Hello everyone. Thank you so much for
joining us on our YouTube page.
Today I want to kind of give an overview of
women's suffrage. So this year, 2020, marks
a hundred years since the passage of the
19th amendment, which guaranteed all
women the right to vote. Now, unlike last
year's Bicentennial, this Centennial is a
national commemoration, so across the
country different states are working on
ways of how to celebrate this, looking at
the history in their own state but also
that national story. And so there is a
national story to women's suffrage that
can go all the way back to the
Constitutional Convention, when it did
not protect women in their decision of
who gets to vote. So when they're
defining who a citizen is, they let States
decide who counts as a citizen
and most states determined that to be a citizen 
you have to be a man,
but then it also
continues from there, other issues that
women get involved with from the
temperance movement--so trying
to get rid of alcohol--to child labor
laws, other issues like that and women
are getting involved in politics in the
early period of America and it really culminates in 1848 Women's Rights Convention
So that's where we a lot of
people will start their story, at Seneca
Falls with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the
Declaration of Rights and Sentiments,
where they first kind of lay out this
idea of women's rights and voting rights
for women and then it continues from
there. You hear names like Susan B Anthony,
Carrie Chapman Catt, Alice Paul,
and all of those names are really
important to understanding how the
movement formed its connection to other
issues, like abolition, but also how it
sometimes divided after that. After the
14th and 15th amendment, which first
defines citizen as male in the
Constitution and that division at the
national level then coming back
together in order to get the 19th
amendment. Now, as we are thinking about
this national anniversary we want to
figure out what is Alabama's place in
this, what is the story of women's
suffrage in Alabama?
Now, it's a complicated story, like a lot of aspects
of Alabama, but it is full of a complex
and rich story of women getting involved
in this political question
So we want to figure out what is their individual
story how does it fit into that national
story, and first I can tell you that the
first suffrage associations, the official
ones, don't show up in Alabama until the
1890s. Now, remember that first date, 1848, right?
I told you about that, well in
Alabama there are suffragists, maybe
people who want suffrage, but there's no
formal association prior to the 1890s, in
many ways because of that connection
between suffrage and abolition, and so
you really don't see an association
forming until 1892, when one formed in New
Decatur, Alabama. Now, what happened is
at these local levels, women grouped
together, formed an association, so you
start seeing them pop up in other towns
Huntsville, Birmingham, so on and so forth,
and they do create an early statewide
association called the Alabama Suffrage
Association and at first that national
level is so excited that Alabama is
getting on the bandwagon for women's
suffrage and the women who are involved
in that movement are well-connected
women in Alabama that they get the
attention of the National Association
and Susan B. Anthony herself stops in
Alabama. In 1895 she comes to Decatur,
Huntsville, she stops by Birmingham
on her way to Atlanta and she gives
talks. Now, in the newspaper recounting of
this talk, they weren't
big audiences, right? It was a moderately
sized audience but it was people who
were in full support. They're energetic and
excited for her talk and they had great
reviews for it in the newspaper, but this
movement in the 1890s, it's not
widespread, right? It's not becoming a big
social movement yet, instead it stays in--
there's kind of smaller circles of women
and some men who really care about the
issue and they're working towards trying
to get a state amendment, something to
change at the state level. Now, we can
really start to see the big push for
this early suffrage movement in the
early 1900s with this woman, Francis Griffin
So Francis Griffin was a native
of Wetumpka, a graduate of Judson College,
and after she graduated she came to
Montgomery to teach and she got involved,
like many other women, with the Women's
Christian Temperance Movement and she
becomes a circuit speaker. She
goes around talking to people about the
prohibition of alcohol, "we gotta get rid
of it!" She goes as far as Texas giving
these speeches and she is known as just
this amazing
speech writer, speech giver, and that issue
becomes kind of a gateway issue for her
to getting into suffrage, and you see--I
said a lot of times those political
issues, that's what started with women
and what happens is they become
passionate about these issues and they
find a limit, right? There's only so far
you can go without having the vote, so
they can petition, they can do all these
things, but when they're not considered
full citizens their opinions are not
taken into full consideration, and so
oftentimes those issues like temperance
lead you into suffrage, because you
understand that you need the vote to get
that issue taken care of.
So she seamlessly moves and
transitions into a suffragist and becomes
president of the Alabama Suffrage
Association in 1900 and she sees in this
moment an opportunity, where they can get
something changed at the state level, and
that opportunity is the 1901
Constitutional Convention. So Alabama
decided in 1901 they needed a new
constitution, there's a whole lot of
reasons why they thought they need a new
constitution in 1901, but
what you need to know for this
particular topic is they wanted to look
back at this idea of suffrage, who gets
to vote in Alabama, and Frances thought
this was a great moment for her to come
in and argue on behalf of women, why
women should specifically be protected
in this new constitution. She shows up
and there's a group of male delegates,
some who want to hear from her, most who
do not, and even up to the moment before
she steps onto the platform we have
people trying to adjourn, trying to not
have her talk. She stands up and she
makes her speech. In her speech she
takes some of their arguments for why
women shouldn't vote, she turns it on the
head. So one of those arguments was if
women get the right to vote they're
gonna lose their silent influence in the
home and she looks and says, "have you
ever heard of a man who asked to be
disenfranchised in order to gain more
influence?" and of course the answer is no.
So then she leads up to her own argument
which is laws affect both men and women,
because that is the case both men and
women should work together in creating
those laws. Now, throughout her whole
speech there's laughter, sometimes
mocking, but it is stone silence
She looks something says, "now where is my
applause
for that?" So here she is talking to a
group of men who don't want to hear from
her but making her argument passionately
with a little bit of flair and humor
added into it.
Unfortunately her plea is ignored, the
1901 Constitution actually takes more
votes away than it gives, so it is set up
to use things like literacy tests, poll
taxes, grandfather clauses, property taxes
in order to take away the votes from
African-American men and poor, illiterate,
white men, and it does not give women the
right to vote. So after this kind of huge
buildup and kinda let down, we start to see
Suffrage Associations kind of going
dormant. Some are still there, some are trying to work but they're not
organized very solidly. It's not until
the next decade, in the 19-teens, you
start to see suffrage associations
forming again in Alabama. Again, it starts
at the local level, first with Selma and
then spreading Huntsville, Birmingham,
Montgomery, but this time they form an
even stronger statewide association.
In 1912 they form the Alabama Equal
Suffrage Association and it's a little
bit stronger in its constitution and
it's bylaws, there's a lot more
committees that are formed and so you
sorta see a different kind of group,
really focusing, and these two women are
two very important women to the
formation and an objectives of that
Association. So you have Patti Ruffner
Jacobs who served as the first president
from 1912 until 1916 and then you have
Bossie O'Brien Hunley, who served as their
legislative chair. She's writing a lot of
the different briefs and arguments
and they, like Francis Griffin, are
working towards that state legislation.
So they want an amendment to that
1901 Constitution that adds in
'Now, now women get the right to vote' and
they get really close. In January of 1915,
representative Greene from Selma Alabama
proposes the suffrage amendment and they
see it as this is their moment that they
can get it passed, so they start having a
flurry of events: luncheons dinners,
dances, a suffrage day at the Birmingham
Barons ballpark on August 18th where all
the players wore yellow sashes and all
the coaches wore Votes for Women sashes,
and the women are collecting the
admissions to come in, they're passing
out pamphlets, women are in the press box,
and so they're trying to go in lots of
different ways to get people aware of
the amendment, to get people behind the
amendment.
Bossie O'Brien drives her husband's
Hudson 6 around Alabama and gets over
10,000 signatures on a petition to send
to the state legislature, saying women
want the right to vote
and they think they're almost there, they think that
they have the votes, but ultimately they didn't.
Representatives voted against the
amendment, including representative
Greene, who had first proposed it. He
turned on them and he voted against the
statewide amendment, but unlike that
earlier Association this doesn't stop
them. They don't disband, they don't go
stagnant, they keep fighting and they
decide to adjust their sights.
Alright, the state amendment didn't work,
let's get a federal amendment. That's why
in 1916 Pattie Ruffner Jacobs is no longer
the president of the Alabama Equal
Suffrage Association but that's because
she moves up to the board of the
National American Women's Suffrage
Association. So she moves up to that
National Association and she kind of
connects Alabama to them, helping bring
in literature from their writing, from
that stationery, about stuff happening in
Alabama and pushing for that federal
amendment. Bossie O'Brien also doesn't
stop, she stays kind of at the state
level but she continues to fight. One of
my favorite stories is of Bossie having
an impromptu debate with Tom Heflin, a
congressman. It was at a Wetumpka
barbecue and she stands up, gives a speech
about women's suffrage. He stands up
after her and says, "I did not like her
speech" and then he says "if women wanted
the right to vote in Alabama, why don't
they just organize a referendum, register
all the female voters, have them vote in
this referendum, submit the referendum to
the legislature, and there you go.
All you got to do." Bossie O'Brien raises
her hand and says, "will the congressmen
yield to a question, how are Alabama women
supposed to organize this referendum,
register all these female voters, if it's
not allowed to and it's not allowed by
the Constitution and is it even gonna be
seen as a legal document since women
aren't allowed to vote according to the
Constitution?" He does not have a good
response for that so he just makes a
little joke and moves off stage, and so
you continue to see they're not gonna
give up, they're gonna keep fighting, but
now they focus their attention on
that federal amendment, and then in 1920--
1919 excuse me--1919 the US Congress
passes the 19th amendment and sends it
out for ratification, and after nineteen
it's when it comes to the Alabama State
Legislature and they start debating and
Pattie Ruffner Jacobs comes back, serves
as the president for that last year and
she stands on the floor of the Alabama
Legislature and argues on behalf of the
19th amendment--
spoiler alert: Alabama chooses
not to ratify the amendment. I'll give more on
that in a second. So it's taken to
Tennessee, Tennessee becomes the 36th
state to ratify the amendment but
Alabama chooses not to at that time but
they don't let that stop them. They then
focus on becoming the Alabama League of
Women Voters and expanding from there.
So we have these amazing women, right? Who
have in some ways pushed the boundaries
at that time in society about the ideas
of gender equality, but I don't want to
hold these women up as infallible, right?
Because although they push those bounds
for gender equality, all three of these
women did not push boundaries for racial
equality. So while they're making these
arguments that women should be involved
in politics they make it very clear that
they mean white women and specifically
they say things like white women will be
able to offset the votes of African
American men and they encourage the
Alabama legislators that if they pass an
amendment to keep all of those
restrictions in the Constitution because
that will weed out African-American
women and the Alabama Equal Suffrage
Association is a segregated association,
so African-American women are not
allowed to join it. Instead, you start
seeing other women's clubs forming in
places like Tuskegee. So with Margaret
Mary Washington forming women's clubs
and talking about issues like suffrage,
and there you have someone--oh and this
is, I almost forgot--this is some of the
literature put out by the Alabama
Equal Suffrage Association. So you can see them
kind of focusing in on Alabama and
focusing in on why women should be
allowed to vote--and all of these are
made available on our digital
collections, so you can go and find all
of these wonderful resources yourself on
our website--
but I want to talk about a Adella Hunt
Logan
So Adella Hunt Logan was of African,
Cherokee, and European ancestry. We know
more about her now because of the work
of her granddaughter,
Adele Logan Alexander, and her book
Princess of the Hither Isles. Adella Hunt
Logan could quote, "pass," meaning her
lighter complexion allowed her to walk
into segregated suffrage meetings and
she used that occasionally. She was able
to go into these meetings but she did so
at great danger to herself, because if
she started interacting with the wrong
person
it could have hurt her, but she also used
this in order to bring into the
conversation--into that national
conversation, "what about African-American
women?" because, though she could quote
"pass," she was legally, and therefore
socially, considered black. So she could
go into these meetings, she could meet
Susan B Anthony, but her race limited
what she could do in those circles.
So even though Susan B Anthony respected
her, and all these other national
suffragists respect her, even though
Booker T Washington and Margaret Marie
Washington actually recommended her
to those national suffragists, she wasn't
allowed to speak at those meetings and
Anthony said--and I want to make sure I
get the quote right--
Anthony said, "I cannot have speak for us
a woman who has even a ten thousandth
portion of African blood, because it
would so mitigate against our cause."
So she faced a lot of hardships when she
was trying to fight for women's suffrage
but she didn't let that stop her. Instead
she took to writing, she writes for the
National Suffrage Association's journal,
she writes for the NAACP's
journal, The Crisis, and in all of these
articles she makes these eloquent
arguments for why suffragists should
include African-American women in their
circles, but she also makes separate
pleas to black women saying, "you should
get involved and the reason you should
get involved is because you are mothers,
you are wives,
you are citizens, and the government
needs to hear from you."
She writes that these women need the
vote but also the vote needs them, and it
was her dream that her daughter would
one day get to vote in Alabama, but like
I said before,
Alabama's story is complicated, right? So
in 1920 women are given the right to
vote, but in Alabama and in other states
that did not mean every woman got the
right to vote, because those same
restrictions that were put down in the 1901
Constitution affected women, and so
African-American women are not given
that right and it would take another 45
years until the Voting Rights Act of
1965 before Adella's dream could become a
reality
And so as we look at the suffrage
movement of the 19-teens--
we should also connect it to the civil
rights movement of the 1950s and 60s and
the women who fought for voting rights
and racial equality in that period.
So I've already complicated the story at
one level, right? You have women who are
for suffrage but have racial undertones
to their argument that don't sound quite
great to our 2020 ears, we have African-American suffragists who
are fighting for racial inclusion and
suffrage, but we also have another side,
the women against the 19th amendment, so
against ratification. It's sometimes hard
because we think of the argument as
being women fighting men, so women were
fighting men or to get the right to vote,
but there were men who supported women's
suffrage and there were women who fought
it, and they fought it at the state level,
and they fought it at the federal level.
So we have up here two women,
the one here to your left is Maria Bankhead
Owen. So, the second director of the
Alabama Department of Archives and
History, my employer--we're gonna have to
deal with that during this year--the
second, Nena Pinkard, who became the
president of the Alabama Women's Anti
Ratification League that then turned
into The Southern Women's Anti
Ratification League, who was a Montgomery
native, the great-great-granddaughter--
I believe that's enough 'greats'--of the
first mayor of Montgomery, whose father
was a judge, whose husband was a colonel,
and who was the great-grandniece of
John C Calhoun. So she is someone who
prides herself in fitting into, kind of,
southern society, but both of these women
come from very similar backgrounds, and
they see suffrage, and especially
suffrage at the federal level, as a
threat to their way of life. So they have
three main arguments that show up
consistently in their literature. One
being that politics is not for women,
women are soft,
politics is coarsening. They buy into
the idea of the silent influence and
they don't want to lose that, that women
have their place and their place is not
as political gladiators, as they called
them. The second is race, that this opens
up a larger kind of problem of how then
are we going to control who votes, if you
give women the right to vote, it's gonna
bring up all these questions.
The last is this idea of states rights,
which kind of encompasses the other two
arguments, but what essentially it says
is if it really is an issue for Alabama
women then Alabama should make a state
amendment, ignoring the fact that Alabama
chose not to make a state amendment. So this
was in many ways the suffragist's only
option, saying that if it really was a
deal, Alabama would deal with it, but it's
obviously not in their mindset. So they
start producing all these different
materials they send out, right? They were
sending this at the state level, they're
sending it out eventually in a kind of
regional sense, when they become the
Southern Anti Ratification League,
arguments about "America when feminized."
So this is essentially talking about
they think that women's suffrage will
switch the roles, men will become like
women, women will become like men,
civilization will unravel because of
that, just because women are getting the
right to vote. It'll essentially turn
everything topsy-turvy. You can see
some of them also comparing it to socialism
and other kinds of ideas and kind of
connecting idea that suffrage is going
to be the undoing of American society.
We also have them bringing in the idea of
race, so in this one it says quote, "votes
for colored women" it is essentially saying
that women's suffrage is a way to
backdoor African-Americans into the
electorate, so if we allow this then we
won't be able to stop anybody, any of
the, quote, "undesirable people" from
voting, and so there's this fear that
you're letting the federal government
into it you're losing control of your
electorate, but also that it's just going
to be kind of the end times,
and this is actually a very effective
argument in Alabama. Like I said before, I
gave a little spoiler and now I can talk
about it a little bit more. Alabama
chooses to reject the 19th amendment, so
not only do they decide they don't want
it they actively send something to
US Congress saying, "we reject this," and so
in Alabama these anti ratifiers, or anti
suffragists, they win
and it's not until 1953 that Alabama chooses to ratify
the 19th amendment, but like I tell
everybody, don't worry, we were not the last,
but still, it takes a long time, but
people ask me,  "if they
chose to reject it did that mean that
women didn't get to vote?" That's not what
it means. Women still got the right to
vote in 1920. Just because Alabama chose
to reject it doesn't mean that it didn't
become a federal amendment. When
Tennessee decided to ratify it in August
of 1920 it was sent to the US Secretary
of State, he adopted into the
Constitution and it becomes effective in
Alabama, and so even within the next year
or two you start to see women not only
voting but running for office.
Hattie Hooker Wilkins becomes the first
woman in the state legislature in 1922,
and so it does change, but a lot of the
sentiments of that argument, a lot of the
feelings that happen around
this debate continued to be problems in
Alabama, continue to bring up debates in
the 50s and the 60s, and our part of the
complicated story of suffrage in Alabama
So we can't just tell one story. We can't
just focus on it on one claim, it has
multiple perspectives and it's
complicated and messy, but it is the
story of Alabama, the story of who
becomes a citizen, how they fit into this
government, and this year it's just so
wonderful that this Centennial aligns
with an election year, because as we
learn this story and as we kind of learn
more and more about, you know, the
suffrage Centennial--you can go to this
website to learn more about it--then we
can respect the fact that it's not
something that was given easily to
citizens, it was something that was
fought for and so to vote this year is
to respect the struggle and the fight
that these women went through, and it's
to exercise the right that they asked
for. If you have any questions you can, of
course, always go here and you can learn
more and find contact information. Thank
y'all so much.
