Anne Clay Crenshaw and founding of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia in 1909 at 919 W. Franklin Street, on VCU's Monroe Park campus.

In 2012, a Virginia Historical Marker was placed in front of the Crenshaw House to observe the 103rd anniversary of the founding of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia (ESL). The ESL led the movement in Virginia for women's suffrage for ten years and would become the Virginia League of Women Voters in 1920 after women won the right to vote. The ESL's first meeting took place on November 20, 1909 at 919 West Franklin Street, the home of Anne Clay Crenshaw and her family. The Crenshaw family lived in the house for nearly 40 years. It was purchased by Richmond Professional Institute (now VCU) in the 1960s. Fittingly, the building that served as the host to the formation of the women's rights movement in Virginia now houses VCU's Department of Gender Sexuality and Womens Studies. It was renamed the "Crenshaw House" on November 20, 2009, 100 years to the day that the first ESL meeting took place.

The marker reads:

Eighteen women dedicated to obtaining the vote and expanding women’s traditional roles formed the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia at 919 West Franklin Streeton Nov. 20, 1909. Under Lila Meade Valentine’s leadership, the ESL grew to more than 100 local chapters and 30,000 members statewide. The ESL held public suffrage rallies and supported social reform movements to urge theGeneral Assembly to amend the state constitution. Although the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution passed in 1920, when the ESL became the League of Women Voters, Virginia did not ratify it until 1952.

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In November of 1909, eighteen women met at the Richmond home of Anne Clay Crenshaw to organize what became Virginia's largest and most influential women's suffrage organization, the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia (ESL). Their ten year struggle to change their status as disfranchised citizens and to exercise what they believed was their right to vote, led ultimately to a substantially greater role of women in Virginia's public affairs.

The struggle for women's suffrage and equality in Virginia is in many ways a Richmond story. Not only did Richmond women begin the movement, they guided its course. While there has been increasingly more interest paid by historians and academics to the history of the women's rights movement in Virginia, certain events and individuals have been given little attention or completely ignored. This paper will examine the role of one such individual, Anne (Annie) Warfield Clay Crenshaw (1859-1945).

 

More than just the hostess of the first two meetings of the ESL, Anne Clay Crenshaw was a link between nineteenth and twentieth century attempts by women to win suffrage in the Commonwealth. She also served as an important liaison in the early days of the ESL between its Richmond organizers and national leaders of the movement. Anne Clay Crenshaw's life in Richmond is representative of many other like-minded women of this city who became active in the cause for suffrage in Virginia.

 

Though the United States has been characterized as a participatory democracy, it initially denied political rights, including enfranchisement, to women and other groups. While there had been vocal advocates for women in the first few decades of the nation's history, the real struggle for women's political rights began in 1848 when the first Women's Rights Convention was held at Seneca Falls, New York. Many of the women who met at this historic convention were abolitionists whose experiences in advocating the abolishment of slavery led to an examination of their own political rights. While the majority of delegates at Seneca Falls focused their concerns on opportunities for education and work for women, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the convention's principal organizer, advocated women's suffrage as a solution to the problems women faced.1 First considered a radical idea, Stanton's call for women's suffrage eventually appealed to many women activists. After the Civil War they saw suffrage as a "necessary precedent to winning other rights,"2 especially when male abolitionists deserted their cause.

 

In 1869, two national women's groups, each representing different wings of the women's movement, were formed. Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the more radical National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), which advocated an amendment to the United States Constitution to gain women's suffrage. The somewhat more conservative activists formed the American Woman Suffrage Association which called for a state by state strategy. In 1890, both groups merged, forming the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Though they would help organizers to win suffrage in state campaigns, NAWSA concentrated its efforts at the federal level in their work to pass what would become known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment to the Constitution.

 

The first known organized attempt to gain women's suffrage in Virginia was led by Richmonder Anna Whitehead Bodeker in the 1870s. In her 1994 essay for the Virginia Cavalcade on this early Virginia suffragist, Sandra Groia Treadway writes that Bodeker and her husband invited Paulina Wright Davis, a longtime women's rights activist and member of NWSA, to their Richmond home in January of 1870.3 More than a dozen people attended the dinner and news of the event reached the local newspapers. Enthused by these events, Bodeker founded and became president of the Virginia State Woman Suffrage Association.4 It numbered only a handful of people and was chiefly a vehicle for Bodeker. Through her efforts, Susan B. Anthony came to Richmond in December of 1870 and spoke to two small groups. In the next few years, other NWSA leaders came to Richmond to speak and to organize.

 

Bodeker attempted to vote in Richmond on November 7, 1871 but the presiding judges refused to accept her ballot.5 She also succeeded in submitting a petition to the Virginia General Assembly in January of 1872, requesting that body to pass legislation guaranteeing women the right to vote. The petition, introduced by Henry County House of Delegate's member George W. Booker, was referred to the committee for courts of justice where no action was taken. 6 Faced with apathy and opposition at a time when Virginia's conservative politicians were unwilling to consider issues linked to what they saw as the politics of Radical Reconstruction, Bodeker's public efforts for suffrage ended in 1872.7

 

The second known organized attempt at gaining women's suffrage in the Old Dominion was led by Lynchburg's Orra Gray Langhorne (1841-1904). An avid Republican, she was educated and outspoken on the issues of her times.8 She wrote numerous articles advancing progressive issues but was especially concerned with the plight of blacks in post-Reconstruction Virginia. Langhorne began attending national suffrage conventions in 1880 and became familiar with national suffrage leaders. In 1893, she became president of the state's second suffrage association, the Virginia Suffrage Association. The organization was limited in its scope and in its efforts.9 Lasting only a few years, it lost its most vocal proponent when Langhorne moved from Virginia to Kentucky after her husband's death. Langhorne went to live with her sister, "Nettie" Foxhall A. Daingerfield, and her husband at the Daingerfield family home near Lexington.

Not far from Lexington is Richmond, Kentucky where suffragist Laura Clay lived. Clay (1849-1941) was founder and leader of the Kentucky Equal Rights Association, that state's leading suffrage organization. Before Orra Gray Langhorne's death in 1904, she left Clay $2.50, the remaining funds from Langhorne's defunct Virginia Suffrage Association.10 Clay was instructed to pass the account to a future Virginia suffrage organization. Minutes of an early meeting of the ESL almost two decades later in Richmond, Virginia report that it was the organization that received this bequest.11

 

The exact relationship between Clay and Langhorne is hard to determine. They were two of the most politically progressive women living in Kentucky at the turn-of-the-century and would most likely have known each other. At least one letter from "Nettie" Daingerfield to Laura Clay has been located among the Laura Clay Papers at the Margaret I. King Library, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky. The letter clearly shows that the Clay and Daingerfield families knew each other well. Both families were also well-known horse breeders. Two undated newspaper clippings of Orra Gray Langhorne's activities are also part of the Laura Clay Papers. Clay and Langhorne may also have known each other through their attendance of national suffrage conventions and meetings.

 

Whatever their relationship, many of the written histories of the ESL note the bequest of funds from Langhorne's organization to what would become the ESL. Unfortunately, other than noting this sort of symbolic passing of the torch for suffrage from one group of Virginia women to another, no one has examined the real implication of this event. Its significant because these funds were transferred to Laura Clay, the older sister of Anne Clay Crenshaw, the woman who hosted the first two ESL meetings.

 

Laura and Anne Clay were raised in Richmond, Kentucky at White Hall, the Clay family home. Their father was Cassius Marcellus Clay, a nationally known abolitionist, an advisor to President Lincoln, and who would later serve as Unites States Minister to Russia. Their mother was Mary Jane Warfield Clay. The Clay family was large and included six girls and four sons, though not all survived to adulthood. The children's relationship with their father was a limited one in that he traveled extensively and was seldom home. Cassius Clay was habitually unfaithful to his wife and the Clays divorced in 1878 when Laura was 28 years old and Anne was 19.

 

In his biography of Laura Clay, Laura Clay and the Woman's Rights Movement, Paul E. Fuller writes that the divorce had a lasting impact on the Clay women, bringing them "face to face with one of the greatest inequalities of American Life: the vast difference between the legal and property rights of men and women."12 Mary Jane Clay, who had managed the large estate of White Hall during Cassius Clay's long periods of absence, was left with none of the property or assets that the Clays had acquired during their marriage. With no legal recourse, Mary Jane Clay moved out of White Hall and lived without any assistance from her former husband. In an 1874 diary entry, Laura Clay wrote that the dissolution of her parent's marriage left her "eyes unblinded [sic] to the unjust relations between men and women and the unworthy position of women."13 She went on to write that she believed "the great cause of Woman's Rights [was] that sphere of activity in His service to which God has called me ..." By the 1880s, all four Clay sisters were actively involved in the Kentucky suffrage movement and worked to promote progressive causes.

 

Anne Clay's involvement in the Kentucky suffrage movement included writing a newspaper column on women's issues for the Kentucky Gazette. In 1886, at the of age 27, she married Spottswood Dabney Crenshaw, a native of Richmond, Virginia. She moved to the Virginia capital that year to begin a new life and family. In his biography on Laura Clay, Fuller writes that Anne's marriage and family life ended her involvement in the suffrage cause. This is only partly true. Her participation in the cause for women's rights certainly became limited though it did not end when she left Kentucky.

Anne Clay Crenshaw had married into a wealthy and established Richmond, Virginia family though her own family background was similar. S. Dabney Crenshaw was a 32-year-old successful businessman when he married Anne Clay. A native of Richmond, his father, William G. Crenshaw, organized and commanded the Crenshaw Battery of the Confederate States Army during the Civil War and was later sent as an agent of the Confederate government to procure war supplies from England.14 The younger Crenshaw attended the University of Virginia and later took part in the formation of the Virginia-Carolina Chemical Company, serving first as secretary and later as vice-president.

 

After settling in Richmond in 1886, the Crenshaws lived in four different houses in the city before building a three-story townhouse at 219 East Grace Street in 1892.15 Three of their four children were born while they lived at this address.

[The following paragraph was added to this web site in October of 2002]

It was while they lived at this address that the first known activism by Anne Clay Crenshaw in Richmond has been documented. A journal from the papers of Adele Goodman Clark (1882-1983), housed in Special Collections and Archives, notes that an organization called "The Richmond Equal Rights Association" was formed at the Crenshaw house. The entry noted that "Mrs. Langhorne, President of the Virginia Women's Suffrage Association, was present to assist in the organization." Mrs. Crenshaw was elected president. Six individuals were present at the meeting. Unfortunately, the entry is not dated -- though it notes that the meeting took place in April. That meeting occurred when the Crenshaws lived at their East Grace Street address so the time frame can be anywhere from 1892 through 1899 (thus forming at least ten years before the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia came into being). The three page entry also notes that "the Treasurer of the Virginia Women Suffrage Association was to be informed of the newly formed organization and that she should forward her all dues necessary to make its members numbers also of the State and National Associations." Was this new Richmond women's suffrage group Virginia's third such organization? How active was this group? How long did they last? What other women's suffrage organizations in Virginia have gone undocumented?

[Thanks to Susan King, a graduate student in VCU's history program, for locating this valuable document in the Adele Clark Papers. The journal is located in Box 50 of the collection. Hopefully, this new information on Virginia's suffrage history will be pursued by interested researchers. -- RB, October, 2002.]

The Crenshaw family moved to 919 West Franklin Street in 1899. Richmond's West Franklin Street had emerged by this time as the most fashionable address in the city, home to some of the city's most wealthy and prominent citizens.

 

The house at 919 West Franklin Street had been built in 1891 for Lawson Chiles Younger, a merchant and grocer.16 In 1904, the Crenshaws hired the Richmond architectural firm of Noland and Baskervill to substantially alter the building's appearance. A new front porch and a new main cornice were added. All three floors of the house received interior alterations including converting the back porch into a smoking room with a glass skylight that filled most of the ceiling. Anne Clay Crenshaw's granddaughter, Sally Clay Witt, has said that her grandmother was probably most responsible for directing the changes in the house.17

 

The Crenshaws' active participation in Richmond society included a 1903 event held in the Masonic Temple on Broad Street where they were host to a large "Olden Days" dancing ball that society page newspaper accounts reported to have featured the "Virginia reel" and the "melody of the `Old Kentucky Home.'"18 The Crenshaw family also participated in Richmond's horse drawn parade celebration of the new century in May of 1900. Anne Clay Crenshaw, an early member of the Woman's Club of Richmond, seemed to easily find her place in Richmond society.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Family life seemed to be at the center of Anne Clay Crenshaw's life. According to Sally Clay Witt, the Crenshaw children, two sons and two daughters, grew up in a household where there was a "tremendous sense of moral [upbringing in their lives]." Anne Clay Crenshaw was described by her granddaughter as a "very strong [person], mentally and physically." Though they had servants, Crenshaw was active in her children's care and was clearly in charge of her household and her family. Her strong will and progressive attitudes about society may have also had some influence on her husband. In 1913, during the debate on whether the University of Virginia should admit women, S. Dabney Crenshaw was one of several noted alumni of the University who publicly favored the idea.19Opposition to the proposal included a majority of the members of the General Assembly and another University of Virginia graduate, Richmond lawyer Eppa Hunton, Jr., a neighbor of the Crenshaws who lived at 810 West Franklin Street.20

 

It was during this time period that the ESL was organized in Richmond. There have been various accounts of the founding of the ESL. Richmond writer Ellen Glasgow's involvement as a participant and chronicler of the events has led to some misleading conclusions about exactly where the ESL was founded. Confusion over two meetings in 1909, one at Glasgow's in the spring and another at the Crenshaw's house in November, are at the heart of the matter. Accounts of the ESL founding have also been shaped by the sketch that Glasgow described in her autobiography, The Woman Within. Glasgow wrote: In the early autumn of 1909, I returned from a summer in Colorado to speak the first word ever uttered in Virginia in favor of votes for women.   .  .  .   It was that year, I think -- though I am seldom certain of dates -- that Miss Laura Clay, of Kentucky, came to Richmond, and Cary and I asked a group of women to meet her at tea.  .  .  .  Several days after this tea, the first suffrage meeting in Virginia was held  .  .  .  in [the house of] Mrs. Clayton Glaville Coleman.  .  .  .  In her house the Virginia League for Women Suffrage was organized.21

 

In addition to misstating the name of the ESL, Glasgow was not the first woman to "speak the first word" in Virginia in favor of women's suffrage. As for where the "Virginia League for Women Suffrage" was founded, minutes of the first organizational meeting of the ESL state that the event took place at the Crenshaw house. Glasgow's reference to Laura Clay, sister of Anne Clay Crenshaw, only adds to the confusion. Richmond newspaper accounts two days after the event and remembrances by other women at the meeting attest to this fact that the ESL was founded in the Crenshaw at 919 West Franklin Street. Glasgow admits that she is "seldom certain of dates" and one can assume that her memory of these events, written a few decades later, was most likely clouded by time. A less charitable view of her account might recall what Richmond writer James Branch Cabell (1879-1958) once said of his friend's autobiography -- that it was her best work of fiction.

 

In addition to Glasgow's inaccurate account of the events in 1909, a meeting at her Richmond home in the spring of that year has added to the confusion of when and where the ESL formed. Nora Houston, a Richmond artist and active member of the ESL, wrote a brief history of the organization in 1914. Houston wrote: In the spring of 1909, a small number of women met in the home of Miss Ellen Glasgow, in Richmond, to discuss the subject of woman suffrage. As a result petition work was started in Virginia. The following November, at a meeting held in the home of Mrs. S. Dabney Crenshaw, the Equal Suffrage [League] of Virginia was organized.[sic]22

 

Numerous accounts of these events have tended to stress the meeting at Glasgow's house as the place where Virginia's suffragists first organized. A typical interpretation of these events can be found in Virginius Dabney's Virginia: The New Dominion where he wrirtes that " .  .  .  a meeting was held in the Richmond home of Ellen Glasgow, the novelist. Out of this grew the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia.  .  . "

Newspaper accounts over the years, sometimes relying on the remembrances of Virginia suffragists years after the event, have also stressed the meeting at Glasgow's house. A reader of these misleading accounts is left with the impression that ESL was formalized at the Glasgow house.

 

Two more recent accounts of the founding of the ESL are even more muddled with inaccuracies. In what is probably the most detailed analysis of the ESL, Sara Hunter Graham's 1993 study of women's suffrage in Virginia in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, the origins of the ESL is pulled from an account of a much later meeting of the ESL written by another Richmond writer, Mary Johnston. Graham places the first ESL meeting in a rented parlor, misinterpreting what Johnston had written and ignoring the documented record of the actual event.24 In her recently published history of the city, At the Falls: Richmond, Virginia and Its People, Marie Tyler-McGraw correctly addresses Glasgow's assertion that she spoke "the first word ever uttered in Virginia in favor of votes for women." Tyler-McGraw notes that "many Virginia women had spoken to the topic over many years." But then Tyler-McGraw writes that "Glasgow could, however, take credit for a meeting at her home" that led "several days later to an organizational meeting" of what became the ESL.25 It is possible that if Ellen Glasgow had not been the most well-known of Virginia's suffragists, the persistent ms-interpretation of the facts as to where the women who founded the ESL first met would most likely not have been repeated. Fortunately, the newest biography of Ellen Glasgow, Ellen Glasgow: A Biography, written by Susan Goodman and published in 1998, correctly states that the first meeting of the ESL took place at the Crenshaw house.

 

Primary sources, including the official minutes of the ESL and contemporary newspaper accounts, clearly document the fact that the first two meetings of the ESL took place at the Crenshaw house at 919 West Franklin Street. The first meeting, on 20 November, was an organizational meeting. The minutes note that ". . .  [a] representative and enthusiastic meeting of women interested in the formation of the Virginia Suffrage League was held on the afternoon of November 20th 1909 at 4 o'clock in the home of Mrs. S. Dabney Crenshaw on West Franklin Street.  .  ."

 

Mrs. Crenshaw told the members present that she had always been a suffragist. She adopted her views as to the rights of women in girlhood. She married to be her husband's help mate and co-equal and to bring up her children in an atmosphere of freedom and distinct individuality. She said her sister, Miss Clay, had been for years an officer of the Woman's National Suffrage League, and the Kentucky woman [sic], through her leadership, had accomplished a great work for the betterment of their sex, educationally and otherwise.26

 

A committee to draft a constitution and by-laws of the organization was appointed by the acting chairman pro tem, Richmond's Lila Meade Valentine. It was also agreed that [an] "American suffrage lecturer" be invited to Richmond to speak. The members of what would become the ESL agreed to meet the following week and accepted "Mrs. Crenshaw's gracefully offered invitation to meet again at her house." The Saturday afternoon meeting was then adjourned. According to Nora Houston's history of the ESL, the meeting was over "the woman left by twos and threes to prevent exciting suspicion." Details of the meeting were published in at least one Richmond newspaper. The item about the event appeared on the Society page of Monday's Richmond News-Leader with the heading "Virginia Suffrage League Meets At Mrs. Crenshaw's."

 

At the 27 November meeting at the Crenshaw house, the constitution and by-laws were adopted and the officers and members of the board of directors were elected. A temporary headquarters were established at 307 East Franklin Street. Anne Clay Crenshaw was elected to a six-member board of directors. Lila Meade Valentine was elected president. Other officers included Ellen Glasgow, elected third vice president, and Adele Clark, a Richmond artist and long time companion to Nora Houston, who was elected recording secretary.

 

On 2 December 1909, at the "first regular monthly meeting of the Board of Directors" of the ESL, the organization decided to invite Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, president of the NAWSA, to lecture in Richmond. "Mrs. Crenshaw, upon request, undertook to communicate with Miss Shaw, and to report at the next meeting."27 More than likely, Anne Clay Crenshaw relied on her sister, Laura Clay, to secure Dr. Shaw's visit to the city. The Richmond Dispatch reported on 21 January 1910 that the president of NAWSA would be coming to Richmond on 25 January to speak about women's suffrage at the Jefferson Hotel. The newspaper account noted that while staying in Richmond, Dr. Shaw would be the guest of Mrs. S. Dabney Crenshaw.

 

Active participation by Anne Clay Crenshaw in the ESL soon ended. The successful lecture by Dr. Shaw was her last major involvement in the organization. One can speculate that Anne Clay Crenshaw's devotion to her family limited her time and energy to the cause. Many of the Richmond women who would lead the ESL were either unmarried, like Adele Clark and Ellen Glasgow, or women who had no children, like Lila Meade Valentine. Others had children who were grown and were financially secure to pursue civic minded causes.

 

From 1909 through 1920, ESL membership expanded beyond Richmond and local chapters spread throughout Virginia. The organization gained slow but steady political support in the Virginia General Assembly, though their efforts at amending the state constitution to allow women the right to vote failed. In addition to traditional opposition, of extending the vote to women, opposition to their cause centered around racial intolerance. Opponents, both men and women, promoted the fear of whites that if women were given the right to vote, the votes of black women would upset the balance of power in Virginia.28 Several of Anne Clay Crenshaw's neighbors were active opponents of women's suffrage, including Eppa Hunton, Jr., E. Randolph Williams, who lived at 826 West Franklin Street, and Henry W. Anderson, who lived only three houses east from the Crenshaws at 913 West Franklin Street.29 Anderson would later change his position and support women's suffrage. He stated that his involvement with women in the Red Cross in Europe during the first World War changed his mind.30 Others may speculate that Ellen Glasgow, to whom Anderson was briefly engaged during the decade, may have had a more direct influence.

Documents exist that show that Anne Clay Crenshaw did not abandon the women's movement. The Adele Clark Papers at the James Branch Cabell Library at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) include hundreds of signed petitions to the General Assembly of Virginia requesting that a women's suffrage amendment to the constitution of Virginia be adopted. These petitions date circa 1915. One petition in the collection includes the signature of "Mrs. S.D. Crenshaw, 919 W. Franklin, City." Another petition has the names of Anne Clay Crenshaw's two daughters, Fanny J. Crenshaw and Warfield Crenshaw. Both sisters list their occupation as teachers.

 Another record from this time period also documents Anne Clay Crenshaw's commitment to the cause for women's suffrage. The Richmond City Registrar's Records housed at the Library of Virginia, date from September 1920, the month when women in Richmond and Virginia were first allowed to register to vote. Though the ESL failed to persuade the General Assembly to support women's suffrage, the Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in August 1920, gave the nation's women the right to vote. The City Registrar's record book for white women in Richmond's Lee District records that Anne Clay Crenshaw wasted no time in exercising her newly won right and registered to vote on 9 September 1920. The same records show that her daughter Fanny registered to vote thirteen days later.

 

In the fall of 1920, the ESL renamed itself the League of Women Voters of Virginia (LWV). The organization chose 20 November to officially become the LWV, in memory of the founding of the ESL eleven years earlier. Adle Clark was elected president. The organization was active throughout the Commonwealth in the 1920s, promoting issues of concern to both men and women. A period of inactivity began in the early 1930s. The Virginia state League and several local components were reactivated in 1948 and were involved with both voters service efforts as well as public policy issues during the 1950s and 1960s. Much of their work in the 1970s and 1980s focused on passage of the Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution. Virginia was one of several states not to ratify the amendment. Adele Clark, who had attended the first meeting of the ESL in 1909, came out against the proposed amendment. She said it was not needed. Virginia was a stronghold of conservatism. This is most clearly demonstrated in that is was not until 1952, twenty-two years after its ratification, that the General Assembly finally voted to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment.

 

The four Crenshaw children were successful in their endeavors as adults. All raised families of their own except for Fanny Crenshaw, who remained single. She became Westhampton College's first athletic director in 1914 and is credited with bringing women's field hockey to Virginia. Their father, S. Dabney Crenshaw, died in 1940. Anne Clay Crenshaw died in 1945. Both are buried in Richmond's Hollywood Cemetery.

 

This paper has attempted to clarify the important role that Anne Clay Crenshaw played in Virginia's women's history by hosting the meetings that laid the groundwork for the organization that would become the Equal Suffrage League and later the [Virginia] League of Women Voters. Crenshaw was a link between nineteenth and twentieth century attempts by Virginia women to become full citizens of the Commonwealth and the nation. Though she was not active throughout the decade that the ESL attempted to gain women's suffrage in Virginia, she served early on in the role as a bridge between Richmond's women activists to leaders at the national level of the suffrage cause. She followed through on her convictions, registering to vote as soon as she could and raising her children in what she described at the first ESL meeting in an "atmosphere of freedom and distinct individuality." Anne Clay Crenshaw is symbolic of the many quiet yet determined Virginia women who for at least two centuries have fought to advance the opportunities for themselves and their children.

------ Ray Bonis, Spring 1998.

The text of this exhibit was written by a Special Collections and Archives' staff member in the spring of 1998. Please email Special Collections and Archives if you have any questions or comments. Many of the images in this collection are courtesy of Sally Clay Witt, granddaughter of Anne Clay Crenshaw.

Notes:

1. Charlotte Jean Shelton, "Woman Suffrage and Virginia Politics, 1909-1920" (Master's Thesis, University of Virginia, 1969), 2-3.

2. Ibid., 3.

3. Sandra Gioia Treadway, "A Most Brilliant Woman: Anna Whitehead Bodeker and the First Woman Suffrage Association in Virginia,"Virginia Cavalcade, Vol.43, No.4, (Spring 1994), 168-169.

4. Emily J. Salmon and Edward D.C. Campbell, Jr., The Hornbook of Virginia History: A Ready-Reference Guide to the Old Dominion's People, Places, and Past (Richmond: Library of Virginia, 1994), 64.

5. Treadway, 175.

6. Ibid, 175-176.

7. Salmon and Campbell, 65.

8. Welford Dunaway Taylor, Virginia Authors, Past and Present (Richmond: Virginia Association of Teachers of English, 1972), 72.

9. Shelton, 9-10

10. Ibid, 10.

11. Equal Suffrage League Papers, State Archives, Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia, Box 4.

12. Paul E. Fuller, Laura Clay and the Woman's Rights Movement, (Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1975), 16.

13. Ibid, 17.

14. Lyon G. Tyler, Men of Mark in Virginia, Volume 5, (Washington D.C. : Men of Mark Publishing Company, 1909), 75-76.

15. Christopher Vincent Novelli, "William Noland and Residential Design on Richmond's Franklin Street" (Master's Thesis, University of Virginia, 1996), 41.

16. Kerri Elizabeth Culhane, "`The Fifth Avenue of Richmond': The Development of the 800 and 900 Blocks of West Franklin Street, Richmond, Virginia, 1855-1925." (Master's Thesis, Virginia Commonwealth University, 1997), 53-54.

17. Interview with Sally Clay Witt by Ray Bonis, Assistant Archivist, Special Collections and Archives, James Branch Cabell Library, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia, March 1998.

18. Two different clippings from unidentified Richmond newspapers dated 1903, collection of family materials of Sally Clay Witt.

19. Anne Hobson Freeman, "Mary Munford's Fight for a College for Women Co-Ordinate with the University of Virginia," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol.78, No.4 (October 1970), 485.

20. Ibid, 486.

21. Ellen Glasgow, The Woman Within (New York: Harcort Brace, 1954), 185-186.

22. Nora Houston's typescript history of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia, 1914, Adele Clark Papers, M 9, Box 54, Special Collections and Archives, James Branch Cabell Library, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia.

23. Virginius Dabney, Virginia: The New Dominion (Garden City, New York, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1971), 477.

24. Sarah Hunter Graham, "Woman Suffrage in Virginia: The Equal Suffrage League and Pressure-Group Politics, 1909-1920," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol.101, No.2 (April 1993), 229.

25. Marie Tyler-McGraw, At the Falls: Richmond, Virginia, and Its People (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 236.

26. Minutes of November 20, 1909 organizational meeting of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia, Equal Suffrage League Papers, Box 4.

27. Minutes of January 6, 1910 meeting of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia's Board of Directors, Equal Suffrage League Papers, Box 4.

28. Salmon and Campbell, Hornbook of Virginia History, 65-66.

29. Advisory Committee Opposed to Woman Suffrage, The Virginia General Assembly and Womans' Suffrage, pamphlet, Clark Papers, Box 51.

30. Evening Journal, November 21, 1919 newspaper clipping, Richmond Subject File Collection, Women's Suffrage Folder, Richmond Public Library, Richmond, Virginia.