This week Massachusetts voters faced four questions on the statewide ballot, deciding on a range of issues from the fate of casinos to the gas tax. Nearly a century ago, voters faced a single question, and it was a historic one: Should women in Massachusetts be allowed to vote?
More than 400,000 votes were cast on Election Day 1915 in Massachusetts — at the time, more than any other election in state history. Every one was cast by a man.
"There were, by 1915, a number of Western states that permitted women to vote," said Goucher College professor Jean Baker, author of "Votes for Women." "Not so in the East. Women could vote for school committee elections. I mean, it was this tiny little morsel."
But a ballot question that year would give women the vote. Weeks before the election, 9,000 women, including Helen Keller — and a few hundred men — paraded through the streets of Boston in support of the referendum.
"These symbolic parades were very appealing and very good propaganda," Baker said.
Among the some 200,000 who came out to watch the parade were then-Mayor James Michael Curley and then-Gov. David I. Walsh, both Democrats.
"Democrats are not in favor of suffrage and the Massachusetts governor is opposed," Baker said.
Peppered throughout the crowd were women selling red roses, and releasing red balloons — members of a large, powerful, well-connected opposition group of women, known as the Antis.
"There’s this idea that women will compromise their position as moral beings if they’re all tied up in dirty politics and so one of the slogans was, 'Better citizens without the vote,'” Baker said.
The suffragists also faced fierce opposition from another powerful force here — the Catholic Church.
"The church, in these very influential parishes throughout the state, works against the referendum on the basis that women belong in the home," Baker said.
On Election Day, the Antis, Democrats, and Catholic Church carried the day, as the measure was defeated by a 2-1 margin. But Baker says that by losing the battle here, and in other states that day, suffragists took an important step toward winning the war.
"When the suffragists lost the referendums in New York and Massachusetts — I believe there was also one in Rhode Island — they knew they would have to go for a national amendment," Baker said.
Just five years later, that amendment, the 19th, was ratified, guaranteeing all American women the right to vote. Today, the battle for women in politics has shifted from casting votes to earning them — and equal representation — in the highest offices in the land.
"West Virginia will send its first female senator to Washington, Rhode Island got its first female governor," Baker said.
The next U.S. Congress will include more than 100 women — for the first time. And this week, Martha Coakley, who came within a few thousand votes of becoming Massachusetts’ first-ever elected female governor, urged the next generation to take up that fight.
"I want to say this to all the young women who have worked on this campaign, who have thought about running for office, who have tried and maybe not won: It’s important that you do it," she said.
The statewide referendum to make Massachusetts the first Eastern state where women had the right to vote was defeated by a 2-1 margin, 99 years ago this week.
