Early Efforts
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.
Equal Suffrage League
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.
The Suffrage Argument
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.
Suffrage and Race
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.
After the Fight
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.
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.
Time Line
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July 1848 - The first women's rights convention is held in Seneca Falls, New York, to argue for women's right to vote.
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1870 - Anna Whitehead Bodeker organizes the first Virginia State Woman Suffrage Association and serves as president.
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November 1871 - Anna Whitehead Bodeker tries unsuccessfully to vote in a Virginia municipal election.
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November 27, 1909 - A group of women, including Kate Waller Barrett, Kate Langley Bosher, Adèle Clark, Ellen Glasgow, Nora Houston, Mary Johnston, and Lila Meade Valentine, found the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia.
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February 1910 - The Equal Suffrage League of Virginia joins the National American Woman Suffrage Organization.
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1912 - Lila Meade Valentine persuades a group of Richmond businessmen to form the Men's Equal Suffrage League of Virginia.
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1912 - Anti-suffragists in Virginia organize a counter organization to refute the arguments of suffragists.
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1912 - The General Assembly defeats a bill that would give women the right to vote.
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1914 - The Equal Suffrage League of Virginia begins publishing a monthly newspaper called the Virginia Suffrage News.
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1914 - The Equal Suffrage League of Virginia has forty-five local chapters.
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1916 - The Equal Suffrage League of Virginia has 115 local chapters.
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1919 - Membership in the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia reaches 32,000, making it most likely the largest state association in the South.
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June 4, 1919 - The U.S. Congress passes the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The amendment guarantees women the right to vote.
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1920 - State archivist Morgan P. Robinson registers women to vote.
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1920 - The newly founded Virginia League of Women Voters begins to sponsor registration drives and voter education programs.
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1920 - Charlotte Woodward, at age nintey-one, becomes the only surviving member of the Seneca Fall meeting to legally vote under the Nineteenth Amendment.
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1920 - Mary-Cooke Branch Munford is appointed to the Democratic National Committee.
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February 12, 1920 - The General Assembly votes not to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees women the right to vote.
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August 18, 1920 - Tennessee becomes the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, completing the ratification process.
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September 1920 - The Equal Suffrage League of Virginia disbands.
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October 1920 - Thirteen thousand Richmond women, 10,645 white and 2,410 black, register to vote.
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November 6, 1923 - Sarah Lee Fain, of Norfolk, and Helen Timmons Henderson, of Buchanan County, become the first women elected to the General Assembly.
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1924 - Kate Waller Barrett of Alexandria serves as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention.
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1924 - Six women serve in the General Assembly, which allows a wider role for women in Virginia politics.
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June 1948 - The town of Clintwood elects an all-female town government.
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February 21, 1952 - The General Assembly ratifies the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, thirty-two years after it became law.
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November 1953 - Kathryn H. Stone becomes the first woman elected to the General Assembly since 1933.
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1961 - Hazel K. Barger receives the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor.
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November 1979 - Eva F. Scott becomes the first woman elected to the Virginia state senate.
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1984 - Edythe C. Harrison receives the Democratic nomination for U.S. senator.
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November 1985 - Mary Sue Terry becomes the first woman elected attorney general of Virginia.
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1989 - Elizabeth B. Lacy becomes the first woman elected to the Virginia Supreme Court.
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November 1989 - Mary Sue Terry wins reelection as attorney general of Virginia.
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November 1992 - Leslie Byrne becomes the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress from Virginia, beating Republican Henry N. Butler for the seat in the new Eleventh Congressional District.
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November 1993 - Mary Sue Terry becomes the first woman to run for governor of Virginia but is defeated in the election.
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2000 - Mary Margaret Whipple becomes the first woman chair of the Virginia Democratic Senate Caucus.
References
Further Reading
External Links
- By Popular Demand: "Votes for Women" Suffrage Pictures, 1850–1920, Library of Congress American Memory
- Women of Protest: Photographs from the Records of the National Woman's Party, Library of Congress American Memory
- Miller NAWSA Suffrage Scrapbooks, 1897–1911, Library of Congress American Memory
- Library of Virginia Working Out Her Destiny online exhibition
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First published: February 8, 2008 | Last modified: September 12, 2019