Starting in 1869 with a state wide convention held in Milwaukee, a coordinated front was made by women to gain the right to vote. Within just a few years, the new Wisconsin Woman's Suffrage Association had gained some rights in casting ballots on school board measures. Elizabeth Gifford Peckham, a graduate of Vassar college and one of the first librarians for the Milwaukee Public Library, frequently testified before the Wisconsin Legislature in favor of the suffrage campaign. In 1887, the then president of the WWSA, Reverend Olympia Brown of Racine, took the issue of voting for a city position which authorized school budgets, to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Her lost case would slow the movement, but only temporarily.
  Theodora Winton Youmans with an On Wisconsin flag | In 1911, Belle Case LaFollette gave a series of talks at chautauqua education events and local fairs throughout Wisconsin in support of a statewide voting referendum. Following its failure to pass in November 1912, Wisconsin women redoubled their efforts. Mrs. LaFollette used the platform afforded her by her husband's new LaFollette Weekly Magazine to write on Home and Education. Waukesha journalist and activist, Theodora Winton Youmans, also was a popular writer on women's equality and in 1913 became the president of the WWSA. More grassroots efforts were included too. A 1914 Milwaukee Sentinel article wrote of a local high school's suffrage effort. The girls of the school banded together and vowed not to date any boy unless he wore a button in support of women voting. |
Even as women assisted the Great War effort by replacing millions of men in the factories, they continued to fight for equal rights. At the conclusion of the war, their significant contributions could not be ignored. Wisconsin women abandoned the state strategy, and put their efforts behind a federal constitutional amendment. What became the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution passed the House in January 1918 and the Senate in June 1919. The Wisconsin legislature was the first state to ratify the amendment a week later on June 10, 1919, along with Illinois and Michigan on that day.
Chudnow Museum of Yesteryear's Forward Wisconsin Women exhibit on Suffrage and Temperance is open through March 2020.
Vintage Suffrage designs printed on hundreds of merchandise items to purchase online:
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by Joel Willems, curator
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