Ellis Meredith

Who was Ellis Meredith?

Ellis Meredith was an American suffragist, journalist, and novelist, known as the Susan B. Anthony of Colorado. Her mother Emily R. Meredith was a suffragist as well. Ellis Meredith was born in Montana in 1865, and later moved to Denver, where she joined the Rocky Mountain News in 1893. She began writing the column A Woman's World for the Rocky Mountain News in 1889, where she advocated women's suffrage. In 1890 she and five other women founded the Colorado Non-Partisan Equal Suffrage Association. In 1893 she went to the Woman’s Congress at the Chicago World’s Fair in August 1893 to ask for help from Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone, leading suffrage activists, saying, "If Colorado goes for woman suffrage, you may count on a landslide in that direction throughout the west." Susan B. Anthony agreed to send organizer Carrie Chapman Catt to help, and Meredith wrote to Anthony about the situation in Colorado while Carrie Chapman Catt traveled around Colorado organizing.

On November 7, 1893, the men of Colorado voted for women's suffrage. Meredith stayed involved in politics after that, however.