Wisconsin Magazine of History – May 2019
English | 62 pages | True PDF | 54.5 MB

Woman suffrage is coming, but it is not coming as the light follows the darkness or the summer follows the winter. It is coming as the harvest follows the patient.” So said Theodora Winton Youmans in her 1917 president’s address to the Wisconsin Woman Suffrage Association. She was speaking from painful experience. In 1912, a referendum for statewide women’s suffrage that had passed handily in the state assembly was put down by male voters, to the shock and dismay of many who believed the time was right for this landmark legislation. It would take seven long years of continued campaigning, educating, organizing, and speechmaking for the nation to be brought to the same crossroads—this time with success—as Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment on June 4, 1919, and sent it on to the states for ratification.
It is fitting that the photograph of Youmans that graces our cover dates to the years between Wisconsin’s failed vote and the national victory. Like Youmans, women’s suffrage activists Belle La Follette, Ada James, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Olympia Brown continued to raise the banner during those crucial years, with a stunning result. On June 10, 1919, Wisconsin became the first state (neck and neck with Illinois) to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. Belle La Follette, who was sitting in the Senate balcony when the amendment passed, lent her voice as an orator and writer for the cause. Her columns in La Follette’s Magazine (later The Progressive) and the stump speeches she made across the state and nation pushed women to reconsider their roles in the public sphere. As she put it during a hearing in front of Congress in April 1913, “Home, society, and government are best when men and women keep together intellectually and spiritually, where they have the widest range of common interests, [and] where they share with each other the solutions to their common problems.” The common sense solution, she argued, was to grant women the vote. Nancy C. Unger celebrates La Follette’s tireless campaigning for women’s suffrage in this issue of the Wisconsin
Magazine of History: losing the battle for Wisconsin, but winning the war for the nation. Sara.E.Phillips – Editor

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