Suffragist Linda Deziah Jennings honored with signage at Pleasant Ridge cemetery

But not as lengthy as the campaign to secure for women the right to vote, a decades-long fight whose leadership ranks in Washington state included the daughter of a pioneer La Conner family.

Linda Deziah Jennings, 1869-1932, is being honored now for her many contributions to the women’s suffrage movement, which ranged from speaking engagements, authorship of persuasive magazine articles and the editing of a thematic cook book whose popular recipes shared pages with voting rights essays.

In observance of the centennial anniversary of passage of the 19th amendment, which granted women in all states the right to vote, Jennings’ gravesite at Pleasant Ridge Cemetery east of town was selected for commemorative signage as part of the national “Here Lies a Suffragist” project.

“Our office received a call asking for permission (to place the sign),” Pleasant Ridge Cemetery Secretary Lori Buher told the Weekly News last week.

It came as little surprise to Buher and others in the La Conner area that Jennings would be saluted by groups involved in “Here Lies a Suffragist,” essentially a virtual cemetery for the movement’s revered heroines.

Jennings merits recognition solely for her editing of The Washington Women’s Cook Book, published in 1908, when she was in her late 30s.

“La Conner residents deserve to be proud of this contribution to Washington women’s suffrage,” Wende Sanderson, president of the League of Women Voters of Skagit County, wrote of Jennings’ role with the ground-breaking cook book in a guest column penned for the Weekly News earlier this year.

“The Washington Women’s Cook Book,” historical issues essayist Paula Becker adds, “soothed men who worried that voting women would throw off their domestic traces, and offered suffragists a Trojan Horse. The thick pro-suffrage crust surrounding homey recipes invited a woman to peruse the message of equality while warming the oven to bake Hot Water Sponge Cake.”

But “The Washington Women’s Cook Book” was just one of many literary highlights for Jennings, a skilled and insightful writer, who earned a loyal readership as a contributor to Pacific Monthly and The Coast magazines.

Her short story, “The Finding of a Prodigal,” which appeared in 1902, reflects Jennings’ commitment to social affairs. Three years later she wrote “The Rural Phone,” a light-hearted and comical account that mocks men who opposed women’s suffrage, flinging deft jabs at a sexist man insensitive to women over their use of the telephone.

In between, Jennings served as a keynote speaker for the Skagit farmers Institute.

Born shortly after the end of the Civil War, Jennings moved from her native New Jersey with parents Isaac and Margaret James Jennings to the La Conner Flats. She attended the University of Washington prior to her involvement with the Washington Equal Suffrage Association, which held its first convention in 1895.

Jennings did not stop there.

“She participated in various suffrage organizations throughout her life as well as taking in other events that contributed to both the civil rights and suffrage movements,” according to her biographer, Daniel Li, of the University of California-Berkeley.

In 1903, Jennings attended the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where the first-ever moving sidewalk was displayed.

Thanks to Jennings and the other suffragists, America was by then moving as a nation – though ever so gradually – toward granting women the right to vote.

Today, more than 68 million American women vote in elections.

In Washington, the state historical society is encouraging the public to visit gravesites of suffragists on Election Day.

Jennings’ legacy, of course, continues to stand the test of time.

“Her life,” Li insists, “largely speaks to the movement she supported, a life independent of men, and fighting for equality with them.”