The Year is 1908 & the Place is Boone, Iowa

Iowa Women March for the Right to Vote

[Life in 1908]
[Suffrage Background]

The photographs of the Boone Suffrage Parade were taken by Boone photographer A. E. Moxley. The above picture shows the Wilder-Yeoman Band leading the marching women past the First Methodist Church. The Photograph to the right shows the Reverend Dr. Anna Howard Shaw addressing the crowd at 8th and Story Streets. Photographs are courtesy of the State Historical Society of IowaOn October 29, 1908 a group of about 100 brave women took to the streets of Boone and protested for their right to vote.  That day is an important one in Boone and Iowa history, for that march marked the only women’s suffrage march ever held in Iowa and one of, and possibly the first real suffrage parade, to be held in the entire United States.

The picture to the left shows the Wilder-Yeoman
Band leading the marching women past
the First Methodist Church. 

The march took place as part of the 1908 annual convention of the Iowa Equal Suffrage Association (IESA) The photographs of the Boone Suffrage Parade were taken by Boone photographer A. E. Moxley. The above picture shows the Wilder-Yeoman Band leading the marching women past the First Methodist Church. The Photograph to the right shows the Reverend Dr. Anna Howard Shaw addressing the crowd at 8th and Story Streets. Photographs are courtesy of the State Historical Society of Iowawhich was held that year at the Universalist Church in Boone.  The three-day convention was held October 27, 28, and 29 and suffragists from all over the state and nation were present.  The primary speaker at the event was the Reverend Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, who at the time was the president of  the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

 

 

The Photograph to the right shows
the Reverend Dr. Anna Howard Shaw
addressing the crowd at 8th and Story Streets. 

 
Rev. Eleanor E. Gordon

The parade was organized by two women, Rowena Edson Stevens, wife of Judge John Stevens, of Boone, who also was the organizer of both the Ames Political Equality Club and the Boone Equality Club as well as being a past president of the IESA, and Eleanor Elizabeth Gordon, an ordained Unitarian minister living in Des Moines, who, in 1908, was the president of the IESA.

Left:  Eleanor Elizabeth Gordon, courtesy of the State Historical Society of Iowa.

Right:  Rowena Edson Stevens as a young girl.  Photo, courtesy of the Stevens family

 Rowena Edson Stevens

 

 

The photographs of the Boone Suffrage Parade were taken by Boone photographer A. E. Moxley.  Photographs are courtesy of the State Historical Society of Iowa.
 

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