Seattle women in the street: A quick history

For Washington women, political protest is a tradition as old as the Evergreen State.

On Saturday, thousands of women hit the streets in cities across the state in a string of protests that were, at first, keyed to President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration. A record number of folks turned out to the first Women’s March in 2017, which is on track to be one of the largest demonstrations in the city’s history.

In this Washington, one of the first causes taken up by women cost them the right to vote.

That fight – against alcohol and prostitution, both of which were big business for Seattle’s big boys – involved one of Washington’s most interesting, if unsung, early immigrants.

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Emma Ray was a baby in her mother’s arms in February 1859 when they were both sold into slavery from a Springfield, Missouri auction block. The Civil War saw her “run south” ahead of the Union Army to Arkansas by an owner intent of maintaining his property; she was returned north and freed months before the Emancipation Proclamation.

Educated by missionaries, she married a mixed-race man, L.P. Ray. In her autobiography, “Twice Sold, Twice Ransomed,” she described him as a wanderer who lost himself in alcohol.

“I was born twice, bought twice, sold twice, and set free twice,” Ray wrote. “Born of woman, born of God; sold in slavery, sold to the devil; freed by Lincoln, set free by God.”

The Rays eventually wound up in Seattle, where Ray found God in several Christian churches and, ultimately, the temperance movement. Ray became a leading light in the local chapter of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

The organization’s aim was alcohol prohibition, and its members in Washington fought successfully to shutter brothels and saloons. This, it seems, didn’t go over well with many of the power brokers in a booming frontier Seattle.

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Washington women first won the vote in 1883, and, though they made up less than 40 percent of the state’s population, had enough sway to push prohibition while allied with similarly inclined men. Their opponents found a reprehensible solution.

Here’s how Mildred Andrews describes the moment at HistoryLink.com, Washington’s online encyclopedia:

“The city, which relied heavily on ‘sin taxes,’ lost revenue. A powerful Saloon League successfully lobbied the judges of the territorial supreme court.”

And so it was that, on Feb. 3, 1887, Washington’s non-Native American women were disenfranchised by a 2-1 vote by a supreme court that ruled that the title of the suffrage act wasn’t clear enough.

Washington’s voting men relented 23 years later, passing women’s suffrage into law in 1910. Four years late, the state enacted prohibition following massive demonstrations led by the temperance leagues.

Writing in her autobiography, Ray described the last great temperance rally.

“There was a call for every prohibitionist to meet at a certain place in the morning and take part in a parade. For once most all sects of religion answered the call and came together, and with them a great number of unbelievers. …

“Some of the banners read, ‘John Barleycorn must go,’ ‘He robbed me of my father,’ ‘He killed my brother,’ ‘He broke up my home,’ and such like. We started at the north end and marched down First Avenue. Part way down First Avenue we looked back towards Pike Street and it was a beautiful sight to see those banners and flags floating in the breeze.

“It reminded us of the Scripture in the Song of Solomon, when he was speaking of the church, and asked, ‘Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, as fair as the moon, and as clear as the sun, and as terrible as an army with banners.’”

Saturday’s throngs of marching women and their supporters may strike a similar scene in a city that, a century later, still makes room for a righteous rabble.

Follow Levi on Twitter at twitter.com/levipulk.