Smithsonian Interviews Elaine Weiss on Tennessee’s Role in the Suffrage Fight

The book The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote, published in March 2018, tells the fascinating story of the fight over suffrage in Tennessee, the last state needed to secure a Constitutional amendment to give women full voting rights.

Smithsonian published an informative interview with the book’s author, Elaine Weiss. The interview discusses, among other topics, the role race played in the debate over suffrage in Tennessee, the money behind the anti-suffrage forces, and what conventional wisdom gets wrong about the suffrage movement.

Read the full interview here.

Interview: Joan Marie Johnson on the Monied Women Who Funded Suffrage Activism

In Funding Feminism: Monied Women, Philanthropy, and the Women’s Movement, 1870–1967, historian Joan Marie Johnson dives deep into the world of wealthy women and the activist causes that benefited from their money.

She argues that female philanthropy was an expression of women’s political power at a time when they had very little, and that the cash they delivered to everyone from suffrage organizations to birth control advocates shaped the trajectory of those groups and causes.

Alex Kane, a researcher for this website, interviewed Johnson about how philanthropy impacted the suffrage movement and media that covered the fight for women’s voting rights.

Alex Kane: Given that the suffrage movement occurred before women entered the workforce in a widespread manner, where did the monied women who funded the suffrage cause get their money from?

Joan Marie Johnson: Most of the wealthy women in the book inherited their fortunes, from their fathers or from their husbands. What makes their giving to the women’s movement so fascinating is that despite their enormous privilege, and these were very wealthy white women, they still experienced discrimination as women. Sometimes it was in their families, where they were not allowed to go to college or work in the family business like their brothers. Sometimes they felt abused by husbands, who cheated on them. They did not feel financially independent until their husbands died, and sometimes even afterwards, when brothers, lawyers, or their husbands’ former business associates still controlled their money. Thus, despite their privilege they understood that it was essential to use their money to fund efforts to make change for women and bring about gender equality, and saw themselves as united with other women.

AK: Activist organizations are often competing against each other for similar sources of funding. What did your research tell you about this dynamic, and how did it impact the suffrage movement?

JMJ: My research uncovered both competition for similar sources of funding as well as cooperation and networking. For example, in the woman suffrage movement, leaders of the larger and more moderate National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) were incensed when Alice Paul and the new, more militant Congressional Union (which became the National Women’s Party) began fund-raising for a parade in Washington, DC. They complained that Paul was duping NAWSA supporters into giving to her instead. But there was also substantial cooperation. Many of these women knew each other socially, and they tapped their friends and neighbors for participation and contributions. The women’s movement benefitted from their social network, which informally built a circle of women who gave to these causes. There were also more formal efforts to organize nationally, with leaders in various cities each expected to bring a number of women in. In this sense, I would argue that the suffrage movement benefitted more from social networks than it suffered from competition.

AK: Did the wealthy women philanthropists you researched give money that went towards suffrage publications--and if so, did they have influence over the editorial direction of those publications?

JMJ: The women philanthropists I studied were very interested in publicity, especially in having their own publications, as Susan B. Anthony said, so they could “sauce back” their opponents. Most newspapers were not promoting woman suffrage, so they had to create to their own publications. NAWSA took over a long-running magazine, The Woman’s Journal, had to give it up because it was losing so much money, and then, as soon as they had the funding, bought it back and combined it with other publications to create a new magazine, Woman Citizen. The money for this came from a million dollar bequest left to Carrie Chapman Catt, the NAWSA president, by Mrs. Frank Leslie. She left her estate for Catt to spend however she liked, leaving Catt free to shape the editorial direction of the magazine.

AK: Did the money that flowed into suffrage organizations increase their ability to generate press attention? What were the most effective tactics these organizations used to get the press to cover them?

JMJ: The money flowing in and the women who gave it drew enormous press attention to the movement. The spectacle of wealthy society women speaking out publicly for woman suffrage was enough to garner press attention, especially from the New York Times, which was against woman suffrage. But even more importantly, they understood that educating the public and changing public opinion was essential to winning the vote. When Alva Vanderbilt Belmont became involved in NAWSA, she gave a large contribution – to pay for moving from Warren, Ohio, to a new headquarters in New York City where they could get more publicity and begin hiring publicists. Catt then spent a large portion of the Leslie bequest to fund 25 full time publicists who provided editorials, cartoons, statistics, features, silent movies, and the magazine. In addition, they financed more elaborate, attention-getting events like parades and the White House pickets.

AK: Alva Belmont, one of the wealthy pro-suffrage women you write about, had a column in the Chicago Tribune. What impact did her columns have?

JMJ: Alva Belmont’s column was particularly interesting because she wrote quite forcefully about women’s need for independence, the failings of men to protect women, the needs of working class women, and many other issues. She was very outspoken, and as one of the wealthiest and most elite women in New York, it was remarkable for her to have such an explicitly feminist column.

Interview: Johanna Neuman on the “Gilded Suffragists”

Johanna Neuman‘s new book, Gilded Suffragists: The New York Socialites who Fought for Women’s Right to Vote, tells the fascinating story of how the elite women of New York City took up the suffrage cause and ultimately helped the suffrage movement triumph in its quest for voting rights.

Alex Kane, a researcher for this website, interviewed Neuman, a historian and journalist, about her book and how the media covered pro-suffrage socialites.

Alex Kane: You describe how word of a debate on women’s suffrage at a meeting of the Colony Club, a women’s-only club started in the early 20th century, leaked to the media. Could you explain why such an event would be newsworthy–why newspaper readers would want to know about who was debating suffrage at the Colony Club? 

Johanna Neuman: You can only imagine how excited I was when I found the statement from the Colony Club disavowing the leaking of a suffrage debate within its walls. The press release was pasted into the scrapbooks of Catherine Palmer Abbe, who had emerged as a suffrage leader during the 1894 constitutional amendment campaign. It confirmed several things for me.

One is that these elite women were the media darlings of their day, covered for every fad in attire, décor, entertainments and travel. With the city’s newspaper culture at its zenith—at the turn of the century New York boasted 29 daily newspapers and a vibrant immigrant press—everything they did and said provided ink. Newspapers began covering the wealthy as news in the 1880s, and readers seemed fascinated with every aspect of their lives. Perhaps this stemmed from the great disparity in social standing, or perhaps out of a longing for Horatio Alger rags-to-riches promise. In any event, when these figures of Society—until then known for hosting extravagant costume balls and commissioning Fifth Avenue mansions—embraced the women’s suffrage movement, it pushed coverage of their activities from the society pages to the news section and gave the movement enormous attention.

Second is that the very idea of a social club for women was threatening to men, because it violated the separate spheres that had so long ruled gender norms. Former President Grover Cleveland took to the pages of the Ladies Home Journal to proclaim that woman’s “best and safest club is her home.” One newspaper called the club a “Death Knell to the Home.” There was this fear that if women had a club of their own in the city, they might use it for illicit affairs and that men would no longer conscript the boundaries of their lives. So when word leaked that the Colony Club, billed as a social space, was also the site of debates over the most controversial political hot button issue of day – women’s suffrage — it was unsettling to men who had feared such a club would lead to emasculation of men. It was also upsetting to members of the Colony Club. They were taking their first steps into a debate over whether the vote would be good for women – wondering if it would rob them of their feminine moral authority or corrupt them with the stench of cigar-ridden politics. Most were not yet ready to announce their views in public. The issue was contentious between them and they insisted on privacy to keep discussing it.

AK: Newspapers loved to cover the socialites’ thoughts on suffrage. Did the widespread dissemination of high-society endorsements of suffrage impact how the wider American public thought about the issue? Was there any class resentment that turned into suffrage opposition as a result of the rich endorsing the cause?

JH: I don’t think newspapers loved covering their views on suffrage, but they did so because everything these social figures did and said was news. One of the assets these women brought to the campaign was an understanding that they could leverage the media’s interest in their appearance to promote the cause. Katherine Duer Mackay was one of the first women of Society to declare herself for suffrage, a woman of poise, beauty and social connections. Journalists accustomed to covering her as a social figure came to her suffrage events and always reported on what she was wearing and how her meeting rooms were decorated. But her secretary, Ethel Gross, noted that reporters who came “to cover her clothes” never left without quotes from her about the importance of the vote.

Class resentment was inevitable. The first political cause for many of the gilded suffragists was to join the New York garment industry strike in 1909-1910. At one point, labor leaders held a five-hour debate about whether to continue working with wealthy reformers, known as the Mink Brigade. Theresa Malkiel, a radical labor leader, accused them of “political crimes against the working class.” While some in the working class appreciated the support of these “women of leisure,” often crediting them in movement literature, others suspected these gilded suffragists were seeking the vote to increase their own influence, not to help fight for safety regulations and improved conditions in factories. Once the vote was won, they feared, elite supporters would lose interest in the reforms they were seeking.

As to the question of whether their involvement influenced others, one of my favorite anecdotes in the book is about a Canadian immigrant named Florence Nightingale Graham, who moved to New York and opened a beauty business. Changing her name to Elizabeth Arden, she largely eschewed politics. But in 1912, she stunned her staff by leaving her desk one day to join a suffrage parade on Fifth Avenue. Her biographers insist that she was not interested in the cause, but understood that her clients were. That was the sea change, when suffrage became popular among middle class women until then indifferent or even hostile.

AK: You write that newspapers derided suffrage activists as “masculine and vulgar,” but that their tone changed when covering elite women. Did that change in tone when covering these socialites’ support for suffrage transform newspaper coverage of the overall suffrage movement?

JH: News stories about the women’s suffrage movement in the 19th Century and early 20th Century contain lots of coded language, often suggesting that suffrage activists were masculine or unattractive, hinting that advocates were lesbians or spinsters. That line of attack was more difficult to justify with elite women, who were accustomed to brandishing feminine charms. There were a few pro-suffrage newspapers – the Boston Globe was a loyal supporter. Still, most newspapers did not embrace the cause, even if their tone softened. Some resorted to snarky comments ridiculing elite women’s call for more privileges.

The New York Times was adamantly against women’s suffrage always, and its editorials were especially coded. After a suffrage parade in 1912 that attracted women of diverse classes, “ the Times assailed “the refusal of woman to recognize his manhood as a title of supremacy in the world’s affairs.” The problem was not the “very small minority” of women who “have a natural inclination to usurp the social and civic functions of men.” It was this new generation of marchers, who were “young and personable, all … healthy and presumably intelligent.” The Times sought to shake men out of their complacency by questioning their manhood. “The situation is dangerous,” the paper editorialized. “We often hear the remark nowadays that women will get the vote if they try hard enough and persistently, and it is true that they will get it, and play havoc with it for themselves and society, if the men are not firm and wise enough and, it may as well be said, masculine enough to prevent them.”

AK: Did women ever convince their husbands to support suffrage, and was that ever covered in the press? If so, what impact did that support have on the conversation around suffrage?

JH: One of my chapters, “Mere Men,” discusses the biographies and motives of some of the key male suffragists. Many were husbands of women who were active in the movement. Others were progressives who thought, as writer Max Eastman did, that suffrage was “the great fight for freedom in my time.” Members of the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage, headed by James Lees Laidlaw, withstood enormous derision when they marched in the 1912 parade. “We had to laugh nearly all the way on account of the things that were shouted at us,” recalled Rabbi Stephen Wise. “For a few moments, I was very warm and took off my hat, whereupon someone shouted, ‘Look at the long-haired Susan.’ Some of the other delightful exclamations that greeted us were: ‘Who’s taking care of the baby? … Oh, Flossy dear, aren’t they cute? Look at the Mollycoddles.’ ” Still, Wise found the event uplifting, because while both male and female “rowdies” shouted insults, “the most hopeful thing” was the “respect (shown) by the intelligent class of people.” The male suffragists were careful not to usurp the leadership role of women, but they gave cover to other progressive men who were drawn to the cause. And in the end, of course, it was male voters who enfranchised women to vote in New York in 1917, and male lawmakers in Washington who enacted the 19th Amendment in 1919 and male legislators in various state capitols who ratified it in 1919 and 1920.

AK: In your research, did you ever detect concern among activists that press focus on what pro-suffrage socialites were wearing would distract from the substantive issue at hand?

JH: On the contrary, by 1910, after nearly a century of failed efforts to win the vote, mainstream suffrage leaders had determined that suffrage had to be sold, that how activists presented themselves was important to convincing a wavering or indifferent public. In part this was a deliberate effort to counteract the sneering of critics that suffrage activists were “mannishly or sloppily dressed.” As a result, leaders urged marchers in the 1911 suffrage parade on Fifth Avenue to “be neat and as modishly gowned as her purse will permit.” Noting that Alva Belmont and Katherine Mackay, two of the most prominent gilded suffragists, “always keep up with the fashions,” the National American Woman Suffrage Association reasoned, “The well-groomed, attractive matron or maid…has more influence over both sexes on the speakers’ platform or in personal conversation than her out-at-elbows sister.”

AK: Do you think the ways in which celebrities boosted the movement holds lessons for modern day social movements and how they might interact with celebrity endorsements? 

JH: It is always risky to extrapolate lessons for our age from history. But I would say that what is notable about the Progressive Era – especially about the women’s suffrage campaign – is that the cause attracted a great array of classes marching together under one large tent. When Elizabeth Cady Stanton first proposed in 1848 that American women get the vote, the idea was so controversial that her husband Henry, a New York legislator, boycotted the Seneca Falls convention for fear he would be ridiculed. By the time women were enfranchised in New York in 1917 and nationally in 1920, women and men of many classes had joined the movement to demonstrate the breadth of support for a cause once considered radical. In the parades that became an iconic symbol of that campaign, delegations of nurses, librarians, actresses, lawyers, factory workers, women of leisure, academics, labor leaders, department store clerks, even men marched in contingents meant to display visually that everyone was for the cause. For me, this assertion of diverse interests around a single cause was a spectacular demonstration of how social change was made, and how public opinion changed. Would such a cross-class, multi-gender approach benefit the causes of our times? That question I would leave to the good sense and thoughtful opinions of your readers.

Interview: Brooke Kroeger on “The Suffragents”

In September 2017, Excelsior Editions published the latest book of Brooke Kroeger, an author and professor at the New York University Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote tells the largely unknown story of the Men’s League for Woman’s Suffrage, a group of powerful men who banded together to lobby for women’s voting rights.

Alex Kane, a researcher for this site and a former graduate in student of Kroeger’s at New York University, sat down with his professor and program director to talk about her book, its relevance for today’s political moment, and why the men’s league is not more well-known today.

Alex Kane: I want to start out with a simple question: Could you explain who the “suffragents” were?

Brooke Kroeger: “Suffragents,” of course, is a made-up name. It was originally a moniker attributed to the men who supported women’s suffrage in Britain and it came across the puddle. These men were either directly connected to an organization started in November 1909 called the Men’s League for Woman’s Suffrage–w-o-m-a-n, the style of the day–of the State of New York, or they were closely affiliated with the ideas and the people who were involved. The mission was to help the women’s suffrage movement to get over the finish line in the last decade of what was a 70-year struggle.

AK: Why is it important to understand men’s contribution to this social movement?

BK: When realizing that the suffrage centennial was about to take place, I started thinking, “What hasn’t been done about suffrage that would be illuminating.” As I thought about it, it occurred to me that there couldn’t have been a way for the women to succeed at obtaining the vote without some help from men. Men were the voters, for the most part. Men were the legislators, almost exclusively. Knowing that, it seemed obvious that they would have had some sort of help. So I went looking, and ran into references to a Men’s League for Woman’s Suffrage in much of the secondary literature. Scholars certainly have talked about it, but usually in a paragraph, or maybe a page and a half. That’s all there was in the record, both in academic work and and in less academic work. That told me there was something to learn.

So I set about trying to find as much about it as I possibly could. And because it hasn’t been written about very much, not a lot of the record had been dug out. I went to the archives, to the correspondence of those whose names were coming up and what I found was a relatively modest amount of material. There wasn’t as much as you would have thought. The League wasn’t mentioned in their obituaries. It didn’t really appear in their memoirs, save  Max Eastman’s, one of the only ones that mentions the League very specifically.)  Several do write about their involvement with the suffrage as an issue and almost everyone has at least a passage about the 1911 suffrage parade in New York.

I dug a lot of material out through the contemporaneous record. If I found, for example, say, that Max Eastman gave a speech in Troy, New York, I dug out the local newspaper for the days before and the day after, and in doing that kind of work, I’d sometimes happen on an editorial that shed more light, or comments by local women suffragists involved in organizing whatever event took place. A lot of best material came that way.  I like that kind of work, and find it exciting.

So why does it matter? It matters because it’s an important under-told slice of the record–and I would say a slice because these women were at the campaign for seven decades and the victory was theirs. But the active, organized participation of men in that last determinative decade certainly eased the way.  James Lees Laidlaw’s mission statement for the League explains its purpose so well: It was to encourage support from men who wouldn’t come forward publicly unless there were numbers, to encourage those “not even ready to give the subject consideration until they see that a large number of men are willing to be counted in favor it,” and its says that those who oppose women’s suffrage would simply “pass away with this generation if not sooner.” He adds that men came in on the question of moral support: Here are women besieging legislators for years. Legislators are responsive to voters, and voters only. What could be harder for a non-voter?

And lastly, from a contemporary standpoint, once I learned about “allyship,” I understood that the Men’s League had created a perfect exemplar of how to give meaningful aid a cause not one’s own. You can see that in the fact that they didn’t talk about it or take credit for anything, after it was over, after the work was done. They did what was asked, they helped where they could in very significant ways, including money, and they never took any credit. 

AK: You said that scholars had only devoted about a paragraph or so to the men’s league. Why do you think this history isn’t common knowledge?

BK: I can only conjecture. But I think that in the periods where women’s suffrage history was getting written, in the 1960s and ’70s, as the reclamation of the record was underway, it was really important to give women primacy. The biographies, the history that was written–everything was focused on who the women were and what the women did. And the women were at it for such a long time, there was quite a lot to say. Remember, the men’s organized involvement was only for about a decade.  

When the proposal for the book was first circulating, I got some telling responses, such as “Who cares what the men think?” “I’d be glad to work with Brooke but not about this.” That was four or five years ago now, and I can sense a bit of a shift in that kind of thinking. But I’m guessing that’s part of why the story was submerged. Also, it was hard to dig out.

AK: These were elite men, men from the clergy and the professional and upper classes. And your book has a ton of examples of newspaper headlines that shed a pretty favorable light on them. Did that surprise you?

BK: No, I think that was part of the strategy. They played that celebrity role by enticing larger groups of people who admired their positions in society to think, “Oh, this is a club I could join. This is something I could or would like to be part of.” That was really important to the suffrage movement, whereas earlier, the suffragists were viewed as brown-shoed, dowdy dressed battle axes. Both the men of the League and the women of New York society who came into the movement at the same time changed the palette.

AK: In the early stages of the suffrage fight, New York was a particular focus. Could you explain why it was so important to get New Yorkers on board the suffrage train?

BK: True, a lot was centered in New York. Many of the great promotional ideas, were, as I like to say, New York-born and New York-borne. It just happened that it was an epicenter of suffrage activity, with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton residents of the state. And remember, the years from 1898 to 1919 were the period where New York consolidated and conglomerated—its when the five boroughs came together—when the city fathers reimagined and refashioned in into a great metropolis. It was the place to be and the suffrage movement was one of the many forces involved in making it great. 

Also, up until the New York victory in 1917, there had been no states east of the Missouri that had accepted suffrage. So that was huge. In 1915, in fact, a Washington Post editorial writer had said that a defeat in New York would set the movement back ten years. Also, the official suffrage history notes that no state suffrage campaign was as dramatic or effective as New York’s.

AK: You devote some ink to WEB Du Bois in your book, but he was not a member of the Men’s League. Why did you think he was important enough to warrant mention in the book when he wasn’t part of the league?

BK: Because he was such an important figure of the period and because I thought it was important to have the book say what was happening in the African-American community, which wasn’t enthusiastic about suffrage because it was perceived as a white, middle-class movement with a too-strong scent of racism. Du Bois was also involved with Oswald Garrison Villard, a founder of the the Men’s League and, with Du Bois and so many others, a founding member of the NAACP. There was no real love lost between them, but there was a connection and common interests.

Du Bois was also important to talk about because of his pro-women’s suffrage arguments were so strong. Women and black people were “fighting the same battle” for voting rights and needed to be in solidarity and, as importantly for the black community, “votes for women means votes for black women.”

AK: Obviously all the men profiled in your book supported women’s suffrage, but they weren’t on the same page ideologically.

BK: That’s correct–isn’t that exciting? They were all progressives. They all understood a just cause. But they were Democrats, Republicans, socialists, independents. When do we see something like that happening? Where are these joint forces today, connected by a just cause? That powerful people of such political differences could come together in this way, I found very moving. 

AK: You talked about how your book was relevant to questions of “allyship” today. Is that the main relevance you think the book has?

BK: I’d like to think so. In my mind’s eye, the book has a kind of primer quality for how to behave as one involved in the cause of another. I was struck by the way the men never spoke again about what they had done, and never took credit. There’s that wonderful line of James Lees Laidlaw, when he’s thanked after the vote in New York was won, and he says: “We men too have learned something, we who were auxiliaries to the great women’s suffrage party. We have learned to be auxiliaries.” This man is the head of a major financial company, on the board of directors of what became Standard and Poor’s, can trace his lineage back through 50 different lines to colonial days, and he’s talking about learning to be an auxiliary.

There’s such a marvelous humility about what they did. In the book there’s a photo of a one-dollar receipt for a membership fee, and it’s signed by Ward Melville, the philanthropist and patron saint of Stonybrook, Long Island and creator of Thom McAnn Shoes. And he’s signing these little bitty receipts himself! They did their own scut work. Gentlemen of the 1910s. I love that. Other women will understand how gratifying that is to learn. 

When I first started, I thought I was going to find these men to be no more than the equivalent of celebrity endorsers, men who lent their names, signed some letters, and showed up to see the governor or a legislator from time to time. And I was bowled over by what I amassed.