Before 1889 — 1889-1890 — 1891-1896 — 1897-1898 — 1899-1908 — 1909-1910 — 1911-1912 — 1913-1914 — 1915-1916 — 1917-1918 — After 1918
Key Players
Helen M. Barker
Rev. M. Barker
Philena Everett Johnson
Alice M.A. Pickler
John A. Pickler
Samuel A. Ramsey
Alonzo Wardall
Elizabeth M. Wardall
Sarah A. Richards
Emma Smith DeVoe
John H. DeVoe
William M. Fielder
Sophia M. Harden
Nettie C. Hall
Marietta Bones
Emma Cranmer
William F. Bailey
Henry B. Blackwell (Boston)
Susan B. Anthony (New York)
Rev. Helen G. Putnam (Jamestown ND)
Anna Howard Shaw (Washington DC)
Helen M. Gougar (Kansas)
Sena Hertzell Wallace (Kansas)
Carrie Lane Chapman Catt (Iowa)
Mary Seymour Howell (Albany NY)
Matilda Hindman (Pittsburgh PA)
Julia B. Nelson (Red Wing MN)
Clara B. Colby (Beatrice NE)
Olympia Brown (Wisconsin)
1889
The Dakota Territorial House created a seven-member committee on woman suffrage of Van Etten, Cooke, Lillibridge, Newman, Price, Burnham, and Potter [Press and Daily Dakotaian (Yankton SD), January 15, 1889, January 16, 1889]. Captain Van Etten, a “temperance lecturer,” introduced a bill for suffrage but made “an inconsiderate speech” that “damaged the cause” and the bill was rejected 28 to 17 [Press and Daily Dakotaian (Yankton SD), January 18, 1889; January 26, 1889, January 29, 1889]. Several suffragists, including Helen Barker, Philena Johnson, and Alice Pickler, had gone to Bismarck for the session [Press and Daily Dakotaian (Yankton SD), January 16, 1889, February 15, 1889]. Later, Cooke introduced a municipal suffrage bill which was defeated 26 to 22 after two hours of discussion, including remarks by Helen Barker who was invited to speak and “presented her points with wonderful clearness” [Press and Daily Dakotaian (Yankton SD), January 30, 1889, February 8, 1889; Mitchell Capital (SD), February 15, 1889].
“Petitions, principally from South Dakota, beseeching for female suffrage and prohibitory law, are coming in, and the speakers deferentially refer them to the yawning abysses of the election and temperance committees.”
Jamestown Weekly Alert (ND), January 31, 1889.
Suffrage supporter S.A. Ramsey served as a delegate to the Dakota statehood convention in Sioux Falls from Sanborn County, and national suffrage activist Henry B. Blackwell of Boston attended and addressed the Sioux Falls convention [Kingsbury/Smith, History of Dakota Territory, vol. 2 (1915), 1926; Jennifer M. Ross-Nazzal, Winning the West for Women: The Life of Suffragist Emma Smith DeVoe (Seattle: The University of Washington Press, 2011), 33].
The proposed constitution was then taken out to the people for additional promotion and debate. At the county convention held on it in Wessington Springs, Nettie Hall was “asked to speak on the constitution from a womans standpoint” — “She showed the inconsistency and partiality of the bill of rights and the constitution. Women were considered people under every condition and consideration of law until she approached the ballot box” [Wessington Springs Herald (SD), April 5, 1889].
“Gov. Mellette will be apt to have the support of every lady in South Dakota. He is pronounced in favor of woman suffrage.”
And he was quoted at a commencement speech in Grand Forks (ND) having said: “I notice in this class that the ladies outnumber the gentlemen six to two. The granting of the ballot to women will be the next step in advance in the political development of our land. Equal as she is in education, an added power will be given her with the ballot in her hand. The emancipated slave can vote, but he can deny the ballot to Harriet Beecher Stowe, his emancipator. I hope to see the day when the ladies of Dakota will walk side by side with men to the ballot-box to express their opinion upon all questions.”
Wessington Springs Herald (SD), July 12, 1889.“The first important measure to occupy the public mind of South Dakota, after prohibition is settled—and perhaps before, as a step towards it—is woman suffrage. All the old fogies who have been on the losing side in every advance, should get their thinking apparatus in repair to be ready to get on the right side for once.”
“Twin State Talk,” quoting Aberdeen News in St. Paul Daily Globe (MN), July 22, 1889.
October: The Dakota W.C.T.U. convention supported equal suffrage in four of its approved resolutions — “we reaffirm our belief in the inherent right of the ballot for women, and that justice and good government demand her enfranchisement. We therefore consecrate our efforts to the accomplishment of this end the coming year” [Brookings County Sentinel (SD), October 11, 1889].
The 1889 statehood convention continued the 1887 law by including, in the draft of the state constitution, school suffrage for women “‘any woman having the required qualifications as to age, residence and citizenship may vote at any election held solely for school purposes.’ As State and county superintendents are elected at general and not special elections, women can vote only for school trustees. They have no vote on bonds or appropriations.” They were eligible to hold office as school board members, or county or state superintendents of public instruction [ Anthony and Harper, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4 (1902), 561; Nelson in Lauck et al., 133; Jones, “The Women Voted,” in Lahlum and Rozum, Equality at the Ballot Box, 197, 203]. The convention did make a provision for full suffrage to be put to a public ballot in November 1890–kicking off the first major statewide suffrage campaign in South Dakota [Turner County Herald (Hurley SD), July 11, 1889; Plattsburgh Republican (NY), October 12, 1889; Kingsbury/Smith, History of Dakota Territory, vol. 2 (1915), 1929; Dennis A. Norlin, “The Suffrage Movement and South Dakota Churches: Radicals and the Status Quo, 1890,” South Dakota History (1985), 308].
Susan B. Anthony — “I do hope we can galvanize our friends in every state to concentrate all their money and forces upon South Dakota the coming year. We must have no scattering fire now, but all directed to one point, and get everybody to thinking, reading and talking on the subject.”
Nanette B. Paul, The Great Woman Statesman (New York: Hogan-Paulus Corp, 1925), 109.In a telegram from Minneapolis, Susan B. Anthony included an interview where she said: “The state of Dakota is the place of all others in the United State to which we are going to turn our attention. The state is bound by its constitution to submit the question of universal suffrage a year from this time, and we are going to concentrate all our forces in that state from this time on. All the best speakers, all the best workers in the woman’s suffrage ranks in the United State are to be turned into the field in South Dakota…. We shall do the greatest work for the cause ever done. We never before had such an opportunity. We never had before a whole year in which to work on a state…. The fact is the people of South Dakota are largely made of liberal westerners who did not come from the conservative east. We will not have to work with them as we would the people of the east. Many of them are educated up to the fact that woman’s suffrage has come, that it is no longer an experiment. We are going to educate the whole state. We have very great hope in South Dakota.”
Evening Star (Washington D.C.), October 22, 1889; Mitchell Capital (SD), October 25, 1889.“Susan B. Anthony announces that all the woman suffrage stumpers of the country are to be turned loose on South Dakota. Heaven help Dakota and her people.”
Wichita Eagle (KS), October 26, 1889.
One of the earliest campaign events was Woman’s Day at the Beadle County fair in 1889, which was headed by Emma Smith DeVoe, aided by Libbie Wardall and Mrs. Thomas. In addition to a baby show and horseback riding contests, she arranged for many suffrage and temperance speakers to address the “densely packed” crowds who had come to see the women’s exhibits. The speakers included DeVoe, Libbie A. Wardall, Alice Pickler, Rev. Helen G. Putnam, Sophia Harden, and Helen Barker, as well as short remarks on equal suffrage from several “brothers-in-law of the W.C.T.U.” Rev. Mr. Barker, Rev. Mr. English, Mr. Langley, Hon. A. Wardall, and A.W. Page of Broadland. After the speeches, “a unanimous vote of all present was taken in favor of equal suffrage and it was so popular that four bolts of yellow ribbon, the badge of the suffragists were used up.” The exhibits and speeches took place in a tent referred to as Floral Hall. Despite “dust that was driving in blinding clouds by a strong northeast wind,” the fair crowds were largest that day. After the fair, the DeVoes hosted a meeting at their home on Kansas St. to plan for a convention to organize the South Dakota Equal Suffrage Association [Sources: The Union Signal, November 7, 1889, in “Page 09 : South Dakota — Equal Suffrage Work,” “Page 09 : [news clipping: “Woman’s Day”],” Dakota Farmer (Huron SD), November 1889, “Page 66 : Entire Page,” and “Page 67 : Entire Page.” Emma Smith DeVoe: 1880-1890 (Scrapbook D), WSL Manuscripts, MS 171, Box 10].
October 21-22: The South Dakota Equal Suffrage Association was organized at the state convention held in the city hall at Huron. Sixty delegates from sixteen counties were reported to have attended. The first officers elected to lead the association were S.A. Ramsey, president; Alonzo Wardall, vice-president; and Rev. M. Barker, secretary; Sarah A. Richards, treasurer; J.H. DeVoe and William Fielder, executive committee; and Helen Barker, state lecturer/organizer. They also set up committees to solicit support from the Farmers’ Alliance, the Knights of Labor, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, “and other similar organizations” [“Page 01: Equal Franchise,” Emma Smith DeVoe: 1880-1890 (Scrapbook D), WSL Manuscripts, MS 171, Box 10; The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), November 2, 1889, p.348, and January 18, 1890, p.17, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University; Wessington Springs Herald (SD), October 25, 1889; “Page 66 : Entire Page,” Emma Smith DeVoe: 1880-1890 (Scrapbook D), WSL Manuscripts, MS 171, Box 10; Wittmayer, “The 1889-1890 Woman Suffrage Campaign,” 205].
“Mrs. H. M. Barker, the popular president of the W.C.T.U. of South Dakota, was called to the chair, and stated in terse and forcible language the object and importance of the meeting. Mr. J.H. DeVoe, an ardent friend of the cause, was made secretary of the meeting. A preamble and constitution were then presented by a committee formerly designated for that purpose, of which Mrs. Emma Smith DeVoe was the chairman. The preamble set forth the doctrine contained in the Declaration of Independence, of the equality of all men before the law under the endowment of the Creator; that governments are established to secure those rights; that governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed; that taxation without representation is tyranny; that all people are amenable to laws, yet one-half are debarred from the right to a voice in framing them. The constitution makes the organization non-partisan in politics and non-sectarian in religion, and places both sexes on an equality before the law. It admits to membership all persons above eighteen years of age who are in sympathy with the object of the Association. It provides for the organization of each county and township of the State… Thus South Dakota enters upon another vigorous campaign for the supremacy of justice, righteous laws, and God-given equality in human government.”
The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), November 2, 1889, p.348, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
John and Emma Smith DeVoe were selected for a committee on music for the campaign, and “Mr. DeVoe offered as an emblem for the association a pair of balances containing on either side the words ‘equality’ and ‘justice,’ which was adopted and Mr. DeVoe was authorized to get the emblems manufactured into medals and pins” [Wessington Springs Herald (SD), October 25, 1889]. Rev. Barker was selected a full-time secretary/staff for the association with headquarters in Huron [The Daily Plainsman (Huron, SD), November 19, 1889].
[Constitution and By-Laws of the South Dakota Equal Suffrage Association, #2021-02-26-0074, Box 6674, Folder 42, WCTU Equal Suffrage Association Miscellaneous Flyers, H91-74, Pickler Papers, SD State Archives.
Also printed in: Wessington Springs Herald (SD), November 15, 1889.“A State Woman Suffrage Association has just been organized at Huron, and active efforts will be made during the coming year to educate public sentiment to a point which will ensure victory. Friends of equal rights all over the United States ought to lend their best aid to South Dakota in this struggle…. The people are intelligent, enthusiastic, and progressive; although impoverished by the long-continued drought, they are willing to help themselves, and all others should therefore be the more willing to help them.”
— Alice Stone Blackwell, editor, in The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), November 2, 1889 [p.348, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University]“We want good laws and want them enforced, and if there is any power that will bring about such a state of affairs it is the power of the woman’s ballot. The purity of womanhood will stand as an immovable safeground about our public affairs as it does now about our homes and firesides.”
Brookings County Sentinel (SD), October 25, 1889.
November: Shortly after South Dakota became a state on November 2, 1889, the first state legislature was convened. During that session the question of putting equal suffrage on the ballot was brought up for a vote and passed 40 to 1 in the Senate and 84 to 9 in the House, in accordance with the direction of the 1889 constitutional convention [Anthony and Harper, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4 (1902), 553].
The legislature also put a measure on the ballot that would have limited voting rights of men of Lakota/Dakota tribes. Men of the tribes who took their assigned allotments from the 1877 Dawes Act, “proved up” (in a way) for twenty-five years to get it out of trust status, and relinquished tribal affiliations could be considered U.S. citizens and eligible to vote. The ballot measures were worded in a way that suffragists later claimed would cause confusion. The prospect of native men voting brought up racism in society such as the conservative Kimball Graphic editor, Clate Tinan, who referred to it as “a problem comparable to negro supremacy in the South.” As with African-American voting in the South, opponents of native enfranchisement promoted education requirements or literacy tests. Some supporters of women’s suffrage, like John Pickler, argued that educated white women would help offset the increased numbers of native voters. [Rozum, “Citizenship, Civilization, and Property,” in Lahlum/Rozum, Equality at the Ballot Box (2019), 240-247].
Susan B. Anthony lectured across the eastern part of the state with scheduled stops in ten cities. Susan B. Anthony’s first visit to South Dakota concluded with a speech to the state Farmers’ Alliance meeting with its “densely packed” audience of 475 delegates plus other spectators at the opera house in Aberdeen. After Anthony, Helen Barker and S.A. Ramsey, who were seated on the platform, gave short responses [Wessington Springs Herald (SD), November 8, 1889; “Page 66 : Entire Page,” Emma Smith DeVoe: 1880-1890 (Scrapbook D), WSL Manuscripts, MS 171, Box 10; The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), December 14, 1889, p.394, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University].
“The attitude of the Alliance was shown by the following resolution…: Whereas the interests of man and woman are identical, and woman is as well informed politically as newly enfranchised classes generally are, and as taxation without representation is just as tyrannical when practised upon woman as upon man; and Whereas, woman should take part in government for her own protection and the elevating of the whole human race; therefore be it Resolved, That we will do all in our power to aid in her enfranchisement in South Dakota at the next general election by bringing it before the local alliance for agitation and discussion, thereby educating the masses upon the subject.”
The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), December 14, 1889, p.394, Schlesinger Library, Harvard.
“I feel sure of success, for the fact that we were forced to remain a Territory so long after we had complied with all the requirements of being a State makes our voters see exactly what it is to be disfranchised, and they are inclined to look upon it as a grievance, even for us women.”
From “A lady in Huron, So. Dak.” in The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), November 23, 1889, p.369, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
December: Emma Smith DeVoe went to Hyde, Hand, and Spink Counties, each for a week, to speak and organize local suffrage societies [“Page 01: Equal Suffrage Meeting,” “Page 05 : Entire Page,” The Woman’s Tribune (Boston), January 4, 1890 in “Page 09 : Among the Workers,” and “Page 10 : Entire Page,” Emma Smith DeVoe: 1880-1890 (Scrapbook D), WSL Manuscripts, MS 171, Box 10]. At one stop at Greenleaf church in Hand County, “the usual Sunday school and gospel service was suspended, and the entire time given to this subject, the pastor fully believing that the cause she advocated, appealed so strongly to the noblest christian sentiment of the church, as to be appropriately considered on the Lord’s day” [“Page 10 : Mrs. DeVoe at Ree Heights,” Emma Smith DeVoe: 1880-1890 (Scrapbook D), WSL Manuscripts, MS 171, Box 10].
1890
January 11: The S.D.E.S.A. executive committee met in Huron to select delegates to the national convention in Washington D.C., plan legislative work, and plan literature and speakers for the campaign [St. Paul Daily Globe (MN), January 12, 1890; Griggs Courier (ND), January 24, 1890, et al.].
January 17: H.P. Smith, state senator from Lake County, introduced Senate bill No. 57 to give women the right to to vote at all school and municipal elections [Jennings, “Lake County Woman Suffrage Campaign,” (1975), 393]. Partridge introduced a full suffrage bill in the House [Kimball Graphic (SD), January 17, 1890; The Herald (Big Stone City SD), January 28, 1890].
February: Emma Smith DeVoe lectured and organized local suffrage clubs in Beadle County. One reporter printed that they accompanied DeVoe and “extensive preparations were made to enable us to defy the attacks of jack-frost, wolves, bad roads, etc., which were rewarded by a very pleasant and comfortable ride.” The week concluded with a county convention at G.A.R. Hall (Kilpatrick Hall) in Huron. Coffee was supplied and “many were there from the outside townships who came early with baskets well filled with provisions” [Wessington Springs Herald (SD), March 14, 1890; “Page 25 : Entire Page,” “Page 26 : Entire Page,” and The Woman’s Tribune (Boston), March 15, 1890 in “Page 27 : Beadle County Convention,” Emma Smith DeVoe: 1880-1890 (Scrapbook D), WSL Manuscripts, MS 171, Box 10].
“Let all the friends of equal rights everywhere take a personal interest in this campaign, and help us in a practical way. We need money very much to help pay the expenses of the campaign, for we are financially exhausted by the prohibition fight through which we have just come.
Yours for equal rights, M. Barker, Sec’y.”
The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), February 22, 1890, p.59, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
February 15: At the G.A.R. Hall in Huron, local suffragists held an event to celebrate Susan B. Anthony’s 70th birthday with speeches about her and her work by John and Emma DeVoe, Libbie Wardall, Mary Elson, and others, and closing by singing DeVoe’s “A Soldier’s Tribute to Women.” They had decorated the hall: “On the stage hung large lithographs of Miss Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, handsomely draped with national flags. In front of these, on tables, were handsome bouquets of flowers, and large potted plants that added beauty to the surroundings.” [Huron Daily Times (SD), February 17, 1890, “Page 26 : Susan B. Anthony Honored,” and “Page 26 : In Honor of Miss Anthony,” Emma Smith DeVoe: 1880-1890 (Scrapbook D), WSL Manuscripts, MS 171, Box 10; Huron Dakota Huronite (SD), February 20, 1890; Leavenworth Times (KS), March 11, 1890].
February: Alice Pickler, John Pickler, and Alonzo Wardall attended the National Woman’s Suffrage Association convention in Washington D.C. to ask for personnel and funds to run their suffrage campaign in South Dakota [Wessington Springs Herald (SD), December 6, 1889, February 28, 1890; Black Hills Union (Rapid City SD), March 7, 1890; Jamestown Weekly Alert (ND), February 27, 1890; Washington Critic (DC), February 20, 1890; Anthony and Harper, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4 (1902), 554; Kingsbury, History of Dakota Territory, vol. 3 (1915), 786-787; Wittmayer, “The 1889-1890 Woman Suffrage Campaign,” 208]. Congressman Pickler sent back a telegram to John DeVoe that $3,000 had been subscribed for the fund [“Page 09 : [news clipping : A telegram from Congressman Pickler],” Emma Smith DeVoe: 1880-1890 (Scrapbook D), WSL Manuscripts, MS 171, Box 10; Kingsbury, v.3, 786-787].
In February 1890, Major J.A. Pickler proclaimed for the press that the chances were “excellent” to pass suffrage…
“He has thus epitomized the facts on which he bases his conclusions: ‘That there are a large number of unmarried women in the state, who came to the state and acquired government land under the pre-emption and homestead laws, and who are paying taxes without any representation, and without any voice in the levying taxes on their land. It is estimated that one fifth of the land belongs to women. The state is largely agricultural, and the Farmers’ alliance, which is a very strong organization, has declared with very few dissenting votes for equal sufferage, and many of its leaders will engage actively in the work… The prominent men of the state are generally outspoken for equal sufferage, and no prominent politician openly opposes it. The near prospect of the enfranchisement of fifteen thousand Indians makes it imperative that woman suffrage be adopted now, before this new element shall be admitted to participation in the state government. The newspapers of the state are generally friendly. – Deadwood Pioneer.”
Black Hills Union (Rapid City SD), February 21, 1890
The territorial assembly of the Knights of Labor passed a resolution in support of equal suffrage [Black Hills Union (Rapid City SD), February 7, 1890].
Starting in the spring of 1890, national speakers came to South Dakota to campaign for suffrage, including: Susan B. Anthony, Anna Howard Shaw, Helen M. Gougar, Sena Hertzell Wallace, Henry B. Blackwell, Carrie Chapman Catt, Mary Seymour Howell, Matilda Hindman, Laura M. Johns, Catherine Waugh McCulloch, and other national speakers from the east, as well as a few from neighboring states like Julia B. Nelson of Red Wing, Minnesota and Clara B. Colby of Beatrice, Nebraska. Anthony and Blackwell both donated their time. Shaw and Catt were “new recruits” of Anthony’s. Shaw’s expenses were paid by the national association. Hindman had gone to California and Colorado and raised funds herself to support her work in the South Dakota campaign. For local speakers, Emma Smith DeVoe was joined in the field by Helen M. Barker, Alice M.A. Pickler, and Nettie C. Hall. They spoke at schoolhouses, courthouses, opera halls, and churches. Suffrage speakers appeared mostly in East River counties (most of West River was the Great Sioux Reservation), but also traveled to and through the developing towns and mining camps of the Black Hills. Concerns about the year’s drought was a major competitor for the attention of the wider public and drove people out of the state–Julia Nelson reported that Buffalo and Brule Counties on the plains of central S.D. were “nearly deserted.” The heat and dust, as well as scarcity of “decent” accommodations made traveling and campaigning difficult for out-of-staters as well.
[The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), November 30, 1889, p.377, May 24, 1890, p.168, June 14, 1890, p.185, June 21, 1890, p.194, July 26, 1890, p.250, September 13, 1890, p.292, September 27, 1890, p.308, October 4, 1890, p.316, and October 11, 1890, p.324, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University; The Dakota Ruralist (Aberdeen SD), June 28, 1890, “Page 42 : Entire Page,” and August 16, 1890, “Page 57 : Entire Page,” Emma Smith DeVoe: 1880-1890 (Scrapbook D), WSL Manuscripts, MS 171, Box 10; Trisha Franzen, Anna Howard Shaw: The Work of Woman Suffrage (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 67-68].
For more details: See the linked biography pages for in-state campaigners,
also Invaluable Out-of-Staters, Matilda Hindman and the 1890 Campaign, and Susan B. Anthony in SoDak.
“The National Association paid the expenses of Dr. Shaw, Rev. Olympia Brown, Laura M. Jones, Mary Seymour Howell, Carrie Chapman Catt, Julia B. Nelson, and Clara B. Colby. It also contributed one thousand dollars to the office ex of the State Committee, purchased four hundred dollars’ worth of copies of the Woman’s Journal and Women’s Tribune for distribution, and flooded the State with literature. The speakers collected fourteen hundred dollars which went toward their expenses.”
Paul, The Great Woman Statesman (1925), 115–116.“At the annual meeting of the National-American W. S. A. at Washington, it was voted that no speakers should be sent to South Dakota by the Association except such as were approved both by the executive committee of the South Dakota E. S. A. and by the South Dakota committee of the National-American W. S. A.
All donations for the Dakota work raised by the National-American or its auxiliaries should be sent to the chairman of the latter committee, Miss Susan B. Anthony; Rochester, N. Y.”
The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), March 15, 1890, p.85, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
Marietta Bones, Samuel A. Ramsey, and Helen M. Gougar of Indiana/ Kansas criticized Anthony for not turning over national funds for the South Dakota campaign to the state board. The tension between these active leaders carried through the end of the campaign in 1890. Suffragists in South Dakota were split between support for or opposition to Anthony’s leadership. More in my post: “Susan B. Anthony in SoDak,” July 29, 2020.
“Susan B. Anthony says she will manage the campaign from Washington. Our South Dakota sisters say she will not, that they are perfectly competent to carry on the war. Result: blood on the moon.”
Sturgis Advertiser (SD), March 20, 1890.“To be sure some of us may think we know a good deal about woman suffrage; but we should be willing to admit that those who have devoted twenty, thirty, and even fifty years to this cause might know even more, and we should be glad of their help, especially as it is to be paid for by outside parties or donated entire. We hope our South Dakota Association will not kick up a row simply because they cannot handle the money that was donated the National Association for work in our state.”
Wessington Springs Herald (SD), March 28, 1890.“The women’s public battle was giving the newspapers the opportunity to poke fun at the women and, by association, the suffrage cause… For all of their efforts to attract political support and educate the public, the suffrage workers were only succeeding in getting their internal feuds ridiculed in the papers.”
In Wittmayer, “The 1889-1890 Woman Suffrage Campaign,” 210, 220.
Over two weeks, Emma Smith DeVoe did organizing work in Spink County with a county convention at the Methodist Episcopal church in Frankfort on March 21st. As she organized in each voting precinct, “usually men” were chosen as officers to distribute literature “and to look after the interests of the cause at the polls on election day” [“Page 27 : Entire Page,” and “Page 28 : Entire Page,” Emma Smith DeVoe: 1880-1890 (Scrapbook D), WSL Manuscripts, MS 171, Box 10].
Libbie Wardall edited a suffrage department for The Dakota Ruralist, a paper of the Farmers’ Alliance [“Page 27 : Among the Workers,” Emma Smith DeVoe: 1880-1890 (Scrapbook D), WSL Manuscripts, MS 171, Box 10]. When anti-suffragists in Boston printed the first Remonstrance newsletter, they sent it specifically to leaders of the Farmers’ Alliance to sway them away from suffrage. One, John Goodspeed in Brookings County, sent his copy to the Ruralist to alert them of the mailing [Nelson, “Defending Separate Spheres,” p128-130 in Lahlum and Rozum, Equality at the Ballot Box (2019)].
At the 1890 SD W.C.T.U. convention in Madison, one of the proposed resolutions stated: “Therefore, Resolved; that we, members of the W.C.T.U. and women of South Dakota will never cease to petition, to work for, and to demand the ballot for women, till we are granted a fair share in the government of our commonwealth.”
Jennings, “Lake County Woman Suffrage Campaign,” (1975), 407.Another issue on the ballot for 1890 was about limiting the pending voting rights of native men. This parallel ballot issue was the occasion for a number of racist comments by suffrage supporters, such as this quote from the Brookings County Sentinel (SD), March 21, 1890:
“The question as it will come before the people is whether the women of South Dakota are as worthy of the elective franchise as the noble red man of the plains, whose comfort is a greasy blanket and a dirty pipe and whose joy is a bottle of forty rod whiskey.”
April: Emma DeVoe and Helen Barker worked to obtain translations of suffrage literature in Norwegian and German. Some were provided by the National W.C.T.U.’s superintendent of foreign literature, Sophie F. Grubb of Missouri [The Woman’s Tribune, April 5, 1890, “Page 32 : Entire Page,” Emma Smith DeVoe: 1880-1890 (Scrapbook D), WSL Manuscripts, MS 171, Box 10; The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), February 22, 1890, p.63, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University].
Emma DeVoe continued organizing work in Potter, Sully, Stanley, and Hughes Counties [Sully County Watchman (Onida SD), April 19, 1890; “Page 29 : Entire Page,” and “Page 30 : Entire Page,” Emma Smith DeVoe: 1880-1890 (Scrapbook D), WSL Manuscripts, MS 171, Box 10]. Through Sully County, “she traveled 166 miles by team—a task which many of us would shrink from” [The Dakota Ruralist, May 3, 1890, “Page 34 : Entire Page,” Emma Smith DeVoe: 1880-1890 (Scrapbook D), WSL Manuscripts, MS 171, Box 10]. In her tours of Kingsbury County, her speeches were accompanied often by a female quartette (from Iroquois?) who also performed later at the state convention in August [The Dakota Ruralist (Aberdeen SD), June 28, 1890, “Page 42 : Entire Page,” Emma Smith DeVoe: 1880-1890 (Scrapbook D), WSL Manuscripts, MS 171, Box 10].
“Thousands are filling the largest churches and halls to listen to our speakers. The topic is a household word among the common people. Our lecturers go into the neighborhoods, see people in their homes, and lecture in school-houses. Thus they get at the voters… Yours for victory, M. Barker, Sec’y So. Dakota E. S. A.”
The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), April 19, 1890, p.124, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
During city and county elections in April 1890, the women of Lake County were urged by the state Equal Suffrage Association to attempt to vote. “Territorial law had granted women the right to vote only at elections that included school business. [Newspaper editor F.L.] Mease interpreted new state law as allowing females to vote on school questions in any election.” They gathered at the Baptist Church but were turned away from submitting votes on school officers at the polls. Apparently women were accepted at polls in DeSmet and Rapid City. Editor Mease commented that another paper in Madison “makes her [women] the object of newspaper ridicule and sneers at the ladies attempting to vote. Heaven forbid, that the outside world should take this unmanly slur as a reflection of the best thought of this community” [Jennings, “Lake County Woman Suffrage Campaign,” 396-397].
In April 1890, state attorney general Robert Dollard tried to clarify school franchise questions but was vague about women who were unnaturalized. Two Scandinavian women who tried to vote in Slaughter SD were challenged for their lack of citizenship papers. In other cases, cities refused to set up distinct ballot boxes for school questions. Where there were no challenges to school franchise, the turnout for women voting was interpreted as an indication of their interest in voting at general elections. One of the Beadle County E.S.A. resolutions in 1890 was to encourage voting at the their school elections [Jones, “The Women Voted,” in Lahlum and Rozum, Equality at the Ballot Box, 197, 201-204].
May: Anthony returned to South Dakota in May 1890, staying for six months and making her headquarters with the DeVoes in Huron.
“Woman suffrage has received a very great impetus by the arrival of Susan B. Anthony. She was present at our last executive committee meeting and aided much by her counsels and words of cheer….
Again, dear friends, we need money to pay our workers. We have not one-half enough to pay the expenses of the canvass. I sadly fear our cause will be lost unless we receive more help in this direction. Our workers must be paid for their time, in part, at least. We are all poor, and the fear of another crop failure takes away what courage we have had. M. Barker, Gen. Sec’y.”
The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), May 10, 1890, p.152, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.John W. Brewer wrote to Herald editor from the State Agricultural College in Brookings: “Woman suffrage is booming, even among the students, many of them wearing the suffrage pin adopted by the So. Dak. E.S.A.” [Wessington Springs Herald (SD), May 2, 1890].
Emma DeVoe went to the Black Hills to organize local committees in advance of Shaw and Anthony’s visits there scheduled for October [Sturgis Advertiser (SD), May 15, 1890; Hot Springs Star (SD), May 23, 1890, June 20, 1890, “Page 33“–“Page 37,” Emma Smith DeVoe: 1880-1890 (Scrapbook D), WSL Manuscripts, MS 171, Box 10, et al.]. DeVoe traveled on “lengthy stage rides over the hilly, rough country, and sometimes speaking twice a day” to organize in Rapid City, Hot Springs, Terraville, Centennial Park, Central City, Deadwood, Spearfish, Lead, Oelrichs, Minnesela, Sturgis, Tilford, Postville, Whitewood, Hermosa, Buffalo Gap, Custer, and Hill City [The Dakota Ruralist (Aberdeen SD), June 14, 1890, “Page 37 : Entire Page,” Emma Smith DeVoe: 1880-1890 (Scrapbook D), WSL Manuscripts, MS 171, Box 10]. DeVoe was reportedly “loud in praise of her reception in the mining towns. She asserts that it is a great mistake to think that the miners are a rough set, uneducated, she finding them intelligent, kind-hearted and wide awake to all the reforms of the day” [The Dakota Ruralist, May 31, 1890, “Page 34 : Entire Page,” Emma Smith DeVoe: 1880-1890 (Scrapbook D), WSL Manuscripts, MS 171, Box 10]. Her visits inspired local workers like Marie J. Gaston (Deadwood), Belle Hammond (Centennial Park), and Mrs. S.A. (or A.S. or H.S.) Way (Hermosa) to continue field work through the summer around the Hills [“Page 48 : Suffrage Campaign in the Black Hills,” and Woman’s Tribune, August 16, 1890, “Page 48 : Letter from Mrs. DeVoe,” Emma Smith DeVoe: 1880-1890 (Scrapbook D), WSL Manuscripts, MS 171, Box 10; The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), July 19, 1890, p.228, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University].
“Western men, of whom the population of the Black Hills is largely made up,—and by western men is meant those coming here from Montana, Idaho, Nevada and those far western states—who have literally hewn their way to success, are the kind of men who listen patiently and with a chivalry that is real to a wrong that needs righting, ‘fair play’ being a code of honor with them. They are the men who do not fear women becoming ‘feeble, second rate copies of men,’ but have had a life experience of woman’s endurance, patience and courage…”
Dakota Ruralist, June 28, 1890, “Page 42 : Entire Page,” Emma Smith DeVoe: 1880-1890 (Scrapbook D), WSL Manuscripts, MS 171, Box 10.
May 10-11: The Jerauld County Equal Suffrage Association held its convention in the chapel of the Methodist Seminary in Wessington Springs. Prominent convention workers were Nettie C. Hall, Abi Huntley, Mother Freeland, Rev. Vessey, Rev. S.F. Huntley, and Prof. Freeland and wife Clara Freeland. Susan B. Anthony came to speak about her life and work. The Seminary Chapel was decorated with flags, banners, flowers and ferns, and among the mottoes displayed were: “Taxation without representation is tyranny”; “Equality before the Law”; “In 37 states the mother has no control of her child”; and (in the attitudes of the day) “Only idiots, paupers, criminals, insane, Chinese and women cannot vote.” [Wessington Springs Herald (SD), May 2, 1890, May 16, 1890].
In late May, Mary S. Howell went to Tripp (Hutchinson County) to give a lecture scheduled at a school there. The resulting story sent from Tripp on the 26th is interesting to my historian-brain in terms of the analysis of opposition to suffrage, but also for the terminology used in reference to race and ethnicity…
“Upon her arrival here she was confronted by a gang of scabby-brained Russians fresh from a hole-in-the-wall, who think that woman was created solely to ‘stay at home home and take care of the children’ and other menial duties, who informed her that they did not believe in woman’s rights or woman preachers and under no circumstances could she speak in the school-house. This aroused the few white people in town and they determined to open the school-house to Mrs. Howell at all hazards, but some of the gentlemen from the land where freedom of speech and the press is unknown were so demonstrative in their actions that the lady hardly felt safe to even remain in town, and she spent the afternoon with an old acquaintance and went to Parkston to wait for a train to take her to Scotland. Such behavior on the part of the school board and city officers has given our little town a black name that will require long and careful nursing to restore to its usual brightness” [Madison Daily Leader (SD), May 29, 1890; Wessington Springs Herald (SD), May 30, 1890].
In a Montana newspaper, the story was retold with less extreme language: “confronted by a crowd of people of foreign birth, principally Russians… the friends of the cause were determined to give Mrs. Howell the freedom of the school house at all hazards… [she] shook the mud of Tripp from off her dainty overshoes and left by the next train” [Anaconda Standard (MT), June 1, 1890]. Later, an ESA president wrote that he had met the man who ‘threatened’ Howell, who now was willing to concede “that old maid, and widow, that payed[sic] tax, ought to vote, but not women that had husbands, so you see there is hope” [Letter to Mrs. Wardall, October 2, 1890, #2021-01-20-0122, WCTU Suffrage Correspondence 1890: A-C, Box 6674, Folder 1, H91-74, Pickler Papers, SD State Archives, Pierre].
In the midst of leadership conflict, the South Dakota Equal Suffrage Association called a state convention in Huron ‘to attempt reconciliation’–the call was signed by “forty or more women” including Harden, DeVoe, Wardall, Bonham, Pickler, Johnson, Elson, Mouser, and Hall [Madison Daily Leader (SD), June 24, 1890; Kimball Graphic (SD), July 4, 1890; Union County Courier (Elk Point SD), July 2, 1890; Wittmayer, “The 1889-1890 Woman Suffrage Campaign,” 213-214].
By the summer, the national speakers were also criticized for limiting their appearances to larger towns and county seats, where the crowds willing to travel to hear them would likely already be supporters — new supporters would only be obtained by campaigning in rural areas [The Woman’s Tribune, June 7, 1890, “Page 42 : Entire Page,” Emma Smith DeVoe: 1880-1890 (Scrapbook D), WSL Manuscripts, MS 171, Box 10.
Starting in June through October, Mary Bradford–a teacher and homesteader in Hand County–campaigned for suffrage through twelve counties, by her reports, often visiting multiple townships in each county where she organized local suffrage associations and encouraged them to hold oratory contests on suffrage; and she reported doing this work on her own time and resources [Letter to Mrs. E.M. Wardall from Mary A.S. Bradford, December 2, 1890, #2021-03-30-0097, 1890 Campaign Folder 3, Box 6675, Folder 28, H91-74, Pickler Papers, SD State Archives, Pierre].
Sophia M. Harden (secretary of the SD Farmers’ Alliance), Mrs. Bonham, and Judge A.W. Bangs attended and spoke for suffrage at the state Democratic Party convention held at the opera house in Aberdeen. Newspapers reported that a “large delegation of converted Russians were present from Hutchinson county, who have abandoned the republican party because of prohibition. They wore large badges on which were printed ‘Hutchinson county is opposed to prohibition, Susan B. Anthony and equal suffrage; we favor high license instead of the original package, and want men to vote.'” They also reported that the anti-suffrage response from congressional candidate Ezra W. Miller (Elk Point) was “a vulgar and outrageously filthy speech…. an insult to every woman.” According to one news report, a small group made apologies for the incident, but most of “the party stands branded with the outrage.” The party adopted a resolution opposing suffrage, but another later article claimed that Miller’s “attack upon the women and upon Bangs was so bitter that it defeated him for the nomination for Congress” [The Herald-Advance (Milbank SD), June 13, 1890; Brookings Register (SD), June 13, 1890; Wessington Springs Herald (SD), July 25, 1890; Mitchell Capital (SD), April 7, 1893; Sully County Watchman (Onida SD), June 14, 1890; Vermillion Plain Talk (SD), July 4, 1894].
More on the SDESA appeal to the Democratic and other 1890 party conventions.
“THE ‘GLORIOUS FOURTH.’ Sixteen States now have school suffrage for women. Kansas has municipal suffrage. Wyoming is the first State whose daughters are politically free. It is our hope that South Dakota will be the second. This year, for the first time, the Judiciary Committee of the U. S. House of Representatives has reported in favor of a sixteenth amendment enfranchising women. As these results crown the labors of many years, it will be appropriate for the suffragists of the United States to hold meetings on the coming Fourth of July, for the double purpose of rejoicing over these victories and helping the Dakota campaign. Let such meetings be held on the Fourth wherever it is practicable, and at every meeting let a collection be taken up for Dakota. Hold literary exercises appropriate to the occasion, and secure good speakers and fine music. Let the women who believe in representative government enlist the men who also believe in it, and together let them make this a Fourth of July worthy of a Republic.
Susan B. Anthony, Vice-Present-Large of National-American W. S.A.
Lucy Stone, Chairman Ex. Com.”
The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), May 31, 1890, p.172, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
July 4: “The fourth of July in South Dakota is pre-empted by the woman speakers.” Emma Smith DeVoe spoke at Scatterwood Lake in Faulk County at a picnic held by the Farmers’ Alliance. Susan B. Anthony spoke at Wessington and at Merritt’s Grove. James Kyle of Aberdeen spoke at a celebration “in which he attacked corporate wealth and advocated compulsory education, universal suffrage, and freedom of the press”; after which Brown County Populists selected him to be their state senate candidate [“Page 43 : Entire Page,” Emma Smith DeVoe: 1880-1890 (Scrapbook D), WSL Manuscripts, MS 171, Box 10; Guide to the Hagerty-Lloyd Historic District (1990), 11-12, Beulah Williams Library Archives and Special Collections, NSU].
“More than once the speakers slept in sod houses, where the only fuel for preparing the meals consisted of ‘buffalo chips.’ Sometimes they drove twenty miles between afternoon and evening meetings, at one time forty miles, on a wagon seat without a back. On the Fourth of July, a roasting day, Miss Anthony spoke in the morning, drove fifteen miles to speak in the afternoon, and then left at night in a pouring rain for a long ride in a freight car.”
The Woman Citizen 3 (March 22, 1919), 901.
July 7-8: At the Huron convention, delegates from each county met as a committee “on the order of business” which met in the G.A.R. Hall “to report the attitude of the convention towards the state executive committee” who had been in conflict with those factions allied with Susan B. Anthony. They adjourned at 3:00 a.m. to reconvene in a jury room of the courthouse at 9:00 a.m. Other activities of the convention included a speech by Mary Howell in the opera house on the first night and a general business meeting in the morning. When the committee adjourned, the state executive committee had all resigned except Sarah Richards who was not present. The remaining members reorganized the state association, electing new officers and establishing a headquarters in the Hills Block in Huron. The reorganized state organization encouraged a “Do-Everything policy” for local associations do have regular meetings, do press work, have oratory contests, tent meetings, “yellow tea parties,” and suffrage dinners, and more. The state also planned to include more outreach to German and Scandinavian populations [Madison Daily Leader (SD), July 10, 1890; The Daily Plainsman (Huron SD), July 10, 1890; “Page 44 : Entire Page,” and “Page 45 : Entire Page,” Emma Smith DeVoe: 1880-1890 (Scrapbook D), WSL Manuscripts, MS 171, Box 10; Notes, July 8, 1890, # 2021-03-16-0012, Box 6675, Folder 20, WCTU Report to National Suffrage Convention – 1886, Letter to “Friends of Equal Suffrage,” July 16, 1890, #2021-02-26-0071, and “Instructions for Equal Suffrage Oratorical Prize Contests,” July 23, 1890, #2021-02-26-0077, Box 6674, Folder 42, WCTU Equal Suffrage Association Miscellaneous Flyers, H91-74, Pickler Papers, SD State Archives; Wittmayer, “The 1889-1890 Woman Suffrage Campaign,” 217-218; Egge, “Ethnicity and Woman Suffrage,” in Lahlum and Rozum, Equality at the Ballot Box, 223].
Correspondence about the leadership difficulties in Pickler collection (H91-74), SD State Archives:
Letter to Mrs. Pickler from L.A. Wardall, July 8, 1890, #2021-05-13-0092, WCTU Correspondence 1888-1886, Box 6677, Folder 7.
Letter to Mrs. Elizabeth Murray Wardall from Irene Adams, July 21, 1890, #2021-01-20-0097, WCTU Suffrage Correspondence 1890: A-C, Box 6674, Folder 1.
Letter to Sister Wardall from Helen M. Gougar, August 6, 1890, #2021-01-22-0001, WCTU Suffrage Correspondence 1890: D-G, Box 6674, Folder 2.
July: The state suffrage convention in Huron was scheduled to coincide with the Independent party convention in hopes that suffragists could convince the party to adopt a suffrage platform [Kingsbury, History of Dakota Territory, vol. 3 (1915), 787; Wittmayer, “The 1889-1890 Woman Suffrage Campaign,” 214-218]. Although each group separately had indicated support for equal suffrage, the Farmers’ Alliance and Knights of Labor did not adopt a suffrage plank in their platform — “instead the statement that ‘no citizen should be disfranchised on account of sex’ was so successfully hidden in a long resolution that none of their speakers brought it to light during the whole progress of the campaign” [Sully County Watchman (Onida SD), July 26, 1890; Madison Daily Leader (SD), July 26, 1890; Paul, The Great Woman Statesman (1925), 116 (quote); Wittmayer, 213-214].
“That was a terrible campaign. Even the Knights of Labor and the farmers dumped the women’s cause in the ditch for a last-minute political expediency, after swearing by all their gods to support it.”
The Woman Citizen 3 (March 22, 1919), 901.
More on the SDESA appeal to the Independent and other 1890 party conventions.
July-August: Libbie Wardall and the SDESA created a press department and sent word to local ESAs to each appoint a superintendent of press work, saying “Be very careful to appoint a competent person who will prepare legible, well written manuscript for publication” [Letter for the Presidents of All Equal Suffrage Clubs in South Dakota from Mrs. Elizabeth Murray Wardall, #2021-02-26-0080, WCTU Equal Suffrage Association Miscellaneous Flyers, Box 6674, Folder 42, H91-74, Pickler Papers, SD State Archives, Pierre].
Clara Colby and Mary Howell undertook a campaign tour through the Black Hills, including several small mining camps [Sturgis Advertiser (SD), July 31, 1890; Hot Springs Star (SD), August 1, 1890; Black Hills Union (Rapid City SD), August 8, 1890; Daily Deadwood Pioneer-Times (SD), August 9, 1890; “Page 46 : Appointments,” Emma Smith DeVoe: 1880-1890 (Scrapbook D), WSL Manuscripts, MS 171, Box 10; The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), July 5, 1890, p.213, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University].
Irene Adams’ song “Woman and the Ballot,” was printed in the South Dakota Equal Suffrage Song Book (Pickler Papers, SD State Archives) and in papers around the country. For instance: Iola Register (KS), July 11, 1890; Iowa Plain Dealer (New Oregon IA), July 17, 1890; Grenada Sentinel (MS), July 19, 1890; et al.
“HELP FOR DAKOTA. A private letter received from Miss Anthony just as last week’s Woman’s Journal was going to press, says:
‘I wish you would keep making strong and varied appeals for the South Dakota campaign. The more I see and learn of the work here, the more I see and feel that we must raise every dollar from outside of this State. We are paying our railroad fare from outside money. The collections, after rousing speeches, amount to barely enough to pay hall rent and incidental local expenses. If there is a little left over, we have it placed in the County W. S. A. treasury. Of course, if the rains do come, and the people do have good crops, they will be more able to contribute. But splendid men and women—college educated, too,—drive ten, fifteen and twenty miles to our county conventions, who, much as they long to help, can’t give a quarter toward the work, because they haven’t it. We must raise the money from outside. Ask all persons who send money to our treasurer (Mrs. Jane H. Spofford, Riggs House, Washington, D.C.)…’ …the drought and failure of crops make it impossible for the friends in Dakota to contribute largely. It is therefore the more necessary that friends outside the State should continue to lend their aid. a. s. b. {Alice Stone Blackwell}”
The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), May 31, 1890, p.172, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.“Money is greatly needed for the woman suffrage campaign in South Dakota. The sums already subscribed will probably carry on the work until the State Convention, August 25. The following two months will be the most important of all, and, for these, contributions are imperatively needed. South Dakota is the battleground for woman suffrage this year.
All remittances for the fall campaign should be sent direct to Mrs. Jane H. Spofford, treasurer National-American W. S. A., Riggs House, Washington, D.C.”
The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), August 2, 1890, p.241, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.“The Massachusetts Leagues, as well as the local suffrage associations everywhere, have been repeatedly urged in these columns to devote at least one meeting to an entertainment of some kind to raise funds for the campaign in South Dakota. The distances in that new State are long and the railroad rates high, and the varied expenses of the campaign carried on during the past six months have exhausted all the money thus far contributed. If the campaign is to be continued as it should be during the important two months that remain before the election, more funds must be raised. Dear friends of the Massachusetts Leagues and of the local suffrage associations everywhere, will you not each have a lawn party, a sociable, a series of tableaux, an Old Folks’ Concert, an oratorical contest, or some other entertainment by which you may be able to raise a little money to aid the campaign? No matter how small the contribution, it will be gratefully received; and ‘many a mickle makes a muckle.'”
The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), August 30, 1890, p.276, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
DeVoe and Matilda Hindman campaigned through Brown and Edmunds County. DeVoe’s schedule included speaking at a Farmers’ Alliance picnic at Rondell [“Page 44 : Entire Page,” “Page 47 : Entire Page,” and “Page 48 : Entire Page,” Emma Smith DeVoe: 1880-1890 (Scrapbook D), WSL Manuscripts, MS 171, Box 10].
Helen Barker also held talks on suffrage in Deadwood, Sturgis, and Hot Springs [Black Hills Union (Rapid City SD), August 8, 1890, page 1, page 4; Sturgis Advertiser (SD), August 14, 1890; Hot Springs Star (SD), August 15, 1890].
Nettie C. Hall campaigned in Yankton County spending ten days riding horseback to rural communities, many of German or Scandinavian descent, to talk about the suffrage amendment. County organizers, largely Anglo-American city residents, were glad to have a speaker from the SDESA to send around, but also asked for speakers who could deliver addresses in the immigrants’ own languages [Egge, “Ethnicity and Woman Suffrage,” in Lahlum and Rozum, Equality at the Ballot Box, 223-224].
August 25-26: The South Dakota Equal Suffrage Association held its convention in Mitchell, to coincide with the state Republican convention at which they hoped to be able to present their case [Kingsbury, History of Dakota Territory, vol. 3 (1915), 788]. As convention attendees were arriving, many filled the pulpits of local churches as visiting speakers [Mitchell Capital (SD), August 22, 1890, August 29, 1890, page 10].
“STATE CONVENTION IN SOUTH DAKOTA… Let this be the grand rally of the friends of humanity. The issue is plain: Justice against injustice, reason against prejudice, slavery against freedom, the Golden Rule against all evil tendencies of the times. Come, one and all, determined that this great struggle for the political equality of woman shall be successful—that the word male shall be stricken from our constitution, and our grand young commonwealth be made worthy of a place beside Wyoming, the only true republican State in the Union.
Philena Everett Johnson, Pres.,W. F. Bailey, Sec’y.”
Brookings Register (SD), August 8, 1890; The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), August 16, 1890, p.261, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.“Mitchell will no doubt be greatly crowded and friends are advised, if coming in parties, to bring tents and camp out, as they would probably be much more comfortable, and at no expense, than if depending upon accommodation to be secured after arriving.”
Dakota Ruralist, August 16, 1890, “Page 57 : Entire Page,” Emma Smith DeVoe: 1880-1890 (Scrapbook D), WSL Manuscripts, MS 171, Box 10.
The convention included many different addresses and reports by local and national speakers, music by a female quartet from Iroquois, and a business meeting at the Davison County Courthouse [Mitchell Capital (SD), August 8, 1890, August 22, 1890, (full report) August 29, 1890; Madison Daily Leader (SD), August 8, 1890, August 26, 1890; Wessington Springs Herald (SD), August 15, 1890, September 5, 1890, September 12, 1890, September 19, 1890; Convention program, “Page 31 : Entire Page,” Emma Smith DeVoe: 1880-1890 (Scrapbook D), WSL Manuscripts, MS 171, Box 10; Program for the South Dakota Equal Suffrage Mass Convention, Pickler Papers, SD State Archives].
“It was a hopeful and significant fact that among those who took part in these meetings were clergymen, Catholic and Protestant, presidents of colleges, men from the Farmers’ Alliance, editors, both men and women, physicians and others representing all classes of the people.”
The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), September 6, 1890, p.284, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University
The suffragists who stayed in Mitchell and approached the state Republican party convention were initially denied seats, but eventually ten were found at the back of the hall. The suffrage committee made a request to be heard, but were also only given permission to speak during a recess after the general meeting had adjourned to await committee reports. Apparently about two-thirds of the attendees remained to hear the suffrage speakers. John Pickler did indicate support for suffrage in his acceptance speech for the congressional nomination. “The Republicans as a party failed to endorse woman suffrage.”
Some suffragists (particularly national representatives) were bitterly disappointed at events they perceived as insults, especially when a few men from native tribes in the state arrived and were seated when the suffragists had not been. This event reappeared in numerous speeches later, especially by Anna Shaw and Carrie Catt, with accompanying racist language about the native men, as an illustration of injustice towards ‘educated’ ‘respectable’ women. Yet, most local suffragists did not seem to dwell on that incident to quite the same degree. Rev. A.W. Adkinson remarked that: “On the whole the friends of equal suffrage are well satisfied with the work of the republicans. While they did not get what they asked for, they are gratified with the feeling of the majority of the delegates on that subject” [Wittmayer, “The 1889-1890 Woman Suffrage Campaign,” 222; Mitchell Capital (SD), August 29, 1890, pg 4, pg 9, pg 10, (Adkinson quote) September 5, 1890; Black Hills Union (Rapid City SD), August 29, 1890; Hot Springs Star (SD), October 3, 1890; Catt’s presidential address recounting the event in Hannah J. Patterson, ed., The Hand Book of the N.A.W.S.A. and Proceedings of the 48th Annual Convention held at Atlantic City, N.J., September 4-10, 1916 (New York, 1916), 59–60, 66; Catt and Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics (1923), 116; Paul, The Great Woman Statesman (1925), 116].
More on the SDESA appeal to the Republican and other 1890 party conventions.
By the end of the summer, when no political parties had adopted a suffrage plank, organizers held little hope that the bill would pass [Nelson in Lahlum/Rozum, Equality at the Ballot Box, 132].
“AID FOR DAKOTA. Let every suffragist bear in mind the pressing needs of the campaign in South Dakota. Our workers there are devoting their time and labor to the cause, several of the best speakers giving their services without pay, when they might be earning large sums in the lecture field. But money for railroad fares and actual expenses must be provided. The people of South Dakota are progressive and generous, but they have been so impoverished by the drought that it is impossible for them to contribute largely. The money must be raised mainly from outside the State. One woman in Ohio is growing celery in the hope of raising $20 for Dakota. Another woman who had no money has contributed a pig. One of our best and most unselfish workers says: ‘If you cannot give money, give something,—chickens, butter, or anything that can be converted into money.’ If everyone who desires the success of the amendment would send even a small contribution, wearing anxiety as to how to meet bare expenses would not be added to the hardships which inevitably attend ‘campaigning’ for woman suffrage in any State, and which are greater than any one has any idea of, except those who have tried it. Contributions should be sent to Mrs. Jane H. Spofford, Riggs House, Washington, D. C. Those who wish to have their contributions go toward the work of any particular speaker should specify, in sending the money, how they prefer to have it applied.”
The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), September 13, 1890, p.292, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.Laura M. Johns (KS) — “There is lots of pathos in all this, and especially in the struggles of the office here for money. Poor things! they don’t know which way to turn. Mrs. Johnson goes to bed to lie awake and pray God for money to pay the daily necessities. They get out of money, and just as they run their faces up against a stone-wall there comes in something. They were down to six dollars when Mr. Blackwell’s last remittance came, and Mr. Wardall paid them thirty-eight dollars. But that is gone now, and our collections are small.”
The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), October 18, 1890, p.332, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University
September: The re-organization of the state board had not dispelled all leadership difficulties. Letters from Sarah Richards to William Bailey expressed her frustration with the financial management of the SDESA, having tried unsuccessfully to discuss the matter with him at the Mitchell convention. She wrote: “I do not approve of our present loose methods of dealing with the finances of the Association…. I indeavor[sic] to carry on my business so that it will be a practical illustration of the theory that women are competent to grapple successfully with industrial pursuits & finance if successful – I hold then this alone is worth more to the woman’s cause than months of talk on theory.” For instance: Letter to W.F. Bailey from S.A. Richards, September 9, 1890, #2021-02-03-0113 to -0117, Box 6674, Folder 5, WCTU Suffrage Correspondence 1890: R-Z, H91-74, Pickler Papers, SD State Archives.
Anna Howard Shaw spoke at the Lincoln County Agricultural Association’s fairgrounds. Her half-hour talk included pointed comments on the native men that had been seated at the Republican convention in Mitchell and opposition from Germans from Russia. Shaw told the crowds that “she never knew the importance of being a man forcibly, until she attended the republican state convention at Mitchell” because their votes as men “was the reason the republicans loved their Indians more than their women” [Daily Dakota Farmers’ Leader (Canton SD), September 11, 1890, September 12, 1890; Nelson in Lauck et al., 139; and Rozum, “Citizenship, Civilization, and Property,” in Lahlum/Rozum, Equality at the Ballot Box (2019), 250].
A new SDESA “department of press work” called for local suffrage clubs to appoint press chairs –“whose duty it shall be to see that the subject of equal suffrage is kept before the people, by sending to some one newspaper in your respective counties, a report of all meetings held, interesting items of news bearing upon the subject, or a well written-article, none of which will be refused by any live newspaper. Be careful to appoint a competent person, who will prepare legible, well-written manuscript for publication. Upon the appointment of such a superintendent, please send the name of the person to us at once, that we may give whatever instruction is necessary to carry on this work. Trusting that you will recognize the importance of immediate action, that no time may be lost, Yours for justice and equality, Elizabeth Murray Wardall, State Supt. Press Work” [The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), September 20, 1890, p.300, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University].
In September, a man wrote from California and sent ten cents in stamps in order to request a copy of the South Dakota Equal Suffrage Song Book from William Bailey to aid work in San Bernardino County.
Letter from M.E. Sommet, September 23, 1890, #2021-02-02-0029, Box 6674, Folder 5, WCTU Suffrage Correspondence 1890: R-Z, H91-74, Pickler Papers, SD State Archives.
Emma Smith DeVoe was appointed superintendent of Woman’s Day at the state fair in Aberdeen. She arranged for a procession/parade from downtown Aberdeen to escort speakers to the fairgrounds with the Women’s Relief Corps, the W.C.T.U., a drum corps and a brass band “composed entirely of women”, the Aberdeen Guards–“young ladies in blue & red suits with gold trim,” equestriennes, Knights of Pythias Band, and “All societies composed of women, and all of our farmers’ and mechanics’ wives and daughters, are earnestly invited to be present and participate.” The slate of suffrage speakers included Emma Cranmer, Susan Anthony, Anna Shaw, Olympia Brown, and Clara Colby. They made their addresses from a platform in front of the noisy grandstand and musical selections were performed as well. DeVoe reported to The Woman’s Tribune about the procession, saying that “People came out of their stores and shops; farmers filled both sides of the street, clear out to the ground, and they crowded around the speaker’s stand, eager to catch every word… dear Aunt Susan, I wish you could have seen her face, it just beamed” [Madison Daily Leader (SD), April 16, 1890, August 16, 1890; Wessington Springs Herald (SD), September 5, 1890; The Dakota Ruralist (Aberdeen SD), April 5, 1890 in “Page 27 : Woman’s Day,” “Page 47 : Entire Page,” Aberdeen Daily News (SD), September 17, 1890 and September 18, 1890, “Page 50 : Entire Page,” “Page 52 : Entire Page,” The Dakota Ruralist (Aberdeen SD), September 13, 1890, “Page 57 : Entire Page,” and The Dakota Ruralist (Aberdeen SD), September 17, 1890, “Page 58 : Entire Page,” and October 11, 1890, “Page 57 : Entire Page,” Emma Smith DeVoe: 1880-1890 (Scrapbook D), WSL Manuscripts, MS 171, Box 10].
“Another pleasant drive of twenty miles over the illimitable plains brought me next afternoon to the little railroad town of Westport, where I vainly tried to get up an impromptu suffrage meeting while awaiting the train for Aberdeen, which I reached before dark. Here I found a great crowd of people gathered from far and near to the State fair, and had the pleasure of meeting Miss Anthony, Mrs. De Voe, Anna Shaw, Olympia Brown, Mr. and Mrs. Wardall, Mrs. Cranmer, and William F. Bailey, the secretary of the State Association. Here Anna Shaw and Mrs. Brown and myself spoke in the Methodist Church on three successive evenings to large audiences, the intermediate day being “woman’s day” at the fair ground. On that occasion Mrs. De Voe presided. The ladies spoke from a platform in front of the grand stand. From noon till 2 P. M., more than a thousand people listened with delight to these noble women, all of whom spoke with great ability, the closing speech by Miss Shaw being an effective and brilliant appeal, which captivated her audience.”
The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), October 18, 1890, p.332, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
DeVoe — “Sisters, the time is auspicious. Let us not rest complacently while women of other States, by their persistent energy, are sharing the blessings derived from participating in public enterprises of this character. Never before has there been a period so full of promise for women as there is today for the women of our own beloved State. Let us prove ourselves equal to the demand of the age.”
Wessington Springs Herald (SD), September 5, 1890.
September-October: Henry B. Blackwell of Boston went on a speaking tour through thirty counties in South Dakota [Wessington Springs Herald (SD), August 29, 1890, September 5, 1890, September 12, 1890; Sully County Watchman (Onida SD), September 6, 1890; Madison Daily Leader (SD), September 24, 1890, September 25, 1890; Dakota Farmers’ Leader (Canton SD), October 3, 1890; Turner County Herald (Hurley SD), October 16, 1890; Union County Courier (Elk Point SD), September 24, 1890]. During the 1890 campaign, Blackwell asserted that “God had made men and women equal, but man had deprived her of her rights” and discussed the national/international scope of the suffrage movement [Kingsbury, History of Dakota Territory, vol. 3 (1915), 787-788].
The S.D.E.S.A. published the structure of their oratorical contests program. The three-tier competition had prizes of a $5, $10, and $20 gold pieces. “Contestants are not limited as to age, and may compete as many times as desired in the half-eagle contests, twice for the eagle, once for the double-eagle, learning new pieces each time, which may be procured by sending ten cents to Elizabeth M. Hammer, State E. S. A. Supt. of Oratorical Prize Contests.” [The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), September 27, 1890, p.308, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University].
October: Julia B. Nelson of Minnesota did a speaking tour of Hutchinson and Yankton Counties. Germans-from-Russia communities in Hutchinson Counties were hostile. She once went fourteen miles to Jamesville (an area of Mennonite Germans-from-Russia) in a buggy but was turned away without leaving it. She had slightly better luck with Norwegians at Norway township. Nelson believed that touring rural school districts was the best way to reach foreign farmers — “she explained that their lack of support was neither a permanent cultural hallmark nor an unchangeable political stance. She argued that when she could gather an audience, she made converts” [Egge, “Ethnicity and Woman Suffrage,” in Lahlum and Rozum, Equality at the Ballot Box, 225].
“FROM SOUTH DAKOTA. Huron, S. D., Oct. 10, 1890.
Editors Woman’s Journal: Our speakers are preaching the gospel of progress to our people, and they find eager listeners among the miners of the ‘Black Hills,’ as well as among the herdsmen of the ‘Coteaus’ and the farmers along the ‘Jim’ River. The aristocracy and the slums of a nation are never friendly to advanced ideas. But the pioneers of a country, in the midst of poverty and privations, seldom fail to give a warm welcome to the pioneers of thought. They have a fellow feeling for each other. One class must fight the storms of nature and the wild beasts of a wilderness; the other struggles with ignorance and prejudice—the worst obstacles in the path of humanity. Hence, Australia and western America are the hope and pride of the friends of modern progress. Wyoming’s people are in ‘the foremost files of time,’ and South Dakota’s daughters are struggling to be free. The outlook in our State is the most hopeful it has been…
South Dakota, not the principle of equal suffrage, is on trial at this election. Failure would simply mean that our State is not as civilized as we had thought, and that the era of universal peace is farther off than hopeful men had dreamed. We need the aid of every friend of true republicanism. Our State is but the battlefield, the cause is the cause of all humanity.
Will F. Bailey, Sec’y.”
The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), October 18, 1890, p.332, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.“Women Suffer Enough Now. Chamberlain Tribune:– The best thing voters can do is to defeat the woman’s suffrage amendment to the constitution, as now one woman out of a hundred desires the right of franchise. It is something they have no interest in, and only those that neglect their homes and home duties can find time to go around as agitators in regard to this mooted question. As soon as the ladies generally desire to vote, their brothers and fathers will gladly confer the privilege on them.
Kimball Graphic (SD), October 24, 1890.“The Sentinel is of the opinion that the public welfare will be the best subserved by the adoption of the amendment granting equal suffrage. Logic and justice are on that side. Experience has proven that as an expedient it brings about purer politics and a better social condition…. The cause of good education, of good morals and a good government would be benefited. Place the ballot in the hands of the purest, the noblest and the best half of the human race. They ask for it and deserve it.”
Brookings County Sentinel (SD), October 31, 1890.“To the Men of South Dakota… You as men and soldiers say by your words and your actions, ‘Give us liberty or give us death.’ Hear the same cry from the women.”
Brookings Register (SD), October 31, 1890.
The quantity of campaign events fatigued some communities. For instance, Lydia A. Waters in Aurora County “wrote to the state committee hoping to postpone a visit by Carrie Lane Chapman, ‘as we have just had two excellent lecturers within the past two weeks.’ …. Waters suggested Chapman come on a day nearer to the election or ‘would she be willing to lecture in the country instead of in the town as there has been but little school house work done in our county?'” [Ruth Page Jones, “A Case Study: the Role of Women in Creating Community on the Dakota Frontier, 1880 to 1920,” Master of Arts thesis, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (December 2015), 96].
In mid-October, there was concern that a wording error in printing the suffrage amendment would lead to its removal from the ballot, but it was determined a clerical error and state officials decided it would remain [Hot Springs Star (SD), October 17, 1890; Madison Daily Leader (SD), October 17, 1890; Sully County Watchman (Onida SD), October 25, 1890].
Nettie C. Hall, the state superintendent for election work, put out for the South Dakota Equal Suffrage Association an open letter to women of South Dakota with encouragement to have committees canvass each voting precinct and hold meetings, that young women can look after refreshments, have prayer meeting before polls open, “have the bells rung every hour to encourage those at the front,” “have the children out on parade three times during the day (outside of school hours) with their flags, banners, mottoes and suffrage songs.” Local clubs could also write to state secretary William Bailey for John DeVoe’s song books and copies of mottoes to put up at polling places, have picnics near polling places in country with basket dinners and suffrage songs, and serve lunch or at least coffee and sandwiches. Hall referred them to the biblical passage in Numbers 27 for an “account of old time women’s rights rally”–“Read it and then with a heart trusting in the same God, and with all womanly modesty and dignity, go up before the congregation of the Princes of South Dakota, and present your just cause, and that same Good will give us the victory. Yours for human rights, Nettie C. Hall” [Wessington Springs Herald (SD), September 26, 1890, October 3, 1890; Turner County Herald (Hurley SD), October 23, 1890].
South Dakota Equal Suffrage Song Book, Pickler Papers, SD State Archives.
Some took up the suggestions, including clubs in Onida, Madison, Mitchell, and more. After spending the election in Yankton, Emma DeVoe reported that “The fore part of election day was bright and pleasant, but in the afternoon the wind blew, so that with the dust and sand it was very disagreeable. But notwithstanding this, never a murmur passed the lips of one of those brave women. All came early to the polls, and remained till they were closed in the evening. As each man came to deposit his vote, some lady would politely ask him to across the little word ‘no’ off his ticket… Never before was I so proud of being a woman as when I beheld those intelligent, cultured women going out from elegant homes, to stand in unbroken ranks all day on the street, asking that justice should be done to women. All over South Dakota, from every town and school-house, we have heard a similar report, and the women who performed this work, all over our State, were composed of our mental and moral aristocracy” [Sully County Watchman (Onida SD), October 18, 1890, November 8, 1890; Madison Daily Leader (SD), November 4, 1890, November 5, 1890; Mitchell Capital (SD), November 7, 1890; The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), October 11, 1890, p.324, November 22, 1890, p.376, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University].
November: In the final days of the campaign, Susan B. Anthony and Anna Howard Shaw went through Sioux City and on to the Black Hills–speaking at the M.E. Church in Hot Springs, the opera house in Sturgis, Library Hall in Rapid City, the Methodist church in Lead, and the Miner’s Hall in Central City [Madison Daily Leader (SD), October 21, 1890; Hot Springs Star (SD), October 10, 1890, October 24, 1890; Sturgis Advertiser (SD), October 23, 1890, October 30, 1890; Daily Deadwood Pioneer-Times (SD), November 2, 1890]. Shaw later recalled that at Hermosa “we had a desperate time one Sunday to get a place for a meeting, because a clergyman told the women it would be wicked to talk suffrage on Sunday,” while at another location, “we could not get any hall to speak in. They were all in use for the variety shows and there was no church finished, but the Presbyterian was the furthest along, and they let us have that, putting boards across nail kegs for seats” [“American Suffragists Need Money,” JK1881 .N357 sec. XVI, no. 3-9 NAWSA Coll, series: Miller NAWSA Suffrage Scrapbooks, 1897-1911; Scrapbook 9 (1910-1911), Library of Congress; The Pensacola Journal (FL), March 30, 1919]. Anthony later commented on the lack of support shown by “the miners of South Dakota” [Anderson Intelligencer (SC), December 4, 1890].
“THE CAUSE IN SOUTH DAKOTA.
Before the next issue of the Woman’s Journal, the vote of the men will have been taken in South Dakota, on the amendment to secure to women equal political rights with men. Much excellent seedsowing has been done during the last six months. Many hundred thousand pages of the best suffrage literature have been liberally distributed, besides 35,000 copies of the campaign number of the Woman’s Column mailed to the individual voters.
The friends of the cause in South Dakota I have been untiring in their devotion. The suffragists who went from other States to aid in the work have spared neither time nor strength. It has been a great battle to establish a government truly representative of the whole people, men and women. The result will be awaited with the deepest interest on both sides of the Atlantic by those who on the two continents are striving to secure equal human rights.
South Dakota will always be grateful to the brave women who have worked so unselfishly for the Woman Suffrage Amendment. Among the South Dakota speakers are Alice M. A. Pickler, Emma Smith DeVoe, H. M. Barker, Philena E. Johnson, Elizabeth M. Wardall, Nettie C. Hall, Mrs. Way and Mrs. Cranmer. From the East are Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Hindman, Olympia Brown, Helen M. Gougar, Mary Seymour Howell, Anna H. Shaw, Laura M. Johns, Clara B. Colby, Carrie Lane Chapman, Julia B. Nelson, and Helen Putnam. They all gave up easy conditions to endure months of fatigue and privations for the enfranchisement of women.
l. s. [Lucy Stone]”
The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), November 1, 1890, p.349, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
In 1890, equal suffrage was defeated at the polls by over 20,000 votes [Hot Springs Star (SD), December 12, 1890; Black Hills Union and Western Stock Review (Rapid City SD), October 21, 1910]. According to S.D.E.S.A. secretary Elizabeth Wardall, 789 addresses had been made by national speakers and 707 by state speakers; the W.C.T.U. made 104 addresses for suffrage; 400 local clubs had been organized, and literature had been distributed to every voter [Anthony and Harper, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4 (1902), 554-555].
“Women suffrage was badly snowed under… Several ladies were present at the polls all day in the interest of women suffrage, but the voters were more wise than gallant. The amendment was badly defeated.”
Kimball Graphic (SD), November 7, 1890.“The ladies did noble work at the polls for equal suffrage, but it was an uphill fight. The vote, however, was a surprise to the opponents of the measure and proves that the cause has a strong foothold among thinking people.”
Brookings County Sentinel (SD), November 7, 1890.Anna Wardall, Huron — “You will see by the returns enclosed that we are beaten by a considerable majority. We are crushed, but not dead, as our opponents will soon find out.”
The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), November 29, 1890, p.377, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.“We know that we have done what we could, and there is a consolation in feeling, that, although we did not win the prize, we know that we were worthy of it.”
— Ella V. Milliken, Alpena in Wessington Springs Herald (SD), November 28, 1890.Irene Adams:
““It has got to come to a matter of you must [vote for woman suffrage] in the majority of homes before we shall win the ballot”
“Women must feel the need of it an hundred fold more than they do now before we shall win equality.”
Quoted in Nelson, “Defending Separate Spheres,” p132, in Lahlum and Rozum, Equality at the Ballot Box (2019).
FROM REV. JOSHUA V. HIMES. Elk Point, S. D., Nov. 11, 1890.
Editors Woman’s Journal: We do not forget, nor fail to appreciate the faithful labors of Henry B. Blackwell and the women who have labored with him for suffrage in our new State, for many months of this year. We have failed to get the vote for women’s enfranchisement. But a great work has been done by Mr. Blackwell and the women speakers, in enlightening the people upon political science as connected with woman as an equal in legislation upon all that pertains to good government. Miss Anthony and her talented associates, by their able lectures throughout the State, have greatly enlightened and educated large masses of men and women to a higher view of government, and the necessary connection of woman with just rule. Their labors therefore, will not be lost. We owe you and others a debt of gratitude we can never repay. Joshua V. Himes.”
The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), November 22, 1890, p.376, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.“It would be difficult to put into words the hardships of this campaign of 1890 in a new State through the hottest and driest summer on record. Frequently the speakers had to drive twenty miles between the afternoon and evening meetings and the audiences would come thirty miles. All of the political State conventions declined to indorse[sic] the amendment…. There were 30,000 Russians, Poles, Scandinavians and other foreigners in the State, most of whom opposed woman suffrage. The liquor dealers and gamblers worked vigorously against it, and they were reinforced by the women ‘remonstrants’ of Massachusetts, who sent their literature into every corner of the State.”
Anthony and Harper, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4 (1902), 555-557.“Dr. Anna Howard Shaw said that in all her years of lecturing and campaigning she had never been so exhausted as at the end of this season. Carrie Chapman Catt lay ill for months afterward with typhoid fever and in her delirium constantly made speeches and talked of the campaign. Miss Anthony’s sister Mary said, ‘When my sister returned from South Dakota, I realized for the first time that she was indeed three score and ten'”
Paul, The Great Woman Statesman (1925), 118.
According to one history of the 1890 campaign: “Years after this campaign was over, Carrie Chapman Catt would point to the South Dakota effort as the first time that the brewers’ interests used the ‘foreign vote as a bloc’ in a large way against suffrage: ‘South Dakota permitted foreigners to vote on their first papers, and there were 30,000 Russians, Germans and Scandinavians in the State…. Unable to read or write in any language or to speak English, these men were boldly led to the ballot boxes under the direction of well known saloon henchmen, and after being voted were marched away in single file, and, within unmistakable sight of men and women poll workers, were paid for their votes’… seemed mere local incidents but I was to learn later that they were the early manifestation of a nation-wide condition” [Patterson, ed., The Hand Book of the NAWSA and Proceedings of the Forty-Eighth Annual Convention (1916), 60, 116; Wittmayer, “The 1889-1890 Woman Suffrage Campaign,” 206].
On the ballot was also a measure about enfranchising native people. The responses of several suffragists demonstrated racism towards native people.
In one commentary printed in Pierre and Hot Springs: “For a fact, it isn’t anything very creditable for South Dakota to deny women the right of suffrage, and at the same time accord the privilege to all the Indians in the state who still insist on clinging to their savage customs. It is claimed the latter was done through misapprehension on the part of the voters in reading the amendment printed on their ballots. While this may be so, the outside public will not understand it that way” [Pierre Weekly Free Press (SD), November 27, 1890; Hot Springs Star (SD), December 5, 1890].
Another from the Aberdeen Pioneer, reprinted in the Hurley Herald, also referenced perceptions of a confusing ballot between women’s and native suffrage: “The defeat of Equal Suffrage will stand as a lasting reproach to the state of South Dakota… The same complication in the Indian Suffrage amendment will probably give the red man the right to vote in our state hereafter! What a reproach upon our civilization, and upon the people of a state who have made a pretense of being liberal and just!” [Turner County Herald (Hurley SD), November 20, 1890; The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), November 22, 1890, p.376, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University].
“DISCRIMINATION IN SOUTH DAKOTA. Webster, S. D., Oct. 1, 1892. Editors Woman’s Journal: … Their tribe was enfranchised by the men of South Dakota at the same election at which they declared that the wives, mothers, sisters and daughters who had helped them to redeem this State from sterility and savagery, should not be enfranchised. 6,060 more men voted for the Indian than for the women; and the worst phase of it is that none of them feel ashamed of it. The enfranchised tribe numbers several hundred voters, who now proceed to dictate legislation for the humiliated white women who have been declared by their husbands, fathers, sons and brothers to be beneath the Indians, and only fit to be subject to their administration. To clinch this declaration beyond dispute, even in our own forgiving and forgetting natures, “our natural protectors” have required white women to pay taxes; but these enfranchised red men have been declared exempt from all taxation for the next twenty-five years! Was there ever grosser discrimination? When will the foundation principle of this Republic, that ‘taxation without representation is tyranny,’ soak into the average male intellect deep enough to apply to women? Yours for equality, Irene G. Adams.”
The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), October 22, 1892, p.344–345, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
November 7-8: The S.D.E.S.A. met in Huron to reorganize and plan legislative work for early 1891 — “the Campaign Association was disbanded, and a new one formed for the furtherance of the cause in this State.” Officers elected were: president Philena Johnson, vice-president Sophia Harden, secretary Elizabeth Wardall, treasurer Nettie Hall (though she reportedly resigned soon after), organizer/lecturer Emma Smith DeVoe (the DeVoes left South Dakota early in 1891), member of national executive committee Alice Pickler, superintendent of oratory Elizabeth Hammer, and delegates to the national convention: Sarah Richards, Sophia Harden, and Nettie Hall. [Madison Daily Leader (SD), November 12, 1890; The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), November 22, 1890, p.376, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University].
“The workers expressed themselves as not dismayed or cast down, but set to work to formulate plans that will batter down the walls of old time predudice[sic].”
Wessington Springs Herald (SD), November 14, 1890.“These women [the new state officers], with the other men and women present on that occasion, declared themselves undaunted by the apparent defeat, and determined to continue the education and uplifting of their brothers and sisters, until that day, not far distant, when one more State shall hold its women on a political equality with its men, and Wyoming shall not be the only one to fulfil the motto, ‘Under God the people rule.’
Yours for justice and humanity, Helen G. Putnam.”
The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), November 22, 1890, p.376, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University“… we must do anything and every thing we can to make the men see and realize that we are in earnest in this matter, agitation is education.”
Letter to Mrs. Wardall from Mrs. C.M. Spears, December 8, 1890, #2021-03-30-0084, 1890 Campaign Folder 3, Box 6675, Folder 28, H91-74, Pickler Papers, SD State Archives, Pierre.“We hoped for much and failed to gain the prize, but there must be no rest until it is gained…. Yours for Freedom”
Letter to Mrs. Wardall from Mrs. Ida A. Davis, December 14, 1890, #2021-03-30-0101, 1890 Campaign Folder 3, Box 6675, Folder 28, H91-74, Pickler Papers, SD State Archives, Pierre.
Emma Smith DeVoe put out an open letter asking for the continued support of the public as they head into the next legislative session [Madison Daily Leader (SD), December 3, 1890; Black Hills Union (Rapid City SD), December 4, 1890; Wessington Springs Herald (SD), December 5, 1890; Dakota Farmers’ Leader (Canton SD), December 25, 1890].
“RESOLUTIONS OF THANKS IN DAKOTA.
The following resolutions were passed at a meeting of the executive committee and friends of the South Dakota Equal Suffrage Association, held at Huron: Resolved, That the present temporary defeat gives the friends of equal suffrage no cause for dismay; but their confidence is still unshaken that eternal justice will reign.
Resolved, That, while we are grateful to the men of South Dakota who possessed manhood and independence of character sufficient to defend the rights and liberties of their wives and daughters at the recent election by voting for their enfranchisement, we deplore the political corruption which has so far tainted the moral understanding of party managers that they did not date to stand for right, justice and progress, and which sent every wire-pulling Republican, Independent and Democrat to the polls to scratch the “Yes” from the ticket of every man who did not know enough to prepare his own ballot.
Resolved, That in order more effectually to aid the uplifting and enfranchisement of the women of our State and nation, we deem it wise to maintain an equal suffrage association in South Dakota.
Whereas, Section 17 of the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of South Dakota declares that “no tax or duty shall be imposed without the consent of the people or their representatives in the legislature, and all taxation shall be uniform Whereas, one-half of the people have no representatives in the legislature, inasmuch as they have no voice in choosing the legislators; Resolved, That one object of the equal suffrage association shall be, until the women of the State are given the right of franchise, to urge hem to stand by said section of the Bill of Rights, and to protest against taxation without representation.
Resolved, That the earnest and heartfelt gratitude of all the suffragists of South Dakota is hereby extended to Susan B. Anthony, who has devoted her entire time, energy and experience for six months to the cause of liberty and justice; and to her noble co-workers. Rev. Anna H. Shaw, Rev. Olympia Brown, Henry B. Blackwell, Miss Matilda Hindman, Mrs. Laura M. Johns, Mrs. Helen M. Gougar, Mrs. Carrie Lane Chapman. Mrs. Julia B. Nelson, Mrs. Mary Seymour Howell, Mrs. Catherine Waugh M’ Culloch, Rev. Helen G. Putnam, Mrs. Clara B. Colby, Rev. J. L. McCrary and others, who, at the sacrifice of personal ease and financial results, worked so faithfully for the establishment of a true republican government.
Whereas, the campaign could not have been conducted without financial aid; Resolved, That special thanks are given to those who have assisted us so grandly by the money they have sent us; to the National American Suffrage Association, to Mrs. Helen M. Gougar and to the hundreds all over the State who have, out of full hearts, dropped their mires to swell the amount.
Resolved, That the thanks of the suffragists are also heartily extended to the editors of the Woman’s Journal, the Woman’s Column and the Woman’s Tribune, who sent these publications so generously to our State; also to the Farmers’ Alliance Publishing Co. for the use of tbe page in their paper devoted to our cause, and which has proved so useful in enlightening the people; and to all the newspapers in our State who have been brave enough to defend our cause or give space to the work.”
The Woman’s Journal (Boston MA), December 6, 1890, p.392, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
Before 1889 — 1889-1890 — 1891-1896 — 1897-1898 — 1899-1908 — 1909-1910 — 1911-1912 — 1913-1914 — 1915-1916 — 1917-1918 — After 1918
History in South Dakota 