When wealthy Winthrop matron Hannah Bailey paid her annual taxes, she always flipped the check over and wrote on the back “Taxation without representation is tyranny!”

Women’s History Month is a good time to remember Maine activists like Bailey, who had an instrumental role in establishing the vote for women. Bailey lived 80 years to see women take their rightful place at the polls. Born into a well-established Quaker family in New York, she married Moses Bailey in 1869. The couple moved to Maine, where Moses established a very successful oil cloth business in Winthrop. Moses died 13 years later, leaving Hannah to raise their son.

Hannah Bailey threw herself into the national movement for women’s rights, a cause that met with fierce opposition for years. She became an officer in the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in 1887 and served as president and business manager of the Woman’s Temperance Publishing Association.

In an interview in the Lewiston Journal in 1919, Bailey explained how the movement to give women the right to vote often intermingled with the push to make alcohol illegal.

“Some of us advocated prohibition because we believed it would help woman suffrage,” she said. “All of us, however, believed and worked for both reforms.”

Bailey was president of the Maine Woman Suffrage Association and worked with some of the leaders the national movement, including Susan B. Anthony.

“Miss Anthony was president of the National American Woman Suffrage society while I was treasurer of the council at the same time,” Bailey recalled. “Very naturally we were brought together a great deal, and I learned to love the woman for her ability, tact and sweet character.”

“None of the great advocates and workers had the tact and diplomacy of Susan B. Anthony,” Bailey said. “She was remarkably kind and never criticized her opponents harshly. She dealt in facts and figures that could not be answered except by sneers and abuse. As an attractive speaker she had but few equals.

“Devoted to the cause, she used every movement and phase of society as an argument for woman suffrage. Her personality was very charming, and this largely disarmed her critics,” she said.

Bailey talked to the press in 1919 on the eve of realizing one of the major goals in her life’s work. The constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote was just about to pass in the House of Representatives.

“After abusing us and fighting us all their lives, they are now trying to scramble into the band wagon,” Bailey wryly observed.

At the age of 80, Bailey felt not only a sense of accomplishment but also a sense of relief. “Our work has not been in vain,” she said. “The older ones like myself are nearly through These movements have gained such a tremendous headway that little more work remains to be done. The martyr spirit is no longer needed.”

Luann Yetter teaches writing at the University of Maine at Farmington. Additional research was provided by University of Maine at Farmington student David Farady.