Folks:

In my last email, I generally talked of Lancaster’s courageous and unified spirit and how it was and is woven into the fibers of its history and its being. However, the time leading up to August 26, 1920, was a difficult period, at which time Lancastrians didn’t react with unanimity, as was so representative of Lancaster’s past.

August 26, 2020, marks the centennial of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which prohibited federal or state governments from preventing anyone the right to vote based on their sex. This hard-fought triumph concluded after a decades-long movement that, although not rooted in Lancaster, found some residents provoked by it.

One hundred years ago today, the women in Lancaster either rejoiced to finally assume rights many felt were already present in the country’s founding documents, or they were confounded and agitated that voting and partaking in the federal election process would somehow degrade a woman’s mild nature.

Let me underscore that some of the more outspoken antisuffragist leaders in Lancaster were women. That’s not to say there wasn’t a group of men who were none too pleased with the notion that women should vote, but I reason that was more or less expected.

It might surprise you to know that a prominent group of Lancaster women likely either wives or daughters to wealthy, educated land-owning men felt that “women cannot vote without becoming defiled.” This, according to Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement published in 1883. The volume references an occasion when 200 women of Lancaster addressed the Commonwealth Senate and Legislature and cautioned that voting “would diminish the purity, the dignity and the moral influence of woman and bring into the family circle a dangerous element of discord.”

Hmmmmm.

Let me just say, if there ever is a dangerous element of discord in my household, I know two things. Number one, it has nothing to do with a woman’s right to vote. Number two, it likely has rather to do with challenging my wife’s right to tell me what to do.

Nevertheless, I found this reading on the times hard to believe and took a closer look at some other materials within the Library’s Special Collections. What I found startled me and included volumes that were undoubtedly donated to the Library by some antisuffragists of the day.

In Arguments against Women Suffrage, Rev. H. M. Dexter stated, “it is an objection against woman suffrage that cannot be set aside … that she can do more useful work for the welfare of the state than she can hope to accomplish by unsexing herself at the polls.”

Huh???!

What about Francis Parkman, a graduate of Harvard College, who specified in Some of the Reasons against Woman Suffrage [note: I find this title amusing since it implies this volume isn’t even sufficient to encapsulate all of the reasons. How many can there be?!] that “[i]t has been claimed as a right that woman should vote. It is no right, but a wrong, that a small number of women should impose on all the rest political duties which there is no call for their assuming, which they do not want to assume, and which, if duly discharged, would be a cruel and intolerable burden.”

This is tough sledding, but before we jump all over this guy, I’m willing to bet these were almost certainly the sentiments of those 200 women mentioned above when they spoke before the state legislature.

What is encouraging is that I similarly found in the Library’s Special Collections as early as 1871, the fight for women’s voting equality had throughout much of the country already captured a full head of steam.

In the Proceedings of a Peace Meeting held at the Union League Hall in New York, poet Julia Ward Howe declared, “I gladly accord to the fathers the deserved honor of their day, I wish that the Mothers also may have a day.”

In 1879 in Woman Suffrage a Right, not a Privilege author William Bowditch asked, “[D]oes anyone say suffrage is not a womanly act … Cannot we safely leave to the women themselves the determination of what is and what is not womanly…?”

That a boy Billy.

Finally, in Woman and the Commonwealth: Or a Question of Expediency, author George Pellew chastises readers that “[f]or one individual … to assign arbitrary, definite limits to the activity of another … is an act of bigotry and injustice.”

Listen, history is complicated. Sometimes we take for granted what we enjoy as our rights and liberties because we don’t take a deep enough dive into the sometimes messy historical events that lead to our current standing. I was likely just as surprised as you that a Town that birthed such a principled establishment as the Thayer Memorial Library heretofore Lancaster Town Library would struggle over such a simple idea that the government should view women and men equal before the law.

As early as 1850, several women conspicuously were members of the predecessor to the Lancaster Town Library, the Library Club of Lancaster, of which Mary G. Chandler was not only a member but an officer. This was an aberration. If you review the historical record of all the committees and boards and all the votes that were cast in Lancaster going back to 1653 up to that time, there were few, if any, that a woman participated in. It wasn’t until 1973 when the first woman Virginia Collins was elected to the Lancaster Select Board.

As you might expect, Massachusetts was one of 22 states to ratify the nineteenth amendment before the end of 1919. The ratification process required 36 states and completed with the approval by Tennessee in 1920. With Mississippi’s ratification in 1984, the amendment was ratified by all states having existed at the time of its adoption in 1920.

Today as with all days, think it virtuous and correct that many can enjoy all of the truths embodied in the Bill of Rights. Give pleasure to celebrate the distinguished achievement realized 100 years ago today for all women the equal right to vote.

Undoubtedly there is more work to be done. As with too many things like the injustice sustained by women prior to August 26, 1920, it is unfortunate but necessary that it is those of us who are courageous to endure the burden to retell their fellow citizens by “[t]he mystic chords of memory … when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature” that we are one and indivisible.

~ joe​