Emma Smith DeVoe

(August 22, 1848 – September 3, 1927)

Eureka College faculty member (early 1870s)

Emma Smith was born in Roseville, Illinois, but her family eventually settled in Washington, Illinois. Some sources suggest that she attended Eureka College as a student, but this fact remains uncertain. What is known is that Miss Smith joined the faculty in Eureka College's music department in 1870.

Miss Smith taught music at the College for several years before she married John Henry DeVoe in 1880 and moved west to the state of Washington. In a biographical sketch she later thanked "Father and Mother Darst" and attributed her success "to influences started and aspirations born" while she was in Eureka.

John Henry DeVoe was an attorney who worked for the Chicago & Alton and other railroads and his duties eventually took him to the Far West. The DeVoes established a household in Tacoma, Washington, that soon became a central part of that community's social scene. (Today, the DeVoe Mansion is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.) As a prominent woman of affluence in Tacoma, Emma Smith DeVoe became active in social causes of the day including the campaign for woman's suffrage. As a skilled strategist, she worked at the local and the national level to advance the cause of women's rights in the United States.

DeVoe was a suffragist trained by Susan B. Anthony. Her approach with men on the subject of woman's suffrage was non-confrontational. DeVoe's gift to the movement was to be intellectual and well-mannered in order to "persuade them, convince them, [and] argue their resistance down." In 1890 she became a national lecturer for the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and traveled the country in this capacity. She sometimes ended her pro-suffrage speeches with a song.

DeVoe was actively involved in the campaign to achieve woman's suffrage in South Dakota (1890) and in Idaho (1896), but she organized and led the grassroots effort to win the vote for women in the state of Washington in 1910. The ripple effects of her success were even felt in central Illinois when the Eureka Equal Suffrage Federation (EESF) formed in April 1912 as a group of women and men from the College and the Eureka community joined together to support passage of a woman's suffrage measure in Illinois.

DeVoe's success in Washington, coming after fourteen years of relative inaction within the movement, brought new life to the women's suffrage campaign, and within a decade the Nineteenth Amendment ("Anthony" Amendment) to the U.S. Constitution had been adopted in 1920 granting the vote to women. She may have single-handedly jump-started the national woman's suffrage movement through her success in Washington State.

In the aftermath of this tremendous victory, DeVoe founded the National Council of Women Voters, the forerunner of the League of Women Voters, and served as the organization's president for several years. Sensing that achievement of the suffrage was not enough, she became one of the early advocates of passage of an "Equal Rights Amendment" as early as the 1920s.

Speaking at a rally in Elmira, New York on October 31, 1915, Emma Smith DeVoe had stated "Though a woman's home may be within the four square walls of her house, she has a wider home; it is the state in which she lives; her home is America; her home is the world. Let us try to have our home better for our having been in it." Her life and her work represented the values of the Eureka College Founders who determined that educating women was a worthwhile pursuit.

On October 7, 2000, Emma Smith DeVoe was one of nineteen new inductees who joined the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York. Other notable women honored in the class of 2000 included author/reformer Ida Tarbell, WCTU founder Frances Willard, author Eudora Welty, and Attorney General Janet Reno.