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43 YELLOW SPRINGS NEWS The GUIDE to YELLOW SPRINGS 2019 – 20 Library Loft Daily or weekly stays in a fully furnished apartment. One block from downtown, bikeway, hiking and more. LibraryLoft .weebly.com eeclark45387@yahoo.com 767-7569 By AUDREY HACKETT Yellow Springs made a small but mighty contribution to women’s suffrage — or woman’s suffrage, as it was rather more grandly known at the time. Two figures associated with Antioch College were ardent advocates of enfran- chisement for women: Olympia Brown, an 1860 graduate of the college, and Antioch President Simeon Fess, who served in that role from 1907 to 1917, as well as repre- senting Ohio in the U.S. Congress between 1913 and 1935. Brown was born in 1835 in Michigan. Determined to attend college, she enrolled in Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, but found that institution’s Calvinism too rigid, according to an entry in the Dictionary of Unitarian and Universality Biography. She then attended Antioch College, with Horace Mann as president, and found that experi- ence “so positive that her family moved to Yellow Springs for all four children to get a good education,” according to the biography. Antioch was coeducational from the start, and unlike Oberlin, the country’s oldest coeducational college, women students earned the same degrees as men, according to Antioch College Archivist Scott Sanders. “Antioch professed equality of the sexes,” Sanders said. While that principle was not always practiced, “it did impart students with the concept,” he added. Because of that, “the college was liter- ally an engine” for women’s suffrage, he believes. Brown was an excellent case in point. After graduating from Antioch, she applied to seminary school — seeking admittance from school after school despite the sin of being female — and became the first woman to achieve full ministerial standing recognized by a denomination. As a young Universalist minister at a Massachusetts parish, she became active in the suffrage movement, which blossomed after the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention in New York, the first women’s rights conven - tion in the United States. In 1888, at 53 years old, Brown resigned from full-time ministry and dedicated herself to women’s rights. She “was a tire - less and effective organizer for suffrage initiatives at the state and national level,” according to the Unitarian Universalist biography. But it wasn’t until 1913, with the founding of the more radical and con- frontational Women’s Party by Alice Paul and Lucy Barnes, that she felt truly hopeful. “I belonged to this party before I was born,” she said at the time. Brown’s suffragist activities included the public burning of President Woodrow Wil- son’s speeches in front of the White House after he turned his back on the suffrage amendment. When the 19th amendment granting women the right to vote was passed by Congress in 1919 and submitted to the states for ratification, “Brown was one of the few original suffragists who was still alive to savor the triumph,” according to the biography. She voted in her first presidential election in 1920 at the age of 85. YELLOW SPRINGS AND SUFFRAGE— Women get the vote! Ohio and women’s suffrage The story of Simeon Fess’ involvement is in some ways the story of failed attempts to pass a suffrage amendment in Ohio — culminating in ultimate triumph at the national level. “Women’s suffrage was a local phenom - enon,” according to Wright State Associate Professor of History Nancy Garner in an August 2019 presentation at the Yellow Springs Community Library. And it was tied to the women-led temperance movement, an effort to curb drunkenness and related social ills. “That movement got women on the streets, and slowly they realized they would have to get the vote” to close the saloons, Garner said in her presentation. Women in Hillsboro and Washington Court House launched the Women’s Crusade, which during 1873–74 became a national movement (outside of the South) to close saloons. Women prayed and sang hymns outside these establishments. A Xenia reporter’s eyewitness account from 1873 records the jubilation that fol - lowed the crusaders’ success in closing the Shades of Death, a Xenia saloon. The owner, a Mr. Steven Phillips, “invited the ladies to enter, and announced that he gave up everything to them, and would never sell anything intoxicating in Xenia again.” The women were ecstatic. The grassroots efforts of the Women’s Crusade led to the formation of the Women’s Christian Temperance Move - ment, or WCTM, in 1874 in Cleveland. That organization was enormously influential in mobilizing more conservative Protes - tant women nationwide to work toward women’s suffrage — in the name of moral reform. The WCTM endorsed women’s suf- frage in the early 1880s. Meeting announcements for the WCTM cropped up in newspapers of the day, including in the Yellow Springs News in the early 1900s. Ohio had been the site of numer- ous state and national women’s suffrage conventions beginning in 1850. In 1885, the Ohio Woman’s Suffrage Association, or OWSA, formed in Painesville, with Frances Jennings Casement as its president. Unlike many other women’s organizations of the day, the OWSA was relatively welcoming of African-American women, according to PUBLIC DOMAIN PHOTO COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS Olympia Brown, an 1860 graduate of Antioch College, went on to become a national figure in the women's suffrage movement. Continued on page 44