Southern Indiana Business July-August 2020 | Page 24

LEFT / a newspaper photograph of the Woman
Suffrage Parade held in New York City on May 6,
1911 (Blanche Culbertson was riding in the sedan
chair shown just behind the women holding flags).
ABOVE / Blanche Culbertson, 1890. RIGHT / a
pledge for the same event.
Women of that era were awarded very
few rights, especially those who married.
Having a husband meant forfeiting that
which a woman owned to him. It was men
who were viewed as the leaders of households.
As Carnegie Center for Art & History
Director Eileen Yanoviak put it, the
push for the right to vote didn’t exist in a
vacuum.
“It was part of a broader women’s issues
movement, including representation in
political sys-tems, to the civil right issues,
to all the issues that might pertain to women’s
rights,” she said. “When we talk about
suffrage, that wasn’t the end that suddenly
women had all the rights we need. It was
just one step in a continuum of advocacy
and hard work for people to increase the
rights and powers of women. Ultimately,
that’s what a lot of politics is.”
Helping to build up solid numbers
of advocates was an emerging trend of
women’s clubs. Unlike religious clubs that
had been popular, the new women’s clubs
didn’t focus on “traditional” women’s
duties.
Instead, politics and other intellectual
matters were at the forefront.
“They were a reading, learning and
political club,” Yanoviak said. “They were
talking about world politics, social issues
and cultural things.”
Matters like increasing the wages of
women came into play. Another major
issue was temperance.
Morgan said it would be hard to separate
women’s suffrage from the movement to
limit drinking. Until laws were changed to
promote temperance, women would perhaps
have to rely on men who drank too
much to properly support the family.
But in order to get those laws on the
books, women would have to play a direct
role in the pro-cess.
“By not having the right to vote, they
didn’t have the representation,” Yanoviak
said. “That whole concept that men chose
to vote for the family, it guided the thinking
that women didn’t need to vote. You also
had women that needed to work. Voting
mattered because they needed policies that
met their needs.”
A SOUTHERN INDIANA LEADER
EMERGES
One prominent voice to emerge from
temperance advocacy groups was Charlestown
native Mary Garrett Hay. With her
mother passing away early in life after her
1857 birth, Hay grew up under the direction
of her politically-minded father, who
was a physician.
Hay would accompany her father to his
meetings, where political matters would
be discussed at length. From those experiences
grew her own political strengths.
“Like many women, she wasn’t interested
in women’s suffrage at first,” Morgan
said. “She was told that if she was interested
in temperance, she needed to be interested
in suffrage. If you want to change the
laws, you need to be able to vote.”
An eagerness to involve herself in the
national movement took over. By the end
of the 19th cen-tury, Hay was organizing
groups to support the cause at the national
level.
By then, Hay had already made her way
to New York City, where she ascended
to the highest positions of certain suffrage
groups. Her work eventually helped
women secure the right to vote at the state
level, and ultimately the national level with
the ratification of the 19th Amendment in
1920.
“The other women in the movement
admired her skills and efficiency,” Morgan
24 July / August 2020