CHAPTER EIGHT

Two Sisters

THE HEIGHT OF the suffrage movement coincided with what has been called “The Golden Age of Campaign Buttons.” The 1896 presidential election was the first in which inexpensive celluloid buttons were widely used, and they have been prominent parts of political campaigns ever since. Like cartes de visites, new technology made this innovation possible. Not only did the buttons offer a novel way to publicly proclaim one’s political views, they also were nifty souvenirs suitable for collecting.¹

Suffragists were always looking for new ways to spread their message, and the popularity of buttons—and the fact that they were cheap and easy to produce—meant that they were quickly added to the suffrage arsenal. During the 1917 New York State referendum, suffragists distributed more than a million buttons to citizens across the state. Most suffrage buttons were fairly small—just five-eighths of an inch, much smaller than ones today—which called for simple messages. “Votes for Women,” “Ballots for Both,” and “I’m a Voter” were some of the most popular.

Suffragists were encouraged to wear buttons and badges to provoke discussion from curious strangers and to demonstrate their allegiance to the cause. “Show your colors all day long,” exhorted the California suffragist Alice Park, who amassed an extensive collection of her own. Park emphasized the symbiotic relationship between the self-confidence it took to wear a suffrage button in public and the broader gains for the movement as a whole: “Until women have the courage of their convictions, how can they expect to win recognition and approval?” Ironically, this public “showing of the colors” often led suffragists to have to give away their suffrage buttons when prospective supporters asked where they could get one of their own.²

Soon antisuffragists got into the act, not willing to cede public display to their more flamboyant suffragist sisters. Realizing the importance of branding, “antis” countered suffragists’ purple, gold, and white color scheme by choosing red to identify their cause. The red rose, often worn in lapels or corsages, quickly became their most recognizable symbol. For those occasions when red roses wouldn’t do, the antisuffrage movement offered its own array of buttons. Usually deploying a striking combination of red, black, and white, these buttons stated their platform so boldly that often one word did the trick: “No.”

THE SISTERS WERE BORN in New York City in the 1860s, into a prominent Jewish family that traced its American roots through eight generations to the eighteenth century. One married her much older first cousin at age seventeen. She became active in civic and philanthropic work, and her name is especially linked to the Consumers’ League, an organization that tried to harness consumer power to improve conditions for the workers who produced the goods that elite women purchased. The other wanted to be a writer and took classes at Columbia College, despite being precluded from registering for a degree because of her sex. She too married an older man, and she played a prominent role in the founding of Barnard College, which opened its doors in 1889. She also wrote several novels and twenty-six plays, including The Dominant Sex (1911). But while one was a prominent suffragist, the other was a vocal opponent.

Both Maud Nathan and Annie Nathan Meyer seemed destined to end up in the pro-suffrage camp, but in the end, the sisters took different routes. This twist of fate introduces a new element into the history of the suffrage movement: women who actively campaigned against their own enfranchisement. It doesn’t take too much historical imagination to grasp why men might have opposed suffrage: they liked things the way they were and remained unsympathetic to changes in traditional gender roles. Women who took this stand are more of a puzzle, but their motives and tactics deserve consideration alongside those of the eventual winners. Making that point through the life choices of two sisters brings abstract arguments into the more concrete, daily realm. Not surprisingly, both personal and ideological factors were at work.

Maud and Annie Nathan had a privileged upbringing, but it was not without its emotional and economic challenges. They proudly traced their heritage on both sides of their family to Sephardic Jewish roots—the “nearest approach to royalty in the United States,” as Annie put it. Their parents, Robert Weeks Nathan and Annie Augusta Florance, were part of the established, well-connected uptown Jewish elite who actively participated in the full range of New York City’s cultural and social life; the extended family included the poet Emma Lazarus and future Supreme Court justice Benjamin Cardozo. The four Nathan children paired off by age, not sex: Maud, the older daughter, was closest to her older brother, whereas Annie, who was five years younger, threw in her lot with the younger brother. Emotional distance, not affinity, was always the rule between the sisters.³

In 1875, Mr. Nathan’s business reverses upended the family, forcing them to relocate to Green Bay, Wisconsin, where they were one of the few Jewish families. The children enjoyed their new surroundings, but the move was especially hard for their mother, who had to leave everything she loved in New York to start over in the Midwest. She also had to deal with her husband’s frequent dalliances and the marital instability they created, which led her to make several suicide attempts and develop a serious drug dependency. After her husband returned to New York, she took her children to Chicago, but she became increasingly distraught and had to be hospitalized in 1878. At age sixteen, Maud shepherded her two younger siblings back to New York on the train to live with their grandparents. A month later, they learned of their mother’s death.

This event crystalized the rivalry between Maud and Annie that would later play itself out in the suffrage context. According to Annie’s account, Maud hogged the limelight with her grieving and shut Annie out, making her feel neglected and lost. “Smarting at the injustice,” Annie later wrote, “her little sister crept unnoticed into a corner and watched with burning jealous eyes the incredible fuss made over her.” This discrepancy was even harder to bear because Annie was convinced she was her mother’s favorite. “The seeds of jealousy were planted then and there—a jealousy of my sister which was largely responsible for spoiling our relations for many years.”⁴

Maud reacted to her mother’s death in part by accepting her first cousin’s marriage proposal. Frederick Nathan was the son of her father’s brother and almost eighteen years older than Maud. They married in 1880, when Maud was seventeen, and set off on a sixteen-month honeymoon in Europe. When they returned to set up housekeeping, Maud Nathan—like Eleanor Roosevelt, she had no need to change her name—was not yet nineteen years old. It took six years before she conceived a child, and her beloved daughter Annette Florance was born in 1886. Tragically, Annette died at the age of nine. The reformer Josephine Shaw Lowell encouraged Maud Nathan to channel her grief into civic and reform work, which led to her decades-long association with the Consumers’ League, the work for which she is best known. From there, suffrage was a logical next step.

Annie was only eleven when her mother died. Because her older sister soon left to marry, she charted her own path through adolescence. Largely self-taught, Annie and six friends convened a group called the Seven Wise Women to study women writers, using Margaret Fuller’s conversations as their model. But Annie wanted more formal education, so she enrolled in the Collegiate Course offered to women at Columbia, despite her father’s steadfast insistence that no man would want to marry an educated woman. She proved him wrong when, at age twenty, she married Dr. Alfred Meyer, a prominent physician thirteen years her senior.

Annie’s marriage caused her to drop out of the Columbia program, but it did not lessen her interest in higher education for women. Soon, she was spearheading the campaign for the establishment of Barnard College, which opened its doors to female students in 1889. For the rest of her life, Annie Nathan Meyer bitterly resented that she was not given proper credit for her role in founding Barnard, her proudest achievement. She always suspected that the slight was in large part because she was Jewish, and historians agree.⁵

At this point, the similarities between the two sisters far outweighed their differences. Like her older sister, Annie had entered into a very rewarding and long-lived marriage to an older man. Like her older sister, Annie took a long time to conceive, bearing her only child, Margaret, in 1895. More importantly, at a time when opportunities for elite women were extremely restricted, both sisters shared a sense of restlessness and ambition that caused them to expand their aspirations far beyond marriage and the domestic sphere. Maud called this “my restless spirit which reached out for broader contacts”; later, she realized that her “latent feminism” propelled her to work with the Consumers’ League and the woman suffrage movement.⁶ Annie too identified with women who were “heart-hungry” and “brain-famished,” and once captioned a youthful picture of herself, “Listen, honestly, Get Out.”⁷ But as the twentieth century dawned, the two sisters found themselves on opposite sides of the suffrage divide.

Maud Nathan offered this somewhat bemused account of how suffrage became taboo within her intimate family circle. Both her brothers were adamantly opposed to the idea (“My older brother was so irascible when the subject was mentioned he refused to discuss it”), as was her cousin, Benjamin Cardozo. But it was her sister’s choice that confounded her:

My sister, Annie Nathan Meyer, who had been instrumental in founding Barnard College, for the higher education of women, who had gone to Denver, Colorado, to attend a convention of the Association for the Advancement of Women, who had addressed the Parliament of Religions in Chicago, who was one of the first women in New York to ride a bicycle—at a time when it was considered most unwomanly to make herself so conspicuous—who, in brief, stood for everything that claimed to be progressive, took her stand on the opposite side and joined the group of anti-suffragists!

Never especially close to her older sister, and nursing simmering resentments since their mother’s death, Annie apparently relished the chance for a public feud. A lifelong gadfly, she could accomplish two goals at once: goad her older sister and make trenchant comments about women’s status designed to keep herself very much in the public eye.⁸

“The fighting Nathan sisters,” as they were soon referred to in the press, offer a contrasting set of viewpoints. Maud Nathan was first drawn to the suffrage cause for a simple reason: “I became convinced that legislators would never give consideration to the women’s point of view, so long as we women had no political status.”⁹ Her involvement with the Consumers’ League made her especially attuned to working women’s concerns, and, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she frequently linked political and economic independence. Like most suffragists, she gravitated towards a vision of modern women’s lives that moved far beyond the domestic realm, stressing that the vote was an important tool for women’s civic engagement. “Bestowing upon women the responsibility of citizenship broadens them, makes them more companionable as wives, enables them the better to teach their sons and daughters, by example as well as precept, the true meaning of patriotism and the duties incumbent upon citizens of a democracy.”¹⁰

Maud Nathan quickly became one of the most sought-after suffrage leaders in New York. A charismatic speaker, she appeared on suffrage platforms several times a week, often accompanied by her husband, who was also an avid suffragist.¹¹ Her speeches were closely covered by major newspapers, and she employed a clipping service to collect and carefully preserve her press notices and articles in scrapbooks. One of the most revealing clippings described a mock suffrage debate in 1911. Nathan, playing the “anti” side, had dressed in a hoop skirt and shawl reminiscent of the style sixty years earlier. As one of the New York papers observed, “Mrs. Nathan, of course, is known far and wide as one of the most able and ardent supporters of the suffrage cause, and the way she took the opposite side in the burlesque debate was really an effective argument for giving women the ballot.”¹² And, no doubt, a not-so-subtle jab at her younger sister.

Like Maud, Annie Nathan Meyer was an effective speaker, but she preferred to stir things up with her pen. By one count, she published over 350 letters to editors in her lifetime, as well as numerous articles, many of which were carefully collated by her clipping service.¹³ (One wonders if she and Maud kept score of who got more press.) Her antisuffrage platform focused on several themes. She often complained that suffragists made unrealistic claims about what women would do with their votes, and she challenged the idea that women would vote as a bloc. She liked to point out that many of the advances in women’s lives since the nineteenth century had been driven by women who were at best lukewarm about suffrage, if not actively opposed to it: “This confusion of the suffrage movement with every movement that made for advance goes merrily on, and few take the trouble to stop it.” She also disparaged the suffrage movement for what she saw as its anti-male stance, despite their attempts to round up “all the contented wives they could muster.” As she noted with a certain smugness, the suffragists were “very angry” when she accused them of sex antagonism.¹⁴

While Annie Nathan Meyer clearly enjoyed poking fun at suffragists, including her sister, this disagreement was about more than sibling rivalry. Women’s antisuffrage arguments were grounded in a clear—and to many citizens at the time, convincing—political philosophy that proved quite resonant with early-twentieth-century audiences.¹⁵

Far from consigning women to the domestic sphere, as their opponents often implied they did, antisuffragist women encouraged a broad range of activities in the public sphere. “We believe that women according to their leisure, opportunities, and experience should take part increasingly in civic and municipal affairs as they always have done in charitable, philanthropic and educational activities,” argued Josephine Dodge of the National Organization Opposed to Woman Suffrage in 1916, “and we believe that this can best be done without the ballot, as a non-partisan body of disinterested workers.”¹⁶ Theirs was an antipolitics stand, therefore, not an anti-public-engagement stand. Traditional partisan politics, especially in states with entrenched political machines, were seen as dirty and unappealing. Why would women want to sink to that level? Moreover, to vote meant to declare allegiance to a political party, thereby foregoing the disinterestedness that many women felt was key to their success in the public realm. More than anything else, this commitment to nonpartisanship was at the root of many female antisuffragists’ opposition to the vote. This stance may seem naïve or misguided, but it’s worth noting that the League of Women Voters adopted this same approach in the postsuffrage era.

The organized antisuffrage movement, beginning with the founding of the Massachusetts Association Opposed to Further Extension of Suffrage for Women in 1882 and the New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage in 1895, grew into a formidable political presence. By 1900, there were additional groups in Illinois, California, South Dakota, Washington, and Oregon; eleven years later, when the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage opened a headquarters in New York City, over two hundred thousand committed antisuffragists belonged to over twenty-five state organizations. Well-known public figures like the muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell, noted for her exposé of John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil, added their support. The very fact that so many women were saying they didn’t want the vote was a powerful weapon in the battle for public opinion.¹⁷

As with the Nathan sisters, the pro- and antisuffrage movements had both strong similarities as well as differences. Both employed traditional forms of political persuasion, such as speeches, pamphlets, and public forums, to build their cases, and both drew their leadership from elite white middle- and upper-class women. (If there was such a thing as a female African American antisuffragist, she was a lonely character indeed.) And yet the antisuffrage movement was unable to stop the momentum of the campaign for votes for women. Once the suffrage movement took to the streets with its parades, street-corner sermonizing, and other displays of public spectacle, it became a topic of vital national interest that no American could ignore. And once politicians began to realize the risk of antagonizing future voters by their continued opposition, they too got on board. As Harriot Stanton Blatch later observed, “if both sides had agreed to stay at home and argue pleasantly and pray, the antis would have won out.”¹⁸

America’s impending entry into the war in Europe and a change in leadership in the antisuffrage movement help explain the shifting fortunes of the two codependent movements. New York State had always been a stronghold of antisuffrage sentiment, and the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage played a key role in preventing the passage of a suffrage amendment in that state in 1915. By the time of the second referendum just two years later, many female antisuffragists were already deeply involved in patriotic war work, where they found themselves increasingly working under the leadership (if not domination) of men. For members of an organization like the New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, which didn’t even allow men to join until 1914, this was a major shift.¹⁹

As men began to dominate the antisuffrage movement after 1917, the focus of the campaign shifted as well. Antiradical, antisocialist rhetoric had been nonexistent in the early years of antisuffragism, but as wartime hysteria gripped the country, feminism, socialism, and woman suffrage were increasingly portrayed as enemies of the state. There is a direct line between the final years of the antisuffrage movement and the emergence of a conservative women’s agenda in the 1920s. Right-wing patriotic groups like the Woman Patriots dedicated themselves to fighting anything considered un-American and unpatriotic, with Progressive women reformers, many of them former suffragists, coming under special attack. And so the battle continued.²⁰

Making the link between the last gasp of antisuffragism and the emergence of right-wing activism in the postsuffrage era is important for understanding the larger story of conservative women in twentieth-century America. Not all politically engaged women, then or now, support a liberal or progressive agenda. A telling example is Phyllis Schlafly, whose Eagle Forum mobilized a core of grass-roots activists in the 1970s to stop the Equal Rights Amendment dead in its tracks. Like the antisuffragists, the Eagle Forum understood the political resonance of women saying they were quite happy with the rights they had. Of course while the suffragists prevailed, the ERA supporters did not, but the antis were among the conservative women of their day, a reminder that not all women think or vote alike.

That, of course, was precisely the point that Annie Nathan Meyer made over and over. She could not abide the claims that women would end prostitution, vote in prohibition, or stop war—because she knew that those claims would be impossible to implement, even if women did vote as a bloc. Starting around 1912, she devoted less time to her antisuffrage activism and more time to her writing. After New York State women won the vote in 1917, she rashly suggested in a letter to the New York Times that women refrain from going to the polls, but quickly recanted. While she did eventually join the League of Women Voters, she still considered herself an anti when she published her autobiography in 1951: “While I think that giving women the vote has done no good, I am perfectly ready to admit that neither has it brought about the dreadful results that the extremists prophesied. I am quite convinced that I was correct in my conviction that women would never vote as a sex. They vote—as they should—as individuals, swayed by all sorts of varying influences.”²¹ In many ways she was right, even if she overstated how often the suffrage movement resorted to the grandiose claims she despised.

Towards the end of their lives, some of the animosity between the two sisters faded. Still, nothing could bridge their suffrage divide, which was rooted as much in temperament as in ideology. At base, woman suffrage was a forward-looking movement. In the end, that is one reason why Maud Nathan’s side, not Annie Nathan Meyer’s, prevailed.