Stratford’s Suffrage Movement Has Deep Roots
By David Wright
Town Historian
Stratford’s Suffrage Movement Has Deep Roots
The first participant in Stratford’s equal suffrage movement of which we have records was a woman named Vivianna Snowden. She went by the name Anna Oliver in her professional life and dealings.
Anna Oliver was the first woman to graduate from an American theological seminary and was a pioneer Methodist Episcopal Church preacher and pastor. She was born near New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1840. Baptized Vivianna Olivia Snowden, she changed her name in the early 1870s so as not to embarrass her family when she decided to enter the ministry.
Educated in Brooklyn public schools and Rutgers Female College in New York City, Oliver began her career as a public school teacher in Connecticut. Anna moved with her parents and siblings to Norwalk before 1860. In addition to teaching, she took an active role in women’s suffrage and temperance movements in her adopted state for the next eight years. She left Connecticut before 1870 because she did not feel women’s suffrage was flourishing in Norwalk.
In 1868, Anna volunteered to teach black children in Georgia under the auspices of the American Missionary Association. Inadequate facilities, domineering male supervisors, and hostility from the southern white community tested her commitment. A year later, when she learned that the AMA paid female teachers less than men who did the same work, Oliver resigned. She rejoined her family in Connecticut for a time, resumed her interest in women’s issues, and took up painting. She soon relocated to Cincinnati, partly to study landscape painting and partly because the Ohio women’s rights movement was more advanced than in Connecticut.
Oliver’s temperance talks in Ohio’s town halls and churches encouraged her to think about becoming an ordained minister. In 1873 she enrolled in the Boston University School of Theology. Armed with a B.D. degree (1876) and a license to preach, Oliver assumed the pastorate of First Methodist Episcopal Church in Passaic, NJ and later, Willoughby Avenue Church in Brooklyn. In 1880, Oliver led an unsuccessful campaign for ordination at General Conference. Without ordination, she continued as pastor of the Willoughby Avenue congregation until 1883 when the church was abandoned.
Oliver remained in Brooklyn until 1884 and devoted much energy to temperance and suffrage, dress reform, and health care for women and children. Anna moved to Stratford to live with her sister at 923 Academy Hill Road about 1885. She continued to preach her message of personal holiness and social responsibility until her death in 1892 in Greensboro, MD. By opening her home to a growing stream of women who were pioneering ministerial roles in Victorian churches, she became a respected mentor and role model.
Anna died broken in both health and spirit, believing she had failed in her attempts to gain equal suffrage for women. However, Anna’s niece, Lillian Snowden, took up Anna’s fight for equal suffrage after the turn of the 20th century and became one of Stratford’s prominent Suffragettes. While Anna was likely not the founder of the Stratford Equal Suffrage Association, her shadow loomed large in its founding.
When Anna died in 1892, she left a portion of her estate to her nieces for their college educations, and another portion to the National Woman Suffrage Association.
