[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