Stewart, Ella Jane Seass, 1871-1945

Elvira "Ella" Seass Stewart was born on February 22, 1871, in Arthur, Illinois, to F. Levi and Elizabeth Powell Seass. She attended Eureka College and received her A.B. in 1890 and her A.M. in 1893. As a student, she secretly became engaged to her classmate and future Illinois state senator Oliver Wayne Stewart. He introduced her to public speaking and to speaking on the topic of woman suffrage. She made the women's movement the subject of her senior address at Eureka. Oliver and Ella married on August 20, 1890. Oliver Stewart died on February 15, 1937, in Normal, Illinois. The 1940 census lists Ella Stewart as widowed and residing as a boarder in Chicago. She died in 1945.

After her marriage, Ella Stewart earned an A.B. in 1892 from the University of Michigan, where she heard her first speech on woman suffrage. She accompanied her husband on his own lecture tour and spoke at these meetings on the women's movement. When the Stewarts arrived in Chicago, Ella found the movement in disarray and worked to rebuild the organization at the state level. She organized twelve of the twenty-one suffrage clubs in Chicago. She additionally lectured for the franchise department of the National Woman's Temperance Union in Chicago from 1898-1908. In 1905, Stewart was elected president of the Illinois Woman Suffrage Association after serving as vice president from 1902-1905. During her presidency, she also acted as the recording secretary for the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).

In 1910, she ran for the position of trustee for the University of Illinois on the Prohibition Party ticket. She was defeated but publicized her belief that alcohol was "inherently threatening" to women in an article titled "Woman Suffrage and the Liquor Traffic," which was published in 1914. She delivered the keynote address at the Twenty-third Annual Convention of the Kentucky Equal Rights Convention in Oct. 1912. The convention report described her speech "The Modern Basis of the Demand for Equal Suffrage" as "a brilliant discourse."

As a result of Stewart and her colleagues' efforts, Illinois obtained partial woman suffrage by 1913, and in October, Stewart embarked upon a two-week speaking tour of southern Illinois towns to continue organizing suffragists. She also addressed the Senate that year in which she likened the ballot to a tool of society. Stewart declared that it possessed a utilitarian purpose "to record the consensus of public opinion" and argued that women were capable of handling the ballot. She reminded the senators that women held opinions on governmental affairs which they indirectly expressed in their clubs. In addition to her suffrage work, Stewart herself was a member of the Chicago Woman's Club, the Woman's City Club, and the American Association of University Women among others.