ENTRY

Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis (1851–1946)

SUMMARY

Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis was a leader in the Virginia and national woman suffrage movements. Beginning her activist work in her native Lynchburg, in 1910, she founded the city’s Equal Suffrage League, the second local league in the state. In addition, she served as vice president of the Virginia Equal Suffrage League, expanding its membership through speeches, debates, and organizing local leagues. She was also involved at the national level in the campaign to pass a federal woman suffrage amendment, carrying the Virginia banner at the 1913 national suffrage march in Washington, D.C. and serving as a Virginia delegate of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. After ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, she helped organize the Virginia League of Women Voters as well as the Lynchburg chapter, serving as president of both. She died in 1946.

Early Years and Family

Elizabeth Lewis was born on December 9, 1851, on the Botetourt County estate of her grandparents. She was the daughter of John Scaisbrook Langhorne and Sarah Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne. She grew up and lived nearly all her life in nearby Lynchburg, where her aunt, Orra Henderson Moore Gray Langhorne, worked for social reform and woman suffrage in the decades after the American Civil War (1861–1865). She was the aunt of Nancy Witcher Langhorne Shaw Astor, viscountess Astor, the first woman to serve in the British House of Commons, and also to Irene Langhorne Gibson, whose husband was noted illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, of Gibson Girl fame.

Maximilian Schele De Vere

She was educated in private schools in Lynchburg and for a brief time near the end of the Civil War at a Charlottesville school the noted University of Virginia linguist Maximilian Schele de Vere conducted. She taught in one of Lynchburg’s first public schools in 1870 or 1871 and in a private school afterward. On August 13, 1873, she married a Lynchburg attorney and Confederate veteran John Henry Lewis. They had three daughters and a son. Their daughter Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis Otey earned a doctorate in economics from the University of Berlin and was also a noted suffragist and the first woman any major Virginia political party nominated for statewide office. Unlike Lewis, who was a Democrat, Otey became a Republican like her father and later a Socialist. Lewis’s husband died on February 23, 1907.

Lewis was well read, cultured, and reportedly a fine pianist and active supporter of the lively musical and artistic life of Lynchburg. She maintained her interest in education throughout her life, promoted a free night school in Lynchburg, and supported the efforts of Mary-Cooke Branch Munford and others to allow women to attend the University of Virginia. Lewis belonged to the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Confederate Memorial Association. She served twice as president of the Lynchburg Woman’s Club and once as president of a local musical society. Although raised in the Episcopal Church, she became a Unitarian and reportedly was the first organist in the city’s Unitarian Church.

Suffrage Activity

Woman Suffrage Parade in Washington

In October 1910 Lewis founded the Lynchburg Equal Suffrage League, the second local league founded in the state. The surviving records of the Lynchburg league indicate that Lewis served as president from its founding through ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The chapter sponsored speakers on woman suffrage and related public affairs, and on April 20, 1917, the Lynchburg league published 5,000 copies of The Lynchburg Woman’s Suffrage News, although no copies appear to have survived. Lewis and other members spoke in schools and in nearby localities to educate people about woman suffrage and circulated petitions urging members of the General Assembly to propose a woman suffrage amendment to the state constitution. She also participated in public events, including the March 1913 national suffrage parade in Washington, D.C., where she helped carry the Virginia banner. In August 1917 she and her daughter Elizabeth Otey joined other suffragists in picketing the White House.

Lewis regularly attended state conventions of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia. At the convention in December 1911 she was elected vice president and served until the league dissolved in 1920. Her Lynchburg league hosted the annual convention in October 1913 at which time she became chair of the committee to revise the league’s constitution. In 1912 and again in 1914 Lewis, state league president Lila Hardaway Meade Valentine, and others spoke on behalf of woman suffrage before the House of Delegates’ Committee of Privileges and Elections. As part of a delegation of more than 200 suffragists, in December 1915 she also spoke before the governor to lobby his support for their cause. During this period Lewis attended conventions of the National American Woman Suffrage Association as a state delegate from 1914 to 1919 and also sat on its executive council.

Woman Suffrage Lectures

Between May 1915 and October 1916 Lewis made more than twenty suffrage speeches, mostly in towns and cities in south-central and southwestern Virginia, and organized local leagues in more than half of them. Lewis and her cousin Lila Meade Valentine were the most active speakers, recruiters, and organizers of local leagues during that time. While reorganizing a league in Appomattox County on October 2, 1916, Lewis debated Congressman Henry DeLaWarr Flood, an opponent of woman suffrage and one of the most powerful leaders of the state’s Democratic Party. As of December 1915 the state league could boast 9,662 members in ninety-eight chapters in eighty-one counties. Valentine estimated in March 1916 that the league was the largest organization of women in the state and undoubtedly the largest in the state’s history to that time. By 1920 the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia had approximately 175 chapters and had obtained about 32,000 signatures in support of woman suffrage.

Camp Lee During World War I

In “A Confession of Faith”published in Virginia Suffrage News in November 1914, Lewis wrote “that the woman’s qualification for citizenship is as valid as the man’s—that her identity of interest, her intelligence, her morality, her patriotism and her proven efficiency” entitled women to all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship for which “equal suffrage is an indispensable element.” During World War I (1914–1918), as leaders of the National American Woman Suffrage Association recommended, Lewis and many other Virginia suffragists channeled their energies into support of war-related work. She served as chair of the women’s committee of the Lynchburg office of food administration and volunteered with the Young Men’s Christian Association at Camp Lee, near Petersburg. The unwillingness of Virginia’s legislators to propose a woman suffrage amendment to the state constitution again in 1916 caused most state suffrage leaders to support instead an amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Lewis campaigned avidly for a federal amendment, known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, lobbying Virginia’s congressional delegation and continuing to speak around the state. Some members, however, left the Equal Suffrage League to join the more aggressive National Woman’s Party, including Lewis’s daughter Elizabeth Otey.

During Valentine’s bouts with illness in 1918 and 1919, and following the death of Valentine’s husband in June 1919, Lewis acted in her stead and ran the state league with the aid of a small but very talented group of women in the Richmond headquarters. The league’s incomplete file of surviving correspondence of Lewis, Valentine, and other league officers documents the work of the state league and urban local leagues better than any other sources. They fully demonstrate Lewis’s devotion to the cause and the great amount of time and energy she gave to it throughout the decade.

Lady Astor, Member of Parliament

The General Assembly did not ratify the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, but at its session early that year it did pass enabling legislation to permit women to vote that year if enough other states ratified the proposed amendment. Lewis participated in planning citizenship schools the league sponsored to prepare women for voting. That October she traveled to England to visit her niece who had taken her seat in the House of Commons the previous year, but returned in December and thus missed her first opportunity to vote in the election on November 2, 1920.

Lewis attended the preliminary organizational meeting of the Virginia League of Women Voters in the House of Delegates chamber in the Capitol on September 10, 1920. At the formal founding of the league in the Senate chamber on November 10 the delegates elected her to the board of directors. She presided over a session at the 1923 state convention and was elected president for the 1926–1927 term. Lewis also served as the first president of the Lynchburg League of Women Voters from 1920 to the mid-1930s, by which time she was in her eighties. In 1931 the Virginia league added Lewis’s name to the honor roll of the national league in recognition of her many years of work on behalf of woman suffrage and the League of Women Voters.

Later Years

Equal Suffrage League of Virginia Memorabilia

Lewis traveled to Richmond early in 1926 to present along with other founding members of the league a collection of flags and suffrage banners, including the Lynchburg league’s banner, to the governor, but they were lost after the museum where they were displayed later closed. Lewis’s grandson, Lynchburg artist Scaisbrooke Langhorne Abbot, lived with her for a time in the 1930s. Lady Astor visited her in Lynchburg late in January 1946, but Lewis was too weak to attend a delayed public celebration of her ninety-fourth birthday with her niece. On January 30, 1946, shortly after Astor left town, Lewis died at her home in Lynchburg. Her ashes were buried in Presbyterian Cemetery in Lynchburg, where her husband’s body had been buried.

MAP
TIMELINE
December 9, 1851
Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne is born in Botetourt County to John Scaisbrook Langhorne and Sarah Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne.
1870 or 1871
Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis teaches in one of Lynchburg's first public schools.
August 13, 1873
Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis marries Lynchburg attorney and Confederate veteran John Henry Lewis.
October 4, 1880
Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis is born in Lynchburg to John Henry Lewis and Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis.
February 23, 1907
John Henry Lewis, husband of Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis, dies.
October 1910
Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis founds the Lynchburg Equal Suffrage League, the second local league founded in the state. Lewis's daughter, Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis Otey, is probably a cofounder.
October 1910—August 18, 1920
Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis serves as president of the Lynchburg Equal Suffrage League.
December 1911
Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis is elected vice president of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia.
1912
Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis, Lila Hardaway Meade Valentine, and others speak on behalf of woman suffrage before the House of Delegates' Committee of Privileges and Elections.
March 3, 1913
The woman suffrage parade takes place in Washington, D.C., attracting thousands of marchers on the day before President Woodrow Wilson's inauguration. The parade includes no southern African American women, a group that was sidelined by white southern suffragists.
March 3, 1913
Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis helps carry the Virginia banner at the national suffrage parade in Washington, D.C.
October 1913
Lynchburg hosts the Equal Suffrage League annual convention.
October 1913
Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis is named chair of the committee to revise the Equal Suffrage League's constitution.
1914—1919
Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis attends conventions of the National American Woman Suffrage Association as a state delegate.
1914
Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis, Lila Hardaway Meade Valentine, and others speak on behalf of woman suffrage before the House of Delegates' Committee of Privileges and Elections.
March 11, 1914
A woman suffrage resolution is defeated in the Virginia legislature by a vote of 74 to 13.
November 1, 1914
"A Confession of Faith" by Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis is published in Virginia Suffrage News.
May 1915—October 1916
Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis makes more than twenty suffrage speeches, mostly in towns and cities in south-central and southwestern Virginia, and organizes local leagues in more than half of them.
December 1915
As part of a delegation of more than 200 suffragists, Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis speaks before the governor to lobby his support for their cause.
December 1915
The Virginia Equal Suffrage League could boast 9,662 members in ninety-eight chapters in eighty-one counties.
February 18, 1916
A woman suffrage resolution is defeated in the Virginia legislature by a vote of 52 to 40.
October 2, 1916
Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis debates Congressman Henry DeLaWarr Flood, an opponent of woman suffrage and one of the most powerful leaders of the state's Democratic Party.
April 20, 1917
The Lynchburg Equal Suffrage League publishes 5,000 copies of The Lynchburg Woman's Suffrage News, edited by Elizabeth Otey under the presidency of Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis.
August 1917—Early 1919
Virginia women including Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis and Elizabeth Otey join suffragists picketing the White House, accusing President Woodrow Wilson of ignoring democracy for millions of American women.
June 4, 1919
The U.S. Congress passes the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The amendment guarantees women the right to vote.
June 10, 1919
Benjamin Batchelder Valentine, Lila Meade Valentine's husband, dies.
February 12, 1920
The General Assembly votes not to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees women the right to vote.
August 18, 1920
Tennessee becomes the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, completing the ratification process.
September 1920
The Equal Suffrage League of Virginia disbands. The Virgina League of Women Voters is organized as its successor.
1926
Along with other founding members of the Equal Suffrage League, Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis presents a collection of flags and suffrage banners, including the Lynchburg league's banner, to the governor. After the museum in which they were displayed closes, the items are lost.
January 30, 1946
Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis dies at her home in Lynchburg.
FURTHER READING
  • Tarter, Brent, Marianne E. Julienne, and Barbara C. Batson. The Campaign for Woman Suffrage in Virginia. Charleston, S.C.: The History Press, 2020.
CITE THIS ENTRY
APA Citation:
Tarter, Brent & Dictionary of Virginia Biography. Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis (1851–1946). (2020, December 07). In Encyclopedia Virginia. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/lewis-elizabeth-dabney-langhorne-1851-1946.
MLA Citation:
Tarter, Brent, and Dictionary of Virginia Biography. "Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis (1851–1946)" Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities, (07 Dec. 2020). Web. 07 Jun. 2023
Last updated: 2021, December 22
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