Appalachian History

On March 10, 1920, the West Virginia Legislature passed a joint resolution ratifying the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution giving women the right to vote.

The original constitution of Virginia allowed only white men who owned property to vote. The property qualification was dropped in the revised 1850 constitution. When West Virginia joined the Union in 1863, its constitution provided for the same voting privileges as Virginia's. With the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1870, black men were granted the right to vote, although local laws often prevented them from actually voting.

Women's Suffrage League, West Virginia University, 1920

Historian Anne Wallace Effland dates West Virginia's suffrage movement to the formation of the West Virginia Equal Suffrage Association (WVSEA) in Grafton in 1895, which combined nine smaller clubs into a statewide organization. Within the first year, seven of the nine clubs were dissolved.

In addition to suffrage organizations, other women's groups played an active role in campaigning for a woman's right to vote. Groups such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), which lobbied to prohibit the sale and consumption of alcohol also advocated women's voting rights. The WCTU believed women would elect more virtuous public officials and vote to ban the sale of alcohol, considered to be the source of many domestic problems.

Effland suggests a second wave of interest in suffrage in West Virginia began around 1905. By 1915, suffragists pressured the West Virginia Legislature to such an extent that a referendum of the state's voters was authorized. In November 1916, the all-male electorate decisively rejected women's suffrage. During the World War I years of 1917 and 1918, many suffragists adopted a different strategy. Their support of the war effort was ample proof of their patriotism.

After the war, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was proposed, giving the vote to women. The Constitution requires three-fourths of all states to approve a constitutional amendment before it becomes a law. In February 1920, the West Virginia Legislature met in special session and was lobbied heavily by the state's suffragists, led by Lenna Lowe Yost.

On March 3, the House voted for the amendment. In a fifteen to fourteen vote on March 10, the state Senate made West Virginia the thirty-fourth of the thirty-six states needed to ratify the amendment. That summer, Yost became the first woman to chair a major party convention at the Republican National Convention, which nominated Warren G. Harding for president.


source: www.wvculture.org/history/thisdayinwvhistory/0310.html



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"Bullets and ballots are not companions;" said Lizzie French in a famous 1912 speech to the Tenneesee Bar Association, "but ballots in the hands of people are supposed to be a substitute for bullets in the hands of hired agents...Thanks be to God that in giving women the crown of motherhood he made her the giver not the taker of life. Woman has no greater claim to the rights of the ballot than she is a producer not a destroyer of life."

Elizabeth Crozier French, born this date in 1851, was at the time the recently elected president of the Tennessee Equal Suffrage Association, Inc. When the first woman in Tennessee history to address the organization took the podium, she delivered what many scholars believe today was one of her greatest messages stating her position on the state’s law forbidding women from voting. French was never one to sit still, and knew her best strategy as president of the state's suffrage organization would be to take her message straight to the Tennessee Bar Association.

As the daughter of an attorney and an out-spoken leader in the women's movement, French wasn't at all intimidated by the men seated in front of her. Her speech was put into the record of the Tennessee Bar Association as an "Address on Women’s Rights" and became a much quoted theme in the South's growing number of suffrage groups. French continued her work in Knoxville founding and serving as president of the Knoxville Equal Suffrage Society and becoming a leading member of the National Women's Party.

From this speech forward, Crozier began her all-out fight to see that the Susan B. Anthony Amendment - now more than 30 years old and regarded as a dead piece of legislation in Congress - was added to the United States Constitution.

The bill and the labors of women like Lizzie Crozier French were having some impact on women's rights in America. Some states had begun giving women greater control over their property, a few had made divorce easier for those in abusive relationships, and women were slowly gaining access to the courts in their ability to sue for damages.

Finally on August 25, 1919, Tennessee certified the ratification becoming the 36th state and making the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution the law of the land giving women the right to vote.

Lizzie C. French and the Suffragists across America cheered passage of the 19th Amendment, and French joined women across Tennessee in casting their first votes that following November. In addition, French went on to help found the Knoxville chapter of the League of Women Voters.

Lizzie C. French remained an active member of the Knoxville community and made a bid for City Council in 1923, but was defeated. Three years later the 75-year-old Lizzie C. French traveled to Washington, D.C. to help the National Women’s Party furnish a room in honor of the Tennessee suffragists and also secure introduction of a bill in Congress to benefit working women in America. On May 14, 1926, while still in Washington, D.C., the Tennessean quietly passed away.

Her body was returned to her hometown in Knoxville where she was laid to rest in the City’s Old Gray Cemetery – leaving behind a legacy that is still felt to this day.


Source: www.tennesseehistory.com/class/LizzieCroz.htm


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