100 Years of Women’s Suffrage
An opinion piece published a century ago in a September 1920 issue of the Milford Citizen predicted that few Milford women would likely act on their newly acquired right to vote.
“Milford women have never shown much of a desire to vote,” the unnamed author wrote, “and there is doubt expressed as to whether the rights given them will include many of them to assume what was heretofore been the masculine prerogative and go to the polls and declare their choice for state and national officers.
“But time will tell,” continued the author, who—as time would tell—could not have been more wrong about how town women would respond to the ratification of the 19th Amendment.
As part of nationwide celebrations launched in 2020 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave women the long overdue right to vote, Mayor Ben Blake established a Milford Suffrage Centennial Committee designed to celebrate this historic anniversary and the role Milford residents played in helping make the 19th Amendment a reality.
Representing organizations, agencies, and businesses from throughout the community, the all-volunteer, non-partisan committee, chaired by City Clerk Karen Fortunati and Milford Board of Education member Cindy Wolfe Boynton, kicked off the year with a standing-room-only celebration at City Hall in January. An all-volunteer choir, led by Milford resident Linda Whittaker, sang songs written in the late 1800s from “The Suffrage Song Handbook.” The event also included a color guard made up of local Cub and Girl Scouts, a speech by CT Secretary of State Denise Merrill, and Milford Council on Aging chairwoman Lillian Holmes speaking passionately about the legacy and impact of suffrage on women of color. “Despite the 19th Amendment, many women of color found themselves unable to vote—disenfranchised by racist politics—until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” Holmes said.
“Considering how active Connecticut residents were in helping pass the 19th Amendment at the national level, you’d think that it would be easy to find news stories, letters, and other documents from that time. But putting together the story of how Connecticut and Milford residents contributed is not easy at all,” says co-chair Boynton, who has spent the past year researching Connecticut suffrage for a book entitled Alice Paul and the Connecticut ‘Suffs’ that will be published in early 2021. “It’s like a puzzle with little pieces scattered everywhere that need to be found before they can be put together.”
To help tell Milford’s story, longtime resident David Duffner spent several days at the State Library in Hartford, slowly and carefully paging through old copies of the Milford Citizen newspaper. The efforts of Duffner and others were meant to kick-off monthly educational and social events taking place throughout 2020. COVID-19 brought those plans to a halt. Fortunately, efforts to expand on what Duffner found—including searching for descendants of Milford suffragists—is still in the works.
Correctly documenting the names of Milford suffragists is one of the greatest challenges Committee members working on this history are facing. Married women in the early 20th century rarely used their first names. It was also common for women to use initials for their first and middle names, so the list of 24 women known to have worked as suffragists looks like this:
Mrs. E. W. Bishop
Miss Mildred Booth
Mrs. John Canning
Mrs. F.M. Case
Mrs. Charles Robert Chase
Mrs. Frederick Clark
Mrs. William Feltis
Mrs. N. T. Gregory
Mrs. Charles O. Mathews
Miss Rose McCarthy
Mrs. H. M. Merwin
Mrs H.C. Miles
Mrs. Robert Morris
Mrs. Ida Glover Peterson
Mrs. Clark Plummer
Mrs. N.M. Pond
Mrs. Helene Y. Putney
Mrs. W. S. Putney
Mrs. G. R. Secor
Miss Susie Simpson
Mrs. Robert C. Stoddard
Miss Lillias Tibbals
Mrs. Cecil Trowbridge
Mrs. William White
“We’d love to hear from anyone who might be able to provide details about any of these women,” says Boynton. “We want to tell all of their stories and bring them to life. It’s the details about the people involved that tend to be most interesting.”
Sadly, Milford voter records for the November 3, 1920 elections do not exist. However, the Citizen reported that between August and October 1920, approximately 2,000 Milford women registered to vote. Milford’s population at the time was about 10,000.
Done by hand, the process of registering so many people in such a short time was overwhelming; extra staff was hired, and Town Clerk hours extended to meet state deadlines. Additional voting machines were purchased for each of the town’s then-three voting districts.
When the morning of November 3rd dawned grey and with a threat of rain, local businesswoman Lillias Tibbals, owner of a downtown hat shop, was found waiting outside her polling place at Town Hall an hour before it was to open at 5:30 a.m. The then Town Clerk William A. Rose told a Citizen reporter that 34 early-rising Milford women had cast their votes within the first hour of the polls opening. By noon, 573 of the 872 women registered in the downtown First District (where Tibbals lived) had voted, as had 120 of the 190 women registered in the Third District near Walnut Beach. No one in Devon’s Second District kept a tally. Many of the voters arrived in automobiles driven by members of the newly formed Republican Women’s Town Committee.
When the final votes were tallied, the Citizen named Milford women responsible for Republican presidential candidate Warren Harding winning in the city. “The enthusiasm of the women on their first voting day outclassed that of the men considerably,” the Citizen wrote.
The number of Milford women who showed up to vote also outnumbered the men, casting 63 percent of the total 3,089 ballots.
In a Citizen article that followed the election, topped with the headline “Efficient Women,” Mrs. Joseph Alsop, president of the Connecticut League of Republican Women, praised Milford suffragists for their voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts, saying, “Your town organization seems to have been the top notch of all (in Connecticut)” she said.
City Clerk Karen Fortunati said she hopes female and male residents alike will embrace that same kind of enthusiasm for voting this November: “It would be a fitting tribute to all those who fought for the right.”
Search for the Milford Suffrage Centennial Committee on Facebook to learn more.
