Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association

Last updated

The Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association (MWSA) was an American organization devoted to women's suffrage in Massachusetts. It was active from 1870 to 1919. [1]

Contents

History

The MWSA was founded in 1870 by suffrage activists Julia Ward Howe, Lucy Stone, Henry Browne Blackwell, and others. [1] It was affiliated initially with the national American Woman Suffrage Association, which had been founded the previous year, and later became a chapter of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). [1] One of its own affiliates was the Cambridge Political Equality Association. [2]

The MWSA lobbied for women to get the vote and the right to be officials of civic organizations such as school boards, educated people about women's rights, organized public demonstrations such as rallies and parades, and coordinated with suffrage associations in other states. [1] [3] Among the people active in the MWSA were physician Martha Ripley, social activist Angelina Grimké, reformer Ednah Dow Littlehale Cheney, and suffragist Susan Walker Fitzgerald.

In 1892, the recent merger of several national suffrage associations and other factors prompted Alice Stone Blackwell and Ellen Battelle Dietrick to write a new constitution for the MWSA that would expand its capacities and funding base (e.g. by making it possible for the MWSA to receive bequests). [1] The new MWSA was incorporated in December of that year. A decade later, in 1901, it merged with a smaller Massachusetts suffrage organization, the National Suffrage Association of Massachusetts. [1] By 1915, the MWSA had over 58,000 members. [3] Others involved with the organization included Margaret Foley, Sarah E. Wall , and Jennie Maria Arms Sheldon. During her senior year at Radcliffe College, Maud Wood Park was invited to speak at their annual dinner.

Between 1904 and 1915, the MWSA was headquartered at 6 Marlborough Street in Boston's Back Bay, afterwards the headquarters of the Women's Municipal League of Boston and then the home of physician Louis Agassiz Shaw, Jr.

In 1920, after the passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution gave women the vote, the MWSA became the Massachusetts League of Women Voters. [1]

Records pertaining to the history of the MWSA are held by Radcliffe College's Schlesinger Library. [1]

See also

Related Research Articles

Julia Ward Howe 19th-century American abolitionist, social activist, and poet

Julia Ward Howe was an American poet and author, known for writing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and the original 1870 pacifist Mother's Day Proclamation. She was also an advocate for abolitionism and a social activist, particularly for women's suffrage.

Antoinette Brown Blackwell

Antoinette Louisa Brown, later Antoinette Brown Blackwell, was the first woman to be ordained as a mainstream Protestant minister in the United States. She was a well-versed public speaker on the paramount issues of her time and distinguished herself from her contemporaries with her use of religious faith in her efforts to expand women's rights.

Henry Browne Blackwell American activist (1825–1909)

Henry Browne Blackwell, was an American advocate for social and economic reform. He was one of the founders of the Republican Party and the American Woman Suffrage Association. He published Woman's Journal starting in 1870 in Boston, Massachusetts with Lucy Stone.

Judith Winsor Smith

Judith Winsor Smith was an American women's suffrage activist, social reformer, and abolitionist. She was involved in the suffrage movement until the Nineteenth Amendment was passed in 1920, when she voted for the first time at the age of 99. She was a founder and the first president of the Home Club of East Boston, one of the first women's clubs in Massachusetts.

Alice Stone Blackwell

Alice Stone Blackwell was an American feminist, suffragist, journalist, radical socialist, and human rights advocate.

<i>Womans Journal</i>

Woman's Journal was an American women's rights periodical published from 1870 to 1931. It was founded in 1870 in Boston, Massachusetts, by Lucy Stone and her husband Henry Browne Blackwell as a weekly newspaper. In 1917 it was purchased by Carrie Chapman Catt's Leslie Woman Suffrage Commission and merged with The Woman Voter and National Suffrage News to become known as The Woman Citizen. It served as the official organ of the National American Woman Suffrage Association until 1920, when the organization was reformed as the League of Women Voters, and the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was passed granting women the right to vote. Publication of Woman Citizen slowed from weekly, to bi-weekly, to monthly. In 1927, it was renamed The Woman's Journal. It ceased publication in June 1931.

Florence Luscomb

Florence Hope Luscomb was an American architect and women's suffrage activist in Massachusetts. She was one of the first ten women graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her degrees were in architecture. Luscomb became a partner in an early woman-owned architecture firm before work in the field became scarce during World War I. She then dedicated herself fully to activism in the women's suffrage movement, becoming a prominent leader of Massachusetts suffragists.

The College Equal Suffrage League (CESL) was an American woman suffrage organization founded in 1900 by Maud Wood Park and Inez Haynes Irwin, as a way to attract younger Americans to the women's rights movement. The League spurred the creation of college branches around the country and influenced the actions of other prominent groups such as National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).

Maud Wood Park Suffragist and creator of Harvards Schlesinger Library

Maud Wood Park was an American suffragist and women's rights activist.

Minnesota Woman Suffrage Association

The Minnesota Woman Suffrage Association (MWSA) was an organization devoted to women's suffrage in Minnesota. From 1881 to 1920, the organization struggled to secure women's right to vote. Its members organized marches, wrote petitions and letters, gathered signatures, gave speeches, and published pamphlets and broadsheets to force the Minnesota Legislature to recognize their right to vote. Due to their efforts, the legislature approved the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919.

The Fragment Society is a charitable women's society, founded in 1812 in Boston and incorporated in 1816.

Cambridge Political Equality Association

The Cambridge Political Equality Association (CPEA) was an American women's suffrage organization founded in 1896 which was dissolved in 1920.

Mary Jane Coggeshall

Mary Jane (Whitely) Coggeshall (1836–1911) was an American suffragist known as the "mother of woman suffrage in Iowa". She was inducted into the Iowa Women's Hall of Fame in 1990.

Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government

The Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government (BESAGG) was an American organization devoted to women's suffrage in Massachusetts. It was active from 1901 to 1920. Like the College Equal Suffrage League, it attracted younger, less risk-averse members than some of the more established organizations. BESAGG played an important role in the ratification of the 19th amendment in Massachusetts. After 1920, it became the Boston League of Women Voters.

Margaret Foley (suffragist)

Margaret Lillian Foley was an Irish-American labor organizer, suffragist, and social worker from Boston. Known for confronting anti-suffrage candidates at political rallies, she was nicknamed the "Grand Heckler."

Gertrude Foster Brown American concert pianist, teacher, and suffragette

Gertrude Foster Brown was a concert pianist, teacher, and suffragist. Following the passage of women suffrage in New York State in 1917, and pending passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, Brown wrote Your Vote and How to Use It, published in 1918. She was Director-General of the Women's Overseas Hospitals in France, founded by suffragists, in 1918. In addition to her work in the New York suffrage movement, she helped to found the National League of Women Voters. She was the Managing Director of the Woman's Journal from 1921-1931.

Elizabeth Boynton Harbert

Elizabeth Boynton Harbert was a 19th-century American author, lecturer, reformer and philanthropist from Indiana. She was the first women to design a woman's plank and secure its adoption by a major political party in a U.S. state.

Edna Lamprey Stantial (1897-1985) was an American suffragist and archivist.

Womens suffrage in Maine

While women's suffrage in Maine had an early start, dating back to the 1850s, it was a long, slow road to equal suffrage. Early suffragists brought speakers Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone to the state in the mid-1850s. Ann F. Jarvis Greely and other women in Ellsworth, Maine, created a women's rights lecture series in 1857. The first women's suffrage petition to the Maine Legislature was also sent that year. Working-class women began marching for women's suffrage in the 1860s. The Snow sisters created the first Maine women's suffrage organization, the Equal Rights Association of Rockland, in 1868. In the 1870s, a state suffrage organization, the Maine Women's Suffrage Association (MWSA), was formed. Many petitions for women's suffrage were sent to the state legislature. MWSA and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) of Maine worked closely together on suffrage issues. By the late 1880s the state legislature was considering several women's suffrage bills. While women's suffrage did not pass, during the 1890s many women's rights laws were secured. During the 1900s, suffragists in Maine continued to campaign and lecture on women's suffrage. Several suffrage organizations including a Maine chapter of the College Equal Suffrage League and the Men's Equal Rights League were formed in the 1910s. Florence Brooks Whitehouse started the Maine chapter of the National Woman's Party (NWP) in 1915. Suffragists and other clubwomen worked together on a large campaign for a 1917 voter referendum on women's suffrage. Despite the efforts of women around the state, women's suffrage failed. Going into the next few years, a women's suffrage referendum on voting in presidential elections was placed on the September 13, 1920 ballot. But before that vote, Maine ratified the Nineteenth Amendment on November 5, 1920. It was the nineteenth state to ratify. A few weeks after ratification, MWSA dissolved and formed the League of Women Voters (LWV) of Maine. White women first voted in Maine on September 13, 1920. Native Americans in Maine had to wait longer to vote. In 1924, they became citizens of the United States. However, Maine would not allow individuals living on Indian reservations to vote. It was not until the passage of a 1954 equal rights referendum that Native Americans gained the right to vote in Maine. In 1955 Lucy Nicolar Poolaw (Penobscot) was the first Native American living on a reservation in Maine to cast a vote.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 "Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association. Records in the Woman's Rights Collection, 1893-1918: A Finding Aid". Finding Aid, Schlesinger Library website. Accessed Nov. 4, 2020.
  2. "Cambridge Women's Heritage Project". City of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Retrieved November 30, 2015.
  3. 1 2 "'"A rash and dreadful act for a woman': The 1915 Woman Suffrage Parade in Boston". Massachusetts Historical Society website. Accessed Nov. 30, 2015.

Further reading