A great many people fear that giving a woman her honest equal rights in the world’s work is bound to make her act mannish. . . . My experience is that so far as it has been tried out it merely makes her act a little more like a gentleman.
Raymond Brown1
BUSINESS stopped in Rhinebeck, New York, the day Jack Astor was buried. The quaint town in Dutchess County, home of Ferncliff, the Astor estate, lowered its flags to half-mast. Bells tolled at noon, and residents crowded the train station as his body was placed on board for the trip to Manhattan. There, at Trinity Church Cemetery in Upper Manhattan, the forty-seven-year-old scion of real estate wealth and social prominence was laid to rest in the family vault next to his mother, the indomitable Caroline Schermerhorn Astor.2 Outside the cemetery, thousands perched near walls and on the fence and “on either side of Broadway and 155th Street, while others sought the roofs of adjoining apartment houses, and the viaduct along the river overlooking the burial ground,” to catch a glimpse of this man of gallantry, who “went to his death nobly,” a man who had “died to let woman live.”3
When the R.M.S. Titanic went down on April 12, 1912, it took more than fifteen hundred passengers to their frigid death, many victims of hypothermia in thirty-one-degree water that shut down their organs and rendered them unconscious in minutes.4 It made a hero of John Jacob Astor IV, a sportsman who had hardly been that in life. And it sparked a nationwide debate over chivalry, that unwritten law of the sea—the call of “women and children first” that prompted Astor and other men to forfeit seats on lifeboats for female passengers. If men had protected women from death, should women enjoy rights of citizenship in life? Critics said no, chiding suffragists for their audacity—some said hypocrisy—in seeking equality at the ballot box when men had just made the ultimate sacrifice at sea.
“Let the suffragists remember this,” argued one letter writer to the Baltimore Sun. “When the Lord created woman and placed her under the protection of man, he had her well provided for. The Titanic disaster proved it very plainly.” In an editorial, the Sun’s editors agreed, arguing that women did not need the ballot. As the Titanic episode demonstrated, “women can appeal to a higher law than that of the ballot for justice, consideration and protection.” Identifying himself as “Mere Man,” another wrote in telling sarcasm, “Would the suffragette have stood on that deck for women’s rights or for women’s privileges?”5
The question hung over the movement in New York as suffrage leaders planned a street parade “the like of which New York never knew before.”6 Moved by the nobility of the men who perished, some urged a postponement. “After the superb unselfishness and heroism of the men on the Titanic, your march is untimely and pathetically unwise,” anti-suffragist Annie Nathan Meyer, founder of Barnard College for Women, wrote to organizers. Even some who planned to march wished men had not forfeited their lives for the lofty code of chivalry. “The women should have insisted that the boats be filled with an equal number of men,” observed suffragist Lida Stokes Adams.7
For others, the tragedy only bolstered the case for giving women a vote, and a voice, in politics and commerce. Had women been involved in planning, they argued, the Titanic, driven by male ego and a conviction that the ship was unsinkable, might have been equipped with a sufficient number of lifeboats for all the passengers, negating the need for chivalry. “There was no need that a single life should have been lost upon the Titanic,” wrote Alice Stone Blackwell. “There will be far fewer lost by preventable accidents, either on land or sea, when the mothers of men have the right to vote.” Invoking the cloak of motherhood, Blackwell and others lobbied for the vote on grounds of moral probity, sure that a female presence in the political world would “bring humaneness, the valuation of human life, into the commerce and transportation and business of the world.” As for chivalry, muckraker Rheta Childe Dorr expressed the cynicism of many when she wrote of conditions at one Brooklyn sweatshop, where locked doors and bad odors imprisoned workers. “The law of the sea, women and children first,” she said. “The law of the land—that’s different.”8
Only hours after Jack Astor was buried, an estimated twenty thousand suffragists marched down Fifth Avenue in an exuberant affirmation of their rights as citizens. In response to the male chivalry represented by the Titanic’s fateful ending, suffragists offered female discipline. Parade organizer Harriot Stanton Blatch banned automobiles, believing that they shielded wealthy or lazy activists from the chore of actually walking—or of having been seen walking—for suffrage. “Riding in a car did not demonstrate courage. It did not show discipline,” Blatch wrote later. “Women were to march on their own two feet out on the streets of America’s greatest city; they were to march year by year, better and better.”9
They were to dress in white—Macy’s was the official headquarters for suffrage paraphernalia—and march in step with one another, column after column of women, “a mass of gleaming white,” declaring their interest in the ballot.10 Eager to defuse criticism that women had dallied the previous year, evidence of their unsuitability for the ballot, Blatch insisted that the 1912 parade begin promptly at 5:00 p.m. “Eyes to the front,” read her orders, “head erect and shoulders back,” and above all, remember that “the public will judge, illogically of course, but no less strictly, your qualification as a voter by your promptness.”11 Vowing to feminize the concept of the street parade—with its male overtones of military combat—she concluded, “Men and women are moved by seeing marching groups of people and by hearing music far more than by listening to the most careful argument.”12
But what most fascinated press and public was the decision of an estimated one thousand men to join in the parade. The previous year, eighty-seven men had shown up for a women’s suffrage parade, enduring great derision from sidewalk hecklers. Now, three weeks after the sinking of the Titanic that had revealed silenced resentments over chivalry, they marched in rows of four across, under the windswept blue banner of the new Men’s League for Woman Suffrage. “As if to give courage to the less courageous of the mere men marchers,” reported the Times, a band “broke into a lusty marching tune as the men swung from Thirteenth Street into Fifth Avenue.” Perhaps they could still hear the jeers through the drumbeat: “Tramp, tramp, tramp, the girls are marching.”13
Rabbi Stephen Wise marched with his ten-year-old son James, who carried a sign saying, “We want our mothers to vote.”14 A popular progressive speaker in the city, Wise once commented on the subway companies that allowed anti-suffragists to advertise, but would not accept ads from suffrage forces. “That’s just the way the anti-suffrage party works—underground,” he quipped.15 Now he wrote in his diary of the derision he encountered along the parade route. “We had to laugh nearly all the way on account of the things that were shouted at us,” he said in bemused recollection. “For a few moments, I was very warm and took off my hat, whereupon someone shouted, ‘Look at the long-haired Susan.’ Some of the other delightful exclamations that greeted us were: ‘Who’s taking care of the baby? . . . Oh, Flossy dear, aren’t they cute? Look at the Mollycoddles.’” Still, Wise found the event uplifting, because while both male and female “rowdies” shouted insults, “the most hopeful thing” was the “respect [shown] by the intelligent class of people.”16
Playwright George Middleton, whose wife, Fola La Follette, was a suffragist, took pride that none of the men had “deserted the ranks.” He recalled hecklers crying, “‘Take that handkerchief out of your cuff,’ ‘Oh you gay deceiver’ and ‘You forgot to shave this morning.’”17 Raymond Brown, whose wife, Gertrude Foster Brown, worked for the New York State Woman Suffrage Party, was less buoyant, saying that the men felt isolated. “Tagging after the girls—that’s what we were doing; and nobody would let us forget it,” he wrote. In an article titled “How It Feels to Be the Husband of a Suffragette,” written under the pen name “One,” he addressed “the over 11,863 of you [who] requested me to go home and wash” dishes. Reassuring detractors that neither he nor his wife did the dishes, he suggested that they both had busy professional careers and could afford household help. “She values the dishes too highly,” he wrote. “They are safer in the hands of a well-trained maid.”18
League president James Lees Laidlaw, a banker whose wife, Harriet, was a leader of the New York State Woman Suffrage Party, was asked why the men were marching. He offered a succinct reply that resonated with meaning. “We are marching to give political support to the women,” he said, “and moral support to the men.”19 As he had anticipated, the week after the 1912 parade, male converts descended on suffrage headquarters, including quite a few men “moved by the guying their brethren got in the parade.”20 And a few years later, when the Union League Club voted to oppose women’s suffrage, William Benedict became one of the first of his fellow members to resign, donating his dues instead to the New York State Woman Suffrage Party.21 The specter of male suffragists being heckled in the 1912 parade also touched marchers of both genders, who credited the men for giving them strength.
“It took so much more courage for a man to come out for woman’s suffrage than it did for a woman,” recalled Laura Ellsworth Seiler, a junior at Cornell University marching in her first parade.22 Many singled out Laidlaw, an outdoorsman equally at home in the men’s clubs of Manhattan and in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, for making them braver.23 “It meant much for him to do this, for he was in the very forefront and faced the derision of the men in his own clubs, as they sat in their windows and watched us go by,” Charles Strong wrote in a book of remembrances issued on Laidlaw’s death in 1932. In the same volume, Harriet Laidlaw confirmed the assessment, noting that “all Mr. Laidlaw’s banking firm were against him in it.”24 Frances Perkins, a social worker who later became Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of labor, the first female cabinet officer in American history, agreed. “I recall him so plainly and am heartened by it still, as he joked and encouraged us on East 10th Street as we waited to ‘fall in’ in the great suffrage parade,” she recalled. “I can never be thankful enough for the courage he gave to many of us—young and doubtful—when he took up the suffrage movement on his own.”25
Some historians have dismissed these male suffragists as insincere, driven more by quixotic political or sexual adventure than commitment to the cause.26 Others have ascribed the behavior of the male suffragists to a sense of chivalry, as if the vote were a courtesy, to be bestowed on delicate creatures.27 In fact, their motives were diverse. In its early years, the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage attracted Greenwich Village bohemians, radicals for whom capitalism was corrupt because it encouraged wives and children to be dependent on men for support. Feminism, armed with the vote, argued Floyd Dell, “would make it possible for the first time for men to be free.”28
By the time of the 1912 parade, some socialists had left the Men’s League, replaced by a legion of good-government reformers. In their campaigns to rid the city of Tammany Hall corruption, these male suffragists had pushed for electoral reforms, including secret ballots and separation of municipal elections from state and national ones. They saw the enfranchisement of women not as a concession of male turf or as an assault on their manhood, but a welcome boost to their anti-corruption efforts. Like Laidlaw, many were married to suffragists whose passion for the cause became theirs. And like gilded suffragists, they understood that their prominence could excite public interest and bolster the movement’s profile. In their eyes, the fight for women’s suffrage was not a contest between men and women, but, as is often the case in campaigns for social change, between progressives and the rest.29
In the face of the vibrant, celebratory parade of 1912, the reliably anti-suffrage New York Times tried to warn its readers that the tide was turning. In an editorial titled “The Uprising of the Women,” the Times assailed “the refusal of woman to recognize his manhood as a title of supremacy in the world’s affairs.” The problem was not the “very small minority” of women who “have a natural inclination to usurp the social and civic functions of men.” Nor was the problem the men who marched for suffrage. Though they were in the wrong, of course, the Times opined that they were “certainly more admirable and entitled to respect” than those men who seem “not to care much whether or not the women get the right to vote,” and ignore “the social revolution which would result.” Conceding that the marchers were “young and personable, all . . . healthy and presumably intelligent,” the editorial sought to shake men out of their complacency by questioning their manhood. “The situation is dangerous. We often hear the remark nowadays that women will get the vote if they try hard enough and persistently, and it is true that they will get it, and play havoc with it for themselves and society, if the men are not firm and wise enough and, it may as well be said, masculine enough to prevent them.”30 The Titanic tragedy was fresh in memory, but female intrusion on the male ballot threatened to eviscerate those warm chivalrous feelings.
The attempt by Times editorial writers to awaken men from their passivity may have been too late, for 1912 proved a pivotal marker for the entry of women into national politics. As the Washington Post put it, “With a suddenness and force that have left observers gasping, women have injected themselves into the national campaign this year in a manner never before dreamed of in American politics.”31 Six states had granted women voting rights—Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Washington, and California. The passage of women’s suffrage in California had been close—the referendum won by a margin of 3,587 votes, one per precinct—but the effect was dramatic, increasing to 1.3 million the number of female voters eligible to cast ballots in the presidential election.32 No less remarkable was the impact on local elections. In 1911 Hiram Gill, mayor of Seattle, a colorful character given to wearing a “broad-brimmed Stetson hat” and sporting a “corn-cob pipe,” was recalled over his “open city” tolerance of drinking and gambling.33 His undoing came at the hands of an electorate that included nearly twenty-two thousand female voters enfranchised only the year before.34 In New York, Yiddish papers “sold out in half the usual time,” as Russian immigrant women rushed to savor the moment, asking their menfolk, “Well what do you think of the women now?”35
The Men’s League for Woman Suffrage was actually the brainchild of a woman, Fanny Garrison Villard.36 In 1908 Villard had urged her son, a crusading editor of the New York Evening Post and the Nation, to contact Anna Howard Shaw, the National American Woman Suffrage Association president, about forming “a men’s club favoring equal suffrage.” The subject had been much discussed in suffrage circles, and Shaw was mindful that some female activists were wary of a male takeover. In conferring her blessings, Shaw encouraged Oswald Garrison Villard to focus on men who might be too busy to campaign but “would be willing to give their names and the influence [emphasis hers] which goes with them.”37 In Shaw’s formulation, the Men’s League would give social cover by its very presence, but like a cadre of silent soldiers would not threaten female leadership. In the crossroads of unintended consequences, an organic political organization once unloosed is rarely contained. Within a year the Men’s League became a loud, active suffrage organization, often garnering more attention than women’s groups.
Villard reached out to Rabbi Wise, the son and grandson of rabbis and an early advocate for women’s suffrage. Offered the position of rabbi at the city’s most influential synagogue, Emanu-El, Wise declined, arguing that he did not want to preside over the status quo but to change it.38 Forming a Free Synagogue, he used his Sunday lectures at Carnegie Hall to address a more secular audience. Once, he admonished wealthy Jews for holding too narrow a view of charity, funding orphan asylums while ignoring the causes of the children’s abandonment. “Some think that to send a child to an orphan asylum is everything that should be done,” Wise intoned. “If mothers and fathers were treated more like human beings than machines, there would not be so many orphans to be taken care of.”39 About suffrage, Wise was outspoken. “As long as women are shut out from citizenship and the exercise of the ballot, which is the symbol of citizenship, ours is no democracy,” he thundered. The country was a “manocracy,” where men use “brute power to shut women out from the right of equal citizenship.”40
Villard and Wise agreed to found a Men’s League. They would “share the ignominy, provided someone turned up who would do the work.”41 That someone turned out to be Max Eastman, an intellectual, socialist, poet, and later editor of the radical magazine the Masses. Influenced by his sister, suffragist Crystal Eastman, and by the “general mood of America,” seizing on what he saw as an opportunity to “demolish traditional monogamous marriage,” he agreed to take on the task of organizing men around the idea of women’s liberation.42
For his part, Eastman, an advocate of free love and red politics, thought that the ballot would improve women’s intellectual skills, the better for both socialism and sex. He reached out to other radicals in Greenwich Village.43 But Villard, descendent of political fame, told Eastman to recruit men of prominence, the better to “impress the public and legislators,” an outreach that communicated power to power, within the class.44 Villard had given Eastman letters of introduction to twelve men of “civic importance,” along with two dollars in dues, which Eastman said “sealed my responsibility” and “weighed me down. . . . I was the organizer now for certain. I held the funds. There was nothing to do but go ahead and organize.”
In contacting men of prominence—he called them “civic wonders”—Eastman encountered some resistance. Hector S. Tyndale, claiming to be a suffrage supporter, practically threw Eastman out of his office, saying he’d “be damned if he’d see [the cause] made ridiculous.” Insulted by this “severe blow,” Eastman avoided anyone on the list for weeks. His next visit was more successful. Charles Culp Burlingham, president of the New York Bar Association, a reformer sometimes called the “first citizen of New York,” was all in.45 Burlingham, whose wife was an anti-suffragist, told Eastman he believed that “women ought to try to be more intelligent than they are, if only for the sake of their husbands.” To all, Eastman made two promises, “the importance of which I had learned in my visits to the original twelve.” One was that there would be no public announcement until one hundred men had signed up, offering the comfort of a crowd even as it suggested the likelihood of social ostracism. “The other was that no member would be called upon to do anything,” Eastman recalled. “The main function of the league would be to exist.”46
But when the Men’s League held its first meeting at the City Club in late November 1909, press interest was considerable, and all thoughts of a silent brigade of compliant men symbolically bolstering the cause vanished. The City Club, founded in 1892 to “aid in securing permanent good government for the City of New York,” was a fitting site from which to announce a new progressive cause.47 Richard Welling, a lawyer and Harvard classmate of Theodore Roosevelt’s, had been instrumental in the club’s growth, and from there had launched many a campaign to improve the city’s water supply and end police graft and election bribery.48 With Burlingham and fellow lawyer Charles H. Strong, he now joined the Men’s League. So did other professionals of their acquaintance, men they had met during the City Club’s reform efforts, including the league’s first president, banker George Foster Peabody, Metropolitan Museum of Art curator William Ivins, Republican congressman Herbert Parsons, businessman William Jay Schieffelin, and muckraker Lincoln Steffens.49
By 1912, the idea of men’s leagues had spread to thirty chapters around the country—the Harvard Men’s League for Woman Suffrage was formed by John Reed, whom Eastman had converted to the cause—and twenty thousand men had signed up for a national Men’s League for Woman Suffrage.50 The New York league’s letterhead, which listed twenty-seven names at its inception in 1910, by 1915 featured sixty-seven men willing to publicly declare their support.51 With the numbers came a sense of excitement. After witnessing the New York suffrage parade in 1915, Henry Allen, the former governor of Kansas who had been panned by suffragists for a speech he gave in Brooklyn, stomped into Carrie Chapman Catt’s office to ask for a second chance. “I never got the spirit of this thing till I saw that parade yesterday,” he told her. “This is not a movement, it is not a campaign—This is a crusade.”52
Many who now joined the league saw themselves as husbands supporting their wives’ causes. In their eyes, manhood was less about defending the barricade of exclusive access to the political process than expanding the definition of citizenship. Whether they were drawn to the campaign because of their wives’ activism or attracted to their wives because of their support for progressive ideals is difficult to say. Either way, their gaze brought dividends, as their endorsement conferred male political power on a female cause. As Ida Husted Harper, press agent for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, observed, “Behind many a woman who worked there was a man aiding and sustaining her with money and personal sacrifice.” A suffragist with a man at her side had more credence with male voters. The moniker of “suffrage husband” became a “title of distinction.”53
Fola La Follette, a suffragist, a member of Heterodoxy, and the daughter of Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette, the Wisconsin progressive, had married playwright George Middleton. On their marriage she opted to keep her given name, and he readily acceded. “When I defended Fola’s right to do as she wished, a teapot tempest spilled over,” he recalled. “Editorials, interviews, and what not followed, for we were accused of starting another of those ‘feminists’ demands’ which were ‘breaking up the home.’”54 So devoted was he to suffrage that one columnist suggested that the playwright “be added to the list of Prominent Feminists—because he not only stands for his wife’s visiting cards, but because he constitutes so large a portion of the masculine element at feminist meetings.” He was often called on to give his own speeches “at street corners and ‘store’ meetings on Fifth Avenue during the lunch hour.” Some suffragists remembered Middleton’s speeches for their pithy phrases, such as “feminism is not an assault on trousers” and “marriage is a link and not a handcuff” (the latter quote more likely attributable to Crystal Eastman). No matter their provenance, these bon mots suggest the asset of the male suffragist—to take the fangs out of a social change that is destabilizing, to make the notion of sexual equality, once radical, now laughably familiar. For his own part, Middleton preferred to make appearances with his wife, who drew crowds. Her verbal gifts, her training as an actress, and her background as the daughter of a prominent politician gave her a presence that delighted him. Once, preceding her at an event in Catskill, New York, he recalled, “I died on my feet. Never have I felt so lifeless an audience.” He turned the stage over to his wife, who melted “all the ice I left.”55
Henry Wise Miller was likewise awed by his wife’s orations. Alice Duer Miller was the daughter of privilege who had excelled at college. Studying mathematics and astronomy, she wrote a prize-winning thesis that experts believe anticipated the solution for the riddle of the irrational number.56 But it was her facility on her feet that most impressed her husband. “There was a perfection in what she said from the platform and in the press,” he wrote. “Coming from one of her background, [she] contributed an authority to the campaign, and did much to silence the venom and ridicule of the opponents of women’s rights.” Like Middleton, he too was called on to share the podium as a suffrage husband. “One of the stunts of the suffrage campaign was a husband and wife speaking as a team,” he recalled. He often began his remarks with a line he had read in the Saturday Evening Post: “I am not a politician, and my other habits are good.” And like Middleton, he saluted the justice of the cause. “The conduct of the campaign—as good as anything we have had since the Boston Tea Party—may well be taken as a model of propaganda, combining in nice proportion premeditated violence with an appeal to reason,” he wrote.57
George Creel was not a suffrage husband. Far from it—he had to negotiate an arrangement with his wife, Blanche Bates, to devote time to the cause. “My wife and I worked out a financial arrangement,” he recalled. “When—and if—I made enough money to take care of my share of household expenses for the year, the rest of the time would be mine” to spend on progressive reform campaigns, including suffrage. Although he described his wife as a “vociferous anti,” he admired greatly her independent career as an actress. More, he ascribed his enthusiasm for the cause to the “deep conviction that my mother outweighed any man when it came to brains and character,” although she too had “held firmly to the Southern insistence that woman’s place was in the home.” Despite this domestic indifference, Creel enunciated a passionate appeal for the vote, becoming the Men’s League’s publicity director and recruiting a committee of men to rebut editorials and letters in anti-suffrage newspapers.58 “Equal Suffrage is part and parcel of the great big struggle for equal justice and real democracy,” he wrote to prospective members. “It is as much the man’s fight as the woman’s.”59
Of all the suffrage husbands who joined the Men’s League, none was as notorious as Dudley Field Malone. A lawyer and fiery campaign speaker, Malone first joined the movement in 1908, when he was seated next to Anna Howard Shaw at a dinner. When it was suggested to her that she try to recruit the charming Malone, Shaw replied, “I am too good a suffragist to try to convert any man to anything before he has had his dinner.” Shaw never mentioned suffrage during their conversation. “I was converted then and there by this exhibit of good sense and insight into human nature,” he recounted.60
During the pivotal 1912 presidential election, Malone stumped for Woodrow Wilson, and was rewarded with appointment to the lucrative position of Collector of the New York Port, with a salary of $12,000 a year (roughly $300,000 in contemporary terms). Throughout his first term, Wilson clung to a southerner’s view that women’s suffrage was a state rather than federal issue. Four years later, when Wilson ran for reelection against former New York governor Charles Evans Hughes, who had endorsed suffrage, the White House sent Malone west, to win over California’s female voters. According to an account in the New York Times, Malone told crowds that Wilson was “sympathetic toward equal suffrage and that if the women of California would support the Democratic National ticket he would do all he could to help them obtain a national vote.” Doris Stevens, a leading figure in Alice Paul’s Congressional Union, was also on the campaign trail. Rebutting Malone, she told female voters that Wilson “was not sympathetic and that the cause of universal suffrage could expect little aid from his Administration.”61
Safely reelected, Wilson treated suffrage as an intrusion on his time, now taken up with preparing the nation for war in Europe. When suffrage leader Alice Paul staged pickets at the White House, he ordered the arrest of protesters on charges of obstructing sidewalk traffic. After the protesters were sentenced to sixty days in the notorious Occoquan Workhouse, several members of the Men’s League, lawyers who had witnessed the trial, expressed their outrage. At the White House, Malone convinced Wilson to pardon the picketers. Then he resigned in protest after a fiery exchange in the Oval Office in which he upbraided the president. Wilson saw Malone as a friend, and was deeply wounded, telling his aide Colonel Edward House, “I know of nothing that has gone more to the quick with me or that has seemed to me more tragical [sic] than Dudley’s conduct, which came upon me like a bolt out of the blue. I was stricken by it as I have been by few things in my life.”62
On hearing of Malone’s grand gesture, suffragists were ecstatic, seeing chivalry and personal sacrifice in the action. “Although we disagree with you on the question of picketing, every suffragist must be grateful to you for the gallant support you are giving our cause and the great sacrifice you are making for it,” Vira Whitehouse telegraphed. Harriet Laidlaw agreed, telling a reporter, “I was thrilled. I didn’t know the suffragists had such a knightly friend. I didn’t dream any man would do such a chivalrous thing for us. It can’t fail to have a splendid effect on the voting men in our referendum this fall.”63
Male suffragists were more suspicious of Malone’s motives. Newton Gilbert, an Indiana official and briefly governor-general of the Philippines, argued that the resignation wouldn’t help suffrage because the picketing had hurt the cause. “Mr. Malone is too closely connected with the pickets,” he observed. “And the pickets have hurt suffrage, which is too bad, for it’s too good a cause to be hurt. I did not support Woodrow Wilson, but he is my President, and I object to having him called ‘Kaiser Wilson.’” As league president James Lees Laidlaw told the New York Sun, the results of Malone’s action “would depend somewhat on whether he got out and rolled up his sleeves for Votes for Women.”64 In fact, aside from his membership in the Men’s League, there is no record that Malone ever did.
Four years later, Malone and Doris Stevens married, a stealth wedding officiated by a justice of the peace in the back of a hardware store in Peekskill, New York, and then quickly left for Paris, where Malone worked his trade as a divorce lawyer and Stevens suffered the insults of his public humiliations.65 Some reported that Malone was “given to drunkenly insulting Stevens in public,” flaunting his extramarital affairs and once hitting her.66 Others suggest that Alva Belmont, who had hired Stevens to promote her international suffrage activism, put additional strains on the marriage by insisting that Stevens tend to Belmont’s needs.67 On their divorce in 1929, all commentary about Malone as a feminist withered.
As the women’s suffrage campaign gained steam in New York, the Men’s League’s initial reticence to do anything more than stand guard gave way to a more public activism. By 1912 Laidlaw was also president of the National Men’s League for Woman Suffrage, and he often involved the New York league in local issues elsewhere, particularly the fight for ratification of a women’s suffrage amendment in West Virginia in 1916. Opponents had threatened to defeat Raymond Dodson, of the Spencer area, if he did not abandon his support for the amendment. Dodson’s day job was attorney for the United Fuel Gas Company, where his boss, Harry Wallace, objected to the idea of women in politics. Word reached James Lees Laidlaw, who rallied male supporters in New York and elsewhere to save the senator. The Men’s League issued a press release meant to “arouse indignation.” Dodson served out his term.68
The fraught issue of chivalry was never far from the surface. In 1913 Laidlaw suggested that Men’s League members wear a blue button of courtesy, signaling to anti-suffrage women on streetcars that, as one newspaper put it, “the days of chivalry were not over when it came to giving a woman a seat in a crowded car.”69
The anti-suffrage Brooklyn Life pounced at this contortion of gender messages. In an article titled “Ostentatious Gallantry,” the magazine pierced the hypocrisy of preaching equality while offering privilege. Calling the Men’s League “that knightly organization,” Brooklyn Life noted that true “gentlemen never make a special feature of courtesy and consideration for women. They do not have to. It is second nature with them and the last thing they would think of bragging about.” Instead the magazine suggested that male suffragists ask women for help carrying their luggage. “It seems to us that this would be much more consonant with the aim and purpose of the league,” said the magazine, “which is to drag women into politics before a majority of them has signified the slightest desire for political equality.”70 Ever eager to emasculate male suffragists, Brooklyn Life often ran notices and summaries of their meetings under the heading “Women’s Clubs.”71
In November 1912, when Harriet Laidlaw planned a Woman Suffrage Party torchlight parade to celebrate recent victories in California and Washington, men took a prominent role, none more than her husband, who led the march. Anti-suffrage sentiment soared. Mocking the parade as the “most pretentious celebration ever attempted,” the New York Telegram reserved its greatest sarcasm for the men. “Don’t think that Mere Man will be left standing on the sidewalk, balancing himself on one foot and then on the other, while lovely women go marching by,” jived the paper. “Any man is at liberty to enter the ranks, provided he obtains an ordinary chrysanthemum for the buttonhole of his coat. They cost only five cents and what up to date man, with red blood in his veins and with a discerning eye for the beautiful, can resist the captivating glances of a suffragette?”72
That was the question suffrage leaders were now eager to test. Giving speeches from atop soapboxes and ox carts from Wall Street to the East River docks, they challenged male terrain. Adopting the tactics of Madison Avenue and a burgeoning new advertising industry, they sold women’s suffrage as a commodity. Mostly, they privileged femininity, ensuring that coming contests would not lack for drama, or media coverage. In short, they created buzz.