“Let Idaho be among the first,” she said. “Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado have all agreed that women should vote. Let Idaho join them.”[18] Being at the forefront of progress has always come with a certain amount of fear—you’re asking people to abandon comfort for the sake of growth. It’s like asking people to follow you into the wilderness for the promise of a better tomorrow. Some people would rather stay where they are, because home is comfortable. Home is safe. Change is scary.
Legislators in Idaho said that if the citizens wanted women to vote, they would have to amend the state constitution. The women of the WCTU would have to convince the men to let them have the ballot. When the morning of election day in 1896 dawned, storms rolled through the sky and through the hearts and stomachs of the women who had fought and organized for so long. They made a schedule to ensure there was always someone to stand as close to the polling place as possible. They hired little boys to stand outside with signs that read, “Vote for your mother.”[19] They gave out free coffee, and met men with a kind word and an ask to please vote for the amendment.
“It’s not my ticket, it’s not my ticket,” they heard over and over.
Some men told them, “Women have too many rights as it is.”[20] The cruel comments cut like the cold wind of the stormy day.
When the election ended and the ballots were tabulated, the women sat for a moment in stunned silence. They had done it. It had worked. They had convinced nearly 66 percent of the men of Idaho to extend them the vote. “Praise God from whom all blessings flow!” the newspapers read.[21]
The State Board of Canvassers then tried to claim that the victory wasn’t good enough, and that they needed an even bigger majority than the one they had just secured. Suffrage worker Kate Green appealed their decision in court.[22] Attorney William Borah argued heartily for the high court to permit the amendment to be added to the Constitution, which was ironic, because later, he would oppose the Nineteenth Amendment enfranchising women nationwide.
More than a month after the election of 1896, the Idaho Supreme Court came back unanimously: the amendment enfranchising women stood. The women of Idaho would be voting in the next election.[23]
The suffrage fight had been won in Idaho, but Rebecca didn’t stop. She put herself on the ballot to be an elector in the Electoral College, and she did something else that gained her national attention, something that no one anywhere in the world had done before: she asked to be the chaplain of the Idaho legislature.[24]
When she first approached her contacts in the legislature about becoming the official chaplain—whose job it was to pray for the lawmakers and to provide counseling or other spiritual direction as they sought it—the men of Idaho said, “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“Why not do the unheard-of thing?” Rebecca asked.[25]
And what a question that is. Why not do the unheard-of thing? Why not do what no one else is doing? Why not leave behind the old ways that are no longer serving? Why not be the first?
Humans aren’t so much afraid of failure as they are of having people watch them fail. The shame doesn’t come from not scaling the summit, it’s from the people who judge you for not having succeeded. So you have to admire Rebecca, who was likened to a tiny tornado, a woman in her later years, who most definitely was being judged. She was judged for having a failed marriage, for having the audacity to start a school the day after she arrived in Eagle Rock, for founding a church and deciding she wanted to be a chaplain, for going back to school as an adult, for advocating for temperance and suffrage, for deciding that instead of retiring, she would become a crusader.
Rebecca didn’t get the chaplain job. People watched her try and fail, and some undoubtedly judged her for it.
The next year, she went to bat for the appointment again, having spent considerable time getting to know the legislators who were in the position of power to make the call. This time, when the legislative session opened, it was Rebecca whose voice filled the room, lifting a prayer to the almighty, as the men listened with bowed heads. Rebecca was the first female chaplain of a legislative body in world history.[26]
She received letters of congratulations from all over the United States, and she said, “As worn as I was with the long battle for citizenship, I was cheered by the honor given me in my old age, a kind compensation for long weary miles of stage travel and storm and cold.”[27]
When she took her post in 1897, she found that “the jeers of men were forgotten, the haughty looks of women who had all the rights they wanted, faded away as a cloud before the sun…. Not for myself did I care so much…but for Womanhood was victory dear to my heart.”[28] Men and institutions that had stood in the way of Rebecca Brown Mitchell had learned to stand aside or come to grief over their opposition. She was sixty-four years old.
Oh, did you think she stopped there? Of course not. Boxes of books stored under her bed? Might as well start the Idaho Falls Public Library, she thought. Eventually, community members were able to get a Carnegie Foundation grant and build a proper library building.
The city of Idaho Falls doesn’t have the infrastructure to beautify its public spaces? Might as well start a Civic Improvement Club and grow some trees.
No historian has come to write the story of Eagle Rock/Idaho Falls? Let me get right on that.
Why not do the unheard-of thing, indeed.
When Rebecca died in 1908, her strength having been slowly sapped by tuberculosis, an article in The Wilsonville Review mentioned that the WCTU was planning a marble monument to her. The Review wrote, “While a monument of marble would serve to perpetuate her memory, far richer monuments are the churches she has fostered, the schools she has founded, the libraries she has opened, the Sunday schools she has established, and men and women who are better men and women for having come in contact with her influence.”[29]
Rebecca took a train across the country to live in a shed. She was never the type who aspired to a marble bust of her face in a hushed memorial hall somewhere. Instead, I think she’d love to know that some of the institutions she nurtured, the schools and the churches and the libraries, the places that continue to help their communities learn about justice and truth and right—these are the most fitting monuments to the woman who finally picked the lock of the iron cage of the law.
On Christmas Day, a few months after her death, The Idaho Republican published a resolution that said Mitchell was “ever ready to proffer the hand of aid and the voice of sympathy to the needy and distressed…a woman of heroic courage, faith, and fearlessness, in championing every right and righteous cause and whose self-sacrificing spirit will ever be an inspiration to all who knew her.”[30]
In 2022, Idaho erected a statue to commemorate women’s suffrage. Cast in bronze, the Spirit of Idaho Women depicts a lithe figure with an outstretched hand. Behind her stand twelve sets of shoes, those of the generations of women who came before, each decade of suffragists treading the path to enfranchisement. In her hand, she extends a shoe to the women of the future, inviting them to continue in the work that was begun by those with the courage to let people watch them fail.
Twelve
Inez MilhollandThe West, 1916
In between her headline-grabbing turns at the forefront of suffrage marches, Inez’s private life had unfolded as well. She finished law school and secretly eloped with a Dutch man named Eugen Boissevain. Even though Inez was a new kind of woman, she and Eugen longed for a child. Many of the letters between them detail this fondest wish, one that was never realized.
By 1916, the struggles of the national suffrage movement were beginning to bear fruit. Women had gained the right to vote in eleven states, all in the West. Why the West? A few reasons stand out:
Territorial organizers wanted more settlers so they could gain statehood. Correction: they wanted more white settlers. And they figured that if they wanted more white men, they could get them by enticing white women to move to the territories. In the words of Maria Portokalos in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, “Men may be the head of the household, but women are the neck.” Wherever the women looked, the men were sure to follow.
Organized activism. Suffrage shows us the importance of organization when seeking to make change. Without the newspapers and lobbyists, the events and the publicity, the connections and the infrastructure, voting rights for women would have taken decades longer, if not more.
Coalitions. People with a common goal worked together. In Oregon, for example, twenty-three separate suffrage groups coalesced around pulling for the same thing. Black women and Chinese women, Jewish women and Quaker women, women who supported prohibition and women who ran saloons—rather than trying to go it alone, they formed a united front.[1]
The western states were a good start, but they weren’t enough. Suffragists wanted a constitutional amendment, and their work picked up a feverish pace. In furtherance of their goal, they formed a new political party: the National Woman’s Party. One of their goals was mobilizing the women of the West, who could vote, to get rid of Woodrow Wilson in the next election, since he was seen as one of the primary obstacles to progress.
They began to step up the pressure. Suffragists attended every speech Wilson gave, and one woman, Mabel Vernon, interrupted him multiple times while he was addressing the American Federation of Labor on July 4, 1916. She yelled, “Mr. President, if you sincerely desire to forward the interests of all the people, why do you oppose the national enfranchisement of women?”[2] Later, after Wilson refused to respond, she called again for him to answer the question. She was promptly escorted out by the Secret Service.
Later, Mabel Vernon would attend one of Wilson’s congressional addresses.
She situated herself in the balcony, in the direct sight line of the Speaker’s podium. Pinned underneath her skirt was a banner, which, at precisely the right moment, she unfurled from the balcony of the House of Representatives. “MR. PRESIDENT WHAT WILL YOU DO FOR WOMAN SUFFRAGE?” the banner demanded.[3] The suffragists in attendance sat quietly, expectantly, waiting for Wilson to look up from his written remarks.
Murmurs rippled through the room, members of Congress craning their necks to see what had happened. Finally, Wilson looked up and saw the banner. He smiled broadly and immediately returned to reading his prepared statement. As the women were escorted out, a representative greeted the press outside the Capitol with prepared statements listing the names of the women involved and offering them up for comments and interviews.
The women did not try to conceal their identities, didn’t come armed, didn’t break any glass or invade any private offices. They weren’t there to kidnap members of Congress; no faux gallows waited outside the building. They came peacefully, stayed in the section designated for visitors, and left peacefully, confident that they had made their point. Suffrage leader Alice Paul smiled happily at reporters and remarked, “It was a most excellent demonstration. Certainly we may in the future adopt various methods not dissimilar from the one we used today to keep Congress reminded of our cause.”[4]
Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party held its first convention in the summer of 1916. If they could mobilize the four million women who had gained voting rights in the West, that was one-third of the votes needed to elect a president. What they needed was to inspire women in solidarity to know that their highest loyalty was owed not to the Republican Party or Woodrow Wilson, but to women, and convince them that voting against the interests of women was morally wrong.
Inez Milholland took the stage in Chicago at the first convention of the National Woman’s Party, dazzling the audience with the force of her fame. “I believe,” she said to the assembled crowds, “and every woman of spirit and independence believes, that women are human beings with a definite part to play in the shaping of human events…. we must say, ‘Women first!’ ”[5]
The crowd erupted.
