#WCW Meredith Ellis (1865-1955)
Meredith Ellis lead the suffrage movement in Colorado. Her mother was also a suffragist and her father owned the “Rocky Mountain News.”
Ellis began her journalism career as a proofreader and in 1889 she had her own featured column called, “A Woman’s World.”
In 1893 she went to the World’s Fair in Chicago to meet Susan B. Anthony. Ellis asked Anthony to send support reasoning that Colorado was ripe for granting women’s suffrage. In her own words, Ellis remarked, ““If Colorado goes for woman suffrage, you may count on a landslide in that direction throughout the West.”
Carrie Chapman Catts was sent to help Ellis organize and together their efforts paid off. Colorado granted women the right to vote in 1893.
Even after the vote was secure, Ellis continued to be active in women’s rights and labor rights.
She eventually became a politician herself and held several political offices.
“Equal suffrage is not an end; it is a beginning. It is the commencement of responsibilities and opportunities so vast that time itself is hardly long enough to work out the problems set before us. For years our resolutions have begun with the familiar preamble, ‘We, as women.’ The enfranchised woman has passed to a higher plane. It is not we as women, nor we as men who will make this world better, but all of us, working together as human beings.” Meredeth Ellis