Recording: Rabbi Stephen S. Wise’s 1918 Speech “Women and Democracy”

Rabbi Stephen S. Wise of New York City’s Free Synagogue was one of the most sought-after suffrage speakers of the 1910s. This 1918 recording is representative of his most common pro-suffrage arguments. For more about Wise’s suffrage involvement—he was a founder of the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage of the State of New York, for instance—see Brooke Kroeger’s March 27, 2017 article in Tablet magazine, “Wise vs. Silverman, or New York’s Historic Rabbinical Women’s Suffrage Smack-Down.” The flip side of this recording is of remarks by Gertrude Foster Brown, one of the prime movers in the New York State campaign, featured here.

To read more about the roles men played in the struggle for women’s voting rights, see Kroeger’s book, The Suffragents.

Women’s Magazines and the Suffrage Movement: Did They Help or Hinder the Cause?

The Wiley Online Library has direct access to the article for payment, including a free preview of the first page. Questia offers this preview of the article’s introduction (as well as related resources):

Twenty-six million American women were granted the right to vote on August 20, 1920, after 72 years of struggle (see Table 1). The outcome of the movement remained uncertain until Tennessee ratified the Nineteenth Amendment only three months before the 1920 presidential election between Warren G. Harding and James Cox.

Ideological opposition to the bill was manifest and formidable. The theological argument, for instance, asserted that “…God had ordained men and women to perform different functions in the state as well as in the home….” Next, the biological argument, used by people who needed pseudoscientific evidence, assumed that women were the weaker sex and could not undertake the physically arduous task of voting. Last, the psychological argument contended that femininity was associated with emotionalism and illogicality, “traits that were inconsistent with the proper exercise of suffrage” (Kraditor 15-18).

Numerous powerful and organized groups that aligned themselves with anti-suffragists availed themselves of these arguments, including the anti-prohibitionists (or “wets”), the Democratically controlled Southern states and business interests.

Anti-prohibitionists saw that suffrage implied prohibition. They did not so much dread suffrage as the fact that it “could only hasten the advent of prohibition, and they marshaled every counterforce at their disposal [to defeat the amendment]” (Kobler 145). To counteract their force, early in the suffrage movement the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) realized they shared many members and consequently coalesced against the “wet” interests.

As late as 1916, none of the Southern states had endorsed the woman suffrage by constitutional amendment, even though the Republican and Progressive parties had done so. Degler said that the South’s reluctance came from “the fear that woman suffrage would reopen the race question.” True, the Fifteenth Amendment had granted all men the right to vote, including black men, but, Degler continued, “Many feared that the kind of coercion and violence that had been routinely used against black males who tried to vote or otherwise upset the political status quo would not be as easily or as effectively invoked against black women” (Degler 340-1).

Business interests opposed the measure because they feared women would demand too many reforms in the work place, which would hurt profits. It was not an unfounded fear: The number of working women had steadily increased, and by World War I, they became an economic force to be reckoned with.

With so many powerful groups militating against suffrage, it would appear that women’s magazines had their work cut out for them in fighting the battle for equality. However, two of the most popular women’s magazines, Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping, did not choose to accept that mission. For the most part, they ignored the issues. Articles that did pertain did not actively support or even discuss the amendment until it had become a “fait accompli.” In general, articles perpetuated the ideologies that historically had detained and fought against the passage of suffrage.

In contrast to women’s magazines, general opinion magazines discussed issues, presented different sides of the controversy and, in general, favored woman suffrage. Being purveyors of, among other topics, political opinion, these magazines wrote much about President Wilson’s pro-suffrage stance. He praised women for their heroic part in World War I and vigorously lobbied in their favor in speeches and letters to congressmen. “Much of the morale of this country and of the world will repose in our sincere adherence to democratic principles,” Wilson said in a letter to a senator. Passage of the amendment would be “an essential psychological element in the conduct of the war for democracy” (“The War and Votes for Women” 33-34) …

DOI: 10.1111/j.1542-734X.1996.1902_13.x

Archive: Suffrage Resources of the National Woman’s Party

The National Woman’s Party collection at the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument in Washington, DC has a vast collection of books, periodicals, cartoons, scrapbooks, artifacts, and ephemera from the NWP’s history.  As the site describes its collection on its homepage:

The National Woman’s Party (NWP) collection housed at the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument is an important resource for the study of the suffrage movement and the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). This unique collection, including the nation’s first feminist library, documents the mass political movement for women’s full citizenship in the 20th century, both in the United States and throughout the world. The collection contains books, scrapbooks, political cartoons, textiles, photographs, organizational records, fine arts, decorative arts, and artifacts produced primarily by women, about women.

The extensive holdings outline the history of the militant wing of the women’s movement in the United States, documenting the strategies and tactics of the movement, demonstrating the use of visual images as effective publicity tactics in a pre-electronic age, and revealing the international work of the National Woman’s Party in its historic quest for complete equality for American women.

You can read more about the tactics and techniques of the NWP here.

Bertha Damaris Knobe, Spectacular Woman Suffrage in America

Bertha Damaris Knobe, a chronicler of the women’s movement for voting rights, penned a striking account of suffragist activism for The Independent magazine in October 1911.

Setting out to document the diversity of tactics the suffragists used—from parades to soapbox speeches to automobile tours—Knobe takes the reader on a whirlwind ride through the United States to show how suffrage advocates took inspiration from their British counterparts and transformed their cause from an “academic” exercise preaching to the choir to a public-facing mass movement. She reports on a women’s suffrage parade in New York, an automobile tour in Illinois, and a Baltimore parade that “trampled on Southern pride and prejudice.”

Google Books has a public, digitized copy of this article, contained in a collection of issues from The Independent. 

For more on Bertha Damaris Knobe’s journalism on the suffrage movement, see her account of a May 1911 suffrage parade in New York City, and her article on the suffrage victory in California.

Novel: The Bostonians by Henry James

Henry James’ The Bostonians was originally published as a serial in Century magazine (Vol. 30, 31, 1885-1886), starting in February 1885. Much of the magazine is digitized so the serial can be accessed in part via Google at this link for Volume 29 (search “The Bostonians” or “Henry James”) and in Volume 30. (W.D. Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham ran concurrently in the Century. Howells was not only pro-suffrage but eventually a vice president of the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage of the State of New York.)

Macmillan published the novel as a book the following year and there have been numerous subsequent reprints. The Internet Archive has digitized the original, which you can read free of charge. James also wrote a version as a play.

From the cover copy and blurb of the 2003 Modern Library edition (free, via Amazon, for Kindle Unlimited subscribers):

This brilliant satire of the women’s rights movement in America is the story of the ravishing inspirational speaker Verena Tarrant and the bitter struggle between two distant cousins who seek to control her. Will the privileged Boston feminist Olive Chancellor succeed in turning her beloved ward into a celebrated activist and lifetime companion? Or will Basil Ransom, a conservative southern lawyer, steal Verena’s heart and remove her from the limelight?

From the introduction to the Modern Library edition of 2003:

The Bostonians has a vigor and blithe wit found nowhere else in James. It is about idealism in a democracy that is still recovering from a civil war bitterly fought for social ideals . . . [written] with a ferocious, precise, detailed—and wildly comic—realism.

For further reference, see also, “The Bostonians, the ‘Woman Question,’ and Henry James: A Critical Analysis of the Characterization of Basil Ransom” by Kyle Lascurettes for The St. Lawrence Review.

This page of the commercial newspaper archive Newspapers.com provides a link to many of the contemporaneous books reviews of The Bostonians. Your local or school library may have access.

Pictures of the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade

To mark the centennial anniversary of the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade in Washington, DC, Atlantic magazine Senior Editor Alan Taylor collected 24 photographs to feature in a slideshow. Taylor explains why the march was so important, and selects some of the more striking images of the parade. There are also photos of a program for the parade, as well as portraits of the organizers.

Go to this link to see the photos, which are housed in the Library of Congress.

Fannie Hurst: What of It? Have We Women Freed Ourselves from Men Or Do They Own Us More Than Ever Before?”

By 1927, the writer Fannie Hurst had earned a reputation as the nation’s highest paid short story writer and one of its most popular women of letters. She was often called upon to comment on issues of the day because—as the introduction to this article said—of her “perceptive qualities and graphic pen are given to brilliant interpretations of our times.”

Seven years after the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, which gave the nation’s women the vote, Hurst expressed her dismay at how little progress women had made, even allowing for the relatively short amount of time that had passed.

“Sisters,” she wrote, “Seven years after, dare we here, in the fastness of the analytical chamber, three women in Congress and thirty in the State legislatures to the contrary notwithstanding, admit that our emancipation hasn’t come off?”

“There are precious few indications on the credit side of the suffrage ledger to indicate that the women of America have kept faith … ”

Proquest Magazines has a copy of the August 1927 issue of Redbook containing the Hurst article. The ProQuest Document ID for the article itself is 1807552580.

You can read here about The Sturdy Oak, a “composite novel” written collaboratively by Fannie Hurst and 13 other prominent American writers in support of women’s suffrage.

To read Hurst’s article and see the magazine cover, click the links below.

Bertha Damaris Knobe in Collier’s: The Co-Citizens of California

Bertha Damaris Knobe reports on the suffrage victory in California of 1911. The promotional campaign, she reports, included 8 x 10 foot posters on billboard, merchant displays of suffrage show windows and slides for nickelodeons.

Google Books has digitized the volume that includes this article: Colliers, October 28, 1911, Volume 48, pp. 20, 31, 32

For more on Bertha Damaris Knobe’s journalism on the suffrage movement, see this account of suffragist activism for The Independent magazine, and her article on a New York City parade for suffrage in Harper’s Weekly.

Pro-Suffrage Illustration: The Mascot, 1915

This Puck magazine cover by Rolf Armstrong, later one of the most famous American pin-up artists, depicts a woman suffragist alongside the publication’s namesake mascot, Puck, who holds a pencil. Both sport a “Votes for Women” sash, an emblem of the suffrage movement that readers of the day would instantly have recognized.

The title of the work, which graced the cover of the magazine’s February 20, 1915 suffrage issue, is “The Mascot,” an apparent reference to the strong pro-suffrage stance the influential satirical magazine was taking: Puck was now a mascot not only for the magazine but also for the fight for women’s enfranchisement.

You can learn more about Puck‘s seminal suffrage issue here, and you can view a free digitized version of the issue here, via the HathiTrust Digital Library.

You can also browse decades’ worth of archived Puck issues here, via the HathiTrust Digital Library.

The Sturdy Oak: A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors

This unusual work was first serialized by Collier’s Magazine in 1916 and then as a novel by Henry Holt & Company in 1917. Fourteen prominent authors each contributed a chapter, working without payment an donating donated the proceeds of the book’s sales to the women’s suffrage movement. This was in advance of the November 1917 referendum vote in New York that granted the vote to the women of the state. The authors include some of the best known and most popular writers of the day: Samuel Merwin, Harry Leon Wilson, Fannie Hurst, Dorothy Canfield, Kathleen Norris, Henry Kitchell Webster, Anne O’Hagan, Mary Heaton Vorse, Alice Duer Miller, Ethel Watts Mumford, Marjorie Benton Cooke, William Allen White, Mary Austin, and Leroy Scott.

The novel was first serialized in Collier’s Magazine in and then published as a book by Henry Holt & Company, both in 1917.

As the book’s preface tells it, although The Sturdy Oak was written to support the cause of women’s suffrage, “the novel itself is first of all a very human story of American life today. It neither unduly nor unfairly emphasizes the question of equal suffrage, and it should appeal to all lovers of good fiction.”

At this link, Google has digitized issues of the magazine and the entire novel in weekly serialization can be read in Collier’s,  Vol. 59, Part I for 1917. The chapters begin with illustrations in the September 22, 1917 issue and proceed weekly thereafter, two per week for seven weeks. Norman Hapgood and Mark Sullivan, both suffrage supporters, comprised the magazine’s editorial leadership.

You can access the novel, including a Kindle version, for free here, via Project Gutenberg.

You can also listen to and download free audio recordings of The Sturdy Oak here, via LibriVox.