Ellis Meredith

Suffrage work

Ellis Meredith was born in Montana in 1865, and later moved to Denver, where she joined the Rocky Mountain News in 1893. She began writing the column A Woman's World for the Rocky Mountain News in 1889, where she (among other things) advocated women's suffrage. In 1890 she and five other women founded the Colorado Non-Partisan Equal Suffrage Association. In 1893 she went to the Woman’s Congress at the Chicago World’s Fair in August 1893 to ask for help from Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone, leading suffrage activists, saying, "If Colorado goes for woman suffrage, you may count on a landslide in that direction throughout the west." Susan B. Anthony agreed to send organizer Carrie Chapman Catt to help, and Meredith wrote to Anthony about the situation in Colorado while Carrie Chapman Catt traveled around Colorado organizing.

On November 7, 1893, the men of Colorado voted for women's suffrage. Meredith stayed involved in politics after that, however. In 1894 she became part of the editorial staff of the Rocky Mountain News, where was the first female journalist in Colorado, and probably the United States, to cover the legislature. In 1902, she helped write Denver's first city charter as one of only was four female delegates to the Denver City Charter convention. She was the vice chair of the Democratic Party State Central Committee from 1904 until 1908, and in February 1904 she became one of the people from Colorado to testify to the House of Representatives' Committee on the Judiciary in favor of the suffrage amendment. She was also elected City Election Commissioner in 1910, and served as such until 1915. In 1917 she moved to Washington, D.C. to work at the National Democratic headquarters.

Meredith also wrote three novels - The master-knot of human fate (1901), Heart of my heart (1904), and Under the Harrow (1907).

Legacy

The Ellis Meredith Papers are held in the Colorado Historical Society in Denver, Colorado.