The Equal Suffrage League of Richmond in Capitol Square, 1915 (Photo courtesy Special Collections and Archives, VCU Libraries)
During a storm in 2006, a huge white oak fell across two gravestones in Hollywood Cemetery. The tree crushed and cracked the eloquent epitaphs to the couple buried there — Sophie and Charles Meredith.
Righting this damage was a major step taken by Sophie “Posie” Meredith Sides Cowan in reclaiming her great-grandmother’s place in the history of suffrage, both in Richmond and nationally.
It was Sophie Meredith, not the oft-mentioned Lila Meade Valentine and Adèle Clark, who in 1909 formally brought the idea for women’s suffrage forward in Richmond.
And it was Meredith who in 1915 formed the Virginia arm of the Congressional Union. Led by indomitable suffragist Alice Paul, it was the first group ever to picket the White House — and Meredith participated.
But by stepping outside convention, Meredith, who became dissatisfied with plodding and unsuccessful efforts to amend the state constitution, was virtually erased by the very Richmond women who initially embraced her petition for suffrage in 1909.
The Search for the Truth
In 2004, after watching “Iron Jawed Angels,” the HBO movie about suffragist Alice Paul — coincidentally filmed in Richmond, Sophie “Posie” Meredith Sides Cowan wanted to learn the truth about a longstanding family rumor — that her namesake great-grandmother got arrested during the suffrage movement.
Cowan went online, plugged in her great-grandmother’s name and found a January 1917 Washington Star article that placed her great-grandmother with the other silent sentinels picketing in front of the White House. That mention put Cowan on a path to Richmond, as she continued to unravel the threads of her great-grandmother’s story.
At the Belmont-Paul National Equality Monument in Washington, the former headquarters of Alice Paul’s Congressional Union, Cowan found correspondence between Paul and Meredith, and that took her to the Library of Congress and various Richmond archives.
“No one in my family knew anything more than that she’d been arrested,” Cowan says. “That led me to an amazing journey of discovering her suffrage banners in my dad’s attic, as well as finding letters, photographs, newspaper articles, drafts of her speeches and minutes from the Congressional Union.”
A suffrage rally on the steps of the Virginia Capitol on May 1, 1915 (Photo courtesy The Valentine)
A 1909 Petition
Meredith, a member of the Richmond Art Club, arrived at a spring 1909 meeting, wishing to speak.
Dooley didn’t affix his signature, but four women did, including Clark and art instructor Anne Fletcher, who’d voted in Colorado but couldn’t in Virginia. “I have thought since that Mrs. Meredith really reaped a large crop, getting four signatures at one effort,” Clark said in a 1964 interview.
By late fall 1909, Meredith and 17 other women — wives of wealthy men such as Lila Meade Valentine, artists like Clark and partner Nora Houston, and novelists Mary Johnston and Ellen Glasgow — founded the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia and joined the National American Women Suffrage Association. Meredith became one of the ESL’s vice presidents, and in April 1910, ESL members were among a group that presented a petition to the judiciary committee of the House of Representatives containing more than 400,000 names from across the nation advocating for a suffrage amendment.
It went nowhere.
Quaker Upbringing
Sophie Meredith, circa 1920 (Image source: records of the National Woman's Party, Library of Congress)
Meredith was born in Baltimore to John Rose from Talbot County, Maryland, and Sophia Gooding Barker from New Bedford, Massachusetts. Following her father’s death when Sophie was just 2, she and her little sister, Kate, were brought to New Bedford by their mother.
Sophie’s maternal grandfather, Quaker businessman and banker Abraham Barker, helped care for the single mother of two. According to Cowan, Sophie spent most of her childhood in the North, schooled in Quaker values of equality and peace, as did Alice Paul.
Possibly when visiting family in Baltimore, Sophie met and married Richmond attorney Charles V. Meredith. They settled in Richmond and raised three children, Kate, Sophie and Bernard.
The Work at Hand
While a handful of Virginia women participated in the first suffragist parade in Washington, organized by Alice Paul and drawing 5,000 suffragists on March 3, 1913 (African-American suffragists were asked to march at the back of the parade), the Virginia league’s efforts focused on convincing state legislators to amend the state constitution — and the group also didn’t publicly promote black female suffrage either. That effort for a constitutional amendment was defeated in 1914.
A year later, bundled up against a chill of winter in early 1915, Meredith, Clark and others again brought their message of suffrage to members of the General Assembly. They wanted the right to vote in Virginia, but a state constitutional amendment required passage by two consecutive legislatures and then a public referendum.
At the same time, a split was forming in the ESL among women who favored a moderate and incremental approach to suffrage — as with Clark and Lila Meade Valentine — and those who supported Alice Paul and her new Congressional Union (CU), with its parades for suffrage as well as an equal rights amendment.
In a 1978 BBC interview, Clark sniffed that Alice Paul and her allies were “the ones who worked for publicity as much as possible and didn’t care too much whether they obstructed their creed.”
In May 1915, Lila Meade Valentine found out that Meredith and another woman had used the ESL’s typewriter after hours for CU work, which infuriated her. Novelist Mary Johnston, an ESL co-founder, cautioned Valentine, however, in a letter dated June 1, 1915: “Of course, Mrs. Meredith … should not have made use of the headquarters [for] an association allied with the Union. … That postulated, I cannot, dear Lila, hold the formation of the other association will necessarily ruin matters. ... The National [American Woman Suffrage Association] gives out that it will push for the federal amendment this coming congress … the odium of the national amendment is upon us.”
The ESL ultimately rid its ranks of more radical members in 1916 by stipulating that members couldn’t serve in executive roles in both organizations, according to Southern historian Elna C. Green. Sophie Meredith was among them, since she had formed the Virginia branch of Alice Paul’s Congressional Union by October 1915.
“Some of her friends criticized her, and her health suffered,” Cowan says of her ancestor’s actions. “One of Meredith’s followers called her ‘our frail but fearless leader.’ ”
“It is better to be a live suffragist than a dead one.” —Daughter Sophie to her mother, August 1918
Arrests and More
The Virginia CU often met in Meredith’s 204 E. Grace St. home, but there often weren’t enough funds or hands to distribute pamphlets, make presentations, and host booths at county and state fairs.
Meredith’s exasperation is clear in an Oct. 8, 1915, letter to Alice Paul, who visited the Meredith house several times. She cited the “large league working against us” and an assortment of strong personalities, like Lila Meade Valentine and Adèle Clark, “speaking against us.”
By 1917, CU membership in the Richmond region numbered 500 (as opposed to the ESL’s 3,000 in 1915), and in February, a delegation of 20 Virginia women — Meredith among them — went as part of a larger group to Congress to again deliver a petition for the “Susan B. Anthony amendment.”
The Congressional Union (which became the National Woman’s Party in 1916) organized the first silent vigils and picketing at the White House, even while the country entered World War I.
According to an article in the Washington Star, President Woodrow Wilson, returning to the gates after a morning round of golf in January 1917, was greeted by suffragists carrying banners using quotes from his book “The New Freedom” against him. He gave the banners a critical survey, found their quotations correct, and, making his “most genial smile,” doffed his hat in appreciation.
Mabel Vernon, in charge of the picket squad, wasn't impressed: “Now, if he will only translate that smile into a brief message to his party to pass our federal amendment, we’ll be perfectly satisfied.”
The Washington Star article concluded, “Early this afternoon a squad of Virginia suffragists departed the national headquarters of the Congressional Union and was promptly sent out to relieve the pickets who had been on guard during the morning. The Virginia delegation was led by Mrs. Sophie Meredith of Richmond.”
Paul and a number of her fellow suffragists in November 1917 were jailed, tortured and force-fed at the Occoquan workhouse. Their refusal to take nourishment while incarcerated earned them the description as “iron-jawed angels” and set off a firestorm of negative press against the Wilson administration. (That description became the title of the HBO drama that sparked Posie Cowan’s research.)
At Wilson’s urging, the House of Representatives finally passed the amendment granting women the right to vote in January 1918, but the U.S. Senate held out.
In August 1918, Meredith was arrested four times for demonstrating in Lafayette Park against the Senate’s refusal to vote on the suffrage amendment. Her family urged her to pay the fine instead of going to jail, which they feared might prove fatal to the then-67-year-old. Her daughter Sophie wrote to her: “It is better to be a live suffragist than a dead one.”
Officers of the National Woman's Party meet to plan the dedication of the party's new national headquarters opposite the Capitol, including Alice Paul (far left) and Sophie Meredith (second from right). (Photo by National Photo Co., Washington, D.C., courtesy Library of Congress)
'Heartedly and Militantly’
Sophie Meredith Sides Cowan found her namesake great-grandmother’s suffrage banners in her father’s attic. (Photo courtesy Posie Cowan)
The U.S. Senate passed the measure in 1919, and women voted for the first time in 1920, but the Virginia legislature didn’t ratify the constitutional amendment for women’s suffrage until 1952.
Once the vote had been won, Meredith and the National Woman’s Party turned to other issues of equality.
Meredith wrote Paul a 1928 letter updating her on the Virginia state legislators’ ongoing lack of support for laws ensuring women’s equality. Meredith said that while she did not expect they would ever pass any, she knew the importance of keeping the issue in front of legislators.
Three months later, at age 76, Meredith died from various ailments, including acute tonsillitis and the failure of a lung.
The members of Richmond’s NWP, memorializing Meredith in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, stated that she “threw herself whole heartedly and militantly into the fight until equal suffrage was won … [and] she continued to struggle toward the goal to which the ballot for women but had opened the way.”
‘The Freedom of Women’
Cowan — born 19 years to the day after her great-grandmother’s death — writes and speaks about women’s struggles through the lens of Meredith’s experience.
“Sophie Meredith’s and many other women’s stories have been forgotten,” she says. “Their dedication, their courage and their sacrifices for fighting for what Sophie called ‘the freedom of women’ need to be reclaimed and appreciated.
“After the 19th Amendment was passed, Sophie Meredith worked closely with Alice Paul on the Equal Rights Amendment. That knowledge has inspired me to help establish Equal Rights Maine, which advocates for the ERA.
“It is shocking to me that 100 years later, her great-granddaughter is still fighting for it.”
Susan Winiecki contributed to this article.
