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.”
Documentary on Inez Milholland: “Forward Into Light”
This fifteen-minute documentary tells the story of Inez Milholland, an important player in the suffrage movement, as well as a death penalty abolitionist and advocate for the poor.
Along with Alice Paul, Milholland was part of the radical wing of the suffrage movement, using disruptive tactics that rankled some other suffrage leaders who thought radical tactics like protesting President Woodrow Wilson would alienate the elected officials suffragists’ needed to win voting rights. As the website for “Forward Into Light” explains:
Known for her elegance, beauty and public presence, [Milholland] led a big march down Fifth Avenue for New York Suffrage in 1912. On the heels of that great spectacle, Inez was drafted by Alice Paul to lead the NAWSA radical parade to disturb the inauguration of the newly elected Democrat, Woodrow Wilson. March 3, 1913. Inez led 8,000 women down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House.
Though Milholland fell ill in 1916, she decided to complete an already-planned speaking tour. She died after speaking at a suffrage event in Los Angeles. The “Forward Into Light” website explains that Milholland “[s]tanding at the podium…wobbled and fell to the floor, gasping her famous last public words, ‘Mr. President, How Long Must Women Wait for Liberty?’”
Panel Video: “When Modern Men Became Feminists” – NYU Center for the Humanities, November 7, 2017
A panel discussion on November 7, 2017 at the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, about the development of men’s engagement with women’s rights from the early 20th century on, with New York Times columnist Gail Collins and biographers Christoph Irmscher and Brooke Kroeger. Collins is the author of When Everything Changed: The Amazing Story of American Women from 1960 to the Present and America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines. Irmscher is Provost Professor of English and George F. Getz Jr Professor at Indiana University and the author of Max Eastman: A Life; and Kroeger is a Professor of Journalism at New York University and author of The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote. The event on November 7, 2017, was hosted by the NYU Center for the Humanities, 20 Cooper Square, NYC, is co-sponsored by Yale University Press, SUNY Press, the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and Humanities New York. For a close-up of the AV for Kroeger’s presentation, please see the additional Vimeo link below the panel video.
For 72 years, from 1848-1920, generations of women—from every state and every party, of every race and every religion—fought for the right to vote. The 19th Amendment was introduced in Congress 42 years before the House and Senate could muster the 2/3 majority to pass it. And that vote was just the beginning of another round of state battles—the final battle for ratification.
This 12-1/2 minute DVD, covering 72 years of suffrage history, describes the struggle the suffragists faced. Would women gain the right to vote before the 1920 presidential election? Which state would be the “perfect 36” to ratify and make the 19th Amendment law? The answer came when Tennessee, the last state that could possibly ratify, convened in special session on Aug. 9, 1920. This final battle to include women in the U.S. Constitution was especially fierce. Suffrage supporters wore the yellow rose while the “antis” countered with red roses. On August 18, the day of the final House vote, 24-year-old Harry Burn, the youngest member of the Tennessee General Assembly, acted on the advice of his mother, and cast the deciding vote granting all American women the right to vote.
You can buy the film and the book through the Perfect 36 website. A preview and the option to buy the film for streaming are available through the Films Media Group website. You can read an excerpt of The Perfect 36 here.
Video-Slideshow: Film’s Role in the British Suffrage Movement
British Film Institute Silent Film Curator Bryony Dixon created this slideshow, which combines text, still images, and video clips from the British suffrage movement, to celebrate the release of the 2015 film Suffragette.
The slideshow includes historical background on the push for women’s suffrage in the UK, but its particular focus is the way in which suffragettes used film—then a silent, nascent medium—to further their cause. As the BFI puts it, Dixon “explores how the BFI’s collections highlight the passion and media savvy of the suffragettes’ struggle, offering a fascinating portrait of British women during this time.”
Dixon examines more than just suffragettes’ use of film, however; she also looks at their portrayal in non-suffragist movies from the era, and the slideshow includes short clips of some of the most famous examples of suffrage in early film, making it a useful—if compact—primary-source guide.
The webpage also contains a short documentary video in which Dixon discusses similar topics.
Using archive film footage and photographs, the video traces the struggle for women’s voting rights, beginning with the anti-abolitionist movement in the 1840s and culminating in the ratification of the 19th Amendment.
Vanity Fair Short Film: The 1910s—Women’s Suffrage and Equal Rights
This Vanity Fairvideo by director Gilly Barnes is short—at just under four minutes, it’s closer in length to a film trailer than a typical documentary—but packs in a lot of information.
Part of the “1910s” portion of Vanity Fair‘s centennial “Decades Series,” the video combines suffrage-era primary sources like photos, quotes, and newspaper clippings with dramatic reenactments of a suffragist narrator explaining how she discovered the cause.
Though perhaps too condensed to be much use to viewers already steeped in the history of the American suffrage movement’s final decade, the video is a good introduction to the topic, and places it neatly within its historical context.
This description of the “Decades Series” comes from the project’s YouTube page:
Ten decades, 10 directors. In celebration of V.F.’s 100th anniversary, 10 eclectic filmmakers—from Judd Apatow to Don Cheadle to Brett Ratner—created a film on each era of V.F.’s century-old history and the Zeitgeist that defined it.
TV Series: Up the Women (2013-2015)
Up the Women is a BBC Two sitcom about British suffragists, created by and starring Jessica Hynes. It begins in 1910 and is centered on the women of the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle, who presently form a suffragist league.
About the sitcom (from BBC Two):
It’s 1910 and we’re in Banbury church hall at the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle. Margaret has been to London and discovered the Women’s Suffrage movement. She decides that Banbury need to set up their own movement and The Banbury Intricate Craft Circle becomes the hilariously ineffectual ‘Banbury Intricate Craft Circle politely request women’s Suffrage.’
Up the Women was the last British sitcom to be filmed in front of a live audience at BBC’s Television Centre building. It ran for two seasons.
The Guardian called it a “hugely enjoyable” comedy about “women who meet regularly to eat cake, do their samplers and discuss the fight for equality.” Read the full Guardian review here.
Up the Women is available to watch online through Hulu.com.
Watch a preview here:
Film: “A Lively Affair,” (1912)
A Lively Affair (2012) is an early silent comedy film poking fun at suffragettes (the production company and the director of the film are not identified, though experts suggest it is a Warner Bros. or Selig Co. film). The film is an attack on suffragettes and their husbands. The women all act like men (playing poker, fighting, ignoring their children, etc.) and their husbands are all emasculated men who take care of running the home. Instead of really addressing the aims of the suffragettes, the film makes fun of them—thus marginalizing their concerns.
This short film is recently restored and included in the compilation Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934 — a set of four DVDs about social issues and reform. The second disk (where you’ll find A Lively Affair) is about women’s issues in particular.
