The undignified methods employed by certain New York women to attract a following [only promote] . . . notoriety, a thing that no lady ever seeks.
Caroline Schermerhorn Astor1
THE Petit Chateau stood in visual contrast to nearby brownstones, a wedding cake surrounded by sand blocks. As gawkers stood on Fifth Avenue shivering on a cold March night in 1883, all was warm and aglitter inside. Hostess Alva Smith Vanderbilt wore a white satin princess gown, made in Paris, embroidered in gold, topped by a veil of velvet, a diadem of diamonds, and a strand of pearls once owned, it was said, by Catherine the Great.2 With a guest list of 1,200, a price tag of $250,000 ($6 million in today’s dollars), and silver party favors from Tiffany’s, the costume ball was meant to serve notice on Knickerbocker landowners who had long dominated New York culture that the new posse of railroad, oil, steel, and financial interests had arrived.3 It was as if a gaudy show of excess had gilded the transition from old money to new. “Dozens of Louis XVIs, a King Lear ‘in his right mind,’ Joan of Arc, Venetian noblewomen . . . danced and drank among the flower filled . . . third floor gymnasium that had been converted into a forest filled with palm trees and draped with bougainvillea and orchids,” said one witness.4
Henry Clews, a Wall Street financier who had emigrated from England at the age of seventeen, attended the party with his wife, Lucy Madison Clews, a descendant of James Madison who was dressed as fire in a “gorgeous costume of iridescent bronze over flaming yellow satin.” Observing the evening’s glittery nod to history, Clews saw at once that the mantle of status had passed not only from old money to new, but from Europe to America. “It may not have been quite so expensive as the feast of Alexander the Great at Babylon, some of the entertainments of Cleopatra to Augustus or Mark Antony, or a few of the magnificent banquets of Louis XIV,” he remarked, but in its social significance the Vanderbilt ball was “superior to any of those historic displays of amusement and festivity.”5
If the Vanderbilt ball in some sense heralded a new American, Gilded Age aristocracy, it also represented a new phase in the history of journalism.6 The era of celebrity reporting had arrived, and with it a public fascination for the excesses of what the St. Louis Post-Dispatch called the “insolent wealth and offensive luxury” of the leisure class.7 Resonating to Horatio Alger’s gospel of rags to riches, a new generation of readers, many newly arrived in the city, hungered for details about the lives of the rich and famous.8 Publishers were only too eager to oblige, even if it meant invading the privacy of wealthy patrons they once protected.
The invasion began in 1880, when Charles Anderson Dana, publisher of the New York Sun, hired an unnamed but well-connected reporter to track the latest intelligence about the “smart set.” These first society columns were rather chatty, eliciting much speculation within elite circles over who the author was and which unfaithful servants or associates were feeding him information. The following year, the Tribune added society coverage; when Joseph Pulitzer purchased the World from railroad baron Jay Gould in 1883, coverage ratcheted up even further. Pulitzer “made an ostentatious display of Society’s activities in the Sunday edition of the paper,” noting “everything that had occurred during the past week . . . with a schedule of events to come during the current week.”9 The paper had one column about Broadway stars, “Among the Players,” one about clubwomen called “Doings of Women Folk,” another catchall column called “People Often Talked Of,” and a gossip column about Mrs. Astor’s Four Hundred entitled “In Millionaire Society.”10
Inspired by the catty London weekly Truth, widely read in New York men’s clubs, a new “journal of society” also joined the scene.11 Unlike the daily newspapers, Town Topics was written of and for the elite. A white-haired St. Nicholas look-alike who took his lunch every day at Delmonico’s, editor William d’Alton Mann is credited—or disparaged—as the “godfather of modern gossip.” He delighted in “blind items” that alluded to scandalous behavior—a playboy about town seen leaving the Newport cottage of a prominent social leader—placed coincidentally next to an innocuous column in which the two lovers were mentioned as attending a charity event.12 This wink to the reader was a code well understood by the Town Topics readership, which by the turn of the century reached 140,000.13 It was just such a blind item—about President Roosevelt’s eldest daughter Alice, said to have listened to dirty jokes while drinking at a 1904 Newport soiree—that provoked Colliers to write an editorial despairing of such methods. Mann’s associate, Judge Joseph Deuel, responded by accusing Colliers of libel. At the ensuing trial in December 1905 and January 1906, Mann’s testimony captivated New York’s wealthy victims, to say nothing of a salivating public.14
Press coverage was intense, public interest considerable. “Women by the score stepped on each other’s heels in their eagerness to gain admission to the courtroom,” reported the Times, many “dressed as if for the theatre.”15 Mark Twain sat at the defense table to view the proceedings, while famed Spanish-American War correspondent Richard Harding Davis sat with the press. As testimony drew more heated, William Randolph Hearst sent the American’s drama critic to critique the legal maneuverings. He also hired the foreman, cartoonist F. T. Richards, to “an exclusive contract to sketch the principals from the jury box.”16
The extent of Mann’s larceny was stunning. In current terms, his haul topped $10 million. During a single day of testimony, Mann admitted that since the mid-1890s he had accepted “loans” totalling $187,500 from the likes of J. P. Morgan, Collis Huntington, Charles Schwab, William K. Vanderbilt, and William Whitney. For this generosity, these titans of industry and capital were off limits to gossip columns, their names included in a list posted on the newsroom wall, a dubious fraternity of the immune, a cadre of those willing to pay to keep playing.17 Nor did his journalism-for-blackmail scheme stop at society’s celebrities.18 Town Topics had so maligned Russell Alger in the late 1890s that the secretary of war was able to quiet the attacks only by giving Mann $100,000 of Alger-Sullivan Lumber Company stock and a seat on the West Point Board of Visitors.19 The wealthy had become invested in their celebrity.
While Town Topics made money by bribing society figures, newspapers were not above paying their associates for gossip. Harold Seton, a producer of plays on Broadway who interacted with many of the gilded set, regularly supplied Herald Tribune society reporter Lucius Beebe with juicy items. Seton bristled with indignation when other papers, notably Hearst’s Journal, got details wrong. He was pleased when Beebe used his material accurately, and grateful not to be disclosed as the source. “I have just returned to New York from another visit to Newport,” he wrote in one letter, about the nouveau riche and their overindulgence in liquor. “All trace of birth and breeding seemed to have departed, temporarily, from the Socially Registered inebriates, as, with bleary eyes and drooling lips, they staggered about.”20
No one understood better the import of this combustion of public fame and printer’s ink than Alva Smith Vanderbilt. She had grown up the daughter of Alabama cotton wealth decimated by the Civil War. Schooled in Paris, she had avenged her father’s financial downfall by marrying a grandson of railroad patriarch Cornelius Vanderbilt. Now, filled with the social ambition that attaches to those who have known wealth and lost it, she set out to host “the most brilliant ball ever given in New York,” conspiring to force even the reluctant guardian of high society, Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, to attend. Because of Alva’s deft handling of the newspapers, it was said, the Vanderbilt ball “awakened editors for the first time to a better understanding of society and its importance as news.”21
In the weeks before the 1883 ball, Alva Vanderbilt had invited a New York Times reporter for an exclusive preview of the interior of 660 Fifth Avenue. Likely hiring a press agent—within a decade this would be standard operating procedure for society hostesses—she provided “the name of her florist, the precise dimensions of the grand hall, gymnasium and dining room and the types of stone and wood paneling used in the interior as well as the names that appeared on her guest list.” So successful was this sophisticated turn in press handling that the Times, whose reporter attended as a guest, gave the ball prominent display on its first and second pages.22 The Sun also placed the story on its front page, while the Tribune and World each devoted four columns to the event.23
Twelve years later, when her daughter Consuelo married the Duke of Marlborough, Alva Vanderbilt again played press agent, orchestrating coverage so extensive that the curious lined Fifth Avenue and lunged at the couple as they left St. Thomas Episcopalian Church, trying, the bride recalled, “to snatch flowers from my bouquet.”24 In the run up to the wedding, the Herald had printed what it claimed was the only authentic illustration of Consuelo’s dress, provided by the family, devoting more than one column of type to the “satin bridal costume . . . in which she will be presented to Queen Victoria.” And with Alva’s acquiescence, Vogue published illustrations of Consuelo’s bridal underwear, on loan for the sketch artist. “The clasps of Miss Vanderbilt’s stocking supporters are of gold,” reported one weekly, “her corset-covers and chemises are embroidered with rosebuds in relief.”25 Consuelo was mortified. “I read to my stupefaction that my garters had gold clasps studded with diamonds, and wondered how I should live down such vulgarities,” she wrote.26
Later still—divorced from William Kissam Vanderbilt, remarried to Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont and then widowed—Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont would bring those same press management skills to her new occupation, the suffrage movement. Using the assets of these two family fortunes, in 1910 she hired a press agent for the National American Woman Suffrage Association and installed Ida Husted Harper in New York, forcing the mainstream suffrage organization to move its headquarters from Warren, Ohio. For the first time in fifty years, in an effort to appeal to the masses, salaried staffers would run a major movement organization once headed by ideologues and fueled by volunteers.
In colluding with the press to forward her schemes, Alva Vanderbilt had entered into what one scholar called a “Faustian bargain.” Upper-class American families had long patterned their estates and their social habits on those of the European aristocracy, importing the sports, architecture, fashion, and high-tea rituals of the older ruling class. Their greatest inheritance was what one scholar dubbed an “ethos of exclusion.” With more men’s clubs than any city in the country, elite New Yorkers barred the doors against those who did not meet their strict standards for respectability and maintained secrecy within the walls of their clubs and the confines of their private railway cars and yachts.
Now, public appetite for news about the mighty had to be fed, and the wealthy were helpless to end the feast. “Unable to control the press, and unwilling to consider life without heightened visibility,” New York socialites became “America’s first celebrity-martyrs.”27 Like contemporary figures famous merely for being famous, they had invited into their circle a ravenous publicity machine that would lionize them on the way up and delight in pillorying them on the way down. Privacy, once their most treasured luxury, was but a figment of memory. In his notebooks, Henry James lamented that this comity had been disturbed by “democratization of the world.” He faulted newspaper reporters for their “invasion, . . . impudence and shamelessness,” and blamed “the devouring publicity” of modern life for extinguishing “all sense between public and private.”28
For Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, who lacked the old money credentials of some of her peers, publicity was an equalizer. What she understood, perhaps better than the press critics who derided her social excesses or the suffrage leaders who would later balk at her autocratic ways, is that when the press in the 1880s anointed the wealthy as the media stars of their day, it conferred on elite women a benefit unlike any before—the power of the celebrity endorsement. And when, in 1894, some society women better known for their charitable donations and good-government reforms instead exploited their newfound celebrity to embrace women’s suffrage, society and its reporters were stunned.
“All these women are in [the] Four Hundred,” exclaimed Pulitzer’s World, barely able to contain its incredulity. Calling their involvement in suffrage an “insurrection,” the paper announced, “Here were nearly two score names as widely known and honorable as any in this state—names of people of the highest social standing. The upper class of women are enlisted. Woman suffrage is the one interesting subject of discussion in the fashionable world.”29
From the beginning, almost everything about the suffrage battle of 1894 was unexpected. As part of the state’s periodic review of its constitution, first enacted in 1777, delegates were appointed to convene to consider changes. Among the proposed amendments was one removing the word “male” from voting requirements in article 1, section 2. Hoping to flood the state capitol with one million signatures, Susan B. Anthony, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, asked four wealthy reformers, Catherine Palmer Abbe, Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, Josephine Shaw Lowell, and Margaret “Olivia” Sage, for $50,000 ($1.4 million in today’s terms) to fund a house-to-house canvassing drive.30 To her surprise, they declined.
In ways subtle and obvious, all four had worked to assimilate the immigrants that had overwhelmed New York’s streets and traditions. By 1900, the city’s population had climbed to 3.5 million, and more than a third of them were foreign-born.31 Society leader Catherine Palmer Abbe, whose first husband, Courtlandt Palmer, had left her vast Manhattan real estate holdings and whose second husband, Dr. Robert Abbe, was a renowned scientist who worked with Marie and Pierre Curie, was a frequent contributor to civic reforms.32 Inspired by the centennial of George Washington’s inaugural in 1887, Abbe had founded the City History Club, an organization dedicated to educating immigrants to the glories of American history—offering classes and theatrical performances, launching preservation campaigns, and planning historic excursions into the city’s streets.33 Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi was the first woman admitted to study at the University of Paris’s Ecole de Médecine and, in 1871, the second female member of the Medical Society of New York County. Active in efforts to improve sanitation conditions in tenements and provide clean milk stations for immigrant mothers, she preached that compassion was as important as science in treatment of disease.34 Josephine Shaw Lowell, a reformer from a prominent family (her brother Robert Gould Shaw commanded the all-black 54th Massachusetts Regiment during the Civil War and her sister Sarah had married into the Minturn shipping family known for anti-slavery activities) was the first woman appointed to the New York State Board of Charities.35 Margaret “Olivia” Sage was a graduate of the Troy Female Seminary, established by Emma Hart Willard in 1821 as the first American institution to offer women an education comparable to that of men’s universities.36 Olivia had come to believe in women’s ability to improve the polity. In 1905 she penned an article, “Opportunities and Responsibilities for Leisure Women,” that spoke to this new reform instinct. “An immense amount of feminine talent and energy was wasted,” she charged, predicting “the reawakening of women, . . . the building her up on a new basis of self-help and work for others.” Disparaging the evils of drinking, smoking, and gambling, she urged “all our rich idle women” to reform the public square. “Every woman can make her village or town better,” said Sage, who thought the wealthy had a greater duty because “woman is responsible in proportion to the wealth and time at her command.”37
Perhaps weary of being asked to give money, nurturing their own reform agendas, the four now made clear that they were not interested in affiliating with traditional leaders in women’s suffrage, who in their view had been campaigning with little effect for nearly fifty years. “The women who are making this movement are rich and conscientious,” one unnamed social leader explained to the Times. “They feel that this is a progressive step. This has nothing to do with the work of the women suffragists, although we owe them a debt of gratitude for the progress so far made.”38 As the Times put it, they “have taken steps to have it quietly made known that they have no official connection with the professional ‘woman’s rights’ agitators who have been demanding the right to vote for twenty-five [sic] years.”39
How they settled on their strategy is not recorded, but once they had declined to fund Anthony’s petition drive, they launched their own. They would give lectures from their parlors to stir interest, and gather signatures in what the Times called “the dainty white-and-gold atmosphere” of Sherry’s restaurant at Fifth Avenue and 37th Street.40 Lou Sherry had “very generously placed a white mahogany round table in his salesroom . . . occupied by a monster petition.”41 As the Sun helpfully explained to its readers, Sherry’s was “a resort of fashion,” not a place “with which radicalism or eccentricity is associated.”42
Their activism would be genteel, not the coarse wrangling of political parties but the quiet appeal of the influential. Dr. Jacobi explained that amid rising immigration, they hoped to blunt “the shifting of political power from privileged classes to masses of men.”43
Catherine Abbe was particularly outspoken about the need for society women to leverage their social standing.44 “It is the Lord’s work,” she said of the parlor meetings. “We will get over 1,000 signatures of prominent men through social influences alone.”45 They sought the vote not as a measure of universal suffrage but as a marker of educated privilege. Unlike the male criminals, mentally ill, uneducated, and immigrants who had access to the ballot, they claimed the vote as women of erudition, to counteract those of the uninformed.
The idea of elite women speaking on any political topic was intoxicating to others of their class, who attended in such numbers that rooms overflowed, and to the press, which swarmed as if to cover a fancy dress ball. In May 1894, some thirteen hundred people were turned away from a debate at Sherry’s, and speakers “could scarcely push their way to the platform.” In an assessment that likely stunned its readers, the New York Times noted, “Never in its history has Sherry’s seen such a gathering of people as flocked there last evening.”46 So effective was this branding of suffrage as a new cause of the wealthy that one woman stopped at the petition desk at Sherry’s to inquire whether “she might put her name down, even if she did not belong to the Four Hundred.”47
Converting a parlor—the refuge of domesticity—into a political war room took considerable doing, as a reporter for Pulitzer’s World noted when he described how “two-story tables of mahogany, satinwood and marquetry” were “cleared of china and silver, to leave room for suffrage literature.”48 At Olivia Sage’s home in April, two hundred “women of fashion” attended a suffrage discussion with chairs crunched together and overflow seating in the hallway. As Sage stood in her own parlor, with a glittering audience that included financier Jay Gould’s daughter Helen, a reporter for the Sun expressed surprise that this former schoolteacher “presided with dignity and a great deal of self-possession,” using “no notes at all and was not the least embarrassed.”49
Dressed in fashionable clothes, wearing violets “but no other ornaments,” these “charming matrons” confounded journalists who derided suffrage activists as “masculine and vulgar.”50 Now they saw “women of much refinement, remarkable intelligence and exquisite femininity” gravitating to the cause. Of another “crowded drawing room meeting,” the Sun observed, “The question of woman suffrage seems to have taken precedence over all others in the minds of many leading ladies of fashionable society,” including one who told a reporter that someday a woman would be vice president of the United States. Acknowledging that such a sentiment “sounds ludicrous and makes men laugh,” she added, “The men will see that the women will laugh last, and he who laughs last laughs best, you know.”
Unlike Alva Vanderbilt, who flaunted her wealth and the position it conferred, many of these first-generation celebrity suffragists were more modest. Cettie Rockefeller was a Baptist, to whom courting publicity was a sinful indulgence. Olivia Sage was, said one biographer, “a product of an evangelical Protestant upbringing that bred a strong sense of duty.”51 Florence Clinton Sutro, wife of prominent New York lawyer Theodore Sutro, was a Universalist who worshipped at the Church of the Divine Paternity at Central Park West and 76th Street.52 When a Times reporter asked her for the names of those who had signed the suffrage petition, she demurred, expressing a reluctance to invade boundaries of privacy. “We are not like the Woman Suffrage League,” she explained, eager to distance herself and her movement from the “agitators” who had been seeking the vote through publicity stunts. “We do not want advertising. We shun it. We do not want our names made public. We want to keep out of the newspapers. We want enfranchisement, not notoriety.”53
In April, the staunchly anti-suffrage New York Times offered a qualified welcome, on the front page. “The society of women of New York want to vote,” the paper began. “Having reached this determination, they have set about accomplishing their desire in the energetic manner characteristic of them on all occasions.”54 Still, like sports reporters in a later generation forced to cover steroid or domestic abuse, subjects far from their field of knowledge, these journalists were thrown into a tizzy of denial that would test their stereotypes about women, wealth, and gender.
After covering a parlor meeting in February 1894, a reporter for the World suggested that female speeches about the need for a vote are likely “to arouse the risibilities of men who have not been educated up to the standpoint of regarding a woman in any other way than as a beautiful and helpless angel, to whom they should give their seats in public conveyances, and to gratify whose lightest whim they should fight and die.” To the World’s reporter, “it was funny to a man whose wife and sisters protest that they will ‘never, never vote’ to be told that he was standing between womankind and the divine gift of the franchise.” And when one speaker had the audacity to point out the inequalities of salary between male tenors and female opera singers, an injustice she said could be remedied by the ballot, for the reporter “it was hard not to snicker right out in meeting.”55
In April, Harriett Gibbs Fox hosted a parlor meeting at her home at 18 East 31st Street. This time, as “a bunch of white double tulips stood in a dull-gold vase on a small table under the arch of the handsome parlors,” speaker Eleanor Sanders confronted directly the charge that society’s interest was “mere fad and caprice.” She described one woman “of social position and modest personality” who circulated the petition at sixteen saloons, only to discover no signers.56 In the face of the liquor industry’s known opposition to women’s suffrage, such perseverance might be seen in some quarters as folly, but here it was hailed as a measure of diligence. John D. Townsend, the “fighting lawyer” who had defended Boss Tweed on corruption charges and would later write a book about city politics, captured the excitement generated by the parlor suffragists.57 “You cannot go anywhere now but some one meets you with a woman-suffrage petition and asks you to sign it—and every one does sign,” he said. “The only person I have known who would not sign was a bachelor.”58
When Laura Rockefeller opened her home at 4 West 54th Street in May, the audience “overflowed the parlors, crowded the hall, which is larger than the parlors of an ordinary city home, and filled the broad staircase almost to the top.” It was, said the Times, “one of the largest parlor meetings that has been held in this city since the interest in the subject of political equality began to focus itself.”59 Trying to understand what had propelled these women of the leisure class to invade the male purview of politics, the Times interviewed suffragists staffing the desk at Sherry’s. In a piece entitled “Their Enthusiasm Growing,” the paper reported that some socialites had taken a course on political economy the previous winter, and were surprised to learn of legal barriers to women in taxation, property, and marriage. Others told the Times that they had been turned away at the polls for trying to vote for school commissioner, though the state had enacted school suffrage for women in 1880.60
Sometimes these new activists faced a backlash within their own families. Lee Wood Haggin, who married into the gold-rush rich Haggin family of Turkish origin, hosted a parlor meeting at her home at 10 East 54th Street. Turnout was so enormous that, as the Times put it, “Mrs. Haggin’s large parlors were crowded to their utmost capacity, notwithstanding the fact that the invitations sent out had been limited to the immediate friends of the hostess.”61 When a reporter for the Herald called for her comments, she demurred. “My family is opposed to the campaign we are waging and so I shall not express my view,” she said. “I am obeying the dictates of my conscience in the part I am taking.”62
And sometimes the meetings sparked contention between those who favored suffrage and those who did not, among women who came to hear the speeches but not necessarily to applaud. It was a tussle among equals, over the prerogatives of class. Would the ballot, so stark in its overt political power, lessen their moral influence? Would exercising the vote rob them of their authority to steer policy from above the fray?
“Excitement reached fever heat” on Thursday, April 26, 1894, at Emma Constance Perry’s home on East 38th Street when Josephine Jewell Dodge rose to oppose suffrage.63 The Times reported her appearance as a “little diversion.”64 Founder and first president of the Association of Day Nurseries of New York City, founder of the New York Charity Organization Society, Dodge shared with other reformers a benevolent view of philanthropy and civic duty, but thought it better to influence reform from outside the political structure, preserving femininity.65 Later president of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, Dodge spoke for those who feared that the franchise would provoke a gendered “social revolution such as the world has never seen.”66
It was not, as one scholar noted, that anti-suffragists were hostile to women in public life, only to women in politics.67 Fearful that uninformed immigrants would unravel the skein of public life, worried that women would lose their moral authority if they descended into the pit of partisan politics, antis argued that it would be better for the health of the polity if universal suffrage were repealed and the vote restricted to those who could read and write in the English language. Once the voter rolls were purged of immigrants, drunks, illiterates, and onetime criminals, a vote for educated women might be appropriate. Until then, they had plenty of duties at home without adding the responsibilities of military or jury service.68
Until the 1894 campaign, male derision had been the movement’s loudest obstacle, female indifference its silent enemy. Now, a worthy opponent had publicly entered the ring. A seminal moment, this debate within the parlors, covered by the press, brought the fight into the open and in an unexpected way girded the movement for victory. As Crystal Eastman, sister of Max Eastman, editor of the Masses, and like him a prominent figure in Greenwich Village literary circles, noted, “Indifference is harder to fight than hostility.”69
Thrust into the public eye, anti-suffragists situated their campaign at the just-opened Waldorf Hotel, down the street from Sherry’s at Fifth and 33rd Street. Copies of their anti-suffrage petition were also available at Cooper Union, a university-without-walls created in 1859 by industrialist Peter Cooper. Anti-suffrage rhetoric may have influenced suffrage leaders, who now turned the movement’s rationale from a natural rights argument (that women were entitled to the vote as citizens) to a municipal housekeeping one (that politics would benefit from the maternal instincts of women).70 By whatever name, the increasingly high profile of the anti-suffragists politicized both sides.
The prospect of fashionable women warring over suffrage was intoxicating to publishers, who sharpened pencils for the fight ahead. Often the subtext of newspaper copy was whether politics would harden these women, itself a proxy for the question of whether granting women the vote would enfeeble men. In this, society advocates were reassuring. Noting that “women of Society have taken up the question of woman’s suffrage,” the Evening World explained to its readers helpfully, “mannish advocates are still in the field, but they are in the background, and the gentlewomen who have been induced to go in front are working in a way to win, if not ‘equal rights,’ a great deal of interest in the question.”71
Another reporter for the World explained it this way: “There are two kinds of women in New York politics just now—ladies and females. The ladies belong to society; the females belong to the Suffrage League.” The activists “do not enjoy being patronized even a little bit,” observed the reporter, while “the fashionables” were just looking for “something to do.” Society women had made clear, reported the newspaper, that “unpleasant women” were not welcome. Also treated dismissively were suffrage “professionals,” now having “the greatest difficulty getting admission cards to these exclusive meetings” and “biting their finger nails to the quick . . . hoping that this humiliating influence may bring about the coveted ‘woman’s rights.’” To the reporter, the tensions seemed “delicious.”72
As delegates to the constitutional convention gathered in Albany, one of their first decisions was to name as presiding officer Joseph H. Choate, a prominent New York society lawyer and legislator who had his sights on the governor’s mansion. His wife, Caroline Choate, called Carrie, had been “among the first in society circles to come out openly” for suffrage, becoming a leader “in the task of securing signatures for the petition.” Tall and “rather slightly built,” with dark brown eyes, she was described by her husband as “the most graceful of women.”73 A talented painter, she at first resisted his marriage pleas, wearing a ring inscribed “Wedded to Art.”74 Now, she convened parlor meetings, although she avoided “publicity as much as possible, probably because of her husband’s position as a delegate to the convention.”75
To the shock of movement leaders, on his first day as presiding officer, Joseph Choate stacked the convention’s suffrage committee with opponents. Led by the inestimable Elihu Root, they were almost uniformly and in some cases rabidly against granting women the right to vote. “It was clear to the suffragists,” concluded one scholar, “that when Mr. Choate . . . packed the Suffrage Committee with conservative anti-suffragists . . . he was counting on the popularity he would acquire from the convention to win the governor’s seat.”76 Conversations between husband and wife, by then married for thirty-three years, must have tested the civility of their partnership. Choate never did serve as governor of New York, but in 1899 President McKinley appointed him U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James, where he served until 1905. Perhaps in deference to his wife’s interest in painting, he also served as one of the founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
By campaign’s end, Susan B. Anthony had managed to collect 600,000 signatures, a sizeable number though short of her target of one million. No matter. Pleas went unheeded, as delegates failed to pass the women’s suffrage amendment; ninety-eight delegates voted against it, and only fifty-eight voted for it.77 Like a fleeting spring shower, the advent of the gilded suffragists might have been quickly forgotten, but for an unexpected legacy of their participation.
Convinced that the surest path to the ballot was through an informed electorate, they now created an organization to interest the public in civic issues. Headquartered at 143 West 43rd Street, the nonpartisan League for Political Education sponsored lectures and debates that attracted an audience hungry for substance. Formed in 1895 to “arouse among women practical interest in public affairs, in civic institutions and in good government,”78 the league offered lectures on history, instruction in parliamentary procedure, and courses in social ethics.79 One scholar described it as the first self-conscious effort to use print media and the public square to espouse policy.80 Later, in the aftermath of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, their renamed and relocated Town Hall became a staple of New York City oratory and performance. Designed by the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White, which had created many of the mansions where parlor suffragists spoke, Town Hall would host some of the great names of twentieth-century public life. Booker T. Washington, Eleanor Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Winston Churchill spoke from the hall’s podium.81 In 1921 Margaret Sanger was arrested on stage while discussing birth control. In 1944 Langston Hughes led a town meeting on race. And in 1963 Bob Dylan played his first major concert there, unveiling his new song “Blowin’ in the Wind.”82
Suffrage leaders had hoped that the advent of society suffragists would help defuse press derision, as it seemed to have done the year before in Colorado. Iona Hanna, wife of a prominent banker and the first female director of the Denver school district, had invited wealthy clubwomen and social figures to join the Denver Equal Suffrage League, attracting “the best people.” Observers noted one immediate result. Where once the press had been dismissive, now “not one paper in Denver said a word of ridicule or even mild amusement concerning suffragists.”83 With support from the Populist Party, male voters approved the state constitutional amendment allowing women to vote, 35,698 to 29,461.84 Suffrage leaders hoped that newspapers and magazines in New York would follow suit.85
If New York reporters did not hide their sarcasm at the advent of gilded suffragists, they did lavish attention on an issue all but invisible before the 1894 campaign. Harper’s Bazaar published twenty-one stories on the subject, Vogue Magazine twelve. Among the dailies, Pulitzer’s World published 187 stories, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 159, and even the anti-suffrage New York Times, 148. For the next fourteen years, interest flagged as the cause faltered in failing state campaigns across the country. By century’s end, only four states had given female citizens the right to vote in national elections—Wyoming (1890), Colorado (1893), Utah (1895), and Idaho (1896).86
Not until 1908 did press interest again fire, this as a new generation took to the podium. Nothing stoked media scrutiny more than the entry into the movement of two of society’s most glittering celebrities, who waged a public contest for the title of preeminent suffragist that converted many within their circle and electrified many others in the public. Though Katherine Duer Mackay and Alva Vanderbilt Belmont denied that theirs was a rivalry, their contest for power was as intense as anything Samuel Tilden ever attempted against William “Boss” Tweed when Tammany Hall and the governance of New York were in the balance.
That two women of wealth and social standing were competing for the role of suffrage leader suggests a notable shift in society’s view of politics. No longer content to defer to their husbands and fathers in matters of the state, these two giants of social celebrity fought not to replace Mrs. Astor as a preeminent social leader or compete with their husbands in business prowess but to assume a title new to both women and society—political kingmaker. Alva Belmont was a child of the Civil War, a veteran of wars for social dominance whose infamous divorce from William Vanderbilt and remarriage to Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont had, like all her adventures, been lived in public on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers. Katherine Mackay was a Gilded Age beauty whose seemingly picture-perfect marriage and genteel activism protected her from public criticism, even as tensions in her personal life made her the first celebrity built up and then torn down by a capricious press.
Together, their involvement engendered a shift in public attitudes, as magazines and newspapers gave more coverage to the suffrage movement in the 1910s than at any time in history. Unlike the first generation of society suffragists, who spoke from their parlors to a New York audience, Mackay and Belmont were national figures, celebrities chronicled nationally for their clothes, their décor, their marriages, and now their activism. Gertrude Atherton, a San Francisco novelist then often compared to Henry James and Edith Wharton, mused that because of “the individual awakening of the women of Society,” the chaperone had disappeared (“the modern American Society girl . . . is quite capable of taking care of herself”) and, most notably, suffrage had replaced bridge whist as the nation’s hobby. “Suffrage has arrived,” she declared. “It is fashionable. It has put the would-be Mrs. Astor . . . out of business. . . . Fancy Mrs. Mackay wasting her time leading Society.”87