Women's Suffrage Poster (digitally restored)
New York State Library
Every year, do you celebrate what happened on November 6, 1917? Maybe you should. On that day, the voters of the State of New York (all of them men, incidentally) decided that thereafter, women would be entitled to vote in all elections held in the state. Getting things changed took a lot of work by a lot of people - and some people in Hicksville were part of it.
Introduction
At the start of 1917, female American citizens who resided in any state east of the Rockies (except Kansas) had no vote, or only a limited vote. Among those states were four of the nation's most populous: Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. During 1917, one of those four, New York, voted to open its ballot boxes equally to men and women.*
*Note that other constraints still remained. For example, many Chinese, whether male or female, were still denied citizenship, and thus were not eligible to vote.
The Woman Citizen, November 24, 1917
Above is an end-of-1917 map. Starting with the line of states that extends from Minnesota through Louisiana, and heading towards the Atlantic, there are thirty-one states. By this time, some had taken timid first steps towards women's suffrage. Incredibly, New York was the ONLY state of the thirty-one to have granted unrestricted suffrage to women!
There were many reasons, including the significant contributions being made by women to the country's war effort in 1917-1918, why the idea of full women's suffrage would continue to gain national support, but the victory in New York - the first in any of the original thirteen United States - was symbolic and inspiring. It showed America that the issue of women's suffrage need not divide the country between the West and the East, or between the Old states and New.
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Obviously, the saga of women's suffrage in America is not in itself a Hicksville story - but it is interesting to see how things played out locally. The nation's cities may have hosted the biggest parades and conventions, but all across country, in towns and villages like Hicksville, people worked for years, organizing small lectures and meetings, sustaining public interest, debating with anti-suffragists, and garnering funds as well as people's support.
Let's take a look.
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The Political Equality League
In the late 1870s, efforts to add a Women's Suffrage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution had failed. It took time for proponents to build new momentum. By the 1890s, mention of the subject again appeared with some frequency in the press, in part because suffrage had been granted to women in other countries, such as Australia.
Across America, a network of local support groups was coalescing. This organized yet "grass roots" approach tapped into regional and national suffragist resources, providing even small towns with speakers and informative printed literature. The earliest instance I have found of this network's reaching Hicksville dates from 1911:
Huntington Long-Islander, June 23, 1911
A few notes:
- Mrs. Belmont was the sister-in-law of August Belmont Jr., who had lost the battle for the trolley franchise that then was about to link Hicksville to towns as far west as Flushing; v. Ancient Hixtory August 2018.
- She previously was married to Willie K. Vanderbilt of racing fame; v. Ancient Hixtory February 2019
- Brookholt was the name of the O. H. P. Belmont estate in East Meadow.
Alva Belmont was an ideal person to promote the suffragist cause; she was locally prominent, respected, wealthy, and widowed. She could give the cause all the time and money she wished, and she could lead by example, encouraging other women to do the same in their own respective towns. People like Alva Belmont made the suffragist cause contagious.
We cannot tell with certainty what followed her June appearance, but there likely were many telephone calls, invitations to tea, and planning sessions throughout the summer and autumn. Come December, a coordinated Nassau County Women's Suffrage Campaign began, with meetings held in Farmingdale, Mineola, Oyster Bay, Hicksville, and several other towns during the first half of December. The coordinator of these meetings likely was Jessie Hardy Stubbs, well-known women's suffragist and pacifist who traveled from coast to coast. In a few months she would hike from Manhattan to Albany, to present a letter in support of women's suffrage to the Governor.
Evidently, Stubbs found a willing audience in Hicksville. She returned eight days after her first visit, sat down with a group of interested volunteers, and Hicksville's chapter of the Political Equality League was formed. Its President was Johanna Taliaferro - like Alva Belmont, Taliaferro was locally prominent, respected, wealthy, and widowed. Note that the new chapter's Lydia Kraemer was already the head of the local Women's Christian Temperance Union, a group which favored women's suffrage.
Huntington Long-Islander, January 5, 1912
Publicity photo for a Brooklyn leaflet campaign;
rooftop of the Academy of Music, c.1910
Wikipedia Commons
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Johanna Augustin Taliaferro
Pssssst! Don't worry; you can give your tongue a break. The surname Taliaferro is generally pronounced Tolliver (see the Appendix to this article).
Johanna Augustin Taliaferro
July 26, 1872 - June 14, 1964
"digitally restored" versions of online images found in the
Hicksville Public Library Collection at nyheritage.org
She was the first daughter of Frederick Julius Augustin, one of the early German settlers of Hicksville who rose to prominence. He was a man who went quickly from one success to the next. He published a newspaper in German for his fellow immigrants, but left it for a new challenge: establishing a thriving retail business. He sold the business once the challenge was gone, and decided to retire young. His concept of retirement did not differ substantially from what we would consider working. He settled into an impressive home, and soon added a retail lumberyard and coal yard to the property. He remained active in church and fraternal activities, and he also served as a TOBAY Justice of the Peace.
In the picture of the young Johanna, above, she reminds one of her father, as seen in a portrait in the Evers' book on Hicksville. She too looks thoughtful, accepting rather than determined, and not at all carefree. That's understandable. Her young mother, Johanna Freytag Augustin, had died four days after giving birth to Johanna. Julius must have done everything in his power to get his wife the best medical attention, for she died in Manhattan, probably in a hospital. New York City records say that she was only eighteen.
Like her mother, Johanna Augustin married at seventeen. Her husband, Dr. Fontaine Newton Taliaferro, had been born in Virginia; he practiced in Hicksville and served as Coroner. A son was born four years after they married, and given his father's name. Fontaine Sr. became ill and died nine months after becoming a father. The following year, the new widow's father Julius, fifty-seven years old, died after a struggle with kidney disease. Johanna moved in with her grandmother Freytag. She would never remarry.
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By the time the renaissance of women's suffrage activity was reaching its height, Johanna Taliaferro had become an officer of Plainlawn Cemetery, had lost a bid to be elected to the School Board (perhaps because Hicksville did not elect women to the School Board in those years), had become a founding member of the first Rebekah Lodge (part of the Foresters organization) in Nassau County, had donated a new bell to the Methodist Episcopal Church, and was developing or selling idle properties that had belonged to her grandmother. Part of the latter effort included her becoming proprietor of the Kenmore Hotel on West Marie Street. She pleased Hicksville's townsfolk by having cement sidewalks poured from Broadway to Jerusalem Avenue on the north side of Marie Street.
Clearly, this was the kind of woman whom the movement had wanted to recruit.
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On August 23, 1912, Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive Party - aka the Bull Moose Party - held a "mass meeting" in Hicksville's Grand Central Hotel. On the agenda was an address by a government official, who explained the legal issues to be faced by efforts to establish women's suffrage in New York State. This was not surprising - at the party's recent convention, some "upstarts" had succeeded in revising the party platform to be in favor women's suffrage.
The following month, the largest Mineola Fair to date was held. Yellow, the color adopted by the suffragist movement, was much in evidence - there were yellow banners, yellow placards, and even yellow cars owned by "suffragettes." Johanna Taliaferro was there, working the crowds along with dozens of other women, signing up supporters.
On the eve of the November election, William Sulzer, Democratic (and soon-to-be-victorious) candidate for Governor, arrived in Hicksville by train, and made a brief last-ditch speech, presumably from the open platform of an observation car. An uninvited suffragist deliberately drove up at the same time to poach the crowd, addressing it from her yellow touring car.
Huntington Long-Islander, November 8, 1912
The next day, however, the voters again did not choose to grant New York women suffrage. Part of the difficulty lay with the simultaneous promotion of Prohibition by women; men who otherwise might have considered supporting women's suffrage feared that, if allowed to vote, most women would be pro-temperance.
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On to the Final Rounds
With the 1912 election over, the movement looked ahead, seeking new ways to move forward. Local groups began to yield the floor to larger regional events that attracted more attention, but even so, the villages were not to be forgotten.
On May 24, 1913, there was a Votes for Women Pageant, in which five hundred women paraded from Mineola to Hempstead.
There were two official Grand Marshals for the parade, both male.
Each had distinguished himself working to advance women's suffrage.
One was in the parade; the other flew his plane overhead;
note how the driver in the photograph is looking skyward.
https://msmagazine.com/2020/05/24/today-in-feminist-history-votes-for-women-and-parades-too-may-24-1913/
Although pageants and parades attracted people, not everyone could - or would want to - go to see them. Thus, a new suffragist phenomenon was introduced to Nassau County on that day: the Flying Squadron. Clusters of automobiles visited more than twenty villages, including Hicksville, while the pageant was taking place. At each stop, suffragist speakers told the people who had gathered that the movement would continue, and explained to them why they ought to support it. The work would go on as long as necessary, until victory was won.
Huntington Long-Islander, June 11, 1915
There were suffragist bake sales, and suffragist speakers at the Hicksville Fire House, sometimes presented in conjunction with the Jericho Political Equality League. That fall, women's suffrage again was defeated at the polls, and the local margins of loss remained significant.
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Judging by the newspapers, the suffrage movement was quiet in 1916 - or perhaps it was merely preempted by news of the continuing war in Europe. By 1917, however, the movement was again looking ahead to an autumn vote in New York State. The first sign of new life appeared in the newspapers in February, when two women spoke at a meeting in Hicksville's Town Hall, discussing the benefits which other jurisdictions had experienced after granting voting rights to women.
In May, the New York State Women's Suffrage Association held a "Long Island Suffrage Rally" at the Garden City Hotel.The local newspapers pointed out that Hicksvillians could easily get there by automobile, train, or trolley.
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Storage Jars Help Make the Difference
Suddenly, things were different - with the country going to war, it needed all the help that women could give. In a story somewhat reminiscent of a Monty Python episode, it was reported that women all over Long Island had been transformed into vital wartime resources, and now were efficiently preserving vast quantities of food in jars, thanks to the Food Reserve Battalion.
New York Herald, July 8, 1917
With women contributing so visibly to the war effort, many men on the home front faced a dilemma. Even if they opposed Prohibition, would their consciences allow them to vote against women's suffrage come November?
Some among them, perhaps less generous in spirit, faced a slightly different version of the same problem. Men were registering for the draft; others were enlisting. Women were already working at various jobs men had vacated. If you lived in a small rural town, and everyone knew that you liked to drink your beer or your liquor once in a while, and women's suffrage was again rejected at the local polls, everybody - "everybody" now being mostly women - was going to start looking at you a lot less kindly, because they pretty much knew that you'd voted against it. Just saying.
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The Hicksville page of the Long-Islander of October 12, 1917 mentions an upcoming "big suffrage rally in Fireman's Hall." Of greater interest is a separate article on the same page. After receiving a petition signed by nearly 14,000 Nassau County women who could gain the right to vote after the upcoming election, the County Board of Supervisors officially endorsed the proposed amendment to the State Constitution. Two weeks later, enthusiasm ran high as another women's suffrage meeting was held at the Town Hall.
On October 20, the Sea Cliff News reported that many Nassau County women would be taking part in the New York City suffrage parade scheduled for one week later. The report claimed that the parade might well "outstrip" any similar parade previously held anywhere in the United States - and perhaps it did. It was not the showiest suffragist parade ever, but it may have been the most dignified, and it was very suitable for wartime. It took 2½ hours for the 25,000 marchers to pass any given point. The paraders carried the signatures of more than 1,000,000 women who had petitioned for the right to vote.
The thoughtful words below convey very well how things had changed.
excerpt from 25,000 SUFFS WIN CHEERS IN PARADE
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 28, 1917
Most of the excerpt above is clear. For those readers who want to know what Service Flags were, and the significance of the stars they carried, I refer you to one of the first articles in this series: Ancient Hixtory June 2018.
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Back Where We Started
There was a large voter turnout, and as always, people wanted to find out what happened as soon as possible. Radio had not yet come along, so many people in the City gathered in Times Square - where the NY Times still had its own building - to see the results as soon as they were flashed to the public.
Easy as pie, right?
New York Times, November 5, 1917
The white searchlight waggled to the west; the suffragists finally had carried New York. It would not be long until the U.S. Constitution was similarly amended.
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Appendix
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 7, 1911
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