The Path to Leadership
Montgomery County Women Leading the Way
This is the first of a two-part online exhibition about the paths Montgomery County women forged to become active participants and leaders in county politics. Part One explores women’s suffrage in the county and its relationship to the growing network of women’s clubs from the late nineteenth century through the early 1930s.
It highlights the lives of three local women — Lavinia Margaret Engle, Lucy Wright Trundle, and Jessie Ross Thomson — who worked for women's rights in various ways.
Part Two, which will be released later this Spring, will pick up where this first exhibition ends and address the path to politics post-1930s.
“Something which we think is impossible now is not impossible in another decade.”
~ Constance Baker Motley, African-American Civil Rights Activist and Judge ~Like women in so many other counties in the U.S., for Montgomery County women, the path to politics began with women’s suffrage. Suffrage was not just about attaining the right to vote but also gaining power to shape state and local laws and policies that directly affected women. As the authors of Women and Politics: Paths to Power and Political Influence explain, this was a time when “women lost most of their legal rights upon marriage … Married women had no right to own property, no right to an education, no right to their children in cases of divorce, no access to most professions, and no right to the wages they earned.” [p. 20] Women who supported suffrage, whether married or single, were seeking a way to have a meaningful say in the decisions that affected their everyday lives and livelihood.
“This is all that women ask, simply a chance to develop, simply a chance to work out their own salvation, if you choose to call it so. ... I mean salvation in the sense of development within themselves. We ask this, and this alone. We ask nothing because we are women. We ask everything because we are human, because before a woman is a wife or a mother, or a sister, or a daughter, she is a human being.”
~ Rev. Ida Hulton, Hearing Before the Committee on Woman Suffrage, U.S. Senate, February 21, 1894 ~Articles frequently refer to the "suffrage movement." Yet, calling the efforts to attain women’s suffrage a “movement,” suggests that it was a united, cohesive effort of like-minded women and men. It was not. At both the national and local level, there was much disagreement about how to achieve women’s suffrage and the methods used to attain it. Montgomery County women were generally more conservative in their approach and denounced some of the methods employed by others. Suffrage, Montgomery County-style, largely focused on tapping into the social capital of existing women’s clubs and other forums.
Setting the Scene - Life in 1900s Montgomery County
Despite its proximity to the District of Columbia, Montgomery County in the early 1900s was still widely rural and agricultural. Electricity was just coming to the county, and telephone service was still not widely accessible. Horse and buggy was the predominant mode of transportation, although streetcar and train service connected several business and residential districts. Women’s lives were primarily focused on home and family.
Racial segregation was a fact of life in the county. Black and white residents lived within their own communities, attending their own churches and schools and establishing their own benevolent societies and fraternal organizations. To earn a living, black men and women frequently worked in agricultural and labor jobs or by providing domestic services to middle- and upper class white families in the county, including families on the forefront of women's suffrage.
This was the era of Jim Crow laws that enforced segregation and fueled widespread discrimination, which black men and women encountered in their daily efforts to use local businesses and public transportation, purchase property, obtain formal education for their children, and participate in civic activities.
Although black men had won the right to vote in 1870 under the 15th Amendment, they were often deterred from voting by restrictive rules, cumbersome registration requirements, and intimidation and violence. The fear of violence extended beyond just voting rights, to other basic rights as well. For example, in 1896, Sydney Randolph, a black man accused of assaulting a Gaithersburg family, was forcibly removed from the county jail and lynched by a mob of men in Rockville. [Washington Post (Washington, DC), August 22, 2018]
Despite many barriers during this time, like their white neighbors, black families in Montgomery County strove to strengthen their communities, build new churches and community organizations, grow new businesses, and advocate for their children's education.
Early 20th century Montgomery County is a challenge to describe because experiences were different based on one's race, gender, and even geographical location. Because of its proximity to the District of Columbia, modern day conveniences of the time were generally more accessible to residents in southern parts of the county than in the more northern regions. But even with these new conveniences, old traditions and attitudes continued. Women's lives were still very much focused on home and family, and opportunities to lead and promote change were few. Therefore, understanding what life was like in Montgomery County at the time fosters greater appreciation for the distances women went, both literally and figuratively, to achieve suffrage and become greater participants in the political process.