Women's suffrage in Rhode Island

Even before women's suffrage efforts took off in Rhode Island, women were fighting for equal male suffrage during the Dorr Rebellion. Women raised money for the Dorrite cause, took political action and kept members of the rebellion in exile informed. An abolitionist, Paulina Wright Davis, chaired and attended women's rights conferences in New England and later, along with Elizabeth Buffum Chace, founded the Rhode Island Women's Suffrage Association (RIWSA) in 1868. This group petitioned the Rhode Island General Assembly for an amendment to the state constitution to provide women's suffrage. For many years, RIWSA was the major group providing women's suffrage action in Rhode Island. In 1887, a women's suffrage amendment to the state constitution came up for a voter referendum. The vote, on April 6, 1887, was decisively against women's suffrage.

Women's suffrage efforts in Rhode Island continued to fight on, despite setbacks. The suffrage movement gained more publicity from Alva Belmont, who hosted a well-attended series of lectures at her Marble House mansion in 1909. Belmont, who also funded the work of Alice Paul, helped initiate a 1915 cross-country trip to deliver a petition to President Woodrow Wilson and Congress. Driving and working as the mechanic on that trip were two Swedish-American suffragists from Rhode Island. In 1913, the Rhode Island Union of Colored Women's Clubs, at the urging of Bertha G. Higgins, became the largest women's group to endorse women's suffrage in the state. In 1915, pro-suffrage governor, Robert Livingston Beeckman, helped initiate the efforts to pass a presidential suffrage bill. The bill passed in 1917, allowing women to be able to vote for the first time in Rhode Island, even if it was on a limited basis. On January 6, 1920, Rhode Island became the twenty-fourth state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment.