An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century

17 Rights

Although her Miami Herald predecessor limited the society page to unoffending prosaic items of the commons, Douglas quickly proved more adventurous. When she began covering club meetings, she was pleasantly surprised to meet so many educated, worldly women. They came from different parts of the country, many had lived abroad, and some spoke foreign languages. She found herself reporting on an unexpected range of club activities that included health and sanitation improvement, prison reform, conservation, Belgian war relief, Prohibition, and suffrage. She came to know the various men’s organizations, too, such as the Masons, who were interested in business development and municipal operations. But she learned that women’s organizations “in isolated places like this in many parts of the country . . . were a kind of selfproduced university . . . a small, respectable pot, boiling away unnoticed, a stirring of minds, a spirit of inquiry, a new awareness of ideas.” Here was her Wellesley indoctrination into the activist woman in living flesh, not the college-professor radical but the housewife and mother, middle class and privileged, who knew what she wanted for her community and state. Rights [ c h a p t e r s e v e n t e e n 17. rights [ 229 Just as women had politicized their clubs, Douglas politicized the society page. On her third day on the job, she ran an article on woman suffrage . She was particularly interested in highlighting women in executive positions in higher education, including at industrial schools, to illustrate their leadership capabilities and thus their capacity for the ballot. She made such items a mainstay of the newspaper. When she took over as interim editor during her father’s absence, suffrage pieces—the local and national movement and the club women behind it—moved from the second or third page to the front page and the editorial page. Suffrage work provided the real beginning to her activist life; her experience as a suffragist remained always personally important to her. Later in her long life, it gave her a historical foundation on which no other Florida activist in the late twentieth century could draw directly. By the time Douglas arrived at the Herald, the mantle of woman suffrage in Florida was passing on to a second generation. An earlier newspaper woman, Ella C. Chamberlain, had served as Florida’s voting-rights trailblazer . In 1892, she attended a suffrage conference in Des Moines, Iowa, returned home to Tampa, and began barnstorming the state and writing fiery commentary for her column in the Tampa Morning Tribune. The following year, she organized the Florida Woman Suffrage Association in affiliation with Susan B. Anthony’s National American Woman Suffrage Association. At the time, Wyoming and Colorado were the only states that allowed women to vote, although Idaho and other western states soon followed. The South was gelling into a one-party region, overturning Reconstruction to purge blacks and carpetbagger Republicans from the political process. In 1887 and in spite of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, Florida Democrats mandated a poll tax and partisan poll watchers, thereby leading the other southern states in creating a white male political empire whose power brokers had little interest in opening the system to white women. The legislature never considered granting women the franchise during Chamberlain’s time, and after she left the state in 1897, the movement for woman suffrage tumbled into decline. 230 ] part two By the time it acquired renewed force, around 1912, expanded voting rights remained a long shot. Florida women were, nevertheless, more revved up than before. The national movement was generating noticeable excitement, and Florida now had more female residents to become excited. In 1913, local suffrage leagues sprang to life in Jacksonville, Orlando , and Lake Helen. A delegation of women then formed the Florida Equal Suffrage Association (FESA) to coordinate the effort statewide . Under May Mann Jennings’s stewardship, the Florida Federation of Women’s Clubs (FFWC) lent its considerable influence to the movement. By 1915, women were voting in a few municipal elections, but equal suffrage remained far away. Activists wanted the legislature to take one of three possible steps: allow primary voting for women, approve a constitutional amendment for woman suffrage in state elections, or—preferably —ratify the federal Susan B. Anthony Amendment (later the Nineteenth Amendment). With their numbers peaking at fewer than 800, Florida suffragists who organized rallies, wrote letters, gave speeches, and marched in the streets...