Program

National Votes for Women Trail

Subject

People

Location

71-67 Lincoln Hwy, Austin, NV 89310, USA

Lat/Long

39.493062, -117.071345

Grant Recipient

National Collaborative for Women's History Sites

In 1894, Frances A. Williamson was elected as the Secretary of the newly formed Austin Equal Suffrage League (also referred to in historical sources as the Lucy Stone Non-Partisan Equal Suffrage League) in Austin, Nevada. The following year, the Nevada Equal Suffrage Association (also Nevada Woman Suffrage Association), a state-wide organization affiliated with the National Equal Suffrage Association, was established with Frances as its first President. Her role within the organization quickly evolved, becoming the State Organizer and Lecturer in 1896 and later the Recording Secretary in 1897.

Throughout her career, Frances canvased towns for petition signatures, addressed legislators, and wrote letters to newspaper editors in support of woman suffrage. She also authored a series of essays as well as a book, The Age of Sham in 1886, which encapsulate her early sentiments on the advancement of women. In addition to her attendance at state and national suffrage conventions, Frances is credited with speaking in every city and town in the State of Nevada – an impressive feat considering the harsh environmental conditions and limited means of transportation in the southwest United States during the late nineteenth century. In her letter to the editor of The Reno Weekly Gazette and Stockman in 1894, she alludes to the resilience of the region’s residents:

Let us prove to our country-women that we of the far, far West, who braved the dangers, endured the hardships and privations of pioneer life, do not move in grooves, but live in an atmosphere of progressiveness, and are ever ready and willing to fall in line with the forward march of the most approved theories and ideas. There is not a State in the Union more morally obligated to grant the franchise to her women than our battle-born Nevada.

From 1896 to 1898, she and her daughter, M. Laura Williamson, edited and published a monthly newspaper, The Nevada Citizen, which promoted the suffragist ideals of social, political, and economic equality for women. In 1899, Frances left Austin, Nevada to accept a position with the Woman’s Press Bureau in Washington, D.C. She later moved to Oakland, California, where she remained active in the suffragist movement until her death in 1919.