Woman's National Weekly.
52 Issues
[Suffrage]. Woman’s National Weekly. Published by the Regents Publishing and Mercantile Corporation. Industrial Branch of the American Woman’s League. Mabel G. Lewis, President. E.G. Lewis, editor. University City, St. Louis, MO: 1911-1914.
52 vols., folio; each volume six pages; occasional browning, creasing and light tearing along folds; each volume folded in half horizontally and individually wrapped in plastic; in a specially made cloth slipcase.
A broken run of 52 volumes of this suffrage weekly edited by Edward Lewis. Each with a slim slip of paper affixed to the cover with the name and address of the subscriber in type: “Howe, Albert, 5 Jones st.” Includes volumes from volume 13 #97 (June 3, 1911) to volume 17, #141 (March 14, 1914). Rare; OCLC locates single issues at two libaries, and a complete run at the State Historical Society of Missouri.
The Woman’s National Weekly was the organ of the “Woman’s Republic” organized in St. Louis by publisher E.G. Lewis to give women political power and, not coincidentally, to support Lewis’s publishing empire. The American Women’s Republic was a quickly-formed successor to the American Women’s League, which Lewis had organized as a giant subscription army to support his family of publications (Keep Your Face to the Sunshine: A lost chapter in the history of Woman Suffrage, by Pauline Meyer, Alcott Press, 1980). Despite these efforts, by June 1910 Lewis’s empire was in shambles. One thousand of the League’s 100,000 members met in University City for the organization’s first convention since its founding in 1908. There Lewis, the eternal optimist, urged them, “Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadows,” inspiring words which had become his and the League’s motto. They signed a Declaration of Equal Rights and a constitution as militant as that of any emerging nation. It read, in part,
…all experience has shown that woman is more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right herself by abolishing the forms to which she has been accustomed. When a long train of abuses and usurpations pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them to absolute servitude it is her right, it is her duty, to seek by all peaceable means to bring about better conditions and to provide new guards for her future security…
The women, whose ranks included such distinguished women as Belva Lockwood, the first woman to practice law before the Supreme Court, chose as their president Lewis’s wife Mabel, invested with the authority to appoint a full cabinet: Secretaries of Peace, Interior, State, Treasury, Commerce and Industry, Education and Social Service, and, of course, an Attorney General.
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