Header image: Home of the Suffrage Club // Northwest Room, Everett Public Library

On election day, November 3rd, 2020, a local resident leaves a note to Dr. Ida Noyes McIntire near the space where her clinic once existed at 3129 Colby Avenue. “Thank you Ida Noyes McIntire and all the women who fought for women’s right to vote. - Raniere” While today the place is occupied by the Colby Professional Center, Dr. Ida Noyes McIntire had opened her clinic and practice on the corner of 32nd and Colby Ave in 1901. She was a surgeon and physician who specialized in treating diseases specific to women and children, as well as a civic leader and suffragist.

Shout out to the suffragettes from Raniere // Courtesy Starlyn Nackos and the ThankHER2020 project

Dr. Noyes’s achievements were notable enough to have numbered her among the subjects of the Woman's Who's Who of America: A Biographical Dictionary of Contemporary Women of the United States and Canada, Volume 1. The publication illustrates her ascent; brought up and educated in and around Detroit Michigan, she became a teacher in her early 20s. At age 30, she married a man more than twice her age - then left to pursue a degree in medicine at the Women’s Medical College through Northwestern in Chicago.

Image // Northwest Room, Everett Public Library

For two years, her post-grad clinical studies carried her from NYC, to Dayton, Ohio and even overseas where she worked and studied in London, Paris, Vienna and Berlin. In 1896, she took a post in Denver at the State Girl’s Industrial School overseeing the medical staff there. Colorado had awarded women the vote by popular referendum in 1893 and the experience placed Ida at the center of a successful suffrage network that was now eyeing the same end for the remaining states. Ida’s influence was broad as she served on state charity and corrections boards, on the National Prison Congress and on the Board of Pardons - where she likely met “then-Governor” Alfred McIntire. It was in Denver that she took a more active role in civic life and that fervor followed her to her next great undertaking.

Image // The Labor Journal, Volume 20, Number 39, 14 October 1910

In Washington, the campaign for suffrage had been a demoralizing stutter-stop-regress. From its territorial introduction in 1854 to a back and forth with the legislature and supreme court - granting and revoked suffrage three times before Washington was even a state. By 1898, Washington suffragists were discouraged and the robust infrastructure of the campaign had begun to crumble. Perhaps this was the challenge that drew Dr. Ida Noyes McIntire to move her practice to Everett. They were in need of leadership and hope from someone who had experienced what it was like on the other side of the struggle.

In 1899, Dr. Noyes became Dr. Noyes McIntire when she and Alfred were married in New Haven, Connecticut. They soon relocated to Everett, Washington and Dr. Ida Noyes McIntire got immediately to work influencing “the suffrage question”. She became a member of the Everett Suffrage Club and opened her clinic up to hold the meetings there. She gave lectures and became a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines on the topic.

The movement soon regained its momentum. Ida shared the helm of the Suffrage Club as Vice President with Ella Russell as President. The Club found a permanent residence on the 3rd floor of The Commerce Building when it was built 1910, just in time for the election homestretch. The work of the Everett Suffrage club was known throughout the movement for its aggressive coverage in the press - regularly featured in publications like Votes for Women in the lead up to the election and in local papers like the Everett Daily Herald, the Everett Morning Tribune and the Labor Journal. Concern regarding the wording on the ballot provoked the Everett Suffrage Club’s creation of a giant banner that read "Vote for amendment, Article VI: It means vote for women" strung across Hewitt Ave. from their office in the Commerce Building - receiving mixed reactions from Everett residents. But in the end, it must have done the trick. In 1910, the women of Washington won and kept the right to vote.