August 19, 2020

Remember the Ladies: Woman’s Suffrage and the Black Holes of Local History

By Alexandra Elliott

Introduction: Reexaminations of the Woman Suffrage Movement

Local historical institutions play an important role in expanding the conversation surrounding significant national events and individuals. They are often the keepers of documents and artifacts that contribute more detail to the overarching national narratives. They are also often the meeting point between academic research and the general public. These institutions put on exhibits, or host events in which new ideas are shared and the conversations about our history flourish.

However, what happens when the national conversation turns to subjects where the story was under-reported or undervalued in its own time? Historians then encounter black holes in their research from which it becomes incredibly difficult to add anything new or to focus locally on that topic.

Photograph of Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, 1900. A Massachusetts Suffrage leader, and editor of “The Woman’s Era”. From The New York Public Library.

Over the past several years, as our nation approached the Centennial, a renewed interest arose around the story of women’s suffrage. In particular, there has been an impulse to approach the history differently. Much of the early scholarship on the Suffrage Movement took Susan B. Anthony’s A History of Woman Suffrage as gospel. But her six volume opus leaves out many important details, including the significant contributions of women of color to the Movement. This new wave of scholarship seeks to give increased visibility to minority leaders in the Movement, such as Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, and Boston’s own Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin. These new studies also seek to reconcile the less honorable aspects of the Movement, such as the overt marginalization of women of color and allying with segregationist legislators, with the heroic narratives that many of us grew up hearing.

On August 18th, 2020 the nation honored the one-hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution; the Amendment which officially granted all women the legal right to vote in the United States. Of course, the reality is a great deal more complicated than this one sentence summary. The fight for women’s suffrage lasted approximately 72 years, from its canonically recognized beginnings at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, to when the Movement’s goals were finally achieved in 1920 and the federal amendment was ratified. But even so, after the Amendment’s passage, legal and cultural roadblocks were immediately thrown up to prevent women from exercising that newly won right. This was particularly true for women of color, who did not truly gain access to the ballot until 1965 when the Voting Rights Act of that year gave the Federal Government the power to protect voting rights.

This work is important and necessary to understanding who we are as a nation.

Women’s Suffrage and Local History

For local historical institutions, this reexamination of suffrage history provides an opportunity to delve into our archives and to tell the stories of the Movement from the perspective of our own communities. However, this effort is not always as simple as cracking open the old municipal records or combing through the old issues of the local newspaper. For example, in Quincy we do not yet have a strong understanding of the scope of Quincy’s involvement in the Suffrage Movement. We know the names of only a handful of the women who participated, and the Historical Society’s archive only contains one relevant document — that being a pamphlet from an Anti-Suffrage Organization meeting.

One of the other main sources for local history are newspapers. However, in Quincy’s case the Patriot-Ledger did not cover the local groups in any great detail.[i] The Ledger does reveal that Quincy’s popular Women’s Clubs and Temperance Clubs were involved in the larger state and national Suffrage Organizations. But we are rarely given any reports about what the local groups did to participate, or how suffrage was discussed in their meetings or in town generally. We do not even know how many women voted in Quincy in 1920, the first Presidential election in which they could participate.

Photograph of Adalaide A. Claflin, from “A
Woman of the Century: Fourteen
Hundred-seventy Biographical
Sketches”. F. E. Willard and M. A.
Livermore, editors. 1893

And in some cases, the information that we thought we knew turns out to be wrong, as we discovered in the case of Mabel Adams and Adelaide A. Claflin. For many years we believed that Mabel Adams, a teacher and principal of the Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, was the first woman to hold elected office in Quincy. She served as a member of the School Committee from 1895 to 1904. But recently, the research of Society board member Wayne Miller, determined that Adelaide A. Claflin was really the first woman to hold elected office in Quincy. She also served as a member of the School Committee, but from 1884-1887.

Without the benefit of the usual sources of historical information, historians of Quincy are left with large gaps in our knowledge. Right now, it is impossible to give a coherent narrative of Quincy’s involvement in the Suffrage Movement, but we can share some of the names and deeds of those we do know were involved.

Quincy Women in the Suffrage Movement

“Remember the Ladies” Abigail Adams implored her husband John in a letter from March 31, 1776, while John was serving on the committee that worked to draft the Declaration of Independence. Her letter advocated that in the new Republic, women be treated better and be given more rights than they had been under English law. She went on to say, “be more generous and favorable to them [the Ladies] than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands.” Whether she argued for women to be given the right to vote or not is a matter of much scholarly debate. However, this letter does make Abigail Adams one of the first women to advocate for women’s rights in Quincy history. She would not be the last.

The first Quincy-resident that we can tie directly to the Suffrage Movement is Adelaide A. Claflin. She was mentioned above as the first woman to hold an elected office in Quincy in 1884, but she was also well known in the Suffrage speaking circuits as a passionate and entertaining presenter. She moved to Quincy in 1870 after getting married, and quickly devoted herself to public service and to the fight for women’s suffrage. Claflin petitioned the Commonwealth of Massachusetts multiple times to pass a suffrage bill. In 1894 Claflin ultimately left public service and became a minister. Her life is also discussed in more depth in the Summer 2020 issue of the Quincy History Newsletter.

Mabel Adams was the second woman to hold elected office in Quincy in 1895. A descendant of the Presidential Adams family, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe College. Adams then went on to be a teacher at and, ultimately, the principal of the Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. She served on Quincy’s School Committee for three consecutive three-years terms.

It is worth noting that both of these women were elected in Quincy before any woman could cast a ballot in their favor.

Classroom scene with teacher Mabel Adams and students, ca. 1891. From Horace Mann School photographs, Collection 0420.047, City of Boston Archives, Boston.
Mary Parker Follett ca. 1920.

Mary Parker Follett was a social worker and political thinker, whose theories about the management of non-profit organizations drew the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt would appoint her as his personal consultant based on her ideas and expertise. Follett was born in Quincy in 1868 and stayed in the Massachusetts area for most of her life. She graduated summa cum laude from Radcliffe College in 1898, and also studied at University of Cambridge, and even applied to Harvard though it did not accept women at the time. Her works defined management as “the art of getting things done through people” and her ideas have been influential in management theory.

Mary Dewson was born in Quincy in 1874, and after graduating from Wellesley in 1897 she quickly began working in fields relevant to the advancement of women’s rights, and the minimum wage movement. Dewson then went on to participate in the Woman Suffrage Movement and even volunteered with the American Red Cross during World War I. After the war she began moving in the same circles as Eleanor Roosevelt, who recruited her for politics. Dewson’s Reporter Plan became a key information campaign in support of the New Deal, and Dewson is frequently credited with securing positions for women at all levels of government.  

One of the loudest voices that we know of in Quincy for the Suffrage Movement was Miriam N. Marsh. Marsh was born in 1889, and was a descendant of one of Quincy’s most successful families. On top of being a Suffragist, she was also a vocal champion of various charities in Quincy. Many of the contemporary articles regarding suffrage that we were able to find site Marsh in some shape-or-form. One memorable quote from the Quincy Telegram reads:

“The best way to show our patriotism is by trying to make our country a better place to live in. This means that we shall seek to make our country not the nation with the biggest commerce, or the nation with the biggest fleet, but the nation with the best government and the highest level of citizenship. All of us can be good citizens by living uprightly and obeying the laws but we cannot make our country, or our state, or our city a better place to live in unless we can elect the men who make the laws. And it is because the women are just as patriotic as the men that they are asking for the ballot, in order to have part in bringing about better social conditions.”

Miriam N. Marsh, as transcribed in the Quincy Telegram, May 10, 1915
Mary Dewson (left) and her lifelong partner Mary G. Porter (right), ca. 1925, at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. Image courtesy of Castine Historical Society.

Black Holes and Local History

A large part of the reason for the gaps in the historical record on the topic of women’s suffrage was the contemporary societal attitudes towards women and other marginalized groups (such as the poor, immigrants, and people of color). Their cares and thoughts were often not deemed important enough to report upon or to preserve. Thus their stories were neglected, leaving today’s historians with a great number of black holes in our archives and in our narratives. Historians today seek to remedy the oversight by previous generations of scholars, but the work is not easy for the reasons stated above.

As the curator for Quincy Historical Society, I frequently find myself parodying the proverb “all roads lead to Rome” when talking about Quincy’s remarkable ability to be relevant to any given event or movement in American history. When it comes to the history of the Revolution, sports, aviation, the World Wars, cinema, music, the 1918 Flu Pandemic, Temperance, fast-food, or virtually any other topic, it is remarkably easy to find a connection to Quincy itself or to a Quincy resident. But when we began researching the history of the Woman Suffrage Movement in Quincy, we were shocked to discover how little the historical record has to tell us.

I am highly incredulous that Suffrage was the one political movement in American history that Quincy just sat out. And I received some vindication of that incredulity in the last few days of researching for this article. On a whim, I typed in Miriam Marsh’s name into a database of the Patriot-Ledger and was rewarded with an entire issue from 1917, dedicated to discussing Woman Suffrage. While that issue ultimately didn’t give me any new information, it did give me a few ideas for where to look next.

Being a public historian is part-gumshoe detective work, and part-storytelling. Not only do you have to present a narrative to the public, but you also have to track down the information that you need in order to tell that story. And sometimes it just doesn’t turn up where you expect it to be. The quest for Quincy’s unique story in the Suffrage Movement is not over. Sadly, it did not reveal itself in time for the Centennial, but I have no doubt that the story will reveal itself in time.

Political cartoon from the “Patriot-Ledger” that ran on June 23rd, 1919 and heralded the ratification of the 19th Amendment in Massachusetts.

[i] Due to the COVID-19 public health emergency, I was unable to have full access to the Patriot-Ledger archives at the Thomas Crane Library. As such I was not able to check the Ledger for the period between 1910 and 1915, and specifically the months leading up to a vote in Massachusetts for a referendum on Women’s Suffrage at the State level, a referendum which ultimately failed.