Free to use Photo of Women at the Meeting | RF._.studio
Free to use Photo of Women at the Meeting | RF._.studio
In celebration of #WomensHistoryMonth and on #ThrowbackThursday, the #MonmouthCountyArchives Division will be highlighting selected #MonmouthCounty women who strove to make a difference in their communities through activism in the areas of public service, temperance, and women’s rights:
Achsah Cannon Dunham: Activist
The New Jersey legislature gave women the right to vote for local school boards on April 8, 1887. On March 20, 1888, after being nominated by temperance leader Sarah Downs, Achsah Dunham was elected to the Neptune Township School Board by a margin of one vote. About two dozen out of 107 ballots were cast by women. A dissenter, James H. Bird, appealed the result but County School Superintendent Samuel Lockwood confirmed Dunham’s election. The dismayed male editor of the Asbury Park Journal called the women “crowing hens.”
Women had become eligible to hold this office by an 1873 New Jersey law, but they hadn’t been able to vote since 1807. The limited suffrage granted in 1887 was removed by the New Jersey Supreme Court in Allison v. Blake (1894), when it ruled that voting by women violated the 1844 state constitution. In Landis v. Ashworth (1895), the court enabled women to vote for school taxes but not officers. Full suffrage was enabled by the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified August 18, 1920.
Born in 1824 in the Adirondacks, Achsah Cannon married Thomas Dunham, a cuffs and collars manufacturer in Troy. In 1882, they moved to Ocean Grove, where they lived at 72 Heck Avenue. Daughters Elizabeth and Alice became teachers. In addition to her school board service, Dunham became President of the Ocean Grove Women’s Christian Temperance Union and, in 1903, the founding President of the Ocean Grove and Asbury Park Political Equity Club, an auxiliary to the National Woman’s Suffrage Association. She suffered a paralytic stroke in 1907, the year Thomas died, and she followed him in 1914.
Source: The Monmouth County Archives “Four Centuries of Monmouth County Women” Catalog: https://www.monmouthcountyclerk.com/.../exhibit-catalogs.../
Original source can be found here.
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