Oil Region Suffragists
- Lydia Seaton
- Aug 11
- 7 min read
The staff at the Venango Museum have been discussing a number of very interesting historical women. It’s All History has talked about French Kate, Emma Taft Egbert, and Lydia Dean to name a few. A Minute in History told the story of Ida Tarbell and her investigative journalism just last week!
Our staff were inspired to talk about women’s suffrage this week, and how the international cause had an important place in Venango County!
Women's Suffrage: A Brief History of a Long Struggle
The 19th Amendment of the United States Constitution recognizes the right of women to vote and prohibits the United States from denying the right of suffrage on the basis of sex. However, the ratification of the amendment was a long-fought struggle, which took decades for suffragists to achieve.
Discussions for suffrage first began in 1848 at the Seneca Falls Convention in New York. It was recognized as being the “first women’s rights convention” and had been organized by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, two suffragists who were integral to the movement. Desire for suffrage had been increasingly popular over the 19th century, and there had been numerous, albeit smaller movements, prior to the 1848 Seneca Falls meeting.
Due to the increasing pressure for the women’s vote, Aaron Sargent, a senator from California, introduced the first Women’s Suffrage amendment in 1878. This was the first time a suffrage amendment had formally been introduced in congress and declared that the right to vote should not be denied on the basis of sex. While this amendment was not successful, it laid the groundwork for future campaigns in the name of suffrage and provided a strong foundation for the thoughts many Americans were having in terms of women's rights.
Forty years later, the amendment successfully passed through the House of Representatives on May 21, 1919. On June 4, 1919, it passed through the Senate. After this, the amendment was sent to be ratified by the States, needing a ¾ majority which equaled 36 states in 1919.
The amendment was successfully ratified on August 18th, 1920, and the adoption was certified on August 26, 1920. Pennsylvania, a state whose “women had been at the forefront of the struggle for women’s rights,” ratified the amendment on June 24, 1919. It was the seventh state to ratify out of thirty-six.
Before the 19th Amendment, there had been a handful of states which granted suffrage to women. These included Wyoming (1869), Colorado (1893), Idaho (1896), Utah (1896), Washington (1910), California (1911), Arizona (1912), Kansas (1912), Oregon (1912), Illinois (1913), Montana (1914), and Nevada (1914). Prior to the formation of the United States, many settlements within the colonies had given women the right to vote, one such place being New Jersey. In 1776, The New Jersey State Constitution referred to voters as “they,” leaving the door open for men and women, black and white, so long as they met property requirements, to vote. This decision was later reversed in 1807, however, when a new state law was introduced, changing the voting allowance to only white men who owned land.
The Justice Bell, a close replica of Liberty Bell, was an important piece of the suffragist movement. The Justice Bell, cast without a crack unlike the Liberty Bell, was commissioned by Katharine Wentworth Ruschenberger in 1912, who was one of the “70,000 members of the Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage Association. After the bell was produced, it was mounted on the bed of a pick up truck and driven around all of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties to raise support for suffrage.
The Oil Region's Suffragists!
In February 1896, the subject of suffrage was introduced in The Oil City Derrick. Mrs. J. D. Boulton wrote: “There can be no doubt in the minds of reasonable people as to the justice of it. [...] In many ways women are more liable than men to penetrate the details of affairs. Is not the average woman equally well qualified for deciding who shall direct the affairs of State as the man whose only qualification consists in being 21 years of age?"
The questions continued to spread through Venango County, first as a widely contested debate within 19th century Literacy Societies. After one such meeting at the Pine Hill School in Clinton Township, it was said that “Society came pretty near to having a row over the debate.”
Suffragists also began visiting Venango County to give lectures on the topic. One such visitor was Constance McCalmont Humphrey, who had been born in Franklin but moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan and fought nationally for suffrage. Prior to her address in Franklin, an article she wrote titled “Why I am a Suffragist” was published in The Evening News. She says in the article: “Nothing can prevent the success of the cause, for it is the next great step in the uplift of the world.”
150 people attended her lecture at the St. John’s parish house in Franklin. She was introduced by James Denton Hancock, a Franklin attorney who was opposed to suffrage. In his introduction, Hancock said voting was a privilege and he needed a few questions answered before he could agree to “women voting.” Before he could listen to Humphrey speak and answer his questions, Hancock left for another engagement. Humphrey was described as being “extremely bright and entertaining.”
Another speaker in Venango County was Miss W. K. MacDiarmid, who spearheaded the
cause in Franklin and was a featured speaker at the Majestic Theater in Oil City in 1914 for a lecture series presented by the Oil City Educational League. During her lecture, MacDiarmid argued that women, “as human beings [...] have every right to the ballot that a man has – to use [their right] as they see fit, and for the purposes they see fit.”
By the summer of 1915, the suffrage movement had gained significant momentum in Venango County and was frequently reported on in local papers, such as The Seneca Kicker, a weekly, female run newspaper.
Miss Emma L. MacAlarnay, a state suffrage organizer based in Philadelphia, came to visit the oil region, she was taken to the home of Anna Kinney, The Kicker’s editor, and then to a “mass meeting” for the suffrage movement. She was then taken on a tour of Venango County and visited nearly “every settlement in the county.”
Organizers in Venango County began preparing for a state-wide referendum in 1915, which would grant Pennsylvanian women the right to vote. After months of campaigning, the referendum was carried out on November 2, 1915, with 51 out of 59 precincts in Venango County taking part. While the referendum failed to pass in Pennsylvania, Venango County voted in favor of suffrage for women, with a 2,007 vote plurality in favor. In fact, most counties in Pennsylvania supported women’s suffrage, however large blocks in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia voted against the proposal.
Suffrage came to Pennsylvania in 1920 with the national amendment, however, women were still required to pay a poll tax if they were not landowners. Women immediately began registering to vote, and, on the first Tuesday in November in 1920, women swelled voting numbers to the biggest turn out in United States history. In many areas, such as Cooperstown, more women voted than men! Women had been “encouraged” to vote early that day so as not to congest the polls when men came to vote after work.
Ida Tarbell – Journalist, Activist, Anti-Suffragist
Ida Tarbell, the famous “mudraking” journalist from the Oil Region was active in the early twentieth century current events and political circles. She became well-known after her exposé on John D. Rockefeller's Stand Oil Company monopoly.
In the early 1910s, Tarbell’s name was listed as a member of the executive committee for the New York State Association Opposed to Women’s Suffrage. Due to the progressive nature of her personality and her previous work, Tarbell’s friends and colleagues were deeply surprised by her affiliation.
Helen Keller, who was twenty-three years Tarbell’s junior, said that Tarbell was “getting too old to understand and sympathize with the aspirations of the growing world.” Jane Addams, a notable suffragist, said, “There is some limitation to Ida Tarbell’s mind.”
Tarbell – who believed that any woman should be able to “study what she chooses, come and go as she wills, support herself unquestioned by trade, profession, or art, [and] receive a respectful attention on platform or before legislature.”
Despite these progressive views, Tarbell argued that women voting would be a “distraction to the cause of economic and social justice” and “women’s energies would be better spent on other causes.”
“It is not bigotry or vanity or a petty notion of their own spheres which has kept the majority of women from lending themselves to the radical wing of the woman’s movement. It is a fear to destroy a greater thing which they possess. The fear of change is not an irrational thing.”
In 1924, Good Housekeeping asked multiple writers, journalists, and activist, to discuss whether suffrage had been a success or a failure. Ida Tarbell was one such writer. She continued to defend her early opposition to suffrage, both in her Good Housekeeping article, and until her death in 1944, however, she admitted that the “effects [of suffrage] were more positive in a short period” than she had believed possible.
She opposed those who were quick to deem women’s suffrage a failure, saying that political experiments must be judged “not by decades, but rather by centuries.” Tarbell was particularly impressed with the increased involvement of women in local politics. In her 1924 article, she urged women to vote and not give up home, saying that since women now have the right to vote, they must use it widely.
Tarbell concluded her article saying: “The only real failure at present in women's suffrage is the failure to exercise it. To denounce it because we do not yet see anything particularly helpful or illuminating coming from its exercise is foolish and unjust.” Women’s business, Ida concludes, is the constant exercise of voting power “as intelligently and disinterestedly as we are able, with thoughtful study of the effects [and] the mistakes made.”
Thanks for reading!
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