Alice J. Curtice Moyer-Wing , The Ozark Suffragist

Alice J. Curtice Moyer-Wing , The Ozark Suffragist. Writer, Organizer, Women's Rights Activist, Suffragist, Politician, Child Labor Advocate.

"All that is necessary to elect women to official positions is that men work to elect them , just as women work to elect men." , Alice C. Moyer-Wig, 1928, "If I had a gift of some great educational or political right, and it was in my power to confer it upon men, they wouldn't even have to ask me for it. They wouldn't have to wear themselves out petitioning me to give them something that is no more mine than theirs." , Alice Curtice Moyer, 1912

, Alice J. Curtice Moyer-Wing (1866-1937) was a noted suffragist, writer, and politician. For the last 21 years of her remarkable life she lived near Greenville and considered this to be her hometown., Widowed at age 30 with two young children, Alice learned stenography and supported her family by working as a business correspondent and then as a traveling saleswoman. Beginning in 1903, she became an active organizer, writer, and speaker in the women's suffrage movement, first in Kansas and later in Missouri., In 1915, as the field secretary and the only paid staff member of the Missouri Equal Suffrage Association, Moyer-Wing traveled throughout the state; speaking, fund-raising and organizing for women's voting rights. Although she had lived and worked in cities most of her adult life, Alice was raised on an Ozark farm and had a deep affection for rural life and people. Between 1916 and 1919, Moyer-Wing famously helped bring the voting rights campaign to rural southern Missouri, traveling by horseback to reach remote areas of the Ozarks that were not well served by roads or railroads. She chronicled her efforts in a series of humorous, well illustrated and widely read articles in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Sunday Magazine., Alice remarried in 1914 and in 1916 she and her husband, Turner G. Wing, moved from St. Louis to a rural, 40-acre farmstead east of Greenville. From that remote outpost on the edge of the Ozarks, Alice Curtice Moyer-Wing continued to organize, speak and write in support of women's voting rights. Moyer-Wing reported that she and Turner had moved to Wayne County for his health. But their move to the country also followed the receipt of hate male and a frightening incident on February 16, 1916, during which she had been accosted, choked and threatened by a political opponent on a St. Louis city street following one of her voting rights speeches., In 1919, after passage of the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed women the right to vote, Moyer-Wing turned her efforts to party politics. Prior the the 1920 election, the first in which women could vote for president, Moyer-Wing made 343 political speeches in 54 Missouri counties on behalf of Republican candidates. Alice was selected as a delegate to the 1920 Republican National Convention, where she was one of the first two Missouri women to share in the responsibility of nominating a presidential candidate and setting the party platform., In May of 1921, Missouri's newly elected Republican governor, Arthur Hyde, appointed Moyer-Wing to lead the Department of Industrial Inspection, making her the first woman to hold a Cabinet-level post in state government. Moyer-Wing was responsible for enforcement of health and safety regulations in factories, mines, mills, railroads, theaters, restaurants and hotels. Workplace safety, protection from occupational diseases, food safety, and product labeling were among her department's many concerns. Moyer-Wing championed fair wages for working women and improved working conditions for all workers, including women and children. She hired women industrial inspectors and they were paid a salary equal to their male counterparts. Moyer-Wing served for eight years as Missouri's Chief Industrial Inspector, successfully overcoming the objections of one state senator, who remarked during her confirmation that an industrial inspection was "no place for a woman.", Moyer-Wing ran for Congress in 1924, but was dismayed to find that the local party bosses were not yet ready for a woman representative. Lacking their support, she was defeated in a three-way Republican primary. In 1928, Moyer-Wing served as a delegate to the Republican National Convention but declined to run again for office. During the Great Depression, she wrote articles about life in rural Missouri for Scribner's, Reader's Digest and The Forum. Alice J. Curtice Moyer-Wing died suddenly in August 1937 and her farm 8 miles east of Greenville. She is buried in the Crossroads Cemetery near her Ozark home.