Chicago History | Spring/Summer 2021

2021 CHGO HIST Spring-Summer_CHGO HIST 9/10/21 6:03 AM Page 1

CHICAGOHISTORY

SPRING/SUMMER 2021

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CHICAGO HISTORY THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM • VOLUME XLV, NUMBER 1

SPRING/SUMMER 2021 CONTENTS

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Treatment of a Cotillion Gown, c. 1956 designed by Ann Lowe HOLLY LUNDBERG

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American Medina: Stories of Muslim Chicago PETER T. ALTER

Democracy Limited: Chicago Women and the Vote ELIZABETH FRATERRIGO

DEPARTMENTS

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From the Editors Making History TIMOTHY J. GILFOYLE

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CHICAGO HISTORY Director of Communications Laura Herrera Editors Heidi A. Samuelson Esther D. Wang Designer Bill Van Nimwegen Photography Timothy Paton Jr.

Copyright © 2021 by the Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago, IL 60614-6038 312.642.4600 chicagohistory.org ISSN 0272-8540 Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life.

CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY OFFICERS

Daniel S. Jaffee Chair Mary Lou Gorno First Vice Chair Warren K. Chapman Second Vice Chair Mark D. Trembacki Treasurer Denise R. Cade Secretary Donald E. Lassere Edgar D. and Deborah R. Jannotta President HONORARY T R U S T E E

The Honorable Lori Lightfoot Mayor, City of Chicago

TRUSTEES

James L. Alexander Denise R. Cade Paul Carlisle Walter C. Carlson Warren K. Chapman Rita S. Cook Patrick F. Daly James P. Duff A. Gabriel Esteban Lafayette J. Ford T. Bondurant French Alejandra Garza Timothy J. Gilfoyle Gregory L. Goldner Mary Lou Gorno David A. Gupta Brad J. Henderson David D. Hiller Tobin E. Hopkins Daniel S. Jaffee Ronald G. Kaminski Randye A. Kogan Judith H. Konen Michael J. Kupetis Donald E. Lassere Robert C. Lee Ralph G. Moore Maggie M. Morgan Stephen Ray Joseph Seliga Steve Solomon Samuel J. Tinaglia Mark D. Trembacki

Cover: Women participate in a liberation march and rally at the Civic Center, May 15, 1971. ST-20003470-0001, Chicago Sun-Times collection, Chicago History Museum

Ali Velshi Gail D. Ward Lawrie B. Weed Monica M. Weed Jeffrey W. Yingling Robert R. Yohanan

John W. Rowe Jesse H. Ruiz Gordon I. Segal Larry Selander Paul L. Snyder TRUSTEES EMERITUS

HONORARY LIFE TRUSTEE

The Honorable Richard M. Daley The Honorable Rahm Emanuel LIFE TRUSTEES

David P. Bolger Laurence O. Booth Stanley J. Calderon John W. Croghan Patrick W. Dolan Paul H. Dykstra Michael H. Ebner Sallie L. Gaines Barbara A. Hamel M. Hill Hammock Susan S. Higinbotham Dennis H. Holtschneider C.M. Henry W. Howell, Jr. Edgar D. Jannotta Falona Joy Barbara L. Kipper W. Paul Krauss Josephine Louis R. Eden Martin Josephine Baskin Minow Timothy P. Moen Potter Palmer

Catherine L. Arias Bradford L. Ballast Gregory J. Besio Michelle W. Bibergal Matthew Blakely Paul J. Carbone, Jr. Jonathan F. Fanton Cynthia Greenleaf Courtney W. Hopkins Cheryl L. Hyman Nena Ivon Douglas M. Levy Erica C. Meyer Michael A. Nemeroff Ebrahim S. Patel M. Bridget Reidy James R. Reynolds, Jr. Elizabeth D. Richter Nancy K. Robinson April T. Schink Jeff Semenchuk Kristin Noelle Smith Margaret Snorf Sarah D. Sprowl Noren W. Ungaretti Joan Werhane *As of June 30, 2021

The Chicago History Museum acknowledges support from the Chicago Park District and the Illinois Arts Council Agency on behalf of the people of Chicago.

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F RO M T H E E DI TORS I

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s the magazine of the Chicago History Museum, we wanted to dedicate an issue to the place where it all happens—the Museum.

In this issue, you will get a behind-the-scenes look at what happens when we loan an item from our vast costume collection to another institution for display in an exhibition. It involves much more than packing it into a box for shipping. CHM conservator Holly Lundberg documented the process of assessing the condition, repairing, and readying for loan a cotillion gown (1956) designed by Ann Lowe.

The dress was on display at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, for an exhibition on women who revolutionized fashion.

Founded in 2005, the Museum’s Studs Terkel Center for Oral History collaborates with community partners to promote oral history as a tool of social justice. Following the legacy of well-known author, historian, and broadcaster Studs Terkel, the Center documents diverse Chicago voices. In recent years, projects have included a youth engagement component, training middle and high school students as oral historians. Over the past three years, the Center has collaborated and developed projects related to the West Side communities of East Garfield Park and North Lawndale as well as the Chicago area’s Polish and Muslim communities. Those oral histories from Muslim Chicagoans became the foundation for the in-person exhibition American Medina: Stories of Muslim Chicago curated by Peter T. Alter, the Museum’s chief historian and director of the Studs Terkel Center for Oral History. Though the exhibition has closed, Alter’s article in this issue discusses the themes of identity, journey, and faith that emerged from the oral history project and features excerpts from conversations with Muslim Chicagoans that were not included in the exhibition.

The past year, with the Museum closed for months due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we turned to digital spaces to continue to share Chicago stories with our online audience, members, and friends, as we all adapted to screens as our primary tool of communication. Our planned exhibition Democracy Limited: Chicago Women and the Vote was set to open in August 2020 to mark 100 years since the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. As COVID cases rose, the Museum made the decision to adapt the exhibition to an online experience (www.democracylimited.com). Our curator, Elizabeth Fraterrigo, associate professor of history at Loyola University Chicago, reworked the exhibition, and relied on photographs and other 2-D materials in the Museum’s collections to tell the story not just of the vote, but of recent and distant moments when Chicago-area women mobilized for change, part of a long history of activism and protest.

In the narrative found in this issue, she unpacks the complex story of how the suffrage movement in the Chicago area was forged by women of different backgrounds and with different motivations. The title “Democracy Limited” was the nickname of a train, boarded by a group of women in February 1919, to embark on a tour where they shared the story of their arrests for protesting in support of a federal women’s suffrage amendment. Although these white women omitted women of color from their claims to the rights of citizenship, their nickname for the train is a reminder that the project of democracy is diminished without full and equal participation of all members of society. Although the Nineteenth Amendment did not grant all women the right to vote, it was still a hard-won achievement met with serious opposition and incremental victories along the way.

We hope you enjoy this issue and that you learn something not just about Chicago history, but about the work we do at the Museum to bring history to you.

From the Editors | 3

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The Ann Lowe cotillion gown on display after conservation.

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Treatment of a Cotillion Gown, c. 1956 designed by Ann Lowe See what goes into preparing a dress from the Museum’s world-renowned costume collection for loan and display.

H O L LY L U N D B E RG t is a common practice for museums to loan artifacts to other institutions. In Spring 2020, the Chicago History Museum conservation team prepared a cotillion gown (1956) designed by Ann Cole Lowe (1898–1981) to go on loan to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, for the exhibition Made It: The Women who Revolutionized Fashion. In what follows, learn more about the garment and conservation process that went into preparing the piece for loan and display.

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Ann Lowe was one of the first African American designers to achieve wide acclaim, and her one-of-a-kind gowns and fine handiwork were highly sought after by the elite of high society from the 1920s through the 1960s. She is perhaps best known for designing the iconic ivory silk wedding dress worn by Jacqueline Bouvier upon her wedding in 1953 to then Junior Senator John F. Kennedy, though Lowe did not receive credit for the work at the time.

John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier in their wedding attire in 1953. Toni Frissell, photographer 5

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Ann Lowe label (above) and detail of the flower motif on this cotillion gown skirt (left).

One of Lowe’s trademarks is the use of flower motifs in her designs, such as the elegant self-fabric long stemmed rose appliqués that embellish the bodice and skirt of the cotillion gown, which was worn by Carole Duke Denham on December 22, 1956, at the Passavant Cotillion (Gift of Mrs. Charles Chaplin, 1976.241.170).

The strapless silk gown has a boned bodice, center-back zipper, and a full skirt with an attached underskirt of taffeta, lined with a stiff nonwoven interfacing-like material and edged with horsehair at the hem. Along with the floral appliqués, the gown is embellished with faux pearls, sequins, glass seed beads, and rhinestones.

After being requested for loan, the gown was brought to the conservation lab to be assessed for condition, treatment needs, recommendations for display, mounting, and handling, as well as for any needed conservation treatment.

The gown was found to be in fairly good condition.

Immediately apparent was damage associated with use that included some spots, stains, and soiling down the 6 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring / Summer 2021

front and at the hem. In addition, the garment was heavily wrinkled and creased, and the blooms of Lowe’s trademark floral appliqués were flattened and crushed. A closer examination revealed a significant number of loose sequins, beads, pearls, and rhinestones, as well as some losses of the same in spots throughout due to embrittlement and breakage of the embroidery threads. Some of the leaves and a few of the stems and flower blossoms were also coming loose as a result of broken stitches and thread, especially around the hip and thigh areas on the skirt. The silver-plated rhinestone settings and the silvered backing on the sew-on stones were blackened by tarnish.

The stiff underskirt, which helped to support and provide some shaping for the skirt, was misshapen and had numerous hard vertical running folds down it. Both the outer layer of taffeta and the interfacing were creased, and the band of horsehair stitched at the hem was bent, folded upon itself in spots, and misshapen. Of particular concern was the presence of a 9-inch long, ragged tear in the interfacing layer at the back of the underskirt.

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Front and back view of the gown before treatment

Examples of loose and missing beadwork, sequins, and stones on the gown’s bodice and loose, detaching self-fabric appliqués on the skirt.

Cotillion Gown Treatment | 7

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Treatment of the cotillion gown was undertaken over the course of several months. At that time, any dust and loosely adherent dirt and particulates were removed using a lowsuction vacuum, and conservation sponges were used to reduce some of the dirt and soiling at the hem of the dress and underskirt. Loose and/or detaching floral appliqués, beads, sequins, pearls, and rhinestones were secured by stitching, using a thin cotton thread for fine embroidery

(size 60/2, i.e., 60 weight thread with 2 plies). Long, broken lengths of embroidery thread found throughout the areas of beadwork and around the appliqués were pulled through to the interior side of the dress with the aid of a sewing needle.

Sew-on rhinestone rose montee beads similar to those originally used on the gown were sourced and purchased online to fill a 1.5"–2" long section of loss along the top edge of the bodice at the front.

Bodice with missing rhinestones before (left) and after (right).

The tear in the interfacing layer of the underskirt before treatment.

A series of tests were undertaken to find the most appropriate patch material and adhesive to repair the 9-inch tear in the thick nonwoven interlining of the underskirt. Both long-fibered Japanese tissue papers and a couple of different nonwoven spun-bonded polyester fabrics of different weights were tested for their suitability as patch material, and several heat-reactivatable adhesives were also tested for use, including some dilute mixtures of conservation grade acrylic adhesives, and an adhesive film originally developed for the relining of painted canvasses. The prepared test 8 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring / Summer 2021

patches were applied to pieces of heavyweight Pellon® sewin interfacing to test suitability on a material somewhat similar in nature to the interfacing of the underskirt. Ultimately, a grade of Hollytex, a white nonwoven spun-bonded polyester fabric, was chosen for the patch material due to its smooth finish, nonraveling edges, dimensional stability, and high tensile and tear strength, along with an adhesive film created specifically for conservation applications, as it was found to have better adhesion and more appropriate peel strength than the other adhesives tested.

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Left: The set-up to repair the tear in the underskirt interfacing.

Below: Here, a heat spatula is used to secure the patch in place.

Because the tear in the interfacing layer of the underskirt was ragged, a patch was applied on both sides. The patch on the interior face was slipped in through the tear, aligned, and secured in place by reactivating the adhesive with a heat spatula. As the patch on the exposed exterior surface of the interfacing would be visible to anyone examining the interior of the garment, the outer face of the outer patch was toned with washes of Golden Fluid Acrylic artists’ paints and air-dried prior to being secured in place, so as to blend more seamlessly with the color of the interfacing.

Close-up of the patch-repaired tear after treatment.

Cotillion Gown Treatment | 9

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Wrinkles, creases, and folds throughout the gown and underskirt, and the distortions and folds in the horsehair band at the hem of the underskirt were removed or reduced using a variety of localized humidification techniques, including the use of cool mist generated by an ultrasonic humidifier and isolated strips of

blotter paper misted with deionized water that were placed over areas of wrinkles and/or creases (with the misted side away from the garment) and weighted or secured in place to humidify the fibers, then allowed to reacclimatize to ambient conditions.

Wrinkled and creased section of underskirt before (left) and after treatment (right).

Blossoms on the bodice before (left) and after treatment (right).

Blossoms on skirt before (left) and after treatment (right).

Finally, the flattened and crushed flower buds were reshaped using small pieces of blotting paper dampened with deionized water, which were carefully wrapped or tucked around each flower and/or petal for less than a 10 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring / Summer 2021

minute to relax the fibers. Once humidified, the petals were gently manipulated by hand to reshape, then left to reacclimatize to ambient conditions.

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Front view of the gown before (inset) and after treatment (below).

Back view of the gown before (inset) and after treatment (below).

While the gown was in the lab, it was measured and test fitted on several different forms and mannequins to find the most appropriate size for support and display purposes, and a determination was made as to what type of padding and underpinnings, such as petticoats, would be sent with the garment. After treatment was complete, a detailed condition report along with photographs, instructions for handling, dressing, and packing, and the requirements for display were written and printed up to be packed within the travel crate along with the gown, which was carefully packed in a custom-made archival box padded out with acid-free tissue paper for the trip.

The Lowe gown was on loan from November 21, 2020, through March 14, 2021.

With special thanks to Nancy Buenger (conservator in private practice), Sue Reif-Gill, and Julia Eckelkamp (CHM conservation volunteers) for all their help and efforts on this project.

Holly Lundberg received her degree in Conservation and Materials Science from University College London. She completed her postgraduate work in the conservation analytical labs of the Smithsonian Institution, and worked in conservation at the Field Museum of Natural History for seven years before joining the Chicago History Museum in 2005, where she specializes in the preservation, care, and conservation of materials in the Costume and Textile, Decorative and Industrial Arts, and Painting and Sculpture collections, as well as for artifacts on exhibition.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | All images courtesy of Chicago History Museum staff unless otherwise noted. Page 5, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, www.loc.gov/item/96519318/.

Cotillion Gown Treatment | 11

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American Medina: Stories of Muslim Chicago The Chicago Muslim Oral History Project interviewed more than 150 Muslim Chicagoans from a variety of backgrounds—read their stories in their own words.

P E T E R T . A LT E R

The entrance to the exhibition American Medina: Stories of Muslim Chicago (October 21, 2019–May 16, 2021) at the Chicago History Museum.

o highlight the importance of Chicago’s religious communities, the Chicago History Museum, in the early 2000s, developed plans for a religious suite of exhibitions focusing on the Abrahamic faiths—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

Catholic Chicago opened in 2008. In 2012, the exhibition Shalom Chicago, focusing on the city’s Jewish communities, debuted. Seven years later American Medina: Stories of Muslim Chicago opened to complete the suite.

Unlike its two predecessor exhibitions, American Medina’s foundation was an oral history project. Under the auspices of the Museum’s Studs Terkel Center for Oral History, the Chicago Muslim Oral History Project began in the summer of 2016 and continued into 2021, gathering more than 150 interviews. The oral histories, including audio files and transcripts, will eventually be available through the Museum’s website, as a permanent online archive. Project staff, interns, and volunteers

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worked to interview a broad array of American Muslims from many suburbs and throughout the city. Oral history narrators came from multiple historically significant Muslim communities, as well as newer lesser-known ones. People born into the faith as well converts sat for interviews. Many are native-born Americans while others were immigrants and refugees. The youngest narrators were college students while the oldest were in their eighties. Some volunteered to be interviewed after hearing about the project through word of mouth and others by going to the project website. Staff, volunteers, and interns however, recruited most narrators through community organizations, mosques, public meetings, and individual contacts.

Founded in 2005, the Museum’s Studs Terkel Center for Oral History collaborates with community partners to promote oral history as a tool of social justice. Through documenting everyday people’s voices, the center carries

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forward the legacy of well-known actor, disc jockey, oral historian, journalist, and writer Studs Terkel. In their approach to this project, oral history center staff applied frameworks of shared authority, reflective practice, antiracism, being trauma informed, and understanding the pitfalls of Christian normativity.

Typically, the center’s oral history initiatives, including this project, have a youth engagement component. In spring 2019, center staff recruited, hired, and trained eight urban and suburban American Muslim high school students to conduct oral histories and work on the resulting exhibition. From April to October of that year, they led seventeen interviews, recruited oral history narrators, promoted the exhibition, and did research.

The exhibition’s five-minute introductory film also featured them.

While listening to the interviews, center staff discovered that three main topics, among many others, consistently rose out of the Chicago Muslim Oral History Project: narrators discussed themes of identity, personal journeys, and faith. These three ideas became the organizational rubric for the American Medina exhibition and the following edited excerpted oral histories. Although each thematic section here is grounded by an interview featured in the exhibition, most of these oral histories did not appear in American Medina.

Combing through more than 150 interviews to create this article was a major undertaking. Interns working with the oral history center, Michala Marcella Fitzpatrick, Miriam Montano, Sophie Ospital, Rachel Rudolph, and Andrea Serna, did a wonderful job analyzing oral history audio and transcripts to help produce this piece.

The Teen Historians who worked on the Chicago Muslim Oral History Project. Back row: Jaree Zaidi, Ilyas Kherzai, Abdul Awal, Sultan S. Muhammad; front row: Amatullah Mir, Zakiyat Amin, Nusaybah Mallick; not pictured, Andre Pierce Jr. Photograph by Timothy Paton Jr. American Medina | 13

  

I D E N T I T YJ

Like any followers of the same religion, Muslim Chicagoans share a faith but also maintain their individuality. Their varied characteristics help us better understand the city’s and country’s histories and Muslim communities.

Mirzet Dzubur is Bosniak from Prijedor, Bosnia.

Bosniaks are South Slavic Muslims from southeastern Europe. Dzubur fled his country’s genocide of Muslims in 1995 with his two sons and wife.

Soon after their arrival in Chicago, he founded KUD “Bosna” Chicago, a Bosniak youth dance troupe.

Aisha Ibrahim-Hanson is from Chicago and grew up on the South Side. She currently lives in northern California where she works as the convert care coordinator for Ta’leef Collective.

Ta’leef also has a Chicago presence and creates “the space, content, and companionship necessary for a healthy understanding and realization of Islam.”

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think my experience was incredibly unique in a couple of ways. One, growing up I’d never really thought about race attached to religion, meaning there was no immigrant experience that I had to kind of navigate being in this country as a lot of my peers did.

They had to deal with navigating an environment that they grew up in, which would be the West and America, but then have to deal with immigration, things at home . . . just different cultural things.

I would say that my culture was Islam, which is really interesting because Islam is a religion. It’s not a culture, right? But being that my parents converted, all we knew was Islam. There was nothing else. There was no, “Our Italian side does this, or our Black side does this.” My parents made a very intentional effort to raise all of us in the Islamic lifestyle. So, when I say culture, I mean synonymous with lifestyle. And I learned that that was kind of different for my peers at high school.

Born in Lahore, Pakistan, Tayyaba Syed came to the United States in the 1980s with her family. When her family got to the Chicago area, they first lived in the city and then moved to southwest suburban Westmont.

Today, Syed is an award-winning author, journalist, keynote speaker, and performer. She is also a member of the Glen Ellyn, Illinois District 41 school board, as “the first Muslim to ever serve” in this capacity.

Photograph by Sadaf Syed Photography

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hen we came, it was May 23, 1995. They [a refugee resettlement agency] found for us an apartment. It was one bedroom and the basics of what we needed, a bed . . . food. We were happy. And we visited World Relief, and we followed their program. After one month, I established that [a dance troupe] with a few teenagers. This was good for me at that time because— inside we have a lot of trauma. . . . That is a good time for me to go to that [dance troupe practices and performances]. . . .

Doing something with the kids, teenagers, and me, it was my therapy and for the kids, and for everybody in the [Bosniak] community, and that’s my point. . . . From 1995 to today, it has been over 500 kids, members, through generation to generation. To start it was not easy. It was not easy because we did not have costumes or instruments. We had nothing. I just clapped like this to start in the refugee center—Bosniak refugee center—near Sheridan and Broadway [on the North Side].

14 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring / Summer 2021

I

t comes down to accepting our identity of who we are. I did not grow up wearing the head scarf. I started practicing hijab as a sophomore in college at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I actually grew up

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very detached from my faith. We grew up in the culture.

There are principles that overlap between the culture and the religion. Sometimes, things are confused. It wasn’t like the religion was forced upon us. I grew up confused as to what is culture and what is religion.

It wasn’t until I took a bunch of world religion courses, philosophy courses, humanities courses, and sociology courses, where I studied everybody else, that I learned to appreciate who I was. I think that is what it comes down to. When I put the scarf on my head, I am declaring that I am a Muslim. When I was growing up, I never fit in anyway. It didn’t matter if I was covered or not covered. I still didn’t look like everybody else. That was one of the defining factors for me to start wearing the scarf. Well, I am already different. Who cares? Now, it is a testimony of my faith.

Yvonne Maffei, a native of Lorain, Ohio, and a longtime Chicago resident, runs the popular food blog My Halal Kitchen. She describes herself as “half Sicilian and half Puerto Rican, but all Midwest American.” After converting to Islam in her 20s, Maffei explored how to cook familiar foods following Halal dietary guidelines.

I

had big lessons to learn there about the meaning of Halal. I could embrace the new religion—and Islam doesn’t tell you to drop your culture—but I needed to communicate myself a lot better to the people I cared about and who were a bit taken aback about my decision. Food was that communication vehicle and something that brought us together and closer. Over the years, I had to get better at that, so I started to think about making more Italian food with Halal ingredients, as well as Puerto Rican dishes and all-American food too.

These are the three cultures I am ingrained in and mean a lot to me, so I wanted to be sure to respect and preserve my personal culinary heritage. When my family comes to visit me, they don’t want something innovative or fancy. They just want comfort food. Because I spent years testing and tasting, I can now make our traditional foods with Halal meat, and, luckily, they are happy to enjoy it with me too. The flavors are familiar to them, and everybody is happy. That is where I found my happy medium, and I saw a gap in the market. . . .

Halal is an Arabic word that means permissible in the context of Islam. It means more than what is permissible to eat. It is also what is permissible in actions, societal

norms, financial transactions, for example. The opposite is Haram, but I just like to focus on what is permissible, because there is a huge abundance of Halal in terms of food. It is really so delicious!

Originally from Istanbul, Turkey, Serpil Caputlu came to Chicago in 2004.

Currently, she is a mathematics instructor at Triton College in the western suburbs. Caputlu discussed the challenges she overcame to be successful.

R

ight after our marriage, I came here to the U.S.A. [with my husband]. Everything was new for me, of course. I was twenty-two years old, just finished college. It was a big transition for me . . . I still started going to college here, and I was helping my friend with newspaper deliveries.

I started going to churches in my neighborhood.

There were some volunteer teachers there. They were very nice to me, teaching me English. To be honest, I didn’t have a hard time practicing my religion as a Muslim here. I felt like everybody was so respectful. I was able to do newspaper delivery until I had my [first] baby. As soon as he was born, my husband got a job offer in Chicago.

When I moved to Chicago, I was able to start community college part-time. Then, I got a full load of classes and became an international student. I started a job as a nanny. I took my son with me and took care of other kids with him—that helped me pay my tuition—I finished my master’s degree [in mathematics]. I already had a bachelor’s degree in physics before I came here. I was working about ten hours every day. In the evening, I was leaving my son to my husband when he came home from work. I would then leave for my night classes.

I was very busy, but I was happy because I was able to earn money, pay my tuition, and complete my education. I got my green card and work permission. Right after I finished my master’s degree, I started to work at different community colleges—Truman College, Triton College—having three part-time jobs was like having a full-time job.

I applied to Triton College as full-time faculty. After . . . three years, I was able to get my tenure [at Triton]. I also work at DePaul University because I like to be busy.

[Now,] I have two kids—it was especially hard for me during my [second] pregnancy because I was working at the same time. I continued teaching until the night before I had the baby, and then I went back to work two weeks after giving birth.

American Medina | 15

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Diana Cruz was raised in Chicago’s Little Village community on the city’s Near Southwest Side. She commented that her “upbringing was in the Mexican culture, but my mom did not want me to lose my Puerto Rican culture.” The Teen Historians, who interviewed Cruz, asked her: “When you first converted in 1999 as a Latino Muslim, what resources did you have?”

I

was introduced by a friend of mine to a Latino Muslim. To me it was like, “How can you be Latino and Muslim? You need to tell me more.” He was my connection to learning more about Islam. He was the one who said, “You can convert to Islam. Islam is universal.”

I did not want to lose my identity as a Latina. To me, it shaped me to be like, “I am Muslim, but I am also Latina.” I started making it a point to do Latino Eid events with other people. We started getting together and started doing Latino Eid [two yearly feast days for Muslims] events, Latino Eid parties. . . . Now, there is a huge conversion of Latinos. There are conversion classes for new converts. When you convert, there are a majority of Latinos who speak Spanish and are able to assist those who speak Spanish. Back in the day, when I started, there was none of that.

J O U R N E YJ

Journeys, both physical and spiritual, are an important part of religious faith.

For well over a century, thousands of Muslims have started, ended, or undertaken their journeys in Chicago as residents, migrants, immigrants, refugees, and converts.

As a Rohingya in Burma, Norjahan Binti Fozarahman faced violent persecution.

The Burmese government does not recognize the Rohingya as a distinct ethnic group, will not acknowledge them as Muslims, or grant them citizenship. They are stateless. As a refugee, she endured a long, tortuous passage through Thailand and Malaysia before arriving in Chicago. She spoke in her native Rohingya while her son translated.

Photograph by Sadaf Syed Photography

The style of this hand-embroidered girl's dress (c. 2005) comes from Medculii, a village in Afghanistan, while the mirrors on the garment are a common feature of Pashtun clothing.

16 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring / Summer 2021

S

he was saying the reason she left Malaysia is she thought about her children’s future. Because in Malaysia when your children don’t have an education, people used to say that they’re going to be wild. So she didn’t want her children to be like that. She wanted

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her children to have a good future. She wanted her children to be good people in the future. And she thinks about that, and it’s hard in Malaysia.

She said we don’t have a country. We need a country.

We are still refugees. But we need a country that we can go anywhere we want, where we have freedom of movement, freedom of speech. She thought about that. And then she went and applied to the UNHCR [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Malaysia], and the UNHCR eventually brought her over here [to the city’s North Side].

Originally from Houston, Texas, Trenton Carl came to Chicago in 2009 to attend DePaul University and major in Islamic studies.

He grew up with a father “of Anglo-American descent” and a mother who “is [of] Mexican [descent].” Carl converted to Islam in 2006 and found community at DePaul University.

W

hen I moved to Chicago, I didn’t come with a car, and so my world was basically from Ravenswood [a North Side neighborhood near DePaul’s main campus] to downtown. That was my world. And so my community was the MSA [Muslim Students Association] community. So I reached out to DePaul’s UMMA, United Muslims Moving Ahead— that’s their MSA program—before I moved and said, “Look, I’m moving to Chicago. I’d like to get involved in your community space.”

So the president of UMMA at the time and I began emailing, and we kind of clicked really well. He created a position for me, making me the historian. I was immediately put on the board when I moved, and within six months or so he had asked me to start leading some programs at the MSA. The MSA space was of super importance for me in those two years at DePaul. That’s where my community was. That’s where my friends were.

That’s where my intellectual activity was, my spiritual activity was.

A native of Rafah, Palestine, Mohamed Elnatour discusses his journey to Chicago from Saudi Arabia in 1991. He is currently the principal of the Islamic Community Center of Illinois Academy in Chicago.

Photograph by Sadaf Syed Photography

I

came to Chicago with my wife and my two children. Now I have eight children. The only people I have in the United States are my own children and grandchildren. Some of my kids are married, and they have children. So now I am a grandfather. I have no brother, no cousins, no sisters in the United States. It is very rare to find Palestinians from Gaza outside [of Palestine], because the people in Gaza do not have the privilege of having a visa.

There is no counselor, no representative for any state to give visas for any people to go outside of Gaza. That is why I came here from Saudi Arabia. I was a teacher over there. I applied to the American Embassy to get a F-1 Visa as a student to become a graduate student. That is how I get here. If I’m in Gaza, I would not have this kind of privilege to come to the US, as the majority of the people of Gaza can’t get here now.

Bashir Asad is a Chicago native whose family hails from Mobile, Alabama.

In 1968, he and his wife, Na’Imah, joined the Chicago-based Nation of Islam (NOI). With teachings based on the Quran, the Bible, and Black nationalism, long-time NOI leader the Honorable Elijah Muhammad built it into a major religious, cultural, Leader of the Nation of Islam, business, and political force, Elijah Muhammad, speaks at challenging white supremacy the Saviours’ Day annual and promoting Islam as an meeting, February 26, 1966. alternative religion for African Americans.

Upon the death of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad in 1975, Asad and his family, like many other members of the NOI, transitioned to the leadership of Imam W. D. Mohammed, Elijah Muhammad’s son. Imam Mohammed lead the membership in another direction, including adherence to the dictates of the Quran and the life example of the Prophet Muhammad. This path had already been indicated American Medina | 17

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in the Honorable Elijah Muhammad’s teachings that it would be the direction of the future of the NOI. Imam Mohammed’s goal was to move members closer to the universal principles of “Al Islam.”

I

tell people today one of the things that impressed me the most, when I attended my first [Nation of Islam] Saviours’ Day event, was the well-organized conduct of the people, neatly dressed—even the children. I can remember looking at the children and how organized and mannerable and courteous they were. I said, “This is where I want to be.” These are the kind of people I want to be a part of.

They were progressive. They had an economic program. They put importance on education. One of the things that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and his message stressed was “that you will not be equal to the white man until you have equal education.” It was practical things like that. Although other African Americans were saying similar things, it was the emphasis on self-reliance, Do For Self, that attracted me to the Nation of Islam at that time. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad asked the African American community “Why ask another people to do for you what you can do for yourself?”

Abdul Mallick Ajani, who currently works at a major insurance company in suburban Northbrook, discussed his journeys from East Pakistan to West Pakistan and then to Chicago. Since his arrival in Chicago, he has been associated with his religious community center, volunteering there since 1972.

Over the years, he has had many roles and currently serves as a mediator.

A

fter the 1971 civil war, my family and I migrated to West Pakistan [modern day Pakistan] and started working there [after moving from East Pakistan, modern day Bangladesh]. That period was a bit difficult.

I would go to school in the evening and work during the daytime. It was a big adjustment from the life that we had in East Pakistan. In West Pakistan, also, while I was there, the schooling, at times, was irregular. I had talked with some of my friends who had come to the United States and to Chicago . . .

Then, my family decided that it may not be a bad idea for me to come over to the United States, particularly to Chicago [in 1972]. The only reason of my coming to 18 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring / Summer 2021

Chicago was I had three or four friends here who had come over about six months before I did. And I did not know anyone else anywhere besides Chicago. The talk in my family, then, was that if I knew somebody in the United States, and they are in Chicago, it will help me settle a bit easier than if I went to a place where I did not know anyone. My parents and my other siblings stayed in [West] Pakistan for a while before they also moved to the United States.

Khalil Rasheed has lived throughout the city, including in the North Side Uptown neighborhood where he interacted with diverse Muslim communities.

He’s currently a graduate student at Northeastern Illinois University studying political science and international relations.

I

always questioned things when I was young. And those questions really drove me to research and inquire more about God and spirituality. I accepted Islam officially, we say take shahada [the Islamic profession of faith], in the summer of ’95. I started researching and studying the religion probably at about age 11 [in 1992], so I got introduced to it, if you will, through Malcolm X and his autobiography. I remember I was at McCorkle [Elementary School on the South Side], and there weren’t enough books to go around.

And so my mom, because I was slacking on some homework, fought for me to have access to the books in my social studies class, and Malcolm X was one of them.

So I had to do a book report. At the same time, the [Malcolm X] movie came out [in 1992]. And I didn’t get a chance to see the movie until later. But I was introduced to another faith outside of the religion of Christianity. I started opening up my eyes and just trying to grab books—and anything. I researched some Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, you know, different aspects of different spiritualties. I was already kind of calling myself Muslim—by the age of 11 or 12. I had stopped eating pork and gotten accustomed to some of the traditions and practices.

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the holiest month of the year in which Muslims observe a daily fast from sunrise to sunset.

Photograph by Sadaf Syed Photography

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nstead of continuing what mass culture encourages in us, materialism, consumerism, capitalism, every other -ism, how I think of Islam [is] there are these vices out there. They exist. What is in your will that is trained by Ramadan, trained by your religion that you can hold yourself back and go, “No I don’t need that.”

To be that same thing where I see that Muslim identity portrayed through that, where I see that I can make money so easily doing whatever I want to do and creating whatever art I want to. Is that ethical, like is that Halal? Haram? I think more about Halal and Haram in terms of capitalism, racism, whatever it is. That’s what I’m more interested in.

Yusef Trice owns and operates Dawah Oil Palace on the city’s West Side. When naming his business, Trice took inspiration from Masjid [Mosque] Dawah, a longstanding West Side mosque. Here he describes the sense of community at Masjid Dawah and answers the question: What does your faith mean to you? Every oral history interview concluded with this question.

FA I T H J

The word “Islam” means to submit or surrender to Allah (God) in Arabic, which is the language of the Muslim holy book, the Quran. For Muslims, this takes many forms, from worship and prayer to living their faith in their daily lives. Understanding how Muslim Chicagoans live their faith is key to seeing their places in Chicago’s history.

Jumana Al-Qawasmi founded Watan in southwest suburban Orland Park.

Watan is a Palestine-inspired arts shop that provides a space for Palestinians to explore their cultural and intellectual heritage. In this excerpt, she mentions Ramadan, which is the ninth month of the Hijri (Islamic lunar) calendar. During this month, the Quran was first revealed to Muhammad, Allah’s [God’s] prophet. It is

W

hen I got there [Masjid Dawah], it was a feeling of genuine warmth and brotherhood. You could get the assistance, the help, that you needed.

Masjid Dawah has always been pivotal, I believe, in helping people to reconstruct their lives and providing the help that is needed. . . . What does the faith mean to me?

It is the very—I think without it—wow—I wouldn’t even be here. My faith is the reason why I’m sitting here today.

American Medina | 19

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Based in Chicago, Hoda Katebi is an IranianAmerican writer, abolitionist organizer, and “creative educator.” Here she responded to the Teen Historians’ question: What does your faith mean to you?

I

like this question. My faith is central to my sense of self as well as my relationship to the world and the people within it.

And of course that has changed over time, as I continue to learn and grow. Today, Islam—and particularly within a Shia Muslim lens—is the cornerstone of what guides me throughout the remainder of my short time here on Earth.

For me, Islam is a blueprint that provides an outline of values—such as a deep commitment to fighting for justice and practicing divine mercy and compassion, as well as the physical practices and disciplines, such as praying five times a day or fasting during Ramadan that helps cultivate and nourish our lives, holistically.

Native Chicagoan Constance Shabazz discussed the transformative power of reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X in the 1960s.

In 2020, Shabazz founded the Salaam Community Wellness Center in the Woodlawn community on the South Side.

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ne day, my dad came up to me, and he hands me this book. He said, “I think you might want to read this” or something along that line. I’m thinking, “What is this?” The book was The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I just said, “Okay.”

By then, I had started reading books about African history, African American history. But to get that one from him I was thinking, “Okay,” never any discussion, during, after, no question about it. I just feel like it was a sign from God, “Read this book.”

When I read it, the thing that got me was not the theology of the Nation of Islam. I kind of knew that already.

But what got me was Malcolm’s transformation— human transformation story. And that’s where I was, because I was looking to go to that next step, me as a human being.

20 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring / Summer 2021

Halil Demir was born into a Kurdish family in southeastern Turkey. He founded the Zakat Foundation of America, located in southwest suburban Bridgeview, in 2001.

I

saw myself having a lot of questions. Islam was, for me, answering these questions. Religion was a question for me. I was looking for equality, so Islam says there is no differences between white or Black, you know, between wealthy or poor, between Turk and Kurd, or Arabs and Persians, so forth and so on . . .

I find out that Islam addresses the race issue, social justice issue—I find out that Islam addresses these issues. You cannot oppress people, and you don’t want to be oppressed, so deny or reject anything totalitarian or oppressing any individual in any aspect of their lives. So Islam denied all these. Islam gives freedom. The religion gave the full freedom for human beings. Be free as God has created you.

Olaseni Quadri Shehu is a Quranic and Arabic teacher living in the south suburbs.

He has an extensive education in Islamic, Arabic, and religious studies in his homeland Nigeria, where he was born in the city of Ibadan. He came to Chicago in the 2000s. Among many other topics, he discussed his Quranic teaching philosophy.

T

he way I break down the Quran people say, “Ah, it’s very simple.” Don’t chase people. Don’t make it too hard. “Ah, it’s so hard.” No, nothing like that. The book of God must be something that children can understand. It’s not something that is difficult. Don’t touch it, don’t touch it, no, no, no. Don’t make it supervised like that.

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You have to respect the book of God—respect it. But don’t make people be afraid or scare them. Even if they are scared, talk to them. It’s not scary. Teach a Christian the Quran. Teach them Quran. You are not converting them.

Craig Turner (Brother Hasan) from Masjid [Mosque] Al-Ihsan in Bronzeville on the city’s South Side describes the diversity of the mosque’s Friday Jumu’ah services.

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e have a beautiful community [Masjid Al-Ihsan], very diverse. When I say community, I don’t mean in a conventional sense—locality defined by demographics or area. I look at it in a broader sense. The word, “community,” come in unity. Those who come to the masjid are united in this worship of one God. We have one of the most diverse communities that you will find, not just in the city of Chicago but throughout the United States of America.

At our Friday Jumu’ah services, you have South Asians. You have the Arabs. You have the African immigrants. You have the African American converts. You have the Hispanic converts. It is just beautiful. Our community, our Jumu’ah, defines how Allah(God) loves wonderous variety.

Peter T. Alter is the Museum’s chief historian and director of the Studs Terkel Center for Oral History. He led the Chicago Muslim Oral History Project and curated the exhibition, American Medina: Stories of Muslim Chicago.

A D D I T I O N A L R E S O U RC E S | Watch the five-minute introductory video to the exhibition American Medina: Stories of Muslim Chicago at bit.ly/medinavideo. Read the currently available transcripts from the Chicago Muslim Oral History Project at bit.ly/medinatranscripts. Visit the Chicago History Museum’s SoundCloud page to hear interviews and clips from a selection of the narrators at https://soundcloud.com/chicago museum/sets/american-medina.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | All images of courtesy of narrators or Chicago History Museum staff unless otherwise noted. Page 17 (bottom right), ST-19031786-0025, Chicago Sun-Times collection, CHM.

Chicago artist Trinidad Castillo created this mural for the American Medina: Stories of Muslim Chicago exhibition, incorporating traditional Islamic elements with ones that are distinctly Chicago.

American Medina | 21

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Democracy Limited: Chicago Women and the Vote Explore women’s activism in Chicago to secure the right to vote—and beyond.

E L I Z A B E T H F R AT E R R I G O n February 12, 1869, Naomi Talbert took the platform before a packed assembly at Chicago’s Library Hall, located at the corner of LaSalle and Randolph Streets, and made a stirring appeal for the right to vote. Claiming to speak on behalf of fellow Black women of Chicago and Illinois, she expressed hope that opponents of “universal suffrage” without barriers of race or sex would soon “flee as chaff before the wind.” “Our God is with us and for us, and will hear the call of woman,” Talbert proclaimed, “and her rights will be granted, and she will be permitted to vote.”1 Talbert’s remarks at the two-day women’s rights convention came at a pivotal moment in the nation’s history when citizenship and voting rights were being debated and defined during the tumultuous period after the Civil War. Chicagoans gathered at Library Hall as Congress considered passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to bar states from denying voting rights based on race. Already the Fourteenth Amendment had extended citizenship to African Americans and promised equal protection under the law. For African Americans, forging freedom in this era required not only the end of enslavement, but also access to education and economic opportunity, civil rights, political participation, and protection from racial violence.

Some, such as white Eastern suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had traveled to Chicago to attend the Library Hall and other midwestern conventions, criticized the pending amendment for failing to expand the vote to women. But many others saw an immediate need to secure the vote for African American men in order to safeguard freedom for formerly enslaved people in the South. Although the Fifteenth Amendment held no promise of enfranchising women, a primary goal of those gathered at Library Hall was to craft a strategy for ensuring that women’s rights, including suffrage, would be included in a new state constitution, plans for which had been announced only months earlier.

If the Library Hall meeting provides a glimpse of a moment that gave participants hope for change, it also

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22 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring / Summer 2021

As Rosalyn Terborg-Penn pointed out in her seminal work, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920, which recovered the voices of Black suffragists, the perspectives and experiences of Black activist women were left out of many early accounts by white authors.

Reporting on the Library Hall proceedings in their newspaper, The Revolution, Anthony and Stanton acknowledged Naomi Talbert Anderson’s vocal support for universal suffrage, but they did not identify her by name. Instead, her remarks appeared under the headline: “A Colored Woman’s Voice.”

provides insight into themes that characterized the long struggle by Chicago area women to secure the right to vote. Like supporters of women’s suffrage elsewhere, many at the Chicago gathering took part in movements for abolition and temperance. Likewise, suffrage was not a single goal, but rather an issue bound up in broader aspirations and activism shaped by the lived experiences and circumstances of women who sought the vote. As was also the case in the larger struggle, those who came together at Library Hall advanced a variety of arguments for women’s suffrage. White women who organized the convention such as Mary Livermore and Myra Bradwell were intent on challenging the laws and customs that kept them subordinated to men. Talbert’s suffrage activism emerged from her understanding, grounded in lived experience, that racial oppression, gender, and economic status were intertwined. Following the convention, Talbert reiterated her views in a letter to the Chicago Tribune.

There, she countered gendered antisuffrage arguments

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that voting imperiled femininity by alluding to far graver threats and abuses historically endured by Black women.

She acknowledged the economic conditions of Black women’s lives and the necessity of Black women’s work.

She tied women’s suffrage to racial advancement and called upon Black men for support, concluding, “if you want to overcome prejudice, you must undertake the broad platform of universal suffrage.”2 As in the broader movement, issues of race permeated discussions during the Library Hall convention. After decades fighting for women’s rights, Stanton grew frustrated that the Fifteenth Amendment would enfranchise Black men ahead of white women. In her efforts to garner support for her views, she advanced racist arguments that questioned the fitness of African American and immigrant men to vote. She implored the gathering to “think of Patrick and Sambo, and Hans and Yung Tung . . . who cannot read the Declaration of Independence . . . making laws for . . . Susan B. Anthony.” Stanton and Anthony also proposed a resolution that in the process of denouncing “manhood suffrage” also invoked the specter of Black men’s sexual

predation of white women, should the former be empowered while women were left without the ballot.3 The men and women gathered in Chicago refused to endorse this resolution. But Stanton would continue to repeat these statements once Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment later that month and the campaign for ratification got underway.

These post-Civil War discussions of suffrage also occurred as immigration, US expansion, and ideas of racial hierarchy fueled debates over fitness for citizenship and participation in democracy. Only a week before the Library Hall convention, the Chicago-based labor weekly The Workingman’s Advocate warned of legions of Chinese workers on the west coast and called upon government to “forbid another [Chinese worker] to set foot upon our shores.” 4 In the 1870s, racist tropes about Chinese laborers undercutting white workingmen’s wages fueled violent attacks against Chinese communities and passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. The law, which barred immigration and naturalized citizenship, was eventually extended to include all Asian immigrants.

During these same years, settlers continued to stream

Even as the women’s rights convention took place at Library Hall, a splinter group led by Delia Waterman and Cynthia Leonard of the Chicago women’s club, Sorosis, met at nearby Crosby Music Hall to discuss similar issues. Throughout decades of efforts to achieve voting rights, Chicagoans, like those in the national movement, experienced fissures and fractures caused by conflicting personalities and principles.

Democracy Limited | 23

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On Sunday, October 19, 1879, Native American activist Susette La Flesche or Inshata-Theumba (Omaha), informed the audience gathered at Chicago’s Second Presbyterian Church (Twenty-Second and Michigan) about the US government’s mistreatment of the Ponca people. Forcibly relocated to “Indian Territory,” a group led

by Standing Bear, a Ponca chief, was later imprisoned for trying to return to their ancestral homeland in Nebraska. Standing Bear successfully challenged this imprisonment in court, with La Flesche interpreting on his behalf.

Afterward, she traveled the country advocating for Native American rights, including land rights, citizenship, and equal rights.

In Chicago, Susan B. Anthony (left) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton criticized the Fifteenth Amendment pending passage by Congress for failing to include women. In May, they severed from longtime abolitionist allies. That split resulted in the formation of two separate women’s suffrage organizations, which remained apart until 1890. Stanton and Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869 and continued working for a federal women’s suffrage amendment.

into the Trans-Mississippi west, spurred by federal policies to promote landownership, railroads, and commercial development. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Frances Walker described the impact of this movement on Native peoples in his 1872 report: “The westward course of population is neither to be denied nor delayed for the sake of all the Indians that ever called this country their home. They must either yield or perish.”5 Over the next two decades, as Indigenous peoples resisted this encroachment, the US waged war against them while undertaking policies aimed at dispossessing Native peoples of their lands and eradicating their ways of life, including conferring US citizenship upon those who gave up tribal practices.

The long struggle for women’s suffrage would play out amid contestation over boundaries of inclusion and exclusion into the next century. In Chicago, women’s struggle for voting rights was shaped by local individuals and circumstances while also connected to broader forces and developments nationwide. The city and its inhabitants played active roles both in the achievement of local victories and in influencing the course of a larger movement that resulted in the addition of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution in 1920, which prohibited states from denying the vote “on account of sex.”

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In Chicago, participants of the Library Hall convention passed resolutions in favor of equal education and employment opportunities for women and removal of legal barriers to women’s full participation in “social civil, and political life.” They also committed “to make a united effort to have the new constitution for the state of Illinois so framed that no distinction shall be made among citizens in the exercise of suffrage on account of race, color, sex, nativity, property, education, or creed.”6 Tasked with lobbying for these goals were members of the new organization that emerged from the Library Hall meeting, the Illinois Woman Suffrage Association (IWSA), later known as the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association (IESA). Chicago women played major roles in this group, which battled for women’s suffrage until 1920.

Although the prospect of a new state constitution inspired optimism, the outcome proved disappointing.

Elected delegates—eighty-five men from around the state—convened to draft the new document on December 13, 1869. By April, they were ready to decide on the matter of voting rights. By then, the Fifteenth Amendment had been added to the US Constitution, but some delegates nevertheless used the occasion to express opposition to its enfranchisement of Black men and its potential to extend voting rights to Chinese immigrants.

Women’s suffrage received little backing, and indeed much derision, from delegates. In an era when a husband’s vote was widely believed to adequately represent the interests of his wife and children, one delegate interrupted debates by jesting that nationally prominent suffragist Anna Dickinson lacked political representation simply because no man would marry her. Laughter followed. Some delegates considered limited suffrage—permitting property-holding women to vote. One supporter reasoned that few could argue with this principle.

Furthermore, rather than emboldening suffragists, as

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some feared, such a measure would disarm them, taking away “a great deal of the thunder of the women who are traveling about the country and crying out for woman suffrage.” Opponents of women’s suffrage claimed to have women’s best interests in mind. One such delegate voiced the widely expressed view that the ballot would “degrade” women and drag them “down to the lower level of the politician.” The delegates decided to put the question of women’s suffrage to a popular vote, a move that would have let Illinois’s male voters decide. Then, after hearing from a woman who lobbied against suffrage, they reversed themselves, closing the door to this possibility for women’s enfranchisement.7 Although its participants were unable to achieve the immediate goal of a state constitutional guarantee of equal suffrage, the 1869 Liberty Hall convention spurred further organizing and activism. Women continued to lobby lawmakers, go to court, organize to aid their communities, and raise their voices to demand justice. A look at several women involved in Chicago’s post-Civil War suffrage activities reveals how their support for women’s voting rights was part of a lifelong trajectory of agitation and activism.

Mary Livermore

Talbert continued to write, speak, and advocate for equal rights and racial justice. Later that year, she lectured throughout Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, eventually moving to Dayton, where in April 1870, she addressed another mass meeting of suffragists. During the 1870s, the Talbert family lived in several Ohio cities, Talbert working as a hairdresser and public schoolteacher to support her children and ailing spouse, who died in 1877. In 1881, she married Lewis Anderson. They moved to Wichita, Kansas, in 1884, where the now-Mrs. Naomi Anderson organized an orphanage for Black children excluded from the city’s whites-only children’s home. She continued to advocate for temperance as a member of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) as well as women’s rights, which she deemed essential for protecting Black women experiencing racial prejudice and violence not only in the South but throughout the United States. In the 1890s, she moved to Sacramento, where she again joined the suffrage fight.

In California, she lectured widely in support of a state constitutional amendment to enfranchise women, linking Black women’s possession of the ballot to the prospect of eliminating discriminatory state laws and uplifting Black women. Anderson drew “immense crowds” in churches and meeting halls as she toured the state. Throughout her campaigns as a paid lecturer, she called for “justice and . . . a voice in making the law.”8 Like Naomi Talbert Anderson, Mary Livermore, who organized and presided over the Library Hall convention, remained in Chicago only a short while longer, but continued to advocate for women’s rights. With women excluded from the political world, she believed, “a large portion of the nation’s work was badly done, or not done at all.”9 Livermore had come to this realization while working for the US Sanitary Commission, which handled relief efforts during the Civil War. Livermore toured hospitals and encampments to assess and publicize conditions and organized the successful Great Northwestern Sanitary Fair, which raised money for the Union cause.

Her wartime work made clear to her the extent to which women’s talents and energy were wasted due to women’s exclusion from full participation in public life. After the war, she became a staunch advocate for women’s rights, including suffrage.

Livermore had moved to Chicago in 1857 with her husband, Universalist minister Daniel Livermore, with whom she edited the New Covenant, a newspaper through which they promoted religious, antislavery, and temperance views. Elected president of the new, predominantly white Illinois Woman's Suffrage Association, Livermore also started another newspaper, The Agitator. Its motto: “Healthy Agitation precedes all true reform. . . .” Male friends suggested calling this newspaper “The Lily” or some other “mild” name fit for a woman’s publication.

Democracy Limited | 25

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Livermore insisted on the “The Agitator,” which conveyed fierce determination to stir people up and create change.

In 1870, Livermore moved to Boston and merged her paper with The Woman’s Journal, published by the American Woman Suffrage Association. She maintained ties to a reform network forged during her wartime work and years in Chicago, supporting movements for women’s rights and temperance. Livermore believed education should prepare girls for independence. That way, a woman would not have to marry out of financial need. She shared these views on the lecture circuit in a talk titled “What Shall We Do With Our Daughters?” Although reportedly informing those gathered at Library Hall that she was “not very good at talking,” Livermore became an admired and frequent public speaker, an agitator who kept issues of women’s rights and other reforms before public audiences for the rest of her life.10 Mary Jane Richardson Jones’s post-Civil War suffrage activity was preceded by two decades of involvement in antislavery and civil rights organizing and activism in Chicago. When she and her husband John Jones moved to Chicago with their daughter in 1845, they carried with them certificates of freedom issued months earlier by the Madison County circuit court. All free African Americans residing in Illinois were required to post bond and carry these documents under the state’s racist Black Laws, which also prohibited African Americans from voting, testifying in court, or serving in the militia. In Chicago, the Joneses prospered and became prominent members of the city’s Black community.

The Jones home served as an abolitionist meeting place as well as an Underground Railroad safe house.

There, Mary Jones took great risks by housing and feeding those seeking freedom from enslavement.

Passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, which required a claimant only to assert in an affidavit that someone was a “fugitive,” posed a threat to freedom seekers and free Black people alike. With about three hundred Black Chicagoans, Mary Jones and her husband took part in a mass meeting at Quinn Chapel AME Church to coordinate a response. Formally denouncing the law, they pledged to resist, organizing patrols to keep watch for bounty hunters looking to enslave African Americans.

Jones also assisted her husband’s decades-long campaign to end Illinois’s racially restrictive Black Codes, finally repealed in 1865. During the Civil War, Jones and other women in Chicago’s tightly knit Black community organized relief efforts on behalf of Black soldiers’ families as well as formerly enslaved people in the South.11 After the war, she joined Chicago women in organizing for suffrage and later participated in the city’s Black women’s club movement. Jones’s support for women’s suffrage was only one facet of a lifelong commitment to Black freedom and equal rights.

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Mary Jones

Mary Jones’s Freedom Papers

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Myra Bradwell announced the women’s rights convention in her weekly newspaper, Chicago Legal News, and later reported on its proceedings. As a married woman, Bradwell needed special permission from Illinois lawmakers in 1868 to publish the successful journal, which kept readers informed on legal and business matters. As corresponding secretary of the newly formed IWSA, Bradwell’s agitation for suffrage was entwined with her efforts to change laws under which a woman’s legal identity was absorbed into her husband’s upon marriage. She challenged gender stereotypes as well as legal barriers to women’s economic opportunity and independence.

Within weeks of the convention, Bradwell traveled to Springfield as part of a group appointed to lobby for laws granting married women rights to their earnings, property, and equal custody of their children. Bradwell drafted a bill granting married women control of their earnings, which became law in April 1869. Laws establishing further property and custody rights followed within a few years.12 In summer 1869, having studied law under her husband’s mentorship to assist with his legal practice, she applied to the Illinois Supreme Court for admission to the bar. A few months later, she received a notice of denial. The reason: as a married woman, she was not permitted to enter into contracts with or for her clients, a condition that left her unable to practice law. Bradwell crafted a well-reasoned challenge to this decision, noting that state statutes did not explicitly prohibit women from the legal profession. In response, the court informed her that the many historical restrictions on women’s rights made clear that Illinois lawmakers never intended for any woman, married or not, to practice law.

Dismayed but determined, Bradwell launched the first sex discrimination case heard by the US Supreme Court.

For the next three years, she updated readers on her case, Bradwell v. Illinois, which essentially posed this question: Did a woman have a right to pursue her chosen occupation? The court gave its unfavorable ruling in April 1873.

One justice, Joseph P. Bradley, drew on idealized views of white womanhood to claim, “The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life.”

In the meantime, women had gained the right to practice law in Illinois, through an 1872 state law Bradwell helped draft granting equal rights to employment in many occupations. Having lost her Supreme Court case, however, Bradwell focused her energies on publishing her acclaimed newspaper until her death in 1894. When, in March 1890, the Illinois Supreme Court decided to grant her a license to practice law based on her initial application, Bradwell noted the occasion in her newspaper but declined to accept the offer.13

Myra Bradwell

Catharine Van Valkenburg Waite served as second president of IWSA after Mary Livermore’s departure and oversaw the group’s legislative work until 1890. On October 3, 1871, Waite and executive committee members met at the group’s headquarters at 145 Madison Street to discuss the upcoming November election. With women’s voting rights left out of the state’s new constitution, they prepared to embark on a new path to suffrage. Five days later, the Chicago fire destroyed the offices of the association, which would not meet again for months. Undeterred, Waite, along with one of her daughters, appeared before the Board of Registry in Hyde Park on October 31 and asked to be added to the list of registered voters. When they were refused, Waite took the matter to court—as planned.14 Like Bradwell and other white suffragists, Catharine Waite’s suffrage activism was one aspect of her broader engagement with public life and commitment to women’s rights. In the 1850s, she wrote and lectured on equal rights throughout Illinois with husband Charles Burlingame Waite. Refused admission to Rush Medical College in 1866, she ran a girl’s school in Hyde Park and later worked as an editor and publisher. In 1886, Waite graduated from Union College of Law and afterward provided pro bono legal services for women unable to pay Democracy Limited | 27

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B E YO N D T H E VO T E I Marca Bristo, an internationally recognized force in the disability community, worked tirelessly to promote disability rights and to drive sweeping social reforms that changed Chicago and the nation. As the founding CEO of Chicago-based Access Living, a disability service and advocacy center for people with disabilities, run and led by people with disabilities, Bristo was committed to building a more inclusive society for disabled people to live fully-engaged, self-directed lives. Access Living continues this work today. In the 1980s, Access Living, Chicago ADAPT, and other demonstrators launched a campaign for accessible transportation, petitioning the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) for lifts on public buses. Their activism and resulting lawsuit led to the improved accessibility of Chicago’s public transit, and created a blueprint for accessible transit systems across the country. Bristo also helped author the landmark 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, and fought for its passage.

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vs. Happersett (1875) that voting was not a right of citizenship protected by the federal government. That decision allowed states to keep women from voting. It also set precedent for later decisions that permitted discriminatory laws that restricted voting for poor people, immigrants, and people of color.17 With another possible avenue to suffrage blocked, Chicago’s activist women continued to agitate and organize. In the decades that followed, they pressed for local laws to enfranchise women, maintained ties with suffragists outside the state, hosted meetings of regional and national suffrage groups, and joined efforts to win support for a federal amendment. Their involvement in the decades around the turn of the century in a range of organizations addressing a multitude of issues would bring them together to gain substantial voting rights.

Catharine Waite

for a lawyer. She also edited and published Chicago Law Times, a quarterly journal that included many articles advocating legal reforms to secure women’s rights.15 Between 1868 and 1872, hundreds of women, including Waite and her daughter, tried to register and vote. Although the Fourteenth Amendment defined voters as “male,” it also promised protection from laws that took away the “privileges and immunities” of citizenship. Unsure whether this new amendment made women voters, some local polling officials permitted them to cast ballots. In other places such as Hyde Park (not yet part of Chicago), women were not allowed to register. Elsewhere, registered women were turned away at the polls. Would-be women voters anticipated these outcomes as part of the “new departure” strategy. If prevented from voting, their next step was to challenge the decision in court.16 In Chicago, a January 13, 1872, Tribune headline informed suffragists of the disappointing outcome of Waite’s case: “Ladies, You Can’t Vote.” Cook County Superior Court Judge Jameson ruled that voting was not a “natural” right protected by the Constitution. The US Supreme Court would also reach this conclusion, putting an end to this strategy. After Virginia Minor was barred from voting in Missouri, the court ruled in Minor

Abolitionist and activist for the rights of Black people and women, Sojourner Truth was among the hundreds of women who voted between 1868 and 1872.

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n July 1, 1913, spectators lined Chicago’s sidewalks to watch more than a hundred automobiles, yellow and white banners and streamers fluttering, make their way up and down Michigan Boulevard (now Avenue) in a late afternoon victory procession. The jubilant motorists were celebrating the Presidential and Municipal Voting Act, signed into law earlier that week by Governor Edward F. Dunne. The law granted nearly full suffrage, empowering Illinois women to vote for local offices and in presidential elections. Chicago area women led the way to this substantial victory. The hundreds of women riding in the auto parade represented the many organizations that campaigned for the law, including suffrage groups such as the IESA, the Chicago Political Equality League, and the Alpha Suffrage Club, the state’s first Black women’s suffrage association; working women’s organizations, including the Chicago Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) and Chicago Teacher’s Federation; club women and reformers from the Chicago Woman’s Club and Women’s City Club; and Progressive Party and Socialist Party supporters.

During the decades before Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment, Chicago women of different backgrounds pursued varied and sometimes overlapping goals—working for urban and social reforms, economic and political empowerment, and racial equality. Those issues and efforts also propelled many to press for suffrage, forming tenuous alliances and building momentum toward full enfranchisement. Viewing the ballot as an expression of political will and a tool to achieve larger goals, Chicago women followed many paths to suffrage, becoming voters one campaign and one law at a time.

As the experiences of Naomi Talbert Anderson and Mary Jones attest, Black women navigating a world built on both racial and gender oppression did not have the luxury of battling only for women’s rights. Their longtime activism reached new heights in the early 1890s with the creation of a network of women’s clubs devoted to social action. Many of the women involved in these clubs also fought for women’s right to vote. Their activism and support for suffrage was rooted in the struggle for Black freedom and connected to such issues as widespread racial discrimination, a racist criminal justice system, exclusion from white institutions, and violent attacks on Black men and women intended to maintain white supremacy. Chicago women played leadership roles in this national movement. As the city’s Black community continued to grow, spurred by migration from the South, they organized to meet its needs while addressing racial inequities both within the city and the nation.

O

B E YO N D T H E VO T E I During six decades of legal practice, Pearl M. Hart combatted injustice, defended civil liberties, and fought for the rights of marginalized people. After graduating from law school in 1914, Hart served as a public defender in the 1920s and 1930s for children and women in Cook County’s juvenile and women’s courts. During the mid-century anti-Communist Red Scare, Hart appeared on behalf of many individuals called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Hart also defended LGBTQ people victimized by police entrapment and harassment and was a founder in 1965 of the Mattachine Society of Chicago, an early LGBTQ-rights group. Hart served as the group’s legal counsel until her death in 1975 and was remembered as the “Guardian Angel of Chicago’s gay community.”

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The scenario played out again in 1912 when, amid fervent organizing for citywide suffrage measures, Barrier Williams, together with Black clubwomen Elizabeth Lindsay Davis and Mrs. George C. Hall, applied for membership in the Chicago Political Equality League (CPEL), an outgrowth of the CWC organized in 1894 to educate women on politics and advance women’s rights.

By the 1910s, the CPEL stood at the forefront of local suffrage activism. Only after a public campaign waged by supporters did the women receive admittance.18

Fannie Barrier Williams

A skilled public speaker, journalist, and suffragist, Chicago’s Fannie Barrier Williams worked to assist Black Chicagoans excluded from the city’s white institutions while connecting local efforts to a national movement of Black activist women. For example, racial discrimination in the city’s hospitals prevented Black patients from accessing adequate health care. Barrier Williams strongly advocated for and raised funds to create Provident Hospital, an interracial facility controlled by African Americans, which also provided training and employment for Black nurses excluded from white nursing schools. Barrier Williams also served as vice president of the Illinois Women’s Alliance, an interracial coalition of women’s groups formed in 1888 that focused on the wellbeing of the industrializing city’s working women and children.

Through her work with the alliance, Barrier Williams forged cooperative bonds with elite Black and white reformers toward shared goals. But Barrier Williams also experienced racial exclusion. When white supporters nominated her for membership in the Chicago Woman’s Club (CWC) in November 1894, the move stirred controversy among the all-white group, which initially rejected Barrier Williams’s bid for membership. The matter embroiled the club for more than a year until it passed a resolution affirming that no racial qualifications for membership existed. Barrier Williams was admitted.

Provident Hospital and Training School, Thirty-Sixth and Dearborn Streets, c. 1918. Opened in May 1891, the hospital was initially located in a three-story brick building at the corner of Twenty-Ninth and Dearborn.

Chicago activist women hosted the August 1899 meeting of the National Association of Colored Women at Quinn Chapel AME Church at Twenty Fourth Street and Wabash Avenue. The longtime political gathering place for the city’s African American community was started in a blacksmith shop in 1844.

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B E YO N D T H E VO T E I Carmen Velasquez recognized how language and cultural barriers along with concerns about insurance or immigration status kept many people in the Pilsen, Little Village, and Back of the Yards communities from accessing healthcare. In the 1980s, she became the driving force behind Project Alivio. The community campaign raised funds and support to create a medical center at 2355 S. Western Ave, which opened in 1989. The bilingual/bicultural Alivio Medical Center opened in 1989 with Velásquez as the first executive director. It continues to operate an urgent care center and six community health centers, providing care for the un- and underinsured.

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  

To Fannie Barrier Williams, the club movement was a “national uprising” of Black women “pledged to the serious work” of racial advancement. She and Davis led Chicago clubwomen in hosting the 1899 meeting of the National Association of Colored Women, the umbrella organization of Black women’s clubs founded three years earlier. Organizing this convention strengthened ties among Chicago’s clubwomen and connected them to women’s efforts in other regions. During the three-day gathering, participants addressed topics traditionally linked to women’s roles as caretakers or moral guardians of the home. They also focused on urgent, life-and-death matters: lynching, segregation, and the convict-lease system—forced prison labor that targeted African American men. During this meeting, members also elected the group’s next slate of officers.19 Although not yet able to participate fully in in the wider world of electoral politics, NACW members, like members of countless women's groups in this era, enacted democracy as voters and office holders within their club work.

Elizabeth Lindsay Davis was an early advocate for creation of the NACW; through her subsequent work as the group’s national organizer and historian, she greatly expanded membership and documented decades of Black activist women’s vital work. In Chicago, among other activities, in 1896 she organized the Phyllis Wheatley Club, named for an eighteenth century enslaved African American. The club initially offered educational programs, undertook charitable work, and operated a sewing school. Later, after providing temporary

Board of Directors of the Phyllis Wheatley Home Association, c. 1915. Club women tapped extensive networks and organized fundraisers to support operations and maintain the residence, which moved to 3256 Rhodes Avenue in 1915, and again in January 1926 to 5128 S. Michigan Blvd.

Emerging from the cooperative effort to organize the 1899 Chicago meeting of the National Association of Colored Women, the Illinois Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs was created by the joining of the “Magic Seven”—Chicago’s first Black women’s clubs. The federation’s motto: “Loyalty to Women and Justice to Children.” Elizabeth Lindsay Davis (top row center) served as president and historian of the state federation. These portraits were published in her book, The Story of the Illinois Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, 1900–1922.

Democracy Limited | 33

  

shelter for several girls in members’ homes, the club established the Phyllis Wheatley Home for Girls, which opened its doors in 1908 at 3530 Forest Avenue.

There, excluded from the white YWCA and other settlement houses, young Black women migrating to Chicago found a safe residence, help finding employment, and other Elizabeth Lindsay Davis services. Davis served as president of the Phyllis Wheatley Club for more than twenty years, work that informed her views on suffrage.

She called women “a potent factor in the body politic,” whose influence as voters would advance the goals of their philanthropic and reform activities.20 Davis’s longtime involvement in club work included serving as secretary of Chicago’s first Black women’s club, organized by antilynching activist Ida B. Wells in 1893. Wells reached out to Mary Richardson Jones to serve as honorary chair of the new club, a move that bridged its work and the activism of an earlier generation of Black Chicagoans. When Wells traveled to England to Publicized in this 1892 pamphlet and elsewhere, Ida B. Wells’s investigations revealed how lynching was used as an instrument of terror to uphold white supremacy. She later cofounded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which pressed for federal antilynching legislation.

B E YO N D T H E VO T E I Members of Mujeres Latinas en Accion (MLEA) Young Professionals Advisory Committee (YPAC) attend the January 21, 2017, women’s march in Chicago. Started in Pilsen in 1973, MLEA centered issues affecting girls and women, encouraging Latinas to become active agents of their lives and communities. Founders battled hostility and suspicion—from men critical of their focus on women to religious leaders concerned the group’s work would weaken families. Today the longest-standing Latina organization in the US, MLEA fights for immigrant justice, women’s health and reproductive rights, economic justice, and an end to gender-based violence.

34 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring / Summer 2021

rally support for an antilynching movement, members honored her by naming the new club for her.21 Wells relocated to Chicago after receiving death threats for speaking out against lynching after three of her friends were murdered by a white mob in Memphis in 1892. The horrific event prompted Wells, a journalist, to investigate systematic violence against Black men and women. Defenders of lynching justified these murders by claiming that Black men threatened and raped white women. Wells’s investigations revealed that violent mobs targeted Black people who competed economically with whites. 22 As white southerners regained power after Reconstruction, they created a system of legal segregation and inequality and, despite the Fifteenth Amendment, denied Black men’s voting rights through threats, violence, and laws such as poll taxes and literacy tests. Supportive of this system of racial oppression, lynching was used to terrorize the wider Black community and keep its members “in their place.”

From Chicago, Wells continued her antilynching activism and became an international figure during her

  

lifelong campaign for racial justice. In 1895, she married Ferdinand Barnett, a Chicago attorney. Locally, WellsBarnett’s efforts on behalf of Chicago’s growing Black community took many forms, from helping to establish the city’s first Black kindergarten, to challenging Chicago Tribune editorials favoring segregated public schools, to her work with the Negro Fellowship League. WellsBarnett formed this group to foster dialogue and action after widespread racial violence against Black residents of Springfield in 1908. By 1910, the League also provided a rooming house and recreation space in the Douglas area on the South Side, as well as employment services to Black men excluded from the white YMCA. Through Wells-Barnett, the group extended its work to “all matters affecting the interest of our race,” including its efforts on behalf of Joseph Campbell. Upon learning of his plight, Wells-Barnett took action to help Campbell, accused of murdering a white woman, defend himself

against the questionable charges. Concerned he would not get a fair trial in a racist criminal justice system, Wells-Barnett raised awareness and money to pay for Campbell’s legal defense. Despite these efforts, Campbell was found guilty and received a death sentence. The public attention and legal support brought by WellsBarnett and her husband helped in getting his sentence changed to life imprisonment.23 Although women could not yet vote in city elections, she formed the Women’s Second Ward Republican Club in 1910 to “assist men” in deploying their votes for the betterment of the city’s Black community. A member of IESA and CPEL, Wells also organized the Alpha Suffrage Club in January 1913.24 For Wells-Barnett, as for other Black suffragists, the vote was not a matter of gaining individual rights for women. Rather, it was tied to a larger struggle for political empowerment and racial equity throughout the US.

B E YO N D T H E VO T E I

Wells-Barnett founded the Negro Fellowship League in 1908 and raised awareness and funds to assist with Joseph Campbell’s legal defense in 1915.

Women participate in a Black Lives Matter rally in Millennium Park on July 11, 2016, to protest ongoing, systemic racial inequities and police brutality. The demonstration was held in response to the then-recent shooting deaths of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile in suburban St. Paul, Minnesota, during encounters with police.

Democracy Limited | 35

  

At the March 3, 1913, Woman’s Suffrage Procession in Washington, DC, Ida B. Wells-Barnett protested organizers’ insistence that she march separately with Black suffragists instead of with white members of the Illinois delegation. Alice Paul, procession organizer and head of NAWSA’s Congressional Committee, believed a stunning spectacle would attract media attention and widen support for women’s voting rights. Knowing national support was required for a constitutional amendment and concerned that allowing Black and white women to march together would anger and alienate white southerners, she and other planners tried to limit Black women’s participation. That morning, IESA president Grace Wilbur Trout had advised the Illinois women to go along with efforts to exclude Wells-Barnett. But Wells-Barnett refused to give in. Instead, as white suffragists from Illinois passed by, she marched alongside Belle Squire and Virginia Brooks, who had opposed the plan to segregate Illinois suffragists.

During the late nineteenth century, Chicago and nearby Evanston served as headquarters for a growing temperance movement, which also led many women to support suffrage. Nineteenth-century women were drawn to temperance as a moral reform and a practical necessity. Without custody rights to their chilFrances Willard dren and unable to divorce or own property for much of the century, married women had no means to escape abusive, alcoholdependent husbands. Moreover, such men could scarcely be said to represent the best interests of their wives and children at the ballot box. During the Library Hall convention, prominent women’s rights orator Anna Dickinson countered an antisuffragist’s remarks by describing men whom the law made “absolute masters of wives and children; men who reel to their homes night after night to beat some helpless child, to beat 36 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring / Summer 2021

some helpless woman.”25 Armed with the ballot, she argued, women could protect themselves and their families by voting for prohibition and other needed reforms.

Such a view gathered widespread support in the last decades of the nineteenth century through the work of Frances Willard and the WCTU. The former head of the Evanston College for Ladies (which later joined with Northwestern University), Willard served as president of the Chicago WCTU before leading the national organization for nearly two decades beginning in 1879. The WCTU had emerged from a “woman’s crusade” in Ohio and western New York, during which thousands of women prayed for saloons to close their doors. Willard gradually pressed members to seek a political route to change. In 1876, she introduced the concept of a “Home Protection” ballot, arguing that women’s votes could win laws prohibiting the sale of alcohol and other reforms to protect women and families. At first, the WCTU endorsed voting rights for women only on certain matters like local prohibition laws. In 1883, the organization began supporting full suffrage for women.26 In 1885, the WCTU moved its headquarters to Chicago, already home to the offices of the Woman’s Temperance Publishing Association and the WCTU’s Union Signal newspaper. Willard’s residence in the neighboring “dry” town of Evanston served as an unofficial headquarters, from which she built the WCTU into a thriving organization of more than 200,000 members.

B E YO N D T H E VO T E I Founded in 1989, Apna Ghar, which comes from a HinduUrdu phrase meaning “Our Home,” was the first organization in the US with a shelter focused on needs of domestic violence survivors of Asian descent. Today it provides comprehensive crisis intervention and prevention services, outreach, and advocacy to end gender-based violence across communities.

Former Executive Director Ranjana Bhargava (right) with Apna Ghar board members, Illinois First Lady Brenda Edgar (third from left) and Christine Takada (left), Asian American liaison to Governor Edgar, 1993.

  

Willard promoted a “Do Everything” approach to reform, expanding the organization’s efforts to include such matters as suffrage, workers’ rights, prison reform, and kindergartens.27 Willard worked to organize women nationwide. Many of the racist exclusions and tactics characteristic of whiteled suffrage organizations, however, were presaged by the WCTU. For instance, seeking support in the 1880s from white southern women, Willard accepted segregation in

southern units of the WCTU. When the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA)— formed from the 1890 merging of NWSA and AWSA— began to recruit southern suffragists, its leaders sanctioned Jim Crow discrimination by excluding Black women from national meetings in southern cities and by affirming a states’ rights approach to defining the electorate.28 While visiting the South for a temperance convention in 1890, Willard also made racist public

Without the vote, women had only the right to petition—to formally ask lawmakers for something. In 1879, Willard, then president of the state WCTU, presented a petition with more than 170,000 signatures to the Illinois General Assembly, asking for a law allowing men and women the right to vote on whether saloons could operate in their towns. The all-male legislature did not pass the law, but women in other states adopted the practice of submitting petitions for a “Home Protection” ballot.

Democracy Limited | 37

  

statements suggesting Black men opposed temperance, were prone to drunkenness, and threatened white women. In a controversy that played out in the international press, Ida B. Wells challenged Willard for perpetuating racist stereotypes used to condone lynching and failing to use her public platform to speak out against systemic violence against Black men. Only after considerable pressure from Wells did the WCTU pass resolutions that condemned lynching.29 From its home base of Chicago and Evanston, the WCTU won many converts to suffrage by linking the vote to women’s defense of home and family. In 1894, Willard remarked on temperance women’s support for suffrage: “Today you cannot tell the yellow ribbon [suffrage] from the white [temperance].”30 The intertwining of the temperance cause with suffrage had consequences for both the wider voting rights movement and Chicago women. The clamor for voting rights by prohibitionminded women sparked lasting opposition from the liquor industry. And a partial suffrage bill prepared by the Illinois WCTU, which passed in 1891, would provide the opening wedge for Chicago women to vote.

Industrialization and urban growth transformed cities in the late nineteenth century. In response, as Maureen Flanagan has demonstrated, activist women, through their clubs, settlement houses, and other reform organizations, worked to shape the city into a place that provided for the health, safety, and well-being of its inhabitants—goals that cut across lines of race and class.31 Chicago women intent on addressing the challenges of urban industrial life also increasingly saw the ballot as a key to achieving their goals.

Addressing a suffrage meeting in 1906, Chicago’s Hull-House settlement founder and reform leader Jane Addams identified a long list of concerns for urban women. “Unsanitary housing, poisonous sewage, contaminated water, infant mortality, the spread of contagion, adulterated food, impure milk, smoke-laden air, ill-ventilated factories, dangerous occupations, juvenile crime, unwholesome crowding, prostitution and drunkenness are the enemies which the modern cities must face and overcome. . . .” Addams went on to explain how “the municipal franchise”—the right to vote in city elections—would allow activist women to be an even greater force in urban reform. Indeed, as they worked to create institutions and secure laws and resources to tackle such problems, reformers found their ambitions limited by lack of direct political power. Hull House resident and reformer Florence Kelley campaigned against sweatshops, drafted workplace legislation to safeguard women and children, and served as Illinois’s first Chief Factory Inspector. Yet, Kelley expressed frustration, telling a suffrage meeting audience, “The number of working children grows faster than the number of petitioning 38 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring / Summer 2021

Jane Addams

Florence Kelley, with her children, left her abusive spouse in 1891 and joined the community of reformers at Hull House. In Chicago during the 1890s, she campaigned against sweatshops and for other reforms before relocating to New York as secretary of the National Consumers’ League, an organization that worked for protective legislation for women and children.

  

B E YO N D T H E VO T E I The lack of existing resources for her child with developmental disabilities prompted Guadalupe Reyes to take action in ways that extended well beyond her own family. In 1969, Reyes founded Esperanza School for children with disabilities whose learning needs went unmet in traditional classrooms. In 1973, she founded El Valor, Illinois’s first bilingual and bicultural rehabilitation center. Both organizations continue to promote inclusion by providing education, programs, and support for low-income families and children and adults with disabilities. Reyes played a leadership role in the Pilsen Neighbors Community Council and fought for the creation of Benito Juarez High School, which opened in 1977, to serve students in the Pilsen neighborhood.

women. . . .”32 The vote would provide direct access to the political sphere, allowing women to elect those who supported child labor and compulsory education laws and other reforms.

In the early 1900s, the concerns of working women and their allies also propelled them to campaign for suffrage. Women worked in myriad jobs—as teachers and laundry workers, bookbinders and bootmakers, waitresses and glovemakers—to support themselves or their families. Yet, many endured long hours, harsh conditions, or seasonal layoffs and earned barely enough to get by. Gendered assumptions that women were not primary household earners helped employers justify paying them so little. Racism combined with gender discrimination further circumscribed opportunities for Black women’s employment, income, and union membership. Working women and labor organizers were drawn to the suffrage

A leader in the Black women’s club movement and Chicago WTUL, Irene Goins campaigned for workers’ rights and organized Black women stockyard workers during and after World War I. After ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, Goins organized the Frederick Douglass League of Women Voters, which offered citizenship classes to educate African American women on political matters, and served on the board of the Illinois League of Women Voters.

cause through their efforts to win better workplace conditions and a living wage.

As leaders of the Chicago Teacher’s Federation in the early 1900s, Catharine Goggin and Margaret Haley fought for teachers’ fair compensation and voice in determining how the city’s schools were run. Their battles with school and city administrators—men unaccountable to women who couldn’t vote—inspired their commitment to suffrage. They also won support for suffrage from the many primarily second-generation Catholic immigrant women who taught in Chicago’s schools.33

B E YO N D T H E VO T E I Reverend Addie L. Wyatt addressed working women at the March 1974 formation of the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) in Chicago. Wyatt battled intersecting gender, racial, and economic injustices throughout her life.

She campaigned for Black voting rights in the South and fair housing in Chicago. As a union leader, she fought racial and gender-based workplace discrimination and supported the Equal Rights Amendment, which, if ratified, would have provided a constitutional guarantee for gender equality. It was narrowly defeated in 1982.

Catharine Goggin (left) and Margaret Haley Democracy Limited | 39

  

B E YO N D T H E VO T E I Women install drywall during a Chicago Women in Trades training program. Sexist ideas about women’s roles and abilities and gendered barriers to training and apprenticeship programs have long kept women out of many high-paying skilled jobs. In the 1970s, women entered construction trades such as carpentry, welding, or plumbing—jobs almost always held by men. Chicago tradeswomen began meeting to help one another cope with the hostility and discrimination they faced in these male-dominated industries. The informal group became Chicago Women in Trades. It continues to provide training, support, and advocacy for women’s employment and advancement in trades and other nontraditional jobs.

40 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring / Summer 2021

  

Meanwhile, trade unionists lobbied for laws to protect working women’s health and safety—and for suffrage. In 1909, for example, Anna Willard and Elizabeth Maloney, leaders of Waitresses Union, Local 484, together with glove worker and union organizer Agnes Nestor and laundry worker Lulu Holley, spent months lobbying the Agnes Nestor Illinois General Assembly for a law limiting work hours to eight hours a day for women in many jobs. Facing strong opposition from manufacturers, they had to settle for a ten-hour law. They called the victory a step “in the splendid struggle for justice” for working women. During these months, activists also pressed for municipal voting rights for Chicago women. When hearings for both measures were held concurrently, Jane Addams, together with Grace Nicholes of the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), went from one hearing to another, advocating first for suffrage, then for the eight-hour day, which lawmakers called the “girls’ bill.”34 Meanwhile, Maloney and Nestor lobbied lawmakers for suffrage on behalf of working women. During her long tenure as president of the Chicago WTUL, Nestor continued to pursue an eighthour law during each legislative session. During the 1910s, she was joined in this effort by Black labor organizer and clubwoman Irene Goins, who organized women stock yard workers during World War I. Goins was also a suffragist and later started the Douglass chapter of the League of Women Voters.

As a glovemaker, Nestor had worked long hours to exhaustion, getting paid by the piece and having the power used by her sewing machine deducted from these wages.

Like Florence Kelley, who viewed the ballot as an instrument to advance reformers’ goals, Nestor understood the ballot as a tool for achieving health and safety laws and workplace fairness. The “working girl” needed the vote just as all workers did, Nestor proclaimed. “To us it is not a question of equal rights but a question of equal needs.”35 Working women undertook other approaches to achieving their goals; they formed unions and took part in strikes, believing group action would empower wageearners. But workers on the picket line faced opposition not only from business owners, but also from police and the courts, which often sided with businesses. In September 1910, for example, young women walked off the job at clothing maker Hart Schaffner & Marx to protest wage cuts and unfair working conditions. Their action sparked a months-long strike involving more than

40,000 garment workers, half of them women, including many recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Labor activists and their allies protested the arrest and harsh treatment of peaceful picketers, including the use of private police forces against striking workers. Likewise, when striking waitresses marched through a lunchtime crowd outside Henrici’s restaurant in February 1914, they were later arrested and charged

A striking restaurant worker wears a coat announcing waitresses’ demands: “On strike at Henrici’s. Henrici’s pays $7 for 7 days. We want $8 for 6 days.” Hundreds of unionized waitresses were among the many working women who joined the Wage Earners Suffrage League in 1913.

Democracy Limited | 41

  

Police put a woman into the back of a police wagon during the 1910 garment workers strike.

with encouraging an illegal boycott. National WTUL president Margaret Dreier Robins of Chicago linked such circumstances faced by “girl strikers” and women’s need of the ballot during a Congressional suffrage hearing in April 1910. Citing recent strikes, she explained that when wage-earning women tried to organize and take action, they found themselves “fighting their industrial battles in the political field,” where such instruments of power as police officers, the courts, and injunctions were used against them. “Whenever we try to meet that political power, or the expression of that political power, we are handicapped, because there is no power in our hand to help change that political power.”36 hicago area women followed many paths to suffrage. Bit by bit, they achieved local victories—steppingstones to full suffrage. In 1891, an ambitious effort to secure a constitutional amendment enfranchising Illinois women was defeated.

However, since education seemed to fit within the “women’s sphere,” the state legislature passed a School Suffrage Bill drafted by the state WCTU, allowing women to vote for elective school offices. In Chicago, where

C

42 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring / Summer 2021

most school officials were appointed, not elected, the law had little impact on women’s political power. Every two years, Chicago women could now vote in one election—for members of the University of Illinois’s governing board. Still, for activists, the new law marked a milestone, demonstrating that suffrage could be achieved through legislative action rather than a state constitutional amendment, as previous court decisions had held.

Guided by legislative superintendent Catharine McCulloch, IESA and other women’s groups continued to press for limited but expanded voting rights one proposed bill at a time.37 In the meantime, Chicago women made use of the limited vote they had achieved. During the 1894 election, four women ran as candidates for trustee of the University of Illinois, an occasion that roused Chicago suffragists to hit the campaign trail and register voters.

Social and educational reform leader Lucy Flower became the first woman elected to statewide office when women helped elect her that year. Black clubwomen such as Ida Dempsey, Ida B. Wells, and Fannie Brown gave speeches and canvassed through the auspices of the interracial Illinois Women’s Republican Educational

  

B E YO N D T H E VO T E I Activists and union members marked International Women’s Day on March 8, 2018, with a rally calling for fair paying, safe jobs.

Women janitors of Local 1 of the Service Employees International Union took part in the demonstration amid contract negotiations with Chicago area employers.

Employees and union activists protest low wages outside a Chicago Whole Foods Market store in July 2013. In search of a living wage and worker protections, fast food and retail workers were participating in the “Fight for $15” campaign to raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour.

Democracy Limited | 43

  

Committee (IWREC), urging Black women to go to the polls for Flower, who created scholarships for Black students, only recently admitted to the university. As historian Lisa Materson has demonstrated, for Black Chicago women, many of whom had witnessed the disfranchisement of African American men in the South, the local election took on greater meaning as a springboard for discussions of national politics and federal support for civil rights. While some Black suffragists supported Flower, a Republican candidate, Fannie Barrier Williams cautioned against strict party loyalty, encouraging Black voters to choose candidates whose platforms best aligned with their interests.38 Leading white suffragists also urged Chicago women to vote in these elections in order to gain broader acceptance for women’s inclusion in the electorate. Activist women seized a chance for enfranchisement in the early 1900s when urban reformers proposed drafting a new city charter, the legal document through which states empowered municipal governments. State laws restricting the autonomy of municipal authority hindered

effective governance in Chicago. A new charter better suited to the burgeoning city’s needs could address this problem and simultaneously extend the vote to women.

Although largely excluded from the formal process of creating a new charter, activists nevertheless lobbied for inclusion of suffrage.39 They also urged women to make themselves visible as voters in the 1906 University of Illinois trustees’ election. “Women of Chicago! Register,” urged one broadside. Noting that low voter turnout among women fueled arguments against their further enfranchisement, it went on to explain, “A large vote cast this Fall may influence members of the Charter convention to recommend full municipal suffrage for women in the new Charter.”40 Again, their hopes went unfulfilled. But women’s efforts to achieve “municipal suffrage” in Chicago during two failed attempts at a new city charter eventually inspired statewide organizing critical to passing the farreaching 1913 state suffrage law. When the first proposed charter did not enfranchise women, activists spoke out against its failure to give them a voice in choosing

Grace Wilbur Trout (left), Belle Squire, S. Grace Nicholes, and Ella S. Stewart, photographed in front of Michigan Avenue’s Fine Arts Building, headquarters for the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association. As president of the CPEL and later the IESA, Trout launched new tactics, including the auto tours, to promote suffrage.

44 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring / Summer 2021

  

their representatives and shaping the city’s affairs.

Chicago voters failed to endorse the proposed charter in a referendum vote, prompting a second charter convention. This time, women’s suffrage received more support, but instead of including the measure in the proposed charter, delegates drafted a separate suffrage bill for consideration by the legislature. On April 13, 1909, Chicago suffragists boarded a “special train” to Springfield for a hearing on the Chicago Municipal Suffrage Bill in the House of Representatives. Intending to showcase broad support and offer multiple justifications for suffrage, twenty-five speakers each delivered a three-minute speech. Lawmakers heard about women’s suffrage as it related to such issues as child welfare, public health, philanthropy, urban reform, and the needs of wage earning and professional women.41 Although the Chicago bill failed to pass, activists continued to build momentum for a statewide law.

Toward that end, suffragists employed a new tactic— statewide automobile tours—to raise awareness, encourage local organizing, and urge voters to elect legislators supportive of women’s suffrage and other reforms.

In Chicago and nationwide, suffragists increasingly staged events—dramatic marches, parades, automobile tours, performances—to grab headlines and provide striking images that filled daily newspapers by the 1910s. Under the leadership of newly elected president Grace Wilbur Trout of Oak Park, the CPEL organized the tours in coordination with IESA. Trout brought a flair for organizing and promotion, greatly expanding CPEL membership and visibility.42 The auto tours gave Chicago suffragists an opportunity to canvas the state while also serving as an important publicity stunt.

The tours required careful preparation. Planners contacted officials to secure local cooperation. They also sent advance promotional materials that called attention to the fact that women already voted in many western states. “Women vote for president and for all other officers in all elections on the same terms as men in Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, and Colorado,” these placards noted.

“Why not in Illinois?” Organizers also alerted reporters, attracting widespread press coverage.

During summer 1910, suffragists packed their bags, donned dusters and “automobile veils” to ward off the grime of the open road, piled into Winton and Stoddard Dayton vehicles, and crossed the state during multiple tours. They traveled west to Galesburg, north to Waukegan, northwest to Rockford, and south to Champaign in chauffeured autos loaned by wealthy backers. (One supporter provided her car and enlisted her son to drive it.) As they pulled into towns in cars festooned with “Votes for Women” banners and flags, a vocalist sang to attract listeners, and suffragists made speeches and passed out pamphlets. The women drew

NWTUL president Margaret Dreier Robins and a group of suffragists gather in front of the Coliseum at 1513 South Wabash Avenue during the 1912 Republican National Convention in Chicago.

crowds in parks and on street corners, in town centers and outside county courthouses. In Rockford, they spoke to furniture factory laborers taking a lunch break. In Morrison, they enlisted the mayor’s wife to bring the local state lawmaker to an open-air meeting, where Catharine McCulloch criticized his failure to back a recent suffrage measure and elicited his pledge of support during the upcoming legislative session. In Freeport, battling noise from automobiles, streetcars, and a nearby theater, McCulloch denounced local officials for failing to deliver on the promise of a quiet setting for suffrage speakers. Elsewhere, the women received a more welcome reception. Western Illinois was reportedly “aflame with enthusiasm over votes for women,” where suffragists reached about 8,000 people during open air meetings in four towns.43 The 1910 auto tours helped drum up and coalesce suffrage sentiment throughout Illinois. In 1912, after inching closer to victory the previous year when state senators passed, but the House defeated, a nearly full suffrage bill, representatives of the CPEL, WTUL, and several other women’s groups petitioned to have the matter put before voters in a nonbinding poll. These women hoped the referendum’s outcome would convince lawmakers of widespread support—a controversial and risky attempt to Democracy Limited | 45

  

Some reporters used such words as “militant” and “invaders” and wrote about what suffragists wore on the trips. But tours also received favorable accounts. The Chicago Tribune sent reporters on the road with suffragists and later published essays by suffragist and auto tourist Belle Squire.

46 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring / Summer 2021

  

win a symbolic victory. Once Cook County Judge John E. Owens gave permission for the balloting to take place during upcoming primary elections, Chicago area suffragists went to work in full force to get out the vote.

Campaigners tacked up suffrage placards alongside candidates’ posters, and distributed buttons, badges, and literature throughout the city. Suffragists spoke at churches and theaters, organized mass meetings, and delivered five-minute lectures in crowded movie houses. Virginia Brooks canvassed restaurants and cafes to arrange for speakers to reach voters as they dined. Directed by Margaret Dreier Robins, the WTUL’s suffrage committee went door to door in the city’s Seventeenth Ward, distributing literature and sample ballots printed in English, Yiddish, Italian, Polish, and Lithuanian. Suffragists traversed the city. They addressed potential voters at the “car barns” at Devon and Clark Streets, spoke to striking carpenters at Sixty-Third and Halsted Streets, visited steel workers in South Chicago, and held an outdoor meeting at Madison Street and Ogden Avenue to encourage support from nearby industrial workers.44 More than a thousand hopeful women volunteered to serve as poll watchers and ballot count observers on April 9, 1912, as Chicago voters—men—were given the chance to answer the question: “Do You Approve of Extending Suffrage to Women?” More than two hundred thousand voters cast ballots, depositing them into special boxes provided by suffragists for the occasion.

Despite women’s widespread campaigning, men answered no nearly two to one. Although the advisory ballot failed, the campaign for it succeeded in drawing together a diverse coalition of activists and supporters who continued to battle for a statewide law.

That summer, votes for women received even greater attention, locally and nationally, when reformers splintered from the Republican Party during its national convention in Chicago to form the Progressive Party. Many suffragists embraced the new party, which nominated Theodore Roosevelt for president and marked the first time a major national party endorsed women’s suffrage. When the Progressive Party held its convention at the Chicago Coliseum in August, supporters of Roosevelt and suffrage paraded to the site, carrying a banner proclaiming “Woman’s Votes, Chicago’s Welfare.” At the national level, the Republican-Progressive split assured the presidency for

Lawyer, writer, and Evanston Justice of the Peace from 1907 to 1913, Catharine McCulloch served as IESA legislative committee chair for more than two decades beginning in 1890. The Presidential and Municipal Suffrage Bill passed in 1913 was written by McCulloch and first introduced in the Illinois General Assembly in 1893.

Suffragists wrote and performed plays to dramatize the need for the vote and raise money for their campaigns. Set in the 1860s and based on women’s legal status at that time, this 1911 suffrage play

by Catherine McCulloch tells a story of political awakening. In it, a group of middle-class women realize that without voting power they cannot change laws harmful to themselves and the title character, Bridget, a laundry worker whose earnings, by law, are the property of her husband.

Democracy Limited | 47

  

Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson. In Illinois, twenty-five Progressives were elected to the House, shifting the balance of power there to the benefit of suffragists.45 Years of widespread campaigning prepared suffragists to launch the final push for a statewide suffrage law in 1913. Trout, elected president of IESA in fall 1912, shepherded the group’s lobbying efforts, aided by IESA legislative director Elizabeth Knox Booth, Chicago lawyer Antoinette Leland Funk, and the politically astute Ruth Hanna McCormick, daughter of Republican party leader Mark Hanna and wife of Medill McCormick, Progressive Party leader in the House. By 1913, IESA had organized nearly every legislative district in the state with local groups prepared to pressure lawmakers. As the legislative session began, however, suffragists’ efforts were muddled by competing factions clustered around Trout and McCulloch, and the introduction of multiple suffrage bills in the General Assembly. After maneuvering to keep alive the most promising Senate bill, the suffrage lobbyists spent months in Springfield building support among lawmakers. Trout would later explain how, rather than publicly attacking or overwhelming them with dramatic

demonstrations by backers, these lobbyists worked to quietly convert opponents to the cause. This calculated, low-key approach set by Trout proved effective but alienated some longtime suffrage campaigners.

The bill passed the Senate on May 7 and moved into the House, where it survived multiple efforts to defeat it.

With the final vote set for June 11, suffragists mobilized to ensure the support of House speaker William B. McKinley by organizing a “telephone brigade.” When he returned home to Chicago the weekend before the final vote, he received phone calls every fifteen minutes from men and women expressing support for the proposed law. On the day of the vote, Trout kept post outside the House door, watchful for opposing lobbyists seeking entrance as well as any “friendly” lawmakers trying to leave during roll call. With Booth and McCormick keeping tally from the gallery and Funk providing updates to Trout on the proceedings, McKinley cast a decisive favorable vote, securing the majority needed for the law’s passage.46 48 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring / Summer 2021

Ballot box used on April 9, 1912, in Ward 18, Precinct 22.

Banners like this one carried by Chicagoan Alice Prince Miller, along with flags, costumes, and hats, added to the spectacle of the many suffrage parades of the 1910s

  

Suffragists in various groups encouraged women’s political participation by educating and registering voters.

Many groups offered civics classes. The Woman’s City Club called for creation of a publication to guide this work. A Handbook for the Women Voters of Illinois (1913).

Published by the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy with help from IESA, it assisted women “in preparing for their exercise of their new political power.”

Meanwhile, labor organizers went to work “gathering in the girls for suffrage,” as bootmaker and union leader Emma Steghagen put it. Within months of the state suffrage law’s passage, women from twenty-two trades had joined the Wage Earners’ Suffrage League (WESL) organized by Steghagen. Among them were labor leaders and

trade unionists from the eighthour-day fight: Maloney, with more than four hundred waitresses, Nestor and hundreds of glove workers, and laundry workers all pledged membership. Russian immigrant and strike leader Bessie Abramowitz and three thousand garment workers, along with countless others, also joined. The WESL Emma Steghagen registered voters and educated working women about labor and politics so their votes could “become a power in Illinois.”47

Commenting on the shared interests of suffragists and Progressives, the Chicago Examiner claimed “[Presidential candidate Theodore] Roosevelt is now equipped with an elaborate system for campaigning through the kitchens of America.” Despite advocating women’s right to vote and other reforms, however, the Progressive Party failed to include a proposed racial equality plank.

Democracy Limited | 49

  

Governor Edward F. Dunne signing the Illinois suffrage bill on June 26, 1913. From the Chicago Record Herald, June 27, 1913.

The Alpha Suffrage Club, with more than a hundred members and working to recruit more, met weekly at the Negro Fellowship League, hosting a variety of informational programs. Reformers and city leaders spoke on political issues. Election officials demonstrated the use of voting machines. “County Commissioners’ Night” and “Municipal Judges’ Night” gave prospective voters a chance to meet candidates for these offices. In 1914, the Alpha Suffrage Club and other Black suffragists in the

city’s Second Ward proved a force to be reckoned with as they registered voters and campaigned during a highly contested city council race. Their efforts to activate Black women’s voting power attracted attention from Republican machine representatives, who, in return for the women’s support that year, nominated Oscar DePriest for the next open seat. In 1915, Alpha Suffrage Club members canvassed block by block to elect DePriest, the city’s first Black alderman.48

Within months of the state suffrage law’s passage, wage-earning women from twenty-two trades had joined the Wage Earners Suffrage League.

50 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring / Summer 2021

  

y 1913, Chicago women had achieved limited yet powerful voting rights. In the wake of the Illinois law’s passage, they registered and educated voters, campaigned for candidates, ran for local office, voted in local elections in 1914 and 1915, and organized to defend the law against continued legal challenges from opponents. They also continued to work for full enfranchisement. Suffragists such as Trout and McCulloch employed different strategies while pursuing state constitutional routes. At the same time, Chicago and its activist women were poised to play important roles in the continued push for women’s voting rights nationwide. The Illinois law energized renewed efforts for a federal amendment. The achievement of nearly full suffrage in the populous state provided a model for suffragists elsewhere and empowered Illinois women to influence national elections.49 In “suffrage states” like Illinois, where women could vote for president and other offices, Alice Paul’s Congressional Union wanted women to use those votes to pressure candidates to support a federal suffrage amendment. Inspired by British suffragettes’ militant tactics, Paul formed the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CU) in 1913. Disagreements over leadership and strategy eventually split this group from the more moderate National American Woman Suffrage Association, which since the 1890s had focused primarily on a state-by-state approach to suffrage. These rifts exacerbated growing tensions among Chicago area suffragists as well.

In spring 1916, the CU rallied women voters to attend a June convention in Chicago to form a National Woman’s Party. On April 10, CU envoys made Chicago their first stop in a five-week tour to “appeal to the voting women of the west,” urging them to attend the three-day event planned to coincide with Republican Party and Progressive Party conventions taking place there. For months, the city was abuzz with preparations. Suffragists gave stump speeches before crowds assembled on the corner of Michigan Avenue and Washington Street, where local organizers opened a CU information bureau. On State Street, a mannequin decked out in CU regalia in a Carson Pirie Scott & Co. department store window reminded passersby of the historic suffrage gathering about to take place. Meanwhile, NAWSA was also convening members and organizing a massive parade, hoping to convince Republicans to declare support for suffrage.

Planners strung banners over city streets announcing the parade and operated a recruitment station to sign up marchers. Women organized day nurseries to provide childcare for mothers who wished to march.

On the evening of Monday, June 5, Chicagoan Mabel Lamberson Sippy, chair of the Illinois branch of the CU, called the convention to order at the Blackstone Theater.

B

Alpha Suffrage Club members such as club officer Sadie Lewis Adams embraced voting rights granted by the 1913 suffrage law, canvassing Chicago’s Black wards to register voters. Their efforts to activate women’s voting power helped elect Oscar DePriest, the city’s first Black alderman in 1915.

In Illinois women voters’ first presidential election, activists such as Ella Berry (above), Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Ada Denison McKinley campaigned for Republican Charles Evans Hughes in 1916, opposing the Democratic incumbent Woodrow Wilson, who had presided over an expansion of Jim Crow in the nation’s capital.

Democracy Limited | 51

  

The following day’s Tribune announced the “Birth of the Woman’s Party . . . Mothered by the Aggressive Congressional Union.” The new party sought immediate passage of a federal suffrage amendment, threatening to mobilize women’s votes against Democrats in upcoming November elections unless “the party in power” supported the measure. NAWSA leaders, mindful of the likely need for bipartisan support to pass and ratify an amendment, instead appealed to Republicans only to affirm the principle of women’s suffrage. On June 7, NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt formally asked the Republican platform committee to include a plank declaring the party in favor of women’s suffrage. Catt spoke on behalf of more than five thousand rain-soaked marchers, their flags and banners blown asunder by high winds, who braved a heavy downpour with enthusiasm as they splashed to the Coliseum. The GOP responded by endorsing women’s suffrage while recognizing “the right of each state to settle this question for itself.”50 The National Woman’s Party announced its entry into politics by declaring “Our Hat’s in the Ring.” The expression, used by Progressive Party presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, came from boxing, where a contender threw his hat into the ring to signal a challenge. Suffragists could purchase CU hats like the one pictured to show support for the cause.

Girls and young women lead a parade down Michigan Avenue, joining suffragists in demonstrations nationwide on May 2, 1914, urging Congress to pass federal suffrage legislation. Disagreement among Chicago suffrage leaders over support for national organizations NAWSA and CU kept some from participating in the parade.

52 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring / Summer 2021

  

This suffrage pin announced the June 1916 march organized by the National American Woman Suffrage Association during the Republican National Convention in Chicago. Even after achieving substantial voting rights in 1913, Chicago activist women continued to press for full suffrage.

The creation of the National Woman’s Party (NWP) sparked controversy among suffragists in Chicago and beyond, drawing criticism from those concerned its political approach would alienate potential allies. After the reelection of Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, who favored state rather than federal action to enfranchise women, the NWP adopted more militant tactics. Such actions as picketing and burning the president’s speeches, in turn, stoked fears among moderates that suffrage militancy would turn supporters against the movement. Yet, these actions and the harsh reprisals they drew kept the matter of suffrage before the public and eventually galvanized support for the Nineteenth Amendment.

On January 10, 1917, a dozen women carrying suffrage banners and wearing sashes of purple, white, and

gold, stationed themselves outside the White House. Among this first group of “silent sentinels” was Gertrude Crocker of Hinsdale, Illinois, an assistant treasurer for the NWP who had helped establish the local CU office in Chicago. In the months that followed, as protestors kept up their daily vigils, she and her sister Ruth Crocker were both arrested and imprisoned for picketing. After the US entered World War I, White House pickets continued to challenge Wilson for promoting democracy abroad while failing to ensure it at home. These demonstrators faced frequent attack by angry mobs as well as arrest, technically for “obstructing traffic.” In August, amid days of attacks that injured suffragists and destroyed more than two hundred banners and flags, Chicagoans Madeline Upton Watson and Lucy Ewing were arrested, while those who assaulted suffragists went unchecked by police. In fact, a Chicago sailor on duty in Washington, DC, won praise and made headlines for tearing from Watson and other suffragists a protest banner likening Wilson to German autocrat Kaiser Wilhelm. After refusing to pay fines, Watson, Ewing, and four others were sentenced to thirty

Members of the National Woman’s Party protest president Woodrow Wilson’s refusal to support federal action on women’s suffrage. Signs asking, “How Long Do You Advise Us To Wait?” pressed Wilson to urge lawmakers to pass a women’s suffrage amendment, first introduced in Congress in 1878. Wilson was speaking at the Chicago Auditorium Theatre on October 19, 1916, during a reelection campaign stop Democracy Limited | 53

  

The Chicago Tribune covered the arrests of Madeline Upton Watson and Lucy Ewing for their protest in front of the White House.

days at Occoquan Workhouse, a District of Columbia jail facility in Lorton, Virginia. They were among hundreds arrested and scores imprisoned between 1917 and 1919 during NWP demonstrations at the White House and nearby Lafayette Square.51 In protest of their unjust sentences, imprisoned suffragists demanded but were refused political prisoner status. They endured brutal treatment, including beatings, solitary confinement, and force-feeding. In February 1919, more than two dozen suffragists, including Lucy Ewing, embarked on what they called the “Prison Special” tour. These women traveled the US on a train nicknamed the “Democracy Limited” to share their stories of imprisonment by a government that denied them a voice in the political process. By then, Wilson had endorsed the suffrage amendment, but more support was needed. During the tour, suffragists wore recreated prison garb and spoke of the need for women’s voting rights to crowds in fifteen cities. The group arrived in Chicago on March 5 for a mass meeting at the Congress Hotel. There, NWP leader Lucy Burns described the “terrible experience” of forcible feeding inflicted on hungerstriking suffragists.52 Public outrage over their ordeal, along with heightened pro-suffrage sentiment ignited by women’s wartime contributions, helped gather the final support needed for Congress to pass the Nineteenth Amendment in June 54 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring / Summer 2021

Meant to arouse sympathy for jailed white suffragists, this cartoon offered a racist description of Watson as an “intelligent society woman” “thrown into the workhouse with negroes and criminals.”

Drawn by Congressman John M. Baer, it was reprinted on the cover of the NWP’s weekly newspaper.

  

1919. Illinois lawmakers raced to ratify it first. Other states soon followed. In February 1920, Chicago hosted the final meeting of the National American Woman Suffrage Association at the Congress Hotel. The Chicago participants included Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Margaret Haley, Margaret Dreier Robins, Agnes Nestor, Catharine Waugh McCulloch, and Jane Addams. The program for what was billed as a “Victory Convention” announced “there is every reason to believe that this Convention will celebrate the ratification of the Federal Suffrage Amendment in the necessary thirty-six states.” During the convention the NAWSA disbanded, and a new national organization, the League of Women Voters, took its place. But by June, a vote for ratification from a 36th thirty-sixth state had yet to materialize. The National Woman’s Party again made Chicago a focal point for their actions during the Republican National Convention.

“Republicans, We Are Here. Where is the 36th State?” demanded banners carried by picketers in protest of the stalled ratification process. Finally, in August, Tennessee joined the ranks of ratified states, and the amendment became law on August 26, 1920. That fall, members of

In 1968, Fannie Lou Hamer was seated as a Mississippi delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The recognition came four years after she was denied the chance to represent her state’s Black voters as a member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, formed to challenge the state’s whites-only Democratic party. Hamer was evicted from her home after trying to register to vote. During years of suffrage activism, she endured arrest, brutal beatings, and death threats.

the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association and Chicago Political Equality League prepared to reconstitute these groups into Illinois and Chicago branches of the League of Women Voters.53 he inclusion of the Nineteenth Amendment in the US Constitution was an undeniable victory for activists who worked long and hard to achieve it. Even as many Chicago women looked ahead to the November presidential election, however, discriminatory laws and practices meant that many people would continue to be excluded from the electorate. Black women in the South were soon disfranchised through the same methods long used to prevent African American men from voting. Black leaders turned to Congress, but lawmakers failed to pass legislation addressing racially motivated restrictions aimed at Black women voters. The League of Women Voters permitted Black women to voice their concerns at a national convention but failed to act. And the National Woman’s Party, chaired by Alice Paul, who had sanctioned white southern racism by trying to limit Black women’s participation in the 1913 Woman’s Suffrage Procession in Washington DC, refused to help. Demonstrating their narrow vision of equality for white women, NWP leaders reasoned that Black women’s disfranchisement was a problem of racial discrimination, not an issue of women’s rights, and therefore not a matter to be taken up by the NWP. For much of the twentieth century, such tactics as poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation would continue to keep people of color and poor people from the polls.

The Nineteenth Amendment did not enfranchise women in Puerto Rico, despite their US citizenship. Like Catharine Waite a half century earlier, suffragists such as Genera Pagán attempted to vote anyway, hoping the courts would decide in their favor.

Women in Puerto Rico were enfranchised in

T

In the early 1920s, Zitkála-Šá, or Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Yankton Sioux), addressed Chicago’s women’s clubs about US citizenship and voting rights for Indigenous people. Native peoples survived and resisted centuries of genocidal policies and practices at the hands of European and American colonizers. For Zitkála-Šá, citizenship and voting rights were keys to Native peoples’ sovereignty and continued resistance to damaging US policies. ZitkálaŠá welcomed US citizenship for Native people and traveled widely to educate and register Native voters.

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1929 by Puerto Rico’s legislature. In 1920, laws that excluded some groups from citizenship prevented many people from voting, including Asian immigrants and US women who married noncitizens. Only in the mid-twentieth century were laws overturned that barred Asian immigrants from naturalized citizenship and restricted voting. Many Indigenous people in 1920 were also still not able to vote. Congress extended citizenship in 1924 to all Native peoples in the US, regardless of their wishes.

Many states, however, passed restrictive laws that continued to prevent Indigenous people from voting. The 1965 Voting Rights Act barred literacy tests and provided for federal oversight of voting in locales with a history of discrimination. However, since 2013 many states have enacted registration and voting laws that continue to place barriers before marginalized and vulnerable people, limiting who can partake in democracy.54 Chicago women’s reform and suffrage activism highlights women’s extensive political activity before women

B E YO N D T H E VO T E I This 1970 flyer announced a “women’s strike” and rallies at the Civic Center Plaza and Grant Park on the fiftieth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment’s inclusion in the Constitution, calling attention to just some of the unfinished business of achieving gender equity at work, in education, and in the political process.

56 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring / Summer 2021

ever had the vote. This history is also a reminder that women were not “granted” suffrage; they had to fight for it, achieving success only bit by bit. Chicago women gained entry into a community of voters; yet, the vote was only partially transformative. For example, as Flanagan points out, gender continued to shape Chicago women’s relationship to politics. Women’s assistance was welcomed by entrenched political parties, but they were not received on equal footing with men. And party leaders intent on sustaining power looked askance at women candidates who challenged the status quo of a party’s agenda.55 Many reformers and suffragists claimed space for their public activities by describing that work as an extension of woman’s “natural” maternal role.

They won support for suffrage by emphasizing the vote as a means of bringing women’s special virtues to bear upon politics. Such arguments, while effective, endorsed traditional views of gender, upholding ideas about “male” and “female” qualities and concerns, even as they legitimized women’s further entry into the political sphere. Furthermore, they sustained a normative, binary view of gender that in social, legal, and civic realms continued to exclude nonbinary and gender nonconforming people. Issues of racial injustice addressed by Black activists in the women’s club and suffrage movements also persisted. Nor did the vote change attitudes toward women or the circumstances they faced on the job: barriers to training, employment, and advancement; getting paid less than men; sexual harassment. Many continued to lack workplace protections against discrimination and unfair or abusive treatment. Such ongoing inequalities may intersect with discrimination based on race, immigration status, sexual orientation, gender expression, and disability to deepen workplace and economic inequality.

In the years before suffrage, Chicago activist women faced the challenge of seeking change and empowerment in a society that excluded them from formal channels of political power. For Nestor, disempowered workers and exploitive labor practices went hand in hand, and those without votes to give went unnoticed by lawmakers. As she put it, “Public officials have just gotten into the habit of overlooking women’s needs when women are not able to voice them for themselves.” Likewise, for reformer Florence Kelley, prodding and petitioning, while useful, were inefficient methods of affecting change. As she lamented, “It would make a vast difference if women in American cities could enforce their will and conscience by the ballot instead of by the indefinitely slow work of persuasion.” Ida B. Wells-Barnett articulated the significance of the ballot in starker terms. Where disfranchisement and lynching both served to reinforce white supremacy, and violence could be inflicted with impunity when public officials remained unaccountable to Black voters, she explained: “With no sacredness of

  

This 1922 political cartoon by John T. McCutcheon depicts the challenge women face as they attempt to ascend as office holders in US politics.

Article | 57

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B E YO N D T H E VO T E I Girls and women demonstrate outside the Dirksen Federal Building at 219 South Dearborn Street on February 19, 2017. A January 2017 executive order from President Donald Trump that barred the arrival of citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries sparked widespread protest.

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  

the ballot there can be no sacredness of human life itself.

For if the strong can take the weak man’s ballot, when it suits his purpose to do so, he will take his life also.” 56 However imperfect and incomplete as an instrument of change, Chicago activist women believed the expression of political voice through the ballot was essential to their ongoing struggles for justice.

Elizabeth Fraterrigo is Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago and curator of Democracy Limited: Chicago Women and the Vote, a Chicago History Museum exhibition transformed into a digital experience due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

036849; (bottom) ICHi-178179. 51, (top) ICHi-177303A; (bottom) ICHi-177302A. 52, (top) ICHi-026348; (bottom) DN0062620, Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News collection.

53, (top) ICHi-061937; (bottom) Records of the National Woman's Party, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. 54, (top) Chicago Tribune, August 19, 1917; (bottom) The Suffragist, 1917. 55, (left) Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegate, at the Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, NJ, August 1964, Warren K. Leffler, photographer, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/ item/2003688126/; (right) American Indian Stories, Washington: Hayworth Publishing House, 1921.

56, ICHi-177306-01. 57, ICHi-014104. 58, Joshua Lott/AFP via Getty Images.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | All images courtesy of Chicago History Museum unless otherwise noted. Page 22, Monroe A. Majors, Noted Negro Women: Their Triumphs and Activities (1893), New York Public Library https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/ items/ 510d47df-755b-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99. 23, ICHi064360. 24, top left: Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, REX022_034.001; top right: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. 25, ICHi-022144. 26, (top) ICHi-062628; (bottom) ICHi-067444.

27, ICHi-009585; Charles D. Mosher, photographer. 28, Courtesy of Access Living. 29, (top left) ICHi-177304A; (bottom right) ICHi-029415. 30, ICHi-039673. 31, (clockwise from top left) ICHi-177354; ICHi-040212; ICHi-007019. 32, STM038523458, Pablo Martínez Monsiváis/Chicago Sun-Times. 33, (top) ICHi-064245; (bottom) ICHi-063063. 34, (clockwise from top left) ICHi-177324; New York Age Print, 1892, New York Public Library Digital Collection, http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/ items/868f8db7-fa74-d451-e040-e00a180630a7; Courtesy of Mujeres Latinas en Acción. 25, (left) ICHi-177323_01; (right) Steve Schapiro/Corbis via Getty Images. 36, (clockwise from top left) Chicago Tribune, March 5, 1913; Courtesy of Apna Ghar; ICHi-062268. 37, ICHi-176750-E1. 38, (top) ICHi-035457; (bottom) Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Records of the National Woman's Party, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/ mnwp.153003. 39, (clockwise from top left) ICHi-177361A; ICHi-177301A; Photo 040, Box 346, Rev. Addie and Rev. Claude Wyatt Papers, Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of AfroAmerican History and Literature, Chicago Public Library; Chicago Tribune, January 29,1900. 40, ICHi-177311. 41, (left) ICHi-067687; (right) Chicago Examiner, February 10, 1914; 42, DN-0056132, Chicago Daily News collection. 43, (top) Scott Olson via Getty Images; (bottom) Scott Olson via Getty Images.

44, DN-0008359, Chicago Daily News collection. 45, DN0059234, Chicago Daily News collection. 46, Chicago Tribune, July 10, 1910. 47, (top) Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Records of the National Woman's Party, http:// hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mnwp.154004; (bottom) ICHi-177291. 48, (top to bottom) ICHi-032106; ICHi-175957; ICHi-178181. 49, (top) The Omaha Daily Bee, May 15, 1904, Library of Congress; (bottom) Chicago Examiner, August 6, 1912. 50, (top) ICHi-

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | Steven M. Buechler, The Transformation of the Woman Suffrage Movement: The Case of Illinois 1850–1920 (Rutgers University Press, 1986); Cathleen D. Cahill, “Our Democracy and the American Indian: Citizenship, Sovereignty, and the Native Vote in the 1920s,” Journal of Women’s History (Spring 2020); Faye E. Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle Over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America (Oxford University Press, 2011); Maureen A. Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871–1933 (Princeton University Press, 2002); Frances Willard House Museum, Truth-Telling: Frances Willard and Ida B. Wells, www.willardandwells.org; Jennifer Harbour, Organizing Freedom: Black Emancipation Activism in the Civil War Midwest (Southern Illinois University Press, 2020); Wanda A. Hendricks, Fannie Barrier Williams: Crossing the Borders of Region and Race (University of Illinois Press: 2013); Sue Ellen Hoy, “Sideline Suffragists,” Chicago History (Summer 2013); Martha S. Jones, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (Basic Books, 2020); Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (Basic Books, 2009); Anne Knupfer, Toward a Tenderer Humanity and a Nobler Womanhood: African American Women’s Clubs in Turn-of-theCentury Chicago (New York University Press, 1996); Lisa G. Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877–1932 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Catherine H. Palczewski, “The 1919 Prison Special: Constituting White Women’s Citizenship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech (March 2016); Allison L. Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age: US Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870–1929 (Oxford University Press, 2008); Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Indiana University Press, 1998); Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, 2nd edition, eds.

Alfreda M. Duster and Michelle Duster (University of Chicago Press, 2020); Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (Oxford University Press, 1993).

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Organizing Freedom: Black Emancipation Activism in the Civil War Midwest (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press), 106–7.

E N D N OT E S 1. “The Women,” Chicago Tribune, February 13, 1869, 4, and “A Colored Woman’s Voice,” The Revolution, March 4, 1869, 139.

2. “Male vs. Female Suffrage,” Chicago Tribune, March 6, 1869, 4.

3. “The Women,” Chicago Tribune, February 12, 1869, 4.

4. The Workingman’s Advocate, February 6, 1869.

5. United States. Office of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian affairs, for the year 1872 [1872], 9.

6. “Chicago Woman Suffrage Convention,” Chicago Legal News, February 20, 1869, 164.

7. Debates and Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Illinois, Volume II (Springfield: E. L. Merritt and Brother, 1870), 1291 309.

8. Monroe A. Majors, Noted Negro Women: Their Triumphs and Activities (1893), 82–86; “A Colored Woman on the Race Problem,” The Woman’s Tribune, March 22, 1890, 93; “Colored Women Want Suffrage,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 28, 1896, 9; “Fight for Freedom,” San Francisco Call, August 1, 1896, 8; Naomi Anderson, “Where I Stand,” People’s Friend (Wichita, KS), July 20, 1894.

9. Mary A. Livermore, The Story of My Life: The Sunshine and Shadow of Seventy Years (Hartford: A.D. Worthington & Co., 1897), 479.

10. Lana Ruegamer, “Livermore, Mary,” Women Building Chicago (WBC), 512 14; Steven M. Buechler, The Transformation of the Woman Suffrage Movement: The Case of Illinois 1850 1920 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 65–67; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds, History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II, 1861–1876 (HWS) (New York: Fowler and Wells, Publishers, 1882), 373; “The Women,” Chicago Tribune, February 12, 1869, 4.

11. Theresa Cora De Langis, “Jones, Mary Jane Richardson,” WBC, 444–46; Christopher Reed, Black Chicago’s First Century, Volume I, 1833 1900 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 66–68; Jennifer Harbour,

12. Buechler, Transformation of Woman Suffrage Movement, 62–65, 75.

13. Nancy T. Gilliam, “A Professional Pioneer: Myra Bradwell’s Fight to Practice Law,” Law and History Review 5, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 105–33.

14. “Woman’s Suffrage,” Chicago Tribune, October 4, 1871, 4; “Not Totally Destroyed,” Chicago Tribune, February 7, 1872, 2; “Superior Court: The Right of Women to Vote,” Chicago Tribune, November 21, 1871, 4.

15. Carole Dianne Smith, “Waite, Catharine,” WBC, 922–24.

16. Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 57–59; Allison L. Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age: US Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870–1929 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 44–45; Melanie Gustafson, Women and the Republican Party, 1854–1924 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 51–53.

17. “Ladies, You Can’t Vote,” Chicago Tribune, Jan 13, 1872, 4; Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 147.

18. Wanda A. Hendricks, Fannie Barrier Williams: Crossing the Borders of Region and Race (Champaign: University of Illinois Press: 2013), 61–62, 64–67, 86–92, 157–58.

19. Fannie Barrier Williams, “The Colored Woman and Her Part in Race Regeneration,” in Booker T. Washington, A New Negro for a New Century, 392; Hendricks, Fannie Barrier Williams, 114–18; “Minutes of the Second Convention of the National Association of Colored Women,” August 14–16, 1899.

20, Adlean Harris, “Davis, Elizabeth Lindsay,” WBC, 212–14; Elizabeth Lindsay Davis, Lifting as They Climb, National Association of Colored Women, 1933; Hendricks, Fannie Barrier

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Williams, 154; Anne Knupfer, Toward a Tenderer Humanity and a Nobler Womanhood: African American Women’s Clubs in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 81–84; Elizabeth Lindsay Davis, “Votes for Philanthropy,” The Crisis, August 1915, 191.

21. Alfreda M. Duster, ed., Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 121–24.

22. Duster, Crusade for Justice, 47–67, and Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 45–76.

23. Paula J. Giddings, “Wells-Barnett, Ida Bell,” WBC, 955–60; Duster, Crusade for Justice, 299–307; “Appeal to the Supreme Court in behalf of ‘Chicken Joe’ Campbell,” Negro Fellowship League, CHM. 24. Giddings, “Ida Bell Wells-Barnett”; Wanda A. Hendricks, “Ida B. WellsBarnett and the Alpha Suffrage Club of Chicago,” in Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, ed., One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement (Tillamook, OR: NewSage Press, 1995), 263–75.

25. Dickinson, quoted in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds, History of Woman Suffrage, Volume 3, 1876–1885, 568.

26. Carolyn De Swarte Gifford, “Frances Willard,” WBC, 968–74 and Suzanne M. Marilley, Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States, 1820-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 100–23.

27. Gifford, “Frances Willard,” and Jane L. McKeever, “The Woman’s Temperance Publishing Association,” Library Quarterly 55 (October 1985), 368.

28. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 118; Keyssar, Right to Vote, 161; Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “African American Women and the Woman Suffrage Movement,” in Wheeler, One Woman, One Vote, 148–50.

29. Carol Mattingly, Well-Tempered Women: Nineteenth Century Temperance Rhetoric

  

(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), 75–95, and Frances Willard House Museum, TruthTelling: Frances Willard and Ida B. Wells (website), www.willardandwells.org.

30. Willard quoted in Mary Earhart, Frances Willard: From Prayers to Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), 206 31. Maureen Flanagan, Seeing with their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871–1933 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).

32. Addams and Kelley quoted in HWS, volume V, 178, 164.

33. Sue Ellen Hoy, “Sideline Suffragists,” Chicago History (Summer 2013), 7–17.

34. Women’s Trade Union League of Chicago, “The Eight Hour Fight in Illinois by the Girls Who Did the Work,” (Chicago, Women’s Trade Union League of Chicago, 1909).

35. Susan E. Hirsch, “Nestor, Agnes,” WBC, 624; “City Mourns Death of Mrs. Irene Goins,” Chicago Defender, March 16, 1929, 3; “School Opened to Tell Duties of Citizenship,” Chicago Defender, September 15, 1923, 5; Liette Gidlow, The Big Vote: Gender, Consumer Culture, and the Politics of Exclusion, 1890s–1920s (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 60; Agnes Nestor, “The Working Girl’s Need of Suffrage,” [1913?].

36. Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts, 109–114; “Girl Strikers in Riot with Police,” Chicago Examiner, February 10, 1914; Robins quoted in Paula Tompkins Pribble, “Margaret Dreier Robins,” in Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, ed., Women Public Speakers in the United States, 1800–1925 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993), 174.

37. HWS 4, 600, 602; Buechler, 149–50, 153.

38. Lisa G. Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877–1932 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 25–33, 39–50.

39. Flanagan, 75–76.

40. “Women of Chicago! Register,” flyer, CHM, ICHi-014326.

41. Flanagan, 75–83; [List of speakers] and

letter from Ella S. Stewart and Catharine W. McCulloch, Nestor Papers, Box 1, Folder 4, CHM. 42. Buechler, 174–75.

43. Grace Wilbur Trout, “Side Lights on Illinois Suffrage History,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 13 (July 1920), 146–48; “Band Wagon of Lecturing and Vote-Getting Suffragists Will Be a Speedy Sixty Horse Power Motor Car,” Chicago Tribune, May 15, 1910; “Suffragists Off On Tour of State,” Chicago Tribune, June 27, 1910, 5; “Grafters Scored by Suffragists,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 28, 1910, 3; “Pledges Support to Suffragettes,” Chicago Tribune, July 3, 1910, 7; “Suffragists Get Snub by Official,” Chicago Tribune, June 29, 1910; “Vote Pilgrimage Gains Converts,” Chicago Tribune, July 2, 1910.

44. “Suffragists Win Test Vote,” Chicago Tribune, March 14, 1912; “Chicago Limit for Suffrage Test,” Chicago Tribune, March 19, 1912; “Suffrage Force Calls at Homes,” Chicago Tribune, March 30, 1912; “New Rule an Aid to Suffrage Vote,” Chicago Tribune, April 6, 1912, “Women Invade West Side,” Chicago Tribune, March 29, 1912; “Women in Loop Boost Candidates,” Chicago Tribune, March 24, 1912; Flanagan, 84.

45. Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics: the Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926), 191; Buchler, 178.

46. Buechler, 176–79; Adade Mitchell Wheeler, “Conflict in the Illinois Woman Suffrage Movement of 1913,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 76 (Summer 1983), 95–114; Trout, “Side Lights.”

47. Handbook for the Women Voters in Illinois (Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, 1913), 4–5; “House Maids Join Voting League,” Chicago Tribune, July 1, 1913; Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts, 124–29; Hoy, “Sideline Suffragists,” 25–26.

48. “The Alpha Suffrage Club,” Broad Axe, July 19, 1913; November 11, 1913; October 17, 1914; Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race, 86–87, 94–96.

49. Buechler, 180–81; Catt and Shuler, 192–93.

50. “Birth of the Woman’s Party,” Chicago Tribune, June 6, 1916, 5; “Clothing Wet, Ardor Undampened, 5,000 Women March,” Chicago Tribune, June 8, 1916; Gustafson, Women and the Republican Party, 163.

51. Katherine H. Adams, After the Vote Was Won (McFarland & Company, Inc., 2010), 11 35; The Suffragist, August 25, 1917, 5 8; The Suffragist, September 8, 1917, 5, 8; “First Spoils of War, Chicago Tribune, August 19, 1917, 8; “Jailed for Wilson Heckling,” Chicago Tribune, August 20, 1917, 7; Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920).

52. “Prison Special of Suffragists Reaches Chicago,” Chicago Tribune, March 6, 1919; Catherine H. Palczewski, “The 1919 Prison Special: Constituting White Women’s Citizenship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 102, no. 2, 107–32.

53. Catt and Shuler, 344–45; Keyssar, 175; Program for Victory Convention (1869 1920) of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and League of Women Voters Congress, Chicago History Museum, ICHi-177297; “News of the Chicago Woman’s Clubs,” Chicago Tribune, February 8, 1920, Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts, 147; International Film Service Co., Chicago.

Party members picketing the Republican convention in Chicago, June. United States Illinois Chicago, 1920. June.

Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/ mnwp000308; “Equality Won, Let Equality League Die,” Oct 3, 1920, 5.

54. Keyssar, 183, 199–200; Terborg-Penn, “African American Women and the Woman Suffrage Movement,” 151–54; Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age, 129–34; Cathleen D. Cahill, “Our Democracy and the American Indian: Citizenship, Sovereignty, and the Native Vote in the 1920s,” Journal of Women’s History (Spring 2020), 41–51.

55. Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts, 143–44.

56. Nestor, “Working Girls’s Need of Suffrage”; Kelley, quoted in HWS, volume 5, 197; Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “How Enfranchisement Stops Lynchings,” Original Rights Magazine (June 1910), 45.

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  

M A K I N G H I S T O RY I

Transforming Disability into Ability: Interview with Shirley Welsh Ryan T I M OT H Y J . G I L F OY L E

he opening of the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in 2017 inaugurated not only a new hospital in Chicago but a new era in American health care. For more than four decades, Shirley Welsh Ryan has been a nationally-recognized advocate of early infant detection and intervention in motor, sensory, and communication development. In 1985, Ryan cofounded Pathways Awareness Center, an outpatient pediatric therapy clinic.

In 1988, she pioneered outreach through direct mail and founded Pathways.org, a pathbreaking medical, educational, and social media website.

During the 1990s, she was appointed by two United States presidents to the National Council on Disability in Washington, DC, which advises Congress on disability issues.1 Ryan’s forty-year advocacy for early infant development and physical intervention culminated in her collaboration with Dr. Joanne Smith. Together they transformed the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago into the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab with a unique vision: to be the global source of science-driven breakthroughs in human ability and early infant development.2 Shirley Welsh Ryan was born in 1939 in Gary, Indiana, the third of four children of Robert James Welsh Sr. and Catherine Volk Welsh.3 Robert Welsh migrated from an Indiana farm to Gary after World War I. He worked in various mills to acquire capital and opened his own gas station in 1925. When Welsh died in 1968, he owned an oil company, twenty-eight service stations, four real estate companies, two trucking companies, and an auto supply company. At different times, Welsh served as president of the Gary Chamber of Commerce and the Gary Industrial Foundation.4 Catherine Volk was the eldest of eight children whose family migrated to Gary from Pennsylvania and became a registered nurse.5 When she married Robert Welsh, she was the supervisor of the pediatric floor at a local hospital and pursuing a postgraduate degree in public health.6

T

62 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring / Summer 2021

Shirley Ryan receiving the 2016 Bertha Honoré Palmer Making History Award for Distinction in Civic Leadership, presented by Andrew McKenna on behalf of Marca Bristo.

  

The Welsh family initially resided in Gary,7 before moving to Ogden Dunes.8 Young Shirley attended neighborhood schools, first Holy Angels Grade School from 1945 to 1953, and then Horace Mann High School, from which she graduated in 1957.9 She fondly remembers a tightly-knit neighborhood: “Across from us was the doctor, head of public health. Next to us was the doctor who delivered me. Across the street was the woman who played the harp.” Her childhood was full of artistic education. “I loved classical music,” Ryan recalls. “I was given ten years of classical piano, ballet lessons, dancing lessons.” Not surprisingly, she summarizes: “I had a rich childhood, emotionally and culturally.”10 Shirley Ryan admired her parents. “My mother was a very wise, witty woman. She was very pragmatic, very classically driven, and a really caring lady,” she recounts, adding that “it was a happy family.” The Welsh family had “very strong principles,” in her words. “Envelopes were set every Saturday night before we went to church on Sunday with our donation to the church. Prayer before and after meals. Faith was a big deal in our family, and today it’s still a big deal.” At home, Ryan was imbued with the value of public service and public health. These lessons and the diversity in her schooling, she believes, “was a gift to learn the gifts of others.”11 Shirley Welsh matriculated to Northwestern University for college. In 1959, she met a senior by the name of Patrick Ryan during a service at Sheil Chapel.12 After graduating from Northwestern in 1961, Welsh spent a year in Paris, studying at the Louvre.13 Upon returning to Chicago, she worked for four years in the city before reconnecting with Patrick.14 “But this time, it was magical,” she states. “We shared visions and values. We laughed a lot together.”15 The couple married at her childhood parish, the Cathedral of the Holy Angels, in 1966.16 Ryan’s interest in early childhood development sharpened in 1978 after the birth of her third son Corbett. Ryan was confounded by some early motor, sensory, and communication delays in Corbett’s development as an infant. “I wasn’t getting any answers to why our son—who was intelligent—wasn’t

The Cathedral of the Holy Angels in Gary, Indiana.

Making History | 63

  

turning over,’” Ryan complains. “I was getting ‘don’t worry, dear, children develop at different times.’” At eight months, Ryan and her son began a fiveday-a-week therapy program at Children’s Hospital in Chicago.17 Ryan sought out the most advanced approaches and treatments in the world. In 1980, she travelled with her mother and Corbett to Bern, Switzerland, and spent several months working with physiotherapist Mary Quinton and Dr. Elsbeth Köng at the Center for Cerebral Motor Disturbances.

Both were early pioneers in the treatment of cerebral palsy, developing neurodevelopmental treatment courses, and applying their research findings to early infants.18 Eventually Corbett Ryan grew in ability, graduating magna cum laude from the University of Notre Dame in 2005.19 “This was a huge missed idea in America,” Ryan remembers thinking.

“Early detection and early intervention at one to three months,” she points out, were simply not in the treatment plans of American pediatricians.20 In fact, in the 1980s such early interventions were considered radical in addressing childhood neurological problems.

Ryan was not dissuaded. “I learned how therapeutic intervention builds new pathways in the brain,” she says of her experiences in Switzerland. “They can teach typical movement through therapy, synapses,” Ryan explains. “At that point I called them pathways, and I believed that therapeutic intervention teaches and creates the pathway which was otherwise eliminated.” Ryan realized that if such treatments had been available in 1978 in the US, her son Corbett could have enjoyed earlier therapy. Ryan was inspired to spread the word. “It was our message to bring this advanced knowledge to the US,” she recounts, “and to empower infant motor development for others.”21 Ryan thus began her forty-year campaign to promote the study and treatment of early childhood neurological development. But she encountered resistance when she challenged standard treatments in early childhood neurology. With the help of Chicago real estate entrepreneur Arthur Rubloff, who was active in the United Cerebral Palsy Association,22 Ryan organized a presentation by Mary Quinton with the CEOs of eight Chicago hospitals. Still they were unconvinced. Ryan remembers their collective response: “Where’s the data?”23 But one physician, Dr. Henry Betts, then the medical director and future CEO of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, was impressed. “Shirley, I know what you’re doing is right,” he told Ryan. Betts conceded that the US medical system in the 1980s had no structure or programs to train, much less employ, infant therapists. “Start a clinic in the North Shore and northwest suburbs and train baby therapists,” Betts advised Ryan.24 She did. In 1985, Ryan cofounded the Pathways Pediatric Clinic in Glenview, Illinois. In Ryan’s words, the mission was simple: “Teach doctors convincingly why early intervention was important for babies.” Ryan explains that pediatricians were unaware that three-month-old babies “using their neck to jerk was a late detection” for a neurological problem. “Physicians now recognize that infant tone and symmetry are key to typical motor movement,” she explains. “Using core muscles through supervised tummy time daily is important.”

The clinic quickly expanded. According to Ryan, Pathways therapists soon moved to “helping children who were not eating.” Even speech pathologists, she recounts, were trained in “strengthening the tongue, the tightening of the lips, and sensory regulation, since they’re all tied to motor skills.” In the end, “the barriers were to educate the physicians,” Ryan reiterates. “They’d never had a course in medical school about the development of infants—never.”

The first credited curriculum was eventually created by Lurie Children’s Hospital and the Northwestern School of Medicine.25 64 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring / Summer 2021

Ryan speaks at the 1996 Pathways.org That All May Worship Conference on inclusion in worship ministry, with Margaret Daley.

  

Ryan was also instrumental in founding the Pathways Awareness Foundation to promote early detection and intervention to ensure infant physical and sensory development. In 1988, Ryan created the Pathways Medical Round Table, composed of the best pediatric practitioners in Chicago, to guide and distribute new discoveries in infant care and development.26 The Pathways.org guide to typical and atypical motor development was soon endorsed by the American Academy of Physicians. By 2010, the foundation had provided more than 8,000 pediatric therapists with postgraduate training.27 Ryan also proved to be a digital innovator. In 1996, the Pathways.org website provided content to the American Academy of Pediatrics for its continuing medical education programs.28 Today, Pathways.org annually reaches nine million individuals, approximately 25,000 daily, and provides free video and educational materials, tools, and best practices guidelines in order to maximize children’s motor, sensory, and communication development.29 The Pathways organizations made Shirley Ryan a national figure. In the 1990s, she was invited to serve on the National Council on Disability

by Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. In the wake of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), Ryan was motivated to expand the meaning of the ADA to include children’s right to their local schools.30 Again, Ryan encountered resistance to including children’s barriers into the ADA. She vividly recalls her first meetings with the National Council.

Ryan quickly realized how children with a disability were segregated: “They would go to a separate school.”31 Ryan eventually found an ally in National Council chairperson Marca Bristo. Bristo agreed with Ryan that the ADA should cover children’s rights at

In 1997, Ryan was honored with the August W. Christman Award from Mayor Daley’s Office for People with Disabilities.

Marca Bristo is in front on the right.

Making History | 65

  

their local school. Previously children with any difference, any disability, anything ranging from impaired hearing, vision, or physical mobility were often required to attend “a separate and equal school,” in Ryan’s words. “By the time I left, it was the children [who] had the right to be included in their own local school with their supports from the government following them through their education,” Ryan remembers. “They called it mainstreaming; I call it inclusion.”32 Ryan’s experience on the National Council on Disability convinced her that Americans needed to respond to the concept of “disability” in a new way. “I learned something in the National Council: the need for people-first language— a person with a disability or difference, not a handicapped or disabled person.”33 Chicago has long been an international center for physical medicine, rehabilitation, and disability treatment. In 1954, orthopedic surgeon Paul Magnuson founded the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC) in a Near North Side warehouse. Almost a decade later, Dr. Henry Betts joined the RIC, and in a matter of years not only transformed that institution but the entire field of physical medicine and rehabilitation.34 For thirty years, beginning in 1991, the RIC was ranked by U.S. News & World Report as the leading institution in physical medicine and rehabilitation in the United States. It remains the only hospital of its kind to hold this distinction.35 Shirley Ryan met RIC president and CEO Joanne Smith in 2010. Smith was raising money for the new RIC building. “I went to visit Pat Ryan early in the fundraising campaign and asked if he would like to be the naming

This program from 2004 honors Ryan as the first recipient of the Sacred Heart Schools Goal Award for exemplifying a social awareness which impels to action.

Ryan received the Carol Fox Award in 2007, which is given for lifetime achievement and dedication to the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

66 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring / Summer 2021

  

donor,” Smith recalls. “And he said thank you very much, but he wasn’t interested then.” But Smith persisted and continued to share information about the RIC building project. Soon, she noticed “a twinkle in Pat’s eye, but he never really let us know that nothing had ever been named after Shirley in all of their extraordinarily generous philanthropic activity,” Smith explains.

“They always did things together, or they did things for their parents, but they never named something after one of them.”36 Shirley Ryan and Joanne Smith quickly found common ground. Smith has nothing but praise for Ryan: “She’s a beautiful life mentor, a spiritual sister, a partner in Pathways and in vision of what she wants to do with children. She wants to change the world for children who are born with impairments and congenital or developmental impairments.”37 Ryan admires Smith as a visionary and soulmate. “I was thrilled” by Smith’s vision, remembers Ryan. “Research to advance the understanding— it’s a perfect marriage because you need that type of voice in the world of medicine.”38 In 2016, Shirley and Pat Ryan presented the RIC with the single largest gift they ever gave to any organization to complete the new facility, which was to be renamed the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab.39 The construction of such a medical facility was without precedent. No architectural or design model existed that integrated therapeutic and clinical services to the severely disabled, state-of-the-art medical research, and the wide range of medical and physiatric professionals in one physical space.

Such a hybrid program required multiple architects and designers. The human domain design firm IDEO of San Francisco was initially commissioned to test the concept and then moved to architectural firms HDR of Omaha, Nebraska, Gensler of Chicago, Clive Wilkinson of Culver City, California, and the Los Angeles office of EGG. A design consensus was

Ryan at the 2008 Pathways.org annual dinner with Margaret Daley and Pathways Medical Roundtable members.

Making History | 67

  

Dr. Joanne Smith (left) and Shirley Ryan (right) at the 2009 annual dinner for Pathways.org.

reached in which research activity was not isolated but, rather, fully integrated with patient care and the physical clinical environment. Patients were to be directly engaged in the research process in each of the five “ability labs,” research laboratories, and therapeutic spaces.40 When the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab opened in 2017, the $550 million, 1.2-million-square-foot structure was a new kind of medical facility: the first “translational” research hospital. The Shirley Ryan AbilityLab integrates researchers, clinicians, technologists, patients, and families in shared spaces that stimulate collaboration, surrounds patients, discovers new approaches, and applies, or “translates,” research in real time.41 The design included at least 250,000 square feet of “soft space” for future expansion and new programs.42 Ryan and Smith acknowledged that the “Shirley Ryan AbilityLab” name was at least an unconventional, if not radical, departure. But the disruption was deliberate. Both believed that words matter, recognizing the need to change the vocabulary of “disability.” Ryan remembers an early conversation with Smith: “Joanne, you and I are on the same page.” Thereafter, according to Ryan, “a beautiful friendship grew.”43 Instead, they adopted the word “ability” over “cure” because ability can be customized or individualized. The Shirley Ryan AbilityLab marks a “pivot from the process of rehabilitation to delivering on the abilities, or outcomes, our patients most want,” according to Smith. “Let’s ditch the ‘Dis’ and focus on what’s there in all of us—Ability!”44 By 2020, the AbilityLab had served more than 50,000 patients annually from around the world.45 The architecture and design world recognized the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab as a pathbreaking structure. The facility has received more than thirty-five architecture and design awards, including some of the most prestigious: the American Architecture Award from the Chicago Athenaeum, merit awards from the Chicago Building Congress and the Illinois Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects, and six from various chapters of the American Institute of Architects.46 Shirley Ryan’s activism on behalf of children has been only part of her broad civic engagement. She has served as a trustee and innovator on a wide range of boards: the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the Alain Locke Charter Academy, the Art Institute of Chicago, 68 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring / Summer 2021

  

WTTW-PBS, the University of Notre Dame, and the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. Ryan was the founder of the Women’s Board of the Lincoln Park Zoo and chaired the Chicago Community Trust.47 Ryan’s accomplishments have been acknowledged with multiple awards: the Chicago Council on Global Affairs Global Leadership Award (2006), the Northwestern University Alumna Service Award (2013), the Harvard Club of Chicago Statesman Award, the Kids Count Award from the Voices of Illinois Children (1999), and the Bertha Honoré Palmer Making History Award for Distinction in Civic Leadership from the Chicago History Museum (2016).

She has received honorary doctorates from the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Catholic Theological Union, the University of Notre Dame, and Northwestern University.48 Shirley and Pat Ryan are arguably the most generous alumni donors in Northwestern University history. The couple subsidized two renovations of the main gymnasium in McGaw Memorial Hall, first in 1983 and again in 2017–18. The facility was renamed Welsh-Ryan Arena in honor of their parents. In 1996, Dyche Stadium was renovated and renamed Ryan Field in appreciation of their service in raising gifts from approximately 400 alumni.49 Since 2000, large donations by Shirley and Pat Ryan have created multiple programs and structures on the Evanston campus: the Ryan Family Scholarships enabling Northwestern students to avoid taking out any student loans, the Ryan Family Athletic Scholarships, the Ryan Family Fellowships for graduate students in nanotechnology, the Center for Nanofabrication and Molecular Self-Assembly in Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Hall, the Ryan Family Auditorium in the Norris University Center, the Shirley Welsh Ryan Opera Theater in the Ryan Center for the Musical Arts, and the Ryan Fieldhouse.50 Ryan speaks at the Pathways.org 29th anniversary dinner in 2013.

Making History | 69

  

Northwestern’s medical facilities in Chicago have been equally transformed by the Ryans. In addition to the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, an earlier gift resulted in the Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Atrium in the Robert H. Lurie Medical Research Center at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine.51 For Ryan, her philanthropic interests and generosity are rooted in her parents, Robert and Catherine Welsh. They “taught us by the rules, the S-S-S,” explains Ryan. “You had to spend a third, save a third, and share a third.”52 In the end, “How do you measure your life?” she asks rhetorically. “You measure your life by how many people you have empowered.”53

The Shirley Ryan AbilityLab opened its 1.2million-square-foot facility in 2017.

Timothy J. Gilfoyle teaches history at Loyola University Chicago and is the editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Urban History (Oxford University Press, 2019).

I L L U S T R AT I O N S | All images courtesy of Shirley Ryan unless otherwise noted.

Page 61, photograph by Timothy Gilfoyle.

F U R T H E R R E A D I N G | Information on Shirley Welsh Ryan can be found at Northwestern University Alumni Association, “Patrick G. Ryan and Shirley Welsh Ryan,” 2013, accessed March 5, 2016, http://www.alumni.northwestern.edu/s/ 1479/02-naa/naa/naa-interior-2.aspx?sid=1479&gid=2&pgid=6065; “Shirley Ryan, Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Foundation,” Inside Philanthropy, 2014, accessed March 5, 2016, http://insidephilanthropy.squarespace.com/insider-guide-to-programoffic/shirley-ryan-patrick-g-and-shirley-w-ryan-foundation.html; and Susan B. Noyes, “Inspiration and Transformation: Shirley Ryan AbilityLab Combines Pathways and RIC,” Better, June 24, 2016, accessed Feb. 20, 2020, https://better.net/chicago/ philanthropy/shirley-ryan-abilitylab-ric-pathways/. Useful introductions to the architectural and social design of the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab can be found in Edie Cohen, “Three Major Firms Collaborate on Massive Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in Chicago,” Interior Design, July 7, 2017, accessed February 10, 2020, http://m.interiordesign.net/ projects/13417-three-major-firms-collaborate-on-massive-shirley-ryan-abilitylab-inchicago/; and Ian Volner, “Shirley Ryan AbilityLab,” Architect, May 2019, accessed Feb. 14, 2020, https://www.architectmagazine.com/project-gallery/shirley-ryan-abilitylab_o. Lists of the many architectural and design honors awarded to the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab can be found at: “Shirley Ryan AbilityLab,” HDR, 2021, accessed Feb. 20, 2021, https://www.hdrinc.com/portfolio/shirley-ryan-abilitylab; and “Shirley Ryan AbilityLab,” Gensler, 2021, accessed Feb. 21, 2021, https://www.gensler.com/projects/shirley-ryan-abilitylab.

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In 2019, Ryan received an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Northwestern University.

  

E N D N OT E S

9. Ryan, interview.

1. “Our People,” Pathways.Org, 2016, accessed March 21, 2016, https://pathways.org/us/our-people/directors/.

10. Ryan, interview.

11. Ryan, interview.

2. “Joanne C. Smith, MD,” Northwestern Medicine Feinberg School of Medicine, 2020, accessed February 6, 2020, https://www.feinberg.northwestern.edu/ faculty-profiles/az/profile. html?xid=16461.

12. Teddy Greenstein, “A Humble, ‘Elusive’ Billionaire: Northwestern Donor Pat Ryan Does It His Way,” Chicago Tribune, September 28, 2017, accessed November 30, 2020, https:// www.chicagotribune.com/sports/college/ ct-pat-ryan-billionaire-northwesterndonor-spt-0929-20170928-story.html.

3. United States Manuscript Federal Census for 1940, Lake County, Gary, Indiana, pp. 95–96, available at Ancestry.com, accessed December 15, 2020; Trevor Jensen, “Alice Welsh Skilling: 1941–2008,” Chicago Tribune, February 12, 2008, accessed December 15, 2020, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct -xpm-2008-02-12-0802110531story.html.

4. “Robert Welsh Rites Set for Tomorrow [obituary],” Chicago Tribune, October 11, 1968, section 3, p. 13.

5. Shirley Ann Welsh Certificate of Birth, Indiana State Board of Health, County of Lake, City of Gary, Registered No. 1835, available at Ancestry.com, accessed February 15, 2021, https:// www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/60871/images/40474_35769801854?treeid=&personid=&rc=&useP UB=true&_phsrc=FlY4&_phstart=suc cessSource&pId=4992009; United States Manuscript 15th Federal Census, 1930, Lake County, Gary, Indiana, sheet 12B, available at Ancestry.com, accessed February 15, 2021, https:// www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/ collections/6224/images/4584693_0067 8?treeid=&personid=&rc=&usePUB= true&_phsrc=FlY1&_phstart=successS ource&pId=120861830.

6. Shirley Welsh Ryan, oral history interview by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, December 7, 2020, deposited in the collection of the Chicago History Museum (hereafter, Ryan, interview).

7. The family resided at 530 Carolina Street in 1940 and 562 Lincoln Street thereafter. See United States Manuscript 16th Federal Census, 1940, Lake County, Gary, Indiana, pp. 95–96, available at Ancestry.com, accessed December 15, 2020; Ryan interview.

8. Ryan, interview.

13. Northwestern University Alumni Association, “Patrick G. Ryan and Shirley Welsh Ryan,” 2013, accessed March 5, 2016, http://www.alumni. northwestern.edu/s/1479/02naa/naa/naa-interior-2.aspx?sid= 1479&gid=2&pgid=6065. Ryan spent 1961–62 in Paris. See Shirley A. Welsh, Passenger and Crew List, July 13, 1962, New York State, Passenger and Crew Lists, 1917–1967 [database online], Record Group 85, Series Number A3998, NARA Roll Number: 713, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1787–2004, NAI Number: 2848504, available at Ancestry.com, accessed February 20, 2021, https:// www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/ collections/1277/images/42804_ 336701-00133?treeid=&personid= &rc=&usePUB=true&_phsrc=FlY10& _phstart=successSource&pId=7468128.

14. Greenstein, “A Humble, ‘Elusive’ Billionaire.”

15. Ryan, interview; Greenstein, “A Humble, ‘Elusive’ Billionaire.”

16. Ryan, interview. For the 1966 date, see Shirley Ann Welsh, Record of Marriage, Lake County, Indiana, Indiana Archives and Records Administration; Indianapolis, IN; Series Number: 89-204; Year: June 1966; Certificate No. 002781, available at Ancestry.com, accessed February 20, 2021, https:// www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/61009/images/40475_54064100550?treeid=&personid=&rc=&useP UB=true&_phsrc=FlY5&_phstart=suc cessSource&pId=900645091; and Northwestern University Alumni Association, “Patrick G. Ryan and Shirley Welsh Ryan,” 2013, accessed March 5, 2016, http://www.alumni. northwestern.edu/s/1479/02-

naa/naa/naa-interior-2.aspx?sid= 1479&gid=2&pgid=6065.

17. Ryan, interview.

18. Dr. Elsbeth Köng, “Mary Buchanan Quinton, M.B.E. (1912–2000),” St. Ursula Magazine, c. 2000, accessed December 7, 2020, http://www.stursula.ch/Magazine/OLD/ Quinton.html; “2005 Recipient – Dr. Elsbeth Köng, MD,” Pathways.org Pioneer Awards, Pathways.org, 2020, accessed February 19, 2021, https://pathways.org/award/ pathways-pioneer-awards/ 19. “Community Advisor – Corbett Ryan,” CP Research Network, 2021, accessed February 18, 2021, https://cprn.org/ community-advisory-committee/community-advisor-corbett-ryan/; “Shirley Ryan, Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Foundation,” Inside Philanthropy, 2014, accessed March 5, 2016, http://insidephilanthropy.squarespace.com/insiderguide-to-program-offic/shirley-ryan-patri ck-g-and-shirley-w-ryan-foundation.html.

20. Ryan, interview.

21. Ryan, interview.

22. On Rubloff and the United Cerebral Palsy Association, see Charles Storch, “Gone,” Chicago Tribune, August 29, 2007, accessed February 18, 2021, https://www.chicagotribune.com/ news/ct-xpm-2007-08-29-0708280920story.html.

23. Ryan, interview.

24. Ryan, interview. On Betts, see Who’s Who in the Midwest, 2003 (New Providence, NJ: Marquis Who’s Who, 2002), 49.

25. Ryan, interview.

26. “Shirley Ryan, Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Foundation,” Inside Philanthropy.

27. Pat Vaughan Tremmel, “Undergraduate Humanitarian Honored,” Northwestern University News, May 18, 2010, accessed March 21, 2016, http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2010/05/ryanprize.html#!.

28. “Shirley Ryan, Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Foundation,” Inside Philanthropy.

29. “Our Mission,” Pathways.org, 2016, accessed March 21, 2016, https:// pathways.org/us/our-mission/.

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  

30. Ryan, interview.

31. Ryan, interview.

32. Ryan, interview.

33. Ryan, interview.

34. On Magnuson and Betts, see Timothy J. Gilfoyle, “East Coast Transplants: Interviews with Henry B. Betts and Robert V. Remini,” Chicago History, vol. 32, no. 3 (Spring 2004), 48–63; Bob Goldsborough, “Dr. Henry Betts, leader in field of rehabilitation medicine, dies at 86,” Chicago Tribune, January 5, 2015, accessed February 20, 2021, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/o bituaries/ct-henry-betts-obituary-met20150105-story.html; Henry Betts, “The Rehabilitation Experience,” in Nancy Martin, Nancye B. Holt, and Dorothy Hicks, eds. Comprehensive Rehabilitation Nursing (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981); Betts, “Sex for the Handicapped,” in The Ann Landers Encyclopedia A to Z (New York: Doubleday, 1978), 977–79; “The Physician and the Handicapped,” Chicago Medicine, 81 (November 1978), 1015–16.

35. Debbie Overman, “Shirley Ryan AbilityLab Ranks #1 for the 30th Consecutive Year,” Rehab Management, July 28, 2020, accessed September 12, 2020, https://www.rehabpub.com/ industry-news/company-news/shirleyryan-abilitylab-ranks-1-for-the-30th-consecutive-year/.

36. Dr. Joanne C. Smith, oral history interview by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, January 19, 2021, deposited in the collection of the Chicago History Museum (hereafter, Smith, interview).

37. Smith, interview.

38. Ryan, interview.

39. On the Ryan gift being the largest single donation at one time to any institution, see Smith, interview. On the renaming of the RIC, see Susan B. Noyes, “Inspiration and Transformation: Shirley Ryan AbilityLab Combines Pathways and RIC,” Better, June 24, 2016, accessed February 20, 2020, https://better.net/ chicago/philanthropy/shirley-ryanabilitylab-ric-pathways/.

40. Ian Volner, “Shirley Ryan AbilityLab,” Architect, May 2019, accessed 14 February 2020, https://www.architectmagazine.com/

project-gallery/shirley-ryan-abilitylab_o.

41. Overman, “Shirley Ryan AbilityLab Ranks #1 for the 30th Consecutive Year.”

42. Volner, “Shirley Ryan AbilityLab.” 43. Ryan, interview.

44. Smith, “Ditching the ‘Dis.’” 45. “Joanne C. Smith, MD,” Shirley Ryan Ability Lab, 2020, accessed February 6, 2020, https://www.sralab.org/ staff/joanne-c-smith-md.

46. The many architectural and design honors awarded to the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab can be found at: “Shirley Ryan AbilityLab,” HDR, 2021, accessed February 20, 2021, https://www.hdrinc.com/portfolio/ shirley-ryan-abilitylab; and “Shirley Ryan AbilityLab,” Gensler, 2021, accessed February 21, 2021, https:// www.gensler.com/projects/shirleyryan-abilitylab.

47. On Ryan’s civic service on boards, see “Our People,” Pathways.Org; “Shirley Ryan, Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Foundation,” Inside Philanthropy.

48. On Ryan’s awards, see “Patrick G. and Shirley Welsh Ryan,” Northwestern Alumni Association, 2020, accessed November 30, 2020, https:// www.alumni.northwestern.edu/s/1479/ 02-naa/16/interior.aspx?pgid= 6065&gid=2; Tremmel, “Undergraduate Humanitarian Honored”; “Our People,” Pathways.Org. 49. Ryan, interview; “Welsh-Ryan Arena,” Wikipedia, last updated January 8, 2021, accessed Feb. 18, 2021, https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh%E2%80%9 3Ryan_Arena; “Ryan Field (stadium),” Wikipedia, last updated January 5, 2021, accessed February 20, 2021, https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Field_ (stadium).

50. “Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Hall,” Northwestern Magazine, Fall 2012, available at: http://www.northwestern.edu/ magazine/fall2012/feature/whats-in-aname-sidebar/patrick-g.-and-shirley-w.ryan-hall.html; Greenstein, “A Humble, ‘Elusive’ Billionaire: Northwestern Donor Pat Ryan Does It His Way”; “Ryan Center for the Musical Arts,” Northwestern University Bienen School of Music,

72 | CHICAGO HISTORY | Spring / Summer 2021

2020, accessed November 30, 2020, https://music.northwestern.edu/ about/facilities.

51. “Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Hall,” Northwestern Magazine.

52. Ryan, interview.

53. “Shirley Ryan, Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Foundation,” Inside Philanthropy.

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