Virginia Vignettes

In 1909 a few Virginia women organized the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia to educate Old Dominion citizens on the issue of woman suffrage. They were following the path blazed by two unsuccessful late nineteenth-century efforts to obtain the vote for women in Virginia. Rejecting radicalism for a more moderate approach, the suffragists capitalized on [...]

Not many! An unmarried, divorced, or widowed woman possessed a legal personality as feme sole and was solely responsible for her affairs. She could own titles and sign contracts and wills. On the other hand, a married woman was under the cover of her husband’s authority as feme covert and had few property rights. Land she brought to the [...]

Helen Henderson was one of the first two women elected to Virginia’s House of Delegates after women won the right to vote in 1920. A Missouri native, Henderson was a teacher in Buchanan County and helped found the Baptist Mountain School, which opened there in 1911. In 1923, a group of local Democratic men invited [...]

In 1935 Ida Mae Thompson, the executive secretary for Virginia’s League of Women Voters, took on extra work as a researcher for the Works Progress Administration’s Historical Records Survey. Under Thompson’s leadership, the survey collected more than 25,000 items concerning the suffrage movement, from correspondence and treasurers’ reports to “Votes for Women” buttons and ribbons. [...]

In 1909 a few Virginia women organized the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia to educate Old Dominion citizens on the issue of woman suffrage. They were following the path blazed by two unsuccessful late nineteenth-century efforts to obtain the vote for women in Virginia. Rejecting radicalism for a more moderate approach, the suffragists capitalized on [...]

Not many! An unmarried, divorced, or widowed woman possessed a legal personality as feme sole and was solely responsible for her affairs. She could own titles and sign contracts and wills. On the other hand, a married woman was under the cover of her husband’s authority as feme covert and had few property rights. Land she brought to the [...]