Program

National Votes for Women Trail

Subject

Event, People

Location

315 W Main St, Lead, SD 57754, USA

Lat/Long

44.351888, -103.766875

Grant Recipient

National Collaborative for Women's History Sites

It was here in the small mining community of Lead, South Dakota, at the Homestake Opera House aka Homestake Recreation Hall, where noted suffragists Catherine W. McCulloch and Jane Addams campaigned for women’s suffrage in 1914. Mrs. McCulloch was a Chicago lawyer, and an accomplished writer and speaker. Jane Addams was a noted social reformer and advocate for woman’s suffrage, as well as a founder of the Hull House in Chicago, an operation geared toward immigrant assistance. The Homestake was utilized again in 1916 for Flying Squadron Suffrage Rallies, in which a number noted suffragists toured the country to speak on the subject on woman’s suffrage. Only a short time later, women across the United States gained the right to right to vote with the passage and subsequent ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment on August 18, 1920.