Mary Lease, Suffrage, and Prohibition

I teach primarly introductory level survey courses and the notes for those courses are a Frankenstein’s monster of assembled sources. I used to try and keep track of what came from where but found the citations too distracting, so I just settled for double checking notes when I add new material in. Every now and then I stumble across something that makes me question what is in my notes and leads me to dig around trying to figure out if I’m saying the right or wrong thing in class. Recently I went down a rabbit hole thanks to Wikipedia entry for Mary Lease because the opening sentence caught me off guard:

Mary Elizabeth Lease (September 11, 1850 – October 29, 1933) was an American lecturer, writer, Georgist, and political activist. She was an advocate of the suffrage movement as well as temperance but she was best known for her work with the People’s Party (Populists).

What struck me with the statement was the claim that Lease was a suffragist and temperance activist. My lecture notes say essentially the exact opposite. Thinking my notes had been written down wrong, I went and checked the source for the statement, Richard White’s The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age:

Mary Elizabeth Lease of Kansas – “Queen Mary of the Alliance” and perhaps its leading orator – denounced demands for prohibition and women’s suffrage as absurd. The key was economic reform.¹

This, to me, is a significantly different stance than Wikipedia proclaimed and in a debate between a well-respected scholar writing in a peer-reviewed book and Wikipedia, I’m taking the academic. It doesn’t mean she never advocated for those ideas, however, so I decided to dig deeper. White’s book is a work of synthesis, so he’s pulling on someone else for that information. His citations point me to Charles Postel’s The Populist Vision:

Mary Elizabeth Lease, the “Queen Mary of the Alliance,” left St. Louis Ridiculing the demands for prohibition and suffrage as “absurd” when compared to the economic reforms needed by the farmers.²

White paraphrased Postel, so we’re left with the same idea but Postel does write this immediately following that statement:

Lease would later earn a reputation for erratic and vindictive positions. But on this point she shared ground with those who believed that suffrage and politics were secondary to the economics of women’s liberation.³

That complicates the picture quite a bit – maybe Lease was a suffragist and temperance activist or would be one – but what we have is two authors claiming that at one of the most important points in the populist movement, it’s biggest personality was vocally arguing suffrage and prohibition were not that important to the bigger cause.

That still leaves the question, was Lease supportive of either of those policies at any point? Postel cites two sources for the claims in his footnotes, a 1986 dissertation and Gene Clanton’s Kansas Populism from 1969. The dissertation, Maryjo Wagner’s “‘Farms, Families, and Reform’: Women in the Farmers’ Alliance and Populist Party” includes the direct quote from Lease on the matter:

Oh, this demand for women’s suffrage and prohibition is so absurd. Give us planks on money, land and transpor­tation and the farmers are satisfied. Who cares if the people can get whiskey, so it is pure and they have plenty of money to pay for it with? You won’t find much of it outside the mountains of Tennessee. Wherever internal revenue officers go, the whiskey becomes impure.⁴

She also notes that the party would probably have adopted a suffrage plank had Lease been supportive of it. But Wagner then notes this significant point:

Although she had been ambivalent concerning woman suffrage at St. Louis, Lease “made an eloquent plea to the end that her sex might be recognized in the state platform.” Accordingly, the convention proposed a woman suffrage amend­ment for the state constitution.⁵

Digging around Wagner also notes that Lease’s political career started in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union where she began publicly speaking prior to becoming a full-blown populist.⁶ Postel’s citation for Clanton’s book is a footnote, which leads us to this:

A strong commitment to woman suffrage and prohibition, two causes she felt were threatened by fusion with Democrats, could explain Mrs. Lease’s action in the controversy were it not for the fact that she abandoned the cause of equal suffrage during the summer of 1894, and by 1896 she renounced prohibition (Topeka Daily Capital, September 15, 1894; Topeka State Journal, May 25, 1896). Her actions were unbelievably erratic.⁷

The text the footnote is related to isn’t particularly kind towards Lease:

As for Mary Elizabeth Lease, the key to understanding the actions of that famous lady would appear to revolve largely around three facets of her personality: an exaggerated sense of her own importance, which made her a formidable spokesman but allowed her to be used by the opposition; an intense hatred of Democrats, which made fusion unthinkable; and a shallow understanding of the problems of her time, which gave her little to hold to once the going became rough and the impulse for reform less intense.⁸

That leads to the end of the line for the thread started by White and it leaves us with some answers, although not particularly great ones. Lease started as a prohibitionist but renounced it. She advocated for women’s suffrage but also contributed to undermining support for it within the populists when they were at their peak. In other words, to use Clanton’s statement, “her actions were unbelievably erratic.” But that’s not a particularly compelling resolution to be honest. Why was she “erratic?” Why make such drastic changes in positions, sometimes at significant points?

To try and get those answers I went back to Wikipedia to see what it cited, which was an article by Brooke Speer Orr on Lease’s politics. Orr mentions throughout the article the Lease regularly talked about women’s rights and gave suffrage speeches, including a pretty definitive statement that:

She likewise argued that with both temperance legislation and women’s suffrage enacted, political corruption would subside, saloons would shut down, and a general “uplifting of humanity” would occur. Lease insisted that women’s purity, piety, and legislative input were needed to cleanse the national political realm and to “strike down the beasts of drunkenness and lust.”⁹

Orr’s citations are historical newspaper accounts of Lease’s speeches. So Lease very clearly was a suffragist and prohibitionist…at times. As for why the positions change, the best the argument you can really draw from the article is that Lease’s positions were guided by the heavily male-dominated nature of the populist party, which wasn’t always on board with the idea of women’s equality. As Orr writes, the populists were pushing back against the status quo of the period, including traditional gender identity, but “used these same conventional views regarding female domesticity to allow for and even champion Lease as a woman in politics.”¹⁰