Virginia Women Who Shaped— And Won— Fight For Voting Rights

By Rosaland Tyler
Associate Editor
New Journal and Guide

Who knows how many women and African Americans will slide behind the wheel of a car in November, drive to the polls, and zip past three highway markers that describe how three Virginia women helped them gain the right to vote.

The 2026 Women’s History Month theme, “Leading the Change: Women Shaping a Sustainable Future,” brings their pioneering efforts into focus.

A Lynchburg highway marker, for example, was installed in 2020 at the Court St. United Methodist Church. The marker explains how Virginia Suffragist Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis Otey rolled up her sleeves and worked with the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia in Lynchburg in the early 1900s. Otey joined forces with her mother. They fought for a woman’s right to vote by launching the state’s second suffragette organization.

Meanwhile, a Norfolk marker erected in 2020 shows that 60 years ago, Evelyn Butts rolled up her sleeves and went to court to end the poll tax. She won the landmark 1966 Harper v. State Board of Elections lawsuit in a 6–3 Supreme Court decision. A third highway marker erected in Fairfax County in 2023 describes how Annie E. Harper and Gladys Berry filed an anti-poll tax lawsuit in 1964. It was combined with Butts’ lawsuit.

The way a snowball barrels down a hill and gains momentum, these Virginia women changed the political landscape because they ploughed on. Their efforts have had a dizzying impact.

A 2022 report by the League of Women Voters, for example, showed women now register to vote at higher rates than men. As of 2026, 53 women have been elected to serve as governor of a U.S. state.

Last year, in March 2025, a total of 155 females served in Congress–26 women senators and 129 women representatives (4 more than the 118th Congress). And Kamala Harris, a former California senator, ran for the presidency in 2024 after serving as the nation’s first female vice president.

This means you can compare these three pioneering women’s impact to renewable and sustainable fuels like wind energy, solar energy and hydropower since their efforts have sparked and still fuel change.

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This year Virginians installed their first female governor, Abigail Spanberger, four years after a record number of all-female gubernatorial matches were held in 2021 nationwide in five states: Arizona, Alabama, Iowa, Michigan and Oregon.

Voters chose Spanberger over another female gubernatorial candidate, Winsome Earl-Sears, the state’s sitting first Black female lieutenant governor. Spanberger  and Ghazala F. Hashmi, a female Muslim elected lieutenant governor of the Commonwealth, made history when they were  sworn in on Jan. 17, 2026, along with the Commonwealth’s first Black attorney general, Jay Jones.

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This year’s Women’s History Month theme not only shows how the historic women in Virginia sparked change but how they squeezed voting advocacy efforts into a demanding schedule. They cared for their families. They shook hands at political rallies, knocked on legislators’ doors in Richmond, and delivered passionate speeches. They made it look easy, in other words.

Their resumes suggest otherwise. Otey, a White woman, was born in Lynchburg on Oct. 4, 1880. She earned a degree at Bryn Mawr College, returned to Randolph-Macon Woman’s College for one year, and relocated to study at the University of Chicago from 1903–1904. Otey later moved to Berlin where she earned a doctorate in economics in 1907 at the University of Berlin. She was a first cousin of Nancy Witcher Langhorne Shaw Astor, the first woman to serve in the British House of Commons.

Otey, who joined her mother in supporting suffrage, was a founding member of the Lynchburg Equal Suffrage League.

“I believe.   .   .that different individuals should bring their differing gifts and powers to the formation of this government, which is of them and by them and for them,”

Otey said in one speech, “A Confession of Faith,” published by the Virginia Suffrage News in November 1914. “The woman’s qualification for citizenship is as valid as the man’s…I believe genuine democracy to be the sanest and justest form of government.”

For Black women, gaining the right to vote involved challenging the gender barriers Otey fought against and also racial barriers.

About 50 years after Otey’s Confession of Faith speech, Evelyn Butts waved goodbye to her family in Norfolk and soon put a foot on the frozen plaza located outside of the United States Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. Butts was in the nation’s capital on a cold wintry day in January 1966 to change history. 

Photographers captured her waiting to hear the Supreme Court decision. She wore a stylish black hat and a matching coat that she’d stitched together on her sewing machine in the two-bedroom home that she shared with her husband and children in Norfolk.

“When she died in 1993, the Virginia Senate adopted a resolution calling her one of the most influential leaders of the last three decades,” said her daughter Charlene Butts Ligon, a retired veteran who wrote, “Fearless: How a Poor Virginia Seamstress Took on Jim Crow, Beat the Poll Tax, and Changed Her City Forever.”

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“My mom believed in the American ideal and she knew the poll tax was an impediment for black and poor people,” Ligon said in a March 3, 2020 interview in Style Weekly. “She always said that voting is your voice and she realized you must have people in public office who believed in that ideal. “She learned the rules of voter registration and gave confidence to first time voters. She traveled around with a voting machine to demonstrate how to use it.”

After Evelyn Butts’ advocacy eliminated the poll tax, she registered nearly 3,000 voters in one six-month period, and led a political organization that helped elect both Black and White candidates.

Her legacy is reflected in generations of political leaders. In 1995, her name graced a street sign on Elm Street, which was renamed in her honor.

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Meanwhile, two more trailblazing stories were unfolding in nearby Fairfax County.

Two Black Virginia females were squeezing voting advocacy duties into their already hectic schedule. Annie E. Harper and Gladys Berry filed a lawsuit with Butt’s lawsuit that helped to end an annual poll tax that excluded over 85 percent of Black voters in their county. Harper, age 79, was a retired domestic worker living on social security. Berry, age 42, was an unemployed domestic worker.

“They courageously agreed to join the fight against the poll tax which was included in the Virginia Constitution in 1904 to suppress the Black vote. It was blatant discrimination,” Virginia Delegate Paul Krizek said when their names were emblazoned on a highway marker that was unveiled in July 2023 on Fordson Road in Gum Springs, Va.

“Annie E. Harper died at age 98, in 1983, and is buried locally in Snowden Cemetery. She, and the others, deserve this recognition today and forever,” Krizek said at the 2023  unveiling ceremony for the highway marker. They made “this historical marker possible.”