Anne Henrietta Martin (1875 – 1951) was the first woman to run for the United States Senate

April 1, 2023
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Anne Henrietta Martin (September 30, 1875 – April 15, 1951) (pseudonym, Anne O’Hara; nickname, Little Governor Anne) was a suffragist, pacifist, and author from the state of Nevada. Her main achievement was taking charge of the state legislation that gave women of Nevada the right to vote. She was the first head of the department of history of the University of Nevada (1897–1901) And was active in the suffrage movement in England in 1909–1911, working with Emmeline Pankhurst. She was president of the Nevada equal franchise society in 1912, and the first national chairman of the National Woman’s Party in 1916. She was the first woman to run for the United States Senate; She lost twice, in 1918 and 1920.

Early years

Martin was the daughter of William O’Hara Martin, of Irish descent, who served as a Nevada State Senator, and her mother, Louise Stadtmuller Martin, was Bavarian. She attended Bishop Whitaker’s School for Girls in Reno. Anne attended the University of Nevada (1891–1894), where she earned a degree in History. She earned a second B.A. in 1896 and an M.A. in History in 1897 from Stanford University.

Career

In 1897, Martin established the University of Nevada’s department of history. After two years in the department, she left to study at Columbia University, Chase’s Art School, University of London, and University of Leipzig; but returned to the department in 1901–1903. During her leave from the university, Martin recommended the Board of Regents replace her with Jeanne Wier, a friend of hers from Stanford who was just finishing her degree.

Martin returned from Europe in 1901 to attend her father’s funeral. Her father’s death gave her a revelation, “suddenly made a feminist of me! . . . I found that I stood alone in my family against a man-controlled world.” Martin traveled in Europe and Asia and experienced the women’s revolution in England between 1909 and 1911, she became a Fabian Socialist, and wrote short stories and political articles, occasionally under the pen name of Anne O’Hara. Martin was arrested in 1910 over an issue of trying to enfranchise British women. Her friend from Stanford, Lou Henry Hoover, sent husband, Herbert Hoover, to pay Martin’s bail, but Frederick Pethick-Lawrence had already taken care of that.

After returning to Nevada in the fall of 1911, she became president of the Nevada Equal Franchise Society in February 1912 and organized a campaign over sparsely populated deserts that convinced male voters to enfranchise women on November 3, 1914. This success led to her representation of the national movement as a speaker and executive committee member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and the Congressional Union. Martin helped organize voting women in the West in 1916 to challenge Democrats. She was one of the Silent Sentinels, National Woman’s Party women who picketed for suffrage in front of the White House on July 14, 1917; as a result, she was sentenced to Occoquan Workhouse, but was pardoned less than a week later by President Woodrow Wilson.

The Silent Sentinels, also known as the Sentinels of Liberty, were a group of over 2,000 women in favor of women’s suffrage organized by Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party, who protested in front of the White House during Woodrow Wilson‘s presidency starting on January 10, 1917. Nearly 500 were arrested, and 168 served jail time. They were the first group to picket the White House. Later, they also protested in Lafayette Square, not stopping until June 4, 1919 when the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was passed both by the House of Representatives and the Senate.

The Sentinels started their protest after a meeting with the president on January 9, 1917, during which he told the women to “concert public opinion on behalf of women’s suffrage.” The protesters served as a constant reminder to Wilson of his lack of support for suffrage. At first the picketers were tolerated, but they were later arrested on charges of obstructing traffic.

The name Silent Sentinels was given to the women because of their silent protesting, and had been coined by Harriot Stanton Blatch. Using silence as a form of protest was a new principled, strategic, and rhetorical strategy within the national suffrage movement and within their own assortment of protest strategies. Throughout this two and a half year long vigil, many of the women who picketed were harassed, arrested, and unjustly treated by local and US authorities, including the torture and abuse inflicted on them before and during the November 14, 1917, Night of Terror.

In 1918, representing Nevada, Martin was the first American woman to run for the US Senate. Martin’s campaigns focused on illuminating how women could act as a positive influence in the political world. Her platforms focused on providing better working conditions for men and women and nationalization of railroads and public utilities alienated women suffragists. Between her 1918 and 1920 campaigns Martin wrote a series of articles and essays and in these essays Martin urges women to form autonomous political organizations.

Martin moved to Carmel, California, in 1921, and recuperated from a heart attack in 1930. In 1945, she received an honorary Doctorate of Laws from the University of Nevada. She also wrote two articles for the Encyclopædia Britannica, one on Josephine Butler in the 1944 edition, and one on white slavery for the 1948 edition.[citation needed]

Death

Anne Henrietta Martin died in Carmel, California in 1951.

See also

References

  1. Roberts, Nancy L. (1991). American peace writers, editors, and periodicals: a dictionary. Greenwood Press. p. 183.
  2. Van Valkenburgh, Holly. “Anne Henrietta Martin”. University of Nevada, Reno. Archived from the original on 25 February 2011. Retrieved 19 May 2012.
  3. Capace, Nancy (2001). Encyclopedia of Nevada. North American Book Dist LLC. pp. 126–129. ISBN 978-0-403-09611-4. Retrieved 17 May 2012.
  4. Anderson, Kathryn. “Anne Henrietta Martin.” American National Biography Online. N.p., Feb. 2000. Web. 1 Mar. 2014. <http://www.anb.org.jerome.stjohns.edu:81/articles/15/15-00444.html?a=1&f=Anne%20Henrietta%20Martin&g=f&n=Anne%20Henrietta%20Martin&ia=-at&ib=-bib&d=10&ss=0&q=1>.
  5. “Anne Henrietta Martin | American reformer and educator”. Encyclopedia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 2 March 2021.
  6. Chung, Su Kim. (2015). “We Seek to Be Patient”: Jeanne Wier and the Nevada Historical Society, 1904–1950. UCLA: Information Studies 045A. Retrieved from: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/51d75576 p. 72
  7. Cullen-DuPont, Kathryn (2000). Encyclopedia of Women’s History in America. Infobase Publishing. pp. 154–. ISBN 978-1-4381-1033-2. Retrieved 17 May 2012.

Further reading

External links

Silent Sentinels
Suffrage

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