Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870-1920

Sara Egge

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781609385576
• eBook ISBN:
  9781609385583
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Winner of the 2019 Gita Chaudhuri Prize
Winner of the 2019 Benjamin F. Shambaugh Award

Historian Sara Egge offers critical insights into the woman suffrage movement by exploring how it emerged in small Midwestern communities—in Clay County, Iowa; Lyon County, Minnesota; and Yankton County, South Dakota. Examining this grassroots activism offers a new approach that uncovers the sophisticated ways Midwestern suffragists understood citizenship as obligation. 

These suffragists, mostly Yankees who migrated from the Northeast after the Civil War, participated enthusiastically in settling the region and developing communal institutions such as libraries, schools, churches, and parks. Meanwhile, as Egge's detailed local study also shows, the efforts of the National American Women's Suffrage Association did not always succeed in promoting the movement's goals. Instead, it gained support among Midwesterners only when local rural women claimed the right to vote on the basis of their well-established civic roles and public service. 

By investigating civic responsibility, Egge reorients scholarship on woman suffrage and brings attention to the Midwest, a region overlooked by most historians of the movement. In doing so, she sheds new light onto the ways suffragists rejuvenated the cause in the twentieth century. 

Chapter 1

HARDSHIP AND BOUNTY: BUILDING MIDWESTERN COMMUNITIES

IN NOVEMBER 1894 Andrew A. Meek, a farmer from Lyon County, Minnesota, challenged readers of the Lyon County Reporter to see life there as more than just “loneliness and hardships.” He explained that recent population growth had fostered a deep sense of community on the prairie, and he pointed to specific examples to make his case. Friendships had blossomed among neighbors, who always were “ready to accord a hearty welcome to new settlers.” Residents of nearby small towns had erected a number of notable public institutions, including courthouses, public schools, churches, and banks. Educational and religious activities added social events to schedules already filled with near-constant “social intercourse.” Fertile land had enticed a diverse group of farmers from outside the United States, particularly from Germany, Norway, and Sweden, to borrow money, buy land, and plant crops, and they reaped bountiful harvests every year. Railroads like the Great Northern Railway provided ready access to national markets. Economic success produced wealth, and Meek noted the construction of many “luxurious” houses that were “exceedingly neat and well adapted to the climate.” He even praised Minnesota’s seasons, with its “delightful” summers and “superb” winters that beckoned people outdoors even in “extreme cold.” He boldly proclaimed that the “skies of Minnesota more nearly resemble those of Italy than any other.” Meek undoubtedly left many readers dizzy as they read his embellishments while shaking their heads in disbelief.¹

Meek produced his utopic vision by glossing over the conflicts and problems that characterized community building in the American Midwest. When he chose to highlight neighborly cooperation and prosperity, he consciously downplayed the many difficulties to which residents had grown accustomed. Despite his best efforts, Meek could not avoid the “loneliness and hardships” that gripped his community. Minnesotans faced political turmoil with the rise of a powerful third-party option, the Populists, only a few years earlier. Partisan bickering grew markedly, and the political climate became polarized and hostile. While Meek took no stance on political matters, his piece appeared in the Lyon County Reporter, a Republican newspaper. The paper’s editor often took great delight in criticizing Democrats and Populists without mincing words or sparing feelings. In addition, the Panic of 1893 created financial difficulties that made people vulnerable to market vacillations. Rock-bottom crop prices and insurmountable debt forced farmers into insolvency, which drained banks and stalled the local economy. When Meek pointed out that there were plenty of “fine farms” available for “reasonable figures,” he admitted that land was abundant because farmers were “simply overburdened with debt.” Finally, the sociability that Meek celebrated was somewhat limited. Along with his neighbors, Meek was Scottish, and he lived in an isolated colony of Scottish farmers. He was one of many thousands of immigrants who had arrived in Minnesota in the late nineteenth century and had skewed the ethnic and religious composition of the state. Ethnic differences fomented suspicions of outsiders, and native-born people resented foreign-born groups, especially Germans. Meek admitted that native-born residents assumed that Scots were clannish and aloof, but he assured Americans that there was “no cause for such a state of matters.” His words failed to assuage the public’s fears, and his article reveals the contradictions embedded in the immigration process. As immigrants helped to settle regions and establish communities, their presence left many native-born people feeling unsettled.²

The Lyon County Reporter published Meek’s article at a transformative moment in the history of the American Midwest. Less than half a century earlier, only a few white people had lived scattered across the prairies. After the Civil War the federal government aggressively removed powerful Native American tribes like the Dakota (also called Sioux), which opened land to Americans and European immigrants. Communities grew during the late nineteenth century, and small towns and villages slowly began to connect farmers living in the countryside. Railroads linked these places to national markets, orienting midwestern communities to distant urban centers. Despite national influences, the rural landscape was harsh, promoting isolation and encouraging people to construct identities rooted in locality. The settlement process was uneven, and populations remained scattered over vast distances. In other words, while people with shared interests attempted to forge relationships and cultivate social connections, the endless stretches of terrain sometimes limited their ability to do so. Community grew out of geographic and social conditions; it was both a place and an experience.³

Midwesterners defined themselves primarily as members of local communities, of small towns and villages. In doing so, they established belonging as an essential midwestern value. While community was a powerful idea in other regions, the timing of settlement in the Midwest made it a primary way of organizing life. People, especially middle-class Yankees, embraced community engagement and encouraged a strong spirit of civic responsibility. Arriving in vast, unbroken prairies, Yankees planted communities while simultaneously giving them meaning. These residents typically hailed from the Northeast and expected active participation in public affairs so as to boost the prospects of their small towns and improve the overall quality of life. In turn, building communities promoted republican notions of citizenship, and Yankees typically supported shared civic institutions and celebrated communitarianism. They believed that individuals, including women, had a duty to their community, and they conceived of citizenship in terms of contribution and involvement. Public acts were key for community acceptance. When Meek praised nearby small towns for constructing public buildings, he tapped directly into those sentiments. The link between citizenship and community also fostered an emphasis on status, and reputation and loyalty became significant measures of belonging. By fulfilling their obligations to their communities, individuals proved themselves worthy citizens who could enjoy the privileges of membership. Inclusion was Meek’s aim when he exaggerated the community life of Lyon County. He desperately wanted to belong, and his article was an attempt to establish an honorable reputation. Meek was like most midwesterners at the time who constructed their identities at the intersection of community development and active citizenship.⁴

While middle-class Yankees understood civic engagement as a major component of midwestern values, they never agreed on what citizenship meant or how it should appear. They had vague notions as to the character of public service, but they failed to establish any definitive standards until World War I forced the issue. Contradictory goals of “mobility and stability and volunteerism and collective discipline” created tensions among community leaders. As Andrew Cayton and Peter Onuf note, perhaps the “most striking fact” about the Midwest in the late nineteenth century was “the constant struggle among all its peoples over the ways in which they should live their lives.” A kaleidoscope of immigrants, mostly from northern Europe, brought an array of ethnic, religious, political, and economic ideas that challenged any attempts to impose a uniform vision of active citizenship. In an ironic twist, one of the most vital features of midwestern identity became one of its most contested ones as vibrant ethnic diversity challenged a single Yankee standard. While belonging was significant in other regions, ambiguity about it made it all the more important in the Midwest. At the core of these debates were the meanings of citizenship itself. Most midwesterners thought the premise of citizenship straightforward, but it did not take long for individuals to see that contradictions abounded. Birthright citizenship was silent on civic expectations, and until the early twentieth century, the state did little to enforce citizenship laws. Some people avoided involvement in public affairs without consequence. Others contributed as non-naturalized residents. Conversely, gender, ethnicity, race, and class could limit civic engagement for those who wanted to participate, imposing hierarchies based on difference. American citizenship was ambiguous at best and, more often than not, failed to accommodate diversity and distinction. The political culture of the Midwest exposed these fundamental flaws in citizenship and revealed a startling paradox. In a region where people prized civic engagement, inequalities of citizenship restricted the ability of all its residents to do so.⁵

Gender also informed community development in the Midwest by blurring the alleged line between the public and private spheres. The home and family were central to community life, and it was impossible to separate political concerns from domestic ones. Friendship and familiarity characterized both the political and social lives of midwesterners, despite their ethnicity, and locality ensured that people tackled issues more often through face-to-face encounters. Local politics were personal, tied directly to the networks of kinship and sociability that thrived in midwestern communities. Politics and sociability emerged as the two main arenas in which native-born and foreign-born residents, both individually and collectively, made community. People often conflated the two, discussing politics at family or social gatherings or turning political events into parties. In doing so, they confirmed that the boundary between public and private life was elusive at best. At no place was the overlap more pronounced than in the church. Religious activities were at the heart of community life, and midwesterners understood that pulpits could contain both pastors and politicians. Belonging to a church also reinforced ethnicity because both Americans and immigrants sought refuge within familiar religious traditions. For most women, the church became the path through which they first engaged in public affairs, gaining praise for both spiritual and community devotion. In their churches, Yankee suffragists often hosted woman suffrage lectures. Blending public and private created a loophole through which midwestern women of all ethnicities could challenge inequalities of citizenship, and it opened civic issues to people normally excluded from participation.⁶

Bridging politics and sociability did not mean that the Midwest was a bastion of equality. Immigrants often arrived with little economic or political power and smaller populations, giving native-born Americans more prestige and control over civic institutions. While this imbalance did not necessarily sit well with foreign-born residents, they mostly complied with it because they were still able to retain their distinct ethnic traditions. For nearly five decades, most immigrants managed to celebrate their customs despite covert pressure to assimilate. Ethnic diversity was a hallmark of the Midwest, and it remained so until the outbreak of World War I, when nativism erased ethnic plurality without hesitation or mercy. Just as ethnicity marked community, so too did gender. Even though most midwesterners welcomed women into civic life, they did so while espousing rigid gender roles. When women engaged in community affairs, which they did as soon as they arrived, they explained their involvement in gendered terms. They were wives, mothers, and daughters who were concerned about the prospects for their families. Couching their activism in gender masked their significance in community life. Women helped build the places where politics erupted, and they often controlled public spaces, albeit with restrictions. Their community engagement garnered them reputations as citizens with unquestionable loyalty to their communities. It also set the stage for them to demand the right to vote.

Local communities profoundly shaped the identity of the Midwest and the people who lived there during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Settlement encouraged midwesterners to foster inclusivity within their political culture, but ethnic, religious, and gendered factors promoted exclusion. Residents had to negotiate this tension between inclusion and exclusion while simultaneously establishing complex social relationships. While people approached civic life in myriad ways, they favored inclusion until World War I forced them to reconsider who belonged and who did not. For Yankee suffragists, midwestern political culture afforded a distinct opportunity. Initially, they struggled to gain support. During the late nineteenth century, settling the land consumed their energy, and cultivating respected civic reputations took time. Working on the front lines of public affairs gave them reputations as loyal community members, however, and by the early twentieth century, middle-class activists had capitalized on decades of community involvement to argue their fitness as responsible citizens who deserved the ballot. As Progressivism called for increasingly universal citizenship standards, midwestern Yankee suffragists carefully structured their claims in those terms.

Settling the Land

In the three counties in this study—Clay County in Iowa, Yankton County in South Dakota, and Lyon County in Minnesota—the land offered vibrant farming prospects to incoming white settlers. Each county benefited from rich, dark, loamy soil that beckoned people onto its grassy prairie landscape. The first settlers arrived to farm the well-watered land, and small towns sprang up as agriculture developed, populations grew, and transportation networks improved. Clay County, located in northwest Iowa, was the first county to gain legal recognition. In 1858 locals cut it out of a neighboring county. With twenty-four square miles of verdant farmland, spliced through by streams, lakes, and the Little Sioux River running north to south, the county was a beacon to farmers. That same year white settlers arrived in Yankton County, located in southeastern South Dakota. Unlike Clay County, the residents of Yankton County capitalized on its location near the Missouri River, which was a major waterway. The Missouri River brought more than just farmers to the area; it promoted trade and commerce upstream. A small town, called Yankton, developed along the river’s banks and served as a steamboat landing and trade hub. Yankton County gained official status with the Organic Act of 1861. The act created the Dakota Territory and named Yankton as the territorial capital. Soon stagecoach lines complemented the river traffic, running from the frontier capital to military outposts like Fort Randall, Fort Pierre, and Bismarck. Farmers prospered and new settlers, among whom were many families, arrived to take advantage of the rich, well-watered soil near the James River, a tributary of the Missouri River that cut diagonally across the county from northwest to southeast. As one early observer reported, “Yankton is surrounded by an excellent agricultural country” that complemented Yankton’s booming river port.⁷

White settlement appeared at the expense of the indigenous groups living in the area. Through a series of treaties, many later broken, the federal government secured the homelands of Native Americans and forced them further westward. The Dakota (Sioux) had begun to cede their lands to the federal government in 1851, allowing the settlement of white people on the prairies. Even though the terms of the treaties stipulated that the Dakota leave their lands, small bands later returned, ready to fight for survival. From 1857 to 1862, white settlers wrote frequently about the threat of violence from the Indians living in the area. In the spring of 1857, clashes between Indians and settlers in northwestern Iowa left at least thirty-two dead and a sense of terror among white settlers. Relations between the Dakota and white arrivals continued to deteriorate, and violence erupted during the Dakota War of 1862. Angry at the treaties broken by the federal government, the Dakota rebelled, attacking white settlements in southern Minnesota near what became Lyon County. Only with a swift and effective military response from the federal government did the violence abate. The stigma of Indian violence, as well as the Civil War, slowed migration to the area, however, and white settlement stagnated until 1870.⁸

The Dakota uprising prevented much white settlement in Lyon County, located in southwest Minnesota, until 1870, but it blossomed with the arrival of the railroad. By this year, all three counties were experiencing the railroads as a major developmental influence. The railroads did more than just open up new economic possibilities for the Midwest. They carved the landscape, building communities and plotting the town sites along railroad lines at intervals determined by the company. Railroads controlled the fate of small towns, promising vibrant trade potential to communities along the track while sounding a death knell to those the railroad line missed. Yankton County, which included a bustling river port and territorial capital by the late 1860s, benefited handsomely from the construction of railroad lines. Between 1868 and 1890, the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad, the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad, and the Great Northern Railroad all built lines through the county, connecting the area to eastern cities. In Clay County, railroad construction from 1878 to 1901 cut down shipping costs substantially for farmers and transformed Spencer, a small village, into an important rail hub and the county seat. Rail transport also decreased travel times, which was a boon to livestock owners who developed a strong dairy industry with a national reputation. In Lyon County, market activity blossomed in 1873 with the arrival of the railroads. Competition between the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad and the Great Northern Railroad transformed the landscape substantially, as each company built lines that intersected at the county seat of Marshall. The Great Northern Railroad also built town sites at Cottonwood, Green Valley, Lynd, Russell, and Florence. The era of the railroads in the Midwest dramatically transformed the region, connecting it to national markets and promoting immigration and population growth.⁹

The end of the Civil War, the military removal of the Dakota, the advent of rail lines, and the promise of prosperity hastened settlement in the Midwest. Between 1870 and 1900, the region received a tremendous surge of both native-born and foreign-born immigrants, and mobility came to define the region. In the Dakota Territory, the government distributed more federal land between 1870 and 1890 than in any other place. Immigrants c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Citizenship, Community, and Civic Responsibility in the Midwest
• 1. Hardship and Bounty: Building Midwestern Communities
• 2. Humble Beginnings: How Midwestern Women Claimed Civic Activism
• 3. Gender, Citizenship, and the Struggle to Achieve Woman Suffrage, 1880–1900
• 4. Woman Suffrage as an Obligation: Civic Responsibility and Citizenship, 1900–1916
• 5. Fighting for Democracy: Woman Suffrage, Loyalty, and World War I
• Conclusion Remembering Woman Suffrage: Gender and Midwestern Identity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List