Ellen Carol DuBois in the Washington Post: “What Activists Today Can Learn from the Women’s Suffrage Movement”
UCLA Professor Emerita Ellen Carol DuBois contributed this commentary to the Washington Post on International Women’s Day 2019: “What Activists Today Can Learn From the Women’s Suffrage Movement.” She maintains, as the subhead suggests, that persistence and coalition-building are the keys to overcoming backlash.
“Suffrage was a product of a difficult battle that required overcoming enormous political challenges,” she writes. “A small group of farseeing pioneers had to attract more and more women to their vision of political power and equality. They had to become astute and clever in their strategies, all while developing the stamina to stand up against determined opponents and ingrained traditions. Through all this, they had to remain true to their basic belief that American democracy owed women full political rights.”
The Unyielding Search for the Original Declaration of Sentiments
The New York Times on February 8, 2019 reviewed the search started during the Obama administration to find the original Declaration of Sentiments from the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, which to date has come up dry. One theory is that there never was an acutal document, but that the sentiments were gathered in notes sent to Frederick Douglass’s newspaper, the North Star, for compilation and printing. Here is the New York Times article.
When Political Women Wear White – Time, Washington Post, New York Times, CNN
The decision of Democratic US congresswomen to don white for the State of the Union address February 5, 2019 occasioned stories about the color’s symbolism, notably in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Time. CNN took up the topic in 2017 in this opinion piece by Louise Bernikow.
Brent Staples in the New York Times on African-American Women and the Suffrage Movement
Brent Staples, a member of the New York Times editorial board, expands on ideas first presented in July (“How the Suffrage *Movement Betrayed Black Women,”) in this piece headlined “When the Suffrage Movement Sold Out to White Supremacy.” He details the disconcerting truth that the 19th amendment did not guarantee the voting rights of millions of other women, “particularly African-Americans in the Jim Crow South,” who “were being defrauded by registrars or were driven away from registration offices under threat of violence.” The earlier piece prompted this response from VIrginia Kase, CEO of the League of Women Voters, headlined, “Facing Hard Truths About the League’s Origin,” even though Staples had not mentioned the League in his essay. The League’s statement begins:
“The League was founded in 1920—just months before the ratification of the 19th Amendment—by American suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt. Catt was a complicated character, a political operative, and by modern standards, yes, racist. While fighting for the 19th Amendment and lobbying Southern senators, she famously claimed, ‘White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by women’s suffrage.’
“These remarks are sometimes brushed over as a sign of the times or a political strategy. But actions speak louder than words, and our organization was not welcoming to women of color through most of our existence.
“Even during the Civil Rights movement, the League was not as present as we should have been. While activists risked life and limb to register black voters in the South, the League’s work and our leaders were late in joining to help protect all voters at the polls. It wasn’t until 1966 that we reached our first position to combat discrimination. Still, our focus on social policy was from afar—not on the front lines. . . .”
Library of Congress Archives of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The Library of Congress digitized and organized thousands of documents of suffrage leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
The collection spans the years 1840 to 1906, and includes 500 items from Anthony’s papers and 1,000 items from Stanton’s papers.
The Library of Congress wrote about some of the highlights included in the archives:
An official report and newspaper clippings of the historic 1848 convention for women’s rights in Seneca Falls, New York;
A pamphlet printed by Frederick Douglass’ North Star newspaper after Douglass attended the convention and spoke forcefully for women’s suffrage;
Stanton’s handwritten draft of her controversial “The Woman’s Bible,” which nearly divided the suffrage movement when it was published in 1895;
Twenty-five volumes of handwritten diaries kept by Anthony on her activities and events of the day, such as President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination;
Scrapbooks with newspaper clippings, programs and other accounts of the time that would be impossible to re-create today;
Correspondence on the multivolume “History of Woman Suffrage,” the first three volumes of which the two women co-edited with Matilda Joslyn Gage;
Speeches and correspondence on the temperance and antislavery movements.
“Are Women People?” The Poetry of Alice Duer Miller
“Are women people?” It’s a question you may have seen floatingaround the Internet lately, an absurd line calling attention to patriarchy, sexism and the dehumanization of women.
But the line did not come out of nowhere. It has a very specific history that begins with Alice Duer Miller.
Miller was a Barnard College-graduate who made her mark as a writer for publications like Harper’s and Scribner’s. She also advised the New Yorker and wrote screenplays. Later in life, she wrote the story-poem “The White Cliffs,” a work published in 1940 that encouraged the U.S. to join England in World War II. It became her most famous work and was turned into a movie.
The line “Are women people?” is the title of a series of pieces she wrote for the New York Tribune, the newspaper owned by the Whig Party advocate Horace Greeley, from 1914-1917, the year New York voted to give women the right to vote.
Those columns featured Miller’s poetic, satirical send-ups of those who were anti-suffrage. For instance, here’s Miller’s poem “Why We Oppose Pockets for Women”:
1. Because pockets are not a natural right.
2. Because the great majority of women do not want pockets. If they did they would have them.
3. Because whenever women have had pockets they have not used them.
4. Because women are required to carry enough things as it is, without the additional burden of pockets.
5. Because it would make dissension between husband and wife as to whose pockets were to be filled.
6. Because it would destroy man’s chivalry toward woman, if he did not have to carry all her things in his pockets.
7. Because men are men, and women are women. We must not fly in the face of nature.
8. Because pockets have been used by men to carry tobacco, pipes, whiskey flasks, chewing gum and compromising letters. We see no reason to suppose that women would use them more wisely.
Miller’s “Are Women People” poems were collected and published in a book called Are Women People? A Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times. You can read the entire book for free here on Project Gutenberg, a website featuring free books for download.
A pair not published in the book concern the abrupt resignation of Dudley Field Malone in September 1917 from his plum patronage post in the Woodrow Wilson administration, expressly to protest the president’s unwillingness to support the federal women’s suffrage amendment. Three years later, Malone would marry Doris Stevens, the suffrage leader and Alice Paul’s aide de camp. This is the poem that appeared in the Tribune on September 16, 1917:
Some men believe in suffrage
In a peculiar way,
They think that it is coming fast
But should not come to-day.
And others work and speak for it,
And yet you’ll sometimes find
Behind their little suffrage speech
A little axe to grind.
They put their Party interests first,
And suffrage well behind.
Of men who care supremely
That justice should be shown,
Who do not balk at sacrifice,
And make the cause their own,
I know, I think, of only one,
That’s Dudley Field Malone.
And, a month later, on October 14, 1917. she wrote of Byron Newton, Wilson’s choice for Malone’s successor at the port:
To Byron R. Newton
“Every true woman knows . . . Those things which God Almight and Nature designed them to do . . . ” Anti-suffrage interview of Mr. Newton
O, Mr. Newton, are you really sure
You know what each true woman knows and thinks?
No wonder that you go your way secure,
A wise young Oedipus to that old sphinx.
The woman question: it cannot perplex
Your intuition: many men are loath
To boast of understanding either sex,
But you, I gather, understand them both.
You, if I read you rightly, understand
Not only all that women know and hope,
But everything which God and Nature planned
In evolution. So, we cry with Pope:
‘Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:
God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.”
She ends her column with the following:
“The former Collector of the Port Dudley Field Malone resigned his post because the Administration was not taking a sufficiently active stand on woman suffrage. The new Collector is a violent anti-suffragist. If the Administration becomes more aggressive in its suffrage policy, will Mr. Newton show the same sincerity and courage that Mr. Malone showed—and resign?”
You can also read her columns in original newspaper form by utilizing the Fulton History website. Search “Alice Duer Miller” “Are Women People” for a list of her newspaper poems, which you can then read in PDF form. If you know the newspaper page and date of the column, you can also search by that.
If you have access to academic databases, you can read English scholar Mary Chapman’s analysis of Miller’s poetry and politics in this piece for the journal American Literary History. You can also search for that article on JStor.
Nellie Bly for the New York Evening Journal at the 1913 Washington DC Suffrage Rally
Here is Nellie Bly’s article in the March 3, 1913, issue of the New York Evening Journal, writingabout her experience as a sentry in the Washington DC Suffrage rally and parade the day before President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. The University of Texas at Austin has the fullest run of the newspaper. Bly was never a card-carrying suffragist but clearly pro women’s rights. In 1896, she wrote about the suffrage convention of that year, also hosted in Washington DC, as well as about “Women of the Pulpit” and Susan B. Anthony in what is considered a seminal interview.
There is more about Bly’s article about the 1913 parade in this article by Brooke Kroeger for the Gotham Center for New York History, titled “When the Suffrage Movement Got Its Makeover On.”
A Special SuffrageandtheMedia Report: How the Media Covered the New York State Suffrage Centennial
February 12, 2018
By ALEX KANE
On November 6, 1917, New Yorkers voted to give women the right to participate in elections. It was a milestone for the national movement to get women the vote, and helped paved the way for ratification of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, which enfranchised every eligible American of voting age in 1920.
Celebrations across the state in 2017 honored the 100th anniversary of this New York milestone. Up, down, and across the state, local communities both big and small held events that highlighted the sacrifices and activism that led to victory.
Performers for “Votes for Women,” a play put on in New York that chronicled the suffrage movement. Photo: Ron Schubin/”Votes for Women” by Krysta Dennis.
The New York press dutifully followed along. Media outlets, particularly local newspapers, covered many of these events. The local coverage focused on reenactment marches; historic markers commemorating particular suffragists; book talks and readings; museum and historical society exhibits; plays; and the elected officials who showed up. The volume of local press coverage was substantial.
The deluge was not accidental. It grew out of years of organizing among pockets of advocates who pushed for government funding for suffrage centennial commemorations and concerted publicity drives to put these often voluntary efforts in the public eye. The state centennial funding appropriation of $500,000 was far below the $2 million suffrage event organizers had requested.
Scarlett Rebman, a grants officer for Humanities NY, spoke about the considerable energy community organizations put into digging up local suffrage history. She said local media outlets were important contributors. She said they “uncovered a lot of interesting stories and interesting sources.” Humanities NY had responsibility for distributing $266,000 in grants around the state for New York suffrage centennial events.
The attendance count for events her organization funded stood at more than 90,000 by January 2018.The total number is likely higher, since the organization does not keep track of the numerous other events that did not receive Humanities NY funding.
The Auburn Citizenreported on a Girl Scouts convention held in Seneca Falls, the birthplace of the national women’s rights movement, and a speech Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul, chair of the NY Women’s Suffrage Commission, delivered to the scouts.
WNYC, the popular radio outlet, took a look at suffrage commemorations in the five boroughs on the 100th anniversary of winning suffrage, and conducted an interview with an expert on suffrage.
AMNY covered plans to erect statues of suffrage leaders in Central Park.
And theEast Hampton Star focused on the planning and reenactment of a 1913 rally and march for suffrage attended by Harriot Stanton Blatch, whose descendants came to the East End to participate.
The opening of the women’s suffrage exhibit at the New York State Museum in Albany is a centerpiece of the celebration. Called “Votes for Women,” it features over 250 items that help tell the story of how New York activists won their fight. In addition to extensivecoverage in the local press, the Associated Press covered it, generating reprints in such outlets as US News and World Report, the Seattle Times, and the Washington Times, among others.
Attendees at the “Votes for Women” exhibit at the New York State Museum in Albany. Photo courtesy of the New York State Museum.
“It was covered around the state quite a bit mostly because we borrowed from so many different local institutions,” said Jennifer Lemak, the chief curator of history for the New York State Museum, adding that the museum borrowed artifacts from over 50 institutions in New York State, creating interest in the project from communities whose artifacts are on display.
Lemak added that tours of the exhibit were well-attended. And while the state museum does not keep track of attendance by exhibition, Ashley Hopkins-Benton, a senior historian and curator at the museum, said that on “social media right now, if you look at the photographs people post from the museum, a quarter to a third are from the suffrage exhibit.”
Lemak said that the museum exhibit has had success in attracting a younger audience, even though the exhibit was light on the use of multimedia or interactive features. The exhibit’s two digital components were a video about the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act—which prohibits creditors from discriminating against applicants on the basic of race or sex (see the video below)–and a big map of New York with videos and pictures of women’s protests projected on it.
“We declined to have more AV/digital components in the gallery because the artifacts are so great we did not want to distract attention away from them,” she said.
The museum was able to broaden the impact of the exhibition with a suffrage program, based on the museum exhibit, made available to more than 50 different institutions in New York, which then were able to print it out and put it on display.
In addition, many historical societies created their own exhibits to highlight different communities’ contributions to the suffrage movement, exhibits that in turn generated local press coverage. Attending the Suffolk County Historical Society’s suffrage exhibit was mandatory for students at a local high school, and several Girl Scout troops came, said Wendy Polhemus-Annibell, the head research librarian at the society.
The Ticonderoga Historical Society’s exhibit was similarly well-attended. “I know from informal feedback that our ‘Votes for Women’ exhibit was very popular,” said Diane O’Connor, the program assistant at the historical society. “And, since we set an attendance record during the 2017 season (nearly 3,000) visitors to the museum, it would follow that the exhibit was enjoyed by many.” Local media attention was also strong, she said. “We had several local angles to the history of suffrage (Sarah Thompson Pell and Inez Milholland), and I believe this made our local media very receptive.”
And the Rochester Area Suffrage Centennial Alliance’s exhibit, “Because of Women Like Her . . . Winning the Vote in New York State,” was featured at the Rochester Public Library. Michelle Finn, Rochester’s deputy historian, said that during the exhibition’s 2017 run, more than 27,000 people were counted at the library’s door.
Celebrity involvement in suffrage-related events also attracted media attention. For instance, Meryl Streep’s narration of a short film on suffrage, “We Rise,” which exclusively played at the New York Historical Society museum exhibit “Hotbed,” garnered coverage outside the local press. For instance, Hollywood Reporter and Refinery29 ran articles on Streep’s involvement.
Another popular event that the local press covered was the placement of historic markers to highlight particular suffragists. The William G. Pomeroy Foundation gave out over $20,000 dollars to communities in New York. That money funded the placement of 20 markers to honor suffragists such as Margaret Olivia Slocum Sage, a philanthropist and suffragist from Sag Harbor, Elizabeth Browne Chatfield, a suffragist who was the secretary for Susan B. Anthony and who lived in Owego, NY, and Mae Groot Manson in East Hampton, NY.
Standing in front of a suffrage marker for Mae Groot Manson in East Hampton, NY. Photo: Coline Jenkins.
“The dedication ceremonies were highly attended, and had some amazing speakers,” said Paula Miller, the executive director of the William G. Pomeroy Foundation. Those dedication ceremonies lead to substantial local press coverage of the marker program, she added.
Coline Jenkins, the great-great granddaughter of suffrage icon Elizabeth Cady Stanton, said local media coverage of suffrage markers, and other centennial events, was “a way of reminding women how hard it was to get the right to vote, how it shouldn’t be taken for granted, how it should be used. It is the right that you get all of your other rights from. It’s really important to get all these messages out.”
But much to the chagrin of volunteers who organized suffrage events, major newspapers such as the New York Times gave only minimal attention to centennial coverage.
The Times did not completely ignore it, however. The paper ran an article on an opera on the issue, and a piece on the New-York Historical Society’s exhibit on the role Greenwich Village played in suffrage activism. It also reviewed two relevant books in its metropolitan section. In all, only three articles on the New York centennial appeared in the newspaper, although its online-only New York Today did mention the centennial a few times, including suffrage-related events at local venues. Articles on the subject of the suffrage movement more generally did not give the state centennial celebration special focus.
The Wall Street Journal appeared to be even less interested. The newspaper did reprint a number of Associated Press stories on the topic but produced no original reporting on the subject.
In general, little attention was paid to the role of particular minority groups who played a big, if little unacknowledged, role in the suffrage movement.
There was some coverage of the role that black women played in the movement, many of whom worked hard for the vote despite divisions in the movement over black civil rights and outright racism.
That said, numerous media outlets covered Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s announcement of plans for a statue of Sojourner Truth, a black advocate for suffrage and the abolition of slavery. There was also some localpress coverage on the role black women played and the divisions in the movement over black civil rights. Some local outlets covered book talks given by Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello, whose book, Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State, includes chapters on the voting rights advocacy of black people, the working-class, rural New Yorkers, and immigrants. Still, the coverage of minority groups’ role paled in comparison to more general coverage of suffrage.
Rebman of Humanities NY said it was her sense that “a lot of groups, as they developed their events, were sensitive to telling an inclusive story, and also in dealing with the complicated sense of that story.” Still, she said, “There was sensitivity to that but there’s more work to be done.”
Publishing houses timed a few books to the New York centennial and they, in turn, received wider attention than they likely would have, given their placement with academic houses. Sam Robertson’s “New York Bookshelf” column in the New York Times featured both The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote, by Brooke Kroeger (who runs this website), and the aforementioned Goodier-Pastorello book, Women Will Vote. Kroeger wrote articles for Town & Country, the New York Daily News, and Tablet magazine on the men who lobbied for suffrage, and one in press for Zócalo Public Square/ASU/Smithsonian’s “What It Means to Be an American” series. The Gotham Center for New York History’s blog devoted the month of November 2017 to a series of articles on women’s suffrage, including essays growing out of the research by all the current suffrage authors and several others.
Other outlets that ran book reviews and articles on those books, as well as Johanna Neuman’s Gilded Suffragists: The New York Socialites who Fought for Women’s Right to Vote, included The Ithaca Journal, which also reviewed Women Will Vote, and the Poughkeepsie Journal.
Neuman also attracted national press attention. The Atlantic magazine published an in-depth interview with Neuman on her book, and Neuman authored a Wall Street Journal article reviewing the “five best” books on the fight for suffrage.
Authors for all three books gave speeches and appeared on panels at dozens of local events across the state and beyond.
Cornell University Press, which published Women Will Vote, was pleased the attention the book received. “As a university publishing house, many of our titles are generally reviewed solely in academic outlets (which post reviews 1-3 years after publication date),” Jonathan Hall said in an email. He handled publicity for the book.
The SUNY University Press publicists for Votes for Women, a catalog based on the New York State Museum’s exhibit of the same name, and for Kroeger’s book, were similarly upbeat. “I definitely think that the centennial played a big role in the amount of interest we saw,” said Katherine Dias, who had publicity responsibility for Kroeger’s book.
But Christian Purdy, the publicist for Gilded Suffragists: The New York Socialites who Fought for Women’s Right to Vote (NYU Press) said he felt that other events in the news overshadowed the coverage the book received. “While Gilded Suffragists received some great reviews in mainstream periodicals, I was hopeful there would be more media interest given the 100th anniversary of the suffrage movement’s securing the right to vote for women in NYS,” he e-mailed. “Unfortunately media seem more obsessed with Presidential tweets and other DC nonsense than this historic milestone.”
News report: “Suffrage Proclamation Signed Privately; Women Absent and Movie Men Eliminated”
This newspaper clipping from The Washington Herald explains how the Secretary of State, Bainbridge Colby, signed the suffrage proclamation privately on August 26, 1920 – controversially, without the presence of members of the National American Woman Suffrage Association or the National Women’s Party. Both organizations had been hoping to be part of the signing, with the National Women’s Party even inviting “movie men” to the presumed ceremony. Colby issued a statement explaining his actions:
“It was decided not to accompany this simple ministerial action on my part with any ceremony or setting. This secondary aspect of the subject has, regretfully, been the source of considerable contention, as to who shall participate in it and who shall not. Inasmuch as I am not interested in the aftermath in any of the frictions or collisions which may have been developed in the long struggle for the ratification of the amendment, I have contented myself with the performance in the simplest manner of the duty devolved upon me under the law.”
Activism Then and Now: the 1913 Suffrage Parade and the 2017 Women’s March
In this article for USA Today, journalist Mary Bowerman uses the Women’s March—the feminist protest held in Washington, DC and other cities the day after Donald Trump’s January 20, 2017 inauguration—to highlight another massive march in the nation’s capitol: the March 3, 1913 parade for suffrage.
Bowerman writes:
The massive Women’s March on Washington isn’t the first time scores of women have banded together to send a message to a new president.
A little over 100 years ago, one day before the inauguration of President-elect Woodrow Wilson, women also took to the streets as part of the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade. The women called on Wilson to implement a constitutional amendment that would guarantee women the right to vote, according to obamawhitehouse.gov.
The parade was held on March 3, 1913, and was organized by the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
Instead of pink caps worn by protestors in the Women’s March on Washington, women in 1913 wore wide-brimmed hats and carried flags.
