Woman Suffrage and Progressive Reform in Louisville, 1908–1920

"I am a suffragist, but not 'high church,'" said the minister and social reformer Anna Garlin Spencer to the delegates to the convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1908. "I am a suffragist and something else." By emphasizing her work for social reform—"something else"—Spencer acknowledged that woman suffrage as an end in itself had not always been a popular cause. Most nineteenth-century women, in fact, had not found the prospect of participating in politics attractive, for politics was a male ritual celebrated by barroom meetings, military-style parades and insignia, aggressively partisan posturing, sometimes even rioting and assassination. Only when activist women created a new definition of politics, based on values and aims that they recognized as their own, did the suffrage cause gain the support of a mass movement. The creators of this new political culture were the large numbers of women who worked for social reform in many areas from the 1890s until the 1920s—a period that historians call the Progressive Era. From 1908 until 1920, the Woman Suffrage Association of Louisville (LWSA) channeled the energies of women reformers into the suffrage movement.¹

Existing accounts of the state's suffrage movements largely overlook Louisville because they focus chiefly on two leaders, Laura Clay and Madeline McDowell Breckinridge, whom historians portray as "southern ladies" born into the landowning class that lived chiefly in the rural areas around the small cities of Lexington and Richmond and carried traditional conceptions of noblesse oblige into their political work. Certainly, Kentucky's suffrage movement was originally centered in Lexington, but it could not win what Laura Clay called "the argument of numbers" in the towns and rural areas of the state. Only by shifting its center to Louisville, Kentucky's single large city, did the movement gain the momentum it needed to win the vote for Kentucky women. In Louisville, as in cities across the United States and the world, women emerged as social reformers who worked as both volunteers and professionals to improve the urban environment. These newly active citizens learned political skills: to formulate an agenda, build coalitions, draft legislation, and persuade state and local governments to pass it. In this context, the ballot became both a means to a wide variety of ends and an end in itself. LWSA leaders recruited a diverse group of supporters, pioneered new strategies and tactics, and worked at the local, state, and national levels for the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.²

Like other American cities, Louisville became a center of progressive activism partly because it attracted large groups of educated and socially conscious women. By 1908, when our story begins, a population of about 220,000 made it one of the American south's largest cities. Louisville women varied widely in occupations, ethnic and religious affiliations, economic status, and educational attainments—a diversity that the membership of the Woman Suffrage Association of Louisville reflected. Some members might well have thought of themselves as "southern ladies" like their Lexington colleagues Clay and Breckinridge. For example, Caroline Apperson Leech and Mary Lafon, both among Louisville's earliest suffragists, were born to slaveholding families in small towns and left their rural homes to find a broader sphere of activity in the city. Julia Duke Henning, who served for several years as LWSA's president, was the daughter of one ex-Confederate general (Basil Duke) and the niece of another (John Hunt Morgan). A larger group of members, however, had little or no relationship to Kentucky's traditional agrarian culture. They belonged to families that were active in business, and many had moved to Louisville for its commercial opportunities. Susan Look Avery, who founded both the first Louisville suffrage society, the Louisville Equal Rights Association, in 1889, and its much larger sister society, the Woman's Club of Louisville, in 1890, moved from upstate New York to Louisville with her husband, Benjamin, whose firm eventually became the country's largest producer of plows.³

Julia Duke Henning (1875–1961) the woman citizen, july 1918