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Stearns also had an ally in the publisher of the Rochester Post, where she wrote and published pro-women’s suffrage articles. Her articles highlighted daily adversities of Minnesota women, while letting them know that the movement toward suffrage and women’s rights was growing, amplified by her and others.
In 1867, she and Mary J. Colburn secured the first hearing before a legislative committee with a bill that would give women the right to vote by removing the word “male” from existing statutes. It failed to pass the committee by one vote.
Though effective only as an artifact of the past, gendered language continued to be the norm in civic documents. Rochester’s own city charter didn’t strip its gendered language until 2017, thanks to people like then-Mayo High School junior Leah Folpe.
In 1868, the 14th amendment was ratified. Black men got the right to vote. Women did not. A schism in the universal suffrage movement occurred.
A Feb. 3, 1866 Rochester Post article credited to Stearns says, “We can’t see why color is not just as good a qualification for voting as sex, nor why a woman is not just as competent to choose a member of the Legislature as a negro.”
Simply put, the men comprising the post-Civil War, radical-Republican-led-congress saw Black men as a higher priority in the country’s multi-layered system of disenfranchisement.
“These [suffragists] are women who already had some access to power,” explains Wayne Gannaway, executive director of the Olmsted County History Center. “That was one of the things Frederick Douglass said, [that] it would be great if white women could have the right to vote, but currently, no black person has the right to vote. White women can at least lobby their husbands, their brothers and so on.”
Stearns persisted. She organized the Rochester Woman Suffrage Association in 1869, and co-founded the Minnesota Women Suffrage Association in 1881, then served as its president until 1883. She was also a National Woman Suffrage Association Board Member from 1876-1885.
Those organizations were vital connection points for the suffrage movement.
“A lot of the women that were involved in the suffrage movement were also involved in all kinds of good deeds in the community. During that period, there were so many Women’s Club kinds of things,” says Caucutt.
Stearns would have rubbed elbows with women like rural powerhouse and future vice president of the Farm Bureau Jesse Pridemore, who was known for fixing a city road with a team of women-led wagons in the 1810s; Rochester’s first woman minister, Eliza Tepper Wilks of the Universalist Church; Amelia Witherstein, who was elected to the Rochester school board in 1875 (she also happened to be the grandmother of the Withers family, who owned the Post-Bulletin). Even Susan B. Anthony came here to Rochester, to speak on Christmas Day, 1877. (You can learn more about these figures and their connections at the Olmsted County History Center’s current exhibit, “The Onward March of Women’s Suffrage.”)
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