News / Articles

Augusta T. Chissell

Kathryn S Gardiner | Published on 12/8/2025

Forgotten Foremothers

Profiles of lesser-known heroines in the fight for women’s right

“Just as men may be taught to do things that women do—when properly taught, women will vote, administer the affairs of the municipality and figure conspicuously in the business world. Capability and originality have no gender.”

Augusta T. Chissell

“Black women drive turnout for the Black community and are one of the most progressive voting blocs in the country,” said Sheila Jackson Lee, U.S. Representative of Texas, in 2022 in an interview with Aswad Walker for the website Defender Network.

Glynda C. Carr, President and CEO of Higher Heights, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting Black women running for office around the United States, shared a similar sentiment the year before with Defender Network reporter ReShonda Tate. “When you fire [Black women] up, we don’t go to the polls alone, we bring our house, our block, our church, our sorority and our union.” Sixty-seven percent of Black women are registered to vote. In 2024, 89 percent of Black women voters punched the card for Vice President Kamala Harris. This was the highest percentage of any demographic to vote for either party.

That sort of cooperation and communication takes determination, hard work, passion—and deep roots...

___

Augusta Theodosia Lewis was born in Baltimore in 1880 to Sarah Lewis and husband William. Her father was a southerner, born in Georgia before moving to Maryland. Mother Sarah was a lifelong Maryland resident. Both Sarah and William were biracial.

Carolyn Chissell, Augusta’s great niece by marriage, attended the celebration on Dec. 6, 2019, when Augusta’s home at 1534 Druid Hill Avenue, along with neighbor Margaret Hawkins’ home, received a commemorative marker and became a site on the National Votes for Women Trail.

In her younger years and early adulthood, Augusta lived with her parents and worked as a milliner, making hats for friends and locals. In 1914, 34-year-old Augusta joined the illustrious Dubois Circle, a literary and political discussion organization of Black women thinkers and leaders. She shared those halls with Baltimore’s brightest, including Estelle Young and her daughter Louise, and listened to guest speakers like famed writer Langston Hughes and suffragist Mary Church Terrell.

Also in the 1910s, she met Robert Garland Chissell, a Baltimore physician. The exact dates are unknown, but Augusta was certainly in her 30s when she married. She and Robert soon became movers-and-shakers in the city’s African American community. In 1931, she told a newspaper that, “should she marry seven times again, each husband would be a medic.”

The society pages of Baltimore’s The Afro American newspaper shared tales of their travels across the country and abroad, and even reported the time Robert’s car was stolen. The Afro American, still in operation today as AFRO News, was founded in 1892 by John Henry Murphy, an enslaved man freed by 1863’s Emancipation Proclamation. According to the paper, “By 1922, Murphy had evolved the newspaper from a one-page weekly church publication into the most widely circulated black paper along the coastal Atlantic and used it to challenge Jim Crow practices in Maryland. Following Murphy’s death on April 5, 1922, his five sons, each of whom had been trained in different areas of the newspaper business, continued to manage The Afro-American.” Members of the Murphy family still work at the paper today.

Augusta Theodosia Lewis Chissell, a Baltimore suffragist, wrote a weekly primer to help first-time women voters after the passing of the 19th Amendment. Photo courtesy Mark Young.

Augusta’s name was familiar to the paper’s readers, not because of her appearance in the society pages, but because of a resource she provided in the early 1920s.

While Maryland would not fully ratify the 19th Amendment until 1941 (and many fought it actively until then), women’s suffrage became the law of the land in 1920. But fighting for and winning the right to vote is one thing. Knowing how to cast a vote is another.

So, Augusta wrote a weekly column: “A Primer for Women Voters.” She provided general information, answered reader questions, and often gave guidance on which candidates deserved the votes of Baltimore’s Black women.

Each column began with the same paragraph: “This department is being conducted by Mrs. Augusta T. Chissell, a member of the Colored Women’s Suffrage Club of Maryland, for the benefit of women who wish to inform themselves in regard to their newly acquired duties and privileges as voters and citizens. Questions are invited and should be directed to Mrs. Augusta T. Chissell, care of The Afro-American.”

She fielded reader questions such as, “What question will be asked men on registration day?” “I am thinking of supporting [this party or that party]. What do you think?” “Should a woman register as ‘independent’?” “What is meant by ‘party platform?’”

Her column on Oct. 15, 1920, is an evocative snapshot of the range of questions she received. In a single column, she answered the broad question of “What good will it do women to vote?”—

(Her answer? “Just what it does for men. It will give women power to protect themselves in their persons, their property, children, occupations, opportunities and social regulations. It will enable them to get done what ought to be done. As it has made certain classes of men, formerly treated as inferiors because disfranchised, more nearly equal with other men, so it will make all classes of women more nearly equal with men and with each other.”)

—and the ballot-specific question of “I do not understand voting for the loans, will you kindly explain?” (Augusta had this question covered, too. “If the city is to meet its responsibilities adequately and in a sound business way, it must bring its water system, its sewage system, its harbor facilities, its schools…”)

Augusta used her column to educate women voters, specifically Black women voters, in the Baltimore area and beyond. “Potentially women are as capable as men,” she wrote in her Sept. 24 primer. “Just as men may be taught to do things that women do—when properly taught, women will vote, administer the affairs of the municipality and figure conspicuously in the business world. Capability and originality have no gender.”

The advice in “A Primer for Women Voters” was usually practical and clearly stated. “In Maryland, the man or woman who registers as an Independent cannot vote in the primaries,” she explained to a voter considering Independent registration. She encouraged women to think twice about supporting male candidates who opposed their own enfranchisement. “Women should weigh this question very carefully, not from the standpoint of resentment, but from the standpoint of justice.” Like many Black activists before her, such as Mary A. McCurdy and Eliza Suggs, Augusta supported the prohibition of alcohol and encouraged voting for “dry” candidates.

A common argument of the time was that women didn’t need the vote because their fathers, husbands, and brothers would obviously share their views and vote “for them.” Indianapolis suffragist Eugenie Kountze Nicholson had her laughing response to this. Augusta’s was measured and practical, while also angling for to flatter.

"In the realm of sentiment, man has always found his greatest freedom and delight in doing the will of the woman he loved. And were she not ignorant in matters of government and if she knew what she wanted and would make known her political convictions, he would hasten in this as in other things, either as a private individual or a public official to execute her will,” she wrote in her Oct. 8 column. She then argued that this sentimental nature of men is exactly why women should be enfranchised with the vote, so that men are executing a more fully informed will on behalf of their women. “Since it is only by doing and not simply by observing that one really understands or knows a thing, it is necessary that woman not only have access to the ballot, but that she use it.”

Augusta used hers, as well as her intelligence, her social skills, and her connections to improve conditions for her community. An August 1931 profile in The Afro American called her “a clubwoman, and civic worker. ... She is an interesting conversationalist, but her chief air is that of a go-getter. She never relinquishes an idea until it has been produced in concrete results.”

In the early 1900s, Augusta was a board member of the Colored Young Women’s Christian Association, as well as a founding member and first vice-president of Baltimore’s branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In 1936, she became the president of the Women’s Auxiliary of the Baltimore Urban League, an organization working to coordinate with white women interested in interracial social justice. The Maryland Women’s Heritage Center noted that, “As part of this effort, the Women’s Auxiliary distributed 350 copies of a pamphlet titled, How Can the Missionary Societies of Maryland Assist in the Adjustment of the Negro Problems in Our State at the annual meeting of the Women’s International Missionary Union.”

Through all these years, through her marriage, her writing, and all her civic work, Augusta remained a member of the Dubois Circle, eventually joining the Executive Committee and serving as the Executive Secretary.

Augusta with husband Robert Garland Chissell and nephew Mark Young in the 1960s. Photo courtesy Mark Young.

“Her hobby runs to music,” that 1931 profile stated. “She is the possessor of a charming mezzo soprano voice, plays a piano for amusement only, she says, but still does so well that she was able to foster an annual musical at the Y.W.C.A. each fall.” Indeed, so many issues of The Afro American contain advertisements for the various musical concerts and events she hosted to share her passion with her community.

Augusta died on May 14, 1973, at age 94. She was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery beside husband Robert, who died in 1964. The newspaper in which she’d helped first-time voters learn the steps, and in whose society pages she and her husband traveled, sang, danced, and organized also announced her death. In the days following, alongside public funeral arrangements, The Afro American shared a letter from reader Juanita Jackson Mitchell, herself a colleague from the NAACP and the first Black woman in Maryland to work as a lawyer.

Juanita wrote in remembrance of Augusta. “A woman of refinement and comparative wealth, who was a patron of music and the arts, Mrs. Chissell also possessed a keen sense of her personal responsibility to participate in the ongoing struggle for freedom in which Maryland’s black citizens were involved through the NAACP.”

The daughter of two biracial parents, the 1931 profile described Augusta as “auburn-haired” and having gray or blue eyes. Juanita highlighted the choice this gave Augusta, and the character revealed by her choosing. She said, “The fairness of her skin which enabled her to move more freely in white America did not lull Mrs. Chissell into a false sense of security. She chose to share the burdens of her brothers and sisters of darker hue under the bitter cross of racial segregation. ... We owe to our children and our children’s children the story of Augusta Chissell and the valiant women of this city and state who fought for the many new freedoms we now enjoy and take for granted.”

“African American women began forming their own clubs in the 1880s and founded the National Association of Colored Women in 1896,” said U.S. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee. “African American women have been at the forefront of fighting for equality issues prior to passage of the 19th Amendment... Today, as a result of the suffragist movement and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, we have 127 women serving in Congress of which 22 are African American and 48 are women of color.”

Sheila shared the numbers from 2022. Now, in 2025 in the 119th Congress, those numbers are: A total of 151 women, 61 of which are women of color, and 31 are Black women. The Pew Research Center reported, “The number of women of color in the new Congress is the same as it was at the start of the 118th Congress, which was sworn in January 2023. This is the first Congress in about 15 years to have a count that is not higher than the one before it.”

Yet—for the first time ever in United States history—two Black women are serving in the Senate at the same time. One is Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware, and the other is Angela Alsobrooks, from Augusta’s own state of Maryland.

Sources:

Defender Network: Political Power of Black Women: Reflections on 100 years of suffrage

Defender Network: Black Women & Voting Strength: Urged to flex their political muscle

Maryland Women’s Heritage Center: Augusta “Gussie” Theodosia Lewis Chissell (1880-1973)

Mount Auburn Cemetery: Augusta Chissell and Margaret Hawkins worked side-by-side for women’s suffrage

Find A Grave: Augusta Theodosia Lewis Chissell

The Afro American, Augusta’s Primers for Women Voters: Sept. 10, 1920; Sept. 24, 1920; Oct. 8, 1920; Oct. 15, 1920

The Afro American: Jan. 27, 1922; Aug. 17, 1923; May 8, 1926; Aug. 1, 1931

Wikipedia: Augusta T. Chissell

Pew Research Center: Voting patterns in the 2024 election; 119th Congress brings firsts for women of color

Return to Previous Page