In March of 1884, Eureka Springs resident Lizzie Dorman Fyler became the first Arkansan to attend the annual National American Woman Suffrage Association convention. Fyler, one of the first female lawyers in the state, took the lectern on the fourth day of the convention and detailed the extensive legislation recently passed expanding the rights of women in Arkansas.
The “crowning glory,” Fyler believed, was the 1882 act giving Arkansas women the right to vote on the prohibition of alcohol.
“Women’s active and earnest participation in the execution of this law,” she said, “is teaching our men that true womanliness knows no boundary line.”
To learn more about women’s suffrage in Arkansas, visit ARvotesforwomen.com.