Women's Suffrage and the Pandemic
During these troubled times of pandemic and social distancing, I’ve been thinking of our founding sisters whose spirits live within our clubhouse, the Hoyt Sherman Place Mansion. Our sisters who worked for the rights and education of women and children were hampered in their struggle for suffrage by another pandemic in 1918.
IN 1918 the suffrage movement in Iowa was recovering from a bitter defeat in 1916 when an amendment to the Iowa constitution lost by 10,000 votes amid charges of voter fraud and election fraud. The national movement was working toward a vote in Congress to pass a national amendment during the first wave of the “Spanish flu” in the Spring of 1918. The southern Democrats were working against the amendment and the suffragists were two votes short of the two thirds vote needed to pass the amendment so that the states could vote.
“These are sad times for the whole world, grown unexpectedly sadder by the sudden and sweeping epidemic of influenza,” wrote Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, in a letter to supporters in 1918.
“This new affliction is bringing sorrow into many suffrage homes and is presenting a serious new obstacle in our Referendum campaigns and in the Congressional and Senatorial campaigns,” she continued. “We must therefore be prepared for failure.”*
In September 1918 the flu came back killing 675,000 Americans. Travel was dangerous and the movement had to rely on local organizations to work to change the make up of the Congress in the November elections. Women in New York had received full voting rights the previous year and Catt, who was recovering from the flu, insisted on casting her first vote.
The amendment received the 2/3rds vote and for the next 15 months women worked to obtain ratification by 36 state legislatures.
“In February 1920, suffragist Aloysius Larch-Miller, ill with the flu, got out of her sick bed to testify before the Oklahoma Democratic Party convention on behalf of ratification. She won the argument, only to die of pneumonia. Months after the flu had abated, the pandemic had claimed its suffrage martyr. “*
We know the result of their hard work and sacrifice. We will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment this August. Let us hope that the current pandemic will allow us to celebrate well!
*For more information see the National Geographic History, April 2020 article: A pandemic nearly derailed the women's suffrage movement, by ELLEN CAROL DUBOIS. The quotes above are from this article.