In 1912, Effie Frost was living in Verdi, Kansas, a rural village in southeast Ottawa County. Her home was in Junction City but she stayed in Verdi as a missionary to local residents who favored pool halls over churches. She even organized a Sunday school for the children to improve church attendance. Despite her efforts, the pool hall thrived and church attendance suffered. Then Kansans approved a proposition to give women the vote. Like many women, Effie understood that winning the vote was more than an accomplishment; it was an opportunity. Documents on women’s suffrage in Kansas are now available on Kansas Memory.
On November 6, Effie wrote Lucy B. Johnston, president of the Kansas Equal Suffrage Association, about the recent election. “Now that we have the weapon,” Effie wrote, “I pray that we may… use it in destroying all vice breeding places… [like] Pool Halls and such things.” Effie understood that what she could not change by Christian influence alone women could change together if they applied their values at the ballot box.
Echoing these sentiments, Genevieve Chalkley of Lawrence declared “women are now a factor” at the Women’s Kansas Day Club meeting, on January 30, 1913. Her speech “After the Ballot – What Next?” implored women to use their vote to “humanize our people” and push for “progressive laws” that would soften the impact of an increasingly urban and industrial America on the family. Women’s clubs, like this one, played a vital role in achieving women’s suffrage in Kansas and they would prove equally important in determining how women used the vote.
By 1914, the Kansas Good Citizenship League (successor to the Kansas Equal Suffrage Association) endorsed a series of measures calling for greater attention to childhood and adult education, health care for women and children, and community and financial support for women and children in need. Women did not achieve national suffrage until 1920 with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Selected documents on women’s suffrage in Kansas are now available on Kansas Memory.