Community NY: Historic Sites Relating to Women's Suffrage in Central New York

The movement for women's right to vote—totally nonviolent—formed one of the largest campaigns for human rights in U.S. history. Central New York was nationally important in this movement. We all know something about famous woman suffragists from this region—from Susan B. Anthony to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Hester Jeffrey, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Frederick Douglass. But what do we know about the hundreds of thousands of ordinary and not-so-ordinary people who joined these national leaders? These women and men from farms, villages, and cities reflected a wide variety of ethnic, racial, cultural, and economic backgrounds.

Their numbers were astounding. Here are just three examples, from 1894, 1915, and 1917.

In 1894, suffragists organized a statewide petition campaign "to strike the word 'male' from Article II, Section 1, of the constitution, and thus secure to the women of the State the right to vote on equal terms with men." The Grange, labor unions, and Women's Christian Temperance Union joined the New York State Woman Suffrage Association to collect almost 600,000 signatures from men and women, upstate and downstate (almost one-quarter of New York State's adult population in 1890), on these petitions.

In 1915, about 40,000 marchers walked down Fifth Avenue in the largest suffrage parade ever organized. Suffragists printed 7,230,000 leaflets, 657,200 booklets, 149,533 posters, and a million suffrage buttons, urging New Yorkers to vote yes on women's suffrage in 1915. They lost.

Two years later, in 1917, suffragists repeated their campaign with even more energy. More than a million New Yorkers (about 25 percent of the total adult population in 1920) signed a petition for woman suffrage in 1917. Suffragists held 9,000 meetings upstate and more than 11,000 in New York City. This time they were successful. Although upstate New

Workshop participants, Wood Library, Canandaigua, October 2018. photo by author.

York defeated the measure by 1,510 votes, New York City—buoyed by labor unions and immigrant districts—carried the amendment by 103,863 votes.¹

Homes, churches, and meeting spaces that help tell the story of this immense movement still stand in neighborhoods all across New York State. In 2019, to help locate these historic sites, Preserve New York (a program of the New York State Council on the Arts and the Preservation League of New York State) funded a cultural resource survey focused on women's suffrage sites in central New York. The Ontario County Historical Society (with Ed Varno, director, and Wilma Townsend, curator) sponsored this survey and hired Judith Wellman, principal investigator, Historical New York Research Associates, to carry it out. Dana Teets, a student in the public history program at Nazareth College, was database manager.

By limiting this first attempt to central New York, we hoped to (a) identify historic suffrage sites that could be nominated to the National Register of Historic Places; (b) create a model project that might be expanded to the rest of New York State; and (c) identify sites that could be added to the National Votes for Women Trail (www.nvwt.org) with markers supplied by the William G. Pomeroy Foundation (https://www.wgpfoundation.org/).

We began with a workshop of local historians and other interested stakeholders from central New York. We ended with three main documents:

1. (1). an historic context statement, outlining the development of the suffrage movement in central New York;

2. (2). a database with names of 475 central New York suffragists, adding to Tom Dublin's suffrage biographies for Women and Social Movements (https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/VOTESforWOMEN); and

3. (3). a database listing 209 women's suffrage sites in central New York.

These results are online at https://www.ochs.org/womens-suffrage/. Three major possibilities emerged from this project. First, New York State's Historic Preservation Office determined that many of these suffrage sites are eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. Our work might also form the basis of a Multiple Property Document Form, so that suffrage...