Celebrating Women’s History Month, Lucy Barber was arrested for voting and jailed in Belmont
By Kathryn Ross,
March is Women’s History Month. It was officially declared Women’s History Month after President Jimmy Carter declared Women’s History week in 1980. In 1987 Congress passed a law designating March as Women’s History Month.
During Woman’s History Month, we celebrate the accomplishments of women. I’ve decided that each week I will borrow a DVD from the library which celebrates a certain woman or women in general. This first week I decided to learn more about the suffragette movement and women getting the right to vote, since a movement is underway to make it more difficult for women to vote.
The name of the movie is “Iron Jawed Angels”. The title is twofold referring to the determination of such women as Alice Paul, Inez Milholland and Lucy Burns fighting for an amendment to the Constitution for women’s voting rights in the early 1900s. I know these aren’t the names we usually hear when looking at the suffragette movement, which is why I chose the movie. “Iron Jawed Angels” refers not only to their determination, but also the clamps used to force their mouths open when the protesters went on hunger strikes while in jail.
It’s a great movie with a great cast. Hilary Swank plays Alice Paul, Anjelica Huston portrays Carrie Chapman Catt and Julia Ormond is Inez Milholland. All were real suffragettes.
There was local drama with the suffrage movement right here in Allegany County. In 1885 Lucy Barber of Alfred Centre was the first woman to try and vote in Allegany County. Barber was a farming wife and in charge of most of the farmwork, she had cast her ballot in an Alfred area election after the electors decided she had the privilege. But they were overruled and Barber was arrested and put in jail overnight. Later a grand jury failed to indict her.
In the archives of the Allegany County Historical Society Alfred Historian G. Douglas Clarke expands on the story.
Two years later, Lucy Barber, accompanied Susan E Larkin, Arminda Heseltine, Abigail A. Allen, Ann Thomas, Alice Satterlee, Emily Green, Abby K. Witter, Eleanor J. Potter, Eloise Livermore, Abby Lewis who were determined to vote in the presidential election between the incumbent President Grover Cleveland and former Senator Benjamin Harrison. Of the women, Clarke wrote, “They marched in a body to the polls and before the astounded men knew what was happening, they had snatched ballots, marked them, and stuffed them into the ballot boxes.”
The women were arrested and put in jail for illegal voting and disturbing the peace. Their husbands promptly bailed them out.
A newspaper story hypothesizes that the 10 women were inspired by Barber and her apparent success at escaping punishment which encouraged several of her sisters in the cause, to follow in her footsteps, but the District Attorney had a different plan.
Warrants were served on the ladies and they went to Belmont to appear before the court. The DA had secured an order allowing him to resubmit Barber’s former case at the same time.
Clarke wrote: “Lucy Barber was an ardent suffragette. Those of us today who take voting so casually often do not realize what moral stamina it required to espouse the cause in the early days. Women who worked for the vote were reviled, put in jail, and made to look ludicrous by the most insulting cartoons. Alfred contained an ardent group of suffragettes, composed of faculty wives and teachers, and they decided they were going to vote.
“The courtroom was filled with excited spectators. Everyone in Alfred who could possibly arrange it, took a day off to see what was going to happen to the leading ladies of the community.”
But as the proceedings began, the judge ruled that before they could proceed with the trial, they must first prove that they were women. This so horrified the good men of Alfred that the charges were immediately dropped.”
Barber’s case proceeded. She was tried before a jury of 12 men. After the jury deliberated, they came back with a verdict of guilty. The judge sentenced Barber to be confined in the Allegany County Jail for the period of one day.
I doubt Barber had to be force fed like the Iron Jawed Angels, but the incident shows that women in Allegany County were engaged and as militant as any of their sisters across the Nation. Let’s hope, with the current assault on women’s rights, the women of the county still are engaged.
Kathryn Ross is a Wellsville writer and local historian, a longtime volunteer of the Thelma Rogers Genealogical and Historical Society(TRGHS). You can contact her anytime, kathr_2002@yahoo.com
