Suffrage in Fort Wayne · the Franchise League and the factory chapters

1912 – 1920

Fort Wayne's suffrage fight was run out of the clubrooms and the knitting mills: Indiana's organized movement was old — the Indiana Woman's Suffrage Association dated to 1851 — and its final decade had a Fort Wayne command. The city's branch of the Woman's Franchise League of Indiana was led in its last campaigns by Alice Foster McCulloch, a Fort Wayne-born clubwoman (born 21 December 1884) who had chaired the civics department of the Woman's League in 1914. In October 1912, when the Indiana Federation of Clubs held its annual meeting in Fort Wayne, the Franchise League held a suffrage luncheon at the same hotel, and the contemporary accounts record that the city's club women "demonstrated an unwavering support for suffrage." The movement reached the factory floor in 1917: at the Wayne Knitting Mills that year the first factory-based chapter of the Nonpartisan League — the organization Seigel identifies as the predecessor of the League of Women Voters — was formed among the women workers, chaired by Agatha Diek, the mills' general overseer and an officer of both the local and the district Franchise League. The chapter's purpose was registration: Indiana's Woman's Suffrage Act of 1917 had granted partial suffrage, and the league urged women to register for the September election of delegates to a state constitutional convention. The partial victory collapsed when anti-suffragists sued — the Knight challenge — and Indiana women were kept from voting that November. Through the summer of 1918, noon-day meetings led by the Fort Wayne branch of the Franchise League were held at all of the city's large factories, and McCulloch spoke at the Women's Parade of 30 March 1918; that year she was president of the local league and in charge of membership and petitions for the Allen County Franchise League, hosting the county convention at her own home. In 1919 she was elected second vice-president of the Franchise League of Indiana and chairman of its membership and petition committee, and through 1919 and 1920 she lobbied the state legislators whose votes Indiana needed: the General Assembly, in the special session the suffragists had pressed Governor Goodrich to call, ratified the Nineteenth Amendment on 16 January 1920, making Indiana the twenty-sixth state to ratify. The amendment became national law that August.

Sources: Linda J. Dunn, "Biographical Sketch of Alice Foster McCulloch," Biographical Database of NAWSA Suffragists, 1890–1920 (Alexander Street) — the 1912 convention, the league offices, the 1918 presidency, the parade, the 1919–20 ratification lobbying; Peggy Seigel, "Industrial 'Girls' in an Early Twentieth-Century Boomtown," Indiana Magazine of History XCIX (September 2003) — the 1917 mills chapter, Agatha Diek, the 1918 factory meetings; Indiana Women's Suffrage Centennial (Indiana Historical Society) and Purdue Libraries' suffrage exhibition — the 1917 act, the Knight suit, and the 16 January 1920 ratification.