Program

National Votes for Women Trail

Subject

People, Site

Location

2 Sycamore St, Worcester, MA 01608, USA

Lat/Long

42.2585628, -71.8065723

Grant Recipient

National Collaborative for Women's History Sites

In 1857, Massachusetts suffragist, Sarah E. Wall (1825-1907) petitioned the State Senate and House of Representatives to urge their support for women’s suffrage. Her petition was printed in the March 6, 1857 edition of The Liberator, an antislavery newspaper published in Boston. Wall’s 1857 petition began:

“Your petitioner, believing that all true governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that taxation without representation is totally inconsistent with the Republican theory, equally oppressive and unjust in its results, upon whatever sex or class imposed, respectfully prays you to adopt such measures as will eventually secure to woman the right of suffrage.”

The next year, Wall wrote a letter addressed to the “Treasurer and Assessors of the City of Worcester,” in which Wall informed the city officials that she:

“Shall henceforth pay no taxes, until the word ‘male’ is stricken from the voting clauses of the Constitution of Massachusetts.”

Wall would continue to repeatedly refuse to pay taxes on her Worcester, Massachusetts property while women were denied the right to vote. Sadly, Wall did not live to see women enfranchised. She passed away at the age of 82 in June 1907.

It was not until June 1919 that Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution which states that the right to vote cannot be denied on account of sex. By August 1920, the necessary 36 states had ratified the amendment, finally securing women’s right to vote.