Anna Whitehead Bodeker (ca. 26 July 1826–26 October 1904), woman suffrage activist, was born in Midland Park, Bergen County, New Jersey, the daughter of Jesse Whitehead and Sophia Candy Whitehead, both of whom were English immigrants. When she was ten years old the family moved to Virginia. Her father oversaw construction of the Manchester Cotton Mill in the city of Manchester and served for many years as its superintendent. The family lived in a house adjacent to the mill, and Whitehead's parents evidently provided her with a good education. On 15 January 1846 she married Augustus Bodeker, a German immigrant who had settled in Richmond ten years earlier. Then a clerk for a local druggist, he soon opened his own pharmaceutical business. She assumed responsibility for the care of two teenage members of her husband's family, and she had three daughters, the first of whom died in infancy. In 1862 the family purchased a two-and-a-half-story brick house in Church Hill in Richmond. Bodeker spent part of the Civil War in Albemarle County but lived in Church Hill for the remainder of her life.
By late in the 1860s Bodeker was well versed on women's issues and had begun to follow the activities of the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), the larger and more radical of the two major suffrage organizations founded in the United States in 1869. When she learned that NWSA activists, including Paulina Wright Davis, were visiting Richmond late in January 1870, Bodeker invited them to her house to discuss the suffrage movement with friends and neighbors. The visitors left the meeting impressed. Reporting on her trip in the Revolution, a prosuffrage weekly, Davis described Bodeker as a "most bril[l]iant woman" and predicted that if she could "be induced to take the lecturing field, she might reach the whole south and do incalculable good."
Virginia State Woman Suffrage Association
With this encouragement Bodeker made plans to organize a woman suffrage association in Virginia. She and several other Richmond women drafted and submitted a "Defence of Woman Suffrage" to the Richmond Daily Enquirer, which opposed extending the franchise but published the essay in two installments on 18 and 23 March 1870. The article promised benefits to society if women were granted the vote and focused on the connection between the franchise and women's economic opportunity and independence. Bodeker also arranged for the prominent New York suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage to visit Richmond. On 5 May 1870 Gage addressed a small group of suffrage supporters. The following evening she joined Bodeker and others in founding the Virginia State Woman Suffrage Association, with Bodeker as president. The founding officers also included United States District Court judge John C. Underwood and his wife; Alexandria attorneys Lysander Hill and Westel Willoughby and their wives; Freedmen's Bureau school superintendent Ralza M. Manly; the novelist Martha Haines Butt, a native of Norfolk, then resident in New York; Elisa Washburne, wife of Richmond's superintendent of schools; Georgianna Smith, a physician's wife; and Sue L. F. Smith, daughter of a former president of Randolph-Macon College.
Bodeker was elated and invited several well-known suffrage leaders to speak in Richmond during the meeting of the General Assembly that began on 7 December 1870. Susan B. Anthony, hoping that Bodeker would be able to ignite a viable suffrage movement in the South, accepted and gave evening talks at the federal courthouse on 9 and 10 December. Anthony advocated a constitutional amendment granting women the vote, but despite advance publicity and personal invitations to the members of the House of Delegates, on both nights the audience consisted of only a few legislators and women. Because many white Richmonders avoided the federal courthouse as a result of its association with Reconstruction, Bodeker attempted unsuccessfully to move the second night's talks to the House chamber in the Capitol. Nevertheless, she used Anthony's second appearance to test her own oratorical skills. In introducing Anthony, Bodeker delivered a fierce denunciation of the subordinate status of women and concluded with a stirring call for immediate legislative action.
Far from being discouraged by the low turnout, Bodeker was energized by Anthony's visit and pushed forward with her own schedule of lectures and appearances. In January 1871 she hosted a presentation by the southern-born suffragist Lillie Devereux Blake, and two months later Paulina Wright Davis, Josephine S. Griffing, and Isabella Beecher Hooker spent several days in Richmond with Bodeker. These speakers attracted larger audiences than Anthony had, but few Richmond women attended their lectures, and their presence failed to create a groundswell of support for the suffrage movement.
At a suffrage convention held in New York in May 1871, Bodeker was one of thirty-four women whom Anthony selected to serve on the National Woman Suffrage Educational Committee, a group charged with coordinating future NWSA activities. The committee urged association members to cite the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and attempt to vote in local elections in the autumn of 1871. Bodeker accordingly appeared at the designated polling place for the second precinct of Marshall Ward in Richmond to cast her vote. When the election judges refused to accept it, she insisted on placing a paper in the ballot box stating that "by the Constitution of the United States, I, Mrs. A. Whitehead Bodeker, have a right to give my vote at this election, and in vindication of it drop this note in the ballot-box, November 7th, 1871."
During the 1872 assembly session the Virginia Woman Suffrage Association sponsored another suffrage program featuring Matilda Joslyn Gage and Laura de Force Gordon, who had recently campaigned unsuccessfully for a seat in the California state senate. At Bodeker's request, Henry County delegate George William Booker presented her petition for legislation granting women the right to vote. The petition was referred to the Committee for Courts of Justice, which ignored it, and the assembly once again rose without seriously considering woman suffrage.
Spiritualism
Whether prompted by frustration at her inability to effect suffrage reform in Virginia or by some other reason, Bodeker late in 1871 began to take a deep interest in spiritualism. By 1872 she believed that she had developed exceptional powers as a medium. Convinced that she could commune directly with Heaven and that she had a responsibility to interpret God's plan to all who would listen, Bodeker began to express her unorthodox spiritual views forcefully at home and in public. Her behavior became so erratic that on 19 September 1873 her family had her confined against her will in the Western Lunatic Asylum in Staunton. Following her release on 20 October 1874 Bodeker returned to her home in Richmond, but she never resumed her suffrage activity and by 1876 had been replaced as Virginia's representative to the National Woman Suffrage Association by Caroline Putnam, a Northumberland County teacher. By 1909, when the suffrage movement revived with the founding of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia, Bodeker's legacy as the founder of the state's first suffrage organization had faded into obscurity.
In 1882 Bodeker published Medium We, a collection of her spiritualist writings. After the death of her husband on 26 July 1884, she continued to live in the family's home with her surviving daughters, neither of whom had married and the elder of whom became the head of the household. Anna Whitehead Bodeker died in Richmond on 26 October 1904 and was buried in Hollywood Cemetery in that city.
Sources Consulted:
Sandra Gioia Treadway, "A Most Brilliant Woman: Anna Whitehead Bodeker and the First Woman Suffrage Association in Virginia," Virginia Cavalcade 43 (1994): 166–177; Richmond City Death Certificate, gives incomplete birth date of 26 July 182_ but notes age at death as seventy-eight years, three months, and zero days; Hollywood Cemetery interment record (Library of Virginia microfilm) gives same age at death, implying birth in 1826; United States Census Schedules, Richmond City, 1900 (gives birth date as Sept. 1827, with incorrect first name and birthplace), Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; Benjamin B. Weisiger III, ed., Marriage Bonds and Ministers' Returns of Chesterfield County, Virginia, 1816–1853 (1981), 18; Richmond Daily Enquirer, 3 Feb., 18, 23 Mar., 9 May, 10, 12, 13 Dec. 1870, 7, 9 Mar. 1871, 31 Jan., 1 Feb. 1872; Revolution, 17 Feb. (first quotation), 19 May 1870, 26 Jan., 16, 23 Mar., 18 May 1871; Richmond Daily Dispatch, 8 Nov. 1871 (second quotation); Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 1870–1871 sess., 29–30, and 1871–1872 sess., 244; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, et al., History of Woman Suffrage (1887–[1922]), 3:19, 823–824; dates of hospitalization confirmed by Western State Hospital, Staunton; obituary in Richmond Times-Dispatch, 30 Oct. 1904 (gives variant birth date of 27 July 1827).
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Sandra Gioia Treadway.
How to cite this page:
Sandra Gioia Treadway,"Anna Whitehead Bodeker (ca. 1826–1904)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2001 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.php?b=Bodeker_Anna_Whitehead, accessed [today's date]).
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