“On the list of those who will vote for Woman Suffrage”: Virginia Women Lobby the General Assembly

Visitors to the Library of Virginia’s exhibition, We Demand: Women’s Suffrage in Virginia, have been drawn to a large display of index cards filled with handwritten notes about members of the General Assembly in 1919. These cards are in the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia Records, which are part of the Library’s archival collections. Virginia women organized the League in November 1909 to lobby for an amendment to the state constitution to grant women the right to vote on equal terms with men. These cards, stored in their original pasteboard box, tell us how resourceful and able the advocates of woman suffrage in Virginia were.

Officers and volunteers of the Equal Suffrage League created these cards in 1919, about the time Congress submitted the Nineteenth Amendment to the state legislatures for ratification or rejection. Each card contains information about most of the men who were members of the General Assembly that year, although the cards for members of the House of Delegates are much more detailed. League officers hoped to identify legislators who were adamantly opposed to woman suffrage and so not waste time trying to persuade them, such as E. Griffith Dodson (below), of Norfolk, who “the more he was talked to about it, the more determined he became against.”

They also wanted to identify legislators who supported woman suffrage, like Thomas Lomax Hunter (above), who was president of the King George County league and “on the list of those who will vote for Woman Suffrage,” as well as others like him who could be encouraged to try to persuade other members of the legislature. It was also helpful to identify members who might be subject to persuasion if their constituents put pressure on them at the time of the November 1919 legislative election.

The cards contain information about how legislators had voted when the House of Delegates considered amending the state constitution in previous sessions (the measures failed in the sessions of 1912, 1914, and 1916), as well as what league members learned when they interviewed legislators. The suffragist who wrote notes about William M. McNutt, (left) a Rockbridge County farmer, reported that he “did not commit himself to vote for or against,” but also that “his wife is a violent anti” (an anti-suffragist).  Some cards also contain information that League volunteers sent in from legislators’ districts.

Other cards contain a note that a legislator who had opposed woman suffrage or was undecided might be persuaded to support the cause, such as future governor James H. Price (below) of Richmond. He had voted against a state amendment authorizing suffrage in 1916 but was described as “very favorable” after an interview in 1919, although he wasn’t present on the day the House of Delegates rejected the Nineteenth Amendment in February 1920.

This may have been an innovative lobbying technique in Virginia. National woman suffrage leaders in Washington, D.C., had created similar cards for members of Congress during the campaign to convince Congress to pass a constitutional amendment. We know so little about citizen lobbying in Virginia that we cannot say for certain whether anybody had done something similar in the state. In the past, citizens often signed petitions to the General Assembly to urge legislators to pass or defeat some proposals, and in fact that is how the Equal Suffrage League worked earlier in the decade. The league also canvassed the state in 1918 and 1919 to sign up people who supported woman suffrage in hopes of persuading members of the General Assembly that woman suffrage was popular among their constituents. But so far as we know, nobody in the state had created such a sophisticated database of information on legislators in order to improve their lobbying success.

The card for Richard Lewis Brewer (above) of Suffolk is particularly interesting. Brewer was elected Speaker of the House of Delegates in January 1920. That means that in 1919 he was already one of the most influential members of the General Assembly. He was sympathetic to woman suffrage. The card indicates that he even advised the Equal Suffrage League on tactics for the 1920 regular session of the General Assembly.

Brewer suggested that the resolution to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment be introduced in the state Senate first, where it had a better chance to pass. If the Senate passed it, that would improve the chance that the House of Delegates would pass it. He also suggested to Richmond artist Adèle Clark, one of the state’s most active suffrage volunteers who interviewed Brewer in December 1919, that they should think about introducing a woman suffrage movement to the state constitution.

The language of the Nineteenth Amendment echoed that of the Fifteenth Amendment, which had granted the vote to African American men in 1870, and Virginia politicians had then spent decades undoing that reform. Like Albert O. Boschen (below), whose card contained the note “negrophobia,” those politicians feared that if Congress gained additional authority over state voter registration and elections, the disfranchisement of African Americans might be reversed. A state amendment, however, left all state laws in place, and those laws in Virginia had severely reduced the number of African American men had been able to could register and vote. Clark responded to Brewer’s suggestion that it was too late for a state amendment.

What Brewer suggested came to pass, though. Early in 1920 both houses of the General Assembly by large majorities rejected the Nineteenth Amendment; but in February and March 1920 both houses of the General Assembly by large majorities voted for a proposal to amend the Constitution of Virginia to allow woman suffrage.

Ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in August 1920 made an amendment to the state constitution unnecessary, so the General Assembly never submitted the proposed amendment to a referendum for ratification or rejection. But Virginia suffragists had succeeded in their initial objective, which was to put woman suffrage into the Constitution of Virginia. It was too late to make any difference, but in fact the woman suffrage movement in Virginia very nearly achieved what it set out to do, win the vote for Virginia women.

That limited success was the result of suffragists’ dedication, hard work, ingenuity, and persistence. It deserves to be better known than it is. Virginia suffragists were a remarkable group of leaders, and they were active all over the state. They had much more success than we have appreciated and deserve much more credit than they have received.

-Brent Tarter and Mari Julienne, co-authors of The Campaign for Woman Suffrage in Virginia.