Elvira “Ella” Seass Stewart

(February 22, 1871 – 1945)

Eureka College alumnus (Class of 1890); national suffragette leader

Besides being an alumnus of this institution, Ella Seass had another special connection to Eureka College. Her great-grandfather, Rev. Bushrod Henry, had been one of the Founders of the school and served on the first Board of Trustees when the College was chartered in 1855.

On August 20, 1890, just two months after graduation a marriage took place as Elvira Seass (Class of 1890) married her college beau Oliver Wayne Stewart (Class of 1890). The Stewarts wasted no time after leaving Eureka College to become involved in reform movements at the state and national levels. Elvira Seass Stewart would eventually serve several terms as a national officer (secretary and treasurer) in the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). She also served as the national president of the Equal Suffrage Association from 1905 to 1911. She was one of the women who was instrumental in having Illinois adopt woman suffrage legislation before it became national policy. Oliver Wayne Stewart was one of the national leaders in the temperance movement and campaigned nationwide for the adoption of Prohibition. From 1899 to 1919 Stewart was the chairman of the National Prohibition Committee. In 1904, he was briefly considered as a Vice Presidential candidate for the National Prohibition Party ticket. When the nation was considering adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment providing for Prohibition, the Stewarts organized "The Flying Squadron" - a group of temperance advocates who traveled around the country speaking in support of the Prohibition measure from 1915 to 1920.

In 1912, Ella Seass Stewart became the first woman to present a Founder's Day address at Eureka College. In that address, she spoke of her great-grandfather and the other Founders with these words: “They provided liberty for every soul to follow the gleam, and be true to himself. They realized that the only value in education is to change and modify, never to solidify. They were no dogmatists with rules of thumb—even though one phase of education here was to seek religious truth. They knew that even interpretation of doctrine as interpretation of literature or science may alter with varying perspective as an object when one is ascending a height.” She closed her address with a Puritan quote that she believed was fitting to her own Eureka College experience: “I was a radical in my day, be thou the same in thine.”

Motivated by these words, it is not surprising that the Eureka Equal Suffrage Federation (EESF) formed in 1912 as a group of women and men from the College and the Eureka community joined together to support passage of the suffrage issue in Illinois. Ella Stewart spearheaded this movement while serving as a national officer in the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Even though Ella Stewart traveled the country giving speeches on behalf of women's suffrage, she continued to make frequent visits to Eureka.

The notion of women's equality is one of the reform impulses that is woven into this institution from the time of its inception. When the Walnut Grove Seminary opened its doors in September 1848 - just two months after the Seneca Falls Convention ended - the school became the first in Illinois and the third in the nation to offer degree programs to women on the same basis as men. [Oberlin and Hillsdale are #1 and #2, respectively.]

In 1913 Illinois became the first state east of the Mississippi River to grant the right to vote to women. Certainly the work of the EESF that was built upon the efforts of those who came before had an effect upon this important reform.

Later in her life, Ella Stewart reflected upon her experiences at Eureka College and wrote:

"No spot is so dear to me as Eureka. My happiest associations cluster about it. In Rambles about its shady streets and neighboring rustic haunts, I have dreamed most pleasant dreams. Here is the birth-place and nourishing lap of ambitions and ideals, of happy friendships, of love's sweet dream and blest reality. My class-mates and associates are young in after-graduate life. Our future is yet to be unfolded. Our hopes and aspirations have not burned into cold, gray ashes on the hearth-stone of life's experience, but are still rainbow-tinted and dew-laden.

For the sake of our precious Alma Mater may all good purposes and high endeavors of her children come to bountiful fruition, and in adaptation of Rip Van Winkle's ever-ready toast, 'May she live long and prosper.'"