‘We Demand: Women’s Suffrage in Virginia’
Traveling exhibition from Library of Virginia is on display in Norfolk
In the summer of 1919, Congress passed the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. When the amendment was sent to the states for ratification, Virginia wouldn’t do it.
Among legislators’ concerns was that African American women would be able to vote, and the state had been chipping away at African Americans’ civil rights for years already.
When Virginia women finally did get voting rights the following August, they faced another hurdle: Only a month to register for the November 1920 elections. Nevertheless, they persisted. Approximately 80,000 women ultimately cast ballots.
Those years of organizing, protesting, getting arrested, jostling in parlors about race and women’s suffrage are all covered in the traveling exhibition “We Demand: Women’s Suffrage in Virginia,” which is on display at Slover Library in Norfolk through Election Day — Nov. 3.
Created by the Library of Virginia, the exhibition commemorates the centennial of the 19th Amendment and tells the story of how Virginia women fought for and against voting rights.
It includes panels of documents, photos and rare newsreels of events such as the 1913 suffrage march in Washington, D.C., which included Virginia women. Norfolk activist Pauline Adams is also seen in a 1919 national tour called the “Prison Special” in which women like Adams gave speeches wearing replicas of their prison garb.
“These ladies traveled at the drop of a hat, they talked incessantly. They spoke on street corners, they spoke from their automobiles, they cornered legislators in their offices, even in their homes, to talk about suffrage and how important it was,” said Barbara Batson, exhibitions coordinator at the Library of Virginia in Richmond.
“They were just an intrepid bunch of women who stepped way outside the bounds of what was expected of them.”
Wyoming became the first territory to grant women voting rights in 1869, and a few states and territories slowly followed. Some women believed that pushing for an amendment to the Constitution was best and organized groups like the National Woman Suffrage Association. Others targeted their own states, which usually handled election matters.
Virginia’s first group, the Virginia State Woman Suffrage Association, formed in 1870 but died quickly. In 1909, however, a group of well-to-do women in Richmond launched the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia, and they traveled across the commonwealth to set up local units.
Adams started a Norfolk chapter in 1910. Batson called Adams “feisty,” too feisty at times for her conservative Norfolk neighbors because Adams believed in a more in-your-face approach to change. She joined a militant national group and got arrested in front of the White House in 1917.
Another member of the ESL was Maud Jamison, a young Nor
folk teacher, who racked up the most arrests of the Virginia women, said Mari Julienne, an editor of the Library of Virginia’s Dictionary of Virginia Biography project.
Jamison later took a job with the National Woman’s Party. The portable typewriter she used for the NWP, on loan from Jamison’s granddaughter, is part of an exhibition at the Library of Virginia.
The ESL eventually had more than 140 chapters and became the largest nonmilitary organization in the state, Batson said.
Meanwhile, the Virginia Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, which had an all-male advisory board, formed in 1912. It published broadside papers and argued that “political women will be a menace to society to the home and to the state.”
The legislature met every two years and every session rejected a suffrage amendment. Yet, the margin between those for and against grew narrower each session, Batson said.
“You can tell the Equal Suffrage League women are making some progress,” Batson said. “Virginia did not ratify the 19th Amendment but, in fact, ESL’s approach was persuasion and education.”
African American women were on their own when it came to voting rights. None of the suffrage organizations allowed them to
join. National women’s groups were still sore because the 15th Amendment had given African American men the right to vote but not women. Virginia circumvented the 15th Amendment by requiring voters to pass literacy tests and pay poll taxes to vote. While denying 90% of African American male voters the right to vote, the tests and poll taxes also disqualified 50% of white men.
The ESL believed in the color line and published leaflets using the rationale for its cause. Since white women outnumbered African American men and women, one read, giving white women the vote “would increase white supremacy.”
Even after the 19th Amendment was ratified in August 1920, antisuffragist women registered in hopes of diluting the African American vote.
African American women had not been deterred.
In July 1912, the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs met in Hampton and approved a resolution supporting suffrage and held a suffrage parade in the city. They also discussed the importance of forming political study clubs to stay informed.
Josephine Norcom of Portsmouth, Janie Porter Barrett of Hampton and Rebecca Pride Bowling of Norfolk were a few of
several local African American activists. Once the suffrage amendment was passed, the women held voter registration drives and pushed women to stand in long lines and return, several times if necessary, if they were initially told no.
Some male registrars resigned so that they did not have to register women — white or black — to vote. Batson and Julienne said the records show that women were appalled that they were asked their age when they registered.
But about 80,000 women voted for the first time on Nov. 2, 1920 and in some areas like Roanoke, female voters outnumbered men.
African Americans continued to have to fight for equal voting rights, Batson and Julienne said. The poll tax wasn’t completely eliminated in Virginia until 1966 when Norfolk’s Evelyn Thomas Butts brought her case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled the tax unconstitutional.
More videos, documents, biographies and an interactive timeline can be found on the Library of Virgi ni a site at www.edu.lva.gov/wedemand.