By CONNIE ZEIGLER, Contributing editor
In November 1878 – 146 years before the United States will hold a second election in which one of the presidential candidates is a woman – Indianapolis played host to the Women’s Equal Suffrage Association. The Equal Suffrage Association had sought since its inception exactly what its name advertised – voting rights for women equal to those for men.
The 1878 meeting, held Downtown in the Masonic Hall, was not the first time that Indiana’s Woman’s Suffrage Association had hosted women’s suffrage groups in Indianapolis. National conferences had taken place here as early as 1854, according to the Encyclopedia of Indianapolis. Indiana’s association, in fact, was the oldest state group in the country.
In 1854, the famous suffragist, Lucy Stone, gave a series of lectures in the city on women’s rights to employment and suffrage, as well as self-support. Twenty-four years later Stone returned to Indianapolis to speak at the 1878 conference, but it was the men in attendance who garnered first mention in The Indianapolis News. They included several ministers and reporter and historian Barry R. Sulgrove. Also in attendance was Gov. Thomas A. Hendricks’ wife, Eliza Morgan Hendricks, referred to in the newspaper article as “Mrs. Governor Hendricks,” and “other ladies and gentlemen interested in the objects of the association.”
Bostonian Henry Browne Blackwell – women’s rights activist and co-publisher with Lucy Stone of the Woman’s Journal – read aloud the constitution that the association had adopted in 1869. Stone then read the annual report, prefacing it, according to The News article, with these words: “It leaves for this committee the pleasant duty of reporting the gains made on every hand in the great movement of equal rights for women … if our final victory, the preservation of the ballot, did not still remain to be won, we might be pardoned if we paused from the strife to congratulate ourselves on the growth already made ….” She went on to list the gains of increased number of occupations now available to women. The census reported 71 occupations “that are open to women,” including “the pulpit and the bar.” Women were earning higher wages, making gains in higher education offerings and were realizing “almost infinitely better” legal rights as wives and mothers.
Over the next two days the conference educated and enlightened Indianapolis residents and attendees from 14 states on what women’s rights advocates had achieved and on what and how they would continue to work.
Indiana’s representative to the nominating and business committee was the state’s former first lady, Zerelda G. Wallace, whose husband had died in 1859, leaving her penniless with several small children. She had turned her Indianapolis home into a boarding house to support her family and, in her 50s, became a vocal proponent of women’s rights, establishing the local Indianapolis Equal Suffrage Society in her home just a few months earlier in April 1878.
Eliza Hendricks, the current governor’s wife, spoke to the assembly. Gov. Hendricks would later become vice president under Grover Cleveland in 1884, dying in office a year later. Eliza Hendricks would become a tireless proponent for a separate prison facility for women offenders, and for many years served as the president of the board of managers for the Indiana Prison for Women and Reform School for Girls. In 1891 she wrote A Popular History of Indiana.
The Women’s Equal Suffrage Association conference adjourned at the end of its second day after electing officers for the coming year, including Zerelda G. Wallace, one of several vice presidents.
Undoubtedly the women and men who attended the conference left buoyed by the gains that Lucy Stone had listed. And the enthusiasm to reach for more, most especially for suffrage, which they hoped would be forthcoming. But a writer for The Indianapolis News, whose paper had reported on the happenings at the conference, had a different idea about women and what rights they had a right to, one that must have dismayed the members of the Equal Suffrage Association.
In the November 21, 1878, the newspaper published a long diatribe written by an unnamed author addressed Woman Suffrage. The writer blathered at length and quoted both the Bible and Webster’s Dictionary to express his personal belief, and one undoubtedly held by many, that “Woman means ‘wife of man’ and that which constitutes that office is that which gives to the term female its only significance. Most women and all but a few men feel the force of the irreconcilable difference between the purpose of the creator concerning womanhood and that of the woman suffrage association.”
The writer stated that the goal of the association “is to place the sexes on a plane of equality.” However, he wrote, “They are manifestly unequal, or rather unlike in most of their instincts, desires, wants, aspirations and purposes.”
Zerelda Wallace, Lucy Stone and all the other attendees at the Women’s Equal Suffrage Association meeting had been reading these sorts of arguments against women’s suffrage for decades. Because women’s suffrage threatened the status quo, especially for men, those strong women would not see suffrage in their lifetimes.
That would not happen until 1920, but their work inspired the next generation’s work and that generation’s work inspired the next. And here we are in 2024 with another chance to put a woman into the highest office in the country. To quote an old Virginia Slims ad (remember those cigarettes for women?), “It took a long time, baby, to get where we got to today.” Go out and vote. n
Connie Zeigler holds a master’s degree in history. She enjoys digging up a surprising, forgotten story and sharing her pirate’s booty with Urban Times readers.
