Author: Fay Mitchell
Many people think of the women’s liberation movement as starting in the 1960s, but women were engaged in the struggle for equal rights 100 years earlier. One of them was Raleigh-born Elizabeth Devereux Blake, who joined the women’s suffrage movement in 1869, the year it was founded by Susan B. Anthony.
Devereux and her mother moved to Connecticut in 1837 when she was two-years-old, following her father’s death while en route. Although trained in music, dancing and drawing, Devereux also received instruction in mathematics, philosophy and other courses pursued by young men at Yale University. After the death of her first husband she wrote articles, essays and books under several pseudonyms and earned enough to be financially independent.
She married again, and was a natural organizer who worked on the national level to champion working people, particularly women. Her 1874 book, “Fettered for Life, or Her Lord and Master” was an immediate success. An active lobbyist, she authored a leaflet of lobbying instructions for women, published in “Woman’s Journal.” She successfully lobbied in New York for women to vote in state elections, become police matrons, and to be allowed to remain citizens after marriage to a foreigner. Upon her death, she was memorialized as “Lillie Devereux Blake, Champion of Woman Kind.”
Anna Julia Cooper was born in 1858 to Hannah Stanley enslaved in the household of Dr. Fabius J. Haywood, whom scholars concluded was Cooper’s biological father. Little is known of her years in slavery in Raleigh. While a student at St. Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute, 10-year-old Anna earned money tutoring her classmates. She first encountered gender discrimination at the school, and decided to fight for racial and gender equality equally. She graduated high school in 1877, enrolled at Oberlin College in 1881, and was the fourth female to attend. She received a B.A. in mathematics in 1884 and completed a doctorate degree at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1925. She became an influential educator, writer, activist and feminist.
“Not the boys less, but the girls more,” Cooper wrote in “A Voice from the South,” published in 1892. Topics included education, segregation, women’s suffrage, the portrayal of African Americans in literature and poverty. The title is considered the “first book-length feminist analysis of the condition of African Americans.” Cooper wrote, ‘Women in stepping from the pedestal of statue-like inactivity in the domestic shrine, and daring to think and move and speak –to undertake to help shape, mold, and direct the thought of her age, are merely completing the circle of the world’s vision.”
Gertrude Weil of Goldsboro was North Carolina’s best-known women’s suffrage leader. Born into a prominent socially and politically active family in 1879, Weil attended preparatory school in New York and graduated from Smith College in Massachusetts. In 1901, she became the first North Carolinian to graduate from Smith, earning a degree in sociology.
Upon returning to Goldsboro, Weil became active in local charitable organizations and involved in the women’s suffrage movement. She was a founder and first president of the North Carolina Equal Suffrage League (now the League of Women Voters) in 1920, the year the North Carolina General Assembly failed to ratify the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote. She was active in other civic organizations, among them the North Carolina Association of Jewish Women, North Carolina Federation of Women’s Clubs, Legislative Council of North Carolina Women and the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. She provided money to help Jews escape the Holocaust during World War II. Gertrude Weil thought equal rights should be extended to African Americans, saying of segregation that it was “separate but by no means equal.” Even in her eighties she hosted bi-racial committee meetings in her home. The North Carolina General Assembly ratified the 19th Amendment May 6, 1971, just days before Gertrude Weil died on May 30.
Photo credit: The headquarters of the North Carolina Equal Suffrage Association, Raleigh, NC, c.1910's-'20's. From the Barden Collection, State Archives of North Carolina, Raleigh, NC, N.53.16.6672