Sarah Tarleton Colvin - Infinite Women

The following is republished from the WAPUSH campaign, an initiative to get women’s history into US schools.

Born: 12 September 1865, United States
Died: 22 April 1949
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Sarah Lightfoot Tarleton

Nurse, Author, NWP President

Sarah Tarleton was born on September 12, 1865 on her grandfather’s cotton plantation in Greene County, Alabama. Her father, Robert Tarleton, fought for the Confederacy during the American Civil War, while her mother, Sallie Bernard Tarleton, looked after Sarah and her sister, Maud. In her autobiography A Rebel in Thought, Sarah stated, “My greatest need, as a girl, was to feel some sense of importance — that is, to know that just because I existed I mattered… The tremendous effort used to compress a woman’s individuality into a uniform mold, be she rich or poor, is appalling” (Colvin 51).

In the late 1870s, Sarah briefly attended private school, before her parents had her educated by tutors, governesses, and an Oxford graduate. Her formal education ended when she was 17 years old, when her family moved to Europe, where she proceeded to study German. In December of 1890, at 25 years old, she returned to the United States and studied in the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing in Baltimore. She graduated from the Johns Hopkins Hospital training school shortly after and began working at the hospital. In 1894, she moved to Montreal, Canada to work at the Royal Victoria Hospital, where she met Dr. Alexander Colvin, who later became her husband. In 1895, she moved back to Baltimore to become a public health nurse, establishing the Baltimore Visiting Nurses’ Association and working as a secretary there. Two years later she moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, where she married Dr. Colvin, on June 1, 1897.

In St. Paul, Colvin helped found the Minnesota State Graduate Nurses Association, and served as the president from 1905 to 1910. In 1906, she drafted & introduced a bill that would provide for the state registration of nurses. She emphasized the importance of determined and united effort among nurses to secure passage, a sentiment which she would carry throughout her life in her various causes. The next year, she served as the first VP of the Nurses’ Associated Alumnae of the United States, helping obtain funding for the building and equipping of a tuberculosis sanitarium in Ramsey County, Minnesota.

In 1915, Colvin traveled to Washington, D.C. and discovered Alice Paul’s Congressional Union (CU), a controversial offshoot of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) which in 1917 became the National Woman’s Party (NWP). Colvin, recognizing that more women were entering the workforce and facing injustice and discrimination, was enthusiastic about Alice Paul’s controversial tactics like picketing in order to gain the right to vote. She reportedly believed NAWSA to be in “a completely static condition without possibility of progress.” Returning to St. Paul, she founded the Minnesota branch of the then-CU and became its president from 1915 to 1919. As president, she gave speeches, wrote letters, and lobbied elected officials.

Colvin embraced Paul’s militant protest strategies, and on October 20, 1916, Colvin and other suffragists were attacked by men while demonstrating outside a Chicago auditorium where President Woodrow Wilson was speaking. She was featured in her local newspaper for publicly speaking out against President Wilson, supporting the Republican party, & monetarily backing the suffrage movement.

The action ramped up when the U.S. became involved in World War I. Colvin’s husband served as a major in the army & acting surgical chie at Fort McHenry, and Sarah served as a Red Cross nurse in Baltimore. In 1918, NWP officials announced a boycott of Liberty Bonds. Colvin was outspoken in her support for this movement, stating that the party had little interest in giving money to “short-sighted, incompetent men.” Colvin’s close proximity to D.C. made it possible for her to participate in NWP demonstrations in the capital. She was a member of the Silent Sentinels, a group of women who picketed silently in front of the White House with signs and banners calling for women’s suffrage. In January 1919, Colvin was arrested for participating in a watchfire in front of the White House along with Alice Paul. She spent five days in a Washington jail, and went on a hunger strike while imprisoned. This was a tactic used by many dedicated suffragists to protest not being given the status of political prisoner, which would allow them more rights than ordinary criminals. Many of these strikers, including Alice Paul, were force fed. In A Rebel in Thought, Colvin described the hunger strike as “a most unpleasant experience.” Colvin was arrested for a second time and sentenced to another five days in jail in February 1919 during a highly publicized demonstration where Paul, Tarleton, Lucy Burns, & others burned Woodrow Wilson in effigy.

In the spring of 1919, Colvin participated in the Suffrage “Prison Special” Tour, in which 26 women, all of whom had been arrested for picketing the White House in support of women’s suffrage, organized a train tour to share their stories as political prisoners in the Occoquan Workhouse and D.C. jails. Their slogan was “From Prison to People” and they called their train the “Democracy Limited.” The suffragists traveled to 15 major cities in the United States, including many in the more conservative South, believing that Southern support was the key to passing a suffrage Amendment. The women wore replicas of their prison uniforms, gave speeches, and fundraised. A Suffragist article about the Prison Special described how their audiences in the West had “become a path of people freshly awakened to the deep importance of immediate national action.”

After the ratification of the 19th Amendment in August 1920, Colvin hoped to address income inequality and to pass an equal rights bill. However, an equal rights amendment fight did not come until decades later. Most suffragists believed their work was over after gaining the right to vote, and Tarleton parted ways with the NWP, returning to her home in St. Paul. However, in 1933 she was asked to rejoin the Minnesota branch of the NWP in the effort to support and preserve married women’s economic influence, and was even elected national chairman, though she only served for a few months. Instead, she chose to focus her efforts on important issues at home.

She became a Minnesota Farmer Labor Party activist, working to inform the populace about important issues. She served on the Minnesota State Board of Education from 1935 to 1941, using her position to lobby for better science education for girls and boys, equal pay and status for female teachers, nursery school funding, and better training and status for nurses. She also planned curriculum, managed budgets, and improved the overall state of education in the state. Shortly after her time on the board, she wrote her A Rebel in Thought, and published it in 1944.

Colvin died in 1949 in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her political activism and nursing reforms inspired the Sarah Tarleton Political Activist Award, which today is awarded by the Minnesota Nurses Association to a nurse or group of nurses who have taken action in furthering the political presence of nursing, and fight for positive changes to public policy concerning nursing. She died on April 22, 1949, and is buried at Roselawn Cemetery in Roseville, Ramsey County, Minnesota.