MINNIE QUAY
Suffragette
By Mary Jane Taylor
One way we know for certain Minnie Quay was a member of the Utah Women’s Democratic Club (WDC) is due to documents describing her 1917 (possibly 1918) termination from the Club. Additionally, her dues were refunded, and her “personal political sincerity” questioned by WDC president Hortense Haight Nebeker.
Mary McCluster Prior (Minnie) was born in California on November 20, 1872. She completed elementary school, and at the age of 22 married Robert Quay, a prominent Salt Lake businessman. They had two children together. She lived primarily in Salt Lake City but spent a period of time in Garfield County when her husband was appointed postmaster there .
Minnie belonged to National Women’s Party (NWP), a more militant organization than the WDC-sanctioned National American Woman Suffrage Association. The NWP organized a picket line which marched in front of the White House beginning January 10, 1917. For the next two and a half years, 6 days a week, almost 2000 women took turns on the picket line. At that time picketing was unprecedented in the United States, and considered a dramatic and very aggressive form of political expression.
Minnie and another Utah woman, Lovern Robertson, were invited to Washington DC by NWP leadership, to join the picket line. (A trip to Washington DC from Utah to participate in a political event in 2021 requires planning, and most of all commitment. For a woman to leave her family and travel across the country in 1917 would have been a very significant event.) Minnie and Lovern were among the 41 picketers who protested outside the White House on November 10, 1917 and were arrested for obstructing traffic, and sentenced to 30 days in prison. The night of November 14, 1917 is infamous in suffragette lore as the “Night of Terror”. The suffragettes were transferred from prison to the Occoquan Workhouse
“where the prison superintendent ordered approximately 30 guards to brutalize the imprisoned suffragists. Several of the women were chained, beaten, choked, and even violently force fed when they engaged in a hunger strike….[Minnie] was dragged in the dark to a filthy freezing cell and the superintendent threatened to use straitjackets, gags, handcuffs, and the whipping post.”
Minnie returned home to Utah. Her protest actions were considered extreme, and perhaps theatrical, to members of the Utah WDC, resulting in the dramatic action of terminating her membership in the Club.
She remained a committed suffragette. Her husband stated that “she never has forsaken the cause of suffrage since she cast her first vote”. It is important to realize that Minnie, as a citizen of the state of Utah, had the right to vote in municipal, state-wide and national elections. Her actions were on behalf of the women who had not yet been enfranchised.
The victims of the “Night of Terror” created a level of sympathy for the cause of the suffragettes, ultimately contributing to the passage of the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. That year, a U.S. Court of Appeals cleared the 41 formerly imprisoned women of all charges for civil disobedience.
Minnie died in Salt Lake City on February 15, 1946, and is buried in the Mt. Olivet Cemetery.
Quote from “The Silent Sentinels, Lovern Robertson & Minnie Quay”, written by Rebekah Clark for Better Days 2020; Narrative based heavily on Rebekah Clark’s document and information from Ancestry.Com.