Notable Pioneer of the Women’s Suffrage Movement in America
Courtesy of Washington County Historical Society
Charlotte LeMoyne Wills and her son, William Wills, pose for a picture.
Courtesy of Washington County Historical Society
Charlotte LeMoyne Wills’ house in Los Angeles on Bunker Hill
Courtesy of Washington County Historical Society
Charlotte LeMoyne Wills was a 19th century advocate for female suffrage and collaborated with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to form the National Woman Suffrage Association.
Courtesy of Washington County Historical Society
John Alexander Wills
Courtesy of Washington County Historical Society
From left, Charlotte LeMoyne Wills, Caroline Severance, Susan B. Anthony and Rebecca Spring pose for a picture.
In July of 1905, Susan B. Anthony visited Los Angeles to take part in “Equal Suffrage Day.”
The event included a reception at the Friday Morning Club. Sitting next to Anthony at the reception was Charlotte LeMoyne Wills, who escorted Anthony to the podium and introduced her to an audience of more than 200 people.
Later that evening, LeMoyne Wills hosted a large farewell reception in her home on Bunker Hill. During the reception, Mrs. Anthony posed for a photograph that would run in the Los Angeles Times.
The photograph was captioned “Notable Pioneers of the Suffrage Movement in America – Susan B. Anthony, Rebecca Spring, Caroline Severance, and Charlotte LeMoyne Wills.”
Born June 21, 1824 in Washington to Dr. Francis Julius LeMoyne and Madeleine Romaine Bureau, Charlotte LeMoyne grew up in an environment in which social justice was the family business. Her father was a noted abolitionist who traveled the country speaking out against the evils of slavery and assisted freedom seekers in the Underground Railroad. Charlotte LeMoyne attended abolition meetings with her father in Philadelphia, Boston and many other cities around the country.
Charlotte LeMoyne actively cultivated her positions on social issues, many of which echoed those of her father. While at the Washington Female Seminary, a school for girls her father helped to establish, she wrote several papers on the evils of slavery. In an essay from 1838, Charlotte LeMoyne stated the enslaved are also in God’s image.
“If this be true, what man shall presume to hold him in bondage?,” she wrote. “One would suppose in this far famed country of the free such a question would hardly be agitated, that every true born son of Columbia would respond ‘Let the oppressed go free.'”
In 1841, LeMoyne graduated from the seminary and in 1848, she married Pittsburgh attorney John Alexander Wills, who was also involved in reform movements.
LeMoyne Wills carried her belief that all were equal when she moved with her husband to California. In 1884, LeMoyne Wills, along with her son, William Wills, founded Rosedale Cemetery, the first cemetery in California open to all races and creeds.
In 1887, LeMoyne Wills and William also constructed an exact replica of the LeMoyne Crematory in Rosedale. It was the first crematory west of the Rocky Mountains.
The reform movement most dear to LeMoyne Wills was women’s rights. From an early age, LeMoyne Wills was raised to think on her own and not be dependent on others for her thoughts and beliefs.
In 1839, she wrote in an essay “women will not long be content to have a voice only through their husbands, but rather their own voices will soon carry the weight that reflects their equality in God’s eyes.”
In 1851, while attending an abolitionist convention with her husband in Rochester, N.Y., Charlotte was introduced to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
Both Stanton and Anthony were members of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and were also fighting for women’s rights in their home state of New York.
LeMoyne Wills and Anthony began corresponding and, in 1866, Anthony invited her to join the newly-formed American Equal Rights Association. LeMoyne Wills would later assist Stanton and Anthony in the formation of the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869.
Over the next 4 decades, LeMoyne Wills, along with Stanton, Anthony and others, would work tirelessly to achieve the right to vote. They traveled to conventions in Chicago, Rochester, Portland and even here in Washington where Susan B. Anthony addressed the Washington Female Seminary.
A speech LeMoyne Wills gave to the graduating class of the Washington Female Seminary in 1866 demonstrated her unshakable belief that women would one day stand equal.
“It is now admitted, and felt, that women must have an extensive and solid education … the time will come when girls shall receive as liberal education as boys; when great and noble careers shall be open to all who are fitted to follow them; when the women, whose duty and necessity requires her to earn her own living, shall not be obliged to choose between the schoolroom, the needle, and the wash-tub… when women are prepared to maintain a position of equality, it will be readily acknowledged that they are equals of man, in rights and intellects… then universal suffrage will follow universal freedom, no longer restricted by color, or race, or sex, and we shall all be alike before the law, as before our God,” she said in the speech.
Although LeMoyne Wills, who passed away in 1908, would never see the fruition of her labors, it was her dedication and efforts that would help bring about the 19th Amendment in 1920, finally gaining women the right to vote.
Clay Kilgore is the executive director of the Washington County Historical Society.