Celebrating Suffrage Nation Marks 75th Anniversary Of The Right-To-Vote Amendment

Perhaps it hasn’t helped matters that in photographs Susan B. Anthony resembles George Bush in drag.

But why, after a dramatic decades-long revolution, aren’t the faces of the leading suffragists carved on a mountain somewhere? Most Americans would recognize a photo of Thomas Jefferson or Martin Luther King, but few could ever identify Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Carrie Chapman Catt.

Until recently, the long, non-violent campaigns by these women were largely omitted from American history books, according to the National Women’s History Project based in Windsor, Calif. Many American students read a single line in their history texts: “In 1920, Congress gave women the right to vote.”

“Nobody was killed, no one was injured, no blood was shed, yet it really was a revolutionary thing, using very sophisticated political tactics,” says Jan Polek, a former Democratic candidate for the Washington Legislature and manager of the gender equity program at the Community Colleges of Spokane.

This Saturday will be the 75th anniversary of the day the United States officially added the 19th Amendment. The amendment said, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

Polek and former Spokane mayor Sheri Barnard have organized a celebration at the Davenport Hotel. They want Inland Northwest women to learn more about the rich history of the suffragists.

The event will feature a roundtable discussion by 25 women leaders from Spokane and Coeur d’Alene, and the first-day issue of a new commemorative postal stamp. Spokane County commissioners also have named Saturday Woman Suffrage Day.

In Washington, D.C., on that day, a ceremony will be held at 11 a.m. at the woman suffrage statue in the Capitol Crypt. At 1 p.m. the 1913 suffrage march will be re-enacted. Women wearing white, with lavender sashes, will march down Pennsylvania Avenue.

Along with Anthony, the Quaker temperance and abolition organizer, other prominent leaders were Stanton and Lucretia Mott, who first called for women’s rights in 1848 in Seneca Falls, N.Y., and Catt, a teacher and campaigner who founded the League of Women Voters.

The revolution finally ended 72 years later. By 1920 tens of thousands of women had worked on campaigns throughout the country, and millions of dollars were raised.

“It was a continuous, seemingly endless chain of activity,” Catt wrote with Nettie Rogers Shuler. “Young suffragists who helped forge the last links of that chain were not born when it began. Old suffragists who forged the first links were dead when it ended.”

Still, this struggle went largely unrecognized by male historians.

Even today, Polek believes the suffragists suffered from poor public relations. Their awkwardness with the camera proved to be as detrimental as Richard Nixon’s with the television.

“When we look at pictures of the suffragists, they look so formidable. They look so serious. That’s because they weren’t used to having their pictures taken,” says Polek.

“But these were the rabble-rousers, the far-out feminists. It’s interesting to look in their eyes to see what was truly in their hearts.”

One of the most delightfully eccentric suffragists in this region was May Arkwright Hutton. The daughter of a backwoods preacher and a woman he never married, she had only a third-grade education when, in 1883, she came west to run a boarding house in Wardner, Idaho.

She married a railroad engineer named Levi Hutton, and they moved to Wallace. The two of them befriended prostitutes, orphans and miners.

May wrote a book called “The Coeur d’Alenes or a Tale of the Modern Inquisition in Idaho.” It was such a libelous diatribe against mine owners that she later tried to buy back every copy.

The Huttons worked hard and invested money in mining claims. At one point, May Hutton picked huckleberries in the mountains and baked pies for extra cash.

But in 1901 the Hercules Mine, in which the Huttons were partners, hit silver. They became millionaires.

Hutton, a 250-pound woman with outrageous plumed hats and brash self-confidence, relished spending her money exactly as she pleased: to entertain the famous attorney Clarence Darrow, to throw a big dinner for President Theodore Roosevelt, to host a banquet for Susan B. Anthony.

Hutton had helped women in Idaho win the right to vote in 1895. After the Huttons moved to Spokane in 1907, she began campaigning for the cause in Washington.

Spokane had the dubious distinction of setting back the right to vote by 22 years. In 1883 the territorial Legislature extended this right to women, but the territorial Supreme Court overturned the law on a technicality.

On Jan. 18, 1888, the last Washington Territorial Legislature passed a second bill granting women’s voting rights.

But a Spokane saloonkeeper, Edward Bloomer, worried that women’s ballots would bring on Prohibition. He set up his wife, Nevada Bloomer, and his crony, an election judge named John Todd, to challenge the issue.

On April 3, 1888, Nevada Bloomer attempted to vote, and Todd refused to accept her ballet. Nevada Bloomer sued the election judges for $5,000.

The case went to the state Supreme Court, which overturned Washington women’s voting rights again.

In 1907 May Hutton fought back.

She gave speeches. She lobbied in Olympia. She decorated her Thomas Flyer automobile with 1,500 white roses and drove in the Portland Rose Festival parade with Oregon suffragist Abigail Scott Duniway.

In 1910 she celebrated when Washington, like most of the Western states, extended the vote to women.

Hutton became the first woman in Spokane County to register to vote and the first woman in Washington to serve on a jury and become a delegate to the Democratic National Convention.

She died in 1915. Like Anthony, she did not live to see the 19th Amendment ratified.

After her death, Levi Hutton used their fortune to establish the Hutton Settlement in the Spokane Valley, which still shelters children today.

The Washington State Women’s Political Caucus also honors Hutton’s memory through a financing effort called May’s List. Women who become members of May’s List agree to make donations that then sponsor women candidates, such as state Rep. Lisa Brown, for political office.

It mirrors, on the state level, a national women’s fund-raiser called Emily’s List.

The Inland Empire Women’s Political Caucus will sponsor the 19th Amendment Roundtable at the Davenport Hotel.

Among the 25 women who will participate in the roundtable are Kathleen Taft and Selma Clark, who were both alive on Aug. 26, 1920, when the amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution.

Taft, one of Spokane’s early woman attorneys, was living on her parents’ farm in Wheeler, Wash., at the time. She remembers her parents supporting women’s suffrage, but she recalls far more furor over Prohibition than the right to vote.

“That wouldn’t make a big hullabaloo like taking people’s hooch away from them,” she said.

Clark, who grew up to become a maid for Tom Foley’s parents and a founder of the East Central Community Center, was 4 years old at the time.

For the women in her African-American family, the lack of voting rights was linked in their minds with slavery. She listened to the talk of her aunts and relatives and concluded, “It was a wonderful idea that women had a right to vote and improve the living conditions in this country.”

Taft remembers the subjugation of women and the suffragists’ hopes.

“I think they were very optimistic that (if women got the right to vote) children would be better taken care of, that laws would be passed, that war would become less prevalent,” she said.

They were, Polek says, naive.

“For many years it didn’t make any difference politically,” she said. “Nationally, thousands of women did not suddenly go to the polls.”

Many women voted as their husbands did. Gradually, however, more women ran for public office and sponsored legislation that reflected their concerns.

Finally, in 1980, women voters outnumbered men, and candidates began to take a separate “women’s vote” seriously.

Today, the women organizing the Davenport event are worried about the national political scene.

“We’re not much in the mood to celebrate,” Polek said. “We’re in the mood to think, ‘What are we going to do?”’

She imagines that the suffragists would not be pleased.

“I think they thought they were opening a bigger door than they were,” she said.

Taft believes today’s leaders of the far right convey a subtle resentment of women’s achievements in this century. They use religion, she says, as “a method of keeping women down.”

And so the roundtable will also address federal budget-cutting in areas that affect women and children, such as breast-cancer research, day-care food subsidies, and public broadcasting.

The women will look to the early suffragists for inspiration.

Says Polek: “We want to catch some of their passion and their determination.”

The 75th anniversary of the 19th Amendment will be celebrated Saturday afternoon in the Davenport Hotel’s Elizabethan Room. First-day issues and a special stamp cancellation will be available from 1 to 4 p.m. The 19th Amendment Roundtable will be from 1 to 3 p.m. People may attend part or all of the session. Admission is free, with a donation suggested.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 6 Photos Graphic: Why women shouldn’t get the right to vote