Marilla Marks Young Ricker, Esq. Portrait by Kate Gridley The portrait hangs in the New Hampshire State House

The woman suffrage movement in New Hampshire—as in much of New England and the rest of the country—had its roots in the anti-slavery movement. Abolitionist Armenia S. White and her husband Nathaniel founded the New Hampshire Woman Suffrage Association in 1868. White served as the organization’s president until 1895. She continued to hold an honorary leadership position until her death in 1916 at the age of 98. She often opened her home in Concord to suffragist gatherings and donated money to the cause.



Marilla Marks Young Ricker of Dover showed up at the local polling place for the 1870 election and demanded that she be permitted to vote as a property owner and tax-payer. She was turned away but continued to demand the ballot every year for five decades. She was admitted to the New Hampshire bar in 1890; the next year, she was admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court. She ran to represent New Hampshire’s 1st District in Congress in 1897 but did not win. That same year, she petitioned unsuccessfully to become Ambassador to Colombia. She also attempted to run for governor of New Hampshire in 1910 but could not get her name on the ballot because she was not a registered voter. She ran without any expectation of winning but because, she told the Grand Forks Daily Herald, she wanted “to get people in the habit of thinking of women as governors.” She thought it might take at least one hundred years before a woman might be successfully elected, but she wanted “to set the ball rolling. There isn’t a ghost of a reason why a woman should not be governor or president if she wants to be and is capable of it.”