Biographical Database of NAWSA Suffragists: 1890-1920
Biography of Mabel Connor, 1872-1962
By Catherine Maluski, librarian, Sarah Lawrence College
Mabel Connor was born in 1872 to Henrietta and Selden Connor, the 35th governor of Maine and former General in the United States Army during the Civil War. In addition to being the governor of Maine, Selden Connor was a proponent for women's suffrage and was vice president of the Maine Woman Suffrage Association
She was the president of the Maine Woman Suffrage Association from 1917-1919 and following this became the President of the League of Women Voters from 1920-1922. She believed that equal suffrage was war work and led the push to lobby the Legislature to pass a federal amendment as opposed to just state. In addition to helping to persuade the nation of a woman's right to vote, she also converted her sister, Rosamand Connor, from an anti-suffragist to an active member of the fight. A sign of Mabel's importance is that when the governor of Maine signed the bill giving Maine women the right to vote he presented the signing pen to Mabel Connor, noting that the handle was yellow.
Mabel generously donated her scrapbooks to the Maine State Museum to help preserve the history of women's suffrage in the state. She died, unmarried, in Augusta, Maine in 1962.
Sources:
"State Conventions," The Woman Citizen, vol. 3 (Nov. 2, 1918), p. 453. Accessible online athttps://books.google.com/books?id=KtMRAQAAMAAJ&lpg=PA453&ots=-37UO7-MMW&dq=%22mabel%20connor%22%20AND%20suffrage*&pg=PA453#v=onepage&q=%22mabel%20connor%22%20AND%20suffrage*&f=false
Shannon M. Risk, "'In Order to Establish Justice': The Nineteenth-Century Woman Suffrage Movements of Maine and New Brunswick" (Ph.D. diss., University of Maine, 2009). Accessible online at https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1112&context=etd
Death record for Mabel Connor, accessed in Ancestry Library edition.