Was Calder first female to vote in Florida?
Some answers aren’t as simple as they seem. Just ask Hiram Calder.
Unfortunately, that’s impossible.
He’s buried in an unmarked grave at Orlando’s old pauper’s cemetery. But Calder is the subject of this week’s Ask Orlando question.
A reader noted this is the 100th anniversary of Congress passing the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote after it was ratified by the states.
“I read somewhere about a lady dressed as a man who voted in Orlando? Is it true?”
He was asking if the legend is true, that Calder was a woman who beat the voting system by pretending to be a man.
In 2019, the answer is no. A few years ago, some people would have answered, “It depends.”
In 1902, almost everybody in Orlando would probably have screamed “yes” if they’d known Calder’s secret.
That’s the year Calder moved here with his wife, Sarah. Calder got a job at Hungerford’s bakery on Orange Avenue and apparently went through life like your average Hiram.
“Instead of avoiding the company of men she always acted naturally with them, talking intelligently upon many subjects and greatly enjoying the gatherings of men where stories of all kinds are the chief amusement, nor failing to contribute her part,” the Orlando Morning Sentinel wrote when Calder died in 1914.
All seemed well in Calder’s life until his wife died in 1910. They had bought adjoining burial plots at a Tampa cemetery.
The newspaper said Sarah’s death left Calder “heartbroken and frantic with grief, even spending hours at the grave.”
He never recovered and died four years later of pellagra, a severe niacin deficiency. On his death bed at the county home for indigents, a doctor uncovered Calder’s secret.
“Not even the closest associates of Calder suspected she was a woman,” the Morning Sentinel reported.
Calder’s last wish was to be laid to rest by Sarah, but he was quickly buried in an $8.50 casket in what is now Orange Hill Cemetery.
His story made newspapers around the country.
“Gained Suffrage by Subterfuge,” the Tampa Tribune wrote.
Everybody wanted to unravel the mystery of “Orlando’s Beardless Man.”
If they’d had Google, they might have found an 1889 article in the New York World about Hanna Calder, “the wildest tomboy who ever lived.
“When Hanna reached the years of womanhood she failed to take on the characteristics with which the very name of womankind is pregnant,” the article said.
Calder married a teenage girl who lived on a nearby farm. He told the priest, “I am a man, but my good parents brought me up as a girl.”
The couple moved to Baltimore, but the marriage dissolved when the girl’s family took her back. Calder stayed in Baltimore, working as a bartender.
He eventually met Sarah Kemp. They fell in love, but finding a bakery to make a wedding cake was the least of their worries.
“She is a monster ineffable,” the World wrote in its exposé on Calder.
Monsters.
That’s what society considered anyone in the LGBTQ spectrum back then. Orlando wasn’t exactly waving rainbow flags, but it offered a fresh start for the Calders.
Hiram almost managed to take his secret to the grave. But the tale of the “First Woman to Vote in Florida” became Orlando lore.
But Hiram wasn’t pretending to be a man. By today’s standards, he was a transgender man.
As for registering to vote, it’s unclear what the rules were in 1902. These days, a driver’s license or state-issued identification card or U.S. passport is usually used.
Until 2011, a transgender person had to have undergone gender-reassignment surgery in order to change their gender marker on state-issued IDs.
Now they need only documentation they are undergoing
“clinical treatment.”
So was Hiram Calder really the first woman to vote in Florida?
It depends on whether you apply 2019 laws to 1902, or vice versa.
But this week’s Ask Orlando inquiry raised another question — should we even answer?
“He’s been dead a long time,” Gillian Branstetter said. “There are concerns addressing in death what he didn’t want to address while alive.”
She’s a spokesperson for the National Center for Transgender Equality. Her concern was that we’d be outing Calder by writing about him.
But Hiram has been effectively outed for more than a century. My guess is he’d be tired of being known as the woman who voted before it was legal.
He’d rather be remembered as a man who was married to his wife, and their love was such that he could not live without her.
That doesn’t sound much like a monster.