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



suffragists womens+suffrage appalachia +appalachian+history history+of+appalachia

Rebecca Latimer Felton, in her customary way, saw right through the political machinations that led to her officially becoming the first woman to serve in the United States Senate.

When Georgia Senator Thomas E. Watson died on September 26, 1922, Governor Thomas Hardwick appointed a replacement to serve until a special election could be held. Hardwick noted that his appointee would not actually "serve" because Congress was not in session when Watson died, and the next session would not begin until after the special election.

Hardwick himself wanted to be a senator, and he knew that the person he appointed would have a real advantage (as incumbent) in the special election. So rather than give an edge to a potential opponent, and to get on the good side of Georgia's newly enfranchised women voters (whom he had offended by opposing the Nineteenth Amendment), Hardwick appointed the eighty-seven-year-old Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835-1930) on October 3. To this day she holds the record for the oldest freshman senator to enter the Senate.

Felton sitting at the Senate Office Building desk she occupied for 24 hours.

Hardwick lost the special election two weeks later to Walter F. George. When the session opened George allowed Felton to present her credentials before he claimed his seat so that she might make history. She was sworn in at noon on November 21.

In one sense it was a meaningless, perhaps even condescending parody; Felton herself called it a “joke.” But it acknowledged her years of political activism and set the stage for women to become serious participants in the political process. Minutes after being sworn in, Felton rose to address her temporary colleagues: “Mr. President, the women of this country are going to come and sit here. There may not be very many the next few years, but in time they will come. When they do I pledge that this body will get ability, integrity and unstinted usefulness.”

The next day Senator-elect George was sworn in. Felton's term had lasted for just twenty-four hours.

Rebecca Latimer Felton is worthy of our attention for far more than this passing episode in her long life. A writer, lecturer and reformer who had a special interest in agricultural and women’s issues, she did not accept the popular belief during that time that a woman’s proper role was a housewife and instead had an active role outside the home.

As a columnist for the Atlanta Journal for twenty-eight years, Felton contributed various articles under the titles "Mrs. Felton's Timely Talks" and "The Country Home," their format being a cross between a modern "Dear Abby" and "Hints from Heloise."

Late in her life, Felton campaigned tirelessly for Progressive Era reforms. Through speeches and her writings, she helped to effect statewide prohibition and to bring an end to the convict lease system, a system of leasing cheap labor to private companies, which often maintained the convicts in substandard and even inhumane conditions. Both were achieved in 1908.

She supported the state university against its opponents—the church-affiliated colleges and those who felt that the state's limited funds should be directed toward improving public schools below the college level. In 1922 Felton received an honorary doctorate from the University of Georgia.

She also spoke out for vocational education opportunities for poor white girls in the state. Not until the early twentieth century did Felton embrace the reform with which she is most associated: women’s suffrage. She became the South's best known and most effective champion of women's right to vote. Hence the symbolic importance to Georgia’s women voters of her Senate seat appointment.

Felton published her Memoirs of Georgia Politics in 1911, Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth in 1919, and The Romantic Story of Georgia Women in 1930, shortly before her death. In her preface to Country Life in Georgia… she stated: “[The readers of Georgia’s newspapers] write to me and touch my heart, and some of them say further – ‘You have a large following in the State of Georgia who are devoted to you, especially among the rural citizens, the plain people of the State. They always feel assured you will state facts and furnish proof if your statements should be questioned.’”


Sources: www.legis.state.ga.us/legis/2005_06/house/kids/famous/rebeccafelton.htm
http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=F000069
www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-904
www.roselawnmuseum.com/history%5Cfelton.html
www.georgiawomen.org/_honorees/feltonr/index.htm



Rebecca+Latimer+Felton womens+suffrage Georgia+politics Appalachian+politics appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

"I went up to Wise that night along with my cousin and not meaning no harm,” testified Edith Maxwell at her murder trial. “Along in the evening Raymond Meade came along and said he would give me a lift back to my house in Pound. There was some more people in the car with him but we let them out down the road a piece and Raymond Meade says to me: 'Let's go to the Little Ritz and get something to eat.' "

"The Lonesome Pine Girl," accused of killing her father Trigg on July 20, 1935, attracted the attention and support of newspaper, magazine, and radio reporters, as well as women's organizations, across the United States and Canada. Her nickname is a reference to a well known 1908 John Fox novel, The Trial of the Lonesome Pine, that portrayed the lifestyle of mountain residents in a rather one-dimensional manner.

So
 popular was the tale with the American public that a third production of it--
this one in sound and color--was being filmed, with considerable publicity,
even as Edith Maxwell faced the first of two trials in the Wise County, VA courthouse.

The media coverage the case received for nearly 
two years rivaled that given to the Scopes "monkey trial" of the 1920s. By the end of Maxwell's ordeal, even Eleanor Roosevelt had gotten involved.

Why the national spotlight? The Maxwell case was a clash between modernity and tradition, between "women's rights and reason against bigotry and fanaticism.” On the side of bigotry and tradition was the "code" of the Virginia mountains, where women and children had to obey and submit to the father, even when he physically abused them.

Edith had left home for two years of teacher's college, highly unusual for a young woman of her circumstances. After attending Radford State Teachers College (later Radford University), Maxwell reluctantly returned to Pound, where she associated with the "bright young set," tested the boundaries of acceptable behavior, and became frustrated by the limitations of small-town life.

Raymond Meade tried to get her to drink some liquor, Edith continued in her November 1935 court testimony, but all she took was some potato chips and a glass of ginger ale. She told him it was getting late and she had better be starting for home because she was going blackberrying next morning. When she got home around midnight her little sister, Mary Catherine, warned her: "Your bed covers is in Pappy's room but don't go in there. He's drunk and he's going to run Ma out of the house tomorrow." But Edith went in anyhow. Pappy woke up.

'I'm goin' to whip you," he said.

"Pappy, don't you do it," said Edith.

Pappy chased her out of the bedroom and grabbed a carving knife. "Pappy, don't you cut me," said Edith.

"I'll show you I can whip you," said Pappy.

Edith fell to the floor and fumbled for a pair of old high-heeled shoes she had given her Ma. She flailed out with one of them. Pappy fell back. Edith, half-naked from the fight, caught up a covering, ran out of the house. She could hear Pappy moaning: "Jesus, Jesus, why can't a man whip his own child?" Trigg was soon dead, allegedly from the beating Edith gave him.

The prosecutor tried to show that Edith was a fast filly who had saddened her honest mountaineer father with her late hours and citified ways. But he could not shake her story of the fight. It was further corroborated by Edith’s 11-year-old sister Mary Catherine who, when twitted by the prosecutor for forgetting certain details, leaned out of the witness chair and yelled: "And you wouldn't remember so good either if you had been as scared as I was that night with Pappy a-yellin' and a-cussin' and Edith a-tryin' to outrun him!"

Edith, argued her lawyers, had exercised no more than her "God-given right of self-defense." But that did not impress the jury, which, after less than an hour's deliberation, returned a guilty verdict.

Despite expert medical testimony that Trigg's wounds could not have caused his death and that he had probably died of a stroke or heart attack, rumor and innuendo were enough to send Edith to jail for five years of a 25 year sentence.

She was pardoned by Gov. James H. Price in December 1941 – thanks, in part, to a letter written on her behalf by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Upon her release, Edith changed her name to Ann Grayson and eventually made a new life for herself in Jacksonville, Fla., after marrying Otto Abshier, the owner of an Indianapolis trucking company.

The day after Trigg Maxwell died, his wife Ann, along with their daughter, had been indicted, but never brought to trial. Was Trigg Maxwell hit by Edith? Or was it Ann? Or was he hit at all?


Sources: www.blueridgecountry.com/FavoriteArticles/EdithMaxwell_MA06/index.html
http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/VALib/v52_n2/reviews.html
www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,848229,00.html
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3686/is_199512/ai_n8723473
www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=14615437&BRD=1283&PAG=461&dept_id=158544&rfi=6



appalachia Radford+State+Teachers+College Eleanor+Roosevelt Edith+Maxwell womens+suffrage Wise+County+VA John+Fox+Jr appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

"CONGRESSMAN TOM HEFLIN'S TILT WITH WOMAN SUFFRAGE LEADER FEATURES BARBECUE"
Montgomery [AL] Daily, c. 1915

"Congressman Tom Heflin has returned to his home from Wetumpka, AL where he delivered the principal address before the crowd of several thousand gathered to participate in the big barbecue held there yesterday. The congressman is glad to be alive today, for he escaped 'whole' after having a tilt with a woman on the platform, and in the presence of that same several thousand persons. Mr. Heflin brought about a very keen situation, when he followed Mrs. Bossie O'Brien Hunley on the platform, and politely told the audience that he had not liked the speech of that lady.

"Just imagine a mere man, telling a lady to her face and before her own audience that her speech was not liked. Well, Tom Heflin did it, and got away with it. Mrs. Hundley, who is one of the suffrage leaders of the state, a very charming and a very smart woman had an important part on the program. She addressed the big audience on "women suffrage" and made an appeal that the vote he given to her sex.

"Mrs. Hundley was followed on the platform by Congressman Heflin, who is known through the state as one of the strongest anti-suffrage leaders. Mr. Heflin thinks that the woman's place is in the home, where she molds public opinion by her own sweetness of character and where she raises boys to be real men, and men who are capable of giving woman-hood every advantage and at the same time, keep her from mixing up in the mire of politics.

"Mrs. Hundley knew Mr. Heflin's views on this question, and she had at some previous time challenged him for a joint debate, but Mr. Heflin had evaded the meeting. While addresses were made by Mrs. G. H. Mathis, of Gadsden, who a month ago thrilled a Chicago audience with her rccountal of farm work in Alabama; Mrs. Thomas M. Owen; Mrs. P. L. Matthews, and Mrs. Hundley. The feature speech on the program was scheduled to be that of Congressman Tom Heflin. Mr. Heflin followed Mrs. Hundley and prefaced his remarks by saying that he had enjoyed the speeches of Mrs. Owen and Mrs. Mathis, but not enjoyed that of Mrs. Hundley, and he turned, and smiled at Mrs. Hundley.

"Mrs. Hundley bit her lips, she did not know what was coming and neither did any one else. Congressman Heflin continued and intimated that there were only a few suffrage seekers among the womanhood of Alabama and said that he had recently told a friend that he would be willing to leave the question to a vote of the women of Alabama and that if a majority of the women would show that they wanted the vote, he might waive his objections.

"He had reached this point when Mrs. Hundley interrupted and asked if the speaker would yield to a question. She did it too, in real parliamentarian manner, and Congressman Heflin, who had been interrupted time and again on the floor of congress in a like manner, but never before by a small wee voice coming from a woman, knew that he was in the middle of a bad fix, so he acquiesced and Mrs. Hundley said that surely he knew that his position was not practical and that it would be impossible to hold any such election of women and that the constitution did not provide in any way for a referendum, and that the suffrage people of Alahama wanted to have the vote given to them by the men of the state. Mr. Heflin in resuming his speech after the interruption, side-stepped Mrs. Hundley's remarks, told a witty story and extricated himself from the situation and went on with his address, but never again during his remarks did he mention woman suffrage."


source: http://snipurl.com/2617n


womens+suffrage Alabama+politicians Wetumpka+AL appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history