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In 1853, five years after the Seneca Falls Convention in New York, the meeting that launched the Women’s Suffrage Movement, a young Connecticut woman named Frances Ellen Burr attended the Women’s Rights Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. There, she was so inspired by speakers like Susan B. Anthony that she vowed to return to Connecticut to be an advocate for the cause.

Born in Hartford on June 4, 1831, Frances Ellen Burr became one of the first champions of the feminist cause within Connecticut. Soon after the convention in Cleveland, she petitioned the Connecticut General Assembly to formally discuss an 1867 bill to give women the right to vote. The bill ultimately failed, but the outcome motivated other Connecticut suffragists to action preparing petitions, speaking at hearings, and pressuring legislatures.

In October 1869, the state’s first suffrage convention was held, marking the birth of the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association (CWSA) of which Burr was co-founder along with Isabella Beecher Hooker. She would be the association’s recording secretary for the next 41 years while Hooker served as its director.

The CWSA boasted, at its peak, 35,000 members and was the most important suffrage organization in the state. For her part, Burr worked to win the vote for women first in school and local elections—succeeding in 1893-- and then on a national and state level. She also co-founded, with Emily P. Collins, the Hartford Equal Rights League in 1885, working as both treasurer and secretary. She encouraged membership from parties within and outside of the state, from all classes and backgrounds. But these early suffragists had little support from the general public. As Burr later wrote to Susan B. Anthony, she had been “pretty much alone here in those days.”

As a writer, speaker, stenographer and activist, Burr made an enormous contribution to the cause of suffrage in Connecticut. When she died in her home in Hartford in 1923—three years after the passage of the 19th Amendment—she had rallied support for women’s causes for over seventy years.Burr was one of Connecticut’s first suffragist organizers and co-founder of the Connecticut Woman’s Suffrage Association, the most important women’s suffrage organization in the state’s history. Frances Ellen Burr served as its secretary for 41 years.

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