In 1866, women petitioned the Missouri legislature to remove the word “male” from the state Constitution’s section on voting rights. They were ignored.
On May 8 of the next year, five women met in the director’s room of the St. Louis Mercantile Library to establish the Woman Suffrage Association of Missouri. It would be the first organization in the country dedicated exclusively to the fight “to secure the ballot for women upon terms of equality with men.”
One of those women was Virginia Minor, and she was in close contact with movement leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. They were developing a theory called the New Departure, which reasoned that if women were U.S. citizens just as former slaves were, according to the new 14th Amendment, then women must have the right to vote. Citizenship conferred it.
And so, in 1872, Minor strode into the building we now know as the Old Courthouse and found the office of voter registrar Reese Happersett. She wished to register to vote for the presidential election, she announced. Granted, she was a woman and therefore not allowed, under the Missouri Constitution, the right to vote, but she wished to register nonetheless. When Happersett refused to let her do so, Minor—with the support of her husband, an enlightened lawyer named Francis Minor—filed a lawsuit. His name was needed, because in Missouri, a married woman fell under the femme covert legal doctrine: She had no right to own property in her own name and required her husband’s consent to take any sort of legal action, because her identity was subsumed by his. As an individual, she no longer existed; she was, as some scholars put it, “civilly dead.”
The case went to the Supreme Court, but the justices found it to be without merit. The 14th Amendment, they held, did not expressly stipulate voting as one of the rights of citizenship. The Minors’ lawsuit, however brave, went down in history as setting the national suffrage movement back decades. No longer hopeful for a federal amendment, the suffragists took a tedious state-by-state approach. In horse-drawn carriages, breathing dust and sweating into their corsets and petticoats, they crossed the country, waving banners and pennants. Periodically, they’d stop in a small town to speak from a shaded gazebo or platform, exhorting women to join their campaign and men to recognize women’s rights.
Minor, meanwhile, had not quit. After the Missouri Supreme Court ruled against her, in 1872, she waited precisely one year, then sent a letter notifying the St. Louis Board of Assessors that she would be unable to pay her taxes, because she, as a femme covert, could not own the money with which to do so. Furthermore, she added, she believed taxation without representation to be the sum of all tyranny. The following year, she took her argument to the state legislature. Again, she failed to prevail. But what was extraordinary about her arguments was that they never collapsed into the sentiment of the times. Minor calmly, repeatedly pointed out that men and women were equal and therefore should possess the same rights.
The fight to have that equality acknowledged took almost half a century.
The fight to have that equality acknowledged took almost half a century, and in those tumultuous decades, Missouri was a favorite site for suffrage conventions. The National Suffrage Convention was held in St. Louis in November 1872, with abolitionist and suffragist Lucy Stone presiding. The St. Louis Equal Suffrage League also kept at it. At one of the many parades, women who worked at the Sayman Products Company carried wooden food mashers, waving them for emphasis. When the Democratic Party held its national convention here in 1916, suffragists in white dresses lined Locust, standing motionless as they held yellow parasols. As the Dems made their way from the Jefferson Hotel to the Coliseum, they couldn’t miss the spectacle, dubbed the Golden Lane.
Today, delightful artifacts of the movement are preserved at the Mercantile Library, among them a letter from Edith Barriger, penned on the letterhead of the National Woman’s Party, telling Florence Taussig that “there is no doubt but that Federal Suffrage will be considered by the next session of Congress… It seems to be the thing that must be done and we will have to lend ourselves to it.”
There were, however, breaks along the way. In 1918, reported The Woman Citizen, suffragists turned their energy to the war effort, and “the entire machinery of the Woman Suffrage party was placed at the disposal of the government” to help sell Liberty Bonds. Their efforts were not thankless: In March 1919, The Missouri Woman reported that men in Warrensburg had formed an advisory committee to aid in the suffrage effort. In the same issue, Alice Curtice Moyer Wing made her feelings plain: “It is no longer ‘the thing’ to receive the mention of woman suffrage with uplifted brow or tip-tilted nose.” She then pointed out that “there are just as many fat, sleek, well-fed husbands to the square inch in the states where women vote for everything.”
Later in 1919, Mrs. William C. Fordyce traveled to Jefferson City to address the state legislature: “Gentlemen, 50 years ago my grandmother came before the Missouri legislature and asked for the enfranchisement of women; twenty-five years ago my mother came to make the same request; tonight, I am asking for the ballot for women. Are you going to make it necessary for my daughter to appear in her turn?”
They did not. On July 3, 1919, Missouri became the 11th state to ratify the 19th Amendment. It had been approved by the U.S. Congress, but 36 states had still needed to ratify, Missouri among them. Tucked into the archives are a suffragist’s handwritten notes, on hotel stationery, to cue a celebration: “Hurrah for Missouri girls hurrah. Razzle dazzle, [then ditto marks for another ‘razzle dazzle’] sis boom bah… Missouri rah rah rah.”
The amendment became federal law in 1920, guaranteeing women across the nation the right to cast a vote.
Why were the St. Louis activists “suffragists” and not “suffragettes”? Because they took pains to distance themselves from the British suffragettes, who had lost patience and turned militant, chaining themselves to railings, disrupting public meetings, and wreaking havoc to make their point.
