Name Elsie Hill | ||
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Elsie Hill (1883–1970) was an American suffragist, as were her sisters Clara and Helena Hill. She was the daughter of Congressman Ebenezer J. Hill. She taught French in Washington, D.C. at a high school after graduating Vassar College in 1906, and was a leader of the D.C. Branch of the College Equal Suffrage League when Alice Paul and Lucy Burns became active in Washington. She was lifelong friends with Alice Paul.
Biography
Elsie Hill was involved in the planning of the Woman Suffrage Parade of 1913, and notably reached out to African American students during the planning of that event. In 1914-1915 she joined the Congressional Union of Woman Suffrage’s executive committee, and headed efforts to establish branches of the Union in South Carolina and Virginia. In July 1916 she spoke at a street meeting in St. Paul, Minnesota, during a Prohibition Party convention (while representing the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage) and the convention did endorse a plank advocating a suffrage amendment. Alice Paul sent Hill on public tours to campaign in favor of women's suffrage in 1916.
She was arrested for speaking at a Lafayette Square meeting in Washington D.C. in August 1918, and was arrested in Boston in February 1919 for picketing President Woodrow Wilson upon his return from Europe.
In 1921 she married Albert Levitt but kept her own name, as was noted in the New York Times. Also that year she chaired the National Women's Party's convention, and she was the Party's National Council chairwoman from 1921 until 1925. (The National Women's Party was simply the Congressional Union of Woman Suffrage with a new name.) In 1924, Hill and other members of the Party visited President Calvin Coolidge to lobby on behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment.
In 1956 she and Levitt divorced.
In 1968 Hill was a passenger on Pan American Airlines' first flight from New York to Moscow.
The Elsie M. Hill Papers are held at the Archives and Special Collections Library in the Vassar College Libraries.