[TAPE 1, SIDE A]
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WINSTON BROADFOOT:
This is Winston Broadfoot of the Duke Oral History Project.
I'm in the living room of Miss Clark on 3614 Chamberlain
Avenue in Richmond. It's snowing outside, February 28, 1964.
Miss Clark has kindly consented to make this recording for us of her
recollections, and we in turn have promised that it may not be used in
any part without her permission. With those few introductory remarks, I
would like to turn the microphone over to Miss Clark and have her tell
us about anything she likes of her very interesting life, starting
wherever she will.
ADELE CLARK:
Thank you, Mr. Broadfoot. I'm very glad to have the
opportunity of recording some matters in connection with the work I did
in the equal suffrage movement and some other things that may come to
mind in giving that. You have asked me to identify myself. My name in
Adele Clark, and I come of New Orleans heritage, my mother, Estelle
Goodman, having been born in New Orleans; my father, Robert Clark,
having come there from Belfast, Ireland, in the eighteen-fifties. I was
born in Montgomery, Alabama, because my father was transferred to the L
and N Railroad in Montgomery just a few months before I was born. But I
have very little Alabama connections except for accident of birth there.
I was born in September, 1882, and, as I have a fairly [Interruption] Virginia is the first place
that I remember, so, despite my connections with any other states in the
South, I feel as though I were a Virginian, because the family brought
me to Virginia when I was a little over three years old. We then went
back when I was about seven and lived in Alabama and Mississippi for a
while. Then I came back to Richmond at twelve and
have been here ever since except for travels around through the country.
I became involved in the equal suffrage movement in 1909. It was in the
spring that a very active advocate of woman's suffrage, a
Mrs. Charles V. Meredith, came up to the Art Club, of which I was a
board member, and asked for permission to speak before the board. And so
after the Art Club business was over, we called Mrs. Meredith in and she
brought a suffrage petition for the Congress asking for a federal
amendment for equal suffrage for women. I signed the petition. Miss Ann
Fletcher, the artist who was teaching at the Club, signed it, and a
young newspaperman, and possibly one other person. I have thought since
that Mrs. Meredith really reaped a large crop, getting four signatures
at one effort, when I had so much trouble later in getting the suffrage
movement. Then there was an old friend of ours, Mrs. Jacob Ezekiel, who
was in Washington with the National Suffrage Association, and she wrote
me a letter, noticing my name and asking me to become a little more
active in the movement. That fall, on November the ninth, the Equal
Suffrage League was organized in Richmond. And, as I told you before,
I've often thought that a dramatis personae
of the women who were at Mrs. Dabney Crenshaw's when the
League was organized would be rather interesting. The leading one was
Lila Mead Valentine, and in Virginia fashion I'm going to
try to sketch a bit of their inheritance. Mrs. Valentine was a
descendant of Everud Mead, the general in Washington's army
who was commissioned by Washington to take Cornwallis's sword
at Yorktown. Virginia-fashion, we were always proud to cite the ancestry
of these suffrage leaders. Agnes Randolph was
another early suffragist, and she was a great-granddaughter of Thomas
Jefferson. Lucy Randolph Mason was a descendant both of George Mason,
the author of the Bill of Rights of Virginia, and of John Marshall of
the … [Interruption]
ADELE CLARK:
… and of John Randolph, the first Justice of the Supreme Court
of the United States. Kay Fuller Barrett was another one of the women
present at the organization of the Equal Suffrage League, and she was a
Miss Waller of a rather distinguished Virginia family and had married an
Episcopal minister, Mr. Barrett, and had gone into social work,
particularly for the Florence Crittenden Mission, which worked with
unwed mothers. Mrs. Dabney Crenshaw, in whose home we met, was a
descendant of Henry Clay's or a collateral descendant of
Henry Clay's, and I think the daughter of Cassius Clay of
Kentucky. So we had quite a bit of background. Then Ellen Glasgow of
Virginia, the author who was so distinguished, had circulated the first
suffrage petition in Richmond. Mary Johnston was another member of the
early League. Mrs. Charles V. Meredith. Kate and Marian Mead, Mrs.
Valentine's sisters, who are living and who might be
wonderful people to get some record from, which we can discuss later.
The League was organized after a preliminary meeting. We had also some
journalists. It seems interesting to me that the newspaperwomen and
writers have always been in the vanguard of movements of this sort.
There was a Mrs. Alice Tyler who was editor of the woman's
page of the Times-Dispatch. Mrs. Valentine was elected
President of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia,
and I have in my records, but don't recall right now, the
names of all the Vice Presidents. Mrs. John H. Lewis, whose maiden name
was Elizabeth Langer Lewis, who was an aunt of Lady Astor's,
was one of our Vice Presidents. She had come down from Lynchburg to
attend this meeting and became a very distinguished leader in the
suffrage movement. She was quite a wonderful woman. At the meeting Mrs.
Tyler was elected Secretary but declined to accept the Secretaryship,
because she was afraid she'd lose her position with the Times-Dispatch. Some other lady then was chosen, and
she was afraid her husband would object. I was one of the youngest women
there and one of the least distinguished; in fact I wasn't
particularly distinguished at all, except that I had been active in art
work in Richmond. But I didn't have any job and I
didn't have any husband, and finally the Secretaryship fell
to me [Laughter] because of those two
accidents. So I have the handwritten record of that first meeting of the
suffrage association. We had no idea that anything much would come of
it. We did not go to the newspapers with the formation of the League
immediately. But the newspapers caught hold of it, and, as it was just
at the time of the militant suffragists in England, although Mrs.
Valentine's connection with suffrage had been through the
conservative group in England (she having visited England with her
husband quite frequently), the newspapers caught hold of this. And, as I
recall it, the headlines came out a few days later saying, "We
may expect women to go up and down Broad Street throwing rocks at store
windows." We were very much embarrassed, and of course we
didn't throw rocks at store windows. We felt much more like
throwing them at the newspapers [Laughter] for all of the ugly things that
they said about us. The editorials came out in very bombastic fashion
saying that a group of misled women had formed an Equal Suffrage League,
and that no doubt the large majority of pedestal-holders in Virginia
among the women would repudiate this outrageous thing that their sisters
were doing. And it was amazing to realize that the wives of some of the
best known men in Richmond were involved in this outrage. I
don't remember a single nice thing being said about the whole
movement. We didn't introduce any measure for amending the
Virginia Constitution until well over two years had elapsed.
It was
in the legislature of 1912 that the resolution to amend the Virginia
Constitution was proposed. The Virginia Constitution was at that time
only ten years old, because we are living under a constitution which had
its inception in 1900 and was proclaimed in 1902. If I may run back a
moment, because this is a little informal, when the Constitutional
Convention of 1900-1902 was meeting, Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt came to
Richmond and spoke before the Privileges and Elections Committee of the
Constitution, urging that woman's suffrage be put in the
Constitution. Mrs. Valentine told me that she had received a letter from
Mrs. Kate Gogan Bruns, of a New Orleans family, who was living in
Charlottesville at the time, and Mrs. Bruns wrote her and asked her to
meet her and Mrs. Catt at the Capitol and to appear before the
Privileges and Elections Committee. It was at that time that Mrs.
Valentine met Mrs. Catt. I have not been able to find any record of it
in the records of the Constitutional Convention, because only floor
action was recorded, and the committee action, if it is on record
anywhere, has never been discovered. It has always
seemed to me such a curious thing that the men of Virginia, as well as
of the South, did not realize that they could have preserved what they
were so anxious to preserve—the white electorate
majority—had they enfranchised the women of the South.
Because the Fourteenth Amendment was not at all concerned with Negro
women voting. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which
enfranchised the Negro, enfranchised only the Negro men, disfranchised
all of the white men who had borne arms for the Confederacy. And, as you
know, most of the South was under military district rule for anywhere
from five to ten years, and therefore, had the southern men, when they
began to write new constitutions, enfranchised the women, the federal
government could not have touched the fact that they enfranchised white
women. Because the Fourteenth Amendment didn't say anything
about women, and they could have got a large white majority very easily,
but they never seem to have thought about it. Anyway, the Constitutional
Convention did nothing about the enfranchisement of women, and the
suffrage movement did not begin until 1909.
In 1910, we were
entitled to send two delegates to the national convention of the
National American Suffrage Association in Washington; it met in the
spring of 1910. William Howard Taft was President. We sent two
delegates, Mrs. Valentine, because she was President of the League, and
Mary Johnston, because she was one of our most distinguished
suffragists, and she was to make the report in Washington. I went up as
an alternate, and I think we had another alternate but I
don't recall who it was. The morning that the reports were to
be made of what the Suffrage League in Virginia had done in its year of
existence, Mary Johnston sent for me at her hotel
and told me that she was so ill—she was a woman of very
delicate helath—that she would be unable to make the report,
and so she wanted me, as an alternate, to make the report. I remember
that I was terrified to walk up the aisle at the hotel there in
Washington and make the suffrage report, but there was nothing else to
do because Mary was ill. Mrs. Valentine was on the platform with the
other presidents, and I made the report, and I can remember now with a
certain amount of amusement that we did report that we had gone down to
the General Assembly of 1910 but had not attempted to introduce any
suffrage resolution to amend the state Constitution, but had been very
active in a pure milk bill [Laughter] ,
because, of course, women had been interested in educational and health
affairs. At any rate, our report was received with great enthusiasm,
partly because there were not many southern states enrolled in the
Suffrage Association, and also because Mrs. Valentine was a friend of
Mrs. Catt's, and she herself was a woman of tremendous
personality, and I recall our report being very much applauded. That
night or one night during that convention, President Taft was asked to
make an address to the Suffrage Association convention. He was very late
for the meeting. Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, who had put off her speech for
the longest time waiting for the President to come, had finally become
involved in making her President's report, when suddenly
there was a signal from the back of the hall, and Colonel Archibald Butz
preceded the President. He was his aide, and he preceded him into the
hall. He was quite a magnificent-looking man. You will recall that he
was one of the fatalities on the
"Titanic" on his way back from Europe some years
later. He came in with a great military air, and they had not given Dr.
Shaw time to close her speech, and she hastily put her papers together
and [Interruption]
ADELE CLARK:
Therefore it did not make too pleasant an impression on the women
delegates, who had the greatest veneration for Dr. Shaw, to see her
somewhat confused by the President just walking in. But after all, it
was the President of the United States coming to speak to a suffrage
convention, and possibly the first time a President had addressed the
convention, so there was quite a good deal of excitement. Dr. Shaw
hastily put her papers down, and the presiding officer introduced the
President, and Mr. Taft began to speak. And as far as I can recollect,
at least the first part of his speech that made a very definite
impression on me was that he said… He was very jovial, and he
said that when he was in high school he had written a paper on
woman's suffrage and that it had been in favor of
woman's suffrage. But a good deal of time had elapsed, and in
the light of today he had seriously modified his views. Of course, he
had said a word of welcome before he did that, just as he would have
welcomed any group to Washington. But he said that in the light of years
that had passed, that he had come to the conclusion that the giving of
suffrage was a very difficult experiment, and one would not give the
suffrage to Hottentots. But when he said that one would not have given
the suffrage to Hottentots, a little group of women—I
understood afterwards they were led by a Mrs.
Fitzgerald of Boston—hissed. The presiding officer quickly
rapped for order, and a good many women over the hall were saying,
"Shhh" to the women who were hissing. And so that
occupied only a few minutes. And then Mr. Taft went on with his speech
and told us how beautiful Washington was in the spring and all the sort
of thing that a welcoming person says, and he and Colonel Butz and the
rest of his aides left the hall. But the next morning the Washington
papers came out with two-inch headlines saying, "Suffrage
Convention Hisses the President." And I think it took the
suffrage movement years to live that down. It was a very unfortunate
thing, but it has stuck in my memory [Laughter]
because it was the first convention I attended.
[Interruption]
ADELE CLARK:
That, of course, was a very unfortunate thing and was played up by the
enemies of woman's suffrage a great deal. One of the features
of the convention was the presentation of petitions from all over the
country to the Congressional committee. It was at the era that old Uncle
Joe, as the Congressmen called him—Joe Cannon—was
the Speaker of the House. We had a Mr. Lamb from the Third Congressional
District, in which Richmond is located, so we handed our petitions to
Congressman Lamb, who told one of us some years afterwards that when he
came up with them to Uncle Joe Cannon's desk that Congressman
Cannon had said, "You know what to do with those. Just throw
them in the wastebasket when the session's over." I
just give these to show the atmosphere that existed with regard to
woman's suffrage. We went from the presentation of the
petitions to a meeting of some committee of Congress that was to hear
Mrs. Katt speak; Dr. Shaw spoke; and some of the most distinguished
women in America. The committeemen, some of them
had their feet up on their desks; several of them turned their backs.
The ladies who presented these measures were treated with such
disrespect and contumely that I know I and a number of the other women
from the South, who were at least accustomed to being treated politely
by our officials, although they voted against us all the
time… But most of the southern men in office had been
extremely courteous to the women when they came to present
their… They said insulting things on the floor in their
speeches, but they were personally very polite. So I was very much
shocked to see the way these ladies from all over the nation were
treated by the Congressional committee. I don't recall very
much else about the convention. It was in the spring of 1910. And we
came home and just kept on getting names signed to the petitions, and
our Virginia League decided immediately to concentrate on getting a
state amendment.
A great many of the women felt very keenly
that they would prefer having the state constitutions amended giving
women suffrage by their own states, instead of getting it through a
federal amendment. Because a good many of them—Mrs. Valentine
herself having been born in 1865 and grown up during the
Reconstruction—still felt a little leery about getting
federal government interfering in suffrage. So we started right away to
get the suffrage through the state Constitution. It's more
difficult to amend the Constitution of Virginia than it is to amend the
Constitution of the United States. A constitutional amendment has to
pass in exactly the same form through two sessions of the General
Assembly, and then be submitted to the people. If an
"and" or a "the" or a
"but" or an "or" is altered in the
passage of it through the two different sessions,
it doesn't go through at all. But anyway, we started
valiantly to do that, and there was a Mr. Hill Montague of Richmond who
had the temerity to present the first resolution to amend the Virginia
Constitution, giving women the vote, in the session of 1912. The
resolution never got out of the House. It was presented in the House,
and, as far as I recall, I think it reached the floor that year and got
twelve votes out of the hundred members of the House of Delegates. In
1914 we had increased our followers to about fourteen or fifteen votes.
I'm not sure of these figures, but they're on
record. In 1916 we had forty votes in the House and very good hearing in
the Senate. But it never passed the House; it never got through the
House of Delegates. By 1918 it was too late to bother with the state
Constitution. The federal amendment was almost through the Congress. And
in 1919 and in 1920, we worked to get ratification of the amendment. But
ratifying a federal amendment on suffrage was extremely difficult. There
was a dear old Confederate soldier, a Mr. Young, in the House of
Delegates, who had been one of our staunchest supporters. But when we
went to him to ask him to vote for ratification of the amendment, he
said, "Ladies, you cannot expect me to vote for anything
federal. I still bear in my body a wound I received in Chancellorsville,
and I would not vote for the federal government to do anything about the
electorate." So we lost him. And of course there was the
prejudice that still is evident about federal things in many of the
southern states. So Virginia did not ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. We
were very much hampered by the activities of the Woman's
Joint Congressional Union that afterward became
the Woman's Party, and which was the militant group. In spite
of every effort of the National American Suffrage Association, led by
Mrs. Catt at that time because Dr. Shaw either had died before 1920 or
was inactive (that is, of course, historic record)… But the
National American Suffrage Association was proceeding entirely by
educational methods and by non-partisan methods. We did have parades and
things of that sort, but everything was on a very legal basis. But the
Congressional Union and the Woman's Party, which broke away
and followed the lead of the militants in England, would do such things
as, for instance, in our own city, where we always got permission from
the city authorities to hold a street meeting, they came to Richmond and
held a meeting without any permission, which just meant going down to
the City Hall to get permission and being assigned a place on Broad
Street. But they went and held their meetings without permission and
then got arrested, and then said they were persecuted. And they did the
same sort of thing in Washington, and they unrolled a large paper in
Congress saying "Czar Wilson," and that during the
World War. And they burned Mr. Wilson in effigy before the White House
in Lafayette Square. And naturally that made a number of the Congressmen
very indignant. Getting support from southern Congressmen and southern
senators was one of the most difficult things in the world. The only man
in Congress from Virginia who voted for the federal suffrage amendment
was the Republican Bascomb Slemp from the Tenth Congressional District.
John Sharp Williams, Senator from Mississippi, was a suffragist and
supported us, but he sent word to Mrs. Catt and Dr. Shaw and the different other women there that he would not vote for
the federal amendment giving women suffrage if women were going to
behave as the militants were behaving. And Mrs. Catt and Mrs. Edwards of
Indiana and several of the other women went to Alice Paul, the leader of
the militant group, and urged her not to do these violent things because
we would lose the federal amendment in 1918. They went right on being
militant, and we did not get the amendment through till '19.
Now it's a curious thing, and I know I'm being
a bit tedious in this, but …
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[TAPE 1, SIDE B]
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ADELE CLARK:
… most of the state legislatures meet in the odd years. Had
the suffrage amendment passed in 1918, it would have been ratified in
1919 because there were enough states that already had suffrage to have
gotten it through in early 1919, and there would have been women
delegates from all over the country at both the Democratic and
Republican conventions of '20 for the nomination of
President. But as it did not pass until 1919, extra sessions had to be
called in almost every state to get the ratification. We went into
session in 1920 in Virginia in the legislature, and a handful of states
only had ratified. By March of 1920, thirty-four states had ratified, or
thirty-five. Virginia could easily have been the thirty-sixth. But it
was too late, and so the suffrage amendment was not ratified until
August, 1926, and then, I'm glad to say, by a southern state,
which was in Tennessee. So I feel particularly
bitter about the people who are pushing for an object and resort to the
militant method when victory is so near at hand by the more conservative
educational methods. Because they give an excuse to the people who are
going to vote against a thing anyway to carry out their opposition.
[Interruption]
ADELE CLARK:
At any rate, we did get the suffrage in August of 1920. And in Virginia,
under the leadership of Mrs. Valentine and through the cooperation of
the University of Virginia, we organized a Citizens'
Committee of men and women all over the State of Virginia to educate
women for the use of suffrage, mainly to teach them how to vote, the
simple mechanics of getting registered and… One of the
leaders of the suffrage movement in the Senate of Virginia was George
Walter Mapp of Accomac County. And seeing that suffrage was coming and
being a very ardent woman's suffragist, Senator Mapp
introduced what he called "an enabling act."
Incidentally, he had been the father of the state Prohibition movement,
and they had had an enabling act. He introduced this enabling act which
said if and when the federal suffrage amendment is ratified by
thirty-six states, Virginia women will be on the status of the male
citizen coming of age. The male citizen coming of age has to pay only
one year's poll tax when he registers, instead of the three
years next preceding that in which he offers to vote. So women were
legally all twenty-one years of age as far as the poll tax was
concerned. And we were able to go down and pay our dollar and a half and
register. We had to get groups together and teach
them the registration methods of what they had to say .
[Interruption]
ADELE CLARK:
Out of that citizens' committee grew the efforts toward
organizing the League of Women Voters in Virginia. It was in September
or perhaps early in November that we planned the last meeting of the
Equal Suffrage League. Mrs. Maude Wood Park came down to tell us the
efforts that were being made to organize a League of Women Voters
nationally. And I remember that Mrs. John H. Lewis, Elizabeth Langen
Lewis, whom I mentioned in the earlier comments about women who had
organized the Suffrage League, was our Vice President. Mrs. Valentine
was very ill, and so Mrs. Lewis presided over the last suffrage meeting.
It was very interesting to note the change of atmosphere [Laughter] in the politicians after we had
got the vote. The Governor of Virginia during the last year of our
suffrage efforts was Westmoreland Davis, and he really was very much
interested in woman's suffrage and probably would have come
out and urged the adoption of the ratification of the amendment but for
the extraordinarily vicious opposition of most of the political people
in Virginia. So I cannot say that Mr. Davis made any right about-face,
because he had been very friendly all during the ratification efforts.
However, the Speaker of the House and the Lieutenant Governor, as well
as the Governor, permitted us, of all things, to hold the last
convention of the Equal Suffrage League in the Capitol of Virginia. And
we met in the House of Delegates and had all of our speakers there. Mrs.
Park spoke, and we at that meeting adopted a
resolution that we would meet shortly afterward and organize the state
League of Women Voters. Now I think it's already in most of
the history books how the League of Women Voters came into being, but it
may be interesting to note here that the League was the brainchild of
Mrs. Catt, and the last convention of the National American Suffrage
Association in 1919 had had representatives from both the already
enfranchised states and the states which were unenfranchised.
I'm sorry to say, as a southerner, that the little black spot
on the map of the United States which indicated in all of our propaganda
the non-suffrage states, that the South was always pretty black, and
some of the other states were speckled and cross-barred, showing that
they had municipal suffrage or school suffrage, or white if they had
full suffrage. Mrs. Catt had thought that the Suffrage Association would
disintegrate after almost three-fourths of the states had already
obtained suffrage statewise. So she thought of forming a League of Women
Voters, and at the last national convention of the Suffrage Association
there were two houses, the Enfranchised House and the Unenfranchised
House. The delegates from Virginia—I'm sorry to
say I was not one of them—of course sat in the lower house of
the unenfranchised. But they came back with all of the principles of the
League of Women Voters. So as a question of sentiment, we decided to
organize the League of Women Voters as near as possible to the
anniversary of the formation of the Equal Suffrage League. And the
League was organized in the Capitol of Virginia in November, 1920,
almost on the date that the Suffrage League had been organized in 1909.
Again we were allowed to meet in the Capitol, and
the League of Women Voters was organized in the Senate of Virginia. We
had a number of very distinguished men speakers as well as women
speakers, and one of the first things we did was to decide to elect Mrs.
Valentine as Honorary President of the League. She was always a woman of
quite delicate health and was very ill at the time. In fact, she did not
live till 1921. She was never able to vote, but she was registered as a
voter. So she was elected the Honorary President, and I was elected
President of the Virginia League, almost again by default because so few
people were willing to take it.
And Mrs. Beverly Munford, who had
led the movement to have women have a coordinate college at the
University of Virginia, was one of the Vice Presidents. Mrs. Townsend of
Norfolk. Mrs. Lewis of Lynchburg. And Dr. [Kate Waller?] Barrett. And we
had a board of directors from all over the state. And we started out on
a clip, adopting a budget based largely upon what we had thought that
the Suffrage League had operated on, not realizing that a number of
rather wealthy women had given things to the Suffrage League and it
[Laughter] hadn't been duly
worked out in the budget, and also because that once women had the vote
that they would rush toward supporting the League of Women Voters. And
Mrs. Munford, I remember, said, "Well, if we don't
get very far, we'll at least have a handsome
funeral," so we adopted a rather large budget and even had the
enthusiasm to pledge to the University of Virginia somewhere between six
hundred dollars or a thousand dollars a year for half of the salary of a
citizenship educator in the extension department of the University. She
was a Miss Elizabeth Pidgeon, who is now living in
Washington. We decided to have an Executive Secretary and a Headquarters
Secretary. We had had quarters for the Suffrage League, and we rented
those, and we started off thinking that we were going to get
contributions from all over the state and that we would enroll all of
the suffrage leagues. But membership in the Suffrage League had been
non-dues-paying, we were so glad to get members to have the large number
of names. So the first year of the League was a dreadful difficulty of
meeting the obligations, with an Organization Secretary, Miss Roberta
Wellford, who went all over the state organizing leagues, with our
obligation to the University of Virginia for the citizenship education
group, and with a Headquarters Secretary and an Executive and Press
Secretary shared expenses with the Richmond League of Women Voters. But
by the end of a year or two we had to curtail everything financially,
because we did not get the financial support that we had expected. I was
wondering whether… It's so difficult on a thing
like this not to find your mind jumping back to something else
…
WINSTON BROADFOOT:
Go right ahead.
ADELE CLARK:
… and if I may run back to the April of 1920, directly after
we had realized that the Amendment was not going to be ratified by the
legislature, Mrs. Valentine had asked Dr. Alderman of the University to
let us hold a citizenship meeting for women at the University of
Virginia. We thought at that time that a sufficient number of states
would have ratified, so that we would go to the University as
enfranchised women. But when we got up to the University, the meeting
having been agreed to by Dr. Alderman and promoted largely by Mr. Charles G. Maphis, one of the most liberal and
broadminded men at the University of Virginia and head of the extension
department, we got up to hold our citizenship meeting and found out that
the alumni were protesting violently with Dr. Alderman and asking him to
call the meeting off. In fact, we were a half hour late getting started
because of long distance telephone messages coming from the president of
the alumni association, Mr. Epper Huntin, urging that we not be allowed
to meet. The University published a very interesting bulletin on that
meeting which contains, among other things, a statement from Dr. Lyle,
who was head of the Law Department of the University, on the legal
status of women in Virginia. That is a matter of record, so I
won't bother to go into that. But we also had the attorney
general of the state, who spoke to the woman suffragists. And I remember
one of our ladies said it was the most remarkable thing that
he'd talked to the group of fifty or sixty women as if each
one of them had been sitting alone next to him on a sofa. But we did
have two or three days of discussion, and that was the launching of what
I mentioned before, the citizenship committee teaching the women how to
register.
And registration in Virginia is tricky more
than very difficult. Unless the register wishes to ask people questions,
it's fairly simple. You have to give your name and age and
date of birth and residence and various things of that sort, not much
more difficult than registering for a motor vehicle license. But then,
if the registrar wants to ask you questions about interpreting the
Constitution, he may do so. I don't remember that we had much
trouble with that. Our rural women had a lot of
trouble running all over the county trying to catch the registrars, who
were out plowing or fishing or doing various things. But in the towns we
nearly always had registration offices. The colored women had the most
trouble with registering. There had been so much of that sort of thing:
"If you get the vote, what about the Negro woman?" But
we had some wonderful Negro leaders, and there was one in Richmond named
Ora Stokes, the wife of a colored clergyman. And she organized the
colored women and taught them to register. But the City Hall here in
Richmond registered the colored women separately from the white, down in
the basement. And they worked out all sorts of things of having their
hours shorter than the white women. We white women had a big fight with
the electoral board, insisting on their giving the Negro women the same
privilege of hours for election. Our newspapers were perfectly terrific
about the Negro woman voting. They brought out everything that they
could of Reconstruction days, and they wrote outrageous editorials. My
very intimate friend Lenora Houston, who was an artist—and
she and I had a studio together—decided that we could not let
this terrible race condition occur. I've jumped back now to
the fall of 1920. Lenora and I decided that we had to do something to
meet the colored women, because we were really afraid there'd
be riots of sorts. And, as we didn't dare ask them to the
Equal Suffrage League—this was before the League of Women
Voters was organized—because we would have been accused of
trying to get the Negro vote out, we took advantage of being artists
(always considered a little erratic). So we had a group of the colored
women come to our studio one night to talk over
the whole situation with them, and to tell them that the men had been
just as much afraid of our voting as they had been of their voting, but
we wanted to assure them of our friendship. Ora Stokes and a Mrs.
Lillian Payne and several other leading Negro women, whose names we had
got from a Mrs. Walter MacNeill, a sister-in-law of Mrs.
Valentine's who had done interracial work. She told us who to
call, and we had called these colored women, and they came to our studio
and we talked over the whole situation with them. And it was decided
that on the election day that several of us white women would take
automobiles and visit all the Negro registration places to see whether
any violence was breaking out. There was a very able woman leader here,
a Miss Catherine Halls, who was most active with YWCA work. She lent her
car. Mrs. Houston's mother rented a car for us, and I
don't remember who else had automobiles at her disposal, but
there were about four of us who started off at sunrise on the election
day and visited all the Negro polling places just to see if everything
was going quietly. And everything went quite quietly; in spite of the
fact that there had been threats of bloodshed and riot and everything
else, there wasn't any rioting. The Negro women went up
quietly and voted, but I think they were very much heartened by the fact
that there were four or five white women that went to the polls to give
them their backing. And so that went through. But we never had the nerve
to enroll the Negro women in the League of Women Voters. I've
always regretted it, but we just couldn't bring the middle-of-the-road thinkers to the point of bringing
the Negro women in. A number of us, especially Lucy Mason, went to
groups—Negro clubs and all—and talked to the Negro
women about civic affairs. And we made as much contact with them as
possible. But we couldn't do very much about it because we
were afraid of being accused of being carpetbaggers, so that we [Laughter] had to stay out of it to a
certain extent.
Now I don't know just what is
significant in the development of this work, except it occurs to me that
in 1921, in preparation for the 1922 General Assembly, that one of the
most significant pieces of work that women did in Virginia occurred. The
national League of Women Voters held a regional meeting in Atlanta,
Georgia, to which the presidents of all the southern leagues were
invited, and as many delegates as could go. And at that meeting in
Atlanta, as President of the Virginia League, I attended the conference.
And in talking to one of the women from Chicago, one of the women
lawyers, we were advised to organize a Children's Code
Commission, if possible, because there were so many laws that were
unfair to children. We had no child labor laws, no compulsory education
laws. We were very backward, particularly the question of juvenile
courts and that sort of thing. And we were advised to organize a Code
Commission to study what was necessary about the laws about women and
children, particularly about children, rather than try to get a number
of bills through separately. That meeting was held either in the early
spring or the very late winter of 1921; I'd have to look at
the records to make sure. But when I came back to
the meeting of the board of the Virginia League of Women Voters, I found
that Mrs. Houston, who was the Legislative Chairman for the League, told
me that she had been to see the Commissioner of the Board of Charities
and Corrections, now the Board of Welfare, a Dr. Maston. And he had
advocated our having a Children's Code Commission to look
over the whole field. Mrs. Louis Branlow, the wife of Louis Branlow in
Washington who was a very distinguished liberal leader (he was at that
time the City Manager of Petersburg), was our Child Welfare Chairman.
And she came to the board with the urgent recommendation that we
organize a Children's Code Commission. So from three
different angles, we decided that was our best course to pursue for the
1922 General Assembly. And we went down and asked Governor Davis if he
would appoint a Children's Code Commission, and he was
perfectly willing to do it, but he said there was no money set up to
finance the Commission. So he very generously arranged to assign Mr.
Morrissette, who is now our State Tax Commissioner and who was then the
head of the Committee on Legislative Drafting, as a member of the
Commission. He assigned a Dr. Bryden, who was on the staff of the Health
Commissioner and a state employee, to the Commission. He appointed Judge
Ricks, who was the Judge of our Juvenile Court in Richmond, and Judge
Royster in Norfolk. There were four state officials, and I've
forgotten for the moment the fifth, but he assigned five state officials
and relieved them of their work so that they could serve for the
necessary time on the Code Commission. And then he appointed four
volunteer women: a Mrs. King of Staunton; Mrs. Houston, who was the
Legislative Chairman; and two other women. I'm sorry that I don't remember them, but this is all
recorded history. And they began a study of the laws in Virginia with
regard to women and children, particularly with regard to children. They
worked assiduously without pay till the fall of 1921, just giving them
time to print their report. And they brought in a recommended twenty-six
laws. Believe it or not, we got about twenty of them enacted in the
General Assembly of 1922. They comprised a very good child labor law; a
compulsory education law that was very weak, but at least it was a
camel's foot in the tent; a law that registered maternity
homes; a statewide juvenile courts system. These are the things we got
through. Laws about the registration of infants in hospitals, the
infants of unmarried mothers. It's rather appalling to me
now, when the discussion comes up so much about the aid to dependent
children, ADC things that people make such a fuss about and about the
illegitimate children, to realize that they didn't even
bother whether they were killed at birth. And a great many of them were,
as the studies of this Code Commission showed. Because maternity homes
were not registered, and a great many of the women who were in great
distress over finding themselves unmarried mothers, their children were
taken away from them, and in many cases they probably were allowed to
die. We found appalling conditions about that sort of thing. Strangely
enough, the conditions were a little better among the colored women,
because they hadn't had so much of a stigma attached to
irregular living, as white women had. But the attitude toward the
illegitimate child was pretty awful. But we worked ourselves to death,
but we got about eighteen or twenty of those laws
enacted, including a statewide juvenile courts system, which we felt was
one of the triumphs. We got a pretty good child labor bill because the
federal child labor bill had not been declared unconstitutional at the
time. And so we met most of the standards of the federal child labor
bill that afterwards was declared unconstitutional. It had been enacted
in '20 or '21 by Congress, and the Supreme Court
did not declare it unconstitutional until 1923 or 1924. And then based
on the fact that it had been based on the interstate tax system of some
sort. Another thing we were able to get enacted that year… We
got several election laws improved, but I'd have to look over
the record to make any accurate statement. But we did push through the
1922 session a commission to study efficiency in government. And
therefore, by 1924 we had brought in a very good recommendation about
the reorganization of state government. That was also done with the
cooperation of the University of Virginia. I think the men politicians
were much more frightened of us in those early days than
they've come to be since. They were dreadfully afraid we were
going to organize a woman's party. And also they were very
much afraid that a number of us were going to become Republicans, which
we had, for gratitude, every reason to be, because when the ratification
measure had come up in the 1920 session of the legislature, six
Republicans and six Dem …
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[TAPE 2, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
ADELE CLARK:
… ocrats had voted for it in the Senate. And I think that was the total Republican personnel of the
Senate; they had all voted for it. And so we had every reason to be very
thankful to the Republicans in Virginia for their efforts. And I think a
number of us would have been led by just sheer gratitude to vote the
Republican ticket except for the fact that we did get information from
states like Vermont and Maine that the Democrats had been equally
generous in a strongly Republican state.
[Laughter] As a matter of fact, though, the late Judge John
Paul who died recently in Harrisonburg got elected to Congress largely
through the votes of women in his congressional district (he was a
Republican), largely because his Democratic opponent had been a violent
anti-suffragist. He was a splendid man, but also a great many normally
Democratic women had voted for him, and we was elected to Congress,
though he was ruled out and didn't serve except a few months
of his whole term. Now these are things I'm just trying to
remember at random from our early years as voters.
WINSTON BROADFOOT:
I would imagine at that time that the present Senator Harry Byrd was then
certainly a beginning force in politics, and could you tell me anything
of your relations or the suffragette or League of Women
Voters' relations with Mr. Byrd or any other prominent
people? Specifically, I was thinking in your mentioning the gentleman
from Harrisonburg, was there an attempt in the ordinary political way of
doing things to reward one's friends and try to vote your
enemies out of office? Could you give us anything of the byplay of
personality, in other words, from some of the political leaders of the
day?
ADELE CLARK:
Yes, I'd be very glad to. You've reminded me
particularly about Senator Harry Byrd of two
things. The gentleman I mentioned, George Walter Mapp, who was a
suffrage leader in the Senate all during the ratification days, ran for
the governorship in 1925 against Harry Byrd. And most of us as
suffragists supported Mapp very actively. Now mentioning the Byrds, I
think, is rather interesting. When Harry Byrd came to the Senate of
Virginia in 1916—his son resembles him very strongly; his son
is a state senator now—the undercurrent of political talk in
the legislature of Virginia was to call him the crown prince. His father
was Speaker of the House, Richard Byrd. His son Richard Evelyn Byrd, who
was the , was named for his father. And Richard
Evelyn Byrd was Speaker of the House of Delegates, and Congressman
Harold Flood of Appomattox had been Congressman for a long, long time,
and they were the pulse of the Virginia machine. And Harry Byrd was
called the crown prince [Laughter] when he
first came in. He never voted for suffrage. Strangely enough, his father
had supported the equal suffrage movement. His father, Richard Evelyn
Byrd, had been one of the men who voted for it in 1912 and 1914 when he
was Speaker of the House. I don't remember which year he was
Speaker, but I know he was in 1912. But his son did not follow in his
footsteps on that. But we went to Senator Byrd (then state senator) in
1922 and asked him to be a patron of the Child Labor Bill. Senator Mapp
had suggested it, because Senator Byrd was a very strong person in the
Senate right from the beginning. And Senator Byrd said that he would be
a patron of it. He read the bill, and of course we had exempted children
in agriculture, as all child labor bills have done. Because you couldn't regulate that; they worked on the
farms anyway. And Senator Byrd said that he would vote for it if we
exempted the work of children in orchards. And we pointed out to him
that agriculture covered orchards, and he said probably it did, but he
would like that specific amendment made, and Mr. Mapp made no objections
so we let orchards be put in, feeling anyway that they fell under the
term "agriculture." So with that
exception—he being a large orchard grower and not wanting to
be embarrassed about the employment of underaged children occasionally
in his orchards—he was the sponsor of one of the strongest
child labor bills in the South, and one that stayed and has never been
contested, although the federal bill was. But Senator Byrd had never
voted for suffrage. Now Senator Mapp was one of our leaders. As I
mentioned, Senator John Paul of Harrisonburg was a Republican. Senator
Swanson, who was our United States Senator, was definitely an
anti-suffragist. We never could get him to the point of voting. And I
went to see him about a federal bill when I was President of the state
League of Women Voters. I think it was around 1925. There was some bill
in the Senate of the United States we wanted to talk to him about. He
was a very genial man, a very pleasant man, and he said to me,
"I'm supporting Harry Byrd for Governor of the
state. How do you ladies feel?" And I said, "Well,
with Senator Walter Mapp running against him, I'm supporting
Senator Mapp, and I think most of the women will." And Senator
Swanson said, "I understand thoroughly. If we
haven't gratitude in politics, what have we? I
wouldn't expect you to do otherwise," which I
thought was a wonderful sideline on the political
attitudes of their day.
That was one thing. But your question has made
me think of one other thing that happened before we got the vote. During
the extra session of the Virginia legislature in 1919, there was a call
to consider some road bill, and, against everybody's wishes,
took up the ratification of the Suffrage Amendment, which we as
suffragists were trying to keep out of the legislature, knowing that it
was a lame duck session and we didn't have any chance of
getting it ratified. A very distinguished Virginia congressman, Harry
St. George Tucker, came down to Richmond. I think he lived in Lexington,
so it was that congressional district. He was a leader of the
anti-organization movement in the Democratic Party and a great friend of
Governor Westmoreland Davis's. There's always been
a conflict between the organization Democrats… If
you're a member, it's the organization; if
you're opposed to them, it's the machine. And
there was always a great conflict between the machine and the
anti-machine Democrats. Senator Carter Glass started out as an
anti-machine man, and Tucker was an anti-machine man. It was all
involved in the Prohibition fight and the Anti-Saloon League and all
that sort of thing. But Tucker came down, and he was a violent
anti-suffragist. And Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt had come to Richmond to
speak for the Suffrage League. One of the men who introduced her was Mr.
Roosevelt Page, a very distinguished Virginian whose great-grandfather
had been one of the early governors of Virginia and who was the brother
of Thomas Nelson Page, who was Ambassador to Italy. Mr. Roosevelt Page
introduced Mrs. Catt. The morning that Mrs. Catt
spoke at the House of Delegates, which was in session at this extra
session, there was distributed on every desk in the legislature an
anonymous paper with Mrs. Catt's picture, together with the
Negro Frederick Douglass of the Reconstruction time. His picture was
next to Mrs. Catt's, and underneath that they said that Mrs.
Catt was a believer in inter-marriage between Negroes and whites and was
quite a visitor to Negro houses, and also that she believed in free love
and was a follower of Emma Goldman. Every kind of thing they could say
that wasn't true about her. And all these anonymous papers
were all over the desks at the legislature when Mrs. Catt spoke. And
Mrs. Catt, who was a very effective, beautiful woman, a very brilliant
woman, picked up the paper and read off what they had said. She said,
"So far as being a believer in free love, I have been married
twice and frequently been asked not to use my husband's name
att—my maiden name was Chapman—because
it's been used against the suffrage movement by cheap
slurs." And then she refuted each thing that had been said
about what she believed, and she said, "All I can say is that,
as this paper is unsigned, there's an anonymous liar in
Virginia." And the next day Harry St. George Tucker got
permission to speak before the legislature at its recess, and he made
the most insulting speech against Mrs. Catt, in which he said in a
trembling voice that if women got the vote, when the child came to say
its prayers at the knees of its mother before he went to bed that his
mother would say, "Today I called my enemy a liar."
Oh, it was the most ridiculous, but very effective, speech for people
who were opposed to suffrage. So Tucker ran for
Governor on the anti-machine ticket, and E. Lee Trenkle, who was an
organization man who had been a suffragist, ran against him. And
practically every newly enfranchised voter voted for Trenkle because of
Tucker's suffrage attitude, although normally we ought to
have gone over to the anti-machine group. So that that gives a little
idea of the political atmosphere. But it's really almost
incredible today to think of the attitude that people had about the
woman voter. I've never understood Harry St. George Tucker
doing that, and it influenced things very terribly. I think, except for
his speech, that Governor Davis probably would have recommended
ratification of the amendment. I think a great many things would have
been altered except for that political atmosphere that grew up. But we
came out. Mrs. Valentine sent for me. She was too ill to do anything,
but she asked me to come up to her house and help draft a statement
against Mr. Tucker, who had been a lifelong friend of her
family's, because of his attitude not only to
woman's suffrage but his insult to Mrs. Catt. Because it was
perfectly indefensible for him to try to stand behind this anonymous
paper. We never did find out who had published the anonymous slur on
Mrs. Catt. But after all, Mrs. Catt wasn't calling any
particular person a liar. I remember well she said,
"There's an anonymous liar in Virginia."
Another thing that seems so interesting to me right now in the midst of
all of the civil rights and the Negro question was how much that whole
Negro question was dragged in to the woman's suffrage
question, as it has been in every bit of progress in the South.
It's dragged in in the Aid to Dependent
Children; it's dragged in in compulsory education;
it's dragged in on things that it has no particular
connection with. Until we can eradicate in the South the tendency to
drag in the race question on every possible political question, I
don't see how we're ever going to make much
progress. It was brought in on everything from university education to
kindergartens in the education field, and from the Aid to Dependent
Children to any welfare work. It's just dragged in all the
time, and I don't really know how we're ever [Laughter] going to quite overcome it.
WINSTON BROADFOOT:
Two things have occurred to me, particularly in reference to your mention
of the episode with Mrs. Catt. In the early days, was there much
indignity, and I mean specifically slurs in terms of "These
must be immoral women, because otherwise they wouldn't want
the vote and get mixed in politics"? Did you have to put up
with rumor and ugly jokes and that sort of thing in the campaign against
you? This was one area you might comment on if you would. And secondly,
in your fight for the vote, were there specific groups that you could
generally count on as being friendly, and I have in mind now such things
as either associations of ministers or denominational support, or,
although it was perhaps early for this, perhaps labor support? Do these
things suggest openings for you that you might comment on?
ADELE CLARK:
Yes, I could. The last thing you mentioned was about the labor groups. I
recall that one of the earliest organized groups who were for
woman's suffrage were the labor groups. We had a woman whose husband had been very actively associated
with the labor movement, a Mrs. Frank Johnson, and she got us hearings
on suffrage before all the different labor groups here in Richmond. And
at that time it was the American Federation of Labor, largely; there was
no CIO. And there were local groups, and there were state groups and
all. And we were invited over and over again to talk to labor groups.
And I remember someone saying one day when Mrs. Valentine came back from
a meeting, she said, "I love blacksmiths
and…" Oh, I've forgotten some of the
other things. The labor men were always behind us, I presume because
they realized what it meant to have the woman vote, but
also—and I sound a little not particularly grateful in saying
this—minority groups have always been better to a movement
[Laughter] being organized. Now we
found marvelous support with college presidents. The first man in
Virginia who introduced Dr. Anna Howard Shaw when she came and spoke in
1910 or '11 or thereabouts in the early days was Dr. Tyler,
who was President of William and Mary and who was the grandson of
President Tyler, the President of the United States. And Dr. Tyler, who
was for years the President of William and Mary, introduced Anna Howard
Shaw at the meeting. Dr. Bullis of Virginia Polytechnic Institute; the
President of Radford College, which is still quite a college, Dr. Jarmon
of Farmville; we had nearly all the prominent educators behind us. And
they were state appointees, too, so it took some courage for them to do
that. The labor unions, the college presidents. We had quite a bit of
support from several Methodist ministers. I don't know just
why the Methodists would seem to me more
progressive on the suffrage lines, but it's quite true that
the Methodist Church in the United States was one of the first to allow
women clergy. But I don't know whether it was that or not,
but we had a good deal of support from Methodist ministers. We had the
support from several… I don't remember an active
practicing Baptist minister, but the Baptists like Samuel Childs
Mitchell, who was an ordained Baptist minister but who was an educator.
He was one of the professors out at Richmond College, and afterwards he
was President of a university in Delaware and, I think, in South
Carolina. But Dr. Mitchell was one of our early suffragists. Rabbi
Kaulisch was one of our early suffragists. And we had a handful of
Episcopal ministers, but not quite so many. They were a little on the
conservative line, but we did have several outstanding Episcopal
ministers through the state who endorsed us. And at the moment I recall
only one Catholic priest, a Father Washington, who was a descendant of
George Washington's brother, Charles Washington, and he died
rather recently. He spoke on the street for us, Father Washington did.
But those are the main clergy I recall. And strangely enough, there were
very few Presbyterian ministers who came out for us, and yet the
Presbyterians today are taking such a very liberal stand on the race
question. But it was odd; I don't know that it has any
significance, and I don't know how it runs with anything in
other states, but that just happened in Virginia. Of course, the pulpits
of the Protestant churches are much more open than either the Episcopal
pulpit or the Catholic Church. There are very few arrangements made with people to speak in Catholic churches. They
can speak in parish halls and whatnot. But Mrs. Valentine, Eudora
Richardson (who was the daughter of a Baptist minister), and various
women were even asked to speak from the platform of churches on
woman's suffrage. There was a Dr. Chenault who was a
Methodist minister here, and Walter Mapp was a Methodist leader; he
wasn't a clergyman. But I don't know just
particularly why the Methodists seemed to be a little bit more for
woman's suffrage than most of the other church groups. Not
that we didn't have some Episcopalians. I was an Episcopalian
at the time—I'm now a Catholic—but my
own clergyman, Mr. Osgood, out here at the little church just outside
Richmond, was an active member of the Suffrage League. And we even had a
bishop or two. But by and large there was a little more of a
conservative feeling. There was another group you asked about. The labor
group; I think I've covered the college presidents and the
clergy.
WINSTON BROADFOOT:
I asked about possible ugly undertones other than the Mrs.
Catt's.
ADELE CLARK:
The undertones were particularly unpleasant, but they were very much
modified in Virginia by the fact that Lila Mead Valentine was not only
a woman of great social leadership in her own personally, but her
husband was a member of a very distinguished family in Virginia and of a
very prominent business firm, the Valentine Meat Juice Company, and the
Valentine Museum here was founded by that group. Mrs. Valentine was
above even any effort to say anything against her because of her social
position and that of her husband. But there was a terrific lot of talking about the childless woman, which was
exceptionally cruel. They couldn't say anything about Mrs.
Valentine's marriage, which was one of the few totally ideal
marriages that I've ever seen. She and her husband were not
only devoted but very congenial, and he promoted her activities in every
way. But she had had one child that had died at birth, and therefore
those of us who knew her and knew the tremendous amount of work she had
done for the visiting nurses and child welfare, and one of the first
mothers' clubs was named for her here because she had
promoted kindergarten education, we felt it was particularly cruel that
they would start off talking about the childless woman as though she was
a frustrated creature who was just doing the… But that was
about the only thing they could ever find to say about Mrs. Valentine. A
campaign of slander against Mary Johnston was started that was so
abominable that she went to Mrs. Valentine and offered to stop speaking
for suffrage if she was doing harm. At that time it was such an
unmentionable subject that we just went around and said,
"Isn't it awful that they're talking so
about Mary Johnston?" But I think in these days of open
speaking, I might as well tell the story. I don't know
whether it's ever been put down; it was just hush-hush at the
time, it was so evil. Mary Johnston was a scientist. I don't
know how much you know of her background and her writings.
WINSTON BROADFOOT:
Her writings I know.
ADELE CLARK:
When I mean a scientist, I mean she was a very great student of science,
and she had a marvelous and interesting mind. When she wrote about
something, she tried to get every facet before she
came to the point. I remember hearing her make a speech one time on
psychological matters as it referred to suffrage, and running back to
the fact that she'd just been reading some of the works of
St. Augustine and found out that in the fifth century he was a
psychologist, and so on. She wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly or Century—I
think it was the Atlantic Monthly—and she
took up the question of the beginnings of life, all biology and
everything, and she spoke of the single cell and the division of cells
and all sorts of intricate scientific things. And then to the point
where there'd been in society matriarchies and so on. She
went through from the early beginnings, scientificially mostly, about
the status of woman at the present day. Some way or other in this
article—I was too ignorant of scientific things at the time
to ever find out how they worked it out—but there were some
people who read it who read into that a discussion of biology that led
them to come up with a whispering campaign that Mary Johnston was
advocating artificial insemination, which of course isn't a
very agreeable or pleasant subject today. But at that time, in the
1909's and '10's and
'12's and along then, was a totally unmentionable
subject. And it is perfectly extraordinary to think how that thing
spread. I went with Miss Johnston to a meeting that she was allowed to
conduct at one of our department stores here, at which, in lunchtime,
the head of the department store had let her speak to the workers there
about woman's suffrage. And I did the little caddying of
handing out leaflets while Miss Johnston spoke. She was a very lovely,
delicate-looking woman and very soft-voiced, and she made the talk to
them about labor conditions and things of that
sort. And she apparently made such a pleasant impression on the head of
the department store that she was invited to come back and speak as
often as possible to the girls. Particularly she was talking about
various economic things and so on. And several weeks or a month later, I
came home one day and found an old friend of my mother's, who
was a very narrow-minded anti-suffragist. My mother was a member of the
Suffrage League, and this lady was saying to my mother that she ought
not to let me out with Miss Johnston, that she understood that Miss
Johnston had made so vulgar and unpleasant and unspeakable address to
the group at this department store that she had been asked to remove her
account and never come back to the department store again. And I turned
to this friend of my mother's, and I said, "At which
store?" So she told me—I believe it was Miller and
Rhoads—and she told me the date. And I said, "Well,
I was with Miss Johnston and handed out the leaflets. And Miss Johnston
made …
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
[TAPE 2, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
ADELE CLARK:
…absolutely no reference to moral or immoral questions. She
spoke almost entirely about women's educational opportunities
and economic opportunities, and the head of the department store came
and asked her to come again." So I said, "What you
heard was totally untrue." "Oh, no," she
said. "You must have either misunderstood, or she must have
said these things when you weren't listening, because I
understood that she was advising all these girls to have children by
artificial insemination." I got very
angry, and I said, "I think they probably would have preferred
knowing how to prevent children if they were irregular in their
attitudes," whereupon my mother told me I was very vulgar, and
so we stopped the conversation. [Laughter]
But that was, to my memory, the most horrible thing, and
we've always hesitated even to put it on any record, I
suppose for fear that somebody might think that it was some semblance of
truth in it. But somebody asked Mrs. Valentine about it at some meeting,
and Mrs. Valentine said, "Mary Johnston," who was
supposed to be, and perhaps was, a free thinker, "is behaving
in a far more Christian attitude than I would have done." I
don't remember our even having very many divorcees or others
in the League, but if there were of course that was plenty brought out.
But the major thing that I recall would be the question of being
Negro-lovers.
And Mrs. Munford was very much traduced
because of her efforts. She was so active in interracial matters. And
her work to get a coordinate college for women at the University. People
went around saying that she kept Booker Washington's
photograph on her bureau, and there was that sort of very dirty, ugly
stuff that was said. And, of course, there was all the cheap stuff about
old maids and… My main recollection is, every time we did a
thing for child welfare somebody would come out and say that childless
women and old maids were the ones that were bothering all this thing. Of
course, we did meet with a certain veiled violence in our open meetings.
Mrs. Lenora Houston, who was one of the most active suffragists, was
making a speech over at one of the parks here in Richmond, and rocks
were thrown. After Mrs. Houston's death
I found in her little box of some of her jewelry the rock that had been
thrown at her at the Jefferson Park. Mrs. Valentine was speaking up at
Fairfax Court House, and I was an also-ran at that meeting, and somebody
got up and sprinkled pepper all over the crowd from the Court House
balcony. There were insults sort of hurled at us at state fairs and
things of that sort. But there was no open violence. At our street
meetings we always had police protection, because we went down and got
permission to speak. And I remember when I was making a talk on Broad
and Sixth Street one night, and one man called out and said something
about women being supported by their husbands and they had no business
asking for extra rights, and I said I'd always made my own
living and I had worked both as an office woman and as an artist. And
the man suddenly hollered out, "If the lady will attend to her
domestical duties, I'll support her." And everybody
[Laughter] kind of laughed about this
street proposal I had had. There were a lot of amusing things of that
sort, but I don't, except for the traducing of Mary Johnston,
totally unfounded and unjust, and except for a lot of jokes and stuff
made… There was a lawyer here who was a great friend of Ben
Valentine's, and he introduced Mrs. Valentine at a meeting at
our city auditorium; that was before we got the vote. And he said that
he was introducing the wife of his old friend Ben Valentine, implying
that was the only reason he was introducing her. And then he said,
"But my position about woman's suffrage is like the
man who was asked did he believe in ghosts, and he said no, he
didn't believe in ghosts, but he was afraid of
them." He said [Laughter] ,
"That's my attitude to
suffrage." And there were lots of cheap jokes during political
meetings.
WINSTON BROADFOOT:
These things, I gather, were used and said to stop the movement, and
substantially disappeared after the women got the vote. Would this be
correct?
ADELE CLARK:
There was a politician here who wouldn't introduce me at a
court house. We had a meeting at a court house for suffrage. And a
friend of mine told me he had asked him to introduce me and he
wouldn't, and the Suffrage League in the little town had an
awful lot of trouble in getting somebody to introduce a suffragist.
Finally they got a young man who afterwards in the Senate. Then I got
the vote, and one of the first things this politician said to me was,
"Well, Miss Adele, you remember how we worked for suffrage when
you came down and spoke at Tappahannock." And I refrained from
saying, "Yes, I heard on definite authority that you cut and
ran when they asked you to introduce me." But I
wouldn't say it; we had to be tactful.
[Laughter] Now you were asking about Senator Byrd. He, as I
said, voted against ratification of the federal amendment. During the Al
Smith campaign when Senator Byrd was supporting Al Smith, several women,
particularly Mrs. John H. Lewis (Elizabeth Langen Lewis), spoke for Mr.
Smith. And Mrs. Houston made a speech for Smith. And Senator Byrd came
up and talked to both of them after this and said that, after hearing
their speeches, he regretted he hadn't followed his
father's footsteps in getting the suffrage. He was rather a
young man, and the whole of his organization was opposed to suffrage.
And Swanson, who was his great friend and monitor,
was opposed to suffrage. I don't know whether he was as much
opposed to suffrage as he was opposed to… He wanted to be on
the conservative side. Because he made some wonderful appointments as
Governor of women to various boards. And of course the suffrage question
hadn't come up particularly during his senatorship.
[Interruption]
ADELE CLARK:
There's one thing that I thought of in answer to your question
about the very ugly and abusive things that happened. During the time
that we were working for ratification of the suffrage amendment, either
in the 1919 special session or the 1920 regular session of the assembly
in Virginia, the old gentleman Mr. Young, whom I mentioned earlier as
having been a supporter of the amendment of the state constitution but
opposed to anything federal because of his being wounded at
Chancellorsville, called Mrs. Houston and me to him one day. And he
said, "I want to tell you ladies that there are two men in the
assembly here who are threatening that the day this ratification comes
up for the vote, if it gets out of committee, or at the committee
hearing—whichever they can make it more
effective—they're going to get every disreputable
Negro woman in Richmond that they can get hold of and pay them, and as
many of them drunk as possible, to come down and crowd the galleries and
the floor of the legislature and make as much of a rowdy demonstration
as they can." And he said, "I have told them that if
they do it, I'm going to get up on the floor and denounce
them and say how the Negro women came here, but I don't know
whether that's going to prevent it. But I want you ladies to
be on the lookout for the fact that they are…" Both of them were from counties in Virginia that
were largely Negro and usually very much opposed to that sort of thing.
But they never did it; he evidently scared them off. But I thought it
was a significant thing in showing the attitude. And then our contact
with Senator Swanson, who was totally opposed to woman's
suffrage and could have turned the one vote that was necessary in the
Senate of the United States to get the suffrage ratification. And I
understood from Mrs. Helen Gardner from Washington, who was one of the
national suffrage leaders, that President Wilson had sent for Mr.
Swanson and urged him to vote for suffrage. Because Wilson knew who much
it meant to the Democratic Party if, under a Democratic administration,
woman's suffrage could come in. Swanson was adamant, but he
was always most charming and polite and received you in Washington
cordially. Now he was already in the Senate, and Westmoreland Davis, the
Governor, ran against him. And I think we might have elected
Westmoreland Davis to the Senate if he had really come out for suffrage,
because the women were still in the mood of supporting a suffragist.
Those were just two things that occurred to me along the lines you were
talking about.
WINSTON BROADFOOT:
I certainly appreciate your help and your cooperation, Miss Clark. I
think at this point we'll close the interview, and
I'll look forward to seeing you on my next trip again to
Richmond, and hope to give you some notice of it. Thank you so much
now.
ADELE CLARK:
Thank you. I'll be glad to see you.
END OF INTERVIEW