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Back in the mid-1800s, women's rights were weak
in many states.
Women couldn't own property, make contracts,
file for divorce, go to college or
earn their own money.
In Iowa, women were more fortunate than
those in the eastern parts of the country.
In fact, Iowa was considered to be so
progressive that in an 1867 lecture, a New York
newspaper editor named Theodore Tilton predicted
that Iowa would be the first state in the union
to achieve political equality of the sexes.
At that time, Iowa women were allowed to attend
college, inherit on equal terms with men, and
purchase property.
They were county superintendents, served on
school boards, and practiced law.
But women still weren't able to participate fully in society.
What they really wanted, and needed,
was the right to vote.
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In the 1860s, Iowa women began to build from the
ground up what would become the suffrage movement.
They formed small clubs across the state in cities
like Algona, Burlington, Monticello and Dubuque.
Through written correspondence, they encouraged other
Iowa suffrage supporters to start their own associations.
These clubs eventually built enough support that
in 1870, they convinced the state legislature to
approve an amendment that would allow women to vote.
However, by Iowa law, an amendment must pass two
consecutive sesesions of the General Assembly
before bringing it to the electorate.
This was particularly difficult because at the
time, the legislature only convened every other year.
To help coordinate efforts and keep the momentum
going, suffragists formed a statewide organization
called the Iowa Woman's Suffrage Association,
later known as the Iowa Equal Suffrage Association.
As you might imagine, it takes a lot to get all
these different people living in all these
different counties in Iowa to work together.
And so a lot of the tasks of the IESA, the Iowa
Equal Suffrage Association was coordination.
They sent a lot of letters.
They have a lot of literature, they have a
newsletter that they will produce and through the
written word, they will really try to keep people
in line and make sure that everyone's on the same
page.
Despite their efforts, during the meeting of the
General Assembly in 1872, the Women's Suffrage Amendment
was struck down in the Senate by a margin of 2 votes.
Suffragists discovered that changing the minds of
the men in their lives, especially those in power,
was just plain hard!
Woman suffrage was radical.
The idea that women could vote and what that meant,
that it signaled that women were somehow equal
on an equal playing field, on an equal plane to men,
especially in a political and legal sense, this was
disturbing to a lot of Iowans at this time.
Women were supposed to be moral guardians of the
home.
Their role was to protect their children and to take
on a public political role for many people that was
disturbing.
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Anti-suffragists desperately tried to maintain
the idea that a woman's place was in the home.
They claimed that access to the ballot wuld cause
women to abandon their families, that women
weren't smart enough to vote and that it would
make them less attractive.
Iowa suffragists, on the other hand, were
determined to change public opinion.
Across the state, they held lecutres, circulated
petitions, wrote letters and passed out literature.
Throughout their campaigns, they received
help from the National American Woman Suffrage
Association, which supplied organizers with a plethora
of flyers, leaflets and posters.
As time went on and new technologies like the
automobile arrived, their methods of campaigning expanded.
So they continue with petitions, but they also
add more direct open air meetings for example.
They take to the streets in 1908, they
have probably one of the first parades ever in the
United States.
They staged it in Boone, Iowa, where they had signs
and they walked up one of the main streets in Boone
and then at the end of the parade, Anna Howard Shaw
who's the president of the National American Woman
Suffrage Association stands atop a car and
delivers of speech for everyone assembled to
hear.
These kinds of direct action campaigns are
fantastic for getting out their messages and it does
more than just handing people a piece of paper.
What these open air meetings do, or these
automobile canvasses and parades do is force people
to reckon with what they think about women's
suffrage.
They can't turn away or they can't just drop the
sheet of paper on the floor.
They have to listen.
♪♪
Meanwhile in the Iowa state legislature,
suffragists had been caught in what Susan B.
Anthony called "a cat and mouse game" for decades.
Some years, the amendment would pass both houses
only to fail in the next session.
Other years, the amendment would pass in the House
and fail in the Senate, or vice versa.
Eventually in 1913 and then again in 1915, the
Iowa General Assembly passed the required two
consecutive bills to get women's suffrage on the ballot.
All that suffragists needed to do now was convince
a majority of Iowa's male voters to support the amendment.
By 1915, the fall of 1915, the suffragists realized
that this is a golden opportunity.
That's the one they've been waiting for for
decades.
And so they are going to pull out all the stops.
They have this extensive plan where they're going
to go into all of these townships and wards and
they're going to meet with people on their front
doors.
They're also going to have these lecturers go across
the state.
And they're going to have a number of speakers
engage with audiences.
And then in mid May of 1916 they orchestrate this
massive statewide automobile canvass where
women go out in their cars and they move away from
the small towns and they go to these more rural
hamlets and these farms and they engage with
people who may not have had those direct contacts
because they lived outside of these more predominant
urban spaces.
And so they really do the work to bring out the
suffrage message to anyone who could hear it.
There's a great quote where the suffragists say,
if someone says they haven't heard of women's
suffrage its because they weren't paying attention.
It's not because we didn't do our work.
♪♪
Victory seemed very likely.
The Iowa Governor, state politicians and
influential newspaper editors supported women's
suffrage.
The Secretary of State predicted that suffrage
would win by a 20,000 vote majority.
So it came as a surprise that on June 5, 1916, the
amendment was voted down by 10,000 votes.
It was really a slim margin and suffragists
were crushed.
They were really devastated.
They thought they had created an effective
campaign.
They thought they had done the work and they were
really bitter by the results.
So they continue their work prodding the
legislature.
And they do, because of all this work that they
had done, it really becomes pretty obvious
that people are supportive, or more
supportive of the right for women to vote. So
they do convince the legislature to support
presidential suffrage.
But really it's less of an issue because by that
point, the federal amendment was coming from
Congress. In Iowa, it really was a bigger deal
to support and ratify the 19th, what would become
the 19th amendment.
On July 2, 1919 in a special session of the
38th General Assembly, Iowa became the 10th state
to ratify the 19th Amendment.
After fighting for over 50 years, women in Iowa
finally had access to the ballot.
What they have now is the right to vote.
And that does make a huge difference in cementing or
securing the things that they could not do
beforehand.
Now they actually have a say.
They don't just influence and hope.
They can secure and control their outcomes
with I think more diligence and that's
really the important difference.
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