Women Should be Seen and Heard: Grand Rapids and the Fight for the Vote

by Ruth Stevens

The story of the women’s suffrage movement in Grand Rapids began as early as 1874 when the Grand Rapids Woman Suffrage Association and Kent County Woman’s Suffrage Association were formed and suffragists brought national leader Susan B. Anthony to Grand Rapids. Hosted by Marion Carr Bliss and Cordelia Briggs, Anthony spoke to large crowds at Luce’s Hall in downtown Grand Rapids as she rallied support for a fall suffrage referendum. While the 1874 campaign was unsuccessful, suffragists persisted and finally claimed victory in 1918 when male electors voted to amend the Michigan constitution to grant women the right to vote, a full two years before the federal 19 th Amendment went into effect.

Grand Rapids suffragists achieved their first victory in 1885 when they convinced the Michigan legislature to give property-owning women and mothers of school-age children in Grand Rapids the right to vote in school elections and to hold school offices. Only three years later, as a result of efforts by female supporters, who had reportedly come “out in full force,” Harriet A. Cook, a respected local dressmaker, won a seat on the Grand Rapids Board of Education, becoming its first female member.

As suffragists pressed forward to win full voting rights, several Grand Rapids women rose to state and national prominence. Emily Burton Ketcham, a veteran of the school suffrage fight, served four terms as president of the Michigan Equal Suffrage Association (MESA) and was chosen to represent MESA at National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) conferences and on the NAWSA executive board. Later, Clara Comstock Russell and Alde T. Blake, members of a new generation of Grand Rapids suffragists, also assumed leadership roles in MESA.

In 1898, Ketcham, representing the local Susan B. Anthony Club, took the bold step of inviting NAWSA to hold its 1899 annual conference at the St. Cecilia Auditorium in Grand Rapids. The invitation was accepted and Grand Rapids became just the third city outside of Washington, DC to host a NAWSA convention. As the convention approached, the city eagerly awaited the arrival of Susan B. Anthony, Anna Howard Shaw, and other well-known suffragists. Dozens of suffrage supporters offered to provide lodging for delegates. Bissell CEO Anna Sutherland Bissell capped the city’s welcome with factory tours and gifts of miniature Bissell carpet sweepers specially engraved for the occasion.

The convention was deemed a success, but an incident at the convention highlighted the reluctance of national suffrage leaders to take a stand on issues of racial equality. When Lottie Wilson Jackson of Bay City, Michigan, most likely the only Black women at the convention, asked delegates to support a resolution providing that, “colored women ought not to be compelled to ride in smoking cars, and that suitable accommodations should be provided for them,” she met fierce opposition from southern delegates. Chair Susan B. Anthony steered the convention away from acting on the resolution, declaring that women as the “helpless, disfranchised class” did not have the power to remedy the problem.

Many unheralded women also worked to propel the suffrage movement forward. Union High School history teacher, May F. Conlon, started a suffrage club at the school and “organized cadres of girls to go out on the street and stand outside churches with leaflets.” Countless other volunteers assisted with canvassing, petition drives, and raising money.

Suffragists also became adept at organizing public events to draw attention to their cause. In 1910, the Grand Rapids Equal Franchise Club, dazzled spectators with a float in the Grand Rapids Homecoming Parade featuring future State Senator Eva McCall Hamilton at the reins and young Grand Rapids suffragist Margaret McKee enthroned on topof the float portraying Justice.

Four years later, suffragists responded to a call for

nation-wide pro-suffrage demonstrations by organizing a mass meeting at Fulton Street Park and a “takeover” of the Grand Rapids Press. As Press readers perused the special May 2, 1914 edition, they found a new masthead portraying a vote-less Michigan woman in chains trudging behind women representing the nine full-suffrage states followed by 22 pages of article written by local suffragists.

Finally, in 1918, a year after the Michigan legislature had granted presidential suffrage to women, suffragists achieved their goal when male voters endorsed a suffrage measure. Suffragists now turned their efforts to getting women to register and vote. A coalition of groups in Grand Rapids organized a successful get-out-the-vote campaign which led to the registration of 26,500 women before the April 1919 election. As they registered, women were given a poster to be displayed in their windows at home proclaiming their new status as voters – a sign that the efforts of generations of Grand Rapids suffragists had finally born fruit.

“Women Should be Seen and Heard: Grand Rapids and the Fight for the Vote” by Ruth Stevens and Greater Grand Rapids Women’s History Council, Thursday, October 8, 2020, 7:00 p.m. Virtual Program on Zoom and YouTube.

Visit our Grand Rapids Historical Society YouTube channel to view the presentation. https://youtu.be/bN5zfnwbIGI