In New York Society, the older families never allow the turmoil of outside life to enter their social scheme.
Henry Cabot Lodge1
CLAD in his gold-laced uniform, the watchman on duty at the Spouting Rock Beach Association knew by sight every carriage in Newport, Rhode Island. Only the elite could pass through his gates to sunbathe at Bailey’s Beach, a stretch of sand claimed by the wealthy in 1890 after trolley service made an earlier and more desirable plot, Easton Beach,2 accessible to all sorts of people—“including domestics and Negroes, some of whom one would rather prefer not to meet in the water.”3 Unless the visitor was the guest of one of the members or bore a note of introduction “from an unimpeachable hostess,” no pleading, “no power on earth could gain them admission.”4 As the New York Times put it, “Only the swellest of the swell” could penetrate “the walls of exclusiveness surrounding the place.”5
At the turn of the century, few tributes to Gilded Age excess glittered as brightly as Newport. The mansions that dotted Bellevue Avenue were America’s answer to the grand castles of Europe—fortresses of marble with enormous winding staircases and intricate architectural detail, filled with the sculptures, portraits, tapestries, and paintings that the new titans of industry had hungrily imported from France, Italy, and England. Every summer, wealthy families descended on Newport from Boston and New York and as far away as Charleston to reside in their “cottages,” play golf, polo, and tennis, sail their boats, race their horses, indulge at the casino, and attend lavish balls. They hired or brought servants to attend to every creature comfort and famous chefs to oversee multicourse meals. Mostly, they came to claim their place in this storied fraternity.
At Bailey’s Beach, women were shielded from the elements—and social offense—by enough gauze, linen, hats, bloomers, stockings, and gloves to stock a small milliner’s shop. Catherine Kernochan, whose brother Pierre Lorillard developed the Tuxedo Park Country Club, once appeared at Bailey’s wearing “bathing shoes, a black blouse, black pantaloons, a full black skirt, a jacket with billowing sleeves and a large Mother Hubbard bonnet.”6 Marian Fish, wife of Illinois Central Railroad president Stuyvesant Fish, may have set a beach fashion standard one day by wearing “a full dark green satin skirt with a flounce and piping of white satin. White satin and lace lined a pointed vest and there was also lace on the belt and collar and on the wrists of the sleeves. This outfit was worn with bloomers, stockings and sandals.” Swimming would have been an act of acrobatics.
Modesty—and club rules—required that bathing dress cover even the ankles. Elsie Clews, a New York heiress who summered at the family home in Newport, caused something of a stir—and received “a serious warning from the house committee”—when she put her naked feet into the sea water to experience the Atlantic Ocean without stockings, incidentally exposing her well-shaped legs to admiring stares. Eager to uphold Victorian standards amid this generational assertion of immodesty, the board of directors laid down the law: stockings for women were required at all times.7 Still, the younger set continued to test the limits of parental permissiveness by convening for nude bathing parties at midnight on Bailey’s Beach. One dowager commented tolerantly, “I don’t suppose the young people realized what they were doing. I understand they were all very drunk.”8
One warm August day in 1902, five women steeped in the wealth that gilded Newport met to challenge male privilege.9 It is unlikely that they set out to spark a nationwide debate over the contours of relations that had dictated behavior between men and women for over a century. Nor did they intend to give new spark to a political movement long given up for dead. By their own accounts, they meant only to end their exclusion from one of the great habitués of gentility—the book-lined, hushed men’s clubs that catered to the urban gentry in Manhattan and London. Still, the effect was riveting. Years later Virginia Woolf would write about a woman’s need for “a room of one’s own.” Now, five well-bred socialites from “good” families, all listed in the Social Register, met to plot a club of their own.
It is hard to overstate the audacity of the idea, the revolution in gender assumptions created by the very notion that women could build their own club in the city. After the land was purchased on Madison Avenue between East 30th and East 31st Streets, after the organizing committee had hired Stanford White to design the building and Elsie de Wolfe to furnish it in a way that would clear out the musty curtains of the Victorian era, still there were doubters. The Princeton Club put its own plans to build in the city on hold, “in abeyance on the ground that the [women’s] club would soon fail and be for sale cheap.”10
Even more destabilizing to men of a certain class and time was the idea that women would want their own space, separate from the home. The threat to masculinity was such that one man remarked, “Women shouldn’t have clubs. They’ll only use them as addresses for clandestine letters.”11 The gentleman failed to mention that this was precisely how men used their clubs, often receiving letters from paramours that “a tactful servant would always bring . . . on a silver tray, butter side down; this was, of course, on the chance that the lady might be connected, in some fashion, with another member.”12 When news of the women’s club venture became public, a German newspaper decreed that it presaged “the swan-song of the American home and family.” Former president Grover Cleveland took to the pages of the Ladies Home Journal to proclaim that woman’s “best and safest club is her home. A life retired is well inspired.”13 One newspaper called the club a “Death Knell to the Home.”14
Instead, in ways that surprised even its founders, the Colony Club became a site of debate over the controversial issues of the day, none as vexing as the heretical idea that women should cast ballots in local, state, and national elections. This unlikely outcome, the legacy of unexpected consequences, owed something to the turmoil of change swirling through turn-of-the-century New York. As one scholar put it, “The tides of modernity, which had washed over Paris in the 1870s and subsequently over Vienna, Prague, Munich, Berlin and London, had finally reached American shores.”15 It was an era of experimentation, a time when Anne Morgan, a new moneyed aristocrat whose father, J. Pierpont Morgan, was the titan of Wall Street, attended lectures on socialism, and Fanny Villard, an old-school liberal whose father was famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, lectured so often about women’s suffrage that she often grew hoarse.16 Scott Joplin opened an office at 128 West 29th Street to experiment with a new form of music called ragtime, and Ida B. Wells moved to 395 Gold Street in Brooklyn to escape arsonists who had burned down her newspaper in Memphis and to create a New York chapter of her anti-lynching Women’s Loyal Union.17 By the 1910s, the Washington Square home built by Cornelius Vanderbilt at the height of the Gilded Age would be torn down for apartments and “shabby rooming houses,” where artists, writers, and radicals came for cheap spaghetti dinners and abundant debates over meaning.18
The names of those who met in Newport that warm August day are in dispute. So auspicious was the occasion that, much as those who convince themselves they were at the scene of great history, some may have deceived their own memories, their stories repeated and embellished in years since by journalists and scholars. What is unchallenged is that Florence Jaffray Harriman, thirty-two-year-old wife of banker J. Borden Harriman, whose family called her Daisy, was the spark for this nascent experiment in female independence.
Daisy had been privately tutored, joining J. P. Morgan’s children for school at their home at Madison Avenue and 36th Street, the first residence in Manhattan boasting electrical lighting.19 Her family’s home, at 615 Fifth Avenue, pulsed not with electricity but with political ambition. Her father, F. W. J. Hurst, was a shipping magnate with deep ties to the Washington establishment and an abiding pride in his tenure as president of the New York Yacht Club. Daisy was three years old when her mother, Caroline Hurst, died, leaving her to be raised by her father and maternal grandparents.20 She had early memories of leaning over the banister to watch the 1876 presidential torchlight parade through the streets of Manhattan or listen to the conversation of visitors in the downstairs parlor, among them John Hay, James Garfield, and Chester Arthur.21 Among those attending her 1889 wedding were Grover Cleveland and John Jacob Astor IV, reflecting her father’s fascination with the bookends of New York’s political and financial power.22 She was an avid sports fan and athlete, once confessing, “which was the more glorious at Newport, yachting or polo, I could never decide.”23 Now, with a five-year-old daughter and homes in New York, Newport, and Mount Kisco, Daisy Harriman embarked on a more public role. It was a journey that would, improbably, take her to the highest ranks of the Democratic Party, and to a harrowing post as President Franklin Roosevelt’s chief of mission to Norway during the Nazi invasion.24
As was their custom, the Harrimans were renting in Newport for the season, this year at the Yardley Cottage at 91 Rhode Island Avenue.25 Daisy was making occasional treks back to the city, usually for a few days at a time, to oversee renovations to their townhouse at 128 East 36th Street. One evening in Newport, complaining about the dust and disruption in their home in Manhattan, she told her husband, “I can’t stay in the mess. What hotel shall I go to—the Waldorf?” In 1893 William Waldorf Astor had opened an “opulent thirteen-story Waldorf Hotel,” quite popular with the elite, at a Fifth Avenue corner where the Empire State Building would later rise.26 Borden was president of a bank so decorous that in 1906 it would offer a separate branch for female customers.27 Now he harrumphed that he did not approve of women going to large hotels unaccompanied, lest they be taken for harlots. “But Bordie, what can women do?” she asked, perhaps with a hint of coquettishness. Almost as an afterthought, she added, “There ought to be a woman’s club and we go to that in the summers and have parcels sent there and do telephoning.”28
The next day she shared her vision with Kate Brice, whose father, Calvin Brice, had been a U.S. senator from Ohio and lately a railroad president. “She had been at a ball the night before, and was only just up and rather sleepy, but she responded at once,” Harriman recalled. Kate dressed and the two of them made the rounds. “Before the August day was over,” they had corralled enthusiasm from Ava Willing Astor, a Philadelphia heiress and wife of the richest man in the country. Also on board was Emmeline Dore Heckscher Winthrop, an auburn-haired pixie whose husband, Egerton Winthrop, “a cultivated man,” had introduced a young family friend, Edith Wharton, to the glories of Darwin, Huxley, and the great French novelists.29 Maud Bull, whose husband, Henry, would later preside over the exclusive Turf and Field Club, was busy planning a dinner for the Newport Horse Show, but readily agreed.30 So did Margaret Lewis Morgan Norrie, who, along with Eleanor Roosevelt, would become a fixture of reform in the Hudson Valley’s Dutchess County.31
Once Daisy Harriman returned to the city, by her own account, the idea drooped in lethargy until one weekend when she went on a hunting expedition with her husband’s family. The party included his cousin Mary Harriman and likely Mary’s younger brother Averill, who in 1955 would become the forty-eighth governor of New York. While at Barnard, Mary had volunteered at a settlement house on the Lower East Side, and was so moved by what she saw there that she reached out to other debutantes to continue the work. Soon the idea of their Junior League, an educational and charitable volunteer organization, had spread nationwide.32 Now she told Daisy that she often dreamed of having squash courts on the roof of some building in Manhattan. “I fizzed up again, quite as I had in Newport,” Daisy Harriman recalled. After that, word of mouth found converts. By December 1903 she had corralled a forty-woman organizational committee, one that glittered with wealth, leavened by spunk.
Anne Tracy Morgan, youngest of J. P. Morgan’s four children, “sent word she was keen, especially if we included a running track in our plans.”33 Growing up at Highland Falls, a country home overlooking the Hudson, Anne had enjoyed the outdoor life—riding, fishing, hunting, golfing.34 Now, at 170 pounds, the twenty-eight-year-old Morgan longed for the kind of athletic facilities offered by the Union and Metropolitan Clubs, especially a swimming pool. Her father supported the venture, joining the male advisory committee.35
Elisabeth Marbury, known as Bessy, was all in too. One of the first women to excel as a theatrical agent, Bessy would represent, among others, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, W. Somerset Maugham, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and Eugene O’Neill, and was credited with all but inventing the modern American musical comedy.36 She lived in the heart of Union Square, at 17th Street and Irving Place, with actress and later decorator Elsie de Wolfe. Describing themselves affectionately as “the bachelors,” the two organized Sunday afternoon salons with a stunning array of up-and-coming talents and thinkers.37
Helen Hay Whitney, a published poet whose father was Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary and first biographer, was on board.38 So was her sister-in-law, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who hosted the Colony Club’s first annual meeting in 1905 at her home at 871 Fifth Avenue.39 Sarah Stillman Rockefeller, Elsie to her friends, daughter of James Stillman, president of the National City Bank, and newly wed wife of William G. Rockefeller, heir to the Standard Oil fortune, joined the founders’ organizational committee, as did Helen Tracy Barney, Anne Morgan’s beautiful twenty-year-old cousin, whose father, Knickerbocker Trust president Charles T. Barney, agreed to serve on the male advisory committee.40
Perhaps no one better exemplified the Colony Club’s odd pairing of inherited wealth and social rebellion as the thirty-seven-year-old Helen Benedict Hastings. Daughter of financier E. Cornelius Benedict, Helen was a natural wit, prompting friends to call her the “feminine Sydney Smith,” reference to an English humorist whose articles occasioned much comment in New York.41 Founding the Ladies Four-in-Hand Driving Club, Helen urged women to take the driver’s seat and steer four horses through the streets, as a man would.42 Her wedding to architect Thomas Hastings on the first day of May in the first year of the new century attracted so many of New York’s glitterati that two special trains were commissioned to take one thousand guests from Grand Central Terminal in New York to Greenwich, Connecticut, where two hundred coaches were waiting to get them to the church on time.43 The groom was one of the city’s leading architects, and his commissions would come to include the New York Public Library, the Manhattan Bridge, and the Standard Oil Building.44 Biographers believe that Helen and Thomas were homosexuals, taking “a social cover marriage, a common practice for the period . . . to keep their families at bay and provide a public face.”45
At first, the Colony Club founders thought small—or anyway, small for them. They contemplated renting the upper floors of a hotel and hiring a caterer to open a restaurant on the main level.46 By 1903, with support from the men’s advisory committee and robust fundraising of their own, organizers had managed to raise $400,000 for land and a standalone building, a number close to $11 million in contemporary terms.47 By 1905, after sending invitations to women of prominence in the professions as well as in society, organizers had received 926 requests to join a club that would cap membership at 700.48
When, on January 20, 1907, the venue opened its doors at 120 Madison Avenue, the Colony Club—named in honor of the nation’s founders and decorated in the blue and buff of the Continental Army—stood as a tribute to innovation. Staff uniforms made in Paris, a “parking room” for dogs (provided they weighed less than eight pounds), and a running track “suspended by brackets from the ceiling”—all suggested a new address for a new era.49 Still, much like the men’s clubs on which it was modeled, the Colony Club also became a refuge from the increasing grittiness of urban life, a haven of comfortable chairs, good food, athletic facilities, and the amiable company of like-minded members of the gilded or professional class. No Jews, Catholics, blacks, or factory workers need apply, but dues were sufficiently within reach—$100 annually, $2,600 in today’s terms—to attract a few professional women of literature, business, and science.50
Controversy had attended nearly every aspect of the planning, especially the decision to give the decorating assignment to Elsie de Wolfe, whose only previous experience was decorating the home she shared with Bessy Marbury at 13 Sutton Place. During one planning meeting of the board of governors, one critic asked in exasperation, “Are you all out of your heads, giving an important job like this to a woman who has had no experience?”51 Even as she worked, de Wolfe recalled having to “fend off in-house critics who kept moving the furniture” she had already put in place. Reviewers later judged her designs breathtakingly fresh, establishing her as the new star of a new profession that came to be known as interior design. Banishing the “somber, cluttered interiors” and dark Turkish tea corners of an earlier era, she used wicker furniture, garden trellises, tiled floors, and chintz, making fashionable a bit of the English country house in metropolitan New York.52 Diana Vreeland, a former Vogue editor and consultant to the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, said later that de Wolfe “simply cleared out the Victoriana and let in the twentieth century.”53
If the Colony Club was a showcase of modernist décor, it also represented a startling shift in gender equilibrium. Children were banned. Male guests, allowed to attend public lectures on the main floors, were prohibited elsewhere, although a later rule change admitted clergymen and physicians to the bedroom levels.54 Though alcohol was banned—Daisy Harriman’s husband scoffed that no institution could make money without the elixir of strong drink—the club prospered, moving uptown several times with Manhattan’s northward growth. To members experiencing their first taste of independence, the result was intoxicating enough, even without liquor. Mrs. Charles L. Perkins, “a mother of club presidents and governors,” spoke for many when she told Harriman, “I’ve waited for this evening all my life. I have just telephoned the boys, ‘Don’t wait dinner; I’m dining at my club.’ My dear, I’ve been getting that message for years—now I’m giving it!”55
Harriman became the club’s first and longest-serving president, a tenure that lasted from 1904 to 1917. At the club’s opening she delivered a speech, the first she had ever made, which she had practiced so often at home beforehand that her ten-year-old daughter Ethel memorized it “as other children of that age know about ‘the boy on the burning deck’” (the opening line of a popular poem, “Casabianca”).56 In her remarks, Harriman said the critics were quite right that the home should come first in a woman’s life, but argued that “the club if used in the right way should enrich the home.” There would be lectures on Tuesdays—the first week of the month on literature, the second on politics, the third on art, the fourth on music. There would also be a state-of-the-art gymnasium to provide regular exercise, “most essential to health and happiness, and very hard to obtain during the winter months in New York.” Mostly there would be a sisterhood of influence, “a common meeting ground for women of all interests,” a place a woman might leave “with a broadened point of view, and her life enriched by contact with the best in art, literature, music and civics, and with the wish to extend her interest beyond just a small group or clique of people.”57 The Colony Club was thus opened not only as a gymnasium, but also as a school of civic engagement.
This appeal to what politicians a century later would call “a cause greater than self” resonated.58 Born after the Civil War, many members represented a new generation, raised on the unparalleled wealth of the postwar boom but coming of age in fin-de-siècle America. With millionaire husbands who delegated to them the task of running large estates, they were keen to partake of the zeitgeist of change swirling through the city. “It is more than a coincidence that the civic awakening that is stirring in our cities . . . has come with the civic activities of women’s clubs,” said one clubwoman. “I have yet to hear of a town that is experiencing a civic awakening that has not had an active women’s club.”59 Though the Colony Club was decidedly more of a social group than a civic club, amid the myriad reform campaigns in need of their money and time, many were eager to help reshape an expanding city.
On January 1, 1898, the four boroughs of New York—Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx—had combined with the independent city of Brooklyn. By this simple gesture of legislative fiat, New York City’s population increased to 3.4 million.60 A metropolis was born, and with it issues of transportation, housing, and sanitation. Immigrants, rural workers, and African Americans streamed into the city, adding to the din of a building boom. In June 1902 the Flatiron Building opened at Fifth Avenue and Broadway, a wedge-shaped design that people said resembled more of a clothes iron than a skyscraper. “Since the removal last week of the scaffolding,” reported the Tribune, “there is scarcely an hour when a staring wayfarer doesn’t by his example collect a big crowd of other staring people—sometimes a hundred or more, with heads bent backward until a breakage of necks seems imminent.”61 With Thomas Edison battling George Westinghouse over the best currents to use in expanding the subway system, the Brooklyn Bridge rising over the East River, and tunnels burrowing toward Penn Station from beneath the Hudson River, the city was bursting with promise—and soot.62 Matilda Gay, who had befriended Edith Wharton when both were expatriates living in Paris, wrote her after a trip back to New York in 1908, “The perpetual tearing up of the city, and the noise and the smoke, now that the omnibuses have been replaced by autobuses, is enough to drive one mad.”63
The Colony Club came of age in this vortex of change, representing an important if unintended marker in New York feminist history, one with a long backstory. When, in 1868, a visiting Charles Dickens was honored at a banquet dinner sponsored by the New York Press Club, Jane Cunningham Croly tried to buy a ticket. Club officials refused. Three days before the event, they sent word to Croly (who often wrote newspaper columns on fashion, cooking, and the arts under the byline Jennie June) and other female writers that they could attend if they sat behind a curtain. Declining this pyrrhic offer, Croly vowed to “form a club of our own [where] we will give a banquet to ourselves, and make all the speeches ourselves and not invite a single man.”64 Twenty years later, during the citywide celebrations to mark the centennial of George Washington’s inauguration, women were again excluded from the newly formed Sons of the American Revolution.65 They formed the Daughters of the American Revolution, becoming more famous than their male counterparts. And in 1900, when Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, daughter of a French-African father and a British mother, was refused admittance to a meeting of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, she formed her own—the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, dedicated to “raising to the highest plane the home life, moral standards and civic life of our race.”66 The advent of clubwomen, temperance advocates, and social reformers was “one of the most important sociological phenomena of the [nineteenth] century,” said social critic Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “marking as it does [the] first timid steps toward social organization.”67
Against this backdrop of nascent female activism, the Colony Club offered a venue for women to consider the great issues of the day. Organizers drew an especially large audience for one Tuesday afternoon debate on women’s suffrage in 1908. Moderated by muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell, a Colony Club member, the session quickly took on the quality of legend. Like Barnard College founder Annie Nathan Meyer, Tarbell was an anti-suffragist, an intellectual who opposed enfranchising women, fearing that they would fail as politicians.68 She opened with a plea for comity, but the conversation quickly turned contentious.
Speaking against the idea of enfranchising women, club member Alida Blake Hazard predicted that giving the vote to women would lead to socialism, an even greater evil in her view than political empowerment. She noted the “curious alliance . . . between the Suffragists and the Socialists.” And she quoted Elizabeth Cady Stanton, matriarch of women’s suffrage, who had once warned that if men did not grant women the vote, suffragists “would rise up as labor, the Socialists and the Anarchists had done, and there would be a revolution like that in France.”69 On the other side was Fanny Garrison Villard, wife of railroad executive Henry Villard and daughter of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Her late father had waged a failing battle for female delegates to be seated at the 1840 World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London.70 Now his daughter said that consequences are not the purview of activists. “I was brought up in the school which considers only what is right, leaving the results to take care of themselves,” she said. “We believe that if a thing is right, the results will be right.”71
When details about the debate reached the newspapers, the club’s board of governors recoiled. Candid discussions were unlikely if the implicit promise of privacy, “which the members would naturally expect in their club house,” was breached. In a special notice to Colony Club members, the board decreed that in the future, “no member of the club may bring a guest to the Tuesday afternoons without first obtaining a special invitation, which may be secured by application to the Committee on Literature and Art.”72 It was one thing to debate suffrage within their circle. To risk what the board called “notoriety” would simply not do. Colony Club defenders would close the gates to all but the invited.
Throughout 1908, club members debated suffrage without word leaking to the newspapers. Harriman called them “talkfests,” and recalled one evening when Katherine Duer Mackay was assigned to take the anti-suffrage position. “With her arms full of books and papers, followed by a footman carrying more,” Mackay—a descendent of colonial power, married to one of the wealthiest men in New York—announced, “I’ve read them all in a week and I am converted.” Harriman later recalled, “It ruined the debate to have her call ‘Camerade’ in that fashion. But her conversion gave suffrage an ally of inestimable value.”73
In December 1908, seated with other prominent women in a special box, Harriman attended a suffrage lecture at Carnegie Hall.74 Like Mackay, Harriman had been galvanized to act by considering the arguments of anti-suffrage lecturers. Now, on going public with her own support, “my presence was taken up in the morning papers as proof that the Colony Club members were followers of Susan B. Anthony. A storm of protest ensued from all the ‘anti’ members of the Club and so, on my husband’s advice, I never went to any meetings again or marched in any suffrage parades until after I had ceased to be president.” Five years later, while she was still club president but commuting to Washington to serve on President Wilson’s Commission on Industrial Relations, a Colony Club acquaintance told her, “I want to advise you that a clique in the club is antagonistic to you and think you should resign as president. . . . This feeling has been steadily growing since you went to the suffrage meeting.”75
If Harriman’s voice was stilled, others began to speak up. In the spring of 1909, Edith Black Bailey lent her “big red automobile” to a suffrage street rally, where it served as a rostrum for soapbox campaigning. Begun that year, “in timidity and half in doubt,” the soapbox lecture usually featured one suffragist to hand out literature and another to speak on an elevated box or car seat. In New York, the effect was cacophonous. “In one district a red and white flag flanks the suffrage banner while a bohemian speaker explains the justice of equal suffrage; in another locality the same message is given in liquid Italian to swarthy laborers and their womankind, lavish as to earrings and perhaps more interest in ‘bambini’ than votes,” wrote one enraptured witness, albeit given to stereotypes.
Here an earnest-faced woman carries on the strain in Yiddish, there the Scandinavian tongue proclaims the new strife for right, the Fatherland tells the same tale in guttural tones and dominating all others the crisp, forceful English speech reiterates the doctrine of government of the people, by the people and for the people, and women are half the people. Is it not wonderful, this sonorous chorus of many notes blending into the one mighty chord of equal justice?76
Not everyone was entranced. Like Alida Hazard, antis saw in street campaigning the threat of socialism, assimilation, and a “suffrage melting pot” of “extreme methods.” Worse, they assailed the unladylike behavior of climbing onto a car seat and speaking in public, surely signs of a gender upheaval in which female “economic independence . . . would depose man as the head of the home” and replace the “sacred marriage” tie with a “mere partnership contract.”77 Despite the dustup, Bailey’s car returned safely to the Colony Club, where participants were feted to a luncheon by one of the speakers, Maud “Mootzie” Cabot.78 Pearce Bailey’s family had given its name to the most exclusive beach in Newport. Now the family automobile had become a prop in a political debate.
As passions intensified, the Colony Club hosted events on both sides of the issue, although there was not always a bright line between the two, making it sometimes difficult to tell condescending friend from ignorant opponent. British journalist William Thomas Stead was invited to speak at the club shortly after it opened. As a newspaper editor, he had pioneered a new concept of “government by journalism,” launching investigations aimed at pressuring officials by influencing public opinion.79 Now he argued for women’s enfranchisement as a means of humanizing the political world. “In politics,” he said, “the best half of American life does not count for one percent.” Looking out on an audience of women gathered for a fundraiser to benefit the Collegiate Equal Suffrage League, he added, “You may be miserably inefficient, but however sentimental, weak and emotional you may be, that is no reason for handicapping you for life.”80 Conversely, at a Colony Club meeting of the National League for Civil Education, an anti-suffrage group, James Walsh, dean of the Fordham University Medical School, suggested that extending the franchise to women would change little, as science had demonstrated that while they were capable of intellectual advances, women, like children playing with fire, always retreated from the heat.81
The suffrage issue may have divided them—conservatives against liberals, matrons against debutantes—but at the club, they were family, a sometime catty network of intermarriages and social alliances. Whatever their views on suffrage, they were forced by dint of status to mingle and make small talk—at social teas, racetrack outings, dog show exhibitions, or luncheons for visiting royals. Interactions were inevitable, courtesy expected, fashion observed. They were connected too through the sporting activities that defined their leisure class, giving many of their wealthy husbands an occupation and many a nascent sport a solid financial footing. The Newport Golf Club, brainchild of sugar magnate Theodore Havemeyer, hosted the first U.S. Open tournament in 1895.82 That same year, society leader Hope Goddard Iselin became the first female to participate in an America’s Cup race, as the boat’s timekeeper.83
Weddings brought de rigueur attendance, not so much marriages as mergers within the confines of the class, fascinating must-be-witnessed fusions of money to title (heiress Gladys Vanderbilt to Hungarian Count László Széchenyi), new money to old money (Theresa Fair, heir to Nevada’s silver mines, to Herman Oelrichs, scion of Baltimore wealth), or money to fame (August Belmont Jr., who built the Belmont Racetrack, to actress Eleanor Robson). At Annah Dillon Ripley’s wedding to French Count Pierre de Viel Castal in 1910, Katherine Mackay tried to convert to the suffrage cause Elizabeth Griscom, whose husband, Lloyd, had served as U.S. ambassador to Persia, Japan, Brazil, and Italy. Elizabeth Griscom’s influence, noted the Club Fellow, “would be tremendous in its effect,” but she “refused to be captured,” brushing Mackay off with a promise to “think it over.”84
At one Colony Club suffrage meeting, the New York American remarked on the “array of carriages, autos and cabs” that descended for the evening. “Occupants for the most part were exquisitely gowned women,” said the paper, and “there was scarcely room to move in the big clubhouse.”85 Edith Black Bailey, one of the speakers, was so skillful in combining “humor with logic” that “ripples of laughter” followed her remarks. Town & Country Magazine noted that Bailey was “really inspiring, even to the antis in the audience, and she deserved better praise than that vouchsafed her by one of the morning papers, which announced that she won her hearers by her good looks.”86 The Club Fellow was biting in its report, chiding these women for wearing the finest fashions while claiming to be victims of male oppression. “The sumptuous Miss Eleanor, in diamonds and black velvet, did not fulfill my idea of a slave, even a white one,” sneered the Club Fellow’s writer. “The suffragists know enough to put their best foot forward and the best dressed women too.”87 Some three hundred women and three men heard the speech, during which Bailey crystalized the issue for women of leisure when she quipped, “Voting is only the servant question on a large scale.”88 Surely electing a candidate to public office—weighing the options, pondering the personalities—was no more difficult than employing a cook or a groundskeeper for one’s estate.
There were other light moments too, many involving Marian “Mamie” Fish, whose husband, Stuyvesant Fish, was a descendant of governors, congressmen, and cabinet officers. With her sharp tongue and her husband’s money, Mamie Fish redefined entertaining in Newport and New York, the more extravagant the better. She once told architect Stanford White to design a ballroom for the new Fish home on 78th Street in such over-the-top style that “a person who was not well bred would feel uncomfortable.”89 Alva Belmont, a friend, once confronted her, asking if it was true she had described the pug-faced Belmont to acquaintances as a frog. “A toad,” Mamie corrected. “A toad.”90
As talk of suffrage interrupted her parties, Fish frowned, insisting that women would not benefit “by mixing in the mire of politics. They always have moved and always should move in a higher sphere and deal with better and more lasting things than the election of this one and that one to office.” She worried about the vote’s effect on fashion, noting, “Can we fancy a Madame Recamier or a Madame De Stael dressed in knickerbockers with short skirts and a derby hat engaged in a hand-to-hand fight at the polls?” A brief nineteenth-century fascination with bloomers had opened the movement to ridicule.91 Now, as the cause attracted more fashionable women, she came over, a victim of the urge to stay atop the trends. An astonished New York Times announced her allegiance with the headline “Mrs. Fish Gone Over to the Suffragists,” attributing her conversion to the sartorial femininity of the campaign’s newest advocates. “Fashion has approved it,” said the Times. “Colony Club meeting costumes show that her dread of knickerbockers and derbies was unfounded.”92
In its first years, the Colony Club had seen the growth of society’s involvement in suffrage. Within its walls raged a debate over whether the vote would bolster or weaken their inherent social power, the stepchild of privilege. Twenty years before, amid the great circulation wars between William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, an earlier generation of society activists had first planted the idea that women of the leisure class aspired to political rights. Married to husbands of Gilded Age infamy, such as John D. Rockefeller, Courtlandt Palmer, and Russell Sage, they had voiced their opinions from the comfort of their homes, to a circle of their social equals. In something of a prequel to the activists at the Colony Club, they became the first group of elite women to attempt to leverage their social status for political power. Before the advent of radio or television, long before the invention of the Internet, even longer before 24/7 news coverage and social media, newspapers and magazines dominated the landscape. At a time when print was ascending, these elite women of an earlier generation rode the crest of a new phenomenon called celebrity journalism.