Women’s Suffrage in Michigan
March 6, 2009
Woman Suffrage Tent, 1912 Michigan State Fair, courtesy the Archives of Michigan
March is Women’s History Month in Michigan and this month’s Image of the Month from the Archives of Michigan tells of the arduous but eventually successful process that eventually secured the right to vote for women in Michigan with the ratification of the nineteenth amendment in 1919 (Michigan was one of the first 3 states to ratify).
In Michigan, that struggle spanned at least seven decades. In 1846, a woman named Ernestine Rose spoke to the Michigan legislature about the need for woman suffrage. This was two years before the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. In 1849, a Michigan state Senate committee proposed a “universal suffrage” amendment to the Michigan constitution. This would have granted voting rights to both women and African Americans, but no action was taken on the proposal. A woman suffrage bill did not come before the state legislature again until 1866. It was defeated by only one vote.
Click through to read the rest of a struggle that spanned lifetimes.
March 11, 2009 at 11:51 am
Aha! A chance to mention my friend Jini Caruso’s dissertation A history of woman suffrage in Michigan , which we’d sometimes discuss while we bicycled through the countryside.
Not sure how anyone would get a copy, though, short of wandering into MSU’s library. Which is certainly worthwhile; I used to do so quite regularly.