Category: Progressive Era: 1900-1920

Woman Suffrage Headquarters 1912 on Euclid Avenue, Cleveland

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How Cleveland Women Got the Vote – and What They Did with It
By Marian Morton

“CROWDS APPLAUD WOMEN IN PAGEANT FOR BALLOT,” cried the Cleveland Plain Dealer headlines on October 4, 1914: “Shoulder to shoulder were society leaders and women, young and old, who gain their livelihood from work in shops and offices,” marching together for an amendment to the Ohio Constitution that would enfranchise Ohio women. Photographs of the crowd – an estimated 10,000 women from 64 Ohio cities and counties and some 400 men on foot, on horseback and on an enormous float – accompanied the story. Mayor Newton D. Baker looked on proudly as his wife and two children walked alongside professional women, Hungarian and Polish women, and women in education. “Awe-Stricken cynics are silent as they View Mammoth Parade,” the newspaper claimed.[1] On that October morning, votes for Ohio women looked like a sure thing. But it wasn’t: the amendment failed. Not until 1920, did Ohio women – and all American women – get the vote with the passage of the Nineteenth (Suffrage) Amendment to the federal constitution. Nevertheless, the suffragists’ fight and final victory enlivened Cleveland politics for a quarter of a century and changed it forever.

Women suffrage was hardly a novel idea in Ohio. American women first demanded the vote at a woman’s rights convention in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York. (The convention site is now a museum in the Seneca Falls Heritage Area.) The second and third woman’s rights conventions were held in Salem, Ohio, in 1850 and in Akron in 1851. In the post-Civil War period two suffrage organizations were founded, the American Woman Suffrage Association, established in Cleveland in 1869, and the National Woman Suffrage Association; in 1890, the two merged as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). From 1871 to 1876, a handful of courageous women in South Newbury, Ohio, cast their votes in state, local, and presidential elections but were rejected each time, the “judges saying that they feared trouble would be the result” if the votes were counted. [2] Woman suffrage amendments to the Ohio Constitution were defeated by the Ohio General Assembly in 1888, 1890, and 1891; in 1894, Ohio women did get the right to vote for and serve on school boards. [3]

In the next decades, women’s opportunities expanded. Growing numbers got an education; a privileged few went to college. They entered the workforce, most in industry or offices, and a handful in medicine, law, and more typically, teaching, social work, and librarianship. Women entered the public arena through the backdoor of charitable and reform activities. A good example was the Consumers League of Ohio (CLO), founded in Cleveland in 1900, the local branch of the National Consumers League. Its goal was to ensure that women and children worked under decent conditions and got paid decent wages. The league urged its members and the public to boycott shops and factories that exploited workers, but league members quickly learned that votes for women would be more effective than consumer boycotts.

In 1910, Cleveland women formally organized for suffrage, energized by seasoned suffragist Elizabeth Hauser, who was also Tom L. Johnson’s secretary and his collaborator in his autobiography My Story. CLO officers like Belle Sherwin and Marie Jenney Howe quickly joined the Cleveland Woman Suffrage Association, which launched an effort to sign up new members and elect delegates in favor of suffrage to the 1912 Ohio constitutional convention.

Sherwin was a founder and the first president the CLO. The daughter of Henry Sherwin, the founder of the Sherwin Williams Company, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Wellesley College, then spent a year studying history at Oxford University, before returning to Cleveland. The CLO led her into other welfare organizations, including the Public Health Nursing Association and the Federation for Charity and Philanthropy. Sherwin claimed that she had to overcome her “natural shrinking from publicity” [1] when she joined the new suffrage organization.

Cleveland men organized the Men’s Equal Suffrage League in 1911. Distinguished members included the Rev. Harris R. Cooley, Newton D. Baker, and Peter Witt, all former members of Tom L. Johnson’s cabinet, and Charles F. Thwing, president of Western Reserve University.

Women asked for the vote on the grounds that as citizens and taxpayers, they were equal to men and deserved equal rights; like the American Revolutionaries, suffragists argued that they should not be taxed unless they were represented – by themselves, not by husbands, brothers, or fathers. Suffragists also argued for the vote on the grounds that they were different from men, especially equipped by nature and nurture to clean up politics, as they might tidy up their own homes, or to use political power to care for others, as they might care for their families. Some suffragists made the first argument; some, the second, and some made both. The contradictions between the two arguments did not bother most suffragists. Newton D. Baker made an argument about simple fairness: “Democracy itself is involved in this question …. It is wrong that one-half of the people, men, should alone make the laws by which both men and women are governed.” [2]

Cleveland suffrage leaders were generally well educated, middle- and upper-class women. Their visits, luncheons, and parties were often described in the society columns of Cleveland newspapers. Their social status guaranteed that their unconventional political activities would make headlines too: “Whizz in Autos” and “Suffragists Best Anti [Suffragists] in Skirmish,” exclaimed the Cleveland Plain Dealer. [3] Yet they had political savvy enough to seek support from working women, distributing leaflets and speaking in local shops and factories and enlisting workers to march in suffrage parades.

The suffrage issue also entered local politics. In the 1911 mayoral election, Baker endorsed suffrage. His opponent, Republican Frank G. Hogen, dodged the issue, maintaining – illogically –that woman suffrage was “not intimately related to the municipal government of Cleveland.” [4]

In the 1911-1912 campaign to amend the Ohio constitution, suffragists risked public scorn and personal humiliation by speaking on soap boxes in open air venues. Forty suffragists and members of the press, including cub reporter and future editor of the Cleveland Press, Louis Seltzer, rode a private trolley through northeastern Ohio, braving shouts from the crowd that they should “stay at home.” [5] Belle Sherwin apparently overcame her natural timidity and spoke in towns throughout the region.

Suffragists collected enough signatures to ensure a referendum in 1912 that would enfranchise women by changing the words that described a voter as a “white male” to “every citizen.” Suffragists’ hopes were high: Ohio was the first state east of the Mississippi to vote on universal suffrage; “these suffragists were the first ‘nice women’ to wave flags and carry banners … the first to make soap-box speeches.” But to their sorrow, the 1912 referendum failed by 87,455 votes.[6]

And despite the splendid parade two years later, the 1914 referendum also lost – and by an even greater margin.

Suffragists blamed their defeats on well-financed “liquor interests,” who bought politicians’ support to ensure that enfranchised women would not vote saloons and distilleries out of business. Although the Cleveland suffrage organization tried to distance itself from the temperance cause, the reality was that many women – and organizations like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union – joined the suffrage movement because they did want to vote saloons and distilleries out of business. (This was accomplished in 1918 by the Nineteenth Amendment even before women got the vote.)

But the most visible opponents of woman suffrage were other women, who organized in Cleveland in 1912. Their own social status notwithstanding, suffragists described the “antis” as snobbish elitists:“ The homes along Euclid Avenue are, for the most part, strongholds of the Anti-Suffragists.” [1] Anti-suffragists maintained that most women didn’t want the vote, pointing out that few actually voted in school elections: “the duty of the vote should not be thrust upon the home-loving woman.” Moreover, giving women the vote would put power “into the hands of women agitators, women Socialists, and undesirables who want police protection.” [2] Mrs. Avery M. Elroy, president of the Cleveland Council of Women, told a group of clubwomen: “Sometime within the next hundred years women will vote. I don’t believe in being in too great a hurry …. [T]here are more important things than voting. Family happiness is one,” she maintained, and family happiness would be undermined if husband and wife disagreed about politics. [3] Not far below the surface of the anti-suffrage arguments were widely shared fears that enfranchising women would make them equal partners in marriage, leading to divorce and\or the end of the family as most Americans knew it. Some of the most progressive of Progressive reformers were not enthusiastic supporters of woman suffrage, at least not at first. Tom L. Johnson became a convert only after he was challenged by Marie Jenney Howe, the wife of Johnson’s adviser and friend, Frederic C. Howe: “”Mr. Johnson, ‘“ she asked, “’ you who are democratic in everything else, why are not you not democratic about women?’” [4] Johnson didn’t have a good answer. (In 1907, Johnson was a featured speaker at an Ohio Suffrage Association meeting in Youngstown.) [5]Howe himself confessed: ‘I spoke for woman’s suffrage without much wanting it. And I urged freedom for women without liking it.” [6]

In addition, suffragists were always short on money to combat “the wealthy Anti-Suffragists and the powerful whiskey interests;” they didn’t have jobs outside the home and didn’t want to ask their husbands for money. Consequently, they staged lively, well-publicized fund-raisers: an outdoor garden fair with interpretive dancing, a lunch kitchen, a bazaar, an elaborate suffrage pageant. [7]

Undeterred by their defeats in 1912 and 1914, Cleveland suffragists sought to disprove the opposition’s arguments that women didn’t want the vote by urging women to vote in the upcoming school board election; suffragists answered their phones “Votes for Women” instead of “Hello,” and Belle Sherwin “in the Sherwin electric [car]” made sure suffrage billboards were in place all over Cleveland. [8]

Suffragists also decided to pursue the vote at the local level. East Cleveland voters adopted a new charter that allowed women to vote in municipal elections in 1916. When the charter provision was challenged by the county Board of elections, the Cleveland Woman Suffrage League initiated a taxpayers’ suit. In April 1917, the Ohio Supreme Court decided in the league’s favor. Lakewood women got the right to vote in municipal elections shortly afterwards.