CHAPTER TEN

“How It Feels to Be the Husband of a Suffragette”

IN THE FALL OF 1911, the issue of woman suffrage roiled Harvard University. The year before, John Reed, later a staff writer for The Masses and a participant-observer in the Russian Revolution, helped organize the Harvard League for Woman Suffrage. Now the group proposed to bring the militant British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst to campus. The Harvard administration refused permission for Pankhurst to speak at the university’s thousand-seat Sanders Theater, inspiring the memorable Detroit Free Press headline “Is Harvard Afraid of Mrs. Pankhurst?” This forced the event off campus to a dancehall nearby on Brattle Street. More than 1,500 students showed up, far more than the hall could hold, but the lecture proceeded without a hitch. Harvard survived this close brush with suffrage militance, and so did the Harvard League’s fifty-two by thirty-eight inch banner. Redder than the traditional Harvard crimson, it proudly proclaimed its suffrage allegiance, fringe and all.¹

The Harvard League for Woman Suffrage was one of men’s many public declarations of support in the last decade of the movement. The most influential was the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage, founded in 1909 by a group of prominent New Yorkers. George Foster Peabody served as president, with Max Eastman as secretary / treasurer. Its charter members represented a Who’s Who of the New York intellectual establishment, including Oswald Garrison Villard, William Dean Howells, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the Columbia professors John Dewey and Vladimir Simkhovitch. Frederick Nathan, Maud’s husband, was also a founding member.

According to James Lees Laidlaw, himself married to the prominent suffragist Harriet Burton Laidlaw, Men’s League activities were intended “to give moral support to men and to give political support to women.” Members marched in suffrage parades, attended NAWSA conventions, lobbied in Albany, and spoke at public forums. Never expecting to take over leadership roles, men’s groups functioned as adjuncts to the women’s suffrage machine, a true role reversal from centuries of women serving as auxiliaries to men. As the historian Brooke Kroeger put it, “they brought up the rear,” but they did so by choice.²

HOW IT FEELS to Be the Husband of a Suffragette was published anonymously in 1914 in Everybody’s Magazine and in pamphlet form the following year to benefit the New York State suffrage campaign. The tract adopted a lighthearted tone to make its case for suffrage. “You are the party aimed at,” it opened, meaning the hecklers who taunted marchers at the suffrage parade in New York City. “You who stood on the sidewalk and urged passionately that we who marched go home and wash the dishes or mind the baby.” Here is the twist: those hecklers weren’t challenging the women suffragists. Instead they targeted the delegation from the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage who joined the parade. Jeers like “sis” and “henpeck” hurt. “Out in the middle of Fifth Avenue’s width we felt a heap isolated; it even went farther than that—we felt ostracized. Tagging along after the girls—that’s what we were doing; and nobody would let us forget it.”³

Banner of the Harvard League for Woman Suffrage. Courtesy of Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

We now know the author of How It Feels to Be the Husband of a Suffragette was Ray Brown, an advertising executive and illustrator married to Gertrude Foster Brown, the president of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association. Himself an avid suffragist, Ray Brown put his creative talents to good use to support the cause monopolizing his wife’s time. The pamphlet, and the story of the marriage behind it, offer a window on what happens when suffrage hits close to home. In the case of Ray and Gertrude Foster Brown’s marriage, the personal truly was political, and vice versa.⁴

Arthur Raymond Brown was born in Groton, Connecticut in 1865, to a family that traced its roots to the Revolutionary War general Artemas Ward of Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. His father was a Congregational minister who died before Arthur was born, the victim of a freak accident when a tree he was cutting fell on him. His widowed mother kept the family together by opening a girls’ school in Connecticut. When Ray was in his teens, he was sent away to the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Expelled over a prank which involved enticing the deacon’s white horse inside the school chapel (newspapers had a field day when administrators couldn’t get the horse out), he taught for a while at an Indian missionary school in South Dakota. His main aptitude was for drawing and illustration, and he found his first jobs in the journalism field. Before the technology existed to easily reproduce photographs, newspapers relied on artists to illustrate their stories, so this was a secure niche. By the early 1890s, he was working in Chicago, where his path crossed with his future wife’s.⁵

Compared to Ray Brown, Gertrude Foster had already had a very adventuresome life by the time they met. Born in 1868 in the small western Illinois town of Morrison, she was musical from an early age, specializing in the piano. Striking out from conventional expectations for women, she was also ambitious and determined to make something of herself. Despite the strain on her family’s finances, she convinced her father to send her to the Boston Conservatory of Music for professional training, where she finished the four-year course in half that time. After a year’s teaching gig in Dayton, and once again with full familial support, she left for Berlin in 1886, where she studied with several noted pianists and lived an exciting—and often unchaperoned—life filled with concerts and suitors. By the time Gertrude returned to the United States in 1889, at the age of twenty-one, she had received no fewer than four marriage proposals. Three she dismissed out of hand—“Gentlemen don’t appreciate platonic friendship, I’m afraid, as much as ladies do,” she said of one—but the fourth was serious enough that she planned to introduce the suitor to her family. For reasons lost to the historical record, that relationship did not work out.⁶

According to her teachers, Gertrude Foster was a “brilliant” pianist with good stage presence, but she worried that she did not have what it took for a full-scale performing career: “a kind of ruthlessness in pushing oneself forward, and an ambition so imperative that one is impelled to sacrifice everything and everybody including oneself.” In addition, she was hampered by “faulty memory,” a very real problem for a performer. So she decided that she would support herself by teaching at the new Chicago Conservatory of Music and by playing small recitals in private homes, a form of parlor entertainment which was popular among socially prominent as well as upwardly mobile families. Chicago proved a congenial place for her to launch her career—and, as it turned out, her marriage.⁷

Ray and Gertrude “met cute”—they were living in the same boarding house when a fire broke out in Gertrude’s rooms, destroying all her possessions. Soon they were spending most of their free time together. With his “mop of unruly hair and heavy shaggy eyebrows” and his total lack of affinity for music, Ray was a stark contrast to Gertrude’s earlier cosmopolitan European suitors. Frankly, her family was not very keen on him, and his lack of prospects and social graces concerned them. But confirming Gertrude’s strong strand of feminism, her father said, “My daughter usually knows what she wants. If she wants to marry you she will do it.” They married in the summer of 1893 in her hometown of Morrison, with the expectation that Gertrude would continue her teaching and recitals in Chicago and Ray would work as an illustrator and specialty writer. In 1896 the couple moved to New York City when Ray received an offer from the Hearst newspaper chain to work as an illustrator. It was a demanding job, and after several years, he had some kind of a physical or mental breakdown. He later became the art director of Everybody’s Magazine, but poor health and nerves shadowed him for the rest of his life.⁸

The move to New York cut Gertrude off from her musical networks and left her at sea about what to do next. The couple did not have children, and Gertrude always knew she was unsuited for a purely domestic life. “Shall I stay at home and mope?” she rhetorically asked her husband. “There is only one kind of a woman who can live doing nothing and that is a woman utterly without brains.” Around 1901, she had an idea that “came like a spark set to tinder.” The dramatic operas of Richard Wagner were gaining a following in the United States, and she decided to offer lectures explaining their complicated plots and musical themes to American audiences, accompanied by snippets on the piano. For the next seven years, Gertrude Foster Brown spent most of her time on the road, lecturing to women’s clubs and schools across the country.⁹

The success of her career strained their marriage. Although “we were quite frank with each other about it,” Ray resented her absences. He probably also resented that she was earning more money—and doing it so easily—than he was. “Don’t you see why I cling to my profession and why I like my trips?” she chided her husband. “Who would exchange the experiences I have, the knowledge of the country, the acquaintances, and especially the frequent friendships I make with worth-while people all over the U.S. for the narrow rut of keeping house in N.Y. and doing nothing else?” Ray replied as good as he got, as in this 1905 letter: “Your theory that separation is a good thing is all wrong—that is from the standpoint of the separated from.… I think when you do come you’ll probably find me standing on the Western edge of New York State with a telescope looking for my wife.”¹⁰

Their frequent letters are affectionate and loving, but it is not clear how long they could have tolerated these enforced separations. Unfortunately for her—but perhaps fortunately for him—a bout of typhoid sometime around 1908 caused her to put her musical career on hold. At this point, Ray and Gertrude Foster Brown’s story becomes a suffrage story.

It happened just after a dinner party in a smart suburban town. The guest of honor had refused to do anything but “grunt and grump,” and in desperation, the evening’s hostess, inspired by the exploits of militant British suffragettes garnering newspaper headlines that day, asked her guest whether he thought women should vote. “Of course I do, and they would have voted years ago if they hadn’t been such damn fools.” On the way back to the train station, Gertrude asked her husband whether he believed women should vote. He was somewhat taken aback, never having given it any thought, but answered in the affirmative. “We’ve been trying to run the world for 2000 years with only one half our available power and nobody likes the result,” he reasoned. “Yes, I think women ought to vote, and I believe they ought to vote whether they want to or not, whether the vote will do them any good or not, and whether they will do any good with it or not.”¹¹

That conversation was Gertrude Foster Brown’s introduction to woman suffrage, or as she put it in her memoir, “our introduction to the movement which … practically took possession of our joint lives for the next ten years.” Ray also remembered it as a joint plunge: “Personally, we—I and mine—fell into suffrage together and practically made only one splash.” And yet when she asked her friends, who were mostly professional women or artists, whether they believed in suffrage, most of them had never given it any thought either. “Their groping and indecision was so universal that I felt something should be done.”¹²

Her first visit to the headquarters of New York’s local suffrage association was not auspicious. “An elderly lady in dowdy clothes and with gray frizzed hair” gave her and a friend some literature and tried to answer their questions, but failed to impress the “young and bright” women. Brown quickly concluded, somewhat patronizingly, that “if suffrage was to come, it would be we who would bring it, not the little ancient.” She organized a woman suffrage study club in New York City with a friend in 1909, and in 1910, she attended her first convention. Soon after, she was giving open-air speeches from the back of her car at the corner of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue in New York City. She marched with the New York delegation in the 1913 suffrage parade in Washington, DC, and in 1914, she was elected president of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association.¹³

Already at ease with public speaking from her performing career, Gertrude Foster Brown now redirected her considerable energy and talent to the suffrage cause. “My musical profession, my social life, even my family duties took second place.… The change was as complete as though I had experienced religious conversion.” Even as her suffrage work increasingly upended the settled patterns of their life together, Ray generously supported her newfound endeavor. In fact, she noted, “most of the husbands, fathers and sons of active suffrage workers, at whatever personal sacrifice, gave their constant help and support to our cause.”¹⁴

One story captures how suffrage work was woven into their marriage. When Gertrude headed off to the 1914 state convention, Ray made what she called “his usual protest”: “Gertrude, I’m really worried. Please don’t let them make you president. I want to tell you that if you do I shall feel as badly as you would feel if I should go abroad and leave you at home.” Not to worry, dear, she replied. But when she got to the convention, both Carrie Chapman Catt and Anna Howard Shaw took her aside to make personal pitches—“I had no children, they said, I was able financially to give up my time, why should I refuse when so many others were sacrificing more than I was being asked to give?”—and she soon found herself duly standing for election. She wired Ray, “Don’t judge me until you see me,” but he greeted her warmly at the train station and took her out to dinner. “Now you’re in for it, I’ll do all I can to help you,” he told her, and promptly ordered a bottle of vintage champagne to toast her election.¹⁵

One imagines similar discussions, with or without the champagne, happening in suffrage households across the country. When a wife signed on to the cause, it was often the equivalent of a full-time job. Not only was it usually unpaid—it could also entail significant outlays of cash for hotel bills, travel, and subscriptions, to say nothing of the disruptions of well-established domestic routines. Many husbands literally and figuratively underwrote their wives’ contributions to the cause.

Especially in New York State, the role of socially prominent married women in the final stages of the suffrage struggle was striking. These women’s marital status brought respectability and credibility to a cause that still struggled for both. Just as striking was how they were almost always listed by their husband’s names: Mrs. Stanley McCormick, Mrs. Clarence Mackay, Mrs. Ogden Reid, Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont, Mrs. Frank A. Vanderlip, Mrs. James Lees Laidlaw, Mrs. Thomas Lamont, Mrs. F. Louis Slade, and so forth.¹⁶ The one exception was the widowed Carrie Chapman Catt, who was simply identified as “Mrs.” When Gertrude Foster Brown published Your Vote and How to Use It in 1918, she was listed on the title page as Mrs. Raymond Brown.¹⁷

The National American Woman Suffrage Association cultivated the support of socially prominent men as well, relying heavily on the publicity that groups like the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage received in the national press to build support for the cause. Ray Brown was not listed as a charter member of the Men’s League—its formation in 1909 was fairly soon after the Browns’ joint suffrage epiphany, and he was not quite in the same league as the founders when it came to professional and social status. Nonetheless, it was likely that marching with the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage inspired his pamphlet.¹⁸

How It Feels to Be the Husband of a Suffragette was written on a dare. Gertrude didn’t even know about it until it appeared in print. Ray called it not “a defense, an apology, or confession” but rather a “frank statement.” There is no question that it was written by a man with strong feminist leanings. He supports women’s economic independence and believes in shared finances in marriage. When it comes to who does the dishes, neither does—they leave it to the maid. He summed up his feminist philosophy this way: “Personally, I believe that a lady with a well-worn latch-key, who has healthy interests outside her home, is better company than one whose view of life is circumscribed by the four walls that the landlord refused to paper last spring.” Gertrude liked that quote so much she used it as the opening epigram for her memoirs.¹⁹

The pamphlet is not a closely reasoned pro-suffrage tract. Instead, it uses humor and wit to make points gently, appealing more to emotion and caricature than to logic and facts. Ray Brown was in fact an aspiring short-story writer, with a few publications to his credit, and he knew that if his piece took itself too seriously, it would not reach a broad popular audience. Even so, it is telling that instead of claiming authorship in his own right, the title page only says “by Him.”

Ray Brown was likely trying to strike a humorous note when he included the fraught word suffragette in the title. That term most accurately described the militant British suffragists from about 1908 on, but it was never embraced by American suffragists, who emphatically wanted to distance themselves from the violence against property their British sisters sometimes displayed. Whenever the term was used in this country, it was almost always a term of derision or disrespect or, at the very least, skepticism. Gertrude Foster Brown would never have referred to herself by that term, so why did her husband? Perhaps he saw it as a term of playful endearment—he had once addressed a letter to her as “Dear Little Suffragette”—but probably it was simply another satirical ploy to catch the public’s attention.²⁰

This photo from a 1915 suffrage parade in New York captures a telling mistake: the banner says “Men’s League for Women Suffrage,” but the correct name of the group was “Men’s League for Woman Suffrage.” Clearly the person who stitched up the banner wasn’t paying attention to the finer points of suffrage terminology. Courtesy of Bryn Mawr College Special Collections.

For all Ray Brown’s cheery banter about “living in the house with a woman who takes a kind, warm, vital interest in everything that is going on in the world,” it wasn’t always easy to be married to a suffragist, especially “his” suffragist. What put the most strain on their suffrage marriage was precisely what had challenged the couple earlier: the time she spent away from home. As he wrote to her in March 1913, probably when she was headed down to Washington, DC for the counter-inauguration march, “WOMAN—Your place is the home (294 West 92nd Street).” The next year he put it even more forcefully: “I wish after a while, pretty soon, when you get tired of staying away, you would come home. It is all right being married to a famous lady, but there are times when it is a little like having contracted honorary matrimony with Minerva or Diana or some other one of those Olympian ladies who spend most of their time on the top of a high and inaccessible peak and when you do meet them it is a miracle.” In a handwritten postscript, he added, “If you live through it.” These somewhat plaintive private thoughts contrasted sharply with the cheerful public face he adopted as “Mr.” Gertrude Foster Brown. But despite any private misgivings, he never wavered in his support for the larger cause.²¹

Ray and Gertrude Foster Brown’s suffrage story reminds us that behind every suffragist was a domestic support system enabling that political activism. Suffragists often spoke of the difficulty of converting male voters, but one place they enjoyed definite success was in their own homes and families. The men who stood behind their suffragist wives, girlfriends, sisters, and mothers are also part of the suffrage story, and it’s time to acknowledge them. As for the men who still refused to get on board, Ray Brown, “the husband of a suffragette,” had these parting words: “All you can do, my brother, is to pray—pray fervently—that suffrage may never come; but with all due regard to Napoleon’s remark about God being on the side that has the heaviest artillery, I’m afraid you lose.”²²

Suffrage bluebird. Courtesy of Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.