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
