Lake County’s suffragists: Celebrating the centennial of the 19th Amendment
- JAN COOK
- Posted On
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – As we celebrate the centennial of national woman suffrage, it’s good to reflect on what it took to reach that point, and to remember the Lake County people who did their parts to bring it about.
When Tennessee ratified the 19th Amendment in August 1920, making equal suffrage legal 72 years after Elizabeth Cady Stanton proposed the idea at the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, Lake County barely seemed to notice.
After all, California women had the vote since 1911.
Three generations of American suffragists had worked for this right, beginning with Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott and others whose work spanned the mid- to late 19th century. Coming up in the second generation were people like Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt. Third generation suffragists like Alice Paul, Mabel Vernon, and Lucy Burns brought new tactics to the battle and helped carry the day.
During World War I female American citizens demonstrating for a national suffrage amendment in Washington DC were arrested on dubious charges and incarcerated. They picketed Woodrow Wilson, a war-time president, mocking his speeches about saving democracy in Europe, and were arrested on bogus charges. In prison some resorted to hunger strikes and authorities force –fed them.
Far from the centers of power, even Lake County had its suffragists who fought for equal suffrage during California’s contentious 1896 and 1911 campaigns. Another Lake County suffragist was arrested in Washington, DC in 1917.
The path to California’s suffrage
The equal suffrage movement in California traveled a long path to reach statewide suffrage nine years before the 19th Amendment was passed.
In 1875 California granted women the right to run for school offices, a right that didn’t include the ability to vote in those elections. Lake County women jumped at that opportunity and ran for the county superintendent of schools. From 1891 to World War II, women dominated that office in Lake County and got a taste of politics.
A massive woman suffrage campaign for California Amendment 6 in 1896 brought out pro-suffrage, pro-prohibition activists all across the state. Suffrage celebrities of the caliber of Susan B. Anthony and Anna Howard Shaw traversed California for months promoting the cause, visiting towns like Lakeport.
In Lake County members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, or WCTU, also joined the ranks of suffragists. Mrs. J.T. Alexander, Viola Boardman, Ada Clendenin, Jennie League, Marcia Mayfield, Mary Meddaugh, Amphelia Olsen, Evangeline Polk, Emma Ransdell, and Orrie Young were some Lake County WCTU members who also participated in suffrage activities. Some of them formed suffrage clubs in Upper Lake and Kelseyville, and some spoke at suffrage meetings.
A two-day Woman’s Congress in Lakeport in September, 1896, featured local speakers including artist Hannah Millard Coffin, newspaper editor Marcia Mayfield from the Clear Lake Press and Ida League, a young teacher. The Rev. H. W. Chapman and L. B. Scranton were among the male speakers on the program. Nationally-known suffragist Anna Howard Shaw, the star attraction and keynote speaker, spoke both days, charming her audience with her melodious voice and powerful wit.
An anonymous male writer who attended the Woman’s Congress in 1896 came away impressed with the speakers.
He recorded his impressions of Shaw in the Clear Lake Press:
“Miss Shaw is truly a wonderful woman. This has been said so often that it borders on a platitude; but what else will express it. Her voice is sometimes sharp when she hurls forth her sarcasm, and her sarcasm cuts—bless you it does—but how rounded her sentences, how sonorous her voice grew when she gave expression to her emotions of sentiment, of delight, of sympathy, of conviction of the righteousness of the cause to which she had given her life. And what man or woman with an unbiased mind is there who, after hearing Miss Shaw’s eloquent defense of that cause, does not believe in its righteousness?”
The liquor industry, anticipating that temperance-minded women with the vote would shut them down, mounted an anti-suffrage campaign that killed the measure. Lake County voters defeated the measure about 54 percent to 46 percent, nearly matching the statewide percentages.
The suffrage movement in California then entered a 15-year period called “The Doldrums” when little happened and suffragists readied themselves for the next campaign.
Some Lake County residents joined women’s clubs that took on other causes such as creating libraries, promoting education for Indian children, and protecting Lake County residents when the Yolo Water and Power Co. gained rights to Clear Lake’s water.
In 1911 California’s Proposition 4 granting equal suffrage came before the voters, and again suffragists mobilized, using what they had learned from the 1896 defeat.
In Lake County proponents for both sides went into action. Ministers and their wives played a big part in the discussion in Lake County.
Mrs. JP Hearst, president, Edith Dunbar, vice-president, and Mary Meddaugh, secretary, led a suffrage committee that promoted suffrage speakers. The Rev. JP Hearst spoke at one of the suffrage meetings.
In a lengthy newspaper debate, Nannie Kastner, another minister’s wife, and the Rev. James Woods made their cases, for and against equal suffrage.
Woods celebrated all the fine qualities he saw in women, and remarked, “Fifteen years ago the Lakeport lecture of the celebrated Anna Shaw was a strong weapon for the defeat of the suffrage amendment. A thousand local leaders such as I have known for a generation past may promote a like result. Many men will be slow to accept their tongue and mantle as sword and shield. I am confident that I speak for myriads of women whose silent voices protest from family, home and against this change and appeal to men as fathers, husbands, brothers and sons to protect and keep them in their womanly ways and graces.”
Kastner rebutted Woods’ notions in a long article, “‘Voting will make women unwomanly.’ The right of franchise is not calculated to make women less womanly and facts prove it does not in the states where the women vote. Why should voting be any more degrading than standing in a line with neighbors and strangers at the Post Office, paying taxes, purchasing railroad tickets, or the many other things which women do, and to which no men seem to object? How can she sacrifice her dignity by putting on her bonnet and walking down to the polling booth? The woman who thinks she is making herself unwomanly by voting is a silly creature.”
The Rev. Arthur Dewdney, a recent immigrant from New Zealand, spoke about his experience living in a nation that had had equal suffrage since 1893. He assured his audience that equal suffrage had proved to be a good thing. Judge Sayre, chairman of the event, found that Dewdney’s speech had converted him from a “straddle the fence” to a believer in the merits of the cause.
Ida Finney Mackrille, a leading San Francisco suffragist, and noted suffrage speaker Mary D. Fiske, both came to Lakeport to support the cause.
Lake County’s suffragists succeeded in their mission when the equal suffrage measure passed in Lake County by about 58 percent to 42 percent. Statewide, in a cliffhanger of a count, with votes trickling in over two days, it passed about 51 percent to 49 percent, making California the sixth state with universal suffrage.
Lake County women register to vote
Limited voter registration took place soon after the election, and in November Lower Lake women had their first opportunity to vote in a “local option” election to decide if the town would be “wet” or “dry.”
California required all voters to re-register in even-numbered years, and women were asked to wait until the 1912 registration forms were ready before registering.
In January, county clerk Shafter Mathews went to Iley Lawson Hill’s home to register her, the first Lake County woman to register on the new form. At 103 she had waited a long time to register and was too frail to get out to the courthouse to register. Newspaper reports say that she registered as a Whig.
The 1912 voter’s registrations index lists the names of known Lake County suffragists like Evangeline Polk, Jennie League and Marcia Mayfield. Viola Boardman, Emma Ransdell and Hannah Millard Coffin had died before California women could vote.
In the new registration lists one can also find the names of other Lake County businesswomen and civic leaders who joined the ranks of new voters: Ida Dutcher, who owned a real estate and insurance business; Lavinia Noel, editor of the Lower Lake Bulletin; Hettie Irwin, superintendent of schools; Etta Kise Harrington a former superintendent, and Minerva Ferguson who would follow Irwin as superintendent; Harriet Lee Hammond, who donated the library building in Upper Lake; and Lottie Mendenhall and Amy Murdock who donated the land for the library.
Whether or not they were recognized as suffragists, they didn’t hesitate to register as soon as legally possible. These, and many other female voters made their marks on Lake County a century ago.
Pursuing a national suffrage constitutional amendment
Getting the vote in California was a big step forward, but passing statewide suffrage measures, as did California and a few other states, didn’t address the larger question of whether there should be a national amendment or if states should continue passing their own measures.
Suffragist organizations themselves were divided on this issue going into the 1910s. The National American Woman Suffrage Association favored the state-by-state plan. On the other hand, the National Woman’s Party, formed in 1916, posted Silent Sentinel pickets in front of the White House for two and a half years to petition for a national suffrage amendment.
Beatrice Reynolds Kinkead, born in Lake County, educated in the Bay Area, and living in New Jersey, was among a group of these Silent Sentinels arrested in July, 1917. Overall, about 2000 women joined this vigil and hundreds were arrested. In the end, it took suffragists on both sides of the question to convince legislators to bring the issue to fruition.
The Equal Suffrage Amendment finally made it to Congress where the House of Representatives and the Senate passed it in the spring of 1919. After that, thirty-six states would need to ratify it to make it part of the Constitution. California ratified the 19th Amendment in November, 1919, the eighteenth state to do so.
Again Lake County didn’t seem to notice. California women were already looking forward to their third presidential election.
State after state ratified the amendment in early 1920, but movement slowed during the spring and early summer. A month of intense politicking from pro- and anti-suffrage forces in Tennessee culminated in a close vote to ratify, making Tennessee the state that sealed the deal at long last.
An editorial in the Lake County Bee on Sept. 3, 1920: under the headline “Not All in a Day” commented that, “Woman with her vote should make haste slowly, lest in the end she makes haste not at all.
“Feminine suffrage was not achieved in a day, nor in a month, nor a year. It has required many years of ceaseless effort and countless disappointments to place her on a political equality with man.
“She cannot expect to revolutionize our political system in a day, nor in a year. To attempt such a sweeping overthrow of the customs of years would destroy her future prestige, and therefore her usefulness.
“The laudable ambition of womanhood is a better government and a more enlightened citizenry. This can be accomplished gradually, but it cannot be done with a stampede.
The tortoise travels slowly, but it gets there in the end.”
The women of Lake County didn’t make a big deal out of their new responsibility, they just got down to business.
Jan Cook is a technician for the Lake County Library who researches and writes about Lake County history.