July 05, 2024

Part Seven: Rural Iowans and Votes for Women

By David Hargrove

Mary Jane (Whitely) Coggeshall (1836–1911) was an American suffragist inducted into the Iowa Women's Hall of Fame in 1990. Coggeshall died of pneumonia Dec. 22, 1911. Although she did not live to see American women get the vote, fellow suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt dubbed her "the mother of woman suffrage in Iowa." Following Coggeshall's death, the IWSA and the Men's League for Woman's Suffrage together set up the Mary J. Coggeshall Memorial Fund, whose mission was to support activities leading to the passage of a suffrage amendment to the Iowa Constitution.

August, 2020, marks 100 years of votes for women in the USA. This is the seventh and final article in a series revisiting the experiences of rural Iowans as they considered a new addition to the American political landscape - votes for women. The 19th Amendment, which was the culmination of a decades-long movement for women’s suffrage at both state and national levels, was officially adopted August 26, 1920.

In September 1913, Iowa suffragists embarked on a statewide automobile tour for the purpose of building support for women’s suffrage among rural men and women. Originating in Des Moines, the automobile caravan was scheduled to cross the state twice “over the White Pole and River-to-River roads,” while making stops in twenty-five Iowa towns, including Creston.

Some of Iowa’s most influential progressives made the tour. After a friendly stop in Adel, the suffragists moved on to Guthrie Center, where they met with resistance from students, faculty of the high school, and people on the street.

The Creston meeting on Friday afternoon, Sept. 5 at the corner of Adams and Maple, was unmarred by any incidents of disrespect toward the caravan riders. Their message was, after all, tailored to rural audiences. Throughout the tour, wrote an Iowa State University historian, “suffragists listened to the desires of rural women and modified their approach to suffrage work in order to reach them. They argued that rural women deserved the right to vote because of their mutual partnership in the family and community.”

Afton Star-Enterprise editor Orval T. Myers had succeeded in securing a previously unplanned visit by the suffrage caravan immediately following their Creston stop, but his cynical reporting in advance of their visit foreshadowed a less than hospitable reception. Indeed, Myers's account of the Afton meeting suggests that although he did his best to create an awkward situation, the suffragists didn't take the bait.

After the dust had settled, Editor Myers included his summary of the caravan's Afton stop in the Sept. 18, 1913, edition of the Star-Enterprise under the headline, "Suffragists Displeased." Claiming that Afton women were "not interested in voting," and preferred to leave the ballot for men, Myers surmised that "the tour over the state was treated as a joke by many of the newspapers. No one gave the matter any serious thought, except those who were in the party."

To support his claim, Myers printed a report on the suffrage caravan's Afton stop from the Des Moines Capital — which, along with the Tribune, merged with the Register in 1927— "Editor O.T. Myers of the Afton Star-Enterprise was startled when the women of the tour hunted him out. Upon arrival there. He had written an editorial to the effect that the short haired women were going to pass through Afton, but that they had failed to schedule a stop there. Mrs. Pleasant J. Mills, generalissimo of the party, wrote to him and told him that none of the women were short haired, but that they would be glad to make speeches in Afton.

“When they found Mr. Myers they asked him to introduce Miss Dunlop, and the Hon. F.S. Shankland, the speakers. He said he was no public speaker, and Mr. Shankland had to introduce himself and Miss Dunlop to the good audience assembled in spite of the fact that no advertising of the meeting had been in advance. Miss Dunlop spoke with bared head and proved the length of her hair.”

Afton Star-Enterprise editor Orval Myers was respectful toward the suffragists as a matter of chivalry, it would seem, but largely dismissed their efforts to reach Iowa's rural women. Writing today, it's easy to conclude that Myers was a chauvinistic cave man but, in 1913, many women did believe that politics should remain a masculine domain.

Myers’s original editorial about the suffrage riders, which complained about their failure to plan an Afton stop, made much of the female suffragists’ hair-length. Short hair was a daring, liberated look for women in 1913, and by focusing on appearances Myers was sensationalizing the suffragists’ cause. Disappointed in this criticism, he dismissed their efforts and championed his interpretation of traditional gender roles at the polls.

Who was Orval T. Myers? According to the current Star-Enterprise publisher Mary Hill, Myers and his brother Russell owned and operated the paper from 1913 to 1943, after which Russell ran it until 1946. Orval Myers, she notes, was a strong advocate for town improvements: an electrical system, water system, paved roads, and enforcement of Afton speed limits.

In 1913, the year of the suffrage tour, Myers was age 33. To the 1920 US Census taker, Myers reported that he was age 40, and lived in the same rented household with his parents (Lewis and Josephine) and two younger brothers (Marshall and Frankie). Unusual, for that era, was the marital status he gave: Divorced. In 1940, at age 60, Myers lived in the same rented house with his mother and another woman who was six years his senior. He remained a divorcee.

It would be a stretch, as a historian, to say that Myers’ views on suffrage were shaped by a negative experience with marriage or that his marriage failed as a result of his traditional view of gender roles (which is amply documented in his commentaries), however tempting such conclusions might be. Moreover, I am grateful to Mary Hill for providing some details about Myers’s accomplishments that enable us to reach a more balanced perspective on the editor.

If I may, I’ll conclude with a personal observation. I’ve always been interested to read the claims of suffragists who believed that votes for women would radically change the political and cultural landscape. Fundamentally, adoption of the 19th Amendment was fair, just, and the right thing to do. All women, and men, deserve the right to vote. Whether society is significantly more humanized as a result, or that progressive causes have been advanced by women at the polls, is, however, debatable. Women and men alike seem to find their way to different places across the ideological spectrum, and influences like income, ethnicity, and religion have as much effect on our political worldview as gender. Did the 19th Amendment change the world? It did, in striking a blow for fairness and gender equity. But did votes for women have a revolutionary effect on society and culture? I’ll leave that, dear reader, for you to decide.