By Lynn Cohen
The June 12, 2021 Annual Town Meeting marked the 100-year anniversary of the first Annual Town Meeting in Westford in which women were able to participate. It was the passage of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution in August 1920 that finally gave women the right to vote and empowered them to have their voices heard at Town Meeting.
Ratification of the 19th Amendment was certified on August 26, 1920. Two days later, on Saturday, August 28, 120 Westford women (and 19 men) registered to vote during an eight-hour meeting of the Registrars of Voters at Town Hall. Over the next several months the Registrars continued to hold periodic, much shorter meetings to register voters, most of them women, at the Abbot Halls in Forge Village and Graniteville as well as at Town Hall. By February 5, 1921, just before the 1921 Annual Town Meeting, 310 women were registered to vote.
But how many women decided to take up their new responsibilities and attend their first Annual Town Meeting?
Unfortunately, records in the Town’s archives don’t explicitly tell us how many voters attended the February 14, 1921 Town Meeting, let alone how many of them were women. However, the next day’s Lowell Sun reported that “About 450 voters attended the Annual meeting of Westford yesterday, and among those present were many women.”
The minutes of the February 5, 1921 Registrars of Voters meeting record a total of 795 registered voters, so turnout of 450 would mean that well over half of the town’s voters attended Town Meeting. It would be heartening to believe that so many voters – many of them newly enfranchised women – were that civically engaged 100 years ago, but other reports may tell a different story.
The weekly Westford Wardsman had two reports on the Town Meeting in its February 19th edition. To understand them, be aware that back then Town elections took place on the same day and at the same place, Town Hall, as Annual Town Meetings. The election was held in the morning and the business part of the meeting was held in the afternoon.
The first Reports reads:
Weather for the annual town meeting Monday proved threatening early, but later was all that could be desired for a pleasant winter’s day to draw the voters to the town hall for the annual transaction of the town’s business. There was the largest gathering in the town hall for a long time, the attendance being estimated at fully 450.
Last year’s town meeting recorded about sixty voters [about a 13% voter turnout]. Monday’s voting [the 1921 Annual Town Meeting minutes record 243 voting in the election, a 30% voter turnout] was done in the lower town hall, but the afternoon session adjourned to the upper hall for the first time in the town’s history of town meetings. Both the hall and gallery were well filled, many in the gallery being young people who will be future voters. There were a large number of women present to take an active and intelligent interest in the day’s affairs.
The second Wardsman report, part of the Graniteville section, says: “Large numbers of voters both men and women attended the town meeting in Westford center on last Monday. It was the largest meeting in the history of the town.”
The Westford Wardsman accounts don’t make it clear if the “attendance…at fully 450” and “the largest meeting in the history of the town” refer only to the number of voters or include those in the gallery as well. Both the 243 voters in the Town election and the one counted vote recorded in the meeting minutes (Article 33, “Voted 152 to 12”) suggest that the Lowell Sun’s reference to 450 voters isn’t accurate (though perhaps by Article 33, most voters had gone home?). But even if 450 refers to all attendees and not just voters, that many people represents almost 15% of the town’s total population. To put that in perspective, 450 in attendance in 1921 is equivalent to about 3,700 residents attending a Town Meeting today.
It seems we can believe that so many people went to the 1921 Annual Town Meeting because, like us, they realized how historic the meeting was. ( July 2021 Musings, Westford Historical Society and Museum)