Document 14: Caroline Nichols Churchill, “Woman’s Suffrage,” The Queen Bee, 14 (26 April 1893), p. 1.Introduction
In 1882, Caroline Nichols Churchill (1833-1926) changed the name of her women’s rights newspaper from The Colorado Antelope to The Queen Bee. But her paper was still “devoted to the interests of humanity, woman’s political equality, and individuality,” and she continued to pursue her reform agenda. Focused on, but never limited to women’s issues, Churchill’s paper advocated for labor unions and, in the 1890s, for the People’s, or Populist, Party, as well as the new Non-Partisan Equal Suffrage Association of Colorado[A], formed in 1890 to organize and mobilize support for winning the vote for women. Within the context of the economic depression gripping the nation and the state, following the repeal of the federal Sherman Silver Purchase Act and the Panic of 1893, support for the enfranchisement of women grew throughout the state, the idea being that women’s votes could help fashion political solution to the crisis.
This article demonstrated Churchill’s arguments for and contribution to the 1893 campaign for woman suffrage in Colorado. In this call for woman suffrage, she emphasized women’s difference from men, echoed Populist rhetoric, and conveyed her concern about the contemporary economic, social, and political developments.
WOMAN’S SUFFRAGE. What the passage of the Woman’s Suffrage Bill will do for Colorado. Give it the most glorious advertising any state in this Union ever had. It will send some of the best speakers of both sexes and orators of the world to this State for a converting campaign that will help the country in very many ways. Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Anna Dickenson, Rev. Anna Shaw, Rev. Antoneth Brown, Fred Douglas and fifteen hundred other able exponents of the true principles upon which liberty is based, will come to Colorado and hold meetings in every city, town and hamlet, where the QUEEN BEE has left a foot print. God speed the time, the cause and the results! If the women of this nation can arrest the development of rascality sufficient to prevent history from repeating itself, it is all the world will ask of them. The brotherhood of the race can be established.
If women cannot accomplish this, then there is no hope for popular institutions. By the people for the people is once more a demonstrated failure, and the priest once more stands hand in hand with the moneyed powers of the earth to smother and destroy the aspirations of the masses, that a few may live in luxury with women, song and wine, while the masses, are enslaved. These pictures are being presented with startling facts and we have the opportunity to take our choice. Every woman in the land should be astir in preperation for the coming election. The emancipation of the women of the country simply means the dawn of a golden era. Better conditions for every man, woman and child. These things are not to be achieved without work, but this is our opportunity and we should be glad of health and strength with which to work in such a cause.
A. The organization was variously known as the Non-Partisan Equal Suffrage Association of Colorado, the Non-Partisan Equal Suffrage Association, and the Colorado Equal Suffrage Association.
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