Women's suffrage in Florida
After attending the Woman's Inter-State Conference held in Fall of 1892 in Des Moines, Ella C. Chamberlain returned to Florida and created a suffrage department at the Weekly Tribune in Tampa.
[5] One exception was a petition to the United States Congress for a federal women's suffrage amendment that was circulated by John Schnarr of Orlando in 1907.
[6] Katherine Livingstone Eagan, Roselle Cooley, and thirty other women met at the home of Frances Anderson on that day to create the Equal Franchise League of Florida.
[6][7] The group had trouble renting space for lectures, but it did secure headquarters in the offices of the Heard National Bank.
[8][6] The Woman's Club would not rent out space for a suffrage meeting and the Board of Trade also rejected them so the women packed suffragists into their headquarters for lectures.
"[9] In February 1913 another women's suffrage group, called the Political Equality Club was formed in Lake Helen.
[8] Edith Owen Stoner of Jacksonville organized the Florida delegates in the Woman Suffrage Procession.
[14] Lawmakers wanted to know who was in favor of women's suffrage in their districts and making a statewide group would help suffragists canvass potential supporters.
[14] The president of the Jacksonville Equal Suffrage League, Roselle C. Cooley, reported that the Florida House had decided to hear the suffragists' arguments.
[14] In October 1913, the mayor of Orlando announced that "all freeholders" should register to vote in a bond election for the city.
[9][8] Because the mayor did not specify that the freeholders be male, several women, organized by Starbuck and Emma Hainer, attempted to register to vote for the bond election.
[21] Women in the city wrote to the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) to help them organize a group.
[32] Suffragists reported in 1916 at the state convention that they had distributed thousands of pieces of literature and written around fifteen hundred letters to advocate for women's suffrage.
[34] Alice Paul visited Florida in May 1917 to recruit members for the National Woman's Party (NWP) and form a chapter.
[35] Florida NWP member, Mary A. Nolan, was arrested in November 1917 for picketing outside the White House.
[38] Other cities that received charters for municipal women's suffrage in Florida were Clearwater, Cocoa, Delray, Dunedin, Florence Villa, Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Moore Haven, Orlando, St. Petersburg, and Tarpon Springs.
[44] On September 7, 1920, Helen Hunt West of Duval County became the first women in Florida to register under the new rules.
[44][45] Hunt West continued to work to get Florida to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment for the rest of her life.
[46] One Florida state representative, L. C. O'Neal, argued that giving women the right to vote would lower them "from the exalted position which they now held.
[40] Others, like Representative Frank Clark from Gainesville used quotations from the Bible to justify the idea that women should have different gender roles from men.
[48] It was also argued that women's suffrage was a "Northern" idea, and therefore as people living in the South, they should reject the arguments for it.
