Facebook Archives

March is Women's History Month. This year the Ridge Historical Society salutes Gertrude Blackwelder, a remarkable woman who lived during the Progressive Era and worked tirelessly for women's suffrage and education reform. Mrs. Blackwelder made history by being the first woman to cast a vote in Cook County when women won expanded voting rights in 1913.

Gertrude and her husband, I.S. Blackwelder, were early settlers in Morgan Park, where I.S. served as president of the Village Board. Gertrude co-founded the Morgan Park Woman's Club in 1889, the oldest such club still in existence in Chicago. The Blackwelders were instrumental in establishing the Morgan Park High School, which opened in 1916. Their house is one of the most famous historical residences in the neighborhood – the Ingersoll-Blackwelder-Simmerling House on Prospect.

We've just entered a major feature on Mrs. Blackwelder on the RHS website so go here for more information: www.ridgehistorical.org.

Pictures: Mrs. Blackwelder voting, from the Chicago Tribune in 1913.

The Ingersoll-Blackwelder House as it appeared when the Blackwelders lived there – RHS archives.

"The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

These two sentences brought to an end decades of demands and campaigning for the right for women to vote in all elections – including Presidential.

This is the Nineteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, passed on June 4, 1919, one hundred years ago.

Illinois was the first state to ratify this amendment, on June 10, 1919. Ratification was declared on August 26, 1920, with 36 of the 48 states affirming by that time. (The last state to ratify the amendment was Mississippi – in 1984!)

It is no surprise that Illinois was the first state to ratify the amendment – it was largely due to an Illinois law passed in 1913 that the final push at the federal level occurred. In fact, the federal outcome was so anticlimactic, it did not even receive much notice in the press. Illinois women had been voting for President for years.

In 1913, the Progressive Party held the balance of power in the Illinois State legislature. Women lawyers came up with a way to significantly increase the voting power of women.

The Electoral College was established by the Founding Fathers as a compromise on how to elect the President – by popular vote or by vote of Congress. Individuals known as Electors are chosen by each state, and it is actually these Electors who choose the President. The U. S, Constitution gives the authority to each state to decide how to choose the Electors.

A bill allowing women to vote for the Electors was introduced into the Illinois legislature. The opposition tried every conceivable parliamentary maneuver to keep the bill from going forward. But after receiving an overwhelming flood of letters, telegrams, visits, and telephone calls in support, the Speaker allowed the bill to go to vote.

Women "captains" went to the legislators' houses to round them up for the vote, and stood guard at the chamber doors to prevent them from leaving before the vote was cast.

The bill passed. Women in Illinois became the first women in the country to vote for President, through electing the state Electors. The new law also expanded voting rights at the municipal level.

Women on the Ridge were very active in the suffrage movement. Gertrude Blackwelder of Morgan Park served as the president of the Chicago Political Equality League for three years. Mrs. Blackwelder made history on Saturday, July 26, 1913, when she cast her ballot in Morgan Park’s special election on building a new high school. She was the first woman to vote in Cook County after the 1913 Illinois law passed.

Pic 1: The 1913 Illinois law.

Pic 2: A WWI-era pro-suffrage ad.

Pic 3: Pro-suffrage propaganda.

Pic 4: Anti-suffrage propaganda. Both sides could be brutal. .

Today the Ridge Historical Society was honored to host the Morgan Park Woman's Club (MPWC) for its monthly meeting and a program on the current RHS exhibit, Threads of Imagination.

MPWC is the longest running women's club in Chicago, and the second longest in the state of Illinois. Formed on November 5, 1889, as "The Ladies Club of Morgan Park," the club adopted its current name in 1897. The famous Gertrude Blackwelder was an organizer of the group. The first meeting was held in the Iglehart House, one of the oldest houses not only in Morgan Park but in the entire City of Chicago, which was moved to its current location at 11118 S. Artesian from its original location at 111th and Western. The purpose of the club was intellectual self-improvement, and educational, philanthropic and civic causes. The Morgan Park Junior Woman's Club is an offshoot of the original MPWC.

MPWC has accomplished much good for the community, from advocating for women's right to vote over 100 years ago; to forming PTAs at the local schools; to working with the Chicago Park District in the 1930s to turn the land that is now Kennedy Park from a waste dump into a bird sanctuary and wildflower preserve; to today's projects including supplying books to local school libraries and clipping news articles for RHS.

MPWC has been recognized many, many times for its accomplishments, including an award from the Red Cross for many hours of service during World War II to just this month being named one of the Illinois 10 Outstanding Club Signature Project winners. The project was collecting socks for A New Direction, the local organization providing services for victims of domestics violence, something MPWC does every year. Interestingly, socks are the #! most requested item at shelters.

Women's clubs have an interesting history. Women's lives traditionally revolved around the home and family, and any "clubs" were usually church-based activities such as caring for the sick. All this changed with the U.S. Civil War, when women used their considerable organizational and management skills for relief efforts including care for the hundreds of thousands of soldiers and veterans. Following was the Progressive Era, that time of great social reform. Long denied membership in men's clubs, women formed their own clubs and became a mighty force to be reckoned with for the good of the country.

As new education and employment opportunities opened up for women, with time women found additional outlets for their interests and skills and most of the early clubs dissolved. But in Morgan Park the legacy of the crusading women of the past lives on.

Picture 1 – Today's MPWC at RHS. Photo by C. Flynn. Pic 2 – The Iglehart House, where it all began on November 5, 1889. RHS newsletter by C. Flynn. .

On Valentine’s Day, February 14, we celebrate romance and love. It is one of the oldest holidays we recognize.

The origins of the day go back to the folklore about several saints named Valentine. One was St. Valentine of Rome, believed to have been martyred in AD 269 for ministering to early Christians and performing marriages for Roman soldiers forbidden to marry.

Another is Valentine of Terni, again, an early Christian who was martyred. The Catholic Encyclopedia includes a third Valentine, of whom little in known except he was martyred in Africa.

The feast day of St. Valentine was set as February 14 in AD 496 because it is believed to be the date St. Valentine of Rome was martyred and buried. Because of the unknown history, however, the Roman Catholic Church actually removed this feast day from the official calendar in 1969, relegating it to local recognition. It does remain an established feast day in some other Christian churches. It is not a public holiday in any country.

The idea of associating the day with courtly love became popular in England in the 14th century thanks to poet Geoffrey Chaucer and his circle. By the 1800s, presenting flowers, candy and greetings of affection, particularly poetry, were common practice. Mass-produced valentines have been around since about 1850 in the U.S.

The U.S. greeting card industry estimates about 190 million valentines are sent each year, about half from children. If you add in homemade valentines, the number one recipient is teachers. No surprise, Valentine’s Day is a major day for gift buying – the flower, candy and jewelry businesses do particularly well.

Also as no surprise, valentines have incorporated political and other messages depending on the times. This little gem from about 100 years ago incorporates a pro-woman suffrage message in it. In 1920, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, granting women the right to vote.

The new exhibit, “Real American Girls of the Ridge,” opened at the Ridge Historical Society on March 1. This exhibit pairs dolls from the historical collection of the American Girl Dolls with real women connected to the Ridge from the same time period. During March, Women’s History Month, we’ll begin to look at some of these women’s interesting stories.

But first we need to finish the story of the connection between Pleasant Thiele Rowland, the founder of the American Girl Doll line, and the Ridge.

If you scroll through the posts on the RHS Facebook page, you will find the first post about Pleasant, made on February 13. We reported that Pleasant’s paternal grandparents, Edward A. and Maude Thiele, lived for decades at 9556 S. Winchester Ave., and her father, Edward M. Theile, lived there as a teen-ager and young man.

We also reported that Pleasant’s parents, Edward M. (E.M.) and Pleasant “Petty” Theile, moved their young family to the Ridge from 1947 to 1951, residing at 2754 West 108th Street. Pleasant was 10 years old when her father took a job with Leo Burnett Co., Inc., a well-known advertising agency, and the family moved to Bannockburn, Illinois.

There are “clues” as to what young Pleasant’s life was like on the Ridge.

First, her mother appeared in the newspapers for society and charity events. Petty was active with the Infant Welfare Society, a non-governmental volunteer organization founded in 1911 to help low-income women and children. The organization still exists today. For many years, the organization ran thrift shops, including one in Beverly, to raise funds.

One 1948 Chicago Tribune article reports that the Beverly volunteers, including Petty, were restoring used dolls to sell in a thrift shop in Roseland. The group also held annual balls, and Petty was listed as an assistant. A 1951 Chicago Tribune article had Petty assisting with a tea at Mickelberry’s Log Cabin restaurant on 95th Street.

Second, a childhood acquaintance of Pleasant’s shared some remembrances. Her mother was friends with E.M.’s sister, Pleasant’s aunt, Barbara Thiele.

This acquaintance called Pleasant “precocious and fun” and shared with us stories about Pleasant’s birthday parties, at her grandparents’ house and up north. The girls dressed very nicely, embroidered organdy with ruffles in the summer and velvet in the winter. Many photos of children in Beverly were on the Chicago Tribune society page.

Keeping in mind that T.V.s were just becoming available then, and there were no home computers and smart phones, children relied on books and visits to museums for entertainment and information. This acquaintance remembers the dolls, doll clothes and doll furniture at the Chicago Historical Society, and the miniature Thorne rooms at the Art Institute. There was also the Marshall Field and Co. toy and doll department. Surely we can also add the Colleen Moore Fairy Castle at the Museum of Science and Industry to the list of exhibits that likely influenced Pleasant.

A third influence on Pleasant was her paternal grandmother, Maude Daugherty Thiele.

In 2003, the Wisconsin State Journal newspaper ran an article stating that:

“Pleasant Rowland grew up in Chicago’s Beverly area. At age 10 she moved to north suburban Bannockburn, Ill.

“’My childhood was one of loving to read and of loving to put on plays and act out stories and marshalling the neighborhood to put on the carnival or the Fourth of July parade,’ says Rowland in a rare interview. ‘It was a very active life of the mind.

“’My interest in things old was piqued by my paternal grandmother. She loved to go antiquing, and I would go with her. I began to see the value of old things and other times through her eyes.’”

In the early American Girl catalogs, Pleasant told stories from her youth – learning to crochet from her grandmother, etc. Some of these stories surely were from Beverly.

Pleasant also grew up listening to successful marketing and advertising people, as her father rose to become president of Leo Burnett.

Pleasant graduated from Wells College in 1962. She married Richard Henry Rowland, Jr., from South Carolina. Although the marriage did not last, she kept the Rowland name professionally. She had a career as a teacher, news reporter and anchor, and children’s textbook writer.

She developed two highly regarded reading programs. The first was a comprehensive language arts program. The second was the Superkids Reading Program that is used in thousands of U.S. classrooms.

She married businessman and philanthropist Jerome Frautschi from Madison, Wisconsin in 1977.

In 1986, she founded the Pleasant Company, which began manufacturing the line of 18-inch dolls from different historic eras, with authentic period clothing, furniture and accessories. Very important to the series were the books with stories told from the perspectives of girls eight to eleven-years old.

Pleasant said she was motivated by two things to start the line of dolls. First, a visit to Colonial Williamsburg got her thinking about girls’ stories from various periods in history.

Second, while trying to buy dolls for her nieces, she found the only real options to be Barbie or Cabbage Patch dolls. Both dolls forced girls to assume grown-up roles – fashion model or adoptive mother. She wanted dolls that let girls be girls to play at the appropriate age level.

In 1998, Pleasant Rowland sold the Pleasant Company, now called American Girl, to Mattel, the American multinational toy manufacturing and entertainment company, for $700 million. Today she and her husband continue other business and philanthropic activities.

Yesterday, May 5, was National Teacher Appreciation Day, celebrated annually on the Tuesday of the first full week in May. The Ridge communities have had many, many fine teachers through the years. The Ridge Historical Society will share profiles of a few of them.

Let’s start with Elizabeth “Bessie” Bingle Huntington Sutherland, a very respected and forward-thinking leader in the education field.

Bessie was born in 1851 on the Ridge. Her parents, Samuel and Maria Robinson Huntington, were part of the earliest Ridge pioneer families. Samuel was a farmer and kept stock, then became involved with the railroads, and served as sheriff of the early settlement that would become the City of Blue Island. Maria was reputed to have been an early teacher in Blue Island, making $1.00 per week for her efforts.

Around 1854, a two-room school house was built in Blue Island, and it is probable that Bessie attended this school as a child. The Cook County Normal School was established in 1867. The name “normal school” was used for teacher preparation programs because they established teaching standards or “norms.” Bessie graduated from this school in 1869. This school eventually evolved into Chicago State University.

Bessie’s career as a teacher included the Blue Island school and the Hyde Park high school. She took graduate classes at the University of Chicago. The Washington Heights public school started in 1874, and Bessie became principal there in 1883, the first woman to be named a principal in Cook County. In 1893, this school was renamed the Alice L. Barnard School, after another Ridge native who had become the first woman principal of a Chicago school.

Bessie became a teacher during the “Progressive Era,” that time of significant reform in all areas of life. The field of education made great advances during this time, as the philosophy of learning changed from rote memorization to exploration and experimentation. Bessie surely knew two of the movement's leaders in Chicago, Francis W. Parker, who became head of the Cook County Normal School, and John Dewey, who established the University of Chicago Laboratory School.

An anecdote about Bessie illustrates the Progressive educator. While principal at the Barnard School, one day she heard that a camel had escaped from a traveling show and was freely roaming the local woods. She gathered the entire student body and led an impromptu field trip to the woods to observe the camel “in the wild” and share a lesson on animals of the world.

In those years, women teachers were not allowed to marry if they wished to remain employed. Bessie put off marriage to David Sutherland until her 43rd birthday in 1894. Sutherland, 17 years Bessie’s senior, was a real estate developer with considerable property on the south and west sides of Chicago. They made their home at 1638 West 103rd Street. The couple had no children, and David died in 1904.

Bessie served as the principal of Barnard School for almost 40 years. She resigned in 1923, and died in 1924. She was buried in Mt. Greenwood Cemetery. In 1925, the new school built at 101st and Leavitt Sts. was named in her honor.

May 6 to 12 was National Nurses Week, and the Ridge Historical Society did not forget about nurses! One recent history story we posted included the role of nurses in caring for patients during the influenza epidemic in 1918. Nurses bravely went into the homes of quarantined patients to help families care for their sick, plus assist with other domestic tasks, risking illness themselves.

We've also been doing research on some of the earliest nurses on the Ridge – those from the U. S. Civil War era.

Nursing as a profession was in its infancy then, and there were no formal nursing education programs. In fact, there were not even many hospitals – only about 150 in the country.

Thousands of women served as nurses during the U. S. Civil War. At first, women were considered too delicate to be able to withstand the conditions of tending to the sick and wounded, but they soon proved themselves through their determination, hard work and sacrifice.

Women started as volunteers, but thanks to the efforts of Clara Barton, a U.S. Army corps of nurses was formed in 1861. They were paid 40 cents per day for their service. (Male nurses were paid many times that, more than $200 per month.)

The nurses who "enlisted" came from many backgrounds: soldiers’ wives who had accompanied their husbands to military camps, local residents from the areas where camps were set up, religious institutions, and relief organizations. Not only did they deal with the injured, they also cared for patients with pneumonia, typhoid, dysentery, and malaria. Two-thirds of the deaths in the Civil War were from disease, not injury.

The graves of two nurses from the Civil War have been found in Ridge cemeteries. Mount Greenwood Cemetery includes the grave of Catherine E. Near. (Her name is spelled as Katherine on the stone; she went by Kate.) She was from Blue Island, and she died in 1908. Her maiden name was Fay. Her brother was Jerome Fay, of Fay's Point in Blue Island.

At the entrance to Memorial Park on 127th Street in Blue Island is a display of old tombstones dating back to the days when the park was the Blue Island Cemetery. One of the stones belonged to Clarissa F. McClintock, U. S. Army Nurse. Her background is being researched.

Ridge Historical Society

Part IV for Memorial Day – The Civil War and the Ridge

Carol Flynn, RHS Communications

Women joined the war effort, also. At least three U.S. Army Nurses who served during the Civil War have been identified from Blue Island.

Thousands of women served as nurses during the Civil War, first as volunteers, and then as paid members of a nurse corps established through the efforts of Clara Barton in 1861. Dorothea Dix organized nursing efforts in the Washington, D. C., area, and Mary Ann Bickerdyke did likewise at the military camps in Cairo, Illinois.

Nursing as a profession was in its infancy, and there were no nursing education programs. At first women were considered too delicate to cope with the demands of caring for the sick and wounded, but they soon proved themselves through their determination, hard work and sacrifice. Women nurses were paid $0.40 per day. Male nurses in the same situations were paid over $200 per month.

Nurses came from many sources, including wives who had accompanied their soldier husbands to camps, women who lived by the camps, and members of religious institutions and relief organizations.

Mt. Greenwood Cemetery identified the grave of one Civil War woman veteran buried there, Catherine Near, U. S. Army Nurse. Her maiden name was Catherine Fay and she was known as Kate.

The Fay family came to Blue Island in the early 1850s. Kate was living with her mother and a son from a first marriage, with a sister and brother in town, when the war broke out. The exact sequence of events that led Kate to become an Army nurse are not yet documented, but records show that she married John H. Near, a soldier from Blue Island, in December of 1861 in Alexander County, which includes Cairo as the county seat. Cairo, at the southern tip of the state on the Mississippi River, was the site for many Union camps, a point from which the soldiers embarked for campaigns in the South.

So far there is no documentation of Kate Near’s experiences as a nurse. The 1870 U. S. Census reports John and Kate Near and her son living in Grand Tower, Illinois, in the far southern part of the state in Jackson County. It appears the marriage later broke up, with Kate and her son returning to Blue Island, and John Near relocating to Missouri.

Army records show that Kate received her own pension from the Army. She died in 1908 at the age of 73. The cause of death was listed as accidental gas poisoning, assumedly from a gas leak.

Kate’s brother, Jerome Fay, bought property for farming at the junction of the Calumet River and Stony Creek, which became known as Fay’s Point. Jerome married John Near’s sister, Lydia. So a Fay brother and sister married a Near brother and sister.

At the entrance to Memorial Park on 127th Street in Blue Island is a display of old tombstones dating back to the days when the park was the Blue Island Cemetery. One of the stones belonged to Clarissa F. McClintock, U. S. Army Nurse.

The McClintock family came to the Ridge in 1850 and was among the “intelligentsia” of early Blue Island. Clarissa’s mother, Laura (Mrs. Thomas), and her sister, Marion, ran a private school in their home on Vermont St. Her father Thomas allowed his large collection of books to be borrowed by the townspeople, starting the first Blue Island “library.” McClintock's occupation was as a county surveyor.

Both Clarissa and her older sister Marion were listed as employed in 1863 at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, as commissioned nurses. As with Kate Near, no documentation of their experiences have been uncovered yet.

Clarissa was born in 1842 and died young, in March 1867, “after two years’ illness.” It is possible she contracted a lingering illness during the war. She was buried in the Blue Island Cemetery. That cemetery was closed and turned into a park. Most, but not all, of the graves were moved to other cemeteries. Her old gravestone is still in Blue Island but the location of the McClintock family graves hasn’t been looked into yet by RHS.

Marion was born in 1835 and died in 1900. She taught German for many years in the Chicago Public Schools. Marion is buried in Rosehill Cemetery.

The McClintock sisters and Kate Near are listed in the Army pension records. They are also listed in the Illinois Roll of Honor, compiled in 1929 to identify the burial places of those who served in any of the wars up to that time and were buried in Illinois. The list was started to aid in honoring deceased veterans on Decoration (Memorial) Day.

This concludes our posts – for now – about some of the Ridge residents who served in the U.S. Civil War. Their sacrifices to preserve the Union and the U.S. Constitution should be remembered.

The Ridge Historical Society

Carol Flynn

School Series – Profile 1: Alice L. Barnard

It is graduation time, and while the emphasis is on the graduates at this time, recognition is also due the teachers who encouraged the students along their paths of exploration and discovery. “Teachers” is used in a broad sense here to include professional educators as well as other role models and advisors who made lasting impressions.

There are dozens of Chicago public schools in Beverly, Morgan Park, Washington Heights and Mount Greenwood. Nineteen of them are named for individuals who made contributions to education and other important fields. This series will look at those people.

A good place to start is with Alice Lucretia Barnard (1829 – 1908) whose namesake school is at 10354 S. Charles St., because it was education that brought the Barnard family to the Blue Island Ridge in 1846 in the first place.

Alice’s brother was William Barnard, a graduate of Amherst University in Massachusetts. Deciding to seek new opportunities in the West, he made it as far as Chicago, where he had a chance encounter with Thomas Morgan, the wealthy Englishman who bought thousands of acres of land on top of and surrounding the Ridge and gave his family’s name to Morgan Park. Morgan talked William into taking a job as tutor for Morgan’s children. William moved to the Ridge, and other family members soon followed.

Alice was educated in Massachusetts and later she attended Mount Holyoke Seminary which she left after two years because there was “little independence in thought.” She was an early “progressive” teacher, believing in “the opportunity to study from life” and not just the memorization of facts. She advocated for better education opportunities for women and was disappointed she could not study chemistry and other sciences in a laboratory.

Alice began her teaching career at age 17 in Chicago in a one-room schoolhouse. After a few years, she found herself at the Dearborn School, at Madison and Dearborn. At the time of the U.S. Civil War, she angered some school officials by writing a paper favoring the rights of children of color in school. The teachers and children marched in a procession to the Court House to view President Lincoln’s body lying in state after his assassination in April 1865. She met past President Gen. Ulysses Grant when he visited Chicago in 1879.

When offered the position of principal at the school in 1867, she declined because she would have been paid a lower salary than men in the same position. This was considered rank insubordination and the head of the education board called for her to be fired, but wiser heads prevailed and she took the job of head assistant instead.

She had the support of “Long John” Wentworth, the very powerful past mayor of Chicago, U.S. Congressman, and newspaper editor. A few years later, in 1871, she was named principal, one of the first women in the city to receive an appointment, and she was paid the same rate as the men. But that position was short-lived. The Dearborn School site was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire in October 1871.

She was principal of Harrison School for a year, then in 1873 moved to Jones School as Head Assistant, at 12th Street and Wabash where a new school building had just opened. That school was destroyed by fire the following year and rebuilt in 1875. In 1876, when the principal resigned, the teachers petitioned to have her appointed to the position. She became principal of the school, where she stayed until retirement. That school is now Jones College Prep.

Alice never married; back then women teachers were usually required to give up outside employment if they married. She invested her money independently in real estate.

She was a member of Bethany Union Church, and also the First Presbyterian Church. She lived with her sisters and brothers in a charming house at 103rd St. and Longwood Drive, across from Givins’ Castle, and cultivated flowers. She entertained her students there, and she regularly decorated the classrooms at Jones with fresh bouquets. Her nephew later started a seed farm there. Today a CVS drug store is on that site.

Alice received considerable newspaper coverage in her lifetime – she was a celebrity in Chicago. The Inter Ocean ran a full page story about her in 1891 when she retired. It was hoped she would become a member of the Board of Education but that did not happen. Perhaps she was content to live in Washington Heights, the name for the area before "Beverly Hills" became popular, and tend her peonies.

In 1890, the Washington Heights School was severely damaged by fire. It was closed for a few years while it was rebuilt, and in 1892 the school reopened, now named for Alice L. Barnard. Such an honor is usually awarded after a person’s death, but Alice was still very much alive.

When she fell ill in 1908, it was covered in the Chicago papers. Alice was described by the Chicago Tribune as “one of the best known teachers in Chicago.” Upon her death, many tributes were given to her. She was laid to rest in Mount Greenwood Cemetery.

The Nineteenth Amendment

By Carol Flynn

It will be a while yet before they can give final results for today’s election, so this seems like a good time to share a story about the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which was ratified 100 years ago.

The Nineteenth Amendment states: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

The U.S. Congress passed the legislation on June 4, 1919. It took Illinois less than a week to be the first state to ratify the amendment, on June 10, 1919. Thirty-six states were needed to ratify the amendment, and this was reached with Tennessee on August 18, 1920, allowing the country to certify the Nineteenth Amendment as adopted on August 26, 1920. [The last state to ratify the amendment was Mississippi, in 1984. Yes, 1984.]

It was not surprising that Illinois was the first state to ratify the amendment, as it was legislation passed in Illinois in 1913 that was a major turning point in the women’s suffrage movement. In fact, the women of Illinois took the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment somewhat in stride because they had had the right to vote in the U.S. Presidential selection process for years.

Although the issue of women having the right to vote went back to the founding days of the country – the second First Lady Abigail Adams was all for it – the formal beginning of the women’s suffrage movement is considered to be an 1848 women’s rights convention held in Seneca Falls, New York. The group came up with a list of resolutions and the one concerning the right to vote was hotly debated.

It was one of the few men at the meeting, Frederick Douglass, former slave turned statesman, who convinced the women to leave suffrage in their platform.

Douglass wrote, “All that distinguishes man as an intelligent and accountable being, is equally true of woman; and if that government is only just which governs by the free consent of the governed, there can be no reason in the world for denying to woman the exercise of the elective franchise. Our doctrine is

that ‘Right is of no sex.’”

The resistance to women voting was widespread and strong, not just among men but for many women, also. The arguments against it generally related to the “proper” or “natural” role of women in society. The debate continued for seventy years.

But changes occurred in society. There was increased industrialization and urbanization. A fast growth in wealth led to the “Gilded Age,” a veneer which covered a wide range of corruption and social ills. Reform-minded groups called for change, and an atmosphere conducive to women’s suffrage finally emerged.

The period from 1890 to 1920 became known as the Progressive Era. Reforms in government, education, business, even churches and religion, took place. Leadership cut across party lines, and Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, and Woodrow Wilson were all progressive.

By 1913 in Illinois, the Progressive Party held the balance of power in the state legislature. Women lawyers of the state’s suffrage association had figured out a way to get limited but significant voting rights for women.

The Electoral College is the process that the Founding Fathers established as a compromise between Congress or the public electing the President. Individuals known as “electors” are chosen by each state and it is the electors who actually choose the President. Each state has the authority to decide how its electors are chosen.

In Illinois, a bill allowing women to vote for the state’s electors was drawn up and introduced to the state legislature.

Every conceivable parliamentary maneuver was used by the opposition to keep the bill from coming up for a vote. Hundreds of men went to Springfield to entreat the Speaker to prevent entry of the bill. The Speaker asked the pro-suffrage lobby for a show of support, and he was immediately flooded with letters, telegrams, and telephone calls. Satisfied that there was public support for the bill, he let it go to vote.

When the time came for the vote, women “captains” went so far as to fetch needed male voters from their homes, and stayed on guard duty at the chamber doors to urge members in favor not to leave before the vote, and to prevent opposition lobbyists from being illegally allowed on the floor.

The bill passed. Illinois women became the first in the country with the right to vote in the process to select the U.S. President.

The opposition brought forth more than fifty legal challenges to have the new law declared unconstitutional, but none were successful. Pro-suffrage sentiment across the nation swelled. At the annual suffrage convention in 1916, a plan was developed state by state to procure voting rights in the presidential election process. Delegates went home and put their plans into motion and had successful results. By 1919, the country finally accepted that women were going to find a way to vote.

The women of the Ridge were not idle observers of these events, and many were ardent suffragists. They lost no time exercising their new, hard-won right. The other part of the 1913 Illinois bill covered certain aspects of municipal voting. The Illinois bill was passed on June 26, 1913, and on July 26, 1913, the women of Morgan Park voted for a bond issue to fund a high school. They were the first women in Cook County to vote, and the first woman to cast her ballot was Gertrude Blackwelder, former President of the Chicago Woman’s Club and the Chicago Political Equality League.

The InterOcean newspaper carried an article on the event. Many husbands and wives went to vote together for the first time ever. Even progressive David Herriott, the Morgan Park Postmaster and editor/publisher of the Morgan Park Post, was surprised when the women voted in their own names. His wife told him, “Mrs. David Herriott looks well on calling cards, but Janet Herriott has more political significance.” Janet Herriott cast the second female vote.

The event took on the aura of a garden party, according to the newspaper, with the summer frocks and parasols. It turned into a pleasant social afternoon with no problems. The policeman on duty said it was the most civil election he had ever witnessed. The women’s votes were kept separate from the men’s in case they were challenged legally. The only “bribe” in sight were packets of peanuts provided by the school superintendent, John H. Heil.

Just at closing time, a 65-year old woman rushed in still wearing her apron. She had biscuits in the oven at home and was in a hurry. The process was explained to her – she had to select a slip for or against the high school, fold it, and place it in the ballot box.

“For land’s sake,” she said, “it’s that easy and I’ve always respected a man because he knew enough to vote.”

World War I came in 1917, and women took on many non-traditional roles, both as volunteers and as paid employment. They showed they could keep their homes running and also participate in civic affairs. After years of opposing women’s suffrage, President Woodrow Wilson became an advocate. When the Nineteenth Amendment was finally ratified, the Illinois papers took little notice of it. They had been covering women voting for seven years.