Program

National Votes for Women Trail

Subject

Event, People

Location

330 S Jefferson St, Pensacola, FL 32502, USA

Lat/Long

30.408721, -87.2131103

Grant Recipient

National Collaborative for Women's History Sites

From 1914 to 1919, the Pensacola Equal Suffrage League (ESL) held meetings at Pensacola City Hall located on South Jefferson Street. This included the founding meeting of the Pensacola ESL, reported on the front page of the March 24, 1914 edition of the Pensacola Journal. The paper gave the following description of the event:

“Every seat in the council chamber of the city hall was filled with interested women and men, and in the rear many men stood for an hour and a half, listening with the most intense interest to the brilliant young speaker for equal suffrage, Miss Lavania [sic] Engle of Washington, D.C., and again and again the hall rang with the applause of the law-makers and voters of the state and the municipality, as in answer to questions put to her, this woman of twenty-one proved herself not only a delightful speaker but a woman whose intelligence matched her eloquence and the knowledge of her subject.”

After Engle’s speech, the Pensacola ESL was formed to promote women’s suffrage. A constitution was adopted and officers were elected at the meeting. The group was affiliated with the Florida Equal Suffrage Association (FESA) and hosted the first annual FESA convention in December of 1914. The Pensacola ESL continued to hold regular meetings at Pensacola City Hall, which included addresses by state and national suffrage speakers.

As of 2022, the former Pensacola City Hall building is home to the Pensacola Museum of History, at the University of West Florida.