Ethel Hall, B.A.'20, Recalls First Vote By Women

One November morning in 1920, Ethel Hall, B.A.'20, went to a Rockville Centre, N.Y., polling place and wrote out her choice for president: Warren G. Harding. For the 100-year old New Yorker, the memory of that first vote by women in the United States is as vivid as if it were yesterday.

"They were a little bit unladylike, but when we got the vote, we were thankful to them," she said of the women who fought for that right. "But then we had to wake up, too."

Mrs. Hall attended the preview last June 17 of a Ken Burns film on suffragists: "Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony." She is featured in the film, which airs Nov. 7 and 8 on PBS.

Women were not permitted to vote in the United States until Nov. 2, 1920, when more than 8 million women went to the polls.

"Women had fewer rights than an insane man in an insane asylum," said Burns, who also made the highly acclaimed PBS film The Civil War. You were considered incompetent to testify, you could not vote-obviously-you could not go to college or university, you could not become a doctor or lawyer, you couldn't keep your own earnings, you couldn't invest your own earnings, you couldn't divorce."

"When they (Stanton and Anthony) were done, all of those rights had come to women except the vote. When the vote did come, the amendment to the Constitution was word for word what these two women wrote."

Mrs. Hall said that even after women could vote, it took decades for them to really mobilize.

"The first time, it wasn't really exciting. We just went and voted and came home. Many women didn't even bother," she said. "When the League of Women Voters started in about 1950, that's when women started to get interested. I got into it right away."

Born in 1899 in a two-family house on Third Avenue near 80th Street, Mrs. Hall was one of the few women of her generation to go to college. She graduated from the University at Albany, then called the New York State College for Teachers, the same year she first voted.

Because women teachers at that time were not allowed to marry, she kept her future husband waiting for almost 20 years. "When I started teaching, women teachers could not marry. I signed the contract not to marry. My family had sacrificed so much to send me to college-in those days not many women were going-I couldn't just throw that away," she said. She finally left teaching to marry in 1943.

In college "we were taught a slogan: 'Not for ourselves alone, but that we must teach others.' And I thought this (voting) was something I could do for my country," she said. The film takes its name from that slogan.

"When I had the privilege to vote, I was very, very glad to go," she said.