Commemorating Historic Heroines

The fight for women’s suffrage took more than 70 years, starting in 1848.

“Young suffragists who helped forge the last links of that chain were not born when it began. Old suffragists who forged the first links were dead when it ended,” wrote National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) President Carrie Chapman Catt when the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote in 1920.

The first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, N.Y., organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott in 1848, built its preamble on the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men [and women] are created equal…”

Women’s rights were put aside during the Civil War (1861-65), however. Afterward, suffragists split over the 15th Amendment. Passed in 1870, this amendment said that the right to vote should not be denied because of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” African American men could (theoretically) vote, but no women of any race.

The National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) opposed the 15th Amendment because women were not covered; NWSA sought a federal amendment. The American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) supported the 15th Amendment, with the idea that women’s suffrage was an eventuality; AWSA favored a state-by-state approach. In 1890, the two groups merged to become NAWSA, and combined their methods.

Illinois played an especially important role in women’s suffrage as the first state east of the Mississippi River to give women limited suffrage (the right to vote for U.S. president, but not state and local officials) in 1913. If Illinois “had not first opened the door,” Catt said, New York would not have passed suffrage in 1917, and that state strengthened the suffrage movement in Congress.

Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan were the first states to ratify the Amendment, on June 10, 1919.

However, the Constitutional Amendment required ratification by 36 states. Although seven southern states rejected the 19th Amendment, Tennessee became the 36th and final state on Aug. 18, 1920.

Illinois also played an outsized role in gaining women’s suffrage because it was home to three of the most famous American women of the Progressive Era. Jane Addams was founder of the Hull House settlement. Frances Willard headed the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Ida B. Wells-Barnett was an anti-lynching journalist and organizer.

All three of these women are included in the “On the Wings of Change” mural, located back of 33 E. Ida B. Wells Drive in the Wabash Arts Corridor. More on these women:

Sandra Steinbrecher photo

Sandra Steinbrecher photo

JANE ADDAMS

On a post-college trip to Europe, Addams saw people less fortunate than herself and pondered whether mere handouts were the best way to help them. In London, a visit to Toynbee House showed her a model of urban poverty addressed through cross-class fellowship, according to “Women Building Chicago 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionary,” a project by the Chicago Area Women’s History Conference, edited by Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast (Indiana University Press, 2001). Hull House, opened in 1889, was located in an immigrant neighborhood on South Halsted Street. It offered children’s programs, ethnic clubs, labor organizations, women’s clubs, classes in English, government, literature and art, a gymnasium, art gallery and coffee house.

Addams’s skill as a writer built the Hull House reputation. She was a valued speaker for the woman’s suffrage movement, but kept her distance from strategic battles between 1900 and 1920, although she was vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association from 1911 to 1914. World War I made her a pacifist and “convinced her that women simply cared more about life than men did,” that they should be more involved in political affairs, according to “Women Building Chicago.”

FRANCES WILLARD

Willard was president from 1879 -1898 of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which had 200,000 members, both white and Black. Besides sobriety, the WCTU’s reform agenda included women’s economic and religious rights, marriage reform and the growing gap between rich and poor. Suffrage became one of its goals because women’s votes could help pass legislation to ban alcohol, thus protecting women from the effects of male drunkenness, whether physical abuse or loss of job/income.

Willard’s father had served in the Wisconsin legislature until he moved the family to Evanston, IL, where he became a banker. She graduated from NorthWestern Female College and was initially a teacher, then president of Evanston College for Ladies in 1871, which merged into Northwestern University in 1872.

Women were morally superior, Willard believed, so they were needed in the male-dominated world of politics, business and government, in order to make it responsive to women and children. The peak of her power was her presidency of the National Council of Women, organized during the 40th anniversary of the Seneca Falls, NY declaration of women’s rights in 1888. She pushed for women’s coalitions in cities and states across the U.S.

IDA B. WELLS-BARNETT

The lynching of a grocer friend who had competed with white businessmen in Memphis launched Ida B. Wells as an investigative reporter. Lynching was the result of economic envy and the desire for control, she realized, not the myth that Black men had predatory desires for white women. Her 1892 expose on lynching so enraged Tennesseeans, that they burned her printing press. In fear for her life, she fled to Chicago. The next year, during the World’s Columbia Exposition here, she joined other African American leaders in calling for a boycott of the fair, because of negative portrayals of the Black community.

Wells-Barnett saw that white women played an important role in uplifting the community, and she also felt it was important for Black women to “emancipate” their white sisters from prejudice. Seeking to attract Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) supporters in the South, for example, Frances Willard never repudiated racial stereotypes about Black men, despite protests by Wells-Barnett, according to the Willard Museum website. However, the WCTU passed yearly anti-lynching resolutions from 1893 to 1899. Wells-Barnett also worked with Jane Addams as part of an interracial group that convinced the Chicago Tribune to stop publishing stories promoting school segregation.

Around the time Illinois gave women limited voting rights in 1913, Wells-Barnett established the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago, the first such group for Black women in the state. Ahead of the February 1914 primary, their candidate was leading the machine’s. Officials took note, and promised to slate a Black candidate. As a result, Oscar DePriest became Chicago’s first Black alderman.

Ida and her lawyer husband, Ferdinand Lee Barnett, established the weekly Chicago Conservator newspaper. She was co-founder of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 and co-founder of the National `Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) with W.E.B. DuBois and others in 1909.

CATHARINE WAUGH MCCULLOCH

After Waugh McCulloch graduated from Union College of Law (later Northwestern University), male lawyers propositioned her sexually in return for a clerkship. Instead, she opened her own Rockford practice; her clients were women whose problems stemmed from their own legal status: wage discrimination, divorce, probate, and child custody. She drafted the legislation that guaranteed mothers the same custody rights as fathers, that strengthened rape laws and that raised the age of consent from 14 to 16. Her husband shared her mission in their joint Chicago practice.

McCulloch solved her problem of being a working mother by serving as a Justice of the Peace (1907-13), and twice convinced a male electorate she would always be available – at home.

In 1893, McCulloch introduced the bill that would become the Illinois suffrage law 20 years later. She was legislative superintendent of the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association (predecessor to the Illinois League of Women Voters) from 1890 to 1912, National American Women Suffrage Association legal adviser (1904-ca 1911) and 1st VP, 1910-11; and president of the Women’s Bar Association of Illinois, 1916-20.

GRACE WILBUR TROUT

Trout was a gifted public speaker with a flair for making headlines in the Illinois suffrage movement’s final, crucial, decade.

As Chicago Political Equality League president in 1910, she entered the first suffrage float in Chicago’s July 4th parade. A week later, with a touring car and chauffeur, as president of the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association (predecessor of the Illinois League of Women Voters) she led the first Suffrage Automobile Tour of Illinois: 16 towns within 40 miles of Chicago in five days. She and IESA members gave speeches about women’s suffrage on street corners and train stations – and were assured of front-page coverage.

Trout urged a “quiet campaign” – no publicity, no special hearings – to convert so-called opponents of suffrage into friends. But she kept a card file on all the legislators. She also visited Chicago’s seven newspapers on a rotating basis, getting them to write editorials that were placed on legislators’ desks. And when the suffrage bill came up for a final vote, she urged a telephone campaign at the Chicago home of the Illinois Speaker of the House from Saturday through Monday. Back in Springfield on Tuesday, the Speaker also found thousands of letters and telegrams.

He immediately scheduled the final vote on suffrage for June 11, 1913, when it passed.

MARY LIVERMORE

Born in 1820 in Boston, Mary Livermore came to Chicago in 1857. She founded the Home for Aged Women and the Hospital for Women and Children, and became a board member for the Home for the Friendless. Her experiences in the Civil War convinced her that women needed the vote, because without it, in the eyes of men, they and their infant children “were robbed of their legal rights.”

In 1868, she organized the Illinois Woman Suffrage Association and served as its president. She created her own suffrage and temperance publication called “The Agitator.”

When the suffrage movement split because the 15th Amendment gave the vote to Black men but not women of any race, Livermore joined Lucy Stone in the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), which saw suffrage as an eventuality. She became its first vice president, president from 1878 to 1895, and editor at The Women’s Journal.

As a speaker at the Women’s Tea Party in 1873, Livermore reflected on the Boston Tea Party of 1773. “The Woman Suffrage movement has often been spoken of as a new movement. It is…simply a carrying out of the principles further than our fathers carried them a hundred years ago.”

MYRA BRADWELL

Myra Bradwell organized the first Illinois women’s suffrage convention and passed the Illinois Bar exam with high honors in 1869, but she was refused admission because of her gender, despite an appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court. Finally, the Illinois legislature opened most professions to women, and she was admitted to the U.S. Supreme Court and Illinois Supreme Court in 1892, retroactive to her original application.

As editor and publisher of the Chicago Legal News, Bradwell advocated for women’s rights, women’s suffrage and property ownership rights by women; she helped get Mary Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's widow, released from an insane asylum after her son, Robert, had her committed for her eccentricities and wild spending.

Bradwell was an active member of the Illinois Woman Suffrage Association. In 1869, she helped organize Chicago’s first suffrage convention and aided in establishing the American Woman Suffrage Association in Cleveland; she also served on its executive committee. Her influence with lawyers, judges and lawmakers gave her enormous impact as a women’s rights advocate and she became one of the Midwest’s most notable suffragists.

FANNIE BARRIER WILLIAMS

As a new teachers’ college graduate in 1870, Fannie Barrier went to Washington, D.C. to teach freedmen, and was stunned by the discrimination she encountered. Enrolled at the School of Fine Arts, she was told that the only way she would remain was if she were surrounded by screens. Barrier married S. Laing Williams in 1887 and the couple moved to Chicago, where her husband was admitted to the Illinois bar and began a successful law practice.

Barrier Williams became director of the art and music department of the Prudence Crandall Study Club, but she extended her interests beyond this elite African American group. She helped found the National League of Colored Women in 1893 and its successor, the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896. The organizations provided kindergartens, mother’s bureaus, and savings banks for women who would not otherwise have had them. Because there were no Black nurses and doctors in hospitals, she helped to create the interracial Provident Hospital, with a nursing school that admitted Black women.

In 1895, Barrier Williams and Mary Church Terrell established the National Federation of Afro-American Women, which became part of NACW. The two women, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, also split from Booker T. Washington at the National Colored Women’s Congress, saying that Washington compromised too much with “the white supremacist South.” The Congress condemned discrimination and lynching and passed a resolution for a fully integrated women’s movement.

Aligned with W.E.B. DuBois, Barrier Williams was among the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

MARY FITZBUTLER WARING

Born in 1870, in Canada, but raised in Louisville, KY, Mary Fitzbutler married Frank Waring in 1901 and came to Chicago, where she became prominent in social circles, reform and charitable causes. By 1906, she was gaining visibility in the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) and in 1911, she represented the NACW at the National Council of Women’s Executive Session, (a predominantly white organization) as a replacement for Fannie Barrier Williams. She was later secretary of the Illinois Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs.

A teacher in the Chicago Public Schools, she also became a doctor, like both her parents; she took charge of NACW’s Department of Health and Hygiene and wrote a column for its national publication. She also represented the NACW in Norway at the International Congress of Women, a group founded to unite women’s groups across the world; and at the International Council of Women in Scotland.

Fitzbutler Waring was elected president of the NACW in 1933 and then again in 1935. In this capacity, she petitioned President Franklin D. Roosevelt to desegregate railroad passenger cars in the United States.

AGNES NESTOR

Born in 1876 in Grand Rapids, MI, Agnes Nestor moved with her family to Chicago in 1897 when her father needed work. But after he fell ill, Nestor left 8th grade to support her family as a glovemaker in a factory. Impressed with the gains men made through unions, she led a successful 10-day strike by glovemakers in 1901. The organizing spurred the formation the next year of the International Glove Workers Union (IGWU), which secured better conditions and higher wages for workers.

Nestor also organized overworked and underpaid women workers in Illinois through the Chicago Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), which she headed from 1913 to 1948. Her most important achievement, however, according to the Encyclopedia of Chicago History, was lobbying against fierce opposition from Illinois businessmen for the 1909 state law limiting work for women to 10 hours per day.

While much of the Illinois suffrage movement was headed by middle- and upper-class women, Nestor was not alone in speaking for under-represented groups. Her work naturally led her to Hull House founder Jane Addams, who invited her on an April 1909 lobbying trip to Springfield led by the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association (IESA), predecessor to the Illinois League of Women Voters. In Joliet, one of seven stops made by the train, Nestor made a three-minute speech on “The Lack of the Ballot, the Handicap for Working Girls,” which drew hundreds of people. Although the Municipal Suffrage bill did not pass, the campaign led the IESA to form a broader coalition that showed the benefits of suffrage to all classes.

Nestor ran unsuccessfully for the Illinois General Assembly in 1929, then served on several committees during the Great Depression and worked for women’s labor issues until her death in 1948.

by Suzanne Hanney