Political Involvement and Social Status

Mary Fletcher, a socially-prominent Little Rock suffragist, founded the Political Equality League (PEL), the organization that delivered the vote to many Arkansas women in 1917 after 40 years of on-again, off-again agitation.

The pursuit of suffrage brought Arkansas women into the political arena for decades prior. It appeared on the agenda of the 1868 Arkansas Constitutional Convention and was introduced by a male abolitionist. Dogged by cultural assumptions about women’s place and concerns about further controlling the African American vote, the matter received short shrift. However, it did not disappear. The PEL was a successor to attorney Lizzie Dorman Fyler’s effort in Eureka Springs (1881-1885) and to civic reformer and real estate businesswoman Clara Cox McDiarmid’s (1847-1899) work in Little Rock in the 1890s.

The suffrage movement brought together middle class and elite women around wide-ranging issues. Many, such as Fyler & McDiarmid who shared Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) backgrounds, paired prohibition of alcohol with the vote. Others were from study and civic clubs that flourished statewide and nationally beginning in the 1880s. Those concentrated on issues such as public libraries, education, and public health and routinely addressed the Legislature and the men in their private lives to accomplish advocated changes.

The organization that brought these diverse women’s organizations together initially was the Arkansas Federation of Women’s Clubs, formed in 1897. As early as 1899, the federation advocated for school suffrage for women as guardians of children’s interests. The 1901-1904 report advocated school board eligibility for women. A pattern followed showing support for equal pay for equal work, admission of women to the bar, and related matters. In 1915, when the PEL joined the federation, the push for the vote gained momentum and was secured, largely for white women, via the primary tactic.

Approximately 14 percent of the Little Rock electors for 1917-1918 were women, including some women of color, indicating a savvy response to the restrictive voter rolls and an ability to pay toll tax. Twenty percent of Arkansas voters in the 1920 presidential election were women. One consequence of African American women’s participation in these early primaries and the 1920 election was implementation of additional Jim Crow measures that further restricted access to the vote and effected the all-white primary in Arkansas and other Southern states.

For mid-South clubwomen, this was a separate and unequal world. An Arkansas woman, Mrs. Fredrick Hanger of Little Rock, penned a widely-circulated resolution objecting to the admission of colored women’s clubs into the General Federation of Women’s Clubs in 1901. The pioneering work of Mary Church Terrell in nearby Memphis and the Arkansas chapters of the Association of Colored Women, formed as early as 1897, were not seen as evidence of equality, if they were in fact recognized across the color line. By and large, white Arkansas clubwomen worked toward selected social changes from a vantage that preserved their own privileges and the status quo.

An additional activity that brought many women together, and into the public arena, was participation in the patriotic or heritage societies: Daughters of the American Revolution, United Daughters of the Confederacy, Colonial Dames, and others. Formed in the 1890s, these organizations focused on memorialization efforts, student history contests, scholarships, and related projects. While Jim Crow was associated especially with the southern region including Arkansas, it was a shared national phenomenon. These societies were among its creators.

There is little evidence of club and suffragist alliances with labor and working women in Arkansas that appear elsewhere on the national scene. The southwest section of the state – Fort Smith, bordering Oklahoma and Kansas – was a Socialist stronghold at the turn of the 20th century. The activities of individual suffragist-Socialist figures such as Freda Hogan Ameringer, who saw woman suffrage as a means toward a cooperative commonwealth, are well documented. However, no links between these figures and the more individualistically-minded federation/clubwomen’s movement have been found to date.

Also not located to date is material documenting club/suffragist recognition of two World War I era working women’s strikes that would have affected the public considerably: the Fort Smith-Little Rock-Pine Bluff-Fayetteville telephone operators’ strike, 1917, and the Little Rock black laundresses strike, 1918-1919. However, the Club pages during the WWI years demonstrate attention to the status of working women, and the postwar federation agenda focused on social policies affecting women and children.

Finally, the World War I volunteer work that demonstrated the abilities of countless women and helped clinch the suffrage argument, also revealed ‘anti’ sentiment from a different direction. Arkansas Council of Defense records show that numerous women in Delta and hill country counties hesitated or refused to register as volunteers for the war effort – for fear of being forced to vote, leave home, or become converts to woman suffrage.