Rising Above Average: Tennessee Women Leaders in World War I
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Rising Above Average: Tennessee Women Leaders in World War I Emily Hedges HIST 499 Senior Seminar Dr. Alice-Catherine Carls 5 December 2017 World War I was one of the bloodiest wars in American History. Despite the horrific effects of the war, it gave women of the time an opportunity in the United States. Many women took that opportunity and broke out of the traditional gender roles meant for them and took public leadership positions. They used their public leadership positions as opportunities to advance the objectives of women’s rights and civil rights. Sue Shelton White was a suffragist who championed for women’s rights and was instrumental in getting the Nineteenth Amendment passed. Mary Church Terrell became a civil rights activist who helped the NAACP come into fruition.1 Ida B. Wells was an African-American woman who also fought for civil rights. Ida Clyde Clarke was given the opportunity take on the position of editor for a Nashville newspaper. This was unheard of at the time. Women created the American Red Cross and nursing became yet another important role for women. Frances Elliott dreamed of becoming a nurse for the ARC. She became the first black woman to be given an ARC pin. Sue Shelton White, because of her childhood and young adult years, became a champion for women’s rights. She was born on May 25, 1887 in Henderson, Tennessee. Her parents were educators James Shelton White and Mary Calista Swain.2 Her father’s family were slaveholders before the Civil War, living in Wilson, County Tennessee. James White fought on the Confederate side during the war. He sustained a wound in his leg that rendered him lame for the rest of his life. The White family could follow their ancestry back to the Marshall and Jefferson families in Virginia.3 When Sue was young her family moved to Montezuma, Tennessee but in 1879 moved back to the Henderson area to a rural town a few miles north of it. Her parents 1 “Terrell, Mary Church (1863-1954) | The Black Past: Remembered and Reclaimed.” n.d. Accessed October 6, 2017. http://www.blackpast.org/aah/terrell-mary-church-1863-1954. 2 “American National Biography Online: White, Sue Shelton.” n.d. Accessed October 6, 2017. http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-01386.html. 3 Betty Sparks Huehls, and Beverly Greene Bond, n.d., “Sue Shelton White (1887-1943): Lady Warrior.” In Tennessee Women: Their Lives and Times, 1:140–59. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 143. taught in both places until her father died in 1893. From then on, her mother supported herself and her family by giving piano and singing lessons as well as writing articles for the town’s local newspaper. When Sue was growing up her mother did not give gender specific chores to her children. Her family lived in what White once called a “twilight zone” because it was between the white and black communities. This later influenced her views on race. Sue Shelton White’s mother passed in 1901, when she was only fourteen. She went to school for a few years and eventually in 1905 landed a job as a stenographer and clerk at the Southern Engine and Boiler Works in Jackson, Tennessee. While working there she attempted to learn more about the business but instead was hindered by the male employees. She left in 1907 to become a court reporter. There she was congratulated on her work but faced gender bias when she expressed the dream to be a lawyer. After leaving that position, White became a secretary to a few members of the Tennessee Supreme Court. She would have been a secretary to a Tennessee senator but was denied once he learned that she was a woman. Finally, as a result of this, she became an equal rights activist in 1913.4 In December of 1912, she met with other women that were from Jackson at their local library, where they formed the Jackson Equal Suffrage League (or JESL) under instruction from two women, Mrs. Perkins Baxter and Mrs. Guilford Dudley. They were part of the Nashville League. These two organizations were attached to the National America Woman Suffrage Association or NAWSA.5 Sue Shelton White took a job as the recording secretary for the Tennessee Equal Suffrage Association (TESA), a branch of NAWSA. By 1917 she was the chair of the TESA’s eighth congressional district. While working for the TESA, White fought against the South’s 4 “American National Biography Online: White, Sue Shelton.” 5 Huehls, “Sue Shelton White (1887-1943): Lady Warrior,” 148. preconceived notions of “proper female behavior” and chose to deliver speeches on the street and worked in other ways to politically advocate for women in public. Apart from her activism on women’s suffrage, White assisted in composing Tennessee’s first married women’s property bill, one old age pension act and a mother’s pension act.6 White worked in 1917 to call for a Tennessee law which proposed that women be granted the right to vote in both municipal and presidential elections. It finally passed in 1919, through the Tennessee General Assembly. In 1917, White worked as the Chairman of Registration under the Tennessee Woman’s Committee of the Council of National Defense. There she called on women to register to aid the war effort. White managed to get over fifty thousand women signed up.7 When the United States entered World War One in April of 1917, the NAWSA worked to connect both women’s support and wartime service to women’s suffrage. The organization and its state branches began to experience discord over ways to gain suffrage. White then made the decision to leave the NAWSA and work for the National Women’s Party (NWP) in 1918. The NWP was more actively organizing in Tennessee and were pushing Tennessee congressmen to champion for the national suffrage amendment. White was made chair of the National Women’s Party by Alice Paul (the head of the organization) and took on the job of editor for the organization’s national newspaper, The Suffragist. She travelled to Washington D.C. for a demonstration by the NWP on February 9, 1919. They protested outside the White House.8 The NWP and White burned an effigy of then President Woodrow Wilson. Because of this, White was arrested and sentenced to 6 “American National Biography Online: White, Sue Shelton.” 7 Huehls, “Sue Shelton White (1887-1943): Lady Warrior,” 152. 8 “American National Biography Online: White, Sue Shelton.” five days in the Old Work House. Once she was released, she signed up to go on a train that would travel around the country to bring attention and support to the issue of women’s suffrage.9 Congress adopted the Nineteenth Amendment for Women’s Right to Vote on June 4, 1919. To participate in fighting for state ratification, White came back to Tennessee. She made use of contacts she had here to get Tennessee to ratify the Amendment. It was successful, and Tennessee became the thirty-fourth state to pass the Nineteenth Amendment, solidifying the needed three-fourths majority of all fifty states required to pass it.10 After the war, Sue Shelton White was hired as a clerk (later becoming a secretary,) by U.S. Senator Kenneth D. McKellar from Tennessee. She worked for him from 1920 to 1926. During that time, Sue White had a hand in composing the Equal Rights Amendment of 1923. After she left work at the senator’s office, White went back to Jackson, Tennessee where she practiced law for four years.11 Between 1930 and 1932, she helped found and create a foundation for only women within the Democratic Party. This faction helped Franklin D. Roosevelt’s political alliance win in 1932. White was also known as one of the first female court reporters in Tennessee. From 1935 to 1943 she worked at the federal Social Security Board as an assistant to their general counsel.12 She became sick in the early part of the 1940s.13 She contracted cancer and on May 6, 1943, finally passed away at home in Alexandria, Virginia.14 9 “Sue Shelton White | Entries | Tennessee Encyclopedia.” n.d. Accessed October 22, 2017. http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entry.php?rec=1501. 10 “American National Biography Online: White, Sue Shelton.” 11 “Sue Shelton White | Entries | Tennessee Encyclopedia.” 12 Huehls, “Sue Shelton White (1887-1943): Lady Warrior,” 142. 13 “American National Biography Online: White, Sue Shelton.” 14 “Sue Shelton White | Entries | Tennessee Encyclopedia.” Mary Church Terrell was another such woman who took a leadership position during World War One. She was a civil rights activist, helping the NAACP to come to fruition.15 She became a leader because of her childhood and her experiences with racism throughout her life. On September 23, 1863, Mary Church Terrell was born in Memphis, Tennessee. She was born to former slaves who had become business owners.16 Her parents were Louisa Ayres Church and Robert Reed Church. Her father was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi to a sixteen-year-old slave and her white master, Captain Charles Beckwith Church, who never acknowledged him as his son. Her mother was born in the early 1840s and was a slave owned by an attorney, T.S. Ayres. Her life was more privileged than most, because her owner taught her to read and write, going so far as to educate her in French. There are not any records of when or how Terrell’s parents met other than they decided to “marry” in December 1862.17 Louisa Ayres established herself in Memphis as an owner of a hair salon.