Militant political action . . . had broken down hitherto unimaginable taboos. . . . An emotional earthquake had shattered the intangible yet suffocating prison of decorum.
Winifred Holtby1
IT was a day of presidential firsts for William Howard Taft. After lunch on Thursday, April 14, 1910, he left the White House for the Arlington Hotel, where he became the first president to address a suffrage group, welcoming to Washington members of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Then he traveled to Griffith Stadium, where he became the first president to throw out the ceremonial first pitch on opening day of the season. Taft is much remembered for his baseball achievement—even now honored as one of the Washington Nationals’ “racing presidents.” But it was his speech to the suffrage group that reverberated through political circles, exposing a tactical warfare over decorum.
Worried that Taft’s appearance would rouse Democratic enmity against Republicans, Senator Elihu Root of New York had beseeched the president to make clear that his welcome was not an endorsement.2 Taft agreed. He would be polite, even decorous, but would spell out the rationale for his opposition to suffrage. And so he told the audience that it was dangerous to extend the ballot to “Hottentots,” a slang word for South Africans, “or any other uneducated, altogether unintelligent class.” Since the rest of the female citizenry didn’t really want the vote, he reasoned, the ballot would be exercised only “by that part of the class less desirable as political constituents and be neglected by many of those who are intelligent and patriotic and would be most desirable as members of the electorate.”
Reaction was immediate. As the Syracuse Post-Standard put it, “When these words fell from the President’s lips, the walls of the convention hall echoed a chorus of feminine hisses. It was no feeble demonstration of protest. The combined hisses sounded as if a valve on a steam engine had broken.”3 It had. Female hissing heralded the end of gender deference in politics, nurtured since the Revolution, challenged during the Civil War, and reinvigorated during the cult of manhood embodied by the century’s new president, Theodore Roosevelt.4 Women who had “grown up with Victorian standards of modesty” now felt empowered enough to raise their voices.5
Suffrage leaders tried to hush the hecklers, and later wrote a letter of apology to the president, but they could not silence the movement’s newfound freedom of expression.6 Like chivalry, challenged by gender equality, decorum loomed as the next great test for female advocates as they crossed from domestic concerns to the public square. In an editorial entitled “The Sowing of Bad Seed,” Vogue Magazine warned that “the urgent calls to throw off the alleged tyranny of man have seen so many seeds of discontent sown upon all kinds of soil.” The result, thought Vogue, was “a large crop of shouters for rights who have no real conception of just what rights they are shouting for.” The magazine, usually an arbiter of fashion trends, now blamed the “reckless” tendency of suffrage leaders to attack “fathers, husbands and brothers,” and pit “class against class,” leading inevitably to “embarrassing situations” such as hissing at the president.7 What had become of manners?
In England, under the banner of “Deeds, Not Words,” supporters of Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union answered the question by embracing militancy. As Pankhurst explained, “We threw away all our conventional methods of what was ‘ladylike’ and ‘good form’ and we applied to our methods the one test question, will it help?”8 In a remarkable run at power beginning in 1905, these militants for the vote threw rocks at 10 Downing Street, set fire to pillar boxes, smashed windows in Knightsbridge’s luxurious shops, treated golf courses with acid, and cut telegraph wires. They heckled and attacked members of Parliament, including Winston Churchill.9 They set off a bomb at the Theatre Royal in Dublin, started a fire at the Orchid House in Kew Gardens, and bombed Lloyd George’s country house.10 Imprisoned at the infamous Holloway Prison, many protested their incarceration with hunger strikes. The brutality of forcing liquids down their throats by tube, and a medical protest against the practice, sparked continued militancy and renewed publicity.11 In 1913 suffrage activist Emily Davison threw herself at King George V’s horse at the Epsom Derby, whether an attempt to die for the cause or to attach a suffrage banner to the horse’s bridle never determined. What is clear is that her funeral, funded by the party, cemented her reputation as a martyr for the cause.12
Labeling them troublemakers, British journalist Charles Hands in 1906 dismissed the militants as mere suffragettes.13 Activists in London embraced the label, eager to distinguish themselves from the constitutionalists of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, and to turn derision into a badge of honor.14 In New York, by contrast, American activists, the wealthy among them, distanced themselves from the title and the violence, eager to reassure men that if granted the vote, they would not threaten the political order. They would be suffragists, not suffragettes. In short, they would behave like ladies.
In years to come, American suffragists had many tussles over tactics—a division over whether peaceful appeals or boisterous challenges would prove more effective, a discussion of whether adopting the male tactics of the political art would empower them or sully them, even a debate over Alice Paul’s decision to embrace civil disobedience and hardball politics. But nowhere is there any record of an American advocate for the vote throwing a bomb.
The difference is a function of history, and of political culture. The U.S. record of extending the vote to previously disenfranchised groups may have influenced American suffragists to embrace the system. Though it is not widely known, propertied women were eligible to vote in New Jersey from the adoption of the state constitution in 1776 until 1807. Apparently they voted en masse for John Adams in 1800, and Jeffersonians in the state capitol took their revenge by disenfranchising them seven years later.15 Most white American men—the nonpropertied, the working-class—did not get the vote until the 1830s, when Andrew Jackson sought to expand his Democratic Party electorate. African American men got the vote—at least on paper—after the Civil War, although black men and women had to fight for it again a hundred years later during the civil rights movement. Because of this history, American suffragists may have had a view of the Constitution as amendable and the polity as expandable.
Culturally too, differences were instructive. Militant suffragists in Britain sought to frighten lawmakers in the political class, while constitutional suffragists in both countries worked to persuade or pressure them. Unlike activists in London, who fought in a political capital, suffrage leaders in New York parried foes in a city of wealth and aspiration. Theirs was not the political mission of forcing the hand of politicians, but the more commercial art of persuading the public. As a result, they now embraced the ploys of the private sector, entering into what one scholar has called “a period of stunning political experimentation as innovative as anything they had attempted in the nineteenth century.”16
Suffrage would be sold as a commodity, and the branding would be as important as the product.17 The range of tactics was breathtaking—sometimes silly—and always in keeping with a vibrant consumer culture that hawked products on streetcar walls and magazine pages, often using the lure of female beauty to bolster demand. Pageants, concerts, canal boat speeches, sandwich boards, organ grinder concerts, suffrage shops, whistle-stop tours from trains, “Votes for Women” signs on children and pets, pamphlets dropped from airplanes onto President Wilson’s yacht—no spectacle was too outrageous, as long as a sensationalizing press would give publicity to the cause, a current of public interest rising with the attention.18
For many activists, their first experience defying class and gender expectations in the public square was the soapbox speech, as intoxicating as it was nerve-wracking. “You took your box—a good strong grocery box of some sort, because they had wooden boxes . . . in those days,” recalled Frances Perkins, then a New York social worker. “You didn’t have any loudspeakers . . . you had to do it all with your own voice.” Traveling in pairs—one suffragist to speak, the other to distribute literature—suffragists often stood in front of a saloon because there, “you were always sure of a crowd.” Reaction was rough. “You would get jeered at. You would get heckled. You would get asked impertinent questions, but I don’t recall ever having been insulted or treated to obscene language,” she said.19
Belle Fligelman Winestine worked for suffrage in Montana with Jeannette Rankin, who would later become the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress. “Up to that time, no one in Montana . . . had heard of a respectable young woman making a public street corner speech,” she wrote. Winestine recalls being “terrified as I took my place on what was supposed to be a busy Helena street corner. Suddenly, it seemed, there was not a soul in sight. But I had something to say, so I just started talking to the world.” One person stopped to listen, and then another, “and soon I had a big audience, all listening attentively—partly, I suppose, because they had never heard a woman speaking on the street.” Her mother was horrified, admonishing her, “No respectable lady would speak on a street corner.”20
The novelty of it, the shock value of the new—these were the hallmarks of a modern suffrage movement in an America teeming with newspapers, advertisements, and a public forced to confront the cause. “We believed that you had to get the people who weren’t in the least interested in suffrage,” recalled Laura Ellsworth Seiler, who worked for Blatch’s Women’s Political Union. The “whole idea was that you must keep suffrage every minute before the public so that it gets used to the idea and talks about it, whether they agree or disagree.” In fact reaction was often hostile. “Sometimes, depending on the neighborhood, stones would be thrown into the crowd, . . . things would be thrown from the roof.”
Seiler recalled one ploy that did not win the movement a lot of friends. “Once we hired a motorboat and ran up and down shoreline yelling through a megaphone, ‘Suffrage, Votes for Women.’” Men loading cargoes were beyond dismissive. “There was lots of cussing from men loading cargo. I acquired a good many four-letter words on that boat trip.” While the women hurled their suffrage slogans at the docks, “a group of men on a fishing trip circled their boat to make tremendous waves, almost swamping us.” Despite the fact that the suffragists had almost capsized, news coverage was minimal. When Seiler complained to a reporter, he replied that the next time, “if I did drown, he would write it up.”21
Male derision was a stubborn thing. One writer, signing “J.J.,” complained to the Times that the focus on publicity had turned the cause into a “circus.” Parades that featured “their prettiest girls,” pageants where suffragists dressed in “flowing draperies,” statements by Alva Belmont that “arson and crime” would result if voters rejected suffrage at the polls—all seemed designed not for emancipation of women but for publicity.22 Still, they persisted.
In 1906, twenty-eight-year-old Maud Malone, who had founded the Harlem Equal Rights League the previous year, set up a polling place on Fifth Avenue. As male voters went inside to select the state’s next governor, a contest between Charles Evans Hughes and William Randolph Hearst, more than five hundred women stopped by outside to cast their votes—actresses, writers, librarians, teachers, and social workers. The results of their faux election were not recorded, but mockery at their attempt surely was. The Times belittled Malone and her band of election clerks, and suggested that some voted for Hearst because of the beauty of his eyes. “They came very gravely,” said the newspaper, “but once they got together . . . the women yielded to a natural propensity to talk a lot.”23
Amid these adventurous ploys, New York became a national center of “dramatic suffrage activity.” The city’s mix of ethnic groups and seasoned reformers, its remarkable cross-class coalition of working class and leisure class, its actresses rallying Broadway audiences to the cause had, said one scholar, “created an excitement that was unparalleled anywhere else in the country.”24 By the 1910s, most major suffrage organizations had their national headquarters in New York, and often anti-suffrage groups did too. In New York, if nowhere else, the campaign grew so heated that anti-suffragists were accused, as one scholar put it, of “dumping lemons, wet sponges, rolls of ticker tape, bags of water and garbage pails on innocent suffrage supporters parading outside the anti-suffrage offices.”25 For their part, activists responded by plastering pro-suffrage posters on the walls of buildings where anti-suffragists gathered.26 Violence may have been off the boards, but public decorum was on trial.
Of all the tactics women now employed in winning the vote, few were as controversial—or as upsetting to the mannered civility that had settled on relations between American men and women for more than a century—as the public parade. To Katherine Mackay and others in her Equal Franchise Society, the parades challenged the very heart of their ladylike activism. Worried that their first steps onto the grubby streets of New York City would mark them as radicals—or worse, as streetwalkers—they retreated. Elizabeth Callender Stevens, whom Mackay had recruited to lead the New Jersey Equal Franchise Society, resigned her position rather than participate in the 1911 parade. Over the protests of her husband, Richard Stevens, who begged her to reconsider, she insisted, “Men . . . do not have respect for women who will walk through the public streets in this manner. . . . It is so undignified and so unwomanly. . . . It will do no end of harm.”27
Mackay herself was said to be “greatly shocked” by the specter of women marching in the streets; Alva Belmont was likewise “furious and retiring to Long Island.” In a meeting of the Equal Franchise Society board of directors to discuss the 1911 parade, a “voluble” Mackay was said to have “pounded her fists on the table” in protest at this departure from ladylike activism. Once outvoted, Mackay directed the board’s discussion about “banners and regalia,” eager for her organization, as Blatch put it, “to make a good appearance even though she highly disapproved of the occasion and would not attend.”28 Mackay may have had qualms about parading, but she was resolved that her organization’s flag—“a beautiful affair of blue satin and gold”—be prominently displayed.29 So it was. Marching behind the Equal Franchise Society standard was Elizabeth Burchenal, one of Mackay’s lieutenants, bearing a sign that no doubt made Mackay smile. It said, “All This Is a Natural Consequence of Teaching Girls to Read.”30 Despite Mackay’s misgivings about the parade as a tactic, she was aware that her celebrity, and that of her suffrage organization, required showing the flag, with a bit of artistry and a lot of pizzazz.
For two years, as the parades gained in popularity and strategic effect, Belmont feigned illness, looking on from behind an office window or motoring alongside the marchers. She was said to own thirteen cars, and was perhaps the first American to import an automobile from Europe, a leading figure in what the papers called the “autonobility.”31 As she hesitated, women whose wealth was far more pedigreed than hers proudly if quietly marched for suffrage. Town Topics wondered what “the exclusive and precise Egerton Winthrop Sr.” thought of seeing his daughter-in-law Emmeline join the parade, or the late William C. Whitney would have surmised on seeing his daughter Dorothy “in the same gallery.” These women represented the “old and distinctive social elements of the very best in the Metropolis,” observed the weekly, and “their presence was worth more to the leaders of the Suffragettes than a hundred Mrs. Belmonts, Thompson Setons or Inez Milhollands, who either have ceased to have social influence or never possessed any.”32
By 1912, perhaps stung at this assertion that she was no longer socially influential, and as the campaign gathered steam, Belmont decided to risk marching at the head of her Political Equality Association, prompting one newspaper to hail “this epic in the history of womanhood.”33 The association’s Harlem chapter also joined the parade, the first time a unit of black suffragists was formally welcomed, turning out “in all its strength.”34
Belmont’s demeanor, both before and afterward, suggested the gravity of the decision. “She had the appearance of a brave soldier facing fire, looking straight ahead,” reported the Times.35 Her friend Mamie Fish told her she doubted she could walk the whole of the route from 59th Street to the Washington Arch. “My dear Alva, you’ll never be able to do it,” she warned. “It must be three miles and you have scarcely walked a step in your life.” To which Belmont replied, “All the more reason why I should begin now. After all, my dear, I must have something to interest me in my old age. . . . I shall walk the whole way.”36 Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont had been raised into the ways of the gentility, expected to respect the formalities of polite society. Though flippant with Mamie Fish, she may have been more candid with her daughter Consuelo, telling her, “To a woman brought up as I was, it was a terrible ordeal.” Journalist Marie Manning saw great moment in Belmont’s walk, as it forced politicians to pay mind. “The greatest shove ever given to the . . . movement will always be that lady’s appearance at the head of a suffrage parade in New York City,” she wrote.37
Later Belmont opened a suffrage lunchroom in Manhattan serving “good wholesome food, all home cooked and prepared by competent cooks . . . at reasonable prices for the working men and women of the District and visitors who come to town daily.” So popular did the venue become among male patrons—it was said that the very idea was “inspired by a man who lamented that once women got the vote, there would be no one to make his lunch”—that tables were reserved for men only, whether to protect women from unwanted male attention or men from too much suffrage lobbying is unclear.38 Perhaps no stunt challenged the gender landscape more than when activist Mary Morgan Brewer climbed into a Staten Island boxing ring in 1915 to deliver a pre-fight lecture on suffrage. Receiving a chorus of “howls, stamping and cat-calls by 1,500 fight fans” outraged at the very idea of a woman at a temple of raw male power—to say nothing of her audacity at delaying the boxing match—she spoke, then “calmly sat down and watched the ten-round bout” as Ted Lewis “whipped Charley White of Chicago.”39
The viper’s pen was another favorite weapon of suffragists, combining as it did evidence of erudition and intelligence, said to be lacking in the aspiring female voter. In a series of columns published in the New York Tribune from 1914 to 1917 titled “Are Women People?,” Alice Duer Miller exposed the hypocrisy of male resistance to female emancipation. Commenting on the Board of Education’s decision to fire a woman engineer with an exemplary record of overseeing pressure boilers, or the National Education Association speaker who claimed that girls who study algebra lose their souls, or U.S. laws that required women to renounce their American citizenship on marrying foreigners, she was as knowing as she was amusing. She was at her most biting in defense of suffrage. In one column, in the form of a verse, “Why We Oppose Votes for Men,” Miller observed, “Men are too emotional to vote. Their conduct at baseball games and political conventions shows this, while their innate tendency to appeal to force renders them peculiarly unfit for the task of government.”40 It was reminiscent of a tactic used by Britain’s Mary Cholmondeley, who in 1909 published the play Votes for Men, set two hundred years in the future. In the work, the British prime minister, a woman, is approached to speak to the Men’s Reinfranchisement League, and despairs, “I wish they would not pester me so. The government has other things to attend to than Male Suffrage at times like this.”41
When, in May 1915, the New York legislature agreed to put women’s suffrage on the November ballot, tactical imaginations soared, along with New York’s summer temperatures. From her home on East 56th Street, Vira Whitehouse, wife of New York stockbroker Norman de Rapelye Whitehouse and a member of Heterodoxy, made cold calls to potential voters to ask their views on suffrage, an early instance of telephone polling.42 Anti-suffragists protested, saying that suffragists were “disturbing men on a hot day.”43 At a “Votes for Women” restaurant at 70 Wall Street, Harriet Laidlaw delivered a speech as supporters distributed five hundred suffrage fans. “Suffrage sundaes, cooling beverages made principally of peaches were handed right and left,” reported the Sun.44 At the Polo Grounds in May, the campaign arranged a Suffrage Day. The New York Giants cooperated by draping yellow banners in front of the boxes and providing yellow dandelions for the lapels of male ushers. Suffragists distributed a flyer, inserted into each score card, with the exhortation “Fans, Fair Play . . . Vote Yes Nov. 2, 1915.” Other trinkets said, “We’d Like Our Innings,” and “Make a Home Run for Suffrage.” After the game, Laidlaw, Milholland, and Portia Willis spoke from their automobiles.45 As sportswriter Heywood Broun wrote in explaining the Cubs’ 1–0 shutout victory, “Having a certain social position to retain, the Giants always feel a bit nervous when Mrs. John Jacob Astor and others are in the stands.”46
Public attention to movement tactics gave courage to some who had been on the sidelines. For the first time now, they joined the great cause of their day. Rita Lydig had been treasurer of Mackay’s Equal Franchise Society since it began in 1909, but her sister Mercedes de Acosta, a poet, had not found her voice until the war. During the First World War, she wrote, “I worked for Women’s Suffrage as if it were the only thing that mattered in my life.” She canvassed homes, ringing doorbells, engaging in debate. “But always, and under every situation, I left a shower of leaflets and pamphlets strewn behind me. Hounds would not have been necessary to trace me by my scent in those days. Anyone could have found me by following up the stream of literature on Women’s Rights I left in my wake.”47
To some commentators, these newfound strategies seemed to be working. The New York Herald published a cartoon in 1910 that captured the differences in the women’s suffrage campaigns in Britain and the United States. Called “The Smooch versus the Harangue,” the illustration featured John Bull, the portly personification of Britain, hiding a ballot box behind his back, surrounded by female activists in wool jackets and skirts, armed with umbrellas going for his head. In the other corner is Uncle Sam, in early New England known as Brother Jonathan, hoisting the ballot box overhead, encircled by beautifully dressed femmes fatales in flowing gowns and feathered hats, whispering in his ears. The caption, by William Allen Rogers, read, “Jonathan may be in more danger than John.”48
Several scholars have argued that these new tactics—so unexpected because they violated “standards of respectable femininity”—assured the movement’s progress.49 Less noticed is that these departures also privileged activists of social standing. The wealthier the suffragist, “the more ladylike she was supposed to be, the greater the effect of her subversion of the norm.”50 Seeking to counteract negative publicity about boorish behavior and broad hints about lesbian intentions, suffrage leaders had favored femininity. When critics shuddered at the idea of suffragists marching in the streets, likening them to streetwalkers, activists put forward their most fashionable suffragists and kept marching. As always, male derision was the last temple to fall. “This method of propaganda is somewhat different from that of the English suffragettes who go to jail for their principles,” explained one journalist, “but why break into jail when one can break into society?”51
How suffragists looked and dressed was a long-standing concern among activists. When Isabella Beecher Hooker convened a suffrage convention in Washington, D.C., in 1871, she pointedly asked Elizabeth Cady Stanton not to attend, fearful that she and Susan B. Anthony would not act and dress “like ladies.”52 By the mid-1890s, the tendency to apply Darwinian principles of scientific inquiry to everything from public relations to business efficiency persuaded even diehard allies that, like other commodities, suffrage had to be sold. On the eve of their annual festival in 1894, activist Mary Livermore, an early editor of the Woman’s Journal, urged suffragists in Massachusetts to wear yellow flowers in their lapels.53 “We have cultivated a severe plainness long enough,” she said. “It may be classic and it may be artistic but it is desperately ugly. Let’s have a change, and show our colors.”54
Gabrielle Stewart Mulliner, a lawyer, an officer in the New York State Federation of Women’s Clubs, and an early member of Mackay’s Equal Franchise Society, stirred controversy in 1910 when she suggested that some suffragists—she called them “prize packages of frumps”—were so dated in their attire that “a few judicial deaths would be a salubrious thing for the suffragist cause.”55 Protests were many, and loud. Mrs. Clarence Burns, described by one newspaper as “a well-dressed clubwoman,” responded, “If the male ‘frumps’ in the matter of clothes had been eliminated from history, I fear we would have had to get along without our Abraham Lincolns, our Grants and a few other of our heroes. I can hardly believe the cause of women will be settled through the aid of Fifth Avenue hatters and modistes.”56 But logic held no sway over fashion. Within a year, the mainstream movement had taken the admonition to heart. In an item placed in the Washington Post and other newspapers early the next year, New York leaders urged that any woman marching in the upcoming “Votes for Women” parade “be neat and as modishly gowned as her purse will permit.” Noting that Belmont and Mackay “always keep up with the fashions,” publicists reasoned, “The well-groomed, attractive matron or maid . . . has more influence over both sexes on the speakers’ platform or in personal conversation than her out-at-elbows sister.”57
Anecdotal reports of many women, and a few men, suggest that the tactic was working. Florence Nightingale Graham, a Canadian who muscled her way into the American beauty industry, understood intuitively that the issue of women’s suffrage had acquired social cachet. One day in 1912, the woman who had renamed herself and her company Elizabeth Arden stunned her staff by leaving her desk to join the suffrage parade on Fifth Avenue.58 She had rarely shown interest in the campaign, and her biographers speculate that she merely wanted to cultivate the women it was now attracting. “It was not so much the cause that Elizabeth admired as those who espoused it,” they wrote. “Such a prestigious social aegis could only lend distinction to anybody who walked in its shadow.” Glamor rubbed off on suffrage politics. For years to come, Arden cast herself as an activist, noting, “I’ve always felt strongly about women’s issues. I went on one of the key marches, you know, dear.”59
As suffragists grew more adroit at using female beauty to convert male voters, antis objected. Josephine Jewell Dodge, head of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, complained that suffragists were flaunting their sexuality. A leader in the nursery school movement, Dodge had once disparaged suffragists as “flat-chested,” implying that they were lacking in maternal instincts.60 By 1913, after the biggest suffrage parade in New York history, she saw a new face of the movement. Criticizing the “sex appeal of the parade,” she dubbed the campaign “a mighty coquetry, a flirtation planned on a gigantic scale,” and accused suffragists of trying to lure men with clothes that “conduce to immorality.”61
This controversy over tactics, a meditation on decorum, also took a toll on families. Lee de Forest, one of the inventors of wireless telegraphy and self-described father of radio, supported women’s suffrage. But when he married Harriot Stanton Blatch’s daughter Nora, he found himself overwhelmed by his wife’s preoccupation with the campaign. When the two divorced in 1911, de Forest brought suit in court for custody of their two-year-old daughter on grounds that his ex-wife was brainwashing the child with suffrage propaganda. In his court filing, he complained that Nora Blatch de Forest was completely ignoring young Harriet’s education except to teach her to say, “Votes for Women” and “Hurrah for Woman Suffrage.”62
Like de Forest, Medill McCormick, part owner of the Chicago Tribune and a successful Illinois politician, supported suffrage for women, and was particularly helpful to the campaign during his first term in Congress, when the federal amendment was drafted. He had encouraged his wife, Ruth—daughter of Ohio senator and famed McKinley presidential manager Mark Hanna—to accept the chairmanship of the National American Woman Suffrage Association’s congressional committee in 1913. But when he happened on the suffrage shop in Chicago in 1914 and saw for sale a postcard of his wife and his baby daughter Katrina, he demanded that the item be withdrawn from the shelves. Apparently, as Ruth’s biographer put it, he “drew the line at marketing his family life.”63 Ruth Hanna McCormick left her position in 1914, saying she had only planned to stay for a year, but newspapers twisted the story into a morality play, a reassertion of maternal priorities and male authority. “Mrs. M’Cormick to Quit Cause . . . He Puts Foot Down,” headlined one paper.64 Another claimed that the baby “does not recognize her mother,” and the Bismarck Tribune asked, “Are there no other ‘Katrinas’ feeling the neglect imposed by the ‘cause’?”65
Parents and children warred over the issue too, usually in the privacy of their home. One of the first students admitted to Barnard, Iphigene Ochs attended an anti-suffrage speech on campus. After hearing Barnard founder Annie Nathan Meyer speak against women’s franchise, “I immediately espoused the suffragette cause. From then on I delighted in bringing up the subject at dinner.” She and her father, Adolph Ochs, publisher of the most anti-suffrage newspaper in New York, had “heated discussions about Times editorials . . . and both of us held fast to our opinions.” The two were close, going for a walk together most Sundays in Central Park. In her memoir, Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger recalls that she never went “so far as to embarrass my father by marching in suffragette parades, but I used to sneak my allowance to the women’s suffrage committee at school.”66 House Speaker Champ Clark announced in 1914 that he would support a federal constitutional amendment for women’s suffrage, though preferring a state solution. His daughter Genevieve Clark remarked, “He would not have dared to come home if he had not” declared his support.67
Marriages strained over the issue, sometimes resolving in a shared support for the cause. When he married Olivia Langdon in 1870, Mark Twain argued that the day when women cast their votes would be a good “time for all good men to tremble for their country.” The idea of “women voting and babbling about politics and electioneering,” the image of “one of our blessed earthly angels peddling election tickets among a mob of shabby scoundrels,” was, to the Twain of 1867, “revolting.” By the 1880s he was speaking for suffrage, convinced by Livy, a good friend of Julia Ward Beecher.68 Years later, their mutual friend William Dean Howells introduced Twain to Rabbi Stephen Wise. Howells reminded Twain that he had heard Wise speak about suffrage at Carnegie Hall. “Yes, I remember,” Twain quipped. “I heard him speak for equal suffrage, and I am still for it!”69
Even more poignant was the chasm over suffrage between sisters. Annie Nathan Meyer, who in 1887 organized a committee to raise funds toward a women’s college at Columbia, was a playwright and essayist and one of the first women of her circle to take up the bicycle. Despite these feminist instincts, she was also an anti-suffragist, believing that the “new duties” of citizenship would be a “disintegrating influence” on family life.70 Meanwhile Meyer’s sister, Maud Nathan, was president of the Consumers League, dedicated to improving conditions for working women, and a member of the board of directors of Katherine Mackay’s Equal Franchise Society. During a debate in which she reportedly routed a male anti-suffragist, Nathan asked rhetorically, “Is woman ready to vote? Can a fish swim?”71 The two sisters also differed on Jewish religious tradition—Meyer was ambivalent about Jews who were “not of the desirable sort,” while for Nathan Judaism was the source of her philanthropy. The story of these two sisters was well known in reading circles, as editors at the New York Times, the New Republic, and other publications often commissioned a written debate between them. After the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, the two reunited. One of their shared delights was in successfully applying to join the Daughters of the American Revolution, honoring their great-grandfather, Gershome Mendes Seixas, a patriot who refused to fly the British flag over his New York synagogue.72
Unlike the Nathan sisters, the Hay sisters did not debate their differences in public. Their father, John Hay, had been Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary and secretary of state to two presidents. Perhaps his daughters had learned to settle their political differences without rancor, from a man credited with exuding diplomacy.73 Like her father, Helen Hay Whitney was a poet. She was also a wealthy racehorse breeder, member of the Colony Club, and philanthropist. In 1916 she gave a breakfast at what was then called the Hotel Plaza for women setting off on a nationwide whistle-stop train tour in support of Republican presidential candidate and former New York governor Charles Evans Hughes.74 Her sister Alice Hay Wadsworth was married to New York’s U.S. senator James Wadsworth Jr., outspoken suffrage foe. President of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, Alice called for repeal of suffrage after its enactment in New York in 1917.75 “If Congress will give us a fair chance, if the press will give us the opportunity,” she wrote in a letter to the Times, “we anti-suffrage women of America . . . can segregate this menace in the States where it exists until its repeal is eventually demanded.”76
Whatever the politics inside family homes, it was the debate on the public streets that captivated attention, often with the elixir of a feminine appearance. Though she was the toast of the fiercest suffragists, with a constituency that preferred defiance to deference, Alice Paul, head of the Congressional Union, had a keen appreciation for image. In 1913 she positioned Inez Milholland, said to be the “most beautiful suffragette,” atop a white horse to steer a suffrage parade in Washington, D.C., evoking images of Joan of Arc and her quixotic effort to lead medieval French troops to victory over England.77
“We were creating our own mythology of women on the march, women active, and dramatic,” recalled suffragist Rebecca Hourwich Reyher. “Alice Paul insisted on it.”78 With her eyes “a deep hue of the jewel called aquamarine,” and her spirit like “lightning,” Milholland proved a magnificent messenger who complicated gender expectations of brains and beauty.79 As a speaker, she thrilled audiences with a “modern type of oratory,” not the thunderbolts of Anna Howard Shaw but the persuasion of soft-spoken logic.80 A lawyer as well as a suffragist, an advocate of free love as well as a loving wife, a member of Heterodoxy as well as the Colony Club, a socialite as well as a socialist, she was a great draw on the stump, especially among the young—and among men.
Curtis Campaigne later wrote that his wife had dragged him to a speech that Milholland gave in 1912. “My attitude toward the movement has always been instinctively hostile mainly for the reason that, by giving women the vote, it would necessarily force them into a life which would tend to depreciate those womanly qualities and attributes which, in the present social system, wield a potent influence,” he wrote. On hearing Milholland’s argument that women need not “play the game of politics” as men do, he had experienced a “new open-minded surge of thoughts,” no longer seeing the ballot as a bar to femininity.81
Once, while making a speech at Belmont’s Political Equality Association headquarters on Broadway, Milholland wore suffrage buttons on her lapel. One besotted man offered to buy a button if she would shake his hand. Inez agreed. He asked if she would shake his hand again if he bought another, and so it went, this charade of intimacy, until all the buttons were sold.82 Did his infatuation convert him to the cause? Did her beauty convince him that women could participate in political discourse without losing their femininity?
Maud Wood Park, who helped lobby the suffrage amendment through Congress, thought it likely. With a keen feel for human nature—she kept records on which senators preferred which appeals—Park saw that femininity was an asset. “People can resist logic,” she said, “but can they resist laughter, with youth and beauty to drive it home? Not often.”83
Some said it was not beautiful celebrities or novel tactics that won the vote, nor the bravery of a few mere men or a parade of unladylike women. What they said—and this conviction later hardened into conventional wisdom—was that the war had won the vote. The Great War, that war of needless slaughter and imperial ambition, that War to End All Wars, had lifted suffrage on its back and carried it over the finish line. In truth, the triumph came not as the spoils of war but as the honest victory of suffrage leaders who navigated the twin shoals of politics and patriotism at a time when the world was on fire.