Suffragettes moving into Erie Station

CHESTER — It was 1917 when women first won the right to vote in New York State — a full three years before the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave them full access to the ballot box nationwide in 1920.
Now, in honor of the 100th anniversary of that breakthrough, the Chester Historical Society will be opening the 1915 Erie Station Museum for the season on Saturday, May 6, with a new exhibit featuring "Suffragettes."
The achievement of the right to vote — in which thousands of New York women played a critical role by participating in half a century of rallies and marches and fundraisers, while also enduring half a century of heckling — was an early milestone in the civil rights movement.
Suffrage for women may be taken for granted today. But a century ago, it had its heroic champions — and it had some pretty mean-spirited antagonists and detractors, too.
How intemperate were the naysayers? Scores of newspapers from Comanche, Texas to the North Country of upstate New York published a notorious anti-suffragette screed which argued that an enfranchised woman enmbroiled in politics would "neglect the home, forget to mend our clothes and burn the biscuits."
Locally, the feminist fires were kept burning at The Sibyl, a newspaper published in Middletown by Warwick's own Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck from 1856 to 1864 that was an early crusader for equal rights for women, according to a 1985 article in the Orange County Historical Society Journal.
For those interested in learning more about this great movement that helped transform and modernize America, the Erie Station Museum in downtown Chester is open on Saturdays, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., from May through October.
Anyone in possession of letters, photos, articles, artifacts or other material about the suffragette movement is asked to consider loaning them to the Society for the exhibit. And if you have a story to share about local citizens who were active in helping women gain the right to vote, that would be welcome, too.
Contact Debby Lu Vadala–Adams, at 820-2318, or Norma Stoddard, at 469-4674, or visit the Society's website, at Chester_historical@mac.com.
Douglas Feiden