Political Equality Club of Valley Falls
New York State gave women the right to vote in November 1917. The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, extending this right to all eligible women in the U.S. was adopted in 1920. Women (and some men) had been advocating for woman’s suffrage and other political rights for women since at least the Woman’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, NY in 1848. The best-know leaders of the movement were Elizabeth Cady Stanton of Johnstown and Susan B. Anthony, who spent her formative years in Greenwich. After 1890, the progress toward suffrage accelerated.
At the same time, as the 19th century progressed, people in the U.S. began to have more and more free time. Both men and women began forming and joining clubs and organizations of all kinds. The two streams came together, as the National Woman Suffrage Association encouraged women to form Political Equality clubs. These clubs would advocate for woman suffrage and support the national organization financially. There were at least thirty around New York State by 1906. The earliest local club was in Easton, formed in 1891. Susan B. Anthony’s sister Mary influenced the formation of the club. One of the members of the group was Blanche Stover Clum of Schaghticoke and Valley Falls.
Who knows what the spark was, but Blanche and other women in the Valley Falls/Schaghticoke area formed their own Political Equality Club (PEC) on May 13, 1903. The first President was Lucy Thompson, followed by Blanche. Lucy Allen, the main force behind the Easton club, described them as a “large and influential group of women.” First, I will talk a bit about Lucy, then about Blanche. Second, I will discuss the Valley Falls Political Equality Club and its successor, the Woman’s Club of Valley Falls and Vicinity.
Julia Blanche Stover Clum
Lucy Larkin Thompson was the second wife of James Thompson, Sr. James owned the Thompson Mill, the textile mill which was the main employer in the village of Valley Falls. Of course Lucy was one of the most prominent women in the village, and might inspire others to join the PEC. She was President from 1903-1906. Soon after, she moved to New York City, though she visited the area often.
It is widely acknowledged that without Blanche Stover Clum there would have been no local PEC. Blanche, born in 1867, was the daughter of farmers Daniel and Anna Bryan Stover of Pittstown. Her sisters Edith Stover Gifford and Lois Stover Bassett were also very involved in the club, as was her sister-in-law, Lora, wife of her brother Peter Stover. Lora was President for many years. Blanche married farmer Frank Clum in 1893. They had two sons, Paul, born 1896, and Daniel, 1898, and lived on Masters Street.
The second President of the PEC, Blanche held some sort of office in the club until her death. She also represented the group at county and state conventions of suffrage organizations. Susan B. Anthony presented four volumes of “A History of Woman’s Suffrage”, written by her and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to Blanche in 1905 by name, intended to be used as sources of information and education at meetings of the PEC.
Blanche and Frank moved into the village of Valley Falls about 1911- did they want to be closer to school for their sons? Was Frank ready to quit farming? Did Blanche want to be closer to the Methodist Church and her friends? Or was Blanche ailing? At the same time, they began to join Blanche’s sister Edith and her husband Frank Gifford in Orlando, Florida for the winters. The Giffords had an early hotel there. Blanche’s activities in the PEC, her church, and after 1917 in war work, were unceasing. She was also instrumental in the building of the Valley Falls Library. Blanche died of heart disease in August 1919. Her obituary called her “a woman of exceptional ability.
Moving on to the PEC itself, my questions were: Who were the members? What were their goals? Did their husbands support them? What did they do? What were their meetings like?
I found that the 23 founding members of the club either lived near each other on Masters Street in Schaghticoke or in the village of Valley Falls; or were related to each other: sisters, sisters-in-law, cousins; or shared membership in the Methodist Church in Valley Falls or Melrose. A number were among the early members of the lineage organization, the Daughters of the American Revolution. Most were married, but a few were spinsters. A few were wealthy, like Lucy Thompson, most were comfortable, like the Stovers, a few were wives of laborers. None that I have found were educated beyond the common schools. Sometimes it was hard to find information about them as they were camouflaged by their married names.
What were their goals? If we talked to the women individually, I think we would find gradations of feminism. Some women simply wanted the right to vote, others had greater goals. Lucy Allen of Easton said, “we, none of us, want to turn the world upside down or convert women into men. We desire women…to bring their true women’s influence ..to bear upon the conduct of public affairs.” “ We want to get rid of this fallacy that marriage is a state of being supported…he begins and she completes the making of their joint wealth. Their dependence is mutual.” “The majority of us farmers’ wives here in Easton and our husbands are perfect…our tendency is to forget that Easton isn’t the whole world, and there are other women not as we are.”
The Second Annual Meeting of the Rensselaer County Political Equality Club was held at the Melrose Methodist Church in May 1907. A measure of its importance was that the keynote speaker was the Rev. Anna Howard Shaw, M.D., President of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association. She stated, “When we women are going out into the world with the men, what we want is justice, and we will let the hand-kissing chivalry go.” The Convention adopted these resolutions:
1) Women workers need the ballot to work for better working conditions for themselves and their children, also working
2) There should be equal pay for equal work for women and men
3) Taxation without representation is tyranny
4) Congress needs to pass an amendment to the constitution enfranchising women
Further speakers added equality in education to the list. 100 years later, number 2 is still not achieved.
And what about the husbands? Most of the women in the club were married, some had children. The ones with children would need support to attend daytime meetings of family and friends. All would have needed to have their membership in the club supported by their husbands to some extent to stay happy in their marriages. The fact that they did attend and stay married is proof of that to me. But I also found reports the PEC had evening meetings which were attended by the husbands. The agenda for those meetings included all the usual reports on suffrage progress, but also a dinner. One meeting in October 1914 was a “banquet” at the home of Mr and Mrs George Lohnes, attended by sixty people. Mrs Lohnes and Mrs Schuyler Hayner prepared the food. I want to know what they served and how they seated sixty for dinner in the house! But the point is that the husbands supported their wives, at least to some extent.
What did the club do? The women met at least monthly, on the second Wednesday of the month, sometimes at members’ homes, sometimes at a local church. They elected officers yearly, with lots of change from year to year. The programs included singing, prayer, reports of committees, educational speeches, and up-dates on suffrage progress.
Each year they published a program of upcoming meetings. It’s hard to tell what actual suffrage work they did from the programs. We know from newspaper articles that some members attended county, state, and national conventions of women’s clubs and suffrage organizations, or even a convention for peace- this just before the U.S. entrance into World War I. Programs sometimes included reports on legislative work, which implies that members might have been lobbying in Albany. The Easton club members subscribed to the national suffrage newspaper, made items for a National Suffrage Bazaar in New York City, and briefly opened a little shop in Easton which sold ice cream and items the women had made- all to make money to donate to the national suffrage organization for its work. I imagine the Valley Falls women raised money in some of the same ways. Many of them were doing similar things for the Methodist Church, raising money for home and foreign missions, or working against overuse of alcohol in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.
In addition, only a year after its founding, the Political Equality Club voted to use some of the money it had in the bank to begin a library in Valley Falls. There had been some work towards a library for a couple of years, but the club was really the catalyst. In 1906, a small library was begun in Thompson’s Mill. Many members of the club participated in the ensuing activities which resulted in the purchase of the lot by the community and the funding of the building by the Gaffney family. The library, recently enlarged, was dedicated in 1915.
The Political Equality Club changed its name as soon as New York State adopted suffrage in 1917, to the Woman’s Club of Valley Falls and Vicinity. It had been associated with the State Federation of Woman’s Clubs since 1906 and the General Federation since 1926. It became independent in 1996. With the fight for suffrage over, the club moved on to develop a scholarship fund in 1930, and a child welfare program in 1932. It has been involved in fighting TB and working with public health, the Salvation Army, disaster relief, local churches, missionary work, camps, and the USO in World War II.
Today, the Woman’s Club of Valley Falls and Vicinity still meets the second Wednesday afternoon of the month, though not every month. We (I am a member) mostly meet in the Masonic Hall in Schaghticoke. The program still features a prayer, a song, and the pledge of allegiance. Though we don’t report on current politics, we do have a program designed to educate us, featuring many local people. We raise money for charity. We give a small scholarship to a Hoosic Valley Student. Our members are mostly elderly, of varied backgrounds and experiences. There are still some women who are related to each other, some Methodists, and some women who are neighbors, but the members live from Melrose to Easton and Johnsonville to Stillwater. It really is a remarkable survival.
The information for this article comes from the Troy “Times,” the archive of the Woman’s Club at the Valley Falls Library, and research in ancestry.com. This article and bios of the founding members of the club are at Chris Kelly’s personal blog: schaghticokehistory.wordpress.com.
Blog post and research by Chris Kelly, Town Historian of Schaghticoke and HCM Research Associate.