Colorado: A History of the Centennial State, Fifth Edition

11. Women in Politics and Society

183 11 On July 4, 1876, Denverites gathered to celebrate the nation’s centennial. On the banks of the South Platte they watched a parade of the Knights of Pythias, the Governor’s Guard, and the Odd Fellows astride their milk-white horses. They listened to toasts including one to “Woman—the last and best gift of God to man . . . May there yet be had a fuller recognition of her social influence, her legal identity and her political rights.”2 Equal Suffrage Securing women’s political rights took more than Fourth of July rhetoric. In 1870 territorial governor EdwardMcCookurgedlawmakerstofollowWyoming’s lead and allow women to vote. Legislators rejected the notion. Henry P. Bromwell of Denver and Agipeto Vigil, representing Huerfano and Las Animas Counties—delegates to the 1875–76 convention to draft a state constitution —wanted to include equal suffrage in the constitution but were outvoted by their fellow delegates. As a consolation prize, the constitution makers allowed women to vote in school elections and provided that men would hold an 1877 referendum to determine if women should be given full suffrage. Seizing the referendum opportunity, national suffrage leaders Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Stone’s husband, Henry B. Blackwell, and Matilda Hindman The crucial step in women’s history is to see women as actors, not as onlookers in history. No longer are women and women’s concerns marginal; now they are central.1 —SuSan armitagE and ElizabEth JamESon, thE WomEn’S WESt (1987) Women in Politics and Society DOI: 10.5876/9781607322276:c11 chapter eleven 184 joined local suffrage partisans such as Margaret W. Campbell to barnstorm the state in September 1877. In Denver they enjoyed the backing of former territorial governor John Evans. In Greeley they counted on help from Nathan C. Meeker, the town’s founder. By railroad and stagecoach they reached remote places such as Lake City in the San Juan Mountains, where Anthony spoke on a moonlit night under the pine trees because the crowd was too large to be seated indoors. Curious crowds did not signal victory for equal suffrage, which was defeated by a margin of two to one in early October. Most Hispanics in southern counties opposed women voting, as did men in Denver and mountain mining towns. Dismissed as “bawling, ranting women, bristling for their rights” by Presbyterian preacher Reverend Thomas Bliss, women found that men held fast to the past.3 Margaret Campbell reviewed the defeat in the Rocky Mountain News, October 10, 1877. The referendum, she said, had been forced on unprepared women by the constitution makers. Rising to the challenge, “The little band of women speakers had climbed the highest mountain passages, descended into the lowest rockribbed gorges, and have traversed the plains and valleys of Colorado and have not counted their lives dear, if by any means we might lay the foundation for true liberty in this state.” Yet despite support from “Colorado’s most intelligent, most temperate and most moral people,” the women, Campbell said, had been defeated by their enemies: “the ignorant, degraded and superstitious Mexican of the South . . . the rum sellers and their customers, and the uneducated and uncultivated negroes [sic] of the north.” Sixteen years later, in 1893, a handful of reformers—the Colorado NonPartisan Equal Suffrage Association—sensed the time was right for another campaign . National leaders, remembering 1877, cast cold water on the idea. “Have you converted all those Mexicans?” Susan B. Anthony asked skeptically. “Why did you introduce a bill now?” queried Lucy Stone, the movement’s grandmother .4 “I have talked with no one who feels there is the slightest hope of success in Colorado,” wrote suffrage maven Carrie Chapman Catt.5 “Are you sure you have talked with anyone who understands the situation here?” replied Denver newspaperwoman Ellis Meredith.6 Women in southern Colorado, Meredith reported, were threatening to run their anti-suffrage state senator out of the county. Populist governor Davis Waite endorsed suffrage, as did former governor John Routt, a Republican. The opposition saloon keepers and brewers, who feared women voters would crack down on liquor, were not taking the suf- women in politics and society 185 frage campaign seriously and hence had mounted little opposition. Thirty-three newspapers surveyed approved of suffrage; only eleven were opposed. Thomas Patterson, publisher of the Rocky Mountain News, opposed women voting, and his paper was officially neutral. Meredith, however, whose father was the paper’s managing...