Recordpub.com - PORTAGE PATHWAYS: Ravenna native battled for women's right to ballot box

By Roger J. Di Paolo

Record-Courier Editor

Harriet Taylor Upton was a voice for equal rights in an era when many women weren’t able to speak up.

Contrary to those who cautioned that women who became involved in government or politics risked losing their femininity, she believed that they had a right to express themselves at the ballot box. And she devoted more than three decades of her long life to seeing that women got that right.

Her activism earned the Ravenna native a national reputation as a pioneer in the woman’s suffrage movement and now she could find herself immortalized in the halls of Congress because of it.

Harriet Taylor Upton is among the 10 finalists to represent Ohio in Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol, where the Buckeye State is seeking a replacement for one of its previous honorees, William Allen, a 19th Century former governor, whose statue is being removed.

She joins a number of prominent Ohioans ranging from Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers to Ulysses S. Grant and astronaut Judith Resnik in competing for the honor. A final decision will be made by a committee of Ohio legislators later this year.

While Mrs. Upton may not be as widely known as many of her fellow finalists, her contributions to history render her worthy of consideration.

Born Dec. 17, 1854, in Ravenna, she was the daughter of Ezra Booth and Harriet (Frazer) Taylor, both of whom boasted pioneer ties to Portage County.

Ezra Booth Taylor, a native of Nelson Township, was practicing law in Ravenna when his daughter was born. He was elected county prosecutor a year later and also served as a district judge. He spent 12 years in Congress, taking the seat vacated by President James A. Garfield — another onetime Portage County resident who is Ohio’s other honoree in Statuary Hall.

Mrs. Upton’s mother, Harriet Frazer Taylor, was the daughter of Colonel William Frazer, whose harness shop at Main and Meridian streets in downtown Ravenna was a stop on the Underground Railroad. Colonel Frazer’s wife, Anna Campbell, was the daughter of John Campbell, founder of Campbells-port, a small settlement south of Ravenna.

Ezra Taylor and his family left Portage County in 1861, when Harriet was 8 years old, to settle in Warren, where he relocated his law practice. When his wife died in 1876, 22-year-old Harriet took over the household.

After Judge Taylor was elected to Congress, his daughter joined him in Washington, D.C., where she gained a reputation for poise and social grace while serving as his hostess. She met and married George Upton, an attorney, in 1884.

While Congressman Taylor reputedly was a supporter of equal rights for women, his daughter apparently was a convert to the cause. “While engaged in writing articles for the press opposing woman suffrage, she found to her amazement that the arguments were all on the other side,” a Kent Courier article published in connection with a 1900 visit to Portage County noted.

She soon became a forthright advocate for voting rights for women. After becoming acquainted with Susan B. Anthony, the woman’s suffrage leader, she became active in the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association. She served as national treasurer of the organization for 15 years.

A talented writer and lecturer, she began to travel the nation on behalf of equal rights for women.

When her father retired from Congress in 1892, she returned to Warren, where the family home became a center for suffrage activities. She later served as president of the Ohio Woman’s Suffrage Association for 18 years, from 1899 to 1908 and from 1911 to 1920, when passage of the 19th Amendment secured the vote for women.

As president of the Ohio group, she visited Kent and Ravenna in April 1900, along with suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt, as a featured speaker for the Portage County Woman Suffrage Association. She gave a very able talk,” the Courier reported, focusing on why working women and business women needed the right to vote.

The struggle for universal suffrage was a long one, and part of Mrs. Upton’s job was keeping supporters engaged in the cause. In a 1912 letter to an Ohio suffragist, she appealed for financial support — “a dollar a month until suffrage is won” — and urged her correspondent to enlist other women in the effort. “It seems to me that there ought to be hundreds of women in every locality who could give a dollar a month,” she wrote.

Her activities on behalf of equal rights didn’t end when the battle for the ballot box did. She became the first woman to serve on the Warren Board of Education in 1918 and later became a founding member of the National League of Women Voters.

Active in Republican Party politics, she was the first woman to serve as vice chair of the Republican National Committee and she made an unsuccessful bid for Congress. It was said that she counted five Republican presidents — Hayes, Garfield, McKinley, Harding and Hoover — among her friends.

George Upton died in 1923 after the couple had been married for nearly 40 years, and his wife apparently fell on financial hard times. She lost their home in Warren in 1931 and relocated to Pasadena, Calif., where she died at 90 on Nov. 2, 1945.