Eva McCall Hamilton, Centennial Senator ARTICLE BY: JAYSON OTTO, FOR THE GREATER GRAND RAPIDS WOMEN’S HISTORY COUNCIL ILLUSTRATION BY KIM NGUYEN HEADER ILLUSTRATION BY LIBBY VANDERPLOEG
WOMEN WHO RAN! Eva McCall Hamilton took her senate seat in January 1921! Read more about her on our new web page--Women Who Ran-and place her among 46 other Grand Rapids women who ran 82 campaigns for public office between 1887 and 1920. Not only will you find more detail and documentation about Hamilton, you will discover four other women who also ran for state offices, including the State Superintendent of Public Instruction and the UM Board of Regents. Three women even ran for national positions, although most campaigns were local. You can sort alphabetically, chronologically, by political office, occupation, marital status, reform activity, and party affiliation. Learn that there were political parties other than the usual. Have you ever heard of a Farmer-Labor Party in Grand Rapids? Visit ggrwhc.org!
In 1920, Eva McCall Hamilton persuaded Grand Rapids to elect her as their senator in the Michigan legislature. That she was seated in January 1921 after the first election when women could compete for the office, thirty years before another Michigan woman would win a seat in the senate and a century before a Grand Rapids woman would, testifies to her political acumen. How did Hamilton pull this off? Recently, Eva McCall Hamilton had deftly maneuvered the social and political landscapes of Grand Rapids. Suffragists had certainly used creative modern tactics during their final push, but they also recognized that the radical strategies of England’s extremist suffragettes would not work in Grand Rapids. One 1911 news article explicitly distinguished between those“wildeyed” suffragettes in “freakish clothes” and the “home and mother”-type of women pushing for the vote in Michigan. Hamilton did embrace her role as a protector of the home, but she also insisted that women could manage domestic life properly only with “a chance to participate in the public enterprises which affect the home so intimately.” An inaugural member of the 1910 Grand Rapids Equal Franchise Club, Hamilton and other women “elbowed their way” into Lansing’s legislative halls. After the failure of a 1912 women’s suffrage referendum and when one newspaper called Hamilton a “suffragette,” she fired back about the hypocrisy of legislators who had pledged their votes and then “turned tail.” She promised that in two years she would “get on the stump” and “tell the people of their districts just what kind of men” they were. And she did. This non-“suffragette” wasn’t afraid to throw words! And she wasn’t afraid to throw herself into an education or later passionate engagements in civic life and politics. Two years at the Ferris Institute, a pioneer school in the emerging field of physical culture, led to Hamilton’s promotion of athletics for girls; and her courses in banking and business helped in fights for fair property rights for married women, the protection of vulnerable widows and retired schoolteachers, and for fresh food at affordable prices. Appointed by the mayor to the High Cost of Living Commission in 1917, Hamilton helped to establish farmers’ markets in Grand Rapids, gained a reputation as a powerful speaker, and suffered derogatory remarks from the aldermen she had “whipped.”
Hamilton built on her extensive civic work in her campaign for the state senate. And, once seated in Lansing, she continued to promote herself staunchly as a woman first. While her fellow male senators appreciated this, some of her early supporters did not. Hamilton was defeated after only one term; and one reporter suggested that her moderate political stances in Lansing had disappointed her early followers. During Hamilton’s one term as a senator, however, she saw through about fifteen bills and made good use of those courses in banking to promote “modern business methods in every department of the State Government” and to increase teachers’ salaries through increased local taxes. For the rest of her life, this trail blazer continued fighting for child labor laws and mother’s pensions and worked with the League of Women Voters.
Watch for more centennials in the wake of the of the Nineteenth Amendment! On our website’s new page, Women Who Ran, the GGRWHC turns to the history of Grand Rapids women running for electoral office. Follow them--and us--on Facebook and in WLM, and sign up for our hard copy and electronic newsletters at ggrwhc.org!
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Women’s LifeStyle Magazine • January 2021
