On a cold January night 100 years ago, a woman in Shawnee left her sickbed to fight for women’s suffrage.
Aloysius Larch-Miller gave a “speech seldom equalled on any political convention floor” on Jan. 31, 1920, according to the Feb. 2, 1920, issue of The Daily Oklahoman. This speech was in debate with Attorney General S. P. Freeling, who was arguing against calling a special legislative session to ratify the 19th Amendment at the Pottawatomie County Democratic Convention.
After Larch-Miller’s impressive and passionate speech, the resolution passed. But Larch-Miller didn’t live to see the result of that special session — she died of pneumonia within 48 hours of the debate.
Oklahoma Gov. James Robertson ordered the state flag flown half-staff in honor of Larch-Miller, and Freeling was among the state and county dignitaries to attend her funeral.
A memorial plaque at Larch-Miller park, dedicating the park to Aloysius Larch-Miller in Shawnee, on Feb. 24.
On Feb. 28, 1920, 100 years ago today, Oklahoma legislators met and became the 33rd state to ratify the 19th Amendment, voting 84 to 12 in favor of the amendment. Many consider Larch-Miller a martyr for women’s suffrage and credit her speech that night as a major factor behind legislators’ decision to pass the amendment.
Aloysius Larch-Miller's grave and bench with the Larch-Miller name in the background at St. Benedict's Cemetery in Shawnee on Feb. 24.
“After the celebration of the mass, the Rev. Father Maloney preached a short sermon in which he compared the deceased to the immortal Apostle Paul in her life of sublime service to her fellow man,” said a story in the Feb. 5, 1920, edition of The Ada Weekly News.
‘We are engaged in a war of liberation’
As OU professor Jennifer Holland told her Oklahoma history class on Feb. 24, the fight for suffrage was not just a national movement fought by well-known suffragists like Susan B. Anthony and Carrie Chapman Catt. It was a movement that permeated cities, counties and states across America.
“It wasn’t just a national campaign,” Holland said. “It’s one that was waged for decades and decades on the territory and state levels.”
And while many people who think back to the suffrage movement remember protests outside the White House and the Seneca Falls Convention in New York, the first legislative bodies in the U.S. to grant women the right to vote were Wyoming in 1869 and Utah in 1870. Both were still U.S. territories at the time — a status that meant they wanted more incentives to attract citizens and potentially gain statehood, Holland said.
A flyer depicting the states that had granted women the right to vote by February 1918, found in the Western History Collections in Monnet Hall on OU's campus Feb. 26.
Many western states followed suit while the movement battled on in other parts of the country. The states most resistant to women’s suffrage were those in the South, Holland said.
“(There was) this intense racism, and this worry that if you extend the vote to women, you’re increasing the black vote,” Holland said.
Suffrage supporters also fought the argument that women shouldn’t vote because it would take away their claim to femininity, Holland said.
“This old argument that kept resurfacing was that the vote would ‘unsex’ women,” Holland said. “That it would make them (lesser) women, and any woman who wanted to vote was basically a man because she is giving up something that was core to her womanhood if she voted.”
Oklahoma, located between the South and the West and run by the Democratic party at the time, was torn as a state on the issue. As Democrats were widely known as opponents of women’s suffrage, national campaigns looked to ensure suffrage passed in Oklahoma so more states might follow.
A photo titled "First lady voters in Guthrie" on June 5, 1890, found in the Western History Collections in Monnet Hall on OU's campus Feb. 26.
Full women’s suffrage — Oklahoma Territory gave women the right to vote in school elections in 1890 — was one of the most debated topics at the 1907 Oklahoma Constitutional Convention, due to the racist argument against black women’s right to vote.
Holland said white suffragists tried to assure delegates that black people would still be kept from the polls via literacy tests and other methods designed to exclude, given the segregation and inequality of education at the time.
This wasn’t enough for convention attendees to add women’s suffrage into the constitution, and the fight would continue for 11 years in Oklahoma. It wasn’t until the civil rights movement in the 1960s that black men and women were able to freely exercise their right to vote in all states.
In 1910, women’s suffrage was brought as a state question and failed by a vote of 88,808 for and 128,928 against its passage.
Despite this disappointment, suffragists did not give up. According to a document from the League of Women Voters of Oklahoma, suffragists kept their cause before legislators until they were able to gain enough support to put it on the ballot again, which happened in 1917.
A state question would go to the voters again in the 1918 general election. According to the league, the National American Woman Suffrage Association gave $20,000 in assistance to secure ratification — the most spent on one state’s campaign.
Even more uncertainty came after election day when there were attempts at interference and fraud by the State Election Board to try to ensure that women wouldn’t get the vote, according to the League of Women Voters of Oklahoma.
In a Nov. 9, 1918, letter to Oklahoma suffragist and poet Daisy Coldiron, the Oklahoma State Woman Suffrage Campaign Committee secretary, A.P. Crockett, wrote with an optimistic view of the election, saying election returns received when she was writing indicated the amendment would pass.
“If this be true, we have won a great victory, and the next step, the ratification of the Federal Amendment by our legislature, will undoubtedly follow,” Crockett wrote in the letter. “Let us not forget that we are engaged in a war of liberation … We should not desert our cause when the President of the United States has gone bravely before the Senate and declared Suffrage to be a war measure.”
Crockett was correct in her optimism. A month after election day, it was announced that 57 percent of Oklahoma men had voted to amend the state constitution to allow women to vote in all elections, Holland said.
The long battle in Oklahoma for women’s suffrage had been won, and suffragists anticipated that a federal amendment would soon pass in the U.S. Congress.
Jan Largent, president of the League of Women Voters of Oklahoma, said she believes it was easier for Oklahoma to ratify the federal amendment because it had already become part of the state constitution. But ratification still required campaigning to convince the Oklahoma legislature that the state should be one of 36 to ratify the amendment.
When the legislative session ended without a vote on the amendment, increasing pressure from suffragists statewide pushed the governor to call a special session to take a vote, Largent said. Larch-Miller was just one of many who lobbied for this to happen, but Largent said she believed her part had a great impact on the outcome of that session.
“Her argument was so strong, and people were so struck by what she had to say,” Largent said. “And the fact that she got off of her deathbed and went and gave a presentation and died the next day — it was a story, I’m sure, that was used in arguments for (ratification).”
‘It was not all women’
When Oklahoma voted for statewide women’s suffrage in 1918 and nationwide women’s suffrage in 1920, Holland said one of the main reasons it finally passed was that Jim Crow laws had become secure in the state.
“Any black person, man or woman, would have an almost impossible time voting in the state of Oklahoma in the 1910s and onward,” Holland said. “White Oklahomans had less worry.”
Though 2020 is celebrated as 100 years of women’s suffrage in America, not all women were able to vote.
“Suffrage in Oklahoma, suffrage in the nation, was not ‘All women all of a sudden got the right to vote,’” Holland said. “It would still be exclusionary in a certain way, that black women are cut out … in many places, and Native women in many places as well.”
For indigenous women, the road to suffrage was difficult because Native Americans weren’t considered citizens until the Snyder Act of 1924, and it wasn't until 1962 that all states allowed Native Americans to vote.
Obstacles that kept the vote from women of color and Native women — and men of those groups as well — included poll taxes, literacy tests, fraud and intimidation.
“And the literacy tests weren’t really literacy tests,” Largent said. “They were ‘gotcha’ tests. You may have had a college degree, but they made the test so impossible … most of us couldn't pass.”
During the suffrage movement, Largent said there were plenty of women of color and indigenous women who were fighting for the right to vote.
Forced into the background — in the literal sense, as women of color had to stay in the back during marches and even had separate suffrage organizations — they continued to be left behind for decades until the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which enforced the right to vote for all citizens “without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.”
Even today, the fight for suffrage is ongoing for indigenous women, said Nanette Kelley, member of the Osage and Cherokee nations, in a League of Women Voters of Oklahoma newsletter.
“On the 100th anniversary of Women’s Suffrage, we Indigenous women have little to celebrate,” Kelley said. “In 1920, Suffrage was celebrated by white women of European descent and then gradually by people of color. Currently, Indigenous women throughout the U.S. continue to fight for human rights including the right to vote.”
The indigenous community faces obstacles including state laws that enable voter suppression, a lack of rural area polling places and gerrymandering to favor wins for white constituents, Kelley said.
This is the first year that Native American women and men without street addresses — which some state laws require, and many reservation homes don’t have — will be allowed to vote, Kelley said.
“We can’t celebrate until every woman has consistent voting access,” Kelley said. “For us, voting rights are a matter of life and death. Our women and girls are murdered and disappear more often per capita than any other group in the U.S. We are so dehumanized, tragedies such as (these) continue to be ignored.”
Kelley said there needs to be an end to voter suppression and ineffective legislation, which she believes can be achieved.
“We should keep the conversation open, explore our shared history, and not suppress painful past and present events,” Kelley said.
‘Use this power that people fought so hard for’
A pamphlet promoting women's suffrage found in the Western History Collections in Monnet Hall on OU's campus Feb. 26.
As the centennial of the 19th Amendment comes and goes, reflecting on both past victories and battles still being fought today go hand in hand, said Marilyn Artus, an Oklahoma City artist and creator of the nationwide art tribute to the anniversary Her Flag.
“It seems absurd that really not that long ago, more than half the population couldn’t vote,” Artus said.
The passage of the 19th Amendment has brought many positive changes to the U.S., Artus said.
Since 1920, women’s rights and family issues have been brought to the forefront of U.S. lawmakers' agendas.
However, despite 100 years of progress, there is still much to be done when it comes to achieving full equality for all. One of the first steps is more women running for political office, Artus said.
“There’s not enough of us running for office,” Artus said. “(We have) more than half of women voting right now, but more than half actually in office would be a really good place to start.”
Something Artus said she noticed as a young girl is that women are not featured prominently in history books. Even when suffrage is taught, only a select few suffragists are highlighted.
This anniversary is an opportunity to talk about that history, Artus said.
“We need women's history on an equal playing field with men,” Artus said. "Little girls don't see themselves in history. So from the get-go, there's an inequality problem.”
Largent said the League of Women Voters' main focus today is diversity, equity and inclusion.
Yes, legally every U.S. citizen can vote. But there are still many issues, Largent said.
“We feel that no matter who you are — if you're a minority, if you’re gay or (transgender) — you have the right to participate in government,” Largent said. “So that is our push now, because we still discriminate. We have gone backwards actually, in so many ways.”
One way the league is pushing for inclusion in government is its support of People Not Politicians, a movement to end partisan gerrymandering.
Artus said it is interesting that coinciding with the centennial is the recent revival of interest in getting the Equal Rights Amendment passed, which was recently ratified by Virginia, the 38th and final state required. But its ratification comes nearly 40 years after the deadline set by Congress, and the issue will likely go to the courts to determine if it counts.
Of all the history to be discussed and the push for even more positive change, Artus said this anniversary should also be a time for a renewal of excitement about voting and not taking it for granted.
“Realize how hard men, women, Republican, Democrat, everybody fought to get the 19th Amendment passed,” Artus said. “(Don’t) take it for granted, and actually use this power that people fought so hard for. … It took everybody to pass this, and no party owns this anniversary. It's a moment to remember we're all in this together and feel good for a minute.”
