IN every successful movement for social change there is a moment when the generations cross paths, when an idea once deemed radical loses its toxins, now familiar rather than frightful, assumed rather than threatening. In the campaign by women to win the right to vote in America, that moment came in 1908, when an unlikely band of wealthy socialites better known for the excesses of their Fifth Avenue balls and the Beaux Arts luxury of their Newport mansions helped reignite a claim for citizenship. Not since Elizabeth Cady Stanton first advocated a woman’s right to vote at the 1848 Woman’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls had the debate over the female franchise so energized the national political landscape. Leveraging their social standing for political gain, these gilded suffragists normalized the idea that women of all stripes—not just those of the intellectual circle who had originated the idea—wanted the vote. No one was more astonished than the newspaper reporters who covered them. It was as if, said one scribe, their infusion of celebrity had taken the campaign from dowdy to fashionable.1
At a time when the newspaper industry was at its zenith—New York at the turn of the century boasted twenty-nine daily papers obsessed with the doings of society2 and a multilingual immigrant press debating the terms of American citizenship—these women were its media darlings, chronicled for every aspect of their fashion, décor, and travel. When they embraced suffrage, they became the first celebrities to endorse a political cause in the twentieth century. Intent on demonstrating that “it is not only the masculine type of woman who wants the ballot,”3 they dressed in the latest fashions from Paris as they lobbied legislators and addressed lunchtime crowds with press hordes following close on their high heels. Ignoring the sarcasm of anti-suffragists who accused them of “flirtation . . . on a gigantic scale,”4 these fashion-plated activists became players in the vibrant media landscape, no doubt reassuring men that they could vote for suffrage without losing their masculinity and calming women who feared that the ballot would make them unwomanly. Joining one of the broadest coalitions for social change in U.S. history, one that combined under its tent the poorest immigrant with the wealthiest socialite, the angry radical and the mild-mannered progressive, they gave the movement a sense of moment.
In their motives, they were hardly monolithic. Their inspiration ran the gamut from progressive ideals of good governance to unabashed efforts to protect their class privilege. Some joined Heterodoxy, a women’s club based in Greenwich Village that held weekly debates over such heretical topics as free love, socialism, and racial tolerance. Others balked at marching in the suffrage parades along Fifth Avenue for fear it would mark them as ladies of the night. Some went to jail for protesting in front of Woodrow Wilson’s White House, choosing prison rather than paying a modest fine. Others distanced themselves from Britain’s Emmeline Pankhurst, ducking the specter of militancy and violence.
What connected them was a sense of great social change. It was a time when a new century beckoned and bohemian critics in Greenwich Village were challenging every institution from capitalism to marriage, experimenting with socialism, free love, art, and birth control. For women of the gilded set, modernity meant jettisoning old social customs—the cotillion and the costumed ball, the layers of clothes and rigidity of table settings, the decorous courtship and the marriage of strangers—in favor of education, career, and independence. If they had remained on the sidelines, they would have become anachronisms, the fate of those who clung to their status as wives and daughters of America’s most infamous capitalists, just as the Jazz Age was making celebrities of sports figures, musicians, and radio actors. Instead they made a bid for influence—not the moral suasion of motherhood or the indirect power of social standing, but the political influence of the men of their class, long denied them because of their gender.
Some contemporaries dismissed their participation as a fad, the indulgence of bored socialites trying on suffrage as they might the latest couture designs from Paris.5 Historians have echoed the critique, casting the activism of these gilded suffragists as a power play to preserve what one scholar called “the prerogative of the elite to speak for the poor.”6 What has been missing in suffrage history is an understanding that when women named Astor, Belmont, Harriman, Mackay, Rockefeller, Tiffany, Vanderbilt, and Whitney exploited their social celebrity for political power, they galvanized interest among a growing urban public.7
In newspaper accounts of the day, their names were hidden behind the moniker of “Mrs. Somebody Else.” Excavating their identities and biographies was a work of archaeology, the sense of discovery bolstered as their numbers grew to more than two hundred. Researching their religious and political affiliations, their club memberships and civic causes, the source of their wealth and the generation they were born into—all provided stunning examples of how a new century had shifted the ground beneath their feet.8 By 1920, more than a tenth of the gilded suffragists had divorced, quite a few had ridden bicycles or attended a university, and many had become published authors, baring their souls in scandalous candor.
Comfortable with the power that wealth conferred, these women treated politics as an extension of their realm as social figures. Accustomed to running large estates, they knew how to prod and when to delegate. Conditioned to press sensationalism, they knew how to manage the media. With large budgets and a taste for luxury, they also reveled in dressing the part. Katharine Houghton Hepburn was president of the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association and an ally of birth control advocate Margaret Sanger. As her daughter, actress Katharine Hepburn, told biographer A. Scott Berg, “Mother’s secret was in remaining extremely feminine. She dressed beautifully, she tended to her husband, she showed off her well-groomed children. And then, while she was pouring the mayor a second cup of tea, she would discuss with great intelligence some great injustice being heaped upon his female constituents. And then she’d smile and say, ‘More sugar?’”9
The results of their intervention were consequential—and instructive. From the celebrity capital of New York, they joined a cause that had been “in the doldrums” and made it seem intoxicating to a nationwide public. Newspaper coverage surged, attendance at suffrage events swelled, and the campaign gained ground. In their footprints, they also left a roadmap of how social change is made in America—sometimes by defusing radicalism, other times by breaching political decorum, always by appealing to a public that in the case of women’s suffrage had proved indifferent to the cause for more than fifty years. As one activist wrote to a friend who had been traveling in Asia, “It’s now fashionable among the actresses to be a suffragette—Ethel Barrymore has come out for it and Beatrice Forbes Robertson has even abandoned the stage to lecture upon it. Oh, God, it’s so good.”10