A roll call of Western Pa. suffrage trailblazers
These are just some of the Western Pennsylvania women who waged the successful battle for the ballot. To learn more, watch “Trailblazers of the Suffrage Movement: Celebrating 100 Years,” a 28minute documentary airing Thursday at 8 p.m. on PBS station WQED.
Rachel Foster Avery (18581919) was a Pittsburgh native who learned about equality from her mother, Julia Manuel Foster, a Sunday school pupil of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In 1848, at a gathering in Seneca Falls, N.Y., Mrs. Stanton insisted that women should have the right to vote. Mrs. Avery’s father, J. Heron Foster, supported equal pay for men and women as editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch newspaper. After he died in 1868, Rachel and her mother moved to Philadelphia. She traveled abroad with Susan B. Anthony, the dedicated suffragist and lifelong friend of Mrs. Stanton.
Mary E. Bakewell (1868-1960) was the daughter of Benjamin Bakewell, manufacturer of Bakewell “Molly” joined the suffrage movement at age 41 and enrolled at the Hartford, Conn., Theological Seminary in 1950. She taught andpreached but the Episcopal Church did not ordain her. She joined the militant suffragist Alice Paul and members of the National Woman’s Party in protesting outside the White House during Woodrow Wilson’s presidency. In 1949, her recollections of her childhood in Allegheny City appeared in “Of Long Ago: The Children and the City.”
Sara Beatrice Writt Dunston (1883-1966) sang on KDKA radio and trained at the New England and Boston conservatories of music. A social worker, seamstress and suffragist, she used her singing talents to raise funds for the suffrage movement. A Pittsburgh newspaper said she possessed “a most extraordinary soprano voice of great volume and purity of tone.” She taught music lessons, most notably to Ivie Anderson, an outstanding jazz singer in Duke Ellington’s orchestra. In the mid-1920s, she married Dr. Joseph Dunston and moved to Harrisburg, where she was a correspondent for the Pittsburgh Courier. After a 1933 divorce, she moved to New York.
Elizabeth McShane Hilles (1891-1976) was born on a farm in Uniontown and graduated from Vassar College in 1913. She joined the suffrage movement after teaching school for two years in Indianapolis. With college classmate Louise Hall, she traveled throughout Pennsylvania in the summer of 1915 with the Justice Bell, a replica of the Liberty Bell, mounted on a flat-bed truck. She later moved to Philadelphia, working as an assistant to Mary H. Ingham, a board member of the Equal Franchise Society. One of the “silent sentinels” — suffragists who picketed the White House — she was also among women who were jailed after lighting “liberty fires” outside the White House and burning the effigy of President Woodrow Wilson in February 1919. In 1924, she married, raised a family and taught high school in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania.
Daisy Elizabeth Adams Lampkin (1883-1965) was an officer in the Pittsburgh Courier, a civil rights activist and a suffragist who began by organizing consumer protests by local Black housewives. In 1915, she was elected president of the Lucy Stone Woman Suffrage League, which fought for Black women’s right to vote. A year later, she represented the organization at a conference of the National Association of Colored Women. Her political involvement deepened in the 1920s when she was vice chair of the Negro Voters League of Pennsylvania. Her ability to recruit members to the NAACP created a major base of activists who lobbied for civil rights
and voting rights in the
1950s and ’60s.
Mary Flinn Lawrence (1887-1974) was an equestrian who loved dogs, fox hunts and parties. She was also the daughter of state Sen. William Flinn, who taught her how politics worked. At age 17, she started the Allegheny County Equal Franchise Federation, later serving as its president. In 1914, she married John Lawrence and adopted two sons, William and John. During World War I, she formed the Suffrage Red Cross, which supported troops through fundraising and nursing while promoting women’s right to vote. Wealthy, gen-erous and well-educated, she lent her fleet of cars for suffrage parades, supported the Industrial Home for Crippled Children and in 1969, sold her 480-acre estate to Allegheny County, which turned it into HartwoodAcres.
Lucy Kennedy Miller (1880 to 1962) was a 1902 Vassar graduate who, with Mary Bakewell, organized a school for suffragists with faculty from the University of Pittsburgh. She orchestrated a large parade marking Suffrage Day in May 1914. When the General Assembly ratified the 19th Amendment in June 1919, she became the first woman to ever address the state legislature. After women won the right to vote, she became president of Allegheny County’s League of Women Voters. With her sister, Eliza Kennedy Smith, she exposed corruption in Pittsburgh city government from the 1930s through the 1950s.
Winifred Barron Meek Morris (1876-1930) was the daughter of Peter Gray Meek, editor of The Democratic Watchman, a weekly newspaper in Bellefonte, Pa. She came to Pittsburgh after marrying Thomas King Morris. In 1916, she organized the Shirtwaist Ball, which drew 3,000 guests from all walks of life to raise funds for the suffrage cause. In 1917, under her direction, Allegheny County women sold more than $13 million in Liberty Loan bonds, money that supported the Allied cause in World War I. A poet and pianist, her songs in verse were broadcast on the radio and published in newspapers and magazines.
Hannah Jane Patterson (1879
-1937) was a Smithton native and a tireless teammate of Jennie Bradley Roessing in efforts to pass the Pennsylvania suffrage referendum, which
failed in 1915. A 1901 graduate of Wilson College in Chambersburg, she studied finance at Columbia University and law at the University of Pennsylvania. She played a role in establishing County’s Juvenile Court and served as director of the Council of National Defense during World War I.
Emma Bell Writt Richards
( 1879- 1957) belonged to the Lucy Stone Women’s Suffrage League and hosted its meetings in her home. She supported the league’s efforts to award college scholarships and in the early 1900s, taught English literature at the Avery Trade School on the North Side. Her granddaughter, Martha Conley, of LincolnLarimer, became the first Black woman to graduate from the University of Pittsburgh law school in 1971.
Eliza Kennedy Smith (1889-1964) was a leading Pittsburgh suffragist and the daughter of Julian Kennedy, a steel engineer who worked for Andrew Carnegie. She studied economics and political science, graduating from Vassar College in 1912. Between the 1920s and 1950s, she joined her sister, Lucy Kennedy Miller, in exposing corruption in city gov-ernment. The duo’s probe of Mayor Charles H. Kline’s awarding of Allegheny city contracts and lavish expenditures prompted a grand jury to indict Kline on 48 counts of malfeasance. He was convicted in 1932, ordered to resign and sentenced to six months in prison.
Jennie Bradley Roessing (1881-1963) learned she was a second-class citizen when her father, a salesman of imported wool, told her that only criminals, idiots and women could not vote. She became president of the Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage Association and crisscrossed the state with her friend, Hannah Patterson, championing the cause of women’s suffrage. She helped save Pittsburgh’s oldest building, the Block House in Point State Park, and in 1931, organized the successful campaign of Sara M. Soffel, the first woman elected judge in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court. In her will, she left $555,779 to the U.S. government as a “token of appreciation on behalf of my father and mother.”
Edna Schoyer (1881
1946)
came from a family of attorneys and was the daughter of a Quaker mother and a Jewish father. Living in Squirrel Hill, this well- read woman kept the local suffrage movement’s financial books, sold and wrote pamphlets and staged fundraisers. In 1915, she moved to Ridgefield, Conn., to live on a large farm with her wealthy, lifelong partner, Anne S. Richardson. A trained singer and expert gardener, she served for 13 years as president of the League of Women Voters. Both women were elected to the local school board.