By Fred Steiner
Somewhere in a collection of family photos is a 1920 snapshot of my Hahn grandparents, Bertha and Fred, standing in front of their home at 216 W. Elm St., Bluffton.
I know it was 1920 because taped to the window behind them was a Harding for president poster. I never felt the significance of the snapshot until election day 2014. It was then when I recalled a brief notation in my grandmother’s diary. It read: “I went to vote and Margaret and Florence went with me. Margaret is one year old, Nov. 2, 1915.”
After voting on Nov. 4, 2014, I found the diary notation. But the note confused me. I knew that women did not receive their constitutional right to vote until 1919 when the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was adopted. So, how could she vote in 1915?
Thanks to a response from the Ohio State Historical Society, I learned that
Ohio was a partial suffrage state, because of the School Suffrage Act passed into law in 1894. The act allowed women to vote in local school board elections.
So, in reference to the 1915 diary note, Grandma Hahn voted in a school board election, not a presidential one.
Back to the 1920 snapshot: I believe my 44-year-old Grandma Hahn marked the event of her first-ever opportunity to vote in a presidential election by having that photo taken.
I shared the 1915 diary reference with my wife, two daughters, sister and nieces. This excited them even more than it did me.
My sister followed up my message with this note:
“One story (our) mother told was that Grandma Hahn went campaigning door to door in Bluffton, soliciting votes for women's suffrage.
She had doors slammed in her face. Then, she began to take here young daughter, Margaret (my mother), with her, because Margaret was about 5 years old and not yet in school.
Grandma Hahn found that fewer men slammed doors when Margaret went with her. One evening when my grandfather came home, he asked Bertha: "How many doors did you get slammed in your face today?"
She answered: "None, because Margaret was with me."
Concerning the 1915 diary notation. Here’s the scene I envision:
My grandmother dressed up. She also dressed up her two pre-school age daughters. She took them with her to vote. She could have kept the girls at home with her own mother, Barbara Althaus, who lived next door – who I’m certain did not exercise the right to vote in 1915.
I would have loved to watch Grandmother Hahn, probably holding one daughter in one arm and holding the other by her hand as she asked for a ballot.
I’ll bet all the men in the room stopped and stared. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of them were ones who slammed their door in her face in her quest to seek full voting rights.
After she voted, she went home and wrote a note in her diary.
Years later my grandmother became a Bluffton precinct worker. And, years later, my mother followed that tradition.
Grandma Hahn voted ever year until she died in 1968.
Meanwhile, my Grandmother Steiner, a Mennonite, living on a farm four miles west of Bluffton, never voted. Ever. She lived until 1952.
NOTE ABOUT PHOTOS AT THE BOTTOM:
The photo shows Bertha Hahn with her daughter, Margaret, in 1915 or 1916.
The other photos shows her diary notation about voting in 1915.
