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Oak Park, Ill.: Oak Leaves Print., [ca. 1913]. 24mo (5.5” x 3.125”) printed tan wrappers. 8 pp. CONDITION: Very good, diagonal crease at lower-right corner of front wrapper.

The scarce printing of this speech by an important Illinois woman suffrage organizer, made at a longstanding Republican club in downtown Chicago following the passage in Illinois of (albeit limited) voting rights for women.

Grace Wilbur Trout was born in Iowa in 1864, and moved to the Oak Park neighborhood of Chicago with her young family in 1892. She soon became involved in suffrage organizing, and, beginning in 1910 as the newly-elected president of the Chicago Political Equality League, began quietly enlisting prominent men to the cause. She organized car tours for suffrage through several suburbs, and in 1913 led the Illinois delegation at the Suffrage March in Washington, D.C. Her efforts were germane to another milestone that year—the passage of the Illinois Presidential and Municipal Voting Act, which made Illinois the first state east of the Mississippi to allow women to vote in presidential elections. At home in Oak Park, Trout became known as “the woman who never fails.” Following the passage of the 19th Amendment (which Illinois was the first state to ratify), Trout was a core founder of the League of Women Voters. She died in Florida in 1955.

The present booklet contains a speech given by Trout “before 5,000 Republicans,” at a meeting of the Hamilton Club, a stronghold of the Republican party. The meeting took place at the Medinah Temple in Chicago’s Loop, and Trout addresses the crowd “as the representative of the new women voters of this state, who…have wisely decided not to inherit their political faith, like most of our men, but to choose that faith with clear eyes and open, unprejudiced mind.” She stresses that “The people of this nation are tired of hearing democracy merely talked. It must be lived” and articulates the importance of political equality and cooperation across the sexes to “solve the economic, educational, and social problems that confront this nation today. The party that recognizes this fundamental principle and incorporates an equal suffrage plank in its platform and stands for it and works for it will do well.”

No holdings in OCLC. We locate just one example, at Illinois State University.

Item #9167

Price: $475.00