Missouri bicentennial: A suffragette from Southeast Missouri

This is the eighth in a series of articles with Kellerman Foundation for Historic Preservation board chairman Frank Nickell, an emeritus faculty member of Southeast Missouri State University, commenting on Show Me State history on the 200th anniversary of Missouri being received as America's 24th state in 1821.

Historian Nickell believes the work of writer and activist Alice Curtice Moyer Wing (1866-1937), who lived the final 20 years of her life in Southeast Missouri, is one of the great untold stories of women's suffrage -- the movement leading to the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, securing for American women the right to vote in 1920.

Wing, who was born in Du Quoin, Illinois, just after the Civil War, was especially known for a 1917-1918 campaign for women's suffrage atop her beloved horse, Labelle.

"She would ride 200 miles at a stretch across the Missouri Ozarks, camping along the road and sleeping outside," said Nickell, adding Wing's consistent message was for equal pay for women, safety in the workplace and legally established rights for women and children.

Among her non-voting rights efforts were a push to enforce laws limiting the maximum working hours for women in a St. Louis sanitorium and the eradication of child labor.

The move to Southeast Missouri

Wing, who led the St. Louis Equal Suffrage League, moved with her husband to a farm near Burbank, Missouri, in rural Wayne County, in 1916 after a pointedly poisonous remark made to her while in St. Louis.

According to an interpretative panel about Wing's life, found in the Greenville Recreation Area at Wappapello Lake, the reformer was accosted following one of her suffrage speeches.

"(Wing) was choked by a man who threatened her life if she persisted in speaking for equal suffrage," the panel reads.

Her horse

Wing wrote of her travels aboard her trusty mount, LaBelle, in a series of often humorous articles in the St. Louis Post Dispatch Sunday magazine.

"That horse became as famous as (Wing) was," Nickell said.

In one of her very first articles, Wing explained her fight for obtaining the vote for women was noble work that one day would be regarded as righteous.

In the article, Wing described a dream where she rides LaBelle to Judgment Day and is immediately passed through to heaven.

"Ah, Alice, the Ozark suffragist," a saint waiting at the Pearly Gates says.

"Pass her in, pass her in -- and no questions asked."

Political engagement

Wing was a Republican, believing the GOP to be more supportive of women's rights.

According to the National American Women Suffrage Association, Wing organized almost 100 Republican clubs in Ozark counties of Missouri.

Wing went on to serve as a female delegate-at-large to the Republican National Convention in Chicago in 1920, helping to force the men to include her in Missouri's delegation.

Made history

"(Wing) became the first woman to head a state department in the state of Missouri," Nickell said, referring to her stint, beginning in 1921 and lasting until 1927, as chief of the Missouri Industrial Inspection Department under two GOP governors.

Balancing motherhood with work, Wing, who was trained as a stenographer, commuted throughout the 1920s from Wayne County to St. Louis, Kansas City and Jefferson City while she held her state job.

In 1924, Wing unsuccessfully sought her party's nomination for Congress in Missouri's then-13th District.

Final words

A Wing biographer, Greta Russell, wrote: "(Wing) came from humble beginnings, moved to the city and eventually found financial stability with her second husband. Her writings show she had a deep understanding of humanity and could recognize similar traits and motivations in people. Her life experiences led her to the belief that women and men were inherently equal."