She Has Always Exercised and Enjoyed Those Rights

As I said in my last post, my three times great-granduncle Elias Longley and his wife Margaret Vater Longley were idealists. Among Elias’s many publishing ventures was a newspaper, The Type of the Times. Its slogan was “Devoted to all true interests of the human race,” which, as one writer notes, included “women’s rights, as well as abolition, temperance, and even vegetarianism” (Durack 2020). Of these varied interests, the one to which Margaret, in particular, devoted the most time and energy was women’s suffrage.

Portrait of Margaret Vater Longley. 1889. The Illustrated Phonographic World 4 (9): 184.

When Elias Longley married Margaret Vater, he gained a wife whose family background shared some key similarities with his own. Margaret was born in England in 1830. Like Elias, her father was a reformer, although Thomas Vater seems to have been a bit more radical than Abner Longley. Thomas was a Chartist, advocating for universal (male) suffrage and the rights of working men. He was involved with the radical newspaper The Poor Man’s Guardian, which had run afoul of the British government due to its owner’s refusal to pay the stamp tax and pass the cost along to the paper’s working-class readers. In 1832, Thomas fled England to avoid arrest (Brown 1961).

Thomas’s wife and children joined him in America, where they lived in a succession of places as Thomas tried various commercial endeavors. Eventually, he became enamored of utopian socialism and, in 1844, moved the family first to Prairie Home Community at West Liberty, Ohio (Noyes 1870), and then to the Claremont Phalanx, where they would have met Abner Longley’s family.  Like the Longleys, the Vaters settled in Cincinnati after the Claremont Phalanx failed, although Thomas Vater continued to explore utopian ideals, moving his wife and younger children to Utopia, Ohio, one of the communities that succeeded the Claremont Phalanx, and later going on his own to seek his fortune in California, where he died in 1852 (Brown 1961).

Margaret Vater clearly shared the idealistic views of her father and husband. As a sketch of her life published in Illustrated Phonographic World in May 1889 states:

As an earnest advocate, she has always been a consistent one, of the rights of women equally with men, to education, to do business, to buy and sell property, to come and go as she pleased, to the same extent that a man should do so (provided it did not interfere with the duties of the wife or the comfort of the family); and, therefore, she has always exercised and enjoyed those rights (pp 184-5).

In addition to her work as a journalist and teacher, Margaret invested considerable effort in the women’s suffrage movement. In 1869, Margaret served as a delegate to what was to be the last convention of the American Equal Rights Association and represented Ohio on the Later that year, she presided over the organization of the Ohio Woman Suffrage Association at a convention in Cincinnati, where the speakers included Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone. Margaret was elected vice president of the new state society, and her husband Elias served on its business committee. advisory committee of the new National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA).

Longley, Margaret Vater. 1872. Letter to Henry Blackwell. Cincinnati, OH. [1]

A few months later, she served as a delegate to the first conference of the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) in Cleveland, Ohio, and was elected a vice president at large of that organization (Stanton et al 1881; 1886). [2]

Margaret continued her work for women’s suffrage over the next forty years, attending national conventions, speaking on women’s rights locally and nationally, supporting the formation of local women’s suffrage associations, and reporting in the press on her own activities and those of other suffragists. The Hillsboro, Ohio, News-Herald, reporting on one of her speeches, described her as a “fluent and forcible speaker” who “made a strong and logical argument in favor of Woman’s right to the elective franchise” (March 17, 1870, p.3).

Sketch of Margaret Vater Longley. 24 May 1894. San Francisco Examiner, p. 1.

After she and Elias moved to California in 1885, in an effort to improve his poor health, Margaret took up her work with the Women’s Suffrage Association of Los Angeles, serving as its president in 1890. A few years later, she expanded her political horizons and became active in the People’s Party, advocating that the party include a women’s suffrage plank in its platform and serving as a delegate to and vice-president of the party’s state convention in Sacramento in 1894 (Yasuoka n.d.).

 In 1902, she led a group of 50 women to the Los Angeles city hall to demand to be registered to vote. When they were denied, they occupied the council chamber for some time. As the Los Angeles Herald described the scene:

Councilmen scattered as soon as they saw the Amazons, and the session of the city fathers was delayed for over an hour because the city legislators had abandoned the chambers. The women took charge of the chambers, and there was no one who would gainsay them the right to hold the legislative chambers until they were satisfied and willing to vacate (Aug 11, p. 1).

Thanks to the work of researcher Katherine Durack, Margaret’s (and Elias’s) contributions to the women’s suffrage movement were recently recognized with an historical marker in downtown Cincinnati. I look forward to seeing the marker the next time I’m in Cincinnati so I can pay tribute to the idealism and commitment of my Longley (and Vater) relatives. I only wish I could have been with Margaret occupying that city hall!

Margaret and Elias Longley historical marker on the National Votes for Women Trail. Downtown Cincinnati, Ohio. Photo courtesy of Katherine Durack.

 [1] Henry Blackwell, husband of Lucy Stone, was an active suffragist and served many years as an officer of the American Woman Suffrage Association.

[2] The American Equal Rights Association split apart in 1869 over the question of whether its members should support suffrage for Black men, as was the case with the proposed 15th amendment to the constitution, or hold out for universal suffrage regardless of race or gender. The AWSA and NWSA represented these two positions and remained split until 1890 when they merged into a single organization. Margaret V. Longley does not seem to have had strong views on this issue as she was active in both groups.

Works Cited

Brown, Henrietta Brady. 1961. Some Venables of England and America and Brief Accounts of Families into Which Certain Venables Married. Cincinnati, OH: Kinderton Press.

Durack, Katherine. 2020. “Spelling Reform, Phonetic Type, and Woman Suffrage.” Ohio History Connection Blog.

Noyes, John Humphrey. 1870. “Prairie Home Community.”  History of American Socialisms. Philadelphia: J.P. Lippincott & Co, pp. 316-27.

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds.  1881. History of Woman Suffrage Vol II 1861-76. Rochester, NY.

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds.  1886. History of Woman Suffrage Vol III 1876-85. Rochester, NY.

Yasuoka, Koichi and Motoko. n.d. “Elizabeth Margaret Vater Longley.”  QWERTY People Archive.