May 27th 1916
Earlier this month I made the trip up to Tallahassee with fellow members of the Florida Equal Suffrage Association to speak before a joint session of the state legislature on behalf of woman suffrage. (2. pg51)
I have Mary Baird Bryan to thank for getting me into the suffrage movement. I met them through my father's connections as the owner of the Herald. Mrs. Bryan and her husband, William Jennings Bryan, moved to Miami after he resigned from Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson. Very early, when their new house, Villa Serena, was finished, Mrs. Bryan invited me to visit her. She was in good physical shape - though not for long - and asked me and two or three other women to help serve tea on Wednesday afternoons to people who'd come to see Mr. Bryan. I'd stand around with the tea, and overhear all these admirers troop in and say "Oh, Mr. Bryan, I've voted for you three times, and I'd vote for you again." I realized what an influence he'd been. (1. pg106)
Mrs. Bryan enlisted me and Mrs. Frank Stranahan of Ft. Lauderdale, plus the widow of old Governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward and the widow of another ex-governor, W.S. Jennings, to speak to the state legislature about ratifying the suffrage amendment. We went to Tallahassee by Pullman train. All four of us spoke to a joint committee, wearing our best hats. It was a large room with men sitting around on two sides with their backs propped up against the walls and large brass spittoons between every other one of them. Talking to them was like talking to graven images. They never paid attention to us at all. They weren't even listening. This was my first taste of the politics in north Florida. (1. pg107)
I feel like the legislators of north Florida don't even know there's a southern part to the state. Even though our testimony was ignored, it was valuable for me to work with women who'd struggled in this political area.
- Douglas, Marjory Stoneman, and John Rothchild. Marjory Stoneman Douglas: Voice of the River: An Autobiography. Pineapple Press, 1990.
- Davis, Jack E. “Green Awakening: Social Activism and the Evolution of Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s Environmental Consciousness.” The Florida Historical Quarterly, vol. 80, no. 1, 2001, pp. 43–77. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30149433. Accessed 6 Nov. 2023.
