Program

National Votes for Women Trail

Subject

Arts & Culture, People

Location

1002 Washington St SE, Olympia, WA 98501, USA

Lat/Long

47.039795, -122.89959

Grant Recipient

National Collaborative for Women's History Sites

The Woman’s Club of Olympia was organized in March 1883. Four of its nine charter members were active in the fight for women’s suffrage, including Abbie Stuart, Ella Stork, Pamela Hale, and Phoebe Moore. These women organized and advocated on a local and national level for women’s right to vote.

By 1883, women in the Washington Territory had secured the right to vote through the passage of a women’s suffrage bill by the Territorial Legislature. However, in 1887 the Territorial Supreme Court overturned the law and women were once again denied the right to vote. Suffragists continued to advocate to get back women’s right to vote in Washington.

In Path Breaking: An Autobiographical History of the Equal Suffrage Movement in Pacific Coast States (1914), Abigail Scott Duniway, a national suffragist who campaigned for women’s right to vote in the State of Washington, wrote of Abbie Stuart and the Woman’s Club of Olympia. Duniway referred to Stuart as her “wide-awake and ever loyal coadjutor” who “started the Woman’s Club Movement in Olympia as a necessary step in the progress of the cause” of women’s suffrage. Duniway quoted Stuart as saying:

The Woman’s Club Movement will give women who oppose the Suffrage Movement (or think they do) an opportunity to divest themselves of their prejudices.

After a tireless campaign spent advocating for women’s right to vote, the efforts of Washington suffragists, like Abbie Stuart and members of the Woman’s Club of Olympia, finally paid off. In 1910, the voters of the State of Washington approved a legislatively referred women’s suffrage constitutional amendment that read in part, “There shall be no denial of the elective franchise at any election on account of sex.” This resulted in the state constitution being permanently amended, thus securing women’s right to vote in the state.

After this, Washington suffragists continued to advocate at the national level. Finally, on June 4, 1919, the United States Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment which reads, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” On March 22, 1920, the State of Washington ratified the Nineteenth Amendment and by August of that year, the necessary 36 states had ratified the amendment, securing women’s right to vote across the United States.