The remembered past is a much larger category than the recorded past.
John Lukacs1
WHEN New York’s male voters granted women the power of the ballot on November 6, 1917, Vira Boarman Whitehouse was widely credited with the win.2 Orchestrating a disciplined statewide campaign, she rolled up huge majorities in the city and almost reached majority in the more rural counties upstate. New York would now send to Washington, D.C., the largest pro-suffrage delegation in Congress, forty-three men whose voters had opted to include women in politics, improving chances for a federal amendment. Commentators gushed. “No state political organization in the American Union contains half the political ability and intelligence of the group of suffrage workers who under the leadership of Mrs. Norman Whitehouse have succeeded in enfranchising at one stroke a tenth of all American women,” said the New Republic.3 At a celebratory dinner at the Hotel Biltmore, the women who had worked with her, who championed her as “the brilliant field-general of the New York State suffrage army,” issued a full-throated “Three Cheers for Mrs. Whitehouse!” and placed a crown of “gold beads in the form of an olive crown” on her dark curls.4 As Maud Nathan, president of the New York Consumers League, put it, “Our own Whitehouse did more than the White House in Washington.”5
Wary of the tiara’s haughty image, Whitehouse said that she would accept the gift only as a wreath, not as a crown, that she understood it not as a “royal honor,” as critics would later allege, but as a gift to one worker “from other workers as a remembrance of our common victory.”6 No matter. Like so many fallen Stalinist figures cropped from a Kremlin photograph, Vira Boarman Whitehouse and two hundred other gilded suffragists were methodically airbrushed from the metanarrative of women’s suffrage.
Movement leaders had relied on gilded suffragists for their money and exploited them for their celebrity, but as memoirs rolled off printing presses without any mention of their contribution, it become clear that resentments had festered. Grievances were many. Labor’s rank and file, an important contingent of support, distrusted these beneficiaries of capitalist wealth, suspecting them of using the working class to promote their own dominance. Leaders of suffrage organizations were furious about defections to rival associations, and retaliated by omitting deserters from history’s memory.
Middle-class and upper-class women seethed at the attention showered on society suffragists, buckets of media publicity that ignored their own less glamorous toiling for the cause. The star power of the elite may have brought the movement publicity, solvency, and popularity, but their celebrity left wounded feelings among those without a press agent or a staff entourage. Lashing out, the movement’s volunteers dismissed these gilded activists as proxies for a fad. This has been the conventional wisdom since, a consensus that the activism of socialites was mere froth, masking the painstaking work of serious suffragists.
Carrie Chapman Catt gave no credit to Vira Whitehouse for the statewide victory in New York, either in her 1923 memoir, Woman Suffrage and Politics,7 or in a biography she authorized decades later. Instead, she credited Mary Garrett Hay, who headed the campaign in New York City, for providing the majority that overcame an upstate deficit of 1,519 votes.8 That Hay had been living with Catt since the latter became a widow for the second time was well known within suffrage circles. They were companions for twenty years (one biographer wrote of the “sudden bereavement [that] shook Mrs. Catt to the soul” when Hay died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage in 1928)—and are buried next to one another in Woodlawn Cemetery.9 Was Hay miffed at all the accolades that came Whitehouse’s way for the New York victory? Was Catt embedding her companion’s resentment as historic truth? Can history ever be remembered as it happened, or is memory as fickle, and personal, as any human chronicler?
Alva Belmont’s contributions, financial and political, were robust. She paid the rent and salaries of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and then spent $146,000 ($1.7 million in today’s dollars) for the purchase of a mansion in Washington, D.C., as the permanent headquarters of the rival National Woman’s Party.10 Defying the movement’s southern strategy, meant to defuse fears that women’s suffrage would enlarge the black voting bloc, she reached out to black suffragists. Attempting to forge an alliance based on gender, she funded the 1908 strike in New York’s garment industry. Playing hardball, she campaigned against, and defeated, lawmakers blocking a woman’s right to vote. When Emmeline Pankhurst was detained at Ellis Island in 1913 by authorities concerned she might import her violent tactics from Britain, Belmont paid for a lawyer.11 When Pankhurst’s daughter Christabel escaped to Paris to avoid imprisonment in Britain’s Holloway Prison, Belmont helped defray her living expenses.12
Still, in the face of this activism, Belmont’s contemporaries in the movement did their best to ignore her. In her memoirs, Catt mentions Belmont not once—neither as NAWSA’s financial benefactor nor as a much-publicized advocate whose name was once suggested as a candidate for president of the association. One scholar speculated that Catt failed to credit Belmont because by then Belmont had defected to Alice Paul’s Congressional Union.13 In a sentiment no doubt sanctioned by Catt, biographer Mary Gray Peck wrote twenty years later that Belmont “was militant by temperament and, knowing nothing about the past history of the movement, was inclined to think that it began in the summer of 1909 with her own advent.” Belmont had underwritten the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Now Peck wrote that Belmont “was generous but she was arbitrary and hard to work with.”14
Likewise, labor activist Rose Schneiderman was so keen to expunge Belmont from the record that in her memoirs she never once mentioned Belmont’s role in the garment strike of 1909. Belmont’s contribution to that uprising was far-reaching—she joined the Women’s Trade Union League board of directors, sat up in night court to bail out the strikers, and hosted a mass rally for striking workers at the Hippodrome, one that featured NAWSA president Anna Howard Shaw, the Women’s Trade Union League’s Leonora O’Reilly, and the Socialist Party’s Rose Pastor Stokes. Most conspicuously, Belmont put the strike on the media’s radar, leading a mink brigade of socialites to join its ranks, inspiring female college students to walk the picket lines, and hosting lectures at the Colony Club. One scholar called it a “purposeful erasure of Belmont and her activities on behalf of working women.”15 Schneiderman did mention others of wealth who helped, including Josephine Sykes Morgenthau. The wife of Henry Morgenthau, U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, Josephine had quietly deeded property to “furnish bail also for the hundreds of women who were arrested on flimsy charges and herded into police cells with prostitutes, drunks and hardened criminals.” In Schneiderman’s account, she did so without the self-promotional publicity that Belmont indulged in.16
Such deliberate blinders toward Belmont suggest a special animus, shared by many in the movement. Historian Mary Ritter Beard, a member of Alice Paul’s Congressional Union, refused to “do the Newport stunt” and attend the organization’s meetings at Belmont’s Marble House on Bellevue Avenue, wary that ties to “plutocratic” women such as Alva Belmont and Louisine Havemeyer would damage her reputation with labor activists.17
During the 1915 campaign, the Women’s Trade Union League distributed a flyer asserting that “women of the leisure class” merited the vote because “they need every opportunity to devote their leisure to the welfare of the State and the public.”18 It was a sign of enormous cross-class cooperation, recognition that social change required coalitions between classes. Now, working-class suffragists kept their distance. As one scholar put it, Belmont “had a reputation for badgering maids, was blacklisted by women in domestic service,” and weighed all packages delivered to Marble House to avert theft by servants.19 For union activists, this mistreatment of her own staff was confirmation that Belmont was a hypocritical ally. In a raucous four-hour meeting to discuss whether to continue working with the uptown ladies of the mink brigade, Theresa Malkiel accused Belmont of “political crimes against working women.”20 In the end, they voted to end their cross-class coalition, concluding that women who benefitted from the sweat of exploited laborers could hardly be trusted in a campaign seeking better conditions from capitalist owners. “I have no personal feeling against Mrs. Belmont or Miss Morgan, but their contributions will not harmonize capital and labor,” said socialist and firebrand speaker Emma Goldman. A successful labor movement, she added, “must be entirely independent.”21
Middle-class women too shunned Belmont. Katharine Houghton Hepburn, president of the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association whose young daughter Katharine, later an actress, often accompanied her to suffrage events, was so alarmed when the Congressional Union solicited Belmont’s support that she tried to head off the effort.22 Arguing that Belmont was “in the habit of running things absolutely,” Hepburn warned that the diva of Newport society would try to control the organization. She feared that Belmont had “none of the idealism that would make her give in large amounts either in money or personal devotion.”23 Though Belmont proved dedicated to the cause, this notion that she was not a serious activist was the nub of the case against her. Doris Stevens, who understood Belmont better than nearly any suffragist other than Paul, thought the fear well-founded, noting that Belmont “never took part in anything she did not want to direct” and her “desire to run things” often created “antagonism” within the ranks of any organization she joined.24
For her part, Alva Belmont was aggrieved at this excising of her involvement, blaming Catt and Anna Howard Shaw, current and past presidents of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Calling a press conference, Belmont charged that the two NAWSA presidents must have “forgotten who is responsible for this victory. But I don’t care. I shall go down in history.” Donating her Political Equality Association headquarters to the Salvation Army, she left for Europe.25
Two years before her death in 1933, Alva Belmont explained the legacy she felt her activism merited: a statue depicting her, cemented to the ground in the nation’s capital. “She described exactly what she wanted,” recalled Doris Stevens:
A heroic figure of herself in the open air in Washington, the space to be set aside by the government, the base of the monument to contain a bas relief depicting various scenes which occurred in Washington—riots by the police and by the mob, women being loaded into patrol wagons, women arrested for petitioning President Wilson—in short, she wanted cut in stone the sacrifices which so many women had made in going to prison for this idea.26
Nothing came of this request, nor did it come to pass, as she had instructed in her will, that a female minister officiate at her funeral.27 Otherwise the send-off was everything this great puppeteer of public opinion had requested—twenty honorary pallbearers including Christabel Pankhurst, Harriot Stanton Blatch, and Margaret Sanger, fifteen hundred mourners watching as the purple, gold, and white flag of the National Woman’s Party, of which she was both president and financial savior, proceeded down the aisle of St. Thomas Episcopal Church. Another banner, which had been carried by picketers in front of the White House during the war, featured Susan B. Anthony’s quote “Failure Is Impossible.”
The faithful carried the banner to Woodlawn Cemetery, placing it in a mausoleum that Belmont had designed to mimic the Chapel of Saint-Hubert in France’s Loire Valley.28 Leonardo da Vinci had designed the original in the early sixteenth century in a style described as “gothic flamboyant.”29 By one account, Alva Belmont requested that photos from her society years be destroyed so that she would be remembered not as the hostess of balls but as an activist for women’s rights.30 Whether that is true or not—so many such photographs remain from the gilded years as to cast doubt on this assertion—there is no doubt she was always savvy about the power of image. For the ages, she is buried amid this attempt to gild her reputation as an activist. To this day, the worn suffragist banner remains at her side.31
There is much historical precedent for excising the unpopular. In 1881 Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony published the first of their three-volume History of Woman Suffrage. In what one scholar has called an “origins myth,” they positioned the movement’s start at Seneca Falls in 1848 with the two of them portrayed as its lead players—even though Anthony was not present and Lucretia Mott was. They made no mention of Angelina and Sarah Moore Grimké, sisters from slave-country South Carolina who spoke often on woman’s right to the vote, or of black women who resisted slavery, or of Lucy Stone, the abolitionist from Boston whose lectures on women’s suffrage in the 1840s were so controversial that men hurled rotten fruit and verbal insult at podiums where she spoke.32
The story of the movement’s birth might begin here, with women raising their voices in the public square for their rights as citizens. Or the starting point might be placed earlier, with Abigail Adams’s 1776 admonition to her husband, John Adams, to “remember the ladies” at the Continental Congress. If women were not accorded rights, Abigail Adams had warned her husband, “We are determined to foment a Rebelion [sic], and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”33
By minimizing or ignoring these events, Stanton and Anthony shaped their own legacy as the founders. After the Civil War, they had campaigned against the Fifteenth Amendment, arguing that if women could not also gain the vote, as Stanton put it, and “avail ourselves of the strong arm and blue uniform of the black soldier to walk in by his side,” they would fight his right to the franchise.34 Infuriating Lucy Stone and other abolitionists who had given the women’s suffrage movement its ideological foundation, they created a new organization that would splinter the campaign for women’s rights into two camps, and impede its progress for decades to come. Reminding historians of their seminal place as heirs of Seneca Falls, they may have hoped to remove some of the tarnish.
By the time of her death in 1906 at the age of eighty-four, Anthony had successfully outflanked Stanton, Lucy Stone, and other nineteenth-century activists as the movement’s prime architect, at least in the public imagination. When Stanton’s more controversial writings on the misogyny of the Bible, the need for birth control, and the logic of divorce emerged in the 1890s, recalled her daughter, “leaders began to bury her alive, and to re-vivify Miss Anthony.”35 Now, in the twentieth century, the tradition of internecine rivalry was revived, as debate erupted over the rightful heir to Anthony’s legacy and scholars joined the debate.
This time the argument revolved around whether Carrie Chapman Catt or Alice Paul was the real heroine of the story. Catt was the movement’s titular head, president of NAWSA in two separate eras (1900–1904, 1916–1920). Throughout the campaign, she had insisted on organizational rigor and a strategic alliance with President Wilson. The wind at her back was an army, at its peak, of two million members. In June 1916, after neither Republicans nor Democrats endorsed a constitutional amendment in their party platforms, she convened a meeting of her executive committee to unveil a “Winning Plan.” Designed to pressure Congress to enact a constitutional amendment, it focused on winning suffrage victories in the thirty-eight states that had not yet enfranchised women. When the states ratified the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, requiring the direct election of U.S. senators instead of their appointment by state legislatures, it planted the notion that women were constituents, their interests worthy of consideration. By the time New York enacted women’s suffrage in 1917, it gave the cause of women’s suffrage a sense of inevitability. As Catt explained, we “used the political dynamite in the victories gained in the States as a means of blasting through to success at Washington.”36
Alice Paul’s Congressional Union, which in 1916 became the National Woman’s Party, was smaller than NAWSA, numbering perhaps sixty thousand at its peak.37 Her protests at the White House, her campaigning ceaselessly against a progressive president, were less pragmatic, more riveting. For Paul, the path to victory lay in a drumbeat of protests, heckling, and picketing that cheered her supporters and shamed Wilson and his party’s lawmakers into supporting the cause. If Catt appealed to the wider public, Paul focused on energizing the base.
There was no love lost between the two camps, reflecting the tensions that had complicated the campaign. As chairman of the Empire State Campaign Committee, Catt had urged Paul to stay out of New York during the failed 1915 campaign, charging that Paul’s “agents are handicapping the campaign” by telling voters that a federal amendment was the only way to ensure the franchise.38 Denying that her troops had spread anti-suffrage messages, Paul replied, “I need hardly tell you that we are deeply interested in the success of the New York campaign.”39
Antagonisms between the two groups inflamed memories. Crystal Eastman, a Paul ally, was particularly biting about Vira Whitehouse, Harriet Laidlaw, and others “who had scorned and condemned when the pickets stood for months at the White House gates, when they insisted on going to jail and starved themselves when they got there—all these came now with their wreaths and their flowers and their banners to celebrate victory.”40
In fact, despite their dislike for one another, Catt and Paul had unwittingly arrived at a one-two punch for women’s rights, proving more successful than either would have been alone.41 Paul’s tactics “endowed woman suffrage with high drama,” said one scholar, while Catt’s plan piled up pressure from state victories.42 Both approaches proved critical to the outcome, as they have been in many movements for social change in American history. In the 1960s, civil rights leaders protested amid much national indifference until young African American college students marched in the streets of Selma, Alabama. When southern sheriffs turned their hoses on the protesters, the sight was broadcast on nationwide television, turning the nation’s conscience and forcing President Johnson to pursue congressional recourse in Washington. LGBT leaders pressing for reform, beginning in the 1990s, benefitted both from those who ran for office to change the political system from within, and those who demonstrated at Stonewall or in Queer Nation die-ins to pry open its doors from without. In state after state, first in the campaign for women’s suffrage and a century later in the fight for marriage equality, ballot initiatives fell like dominos before a national consensus that emerged to welcome or at least accept these reforms. The long incubation period of debate, the slow drive to turn a once controversial idea into a familiar notion, the humanizing of advocates from radicals to relatives—all played a role.
Like any effort to reclaim the “upstairs long missing from women’s history,” this book seeks to return New York’s elite women, as gilded suffragists, to the history of the twentieth-century women’s suffrage movement, and to the memory of readers interested in the cause.43 The darlings of a celebrity-crazed media, they embraced a cause that had seemed to be in the doldrums, conferring the first celebrity endorsement on a political movement for social change in the twentieth century. To credit their contributions would also be to concede a role in activism for the spectacles of the public square—the parades, the advertisements, the stunts, the publicity that can turn the wheel of public opinion. Those tactics mattered a great deal to the trajectory of the cause, not least in rescuing it from the intellectual fringes where it had begun.
The involvement of society suffragists in civic reforms occurred against a backdrop of great social change in American political life. As immigrants swarmed into harbors and the working class added a new texture to urban life, the United States underwent a cultural shift. In what might be called a transition from male oligarchy to egalitarian democracy, the rules of class and gender that had guided the country for a century gave way to a modernist instinct. For the men of the gilded class, the period brought new dangers, as they were roiled by a federal income tax that slashed their wealth, the diminution of fortunes distributed among children and ex-wives, and the rise of a government more interventionist in curbing business excesses. For the women, there was but one opportunity: to become engaged in the issues of their day or to succumb to irrelevancy. For all of them, a revolution in gender norms upended the society of their parents, as men left the exclusivity of their clubs and sports for a life of work in business, and women went to college, pursued professional interests, experimented with new models of marriage—and joined suffrage.
The exuberant parades where women of all professions and income levels marched to claim their rights of citizenship, the insistence of working-class women on having a voice of their own to combat the twin evils of drunken husbands and intolerable workplace conditions, the grievances of society women about the class power denied them because of their gender—all these currents hurtled suffrage toward victory, silencing its chief opponents, the liquor lobby on Main Street and the political bosses in Tammany Hall.44
The financial donations made by gilded suffragists were substantial, and consequential. Olivia Sage made so many financial contributions to the National American Woman Suffrage Association that as the NAWSA contingent passed Sage’s window on Fifth Avenue from which she watched the 1912 parade, each Assembly district leader dipped her flag in appreciation.45 Phoebe Hearst, wife of Senator George Hearst of California and mother of New York Journal publisher William Randolph Hearst, contributed so frequently to Alice Paul’s Congressional Union that when one letter came in requesting more, Hearst wrote in the margin, “No, impossible, can’t consider it.”46 On her death in 1914, Miriam Leslie, widow of Frank Leslie and inheritor of his publishing empire, left nearly $1 million (nearly $26 million in today’s dollars) to the National American Woman Suffrage Association, putting that organization “on firm financial footing for the first time in its history.”47
Not content to limit their funding to their own resources, they proved particularly adept at corralling contributions from others. Vira Whitehouse muscled Wall Street brokers to contribute to the New York State Woman Suffrage Party during the First World War, chiding one reluctant financier with, “How dare you refuse to give to the most important cause in your lifetime?”48 It was the kind of appeal—from power to power, money to money—that would not have been possible without her and her equally well-connected lieutenants—Harriet Burton Laidlaw, Gertrude Foster Brown, Helen Rogers Reid, and Narcissa Cox Vanderlip. “They were well-married, were rich and they were stylish, . . . people who were well placed and could batter their way into anybody’s office or anybody’s living room,” recalled Frances Perkins, who described Whitehouse and Laidlaw as “really great beauties.”49
But their overriding contribution was cultural. When victory came to the women’s suffrage movement in New York in 1917, by one estimate some 250,000 suffragists had joined the fight.50 Some were men, and they too have been largely omitted from the story, dismissed as victims of what one scholar called a “lifelong romantic attraction to unpopular causes.”51 Even in the moment, male suffragists or sympathizers were easy to miss. A few days after the victory, a reporter asked Governor Charles Whitman who had won women’s suffrage. “I rather thought that it was the men of New York who carried that amendment,” Whitman noted drily. “But what matter who wins the praise as long as the work is done?”52
George Creel, director of Woodrow Wilson’s wartime propaganda agency, the Committee on Public Information, was so impressed by the final campaign in New York that he appointed Vira Whitehouse to serve as an envoy for the agency. “Mrs. Whitehouse’s job was to put America across in Switzerland just as she had put equal suffrage across in New York,” he explained.53 The appointment drew protests from suffragists who resented her tactics and antis who thought that her work for suffrage during the war was unpatriotic. Barbara Wendell, an anti-suffragist who headed the Massachusetts Special Aid Society for American Preparedness, enlisted a friend to stop the appointment. “I cannot imagine a person into whose hands I would less wish to put the affairs of the United States,” she wrote.54 Mary Garrett Hay, perhaps still smarting over the credit showered on Whitehouse for the victory, later sought to block Whitehouse’s appointment to a postwar Peace Commission. “It would be a disgrace for such a woman to represent the United States,” she wrote a friend. “We would prefer to have no woman.”55
Whitehouse readily accepted Creel’s diplomatic challenge. Here was a chance to practice citizenship—a newly enfranchised woman, serving her country. Roadblocks were profound. No woman had ever served abroad for the U.S. government, and reaction from the striped-pants set at the State Department was blatantly hostile. Secretary of State Robert Lansing, whose wife was a fervent anti-suffragist, declined to issue her a diplomatic passport. Legation officials, including a young Second Secretary Allen Dulles, a nephew of Lansing who would later head the Central Intelligence Agency, crippled her efforts at every turn. Finding it unfathomable that a woman had come to do a man’s job, convinced that propaganda was a covert mission, they thwarted her efforts to rent office space or hire staff, concealed CPI news items meant for press distribution through her offices, intercepted her outgoing telegrams, and undercut her credibility with local officials.56 At war’s end, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire crumbled, Wilson used her offices—not those of the legation—to spread a message of restraint. He understood, better than his diplomats, that the conduct of foreign affairs now required appeal to the public. For all their skill at the levers of statecraft, the legation staff, perhaps blinded by misogyny, missed this advent of public diplomacy.57
Later, on Whitehouse’s return from Europe, at a testimonial dinner at the Hotel Biltmore, five hundred suffragists paid tribute to her suffrage advocacy and her war service, understanding implicitly the sacrifices she had made in both. “Why not the ‘Welcome Home’ cards like the soldiers have?” asked one guest. “Aren’t we welcoming home a woman who fought, in her way, just as valiantly and just as tellingly as any soldier or even as any Marine?”58
If Vira Boarman Whitehouse is missing from accounts of how women won the vote, so too Harriet Burton Laidlaw, Whitehouse’s lieutenant in the New York campaign and a valued player on the national stage. Daisy Harriman, who introduced the topic of suffrage to members of the exclusive Colony Club, and by extension, welcomed them to the reform politics that motivated her, is rarely mentioned. Katherine Duer Mackay, who electrified interest just at the moment when suffrage was at its lowest ebb, has disappeared from the record, perhaps a victim of her personal life’s public collapse. Rita Lydig’s couture fashions became the foundation for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, but her activism for suffrage as Mackay’s treasurer and as one of the movement’s most fashionable advocates is nowhere on display.59 Katrina Ely Tiffany was so valued for her suffrage and war relief work that organizers gave her the honor of carrying the flag at the 1917 suffrage parade, but they never mentioned her in any books they wrote or commissioned about the campaign. Even Alva Belmont, who casts such a long shadow on suffrage politics that she could not be ignored, is often derided for her autocratic ways, her contributions belittled as the affectations of a woman avenging the public philandering of a first husband and the sneers that came in its wake. Others are missing at the whim of writers, the snub raising questions of stereotype. Why is Irene Langhorne Gibson remembered only as an icon of white beauty and not as an activist for suffrage? Why are Helen Hay Whitney, a poet, Fanny Villard, a reformer, and Mamie Fish, a socialite, all absent from these histories?
That their involvement gave the cause a sense of vogue was undeniable. “With the two society leaders, Mrs. Mackay and Mrs. Belmont, leading rival camps of suffrage fighters,” said the American in 1909, “the coming fall campaign will be a lively one.”60 Equally evident is that they attracted new recruits to the campaign. Amid increasing public interest, the voice of celebrity carried. Ida Crouch Hazlett, a grassroots activist in the Socialist Party not inclined to look kindly on the latest stirrings of wealthy society ladies, had no doubt about their ability to attract new converts. Lamenting the movement’s “snobbish truckling to the women of influence and social position,” she complained that the campaign was seducing young activists toward suffrage and away from the more prosaic work of labor organizing.61
Looking back over the history of suffrage, Marie Manning, who in 1898 penned the first newspaper advice column, called “Dear Beatrice Fairfax,” credited their fashion. Observing that in the nineteenth century, “the clothes that suffragists wore when they went about petitioning were grim as shrouds,” she claimed that those “unbecoming clothes . . . hadn’t worked in sixty years.” Now, she wrote, with the advent of Alva Belmont, “the smartest drawing rooms in the country echoed with the applause of jeweled hands.”62 She too had expunged faces from the record, so blinded by Belmont’s glitter that she did not see Gibson, Laidlaw, Lydig, Mackay, Milholland, Sage, Whitehouse, and all the others.
To trace their footsteps and narrate their story is to underscore the importance of the suffragists’ physical appearance in defusing male resistance, the importance of celebrity in exciting mainstream opinion, and the need for public acceptance of any social change. In the end, their legacy is simply this: For a brief moment in early twentieth-century America, when change was in the air, they helped push women’s suffrage over the finish line. Familiarity is the ballast of social change. Wives and daughters of the most powerful men in Gotham were well-known figures on the public stage, reassuring in their very presence. As hostesses of extravagant parties and managers of massive estates, they had learned the skills of managing a press corps hungry for controversy. This dexterity they now exported to the suffrage movement, harnessing their own social influence to attract new believers to the cause. If they did not win suffrage outright, they did something very critical to the success of those who did. They gave the movement currency, making it less threatening to men and more appealing to women, more acceptable to a mainstream public.
One year after suffragists had won the right to vote in New York, former president Theodore Roosevelt set off for the polls, as he had done for more than forty years. As he got in his car, the great spokesman for male vigor, who preached against feminization of the public square, was surprised to see his wife, Edith, already waiting in the car. “Why Ee-die, why are you coming?” he asked. “I’m going to vote of course, Theodore,” she replied. To Roosevelt, as others of his time and gender, the abstract concept of equal rights was one thing but, as his longtime friend Owen Wister explained, “the sight of his own wife casting a ballot took his breath away.” Theodore Roosevelt, who had overseen so much progressive legislation as the presidential master of the bully pulpit, who had first ignored women’s suffrage and then embraced it as part of his attempted political comeback, now confronted personally the result of this social change. And in Wister’s words, he simply “sat back in the car, silent for a time.”63