Graceful balance

The Woman Who Never Fails, Grace Wilbur Trout and Illinois Suffrage
by Carolyn O. Poplett with
Mary Ann Porucznik
2000, The Historical Society of Oak Park and River Forest.
62 pages. $10.00

In this tidy volume, Carolyn O. Poplet and Mary Ann Porucznik introduce Grace Wilbur Trout ( 1864-1955), one of Illinois' most successful political reformers, whose life story sheds a relevant beacon for women searching for direction today. "Grace Wilbur Trout skillfully balanced her home, her family and her 'business,' whether that business was a lecture tour, a suffrage campaign, a constitutional challenge, or a city plan. She was the organizing force behind campaigns that achieved suffrage for millions of women and guaranteed equal rights to all citizens under a new state constitution."

With passion and determination Trout gracefully achieved that sense of balance for which today's working parents strive and struggle daily. Her 91 -year lifespan straddled two remarkable centuries and reminds us that the grand balancing act women perform is not a modern construct. It has been an integral part of every age. Women such asTrout give us hope that meeting the challenge can make us all stronger.

Poplet and Porucznik's Trout is one example of hundreds of Illinois women whose voides are now silenced but not forgotten. As a genteel activist and public-spirited citizen, she became one of Oak Park's best-known residents, and one of the noted members of the Chicago Public Equity League from 1910 - 1912, whose names are listed in one of the book's handy appendices in the back. Along with a selected bibliography, the annotated "Timeline of the Woman's Suffrage Movement" offers more than a century's chronology. It traces Trout's most revered causes from 1918 through her death in 1955, from the Constitutional Amendment to full enfranchisement, through the Roaring Twenties, ending with her community improvement efforts at her retirement home in Jacksonville, Florida.

Reginning with the 1896 publication of her first novel, A Mormon Wife, a tale critically compared at the turn of the century to Uncle Tom's Cabin, Trout became a master of the podium. With her husband, young sons, and an orphaned nephew, she set up housekeeping in the progressive suburb of Oak Park, where "women were now reaching for a broader, less restrictive definition of acceptability." It was a middling class sphere into which Grace comfortably fit. Trout worked shoulder-to-shoulder with such national reformers and Illinois activists Anna Howard Shaw, Carrie Chapman Catt, Catherine Waugh McCollough, Alice Paul, Elizabeth Rooth, Antoinette Funk and Ruth Hanna McCormick.

Trout was a master publicist, passionate but not radical, who synthesized effective speaking with coalition building to win the hearts of women and, eventually, enough powerful male lawmakers to make women's suffrage a success. From the use of an effective 1913 "telephone tree," in which constituent volunteers phoned Illinois House Speaker William McKinley every fifteen minutes at his homeduring the recess from Saturday morning until Monday evening — until lobbying efforts to get the bill passed and signed by Governor Edward F. Dunne succeeded, Trout spoke powerfully about the issues.

The National Women's Suffrage Association, recognizing her work in Illinois, quickly recruited Trout to become a "general" as they waged their battle at the 1916 Republican National Convention, chaired by Henry Cabot Lodge. Ranners, billboards, and signs argued that Woodrow Wilson had "kept us out of war," and also "kept women out of suffrage." As a non partisan,Trout refused to endorse candidates but urged women to accept the challenge of the vote. "The question is not a women's problem, nor a man's problem, and the cry going up from women all over the world is not a new one, but an echo that sounded through all the ages — the cry of the human soul for opportunity to express itself."

The group was an outgrowth of the National American Women's Suffrage Association (NAWSA), on whose behalf Trout had been a chief lobbyist, and the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association (IESA), over which she presided for a score of years. Trout's life was one of all-consuming interests. She possessed a magnanimous spirit urging her

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followers to be generous and forgiving with opponents. Perhaps because she was not an all out radical, after her final suffrage triumph,Trout's role in history has been minimized, according to Poplet.

However, historians Rima Lunan Schultz and Adele Hast have included a biographical entry for Grace Wilbur Trout in their recent monumental volume, Women Building Chicago 1790-1990. Schultz and Hast highlight among her many achievements, Trout's efforts as the president of the Chicago Political Equality League (CPEL) and of the IESA to enlarge the groups' focus and enhance the visibility of the campaign for women's rights. Trout is remembered for the grueling five-day, motor-car tour of sixteen towns through mud and rainstorms, bravely undertaken in July of 1910.

With an entourage including Catherine McCulloch, legislative chair of the IESA and vice president of the NAWSA, and two Chicago Tribune reporters in tow, the campaign made front-page news with its innovative outreach to local audiences.

Though suffrage for women has been won and the issues have changed, the battle Trout waged for equal rights remains very real on a global scale, with much more at stake. "Long before 'the personal is political' became a rallying cry, Grace Wilbur Trout recognized the importance of politics in life," writes Poplet. Trout aroused both women and men to understand the importance of the full franchise. "Addressing the twenty-fifth annual convention of the Illinois Federation of Women's Clubs, Trout argued that 'Peace Patriotism' was as vital as 'War Patriotism,' because the former maintained the government that the latter defended."

Reading between the lines of horse-drawn parades and white-ribbon campaigns, we can learn much from the example of early reformers, who skillfully balanced home, family, and passionate activism to achieve their political and civic goals. In Poplet's words, "Move over Frank Lloyd Wright, Ernest Hemingway and Edgar Rice Burroughs... here comes 'the woman who never fails!

Catherine O'Connor is the manager of Local Government Services for the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. She served on the ISHS board of directors and the awards committee from 1995 to 1998. She earned both bachelors and masters degrees in history from the University of Illinois at Springfield, the former Sangamon State University.

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