Never Forget the Suffragettes

At the Washington State History Museum, reminders of a not-so-long-ago time when women fought for the right to vote.

Am I the only one who’s been feeling kind of sentimental about the democratic process over the last couple of months? First I found myself weeping quietly over my mail-in ballot. (God only knows how I would’ve held up in an actual voting booth.) Next came the returns; again, more tears. And finally the euphoric spectacle of the inauguration, in which we celebrated not just the departure of one president, not just the arrival of another, but ourselves as voters. I had to start carrying Kleenex with me, just in case.

The Washington State History Museum in Tacoma is mounting a show to remind us of a remarkable fact: the women of this state only attained the right to vote one hundred years ago. Women’s Votes, Women’s Voices, which opened on February 28, celebrates the centennial of women’s suffrage in Washington.

1. Washington State Archives; 2. Suffrage cookbook (cover detail), c. 1910, Washington State Historical Society; 3. Suffrage ribbon,
c. 1910, Washington State Historical Society; 4. Courtesy of Whatcom Museum of History and Art

I sat down with Shanna Stevenson, the coordinator for the Washington Women’s History Consortium, which is putting the show together along with the Washington State History Museum and the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture in Spokane. Created by a 2005 legislative initiative, the Washington Women’s History Consortium was charged with a classic Second Wave feminist mission: to collect, preserve, document and share the sometimes humble-seeming materials that tell the stories of women’s lives.

Stevenson, a quietly elegant woman, greeted me at her sunny Olympia office. Hanging on the walls were numerous reproductions of photographs of suffragists.

“We collect women’s history materials: recipe books, scrapbooks, aprons, diaries, handwork,” she told me. “Often people don’t know how valuable these things are.”

Women’s Votes, Women’s Voices relies in large part on just such homely stuff: Susan B. Anthony’s dress; pins and ribbons and sashes sported by Washington State suffragists; a “Washington Women’s Cookbook” emblazoned with the charming slogan “Votes for Women, Good Things to Eat.”

From the first moment the state was formed, voting rights for women were part of the discussion, said Stevenson. “In 1854, during the first Washington territorial legislative session, Arthur Denny proposed that white women have the right to vote. This was only six years after Seneca Falls.” Seneca Falls was the site of the first Women’s Rights Convention of 1848, attended by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

6. Courtesy of Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture; 7. Courtesy of Tacoma Public Library; 8. Courtesy of Washington State Historical Society

Suffragists and anti-suffragists scrimmaged back and forth over the next half century. Women in the territory gained the right to vote in 1883, but lost it again when Washington achieved statehood in 1889.

The crucial moment finally came in 1909. The state legislature passed suffrage, which then had to be ratified by (male, of course) voters in November of 1910. The suffragists had just twenty months to convince the men of Washington State to allow them the right to vote. The women who undertook this massive effort came from all walks of life. They were members of the labor union, the grange, the farmer’s union and the more middle-class women’s clubs such as Seattle’s Century Club. They were teachers in Bellingham and Icelandic immigrants in Blaine.

These women mounted a campaign that was both wide-ranging and determinedly nonthreatening. They were led by two local luminaries — Spokane’s May Arkwright Hutton and Tacoma’s Emma Smith Devoe. For the most part they refused the help of the national campaign, wanting to separate themselves from their more radical and action-oriented sisters, including the British suffragettes who were disrupting Parliament and rioting in the streets. The Washington women certainly held rallies, but they were determinedly reasonable.

Their strategies, in fact, looked very much like those of modern grassroots political movements. The suffragists held bake sales and theatricals. They put up banners and rode on floats in parades and had a booth at the Puyallup Fair. They produced newspapers documenting their successes and educating women about how to campaign. Dr. Cora Smith Eaton, a founder of the Mountaineers club, led a group to the summit of Mt. Rainier, where the women planted a “Votes for Women” flag.

11–12. Courtesy of Washington State Historical Society

Mostly, though, they talked. They cornered their husbands and fathers and uncles, and they told them why women should have the vote. The August–September 1910 issue of the “Votes for Women” newspaper calls for women to “ask the business people with whom you deal to help you get the ballot: Not only the grocer and the butcher and the merchant, but the laundryman, the postman, the milkman, the garbage man, the gardener, the man who reads the electric meter and the gas meter, the collector for the telephone, for the newspaper, the book agent, the peddler, the tramp . . . ask them all.” This entry is a poignant illustration of one of the obstacles facing the campaign: While some women were venturing out into the working world, for many the home was their sphere. They didn’t lead public lives. So they canvassed the people who came to them: the meter reader, the postman.

It turned out that canvassing peddlers and talking with tramps worked. Something did, anyway. Every county in Washington State voted for women’s suffrage — ten years before the nineteenth amendment was ratified in 1920.

The suffragists’ coalition of left-leaning labor groups and mainstream women’s clubs remained fruitful for the next few years, as they helped pass a series of progressive reforms. Then it all fell apart with the onset of World War I, when everyone’s true colors shone through: The labor unions were pacifists, the club women patriots. The era of a crusade that united women across the state of Washington was over, for the time being.

At the end of our meeting, as I gathered my things, Stevenson held up a finger as if to say, Just a minute! She pulled out this quote from Susan B. Anthony and read it aloud: “We shall someday be heeded, and . . . everybody will think it was always so, just exactly as many young people think that all the privileges, all the freedom, all the enjoyments which woman now possesses always were hers.”

As Stevenson read, her voice caught and her eyes teared up. I thought of offering her a Kleenex. Unembarrassed, she continued with Anthony’s words: “They have no idea of how every single inch of ground that she stands upon today has been gained by the hard work of some little handful of women of the past.” •