ECTTS and Women’s Suffrage

Suffragists, including Gertrude Weil, far left, Mary Borden Graham, fourth from left, and Rowena Borden, far right
Image Source: Suffragists, including Gertrude Weil, far left, Mary Borden Graham, fourth from left, and Rowena Borden, far right, c.1920. Courtesy of the State Archives of North Carolina

During the Training School’s first decade, one of the most relevant but seldom discussed political issues on campus, then with a largely female student body, was women’s suffrage. While students debated the matter from the start, little evidence remains of any individuals or groups taking an aggressive, outspoken public stand. Nor did the otherwise progressive faculty make female suffrage their cause. The relative quiet that prevailed reflected the political reluctance of North Carolina regarding the issue. In mid-August of 1920, North Carolina had the opportunity to become the crucial 36th state to ratify the proposed “Anthony Amendment,” giving it the two-thirds necessary. But the state refused ratification, leaving that honor to neighboring Tennessee which soon affirmed its support, thus making the proposed amendment the law of the land, even in North Carolina. It was only in 1971 that the Old North State, then in a largely symbolic move, ratified the amendment.

Yet once suffrage was granted, President Robert H. Wright addressed the student body forthrightly encouraging the women of the school to vote and participate in politics. More subtlety but clearly, the Training School’s achievements over the previous decade had established women’s readiness to engage in politics as well as public education, suggesting that they needed little encouragement from a man on high. 

The question had surfaced every so often on campus. In the spring of 1913, the Poe and Lanier Societies debated “Woman’s Suffrage in North Carolina.” Commenting on the debaters, the Training School Quarterly praised Poe Society speaker Bessie Doub for her “argumentative powers,” adding that “her militancy and leadership will serve her well when she joins the suffrage campaign for North Carolina.” Lanier Society debater Lela Deans, who argued against suffrage, was also praised for her “militant manner” which reportedly spoke more for the cause of suffrage than it did against. The Poe team was declared the winner, no doubt reflecting the quiet consensus on campus. At the very least, the 1913 debate revealed women’s awareness of issues confronting them and their ability to discuss them in a fair, responsible, and informed way.

A few years later, during the first ECTTS school trip to Raleigh, Colonel Frederick A. Olds coordinated a visit to the Supreme Court chambers where the Training School group, all females, met Chief Justice Walter Clark. Colonel Olds seated several of the group, including two Training School instructors, Sallie Joyner Davis and Kate Lewis, and three female students, in the justices’ chairs. Endorsing the symbolic seating, Chief Justice Clark observed that “he expected soon to see women grace the bench.” The students “warmly applauded” and assured him that “they were all suffragettes, to the last one.” This brief exchange between Chief Justice Clark and the Training School group suggests that there was substantial campus support for suffrage.

Toward the end of the decade, campus speakers predicted that suffrage would soon be a reality. In 1919, Dr. M. L. Kesler, in his commencement sermon before the YWCA, declined to discuss suffrage, but then added that the suffrage movement was “only one of the symptoms showing that women were finding themselves, but it [suffrage] is coming and women must be ready to meet it and meet it so that they can help in the big tasks.” In his commencement address, Durham attorney Victor Silas Bryant, a champion of women’s suffrage as a state legislator, added, “Thoughtful people realize that suffrage is about to be cast upon woman, great problems are about to be cast upon them.” And, writings contributed to the Training School Quarterly encouraged in no uncertain terms the prospects for women and women’s suffrage. North Carolina commissioner of public welfare, R. F. Beasley, in his “The Increasing Social Consciousness,” remarked, “Those who oppose equal suffrage are simply bickering over a detail whose significance is wholly swallowed up in the larger fact that woman’s ideals, which are the higher and more permanent ideals of the race, are taking possession of the world faster and faster.” Beasley thus hinted that women were in fact more deserving of the vote than men.

President Robert Wright did not, himself, take a strong public stand. However, following ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, he stated, in a school address delivered October 19, 1920, “it makes no difference how one stood on the woman suffrage question before now, it is the duty of every good woman to exercise the privilege of citizenship by registering and voting. There is no option. Today and tomorrow are yours, yesterday is gone forever not to return.” The Greenville Times observed, “In such clear ringing words did he impress upon the young women the stand they should take.” Yet Wright’s remarks were contextualized in classist thinking about politics, distinguishing the “lowest type” of voter from the “highest,” and observing that elected officials were just slightly better than the average voting citizen, making it imperative that “the standard of citizenship” be as high as possible. Implied was that educated ECTTS students, as part of a new, educated elite, could and should contribute to higher standards of citizenship by voting.

Wright’s early reticence perhaps resulted from the fact that major political figures and some members of the board of trustees opposed the amendment. At the dedication of the Pitt County Confederate monument, Governor Locke Craig openly declared his opposition to woman’s suffrage even as he otherwise “eulogized womankind.” Sallie Southall Cotten, a leading figure in the North Carolina Federation of Women’s Clubs, had not been a supporter of the youthful suffrage movement or the Anthony Amendment. Board member and former state senator, Fordyce C. Harding, addressing Greenville’s “End of the Century Book Club,” stated that “constitutionally he was opposed to woman suffrage and disliked to see women brought into politics, but now that she was, he hoped to see her wield her influence along the lines of equity and justice.”

Harding reportedly added that “he was a Democrat because his party stood for white supremacy.” He further noted that the state, in his view, was in danger and for that reason, “women should throw prejudice aside and vote.” Harding’s remarks hinted that suffrage extension might eventually entail even larger numbers of African-American men and women with the franchise as well. Opponents of the proposed amendment indeed suggested that approval of it would then result in “negro domination.” Even defenders of women’s suffrage replied by stating that “every thinking man knows that the south is well able to take care of itself where the black man is concerned.” Others simply cited the math, noting that the white female population of North Carolina, 358,583, was some 50,000 more than the combined total of “colored men and women, 305,988.” Thus, there were unsavory racial dimensions to the female suffrage question, as Harding’s remarks suggested. Looked at differently, the state senator’s observations pointed to another crucial issue that remained for the future: to what extent the suffrage might be extended more fairly to the non-white population, male and female.

Apart from these comments from men on high, the achievements of the Training School students, all of them female by 1920, convinced many, without demonstrations or political activism, that women were fully prepared for a more responsible, participatory role in the politics of the community and the nation. Most immediately, ECTTS’s contributions, in 1917-1918, to the American cause in WWI – whether in the form of picking cotton, cleaning tennis courts, assuming campus custodial duties, or purchasing U. S. Liberty Bonds – helped to persuade skeptics that well-educated, politically informed, patriotic women making their stand on behalf of democracy, freedom, and people’s rights surely merited their say at the ballot box. Through their distinguished work as engaged citizens and devoted, service-minded students, the Training School girls had sufficiently communicated, with crystal clarity, their stand on women’s suffrage.

Sources

Citation Information

Title: ECTTS and Women's Suffrage, 1920

Author: John A. Tucker, PhD

Date of Publication: 4/6/2020

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