Annie Nowlin Savery (born Annie Nowlin, 1831, London – April 14, 1891, New York City) was an American suffragist and philanthropist based in Des Moines, Iowa. She is known as a pioneer feminist and activist for woman suffrage. She began taking part in the woman suffrage movement in the 1860s, and became a leader in the county and state, speaking widely and helping establish organizations to support it.
After a bill to amend the state constitution for woman suffrage was defeated in 1872, Savery worked on other civic interests. She donated to the city public library, and helped found the first public hospital in the city. In 1875 Savery and another woman became the first two women graduates of the University of Iowa College of Law, where she studied the rights of married women. She passed the bar and was licensed to appear before Supreme Courts. Savery was posthumously inducted into the Iowa Women's Hall of Fame in 1997.
Early life
Annie Nowlin was born in London in 1831 and immigrated as an infant with her family to the United States, where they settled in New York. As a young woman, she married James C. Savery, a young businessman and real estate speculator born November 30, 1824, in Massachusetts. They married in Saratoga Springs, New York, on January 20, 1852.
They moved to Des Moines, Iowa, in April 1864, then a town of 1500. They bought the log Marvin House for $3,000, and adapted it as a hotel, which she ran for a period. They had a house built on Grand Avenue, where they later did much entertaining.
Meanwhile her husband built a modern hotel with partners, which opened in 1862 as the Savery Hotel. Her husband reinvested revenue from the hotel and by 1870, the value of their real estate had increased from $10,000 to $250,000 ($ in dollars) as the city developed and settlement increased. For decades, Des Moines also was important as a city on the migrant trail of pioneers to the West and flourished with trade. The couple sold the Savery Hotel in 1878, and the new owners renamed it as "The Hotel Kirkwood".
Among his successful enterprises, her husband was one of the founders of the American Emigration Company, which recruited and helped settle nearly one hundred thousand immigrants from Scandinavia in Iowa and nearby states. Later he invested in banking and western lands, and in mining in Montana.
While not known to have much formal education in her early life, Annie Savery read widely and deeply, and was known for her study of many fields. She was the center of intellectual life in Des Moines, and supported culture. Accounts vary as to her later study: one says she hired a tutor to teach her the French language. According to The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa, she taught herself French. In the 1870s she entered law school at the University of Iowa, graduating in 1875.
Career
Savery is best known as a feminist pioneer and for her early participation in the woman suffrage movement in Iowa, beginning in the 1860s. She made her first speech about woman suffrage in January 1868 in Des Moines. In 1870, she later helped start the first woman suffrage society in Polk County, Iowa.
During the 1870s, she was on the executive committee of the National Woman Suffrage Association. Savery worked closely with leaders such as Lucy Stone, Isabella Beecher Hooker, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony. When Stanton and Anthony collaborated with Victoria Woodhull, who supported free love, the partnership garnered negative opinions, especially in conservative Iowa. Woodhull gained national prominence after her testimony before Congress about women's suffrage. Savery worked to negotiate the difficulties, continuing to stress that women could support woment's rights independent of their opinions about such side issues as free love.
An Iowa woman suffrage bill was passed in committee in 1870 to amend the state constitution. If it was passed a second time in a succeeding session, the bill for a state constitutional amendment would be released to be voted on by the public. It was debated in 1872 by the full state legislature, and the controversy about Woodhull and free love proponents in the women's movement derailed important support. The bill did not pass a second time. Afterward, many activists in the state retreated and the movement was dominated by conservatives. They withdrew support from Savery as their spokeswoman. No woman suffrage bill was proposed in Iowa again until 1916, a few years before the national constitutional amendment was passed in 1919, giving women the vote.