Winning the Vote in
Fort Wayne, Indiana
The Long, Cautious Journey in a
German American City
PEGGY SEIGEL
A
t noon on August 28, 1920, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and across the
nation, the world seemed to come to a standstill. For ten minutes
every church bell and factory whistle broadcast the revolutionary
change that had finally come to American women. The previous
January, Indiana had become the twenty-sixth state to ratify the
Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, and after a painfully close
vote in Tennessee, the required three-fourths approval had just been
achieved. After more than seventy years of struggle, women could finally vote at all levels of government. Suffrage, once a hopeless cause, now
enjoyed majority support. It was a time for celebration, confidence, and
new beginnings.
The story of Fort Wayne women’s long journey to fuller citizenship is a fascinating chapter in regional and national history. In common
with general trends, in the nineteenth century the city’s women’s rights
pioneers challenged legal and social barriers that perpetuated female
Peggy Seigel is the author of “Industrial ‘Girls’ in an Early Twentieth-Century Boomtown:
Traditions and Change in Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1900-1920,” IMH, 99 (September 2003) and
other articles on the history of Fort Wayne.
INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY, 102 (September 2006) 0 2006. Trustees of Indiana Universitv:
F O R T WAYNE WOMEN’S L O N G S T R U G G L E
inequality. In the decades bridging the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, women became more concerned with addressing problems in
their industrial city than with challenging the structures of patriarchal
society. Nevertheless, through female-only clubs they acquired new public roles and greater confidence, necessary building blocks for a future
suffrage movement. In the second decade of the twentieth century, energized by the growing state and national support of woman suffrage, club
women championed suffrage with passion and commitment.’
As in other communities, Fort Wayne women faced generations of
deep resistance. Despite the social changes that came with industrialization and rapid population growth, in the nineteenth century few
Hoosiers, indeed few Americans, supported changes in traditional gender roles. Beginning in the decade after the Civil War, however, Fort
Wayne women faced a different but equally intractable opposition.
Fearing that women would use the vote for prohibition, politicians and
business leaders representing the city’s majority German American population blocked legislative efforts and stifled popular support until the
final years leading up to the Nineteenth Amendment. The connection of
suffrage to temperance, a relationship that in other states brought
women into the political process, was highly detrimental to the growth
of the suffrage movement in Fort Wayne. With few allies in the male
power establishment, the city’s women were latecomers to the political
campaign for suffrage.
A QUEST DEFERRED: 1851-1880
Historian Blanche Glassman Hershs analysis of nineteenth-century
feminist abolitionists provides a helpful insight for understanding Fort
Wayne’s pioneer suffragists. Through their work for the liberation of
slaves, Hersh writes, feminist leaders including Abby Kelly, Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott became conscious of
their own gender limitations. Beginning in the 1840s they called on
women to pursue meaningful activities and, above all, to assert their
right to determine their own lives. The goals of the pioneer feminist abolitionists were to liberate people both in their social interactions and in
‘Historiansgenerally agree on three stages of the suffrage movement. See, for example, Stephen
M. Buechler, The Transformation of the Woman Suffrage Movement: The Case of Illinois, 18501920 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1986), 26-27.41, 183.
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I N D I A N A M A G A Z I N E OF HISTORY
their family settings. These deeply religious women believed that society
needed their “moral and spiritual influence.”2
Feminist abolitionists organized the first national women’s rights
meeting at Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848. In the following
decade, informal coordinating committees organized annual national
conventions that were largely publicized in antislavery newspapers. On
the state level, women’s rights leaders formed associations in New York,
Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and farther west in Ohio and Indiana. At
both the national and state levels, these pioneers championed broad
political, social, and economic changes for women, including the right
to vote. Prior to the Civil War, however, these groups met irregularly and
often remained informally organized.
Fort Wayne’s earliest suffragists were among the converts to this
emerging movement. Like their better-known eastern sisters, they were
universal reformers who championed the major reform causes of the
mid-nineteenth century-abolition of slavery, temperance, and women’s
rights. Many had grown up in the leading antislavery centers of the
Midwest nurtured by Quaker feminism, utopian beliefs, and a common
sense of woman’s m i ~ s i o nIn
. ~ October 1851, only three years after the
Seneca Falls meeting, pioneer reformers organized the Indiana Women’s
Rights Association (WRA) in Dublin, Wayne County, and adopted the
ideology and goals of the earlier convention. Resolutions affirmed that
“all customs, laws and institutions” should afford men and women equal
“social and mental improvement”; that men and women should share
equal responsibilities “for creating and administering the social, civil
and religious institutions under which they are to live”; and that women
should free themselves from “the domestic, social, pecuniary, educational, religious and political disabilities” that oppressed them. Reformers
also pledged to “throw off the bondage” of current fashions and “adopt a
style of dress more in accordance with r e a ~ o n . ” ~
’Blanche Glassman Hersh, The Slavery of Sex: Feminist Abolitionists in America (Urbana, Ill.,
1978), ix, 9 , 4 5 , 57, 133.
’Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage; The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement
in America, 1848-1869 (Ithaca, N. Y., 19781, 51.
’Hersh, Slavery of Sex, 167.
’[Salem, Ohio] Anti-Slavery Bugle, November 8 , 1851; “Proceedings of the Women’s Rights
Association of Indiana, 1851-1859” and “Proceedings of the Women’s Rights Association of
Indiana, 1869-1881 ,” Indiana State Library (Indianapolis, Indiana); “Women’s Rights
Convention,” [Centenille, Indiana] True Democrat, October 23, 1851.
F O R T WAYNE W O M E N ’ S LONG STRUGGLE
Newcomers to the Fort Wayne area had issued the call for the historic meeting and were among the 170 founding members of the Indiana
WRA. Several women were charged with forming a local organization in
their rural Aboite Township neighborhood, but no evidence suggests
that such an organization existed before the Civil War. Two leaders in
particular, Mary Frame Thomas and Beulah Puckett Ninde, nevertheless
brought the issue of women’s equality to public attention.6
Unable to attend the first WRA meeting, Mary Thomas wrote to
the participants expressing her hopes for the new movement. “The elevation of Woman to the position of equal privileges with Man socially,
religiously, civilly, and educationally,” she insisted, was “essential to the
happiness and progression of the race.” Thomas was likely also the
author of two forceful letters signed “Eliza,” published in the Fort Wayne
Times in December 1851. The writer argued that those who assign
“woman certain prescribed limits, as her sphere of action,” who believe
that her intelligence is less than man’s, and who limit her to being a
social ornament, express views held by “savages, the uncultivated, and
untutored. . . . The doctrine of female imbecility is without foundation.”
The following week a correspondent identified as “Orlando” countered
with the conventional view that women should be “unentangled with
the intricacies of political government, and shielded from its contaminating influence; well educated; and fully qualified for adorning society.” Furthermore, “Orlando” insisted, [nlearly all agree that they
[women] are now in the full enjoyment of all their legitimate rights.” In
reply, “Eliza” again stressed the fundamental injustices of woman’s position in American society: “Men may boast of their republican and happy
institutions, but in respect to women they are oppressive and unjust.
“
“ary Frame Thomas (1816-1888) and Henry P. Ninde (1827-1884), members of the ultra-libera1 Congregational Friends, joined in calling for the first meeting of the Indiana WRA. Beulah
Puckett Ninde (1826-1892) signed the official list of charter members. Charged with organizing meetings in their township were Mary Thomas, her husband Owen (1816-1886), and their
neighbor Rhoda Ninde Swain (1818-1895). Anti-Slavery Bugle, October 4, 1851; “Proceedings
of the WRA of Indiana, 1851-1881”; Thomas D. Hamm, Cod’s Government Begun: The Society
for Universal Inquiry and Reform, 1842-1846 (Bloomington, Ind., 19951, 104-105, 217; Peggy
Seigel, “Who’s Hiding in Our Basements? Abolitionists and the Underground Railroad in Allen
County, Indiana Reconsidered,” Old Fort News 66 (No. 2, 2003), 10; Seigel, “Moral Champions
and Public Pathfinders: Antebellum Quaker Women in Eastcentral Indiana,” Quaker History,
81 (Fall 1992), 87-106.
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I N D I A N A M A G A Z I N E OF HISTORY
The right to exercise the elective franchise, and hold property, as naturally belongs to women as to men.”’
Thomas’s commitment to establishing a career as a physician, however, delayed her involvement in women’s rights organizations. Soon
after moving to rural Aboite Township in 1850, she began medical study
under her husband Owen. In the spring of 1854 Mary and Owen opened
a joint medical practice in Fort Wayne, with Mary specializing in the
treatment of women and children. Intermittently,she studied at Western
Reserve College in Cleveland and Penn Medical University in
Philadelphia. Following graduation from Penn in 1856, Mary Thomas
and her family moved to Richmond, Indiana, seeking a community more
supportive of female physicians. The next year, Thomas accepted the
presidency of the Indiana WRA, a position she held for many years.8
By nature, Beulah Ninde seemed less inclined than Mary Thomas
to take on a public voice, making her participation harder to trace. In
addition, health concerns-the loss of twins in childbirth in 1852 and a
pregnancy in the spring of 1854-likely delayed her participation in
reform activities. Nevertheless, in the decade before the Civil War, Ninde
maintained ties to the Indiana WRA, serving as an officer in 1856 and
1857, and remained active in temperance reform.
Ninde became known as a leader in the Ladies’ Temperance
Alliance, formed in the spring of 1854 as an auxiliary to the all-male
Allen County Liquor Law Alliance. Such an organization represented a
new assertiveness, as Fort Wayne women exercised their right to support legislation then pending before the state General Assembly. The
group published its constitution in the local newspaper, openly declaring its moral concerns. Pseudonymous letters published in local newspapers (and probably written by Beulah or her husband Lindley) also
voiced support for woman’s right to enter the public sphere. The
‘The most concise biography is Clifton J. Phillips, “Mary Frame Myers Thomas” in Edward T.
James,ed., Notable American Women 1607-1950: A Biographical Dictionary (3 vols., Cambridge,
Mass., 1971), 3:450-51;Anti-Slavery Bugle, November 29, 1851; Fort Wayne Times, December
11, 18,25, 1851.
*MaryThomas’s two younger stepsisters,Hannah Longshore and Jane Viola Myers, were among
the first graduates of the Female Medical College of Philadelphia in the early 1850s. Fort Wayne
Standard, June 1, 1854; Frederick C. Waite, “The Three Myers Sisters-Pioneer Women
Physicians,”Medical Review of Reviews, 39 (March 1933), 114-19; George Mather, Frontier
Faith: The Story of the Pioneer Congregations of Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1820-1860 (Fort Wayne,
Ind., 1992). 156-57.
FORT WAYNE W O M E N ’ S L O N G S T R U G G L E
temperance advocate “Scrutator” wrote to the Fort Wayne Sentinel that
women had the right to improve their “groggery-cursed city” and thus
should have the right to vote: “It is to be hoped that the time will soon
come, when false notions of propriety shall no longer restrain [woman’s]
voice from being heard through the ballot box,” the writer argued. “In
behalf of the cause of temperance no one has a greater right to speak
than woman. She in fact is the sufferer. The evil concentrates on her.”
Resisting controversial tactics used by Winchester, Indiana, women in
the so-called “Whiskey Riot” during the summer of 1854, Ninde and
other local temperance reformers employed traditional female strategies
of writing letters, circulating tracts, and boycotting merchants who sold
alcohol.’
As temperance initiatives met stiff resistance, men and women
together organized Grand Templar lodges. Pledging to elevate “the
moral sentiment of this community and the world,” they also promised
to cure those afflicted with alcoholism and help their families. What was
new to Fort Wayne in both the organization and governance of these
lodges was the unusual degree to which men and women shared leadership responsibilities. Within a few months of its founding in late 1859,
for example, the Washington Lodge grew to eighty members. Four of its
nine officers were women; Beulah Ninde was named the first vice-president. A second local temperance organization, the Total Abstinence
Lodge, listed fifteen officers, eight of whom were women.l0
‘Fort Wayne Standard, June 8, 15, 1854; “Proceedings of the WRA of Indiana, 1851-1859”;
Ninde family information, Family Search Ancestral File v4. 19, on www.familysearch.com.
Amanda Way, a pioneer suffragist and agent for the Underground Railroad, was one of the leaders of the Winchester “Whiskey Riot.” Temperance women in Winchester, Indiana, had
demanded that merchants pledge to not sell liquor. When this tactic was unsuccessful, a group
of women broke open and emptied kegs of alcohol. Arrested and tried in Randolph County
Common Pleas Court, they were found innocent. Letter from Amanda Way to L. M. Ninde, July
28, 1854 in Fort Wayne Standard, September 14,1854.
1°Dawson5Fort Wayne Daily Times, February 3, 7, 1860. The shared leadership in Fort Wayne’s
temperance societies on the eve of the Civil War challenges Ruth Bordin’s finding that
“[wlomen made up a substantial proportion of antebellum temperance adherents, but they
were not among the leaders.” Ruth Bordin, Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and
Liberty, 1873-1900 (Philadelphia, 1981), 4.
The Independent Order of Grand Templars was founded in 1851 and spread rapidly across
Indiana and other midwestern states. The organization appealed to women’s rights leaders
because women were recognized as equals in the group’s structure. Amanda Way was elected to
the highest offices in Indiana’s antebellum organization. Jack 5. Blocker, American Temperance
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I N D I A N A M A G A Z I N E OF HISTORY
While feminists found an avenue for promoting women’s rights in
temperance reform, the separate women’s rights movement remained
highly controversial. Annual meetings of the Indiana WRA occasionally
drew large audiences and prominent national speakers, but on the eve of
the Civil War, there was little local support. This became particularly
evident in January 1859, when Thomas and two other women presented
a petition to the Indiana General Assembly calling for equal property
rights for married women and for suffrage. Disregarding the signatures
of more than one thousand Indiana men and women, a Fort Wayne
newspaper expressed outrage over the initiative, undertaken by “three
crazy women” whose husbands, for tolerating such “he-male’’ action,
were “surely under petticoat government.””
Once the Civil War began, Fort Wayne women took on a variety of
public responsibilities to meet wartime demands. Working through soldiers’ aid societies, women organized fundraisers, made and collected
badly needed supplies, and cared for sick and impoverished families of
soldiers. Facing financial hardships, many women took on roles as family provider. The crucial need for medical care in military hospitals and
camps also opened new opportunities for women nurses.’*
After the war, Beulah and Lindley Ninde renewed efforts to build a
women’s rights movement in Fort Wayne. With Thomas and some twenty others, the Nindes called a statewide meeting in Indianapolis in June
1869. In March 1871, the Nindes and other local supporters organized
an Allen County suffrage ~0ciety.l~
Movements (Boston, 1989), 51; “Reminiscencesby Dr. Mary E Thomas and Amanda M. Way,”
in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman
Suffrage, Vol. 1: 1848-1861 (3 vols., New York, 1881), 308,311.
“Pat Creech Scholten, “A Public Jollification’: The 1859 Women’s Rights Petition before the
Indiana Legislature,” Indiana Magazine of History, 72 (December 1976), 347-59; Fort Wayne
Times, January 27, 1859; “Proceedings of the Women’s Rights Association of Indiana, 18511859.”
”Examples of Fort Wayne women who assumed new wartime roles are Elizabeth Bass and her
mother, Eliza George. Following the loss of her husband, Col. Sion Bass of the 30th Indiana
Volunteer Regiment at the battle of Shiloh, April 1862, Elizabeth advertised her services as a
milliner to support her two small children. Her mother served as a military nurse for over three
years. Peggy Seigel, “She Went to War: Indiana Women Nurses in the Civil War,” Indiana
Magazine of History, 96 (March 1990), 20-22; Seigel, “Eliza George, Fort Wayne’s Civil War
Heroine: Public Praise and Personal Letters,” Old Fort News, 62 (No. 1, 1999), 13-37; Dawsonk
Daily Times and Union, February 23, 1862; Fort Wayne Daily Gazette, August 2, 1864.
13ElizabethCady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman
Suffrage, Vol. 3: 1876-1885 (3 vols., Rochester, N.Y., 1886), 533-34.
F O R T WAYNE W O M E N ’ S L O N G S T R U G G L E
Lindley Ninde
Lindley and Beulah Ninde were among the earliest supporters of
Fort Wayne’s suffrage society, founded in 1871.
Courtesy of the Allen County-Fort Wayne History Center
On hand for the organizing convention in Fort Wayne were the
foremost women’s rights leaders from Illinois and Michigan. Catharine
W. Waite, president of the Illinois Woman Suffrage Association, was a
lawyer and journalist, and had been a key organizer for Chicago
and Illinois woman suffrage conventions in 1868. Her husband,
Charles B. Waite, a prominent Chicago attorney and judge, was another
founder of the Illinois Suffrage Association, and had successfully lobbied
the Illinois Legislature in 1869 for the right of women to their own earnings. Adelle Hazlett of Hillsdale, Michigan, the president of the recently
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I N D I A N A M A G A Z I N E OF HISTORY
organized North Western Woman Suffrage Association, was praised as
being “as sharp as a steel trap” and able to keep “her audience spellbound by her el~quence.”‘~
For two days, speakers supported resolutions affirming the right of
married women to make contracts, own property, and control their own
earnings. Echoing arguments made twenty years earlier, women’s rights
supporters affirmed that enlarging woman’s sphere of influence would
serve “the true interests of the Government, the Church, and the
Family.” They saw suffrage as a means to correct “all the wrongs women
now suffer as a class.”
Claiming the expertise of twenty years of legal practice, Lindley
Ninde called woman’s current legal status “unnatural” and the principal
of unequal treatment “at variance with every demand of morality and
justice.” Catharine Waite and Hazlett stressed the need for equal opportunities for women, including the means to support themselves, at the
same time acknowledging woman’s traditional domestic role. [ U] ntil
the time shall come that woman can enjoy the same privilege [as men]
we cannot have a republic in fact as well as in deed,” Waite said. The
greatest curse of our nation was “the aristocracy of sex.” Assuring her
audience that voting would not interfere with women’s duties at home,
she stressed the urgency of national housekeeping, which “will never be
prope.rly performed until there is a more complete blending of the duties
and influence of men and ~ o m e n . ” ’ ~
On the second day, the convention elected officers and drew up a
constitution for an Allen County suffrage association. Not surprisingly,
Beulah Ninde was chosen president. Most of the officers were women,
but Robert McNiece, associate editor of the Daily Gazette, and Lindley
Ninde, were appointed as well.
The leaders had anticipated deep resistance, for as Hazlett
expressed in her opening remarks, Fort Wayne frequently gave the
impression of being “too much asleep to a question of such vital impor“
I‘Dorothy Thomas, “CatharineVan Valkenburg Waite,”in Notable American Women 1607-1950,
3:523-25; Buechler, Transformation of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 67-71; History of Woman
Suffrage, 3564, 569-70; Fort Wayne Daily Gazette, March 15, 1871.
“Fort Wayne Daily Gazette, March 16, 17, 1871. There is no direct reference to temperance in
the newspaper account, but it is likely that local activistJunia Aveline spoke about the importance of suffrage for temperance reform: “Mrs. Aveline made a short address decidedly practical, and those who have passed through the trials and oppressions that were there portrayed,
can not consistently withhold their support from this question.”
F O R T WAYNE W O M E N ’ S L O N G S T R U G G L E
tance as that of Woman Suffrage.” Attendance, however, remained “very
large notwithstanding the rainy weather.” Seventy people signed the
charter as members. The Daily Gazette optimistically concluded that
“[tlhe convention, as a whole, has been a decided success.” Yet in the
next day’s newspaper, McNiece also stressed the deep community resistance. “[Elstablished custom is a hard thing to fight,” he wrote. “The
error has to be hammered into the ears of the people a long time before
they can comprehend it.”16
Two years later, in February 1873, three of the most dynamic
women of the day lectured to Fort Wayne audiences, generating interest,
if not support, for the fledgling suffrage movement. Speaking before
packed auditoriums, Mary Livermore, Anna Dickenson, and Susan B.
Anthony charmed their audiences with addresses described as “fascinating,” “very instructive,” “brave and truthful.” In a speech that she would
deliver hundreds of times-“What
Shall We Do With Our
Daughters?”-Livermore urged girls to be self-reliant, healthy, and welleducated. Provoking frequent applause, Dickenson bluntly urged
women to strive for greatness and not to settle for low-payingjobs. “Let
women undergo the same training and she will fare the same as men,”
she said. Anthony gave “a compact legal and constitutional argument for
voting in the recent presidential election which would have done credit
to the best lawyers in the city.” The speakers’ challenges apparently provoked little public debate.”
During the same weeks in 1873, opposition to temperance surfaced as never before, revealing the growing city’s deep German
American roots. Temperance supporters had recently scored a statewide
victory with the General Assembly’s passage of the Baxter Bill, which
closed down local unlicensed saloons (estimated to number well over
200 in Fort Wayne) and made saloon owners liable for damages inflicted
by their drunken patrons. German Americans, now comprising more
than one-fourth of the city’s population, hailed John Sarnighausen,state
senator from Allen County, as a hero for opposing the new law, and
struck a general posture of defiance.18
I6FortWayne Daily Gazette, March 15, 16, 17, 1871.
”To date, 1 have uncovered no evidence that the group met between the 1871 organizing convention and these 1873 lectures.Buechler, Transformation of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 66;
Fort Wayne Gazette, February 14,26,1873; Fort Wayne Sentinel, February 21, 1873.
18FortWayne Gazette, February 26, March 12, 1873. Soon after moving to Fort Wayne in 1862,
Sarnighausen became editor and part owner of the Staats Zeitung. He worked as a teacher and
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John D. Sarnighausen, 1876
As state senator from Allen County,
Sarnighausen was a leader of local
German American opposition to the
temperance movement.
Illustrated Historical Atlas of the State of Indiana (Chicago, 1876)
In the spring of 1874, the association of many local temperance
leaders with the suffrage movement dealt a huge blow to the latter’s public viability. The week before the annual meeting of the Indiana WRA,
the Fort Wayne Ladies’ Union led a conference of northern Indiana temperance supporters at First Presbyterian Church. Official business
included selection of delegates, both women and men, to attend the
upcoming statewide convention in Indianapolis. Attendees were also
minister, and from 1873 to 1879 was elected to four terms in the Indiana Senate. Rebecca A.
Shepherd et al., eds., A Biographical Directory ofthe Indiana General Assembly: Vol. 1, 1816-1899
(Indianapolis, 1980), 344.
F O R T WAYNE W O M E N ’ S L O N G STRUGGLE
enthusiastically invited by Rev. Abijah Marine, pastor of Fort Wayne’s
Berry Street Methodist Church, to attend the woman’s suffrage convention the following week in Fort Wayne.”
Almost simultaneously, however, the German American community charged Marine with having slandered “a certain class of Germans” in
a recent out-of-town speech. Mayor Zollinger, Sarnighausen, and other
leaders of the German community, as well as over 500 local citizens,
called for Marine to appear before “an indignation meeting” to explain
himself. Despite efforts to make peace, Marine became the target of heated charges. The local Democratic newspaper, the Sentinel, described him
as “a strenuous advocate of the temperance cause, and likewise of
woman suffrage.” At the “mass meeting,” a prominent German
American expressed the fear of many of his fellow immigrants, charging
that Marine and other temperance supporters wanted “to get woman
suffrage and ‘abolish all foreigners’ and possess themselves of their property.” The deep and bitter battle between liquor interests and suffragists
that would be played out in Fort Wayne and across the country for
another forty years had begun.20
The conflict probably contributed to the somber mood and low
attendance that marked the state women’s rights meeting at the end of
May. Hoping to distance themselves from the temperance issue, attendees voted down resolutions urging women suffrage supporters to back
political candidates who were “avowed friends of temperance” and committed to “giving the ballot to women.” Newspaper reports instead
recorded “strong and sensible” speeches on behalf of woman suffrage
delivered by featured speakers. “[Wlomen have right and justice on
their side [so] that it will be impossible to resist the movement which
has been inaugurated,” McNiece argued. As she had three years earlier,
Hazlett gave “a rousing speech” that stressed the injustice of denying
half of the population “the inalienable right of suffrage.” Progress was
now being made, she said, as shown by the Michigan legislature’s recent
vote to submit a revised state constitution, which would allow woman
suffrage.
Few others at the meeting shared the speakers’ enthusiasm.
Resolutions offered no clear action for gaining suffrage. Soon after the
”Fort Wayne Daily Sentinel,May 20, 22, 1874.
’Tbid., June 1, 2 , 4 , 1874.
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close of the convention, a carefully argued appeal for woman suffrage,
“The Unfairness of its Opponents,” appeared in the Fort Wayne News.
The local Democratic newspaper, the Weekly Sentinel, quickly smothered
hope for rational dialogue. “That woman will give her support to the
temperance cause cannot for a moment be doubted, but it will be such
misdirected and wrong headed support as will tend to promote and
expand the very evil which is to be removed.” Furthermore, the Sentinel’s
editor charged, “The strongest argument against woman suffrage . . . is
that woman is not possessed of good judgement.” Referring to the moral
zeal of temperance crusaders, the Sentinel further criticized the “tendency among the ladies of the woman suffrage reform to square everything
by the rule of moral equity.” For the time being, popular opinion in Fort
Wayne likely confirmed the editor’s opinion that “both sexes [were] for
the most part entirely indifferent to the whole question.”21
Another underlying, often unstated, objection to woman suffrage
was the expectation that woman’s place was in the home and that this
would be undermined by the goals of the woman’s rights movement. On
the national level this debate was being played out in Anthony’s failure
to gain backing from labor leaders. Working-class men, threatened by
possible competition in the workplace, rejected Anthony’s appeals for
woman’s right to support herself. Furthermore, within German workingclass family traditions, women in particular were sharply defined in
terms of family responsibilities. Suffrage and women’s rights ran counter
to deep social and religious traditions that placed women in a subservient relationship to men.22
Despite its obvious unpopularity, the women’s temperance crusade
had a small number of local converts who, like antebellum reformers,
fervently believed in woman’s special mission to reform society and liberate her sisters. Foremost among Fort Wayne crusaders was Junia
Aveline, a woman already known for her work with the local Civil War
soldiers’ aid society and for her support of suffrage. Like other temperance leaders, Aveline was motivated by the evils of alcohol that affected
women and children around her. She had also been deeply affected on a
”Fort Wayne Daily News,June 1,1874; Fort Wayne Weekly Sentinel, June 3,1874; “Proceedings
of the WRA of Indiana, 1869-1881.”
**DuBois,Feminism and Suffrge, 159; Hartmut Keil and John B. Jentz, eds., German Workers in
Chicago: A Documentary History of Working-Class Culturefrom 1850 to World War I (Urbana, Ill.,
1988), 291.
F O R T WAYNE W O M E N ’ S L O N G S T R U G G L E
personal level by the loss of a son to alcoholism. Beginning in the spring
of 1874, Aveline spent seven months speaking from the courthouse steps
and throughout the district hoping to arouse her neighbors “to a sense
of their country’s danger” from alcohol. Mother Eliza Stewart of Athens,
Ohio, “the war horse” of the temperance movement, made summer visits to build local
Local supporters formed one of Indiana’s first chapters of the
WCTU in November 1874. Two months later, on January 22, 1875,
Aveline, together with Zeralda Wallace of Indianapolis (the first president of the Indiana WCTU), and fellow temperance leader Mrs.
Robinson, delivered a memorial signed by 10,000 women to the Indiana
General Assembly urging temperance reform. The indifference of the
legislators convinced Wallace of the necessity of having the vote and
propelled her subsequent struggle to build a state suffrage movement. In
Fort Wayne, however, following this historic effort, temperance and suffrage seemed to gain few new supporters.24
Moral reformers nevertheless found other causes that would
advance their mission to alleviate social problems in their rapidly growing industrial city. Two initiatives in particular, both begun in the 1870s,
illustrate the continued tradition of female benevolence and moral
reform together with a new unsentimental direction. In both efforts,
women found new public and feminist voices.
In 1873 Beulah Ninde helped organize and manage a Home for the
Friendless to care for indigent women, many of whom had fallen into
prostitution. While new to Fort Wayne, efforts to assist such women had
their roots in antebellum female benevolence work in larger cities.
Caring for over 400 women during the home’s ten-year existence, Ninde
and other women officers relied on contributions from the city’s evangelical churches and from community fundraisers such as lectures and
musical entertainment. No doubt one of the leading guest lecturers was
2 3 F ~an
r example of Aveline’s work with the Fort Wayne Soldiers’ Aid Society, see Fort Wayne
Daily Gazette, November 29, 1864.
“Fort Wayne Daily News,November 21, December 21, 1874; History of Woman Suffrage, 3:539;
Bordin, Women and Temperance, 20-26; Frances Hendrickson, Hoosier Heritage 1874-1 974:
WomanS Christian Temperance Union (n.p., 1974), 13, 15. Aveline spoke at the March 1871
organizational meeting of the Allen County Suffrage Association. Fort Wayne Daily Gazette,
March 7, 1871.
233
234
I N D I A N A M A G A Z I N E OF HISTORY
journalist Theodore Tilton, antislavery reformer and women’s rights
advocate, who came to the city in April 187Ek2’
Reaching further into the community, in February 1878 women
from a broad cross-section of Protestant churches organized the Ladies’
Benevolent Society to identify impoverished families and coordinate
efforts of local charities. While their goals reflected a decided concern
for alleviating poverty, the women were also determined to exercise efficient administration. For example, as part of their plan of implementation, a board of women visitors was assigned to each ward in the city to
seek the “most important information” by means of “personal and careful inquiry.” In this effort, Fort Wayne’s female moral reformers resembled advocates of “scientific charity” in other northern cities.z6
In thirty years, Fort Wayne had grown from a small town of 4,000
residents to a rapidly growing city of 27,000 people. Women who sought
a political voice in suffrage and temperance organizations had been
largely silenced by male politicians and community leaders, especially
those from the German American community. How many women were
deterred from or brought into the women’s rights movement by meeting
such resistance is impossible to guess. What is certain is that an increasing number of local women were taking on new public roles. Refusing to
be silenced, Fort Wayne women were gaining valuable experiences and
building feminist networks that would serve them well in the
”The Chicago Home for the Friendless was founded in 1858by Jane Hoge and Mary Livermore
and, unlike other institutions of the day, cared for both white and black women and their children. Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics and Class in the
Nineteenth Century United States (New Haven, Conn., 1990), 17, 159; Fort Wayne Daily N e w s ,
June 3, December 8, 23, 1874; Fort Wayne Sentinel, February 23, April 11, 1878; Fort Wayne
Daily Gazette, October 27, November 2, 1882.
In 1877 the WCTU formed the Committee for Work with Fallen Women. In the 188Os, the
organization sponsored Homes for the Friendless in Lafayette, Evansville, Richmond, and
Indianapolis. There is no indication that Fort Wayne’s home had a WCTU affiliation. Bordin,
Women and Temperance, 110; Hendrickson, Hoosier Heritage 1874-1974, 28.
’OParticipating churches included Second Presbyterian Church, First Presbyterian, Berry Street
Methodist Episcopal, Centenary Church, Third Presbyterian, Third Methodist, and the
Episcopal, Lutheran, Universalist, Christian, Congregational, and Baptist churches. Fort Wayne
Morning Gazette, February 22, 1878; Fort Wayne Daily Sentinel, March 8, 1878; Ginzberg,
Women and the Work ofBenevolence, 196-97.
“Janet Zollinger Giele argues that resistance brought issues of women’s rights into sharper
focus. Giele, Two Paths to Women’s Equality: Temperance, Suffrage, and the Origins of Modern
Feminism (New York, 1995), 62.
F O R T WAYNE W O M E N ’ S L O N G STRUGGLE
RETREAT AND N E W DIRECTIONS: 1880-1910
During the next thirty years, Fort Wayne continued to shed its
small-town status, more than doubling its population and running a
close race with South Bend to be Indiana’s second-largest industrial center. Unlike the immigrants who swelled other urban centers, however,
those moving to Fort Wayne followed local ethnic patterns already well
established by the mid-nineteenth century. Comparatively few Eastern
and Southern Europeans or African Americans moved to the city to
work in the factories and railroad yards. At the turn of the century, twothirds of city residents shared a common German ancestry.28
German Americans owned many of the city’s leading businesses,
and dominated local politics and culture. In 1896, for example, Germans
and German Americans held all but two of the city’s nineteen top government positions, including the office of mayor. German American athletic and musical societies and two German-language newspapers
conspicuously influenced the city’s social and cultural life. One society,
the Bruederlicher Unterstuetzungs Verein, described as “one of the
strongest German organizations in the world,” reported a local membership of “more than 1,000’’ in 1911. Competitions among German
American societies throughout the Midwest brought thousands of
German Americans to Fort Wayne for popular festivals. In June 1902,
the fifth annual Saengerfest (competitive singing festival) for male
choirs drew over three thousand singers and guests from Indiana and
Ohio for a two-day event in Centlivre Park. In June 1909, the Indiana
Saengerfest brought thousands of visitors to a grand concert at the
Majestic Theatre, followed the next day by an all-day picnic at Robinson
Park. In 1901 and 1911, the Fort Wayne Turnverein-Voerwaerts athletic
society sponsored gymnastic tournaments that also featured parades and
band concerts. The 1911 program included a welcoming ceremony on
the courthouse square, with a performance by eight hundred Fort
Wayne public school children dressed in the colors of the American flag
and the German “old Turner flag.” For four days, thousands of visiting
lRMarkA. Rogers, “Wir Trinken und Tanzen Im Germania Park Fort Wayne German-American
Society and the National German American Alliance During World War I,” Old Fort News, 60
(No. 1, 1997), 1. Fort Wayne’s population in 1910 was 63,933.
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INDIANA MAGAZINE
OF HISTORY
athletes from across the Midwest camped in a tented village in the city’s
driving park.29
Few of the Fort Wayne women who were active in the suffrage and
temperance movements shared their city’s German heritage. Faced with
intense community opposition, they retreated from the broad challenge
to organize a women’s rights movement. While Indianapolis women
were throwing their efforts behind the newly organized Equal Suffrage
Society and honing new political skills, Fort Wayne women, with few
exceptions, avoided the issue of suffrage altogether. Moreover, in contrast to patterns across Indiana and the nation, few Fort Wayne women
participated in the WCTU, the largest female organization of its day.
Nevertheless, by the turn of the century, Fort Wayne women were
steadily, if circuitously, building networks that would lead to greater
political engagement.30
In 1881 woman suffrage advocates, now prominently associated
with temperance, gained strong support in the Indiana General
Assembly. Due to their efforts, as well as memorials and petitions from
thousands of women, the General Assembly passed bills to allow women
to vote for presidential electors and to amend the state constitution so
that women could vote in all elections. Zeralda Wallace, Mary E
Thomas, and Helen Gougar of Lafayette campaigned vigorously across
the state, hoping women would help elect Republican representatives to
the 1883 legislature. In accordance with Indiana law, constitutional
changes required approval by two consecutive assemblies and then a
popular vote.
Unfortunately for the cause of suffrage, the 1881 General
Assembly had also passed an amendment in favor of a far less popular
cause: prohibition. Women from twenty-nine counties had sent memorials and petitions in support of the amendment, but Allen County
women were not among the group. At the polls in November, the
7 i m Sack, “The Germans in Fort Wayne,” Allen County History (Fort Wayne, Ind., 2006); Fort
Waynelournal Gazette, June 16, 1902,June 13, 1909, February 20, May 28, 1911; Fort Wayne
Evening Sentinel, June 11, 1902,June 13, 1911.
’Osee “Indiana,” History of Woman Suffrage, 3: 533-58, for Indianapolis and state efforts during
this period. Suffrage societies were also formed in Kokomo and Crawfordsville in the same
period. L. Alene Sloan, “Some Aspects of the Woman Suffrage Movement in Indiana” (Ph.D.
diss., Ball State University, 1982), 78; Buechler, Transformation ofthe Woman Suffrage Movement,
140.
FORT WAYNE W O M E N ’ S L O N G STRUGGLE
Susan Creighton Williams
In 1882,Williams organized a chapter of the
Women’s Christian Temperance Union in Fort Wayne.
Courtesy of the Allen County-Fort Wayne History Center
Fort Wayne Morning Gazette, a Republican newspaper, reported that
“liquor men posted bills at every voting precinct warning voters that a
vote for the Republican ticket meant prohibition.” Few people were surprised when the Democratic party won a sound majority in the 1883
election, virtually assuring future defeat of any suffrage bill.”
”Rex M. Potterf, “Politics in Allen County, 1884-1892,” Old Fort News, 31 (Summer 19681, 6;
Sloan, “Some Aspects of the Woman Suffrage Movement,” 81; Fort Wayne Daily Gazette,
November 9, 1882.
237
238
I N D I A N A M A G A Z I N E OF HISTORY
Fort Wayne women’s lack of participation in the 1881 and 1883
elections was understandable, if disappointing. Under Frances Willard’s
leadership of the national WCTU, suffrage and temperance had become
closely intertwined, making suffrage all the more controversial in Fort
Wayne. Moreover, a general resignation seemed to freeze women’s reform
initiatives. The city’s first WCTU chapter had apparently disbanded, for in
the spring of 1882 it was reorganized by representatives of Protestant
churches led by Susan Creighton Williams. Political involvement in the
1883 election was not recorded. In the following years, newspaper notices
reported only occasional WCTU meetings, and those avoided political
engagement. For example, in October 1885 the WCTU invited the public
to prayer services at the temperance headquarters. If suffrage and temperance were not completely dormant issues, they were, as historian Stephen
Buechler observed, clearly in “a state of drift and ~ncertainty.”~~
For two days in November 1887, however, state and national leaders temporarily awakened the sleeping reform spirit. Audiences packed
the Berry Street Methodist Episcopal Church to hear Wallace and May
Wright Sewall, both representing the recently formed Indianapolis auxiliary to the National Woman Suffrage Association, as well as Gougar and
the indefatigable Susan B. Anthony. Recognizing the lack of progress on
the state level, these leaders were visiting each Indiana congressional
district to generate support for the sixteenth amendment to the
Constitution during the next session of Congress. Simultaneously, the
women stressed the importance of electing supportive legislators to the
next Indiana Assembly.”
The speakers’ eloquence, “forcible manner,” and personal charm
impressed their Fort Wayne audiences. Wallace spoke bluntly, advocating
the importance of woman’s vote for total prohibition: “‘I am not for local
option or high license,”’ she proclaimed. “‘I am for prohibition from the
crown of my head to the sole of my feet,’ and when the ballot is placed in
’*AvelineSdeath in July 1880 no doubt contributed to the decline of the local WCTU chapter.
Fort Wayne Daily Gazette, July 24, 1880, October 8, 1885. Frances Willard led the WCTU from
1879 to 1898. Buechler, Transformation ofthe Woman Suffrage Movement, 50.
”Fort Wayne Sentinel, November 25, 26, 28, 1887; Fort Wayne Daily News,November 25, 26,
28, 1887; Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. 4:
1883-1900 (6 vols., Rochester, N.Y., 1902), 615. Zeralda Wallace became president of the
Indianapolis Equal Suffrage Society in 1875, served as president of the Indiana WCTU
(1874-1877 and 1879-1883) and as head of the state WCTU franchise department from 1883
to 1888.
FORT WAYNE W O M E N ’ S L O N G STRUGGLE
women’s hands the American saloon, with all its evils and ruinous influences will have to go.” Wallace also evoked the nativism and elitism common among many women’s rights leaders, arguing that women were
“more deserving of and better qualified to exercise the right of suffrage
than the negro and the thousands of ignorant voters in whose hands it
was now placed.” Given Anthony’s reservations about linking suffrage
with temperance, she not surprisingly delivered only a “brief talk,” nevertheless impressing her audience with her “clear and powerful voice,
which makes her language impressive and her arguments real.” Officers
elected to serve the newly organized twelfth district suffrage association
once again included pioneer leader Beulah Ninde as pre~ident.’~
Suffrage and temperance soon faded again from the public forum.
Clearly, the description of the 1880s as the “doldrums”in suffrage history applied to Fort Wayne. The first generation of impassioned moral
reformers was dying. Beginning in the 1890s, however, newly formed
women’s clubs began to bring women into dynamic new female networks. Concurrently, small but significant WCTU organizations in Fort
Wayne and surrounding communities kept alive the spirit of reform.35
Steven Buechler argues that the tremendous popularity of the
World’s Congress of Representative Women at the 1893 Columbian
Exposition in Chicago made suffrage fashionable and attracted upperclass women to the movement. Certainly detailed coverage in Fort
Wayne newspapers stirred pride in women’s achievements. Yet other
forces-including higher educational levels, more free time, and perhaps
above all else, a need for meaningful self-expression-brought women
together in a quickly spreading popular phenomena, the woman’s club.
Not only did clubs provide alternatives to the controversial temperance
and suffrage groups; they offered members organizational experience
and an emphasis on social responsibility. Historian Karen J. Blair argues
that club women were able to maintain their traditional domestic values
while pursuing new feminist
”Fort Wayne Daily Sentinel, November 28, 1887; Fort Wayne Daily News, November 28, 1887.
”Beulah Ninde died June 6, 1892. Fort Wayne MomingJoumal, June 7, 1892.
’OBuechler, Transformation of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 150; Karen J. Blair, The Clubwoman
as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868-1914 (New York, 19801, xii, xiv, 1, 95. The Fort
Wayne Woman’s Club League was organized in December 1892, two years after the Indiana
State Federation of Women’s Clubs. The Fort Wayne federation joined the General Federation
of Woman’s Clubs in 1897.
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HISTORY
Events involving the Woman’s Club League in the winter and
spring of 1898 suggest the gradual progress women were making in the
public arena. The league’s quarterly meeting in January included, in
addition to the accustomed entertainment and socialization, a “scholarly” lecture by former mayor Chauncey Oakley, who stressed women’s
key role in future politics. “Many branches of municipal power would be
improved by having women occupying positions on their boards,” he
stated, and optimistically predicted that women would soon be serving
as city officials. In May, local religious leaders placed women preachers
or speakers in “every pulpit but two” in the city to acknowledge the
biennial convention of the National Federation of Women’s clubs then
meeting in Denver.37
Through their work within the Woman’s Club Federation, Fort
Wayne women extended their roles as municipal housekeepers.
Working through the Civic Department, women cleaned up downtown
alleys “for the purpose of demonstrating how the alleys in the city ought
to be cleaned.” They built playgrounds and established sanitary drinking
fountains. Supporting the work of the Civic Improvement Association,
they urged all women to learn about efforts underway to beautify their
city. Other initiatives included pressuring the police department to
enforce a juvenile curfew and hire a police matron, and convincing
stores to close early on Saturday evenings. For such projects, the
Women’s Club League generally appeared to have the approval of the
city’s male power s t r u ~ t u r e . ~ ~
In other cases, local officials showed extreme disregard for
women’s opinions. In December 1909, members of the Women’s League
wrote to Mayor Jesse Grice, encouraging him to enforce laws and ordinances that were “subject of flagrant violation or neglect.” At the top of
their list were unenforced child labor and child neglect laws. Three years
later, Grice finally replied to the letter, stating that the women’s concerns
were either unwarrranted or had been c ~ r r e c t e d . ~ ~
”Fort Wayne MorningJournal, January 9, May 8, 1898. It is assumed that “everypulpit but two”
referred to Protestant evangelical churches.
”Scrapbook, “Women’sWork, 1909-1915,” Fort Wayne-Allen County Historical Society
’9Women’sLeague Committee to Hon. Jesse M. Grice, December 28, 1909; Jesse M. Grice,
Mayor, to Mrs. Sam R. Taylor, Chairman, Women’s League Committee, December 2, 1912; both
in Women’s League Papers, Early 1900s (Allen County History Center, Fort Wayne).
F O R T WAYNE WOMEN’S L O N G STRUGGLE
In 1911, Fort Wayne club women again challenged the interests of
the business establishment and again were silenced. The controversy
concerned legislation introduced in the Indiana General Assembly by
state labor leaders and the Indiana Federation of Women’s Clubs to
shorten the work hours of children under sixteen in the state’s factories.
Fort Wayne club women were familiar with children’s working conditions in the city’s factories and supportive of the state federation’s position. Two years earlier, in 1909, Mrs. Virgil Lockwood of Indianapolis,
chairman of the department of labor for the state federation, had been
invited to Fort Wayne to give a lecture for the Woman’s Club League.
During this visit she investigated local factories that employed large
numbers of children and stayed with a personal friend, local club
woman Mary McCrea Wilson. When legislative hearings began in
January 1911, Wilson led the Fort Wayne Woman’s Club League’s
Industrial Committee in collecting letters and lobbying state politicians
to support the child labor bill.
Sponsors of the bill advocated a forty-eight-hour work week, a
proposal that seriously affected Fort Wayne’s largest employer of women
and girls, the Wayne Knitting Mills. Over two thousand of the mill’s
employees (two-thirds of the workforce) were under sixteen years old,
mostly female, and working at low-paying jobs for fifty-five hours a
week. At hearings before the Indiana General Assembly in January, company president Theodore E Thieme, his brother Frederick, and other
state industrialists bitterly fought the legislation. Reflecting the businessmen’s influence, the child labor bill that finally passed limited the
work week to fifty hours, fifty-four with parental permission-a minor
victory at best for reformers.4o
After the final vote, the Fort Wayne Woman’s Club remained mostly quiet about its previous support for the legislation. They publicly
reported their lobbying efforts months later, among numerous other
activities of the club. Furthermore, the connection between the final
*Approximately 150 industrial lobbyists argued against the legislation. Barbara A. Springer,
“Ladylike Reformers: Indiana Women and Progressive Reform, 1900-1920,” (Ph.D. diss.,
Indiana University, 1985), 83; Peggy Seigel, “Industrial Girls in an Early Twentieth Century
Boomtown: Traditions and Change in Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1900-1920,” Indiana Magazine of
History, 99 (September 2003). 241.
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INDIANA MAGAZINE
OF
HISTORY
legislation and the intensive pressure brought by executives of the
Wayne Knitting Mills remained unstated.+l
Despite deep cultural resistance, the WCTU maintained a small
membership in Allen County. Branches were formed in the towns of
Hoagland, Maysville, and Monroeville, as well as in Fort Wayne, with
membership drawn from Protestant churches. While stopping far short
of the national organization’s commitment to “militant feminism, equal
rights, and full participation in the political process,” local WCTU members, strengthened by their religious convictions, invited conflict.
Following recognized patterns, the WCTU spurred political consciousness, if not action, and kept the suffrage spirit alive at a time when
At a semi-annual county instimomentum was otherwise non-exi~tent.~~
tute in 1892, for example, members pledged to “never give up the fight
until the last saloon” was closed. In January 1911, Fort Wayne members
urged a grand jury to arrest landladies in the city’s notorious red-light
district. The following June, the group threatened to impeach the mayor
for not enforcing laws to close saloons on legal holidays.43
Despite these local efforts, Allen County WCTU members apparently did little in 1898 and 1899 in response to calls by state leaders to
lobby legislators in support of a state constitutional amendment for
woman suffrage. While women from twenty-five Indiana counties
organized petition drives, Allen County women remained unengaged
and silent. At most, they helped suffrage maintain a grassroots foothold
that would contribute to its future a c ~ e p t a n c eSpeaking
.~~
at a WCTU
meeting in May 1903 at Plymouth Congregational Church, for example,
field secretary Alice Palmer argued for “at least school suffrage” and for
placing women on school boards. Rev. Benedille Sawyer, the pastor of St.
John’s Methodist Episcopal Church of Fort Wayne, expressed the importance of women winning full suffrage to improve American society, an
4’FortWayne Daily Gazette, June 4, 1911; “Mrs. Dawson Tells What the Woman’s Club League
Has Accomplished,” clipping c. 1912, in “Women’s W o r k Scrapbook.
+’In April 1892, for example, sixty women attended the semi-annual meeting of the Allen
County WCTU. Fort Wayne Sentinel, April 26, 1892; Springer, “Ladylike Reformers,” 11-12;
Bordin, Women and Temperance, 116; Giele, Two Paths to Women’s Equality, 103, 107; Buechler,
Transformation of the Woman Suflrage Movement, 145.
“Fort Wayne Sentinel, April 26, 1892; Fort Wayne Gazette, January 19, June 2, 1911.
“History of Woman Suffmge, 4: 618-19; Sloan, “Some Aspects of the Woman Suffrage
Movement.” 118.
FORT WAYNE WOMEN’S L O N G STRUGGLE
argument that was becoming increasingly popular. Moreover, he voiced
arguments of the earliest women’s rights pioneers. “I am in favor of it
because I know of no reason why it should not be given them,” he said.
“She has the same interest in public affairs that men have, and she ought
to have a voice in the framing and the execution of the laws. She would
carry righteousness into politics and would correct many of the evils
that now threaten the life of the nation and are doing incalculable harm
to the people.” At a two-day county institute in 1909, a female speaker
voiced similar arguments. Woman suffrage in municipal elections would
“secure clean politics, clean homes, pure morals and right living on the
part of every man, woman and child in the municipality.” “[Wle believe
in woman suffrage because it is right and just.” Her speech was printed
in full in the morning news~aper.“~
Such efforts stood in courageous opposition to the strong early
twentieth-century opponents of temperance on the local and state levels.
Fort Wayne’s eight German societies, like their counterparts across the
country, joined finances to support the most powerful political lobby of
their day, the National German American Alliance (GAA). Identified by
national suffrage leaders as “the allied organization that performed the
deadliest work in woman suffrage campaigns,” its single purpose was to
fight temperance and suffrage on all levels. Working with the GAA was
the U. S. Brewer’s Association, organized on the state level in 1909.4h
The most powerful local suffrage opponent was political boss,
industrial leader, and liquor lobbyist Stephen B. Fleming. An officer of
the Berghoff Brewing Company, Fleming was elected to six terms as State
Senator between 1901 and 1915 and served as president of the
Association of Indiana Brewers. As one of the state’s leading representatives of the GAA, Fleming enforced the alliance’s anti-suffrage policy,
adopted in 1911 by its 600,000 members. Fleming had the reputation of
”Fort Wayne Daily News, May 23, 1903; Fort WayneJournal Gazette, March 15, 1909; Obituary
for Rev. Benedille Sawyer, Fort WayneJournal Gazette, July 16, 1919. The speaker identified as
“Mrs. Eagy” was probably Dora Eagy, a resident of Van Wert, Ohio, at the time of her death.
Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, October 7, 1936.
‘“Rogers, “Wir Trinken und Tanzen Im Germania Park,” 2; Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie
Rogers Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story ofthe Suflrage Movement (New York,
1923), 147; Clifton James Child, The German-Americans in Politics, 1914-191 7 (Madison, Wis.,
1939), 4, 17; Springer, “Ladylike Reformers,” 23.
243
244
I N D I A N A M A G A Z I N E OF HISTORY
being one of five members of a “secret government” in the Indiana
Senate without whose support a bill would surely fail.47
Opposition to temperance and (by association) suffrage occurred
on more subtle levels as well. In 1910 a group of prominent German
Americans, Theodore Thieme of Wayne Knitting Mills included, partnered with the Berghoff Brewery to create Germania Park as a way to sell
beer directly to the public (and on Sunday) in violation of the recent
Proctor Laws. Preserving the German culture, beer included, was an
undisputed value broadly shared and defended by Fort Wayne’s German
American community.48
By 1911, understandably, local opposition to the WCTU was taking a toll on its members. The local chapter identified only four priorities: Sabbath observance, medical temperance, prohibition of illegal sale
of liquor at the Allen County fair, and open-air meetings. Their 19111912 report alleged that during the previous year, their organization had
“been generally misunderstood, publicly misrepresented and, in many
instances, maligned, and it has taken every degree of loyalty its members
possess to continue to plod onward under these c i r c ~ m ~ t a n c e ~ . ” ~ ~
ORGANIZATION AND FINAL VICTORY: 1911-1920
Despite the lack of support for women’s suffrage, the dynamics of
change were everywhere evident in Fort Wayne in the second decade of
the new century. Within ten years, the city would edge out South Bend
as Indiana’s second most important manufacturing center. Local factories employed the highest percentage of female workers of any city in the
state. Scarcely resembling its former self, the city seemed to come of age
in 1920, bulging with a population of almost 87,000.
During this decade that finally saw the hard-fought victory for suffrage, Fort Wayne women seemed to come of age as well. They entered
“Justin E. Walsh, ed., A Biographical Directory ofthe Indiana General Assembly: Vol. 2, 19001984 (Indianapolis, 1984), 139; Genevieve G. McBride, On Wisconsin Women: Workingfor Their
Rightsfrom Settlement to Suflrage (Madison, Wis., 1993). 222; Theodore E Thierne, “What Ails
Us? An Up-to-Date Analysis of our Political Troubles,” Fort WayneJoumal Gazette, April 20,
1913.
‘8Rogers,“Wir Trinken und Tanzen Im Germania Park,” 2.
+9‘‘W.C.T.U.
Report by Mrs. A. B. Nivens” in “Official Reports,”Woman’s Club League of Fort
Wayne, Indiana, 1911-1912, copy in Genealogy Division, Allen County Public Library, Fort
Wayne.
FORT WAYNE W O M E N ’ S L O N G S T R U G G L E
the decade with little direct political involvement, despite repeated
efforts by Indiana suffragists and temperance leaders to push legislation
through the General Assembly. Nevertheless, valuable experiences in
their community through women’s clubs and charity work, together
with growing support from mainstream churches, guided women into
new public roles. Women’s issues were now to be taken seriously, even if
political and business forces were still largely aligned against suffrage.
This time, as suffrage supporters organized and finally gained local support, they began to distance themselves from their WCTU sisters.
When Myra Strawn Hartshorn, chair of the Cook County Suffrage
Committee, spoke to the Fort Wayne Woman’s Club League in February
1911, she charmed her audience with her academic credentials, professional writing experience, and traditional role as “a devoted mother of
two babies.” Certainly Hartshorn’s newspaper photograph with her children added an aura of domesticity to offset any suggestions of militancy.
It was the content of her speech, however-“New Educational Methods
in Suffrage”-that won ready converts. If women were more aware of the
conditions of women sweatshop workers, she told her audience, they
would realize the importance of electing political representatives to
serve the needs of society. Appealing directly to the Woman’s Club membership, Hartshorn also stressed statistics showing women’s growing
educational achievements: “You can’t keep political power out of the
hands of the educated class.” Finally, the speaker urged Fort Wayne
women to adopt plans used by settlement houses and political wards to
study their local and state government and to learn where their elected
officials stood on such subjects as wages and working conditions for
women. There was no doubting the next morning’s newspaper report
that “Mrs. Hartshorn’s successful lecture” had “stirred up the smoldering
interest of club women in suffrage.”5o
Two weeks later, in a specially called meeting, the Woman’s Club
organized “a society to study the social and political aspects of suffrage
for women.” Dr. Carrie Belle Banning, a fifty-four-year-old local physician, was selected as chairman. In the following months, Chicago suffragist and writer Frances Squire Potter spoke to large audiences at the
courthouse on two occasions. Another field lecturer for the National
”Fort WayneJournalGazette, February 5,1911
245
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I N D I A N A M A G A Z I N E OF HISTORY
Woman’s Suffrage Organization, Harriett Grim of Chicago, visited the
city, likewise impressing her audience with a talk on “Woman’s Place in
Government.” “Home and its protection, and the vocations of women
demand the ballot supremely,” she said, citing laws favorable to women
and children recently passed in Colorado as examples of what women’s
votes could do. Her speech, printed in full in the morning newspaper,
was described as “a great pleasure”; the speaker was said to be “[clharming, most attractive, and very forcible.””
Beginning in February 1912, under chairman Katherine Hamilton,
the suffrage society began a series of classes on local government.
Following practices widely used to recruit new members, club women
also held teas in political wards. In a clear indication that activity in other
states was now of major interest, at the end of March, Banning gave a
detailed speech entitled “Recent Legislative Victories” to the Allen County
WCTU convention. In April, Carolyn Fairbank and Addie Guldlin represented Fort Wayne’s suffrage society at the first state convention of the
newly organized Woman’s Franchise League of Indiana in Indianapoli~.~~
Inspired by their connections with other suffragists, in April 1912
Fort Wayne women, led by Guldlin, demonstrated a new assertiveness.
Guldlin was the single female member of the civic improvement association, and she (along with the Woman’s Club League) supported a
$200,000 bond initiative to improve the city’s riverbanks and build
boulevards. Guldlin put city council members on notice that women
were eligible to vote at the ward meetings where such issues were decided: “You see the women can vote as well as the men at the ward meetings
which are being held with the city council,” she said. Unfortunately, the
meeting of the Sixth Ward was crowded with citizens living nearest the
land donated for a city park. The neighbors opposed the proposal, and
Guldlin was accompanied by only two other women supporters. When
they asked if they might vote, the acting chairman told the women that
only legal voters were so entitled. The bond issue was then soundly
defeated by a vote of 350 to 166.53
5’Ibid.,February 20, October 24, 1911, February 26, 27, 1912.
”Ibid., February 19, March 11, 20, 25, 26, 31, 1912; Springer, “Ladylike Reformers,” 118.
Katherine Hamilton was an older sister of settlement worker Agnes Hamilton and a cousin to
author Edith (The Greek Way, 1941) and bacteriologist and public health crusader Alice.
”Fort WayneJoumal Gazette, April 19, 1912.
FORT WAYNE W O M E N ’ S L O N G S T R U G G L E
Addie Guldlin and Carolyn Fairbank
Guldlin and Fairbank represented Fort Wayne
suffragists at the first meeting of the Woman’s
Franchise League of Indiana in 1912.
Courtesy of the Allen County-Fort Wayne History Center
247
248
I N D I A N A M A G A Z I N E OF HISTORY
Despite this failed foray into the male political domain, local club
women demonstrated an unwavering support for suffrage at the annual
meeting of the Indiana Woman’s Club Federation, held in Fort Wayne
the following October. Although the state federation was known to be
conservative by nature, local and state leaders hoped that the convention would officially endorse suffrage, following the precedents recently
established by federations in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.
Anticipating a victory, local suffragists planned a luncheon celebration at
the downtown Anthony Hotel. Deeply disappointed when the convention failed to bring the resolution to a vote, Fort Wayne club women
nevertheless continued with their plans, entertaining over two hundred
women, including state federation officers and guest speakers.
Beginning the luncheon with a rousing suffrage song, the women
expressed great confidence in their future victory, celebrating their common cause in what was described as a “suffrage feast.”54
During this period of revitalization, the WCTU gained new energy
as well. As noted above, an all-day session at Plymouth Congregational
Church in March 1912 had included Banning’s address on “Recent
Franchise Victories.” While another speaker stressed that suffrage should
not be the organization’s main priority, discussions were nevertheless
lively and enthusiastic. At a meeting at the end of December, Martha
Ridenour, president of the local chapter, described their organization as
“one of the greatest working forces for the enfranchisement of women”
and stressed that the WCTU intended to work harder the next year.55
A brief description of leaders in 1912 demonstrates that Fort
Wayne suffragists generally resembled suffragists elsewhere. Most had
college educations, were Anglo-American, and were active in a variety of
organizations. Those who were married often had husbands who were
prominent in the community. Single women were predominantly professionals and civic leaders. Following national patterns, African American
women, except for a limited presence in the WCTU, were excluded.
Suffrage groups and the WCTU now mostly attracted separate memberships. Furthermore, unlike groups in larger cities, Fort Wayne suffragists made no efforts at this stage to reach out to working-class women.56
“Fort Wayne Sentinel, October 25, 1912; Fort Wayne]ournal Gazette, October 26, 1912.
”Fort Wayne]ournal Gazette, March 22, 23, December 23, 1912.
56Gieleargues that suffragists were critical of the evangelical approach of temperance women;
conversely, WCTU members resented suffragists for being more socially influential. In 1906,
FORT WAYNE W O M E N ’ S L O N G S T R U G G L E
Dr. Carrie Banning (1857-1950) was a native of Geneva, New York,
a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Wisconsin, and the mother of three children. Banning practiced medicine in Fort Wayne for 52
years. Carolyn Randall Fairbank (1854?-1918) led musical and art
groups in the city and served two terms as president of the Indiana
Federation of Women’s Clubs. Her husband, Clark Fairbank, was one of
the leading life insurance men in northern Indiana; her father, Franklin
Randall, an early mayor of Fort Wayne. Addie B. Guldlin (1864-1933, a
native of Stratford, New York, and graduate of Buchtel College in Akron,
Ohio, was prominent in dozens of Fort Wayne clubs and served on
numerous civic boards. A leader of the local Woman’s Club League,
Guldlin also served as national chairman of the home economics department for the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. Her husband, Olaf
Guldlin, was founder and director of the Western Gas Construction
Company in Fort Wayne. Banning and Fairbank were both members of
the Daughters of the American Revolution. Banning and Guldlin both
participated in WCTU activities. Martha J. Ridenour (1861-19211, a
native of Canton, Ohio, and graduate of Fort Wayne Methodist College,
championed temperance and suffrage as a WCTU leader for over 30
years. Katherine Hamilton (1862-19321, a cousin to Edith and Alice
Hamilton, was long active in local musical and art societies. Finally, two
other single women strategic to the 1912 suffrage revitalization represent slightly divergent backgrounds. Minnette Baum (1879-19561, a
native of Russia and Jewish by faith, graduated from the University of
Chicago and studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and at the University of
Heidelberg. A professional social worker, she was a founder of the Fort
Wayne Jewish Federation and instrumental in the establishment of the
nation of Israel. Last but not least, Elizabeth Sihler (18551-19281, one of
nine children of Dr. Wilhelm Sihler, pastor of Fort Wayne’s St. Paul’s
Lutheran Church and founder of the Missouri Synod, was a teacher at
Fort Wayne’s Central High School.”
following Oregon’s failed attempt to win suffrage, national suffrage leader Dr. Anna Howard
Shaw urged suffragists to separate from the temperance movement. According to Springer, in
1908 the state WCTU urged its women to work for suffrage within their own organization. Fort
WayneJournal Gazette, September 19, 1913; Giele, Two Paths To Women$ Equality, 104, 106;
Sara Hunter Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy (New Haven, Conn., 1966). 26;
Springer, “Ladylike Reformers,” 38.
’’Fort Waynelournal Gazette, June 2, 1918, April 22, 1921, February 6, 1932, May 10, 1935,
February 26, 1950, September 20, 1956; Fort Wayne News Sentinel, March 8, 1928.
249
250
I N D I A N A M A G A Z I N E OF HISTORY
In their growing support for suffrage, Fort Wayne women adopted
a moderate, independent, largely non-controversial course. During the
1913 session of the Indiana General Assembly, generally called the
“woman’s session,” Fort Wayne women had little direct involvement.
They also were not active in the Legislative Council of Indiana Women,
an ambitious lobby, formed in 1914, representing eight leading women’s
organizations and some 80,000 women. Avoiding conflict with
Democratic politicians, Fort Wayne suffragists chose issues closer to
home. With support from the Fort Wayne Federation of Labor and with
hundreds of signatures on petitions, they pressured the city council to
appoint a woman to the board of education. They attracted large audiences to meetings in the courthouse assembly room, and they reached
out to club women with elaborate tea
During these years of building public support, two events stand
out as particular successes. In early May 1914, male community leaders
sponsored a well-attended Suffrage Day celebration at the Jefferson
Theatre. Part of the program included showing “moving pictures” celebrating renowned political suffragists and the recent defeat of corrupt
politicians. Dr. Warren Calvin, a prominent Fort Wayne surgeon, challenged his audience to think of how women could do away with vice and
political corruption in their own community if they were to have the
vote. Rev. Arthur J. Folsum, pastor of Plymouth Congregational Church,
and WCTU supporter, went even further: “One point that I desire to
emphasize is the fact of woman’s intelligence. Living in an age of
progress along all lines of science, industry, morals and education, we
are standing for political equality for all persons independent of sex.”
The following year, suffragists invited every woman in Fort Wayne to a
“suffrage bridge tea” at the Commercial Club. Over 600 tickets were
sold, and speakers included Miss Blanche Foster of Indianapolis, president of the Woman’s Press Club of Indiana.59
’“Fort WayneJournal Gazette, May 18, 1915. Carolyn R. Fairbank served on the executive board
of the Legislative Council of Indiana Women. Boruff, Women ofIndiana, 29.
”Other community leaders participating in the May 1914 event were industrial and civic leader
E. F: Yarnelle and Rev. Carlton H. Snashall, pastor of First Baptist Church. The first of two
“moving pictures” was “What Eighty Million Women Want” featuring Mrs. Emmeline
Pankhurst and Harriet Stanton Blatch. Fort WayneJournal Gazette May 3 , 1914, May 22, 23,
1915; undated newspaper clipping, “Women’sW o r k Scrapbook.
FORT WAYNE W O M E N ’ S L O N G STRUGGLE
While public support in Fort Wayne was steadily increasing, suffragists still faced formidable opposition from politicians allied with the
liquor industry. In February 1915, a WCTU-sponsored bill granting
women partial suffrage cleared the Indiana Senate and was assigned to a
House committee. Unfortunately, a statewide prohibition bill was pending at the same time, and politicians again linked the two issues.
Lobbyists for the brewing industry, led by Allen County’s former state
senator Fleming, crowded the State House and opponents defeated the
suffrage bill.bo
Despite the liquor lobby’s obvious show of power, dynamics were
in place to change public opinion. With the outbreak of World War I,
anti-prohibitionists, German Americans, and by association, anti-suffragists, were looked upon by a growing number of citizens as antiAmerican; liquor lobbyists became associated with dirty politics. In the
summer of 1916 suffragists by the hundreds exerted new pressure at
national political conventions to persuade Republicans and Democrats
to adopt suffrage platforms.61
While their more activist sisters marched through the streets of
Chicago and St. Louis in hope of swaying political conventions, Fort
Wayne women, dressed in white, rode on horseback and in decorated
automobiles in a long parade to celebrate the state’s centennial. During
the weeklong festivities, manufacturers and merchants exhibited their
products and wares; women from various clubs, including the Woman’s
Club League, served as hostesses at the woman’s building6*
In February 1917, Indiana suffragists finally scored their first true
victory in the state General Assembly. A predominantly Republican legislature approved a law giving women the right to vote for delegates to a
constitutional convention and the right to vote to ratify the constitution.
More significantly, legislators also approved a bill granting women presidential and municipal suffrage. As the bills were maneuvered through
the House, a drama played out that illustrated a profound change in
60Fleminghad recently resigned his position as state senator as a result of a new bill that
required all lobbyists to register with the secretary of state and to disclose their funding and
backers. Springer, “Ladylike Reformers,” 148-49, 168 n21.
“Springer, “Ladylike Reformers,” 163; Rogers, “Wir Trinken und Tanzen Im Germania Park,”
6.
6’Fort WuyneJournal Gazette,June 2 , 6 , 7, 11, 1916.
251
252
I N D I A N A M A G A Z I N E OF HISTORY
A meeting of the Women’s Equal Suffrage League, 1915
During the second decade of the twentieth century, increasing numbers of
Hoosiers, women and men, supported the issue of woman suffrage.
Courtesy of the Allen County-Fort Wayne History Center
Allen County politics. County legislator Dick Vesey, chairman of the
committee assigned the suffrage bill, declared that he had become a suffrage convert and supported the bill. The previous month he had voted
for a statewide prohibition bill, and believing that he had already ruined
his political career, he appeared to conclude that supporting woman suffrage could cause no further damage. Fleming, once again at the head of
the liquor lobbyists, was finally outwitted by a politically savvy coalition
of temperance and reform groups known as the Dry Alliance.63
With the entry of the United States into World War I, Fort Wayne
women, like their sisters nationwide, responded to the calls for patriotic
service in a wide variety of ways. Club women and working women alike
turned out by the thousands to support the federal Liberty Loan and war
stamp drives. Alice Foster McCulloch, long active in the Woman’s Club
Federation and in suffrage work, served as state chairman for these
Yndiana was one of nine states that voted in favor of woman suffrage in 1917. Springer,
“Ladylike Reformers,” 185, 192, 194; Buechler, Transformation of the Woman Suffvage
Movement. 119.
F O R T WAYNE W O M E N ’ S L O N G STRUGGLE
drives under the auspices of the Indiana State Council of Defense. Mrs.
A. E. Fauve directed the local Red Cross supply and shipping center that
served all of northern Indiana. The Red Cross also trained nurses’ aides
and recruited nurses to serve in military hospitals in France. In early
June 1918, some two hundred club women conducted an inventory of
Fort Wayne women to determine job skills as part of a national initiative. Hundreds of other women took jobs at local factories to help the
war effort and to support their families.64
In the early months of the war, Fort Wayne women also prepared
for their future role as voters in the fall elections. At schools, factories,
churches, and the courthouse, suffrage leaders educated hundreds of
women about the workings of government. Notary publics were on
hand to register women as voters. Franchise leagues were formed at the
Wayne Knitting Mills and at the downtown Roman Catholic cathedral.
These preparations were abruptly halted in July, however, when the state
supreme court decided that the constitutional convention law was
invalid. The following October, the court declared the municipal suffrage law unconstitutional as well.65
In the following months, Fort Wayne suffragists, like their sisters
across the state and the nation, demonstrated a new determination to
move the Susan B. Anthony Amendment through the U. S. Senate. In the
summer and fall of 1918 hundreds of women gathered signatures on
petitions and sought new nonpartisan franchise league members. In
August, at a meeting of team captains and workers for the drive, Ross E
Lockridge, welfare director of Wayne Knitting Mills, expressed the common goal that suffragists now shared. “We are fighting for nothing less
than complete democracy. . . . So it would be really ridiculous, following
our united national action in this world war, to offer the women any limited measure of suffrage, territorially or otherwise.” Allen County suffragists were particularly encouraged by the number of men and women of
German descent who signed their petitions. By the end of August, memberships in the Franchise League rose to 1,000; petition signatures in
Allen County alone totaled 7,000. At voting stations in November
suffragists gathered still more signatures and more league members in a
“Mrs. Fauve also served as president of the Woman’s Club League and as general chairman for
the state convention of Indiana federated clubs. Fort WayneJournal Gazette, May 20, July 11,
October 23, 1917, March 25, April 5, June 1, 2, 5,30, 1918, June 21, 1919.
b 5 F ~ lWayneJournal
t
Gazette, June 10, 12, 1917; Springer, “LadylikeReformers,” 201, 205.
253
254
INDIANA MAGAZINE
OF HISTORY
response that “exceeded even the fondest expectations of the most optimistic.” The state Franchise League reported that Allen County “had
made a better showing than any other county in the state up to date.”66
Indiana suffragists experienced a hard-earned banner year in 1919.
The Indiana General Assembly and Governor James P Goodrich quickly
approved bills granting women presidential suffrage and calling for a
change in Indiana’s constitution to grant women equal voting rights. In
addition, the General Assembly enthusiastically endorsed a memorial
supporting the Susan B. Anthony Amendment.
When the amendment finally cleared the U. S. Congress, Fort
Wayne women worked with state Woman’s Franchise League officers to
assure ratification by the Indiana General Assembly in the year ahead.
As in their many earlier campaigns, however, suffragists would find no
simple conclusion. Only after months of maneuvering did Governor
Goodrich agree, on December 31, to call an extra, one-day session of the
state legislature. Furthermore, his offer was contingent upon suffragists’
securing promises from all state legislators that they would consider suffrage only. Two weeks later, on January 16, 1920, Indiana suffragists saw
their work pay off when the Indiana General Assembly enthusiastically
ratified the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, making Indiana the twentysixth state to grant full suffrage to women under the Constitution. The
journey that had begun almost seventy years earlier would grind on for
seven more months until August 28, when the federal ratification
process ended.67
In the following months and years, Fort Wayne women were
indeed living in a changed world. In early September 1920, nearly 8,000
women in Fort Wayne and Allen County registered to vote, a number
much higher than generally expected and almost 40 percent of the county’s total number of registered voters. Now, as members of the League of
Women Voters, Fort Wayne women circulated petitions as part of a
national effort to support the Sheppard-Towner Bill then in Congress to
establish free clinics and hospital services for mothers and children.
66Mrs.Alice Foster McCulloch was general chairman of the state petition drive. Fort Wayne
Journal Gazette, August 8, 21,31, November 4, 8, 1918.
6 7 F ~ Wayne
rt
women on the planning committee for the state Woman’s Franchise League convention in Indianapolis in April 1919 were Mrs. Alice Foster McCulloch, Mrs. Sybil Bowers,
Mrs. Addie Guldlin, and Mrs. Mable B. Weisner. Fort WayneJournal Gazette, March 3,
December 31, 1919.
FORT WAYNE W O M E N ’ S L O N G STRUGGLE
They urged local ministers to observe a Sunday in early December as
national Mother and Child Day. Seeking a close relationship with the
Indiana General Assembly, three members of the League of Women
Voters served on the state legislative committee to advocate for interests
of working women, education, and public health. In April 1921, the Fort
Wayne Board of Public Safety appointed four women police officers. The
following November, Catherine E. Dinklage was elected to the city
council, where she served for four years. And throughout the 1920s,
beginning in 1921, two women were appointed to the seven-member
school board of trustees.68
The broad patterns of the Fort Wayne struggle resemble those
experienced elsewhere. Like their Seneca Falls peers, local pioneer
women leaders championed the bold early goals of the women’s rights
movement. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, however, suffragists were derailed by the intense battle orchestrated by liquor interests against prohibition and, by association, suffrage. Retreating from
political controversy, women addressed social problems in their communities. They found new public voices and meaningful roles through
charitable work and women’s clubs. When public opinion made suffrage
fashionable, women threw their tremendous energy and ability into a
final victory.
Despite its common patterns, the journey of Fort Wayne suffragists
offers a picture of the particular difficulties women faced in areas with
deep cultural resistance to social change. While women forged new public roles and made significant contributions to their community, it can
also be argued that their successes were guarded and delayed. When
their initiatives challenged political or business leaders, they were
silenced. Unlike women elsewhere in Indiana who waged political campaigns for temperance and suffrage legislation, most Fort Wayne women
avoided direct political involvement until suffrage gained broad popular
support. In a city defined by its industrial prosperity, few, if any,
working-class women participated in suffrage efforts until the final years
@Thefollowing Fort Wayne women were appointed to legislative committees for the Indiana
League of Women Voters: Dr. Carrie Banning. Public Health and Morals; Miss Agatha Diek,
Women in Industry; Mrs. Claude Bowers, Education. Mrs. Carina Warrington was appointed
chairman of the state committee o n the legal status of women. Fort WayneJournal Gazette,
September 9, 13, November 13, 29, 1920,January 2, 16, March 6, April 1, 1921.
255
256
I N D I A N A M A G A Z I N E OF HISTORY
of World War I. Moreover, few club women voiced concerns over the
factory women’s workplace conditions. The local suffrage movement
that finally saw success was, then, an elitist movement that largely
embraced traditional gender roles and retreated from controversy.
Exceptions to general patterns often illustrate the complexities of
social change. While the relationship of temperance to suffrage was generally damaging, for example, the experience of Fort Wayne women also
shows a more positive side. Pioneer women’s rights leaders like Beulah
Ninde undoubtedly gained valuable political skills in early temperance
organizations that were important in reform efforts after the Civil War.
Around the turn of the century, small but courageous WCTU organizations in Allen County rekindled an otherwise dying suffrage spirit. In
addition, in Fort Wayne, as elsewhere, the WCTU served as a bridge that
led women from concern for their home and family to concern for the
public good and ultimately, a commitment to suffrage.
One question that deserves particular consideration is the degree
to which suffragists’ experiences in Fort Wayne differed from those of
women in other areas characterized by resistance to the feminist cause.
Indiana had a reputation for being extremely conservative, even lagging
behind other Midwest states in political, social, and cultural change. In
fact, suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt considered Indiana one of five
states that presented the most difficulties for gaining suffrage. Certainly
the control of the Indiana General Assembly by allies of liquor industries, as well as the opposition of the Indiana Supreme Court, created
formidable roadblocks to suffrage. Yet within such a difficult political
arena, Fort Wayne suffragists seemed even more powerless and resigned
than other Indiana reformers. Moreover, existing studies suggest that
Fort Wayne suffragists were more delayed in women’s advocacy than
their counterparts in Wisconsin and in St. Louis, Missouri, centers for
large breweries and large populations of German American and other
foreign-born citizens with traditions of alcohol use. Milwaukee club
women, for example, pressured city officials to appoint a woman to the
school board as early as 1895. Women of Waukesha, Wisconsin, won
election of a woman as superintendent of schools in 1902. In early twentieth-century St. Louis, considered “the most hostile section of the state
on the subject of votes for women,” women shared leadership of their
city’s public improvement program in preparation for the Louisiana
Purchase Exposition in 1904. In 1908, St. Louis women joined the campaign for reorganization of their city government. Backed by a
prominent businessmen’s association, women formed a suffrage associa-
FORT W A Y N E W O M E N ’ S L O N G S T R U G G L E
tion two years later. By comparison, Fort Wayne club women did not
begin to push for a woman on the local school board until 1913, and
their goal was not realized until 1921. While suffragists received some
support from male religious, business, and labor leaders, until the final
years leading up to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, most
business and political leaders were firm
Finally, the story of Fort Wayne’s suffragists adds to our understanding of the resistance women faced and encourages renewed respect
for their long, uncertain, and cautious journey. Despite considerable
opposition, Fort Wayne women gained new public roles and contributed
much to the progress of their industrial city. As their spirits were rekindled in the second decade of the twentieth century, they demonstrated a
passion for voting rights that could only have come from a hard-earned
sense of dignity and opportunity. Their long-awaited political and social
empowerment was a testimony to their many decades of commitment.
“Springer, “Ladylike Reformers,” 20, 221; McBride, On Wisconsin Women, 156, 190; Dina M.
Young, “The Silent Search for a Voice: The St. Louis Equal Suffrage League and the Dilemma of
Elite Reform, 1910-1920,” Gateway Heritage, 8 (Spring 19881, 2-19.
257