Lide Smith Meriwether - Memphis, TN - Civil Rights Memorials on Waymarking.com

"Lide Smith Meriwether of Memphis was a major leader of the woman suffrage movement in Tennessee in the 19th century and nationally known in the 1890s. She had taken part in earlier organizations to help women and children, but it was in working for temperance through the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) where she realized women had to have political power for their voices to be heard. She became president of the Tennessee WCTU in 1884 and was pursuing woman suffrage within temperance by 1886.

In 1889, Meriwether and others organized the Memphis Equal Rights Association, and she was elected the first president. When her colleague, Elizabeth Lyle Saxon, who had been working to organize women in Tennessee for suffrage, left the state in 1886, the National Woman Suffrage Association chose Meriwether to take her place. Through the 1890s, she organized woman suffrage clubs in towns and cities in Arkansas and Tennessee. by 1897, there were ten suffrage clubs in Tennessee and they met to form the Tennessee Equal Rights Association (TERA) with Meriwether as the first state president.

She became known to the leaders of the newly reorganized National American Woman Suffrage Association in the 1890s as a remarkable orator and organizer. She was invited to testify before the House Judiciary Committee of Congress. She was on the NAWSA Special Committee on the Columbian Exposition and, in 1893 gave one of her best know talks, "Organized Motherhood." She toured the country with Susan B. Anthony and Carrie Chapman Catt.

Meriwether left the presidency or TERA around 1900, but, with the reestablishment of the Tennessee Equal Suffrage Association in Memphis, she became involved again in 1906, and became its honorary president. The Memphis group was the only suffrage organization in the state until 1910. Although Meriwether, who died in 1913, did not live to see women gain the right to vote, she is recognized in the History of Woman Suffrage as a "dauntless pioneer."

Civil Right Type: Gender Equality (includes women's suffrage)

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