Anne Dallas Dudley - Women's Suffrage Movement

Women's Suffrage Movement

A few years after being married, Anne Dallas Dudley became involved in the temperance movement as a supporter of alcohol prohibition. Through her work in the temperance movement and her association with friends such as Maria Daviess and Ida Clyde Clark, Dudley became convinced that women's place in society could only be improved if women were allowed to vote. At the time, however, almost all men and a majority of women opposed the idea of women participating in the political process.

"I have never yet met a man or woman who denied that taxation without representation is tyranny. I have never yet seen one who was such a traitor to our form of government that he did not believe that the government rests upon the consent of the governed. This is a government of, for, and by the people, and only the law denies that women are people."

In September 1911, Dudley, Daviess, Clark, and several other women met in the back parlor of the Tulane Hotel and founded the Nashville Equal Suffrage League, an organization dedicated to building local support for women's suffrage while "quietly and earnestly avoiding militant methods". Dudley was selected as the organization's first president. During her presidency, the league organized giant May Day suffrage parades, usually led by Dudley and her children. Dudley also helped bring the National Suffrage Convention to Nashville in 1914. At the time, it was one of the largest conventions ever held in the city.

After serving as president of the local league for four years, Dudley was elected to head the Tennessee Equal Suffrage Association in 1915. During this time she helped to introduce and lobby for a suffrage amendment to the state constitution. Although the amendment was defeated, a later measure to give women the right to vote in presidential and municipal elections was eventually passed by the state legislature in 1919.

In 1917, Dudley became the Third Vice President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, where she contributed significantly to advancing legislation on the issue of women's suffrage. In 1920, Dudley, along with Catherine Talty Kenny and Abby Crawford Milton, led the campaign in Tennessee to approve ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. On August 18, Tennessee became the 36th and deciding state to ratify the amendment, thereby giving women the right to vote throughout the country.