Adèle Goodman Clark

Clark's life exemplified the crucial role women played in the social reform movements of the twentieth century. She applied her sharp intellect, artistic skills, and determination to champion women and the arts. Her interest in the woman suffrage movement began in 1909. On November 27 of that year Clark and other civic-minded women held a meeting to establish a statewide suffrage organization. Many of them wanted the vote in order to work more effectively for the passage of health, education, and child labor laws.

Clark was elected recording secretary at that first meeting of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia but resigned the office the following March. Her first paying job in Richmond, as a stenographer for the Chamber of Commerce, provided useful experience. She enlisted her mother and sister in the suffrage cause, helped direct legislative initiatives, designed and drew postcards, organized suffrage rallies, and went on speaking tours that helped establish league chapters throughout the state. In 1912 Clark debated the antisuffrage leader Molly Elliot Seawell in various Richmond newspapers. Clark opened with "If Women Were to Vote" on February 8 in the Richmond Virginian, Seawell answered with "Why Women Should Not Vote" on February 25 in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and Clark shot back in the Times-Dispatch on March 11 with "The Suffragist Movement: A Reply to Miss Molly Elliot Seawell," a detailed explanation of why women should have the vote. Clark's second article was so persuasive that the Equal Suffrage League distributed an expanded version as an educational booklet entitled Facts vs. Fallacies: Anti-Suffrage Allegations Refuted (1912). That same year Clark organized the screening of a suffrage film at the state fair, where the league also distributed suffrage buttons and yellow "Votes for Women" flags. The women often held their meetings in public places, such as Capitol Square, and Clark sometimes set up her easel and began drawing chalk sketches to lure people to suffrage speeches. "It reached the point," she remembered, "where I couldn't see a fireplug without beginning, 'Ladies and gentlemen.'"

Through canvassing, distributing leaflets, and public speaking, members of the Equal Suffrage League intended to educate Virginia's citizens and legislators and win their support for woman suffrage. Despite the fact that the league was one of the most vital suffrage organizations in the South, the General Assembly defeated woman suffrage resolutions in 1912, 1914, and 1916. Virginia suffragists thereafter directed their work primarily toward the passage of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. By the time Congress submitted the Nineteenth Amendment to the states in June 1919, the league boasted 30,000 members. Clark chaired the league's ratification committee in 1919 and 1920. Nevertheless, Virginia was one of the nine southern states that refused to approve the amendment, and the commonwealth did not ratify the Nineteenth Amendment until 1952.

Source: Encyclopedia Virginia Article on Adèle Clark