CHAPTER ELEVEN

`The Farmer-Suffragettes`

“THE BLUEBIRD CARRIES the sky on his back,” observed Henry David Thoreau. Unique to North America, the eastern bluebird (Sialia sialis) is distinctive for its intense blue color and its pleasing musical song. Bluebirds have long been linked with happiness, hope, love, and resilience. To those associations add woman suffrage.¹

In the summer and fall of 1915, tin bluebirds popped up all over Massachusetts. These die-cut tin birds, with intense blue and yellow coloring, had “Votes for Women” emblazoned down their chests. The prominent placement of “Nov. 2” on their tail feathers confirmed their purpose: to remind voters to support the referendum on woman suffrage scheduled for that date. Massachusetts suffragists did not stint in their promotion of this unique brand of outdoor advertising. On July 17, 1915, “Suffrage Blue Bird Day,” they distributed upward of a hundred thousand suffrage bluebirds around the state. A hole in the middle of the tin sign made it attachable to fences, barns, or telephone poles; they were also stuck in lawns, propped up on porches, and displayed in windows. At twelve inches by four inches—much larger than an actual bluebird—they would have been hard to miss.

Like their cheerful tin bluebirds, Massachusetts suffragists had high hopes for the upcoming referendum. Two weeks before the election, more than fifteen thousand suffragists marched and rallied in downtown Boston, in a massive outpouring of public support. But when male electors in this generally conservative state went to the polls on November second, they soundly defeated the referendum. A significant factor was the strength of the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women, which counted many prominent women and men among its supporters.

The eastern bluebird’s chief competitor is the English house sparrow, which aggressively attacks bluebird nests and destroys their eggs. In many ways, the well-heeled and well-organized Massachusetts antisuffragists played the sparrows against the bluebirds of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association. They prevailed that November, but just four years later, Massachusetts became the eighth state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. And bluebirds, suffrage and otherwise, have been making a comeback ever since.

IN THE SPRING OF 1913, two unmarried women bought a farm in the small central Massachusetts town of South Berlin. The women seemed serious about farming, but everyone knew that Molly Dewson and Polly Porter were not typical farmers. Then as now, there was something decidedly “queer” about this whole situation.² Where were their husbands? Where were their families? That women could so publicly flaunt their ability to live independently of men raised troubling questions for the residents of this conservative farming community. To make matters worse, the two women had not been in Berlin that long before they became active suffragists, touring the Worcester County countryside to promote votes for women. The neighbors quickly dubbed them “the farmer-suffragettes.”³

Molly Dewson, born in Quincy, Massachusetts in 1874, was the older of the two by ten years. After graduating from Wellesley College in 1897, she was immediately caught up in the Progressive fervor sweeping the country. In a class book published in 1910, she wrote exuberantly to her fellow Wellesley classmates, “We used to play at choosing the period in which we would rather have lived. But what time could be more thrilling than our own, when in every city and town are springing up hundreds of sane, alert people to fight under scientific leadership the problems of their community with sympathy and sense?” Not the least bit interested in marriage, and in need of paid employment to earn a living, she held three positions in the fifteen years after her graduation: research assistant at the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union in Boston, superintendent of probation for the Lancaster State Industrial School for Girls, and executive secretary of the Massachusetts Commission on the Minimum Wage. Many of the causes she worked on during her apprenticeship, especially the minimum wage and protective legislation for working women, remained primary focuses for the rest of her career.⁴

Molly Dewson and Polly Porter met in 1909 at the Lancaster School. Born in Chicago in 1884, Polly was clearly not someone who needed to work for a living. Attractive, impulsive, and conspicuously rich—her family wealth derived from the International Harvester fortune—she was the product of an affluent upbringing that included a stately home in suburban Evanston and a shingled, seven-bedroom “cottage” in Castine, Maine. Orphaned in her late teens, she showed no interest in marriage or settling down. When her guardians insisted she find something to do, she enrolled at the Boston School for Social Work. Her field work assignment took her to Lancaster, where her supervisor was Molly Dewson. Almost immediately, the two became “fast friends.” Polly was a frequent visitor to the Dewson family home in Quincy, where Molly still lived with her widowed mother well into her thirties. Mrs. Dewson’s death in 1912 meant Molly was finally free to leave the family claim behind.

Taking a break from social work, the Porter-Dewsons—as they called themselves as early as Christmas 1912—decided to try their hand at cow farming. While Molly and Polly thought of themselves as farmers, they were not exactly roughing it. They employed a hired man to tend the cows, extra hands to help with the haying and harvesting in the fall, and local farm girls to run the household. (Neither Molly nor Polly knew how to cook.) The farm turned a small profit, but farm income would never have sustained their privileged lifestyle. Polly’s trust fund bridged the gap.

Casting about for things to do, Molly and Polly turned their attention to the issue sweeping Massachusetts: woman suffrage. In 1915, they volunteered their services to the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association (MWSA) as suffrage workers in Worcester County. Dewson took over the tenth district, with responsibility for the towns of Berlin, Hudson, Clinton, and Westborough. Polly did not hold an official position; rather, she was Molly’s constant sidekick.

With a state referendum scheduled for November, there was much to do. They opened a “Votes for Women” shop in Hudson, which featured a window display of suffrage mottos and banners they created themselves. They wrote numerous letters to the editors of local Worcester county newspapers and distributed brightly colored “Suffrage Blue Birds” for supporters to display on their fence posts and front porches. Less successfully, they tried to convert the local Berlin women’s club to a suffrage group, but they only mustered a slim majority in support of giving women the vote.

Truth be told, the farmer-suffragettes were willing to do almost anything for suffrage that involved driving their beloved automobiles. They had two: a stylish Buick and a serviceable Ford. Cars were still something of a novelty in rural areas, especially when driven by women, and Molly and Polly relished the sensation they created as they cruised the Worcester countryside in an open vehicle festooned with suffrage slogans. In one case, a twelve-foot-long banner attached to the passenger’s side spelled out “Helen Todd of California” to signal the identity of the out-of-state speaker they were squiring around. In another instance, their featured guest was a former Democratic candidate for governor. The Northboro newspaper captured that scene: “After riding through the main streets in an auto, with a bugler making merry, the party of suffragists drew up at the curbing on Church Street and Miss Dewson of Berlin introduced Mr. Vahey.” As Claiborne Catlin had found on her horseback ride across Massachusetts the year before, such dramatic arrivals were sure to attract a crowd.⁵

Another method of garnering publicity was the open-air meeting. Polly Porter never spoke from the platform—except for cameo roles in an occasional suffrage play, she kept pretty much in the background—but Molly loved to be the center of attention, foreshadowing her later role as the head of women’s Democratic politics in the New Deal. On the suffrage hustings, Molly pitched her talks to the low level of political sophistication found in these random audiences. “Women would be women just the same whether they had the ballot or not,” she reassured listeners in Hudson. “Just as long as women live they will be women; they will work for home, husband, and children.” Of course that last sentiment didn’t apply to her and Polly, but no matter.⁶

Together the two women kept a scrapbook of their 1915 suffrage activities, which was filled with clippings about Worcester County events they had participated in, as well as more general news about the suffrage cause. The sheer amount of activity documented in local newspapers suggests how deeply this political question had penetrated into even relatively rural areas. Even if woman suffrage was impossible to ignore, opinions remained deeply divided. The scrapbook contained both pro- and antisuffrage clippings, with the latter carefully marked in red. The red ink predominated.

Molly and Polly were soon drawn into the organizational network linking local suffrage workers to state and national groups. As the movement gathered momentum, the same recruitment process was happening in localities all around the country. Molly and Polly signed up for a one-day conference on suffrage techniques in Worcester. In May, they attended a three-day MWSA conference in Boston, which culminated in a “monster” rally on Boston Common. They also represented the town of Berlin in October 1915, in Boston’s Suffrage Victory Parade; for this, their car had a starring role, and they decked it out with special care. Unfortunately, talk of victory was premature, as the men of Massachusetts decisively voted down the referendum by a two-to-one margin the next month. Undaunted, suffragists forged ahead, increasingly confident that they would prevail.

In December 1915, Molly and Polly, chosen as Massachusetts delegates to the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) convention in Washington, witnessed firsthand a significant turning point for the national movement. At this convention, Carrie Chapman Catt took over the leadership of NAWSA from Anna Howard Shaw. Dewson judged Shaw “a super woman,” “the best speaker by far for the suffrage cause,” but she thought even more highly of Catt, calling her the “keystone” of the suffrage movement and half joking in 1934 that “without her I believe we still would be voteless!” As a lowly district leader from Central Massachusetts, Dewson had little contact with the national leadership at the convention, although she did befriend younger, less well-known suffrage workers, with whom she would collaborate in the postsuffrage era to increase roles for women in politics. Several fellow attendees, including Sue Shelton White, Lucy Somerville Howorth, Emily Newell Blair, and Florence Allen, later joined Dewson in the Roosevelt administration.⁷

After only a year on the suffrage circuit, Molly Dewson stood poised to break into a substantial leadership position on the statewide level, which was testimony to the professional and organizational skills she had been honing since college. At this point, the suffrage careers of the partners diverged even further. At first, they had been very much in it together: “Molly and Polly, the farmer-suffragettes,” always up for an excursion to a neighboring town or putting on an impromptu suffrage play. But Dewson had far stronger organizational talents than Porter, and she felt much more at ease in public than her shy partner did. Polly continued to be active, but she participated more as Molly’s companion than as a co-worker.

In the fall of 1916, Dewson agreed to assume the unsalaried position of chair of MWSA’s Legislative Committee. She continued to live on the Berlin farm and happily drove the thirty-five miles into Boston for the weekly executive board meetings, chaired by President Alice Stone Blackwell, who by that point had spent almost forty years in the suffrage trenches. While primarily focused on lobbying for suffrage, Dewson tried to push the group to expand its vision to include social welfare measures, such as a bill limiting working hours for women and children to eight hours a day. Many suffragists in fact supported the eight-hour bill, but feared that endorsing that measure in order to build alliances with unions and industrial workers would open suffragists to requests from other organizations on which there might not be such unanimity—such as prohibition or birth control. Those doubts carried the day.

By 1917, a new issue challenged the suffrage movement when the United States formally entered World War I in April. Many women felt torn between their suffrage advocacy and supporting the war effort. While some radical suffragists bravely opposed the war for pacifist reasons, most mainstream suffragists, including Molly and Polly, lined up behind the Wilson administration, vowing to continue their agitation for the vote. The Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association complied with this dual policy, but Dewson’s enthusiasm for the suffrage cause waned in direct proportion to the amount of war-related work she was called on to perform.

Even though the suffrage victory was still three long years away, by 1917, Molly Dewson’s active involvement was drawing to a close. So too were her days as a farmer. “Farming in war time is not for us two,” she confided to a friend in September 1917. “In 1916 it was no expense. This year the scarcity and poorness of labor and its expense have discouraged Wynott [their tenant farmer] so he is going. We can get no one else.… Since we perforce have no farm and our maids have just left and more are hard to get we might as well seize the moment and close up for the winter and take a change.” Despite a catchy handbill stating “Attractive Sale by Auction of the Well-Known Herd … belonging to Porter & Dewson, South Berlin, Mass,” it turned out to be a poor time to sell a farm. So they planted their fields with winter rye, which would not need to be harvested until the summer of 1918, and they arranged for a Berlin family to take care of the house and the remaining stock.⁸

Freed from suffrage and farming responsibilities, Molly and Polly assessed their options. They thought about a six-month cross-country driving trip to California, but they felt a little guilty about planning an extended vacation while the United States was at war. By mid-October, they had signed on as social workers with the American Red Cross in France. “We just couldn’t do it Lucy,” Molly wrote to a California friend. “We felt it would be like quitters this year to travel. If you were in N.Y. you’d think all the world was going to France.”⁹

Before they sailed from New York, with their trusty car packed like a piano onboard the ship, they partook of one final suffrage moment: a massive suffrage parade which Dewson pronounced “superb” and “a thrill.” To the suffragists’ delight, they won a narrow but conclusive victory in New York in November 1917, the first breakthrough in a major northern industrial state. Molly and Polly heard the news on the boat train from Le Havre to Paris. “What do you think of the gallant men of New York!” Molly bragged to Polly’s brother Bill. “Well it certainly gave me about the best send off I could have asked from my native land.”¹⁰

Molly Dewson and Polly Porter’s story shows how seamlessly suffrage work and the war effort blended together for many women, especially those who belonged to mainstream suffrage organizations like NAWSA. (The war had a very different meaning for Alice Paul and the militants of the National Woman’s Party.) But their story also demonstrates something else: how the suffrage movement provided a safe and welcoming space for a variety of unconventional lifestyles, all hiding in plain sight.¹¹

The personal relationships of Carrie Chapman Catt, whose Juniper Ledge suffrage forest opened this book, reveal similar affinities. In 1885, after having graduated from Iowa State University, Carrie Lane married the newspaper editor Leo Chapman, but he died of typhoid the next year. In 1890, she married George Catt, a wealthy engineer. Neither marriage produced children. The Catts had quite an unusual marriage for the time: they often did not live together, while she, with his blessing, continued the suffrage work that kept her constantly on the road. Around 1890, Catt met Mary (Mollie) Garrett Hay, a fellow Midwesterner who was also deeply involved in suffrage organizing. The two women often traveled together, and in 1895, they shared temporary living arrangements. After George Catt’s death in 1905, the two women lived together permanently until Hay’s death in 1928. When Carrie Chapman Catt died in 1947, she chose to be buried not next to either of her husbands but beside Mary Garrett Hay at Woodlawn Cemetery, where she erected this monument: “Here lie two, united in friendship for thirty-eight years through constant service to a great cause.”¹² A queer—as in, strange, odd, and definitely non-normative—choice indeed.

Susan B. Anthony also led a decidedly queer life. “Man-marriage” held no appeal, so she sustained her emotional life with deep friendships with other women, both married and single. First and foremost was her five-decade relationship with Elizabeth Cady Stanton—the “thought” to Anthony’s “action,” according to Stanton’s daughter Harriot Stanton Blatch—a partnership with huge implications for suffrage history. In fact, all of Anthony’s relationships were suffrage-linked. Her most passionate was with the twenty-four-year-old Anna Dickinson, whom Anthony met in 1866 when she was forty-six. But that cooled after a few years, and the peripatetic Anthony never settled into a long-term relationship with any one woman. Instead, “Aunt Susan” surrounded herself with a range of fictive suffrage nieces, most notably Rachel Foster (later Avery) but also Carrie Chapman Catt and Anna Howard Shaw. She also had deep ties to her blood nieces, and from 1890 on, she shared a home in Rochester with her sister Mary. Labeling Susan B. Anthony queer acknowledges the range and depth of the emotional attachments with which she constructed her non-normative personal life.¹³

The suffrage movement supported a variety of living and working arrangements that fell outside the bounds of heteronormativity. Anna Howard Shaw’s longtime companion was Lucy Anthony, Susan’s niece. Alice Stone Blackwell considered herself “betrothed” to Kitty Barry, the adopted child of her aunt Elizabeth. Alice Paul never entered into a committed long-term relationship with another woman—it’s not clear whether she even had a personal life, so to speak—but instead surrounded herself with like-minded feminists at Belmont House, the headquarters of the National Woman’s Party in Washington, DC.¹⁴

Of course the suffrage movement boasted plenty of married women, starting with Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucy Stone in the founding generation and Alva Belmont, Harriet Burton Laidlaw, Maud Nathan, and Harriot Stanton Blatch in the second. But often, suffrage marriages pushed boundaries. Maud Wood Park, for instance, married twice but kept both marriages secret, and younger women like Doris Stevens, Alice Paul’s sidekick at the National Woman’s Party and a self-proclaimed “modern woman,” aggressively claimed the right to sexual freedom alongside men—although she also instructed her male paramours not to send her love letters at headquarters, lest her boss spot them. Stevens carried on not one but two affairs with married men while on the suffrage campaign trail between 1915 and 1919.¹⁵

It isn’t simply a case of who’s gay and who’s not. To speak of “queering the suffrage movement” is to identify it as a space where women felt free to express a wide range of gender non-conforming behaviors, including but not limited to sexual expression, in both public and private settings. This tolerance had its limits, however. From the beginning, the suffrage movement struggled with an undercurrent of accusations that it was engaged in a “sex war” against men. Nor did this openness last. As the work of sexologists like Freud, Krafft-Ebbing, and Havelock Ellis became more widely known in the 1920s and 1930s, being “normal” increasingly came to mean being actively heterosexual. This in turn encouraged a tendency to reinterpret women’s feelings for other women in a decidedly more negative light than had been true earlier.

On sabbatical from the professional work that had brought them together, Molly Dewson and Polly Porter were probably not thinking about safe spaces and gender nonconformity when they signed on as suffrage workers. Instead, they were just keen to spend exhilarating days bouncing around the Massachusetts countryside in their open car or attending “monster” rallies on Boston Common, then come home to quiet evenings in front of the fireplace, with Polly reading aloud while Molly listened contently. They didn’t aspire to the leadership roles that Carrie Chapman Catt, Anna Howard Shaw, or Alice Paul held; rather, they were happy to do good work in their small bailiwick of central Massachusetts, and they were determined to have fun doing it. “No work I have ever done was more entertaining,” Dewson later recalled, “for woman suffrage has nothing to do with economics.”¹⁶