Tag Archives: women’s suffrage

“To Demand Her Right”: Women’s Suffrage Activity in Our Area

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Steuben women started campaigning for the vote almost immediately after the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention. Here’s an overview of their actions and activities!

1852
Susan B. Anthony spoke in Corning (four years after the first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls).

1855
Susan B. Anthony spoke in Bath on January 5 as part of a County Women’s Rights Convention — day one of a five-day visit that also included two speeches in Corning (1/7 and 1/9). The purpose of the meeting was to discuss “all the reasons that impel Woman to demand her right of Suffrage.” Miss Anthony is known to have spoken at some time in Caton and in Cohocton, but the dates are unknown.

1870
Susan B. Anthony spoke in Corning to an audience of 80.

1880
Partial voting rights! New York women could vote in school elections and serve as school trustees if they had children in school, or owned real property. Two women were immediately elected trustees in Cohocton Union Free School District.

1881
Suffrage leader Lillie Deveraux Blake spoke in Corning in November.

1894
On August 9 the W.C.T.U., or Women’s Christian Temperance Union, finished two nights of elaborately-staged performances at the Corning Opera House. Besides temperance, the W.C.T.U. also fought for social reform, protection for working girls, aid and Americanization for immigrants, world peace, and women’s suffrage.

1901
EXPANDED partial voting rights! New York women who owned property, and paid taxes on that property, could vote on village taxation issues. Hammondsport Herald publisher Lew Brown ran repeated pieces sympathetic to women’s suffrage. In one such piece, Ada Stoddard of M.I.T. predicted that once women had the vote, equal pay for equal work would quickly become a reality. Other voices claimed that women voters would end corruption and outlaw war.

1906
The Hornell directory showed an Equal Suffrage society.

1913
On the evening of June 19, two young New England women gave eloquent and persuasive speeches at the Corning clock tower square. They were campaigning on behalf of equal suffrage, or votes for women.

1914
A Corning appearance by Mrs. Harriot Stanton Blatch (daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton) led to a formal organization. On April 6 a meeting in the interest of woman suffrage was held in the assembly hall at the Odd Fellows’ Temple. Mrs. Frank C. Payne of Corning presided. Speakers (all women) came from Syracuse, New York City, and Hornell. A suffrage tent was erected in Dickinson Square, open air meetings were held, and the Torch of Liberty was carried into Corning. Susan B. Anthony, who died in 1906, had predicted that New York women would vote by 1914, but her hopes were disappointed.

1915
Steuben voted 9740 to 7226 against the New York voter suffrage amendment. Chemung was the only local county that approved.

1917
On November 6, Corning voters (all men) cast 947 ballots to approve the women’s suffrage amendment to the state constitution, and 660 against. Steuben as a whole voted it down, 6866 to 6760. Allegany was the only neighboring county to approve, but the amendment passed statewide.

1918
FULL VOTES AT LAST! Women could finally vote in New York, on exactly the same basis as men. Susannah Thompson of Erwin ran for Steuben County treasurer and came in third.

1920
FULL VOTES DOUBLY GUARANTEED! Women could vote nationwide, by U.S. constitutional amendment ratified the same year. Rather than just going out of business, women’s suffrage groups became the League of Women Voters.

One Century Back — We Go To War, in 1917

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Germany rolled the dice in 1917, accepting war with America by an aggressive unrestricted u-boat campaign that sank anything approaching the British Isles in hopes of starving Britain before we could get organized to fight.  When the Germans also used American facilities to send a coded message to Mexico urging war against the U.S., the roof caved in.  America was in the Great War.

We’d had three years to get ready, and hadn’t done much of anything.  A “Home Guard” quickly formed to protect Corning from attack, and almost as quickly faded away.  A draft was soon in effect.  Germania Winery changed its name.  The Curtiss plant in Hammondsport worked around the clock.  When people came over the hill from Bath, they could hear the aircraft engines roaring in their test stands near the Glen. 

Thousands of prospective pilots started training on Curtiss Jennys, mostly made in Buffalo.  Willys-Morrow in Elmira became a Curtiss subcontractor (making engines), and so did Fay & Bowen in Geneva (making seaplane hulls).  Katherine Stinson, flying a custom-made Curtiss biplane, set the American distance record at 606 miles.

America bought the Danish Virgin Islands, and made Puerto Ricans U.S. citizens.  An early spring revolution in Russia toppled the Czar, while an early winter revolution brought Lenin’s communists to power.  Three children reported visions of the Virgin Mary at Fatima.  Exhausted French soldiers began a series of mutinies.  Lawrence of Arabia captured Aqaba.  The first Pulitzer Prizes were announced.  Lions Club was formed.  Race riots in East Saint Louis killed dozens of people.

Mata Hari was executed.  Arthur Balfour declared that the British “look with favor” on the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.  U.S. “patriots” brutally attacked people suspected of not fully supporting the war.  Germania Winery near Hammondsport changed its name to Jermania.  On November 14, prison guards attacked and tortured 33 suffragettes in Virginia. 

Clemenceau, “the Tiger of France,” became his country’s premiere and announced his policy: “I make war.” The National Hockey League was formed.  Allenby took Jerusalem.  In Halifax, the biggest man-made explosion until the atomic bomb killed 2000 people.

Folks in Wheeler and in Mossy Glen (South Corning) formed Granges — the Wheeler Grange is still in operation. New York men approved a constitutional amendment for women’s suffrage, three years before it came on the national level. (Voters in Steuben, Chemung, Schuyler, and Yates all rejected it.)

Buffalo Bill died, along with Admiral Dewey and Count von Zeppelin.  So did Scott Joplin, Edgar Degas, Auguste Rodin, and Mother Cabrini.

Births for 1917 included Zsa Zsa Gabor, Desi Arnaz, Ernest Borgnine, Cyrus Vance, Hans Conried, Ella Fitzgerald, Raymond Burr, Dean Martin, Lena Horne, Andrew Wyeth, Phyllis Diller, Robert Mitchum, Jack Kirby, John F. Kennedy, and Man o’ War. For them, the war would be gone even before they knew about it.