Georgia Women: Their Lives and Times

Mary Latimer McLendon (1840–1921): "Mother of Suffrage Work in Georgia"

245 Mary Latimer McLendon (1840–1921) “Mother of Suffrage Work in Georgia” stacey horstmann gatti    Mary Latimer McLendon, like her better-known sister, Rebecca Latimer Felton, was raised in an antebellum slaveholding Georgia family and supported the Confederacy during the Civil War as a loyal daughter of the Old South. Following the war and Reconstruction, both Latimer sisters reacted to the end of their antebellum society by creating a new identity for white women of the New South that included bringing women into politics as both activists and voters. Mary, unlike her sister, however, did not move into politics through her role as political wife, but rather as a consequence of facing the challenges of urban life in the New South. As a resident of the rapidly growing city of Atlanta during the late nineteenth century, McLendon faced the struggles of maintaining the values of white womanhood she learned as a young woman. As an elite white Southern woman, although interested in listening to political discussions, McLendon initially accepted politics as men’s domain. She also believed that white women should bear the responsibility for sustaining and protecting the moral development of their families and communities, but by the end of the nineteenth century, after managing an urban household, raising three children, and serving as an active church member and temperance reformer, she became convinced that white women could no longer properly fulfill their responsibilities without moving into politics. As McLendon explained to her sister members of the Georgia Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in 1910, “To do her duty nobly and well, the woman of today must take her place at the ballot box beside her husband, father and brothers, and use the ballot, not as a toy or plaything, but as a tool with which to carve out for the children of the race a better and brighter future.”1 McLendon thus advocated the enfranchisement mary latimer mclendon Courtesy of Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. Mary Latimer McLendon 247 of white women in her state, and throughout her adult life she would work to bring the voices of white women into politics. McLendon’s experience as a wife, mother, and community leader in Atlanta during and following the Civil War illustrates the changing roles of urban white southern women adjusting to the demands and realities of the New South and creating a new political and social identity for themselves. This identity continued to connect women to family, church, and community but also propelled women into moral reform and political activism. Thousands of other white southern women joined McLendon as they swelled the ranks of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, but fewer women shared in her enthusiastic support for woman suffrage through the National American Woman Suffrage Association. McLendon’s story of the struggle for white women to define the parameters of their participation in the political and social world of the New South illuminates trends followed by other white women in Georgia, the South, and, albeit with some substantial modifications, throughout the United States as the nation moved from its agrarian, rural roots to a more industrial, urban country during the years following the Civil War. Women who grew up in leading plantation families found themselves adjusting to new economic, social, and political conditions by engaging in political activism on their own behalf.2 During her childhood, Mary Latimer’s family provided the financial, educational , and emotional support that made possible her adult activism. By the time Mary entered their lives on June 24, 1840, her parents, Charles Latimer and Eleanor Swift Latimer, and her five-year-old sister, Rebecca, were already wellestablished residents of DeKalb County. The family, descendants of Maryland and Virginia planters, owned a plantation, a general store, and a tavern, and they ran the local post office on Covington Road ten miles south of Decatur. Charles Latimer’s devotion to the cause of his children’s education, even when it required personal and financial sacrifice, initially ensured his children’s status as members of the southern elite, but ultimately this education prepared his daughters to reinterpret their role in society. The year Mary was born her father coordinated efforts to improve the educational opportunities for the community by helping to build a quality school. He donated land and money, hired its first teacher, and immediately enrolled his eldest daughter in the school.3 When this initial venture of...