Susan M. Chesebrough Bain

(1854–1937) Susan was one of the powerhouse Glens Falls women behind the first local study club, Friends in Council (1884) and the first suffrage club in Warren County, the Political Equality Club of Glens Falls (1893). She was elected vice president of the PECGF in 1901, and later served as president hosting many meetings in her home on South Street.

In 1914, she became the Warren County Suffrage leader, and served on the canvass committee with Lucy Wooster Chapman, and Adelen Walsh Bayle. On June 7, 1894, as Chair of the Campaign Committee of the 21th District, Susan addressed the New York Constitution Convention Committee in Albany, stating “there is one cogent reason for woman suffrage–woman herself. Womanhood and motherhood are as strong arguments for the right to vote as fatherhood and manhood. Though a woman, she is a citizen, a house-holder, a tax-payer, and ought to have, according to the accepted principles of our form of government, a voice in the expenditure of the public money she helps to pay and the making of laws she is bound to obey. As wife, mother, daughter and sister, she is a silent and uncounted unit in the State, except as she appears in the census returns. By what authority is she thus governed by proxy?”

Anthony, S. B., & Sewall, M. W. (1895). Constitutional-amendment campaign year: report of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association, twenty-sixth annual convention, Ithaca, N.Y., November 12- 15. Rochester, NY: Charles Mann, printer, Elm Park. Bio by Tisha Dolton.