Biographical Database of NAWSA Suffragists, 1890-1920
Biography of Augusta Brown Fleming, 1876-1949
By Katherine Pettine, Rosemont College, Rosemont, Penn.
Augusta Brown Fleming was born in May 1876 in San Francisco, California, to W. M. Brown and Agnes Ann Glasgow Brown. She married Hugh Neely Fleming in 1897 and lived in Erie, Pennsylvania. The couple had a son, Hugh Neely Fleming Jr., born December 14, 1901. Augusta Fleming died on July 24, 1949, in Erie, Pennsylvania.
Augusta Brown Fleming was an active proponent for the women's suffrage movement. A director of the Pennsylvania Council of Republican Women, she was also on the council's campaign and publicity committees. She helped make suffrage postcards that were used in fundraising and organizing suffrage events.
Fleming was also a vice president of the Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage Association in 1913 and 1914 as well as the chairman of the Erie County Council of Republican Women. She later became the president of the council, where she was able to voice her support of Senator George Wharton Pepper over Governor Gifford Pinchot for the 1926 senatorial election. She argued that Pepper better represented the goals and ideals of the women's movement than did Pinchot.
SOURCES:
Sources on Fleming include Ancestry.com; Kenneth Florey, American Woman Suffrage Postcards: A Study and Catalog (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company Inc., 2015); and articles in the Wellsboro (PA) Gazette, Harrisburg (PA) Telegraph, and Wilkes-Barre (PA) Record. See also, Ida Husted Harper, ed., "Pennsylvania," chapter XXXVII in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 6: 1900-1920 (New York, NY: National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1922), pp. 550-64. [LINK]