Suffrage Work

While studying at Barnard, Caroline was introduced to Harriot Stanton Blatch and her daughter Nora through a mutual friend. Harriot was the daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and an avowed socialist. She had spent time in England and admired Emmeline Pankhurst and the work she was doing for woman suffrage in Britain. Nora, an engineering student at Cornell when she met Caroline, felt overlooked in the male dominated field and was determined to fight for equality.

After Barnard, Caroline traveled the state, speaking at conventions and clubs to enlist support, and began working for the National College Equal Suffrage League. In this position, she traveled the country enlisting men and women from colleges and universities to join the cause. Both Caroline and Harriot worked with a handful of suffrage organizations that began springing up all over the state.

Harriot began to feel that they needed to adopt a tougher stance and she formed the Women's Political Union (WPU). Caroline joined as Executive Secretary and set out to organize branches throughout the state. Her letters home during that period suggest the frenzied and unpredictable nature of the work. In this letter (right), she tells her mother not to forward her mail because she is unsure when she will be back, but she sent her laundry via Wells Fargo. In 1912, a Rockland County branch of the WPU was organized by Caroline and her mother.

Membership expanded throughout the county, but Nyack was understandbly the home base. The first meeting took place at the Lexow Home on March 12, 1913. Mrs. Arthur H. Mann was chosen as the first chairman. They began planning for events and later that year brought Helen Ring Robinson of Denver, the only woman in the country serving as a state senator, to speak in Nyack. She told the audience she was not campaigning for woman suffrage but for equal suffrage. Women in Colorado had been voting since 1893.

Mrs. Arthur H. Mann was one of Rockland's pioneer suffragists and elected first chairman of the Women's Political Union in 1913. In 1872 she led a group of women from the Nyack Female Institute to the polls, demanding the right to vote.