THE LEGISLATIVE TRAILBLAZERS
5 women pioneers were elected to the Connecticut General Assembly a century ago. Here are their stories.
When Connecticut’s first female legislators arrived at the Capitol on Jan. 5, 1921, the House chamber was literally a smoke-filled room. Arms were twisted and alliances were forged amid thick plumes of cigar smoke. For members who preferred chewing tobacco, large metal spittoons known as cuspidors were positioned by every chair.
It was considered vulgar for women to smoke in public, or even to be around those who indulged in the habit. Would the presence of female legislators put a sudden end to a ritual deeply entwined with political deal-making in what had previously been the exclusive domain of men?
The male members of the House of Representatives didn’t need to worry. “We women want the men in the House to feel that they may smoke just as if there were no women legislators present,” declared Rep. Mary Hooker on the opening day of the 1921 session. It was the first floor speech by a female member of the General Assembly, and Hooker received “loud applause” from the men, according to an account in The Hartford Daily Courant.
Hooker and four other trailblazers — Emily Sophie Brown, the Rev. Grace Edwards, Lillian S. Frink and Helen Jewett — won their seats in November 1920, just three months after the ratification of the 19th Amendment guaranteed women the right to vote.
None of them were suffrage leaders, although Brown played a role in the movement and Hooker later expressed sympathy for the cause.
During their time in the House, the women pushed legislation that dealt with education, road improvements and prison reform. One successful measure amended
the state’s blue laws to allow concerts on Sundays between 3-6 p.m.
Hooker, the wealthy widow of a former Hartford mayor; Brown, a Wellesley College-educated handwriting expert from Naugatuck; and Frink, who helped her husband run a general store in Canterbury, were all Republicans, swept in on the GOP coattails of President Warren G. Harding.
Jewett, a former school teacher from Tolland, was a Democrat, and Edwards, a “lady minister” from New Hartford, had been endorsed by both parties.
One hundred years later, only Hooker enjoys a measure of local recognition, mainly because a school in the capital city bears her name.
The other four women largely have disappeared from history.
Yet each of these pioneers merits wider acclaim, said Secretary of the State Denise Merrill, a Democrat. “We don’t know a lot about these women but we should,” she said.
“They deserve more attention then they’ve gotten,” said Themis Klarides, the former House Republican leader. “They’re the ones who got us here.”
In the century since women were first elected to the General Assembly, their political power has crested and ebbed. Four years after the group of five won their House seats, voters in Hartford sent Alice Merritt to the state Senate, the first woman to serve in the upper chamber.
In the 1940s, Connecticut was represented in Congress by two women, Republican Clare Boothe Luce and Democrat Chase Going Woodhouse.
And the state made history in 1974, when Ella Grasso, the daughter of Italian immigrants from Windsor Locks, became the nation’s first female governor elected in her own right (not filling the unexpired term of her husband.)
But the first Black woman — Margaret Morton of Bridgeport — did not reach the Connecticut legislature until 1973.
And even today, women have yet to achieve parity in state government; they currently hold about a third of the seats in the General Assembly.
“Here we are in 2021, just 100 years after women got the right to vote and we’re stuck at about 35% in the House and 27% in the Senate,” said Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz. “To me, it’s extremely frustrating. I
had hoped we would have made more progress.”
Breaking barriers in The Land of Steady Habits
The first two decades of the 20th century were heady days for the women’s suffrage movement, with protests and hunger strikes in Washington and other cities around the nation.
By 1919, the U.S. Senate had passed the 19th Amendment and the race to ratification was on. Several states and territories, mostly west of the Mississippi River, had given women the right to vote years earlier. (Women legislators had been serving in frontier capitols such as Denver and Cheyenne since the 1880s.)
Connecticut was not at the vanguard of the movement. Gov. Marcus H. Holcomb refused to call the legislature into special session to vote on the suffrage measure. “No madam, you can’t vote,” Holcomb and his fellow Republicans proclaimed, according to a story in The Boston Globe.
Thirty-six states were needed to approve the amendment; finally, in September of 1920, after ratification was assured, Connecticut became the 37th.
“As usual, The Land of Steady Habits wasn’t first,”
Merrill said.
Connecticut did enjoy one distinction: it elected more female lawmakers in 1920 than any other state.
The Daily Courant seemed less than impressed with the barrier-breaking milestone. A December headline touted the fact that 85 farmers had won seats in the General Assembly that year; in smaller type, the newspaper noted that five women also were among the new legislators.
But regional newspapers from Boston and New York featured lengthy front page stories on the women.
“I’m so happy ... that Connecticut ... has more women in its legislature than any other states,” Brown told a writer for The Globe on her first day at the Capitol. Brown had been active in the Connecticut Women’s Suffrage Association.
Hooker was initially an opponent of the suffrage movement. But her experience serving on the Hartford school board before her election to the General Assembly changed her mind.
“The wonder is that women were satisfied without the ballot [for] so long,” she told The Globe. “I used to be anti myself but after I was elected to the board of education, I felt that I was not only inconsistent but wrong to oppose the ballot for women.”
Other members of the inaugural class of women lawmakers appeared to make a point of emphasizing that they were not “militants,” as critics sometimes called advocates for women’s rights.
In a story published in The Boston Post a few weeks after the 1920 election, Lillian Frink was described as a “small, nervous woman ... who says she’s not a suffragist or anything of the sort.”
Frink, whose brother was elected to the House the same year that she was, “plans to approach her new job with the serious intent
of proving that women can legislate honestly, fairly and wisely,” according to the article.
All five women were civicminded and involved in their communities prior to entering politics. They led Liberty Loan and Red Cross drives during the First World War. Hooker was secretary of the Hartford school board, Frink was active with the Canterbury Grange and served as town clerk and Brown volunteered for the women’s auxiliary of the YMCA.
At 54, Hooker was the group’s leader. Born in Philadelphia, she was a descendant by both blood and marriage to one of the state’s founding families; Thomas Hooker established the Connecticut Colony after a falling out with Puritan leaders in Massachusetts.
She was by far the most prominent of the five women and they looked up to her. “It is because I am white-haired and the eldest, I suppose,” Hooker told a reporter at the time.
As the sole Democrat among the five, Jewett lacked the clout of the other members. (At that time, the House had nearly 300 members; just 13 were Democrats.)
Two weeks after arriving at the Capitol, Jewett told a Globe writer that she expected to see an increase in the number of Democrats. “You can’t keep a Democrat down very long,” said Jewett, who won her first election in 1920 by a scant four votes, out of 255 cast.
Brown and Hooker have the most significant legislative records. Hooker’s bill allowing concerts on Sunday afternoons won passage after she convinced her fellow lawmakers that such performances were educational in nature.
Brown was the first woman to wield the speaker’s gavel, taking her turn presiding over the House near the end of the 1921 legislative session. “It was lots of fun up there being boss over all those men,” Brown was quoted as saying in a news story that ran in a Wisconsin newspaper. “No, indeed, I wasn’t rattled a bit.”
But so much of the focus was on appeasing the men, particularly regarding smoking rules. Even Edwards, the “lady minister,” did not object.
The women wanted to send a signal that they weren’t going to upend the customs of the chamber, said West Hartford historian Tracey Wilson. “If you said you didn’t want to be around smokers, you weren’t going to get into the room,” she said.
Remembering their legacies
Hooker won a second term to the legislature in 1924. She spent the final decade of her life giving away part of her fortune, donating thousands of dollars to charitable groups from Hartford Hospital and the Community Chest to the Salvation Army and a fund for shoeless schoolchildren.
When she died at 75 on May, 13, 1939, her obituary ran on the front page of the Sunday Courant.
That’s more acclaim than Edwards received. After her term in the General Assembly, she married a widower named George Kellogg and returned to her church in Litchfield County. The Courant ran a short death notice when she died in December of 1956; it did not mention her historic win.
The Courant also ran a brief item on Jewett’s death in April of 1966. Her service in the legislature was noted, as were her other civic accomplishments.
Brown, who lived the longest of the five, dying in March of 1985 at the age of 103, received an extensive obituary in The Courant. After her single term in the General Assembly, she went on to become a New Haven County commissioner, a position that allowed her to pursue her passion, prison reform.
“She wasn’t necessarily a woman’s libber,” her cousin, Emily Gibbs, told The Courant in 1985. “She believed that if a woman had the time and energy to be a mover, she should be a mover.”
Brown was celebrated in her hometown of Naugatuck as well as at her alma mater, Wellesley College. She never married or had children; her obituary noted that she made her home with Mrs. Marion Rollins, her longtime companion.
Frink, who died in 1974 at 91, went on to a second act in the House of Representatives. In the 1950s, after her husband died, she was elected three more times.
In 1955, Frink made headlines for a proposal to restrict the manufacture and sale of toy pistols. The “Frink bill” as The Courant termed it, would set a maximum fine of $100 for anyone who manufactures distributes, transports or sells a realistic looking toy pistol.
But Frink wound up withdrawing the legislation in the face of heavy opposition from the Middletown-Portland delegation, home to the J & E Stevens Company, one of the nation’s leading manufacturers of toy pistols.
Asked many years later about women’s suffrage, Frink said she “never really thought it was necessary until it came.”
She said when she and the other four pioneers first arrived at the Capitol, the men seemed puzzled. “They seemed to avoid us,’’ she said. “After all, they’d had the place to themselves for a long time.”