Are women qualified to vote? Does it depend on what they are wearing? The West Penobscot Pomona Patrons gathered with members of the Bradford Center Independent Grange to discuss that important question a century ago.
The question, as presented by the Bangor Daily Commercial on Nov. 9, 1914, went this way: “Resolved: That women are not fitted to vote while they adopt the present style of dress.”
Women’s ever-changing dress styles, including slightly shorter, tighter skirts that inhibited movement, had become mixed up with one of the great questions of the Progressive Era.
“Mrs. Huntington believed that the woman who had such a narrow skirt that she had to be lifted into a wagon was not fit to vote,” the correspondent for the Commercial reported. Getting into a wagon, of course, was a far more important exercise a century ago than it is today.
But Mr. Farrar argued “that if a woman had to be carried to the polls she was as well able to vote sensibly as some men who could only make their mark after they had been carried to the polling places.” And by that, they meant carried because they were too drunk to walk, most likely.
Mrs. John Paine, on the other hand, thought the place for women was at home. She sided with the idea that “if there was anything men could do without the aid of a woman, he should be allowed to do it.”
A growing number of such discussions were going on in public halls in towns all over Maine and other states. That same day, a story from Orono described how 20 people at a meeting at the Universalist Church had signed up to join the Orono Equal Suffrage League, which was organizing for “active work.”
Noted suffrage advocate Florence Brooks Whitehouse had stirred up the group that night. She represented the Congressional Union, which was a bit more militant than the Maine Woman Suffrage Association.
A few evenings later in Swanville, the local grange chapter, Comet Grange, had a similar discussion with the North Waldo Pomona Grange. G. H. York argued that it was only a matter of time before women got the vote, but Veizora Nickerson said a woman’s “sphere” was in the home.
A Mr. Thompson added that women were certainly qualified to vote, but he did not believe they should take time away from their household duties. The vote that night was nearly four to one against woman suffrage, the Bangor Daily Commercial reported on Nov. 19.
That day the Bangor Daily Commercial also reported on a talk at Memorial Parlors in Bangor by anti-suffrage Mrs. O. D. Oliphant of Trenton, New Jersey, one of the foremost workers of the Anti-Suffrage Association.
Mrs. Oliphant said that only a small minority of women supported voting rights and that “the noblest work of women was rearing children and modeling the home, and in modeling the home, the country is being modeled.”
A few days later, the members of the Penobscot County Women’s Progressive Club held a meeting to discuss its activities since its founding in April, including distribution of suffrage literature at the Eastern Maine State Fair that summer.
Even though they could not vote, the women had campaigned for Progressive Party candidates in the recent election and, a spokesman said, “nothing occurred … to our knowledge that was not perfectly proper and suitable for women to take part in, and it seems to us that women of all parties should be as vitally interested in the election of law-makers,” reported the Bangor Day Commercial on Nov. 21.
Interest was picking up concerning woman’s suffrage as the decade progressed. The Bangor Daily Commercial, which evolved into an ardent opponent of the female vote, had explained the trend the year just before the Maine Legislature took up the question yet again.
“For some years the bi-annual appearance of the Maine suffragists was not regarded at all seriously; but at the last legislature, they were so numerous and prominent, they stated their cause so well and they were backed by so considerable an amount of sentiment, that everybody sat up and took notice,” stated the newspaper on Feb. 8, 1913. “There was a surprisingly large vote in favor of their cause, too, and undoubtedly this vote will increase at the present term.”
The Grange and other politically powerful groups were joining the cause assuring victory at some later date. But 1913 was to be no different than previous years as Democrats and many women continued to block the pro-vote effort.
Democrats were particularly concerned about the connection between suffrage and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Giving women the vote would probably mean that the repeal of prohibition would become much harder to accomplish.
“The Suffrage Bill Gets Death Blow,” proclaimed a Bangor Daily News headline on Mar. 13. As in past years, the bill to send the issue to voters had died in the House after passing the Senate.
Elmer Newbert, an influential state representative from Augusta and a firm anti-vote advocate summed things up succinctly: “The woman agitator who wants the ballot is the exception and not the rule among the women of Maine.”
The possibility of a limited vote, however, was something else altogether. The Bangor Daily Commercial stated its support for women’s suffrage on “school matters” in an editorial on May 13. Perhaps women who owned property should have the right to vote on other municipal affairs, too, because they paid property taxes.
The following year, Bangor aldermen tabled a request to add two women to the school board, the Bangor Daily Commercial noted on Mar. 23, 1914.
Speaking in what sounds today like an apologetic, even beggarly tone for the city’s federation of women’s clubs, Mrs. L. S. Chilcott said, “the women do not propose to go on the board to be aggressive or find fault. … We represent over 500 women of the city, and this is the only time that we have ever asked anything of you.”
Even these activist women did not like bossy women.
That July – 1914 — a Boston suffragette delivered the Fourth of July oration in Winterport. But divided as they were, on everything from dress styles to strategy, it would still be several more years before women would get the vote in Maine and many other states.
Wayne E. Reilly’s column on Bangor a century ago appears in the newspaper every other Monday. His latest book, Hidden History of Bangor: From Lumbering Days to the Progressive Era, is available where books are sold. Comments can be sent to him at wreilly.bdn@gmail.com