Alan LeQuire's Women Suffrage Monument unveiled in Nashville's Centennial Park

From his very first days, Guilford Dudley III knew what it meant to have his grandmother fight for him.

As an infant, he couldn't keep anything down — not even his mother's milk.

Doctors told his parents to gift the organs of their malnourished baby and prepare for his death.

But his grandmother, the esteemed and well-to-do Anne Dallas Dudley, refused to accept it. She berated the doctors until they gave her the name of someone who would offer a second opinion — a man they called "a country quack." She put her grandson in the car and drove straight out to the farm. There, he was diagnosed with allergies and given unpasteurized milk from a goat.

He lived — and he learned the power of his grandmother's will.

A little-known story of the well-known suffragist, Anne Dallas Dudley fought for her grandson just like she fought for thousands of women before him, leading the statewide and national movement that helped achieve the ratification of the 19th Amendment by the Tennessee General Assembly and add it to the U.S. Constitution.

"She was a pretty extraordinary person from the day I was born," Dudley says.

On Friday — Women's Equality Day — the city of Nashville will recognize just how extraordinary as it unveils in Centennial Park a women's suffrage monument featuring Anne Dallas Dudley and four other women who worked for women's equality. The piece, created by renowned Nashville sculptor Alan LeQuire, was commissioned by the Tennessee Woman Suffrage Monument organization to commemorate the importance of Tennessee's pivotal role in granting women the right to vote.

The five women honored in the new monument were present during the final ratification battle in 1920: Anne Dallas Dudley of Nashville; Abby Crawford Milton of Chattanooga; J. Frankie Pierce of Nashville; Sue Shelton White of Jackson; and Carrie Chapman Catt, national suffrage leader who came to Tennessee to direct the pro-suffrage forces from the Hermitage Hotel. 

Each played a critical role in history — Dudley a significant force among them.

"She had two lovely children, a devoted husband and everything a lady could want," Dudley's granddaughter Trevania Henderson said. "And damned if she didn’t want to vote, too."

On May 1, 1916, Dudley staged a parade through the streets of Nashville to demonstrate her support for women's right to vote.

As the story goes, at least five dozen automobiles traveled from the Tennessee Capitol to Centennial Park along with her. Businesses displayed banners proclaiming "Votes for Women." And the mayor, Hilary Howse, declared a holiday. Those women who could not leave work threw flowers from the windows of their offices on to the cars below.

More than 2,000 people greeted the caravan led by Dudley, her husband, and their two children, when it arrived at the Parthenon.

It was known to be Nashville's largest women's suffrage rally.

As Dudley spoke, the crowd listened with intent. She was, her granddaughter Trevania Henderson says, "fantastically eloquent."

"If you read both her writings and accounts of her speeches, her phraseology and her wit and her ability to think on her feet is pretty impressive."

Henderson recalls from family stories and historic accounts a tit-for-tat her grandmother had with those who said only men should vote, because only men bear arms.

Dudley's response: "Women bear armies."

To have a female make a speech outdoors to such a crowd as Dudley did in the park that day was, at the time, hugely scandalous.

But, her granddaughter says, Dudley was "not only eloquent but quite elegant."

As the daughter of a wealthy cotton mill owner, she came from an upper class family. She attended Ward Seminary and Price's College in Nashville. She married Guilford Dudley, one of the founders of the Life and Casualty Insurance Company, and the couple maintained a country estate on the west side of the city.

She walked in a purposeful way. She didn’t amble. She was always going to do something. She was beautiful to look at, with short tight curls framing her oval face, and features that were extremely fine.

"I don’t think any sculpture could really reproduce the elegance she had in her looks," her grandson, Guilford Dudley III, says now.

"She was a very refined person who went beyond her class in order to stand up for what she thought was right and just — and to be inclusive instead of exclusive."

Adds Henderson: "She was the visual rebuttal to the depiction or characterization of suffragettes who were male hating and unhappy with their lives,"

After she joined a local suffrage association in 1911, the Tennessee Equal Suffrage Association elected Anne Dallas Dudley president in 1915.

The elite circles in which she moved often frowned upon the idea of women voting, yet Dudley worked tirelessly for the right. She organized suffrage leagues throughout the state and spoke across the country. Under her leadership, suffrage became more acceptable.

"She crossed the Jim Crow line in terms of enlisting black women, and that was light years ahead of her time," Guilford Dudley III recalls. "And she was willing to take the criticism. She was very strong in her convictions."

After the Centennial Park parade, the state became a major part of the suffrage movement, and Dudley became a member of the national board of directors, elected as the third vice-president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

In 1920, Dudley attended the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco as the first woman delegate-at-large. On August 18 that same year — after all the other Southern states rejected the 19th Amendment — Tennessee became the center of the suffrage movement.

Rep. Harry Burn, after getting a letter from his mother, changed his vote to yes for suffrage, and the legislature made Tennessee the deciding state to ratify the 19th Amendment.

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That vote changed the course of American history, just as Dudley's actions did for her contemporaries and her descendants.

Thanks to her force, her grandson knew her for the first 23 years of his life.

As a boy, he spent Sundays with his grandmother. She took him and his brother to church and to Percy Warner Park. At the end of the day, she served them banana pudding. And when Guilford Dudley III went off to boarding school in Massachusetts at age 13, his grandmother wrote every other week. She included bible passages and quotes from Abraham Lincoln.

When his father would sometimes put down ideas he got at school, thoughts about racial equality and the like, his grandmother would take him aside and offer her support.

"I think one of the things my grandmother stood for is the very things some other aristocrats in my family did not stand for, which was inclusiveness of people of different races and gender and ethnic backgrounds," Guilford Dudley III says. "... She stood so much for humanity rather than exclusivity."

Dudley died unexpectedly on Sept. 13, 1955, in her Belle Meade home. She was 78 years old.

Henderson never knew her grandmother; the suffragist passed before Henderson was born. But she came to understand her grandmother's importance, as if by "osmosis," she says.

On the table in the family's library there was a famous photograph of Dudley reading to her children. The black and white portrait, with a contemplative-faced young girl wearing a large bow and a small boy with a tiny smirk and a bowl hair cut, was circulated with suffrage publicity materials in an effort to neutralize stereotypes of suffragists as unwomanly radicals.

That photo now hangs in Henderson's kitchen in her Boston home. And a portrait of her grandmother graces her dining room.

When anyone comments on them, they often get a lecture on who her grandmother was — and why she was.

"We, as a nation, take our ability to vote so for granted," Henderson says, "and it's important to remember how hard people fought for it."

Yes, Henderson is proud to have her grandmother's achievements recognized with a monument to her cause.

But, she says, "I think it's far larger than that."

Reach Jessica Bliss at 615-259-8253 and on Twitter @jlbliss.

Tennessee Woman Suffrage Monument unveiling

When: 11 a.m.-1 p.m., Friday

Where: Centennial Park (2500 West End Ave., Nashville)

The ceremony: Anne Dallas Dudley's grandchildren Guilford Dudley III and Trevania Henderson will speak at the event, as will several past Nashville mayors.

Watch live: If you can't make it out to the event, tune in to the livestream at: https://livestream.com/tndv-television/tnwomansuffrage. The video will also be archived.

More: After the unveiling, sculptor Alan LeQuire will host an open house from 1-4 p.m. at his gallery and studio (4304 Charlotte Ave., Nashville). 

Open House includes:

• A chance to meet the sculptor, Alan LeQuire
• A tour the sculptor's studio
• A view the new exhibit of the LeQurie's work, including a limited-edition etching of the 'Suffragists'.
• Parnassus' Pegasus book mobile will be on hand with books about suffragists, sculpture and other related topics  
• Retro-Sno and other food trucks will be on site. 

LeQuire has created numerous public commissions in his 35 year career. At age 26, he began Athena Parthenos, the looming sculpture inside the Parthenon at Centennial Park. It took eight years to complete and was unveiled in 1990. In 2003, he presented Musica to the city of Nashville. Forty feet tall with nine dancing figures, Musica stands in the roundabout at the gateway of Nashville's famed Music Row. Other commissions over the years have come from Vanderbilt University and the Country Music Hall of Fame.