Ryman Auditorium

The Ryman Auditorium, originally constructed as a tabernacle for religious revivals, hosted numerous events related to suffrage, including an 1897 meeting of the National Council of Women. At that meeting the organization’s president, and one of the first ordained female Methodist ministers, Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, spoke. Also in attendance here that day was none other than Susan B. Anthony. 

The Ryman also hosted a national Women’s Christian Temperance Union convention here in 1907. The members of the temperance union were divided on the subject of women voting, but in Nashville in 1909, the Tennessee WCTU persuaded the state General Assembly to pass a law that completely banned alcohol in Tennessee—nine years before national prohibition. If women could successfully get Tennessee’s lawmakers to pass prohibition, surely they could also persuade them to give women the right to vote.

Dr. Anna Howard Shaw returned to the Ryman as the President of the national suffrage association, that held its convention here in 1914. At the convention, Jane Addams and Carrie Chapman Catt joined Dr. Shaw in addressing delegates from across the country about the importance of gaining the right to vote. Then Tennessee Governor, Ben Hooper, even brought his twelve-year old daughter, Anna, to show his support for the cause. Two years before the national convention, Sylvia Pankhurst, the radical British suffragette, made the Ryman her first stop in the southern United States as she traveled across the region. As the guest of the Nashville Equal Suffrage League, she spoke to an audience who burst into frequent enthusiastic applause. 

The Ryman was also the site of a mass meeting of opponents of suffrage on August 19th, the day after the General Assembly’s vote to ratify the amendment. The meeting was called in a last attempt to prevent the signing of the amendment by the governor. Some anti-suffrage legislators even fled the state in an attempt to prevent a quorum in the General Assembly. Their efforts failed, and on August 24, 1920, Governor Roberts certified Tennessee's ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.

The tour continues from the Fifth Avenue side of the Ryman. Turn RIGHT and continue walking north on Fifth Avenue, up the hill. Cross Commerce and Church Streets. Be sure to note Nashville’s thriving arts district on Fifth, a street at the heart of Nashville Civil Rights movement. Visit Nashville Sites’s Civil Rights Tour to learn more. When you reach Union Street, turn RIGHT and walk half a block until you reach 417 Union Street. This is the former site of the Satsuma Tea Room, and our next stop.