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Whist Party! A whist party will be given at ye old Town Hall Hebron…Proceeds for Woman Suffrage Club…Come one come all.

[Hebron, CT, ca. 1915]. Manuscript broadside, 12” x 10”, in watercolor or ink?, done with brush. CONDITION: Very good, minor loss to lower-left corner, 1” separation along upper-left vertical fold.

Rare and appealing evidence of a small-town Connecticut fundraiser for women’s suffrage, involving whist and ice cream.

This broadside announces a “Whist Party!” on the evening of August 28th at 8:30pm at the Town Hall in Hebron, Connecticut. “Playing” and “Ice Cream” cost 10 cents each. The town of Hebron had just under a thousand residents in the decade preceding the ratification of the 19th amendment, and between 1911 and 1919 only about thirty women (compared to over 200 men) registered to vote in what was then the only election in which they could participate: that of the Town School Committee. As this broadside shows, however, the low number of early female voters did not reflect a lack of interest, and the town may have been a stop along the Connecticut suffrage movement’s automobile tours of Tolland, Windham, and other counties in the 1910s. Newspaper articles from the 1910s confirm that there was suffrage activity and discussion in Hebron, and in 1916 at least one larger meeting took place at the town hall, as “A number of Hartford women” were reported to have helped put out a fire as they “were returning from a meeting of suffragists in the Hebron town hall.” When the Connecticut General Assembly approved the 19th Amendment in September of 1920—a year after President Wilson signed it into law—eighty-one women, ranging in age from twenty-two to seventy-eight, arrived at the town hall to register to vote, with seventeen male relatives registering in apparent solidarity. A few weeks later, thirty-one more women registered to vote, swelling the Hebron voter roll “by 33% in a matter of weeks” (McCalla).

A scarce survival of grassroots organizing for women’s right to vote.

REFERENCES: “Andover Hotel Is Burned To Ground: Attendants at Grange Meeting and Party of Suffragists Turn Firemen,” Hartford Courant, 17 Oct. 1916, p. 1; McCalla, Donna. “Hebron Women and the Suffragette Movement, 1911-1920” (2008), The Hebron Historical Society online.

Item #8322

Price: $750.00

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