Beginning the work

Wisconsin women who paved the way in the suffrage fight

by

Isthmus Cover Stories

“Don’t exclude us — don’t exclude woman — don’t exclude the whole half of the human family,” Mathilde Anneke told a crowd gathered in New York City for the American Equal Rights Association meeting in 1869. “Receive us — begin the work in which a new era shall dawn.”

By the time Anneke traveled to the meeting to represent Wisconsin, she had already spent much of her life speaking and writing on behalf of women’s equality. Long an influential author and activist in her native Prussia, Anneke fled to the United States and eventually to Milwaukee in 1850. Two years later, she launched the first feminist newspaper in the country, Deutsche Frauen-Zeitiung (German Women’s Newspaper). According to the Wisconsin Historical Society, the journal may have also been the first to employ women as typesetters, which brought immediate pushback from German printers who formed a typographical union and sought to stop the paper. Anneke ended the journal after just a handful of issues, but continued to advocate for women’s rights. In 1865, she started an academy for girls in Milwaukee, and a few years later in 1869, helped bring Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Wisconsin to speak at the state’s first suffrage convention at Milwaukee’s city hall.

Anthony and Stanton included her passionate New York speech in their six-volume book, History of Women’s Suffrage. “Whether it be prudent to enfranchise women is not the question,” Anneke said in the speech. “Only whether it be right.”

Two other Milwaukee women were involved in organizing that inaugural Milwaukee suffrage convention — Dr. Laura Ross Wolcott, the first woman physician in Wisconsin, and law student Lila Peckham. By then, Wolcott had already gained a small victory for the state’s women, as Genevieve McBride notes in her book, On Wisconsin Women: Working for Their Rights from Settlement to Suffrage.

“In 1867, Ross [Wolcott] and other suffragists were encouraged when she received the first state-level political appointment for a woman in Wisconsin, as commissioner to the World’s Exposition in Paris, from Governor Lucius Fairchild — also a suffragist, though not yet openly,” writes McBride.

Holding Wisconsin’s first suffrage convention in Milwaukee was a natural fit, according to McBride, who calls the city “a comparative mecca for women in the professions” at that time. Out of the 1869 convention, organized by a teacher and newspaper publisher, a doctor, and a law student, the Wisconsin Woman’s Suffrage Association (WWSA) was born. Wolcott became its first president.

As the WWSA was getting off the ground in Milwaukee, another pioneering professional was at work in Wisconsin. Emma Brown was the first woman in the state to successfully publish a newspaper. She edited and printed the temperance weekly The Wisconsin Chief in Fort Atkinson for more than 20 years. The Chief became the longest-running temperance paper in the country and also supported women’s suffrage.

“In the typical transient journalism of the 19th century, her press colleagues came to treat Emma Brown and her Chief almost as a shrine, a miracle,” writes McBride.

Brown is credited with helping another publisher get his fledgling paper off the ground in Fort Atkinson by printing early issues of the Jefferson County Union in 1883. Now the Daily Union, it is one of the few independently owned newspapers in the state.

Fourteen years after The Chief began rolling off the presses in Fort Atkinson, a new, progressive pastor started preaching at Good Shepherd Church in Racine. The Rev. Olympia Brown, the first woman ordained as a minister in the United States, moved to Racine with her husband in 1878. Four years later, she joined the Wisconsin Suffrage Association, eventually becoming its president.

In 1885, Brown and other Wisconsin suffragists appeared to score an early victory when the Legislature granted women the right to vote in elections “pertaining to school matters.” Brown attempted to vote in Racine’s 1887 municipal election, arguing that elected positions like mayor, alderman and supervisor do pertain to school matters. Her ballot was rejected. Brown sued the city but eventually lost the case after a ruling by the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

“The long litigation cost the little band of suffragists $2,000, which they paid by unremitting devotion and self-sacrifice,” recalled Wisconsin journalist and suffrage leader Theodora Youmans in her 1921 article, “How Wisconsin Women Won the Ballot.”

Brown continued traveling the state and country in her long fight for suffrage. She became an original member of the national, more radical National Women’s Party in 1913, just a year after Wisconsin’s suffrage referendum was soundly defeated. In 1920, Brown cast her first vote for U.S. President at the age of 87.

The lead-up to that 1912 referendum gave rise to another suffrage group in Wisconsin, the Political Equality League (PEL). Ada James of Richland Center, whose state senator father had helped introduce the referendum, became PEL’s first president. Joining her as “press correspondent” for PEL was Youmans, who had been an editor at The Waukesha Freeman since 1890.

“That campaign was as lively as we — some trained, some untrained, in suffrage campaigns — could make it,” said Youmans. “Mass meetings were held at points of vantage. Suffrage automobiles toured many counties, and the native Badger experienced the destructive shock of seeing a woman stand up in an automobile on a street corner and plead for political freedom.”

But less than a month after the referendum vote that Youmans would later call a “catastrophe,” James sought to make a change. She wrote to longtime suffrage advocate, writer and speaker Belle Case La Follette, wife of then-Sen. Bob La Follette, for guidance on merging Wisconsin’s two suffrage groups, PEL and WWSA.

“There should be, it seems to me, one head,” La Follette advised. “Two state central committees for a political party could not be as effective as one, even if perfectly harmonious.”

The next year, the two groups held a joint convention. When it was over, they had united under the WWSA name. James and Brown stepped down, and a new president was named — Theodora Youmans.

Youmans described the work of the newly merged organization as “educating and organizing, raising money and expending it, writing and exhorting, and never for one moment failing in faith as to the justice of our cause or its final outcome.”

That work would go on for seven years. As it became clear that lawmakers in Washington would act before those in Wisconsin, Youmans focused on building support for ratification of the coming constitutional Amendment.

“The conversion of the political leaders of the state, as represented in the Legislature as well as in Congress, was apparently complete. Legislation in this state had done all it could for the national enfranchisement of women,” she said.

Wisconsin lawmakers ratified the amendment on June 10, 1919, just four days after it was passed by Congress. Ada James, still working on behalf of women’s suffrage, stepped in next to ensure Wisconsin’s ratification would be the first.

“She went to her father, who had been in the state Legislature and sponsored the referendum bill in 1912,” says McBride. “He had served in the Civil War, and the Grand Army of the Republic — the GAR — was having its annual get-together, its convention in Madison. And she gets this old guy, she packs his bags again, puts him on a train. And so by train, by car and finally on foot, David G. James manages to get to the Secretary of State’s office in Washington, D.C., for Wisconsin women with a copy of the ratification. So that was a great jubilation.” 

Celebrate the vote!

Events around the state will commemorate the 100th anniversary of Wisconsin ratifying the 19th Amendment.

Madison

A special display from the Wisconsin Historical Society is currently on view in the Capitol rotunda. “The Women’s Hour Has Struck, Wisconsin: The First State to Ratify the 19th Amendment,” features images and documents that highlight Wisconsin’s role in the ratification. The display is part of a larger celebration planned for June 10, which will include the unveiling of the original 19th Amendment document at noon, as well as artifacts like a yellow parade tunic worn by Wisconsin suffrage supporters during the 1916 Republican National Convention in Chicago.

The League of Women Voters Wisconsin and Dane County will mark the anniversary at noon, Sunday, June 23, at the Forward statue on the Capitol Square (State Street corner), for a short program highlighting “the importance of Wisconsin’s first-to-ratify vote, how it gave hope to many women but not to all.” The ceremony will be followed by a march around the Capitol Square, led in song by The Raging Grannies. People can make a suffrage sash and enjoy free frozen vanilla custard.

Two Steps Forward Monologue Festival, Forward Theater’s biannual festival of short monologue plays, will focus this year on the 19th Amendment. June 20 to 23, in Overture Center’s Promenade Hall.

Green Lake

League of Women Voters of Wisconsin will hold its annual meeting on June 8 from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Green Lake Conference Center. The focus is “Commemorating Our Legacy, Expanding Our Impact” and the meeting will feature a lecture on Wisconsin’s suffrage history from Genevieve McBride, professor emerita of history at UW-Milwaukee.

— Amy Barrilleaux