Woman Suffrage in Virginia

In 1913, Virginia lawyer Conway Whittle Sams dismissed the woman suffrage movement as "a craze." Laws benefiting women, he declared with disdain in Shall Women Vote? A Book for Men, deserved to be cataloged "in a Museum of Legal Curiosities … in the section devoted to Legislative Attempts to Subordinate Men to Women and Children." Despite such opposition (from both sexes), women would win the vote seven years later. The battle for equality, however, had begun more than seventy years earlier. In July 1848, the first convention agitating for women's rights, held in Seneca Falls, New York, produced a Declaration of Sentiments asserting that "all men and women are created equal." Of those who signed it, only Charlotte Woodward, a glove-maker, lived to cast a vote in 1920, at age ninety-one.

Southern women did not organize in appreciable numbers until the 1890s and failed to mount effective statewide campaigns until 1910. The earliest attempt to organize Virginia women in a campaign for the right to vote occurred in 1870, when New Jersey native Anna Whitehead Bodeker invited several men and women sympathetic to the cause to a meeting that launched the first Virginia State Woman Suffrage Association in Richmond. Between 1870 and 1872, Bodeker, as president of the new association, tried to win public support for woman suffrage by writing articles for the local press and inviting national suffrage leaders to lecture in Richmond. She also attempted unsuccessfully to vote in the municipal election in November 1871, asserting her qualifications under the new Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

Despite Bodeker's efforts, the movement did not gain many followers. Virginia women faced tremendous pressure in the post–Civil War period to conform to traditional ways, and conservative politicians were unwilling to seriously consider the suffrage issue. The movement was revolutionary and emancipatory, claiming for women equality of rights, opportunities, and respect with men. More than just paving the way to the ballot box, early suffragists were also attempting to rethink and redefine what womanhood meant—a threatening proposition to men and women alike.

Orra Gray Langhorne, of Lynchburg, attempted to revive the Virginia suffrage issue during the 1890s, but the association she founded and led was short-lived. Finally, on November 27, 1909, a small group of civic-minded women held a preliminary meeting in Richmond to discuss the establishment of a statewide suffrage organization. Writers Ellen Glasgow, Mary Johnston, and Kate Langley Bosher, artists Adèle Clark and Nora Houston, physician Kate Waller Barrett, and reformer Lila Meade Valentine, among others, came together to form the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia.

Within its first few months, the league, under the able direction of Valentine, joined with the National American Woman Suffrage Association and began a public campaign to educate Virginia citizens on the issue. The league held street meetings in Capitol Square and on Broad Street at the corners of Fifth and Sixth streets, where Clark would set up her easel and start painting to lure the curious to suffrage speeches. "It reached the point," she remembered, "where I couldn't see a fireplug without beginning 'Ladies and gentlemen.'" Clark was elected secretary and later helped direct legislative initiatives, designed and drew postcards, organized suffrage rallies, and went on speaking tours that helped establish new league chapters throughout the state.

The woman suffrage movement coincided with major national reform movements seeking to improve public education, create public health programs, regulate business and industrial practices, and establish standards and create agencies to ensure pure food and public water supplies. Public debate on these issues and simultaneous demands for better roads and public services transformed politics in Virginia and brought into the political process people who had not been active participants earlier. Women were making practical gains, venturing out into the world, forming women's associations, and participating in reform movements. They put these organizational skills to good use to rally for the vote.

Virginia suffragists employed a variety of techniques to enlist women to their cause, making speeches across the state (often from decorated automobiles), renting booths at fairs, and distributing "Votes for Women" buttons. By canvassing house to house, distributing leaflets, and speaking in public, the members of the league sought to educate Virginia's citizens and legislators and to win their support for woman suffrage. Beginning in 1914, the group published its own monthly newspaper, the Virginia Suffrage News. Valentine persuaded a group of Richmond businessmen to form the Men's Equal Suffrage League of Virginia. The state archivist Hamilton J. Eckenrode was among those who signed a resolution in support of woman suffrage in 1912, arguing that the state constitution should be amended "so as to enable Virginia Women to vote on equal terms with Virginia men." Eight years later, his successor as state archivist, Morgan P. Robinson, registered women to vote in Richmond. Johnston visited women's colleges to rally faculty and students to the cause. Soon local leagues sprang up across the state.

Virginia's suffragists argued that women were intelligent, sensible, tax-paying citizens, and therefore deserved to cast ballots. The home and the world in the early years of the twentieth century were overlapping, not separate, spheres, and women had special concerns and interests that were being poorly addressed by male legislators. Virginia suffragists staunchly maintained that women, in order to be good mothers, needed to be good citizens. "Home is not contained within the four walls of an individual home," suffragists argued; instead, "home is the community." When antisuffragists argued that men were the commonwealth's natural-born leaders, intellectually and physically superior to their female helpmates, suffragists countered that women could add valuable insight and energy to solving a number of problems largely ignored by politicians, including education, health reform, and child labor. The woman suffrage movement worked toward equal rights for women as citizens, as well as the right to vote. It was perhaps more important that the movement was building change on the foundation of a new, self-developed, economically independent womanhood.

Public opinion responded slowly to the league's message, but membership in the organization climbed steadily and spread to other areas of the state. In 1914, the Equal Suffrage League reported 45 local chapters; by 1916 that number had grown to 115, including 23 organized in that year alone, and almost every town in Virginia with more than 2,500 residents had a suffrage league. By 1919, membership had reached 32,000, making it most likely the largest state association in the South. Antisuffragists formed a counter organization in 1912 to refute the league's arguments, claiming that most Virginia women had no interest in voting and that woman suffrage would open the door for black women to vote, thus violating the restrictive spirit behind Virginia's 1902 constitution.

The Equal Suffrage League's strategy focused on winning support in the General Assembly for a voting-rights amendment to the state constitution. Some suffragists grew impatient with the painstaking approach and broke ranks, joining the more militant Congressional Union (later the National Woman's Party), and then pressuring Congress and U.S. president Woodrow Wilson to enact a federal suffrage amendment. The National Woman's Party demonstrated in Washington, D.C., during World War I (1914–1918), while mainstream suffragists instead directed their energies to the war effort. Pauline Adams, president of the Norfolk branch of the National Woman's Party (and former president of that city's Equal Suffrage League), was among the protestors arrested in 1917 and sent to federal prison in Lorton, Virginia.

Virginia suffragists succeeded in bringing the issue to the floor of the General Assembly three times between 1912 and 1916, but the vote never came close to passage. Although they took heart in 1918 when Great Britain gave women the vote, and celebrated the following year when Virginia-born Nancy, Viscountess Astor, took her seat in the British Parliament, the first woman to be seated, disappointment marked the efforts of suffragists to convert Virginia's political establishment. When Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment in June 1919, the Equal Suffrage League fought hard for ratification, but Virginia politicians did not relent. Despite the efforts of the Equal Suffrage League, Virginia was one of the nine southern states that refused to grant the vote to women. Virginia women at last won the right to vote in August 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment became law, and exercised that right soon after, in the November elections. The General Assembly stubbornly withheld its ratification until 1952.

Issues of race inevitably complicated debates over suffrage. At first, suffragists tried to ignore the issue, which had the effect of sidelining African American women. The 1913 suffrage parade in Washington, D.C., included no southern black women as marchers, although northern women such as Ida Wells-Barnett participated. By 1915, antisuffragists were openly exploiting racial fears. Providing women the vote, they argued, meant providing African American women the vote. This, in turn, would as much as double the total African American vote and lead to black control at the polls. The system of white supremacy in the South, carefully constructed and nurtured since the end of Reconstruction (1865–1877), was at risk.

Such arguments opened fissures in the suffrage movement. In 1913, Mary Johnston, in a letter to Lila Meade Valentine, defended black women: "I think that as women we should be most prayerfully careful lest, in the future, women—whether coloured women or white women who are merely poor—should be able to say that we had betrayed their interests and excluded them from freedom." Three years later, however, the all-white Equal Suffrage League of Virginia released a flier, titled "Equal Suffrage and the Negro Vote," asserting that giving women the vote would not endanger white supremacy. Indeed, the flier argued that "the enfranchisement of Virginia women would increase white supremacy," suggesting that the literacy test and the poll tax would serve as effective deterrents to black voting.

As a result, black Virginians were almost completely silenced in the public debate. "There was nothing an African American could say [in Virginia] that would help the woman suffrage cause," historian Suzanne Lebsock has written. Virginia's black newspapers, while publishing occasional suffrage news, took no public position on the issue.

Still, when women won the vote in 1920, African American women in Virginia actively participated in registration efforts. Black leaders in Richmond organized registration drives and how-to-register meetings. Maggie Walker, the African American teacher and banker, visited City Hall to demand that more officials be employed to speed up the registration process and reduce the time women spent standing in line. And African American community organizer Ora Brown Stokes petitioned the registrar of voters (without success) to appoint black deputies to assist in registering the large numbers of African American women anxious to vote.

By the time the books closed for the 1920 elections, 2,410 black women had registered in Richmond alone. (Another 10,645 white women had registered.) They still found themselves excluded from the all-white Virginia League of Women Voters—the league's president, Adèle Clark, later recalled with regret that the organization "never had the nerve" to enroll black women—and formed their own Virginia Negro Women's League of Voters. By the end of 1920, several thousand black women had registered to vote and their voices began to be heard in Virginia.

Within a few weeks of the national victory in 1920, the Equal Suffrage League disbanded. The nonpartisan Virginia League of Women Voters, as its successor, shortly afterward began work to make the new electorate an informed one. The league sponsored registration drives, voter education programs, and lobbying efforts on behalf of social welfare issues. By early in October 1920, more than 13,000 Richmond women had registered to vote in the November presidential election—10,645 white women and 2,410 black women. Woman suffrage immediately made electoral politics more inclusive. Many women, like Richmond civic leader Naomi Cohn, spent a lifetime exercising the right to vote won by the Nineteenth Amendment and encouraging others to do the same. "The work is just begun," Cohn explained to the League of Women Voters in 1927, "and must be kept up so that the voters of the state shall become educated to that duty of casting their votes … and that they will send, to represent them in the legislature, only liberal progressive citizens."

Armed with the vote, women began to participate in politics. Mary Munford, of Richmond, was appointed to the Democratic National Committee in 1920, and Kate Waller Barrett, of Alexandria, was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention four years later. Sarah Lee Fain, of Norfolk, and Helen Timmons Henderson, of Buchanan County, became the first Virginia women to serve in the House of Delegates when they were elected in November 1923 and took office in January 1924. Between 1924 and 1933, six women ran successfully for seats in the House of Delegates, pioneering a wider role for women in state politics. All were Democrats (the majority party in Virginia at the time), and each had a background as a teacher or educator. They were elected from the geographical extremities of the commonwealth—the Tidewater and the Southwest. Despite this initial surge in representation, no women served in the General Assembly between 1934 and 1954.

Although the pace was often slow, change came to the commonwealth. In June 1948, when the town of Clintwood in Southwest Virginia elected an all-female town government, the news made the Washington Post. In 1953, Kathryn H. Stone, of Arlington County, won election to the House of Delegates—the first women elected to the General Assembly since the 1930s. Following her victory, numerous women of both parties sought election to public office. In 1970, however, there was only one female legislator in the General Assembly.

In 1979, Eva F. Scott, of Amelia County, became the first woman to win election to the Senate of Virginia. By early in the 1990s there were three women among the forty members of the Senate and twelve among the one hundred members of the House of Delegates. In 1961, Hazel K. Barger, of Roanoke, was the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, the first woman in Virginia nominated by a major party for statewide office. In statewide elections before Adèle Clark's death in 1983 at the age of one hundred, she saw nine women elected to the House of Delegates and two to the Senate. Edythe C. Harrison, of Norfolk, was the Democratic Party nominee for the United States Senate in 1984. Neither Barger nor Harrison won, but in 1985 Delegate Mary Sue Terry, of Henry County, did win election as attorney general of Virginia. The first and only woman elected to statewide office, Terry won again in 1989, but failed in her bid for the governorship in 1993.

Women continued to break new ground in the political arena. In 1989 Elizabeth Bermingham Lacy became the first woman elected to the Supreme Court of Virginia. Mary Margaret Whipple, of Arlington County, became the first woman to hold a party leadership position in the Senate when she became chair of the Democratic caucus in 2000. The number of women legislators in most states was still relatively small in 2005, but in Virginia they included eight of forty state senators and fourteen of one hundred members in the House of Delegates. In 1992, Leslie Byrne was elected to the United States Congress—the first woman elected to Congress from Virginia, seventy-two years after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.