Carmita Aileen Murphy, from the 1957 UNH Yearbook, “Granite.” Image courtesy of the University of New Hampshire Library Digital Collections.
New Hampshire women take for granted that they can vote. Many believe that with the passage of the federal suffrage amendment in 1919 New Hampshire women were automatically given complete voting rights. It is not so. Constitutionally women did not have full rights in New Hampshire until Carmita Murphy proposed they should in 1956, and it was placed on a state ballot and approved (by vote) in 1958.
I came across an interesting story published in several newspapers on the same date of 19 March 1958. “Mrs. Carmita A. Murphy of Dover ran a one-woman suffrage campaign as a delegate to a 1956 constitutional convention to have the word ‘male’ deleted from those sections of the constitution. She won. A proposed constitutional change will appear on the state ballots in November. When New Hampshire ratified the 19th Amendment in 1919, the Legislature ordered the word “male” deleted from the state voting restriction laws. The change had never made in the state constitution.” Continue reading
