In the years leading up to the Nineteenth Amendment, Addie Hunton (1866-1943), Eleanor Egan Franklin (1879-1925) and Helen S. Harmon-Brown represented the diversity of positions women brought to the issue of women’s suffrage during a tumultuous decade.
Join us at the Westport Museum for History and Culture on Wednesday, Feb. 19, from 7 to 8 pm for a fascinating look at this topic. Through the parallel lives of these three women, this discussion with Westport author Dr. Sharmistha Roy Chowdhury highlights the contestations of ideals and the forgotten politics of race and class in the campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Addie Hunton was one of the first African American women recruited by the YWCA and volunteered in 1918 to serve segregated African American soldiers in France. Hunton’s support for women’s rights to vote merged with her war experiences and took her towards the politics of Pan-Americanism. Eleanor Egan Franklin was a war reporter whose war travels eventually tempered her anti-suffragist outlook. Helen S. Harman-Brown was the editor of The Reply, the New Canaan-based anti-suffragist magazine and remained ardently anti-suffragist.