May Stocking Knaggs: Bay City to D.C.
Equality ruled in the home of May Stocking Knaggs, a Bay City suffragist who spoke around the country and testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Suffrage in 1896.
While she traveled in her work on behalf of women's suffrage, Stocking Knaggs' husband stayed home with their children. A native New Yorker, she spent most of her adult life in Bay City and often wrote articles about suffrage for the local newspapers.
President of the Michigan Equal Suffrage Association from 1895 to 1899, she served as the chairperson of the press committee for the convention of the National Women’s Relief Corps held in Detroit and on the board of Lewis Hospital in Bay City.
Testifying before a Congressional subcommittee, Stocking Knaggs gave a stirring speech on behalf of "nearly 600,000 women of the age of 21 years and upward in the great State of Michigan." At the time, about 100,000 were employed and 76,000 were property owners, paying over $2,000,000 in taxes on property with a combined value of $34,000,000.
And still, they could not vote.
"Our forefathers rebelled against British domination upon the principle that 'taxation without representation is tyranny' ; and if it is tyranny for men it is tyranny for women also," Stocking Knaggs said, also pointing out that while idiots, lunatics and criminals had their right to vote protected, women did not.
"In the Kansas Building at the World's Fair, many of you saw a notable picture, a portrait of Frances E. Willard, her face the enthronement of intellectual and spiritual power. At one corner was a driveling idiot, at another a frantic maniac, at a third a low-browed criminal, and in the fourth a painted and befeathered Indian; and this picture was called 'Woman and her political peers'. But if that picture were brought into our State it would have to be rechristened, 'Woman and her political superiors'," she pointed out.
"Gentlemen, it is humiliating; it is unjust. We therefore appeal to you in behalf of the wives, daughters, and sisters of the loyal men of Michigan to do what lies in your power to remove from us this stigma, Senator Peffer. And it ought to be done."
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