Chautauqua: ‘The Loving Friend’ to the Women’s Rights Movement
Amid a Weeklong Celebration of the Women’s Vote Centennial, Revisiting the Institution’s Role as Platform and Catalyst
By Emálee Krulish
On a Saturday afternoon in July 1891, the Chautauqua Assembly at Fair Point held its first women’s suffrage meeting. Susan B. Anthony, the Rev. Anna Howard Shaw, Julia Ward Howe, Grace H. Dodge, Zeralda Wallace, and local suffragist Kate Peate attracted “one of the largest audiences of the season,” according to the Chautauqua Assembly Herald. Woman’s Day, as it was called, was reported to have been “the best and biggest day Chautauqua ever saw” in its 17-year history, thereafter sparking a tradition of regularly featuring women’s suffrage on Chautauqua’s platform.
Ten years earlier, Chautauqua had hosted its first women’s suffrage debate, seeking to answer the question of whether “woman’s suffrage is essential to the highest civilization.” As reported in the Assembly Herald, the hour-and-40-minute-long debate, comprising seven rounds of discourse, pitted the Rev. Theodore L. Flood, editor of The Chautauquan and the Assembly Herald — coincidentally, the only man on the grounds who volunteered to argue in the affirmative — against the Rev. Henry Lummis, professor of Greek and Latin in the Chautauqua School of Languages, and a self-proclaimed “earnest champion” of the rights of women despite arguing against them while on the platform. As proof of Chautauqua’s progressiveness, Flood noted that neither the Chautauqua Association’s charter nor constitution included any wording prohibiting women from holding office, touted the practice of affording women cottage holders “the same right of suffrage” as male cottage holders at their annual meeting, and praised one of Chautauqua’s two founders, Lewis Miller, as being “as earnest an advocate of the cause” as himself. Flood’s praise of only one of Chautauqua’s forebears is noteworthy: the other founder, John Heyl Vincent, opposed the vote for women.
Vincent’s views — immortalized in his correspondence with Anthony’s biographer Ida Husted Harper — while not supportive of women’s suffrage, were by no means prohibitive of allowing suffragists to speak from Chautauqua’s platform or disseminate their views through The Chautauquan, a magazine of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle (CLSC). As he would explain at a CLSC meeting in 1883, as reported in The Chautauquan, Vincent concluded that the Circle’s “great objects,” namely education and self-betterment, were equally afforded to all, regardless of their stance on women’s suffrage: “We must remember in all this discussion, that the largest liberty is granted to all members of the CLSC, that those who believe in woman’s suffrage, and those who are opposed to woman’s suffrage, may be equally loyal to the great objects of the Circle.”
The first name to come to mind for many when considering the key contributors to the women’s suffrage movement in the United States is that of Anthony, the famous Rochester suffragist. And while “the Napoleon of the Women’s Rights Movement” was, indeed, a strong proponent of women’s suffrage in New York, and even though she made her mark on Chautauqua County as early as 1854 while speaking in Sherman and Mayville, Anthony wasn’t the only, or even perhaps the most consequential, force responsible for bringing about the organized women’s movement in and around Chautauqua.
While social reform was occurring at a national level in the 19th century, Western New York was one of the regions of the country where spiritual revivals and emerging religious movements were particularly concentrated and active — such a hotbed for this activity, in fact, it was nicknamed the “Burned-over District.” As the historian and writer Spencer W. McBride noted in his July 22 lecture during the 2019 Chautauqua week on the subject, women in the Burned-over District achieved leadership roles within the religious sphere that were denied to them in the public sphere. Consequently, as McBride explained, this authority empowered women to seek social reform and, using the their newly learned organizational skills, “drove them to seek equality in the political sphere” as well.
The religious movements that swept Western New York following the Second Great Awakening left in their wake a “spirit of organization” which set Chautauqua County on the path to become “the cradle of many progressive movements.”
According to the New York State Woman Suffrage Association’s Constitutional-Amendment Campaign Year 1894 publication, printed in 1895:
This is the home of the world-wide people’s college, the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle. Here you will find the cradle of that other world-wide organization, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Here, too, was born the Grange …
The Woman’s Christian Association, the Relief Corps, King’s Daughters, Christian Endeavor, Epworth League, missionary societies of the various denominations and literary clubs of all descriptions, thrive in this favorable atmosphere.
With an aptitude for leadership and organization freshly obtained from their religious, social, and progressive circles, the women of Chautauqua County “were not slow” in applying their newfound skills to the “various problems which their awakened energies encountered,” including their present disenfranchisement.
In 1887, 13 local women, with ambitions mirroring those of the State Suffrage Association, formed the first Political Equality Club in Jamestown, New York. Though by no means the first women’s suffrage club, the first Political Equality Club in Chautauqua County was responsible for bringing the issue of women’s suffrage to the greater attention of Chautauqua’s rural population. Political Equality Clubs began popping up all over the county, and by 1889, 14 additional clubs — from Fredonia to Frewsburg, Harmony to Westfield — had organized under the umbrella of The Chautauqua County Political Equality Club. Then, in 1890, they decided it was time to bring the issue front and center stage — and where better to do so than from the platform of their local Chautauqua Assembly?
From early on, Chautauqua had welcomed not only women speakers to the platform, but their causes as well. Prior to the commencement of the Third Annual Session of the Sunday-School Assembly in 1876, according to the Assembly Herald, “renowned temperance women of the country” Eliza Daniel “Mother” Stewart, Julia Coleman and Frances Willard descended upon the assembly grounds at Fair Point to speak at the Chautauqua Temperance Convention. Chautauqua County’s suffragists had seen local temperance activists use Chautauqua as a springboard for their movement and believed it could be beneficial to their cause as well.
Fast-forward to 1892 — the year after the first Women’s Day suffrage meeting — and Chautauqua was, again, hosting another suffrage debate. However, unlike the all-male debate in 1881, the 1892 debate was commanded by one of the suffrage movement’s own. The Rev. Anna Howard Shaw returned to Chautauqua to defend women’s suffrage against Dr. James Monroe Buckley, who, though arguing in opposition to the matter at hand, later praised Chautauqua for providing a peaceful platform from which to raise the issue for discussion in a piece for the Assembly Herald: “Chautauqua has been the loving friend of temperance, giving voice to the most radical reformer and the advocate of legal restriction, and the exclusive proponent of moral suasion, and to those who fancy that in universal suffrage the war of four thousand years will be ended by the complete destruction of the enemy.”
While it was not a foregone conclusion that everyone in attendance at the 1892 debate would be on the side of the suffragists, at its close, there was little speculation as to Chautauqua’s sentiment: “The enthusiasm that followed the address of Miss Shaw and the absence of the same at the close of Dr. Buckley’s address told plainly on which side the audience stood,” wrote Elnora Monroe Babcock in The Centennial History of Chautauqua County.
Shaw would make four more appearances at Chautauqua. In 1900, Susan B. Anthony and Carrie Chapman Catt, who had addressed Chautauquans with a stirring speech on “True Democracy” in 1898, joined Shaw for a Suffrage Conference on the grounds, and, in 1903, Harriet May Mills of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association assembled “all persons on the grounds, interested in the granting of suffrage to women,” as the Assembly Herald described it.
Chautauqua women organized their own Women’s Club (still active to this day), Suffrage Club, Suffrage Association, Equal Rights Association, and other women-centered organizations on the grounds, while institutionally sponsored events like Women’s Day and Women’s Federation Day helped to further promote Chautauqua as a suffragist sanctuary for discussion, debate, and the dissemination of information.
“It would be difficult to estimate the amount of sentiment that has been made for women’s suffrage at this famous educational institution,” wrote Babcock, also the Chautauqua County Political Equality Club President, while recounting the history of the Political Equality Movement in Chautauqua County in 1904. However, she continued, the “courtesies on the part of the management” were “the direct result of the Political Equality movement in Chautauqua County,” thus giving credit to the women of Chautauqua County — all but a few of whom will forever go unnamed — who were instrumental in bringing the message of women’s suffrage to Chautauqua.
Thanks to the leadership and organization of local women’s organizations like the Chautauqua County Political Equality Club, national suffragists Alice Freeman Palmer, Mary Torrans Lathrap, Rachel Foster Avery, Mrs. Philip N. Moore, Ida Husted Harper, Cornelia Templeton Hatcher, Grace Wilbur Trout, Mary Garrett Hay, Maud Wood Park, and others continued to “preach the gospel of equal rights” from the Chautauqua platform through the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, and beyond.
What Chautauqua strove for then, it continues to pursue today: It remains a place where all can gather to respectfully share opposing views in the pursuit of lifelong learning and self-betterment. During Week Five of the 2020 CHQ Assembly, building upon a history that includes the 1891 Women’s Day, the Institution presents something of a Women’s Week: “The Women’s Vote Centennial and Beyond” celebrates the 100th anniversary of the constitutional adoption of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave women in America the right to vote. As promoted in the Institution’s official 2020 program, Week Five will “consider those who were left out of the mainstream suffrage movement, examine the slow progress toward gender equality in the United States, and look to the movement’s relevance to the ongoing battle over voting rights.”
“We will try to challenge the collective assumptions that our audience has toward the suffrage movement and issues of equality that continue today,” said Matt Ewalt, vice president and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education, who oversees the centerpiece Chautauqua Lecture Series programs presented each weekday morning.
The many perspectives of Week Five include those of Elaine Weiss, award-winning author of The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote; Kimberly Churches, CEO of the American Association of University Women; Carol Jenkins, co-president and CEO of the ERA Coalition and the Fund for Women’s Equality; and former senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, the longest-serving woman in the history of the U.S. Congress. Meanwhile, throughout the week, the Department of Religion’s Interfaith Lecture Series will explore the theme “The Feminine Spirit,” with an all-star lineup of lecturers that includes the author and activist Sr. Joan Chittister, OSB, translator of the mystics Mirabai Starr, and Revolutionary Love Project founder Valarie Kaur. For the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, the author Susan Straight will present her memoir In the Country of Women.
One major program component, though necessarily curtailed by the COVID-19 pandemic, is the season-long effort by Chautauqua’s artistic companies and departments to showcase women artists and women’s stories. Chautauqua Opera Company’s three female-focused operas were to be featured during its July 30–Aug. 1 Opera Festival, “The Women’s Suffrage Centennial: Claiming a Voice, Claiming a Vote.” Chautauqua Theater Company, which was set to stage plays exclusively by women in Bratton Theater, has instead produced, remotely, readings of two fresh scripts by women playwrights as part of its ongoing new play development work.
Audience members can also expect to see the women’s suffrage centennial theme featured by the Chautauqua Institution Archives in its popular Heritage Lecture Series.
“Our celebration will be uniquely ‘Chautauquan’ in that it will ask us to get behind the headlines and examine women’s rights from many perspectives,” said Shannon Rozner, chief of staff and vice president of strategic initiatives.
In the wake of the women’s vote centennial celebrations, Rozner, who is responsible for spearheading Chautauqua’s work in inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility (IDEA), said the Institution must examine “how women experience Chautauqua and how Chautauqua shows up for women.”
Chautauqua itself has seen some organizational success in terms of gender equality. Forty percent of Institution executives are women, and its Board of Trustees, now helmed by a woman chair and vice chair, is nearly half female.
“As we live out our mission in the 21st century, we have to make sure our culture, our policies and our actions help us explore the best in human values,” Rozner said. “That exploration is at its best when it occurs among a diverse group in an environment that feels inclusive and welcoming to all who seek what we offer at Chautauqua.”
As Chautauqua continues in the work of her founders, educating and enlightening anyone who seeks the knowledge she offers, Chautauqua — the loving friend of temperance, suffrage, inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility — carries on the forward-thinking spirit of all forbearing path-forgers who today, as they did then, call her friend.
Emálee Krulish has served as an assistant with the Chautauqua Institution Archives since 2017.
