Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State by Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello

Abstract

Reviewed by: Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State by Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello Natalie A. Naylor (bio) Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State By Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello. Ithaca: Three Hills, 2017. 316 pages, 6" x 9". $29.95 cloth. This year, 2020, is the Centennial of the 19th Amendment when women achieved the right to vote in the United States. Three years earlier, women in New York State won suffrage in a referendum in 1917, which was pivotal for the national movement. Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello in Women Will Vote provide a comprehensive account of the suffrage struggle in New York in the seven decades that they dub "From Ridicule to Referendum" (1). Their useful Timeline begins in 1827 with the abolition of slavery in New York, and four events when women sought political rights in New York prior to the 1848 Seneca Falls convention (xv–xvii). The authors focus much of their attention on five disparate groups who have not received sufficient attention in most accounts: male suffragists, rural, working-class immigrant, African American, and radical women. Each of these groups is the subject of one of their chapters. Moreover, they want to emphasize upstate New York (defined as outside the metropolitan New York City area). In the nineteenth century, suffrage activities and organization were most extensive upstate. The New York State Woman Suffrage Association was organized in Saratoga in 1869 and held 47 yearly conventions to 1917 (Appendix 1 conveniently lists and maps the dates and locations). In the last decades of the century, suffrage activity was concentrated in the central and western counties of the state. Local leaders upstate regarded New York City as a "lost cause" (39). New York City, however, had a majority of the state's population after adding Brooklyn in 1898. Matilda Joslyn Gage, Martha Coffin Wright, Jean Brooks Greenleaf, and Lillie [End Page 150] Devereaux Blake were among the upstate presidents and leaders of the State Association. The Association worked on a variety of suffrage efforts, including petition drives, school suffrage, and legislative lobbying. By 1910, the state organization had 155 affiliated clubs in 26 counties with 555,00 members. The largest club was in Geneva with 400 members. More information might have been included on this organization, though by the early twentieth century, it was "dominated by an elite leadership primarily located in New York City" (50). National leaders from New York, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, Harriot Stanton Blatch, and Carrie Chapman Catt, are included throughout the book. Others who played important roles nationally and in New York include Gertrude Foster Brown, Harriet Burton Laidlaw, Inez Milholland, Vira Boar-man Whitehouse, and Harriet May Mills. Except for Mills, who was based in Syracuse, each of these women was based in New York City. Information on rural upstate women is a major contribution. Churches, granges, lyceums, lecture circuits, women's clubs, and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) all were involved in suffrage efforts in a "complex network" of "concurrent activism," which extended to the other groups discussed (3). Rochester, with 40 percent of its population immigrants in 1900, had many women working in the garment industry The analysis of suffrage in Rochester is insightful; both the city and county voted against suffrage in the 1915 referendum. Most of the African American suffrage leaders discussed were from New York City or Brooklyn, including Sarah Garnet, Verina Morton Jones, and Victoria Earle Mathews. Heather Jeffrey did form a Susan B. Anthony Club for Colored Women in Rochester; it, like most of the black organizations, had a broader focus than suffrage, also confronting racism. The attention paid to male suffragists is welcome, focusing on the Men's League for Woman Suffrage, founded in New York City in 1909. (Brooke Kroeger's Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote, also published in 2017, provides further detail on men in the movement.) The activities of anti-suffragists are included throughout (Goodier had published No Votes for Women: The New York State Anti-Suffrage Movement in 2013). Most of the radical women were based in New York City...