Christ Cathedral

The Tennessee suffragists who gathered in Nashville in the summer of 1920 were a diverse group of women that transcended religious and racial barriers. The group included Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish women. Here on Ninth Avenue North and Broadway, you’ll find Christ Church Cathedral, the house of worship for two of Nashville’s suffrage leaders—Anne Dallas Dudley and Kate Burch Warner. 

Anne Dallas Dudley was a local suffragist who rose to become a state and national leader. She was the daughter of a prominent family and a graduate of Ward Seminary. For more on Ward Seminary, see the Downtown Schools and Education Tour. Here in 1902, at Christ Church Cathedral, Anne Dallas married Guilford Dudley, one of the founders of the National Life and Casualty Insurance Company.

Dudley served as the first president of the Nashville Suffrage Association in 1911. Four years later, she became the president of the Tennessee Equal Suffrage Association. Then in 1917, Dudley was elected vice-president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). She was a tireless worker, campaigning throughout the state, organizing suffrage leagues, and speaking across the country. In 1914, Dudley became the first woman in Tennessee to make an open-air speech, which she delivered after leading a march of 2,500 women from downtown Nashville to Centennial Park —the first suffrage march in the South.

As the movement gained momentum, Dudley joined forces with Tessie Lowenheim, a suffragist and activist in the Jewish community. Dudley’s two children and Lowenheim’s three children often accompanied their mothers to suffrage rallies. This was a deliberate effort to show that women who wanted the right to vote were, in fact, caring mothers and not militant radicals. Adept at handling anti-suffrage arguments, Dudley responded to criticism that equated the right to vote with military service by pointing out that “men bear arms, but women bear armies.”

According to tradition, Anne Dallas Dudley first suggested the strategy to persuade Governor Albert Roberts to call a special summer session of the Tennessee General Assembly. She became the first female delegate-at-large at the 1920 Democratic National Convention. Anne Dallas Dudley is memorialized as part of a monument in Centennial Park dedicated to honoring Tennessee’s suffragist leaders, and the street behind the Hermitage Hotel, leading to the Legislative Plaza is named for her. You will see these sites later.

Also a parishioner at Christ Church Cathedral, Katherine Burch Warner was raised in Nashville and graduated from Vassar College. An early member of the local suffrage scene, she learned about politics through her father, John C. Burch, editor of the Nashville American newspaper and secretary of the U.S. Senate. Warner was twenty years older than most Tennessee suffragists and emerged as one of the movement’s most experienced public speakers. After serving as president of the local Nashville suffrage league, in 1918, she joined the Tennessee Suffrage League and became its president. She also worked to distance the image of this group from the more militant image of the National Woman’s Party. In 1920, she was chosen by Governor Albert Roberts to lead the state’s Ratification Committee.

Three months before the General Assembly’s session on ratification, Tennessee suffragists held their annual convention in the state house chamber. Dudley, Warner, and other Nashville women planned much of the meeting. At the meeting, Catherine Kenny, an Irish Catholic suffragist asked Frankie Pierce, an African American activist, to speak. Pierce addressed the convention crowd and told them that black women would use the vote to uplift their people—a prominent theme of the National Association of Colored Women. The fact that a woman of color was brought to the state capitol to speak, as an equal to white women, was a first for this strictly segregated city. Pierce is one of the women memorialized as part of the suffrage statue in Centennial Park. If you would like to learn more about another prominent African American reformer and suffragist—the formidable Nettie Napier—please visit our Early Black Life and Culture tour.

For more on the architecture and history of Christ Cathedral, please visit our Broadway Architecture and Old Time Religion Tours. Free tours are also offered by the Cathedral on Saturday mornings from 10:30 a.m. until noon and after services on Sunday mornings.

Continue walking down Broadway toward the Cumberland River. Along the way you will pass several historic buildings. For more visit Nashville Sites’s Broadway Architecture Tour. Cross Fifth Avenue North, before turning LEFT on Fifth Avenue. The Ryman Auditorium is ahead on your right.