The suffrage movement: organization, the 1917 grant and its loss, and ratification

1867 – 1921

The local organization, as the record names it: South Bend's suffrage argument begins in print in the 1860s, in the columns of Emma Barrett Molloy, whose own entry follows. The organized local movement surfaces by name in the record of the nineteen-teens. Alice Mannering signed herself, in the South Bend News-Times of 27 May 1917, "President of the St. Joseph County Branch of Equal Suffrage" — the county branch of the state's Equal Suffrage Association, and the documented head of the cause in this county in its decisive year. Working the same ground from the organizational side was Annie Bell Boss of South Bend, whose papers — district suffrage work for the state organization in 1915–16, and League of Women Voters material running to 1931 — rest today in the Indiana University South Bend Archives. It was Boss who introduced the Terre Haute suffrage speaker Mabel Dunlap Curry at a street-corner address on 4 October 1916, at which Curry made the movement's domestic argument in its own words: "You trust us to regulate your households — why not trust us with that little piece of paper, the ballot, that we may take our part in government housekeeping." Curry was Terre Haute's; the introducing, and the district work behind it, were South Bend's.

The grant of 1917 and its taking: the Indiana General Assembly of 1917 passed three suffrage measures, the operative one the Maston-McKinley Partial Suffrage Act, which gave Indiana women the vote for presidential electors, for some state offices, and in municipal elections that very year — the November 1917 city elections in South Bend among them. The city's women organized for that first vote in print: on 27 May 1917 the News-Times reported, under the headline "Women Insist on New Candidate," that the women voters were determined to withhold their first vote from any candidate whose policies did not meet their approval, and the same day's paper carried Mannering's letter to Congressman Henry A. Barnhart, written as the suffrage branch's president, attacking wartime food prices and the men who profited from them. In July the Socialist Party nominated Mannering herself for mayor. It ended in the courts: the Indiana Supreme Court held the partial-suffrage law unconstitutional — the state constitution defined voters as male citizens, and the legislature could not enlarge the franchise on its own authority — and Indiana women were stripped of the partial suffrage in late October 1917, days before the election. The New York Times carried the decision nationally on 27 October 1917; the Indiana Women's Suffrage Centennial's account dates the loss effective 26 October. Mannering's candidacy fell with the law that had made her eligible.

Presidential suffrage and ratification: the legislature tried the narrower door in 1919, and the Indianapolis News of 6 February 1919 reported a bill giving women the vote for presidential electors through the Senate 44 to 3, after a House vote of 90 to 3, on its way to Governor Goodrich — so that in the presidential election of November 1920 the women of South Bend held a state-law vote for president whatever became of the federal amendment. For the amendment itself, Indiana's suffragists pressed Goodrich for a special session, and won it by organization: they gathered the pledged guarantees of thirty-six senators and seventy representatives to limit the session to the suffrage question, and on 16 January 1920 a joint session of the General Assembly ratified the Nineteenth Amendment — the Senate 43 to 3, the House unanimous, by the ratification tables printed that spring — making Indiana the twenty-sixth state to ratify. The amendment was completed nationally on 18 August 1920 and certified on 26 August. Indiana's own house-cleaning followed: at a special election on 6 September 1921 the state's voters amended the elector clause of the Indiana constitution itself, striking the word that had defeated the legislature in 1917. No South Bend woman is named in the record reached for this section as the city's first voter under any of these grants; the state's suffrage-centennial account names a Warren County woman, Mrs. J. E. McCloud, as possibly the first woman to cast a ballot in Indiana — a state distinction, not this city's, and printed here only to keep the two apart.

The movement's own limits, in its own papers: the scholarly record of the local movement — Jamie Wagman's study of Mannering in the Indiana Magazine of History — reports that no archival material on the northern Indiana suffragists documents their considering the living conditions of the city's Black residents, and that the silence is itself part of the record. The state movement's papers, kept in Boss's own South Bend files, include a Woman's Franchise League of Indiana press bulletin of 16 October 1918 arguing the suffrage case in the era's xenophobic terms — against the "menace" of the "enemy alien" who could naturalize and vote while American women could not. Both facts stand in the movement's own archive, and both are printed here at the size that archive gives them.

Sources:

1. Jamie Wagman, "'South Bend Bossed by a Woman?': Alice Mannering, Socialist Feminism, and the Common Good," Indiana Magazine of History 118 (December 2022) — the St. Joseph County Branch of Equal Suffrage and Mannering's presidency; the News-Times items of 27 May and 15 July 1917; the October 1917 ruling and withdrawal; the Curry speech of 4 October 1916 from the Annie Bell Boss Papers; the Franchise League bulletin of 16 October 1918; and the movement's silence on race, stated as the archive's own limit.
2. Anita Morgan, "An Act of Tardy Justice": The Story of Women's Suffrage in Indiana, Indiana Women's Suffrage Centennial (indianasuffrage100.org) — the three laws of 1917, the supreme court's striking of the partial-suffrage law, the loss effective 26 October 1917, and Mrs. McCloud of Warren County.
3. The Indianapolis News, 6 February 1919, as reproduced by the Marion County Historical Society — the presidential-suffrage bill through the House 90–3 and the Senate 44–3, to Governor Goodrich.
4. "A Woman's Place: Women of the Indiana General Assembly, Past and Present," Indiana Legislative Services Agency paper (in.gov) — the suffragists' guarantees of thirty-six senators and seventy representatives, and the joint session of 16 January 1920.
5. Constitution of the United States, Annotated (Congress.gov) and the ratification history printed in May 1920 — Indiana's ratification date of 16 January 1920, the Senate vote of 43–3 and the unanimous House, Indiana twenty-sixth in order, national completion 18 August and certification 26 August 1920.
6. Palmer v. State, 197 Ind. 625 (1926) — the amendment of Article 2, §2 of the Indiana constitution at the special election of 6 September 1921.