Women's Suffrage Movement Research Articles

To Lead and to Vote: Black Women Suffragists in the Naacp in the South

6 | BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 82, NO 2 82 No.2 TO LEAD AND TO VOTE: BLACK WOMEN SUFFRAGISTS IN THE NAACP IN THE SOUTH By: Jessica Brannon-Wranosky and Cecilia Gutierrez Venable There is increasing interest in woman suffrage history as the August 2020 centennial approaches for the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. This federal amendment removed sex as a qualifier for voting when it passed in August 1920. However, it did not immediately give all women in the US voting access. This article offers an overview of some of the history relevant to current debates on the subject, which of late have focused on the global majority’s role in the woman suffrage movement. Further, it also offers examples of Black women’s suffrage activism in the NAACP. These histories offer sketches of how some white suffrage leaders segregated affiliation within the national woman suffrage organizations and the ways in which Black women suffragists worked to circumvent those barriers. Here are some of their stories. History of Early Woman Suffrage Discussions of early woman suffrage in the United States arose between the interplay of abolitionists. Early supporters included Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan Brownell Anthony. Before the Civil War, early suffrage work was often abstract and aimed at groups of reformers gathering to discuss various aspects of the subject and/or spreading information to new audiences. Following the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, deliberations among early women’s rights advocates and former abolitionists led to the formation of the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) in 1866, with its express purpose “to secure equal rights to all American citizens, especially the right of suffrage, irrespective of race, color or sex.”2 By 1869, however, a rift developed within this organization concerning women’s right to vote, and it split in two, forming the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) and the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). The AWSA, led by Lucy Stone, supported the Fifteenth Amendment, which Congress had recently passed and sent to the states for ratification. The amendment defined the right to vote as an individual male’s right and not limited by race. The NWSA, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, was furious that the Fifteenth Amendment provided black men the right to vote, but did not guarantee suffrage for women. Among the patterns that developed between the split in 1869 and what suffrage historians call “reunification” in 1890, when the AWSA and NWSA recombined, is that Anthony and Stanton aligned themselves with supporters, money, and campaigning that increasingly incorporated nativist and racist language and fear-baiting at different points. Through these tactics, Anthony and Stanton’s support of voting regulations developed a nativist ideology. Therefore, it was not surprising that a larger number of Black women and men aligned their support with AWSA. In 1890, NWSA and AWSA joined to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). After Lucy Stone died in 1893 and Stanton reduced her role in this new group, Anthony assumed its leadership. Now the dominant national woman suffrage organization, NAWSA attracted other dynamicwomen,includingCarrieChapmanCatt,AnnaHoward Shaw, Laura Clay, and many others. These national suffragists focused their efforts on recruiting and organizing white social elite women into NAWSA affiliates, which left Black women on the sidelines. By the turn of the century, African American advocates for women’s suffrage were increasingly pushed out of NAWSA’s corridors, or prevented from addressing Black women’s voting concerns directly as part of the association’s work or proceedings. African Americans found themselves on the periphery of participating in NAWSA by 1910, so they identified new spaces to spotlight the importance of Black women’s suffrage. The NAACP was founded in 1909 by leaders from several earlier organizations, including the National Afro American League (AAL), the National Afro-American Council (AAC), the Constitution League, the Committee of Twelve, the National Negro Suffrage League, the Niagara Movement, and the National Negro American Political League (NNAPL). These various groups built their successes on the strategies, networks, and failures...

Bernard Shaw's Marriages and Misalliances

Bernard Shaw's Marriages and Misalliances

Nurses Fight for the Right to Vote.

: The Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees women the right to vote. Its ratification in 1920 represented the culmination of a decades-long fight in which thousands of women and men marched, picketed, lobbied, and gave speeches in support of women's suffrage. This article provides a closer look at the lives of four nurse suffragists-Lavinia Lloyd Dock, Mary Bartlett Dixon, Sarah Tarleton Colvin, and Hattie Frances Kruger-who were arrested for their involvement in the women's suffrage movement.

The Representation of Female Power in Ethel Smyth's Der Wald (1902)

Born 1858 in England, Ethel Smyth studied in Leipzig, composed six operas, took an active part in the women's suffrage movement and wrote ten books. The lead character of her second opera, Der Wald (1902), is a strong and sexually free woman portrayed as maleficent, which casts a negative light on female power. This article first introduces the context in which the opera was composed, before proposing a closer reading of the libretto with a view to assessing the respective weight of convention and subversion in Smyth's representation of femininity.

The British women's suffrage movement and the ancient constitution, 1867-1909

Between the second Reform Act and the rise of Edwardian suffragette militancy, a critique of women's political exclusion based on a re-reading of British constitutional history was developed first by constitutional lawyers and later by a small but influential network of suffragist historian-activists. These scholars came to view women's enfranchisement not as an innovation but as the restitution of lost rights. This article examines these legal-historical arguments and the alternative narrative of constitutional history that emerged out of them, situating these developments within the lineage of ancient constitutionalist discourse going back to the 'common-law mind' of the early seventeenth century.

“KNEADING POLITICS”: COOKERY AND THE AMERICAN WOMAN SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT

During the American woman suffrage movement, opponents described suffragists as abnormal, unsexed, non-mothers who desired to leave the home and family en masse, levying “war against the very foundation of society.” This charge ultimately compelled suffragists around the nation to respond by embracing expediency arguments, insisting the women's votes would bring morality, cleanliness, and order to the public sphere. This article charts how suffragists capitalized on movements for home economics, municipal housekeeping, and pure food to argue for the compatibility of politics and womanhood. In particular, this article examines suffrage cookbooks, recipes, and bazaars as key campaign tactics. More than a colorful historiographical side note, this cookery rhetoric was a purposeful political tactic meant to combat perennial images of suffragists as “unwomanly women.” And suffragists ultimately employed the practice and language of cookery to build a feminine persona that softened the image of their political participation and made women's suffrage more palatable to politicians, male voters, potential activists, and the general public.

Individuality, Freedom, and Community: Ella Flagg Young's Quest for Teacher Empowerment

After teaching shifted from men's to women's work in the second half of the nineteenth century, women pushed into newly created realms of educational leadership. They earned appointments to principalships and, buoyed by the growing woman's suffrage movement, they began winning elected superintendencies and school board positions. However, fearing that women might overtake men in running the schools, a multifaceted backlash movement emerged to rein in women's advancements. A tightly organized national network of influential male educators sought to centralize power, standardize and mechanize practices, and otherwise push women out of leadership positions while simultaneously making teaching an increasingly servile profession. Ella Flagg Young, Chicago's superintendent of schools who had long advocated for expanding women's public service, staunchly resisted this disempowerment of teachers. Instead, through her leadership, she vividly illustrated how schools might work if freedom, individuality, and community were truly honored.

Suffrage Petitioning as Formative Practice: American Women Presage and Prepare for the Vote, 1840–1940

The American woman suffrage movement remade the U.S. Constitution and effected the broadest expansion of voting eligibility in the nation's history. Yet it did more than change laws and citizenship. It also plausibly shaped participatory patterns before and after the winning of voting rights for women. Drawing upon the idea of formative practice and reporting on a range of historical materials—including an original data set of 2,157 petitions sent to the U.S. Congress from 1874 to 1920 concerning women's voting rights—we focus on woman suffrage petitioning as both presaging the practice of voting and, in a sense, preparing tens of thousands of women for that activity. Our analyses reveal that, before 1920, suffrage petitioning activity was heightened in general and midterm election years (especially among Republican-leaning constituencies), suffrage petitioning both enabled and reflected organization in critical western states, and that post-suffrage women's turnout was immediately and significantly higher in states with greater pre-suffrage petitioning (controlling for a range of political, organizational, and demographic variables). In its claims, symbolism, habits, and temporality, suffrage petitioning differed from other petitioning in American political development and marked a formative practice for women on their way to voting.

The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City: Spectacle and Assassination at the 1901 World's Fair by Margaret Creighton

Reviewed by: The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City: Spectacle and Assassination at the 1901 World's Fair by Margaret Creighton David Simonelli The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City: Spectacle and Assassination at the 1901 World's Fair. By Margaret Creighton. (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2016. 332 pp. Cloth $28.95, ISBN 978-0-393-24750-3.) Margaret Creighton's lively story of the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo in 1901 is produced in the spirit of Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City, a popular read that presents the United States in miniature at a world's fair, this time at the turn of the twentieth century as opposed to the end of the nineteenth. Creighton's book is about the fair itself as opposed to a murderer, though, so the similarities in story line end there. Creighton is a professor of history at Bates College in Maine and previously published as a Civil War scholar. She works with a combination of city records and newspapers, memoirs, medical reports, trial transcripts, and secondary sources to tell the story of the fair, and of the city of Buffalo, then the eighth largest city in the country. One of many superlatives about this history is its ability to create an empathy with the city and its major politicians, their desire to translate their civic pride into a nationwide triumph, and their agony at the unexpected assassination of President McKinley, which defined the exposition in people's memories. Eight million people walked over the Triumphal Bridge and past the Electric Tower to take in the Pan-American Exposition, paying fifty cents each to take in the exhibits. Creighton follows a series of characters through the exposition, among them the cruel animal trainer and junior-league, Barnum-style impresario Frank Bostock, "the Animal King" Alice Cenda, or "Chiquita," billed as the world's smallest woman and a money-making puppet for Bostock; Mabel Barnes, a local schoolteacher who went to the exposition twenty-seven times; Fred Nieman, an unhinged migrant who would come to be known by his real name, Leon Czolgosz, after he assassinated the president; and Jim Parker, a black waiter who helped apprehend Czolgosz and then suffered cruel prejudice in a racist era as his efforts to save the president were denigrated and denied because of the color of his skin. Creighton also [End Page 70] shows how Buffalo's location near Niagara Falls had an impact on local attendance and interest as well. She follows a few people who chose to go over the falls in a barrel. The most prominent was Annie Edson Taylor, a woman who lusted after fame and managed to skirt authorities to make her attempt, becoming the first woman to successfully brave the falls, all at the age of sixty. There are few false steps in this story. An effort to include the story of the women's suffrage movement and employment of women at the turn of the century seems tacked on for politically correct purposes, as neither of them directly relate to the exposition or her characters. Creighton spends more fruitful time covering the efforts to convey the supremacy of whites over blacks in the exposition's displays, especially the "Old Plantation," basically an old minstrel show. She also notes how a local African American leader, Mary Talbert, ran an exhibit based on African American achievements at the fair. Her chronicle of the efforts to achieve racial equality in Buffalo come to fruition later in the book when Jim Parker's story is illuminated. In general, this is a surefooted trail guide through the history of a world's fair that was otherwise remembered for the tragedy of McKinley's assassination. David Simonelli Youngstown State University Copyright © 2018 The Kent State University Press

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

Reviewed by: Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State eds. by Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello Corinne T. Field Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State. By Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello. Ithaca: Three Hills, Cornell University Press, 2017, 296 pages, $29.95, Cloth. Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello's Women Will Vote is an important book for anyone interested in the history of New York, gender, or social movements more broadly. In this meticulously researched and engagingly written monograph, Goodier and Pastorello set out to explain how women in New York worked from the 1840s to the 1910s to convince male voters and legislators to support woman suffrage, finally succeeding with a popular referendum in 1917. By adopting a statewide frame, the authors are able to trace out the loosely organized networks that connected New York City to rural towns and villages, while bringing elite women into conversation with factory workers and farmers. Indeed, a major contribution of this book is to demonstrate that a mass movement can be built from fluid and shifting coalitions and that a common goal can unite those who agree on little else. Goodier and Pastorello make a convincing case for the centrality of New York to the woman suffrage movement, and, conversely, the importance of women to the state's political development. Many of the most important national leaders—including Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Carrie Chapman Catt—lived and worked in New York. Key ideas, strategies, and rivalries that shaped the national movement emerged there. Most importantly, it was in New York that woman suffragists learned how to appeal to skeptical male voters and win the first popular referendum for woman suffrage east of the Mississippi. That victory—with its forty-three seats in the House of Representatives and forty-five electoral votes—decisively turned the tide in Congress, enabling the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. [End Page 143] The state level approach enables a careful study of how women built a complex, fluid, and decentralized mass movement. Goodier and Pastorello skillfully combine a broad survey of the existing literature on woman suffrage and New York history with revealing case studies drawn from archival records such as organizational reports, leaders' correspondence, newspaper articles, photographs, and suffrage propaganda. Throughout, they include rarely seen photographs of New York suffrage leaders and their public protests, thus offering a rich visual record of activism in the state. The result is one of the most diverse accounts to date of the various people who joined the suffrage movement, why they did so, and what they gained. Goodier and Pastorello organize their chapters around the distinct groups of people who joined over time: radical reformers in the antebellum period, rural residents in towns and villages, black club women, and immigrant workers in the late nineteenth century, male supporters and radical "new women" in the early 1900s, and finally, by 1917, the majority of New York's male voters. Throughout, they also pay careful attention to those who resisted woman suffrage, including indifferent voters, organized anti-suffragists, factory owners intent on discouraging trade unions, and both Democratic and Republican political leaders. The drama of the book is provided by women's relentless, innovative, and ultimately victorious effort to convince these opponents to support woman suffrage. The authors begin by tracing the emergence of the organized woman suffrage movement in upstate New York from the 1840s and lay out their argument that the New York State Woman Suffrage Association, founded in 1869, was a loose but highly effective coalition that enabled cooperation throughout the state. The second chapter, focusing on rural women, is one of the most significant, both for New York history and suffrage history. Keeping in mind that the majority of people in the state and nation remained on farms or in small towns during this period, the authors show how New York women helped to build a vibrant political culture that both entertained and enlightened farm families. Through the lyceum network, centered in Chautauqua, local Granges, founded first in Fredonia in 1868, and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, also organized in Fredonia in 1873, rural men and women...

Gertrude Weil: Jewish Progressive in the New South by Leonard Rogoff

Reviewed by: Gertrude Weil: Jewish Progressive in the New South by Leonard Rogoff Anne Gessler Gertrude Weil: Jewish Progressive in the New South. By Leonard Rogoff. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. xiv, 354. $35.00, ISBN 978–1-4696–3079-3.) In the first biography of Goldsboro, North Carolina, suffragist and social justice activist Gertrude Weil, historian Leonard Rogoff's argument is twofold. First, he counters Eli Evans's portrayal of North Carolina Jews as provincial by arguing that although Weil was entangled in the state's complex racial and gendered hierarchies, she was "cosmopolitan with roots" (p. x). Second, Rogoff offers Weil's career as usable history for readers seeking to "live a meaningful life" (p. xi). Weil was steeped in classical Reform Judaism and the civic-minded German ethos of Bildung—"moral education and self-improvement"—and she believed that Jews were meant to model moral conduct for other nations (p. 2). While Gertrude Weil: Jewish Progressive in the New South builds on literature on North Carolina, women's studies, and Jewish history, Rogoff closely follows Anne Firor Scott's classic survey The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 (Chicago, 1970), which documents how the southern women's club movement helped affluent white southern women build networks crucial to organizing politically. Rogoff also complements Pamela Tyler's and Landon R. Y. Storrs's research on the southern woman suffrage movement and consumer activists' emerging maternalist political apparatus. Weil mirrors Storrs's twentieth-century Jewish consumers and advocates whose northern education and international affiliation made radical, interracial organizing possible. Weil's career, however, provides a long view of grassroots movements, and Rogoff extends organizational histories by charting how Weil mobilized social networks to mitigate segregation, poverty, and public health crises for seventy years. The first four chapters examine Weil's spiritual and educational development. Rogoff outlines the Weil family's German Jewish familial network that linked urban nodes like New York City and Baltimore to outposts such as Goldsboro and facilitated assimilation while maintaining traditions, language, and ties to Europe. Additionally, Weil's classical education in North Carolina and at Smith College sharpened the independent, civically engaged idealism that propelled her to join New Woman social work agencies that advocated "municipal housekeeping" to reform political systems (p. 73). Next, Rogoff explores the interplay of Weil's interwar activism, science, and Jewish identity. As a member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and the North Carolina Association of Jewish Women, Weil attended social work conferences and rooted "democracy and social justice in the canon of Israel" (p. 105). Yet racist and classist paternalism complicated Weil's egalitarianism. For instance, in 1919 she declared that black women's enfranchisement "is a problem" to be solved by strict voting requirements and not by "injustice and discriminations against the white women" (p. 119). In 1927 Weil called for economic equity while suggesting that allowing the poor and the "feeble-minded" to procreate exacerbated "social problems" (p. 200). Rogoff concedes that Weil's abstract idealism translated into "utopian thinking that overlooked social and racial consequences" (p. 202). Rogoff shines in chapter 9, where he traces the southern, northern, and European channels that Weil used to rescue a dozen relatives from Nazi-occupied Europe. She doggedly interceded with American and foreign governments and [End Page 193] spent thousands of dollars to secure family members' visas and make travel arrangements. Rogoff narrates Weil's heartbreaking failures with building tension, as wartime bureaucratic delays prevented one of her relatives from fleeing to Cuba before its borders closed. Rogoff thus illustrates the deeply personal stakes that colored Weil's postwar commitment to Zionism, building domestic religious institutions, and racial integration as an antifascist measure. Marshaling an impressive array of letters, ephemera, speeches, essays, newspaper articles, and government reports from the Gertrude Weil Papers and other archives, Rogoff painstakingly documents Weil's wide-ranging philanthropic, political, and religious efforts. However, without consistent historical signposting and confusing chronology, undergraduates and readers unfamiliar with the subject may become mired in Rogoff's thicket of details and dense prose. Nonetheless, Gertrude Weil invites further research into the history of southern Jewish women's organizations, specifically...

FEMINIST POLITICAL THOUGHT AND ACTIVISM IN REVOLUTIONARY IRELAND, c. 1880–1918

ABSTRACTFeminist thought and activism was a feature of Irish political life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Because the women's suffrage campaign coincided with and was at times influenced by wider debates on the national question, it has often been understood almost entirely in relation to Irish nationalism and unionism, and usually in the specific context of acute political crisis such as the third Home Rule. The Irish suffrage movement should instead be understood both in terms of wider political developments and in particular Irish contexts. This paper surveys aspects of feminist political culture with a particular emphasis on the way that nationalist Irish women articulated and negotiated their involvement in the women's suffrage movement. It argues that the relationship between the two was both more nuanced and dynamic than has been allowed, and that opposition to women's activism should be understood in structural and cultural terms as well as in broadly political ones. The relationship should also be understood in longer historical terms than is usual as it also evolved in the context of broader political and social shifts and campaigns, some of which predated the third Home Rule crisis.

‘A Glass Half Full’? Women's history in the UK

ABSTRACTThis article offers an overview of the development of women's history in the UK over the last twenty years or so. It is noted that over this period women's history has expanded massively, an expansion that has cut across national boundaries and drawn in scholars from other disciplines than History. Eight themes in women's history are identified as being prominent during this time—a focus on the modern period (post 1780), a strong empirical bent, a questioning of the dominance of a separate spheres discourse, a ‘spatial turn', an interest in life stories and biographies, an interest in the women's suffrage movement, a ‘religious turn’ and a ‘transnational turn’. Lastly, consideration is given to the influence of the digital revolution on the development and direction of women's history.

Jeannette Rankin, “Democracy and Government,” Carnegie Hall, New York, 2 March 1917

Jeannette Rankin, “Democracy and Government,” Carnegie Hall, New York, 2 March 1917

"Intruding in Sacred Territory": Forging Women's Suffrage on the Buffalo-Niagara Frontier

"Intruding in Sacred Territory":Forging Women's Suffrage on the Buffalo-Niagara Frontier1 Shannon M. Risk (bio) Rochester, New York, and New York City saw a great deal of suffrage agitation in the late 1800s and early 1900s, but pro- and anti-suffrage women and men were also active in Western New York. As Buffalo and Niagara Falls became host to larger enterprises, some elite women with wealth, time, and a desire for action emerged as strong proponents of the women's vote. Niagara Falls and Buffalo suffragists did not coalesce until the early 1900s, after attracting a National American Woman Suffrage Association convention in 1908. The region's suffragists chose the "maternalism" path in their campaign, using domesticity as one of their main themes. This softened the conservative response to their efforts, making suffrage plausible. Theirs was an uphill battle against staunchly conservative, patriarchal ethnic enclaves, and certain economic titans. Wealthy women might engage in charity, in keeping with the "woman's sphere," but press, clergy, and civic leaders discouraged their forays into the political realm. To wage a successful suffrage campaign, wealthy women had to build a fragile coalition of different groups. For Buffalo's African American community, formed from canal workers, descendants of ex-slaves, restaurant and domestic workers, teachers, ministers, and industrial laborers, maintaining the middle class was more precarious. Female leaders in the black community not only headed charity endeavors, but also sought to "uplift" their race and protect their right to be citizens, and they did this without the wealth of elite white women. However, local leaders like Mary Talbert were instrumental in forming the National Association for Colored Women in the late 1890s. Their network became a base for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in effect, a suffrage organization. For this community, [End Page 367] the women's vote was about self-respect and survival, but it also fed into a larger movement for black civil rights. While there was some collaboration between black and white suffragists in the area, their efforts remained mostly separate, reflecting state and national trends. Despite the delay in more formal suffrage agitation in the region for black and white suffragists, their efforts were crucial for the state campaign. To run a successful campaign, well-known organizers in other parts of New York State needed the labor and fundraising of these Western New Yorkers. Buffalo and Niagara Falls women gave needed money and respectability to the suffrage movement in a conservative region. Their donations were important during the last decade of the fight for the vote, but they also needed to coalesce different factions in the region. They helped to empower New York State as the linchpin for greater suffrage success on the east coast, and to put pressure on Congress to pass a national women's suffrage amendment. In the last two decades of the women's suffrage movement, women from Niagara and Erie counties organized, countered conservative voices in their society, and worked with state leaders to realize their main goal–the vote–bettering their communities generally.2 This work allowed these regional suffragists to overcome a devastating loss in the 1915 New York State suffrage referendum, and turn their districts towards a positive vote in the next referendum in 1917.3 Early Reform Work Shaped Woman Suffragists Towns along the western portion of the Erie Canal saw major economic gains by the late 1800s and early 1900s due to heavy industry along the canal and on the Great Lakes. This prosperity gave upper class and educated white women in the region time to devote to the betterment [End Page 368] of their communities. They could employ other women to care for their children and their households, thus freeing them for voluntary work. As these women fanned out beyond their own neighborhoods to provide socio-economic uplift, they experienced a transformation in their own lives. The women soon realized that they needed a voice in politics to create meaningful change. The male, "public" political sphere was not welcoming to women's participation, so women in Western New York readily adopted the maternal approach to...

"He May Sneer at the Course We Are Pursuing to Gain Justice": Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck, The Sibyl, and Corresponding about Women's Suffrage

"He May Sneer at the Course We Are Pursuing to Gain Justice":Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck, The Sibyl, and Corresponding about Women's Suffrage Laura J. Ping (bio) In the fall of 1863 Wallkill, New York resident Dr. Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck was arrested for failure to pay her road tax. Hasbrouck, a water-cure physician and dress reformer, had achieved prominence within reform circles as the editor of the biweekly reform newspaper the Sibyl. The Sibyl primarily promoted the dress reform movement, which placed comfortable clothing at the center of women's fight for equality, but many articles also reflected Hasbrouck's passionate support for the women's suffrage movement. One of Hasbrouck's most ardent arguments was that women should not be required to pay taxes if they were unable to vote. It violated citizenship. By 1863 Hasbrouck, in protest, had not paid her road tax for more than two years. Consequently, the local commissioner of highways notified her that in order to settle the debt she would have to work ten and a half days on a road crew, a common punishment for tax evaders.1 On September 9th of that year Hasbrouck arrived at the appointed patch of road. She had been instructed to bring her "best" shovel and so, she wrote in the Sibyl, she did; it was a fire shovel designed for scooping ashes from a fireplace. The road overseer replaced it with a standard shovel and instructed Hasbrouck to begin filling a wagon with debris. She did not comply. Instead Hasbrouck stood, leaning on her shovel, talking, and "calling the attention of other workmen from work."2 At one point she sat down and began tossing pebbles into the wagon. Finally she occupied herself by reading a newspaper. After the fifth day Hasbrouck did not return to work, resulting in her arrest.3 [End Page 317] Newspapers across the United States reported this incident, but these articles do not reveal for how long Hasbrouck was imprisoned or if her punishment included a fine.4 She wrote more explicitly of the incident in the Sibyl. "Remember we did not go there to do a man's day's work or to work out a man's tax," Hasbrouck wrote.5 Her deliberate insubordination proved a point; women would not accept taxation without representation. But Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck's protest against women's disenfranchisement went beyond simply agitating local officials. In the pages of the Sibyl Hasbrouck used her experiences fighting for suffrage to expose her readers to the hypocrisy of demanding women to fulfill the obligations of citizenship without allowing them equal rights. Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck was born in 1827 in Warwick, Orange County, New York, the fifth of eight children. Her father worked as a farmer and distiller of apple brandy. Although few details are known about Hasbrouck's childhood, local historians noted from interviews that her family often hosted gatherings in their home. During these events young Lydia was the center of attention. She was intelligent and independent; neighbors noted her fearlessness. In 1849, at age 22, this vivaciousness was likely what gave Hasbrouck the courage to abandon fashionable dress in favor of the short dress and trousers worn by dress reformers, also known as the "American Costume." During the 1850s and 1860s the American Costume was adopted by the faction of dress reformers who dedicated themselves primarily to improving women's health. Although Hasbrouck never explained how she learned about dress reform, based on the year of her adoption it is likely that she read about it in health reform publications. The design had first been promoted in 1849 by the hydropathic newspaper the Water Cure Journal as an alternative to fashion. Many reformers feared that corsets and the long, heavy skirts typically worn by middle-class women caused irreparable [End Page 318] damage to their bodies.6 A similar garment, the bloomer costume, would famously become associated with the women's rights movement in 1851 after Elizabeth Smith Miller, daughter of abolitionist Gerrit Smith, adopted it full time. Miller then introduced the design to her colleague Amelia Bloomer, for whom the costume was nicknamed. For Miller and Bloomer dress reform symbolized women...

Editors' Introduction

Editors' Introduction Susan Goodier, Thomas D. Beal, and D.L. Noorlander Publishing an issue of the New York History journal in celebration of the centennial of women's right to vote in New York State seemed both appropriate and necessary. This issue is the product of nearly three years of work. All of the articles included here, representing the latest scholarship of nine historians, help tell the complicated story of the more than seven decades of commitment on the part of three generations of women to win the right to vote in New York State. But this is not just a New York State story. Once women won New York, they threw their considerable talents and energies into the national movement. These essays will continue to be meaningful as we move forward to the centennial of the federal amendment granting women the right to vote in the United States. Within the general topic of woman suffrage, the topics explored in these essays vary widely. One group of articles included here focuses on the woman's suffrage movement in the nineteenth century. These include Laura Ping's article about the dynamic Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck, who refused to pay her taxes until she had the right to vote, Gaylynn Welch's article about the winning of the right to vote in school board elections in 1880, and Lauren Santangelo's article about elite suffragists in Gilded Age Manhattan. Four of the essays describe the early twentieth-century aspects of the story, inviting us to see the change over time as women moved closer to enfranchisement. Shannon Risk shifts our attention to suffrage activism in Buffalo and Niagara, while Randi Storch uses the outspoken commitment of Rabbi Stephen Wise to highlight the involvement of men in the movement. Rusty Tobin analyzes the differences between the two referenda held in 1915 and 1917, explaining why one succeeded and the other failed. We include quite a few images in this issue. Ken Florey illustrates a fascinating aspect of the dominance of woman suffrage in his photo essay on the popularity of suffrage postcards. Thomas Dublin details an ongoing [End Page 315] data collection project involving the writing of biographies of nearly three thousand suffrage activists by hundreds of students (including about forty women's history students at SUNY Oneonta). Finally, Susan Goodier sheds light on the challenges of researching black women suffrage activists for our newest feature, the Historian's Corner. In the issues' book reviews we include topics that range from suffrage rights and social movement activism to vacationing and traveling in the state, from warfare to cotton and wine. Our review essay critiques two books on Jewish activism, creativity, and theater. Writing and editing this issue has taken the efforts of a number of people. In addition to the anonymous peer reviewers, drawn from colleges and universities all over the country, and the steady work of the New York History journal's three editors, several SUNY Oneonta students assisted the process at various stages. Thomas Beal's students (Waldo A. Espinosa, Tierney E. Lynch, Meagan R. Moore, Sean Prahalis, Brittany E. Williams, Jennifer A. Yung), and Danny Noorlander's students (Chadwick Dunham, Evan Sanders, Mary Sawyer, Elia Tanzer, Dominque Wright) provided help and feedback during the editing process. Susan Goodier's students (Ronald Bartlett, Kara Dunderdale, Shivani Patel, Matthew Racanello, and Joshua Rosen) also assisted with the most recent book reviews. We are grateful for their thoughtful contributions. [End Page 316] Copyright © 2017 Fenimore Art Museum

Suffrage at the School House Door: The 1880 New York State School Suffrage Campaign

Suffrage at the School House Door:The 1880 New York State School Suffrage Campaign Gaylynn Welch (bio) One hundred years ago, in 1917, New York suffragists successfully convinced voters to enfranchise women through an amendment to the state constitution. The history of this suffrage victory consists of both well-known and relatively obscure events. In the hegemonic historical narrative, the 1848 Seneca Falls convention has become the standard marker for the beginning of the movement for women's rights and women's enfranchisement in New York State and in the United States. Susan B. Anthony was not present at this first women's rights convention, but her 1872 arrest for illegal voting in Rochester plays another significant part in the popular telling of New York suffrage history. These events' popularity stems, in part, from New York suffrage leaders' successful presentation of their own history. The Seneca Falls convention and the arrest are two important components of the suffrage movement narrative that Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage tell in their three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage. Historians challenge the History of Woman Suffrage timeline that prioritizes the Seneca Falls convention, and suffragists' conflation of the woman suffrage movement as the women's rights movement. In Untidy Origins, for example, Lori Ginzberg uses the 1846 suffrage petition from six Jefferson County women to show that public conversations about women's enfranchisement took place in northern New York two years before the Seneca Falls convention.1 Lisa Tetrault and Nancy Hewitt both emphasize the diverse origins, goals, and strategies of nineteenth-century women's rights activists. Tetrault, in the Myth of Seneca Falls, argues that the emphasis on the 1848 convention as the beginning of, and the franchise as the linchpin for, the women's rights movement stemmed in part from Anthony's attempt [End Page 329] to direct and control the "chaotic" suffrage movement that after the Civil War produced "massive outpourings of diverse support."2 In "From Seneca Falls to Suffrage?" Nancy Hewitt covers an impressive range of activists who defined rights in a variety of ways and challenged the "master" narrative of the women's rights movement. She argues that the convention and winning of the national suffrage amendment were an important, but only a very small part, of a much larger multifaceted history.3 School suffrage laws and campaigns also constitute part of a multifaceted history that lacks a significant place within the History of Woman Suffrage and in the writing of scholars since. Constitutions in five and legislatures in twenty states granted school suffrage to women by 1890. Many other state legislatures considered extending school suffrage to women.4 Thus, during the nineteenth century, more women could vote for school officers and school-related matters than for any other issue. The relationship between school suffrage laws and state and national suffrage leaders helps explain the obscure place of the educational franchise in the hegemonic narrative of the suffrage movement. In New York, suffragists' responses to school suffrage in 1880 shows that the law significantly influenced state and local suffrage activism, but did not change National Woman Suffrage Association strategies. The push for the educational franchise absolutely did not come from the top down. Most national suffrage leaders, and many state leaders, did not advocate school suffrage campaigns. Neither the New York-based National Woman Suffrage Association, nor the New England-based American Woman Suffrage Association, advocated for school suffrage. The New York State Woman Suffrage Association also had not made school suffrage a primary goal. Leaders of the National Woman Suffrage Association, especially Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, focused on winning [End Page 330] full enfranchisement for women at the national level. In the 1870s, the National sought this enfranchisement through the courts and through a sixteenth amendment campaign. Leaders of the rival American Woman Suffrage Association, including Lucy Stone and her husband Henry Blackwell, sought partial suffrage in a state-by-state strategy. In their home state of Massachusetts, Stone and Blackwell, and other state association leaders, sought to avoid a state amendment campaign by promoting municipal suffrage, but they did not seek school suffrage.5 There were...

Crowdsourcing as a Tool for Studying the Woman Suffrage Movement

Crowdsourcing as a Tool for Studying the Woman Suffrage Movement

“A somber passion strengthens her voice”: The Stage as Public Platform in British Women’s Suffrage Drama

Writing in The Freewoman in 1912, Rebecca West--herself a supporter of women's suffrage--denounced with characteristic acerbity increasing popularity of degradations of drama written by propagandists, complaining that the public taste has already been so perverted that Suffrage speeches... stand chance of wide popularity. (1) Despite her dismissive tone, West's description of suffrage plays as dislocated Suffrage speeches is worth taking seriously, and it is this generic overlap between political oratory and theatre that is subject of this paper. Many plays written in support of British women's suffrage movement capitalize on similarities between stage and public speaking platform to encourage women to raise their voices in a public forum. While suffrage movement inspired a variety of theatrical activities in Britain, ranging from processions and public demonstrations to dramatic works performed in mainstream West End theatres, plays that concern me here are dramatic works written in overt support of women's suffrage and performed by activist theatre groups such as Actresses' Franchise League and Pioneer Players. Many of these dramatic works break down distinction between play and suffrage speech, creating a distinctive form of political drama. In staging women's struggle to find a public voice, these plays demonstrate importance of audience in successful public expression of a feminist point of view, in keeping with recent feminist theories of voice that have stressed role of listener in feminist writing. The propagandist plays I examine here invoke two very different audiences, both of which play a role in encouraging feminist protagonists to speak publicly: on one hand, an oppositional audience, often hostile or condescending, provokes feminist speaker to engage in debate; on other, a more sympathetic audience encourages speaker to keep going and to see her quest as worthwhile. While supportive audiences tend to be presented in an idealized or fantastic manner, their convergence with actual audience at these suffrage-era productions encourages political action by breaking down distinction between stage and public challenging actual audience members to join suffrage cause and to act on what they hear. The generic convergence of suffrage oratory and drama is enabled by suffrage playwrights' and performers' unapologetic use of theatre for propagandist purposes. Feminist critics interested in British suffrage drama have long recognized and defended propagandistic aspects of these plays, though in so doing they have tended to focus more on plays' female roles and political content than on genre and staging. Suffrage plays, though well received by suffrage supporters, were often dismissed by theatre reviewers as propaganda rather than art, as Katharine Cockin has noted. (2) Suffrage playwrights and performers, however, defended their use of theatre for propaganda purposes. Edith Craig, founder and director of feminist theatre group Pioneer Players, for example, openly admitted in an interview that our plays take place of tracts, (3) while Cicely Hamilton announced proudly in The Vote that suffragists had started a new system of propaganda by means of plays, that was so successful that everybody was trying to steal plays or imitate them in some way (4) Expanding on Ellen Ecker Dolgin's observation that in suffrage drama there exists a dialogic and yet dichotomous relationship between stage and public platform, I argue that suffrage playwrights deliberately exploited connection between drama and political tract or speech to create a new, hybrid genre to authorize their political message. (5) Several critics have noted this connection, but its generic implications have not been fully explored. Carolyn Tilghman and Claire Hirshfield have both recognized these plays as new forms of protest drama that use stage as a public but they also emphasize authors' appropriation of conventional genres and formulae such as melodrama or fallen woman play. …