Phoebe Couzins. Photograph by unknown, ca. 1904 Missouri History Museum Photograph and Print Collection / https://mohistory.org/collections/item/resource:146931
Phoebe Couzins was born in St. Louis in 1842. She was a member of the Ladies Union Aid Society during the Civil War, and after the War she joined the St. Louis Woman Suffrage Association, and later the National Woman Suffrage Association. She was the first woman to graduate from Washington University School of Law, in 1871. She only practiced law for 2 months before dedicating herself to the women’s suffrage movement. She was a very impressive public speaker, and lectured for Suffrage across the US. In 1887, she became the first female US Marshall in the country.
In her later years, Couzins changed her position and began to speak out against Suffrage, and against Prohibition. As a result, she lost many of her friends and supporters, as well as her sources of income. She died in 1913 in an unoccupied house in St. Louis, and her funeral at Bellefontaine Cemetery was attended by only her brother and 5 other people. She was buried wearing her US Marshall’s badge. She lay in an unmarked grave until 1950, when a headstone was placed by members of the Women’s Bar Association of St. Louis.
Victoria Clay Haley was born in Macon, Mississippi in 1877 and moved to St Louis as a child. She was the first vice-president of the St Louis Chapter of the Young Women’s Christian Association and president of the Federated Colored Women's Clubs of St. Louis as well as a talented writer and public speaker. She dedicated a great deal of time to public works and social causes including serving on the executive committee of the Frederick Douglass Home and the St. Louis chapter of the Colored Women's Unit of the Council of National Defense during World War I.
When the Mississippi Valley Suffrage Conference was held in St Louis in 1913, Victoria attended after noticing that the leaders of the conference had rejected a suffrage bill in Missouri that excluded black women. Some members of the conference and the Buckingham Hotel management attempted to remove her from the hall as the hotel did not serve black guests, but Victoria held her seat and with support from the conference leadership returned for additional sessions. She returned to the same conference the following year.
After the fight for the vote was won she directed outreach programs to black female voters and served as an alternate member of the Missouri delegation to the Republican National Convention in 1920.
Sources: Biographical Sketch of Victoria Clay Haley written by Nell Shea, fl. 2017 (Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street, 2017); & St. Louis Post-Dispatch St. Louis, Missouri 04 Apr 1913, Fri
Rose O'Neill is known best for her Kewpie dolls, but she was also a feminist, suffragist, writer, and liberated woman. She spent time in New York and Branson, MO, using her considerable fame to campaign for women's voting rights between 1914 and 1918. She was frequently in attendance at suffrage parades and often found that her artistic fame came in handy in drawing attention to the unfair treatment of women and minorities. She supported many worthwhile causes such as the Red Cross and the National Tuberculosis Society.
The Kewpie Korner Kewpiegram by Rose O’Neill appeared in newspapers across the United States from 1917 through 1918. These small cartoons with poems promoted woman suffrage and other controversial subject matter.
An April 14, 1915, profile of O’Neill for the New York Tribune featured some of O’Neill’s more strident statements in support of suffrage:
Man has made and ignorantly kept woman a slave. He has forced upon her certain virtues which have been convenient to him. He has damned as intuition her greatest virtue, knowledge.
…
Woman is the philosopher. What she knows man must figure laboriously through logic. For centuries she has borne the greatest insult of the world, but she is now to be emancipated.
Sources: Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and Bonniebrook Museum
Thank-you to our contributors: Jeanne Spencer, Edna Dieterle & Katherine Kozemczak