19th at 100: Commemorating the Suffrage Struggle and Its Legacies in Northeast Ohio

Conventions at Case Hall

Case Hall was a noted concert and lecture hall which first opened near campus in 1867. The primary auditorium located on the third floor could accommodate 2,000 audience members who sat on "patent opera chairs." Over the years, Case Hall welcomed a variety of speakers including Horace Greeley, Henry Ward Beecher, and Mark Twain. The hall was also the meeting place of the first convention of the National Association of Woman Suffrage. 

Additionally, the American Women's Suffrage Association convention held in Cleveland on November 24-25, 1869, was also held in Case Hall. This convention signaled a schism in the national Women's suffrage movement that lasted over twenty years. This national organization of state women's suffrage associations formed as a less radical alternative to the National Woman Suffrage Association, founded earlier the same year by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Convention delegates from twenty-one states and supporters filled the large auditorium. Susan B. Anthony, the Reverend Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and former Clevelander Caroline Severance attended.

The AWSA (which published the Woman's Journal) advocated state-by-state enfranchisement, while its counterpart, the National Woman Suffrage Association (which published The Revolution) worked for a federal Equal Rights Amendment. The two organizations eventually merged, in 1890, into the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
 

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