Sister Suffragette

A major political battle that took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the fight over women’s right to vote. In Memphis, Martha Elizabeth Moore Allen was one of the city’s most prominent suffragettes. She was born in in 1851 in Plymouth, Indiana, and later married Jacob Davis Allen. Mrs. Allen first got interested in the women’s suffrage movement after she heard Susan B. Anthony speak at a rally in the 1870s. Her active involvement in suffrage work began in 1889 after she and her husband moved to Nashville. After they moved to Memphis, Mrs. Allen joined the Equal Suffrage Association in 1904. The organization folded shortly thereafter, and she became the first president of a suffrage group called the Equal Suffrage League from 1906-1912. Her involvement was not limited to the city, but rather extended to organizing the suffrage movement throughout Tennessee, and one of the…