Column: Women Make Our History

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." We all know those words. They are the cornerstone of the Declaration of Independence, adopted 250 years ago this summer. They call for Freedom, not Anarchy. They argue that for our rights to be secure, we need a government, and that government's power must flow from the "consent" of those it governs. So who exactly gets to give their consent? This was a main sticking point with our Revolutionary ancestors. The colonies had Colonial Assemblies, and many landowning white men could vote to elect those Assemblies. But when the British Parliament didn't bother asking the Colonial Assemblies about the plan for a Stamp Act or a Tea Tax, this "consent" issue got hot. King George III later killed the Stamp Act because of widespread resistance. The New York Assembly was so pleased it commissioned a statue of the King on horseback in New York City, hoping to win his favor. That didn't work; the statue was pulled down six years later by a mob riled up listening to a public reading of the Declaration of Independence. Just one day after the statue came down, New York convened its first constitutional convention to draw up rules for a new Revolutionary state government. A key question: Who gets to give their consent, to vote? Well–not women. New York was among the first of these new states to officially bar women from voting. Not that they could beforehand, except in a few isolated instances. (All states except New Jersey did the same.) Thus began the long struggle for greater democracy–for women's rights. Ironically, in the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) communities displaced by New York settlers, women had far greater civic authority and rights. Women had a voice in tribal matters, and Iroquois women actually played the leading role in major tribal decisions of all kinds. It took the new United States women a long time to catch up. As we celebrate America 250 and the passion for liberty and representative democracy that helped to inspire the Revolution, it is clear there is a direct line from those Patriots to the Women's Suffrage warriors of our region. We may not have had enough of a population up here in the North Country to engage in the Revolutionary War era debates. Nobody was throwing tea into the Westport harbor. But there were enough people – as our population grew fast in the 1800s – to pick up the cause of women's rights. Neither the suffrage campaign nor the abolitionist cause bypassed the North Country. Women's rights champion Susan B. Anthony and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass had to deal with angry mobs on a joint speaking tour in our region, and sometimes had to scramble for safe places to speak. Many churches said 'no.' There's an 1859 letter from Anthony in our Museum files, asking for help in getting a suitable place to hold a Suffrage Forum. She explained to Augustus C. Hand that she'd been told Westport might be a good place, but she didn't know anybody there to arrange a hall, and sought his advice. "Strong-willed," Hand noted on the back of Anthony's letter. He was right about that, and she needed to be. It took 140 years from that first NYS Constitution denying their rights, until 1917, when New York finally voted for women's suffrage. Harriet Dudley Bell, a school teacher born in Keene who moved to Plattsburgh, remembered that she'd been inspired by a speech Anthony gave in 1879, after building a warm, welcoming fire in the room where Anthony spoke. Bell was active in the movement for years: a newspaper reported her giving a "bright and spicey paper" in 1900, about taxation without representation. There's that direct line back to the Boston Tea Party. The suffrage campaign had an anti's side as well, populated by both women and men, and in the years leading up to the crucial votes in the 1910's, both sides packed auditoriums, Grange Halls and churches. Katharine Notman, from Keene and Brooklyn, was the Essex County chair for the pro-suffrage forces during the referendum campaigns of 1915 and 1917. Her group organized auto tours around the county, driving into small towns everywhere and setting up soapbox rallies indoors and outdoors. Ultimately, that worked. For instance, Essex County (and the rest of the state) voted 'No" in 1915 to changing the State Constitution. But in 1917, both Essex and NYS overall switched sides and voted "yes." The victory margin here was only 15 votes, out of almost 5,700 cast. So two years prior to passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which granted voting rights to women nationally, women in New York won that right. This was just men voting, of course, and one pro-suffrage campaign tactic was to take out newspaper notices highlighting the names of prominent men who were supporting the cause. Our most prominent national suffrage champion was Inez Milholland of Lewis, a powerful speaker, lawyer, strategist and tireless campaigner. She famously led the 1915 National Suffrage Parade in Washington D.C., riding a white horse down Pennsylvania Ave. A photograph of that event now hangs in the Essex County Courthouse, along with paintings of Samuel de Champlain in battle with Native Americans and abolitionist John Brown. —Written by Peter Slocum, president of the Essex County Historical Society/Adirondack History Museum.

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Column: Women Make Our History

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