Local suffragette paves way for modern day women voters

The late suffragist Alice J. Curtice Moyer-Wing of Greenville and Bobbie Hope Roberts of Poplar Bluff have the same passion about women and voting.

Moyer-Wing was a noted suffragist, writer and politician, who spent 21 years living near Greenville.

She was widowed at 30, with two young children and had to learn a career to support her family. She worked as a business correspondent and a traveling sales woman. Her life was researched and is detailed in historical displays at Old Greenville Recreation Area, as part of the record of that community.

Moyer-Wing became an active organizer, writer and speaker in the women’s suffrage movement in Kansas and Missouri. She helped bring the voting rights campaign to rural southern Missouri, traveling on horseback to rural areas of the Ozarks.

She remarried in 1914, and two years later, she and her husband, Turner G. Wing, moved to a farm east of Greenville.

She had been accosted, choked and threatened by a political opponent in St. Louis for her voting rights speeches.

After the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1919, she was one of two Missouri women to share in nominating a presidential candidate.

She was appointed in May 1921 by Missouri’s Gov. Arthur Hyde to lead the Department of Industrial Inspection, making her the first woman to hold a state cabinet-level position.

In 1924, she ran for Congress, but the party bosses were not ready for a woman representative. She served again as a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1928, but never ran again for office.

She died in August 1937 and was buried in the Crossroads Cemetery near her Ozark home.

A few decades later, south of Greenville, in Poplar Bluff, Bobbie Hope Roberts was born into a family who took voting seriously.

Roberts, who is 80 years old and lives in the Twin Towers, is passionate about staying informed and voting.

When she hears someone say, “I’m not gonna vote. I don’t know anything about the candidates,” Roberts comments, “Why don’t you ask someone? Read the paper. If you don’t know a local candidate, you know somebody in town, talk to them.”

Roberts’ grandfather was the late Grover Greer of Poplar Bluff. Greer was a mortician, who was politically active, she said.

Her mother, the late Anita Greer Hope, “was raised Republican,” Roberts said. “I was raised Republican because of grandpa.”

Growing up in a politically active family, Roberts said, “when I got old enough to take a hammer and nail, we would go and put grandpa’s posters up through the county when he was running for coroner.

“It was my first introduction into politics. Politics was always discussed in our home, the pros and cons, but grandpa’s attitude (was) if we couldn’t discuss it civilly, we couldn’t discuss it at all.”

Roberts’ mother worked as an election judge for Scott County.

“She would collect the ballots at the end of the election and take the ballots to Scott City to be counted,” she said.

Roberts said, “the first thing I did when I turned 21 was go register to vote, and I’ve missed very few elections.”

When Roberts thinks about this year’s election, she calls it “a damn mess.”

First of all, Roberts said, “we started calling each other names and liars and putting out lies. That’s not what they’re running for; they’re supposed to be running for us.

“It sounds like what the (parties) want is power. They don’t care all that much about the people. They want the power, the glory.”

Like Moyer-Wing, Roberts’ views became stronger “when I became a widow and realized that my insurance went up. That everything else went up because I was quote, unquote, a single woman, even though I was a mother.”

“I started watching more things. Do you know of the lack of freedom that women had? Should I be paid more because my husband died, and now I’m the sole breadwinner,” Roberts said. “I couldn’t get credit without someone cosigning.”

Her next thoughts were, “I have a right to my own body. Nobody else has that right, not the Supreme Court. Nobody, but me and God.

“I’m not saying that I have a right to tell you how to live. I don’t have a right to tell you how to worship. I don’t have a right to tell you how to do anything. Slowly, but surely, we’re again allowing men to take our rights.”

When she hears “my vote doesn’t count anyway,” Roberts said, “attitude is doing all the rest of the damage.”

She feels on a good election 50% of those who are registered actually vote, but normally 15% will probably be voting.

While Roberts changed some of her political thoughts, she never shared them with her grandfather.

“He may have been bedridden, but I guarantee he would have pitched a fit,” she said.

“When you can start thinking on your own, and your whole philosophy of life may change or it may not, right,” she said.

Roberts’ advice is “don’t believe everything you hear. Check things out. I do.”