. 26, 1869, 2; New York World, as reprinted in The Revolution, Sept. 2, 1869, 133.

108 New

York World, as reprinted in The Revolution, Sept. 2, 1869, 133. In a letter of Aug. 27, 1869 to her friend Caroline Severance, Hooker wrote that giving her speech in Newport was a transformative experience. Isabella Beecher Hooker Papers, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Conn.

Correspondence,” The Revolution, Sept. 2, 1869, 129; Newport Daily News, Aug. 27, 1869, 2. On Sarah Fisher Clampitt Ames, see Melissa Dabakis,”Sculpting Lincoln: Vinnie Ream, Sarah Fisher Ames, and the Equal Rights Movement,” American Art 22 (Spring 2008): 78-101.

109 “Editorial

110 Newport

Daily News, August 27, 1869, 2. Moulton, a New York merchant, was a close friend of Theodore Tilton. Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999), 92-93.

111 Hannaford,

who served parishes in Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Jersey, became a dedicated speaker for the woman suffrage cause. (Davis, comp., National Woman’s Rights Movement, 30).

112 New

York World, as reprinted in The Revolution, Sept. 2, 1869, 133; Newport Daily News, Aug. 27, 1869, 2.

113 Stillman

had been a speaker at the infamous Equal Rights Association meeting the previous May. (“American Equal Rights Association, Second Day Proceedings,” The Revolution, May 27, 1869, 321) He also spoke at a meeting of the Stanton-Anthony group in New York in November where he argued against the 15th Amendment because “Cuffy, Patrick, Michael, and Sambo” would be enfranchised before such eminent women as Stanton and Anthony. The Revolution, November 18, 1869, 314.

70 v The Bridge

114 Newport

Daily News, Aug. 27, 1869, 2.

115 Newport

Daily News, Aug. 27, 1869, 2.

its edition of July 15, 1869, The Revolution carried a glowing description (taken from the New York Tribune’s account) of the city of Newport’s July 4, 1869 homage to Ida Lewis, p. 26.

116 In

117 Thomas

Wentworth Higginson Diary, August 27, 1869. Thomas Wentworth Higginson Papers, 1856-1911 (MS Am 1162-1162.9).

Houghton Library, Harvard University. https://id.lib.harvard.edu/ead/hou00293/catalog Accessed July 13, 2020; Nelson Sizer, Forty Years in Phrenology (New York: Fowler & Wells, 1888). Abby Patton Hutchinson was a member of the Hutchinson Family Singers.

118 “Editorial

Correspondence, The Newport Convention,” The Revolution, Sept. 2, 1869, 129-130.

Correspondence,” The Revolution, September 2, 1869, 130. The “Train Villa” was a “large mansard Italianate cottage.” https://www.newportmansions.org/learn/history-highlights/lost-newport/1866-1875. Accessed Sept. 30, 2020.

119 “Editorial

120 “Local 121 The

Matters,” Newport Mercury, August 28, 1869.

Revolution, Sept. 9, 1869, 150.

122 “Editorial

Correspondence,” The Revolution, Sept. 2, 1869, 129.

123 Elizabeth

Cady Stanton to “Mrs. Chace,” April 15 [1869], Wyman and Wyman, EBC, 1:315.

and Wyman, EBC, 1:319-321.

124 Wyman 125 Paulina

Wright Davis to Isabella Beecher Hooker, [1869 Dec.], Isabella Beecher Hooker Papers, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Conn. See RIWSA minutes, October 20, 1869. R.I. Equal Suffrage Association, early records, Dec. 16, 1869-Nov. 24, 1871, R.I. State Archives.

126 Paulina

Wright Davis to Isabella Beecher Hooker, July 10 [1870], Isabella Beecher Hooker Papers, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Conn.

127 Paulina

W. Davis, History of the National Woman’s Rights Movement.

128 “Meeting

of the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association,” The Revolution, July 1, 1869, 408.

129 Minutes

of October 20, 1869 RIWSA convention, R.I. Equal Suffrage Association, early records, Dec. 16, 1869-Nov. 24, 1871, R. I. State Archives.

130 Minutes

of October 25, 1869 RIWSA meeting, R.I. Equal Suffrage Association, early records, Dec. 16, 1869-Nov. 24, 1871, R. I. State Archives.

131 RIWSA

convention minutes, October 20 & 21, 1869, and RIWSA meeting minutes, October 26, 1869, R.I. Equal Suffrage Association, early records, Dec. 16, 1869-Nov. 24, 1871, R.I. State Archives.

132 Minutes

of October 25, 1870 RIWSA meeting, R.I. Equal Suffrage Association, early records, Dec. 16, 1869-Nov. 24, 1871, R.I. State Archives.

133 Address

by Elizabeth Buffum Chace to RIWSA meeting, November 10 [1870], R.I. Equal Suffrage Association, early records, Dec. 16, 1869-Nov. 24, 1871, R.I. State Archives.

134 Anna

Garlin Spencer, “History of the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association,” 1893, p. 7, in The Records of the League of Women Voters of Rhode Island, MSS21 B1 F1, Rhode Island Historical Society.

135 Anthony,

Stanton and Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, 1: 283-289; James, et al., eds., NAW, 1:445.

136 Terborg-Penn, 137 Elizabeth

African American Women and the Vote, 42.

Buffum Chace, Anti-Slavery Reminiscences (Central Falls, R.I.: E. L. Freeman & Son, 1891), 17n.

138 Victoria

Johnson, Sankofa Community Connection, https://www.facebook.com/SankofaCommunityConnection/posts/ mrs-mary-h-dickerson-information-taken-from-the-1914-obituary-of-mrs-dickerson-w/492296931116965/ Accessed July 14, 2020.

Terborg-Penn makes reference to the Rhode Island effort in African American Women and the Vote, 74, 98, 103-104, 114, 143, 145, 157.

139 Rosalyn

140

Ibid., 103-104.

The Fifteenth Amendment and the Newport Woman Suffrage Convention of August 1869

v 71

Lippitt House from the northwest corner of Hope and Angell streets in Providence. Construction started in Spring 1863 and the family moved in December 1865. Photograph, n.d., lippitt house museum collection, providence, r.i.

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The Lippitts of Rhode Island: Anti-suffrage and Female Political Activism Carrie E. Taylor Carrie E. Taylor is the director of Lippitt House Museum in Providence.

She has an M.A. in public history from the University of South Carolina and previously worked at Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia and the Atlanta History Center.

T

q

he Lippitts were one of Rhode Island’s leading business and political families of the nineteenth century. Early leaders in Rhode Island’s textile industry, the family’s political influence rose with their economic power — their conservative politics protecting a privileged elite position in the state. With many male Lippitt family members serving in local, state, and federal elected offices, the Lippitt women were relegated to private roles in keeping with societal expectations for nineteenth-century upper-class women. While the female members of the family were civically engaged in their communities through education, patriotic, and relief activities, their work remained within a gendered defined social sphere. The Lippitt women believed that having the vote was not necessary to implement improvements within their community. Rather, there were other actions they could take to initiate social change.

Mary Ann Balch Lippitt (1823-1889) advocated for the education of deaf children by indirectly lobbying the Rhode Island General Assembly capitalizing on her family’s business and political connections. Later, when the women’s suffrage movement in the early twentieth century gained momentum in Rhode Island and was seen as a threat to the social and political status quo, Mary Lippitt Steedman (1858-1938) and Margaret Farnum Lippitt (1860-1940), daughter and daughter-in-law of Mary Ann Balch Lippitt, shifted from charity work to public advocacy to preserve what they saw as their protected status as nonvoters and to safeguard their economic privilege. As the women’s suffrage campaign in Rhode Island concluded, ultimately resulting in the

ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, the Lippitt sisters-in-law used the political skills acquired during their anti-women’s suffrage work to pursue other public activities.

Mary Lippitt Steedman became a leader in the Republican party and Margaret Farnum Lippitt pursued anti-Prohibition advocacy — endeavors that reinforced the conservative American social structure that they embraced while benefitting from its significant advantages.

In 1845 when he was twenty-seven, Henry Lippitt (1818-1891) married twenty-two-year-old Mary Ann Balch.

Mary Ann was one of nine children born to prominent Providence druggist Joseph Balch Jr. and Mary Ann Bailey.

Not much is known about Mary Ann’s childhood. Her father was an educated man who subscribed to the New England Journal of Medicine and was one of the founders of the Providence Franklin Society, a natural philosophy organization.1 He was involved in local politics serving during 1851-1852 as the Ward 2 representative on the Providence Common Council.2 Her older brother Joseph Pope Balch served with then Lieutenant Colonel Henry Lippitt in the Providence Marine Corps Artillery to help suppress the Dorr Rebellion, an 1842 fight to extend voting rights to nonproperty-owning white men.

After their marriage, Mary Ann and Henry Lippitt settled into a comfortable upper-class milieu on the East Side of Providence. They had eleven children between 1846 and 1863, with six surviving to adulthood. The Lippitts lived in several houses before buying land at the corner of Hope and Angell Streets in 1851. However, it was not until

The Lippitts of Rhode Island: Anti-suffrage and Female Political Activism v 73

1863 that they started building their impressive Renaissance Revival Italianate mansion at 199 Hope Street in the heart of Providence’s established East Side neighborhood. The house was designed for their family of six children and a considerable number of servants.

Following au courante domestic design principles of the era, the public entertaining rooms of the house were divided into male and female spaces — the decoration and use of the rooms reinforced accepted gendered roles within the family and society more generally. The social changes brought by the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution influenced the acceptable role of women and the spaces they occupied within the home. For white middle- and upper-class families, women represented a buffer from the industrial and commercial world; the domestic sphere was primarily the domain of women.3 Henry Lippitt, as patriarch of the Lippitt family, conveyed his success in business and his ability to provide for his family through the abundant hunt and harvest imagery used in the furnishing and decorations in the elaborate dining room, considered a male space.4 While Mary Ann’s role as the moral center of the family representing everything good about home and family was reinforced by a large copy of “The Virgin of the Rosary” after Baroque painter Murillo, which dominated the Reception Room where she received guests as she fulfilled her social duties participating in elaborate home-calling rituals.5 This female gendered role developed into a cult of domesticity which depicted middle- and upperclass women as the moral center of the family.6 Despite the popular expectation that her influence should be confined solely to domestic matters, Mary Ann studied French, traveled internationally, and managed her own investment rental property in Providence’s Fox Point neighborhood.7 But her primary responsibility outside the family was to build and maintain relationships amongst other women of her class and to develop these networks through charity work, elaborate calling rituals, and planning and attending dances, parties, and weddings.8 Upper-class nineteenth-century men like Henry Lippitt exercised their economic and political influence through civic organizations, business dealings, and political appointments. In contrast, Mary Ann’s sphere was centered around the home, and the architecture of 199 Hope Street reflected these disparate arenas of influence. The architecture, decoration, and activities performed in the gendered spaces conveyed this

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Mary Ann Balch Lippitt (1823-1889), wife of Gov. Henry Lippitt, was an advocate for the education of deaf children.

Mary Ann Balch Lippitt, photograph, c.1885. lippitt house museum collection, providence, r.i.

social construct not only to visitors but reinforced the idea of separate spheres for men and women to the six Lippitt children raised within those walls.

With their new home considered one of the finest in Providence — Anne Brown Francis Woods a member of another prominent Rhode Island textile manufacturing family wrote Mary Ann, “I have never seen any mansion to compare to yours in decoration, finish and tasteful design…”— the well-established Lippitt family’s influence as business leaders continued to rise.9 The Lippitt Manufacturing Company operations had expanded from the original 1809 cotton mill in West Warwick to six mills in Connecticut and Rhode Island greatly increasing the family’s wealth. In 1868, Henry was one of the founders of the Providence Board of Trade, a pro-business government lobbying group, predecessor to the Providence Chamber of Commerce, serving as the first Vice President and later President for three years.10 With his business connections firmly established, he turned his attention from lobbying behind the scenes to a frontline position in the political arena.

Henry and Mary Ann Balch Lippitt headed a conservative Republican political dynasty that continued into the twentieth century. Starting in the 1850s, the Lippitts along with other elite Rhode Islanders, started affiliating with the newly founded Republican party and rallied around an early party leader — Abraham Lincoln. On February 28, 1860, Lincoln spoke to a crowd of some 1,500 people at the Providence train station, expounding his belief that slavery should not expand

Lippitt House dining room, c.1893. Harvest imagery is featured in the still lifes while hunt imagery is carved into the case furniture pieces. Photograph, lippitt house museum collection, providence, r.i.

“The Virgin of the Rosary� after Murillo, purchased by Mary Ann Lippitt in 1868, hangs above the reception room fireplace, c.1893.

Photograph, lippitt house museum collection, providence, r.i.

The Lippitts of Rhode Island: Anti-suffrage and Female Political Activism v 75

into the Western states.11 It is not known if the Lippitts attended this event. However, a son was born to Henry and Mary Ann a month after Lincoln’s Providence visit and they named him Robert Lincoln—called “Linc” by the family.

In May, Lincoln received the Republican party’s nomination.

During the Civil War, Henry was appointed by Republican Governor William Sprague IV to the public position of Draft Commissioner for Providence in 1862 reinforcing his association with Rhode Island’s Republican party.12 Henry Lippitt ran as the Republican candidate for Rhode Island governor in 1875 on a conservative pro-business and anti-prohibition platform and served two consecutive oneyear terms. Even though Henry held conservative positions during his governorship, he did support some suffrage reform efforts during his tenure. He was in favor of constitutional amendments to repeal the state voter registry tax and to grant suffrage to naturalized veterans, but neither was enacted during his time in office.13 Both measures were intended to expand the electorate but were rooted in the idea that voting was not a universal right, rather a male privilege for those who were deemed worthy.

Notice from Providence Draft Commissioner Henry Lippitt, 1862. This was Henry Lippitt’s first political appointment. Rider Broadsides Collection, john hay library, brown university.

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During his second term, Henry Lippitt reappointed Rhode Island abolitionist and women’s suffrage activist Elizabeth Buffum Chace (1806-1899) to the state Woman’s Board of Visitors to the Penal and Correctional Institutions that had been created by an act of the General Assembly in 1870.14 For conservatives like Henry, only select public reform and relief activities were an appropriate public arena for upperclass women like Chace. Lippitt felt that women of his class should confine their efforts to issues that benefited women and children. Chace, who submitted the first petition for women’s suffrage to the General Assembly in 1867 and was a co-founder of the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association, had a different viewpoint.

Although prison reform was a major issue of nineteenthcentury reform movements, Chace resigned from the Woman’s Board of Visitors frustrated that the Board’s recommendations were not acted upon. She wrote to Governor Lippitt in March 1876, “A Board of women, whose only duties, as defined by the law, are, to visit the Penal and Correctional institutions of the State, elect its own Officers, and report, annually, to the Legislature, bears within itself the elements of weakness and inefficiency.” She advocated for greater equality for women in prison reform efforts for both male and female institutions, writing, “When the State of Rhode Island shall call its best women to an equal participation with men in the direction of its penal and reformatory institutions, I have no doubt they will gladly assume the duties and responsibilities of such positions.”15 After concessions were made to implement some of the women’s committee recommendations, Chace agreed to serve again on the Lippitt administration’s “Board of Lady Visitors” in June 1876.16 Governor Lippitt believed women should only have an advisory role regarding reform efforts affecting women. The actual policy-making was not an acceptable arena in which women like Chace should participate. Even though Lippitt and Chace had different ideas about women’s role in government, there appeared to be mutual respect between the two. After both Chace’s and Lippitt’s deaths, Chace’s daughter and biographer Lillie Buffum Chace Wyman remarked to eldest Lippitt daughter Jeanie Lippitt Weeden “…your father and my mother worked together for what they deemed to be the good of Rhode Island.”17

Gov. Henry Lippitt (1818-1891).

Print of Henry Lippitt, n.d., lippitt house museum collection, providence, r.i.

Mary Ann Balch Lippitt. Photograph, n.d., lippitt house museum collection, providence, r.i.

Given Henry’s view about the role of women in political affairs, it is significant that a major education reform enacted during the Lippitt administration was led by his wife Mary Ann — the state takeover of the school founded for the education of deaf children in 1877. The majority of Mary Ann Lippitt’s volunteer activities were typical of women of her class — supporting her husband’s social and political aspirations. She was active in charitable activities of her church, First Congregational, and served as treasurer of the Providence Children’s Friends Society.18 Mary Ann also participated in relief efforts for wounded troops during the Civil War.19 During her husband’s governorship in 1876, she went with Henry to the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and shared hosting responsibilities for the Rhode Island delegation which provided an opportunity to promote the state’s industries to a worldwide audience.20 But in the 1860s, Mary Ann Lippitt’s informal political networking focused on a charitable cause close to her— the education of deaf children.

Henry and Mary Ann’s eldest daughter Jeanie Lippitt (1852-1940) lost her hearing at age four due to complications from scarlet fever in 1856, which also took the lives of three sons ages eight, three, and one. Mary Ann Lippitt tutored Jeanie at home so she could communicate with the hearing community through lipreading. Jeanie wrote about her mother’s instruction in a 1938 letter to her family: … every morning for two or three hours my mother and I sat in chairs opposite each other and I had to move my lips the way she did, see the object — dog, cat, key, anything — until I could say it as well as she did. She wrote it on the slate. I did the same, so that at one and the same time I learned to speak, read her lips, write and spell on the slate, and understand what it all meant.21

Jeanie Lippitt (1852-1940) as a young child, c.1856-60. Jeanie lost her hearing at age four as a complication of scarlet fever.

Photograph, lippitt house museum collection, providence, r.i.

Mary Ann was an early proponent of what become known as the “oralism method” of instruction for the deaf.

Mary Ann Lippitt advanced her education cause while remaining within her private domestic sphere. Conservatives believed charity work that benefited women and children, and education reform activities like Mary Ann’s quest for better education for hearing-impaired children, could best be done by women when separated from the male-dominated political realm.22 In her journal, Mary Ann tracked social obligations, trips, and other miscellany, and often noted visitors who came to her home specifically to observe Jeanie’s ability to speak and

The Lippitts of Rhode Island: Anti-suffrage and Female Political Activism v 77

read lips in person.23 Massachusetts educator Harriet Rogers recalled her c.1861-1864 visit to the Lippitt house: Here I saw for the first time a deaf child speaking and understanding what was said to her… On the afternoon that we called they were about to go out for a drive. When we arrived Mrs. Lippitt said to Jeanie, ‘Go and tell John we shall not want the horse this afternoon.’ That was the first time I had ever seen a deaf child spoken to in this way. It seemed like a miracle that a child who heard no sound could understand what was said to her.24 Mary Ann built support around her oralism method for several years, privately, in domestic settings. The personal networks she built with other politically and socially connected families enabled her to pursue a goal that had a positive public impact.

Mary Ann Lippitt redefined the intersection of public and private space when she arranged for her daughter’s accomplishments to be demonstrated to members of the Massachusetts state legislature within the confines of a private home in Quincy. Jeanie remarked on this domestic-centered approach when Mary Ann Lippitt’s and her daughter’s cause of educating deaf children received a hearing in Massachusetts in 1867, when Jeanie was fifteen years old: Prof. Alexander Graham Bell and Mr. Hubbard, his father-in-law, wanted me to go to [the] Massachusetts Legislature and show them the same thing. My mother would not let me, as it was too public; so Mrs. Josiah Quincy [wife of former Boston Mayor Josiah Quincy Jr.] opened her house [for a tea] and invited the General Assembly to meet me. It was a large meeting and we deaf ones convinced them we could talk. And soon the law was passed in Massachusetts also.25 No doubt the Lippitt family advocacy in Massachusetts helped pave the way for the establishment of the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton in 1868. In displaying her daughter’s progress to politicians within the confines of a socially acceptable “female” milieu, Mary Ann Lippitt deftly exhibited her ability to pursue a public goal without deserting her private “female” domain. Lippitt house visitor Harriet

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Jeanie Lippitt as a girl.

Jeanie’s proficiency in lipreading helped make the case for the oralism method of instruction for deaf children in Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

Photograph, n.d., lippitt house museum collection, providence, r.i.

Rogers was also at the Quincy tea in the winter of 1867 and recalled, Mrs. Lippitt came with Miss Jeanie, and the most telling thing there, the thing that had the most influence, was a conversation between Miss Lippitt and Roscoe Greene, sitting a little way apart.

They apparently conversed with each other with the ease of hearing persons. That did more than anything else to convince Mr. Dudley, of Northampton, a member of the legislature, that the deaf could really learn to speak and read the lips.26 As evidenced in the establishment of the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton the next year, Mary Ann and Jeanie took a behind-the-scenes approach to political activism while still maintaining the appropriate social place of women.27 Although she would not allow her daughter to appear at the Massachusetts state legislature in 1867, Mary Ann Lippitt did sanction her daughter’s testimony at the Rhode Island State House in 1873. Mary Ann lobbied the state in 1873 to pay for deaf children from Rhode Island to attend the public Horace Mann Day School in Boston so they could be taught lipreading via the oralism method.28 With her mother’s support, twenty-one-year-old Jeanie Lippitt testified as a success story and example of what could be accomplished with an oralism education. Jeanie recalled, “I appeared before

the Rhode Island Legislature and proved to them I could talk and understand them all.”29 Later in 1876, Mary Ann Lippitt founded a day school for deaf children in Providence which transferred operations to the state in 1877 during the Lippitt governorship.30 It was not common for women like the Lippitts to advocate before the General Assembly, but the cause of children’s education was an appropriate endeavor for upperclass women to undertake. According to what were believed to be unique female characteristics, it was part of women’s moral duty to work for the betterment of their own families as well as the broader community.31 This idea of differing spheres based on idealized gendered traits was articulated in remarks Henry gave as governor in 1877 to the legislature describing the potential of Rhode Island youth to grow to be “brave, wise and good men, and noble and true women.”32 Mary Ann Lippitt used the privilege gained through her family’s political and economic position to advocate for change she thought was needed in Rhode Island — access most women in the state did not have.

Margaret Barbara Farnum, Mary Ann Lippitt’s daughterin-law, who married the eldest Lippitt son, Charles (18461924), also used her privilege to advocate for issues that were important to her. As a young man, Charles Lippitt attended Brown University, worked in the family textile

business, served as “colonel and chief of governor’s staff ” to his father Governor Henry Lippitt from 1875-1877, and held leadership positions on the Providence Board of Trade.33 Not much is known of Margaret Farnum’s life before her marriage.

She grew up in a conventional upper-middle-class household at 34 Aborn Street in Providence and was the only daughter of the four children born to Alexander Farnum and Charlotte Ormsbee. Her father was a businessman who was a founding member of the Providence Public Library, served as president of the Providence Athenaeum (a private library), and owned a significant personal library of 4,500 volumes described as “the best money could obtain.”34 Her two older brothers both attended Brown University with one later working as a librarian and the other as a musician.35 She attended school and lived at home with her family until her marriage. Margaret was twenty-five years old when she married Charles Warren Lippitt (Charles was thirty-nine) at Westminster Church in Providence in 1886.

Margaret and Charles Lippitt endured a terrible tragedy in 1893, when all three of their children died within a week due to scarlet fever, echoing the 1856 deaths of Charles’s younger siblings and his surviving sister’s hearing loss.

Although the newspaper death announcement stated that, “Mr. [Charles] Lippitt’s bereavement is peculiarly distressing, and sympathy for him is general and widespread,” Margaret

The Rhode Island School for the Deaf was founded in 1876 by Mary Ann Balch Lippitt.

Originally located on Hope Street in Providence, now demolished, the school is still in operation today.

Rhode Island School for the Deaf, Providence, R.I., photograph, 1904, RHi X17 4260, rhode island historical society.

The Lippitts of Rhode Island: Anti-suffrage and Female Political Activism v 79

left:

Margaret Farnum Lippitt (1860-1940) with daughter Jeanie in carriage outside their Providence home, 1893.

Her sons and nurse Annie Urquhart are in background.

Photograph, lippitt house museum collection, providence, r.i. below:

Margaret and Charles Lippitt’s Providence home at 7 Young Orchard Avenue. Photograph, n.d., lippitt house museum collection, providence, r.i.

Lippitt also suffered greatly from the heart-breaking loss of her two sons and daughter, all under the age of seven.36 A year after enduring this devastating loss, Margaret gave birth to another child, and eventually had two more children, all boys, who survived to adulthood.

Margaret and Charles Lippitt were extremely wealthy due to the family textile operations and other business ventures. Charles pursued a political career, serving two terms as governor in 1895-96 and 1896-97, and made an unsuccessful bid to be the Republican vice-presidential candidate for William McKinley in 1896. The Lippitts owned two homes. Their primary residence was a large Italianate mansion at 7 Young Orchard Avenue in Providence, three blocks from Charles’s childhood home on Hope Street. In 1900, the Lippitts had eight live-in servants helping Margaret take care of household duties and childcare. The servants — a waitress, a chambermaid, two laundresses, three nurses, and a cook —were all women, many of whom were immigrants from Nova Scotia.37 In 1892, the Lippitts began construction of a summer home, “The Breakwater.” Located at the end of Ledge Road in Newport, and commonly referred to as “Lippitt’s Castle,” the house was finished in 1899 after Charles completed his terms as governor.38 Margaret was active in both Providence and Newport social circles. Supported by a large staff of servants who attended to domestic concerns, Margaret Lippitt was able to pursue activities outside the home.

Gov. Charles W. Lippitt (1846-1924) with staff, c.1895-1897. It was said Margaret Lippitt “entertained extensively” during her husband’s term as governor. Photograph, lippitt house museum collection, providence, r.i.

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Like her mother-in-law, Mary Ann Lippitt, Margaret focused on conservative social causes that fell within the traditional women’s sphere. She served in leadership positions for “patriotic” female nativist heredity organizations including the Daughters of the American Revolution, the National Society of Colonial Dames, and the Society of Mayflower Descendants, in keeping with her New England Yankee family pedigree.39 But at the turn of the twentieth century, Margaret stepped to the forefront of women’s suffrage politics in Rhode Island, transitioning from her role as the wife of a prominent politician who “entertained extensively” during her husband’s term as governor, to a political actor in her own right to advance a conservative agenda.40 This shift coincided with the larger societal move away from the oblique “parlor politics” practiced by her mother-in-law in the nineteenth century to direct engagement by women in the twentieth.

The women’s suffrage campaign in the early twentieth century had two fronts — one supporting an amendment to the United States Constitution, often referred to as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, which prohibited any state from denying participation in elections based on sex.

The other front was a state-by-state campaign fought by men and women in Rhode Island and other states to pressure legislatures to grant suffrage to women. Elizabeth Buffum Chace submitted the first petition for woman’s suffrage in Rhode Island to the General Assembly in 1867. Over the next twenty years, bills proposing an amendment to the state constitution were introduced several times — all resulting in defeat. When the woman’s suffrage amendment was submitted to voters by the General Assembly in 1887 and then was defeated by the subsequent public referendum of the all-male electorate, Rhode Island suffragists changed their approach from campaigning for a state constitutional amendment to advocating for a law allowing women to vote for presidential electors, which did not require a statewide referendum. It was not until 1903 that a presidential suffrage bill received enough support to be introduced into the Rhode Island Senate, but it died in committee.41 The year 1903 was also the year Rhode Island’s antisuffrage movement moved forward with the establishment of the Rhode Island Committee of the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women (MAOFESW). The MAOFESW was organized in Boston in May 1895 on the premise that, “The great majority of their

sex [women] do not want the ballot, and that to force it upon them would not only be an injustice to women, but would lessen their influence for good and imperil the community.”

The organization had committees in several states, not just Massachusetts.42 For many women drawn to the anti-suffrage movement, the growing pro-suffrage movement was seen as a break with the natural order related to male and females spheres, what Catherine Beecher, female education activist, described as “distinctive divisions of responsibility for the two sexes.”43 The oft-repeated anti-suffrage message that women did not want the vote was articulated by Beecher in an 1870 Boston address, “… a large majority of American women would regard the gift of the ballot, not as a privilege conferred, but as an act of oppression, forcing them to assume responsibilities belonging to man, for which they are not and can not be qualified.”44 She went on to say, “… any man or party which forces us [women] to the polls will be ostracized by the votes of every woman who is thus dragged from her appropriate sphere to bear the burdens of the state.”45 The natural area of women’s charity and social efforts would be poisoned by the politics that come with suffrage. Beecher predicted that the silent majority of women who did not want suffrage would be activated if suffrage sentiment grew: …should a time come when the woman suffrage party seem near achieving their aim, there would be measures instituted the power of which, as yet, is little known or appreciated. For they too would organize all over the nation and summon to their aid both the pulpit and the press.46 A bill for women’s presidential suffrage was introduced annually in subsequent Rhode Island General Assembly sessions. In 1907, the presidential suffrage bill had support from reform Democratic Governor James Higgins. Public hearings were held in April, and this was the first time Margaret Lippitt was known to publicly declare her support for Rhode Island’s anti-women’s suffrage movement. Of the speakers before the committee, only three spoke against suffrage, one of whom was Margaret.47 The antis testified that “women do not want the ballot, are not qualified for it, and have not the time to study the subjects to vote intelligently,” echoing long-standing anti-suffrage arguments.48 The bill was again defeated.

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As the suffrage fight continued the anti-suffragists employed increasingly more public and direct persuasion methods, the same methods used by the suffragists, such as debates, public talks, and letters to the editor, to rally support against suffrage legislation and raise the visibility of their cause. In 1909, Margaret Lippitt’s name was published in the MAOFESW quarterly publication, The Remonstrance, as a member of the Rhode Island Committee.49 The distribution of The Remonstrance was one of those public persuasion antisuffrage tools. Although her name was conspicuously omitted in the newspaper announcement of her children’s death in 1893, by 1909 Margaret Lippitt allowed her name to be affiliated with a political cause in a partisan newspaper.

Upper-class anti-suffragists had motivations beyond their stated objective of protecting the natural order and moral sphere of women. Many antis worked to protect their own financial interests against reformist suffragist causes that extended beyond voting rights. The Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association (RIWSA) campaigned in 1893 to the raise the age of legal child workers from ten to twelve.50 In 1907, the RIWSA received an endorsement from the United Textile Workers of America for their “equal pay for equal work” agenda.51 Both these reform efforts threatened the profitability of Lippitt-owned textile operations since the mills employed large numbers of both women and children.

The Lippitt family and other prominent Rhode Island antisuffrage families benefited from preserving the status quo for not only political reasons but also economic.

The suffragists recognized this and criticized the antisuffragists for their true motivations stating:

other antis who said they did not want nor need the vote.

The opening stanza specifically targeted upper-class antis: Fashionable women in luxurious homes, With men to feed them, clothe them, pay their bills, Bow, doff the hat, and fetch the handkerchief; Hostess or guest; and always so supplied With graceful deference and courtesy; Surrounded by their horses, servants, dogs – These tell us they have all the rights they want.54 In 1911, Rhode Island women formed their own antisuffrage group — The Rhode Island Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (RIAOWS); Margaret Lippitt was one of the founders and Mary Bushnell Hazard (Mrs. Rowland G. Hazard) was elected president.55 The RIAOWS headquarters was at 90 Westminster Street (with the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association headquarters just down the street at 111 Westminster).56 That year, Margaret Lippitt debated Elizabeth Upham Yates, President of the RIWSA, at the November meeting of the National Council of Jewish Women. Program Committee chair Belle Fink wrote in her account that the debate “gave our members food for thought.”57 This was the same year Margaret’s brother-in-law, Henry “Harry” F. Lippitt (1856-1933), was elected to the United States Senate by the Rhode Island General Assembly once again putting a Lippitt in the upper levels of Rhode Island politics.

The ‘antis’ in Rhode Island form a vigorous organization, and have among their leaders some of the wealthiest women of the state. In fact, the personnel of the members is composed largely of those who have found existing conditions so favorable to their personal interests that they are averse to any changes.52 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a feminist writer who spent her youth in Rhode Island, published a collection of suffragist poems in 1911.53 In her poem “The Anti-suffragists” she satirized the argument made by Margaret Lippitt and

U.S. Senator from Rhode Island Henry ‘Harry’ Lippitt (1856-1933), Washington, D.C. 1914. Senator Lippitt took a stance against woman’s suffrage while in the Senate. Harris & Ewing, photographer. library of congress prints and photographs division.

https://lccn.loc.gov/2016865386.

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Postcard of “The Breakwater,” often referred to as Lippitt’s Castle, in Newport.

Built in 1899 for Charles and Margaret Lippitt, it was a site of anti-suffrage activities during the summer social season. Gift of Dr. Marian A. Bruen Marrin. 2012.43.1, newport historical society.

The suffrage movement was active in other areas of the state besides Providence. Aquidneck Island was a suffrage center in Rhode Island with Julia Ward Howe, president of the New England Woman Suffrage Association, living in homes in Portsmouth until her death in 1910. The Aquidneck Island suffrage movement gained a significant boost in 1909 when Alva Vanderbilt Belmont opened the palatial Richard Morris Hunt-designed Marble House in Newport for suffrage lectures which attracted “a new and influential class” to the suffrage cause.58 The Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association established a Newport headquarters with Belmont’s support in 1912 and held daily meetings during the summer season.59 Using the Lippitt’s summer home “The Breakwater” as a base, Margaret worked to drum up anti-suffrage support amongst the members of the elite Newport summer colony. In 1913, at the beginning of the summer season in June, the Newport branch members of the RIAOWS, including Margaret, announced plans for an anti-suffrage mass meeting later in the summer at an estate featuring “Miss Brownson of the Bureau of Commerce and Labor as the speaker.”60 As part of the campaign against the Rhode Island suffragists’ annual presidential suffrage bill in 1914, the Rhode Island Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage organized public talks at their Westminster Street headquarters daily at noon. Anti-suffragists did not believe the propaganda often cited by suffragists — that giving women the ballot would solve societal problems because of the influence of women’s high moral character on the political scene. Margaret Lippitt

gave a talk entitled “Whether the Suffragists Have Made Good in Suffrage States” on 11 February noting that in states where women’s suffrage was already granted, promised temperance reforms had not eliminated the “social evil” [prostitution] contrary to the claims made by suffragists.61 This talk was given just a couple of days before Margaret, along with Mary Bushnell Hazard, led a delegation of five RIAOWS members to a meeting of the Rhode Island Senate Judiciary Committee.

At the committee hearing, Mary Hazard spoke first, and again made a core anti-suffrage argument that giving Rhode Island women the presidential franchise was “an imposition” and that antis were actually the silent majority, stating, “The Rhode Island Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage has more than 1,700 women enrolled as definitely opposed to woman suffrage. Can Rhode Island suffragists show a larger organization?” She also mentioned the same theme that Margaret Lippitt had addressed in her talk two days before, stating that suffrage “will not give women the power to regulate the liquor traffic, pure food, clean streets or the social evil. It will accomplish none of the ends for which equal suffrage is demanded.” She asserted that women did not need the vote: “The men of Rhode Island have been generous in the past in protecting us by legal privileges and exemptions.

For generations we have enjoyed the benefits of our government, and been free from its burdens.”62 She failed to acknowledge that all women in Rhode Island did not benefit from the same privileges and protections as the women from elite families like the Hazards and Lippitts.

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Margaret Lippitt then spoke to the committee and declared that “the ballot is not a right,” but rather, “an onerous duty from which a majority of women beg to be spared.”

She made a case that all women are not deserving of the vote, making an overtly nativist argument: It is the foreign element wherein lies one great objection to this bill before you. I ask you gentlemen to walk up Constitution Hill, out over Charles street, over Federal Hill and Atwell’s avenue, through Fox Point or to the city dock, and watch the passengers from a Fabre Line steamer,63 and then ask yourselves if you believe the addition of these ‘women citizens’ will tend to reform and elevate the electorate of the State, or register the intelligent will of the people.

Every one of these women is a possible voter, to be reckoned with in some part of the United States, and very many of them right now in Providence.

Margaret continued the anti-foreign argument to drum up support against women’s suffrage: “There is one aspect to this question which is generally kept in the background…

Rhode Island Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage leaders, including Mary Bushnell Hazard and Margaret Farnum Lippitt, participated in public meetings and debates. This 1914 meeting was organized with the F.E.W. Harper Club, a Colored Women’s Club. Broadside, RHi X17 4265, rhode island historical society collections.

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I mean the socialistic side. Every socialist is a woman suffragist, though every suffragist does not acknowledge that he or she is a socialist. Some there are, however, those who already openly avow their belief.”64 Just months before the outbreak of World War I, Margaret Lippitt stoked anti-foreign sentiment in her argument against suffrage alluding to the influence of socialism from overseas. This was in 1910 when only about thirty percent of the state’s population was native-born with American-born parents.65 This testimony at the Senate Judiciary Committee prompted an editorial a few days later from the Providence Daily Journal finding fault with the arguments made by Hazard and Lippitt. The editorial indicated a shift in establishment support in favor of presidential suffrage. The editorial declared Hazard and Lippitt were “somewhat handicapped in the scope of their argument.” Analyzing the argument made against suffrage on the claim that the majority of women do not want the vote, the editor wrote, “. . .the fact that women do or do not want the ballot [does not] decide the right or wrong of woman suffrage.”66 A few days later on 21 February, Margaret Lippitt replied with a “Letter to the Editor” stating that the 14 February article did not accurately reflect the testimony given before the committee. Her letter provides insight into her motivations for becoming involved in the anti-suffrage campaign, stating, “it is with great distaste that our sympathy for the silent majority of our fellow thinkers forces a few of us into the public eye as defenders of our homes and our woman’s privileges.” She asserted that anti-suffragists believed they “have the ability to grasp this subject, to see the injustice and hardship the obligation of the ballot will work on millions of conscientious women who cannot speak for themselves, must we be condemned to suffer for our woman’s insight and knowledge of the limitations of our own sex?” The editor replied with a note following Lippitt’s letter stating: When her argument reaches the point of declaring that a few anti-suffragists with their ‘insight and knowledge’ have been given some mysterious dispensation to ‘speak for the millions of conscientious women who cannot speak for themselves,’ we confess to a keen desire to see the actual power of attorney. To infer that the millions of women who do not come out openly and argue for suffrage are against suffrage is a novel and incomprehensible point of view.67

Despite gaining the support of some labor organizations, the 1914 presidential suffrage bill was again defeated.

In 1915, Mary Lippitt Steedman (1858-1937) engaged in the women’s suffrage debate at the federal level. Mary Lippitt Steedman, sister-in-law of Margaret Lippitt and middle daughter of Henry and Mary Ann Lippitt, married Charles John Steedman in Providence on January 7, 1892 at the age of thirty-three. Widowed at age forty-nine when Charles died via suicide in a Paris hotel on May 2, 1907, and left with a ten-year-old son, May (as the family called her) participated in civic and charity work fulfilling the expected role for upper-class women. She served as president of the alumnae association for Providence’s Miss Abbott’s School, was a member of the Alliance of Unitarian Women, and was elected president of the Rhode Island Exchange for Women’s Work.68 On January 4, 1915, Steedman, along with other women from Rhode Island, signed a petition opposing women’s suffrage that was submitted to the U. S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary. The House voted eight days later against the Federal Suffrage Amendment (174 yeas, 204 nays).69 Lending her name to the 1915 petition was one of the first public actions May Lippitt Steedman took to support a political cause — an activism she maintained for the rest of her life.

First submitted to Congress in 1878, the federal women’s suffrage amendment was introduced and defeated for more than forty years. May’s older brother Harry Lippitt served a term (1911-1917) as United States Senator from Rhode Island. During his term, the proposed women’s suffrage amendment to the United States Constitution came before the Senate twice. The amendment was debated for several days and voted on by the Senate on March 19, 1914.

The vote was very close with 35 “yeas” and 34 “nays” but Harry did not participate in the roll-call vote, nor did his Rhode Island colleague Senator LeBaron Bradford Colt, and the bill was defeated failing to reach the two-thirds majority needed.70 The next year during remarks made to the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association at their Providence headquarters on November 10, 1915, Harry Lippitt told suffrage leaders, “If I had to vote on the question of a Federal constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote, I would say no at the present time. I would hate to see this nation, at the time of world-disturbed conditions, enter upon a new experimental form of government.” He went on to explain, “We [state of Rhode Island voters] are conservative,

Pastel drawing of May Lippitt Steedman (1858-1938), n.d., artist unknown. lippitt house museum collection, providence, r.i.

and being so, move slowly.”71 When a vote on the federal suffrage amendment came before the Senate again in 1917, once again neither Lippitt nor Senator Colt voted on Joint Senate Resolution No. 130. The Federal Suffrage Amendment failed again with 35 votes in favor and 34 against.72 With an opportunity to make a statement in favor of suffrage, both times Rhode Island’s Republican senators abstained.

In the years leading up to the United States’ entry into World War I until 1918 when the Armistice was signed, both suffragists and anti-suffragists expanded their focus to include patriotic activities supporting troops stationed abroad. During the war years, many anti-suffragists completely stopped their political work so they could direct all efforts to support relief projects claiming that “war was the business of men and relief was the business of women.”73 This sentiment conformed to the anti-suffragist belief about separate male and female spheres and positioned the anti-suffragists to claim that they were more patriotic than suffragists, putting the cause of their country first. In December 1914, on the national level, the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage dedicated the “entire machinery” of their organization to support American Red Cross work in Europe.74 This shift from politics to relief work is echoed in the activities of sisters-in-law Margaret Farnum Lippitt and May Lippitt Steedman along with other Rhode Island anti-suffragists.

The Lippitts of Rhode Island: Anti-suffrage and Female Political Activism v 85

Margaret Farnum Lippitt and May Lippitt Steedman both assumed leadership positions in Rhode Island relief organizations as well as providing financial support. In 1916, May served as the treasurer of the Providence Public Service League which sent humanitarian supplies to Allied troops in Europe. In March 1915, the League organized a supply drive and sent cases of wool socks, surgical dressings, hospital supplies, garments for refugees, hospital shirts, pajamas, and pillows to the American Red Cross and the American Relief Clearing House. Mary Bushnell Hazard, President of the Rhode Island Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, was also a financial supporter of the League.75 May Steedman became active in the Red Cross movement and led the effort to organize the Providence Chapter of the American Red Cross in 1917. She was the founding secretary and headed the knitting and garment workshops, the canteen, and the motor corps.76 Margaret Lippitt might have had a more personal connection to war relief efforts since all three of her sons served with American forces in France during World War I (her youngest dying from wounds received at the Battle of

Château Thierry in 1918). Margaret stepped back from her anti-suffrage activities and served as the President of the Battery A Welfare League of Rhode Island. For her work she received the Médaille de la Reconnaissance from the French government after the war in recognition of her service.77 As anti-suffragists turned their attention to war relief work, many suffragists also supported war relief while continuing to advocate for their cause. Momentum turned in the suffragists’ favor during the war, both in Rhode Island and nationally. In Rhode Island, presidential suffrage for women was once again on the State House docket in 1917. The case made by suffragists changed as the campaign continued.

Suffragists agreed with the conservative anti argument that women by nature were different from men. However, the suffragists believed the political process would benefit from women’s involvement due to their high moral character.78 The tide shifted and women’s suffrage gained support from both Republicans and Democrats as the state party machines saw full male suffrage and women’s suffrage as ways to expand their bases.79 To help defeat the bill, the Rhode Island Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage distributed a letter to all members of the General Assembly once again making the case that the majority of women did not want the vote and it should not be forced upon them, writing, Woman suffrage is not rightfully a question of politics. It is the question whether a plausible, persistent minority shall be permitted to assert its irresponsible will over the rights of the great silent majority, a majority in a measure helpless from the very fact of its womanliness, to which the methods practiced by suffrage lobbyists are utterly repugnant and therefore cannot be met in kind.80

May Lippitt Steedman took a break from her anti-suffrage work to help found the Providence Chapter of the American Red Cross during World War I to provide aid to service personnel, c.1917-1918. Photograph, RHi X17 4266. rhode island historical society collections.

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After having been defeated fifteen times by the Rhode Island General Assembly, now with support of both Democrats and Republicans, presidential suffrage for women passed and was signed into law on April 18, 1917, making Rhode Island the first state in New England to allow women to vote for presidential electors.81 Party leaders thought and hoped this might appease the suffragists while still maintaining male control of local and state elections. But the reality was, with presidential suffrage secured, Rhode Island women’s suffrage leaders turned their focus to the federal amendment.

The tide in Rhode Island turned in favor of women’s suffrage when, in 1918, both the Rhode Island Republican

Margaret Farnum Lippitt (right) with World War I era relief sewing group, 1917. Photograph, lippitt house museum collection, providence, r.i.

and Democratic state parties sent resolutions to Rhode Island’s U. S. senators, Republican LeBaron Colt and Harry Lippitt’s Democratic successor Peter Gerry, to support the federal suffrage amendment.82 On January 9, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson announced his support of women’s suffrage.83 The House of Representatives voted on the amendment on January 10, and the amendment passed by a slim majority, with the full Rhode Island congressional delegation this time voting in favor.84 After the Senate vote, Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment on June 4, guaranteeing the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”85 The 19th Amendment then went to the states for ratification.

In Rhode Island there was much debate about when the ratification vote should occur — whether a special session of the General Assembly should be called by the governor immediately or to wait until the regular session in January 1920. Former U.S. Senator Harry Lippitt favored calling an early special session to vote on ratification, but others protested the cost and feared other interest groups might try to advance their own political agendas during a special session.86 The governor waited until the regular session to vote on the proposed constitutional amendment. On January 6, 1920, the Republican-controlled Rhode Island General Assembly became the twenty-fourth state to ratify the 19th Amendment.

The House voted with only three nays, in the Senate, there was only one nay; it was signed by Republican Governor Robert Livingston Beeckman.87

After the passage of the 19th Amendment, many suffragists and anti-suffragists continued their activism through their involvement in political parties. The antisuffragists now viewed voting as a duty, still not a right, and they voted to support their country.88 Both May Lippitt Steedman and Margaret Farnum Lippitt continued their political activities. Even before the Amendment was ratified, May donated $100 to the Republican National Presidential Campaign Committee on July 23, 1920.89 To help prepare to fulfill her duty in her first presidential election, she cut and saved from the October 10, 1920 Providence Journal the “Map of Providence Showing Wards and Representative Districts.”90 As indicated by her donation, she likely voted for Republican candidate Warren G. Harding on November 2.

May Lippitt Steedman did more than just become a voter and a donor, she become a leader in the Republican Party — “the party of business and property” in the 1920s.91 While continuing her work with the Providence chapter of the American Red Cross and serving as the first female board member of the Rhode Island Foundation, May was elected in 1920 to the Rhode Island Republican State Central Committee and was a charter member of the Women’s Republican Club.92 In 1923, she was the first woman to represent Rhode Island on the Republican National Committee.93 May also appeared in a Rhode Island Republican Committee photograph showing her support for the Equal Rights Amendment in 1924.94 Introduced in Congress by Republicans in 1923, the amendment was written by suffragist leader Alice Paul of the

The Lippitts of Rhode Island: Anti-suffrage and Female Political Activism v 87

As a member of the Rhode Island Republican Committee, May Lippitt Steedman (front row, center) shows her support for the Equal Rights Amendment, October 24, 1923. Photograph, national woman’s party, at belmont-paul women’s equality national monument.

National Woman’s Party stating that, “men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.”95 After the fight for women’s suffrage, Margaret Farnum Lippitt continued her leadership roles with female hereditary organizations but also took up a new political cause. According to her 1940 obituary, “Her chief interests in recent years were as chairman of the executive committee of the Rhode Island Branch of Women’s Organizations for National Prohibition Reform, in which she worked for the repeal of the Sherwood State Prohibition Enforcement Law.”96 The Sherwood Enforcement Act was a Rhode Island law passed in 1922, and repealed in 1932, to enforce the 18th Amendment.97 Publicly working against Prohibition kept with earlier proliquor conservative positions taken by both her husband and father-in-law when they served as Rhode Island governors.

Significantly, her long involvement as a leader in the antisuffrage movement was omitted from her obituary.

Sisters-in-law Margaret Farnum Lippitt and May Lippitt Steedman carved out public lives for themselves while still advocating for traditional conservative roles for women of their class. They publicly worked to preserve social and

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political systems from which they benefitted. However, they tried to make the world better by promoting patriotic relief efforts and supporting philanthropic endeavors, just as Mary Ann Lippitt did in the previous generation through her deaf education reform work. However, Mary Ann’s work was done indirectly through social channels while Margaret’s and May’s anti-suffrage work was done directly using public outlets such as letters to the editor, public testimony, and debate. The two women lost the fight to prevent women’s suffrage, but they did not walk away from politics. They saw firsthand that women’s suffrage did not have the negative effect on the domestic order they had feared. The Lippitt sisters-in-law also saw, just as the anti-suffragists argued, that the inclusion of women in the electorate did not eliminate social ills as the suffragists claimed it would. When the political landscape around them changed, the two women used skills developed during their anti-suffrage campaign to continue to work for what they valued in society, and in doing so, to preserve their elevated place in it. Even though they did not hold elected office like other male members of their family, May Lippitt Steedman and Margaret Farnum Lippitt still impacted Rhode Island politics — both with their vote and without.

Endnotes 1

“Providence Franklin Society Records 1826-1922,” MSS 162, Rhode Island Historical Society. New England Journal of Medicine, 23 (1841): 247.

2

Richard Mather Bayles, History of Providence County, Rhode Island (New York: General Books, 1891), 1:318.

3

Susan Goodier, No Votes for Women: The New York State Anti-Suffrage Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 2.

4

Kenneth Ames, Death in the Dining Room & Other Tales of Victorian Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 74.

5

Carol Engelhardt Herringer, Victorians and the Virgin Mary: Religion and Gender in England, 1830-85 (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2008), 1-34.

6

Goodier, No Votes for Women, 3.

7

Elizabeth Wayland Agee Cogswell, “The Henry Lippitt House: A Document of Life and Taste in Mid-Victorian America,” masters thesis (University of Delaware, 1981), 132.

8

Ames, Death in the Dining Room, 38.

9

Letter, Ann B.F. Woods to Mary Ann Lippitt, November 26, 1865, MSS #A12362, John Hay Library, Brown University.

10 The

Biographical Cyclopedia of Representative Men of Rhode Island (Providence: National Biographical Publishing Co., 1881), 401.

11

New England Historical Society, “Abraham Lincoln in New England,” https://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/abrahamlincoln-new-england-five-fast-facts/. Accessed 30 April 2020.

12

Broadside, “Prepare for the draft!: Commissioner’s notice!” for Henry Lippitt, 1862, Rider Broadsides Collection, Brown Digital Repository, Brown University Library.

13

National Governors’ Association, “Gov. Henry Lippitt,” https://www.nga.org/governor/henry-lippitt. Accessed 12 March 2020.

14

Lillie Buffum Chace Wyman and Arthur Crawford Wyman, Elizabeth Buffum Chace, 1806-1899: Her Life and Its Environment (Boston: W.B. Clarke, Co., 1914), 2: 333.

15

Wyman, Elizabeth Buffum Chace, 2: 65 and 66.

16

Wyman, Elizabeth Buffum Chace, 2: 71.

17

Letter, Lillie Buffum Chace Wyman to Jeanie Lippitt Weeden, (27 April 1918), MSS 583 Series 6, Box 1, Folder 15. Lippitt Family Papers, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence.

18

Cogswell, “The Henry Lippitt House,” 132.

19

Fred De Land, “Tribute to Mrs. Henry Lippitt,” Volta Review 14 (November 1912): 516-522.

20

Mary Ann Lippitt Journal, (1876-1886), Box 19, Lippitt House Museum Collection, Providence, R. I.

21

Jeanie Lippitt Weeden letter written to her family, 1 September 1938, Providence, in Marion Almy Lippitt, I Married a New Englander (Los Angeles: The Ward Richie Press, 1947), 43.

22

Goodier, No Votes for Women, 6.

23

Mary Ann Lippitt Journal, (1876-1886), Box 19, Lippitt House Museum Collection, Providence, R. I. B. Rogers, Clarke School and its Graduates: A Memorial Volume Issued to Commemorate the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Founding of the School, 1867-1917 (Northampton: Clarke School Alumni, 1918), 3.

24 Harriet

25

Lippitt, I Married a New Englander, 46.

26

Rogers, Clarke School, 8.

27

Clarke Schools for Hearing and Speech, “Our History,” http://www.clarkeschools.org/about/history. Accessed 16 May 2020.

28

Rhode Island School for the Deaf, “About RISD,” http://rideaf.ri.gov/AboutUs/index.php. Accessed 17 May 2020.

29

Lippitt, I Married a New Englander, 45.

30

Charles Carroll, Public Education in Rhode Island (Providence: E.L. Freeman Co., 1918), 220. The Rhode Island School for the Deaf is still in operation today and recognizes Mary Ann Lippitt as the school’s founder and a leader in what was seen at the time as the groundbreaking “modern” oralism method.

31

Goodier, No Votes for Women, 22.

32

M essage of Henry Lippitt Governor of Rhode Island to the General Assembly at its January Session, 1877. (Providence: Angell, Burlingame & Co., 1877), 13.

The Lippitts of Rhode Island: Anti-suffrage and Female Political Activism v 89

33

“Brown University Graduate Records,” MSS 538, S8 Bx1 F32, Lippitt Family Papers, Rhode Island Historical Society.

34

Jane Lancaster, Inquire Within: A Social History of the Providence Athenaeum since 1753 (Providence: The Providence Athenaeum, 2003), 202; Charles Sotheran, Catalogue of the Library of the Late Alexander Farnum, esq. of Providence, Rhode Island (New York: G.A Leavitt & Co. Auctioneers, 1884), 4.

35

1880 United States Census, Providence, Rhode Island, Population Schedule, House Number 34, Dwelling 178, Alexander and Charlotte Farnum, https://www.ancestry.com/, accessed 22 September 2020.

36

“Sad Affliction,” The Providence Journal, 2 January 1894, 8.

37

1900 U.S. Census, Providence, Rhode Island, Population Schedule, Ward 1, House Number 7, Sheet 5, Family 88, Charles and Margaret Lippitt, https://www.ancestry.com/, accessed 20 May 2020.

38

James L. Yarnall, Newport Through Its Architecture: A History of Styles from Postmedieval to Postmodern (Lebanon, N. H.: University Press of New England, 2005), 259.

39

“ Mrs. C. W. Lippitt Dies in 80th Year,” The Providence Journal, 30 January 1940, Chafee Family Scrapbook (1900-1960), Box 32, Lippitt House Museum Collection, Providence.

40

Ibid.

41

Ida Husted Harper, ed., History of Woman Suffrage (New York: J.J. Little & Ives, Co., 1922), 6: 573.

42

Goodier, No Votes for Women, 186. Margaret Lippitt was the only Rhode Island member of the MAOFESW in 1909.

43

Goodier, No Votes for Women, 6.

44

Catherine E. Beecher, “An Address on Female Suffrage, Delivered in the Music Hall of Boston, In December 1870,” in Woman’s Profession as Mother and Educator with Views in Opposition to Woman Suffrage (New York: Maclean, Gibson, & Co., 1872), 7.

45

Beecher, Woman’s Profession, 17.

46

Beecher, Woman’s Profession, 16.

47

Harper, ed., History of Woman Suffrage, 6: 574.

48

Kathleen E. Egan, “A History of the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Movement,” Seminar Paper (Providence College, 1985), 65.

49

The Remonstrance, Boston, January 1909, 1.

50

Egan, “R.I. Woman Suffrage,” 53.

51

Harper, ed., History of Woman Suffrage, 6: 566.

52

Charles Carroll, Rhode Island: Three Centuries of Democracy (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Co., 1932), 4:1134.

53

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s husband, Charles Stetson, painted a portrait of Henry Lippitt in 1887 the year before Gilman and Stetson separated. It is not known if any social interaction occurred between the Lippitts and Charlotte Perkins Gilman and her husband. The Stetson portrait currently hangs in the Lippitt House Museum hall as it did when the piece was completed in the 1880s.

54

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Suffrage Songs and Verses (New York: The Charlton Company, 1911), 17.

55

Harper, ed., History of Woman Suffrage, 6: 567.

Lippitt Opposes Suffrage,” The Providence Journal, 10 November 1915, 5; Harper, History of Woman Suffrage, 6: 567, 568.

56 “Senator

57

“Report of the Program Committee,” Providence Chapter National Council of Jewish Women, 1912-1913 Year Book (Providence: 1913), 36.

58

Harper, ed., History of Woman Suffrage, 6: 567.

59

Harper, ed., History of Woman Suffrage, 6: 568.

60

“Propose Anti-suffrage Work,” The Providence Journal, 18 June 1913, 1. The Federal Bureau of Commerce and Labor oversaw labor and immigration as related to business and was disbanded later in 1913.

61

“Mrs. Charles W. Lippitt Speaks Against Suffrage,” The Providence Journal, 12 February 1914, 9.

62

“Only Women Fight Bill for Suffrage,” The Providence Journal, 14 February 1914, 3.

63

The Fabre Line started steamship service between Italy and Portugal to Providence in 1911.

64

“The Anti-suffragists,” The Providence Journal, 18 February 1914, 8.

65

John D. Buenker, “Urban Liberalism in Rhode Island 1909-1919,” Rhode Island History 30 (April 1971): 35-38.

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66

“The Anti-suffragists,” The Providence Journal, 18 February 1914, 8.

67

“Women and the Suffrage,” The Providence Journal, 21 February 1914, 8.

68

“Mary L. Steedman Dead in 80th Year,” clipping from The Providence Journal, 28 February 1938, Chafee Family Scrapbook, Box 32, Lippitt House Museum Collection, Providence; “Governor Pothier at Ball,” New York Herald, 9 January 1912, 10.

69

Journal of the House of Representatives of the United States (Washington, 1915), Volume 63, Issue 3, 82.

70

“Woman Suffrage Centennial,” Records of the U.S. Senate, https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/ SJRes11913.pdf. Accessed 18 May 2020.

71

“Senator Lippitt Opposes Suffrage,” The Providence Journal, 10 November 1915, 5.

72

Martha G. Stapler, ed., The Woman Suffrage Year Book 1917 (New York: National Woman Suffrage Publishing Co., 1917), 51.

73

Goodier, No Votes for Women, 94.

74

Goodier, No Votes for Women, 95.

75

“Sock Day Planned by Service League,” The Providence Journal, 31 March 1916, 12.

76

“Mary L. Steedman Dead in 80th Year,” clipping from The Providence Journal, 28 February 1938, Chafee Family Scrapbook (1900-1960), Box 32, Lippitt House Museum Collection, Providence.

77

Ibid.

78

Goodier, No Votes for Women, 168.

79

Harper, ed., History of Woman Suffrage, 6: 272.

80

Letter from the Rhode Island Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage to the Members of the Rhode Island General Assembly, March 1917, Nathaniel T. Bacon Papers, Box 113, Folder 16, Adams Library Collection, Rhode Island College.

81

Harper, ed., History of Woman Suffrage, 6: 576.

82

Harper, ed., History of Woman Suffrage, 6: 571.

83

Elaine Weiss, The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote (New York: Penguin Books, 2018), 92-93.

84

Harper, ed., History of Woman Suffrage, 6:572.

85

U.S. Const. amend. XIX.

86

arrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement C (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923), 373.

87

Catt and Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics, 373.

88

Goodier, No Votes for Women, 146.

89

P residential Campaign Expenses: Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Privileges and Elections. United States Senate Sixty-sixth Congress Second Session Pursuant to S. Res. 357 A Resolution Directing the Committee on Privileges and Elections to Investigate the Campaign Expenses of Various Presidential Candidates in All Political Parties (Committee on Privileges and Elections, 1921), 2: 1215.

90

Mary Lippitt Steedman Scrapbook (1878-1920s), Box 17, Lippitt House Museum Collection, Providence.

91

Goodier, No Votes for Women, 150.

L. Steedman Dead in 80th Year,” clipping from The Providence Journal, Chafee Family Scrapbook (1900-1960), Box 32, Lippitt House Museum Collection, Providence.

92 “Mary

93

Ibid.

94

“Mrs. H. Havemeyer visits Republican Committee on Behalf of ERA—Rhode Island, 1924,” Photographic Records of the National Woman’s Party Action Photos, National Woman’s Party. https://nationalwomansparty.pastperfectonline.com/photo/9EF100651B38-47D9-83D9-562868413037. Accessed 20 May 2020.

95

U.S. Const. Equal Rights Amendment.

96

“Mrs. C. W. Lippitt Dead in her 80th Year,” clipping from The Providence Journal, Chafee Family Scrapbook (1900-1960), Box 32, Lippitt House Museum Collection, Providence.

97

Debra A. Mulligan, Democratic Repairman: The Political Life of J. Howard McGrath (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2019), 48.

The Lippitts of Rhode Island: Anti-suffrage and Female Political Activism v 91

“The women know what they want and they know how to get it” Tuesday, July 1, 1919 was a landmark day for Rhode Island women. It was the first day that women could register to vote in the presidential election of 1920, a right granted to them by the R.I. state legislature in April, 1917. By October 1920 Rhode Island had added 77,836 women to a total voting population of 199,956. (Newport Mercury, October 23, 1920) The Newport Women 1919 Voter Registration Book in the collections of the Newport Historical Society is filled with the names of women who registered to vote in the presidential election on July 1, 1919 and in subsequent weeks and months. The federal amendment giving women the right to vote became law in September 1920.

When Newport women turned out at the polls on November 2, 1920, they were eligible to vote not only in the presidential election, but in the national, state and town elections. The Newport Mercury observed: “The women know what they want and they know how to get it.” (Newport Mercury, November 6, 1920).

The Newport Women 1919 Voter Registration Book reveals that African-American women, some active in the pro-woman suffrage Newport Woman’s League, part of the Colored Women’s Clubs movement in the state, turned out to register to vote in Newport during the period leading up to the 1920 November election.

q Ida E. Gibbons (b. 1891) registered to vote on March 3, 1920. Gibbons was born in Coxsackie, New York, but had been living in Newport since 1907. Her father, born in Bermuda, was pastor of the Mt. Zion African Methodist Church from 1903-1908. Ida Gibbons, a dressmaker by profession, was a member of the Woman’s Newport League, an affiliate of the R.I. Union of Colored Women’s Clubs. She served as the “Juvenile Superintendent” of the R. I. Union according to an account of a meeting on October 13, 1913, at the Pond Street Baptist Church in Providence.

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Clara L. Mitchell DeCoursey (b. 1882) registered to vote in Newport on April 9, 1920. Born in Boston, DeCoursey arrived in Newport in 1886, and at the time of her registration, lived with her husband, William DeCoursey, a porter, who had been born in Liberia, and son, William, Jr. (b. 1915) on Filmore Street. Although the extent of Clara DeCoursey’s involvement with Colored Woman’s Clubs that favored woman suffrage, is not known, her mother-in-law Caroline DeCoursey served as president of the Newport Woman’s League and it is likely that Clara DeCoursey was involved with club work, as well.

Harriet R. Nelson (1864-1931) registered to vote on March 3, 1920.

She was born in Maryland and arrived in Newport in 1888. Harriet Nelson was the widow of Edward O. Nelson and lived at 62 Mill Street at the time she registered to vote. She was a member of the pro-suffrage Woman’s Newport League. At the fifth annual conference of the Rhode Island Union of Colored Women’s Clubs (ca. 1907), Nelson was elected second vice-president of the statewide coalition.

Harriet Rice (1874-1958) registered to vote on July 1, 1919. She was a Newport native who was the first African American to graduate from Wellesley College (1887). Harriet Rice studied medicine, and practiced as a physician for many years. She worked in French military hospitals during the First World War and received the bronze medal of Reconnaissance Française from the French government in 1919.

When she registered, Rice was living with her sister Sophia Rice at 75 Spring Street.

The Bridge v 93

Researching Rhode Island Women Suffragists Elisa Miller If you are interested in doing research on the woman suffrage movement in Rhode Island, here are some suggestions for resources: When searching for sources about suffragists in online databases and websites, it’s important to try different forms of their names. Married women are often referred to by their husbands’ names. Sometimes middle initials are used.

For example, a suffragist such as Bertha G. Higgins shows up in various documents as Bertha G. Higgins, Bertha Higgins, Mrs. William H. Higgins, Mrs. William Higgins, Mrs. W.H. Higgins, and Mrs. B.G. Higgins.

Misspellings of names are also common.

The largest archival collection on Rhode Island suffrage is the Rhode Island Equal Suffrage Association Records, 1868-1930, housed at the Rhode Island State Archives in Providence, Rhode Island. This collection contains the RIWSA and RIESA organization records, and some editions of the RIWSA newspaper, The Woman Citizen.

A finding aid is available at https://catalog.sos.ri.gov/repositories/2/resources/1332.

There is a smaller collection of RIESA documents at the Mary Elizabeth Robinson Center at the Rhode Island Historical Society as part of the Records of the League of Women Voters of Rhode Island. A finding aid is available at https://www.rihs.org/mssinv/mss021.htm. In addition, the Robinson Center also has several issues of the RIWSA newspaper, The Woman Citizen that are different than the ones available at the State Archives.

The Providence Journal contains a wealth of information about all the different woman suffrage organizations and activists in Rhode Island. It regularly published meeting announcements, letters to the editor, and features about the various organizations, individuals, and woman suffrage topics. The Providence Public Library has a microfilm collection of the newspaper and a card catalog with keywords and names. The NewsBank Inc. company has a digital and keyword searchable version of The Providence Journal. The database is limited to subscribing libraries, but the computers at the Rhode Island College Library are open to the public and provide access to the “Providence Journal: Historical and Current” database. The RIC library information is available at https://library.ric.edu/?b=g&d=a.

Sara M. Algeo was a leading Rhode Island suffragist and founder of the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Party. In 1925, she published a memoir, The Story of a Sub-Pioneer, that provides valuable information and photographs of her activism and the Rhode Island movement more broadly. A digital version of the book is available through the HathiTrust Digital Library at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015046898857&view=1up&seq=7.

Numerous NAWSA publications, such as the History of Woman Suffrage, six-volume collection, and various convention reports are available online and can be found on google. These national publications include reports about Rhode Island. Most useful is a summary of the history of the movement in Rhode Island from 1900-1920 in the sixth volume, which is available at https://books.google.com/books/about/History_of_Woman_Suffrage.html?id=rIoEAAAAYAAJ. The suffrage newspaper, The Woman’s Journal, founded by Lucy Stone and later affiliated with NAWSA, contains regular reports about the work of the Rhode Island movement. Digital versions of The Woman’s Journal are available and keyword searchable through the Harvard University library at https://listview.lib.harvard.edu/lists/drs-422585198.

The Suffragist, the newspaper of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage and later the National Woman’s Party, occasionally includes news of Rhode Island activities. Online editions are available on the Internet Archive library at https://archive.org/details/thesuffragist.

The Rhode Island Black Heritage Society has many documents related to Black activists and organizations in Rhode Island in its collection. The organization can be reached at https://riblackheritagesociety.wildapricot.org.

94 v The Bridge

THE BRIDGE:

Newport Historical Society 82 Touro Street Newport, Rhode Island 02840

A Joint Edition of the Journals of Newport History and Rhode Island History the bridge:

Fall 2020

a joint edition of the journals of newport history and rhode island history