Biographical Database of NAWSA Suffragists, 1890 – 1920

Biography of Julia Lovelace Woodworth, 1852 – 1936

By Jessica Suitor
Undergraduate Student, University of Central Oklahoma, Edmond, Oklahoma

Julia Lovelace Woodworth was born in Pennsylvania in March of 1852. By 1870 the Lovelace family moved to Minnesota. On October 10, 1887, Julia married L.E. Woodworth in Fairview, Minnesota. A state pioneer and participant in the Oklahoma land run of 1889, Julia and husband and their three sons moved to a homestead near Weatherford, Oklahoma Territory. In 1896 the family moved to Oklahoma City; the 1920 census recorded here there, working as a dressmaker. She lived in Oklahoma City until July 15, 1936, when she died of a paralytic stroke at the age of 83.

Woodworth was active in political and social circles. She was a key member of the Oklahoma chapter of the Sorosis Club as well as the Oklahoma chapter of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (W.C.T.U.). She held a membership in the Equal Suffrage Association of Oklahoma and Indian Territory. Serving as the Suffrage Association’s Vice President since 1904, she attended the Proceedings of the 37th annual convention (1905) of the National American Woman Suffrage Association which was held in Portland, Oregon. Woodworth often spoke at local W.C.T.U and Suffrage Association meetings and conventions seeking to recruit and educate women. In 1913, she was elected Treasurer of the renamed Oklahoma Woman’s Suffrage Association, a NAWSA chapter, and for the next several years she would serve as its Corresponding Secretary, State Secretary, and Executive Secretary. In December 1916, when National Woman’s Party members swung a suffrage banner in President Woodrow Wilson’s face, Woodworth said "we have never adopted such tactics to further our cause and never will. The Congressional Union is to the suffrage movement what Carrie Nation was to the temperance movement. We are not fighting any parties." As a leader in the fight for woman suffrage in Oklahoma in March 1919, she stated "every woman should vote…women, I believe, do not seem to realize the importance of regarding for the primaries…I have talked with many great club women and they all seem so eager to know about politics. They want to vote but they don’t know how to get about it."

Sources:

The Oklahoman (Oklahoma City, Okla.), 15 July 1936. The McCloud Standard (McCloud, Oklahoma Territory), 23 December 1904. The Shawnee News (Shawnee, Oklahoma Territory), 15 September 15 1905. The Shawnee News (Shawnee, Oklahoma Territory), 12 September 1905. The Chandler Publicist (Chandler, Oklahoma Territory), 22 September 1905. The Guthrie Daily Leader (Guthrie, Okla.), 30 October 1905. Eleanor Flexnor and Ellen Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 183 and 187. U.S. Census, 1930, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma County, Oklahoma, Accessed on Ancestry.com, 21 May 2017. National American Woman Suffrage Association, Proceedings of the Thirty-Seventh Annual Convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association held at Portland, Oregon, June 28th to July 5th, inclusive, 1905 (Warren, Ohio: The Association, 1905). The Wichita Daily Eagle (Wichita, Kansas), 8 December 1916. "Minnesota, County Marriages, 1860-1949," FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:FDDB-L4C : 12 March 2018), L. E. Woodworth and Julia Lovelace, 10 Oct 1877, Fairview, Lyon, Minnesota, United States. 1870 U. S. Federal Census, Olmsted County, Minnesota.

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