Elizabeth Cady Stanton, second only to Susan B. Anthony in women's suffrage fame, also came to and campaigned in northwest lower Michigan.
She came to Manistee in April 1880, and stayed with Smith W. and Fannie Fowler, leading suffragist advocates and owners of the Manistee Times & Standard. Fannie was recording secretary for the Michigan chapter of the National Woman Suffrage Association, led jointly by Stanton and Anthony.
Fannie's reports on activities in northwest Michigan are included in "The History of Woman Suffrage," jointly edited by the famous pair. The book offers a state-by-state rundown of suffrage activities in the late 1800s.
Fowler's husband headed the northwest Michigan chapter of the NWSA. He and Fannie organized much of the campaign for the 1874 suffrage proposal in this part of the state and transported Anthony around the region in 1879, an era before the railroad came to Manistee. Elvin Sprague, owner of the Traverse Bay Eagle, also was part of the committee as was J.G Ramsdell, a judge, pioneer fruit farmer and brother to T.J. Ramsdell, of Manistee.
These visits were no mere happenstance.
In 1870, Michigan became just the second state in the Union to organize a votes-for-women campaign, probably because many of the state's pioneer settlers were from New York state and the Northeast, hotbeds of both abolition and suffrage.
Fannie Holden Fowler's parents, who lived in Grand Rapids, traced their American roots back to Puritan ancestors in the Northeast, a birthplace for both civil rights movements. Her brother, Charles A. Holden, resigned as Grand Traverse County prosecutor in 1861, when the Civil War broke out, to help recruit for Co. A of the 26th Infantry.
-- Loraine Anderson
Print this story
E-mail this story
