Rural Women
in Nodaway County
Women's Suffrage
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Women around the United States were coming together and raising awareness about how women needed the right to vote. Groups started forming around this issue in the 1860s, and soon there were suffrage speakers traveling the country to promote this message.
In Maryville, there were frequent suffrage speakers invited to town, and a local band - the Missouri Ladies Military Band - went to Washington, D.C., in 1913 to play in a national suffrage parade. While much of the fight for women's suffrage happened in the East Coast or in more urban areas like St. Louis, rural towns like Maryville and rural women also supported the suffrage movement.
To learn more about Maryville's part in the suffrage movement you can visit the Nodaway County Historical Society Museum, where you can see a band uniform worn in the D.C. parade and instruments used by the women.
On the national level, suffragists decided to come together on March 3, 1913, for a parade in Washington, D.C. A group of young women from Nodaway County participated in this parade, travelling two days by train to get there. Called the Missouri Ladies Military Band, they were organized by Alma Nash in Maryville as a concert band. The band was made up of female college students, recent graduates, and school teachers, and they performed at local fairs and gave concerts. In January 1913, they expressed their support for women's suffrage and requested to participate in the national parade planned for D.C. As one of only a few bands, and perhaps the only all-female band, they held a prominent place early in the parade line-up. In total, an estimated 5,000 women participated in the parade and 500,000 people watched it from the streets.
Here is a short video of the suffrage parade in D.C. that year:
“It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union.”
This quote is from Susan B. Anthony, one of the most important women figures in the United States women's suffrage movement. She came to Maryville in 1876, on the request of the Library Association, and spoke to the community on women's fight for the vote -- to the glowing acclaim of area newspapers.
Several years later in 1879, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, another early suffrage leader, spoke in Maryville, this time at the request of the Ladies Literary Society. The Nodaway Democrat, a local newspaper, enthused, "Her lecture was one of the best we have ever heard in Maryville...She is without question one of the ablest advocates of women's rights in the land."
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In 1882, the literary association invited Phoebe Couzins to speak. Couzins hailed from St. Louis and was one of the first female law school graduates in the country. She gave two talks in Maryville.
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In the early 1900s, three more women travelled to Maryville and spoke on voting rights. Dr. Anna Howard Shaw was invited by the Maryville Lecture Association in 1901, and she visited again in 1902. A women's club brought Helen Keller to town in 1915, and she spoke to a crowd of 800 at the local Methodist Church. That same year, the college also invited its own suffrage speaker - Lavinia Engle. She came from Maryland and was a recent college graduate herself.
One hundred years ago last year, women across the United States were finally granted the right to vote. Women in Nodaway County played an important role on the local, state, and national levels in this fight.
At the museum, you may visit some of our special exhibits on these local women, and you can celebrate their memory at the Pocket Park in downtown Maryville where a historical marker commemorates Alma Nash and the Missouri Ladies Military Band. Learn more about Alma and her band, by clicking on the links below:
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In celebration of the centennial of women's suffrage in 2020, the museum's uniform from the Missouri Ladies Military Band, the group who marched in the national suffrage parade in DC, travelled to the State Historical Society of Missouri in Columbia. Can you spot our uniform in this video?