Mississippi
Mississippi in the 1920s was more liberal than most would expect: although its legislature never adopted any form of enfranchisement for women, voters were quick to elect them to both legislative chambers. Moreover, Mississippi had the nation’s first mother/daughter legislators.
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| Carrie Belle Kearney Documenting the American South. University Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. |
Nellie Nugent Somerville (1863-1953)
Born in the year that Mississippi fell to Union troops in the Civil War, Nellie Nugent had a hard childhood: before she was seven, she had lost her mother, stepmother, and a grandfather shot by soldiers when their plantation home was burned. Nonetheless, she was able to attend local Whitworth College, where teachers described Nellie as “too smart for them to teach.” She moved on to Martha Washington College, graduated in 1880, and married Robert Somerville five years later.
Living in Greenville, Nellie Somerville became an officer of the Mississippi Women’s Christian Temperance Union and was a founder of the Mississippi Woman Suffrage Association in 1897 – the nation’s last such body to form. Her presidency of that led to her to national conventions, and in 1915, she was elected as a vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. She also was treasurer of the Southern Woman Suffrage Association, a regional coalition founded in 1913.
When all American women won the vote with the federal 19th Amendment in 1920, she took the very first opportunity to run for the Mississippi House, and Greenville voters elected her. Like most female legislators, she championed education and successfully sponsored a bill to establish Delta State Teachers College. A more liberal Democrat than her longtime colleague Belle Kearney, Somerville was less successful in her attempt to ban child labor, as new textile mills continued to hire children (mostly white) as fulltime workers.
Nellie Nugent Somerville served only 1923-1927, but is unique in being the first female legislator to have a child follow in her footsteps. Lucy Somerville Howorth, also of Greenville, was elected to the Mississippi House in 1932, a year when Mississippi joined other states in electing liberal Democrats. Because of her mother’s influence, Howorth was a well-educated attorney -- a profession that she could not have practiced without the work of feminists.
Carrie Belle Kearney (1863-1939)
Carrie Belle Kearney, called Belle, was born on March 6, 1863 in Madison County, Mississippi and grew up on a plantation impoverished by the Civil War. Like many other such women, she became a teacher to support herself, even though she was forced to drop out of school at a young age. A Methodist, she was active in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). As WCTU women campaigned to ban alcohol, some could see how much more effective they would be if they had the vote. Kearney was brave enough to defy traditionalism and become active in that movement.
The National American Woman Suffrage Association hired her as a lobbyist and speaker, and while continuing to make her home in Mississippi, she traveled the United States and Europe as a well-respected orator. She was, however, a traditionalist on race: especially the records of the national association’s 1903 convention make it clear that Kearney was not sympathetic to African Americans. Her chief objective was to equalize the legal position of white women with that of black men.
Although Kearney theoretically wanted states, not the federal government, to control voting rights, when all women were enfranchised with the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920, she took advantage of that and ran for the U.S. Senate in 1922. Her lobbying experience in Washington may have made that goal seem plausible -- but it was much too ambitious to expect that she could win a statewide election. At the next opportunity in 1924, Kearney ran and won the more humble goal of election to the state Senate. A Democrat, she represented Madison County and was the second female state senator in the South, following only a North Carolina woman.
Outside of her life in politics, she wrote two novels: A Slaveholder’s Daughter and Conqueror or Conquered? Never marrying, Belle Kearney died at 75 in 1939.
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