Of women’s suffrage and women in leadership
By Erik Pekar, Town Historian
This year marks a hundred years since women’s suffrage, the right for women to vote in elections, was fully legalized in the entire United States. The movement for women’s suffrage began in the 1840s, and a solid platform of goals was established at the Seneca Falls Convention, held in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York.
Attempts were made by women to use laws and amendments already existing to gain voting rights, but the courts ruled against them. The conclusion was made that a new amendment would have to be passed to gain women suffrage. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the amendment, prohibiting the denial of the right to vote based on whether the voter was male or female, was proposed several times to Congress, but rejected every time. It was only during World War I that support for the amendment began to pick up steam.
What became the 19th Amendment passed Congress in 1919, in the House in May and in the Senate in June. The ratification of the amendment by Tennessee in August 1920 meant it had been ratified by the required number of states to become part of the Constitution, and the amendment was certified that month.
Women turned out in Granville as well to vote in the elections that November. No local or personal mention column for the village of Granville in the Sentinel noted anything about women of the village voting in the election. However, the correspondent for the Middle Granville personal mention column in the Nov. 12, 1920 issue included this news item:
“A great many women of [Middle Granville] took advantage of the nineteenth amendment to the constitution of the United States last week Tuesday and cast their first vote for a presidential candidate. No less than a half dozen had voted before the first ‘mere’ man exercised his privilege as a citizen of the United States. Mrs. Hugh Parry cast ballot no. 1, and it is only the ‘early birds’ who knew who many of the others were. That all of the women voted right is without question, and those who voted for Candidate Cox will find it a course of consolation when they realize that the ballots cast by the women of the village for President-elect Harding were not needed.”
+++
Since the ratification of the 19th Amendment, the number of women elected or appointed to positions of leadership has dramatically increased. While there were some positions, and local or state level elective offices in certain states, overall they were few and far between.
In Granville, the organization of the Pember Library and Museum’s Board of Trustees in 1909 mandated that a minimum of three men and three women serve on the board. This meant that the board couldn’t be entirely composed of only men or only women. These positions are appointed, and the final decision rests with the board of the Village of Granville. It is unclear where the rule originated.
The Village of Granville was the first to directly appoint a woman to a position within its ranks. Anna Stanton was appointed in May of 1922 as village clerk, to replace Thomas E. Stanton. She resigned in October of 1924. Since then, there have been two others: Joyce Wilday and Elizabeth Truso.
The first elective office of any sort within the boundaries of the Town of Granville to have a women elected to it was the Board of Education of Union Free School District 8, in Middle Granville. Three board members were up for reelection at the annual school meeting; all were men running for reelection, and all won. However, longtime board member John Tully had retired and resigned during the 1925-26 school year, and someone had to be elected to finish his unfinished term on the school board. Susan O’Connor was elected at that meeting, and was the first woman to be elected in Granville.
At the time of centralization, at least one other woman had been elected to Middle Granville’s board of education, Ruth Prouty. The board for Union Free School District 7, in the Village of Granville, did not have a woman elected until Clare O’Brien was in the early 1950s. O’Brien and Prouty were both on their respective boards when the Granville Central School District was formed. The new Board of Education for the central school district has always had at least one woman on the board. Clare O’Brien was on the inaugural board in 1957. At present there are six women.
In the village, no woman was elected to the board until Patricia Muller was elected as trustee in the mid-1980s. Since then, there have been three others: Nancy Bixby, Stephanie Munger and Heather Pauquette. Muller went on to be elected mayor, and to date is the only woman mayor of Granville. Munger is currently on the village board.
The Town of Granville was the last of the elective offices within the town’s offices to have a woman elected to said offices. The town councilman/woman position was originally known from the 1780s as justices of the peace. The term was partly replaced around 1940 with town councilman, but two justices of peace continued to be elected with two councilmen until around 1970. No women were ever nominated to run for an office of justice of the peace.
No town councilwoman was nominated to run until Noreen Norton was during the 1981 election campaign. In the end, the first town councilwoman was Beverly Tatko in 1996. Tatko was appointed interim town supervisor after the untimely passing of Rodger Hurley in early 2010; this rendered Tatko the only female town supervisor ever in Granville. In the fall of 2010, Mary Emery was elected to serve the rest of Tatko’s term, and was later reelected to two full terms. At present there are none serving.
+++
On the centennial year of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, it is indisputable to say that is has had a profound impact on the United States in the past century. The success of the women’s suffrage movement paved the way for women to gain public office, or appointment to other government positions, although in some states it was many years after 1920 before women could ascend to said offices. It also paved the way for women’s rights movements in the later years of the 20th century. The impact locally in Granville was immediate in terms of voting rights. However, with the exception of school board elections, it would be decades before women were elected to political offices in Granville.
No comments:
Post a Comment