Photograph by unknown, 1916. Missouri Historical Society Photograph and Prints Collections. Women's Suffrage.
Suffragists of the St. Louis Equal Suffrage League on their way to travel across Missouri to promote women's suffrage.
Perhaps there is some irony that 100 years ago, when women in the United States finally secured the right to vote with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, the country was still shaking off the last vestiges of the great flu epidemic that had begun in 1918. Fast forward to the spring of this year, and the Missouri History Museum’s new exhibition Beyond the Ballot was delayed by the closures associated with COVID-19. Luckily, the exhibit was almost completely installed when the museum was forced to close, and without further ado, it is opening on August 1. Beyond the Ballot is free to the public, but requires a reservation for admission to the museum.
Katie Moon, exhibits manager at the History Museum, curated the exhibition. “Our challenge was how to tell the story in the best way for our visitors," she says. "How do we really talk about women before they had a political voice and debunk the idea that they weren’t doing anything before they received the right to vote? We wanted to show respect to those women.”
For Moon, it was important to tell the story both of women whose names historians know, and those whose names have been forgotten. At the beginning of the exhibition are the photographs of unknown women—from the earliest years of photography all the way to the year women received the right to vote in 1920—culled from the museum’s collections. There are enslaved women, women brought here to be “exhibited” in the 1904 World’s Fair, and members of the elite from Thomas Easterly’s daguerreotypes.
“These women became my audience and my responsibility to tell their story,” Moon explains.
Photography courtesy of the Missouri History Museum
Next up in the exhibit are 32 women who were influential in St. Louis up to 1919. Each woman is represented by a full-length portrait, illustrated by local artist Rori! As Moon says, they are “stories of women we should know but we don’t.”
Originally, Moon was worried she wouldn't be able to come up with enough women for this portion of the exhibit, but eventually the list grew to more than one hundred. The difficulty then turned to witling down the list to a manageable number. One of the first women I was drawn to is a favorite of Moon: Anna Maria von Phul. Working as an artist in the earliest years of the history of St. Louis, von Phul painted images of a long-lost city. Moon further explains: “We don’t have a whole lot of images of the city. She provides an amazing record of architecture and people. There’s only one portrait [of von Phul] we’re trying to find. We’re also the only institution with her work.”
Illustration by Rori!, created for the Missouri History Museum exhibit "Beyond the Ballot: St. Louis and Suffrage"
The very first woman in the exhibit is Françoise LeDuc, who was a French Osage woman. Moon even worked with her descendants who still are living today in Oklahoma. Along with the featured women, the exhibit has “breakout sections” that include objects from both the museum’s collections and loans. An important aspect of the fur trade that is often forgotten is that Osage women prepared hides for sale to Europeans. Some of the most interesting objects on loan come from excavations sponsored by the Missouri Department of Transportation, required when roadwork disrupts archeological sites. The items are as diverse as ceramics produced by Native Americans, a French Catholic medallion, and items from the Worthy Women’s Aid Hospital.
“We don’t have as many objects tied specifically to women’s history,” Moon says, making the items on display all the more valuable.
Some of the other interesting women featured include Esther, a woman enslaved by Jacques Clamorgan, an early resident of St. Louis. When Clamorgan fell on hard times financially, he deeded all his property to Esther to keep it from being repossessed by creditors. But when he later tried to get it back from her, she refused. The legal battles went on for decades.
The Social Evil Hospital makes an appearance from the time when St. Louis tried its hand at legalized prostitution. An outstanding loan from the Becker Medical Library is the actual ledger listing every woman who entered the hospital. Along those lines, famous African American madam Priscilla Henry is featured. Henry owned two brothels next door to each other, one for white and Black clients, respectively. She became so wealthy she bought the plantation where she was born in Alabama. Five thousand people went to her funeral in Bellefontaine Cemetery.
After finishing with the 32 notable women, the visitor turns to the left and heads back down the other side of the exhibit to learn about the road to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote in 1920. Technically, it restored the right for women to vote in the City of St. Louis, as they had many more rights when it was a French/Spanish colony. Women lost those rights when St. Louis joined the United States.
The road toward suffrage begins with freedom suits. Establishing that women were human, and not property, was the first step in the battle for voting rights. The Seneca Falls Conventions of 1848 caused further advancement for the suffrage movement; while there is not any evidence of women from St. Louis attending, Susan B. Anthony, the famous suffragist, frequently visited the Gateway City. The Civil War further advanced the cause.
Virginia Minor, shortly after the Civil War in 1867, founded the first Women’s Suffrage Association in 1867 in the Mercantile Library. With the support of her husband, a lawyer who had worked to secure soldiers’ pensions after the war, she filed suit after attempting to register to vote. Arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment, which had guaranteed citizenship to all persons born in United States, consequently afforded universal suffrage, the Minors fought their way all the way to the Supreme Court—and lost. There is only one known photograph of Virginia Minor, in the Library of Congress.
“Now we think of it as this inevitable—of course they got the right to vote,” Moon says, speaking to how many challenges and setback suffragists faced on the way. For the next portion of the exhibit, each year leading up to 1920 is featured. What many people might not realize is that the Temperance Movement was closely linked to women’s suffrage—but not in St. Louis. During one election, support for women’s suffrage won by large margins in the West End neighborhood, where the movement was centered, but lost badly in the wards where many of the city’s breweries were located. Suffragists and brewers settled into détente in St. Louis, unlike the rest of the country. National Prohibition was ratified with the Eighteenth Amendment and went into effect one year before the Nineteenth Amendment.
Missouri, interestingly, was in the eleventh state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment, and when Tennessee ratified it on August 18, 1920, women gained the right to vote. But the deadline to register to vote for the next presidential election was only a short time away. Women mobilized and 100,000 were registered in only a few weeks. Postcards were printed that could be displayed in the windows of newly registered women voters, which the History Museum has reproduced for visitors.
Reflecting on the purpose of the exhibit, Moon says it's giving a voice to the forgotten—“the history of women has been here since day one. They have helped create the city we have today. They have been doing things before they had the vote. These women have names and stories. The resiliency of women here is amazing.”
