 Eyes on Longmont, offering a diversity of topics about our community that will inform and entertain you. We invite you to sit back and enjoy this edition of Eyes on Longmont. Welcome. I'm Kathy Koehler. The Nywat Historical Society is proud to present the Nywat Now and Then lecture series. We're at the Left Hand Grange. Left Hand Grange number nine. It is in Nywat, Colorado, and it is the oldest practicing active grange in the state of Colorado and serves the community. And it was founded in 1873, two years before Nywat was platted. Women in the United States had several severe limitations in the 1800s and early 1900s, and one of the challenges was the right to vote in elections. The lecture, Let the Women Vote, will take us on a journey, a women's suffrage campaign which began in 1848. In Anne Denney's book, Around Nywat, there is a photo, 1888, by Rocky Mountain Joe Sturtivant, and it is a picture of the Left Hand Grange women and children. The caption in Anne's book states that they were encouraging women and children to become officers of the Grange. So, I kind of curious, was that part of the suffrage movement? Was it related to a suffrage movement beginning? Did the women get to acting in the Grange more as officers at that time? The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1920. So, 1848, when the movement started, to 1920. You can do the math, otherwise it's 72 years. That's a long time. Men voters in Colorado passed a referendum granting women the right to vote in 1893. That is 27 years before the 19th Amendment was ratified. We're honored tonight to have Dr. Rebecca A. Hunt here with us. She is retired history professor at the University of Colorado Denver, and she taught gender, immigration, American Western history, as well as museum studies. Rebecca was co-chair of the Centennial Commemoration of Colorado's Women's Suffrage. She is on the steering committee for the Center for Colorado Women's History and on the 19th Amendment Commemoration Committee. Rebecca has had many publications. She served as a historian on a video, and she now, as she's retired, she has three projects in process. The lecture will take you through the suffrage campaign and share what role Colorado women played in the national movement. I'm honored to present Dr. Rebecca Hunt, who will share Let the Women Vote. I am delighted to be here tonight at the left-hand number nine Grange to tell you all about the long and convoluted journey that women took from second-class citizens to full voters in the American system. Tonight I've got about 45-ish minutes of images and sharing with you, so I think we really ought to get started. When we talk about women getting the right to vote, I really like to go back probably a little further than some people might, because what folks don't know is there was actually a time on our North American continent when women had equal rights, but you have to go all the way back before the Europeans to get there. And the first instance of that is when you look at the First Nation people, and you find that virtually all the tribes in the country honored women as equal parts of their society, and women in different First Nations cultures had what we would now consider voting rights really in a lot of ways. They made a lot of decisions, including some life and death decisions. So this is an Oneida story. In the beginning this place was darkness and water until the time when a woman fell from the sky world, and for them that's the beginning of all good things happening. The Diné, who some people know as Navajo, told all their origin stories as first man and first woman, and they were equally powerful and equally endowed with the ability to create things. George Catlin documented the Mandan and Hadatsa women in their village right across actually from where Lewis and Clark camped in 1804, and they talked about the role that women had in creating their societies. Ironically, in most First Nations societies women owned the houses and were able to dictate a lot of things about family life. One of the ones that influenced some suffragists in the United States and even influenced Ben Franklin was the Iroquois who were up in the northeast. These are the Mohawks Anaitas, Cayugas, Anandagas, Seneca's. They lived in these long bark houses that you see in this picture. They had multiple families in there and all the important decisions for these people were made by the women, including when you're going to hunt, when you're going to go to war, who was going to be allowed into the tribe, things like that. If you look at the Pueblons down in the southwest, and that includes those who lived at places like Mesa Verde, the women owned the houses, they owned much in the way of the crops. What men had that was their own was the religious spaces. So you see there's a lot of models there for women as equal. When the Europeans, especially the English, got here, they had a very specific set of laws, too. If a woman was divorced, well, some got divorced. If she was widowed, if she was unmarried, a single woman, she would be femme sole, which meant that she had some rights to govern her own life. But when a woman married, she became a legal subset of her husband and she lost pretty much all the rights to her property, any wages if she worked, the children were the man's, and the man had the right to discipline his wife in any way he needed to, as long as whatever hit her with was no bigger than his thumb. So that's where you get that concept of the rule of thumb. There were some interesting early interactions between First Nations and English. This is a photograph of a painting that's now in the National Portrait Gallery, which lists this woman named Rebecca. Her name that we know her by really was Pocahontas, and she was a young woman of the tribe that the English at Jamestown encountered. She chose to leave her people to become a diplomat for her people among the English, to marry an Englishman, to have an English child, because having a child with a different set of people cemented the two peoples in their world. And eventually even went to England and met the king and queen in England and unfortunately died there of smallpox. But you see her here all decked out in proper Elizabethan clothing, looking every inch a model Elizabethan noble woman. If we move down the road a little bit to the time of the American Revolution, we have founding fathers who chafed at the bonds of English power and tyranny, much the same way some English women chafed at the bonds of what society set for them. In 1776 of course we know Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and on it it says all men are created equal. Although women became citizens, it was really men that they believed were created equal. And it really was white landed men who owned property who were the most equal of all. So as you see when we start creating our new nation, we're going to create a nation where especially voters, you had to be male, you had to be white, and you had to have land initially to vote. That left out a lot of folks. It left out people of color, even free African Americans. It left out women of course, left out First Nations people. And also by the way left out most of the working class. By the 1820s and 1830s you were starting to have more of class divisions for women. Upper class, middle class women who were on prosperous farms were one group and working class or immigrant women were another. The idea that came out of our early nation was this idea that we call it the cult of domesticity, cult of true womanhood. That women were frail. If you've heard the idea of putting a woman up on a pedestal to protect her, you kind of see it from there. They were moral authority. They raised the children. But their space was in the home. It was very much separate. So you talk about separate spheres. Children were nurtured by moms, but they were always meant to go out into the work world if they were male and then to go into the home if they were not. There were women who showed a slightly different model, but within boundaries. Catherine Beecher, who came from a household which was quite a reforming household. Her father, Lyman Beecher, founded a liberal religious college in Cincinnati. Her brother was a Presbyterian and then later a Unitarian minister. Her sister wrote a little book called Uncle Tom's Cabin. All were very interesting members of this family. But Catherine redefined what it meant to be a housewife, a woman at home. She sort of professionalized caring for a household. And if you look at it from the sort of point of view of 1960s or 1970s feminists, it's very retrograde. But if you look at it from the time of the 1840s, it's quite modern because she's making what women were doing have more clout on their own level. The problem, of course, was this separate spheres was an ideal for women whose husbands made enough money that they could stay home. It was an ideal really for white, well-to-do wives of landed men. As time went on, though, women started to have a few more choices. Some chose to stay single, especially say women who, after the 1840s, might want to be teachers. Some married long later. Some had longer engagements. Some married for love rather than having their family choose for them. Farm wives really liked having lots of children because those are hands on the farm. They helped do the work. City women were a little more edgy, especially if you didn't have a steady income because children then became mouths to feed. So you start having some tension on the number of children you would have. And over time they found ways to go from, say, an average of seven children in 1800 all the way down to an average of four children in 1900. And by the way, that four children average would continue for a significant chunk of the 20th century as well. You know, I say that average of seven, I know, and I look back at my family, I find that many of them had in the range of 15, 17 kids. So there was that larger end of things. Another thing that was going on, though, was after the 1820s and 30s when we had a textile industry, farm daughters who would have stayed at home and worked and then married the boy from down the road could work for a time as young single women in the textile factories. So you see farm daughters who become factory workers and they lived in dormitories, their bosses were all men telling them what to do. Instead of hand spinning and hand weaving fabric, they produced it on big looms and instead of being skilled workers, you had one young woman running maybe one, maybe two, maybe three of these powered looms, water powered looms. And so they became really unskilled laborers very much at the whim of the owners and the managers. So the owners and managers had ways of getting more work out of these young women. They might speed up the machines. They might do what they called the stretch out where they gave them more machines to work on. They might drop the wages but not drop what they paid for the room and board in the dormitories they were required to live in. And so some of these women would walk off the job, do what they called turnouts. And they would either just quit working, walk out of the factory. They'd go down the road to another factory that paid better. They could do all of those things. And things sort of would even out in the end. On the other hand, if a young woman met a man around the work site or in the neighboring town or if she had a young man back at home, she could marry and then she'd go back home and take on the role that her mother had and her great grandmother had of being in the home raising the children. One thing these young women did get that was new was they earned their own wages. They paid money to their parents to help them on the farm. They saved a little to buy fabric and things they'd need for when they got married. And that tended to be their own money, which again was a deviation from the norm. By the 1840s, women began, a number of women began to teach school because you started having public schools for the first time. And we'll talk about that in a second. But then they were replaced in the factories by Irish immigrants, by French Canadian immigrants and others who came in. They wouldn't have as much luxury to just go back home to the farm when they left. So you find more of a steady supply of labor that doesn't have anywhere to go when you have immigrant labor. So women in their moral point in society started purifying things. So they purified the community with church circles. Church was an entirely acceptable way for a woman to be involved in the community because she was providing moral guidance for the children. After the 1790s when most men taught and the 1840s when we started having public schools, single women went into the classrooms and started teaching. Now again, if you married, you were expected to give up your job and go back home. But teaching was actually a pretty decent way. Although if you look at this photograph that I have on the screen, this is one teacher with everything from maybe an older girl who's helping her out down to I would say six-year-olds with everything in between. And especially if you were a teacher in a one-room school, you could have 30 or 40 children of all ages. So there were some challenges. But the other thing I want you to notice is that this is set up like a Quaker meeting house or like a Puritan meeting house or a Protestant meeting house. You've got the teacher's desk up front looking a little bit like a pulpit. You've got the desks in straight rows, like the pews would be two children to each desk. And they were taught in a method much like you would say Lerda Hamm in church for instance. A lot of repetition, a lot of repetition. And so part of the idea, I used the word term factory model on that slide, part of the idea was that we were training children to grow up, to be adults who would function in an orderly manner, in an orderly society, and everyone would fit in. They also became, after the 1830s, involved in various ways of purifying society. So many young women started getting involved in the temperance movement, not abolition of liquor, but being temperate, redeeming drunks, moderating the amount that people might go to a pub or a saloon and certainly trying to deal with all of the ills that could come around the idea of drink. Some of those women then slowly moved over to another movement which was abolition of slavery. And so you have especially a number of the early suffragists, suffragists being the American term for women working for the vote. You had many of them moving out of the temperance movement and into abolitionism. In the 1830s, two of the most famous female abolitionists were Sarah Grimke, her sister on the one side, and her sister Angelina Grimke. They were young ladies who had grown up on a plantation in the South. So they had grown up with slavery, deciding for themselves that they found it to be an evil institution. Sarah first escaped. She became a Quaker and went to Philadelphia. Angelina followed later on and eventually married a fellow abolitionist. They went on the road at a time when women did not speak in public. And they had rotten tomatoes thrown at them and they had people yelling at them. And they were abused in the newspapers, but they kept going. They kept fighting for the women's right to be involved in what they saw as purifying society. One of the abolitionists were Quaker. Lucretia Mott is another person who comes to mind. And here on the bottom we have a picture of Lucretia. She was a Hicksite Quaker. They were the reform Quakers who broke off from the main movement of Quakers when they decided they could not own other people. So you've got Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, daughter of a judge, educated in her father's library, very bright, married Edward Stanton, who was an abolitionist, who took her away for their honeymoon to London for a world abolition conference in London. She met Lucretia Mott there. They became friends. And they could always speak out in the United States within their small circles. They got to London and the meeting was in a big opera hall. And they were placed in a box way up high on the wall behind curtains. And they were directed to stay silent. Well, they did for that, but it sent them home to Seneca Falls, New York, determined to change the status of women. So they put together a convention. They called it a convention or a conference. We'll get there in a minute. A couple of other things. In 1838, in what was then the Wild West of Kentucky, the Kentucky government granted women the right to vote in school elections. Okay, you're within the realm of female responsibility, so it's not too controversial. And they could vote on tax issues having to do with schools and that kind of a thing. Kentucky was really the first in that sense to grant some kind of equal suffrage. But the rest of the country, especially Seneca Falls, which is western New York, along the Erie Canal, was catching up with them a bit. So Elizabeth Stanton and Lucretia Mott put together the Seneca Falls meeting in May of 1848. They took the Declaration of Independence. They rewrote it in their Declaration of Sentiments that said, all men and women are created equal. There was about 40 men, most of whom were Quaker, the rest were women. There was an interesting addition to the group. There was an African American gentleman that many of you out there will have heard of named Frederick Douglass, who was an abolitionist. He started out as a slave and as he said, I am a thief. I stole these arms, I stole these legs, I stole this body from my master. But he was a very famous abolitionist at that point. And he attended this Seneca Falls meeting. And the really interesting thing is some of the best information we have about what happened in the meeting comes from him because he took copious notes and his notes are now digitized in there online. So you can see them. You can read his words and find out what happened. They asked for the things that were uncontroversial first. Women would like the right to their property. They would like the right to their children. They would like the right to wages if they were earning wages. They would like the right to not be beaten by their husbands, things like that. It would take until the 1850s before the New York State Assembly would start passing some of these laws, but they did and it moved out to some other states. The last thing they asked for though is something that Stanton had insisted upon and it was the right of women to vote. Now this was absolutely almost deal-breaking controversial at this point because voting had become quintessentially male. It was out in the world. It was dealing with all kinds of people. It was making big decisions. How could women possibly know how to even deal with these decisions? And they did eventually pass the Declaration of Sentiments and the articles that they had, but it was kind of tough there for a while. And actually Frederick Douglass stood up and he said, the cause of women's rights is actually the cause of human rights. How can you not vote yes for this? And he brought the 40 Quaker men along and it worked out. And it was in the papers afterwards and they got a lot of pushback. They had angry editorials and newspapers and all kinds. I mean you can just imagine if they had our kind of social media back then what it probably would have sounded like. But for the time it was quite controversial. And then everyone kind of went back to their lives and their work. But Stanton especially was convinced that she was going to change things. Well, Stanton had a cousin named Elizabeth Miller who invented a kind of reform clothing and you see a picture of it here. It was a very short dress. It was the bloomers showing. It was uncorseted. And Elizabeth Stanton brought it over to Seneca Falls and introduced an editor of the local paper, Amelia Bloomer, to the outfit. And she popularized it. Stanton wore it for a while but she realized it was detracting from her message. So she quit wearing it. But because Bloomer did such a good thing about reporting on it in her newspaper it became known as the Bloomer dress or the Bloomer costume. And there was rejoicing and there was derision at the same time, frankly. We do know that Julia Holmes came out here with her husband's military unit and passed through Colorado and actually hiked up Pike's Peak in a Bloomer dress. But one of the things that Amelia Bloomer did, which was probably one of the more earth-shaking things was she introduced Elizabeth to Susan B. Anthony. Susan Anthony was a young Quaker woman from Rochester, New York. Her father had been a teacher. She'd done a little bit of teaching. She'd cut her teeth in the temperance movement and then moved over to abolition. And then once she met Stanton she became an ardent suffragist after that. So you've got Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony becoming one set of the leaders of the movement. And they would travel all over talking about it. Anthony especially went out and talked in public, partly because she chose to remain single. She chose to not be tied down and in fact in a letter to Stanton she says, I will not be a rich man's doll nor a poor man's drudge. I have to be free to go my own way. And so between 1851 when they met and the early 1900s when she died she became leader. She became Aunt Susan. She became, well in fact when they finally came up with the amendment to the Constitution they called it the Susan B. Anthony amendment. She was the spiritual and physical leader of the movement for a very, very long time. Stanton had a little harder time because she had a number of children and guess what? You're married, you have children, you stay home. But she could write the speeches and Anthony could go out and give them to the public. And they'd get together periodically and it was a great partnership. It really was for years and years and years. Early efforts. 1869 Civil War was over. By the way the suffragists kind of stepped back from their work during the Civil War and also did war work because that was really important. But once the war was over they moved very quickly back into suffrage work. By 1869 we had the 13th amendment ending slavery. We had the 14th amendment defining citizenship and the 15th amendment defining voting rights. And Anthony and Stanton were especially angered by the fact that black men got the vote but white women did not. So they never quite got over that. Stanton and Anthony in 1869 created an organization called the American Woman Suffrage Association. At the same time another group of suffragists based out of Boston who were a little appalled sometimes at what they thought were some of the more radical things that Anthony and Stanton were doing created their own association. They created the National Woman Suffrage Association. Those two would be separate and parallel organizations until they merged in 1890. Got to say a couple things though about the women in the national. Lucy Stone was married to Henry Blackwell. She was one of the first women in the United States to publicly decline to take her husband's name. And her husband agreed with that. The Blackwells had come from England. They were a very radical abolitionist family. One of Henry's sisters became the first woman to graduate from a U.S. medical college and become a physician who had been trained in a medical college. A second sister would follow suit. One of the brothers married a woman who was the first ordained Unitarian woman minister in the United States. So you had this amazing family and Lucy married into it. And boy, she fit right in. Julia Ward Howe was, of course, battle him of the Republic. And Josephine Ruffin was another one of the many women who were very active. The other thing that was going to happen, by the way, is that Elizabeth Stanton's daughter would go on to be a second generation suffragist. Lucy and Henry's daughter would go on to be a second generation suffragist. So this was not just in families, it was in generations, which is kind of exciting. So between when they merged in 1890 and, well, when they formed and when they merged, Anthony and Stanton went to Kansas and worked very hard for a suffrage amendment for Kansas. And Kansas seemed likely. It was in the West. It had a lot of fairly forward-thinking people. Most people had come and established Lawrence before the Civil War in the 1850s. But they just could not get what was ironically the Liberal Party at the time, the Republican Party, to go for it in Kansas. So it failed in Kansas. Kansas did about a generation later grant women the right to vote in school elections. So we've got an amount of pushing, some nationally, some on the state level. But it's not going anywhere. So 1869, again, you see what a pivotal year. 1848 is an amazing year worldwide for things happening. 1869 was another one of those. In December of 1869, the Democratic Territorial Assembly of Wyoming, then as thinly populated as it is now, by the way, decided to do a bill which became a law granting their women full voting rights. This was interesting. There's been a lot of historians who've talked about this. Why did this happen? Why then? Why there? We do know from some documentation that the all Democratic Elected Territorial Assembly did not like having an appointed Republican governor. And in what they thought one way or another might embarrass him. They sent their bill to him and said, okay, we voted on it now. You signed it into law. They figured he wouldn't risk it because nationally the Republican Party would say no to women's votes. But he signed it. And all of a sudden the women of Wyoming Territory had full voting rights. And that included some limited amount of office. You could do some very small local offices. So that was quite exciting. And this is an illustration from Harper's Weekly supposedly showing the first time women voted in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The problem is in 1869 or even in 1870 in Cheyenne didn't look like that. Only a year or so before the transcontinental railroad had come through. And it was a little more than a shanty town but it didn't look that good. But what did they know? So one month later, one month after the authorities of Wyoming granted women the right to vote, Utah Territory. I'm going to give you a second to wrap your hand about the idea of, okay, this is the Mormon Territory. It's a theocracy. They have polygamy. Men dominate everything. What is going on? They granted their women the right to vote. Again, historians have looked at this and what they finally figured out was, well, the church told the men how to vote. But there were a lot of non-mormons coming into the territory and the church didn't want these non-mormons to gain enough power that they would push back on the church. Well, if the women can vote then their husbands will tell them how to vote and the church will stay in power. So that's what they did. Wyoming kept their women's suffrage and it took them a lot longer than it would have otherwise to become a state. It was 1890 when they became a state because they were very dedicated to it. The women in Utah lost their voting rights because the federal government took it away as they were doing all of their taking control from the church and trying to end polygamy. So they lost it, but it was still there on the books. And when Utah finally became a state in 1896, they managed to bring votes from women and with them. So it worked out in the end. It's just they had a period of being able to vote, then a period of not, and then it came back. So in the meantime, we've got this little territory kind of stuck between Utah and Wyoming called Colorado. You guys were wondering when I was going to get to Colorado, but we're here now. Just to give you a little bit of an idea, 1861 they broke Colorado off from Kansas when Kansas became a state. And they could do a territorial government, elect an assembly, elect various kinds of local offices. And then the governor and lieutenant governor and the head of the courts, those folks would be appointed generally by the president approved by Congress. They considered putting women's suffrage in them because there were officials at that time. And I think John Evans, believe it or not, was one of those who was pretty enlightened about such things. They tried and then they said, no, but if we have it, we're trying to become a state at some point. Let's not rock the boat. So they held off for a while and they had other things going on. Denver especially, Boulder to an extent, Denver especially, had a very, for the time's large population of African Americans. Some of whom were very affluent and were very vocal. Two of Frederick Douglass' sons after the Civil War came to Colorado and lived in Denver. You had a push on their part to maintain the equal rights and the voting rights that they'd gotten with the 14th and 15th Amendments. And to push back on a lot of the Jim Crow things that were happening in other parts of the country. They were fairly successful, but the fact that there were folks who wanted to dis-franchise black men and wanted to limit their rights, every time we would go to the Congress to see about becoming a state, especially during Reconstruction, they would say, no, you're still pushing back on African Americans. So no, you're going to have to wait, you're going to have to get right, and you have to do all that. So it didn't work, and it didn't work. And then finally in 1875, Congress said, okay, if you will write a Constitution, and it'll be a fair and equal kind of Constitution, you can come in. So they, and I'm going to move on beyond this for a minute, started meeting in December of 75, finished up in March of 76. They had delegates from all over the state, including three Espanol delegates, one from the San Luis Valley, one from Trinidad, one from kind of the general southeastern section of Colorado. And two of them had translators because they were not native English speakers. So we were reaching out to a large swath of our constituency. When they printed the final document, and this is just something I find interesting, when people argue that everything always has to be in one language, they printed it in Spanish, German, and English to represent the three main languages of the state. As they're doing this constitutional convention, Judge Henry Barmwell from Denver teamed up with, among others, Agapita Vihil from southeastern Colorado. And they worked on a, an addition of the Constitution that would grant women full voting rights. They presented it to the main body, they said, no, we're not going to do that. That's the sort of thing that could keep us from getting statehood, and we don't want to mess with it, and we're not really sure it's fair anyway. Well then Vihil and Barmwell worked with them a little bit more. And what they did come up with was a provision to go on the Constitution where women could vote in school elections. So they were now the second state, or would be the second state where women could vote in school elections. And they could hold school office like superintendent of schools and things like that on a local level. So they also said that, and in 1877 will allow a state referendum, and the men can vote on whether women should vote for everything else. So August 1st, 1876, Constitution approved, went into effect, school elections, and the referendum. 1877, the women put together the Colorado Equal Suffrage Association. They lobbied everybody and it went down an ignominious defeat. Okay, we have a small bit of progress, but lost the big one this time. And women did vote in school elections and they did hold local school offices, and they voted on taxes related to schools as well. So you get to 1893, Monbenham is building again. New crop of women who are activists, they're excited, they're engaged. Women had been making a lot of stripes and professions. They were students at Boulder, they were students at Denver University. You had lawyers, you had doctors, you had newspaper people, all of whom were women. So you've got a lot of these voices that are now able to argue that women need a more fair share of rights, and they need voting rights. The other thing that was going on was we had actually three political parties in 1893. We had the Democratic Party, we had the Republican Party, and we had the People's Party, the populists. And we had just elected a populist governor, Davis Wait, who was a newspaperman from Aspen. Okay, things might be looking up here. Maybe it's the right time, who knows? So I like this picture because it's what the cover of the Constitution of the Nonpartisan Colorado Equal Suffrage Association. That was a little booklet. And it's nonpartisan because now you've got three political parties. The populists generally supported women's suffrage. The Democrats were more likely to support it. The Republicans are just kind of, they're not so sure. Okay, so let's see who were some of these movers and shakers. Ella Nichols' Churchill, originally from Canada. Newspaper publisher. She's probably the most wild-eyed radical of the bunch on a lot of levels. She started a newspaper where she got to Colorado and called it the Edelem. And then she moved it to Denver and she said, you know, I need to have a newspaper that hits a little harder. So I'm going to call it the Queen Bee because I'm in the Queen City of the Plains now. And it needs to go around, it needs to sting people where they need to be stung. And so she became one of the leading radical voices for women's suffrage and women's equality. Another leader, sometimes called the Susan B. Anthony of Colorado, was Ellis Meredith. Her father was one of the publishers of the Rocky Mountain News. She would be in journalism for a long time. She was still writing in the 1890s and then she moved back east and became a figure in the National Final Push. Recruited a lot of leaders. She actually wrote Susan B. Anthony and said, can you come to Colorado and campaign? Now this is 1893 so Anthony's getting a little long in the tooth. And she said, no but we'll send the head of now the National American Women's Suffrage Association. And her name is Carrie Chapman-Cat. We'll send her out. She can come. Carrie Chapman-Cat said a letter back. Said, I have a voice like a foghorn and can be heard in outdoor meetings. I'll be there. So we at least got her. Another person was Minnie M.J. Reynolds. M.J., she went by Minnie, had applied for the job of the Rocky Mountain News from back east, done a remote interview, and used the initials. She did not use her name. She was M.J. Reynolds. And they hired her. So I didn't see him. She showed up for work on the first day of work and she sat out in the lobby at the Rocky Mountain News and she waited and she waited. And finally someone came over and said, what can we do for you young woman? And she said, I'm M.J. Reynolds. I'm here for the job. And they went, you're a woman. Oh no. So they put her on the society column. And her job was to go around and talk to the Margaret Browns and the Agnes Hills and Alice Hills and all those society women, Baby Doe Tabor, and to get news of their latest party. What were all the ladies wearing, you know, all of those good things. And she always rode around on a bicycle, by the way. But she also was able to recruit them towards suffrage. So for instance, she got Baby Doe to talk Horace into giving an office in the Tabor Opera House for an office for the suffrage campaign. And she had a lot of communications with the newspapers around the state. And by the time the suffrage vote came along in November of 1893, she had about 75% of the newspapers in the state saying, yeah, we think it's a good idea. There are a few other leaders. Of course, Susan B. Anthony was sort of distanced, but she was skeptical but hopeful. And then you've got Elizabeth Inslee. Back east, the suffrage campaign, the suffrage movement, was divided. You had the white suffragists. You had African-American suffragists. And the twain very rarely met. It was not an easy sisterhood. And out here though, we had Elizabeth Inslee. She's African-American. She was trained as a teacher. Her family had been for several generations in Fall River, Massachusetts. Her family having been moved up from the south by a slave owner who was bringing his black mistress and their children out of slavery to Massachusetts to live. And they spent a lot of time involved in the abolition movement as African-Americans. So Elizabeth was quite willing to go to the Suffrage Association and say, hey, put me to work. And in fact, they made her the treasurer of the Suffrage Association. And she managed to raise enough money for them to be able to do flyers and do the things they needed to do in the meantime. Well, there were some other things that worked in their favor in 1893. The government had decided to quit having silver coinage. And when that happened, you have the almost a complete shutdown of silver mining, smelting. You've got all these miners out of work, all these smelter workers out of work. I mean, it was a tough job. And it sort of started in places like Colorado and then it spread nationwide. It was a very, very bad, they call it panic in those days. We would now call it a depression. So you've got all these out-of-work men. And some of them wandered off and joined Cox's Army, which was an army of out-of-work men who marched on Washington. But others were temporarily living in a relief camp down by the river in Denver. That's kind of roughly where Coors Field is now, more or less. And the women figured out very quickly that if you show up with bread and soup and a cup of coffee and a pro-Suffrage leaflet, you might just be able to get some folks on your side. And of course, all the churches and there were a lot of churches around that were doing that. And they may have turned a few hearts towards Suffrage. It's kind of hard to tell. But anyway, so that was one of their techniques. Another one was to get involved with enlisting the Grange. And I don't know if you all can read what's at the bottom of this. It says, at the Grange, December 4th, 1888, this happens to be the left-hand Grange that these people are meeting at. And so because of what Kathy was saying earlier about what the Grange thought about men and women sharing running an organization, they were a natural partner. Plus, farm men tended to have a much better idea of what women were really worth than a lot of other men might, because their farms wouldn't function if they didn't have the women around. So that was part of it. And the two I mentioned, Millie Booth and Grace Booth working, actually were at a place called Formile. Formile's east of Denver. And they were some of the many people who were original founders of Grange. And Millie also, by the way, had bees. And so she founded the State Beekeepers Association. Another group they enlisted. And again, this was a group that was very active in this area, too. Here, there's still temperance people operating out of Longmont. They were abolitionists. They were activists. And just to give you an idea, this is at a home they set up for abused wives and children. And so they took it one step further. They weren't just trying to close down saloons, but they were trying to actually help people. And if you look on the right, there's an older woman in a black dress with a black hat with what looks like a bird wing sticking out of the top of it. Well, that's because it's a bird wing sticking out of the top of it. That's the style of hats in 1893. She's a temperance, very famous temperance worker out of Kansas named Carrie Nation. Carrie Nation had gotten her reputation by going into saloons with a hatchet and chopping up the bottles and the mirrors and any nude painting she happened to find on the walls. And so if you join the WCTU in Kansas, you've got a little gold hatchet to wear on your lapel. Oh, I wish I could find one. So she was visiting with all the temperance people in Denver at the time. I know I've got a lot of pictures of Denver. She also went up to Longmont and visited with them. So you had business women involved, you had farm women involved. I love this picture because these women are working on a quilt and I adore quilts. You also had a labor union called the Knights of Labor and they sent people in to help as well, although they weren't quite as prominent as they'd been about a decade earlier, half a decade earlier. And they were later on going to also help with some of the getting women registered to vote. So they put out campaign literature. This was something that was designed. It's actually a negative plate that you could print and you get a positive picture to go on the newspapers. You've got the men listening to Colorado. And you notice they're all very well-to-do looking, nicely dressed, the men in top hats. So they're definitely aiming at a certain segment of society in this, which was important because there was a surprising number of well-to-do women who were anti-suffragists, who were against the concept. And there was a surprising number of well-to-do men, especially those in the liquor industry, who were rabidly anti-suffragists. So at the same time the women are passing out their pro leaflets, you've got the anti's doing theirs. And this one says, young man, if you do not want a doctor, lawyer, or politician for a wife but want someone who is a good wife and mother, vote and convince all your friends to vote against equal suffrage. And then it goes on to talk about the only women who'd really want to vote anyway are ugly old Spensters like Susan B. Anthony. So she's still getting beat up on at that point. So election day was November 7th, oh no, November 6th, 1893. Okay, but hold that. And then the first election that women could vote was November 7th, 1894. The point is in 1893, suffrage for women passed. Now it passed by about 6,000 votes. And the bulk of those votes were in two places. They were in Denver and they were in Boulder County. So apparently that Grange farmer, maybe the university, something worked. They didn't get nearly as many votes from those young out-of-work minors as they thought they were going to get. They got enough. And a surprising number in places like down in the San Luis Valley. So I found this picture. This is a young woman going in, I'm sure, for her very first time voting ever. Probably just turned 21 so she's of an age when she could vote. And doesn't she look proud? She's finally getting to do something that up to that point only her brothers could do. And so very shortly thereafter you have Grace S.B. Patton-Coles, who was a journalist and educator being elected a state superintendent of public instruction. We had three women elected to the state assembly in 1894. One from Pueblo, one from Denver, and I think one from maybe Loveland. So kind of got that front range going there. Women got involved in all kinds of progressive reform. They helped Ben Lindsay set up the first ever juvenile court in the United States. Before that children would be in adult courts, held in adult jails with adult people. So that was a big deal. He also though, and when I'm doing this program with fourth graders or seventh graders, they laugh because they say, and he invented juvie, you know, juvenile court. And depending on which neighborhood I'm in they'll say, or they'll say, meh, you know. Eventually it also included laws that said women could not work in factories at night because they should be home with their children. It passed laws that said children shouldn't be working in factories and mines. Well, yeah, they should be in school. It said no women after 1901 were allowed in bars. That really is funny for my college students. They don't get not being able to go to a bar. And there were various women who were involved. Josephine Roche, when her father died, became the owner of the Columbine mine at Erie. And so she was a female mine owner. And actually at one point later on during the Depression of the 20s, she took all of her personal savings and continued paying as many of her minors as she could rather than have to lay people off. And eventually ended up in FDR's government. George Creel was sort of the vice czar for the progressive mayor of Denver. Went on later to be the World War I propaganda czar for the U.S. government doing all those posters you might have seen where there's these scary Germans out there. Elected a progressive Henry Arnold as a sister, John Shaffroth, who was mayor of Denver at one point also as governor as a reform candidate. So you have all of these things happening because women have taken that long-vaunted moral authority and they planted it out in society. So this is related to what I was mentioning before. These are the first three women in the Colorado State Assembly. By the way, we did this year a suffrage section on Colorado Encyclopedia which lists biographical information on a bunch of women including these three. For those of you who don't know, Colorado Encyclopedia is a digital encyclopedia put together by Colorado Humanities that tells all sorts of short approachable stories about anything you can imagine in Colorado history. And someone in this room or someone out in the audience ought to go to ColoradoEncyclopedia.org, check and see if NYWATS in there, and if they're not, someone in the community ought to write the article, you know, because this is something that has to happen. Carolyn Nichols Churchill wrote a banner on her newspaper the day after the 1893 election and the banner said, Western Women Wild with Joy. Well, we were trying to find a Western Women Wild with Joy sort of image and this was as close as we could come, but we thought it was pretty good. We actually found a couple of different pictures of women and trees as we were going through various archives. So in 1893, a bunch of us got into our period clothing, our 1890s clothing and we got up in a tree over by the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and we had a photographer take a picture of us up in the tree. We were younger and spryer then. So then a number of the women, many Reynolds, Ellis Meredith, Tunick St. Elizabeth Inslee, began working for the next step which was a national amendment. And the national amendment passed and then had to go through all of the different states for it to become law, to become an accepted. It passed the U.S. House of Representatives by one vote. It passed the U.S. Senate by one vote. The last state they needed that they were working on getting it passed as the states that was Tennessee, they had the vote coming up it looked like it was going to fail. A young man from the mountains of Tennessee got a letter from his mother saying if you have an opportunity, my son, put the rat ratification and vote for this amendment and he did, it passed by one vote. So if anyone ever tells you that one vote doesn't matter, you can tell them my stories here and tell them no, get out there, vote. So August 26th, 1920, the 19th amendment became law and there was a fair amount of rejoicing in a lot of parts of the country. Over the years from Wyoming, Utah, eventually Idaho, Colorado, California came in, Oregon came in, Washington came in. Most of the western states before the 20th amendment had already come up with votes for women. A few states in the Midwest, some in the east. New York didn't get it until 1917, but it was still before. Boy, you've heard the term solid south. They did not go for votes for women in the south because that would have meant after they were already disenfranchising black men then they'd have to turn around and disenfranchise black women. So you think everything's great? Well, but wait. In Colorado, white and black women could vote. In most states, barring state interference, black women could vote. In the south it would take the Voting Rights Act of 1965. First Nations women had to wait until there was first law in the 1920s and the 1930s before they could vote. And many Asian American women had to wait until the 1950s. So it wasn't evenly across the board. There were still battles to be fought. And as we know, if anyone has watched any news recently, there's still a number of efforts to disenfranchise folks in different parts of the country. But I hope tonight, the story I've told you about women getting the right to vote, will give you some sense of hope and know that our democracy matters, voting matters, vote. Thank you. I was wondering when you were showing the pictures early on about women going to work in factories in the early 19th century about labor unions, and then you showed the Knights of Labor much later on. But like in the 1830s in that part of the century, did women have their own labor unions, or were there even labor unions? Did men have labor unions and were women part of them? Labor unions grew slowly as industrialization happened in the nation. And there was a couple of unions that started early. Shoemakers were early. They tended not to call them unions so much. Often they started out calling them guilds. But any activity that was unionizing that had women in it, then the women were included. Later on you're going to get women in textile mills in New England organizing. That will be one of many things that actually drew the textile mills out of New England and to the south where there was no unionizing. But you had really after the Civil War you start seeing a bigger push in unionizing. And if it was a skilled union like the AF of L, it was very male and it was very white. If it was what we call an OBU or one big union like the Knights of Labor later on like the industrial workers of the world, they would organize, they organized housewives, they organized housemaids. We actually had a union in a small group in Colorado that was unionizing housemaids. But women were not included in the main unions for a long time. Rebecca, thank you for coming to NIWOT. The Historical Society is extremely appreciative. And I certainly learned a lot. The video link will be on our website, NIWOTHistoricalSociety.org as soon as it is ready. And we will send a membership notice out and people can click there. It is on YouTube. We have a NIWOT Historical site on YouTube. So if you want to check that, you can see any other videos that we have done there too. Thank you very much for coming.