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Winning the Vote in Fort Wayne, Indiana
The Long, Cautious Journey in a German American City
PEGGY SEIGEL
| At noon on August 28, 1920, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and across the nation, the world seemed to come to a standstill. For ten minutes every church bell and factory whistle broadcast the revolutionary change that had finally come to American women. The previous January, Indiana had become the twenty-sixth state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, and after a painfully close vote in Tennessee, the required three-fourths approval had just been achieved. After more than seventy years of struggle, women could finally vote at all levels of government. Suffrage, once a hopeless cause, now enjoyed majority support. It was a time for celebration, confidence, and new beginnings. |
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The story of Fort Wayne women's long journey to fuller citizenship is a fascinating chapter in regional and national history. In common with general trends, in the nineteenth century the city's women's rights pioneers challenged legal and social barriers that perpetuated female inequality. In the decades bridging the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, women became more concerned with addressing problems in their industrial city than with challenging the structures of patriarchal society. Nevertheless, through female-only clubs they acquired new public roles and greater confidence, necessary building blocks for a future suffrage movement. In the second decade of the twentieth century, energized by the growing state and national support of woman suffrage, club women championed suffrage with passion and commitment.1 |
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As in other communities, Fort Wayne women faced generations of deep resistance. Despite the social changes that came with industrialization and rapid population growth, in the nineteenth century few Hoosiers, indeed few Americans, supported changes in traditional gender roles. Beginning in the decade after the Civil War, however, Fort Wayne women faced a different but equally intractable opposition. Fearing that women would use the vote for prohibition, politicians and business leaders representing the city's majority German American population blocked legislative efforts and stifled popular support until the final years leading up to the Nineteenth Amendment. The connection of suffrage to temperance, a relationship that in other states brought women into the political process, was highly detrimental to the growth of the suffrage movement in Fort Wayne. With few allies in the male power establishment, the city's women were latecomers to the political campaign for suffrage. |
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A QUEST DEFERRED: 1851–1880 | |
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Historian Blanche Glassman Hersh's analysis of nineteenth-century feminist abolitionists provides a helpful insight for understanding Fort Wayne's pioneer suffragists. Through their work for the liberation of slaves, Hersh writes, feminist leaders including Abby Kelly, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott became conscious of their own gender limitations. Beginning in the 1840s they called on women to pursue meaningful activities and, above all, to assert their right to determine their own lives. The goals of the pioneer feminist abolitionists were to liberate people both in their social interactions and in their family settings. These deeply religious women believed that society needed their "moral and spiritual influence."2 |
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Feminist abolitionists organized the first national women's rights meeting at Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848. In the following decade, informal coordinating committees organized annual national conventions that were largely publicized in antislavery newspapers. On the state level, women's rights leaders formed associations in New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and farther west in Ohio and Indiana. At both the national and state levels, these pioneers championed broad political, social, and economic changes for women, including the right to vote. Prior to the Civil War, however, these groups met irregularly and often remained informally organized.3 |
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