Ida Husted Harper

2023

By Sheryl A. Swingley

Indiana native Ida Husted Harper is one of the most impactful and overlooked players in U.S. women’s suffrage history. Her talents as a journalist, columnist, author and suffragist were critical in helping Susan B. Anthony, who was a peer and friend, persuade the U.S. Congress and states to pass the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Harper’s lifelong passions were to secure the vote for women and to document women’s history in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Most of Harper’s contemporaries were investigative reporters, including Ida B. Wells, who fought for racial justice; Helen “Nell Nelson” Cusack-Carvalho, who exposed female sweatshops; and Ida Tarbell, who revealed the Standard Oil monopoly. Harper’s strength was opinion writing, which she started at an early age.

Harper was the youngest graduate in the very first Muncie High School graduation class in 1868. Her parents moved the family to Muncie from Franklin County for its excellent schools. In high school, she was an honors student and wrote essays for the school newspaper. One was called “Why Can’t We All Be Beautiful?” “Intellectual talents” mattered more to Harper than beauty.

Harper was outspoken for her time and believed a woman was responsible for her own agency. As such, she became a clarion voice during her life for opportunities for women.

After high school, Harper was admitted to Indiana University as a sophomore because of her advanced secondary education. After about a year at IU, she moved north and became a teacher and interim high school principal in Peru. By 1871, she was married to lawyer and former Union colonel Thomas Winans Harper and settled in Terre Haute. The marriage ended in divorce in 1890. Together, however, they had a daughter, Winnifred Harper Cooley, who graduated from Stanford University and pursued writing as a career. Harper also attended Stanford for two years, but never graduated.

During her marriage and life in Terre Haute, Harper began her career as a journalist. She recalled: “… to occupy my time I began to reply to various things that appeared in the Saturday Evening Mail, signing my answers ‘Mrs. John Smith.’ Mr. Perry S. Westfall, its editor, published them for some time … [and] suspected that I was ‘Mrs. John Smith’ … so he spoke to my husband who was in total ignorance [of my writings] … I went to see Mr. Westfall [who] wanted me to contribute regularly and offered a small compensation. My husband was willing I should write, as it seemed to amuse me, but said I must not accept any money. This was the attitude of most husbands in that day. I informed Mr. Westfall that I would accept his proposition, including the pay!”

Harper’s Terre Haute years were formative and full. From 1872 through 1890, she wrote columns for the weekly Saturday Evening Mail and served for 11 years as editor and contributor to the Woman’s Department of the Locomotive Fireman’s Magazine, the monthly trade periodical of national political activist and union leader Eugene Debs.

By 1889, Harper landed an editorial position at the Terre Haute Daily News. The next year, she was named the Daily News’ managing editor, becoming one of the first women to hold such a position on a daily newspaper. Harper then moved to Indianapolis so her daughter could attend school in Indiana’s capital. She worked for two years on the editorial staff of the Indianapolis News.

Already a suffragist in her own right, it was in Terre Haute in 1878 that Harper first met Susan B. Anthony. After that meeting, she became a lifelong friend and activist peer of Anthony’s. Their friendship and working relationship led Anthony to handpick Harper to write the three volumes of the suffragist’s biography, “The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony,” and to co-author with her, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage the six volumes of the “History of Woman Suffrage,” which covered the years from 1881 to 1922.

Harper also authored independently at least 10 other books on women’s rights, including “The Associated Work of the Women of Indiana,” which was featured in The Woman’s Building at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, and “Suffrage Snapshots,” which includes witty and humorous essays about her decades-long battle for the ballot.

In 1887, Harper was elected secretary of the Indiana chapter of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. When she and her daughter moved to California, she was named head of press relations for the NAWSA campaign in the Golden State. In 1910 and until her death, she served as head of the NAWSA press bureau.

Her constant and powerful barrage of newspaper articles published in the country’s largest circulating newspapers proved to be critical to the success of the women’s suffrage movement. She was determined to change readers’ opinions on behalf of the ballot, but more importantly, she won over the support of newspaper publishers and editors throughout the nation with her arguments.

From 1916 and until she died March 14, 1931, she worked at the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the American Association of University Women, an organization that, today, is still dedicated to defending women’s rights and their advancement.

As Harper wielded her mighty pen, she also remained loyal to Indiana. She regularly attended her high school reunions in Muncie and chose to be buried in that city’s Beech Grove Cemetery.

In 1918, Harper was invited back to her high school (known as Muncie Central High School as of 1914) to deliver the commencement address. She reflected on her lifelong career on behalf of women:

“It required courage in those days to be a suffragist; it requires courage nowadays not to be one. For 50 years, I have seldom written or spoken for the public without referring to woman suffrage. For the past 20 years, I have given practically all of my time to helping establish it in this country. If I had to live my life over, I would do the same ….”

Harper’s published words in the battle for the ballot for women make her a one-of-a-kind Indiana journalist. She epitomizes how journalism can be used to achieve justice and equality and to give voice to the voiceless.