Eau Claire Women in Theater will present “Failure is Impossible” October 23
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By LeAnn R. Ralph
COLFAX — Eau Claire Women in Theater will be presenting “Failure is Impossible,” a representation of the history of suffrage, October 23 at the Colfax Municipal Building’s Cozy Theater.
According to Eau Claire Women in Theater’s website, the group endeavors to “expose audiences to dramatic readings of existing texts and original works” and is described as a “dramatic reader’s theater group consisting of experienced performance artists delivering original and commissioned plays.”
“Failure is Impossible” will highlight 10 of the most influential women in history, including Lucretia Mott, Theodora Youmans, Abigail Adams, Carrie Chapman Catt, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Belle Case LaFollette, Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul, Lucy Stone and Olympia Brown.
Mott
Lucretia Mott (1793 to 1880) was born in Massachusetts and was raised as a Quaker, a religion that believes in the equality of all people under God.
Mott was a member of the American Anti-Slavery Society and was a founding member of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society.
In addition to being a strong advocate for ending slavery, she also was an activist for women’s rights and spoke against racial and gender injustice.
Youmans
Theodora Winton Youmans (1863 to 1932) was born in Wisconsin and was the last president of the Wisconsin Woman Suffrage Association.
Youmans reorganized the Wisconsin Woman Suffrage Association into the Wisconsin League of Women Voters.
Youmans was a journalist and wrote for the Waukesha Freeman. She was instrumental in lobbying the state legislature in 1919 to ratify the federal amendment for women to obtain the right to vote, and in 1922, as the first woman to run for the state legislature, she ran for state senate.
When Youmans’ husband died in 1931, she became the publisher of the Waukesha Freeman.
Adams
Abigail Adams (1744 to 1818), the wife of John Adams, was the first woman to serve as Second Lady of the United States. She was second woman to serve as First Lady — and she was the mother of John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States.
Abigail Adams, known as her husband’s closest advisor, is only one of two women, along with Barbara Bush, to have been married to one U.S. President and also to be the mother of another U.S. President.
Adams is remembered for the numerous letters she wrote to John Adams while he was in Philadelphia during the Continental Congress, discussing government and politics.
She also wrote letters that serve as accounts of the American Revolutionary War home front.
Catt
Carrie Chapman Catt (1859 to 1947) was born in Ripon and worked for more than 30 years for the right of women to vote.
She was an alumna of Iowa State University and was the only woman in her graduating class. In addition to working for women’s rights around the world, she also advocated for international peace.
Catt’s speaking and organizational skills helped achieve the ratification of 19th Amendment to United States Constitution securing women’s right to vote in August of 1920.
Catt proposed that a nonpartisan educational organization for women voters be created, and on February 14, 1920, the national League of Women Voters was formed in Chicago. She was the honorary president of the League of Women Voters for the rest of her life.
Stanton
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815 to 1902) became active in the anti-slavery movement after marrying abolitionist Henry Stanton in 1840.
Stanton met Lucretia Mott while Stanton was on her honeymoon in London to attend a World Anti-Slavery convention.
Women were excluded from the World Anti-Slavery convention proceedings
Stanton and Mott became close friends.
Stanton and Mott held the first Women’s Rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848.
Stanton wrote “The Declaration of Sentiments,” which added “woman” or “women” throughout the Declaration of Independence. The document also listed 18 grievances, such as the inability of women to control their own property and the lack of the right to vote.
LaFollette
Belle Case La Follette (1859 to 1931) started attending UW-Madison at the age of 16. While at UW-Madison, she met her husband, Robert.
Belle Case La Follette would help her husband with law cases, and in 1883, she started taking law classes. She became the first woman to earn a law degree from the University of Wisconsin law school in 1885.
Belle La Follette wrote her husband’s speeches and managed his campaign when he ran for U.S. Congress, governor of Wisconsin, and U.S. Senate.
She was the co-editor of La Follette’s Weekly Magazine, which became The Progressive later on, and travelled around the country, speaking about women’s right to vote.
Bob La Follette died in 1925 while he was a United States Senator, and Belle Case La Follette was asked to take his place. Belle declined the position, but her son Robert La Follette Jr. served as senator instead. Her other son Phillip later served three terms as the governor of Wisconsin. Her daughter, Fola, was also known as a suffragist, a labor activist and as an actress.
Anthony
Susan B. Anthony (1820 to 1906), who was born in Massachusetts and raised as a Quaker, was one of the most visible of the leaders of the women’s suffrage movement.
Anthony met Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1851. The two women worked together for more than 50 years to fight for women’s rights.
Anthony and Stanton were co-founders of the American Equal Rights Association, and the two friends became the editors of the Association’s newspaper, The Revolution, in 1868.
The newspaper helped spread the word about equality and rights for women.
Anthony and Stanton formed the National Woman Suffrage Association to advocate for the constitutional amendment that gave women the right to vote.
Anthony was arrested for voting in 1872, tried, and was fined $100. The incident brought national attention for the women’s right to vote movement.
Anthony died in 1906, 14 years before the 19th Amendment was passed to give women the right to vote.
Paul
Alice Paul (1885 to 1977), in addition to her work to help achieve the passage of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution granting women the right to vote, also wrote the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923.
The Equal Rights Amendment has yet to be adopted.
Alice Paul’s father, William Paul, was a wealthy Quaker business owner. Her parents both believed in gender equality, education for women and working to make society better.
Paul’s mother was a suffragist and brought her daughter along with her to women’s suffrage meetings.
The Equal Rights Amendment, which would give women constitutional protection from discrimination, was ratified by 35 states during the 1970s, but was short of the necessary 38 states by the deadline in 1982 and never became a constitutional amendment.
Stone
Lucy Stone (1818 to 1893), suffragist and abolitionist, was the first woman from Massachusetts to earn a college degree. She wrote marriage vows that included egalitarianism and did not take her husband’s last name.
When Lucy Stone graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio in 1847, she declined to write a commencement speech because it would be read by a man.
William Lloyd Garrison hired Lucy Stone to write and deliver speeches for Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society.
Two years after the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention, Stone organized in 1850 the first national Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts.
When Lucy Stone met Henry Blackwell, her future husband convinced her they could have an egalitarian marriage.
Stone registered to vote in Massachusetts in 1879 because the state allowed women to vote in some local elections, but then her name was removed from the voter rolls because she was not using her husband’s last name.
Stone gave her last speech at the World’s Columbian Exposition and died later in that year of 1893 when she was seventy-five years old.
Brown
Olympia Brown (1835 to 1926), who was born in Michigan and graduated from the St. Lawrence University divinity school in Canton, New York, was the first woman to be ordained as a minister in the United States in 1863.
She served at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Racine, and in 1887 she left the church to work for women’s right to vote.
Brown served as the president of the Wisconsin’s Woman Suffrage Association from 1884 to 1912.
Olympia Brown was one of a thousand women who marched in Washington D.C. to urge President Woodrow Wilson to take action on supporting a constitutional amendment to grant voting rights to all women in the United States.
Cozy Theater
“Failure is Impossible” begins at 2 p.m. Sunday, October 23, in the Colfax Municipal Building’s Cozy Theater.
The event is being sponsored by the Colfax Municipal Building Restoration Group and the Colfax Public Library. Admission is free.