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Suffrage and the City
Suffrage and the City
New York Women Battle for
the Ballot
Lauren C. Santangelo
1
1
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Ben and Hudson, these “letters” are for you.
Contents
Acknowledgments, ix
Introduction, 1
1. “The Wickedness of the Masses”: The Perils of Suffrage, 1870–1894, 8
2. Becoming “A Lover of the Metropolis,” 1895–1906, 33
3. Ushering in a “New Era,” 1907–1909, 50
4. Geographies of Suffrage, 1910–1913, 76
5. “Suffrage ‘Owns’ City,” 1913–1915, 99
6. From Confrontation to Collaboration, 1916 and 1917, 124
Epilogue, 149
Appendix: Key Suffrage Organizations in Manhattan, 155
Notes, 157
Selected Bibliography, 225
Index, 245
Acknowledgments
One daydreaming strategy I developed while struggling with a difficult text

or after having a challenging day at the archives was to envision writing these
acknowledgments. Thinking about all those who had shaped the project pro-
vided a helpful respite and critical momentum. Now that the time has arrived,
though, actually expressing my gratitude seems like an overwhelming task as
my debt—both personal and professional—is immense.
Robyn Rosen and Lynn Eckert at Marist College inspired an unsure under-
graduate to question the status quo. In graduate school at the City University
of New York’s Graduate Center, I benefited from Kathleen D. McCarthy’s gen-
erosity, dedication, and rigor. Every graduate student should be so lucky to have
someone like Kathy as a dissertation adviser, and as a friend. This work was
possible only because of her unceasing support.
Carol Berkin, Gerald Markowitz, Sarah Deutsch, Kitty Sklar, Dagmar
Herzog, Maureen Flanagan, Elisabeth Israels Perry, Susan Goodier, and
Thomas Kessner provided feedback at critical junctures in the writing and
thinking process. A fellowship with the Center for Place, Culture and Politics
proved serendipitous as it took place just as I was thinking more about the
relationship between metropolis and movement. At Lehman College, Cindy
Lobel pushed me to become a better historian—and a better teacher of history.
She was a role model whose support, kindness, and humor I miss dearly. And,
I would be remiss to not recognize the works of suffrage that have provided
anchors when I felt unmoored in the archive: Ellen Carol DuBois’s Harriot
Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage, Susan Goodier’s No Votes for
Women, and David Kevin McDonald’s “Organizing Womanhood.”
x Acknowledgments
As a graduate student, I was fortunate to receive funding from the City

University of New York’s Graduate Center with an E. P. Thompson fellow-
ship, a Center for Place, Culture and Politics fellowship, and a Sponsored
Chancellor’s fellowship as well as funding from the National Society of Colonial
Dames in the State of New York. A Bernard and Irene Schwartz Postdoctoral
Fellowship from the New-York Historical Society and the New School’s Eugene
Lang College allowed me to continue researching and working in New York
after completing my dissertation. Princeton University and its University
Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences has supported
the project as it neared completion.
I could not envision a more collegial space in which to finish this man-
uscript than Princeton’s Writing Program. Amanda Irwin Wilkins has built
a truly special place, filled with brilliant and caring people who thrive on
each other’s and our students’ successes. Thank you especially to Shannon
Winston and Gen Creedon for quite literally making Princeton my “home away
from home.”
I am grateful to Nancy Toff and Oxford University Press for helping this
first-time book author navigate publication. Every time the process seemed like
a dark labyrinth, Nancy and Elizabeth Vaziri stood ready to shine a bright light.
The anonymous readers for the manuscript provided comments that man-
aged to be detailed, rigorous, and supportive. The final product is better for
them. Portions of c hapter 1 were initially published in “‘The Merry War Goes
On’: Elite Suffrage in Gilded Age New York,” New York History (Summer/Fall
2017); the journal generously granted permission to republish them.
On a more personal note, my parents have encouraged my curiosity; this
book is a testament to my family’s patience and boundless love. The Hados
reminded me that there is a world outside the archives. Logan McBride,
Thomas Hafer, and Paula Austin have served as thoughtful readers of these
pages and (less thoughtful readers) of many a text message. My friendship with
Paula has sustained this project. And, those in Beacon have ensured that my
house is one filled with laughter, acceptance, and celebration.
That house would not be a home, though, if it were not for my partner,
Laura, and children, Ben and Hudson. Laura has shaped more than this book
project; she has created a life for us that a decade ago I could barely have
imagined. Ben and Hudson have enhanced this life immeasurably—and it is
to them that this book is dedicated. I hope one day they can find confidence,
conviction, and courage in these “letters.”
Introduction
“Suffrage Fight Won in Cities,” one headline bellowed. “Greater New York
Carried State to Suffrage Victory,” another announced. “Suffragists Lost Up-
State by 3,856,” cried a third.1 The newspaper headlines captured an unex-
pected twist in suffrage history. Empire State men had agreed in November
1917 to amend the state constitution to enfranchise women. This part many
anticipated. But, that Gotham carried the vote, more than compensating for the
deficit outside the metropolis, astonished pundits, residents, and movement
leaders alike.2
In retrospect, their surprise itself puzzles. After all, New York City claimed
an organized movement as old as the state’s. The New York City Woman
Suffrage League began in 1870, and from then until victory, Gotham boasted at
least one dedicated association. Moreover, funding from city residents helped
keep the campaign afloat during its darkest years. Manhattan provided a home
to both the national and state associations. And, the city served as the back-
drop for the campaign’s most spectacular displays: brilliant parades brought
Midtown Manhattan to a standstill as thousands of men and women marched
in a near-annual ritual supporting the ballot in the 1910s. New York City was
not some remote outpost, without organization or management; it served as
the movement’s epicenter. Still, the state split in 1917 baffled reporters enough
that they spent precious headline space on it.
Why did people react with such wonderment to these results? Why had
pundits not forecasted them? Why did those closest to the campaign, its own
leaders, seem bemused? And how did Gotham end up in this position in the
first place, carrying the state to victory in 1917? These questions drive Suffrage
and the City as it traces the sometimes empowering, frequently frustrating, but
2 Suffrage and the City
always complicated dynamic between gender, urbanization, and the women’s

rights movement.
Although leaders ultimately benefited from New York’s restaurants and
hotels, its busy streets and feminized retail districts, and its national publishing
houses and burgeoning film industry, many initially fell somewhere between
ambivalence and apprehension in their appraisals of the metropolis. In the
heterogeneous, anonymous city, middle-class activists encountered a mosaic
of public spaces dominated by men and ostensibly perilous to “respectable”
women. Lobbyists had to curate a specific political choreography attuned to
urban etiquette, violence, subcultures, and spaces in order to build a diverse
constituency and ultimately triumph at the polls. They had to claim a “right
to the city,” a tedious step unnecessary in more rural regions where advocates
first achieved the ballot.3 New York City was more than a setting for suffrage
action; it was an essential part of the drama in women’s decades-long quest for
the state franchise and a national amendment.
In the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century national imag-
ination, Gotham claimed a rarefied place. “No great city on earth is in so con-
stant and rapid a state of flux as New York,” a 1916 travel handbook expounded.
“A guide book to Rome may stand without revision for a dozen years or a score
of years . . . [but a] New York guide book half as old would be most annoy-
ingly out of date.”4 This frenetic energy was partly a result of the city’s divided
elite. Unlike in Boston, where a coherent, monied world set the pace for urban
development, New York’s upper crust struggled to unify and wield such au-
thority, permitting commerce and consumption to unceasingly reconstruct the
streetscape as often as profitable.5 No building, avenue, or district seemed sac-
rosanct in the country’s largest metropolis. The National American Woman
Suffrage Association’s president, Anna Howard Shaw, cheered this vitality,
swearing that had she not owned a home in Philadelphia, she “would get one
near N. York and settle down there within reach of human alive people instead
of fossils.”6
New York City’s relentless population growth added to the dynamism.
Fewer than 1.5 million people resided in Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, Staten
Island, and Brooklyn combined in 1870, when the movement began to crystal-
lize there. Some 5.6 million people lived in New York City when the Nineteenth
Amendment was ratified in 1920—a 273 percent increase. Half that number
dwelled in Chicago, Gotham’s closest rival. Two million people, including
193,000 Russian, 184,000 Italian, and 116,000 Irish immigrants, crammed
onto Manhattan alone in 1920. Some had resided there for decades, others
for months; some arrived through Ellis Island, others traveled through Grand
Central Terminal.7 Six hundred miles of streets, 1,300 banks and banking
Introduction 3
houses, 280 colleges and academies, 125 places of amusement, 600 hotels,
3,000 restaurants, 5,600 saloons, and 225 hospitals filled the landscape.8
Bustling streets, ethnic enclaves, and a unique cacophony could instantly over-
whelm a person trying to absorb urban rhythms in their entirety.
Still, women, like men, flocked to the metropolis for jobs, for leisure,
for family, and for the future. At a moment when the number of women
enrolling in higher education programs was rapidly increasing, the city
contained dozens of training schools and colleges opened exclusively to them,
most notably Barnard, as well as coeducational institutions.9 Manhattan’s
and Brooklyn’s roughly thirty nursing schools attracted even more women.10
Some crisscrossed the metropolis providing aid to struggling residents and
campaigning to clean up the urban environment; almost one hundred thou-
sand toiled in roughly three thousand garment factories.11 Money—even in
limited supply—empowered these women to access the locale’s famed amuse-
ment parks, legendary department stores, and numerous nickelodeons.12
Gotham’s financial might and cultural sway attracted voluntary and reform
associations, including the Young Woman’s Christian Association, the College
Settlements Association, and the National Consumers’ League.13 Within the city
then, women carved out feminized spaces and a public presence as consumers,
professionals, socialites, and laborers. Suffrage would add political activist to
this list of identities for many.
Not all Americans celebrated New York women’s growing urban visibility.
Some fretted about the “women adrift” who moved away from their families
to come to turn-of-the-century Gotham without friends or money.14 They wor-
ried about these women’s safety, concerned that the newcomers would suc-
cumb to the maelstrom of temptations whirling around them. Others proved
openly hostile to the shifts in metropolitan gender norms, stewing that so-
ciety had grown too genteel, brooding that office work impinged upon men’s
masculinity, and condemning middle-class women for emasculating society
through their ambition and their ubiquity on city streets—a startling departure
from accepted custom.15 Lamenting the “Gynarchy[’s]” power, author Michael
Monahan dubbed New York “the most feminized of the great cities of the world
and therefore the flightiest, the most irrational and the least given to serious
things.”16
Monahan was not entirely wrong. Other cities certainly attracted women
searching for opportunities and housed feminized spaces. Much smaller,
Davenport, Iowa, drew women looking for employment in department stores,
textile factories, and button manufacturing.17 But New York City did so on an
unprecedented scale. The metropolis contained twice the number of employed
women as its closest competitor, Chicago.18 That Manhattan served as the
national hub for entertainment and information provided people near and far
a unique window into New York City’s culture, politics, and economy.19
The suffrage movement blossomed amid these changes, intersecting with
and accelerating them. It played a critical role in destabilizing an urban gen-
dered geography that had long reinscribed bourgeois women’s dependent
status on men. From dining at restaurants to traveling on streets, metropolitan
etiquette demanded that women have chaperones. Doing otherwise indicated
a woman’s sexual availability in nineteenth-century New York. Not all residents
could achieve this ideal, of course, as race and class structured individuals’
realities.20 But the expectation’s very existence deputized residents to patrol a
woman’s behavior and provided subtle reminders of her circumscribed power,
as did her disfranchised state. Suffragists would learn that fighting for one
meant combating the other. This book tracks how the Gotham movement came
to accept that lesson.
It joins and connects two different subfields of gender history: those
looking at gendered urbanity and those studying the women’s rights move-
ment. The former has peeled back rich layers of women’s experiences in
cities: recovering the rhythm of the everyday; the nexuses of class, ethnicity,
race, and gender; metropolitan spaces of empowerment; and even the gen-
dered rituals around urban foodways.21 Suffrage and the City is especially in-
debted to Sarah Deutsch’s Women and the City, which did much to inspire the
most recent scholarship by showing the ways in which race and class shaped
Boston’s gendered geography.22
Historians of suffrage have had different priorities, tracing leadership
strategies; excavating nativism, classism, and racism in campaign decisions;
examining consumerist tactics; and illuminating the performance inherent in
suffrage spectacles, among them.23 Most recently, scholars have focused their
attention on the movement in the Empire State, analyzing everything from the
anti-suffrage drive to the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage.24 Rarely, though,
have suffrage scholars been in dialogue with those studying the gendered
metropolis—despite the fact that the census officially found more Americans
living in cities than outside of them in the same year that the Nineteenth
Amendment removed masculinity as a qualification for voting. Suffrage and
the City changes that, methodologically borrowing from one of the few works
that bridge the divide, Jessica Ellen Sewell’s scholarship on suffrage and San
Francisco, to uncover how movement leaders read the nation’s most crowded
metropolis and approached its forever-changing built environment, all in an
effort to corral its diverse and divided masses.25 As Allison L. Sneider has
demonstrated in her work on imperialism and suffrage, it is imperative that we
situate the women’s rights movement within its larger historical context—in
Introduction 5
my case urbanization and urbanity, in Sneider’s empire-building—to uncover

such subtle, but formative, intersections.26
Understanding the city as a dynamic environment in an investigation
of the suffrage campaign destabilizes historical ground. With all its physical
changes, population growth, and commercial development, the metropolis
becomes its own entity that merits constant attention. But this method yields
immense benefits: illuminating the specific political choreography necessary
for organizers to win the vote in urban landscapes, highlighting the gendered
nature of space and etiquette, and providing a more textured reading of the
suffrage movement attuned not only to changes over time but also to the im-
portance of place. The method also suggests a new answer to a long-standing
question in the literature: Why did women in the West (Wyoming in 1869,
Utah in 1870 and then again in 1896, Colorado in 1893, and Idaho in 1896) re-
ceive the ballot first? Answers have ranged from frontier conditions requiring
greater collaboration between the sexes to the existence of fewer legislative hur-
dles in western territories (compared with established states).27 But we need
to add the absence of metropolises like New York, Boston, Chicago, or San
Francisco to the list; suffragists’ assumptions about cities informed campaign
priorities and strategies.
Admittedly, in investigating suffragists’ “right to the city,” this book
focuses on Manhattan at the expense of the other boroughs. That emphasis
largely reflects movement priorities and leadership decisions, which centered
the campaign in Midtown. It also pays particular attention to the constellation
of professional women living in Gotham. Professionalization intersected with
urbanization and the women’s right movement to refashion women’s quo-
tidian experience at the turn of the century. Nurses, actresses, and teachers
serve as windows into these changes in the work that follows: nursing because
it was a newly emerging profession that put women into intimate contact with
strangers; teaching because of the long-standing feminized nature of a career in
which women were expected to shape a new generation of voters; and actresses
because of their celebrity and unique ability to tell stories. In addition, the book
tracks socialites’ participation—the women whose wealth made it most com-
fortable to abide by and dictate urban etiquette, even if they chose to ignore it.
These recruits joined a campaign managed by white, college-educated,
middle- class women. Working- class women, native- born and immigrant,
black and white, certainly also participated; a few emerged as influential fig-
ures, and some organizations even created ethnic-, class-, and race-based af-
filiated societies. But the face of the campaign remained markedly white and
middle class, far from representative of the diverse metropolis. Class-based and
racialized notions of urban respectability both constrained and empowered
these leaders. On one hand, they had to combat their own long-ingrained
instincts about demonstrating in public. On the other, they manipulated ex-
pectations of chivalry to stir outrage when the state failed to protect them from
the “masses.” In all, gender restricted suffragists’ mobility in the urban en-
vironment at the same time that leaders’ race and class bestowed on them a
privilege most working-class, African American, or immigrant women would
never know.
Organizers left the records detailing their struggle scattered across the
country, from archives in St. Louis, Missouri, to an old Astor estate in Red
Hook, New York. Their suffrage flyers capture their most public of positions,
and the personal diaries that remain preserve their most intimate of reflections.
New York’s daily newspapers regularly provided details about the movement
as well. Some ultimately supported it, while others, like the New York Times,
remained opposed, ensuring contemporary readers and historians studying
them access to a variety of editorial opinions. Combining the wide range of
sources the campaign left behind and journalists’ diverse coverage of the move-
ment with government records, tourist guides to the city, and fire insurance
atlases allows us to unearth the exchange between movement leadership and
metropolis. While largely a top-down account, we can occasionally hear the
voice of rank-and-file supporters in the pages that follow if we listen carefully
as well.
Our story starts in 1870 with the founding of the New York City Woman
Suffrage League. League members regularly expressed concerns that cities en-
dangered “respectable” women in the 1870s and 1880s, and these concerns
informed early tactics and routines. The 1894 New York State Constitutional
Convention disrupted these routines, as Manhattan socialites unexpectedly
rushed into the enfranchisement crusade. Though unsuccessful in amending
the state constitution, the convention demonstrated that under the right
circumstances New York could provide the campaign with unprecedented re-
sources. It helped to create the context for an urban identity to haltingly emerge
in the late nineteenth century. Although it was empowering for city leaders,
those outside the metropolis found the new identity disconcerting, even
alarming.
New York City’s campaign stood independent of both the national and
the state movement by the early twentieth century thanks, in part, to this
defensive reaction. But it also lacked leadership. The retirement or death of
the nineteenth-century managers who had shepherded the drive through its
earliest years set the stage for a new group to take over and fundamentally alter
the power dynamic between city, state, and national movements with innova-
tive (and provocative) tactics. Manhattan became the suffrage capital. These
Introduction 7
second-generation leaders used spaces more strategically, although not always

successfully, in the early 1910s. At the same time, organizers allied with public
health nurses to navigate immigrant enclaves and capitalized on New York’s
dramatic profession and film industry to reach a broader swath of the pop-
ulation, crystallizing the image of suffrage as a distinctly urban affair in the
process.
Lobbying reached a frenetic pace once the state amendment passed
its first legislative hurdle in 1913 and a referendum seemed likely in 1915.
Advocates reinforced the bridges they had already built with actresses,
socialites, teachers, and nurses; they engaged in outreach to African
American and immigrant men; and they canvassed the metropolis without
respite. Such politicking emboldened suffragists to claim a “right to the city,”
even reimagining what polling sites would look like should they achieve the
ballot. Their empowered attitude, however, did not convince New York City’s
men to support enfranchisement in 1915. During the second referendum
campaign in 1917, collaboration with public officials replaced such confron-
tation. For years activists had aggressively claimed a “right to the city.” Now,
they used that right to help the metropolis during a devastating polio out-
break and World War I. When Empire State women finally won the ballot in
1917, with Gotham carrying the state amendment, journalists struggled to
wrap their heads around the sea change.
New York—its diversity, size, spaces, etiquette, and rhythms—cadenced
the movement as suffragists learned to harness its resources. As the nation’s
information and communication capital, the city had the infrastructure to
advertise ideas and images from the campaign across the country and influ-
ence other state drives. Concerns about work in the city might have initially
hampered suffrage leaders, but they learned to marshal its female social geog-
raphy, the iconic places it housed, and the feminized spaces it nurtured, using
all to their advantage.
Their victory in Gotham sent shock waves across the nation. As much as it
was a political victory, it was also a cultural victory. Politically, men no longer had
exclusive control over forty-five votes within the Electoral College. Logistically,
the achievement proved that states with large urban centers might support
the ballot. Culturally, the struggle for the franchise in the nation’s largest me-
tropolis helped to redesign that metropolis and women’s, especially white,
middle-class women’s, place within it. The suffrage campaign, individuals, and
organizations traced within these pages represent just one segment of a far
larger, longer, and more diverse drive for voting rights in American history. But
their strategies, decisions, and success left an indelible imprint on the city, the
government, and women’s day-to-day lives.
1
“The Wickedness of the Masses”
The Perils of Suffrage, 1870–1894
In fall 1871, a seemingly dull article entitled “City and Country Houses”
appeared in the Revolution, a suffrage newspaper founded by Susan B. Anthony
and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. A reader expecting to settle into a study comparing
home design in urban and rural settings was in for a surprise. The article
contained a blistering review of metropolitan life—one that clearly favored the
rural over the urban. The anonymous author drew stark distinctions to hammer
the point. Where the flowers and grass, piazzas and “climbing vines” served to
make the country “humanizing, hospitable, and good,” the scribe detailed, the
“corpselike” parlor windows, iron-spiked fences, window gratings, and double
locks created a hostile atmosphere in cities. The problem did not end there
as the architecture reflected residents’ strikingly different understanding of
community. Country folk might be intrusive, but the journalist believed they
“mean[t]‌well.” Oblivious city residents, in contrast, caroused even while those
in adjacent apartments mourned. The columnist predicted that newcomers
would “perish” when left alone in such a soulless environment; “the wicked-
ness of the masses” would quickly crush them.1 The article reflected an impor-
tant thread in suffrage thought, one that proved particularly consequential for
the Manhattan campaign during its earliest years.
Activists in the 1870s and 1880s accepted and even helped reify a long-
standing trope about urban danger when ruminating on New York City.
Gender increasingly colored this trope in the middle and late nineteenth cen-
tury. With women pouring into the metropolis, commentators obsessed over
the unknowable and potentially dangerous men that “respectable ladies” would
“The Wickedness of the Masses” 9
encounter daily.2 Suffrage organizers in Manhattan proved unwilling to chal-

lenge this belief and indeed reinscribed it in the Gilded Age. As a result, am-
bivalence and pessimism defined their approach to the nation’s largest city in
the first two decades of campaign work. Where early twentieth-century leaders
would understand their metropolis as a mosaic of neighborhoods, these late
nineteenth-century pioneers saw an inscrutable monolith. This perspective
prevented them from strategically approaching the city’s diverse enclaves, and
generally confined their meetings to scattered private homes and commercial
halls. Beliefs about metropolitan perils circumscribed their activities, while
flickers of insight about New York’s strategic importance on the national stage
only exacerbated their frustration.
The New York State Constitutional Convention in 1894 disrupted this mo-
notony and energized the New York City campaign. Lobbyists mobilized to an
extent unthinkable even the year before. Wealthy women joined the cause in
1894, adding their signatures to petitions, opening their homes to meetings,
and contributing their voices to hearings. An exclusive Manhattan restau-
rant hosted suffrage gatherings. Newspapers detailed the fashionable craze.
Ultimately, though, metropolitan organizers proved unable to combat a be-
lief that enfranchising women would damage democracy—one with uniquely
urban undertones that they themselves had legitimized.
Decades before the 1894 Constitutional Convention, New York State acted
as a chrysalis for the woman suffrage movement. Even prior to the famed
1848 Seneca Falls Convention, some women in New York campaigned for the
ballot. In 1846, six Jefferson County women petitioned the New York State
Constitutional Convention to live up to “democratic principles” by recognizing
women’s right to vote.3 The reform tradition rooted in the Burned-over District’s
evangelicalism combined with the Quaker population in western New York to
make the state a generative landscape for organizing. With Lucretia Mott and
Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s decision to host the first women’s rights convention
in the United States at Seneca Falls, the Empire State cemented its place in the
campaign’s annals.4 Seneca Falls gained an especially revered position within
movement memory in the decades following the groundbreaking convention.5
It took another two decades, though, for the cause to formally organize in
New York State. The Civil War contributed to the delay, as relief work reordered
suffrage priorities. But budding activists rallied in 1869 when the Empire
State considered licensing prostitution. Appalled and frustrated by their ina-
bility to influence political decisions, a small band of women established the
New York State Woman Suffrage Association.6 The next year, New York City
advocates followed suit and began the New York City Woman Suffrage League.7
The Woman Suffrage League, which Lillie Devereux Blake managed, was
Manhattan’s leading women’s rights organization throughout the late nine-

teenth century.
A North Carolinian by birth, Blake grew up near Yale University in New
Haven, Connecticut. Her first marriage to a Philadelphia lawyer ended tragi-
cally with her husband’s unexpected death, leaving Blake alone to care for their
two young daughters on the eve of the Civil War. The twenty-six-year-old turned
to writing to earn an income for her struggling family. In 1863, she relocated
to Manhattan, believing that Gotham held out the possibility for greater pro-
fessional success. Writing, a new marriage, and caring for her daughters
filled Blake’s daily routine during the 1860s. But, in 1869, she finally found
the time and mustered the courage to satisfy a long-standing curiosity about
women’s rights and sought out suffragists. Their crusade quickly engrossed
her. Colleagues would soon discover that they had recruited a headstrong and
committed, if easily slighted, woman. Within a decade, Blake gained control
of the state association, a position she held for more than a decade. She took
charge of the city organization midway through her state presidency; Blake
remained in that office for fourteen years.8 Her overlapping tenures at the city
and state levels ensured she had an outsized influence on the women’s rights
campaign and that both organizations moved in sync, at least until 1890 when
a Rochester resident took charge of the state association.
Blake and her peers understood that the Empire State could be pivotal for
enfranchisement.9 Its symbolic and political weight might shift the nation to-
ward women’s rights. But, in order to win New York State, their cause would
need to gain traction in the state’s most important and complicated metrop-
olis: Manhattan. One member of the National American Woman Suffrage
Association put it most colorfully when she announced, “I believe that it is
about as much use to try to carry New York for woman suffrage as to try to
climb to the moon.”10 Victory seemed as far-fetched as a nineteenth-century
moon landing thanks, in part, to Gotham’s immigrants and corporations.
According to suffrage thinking, Old World patriarchal customs would make
it difficult to convert those flooding Ellis Island. Advocates expected that their
alliance with temperance reformers would further alienate the newcomers
who they assumed regularly imbibed. The movement predicted that New York
City’s status as the nation’s corporate headquarters would only compound
these obstacles.11 Leaders felt confident that business magnates would resist
any action that might increase the working-class’s power. The violence of the
Great Railroad Strike (1877), the Haymarket Affair (1886), and the Homestead
Strike (1892) doubtless served to reinforce this perception.
Organizers might have managed these concerns about immigration and
corporations via strategic decision-making if a more abstract and powerful
one about urban life did not exist. For many nineteenth-century Americans,
metropolises seemed pregnant with dangers. For one, they lacked clear
boundaries; their streets threw men and women of all backgrounds together.
The anonymity that characterized urban life heightened this sense of vulnera-
bility. Unlike in rural districts, individuals could not expect to recognize those
who stood next to them at a market or on a streetcar. They would not know the
other person’s family or the location of their home, and would rightly expect
to never see the person again. The anonymity erased the sense of security and
accountability that familiarity bred.12 Early nineteenth-century advice manuals
teemed with dire predictions about the temptations young men would en-
counter when they left family farms to find jobs among these nameless masses.
Gambling dens and prostitutes could corrupt them. “Confidence men” report-
edly skulked, waiting to trick naïfs into friendships and then turn them into
criminals.13
This maelstrom of diversity, anonymity, and congestion appeared par-
ticularly dangerous in Gotham, a city of extremes—home to the country’s
wealthiest individuals and its poorest.14 In 1852, the Young Men’s Christian
Association opened in Manhattan in order to shield the “young stranger” from
the “wicked city[’s]” “snares.”15 The press and publishing houses fueled this fear
by churning out articles and books detailing the city’s growing underworld.16
Pickpockets, blackmailers, opium addicts, gangs, and murderers all resided in
New York and tormented unsuspecting citizens, readers learned.17
The dangers inherent in urban life were thought especially threatening
to bourgeois women.18 They not only had to agonize over all the perils men
confronted; city streets also exposed them to everything from ogling to sexual
assaults.19 Something as simple as visiting an acquaintance demanded a whole
etiquette of calling.20 Those who dressed “conspicuously” (large hats, fancy
lace, bright colors) exposed themselves to the male gaze and potentially snide
and sexual taunts.21 A woman needed to show “reserve” on city streets, an et-
iquette manual decreed, and act “oblivious of those whom she does not in-
clude within her circle of friends.”22 Some, like the Salvation Army’s “Slum
Sisters” or the Charity Organization Society’s “friendly visitors,” could cloak
their public actions in religion and morality to navigate this map of propriety—
a tradition that dated back to the early nineteenth century.23 But the majority of
women could claim no such protective mantle.
New York State suffragists responded to discussions about legalizing
prostitution by championing women without confronting this gendered ge-
ography.24 The most infamous licensing policies came out of Britain in the
1860s. The Contagious Disease Acts empowered policemen in specified areas
to force women they accused of prostitution to undergo internal examinations
for venereal disease. Following this model, municipal authorities from San
Francisco to Chicago to New York City considered regulating women’s bodies
as a way to ensure the health of men soliciting “fallen” women.25 In Gotham’s
case, the proposal called for the creation of a board that would license “houses
of prostitution and assignation” as well as report on the medical “condition of
the prostitutes licensed under the act.”26
As middle- class women, suffragists could have easily accepted this
proposed policy, considering it either irrelevant to their own lives or a way to
protect them from male peers who might take up with “women of the night.”
Indeed, at least one woman, “A Mother, and a Woman of Sad Experiences,” did
write the Revolution to make this argument.27 While the Revolution took on a
more moderate tone following Anthony’s and Stanton’s departures in 1870, the
editors still vehemently refused to accept this “Mother[’s]” rationale: “We say
that legalization does not insure public health, that it erects one of the greatest
crimes of society into an institution, and sets apart thousands of women solely
to minister to the lusts of men.”28 They contended that such licensing would
unleash men’s latent sexual desires and leave all women vulnerable to state
policing. Suffragists used this as an opportunity to celebrate female solidarity,
while also legitimizing cultural scripts of male hypersexuality, women’s vulner-
ability, and urban vice.29
Gotham did not lay exclusive claim to concerns about women’s safety.
Suffrage publications mentioned assaults on Milwaukee’s streets at night,
sexual exploitation of employees in Philadelphia, and the arrest of “girls”
smoking in public in Chicago.30 Blake’s husband even warned her about
walking around the streets of Philadelphia alone at night when she visited
that city. His concerns proved well founded. Though she ultimately made it
home “quite safely,” a group of “young rowdies” did jeer at her along the way.31
Manhattan’s position as the largest metropolis with newspapers obsessively
covering its debauchery, however, earned it a degree of notoriety smaller cities
escaped.
At the same time that cities might endanger women, new opportunities
were emerging for white, middle-class women like Blake and her colleagues.
Across the country, women increasingly pursued higher education. In 1870,
less than 1 percent of women aged eighteen to twenty-one attended college.
By 1910, that number had quadrupled to nearly 4 percent, and these women
represented roughly 40 percent of all of those enrolled.32 Manhattan boasted
its own premier women’s college beginning in 1889 when Barnard College
opened.33 Beyond the academy, the late nineteenth century also ushered
in changes in shopping. In the mid-nineteenth century, a buyer would re-
quest a specific product at a dry goods store, which the owner would retrieve
from his stockroom. Negotiations over the price ensued. Department stores
revolutionized this, elaborately displaying wares, encouraging leisurely
browsing, setting prices, and prioritizing customer service. The stores
themselves—with their lavish interiors, marble exteriors, and plate glass show
windows—existed as feminized retreats in a masculinized city. That retailers
congregated their consumer wonderlands in specific neighborhoods redefined
the urban landscape in the late nineteenth century, creating an entire district in
Manhattan where a bourgeois woman might window-shop or meet friends for
lunch without having to worry about her reputation being questioned.34
Etiquette guides struggled to keep up with the greater freedom unleashed
by the consumer metropolis. As late as 1899, one continued to advise, “A
lady should not venture out upon the street alone after dark. By so doing she
compromises her dignity, and exposes herself to indignity at the hands of
the rougher class.” And the guide reminded that a woman should “not form
acquaintances upon the street, or seek to attract the attention of the other
sex, or of persons of her own sex. Her conduct is always modest and unas-
suming.”35 Capturing this anxiety, a new caricature emerged in the literature
and journalism of the 1860s and the 1870s—the “New York Woman.” This
figure ignored her children to waste time flirting and shopping in the new re-
tail spaces.36
These changes whirled around Blake and her fellow suffragists, trapping
them between increased independence to roam the city and long-held fear that
doing so might jeopardize their respectability and even safety. Mainstream
leaders chose to question advocates who aggressively embraced the new free-
doms. Their reaction to Victoria Woodhull is a case in point. Woodhull chal-
lenged gender expectations at every turn—she started her own newspaper,
opened a Wall Street brokerage firm, and, most scandalously, promoted free
love. Although Woodhull might enjoy Gotham’s resources, she found few
long-term cheerleaders among mainstream suffragists—even after promising
$10,000 to fight for the ballot. Stanton and Anthony did defend her on occasion,
but overall cautious distance, rather than warm embrace, defined Manhattan
leaders’ approach to the firebrand.37 Instead of following Woodhull’s lead or
tapping into the city’s wealth, publicity potential, and entertainment venues,
Gilded Age activists living in Gotham spent the 1870s and 1880s complaining
about the metropolis’s labyrinth-like landscape, carping about the annual ritual
of moving day on May 1 (the day that tenants’ leases expired and thus many
moved to new homes), and grumbling about men jostling women on public
transportation.38
Blake’s 1874 novel, Fettered for Life Or Lord and Master, A Story of To-Day,
provides a window into Manhattan suffragists’ deep-seated ambivalence about
urban living. The novel revolves around Laura Stanley, a young, white, middle-
class woman who travels from her father’s farm in rural Dutchess County to
New York City in hope of earning a living. Within the first three pages, a reader
learns that city life endangers young women like Laura, a refrain throughout
the novel. Blake has her protagonist arrive in Manhattan at night, mobilizing
commonly held perceptions about metropolises after dark in order to build
drama. A nighttime arrival means that Laura cannot find a room at a reputable
hotel and quickly discovers that it is “not safe . . . to be on the streets alone”
when men molest her.39 Ultimately, a police officer escorts her to a station
house, but it provides no more safety than the streets, since it leaves her the
prey of a corrupt judge.40 In reviewing her first night, Laura admits her naiveté,
reflecting, “I had heard much of the dangers of your city . . . but I had no idea
it was so terrible a place for a woman who is alone.”41 Blake cast Manhattan as
a largely menacing character to advance her plot.
In fact, the author developed only one female character who achieves com-
plete success upon moving to New York City. In order to do so, however, this
woman needs to present as a man, Frank Heywood. Blake introduces Frank to
the reader at the very beginning of the story as the astute reporter who saves
Laura from the lecherous judge. On several other occasions, Frank serves as the
story’s hero: rescuing Laura from an attempted abduction, protecting women
unjustly imprisoned, and escorting an impoverished, dying woman out of the
city. Only at the end of the novel—after a reader has accepted Frank as a trust-
worthy, male lead—does Blake provide the character’s backstory. Like Laura,
Frank felt “entirely unprotected” when arriving in Gotham. “I was insulted,
refused work, unless I would comply with the disgraceful propositions of my
employers,” Frank divulges; “in short, I had the experience which so many
young women have in the great city; poverty, temptation, cruelty.” Frank started
wearing men’s clothing to survive and realized the privileges bestowed upon
metropolitan men by their gender: successful careers, professional respect, and
freedom of movement.42
Blake intended the revelation of Frank’s identity to challenge people’s
perceptions about gender. In one swift move, she defied the trope of male
heroes in literature. But her subversive intentions did little to undermine the
idea of cities as female dystopias. Instead, they reinforced this perception. Frank
does not claim a “right to the city” as a woman but as a woman presenting
as a man.43 Blake’s story reveals deep-seated ambivalence about urban life.
Even when trying to create an empowered character who transcends gendered
assumptions, it relies on a hostile metropolitan universe with clearly defined
boundaries for “respectable ladies.”
In the story, gender discrimination is pervasive. Laura flees her family

because inequality thrives in her father’s upstate home, and Laura’s socialite
friend attempts suicide to escape an unhappy marriage in luxurious Newport.44
However, in Blake’s story, it is only in the metropolis that women confront
sexual danger. It is there that sexual advances threaten, peers scrutinize their
reputation, and trustworthy strangers mix with fiendish predators. Blake does
note Gotham’s advantages: it houses a female community that helps Laura as-
similate to city ways and contains cultural and educational resources unavail-
able in the country.45 But, in exchange for these assets, Laura must live within
an urban environment filled with serious pitfalls for a “respectable” woman.46
Blake’s work was fiction, but reviewers believed it accurately captured life
in 1870s New York City. In its praise of the book, the Independent Statesman
commented, “The scenes are laid in and about New York City, and many of
the follies of the social life of that city are satirized sharply.”47 According to the
Home Journal, “The great merit of this story is its startling reality, its truthful-
ness to every day [sic] life. Mrs. Blake writes of what she knows and some of the
characters introduced to the reader are easily recognized by people acquainted
in New York.”48 Another critic emphasized the moral of the story: young
women “without friends” in the city should not travel there alone. Doing so
would only endanger them.49
Believing that the city threatened women created a critical problem for
metropolitan suffragists in the 1870s and 1880s. How could they convince
individuals to enfranchise New York women when, even organizers seemed
ready to admit, going to the polls might jeopardize their safety and respecta-
bility? This proved more than a hypothetical question; Blake confronted it when
she traveled. Those she met outside of Gotham considered rural women voting
“reprehensible enough,” and were convinced that city women voting would be
“intolerable.” They imagined the women “surrounded by a crowd of roughs”
in the “slums” clinging to their ballots.50 Envisioning the polls in this manner
served as another way to police the boundaries of male politics and preserve the
ballot as one of the few remaining badges of masculinity—it provided a spatial
reason to prevent women from voting. Early suffragists did little to counter
it. Instead, their effort to expose gendered injustices resulted in perpetuating
fears about women’s vulnerability in the city.
Leaders’ concerns about respectability and safety severely circumscribed
urban activists’ approach to the metropolis in the Gilded Age. Male reformers
could choose from myriad venues for events—private homes, hotels, theaters,
streets, and public parks. Suffragists’ decisions required a more delicate cal-
culus, one that balanced concerns about propriety and protection with the
need for publicity and coalition-building. Though they regularly prioritized the
former over the latter during the Gilded Age, the sanctity of the contract along
with gendered customs surrounding memorialization did provide fleeting
opportunities to claim a limited and temporary “right to the city,” a harbinger
of future tactics.
Private homes provided the most accessible spaces for organizing in
this time period. They did not add another expense to an impoverished
movement’s budget.51 Gathering in someone’s house also signaled that
activists did not intend to undermine the family, a favorite anti-suffrage po-
sition. Finally, in a city supposedly filled with dangers, parlor meetings pro-
vided a secure arena for middle-class women to discuss their ideas. Going
to a gathering at someone’s home was no different than their usual custom
of calling on a friend.52 Suffragists thus relied on a familiar gendered tra-
dition to create a personal, friendly environment for discussing ideas in
a city that many deemed unfriendly to women. Rather than open a long-
term headquarters in a commercial building—a strategy that would have
symbolized its professionalism, allowed for more efficient organizing, and
made it easier for newcomers to locate the campaign—Blake’s New York City
Woman Suffrage League clung to private homes scattered across the city for
its monthly meetings.
These regular suffrage gatherings proved small enough to fit within pri-
vate residences, but larger meetings, especially state conventions, demanded
more space. Manhattan contained a range of commercial halls for organizers
to consider, from the compact Frobisher Hall to the larger Masonic Hall and
the elegant Chickering and Steinway Halls.53 Different venues attracted dif-
ferent audiences, a point Blake appreciated. When she hoped to attract wealthy
women, the New York City leader turned to Chickering Hall, while she assumed
that Masonic Hall would suit working women.54 Sometimes suffragists re-
ceived the halls free of charge; other times they paid to rent them.55 Though
it was a budgetary burden given the early movement’s small treasury, renting
venues allowed activists to temporarily create a feminized, political space in a
masculinized city. It also granted them a contractual right to the venue. Men
might not recognize women’s right to vote, but they did respect their right to
contract.
This right itself was a relatively new one for women. Married women in
early nineteenth-century New York State lived under the system of coverture,
a common-law tradition that forced women to surrender their property to
husbands upon marriage. This slowly began to change in 1848 when New York
State passed a law that allowed wives to maintain a degree of control over their
real property. Activists, including Anthony, petitioned state legislators during
the 1850s to expand this legislation. Representatives in Albany finally conceded

in 1860, passing the Earnings Act, which recognized married women’s control
over their personal (in addition to real) property and their right to contract.56
Blake put this right to the test at one meeting at the Cooper Institute in
1872. She paid fifty dollars to rent the hall for a general suffrage gathering de-
voted to marriage (in response to those demanding free love). While traveling
to finalize the details and before she could even post information about it in
the city newspapers, she read in the Herald that Civil War veterans planned to
use the space at the same time as her scheduled event, already plastering the
city with posters announcing the presence of Civil War heroes like Generals
Burnside and McClellan. The suffrage director reported she felt “small and
weak” informing General Burnside of his error. She did not surrender, though,
even after a crowd confronted her at his office, confident that her rent gave her
ownership over the hall. One officer threatened that they would seize the venue
anyway. But Blake mustered the courage to retort, “I think not, sir. I think you
will find that the hall is as much mine as my house, since I have paid the rent
for it.”57 At moments the city’s commercial and gendered geographies collided.
Custom suggested that women should not claim ownership over semipublic
establishments, especially in the face of threats from men (and Civil War vet-
erans, at that). But the sacredness of the contract and money in the “capital city”
empowered suffragists to do so.58
Even in the “capital city,” though, money had its limitations. It granted
activists temporary control over commercial venues for meetings. There,
organizers could monitor who entered and shape the day’s program. However,
money did little to tame public spaces like streets or squares where people
interacted in largely spontaneous, unmonitored fashions. Though working-
class women regularly used the city streets, suffragists declined to challenge the
notion that middle-class women should exist only on these spaces’ margins.59
Undoubtedly they believed that taking to the streets would expose them to
hecklers and other dangers inherent to city life. It might also tarnish their rep-
utation, a risk campaigners who already struggled to make their cause seem
respectable proved unwilling to take. After all, etiquette guides laboriously de-
tailed how women should behave in public; the worst thing a “lady” could do
was to use the streets to make a spectacle of herself, especially a political one.
Public celebrations momentarily changed the rules. Since the early nine-
teenth century, women had participated in as well as attended these festivities.
By the 1850s, cities even set up viewing stands from which they could com-
fortably watch parades.60 Following the Civil War, women took on the mon-
umental task of memorializing fallen soldiers. Suffragists capitalized on this
long history of women’s participation in civic ceremonies.61 Although urban
activists would not employ public spaces on a routine basis during the Gilded
Age, they would readily occupy them when other “respectable” New Yorkers
already did so. In the process, they simultaneously mobilized and scrutinized
the feminized traditions around commemoration.
Their protest at the unveiling ceremony of the Statue of Liberty in 1886
is a case in point. People from across the nation flocked to Manhattan for the
October unveiling, providing struggling suffragists with a potentially invalu-
able opportunity to broadcast their message. Ceremony planners crammed the
day’s schedule with events: a morning parade, an afternoon flotilla, and evening
fireworks.62 Blake and her peers had hoped that activists would receive seats
at Bedloe’s Island for the unveiling itself. They decided to hold a demonstra-
tion when they realized that they would not be included in the day’s programs.
Scraping together $100, activists chartered a cattle barge to protest the cere-
mony from the harbor.63 Blake led followers in an “indignation meeting” on
the vessel’s lower deck immediately after Lady Liberty’s veil fell. “In erecting a
statue of Liberty embodied as a woman in a land where no woman has political
liberty,” she sneered, “men have shown a delightful inconsistency.”64
The remarkable protest drew notice from reporters at the New York Times
who detailed the proceedings. Still, even this unprecedented use of public space
by suffragists had clear boundaries: activists did not plan to actually disembark
from the boat to protest at the feet of the Statue of Liberty. Instead, they clung
to the vessel, a space they could claim temporary ownership of because they
paid to use it. Similar to Blake’s struggle with the Cooper Institute, the sanctity
of the contract provided a degree of insulation to women acting outside of the
home, this time creating a floating platform for protest. Moreover, the public
ceremony temporarily shifted the city’s gender dynamic. On an ordinary day
etiquette demanded that “ladies” act as inconspicuously as possible in public;
ceremonies sanctioned and even encouraged them to take on a more visible
presence. Program organizers might have disappointed activists, but the cere-
monial atmosphere emboldened them.
Campaigners planned similar stunts during other celebrations. In 1892,
the New York City League secured forty seats on the corner of Fifth Avenue
and Fortieth Street for a parade commemorating the four hundredth anni-
versary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. Covering the
whole section in yellow (the movement’s color), they unfurled a large banner
insisting that New Yorkers “Forget Not Isabella.”65 In their fight for the ballot,
suffragists transformed civic celebrations into opportunities to recognize
women’s contributions. This would not be the last time that they highlighted
these past contributions to world history. Their 1911 parade included a float ded-
icated to women’s work in eighteenth-century America; banners celebrating
the memory of Anthony and Stanton featured in the spring 1912 march; and
an activist dressed as Joan of Arc participated in the fall 1912 torchlight pro-
cession.66 Suffragists were in some ways early historians of (white) women,
working to ensure that their predecessors’ experiences remained visible to the
public and recognizing that these experiences had worth. They also never failed
to use these past experiences for their present strategic gain.
Manhattan did not lay exclusive claim to such early spectacles, forerunners
of future demonstrations. The National Woman Suffrage Association staged an
impressive protest in Philadelphia during the centennial jubilee. Organizers
lay in wait with a “Woman’s Declaration of Rights” amid a crowd exceeding
thirty thousand people that had gathered at Independence Square to com-
memorate the milestone on Independence Day 1876. They struck immedi-
ately after the ceremony’s capstone—a reading from the original Declaration
of Independence by a signer’s descendent. Shoving their protest into Vice
President Thomas Ferry’s hands, they distributed copies to those in attendance
as they left to climb a separate platform outside Independence Hall. Newspapers
from New York to St. Louis covered the action—some sympathetically and
some critically, censoring activists for the “discourteous interruption.”67
Such stunts required a degree of organization and preparation that escaped
lobbyists on a more regular basis. They also brought advocates out of the shel-
tered spaces of the home and commercial halls. Perhaps the women expected
a greater police presence than normal during civic ceremonies and therefore
felt less vulnerable. The New York Times informed readers that fourteen hun-
dred policemen would patrol Gotham during the unveiling ceremony itself.68
That the authorities meticulously planned the day’s events also likely helped
make the environment seem less chaotic than the everyday landscape—in fact,
organizers could expect that they would be responsible for the day’s only sur-
prise. Women’s long history in public celebrations further empowered activists,
even as they used this tradition to call into question the gender status quo.
But, these proved to be short-lived and rare tactics during the Gilded Age.
And their effect seems limited. Only when special commemorations disrupted
the everyday rhythm of city life did lobbyists generally claim public space.69
Out-of-state tourists mixed with the residents who actually needed to be con-
verted during these moments. The day’s festivities could easily eclipse the
stunts in people’s memories. And suffragists risked offending those who came
to celebrate America’s achievement, not reflect on its shortcomings. Leaders
limited their message by not independently using streets or parks in New York
on a more regular basis in the Gilded Age. No matter how large the hall or
the home, street protests could reach more individuals. Men’s labor organiza-
tions knew this and used Tompkins and Union Squares to spread their ideas.70
Suffragists refused to take such action. This would change by the early twen-
tieth century as they worked to dismantle the city’s gendered geography for
middle-class women and make public spaces more genuinely “public.” Until
then, advocates sheltered themselves in the protected venues of parlors and
rented halls with few, fleeting exceptions.
The 1894 New York State Constitutional Convention interrupted this
suffrage routine.71 The state constitution empowered voters to request these
conventions every twenty years. The 1894 convention was the state’s sixth
such gathering. It promised an alternative means through which women
might achieve suffrage—one that did not require approval from two separate
legislatures and then endorsement by voters, as an amendment introduced
via the regular legislative session did. Instead, the convention delegates would
need to believe in suffrage only enough to include it in a revised constitution
and put it before voters.72
Suffragists across the state hoped to use the occasion to establish a women’s
rights milestone. New York City especially buzzed with activity, as wealthy
women for the first time campaigned for the ballot alongside (and sometimes
in competition with) Blake’s New York City Woman Suffrage League. Exclusive
Manhattan restaurants transformed into battlegrounds for women’s rights,
and metropolitan newspapers could not satiate readers’ appetite for movement
gossip. The city’s latent potentials became strikingly visible in 1894. But, just
as Gotham organizers began to capitalize on the metropolis’s resources in a
sustained manner, they also realized that their foes could brandish the very
perceptions of Manhattan that they themselves had endorsed in the 1870s
and 1880s.
Suffragists had a lot invested in success in 1894. Many imagined that
the convention’s decision would be pivotal for the nation: if the Empire State
enfranchised women, other states would quickly follow. Some even optimis-
tically predicted that the effect would ripple across the Atlantic to Europe.73
Movement leaders frequently tried to capitalize on ruptures in the polit-
ical landscape to promote enfranchisement. As early as the 1870s, activists
inserted demands for women’s rights into conversations about national expan-
sion and imperialism.74 In 1894, they followed a similar strategy at the state
level: lobbyists expected to use the constitutional convention to promote their
demands.
That Kansas voters were also deciding on enfranchisement in 1894
heightened the possibility for a milestone year. At the same time, it escalated
tensions within the National American Woman Suffrage Association over the
national campaign’s limited resources. These tensions came to a head at the an-
nual meeting when both Kansas and New York activists requested aid: New York
for speakers and Kansas for money. Blake set the tone, stressing New York City’s
national “importance” and suggesting that a win in the Empire State would per-
suade other states to follow suit. “I do not think that the effect of a victory in
Kansas will be as great,” she said dismissively. Those representing Kansas point-
edly pushed back, declaring that resource allocation decisions should not be
based on “age or prestige,” but on likelihood of “success or defeat.”75
The clash itself is surprising considering that New York organizers indi-
cated that they did not want financial aid, just speakers.76 Its existence, however,
demonstrates how the national association’s limited resources bred internal
disagreement and jealousy, while suggesting how other state movements
responded to New York’s national clout. Kansas thought it had a right to as-
sistance because success seemed likely there; New York claimed this right by
focusing on what would happen if the state won. Prestige was pitted against
likelihood of success within the national campaign, revealing insecurities,
frustrations, and varying priorities. Ultimately, the National American Woman
Suffrage Association provided Kansas with $2,570 and the Empire State
with $8.77
Tensions existed within the New York State movement as well. State
leaders wasted no time developing a strategy they hoped would ensure suc-
cess. Each of New York State’s sixty counties would hold a meeting. The
legendary, Rochester-based Susan B. Anthony would address each one.78
Securing one million names on a petition was a top priority.79 Activists
planned to rely on paid organizers canvassing voters via house-to-house
visits to reach this ambitious goal—an approach Anthony advocated. They
hoped it would be enough to pressure delegates to endorse a constitutional
change, or at least make the public more aware that women wanted one.80
Blake, however, objected.
The New York City leader questioned applying the statewide strategy to
Gotham, an early indication of the tension building between state and city
leaders. At a Campaign Committee gathering she labeled the canvassing plan
“impractical”;81 in her diary, she derided it as “arrant nonsense.”82 Once a
staunch supporter of Anthony, Blake had grown skeptical of her strategies.83
Only later in the campaign did she publicly explain her opposition. House-to-
house visits would not work in Manhattan, according to Blake, “not because
people were opposed, but because, in a great city, the rule of most people is
that they will not receive unknown callers.”84 Urban customs demanded dif-
ferent strategies than those used in rural communities. These concerns should
not have been brushed aside. After all, Blake had years of experience leading
Manhattan’s movement. But Anthony refused to budge.85 New York City
activists, like those in the rest of the state, canvassed.
Whenever possible, though, Blake did try to tailor strategies to Manhattan’s

diverse landscape. Her New York City Woman Suffrage League organized
meetings in churches, schools, and parlors. It established headquarters at 10
East Fourteenth Street, a significant step for a campaign more accustomed to
isolated meetings in private homes. Beginning in January 1894, individuals
seeking information did not need to rely on a chance encounter with a suffra-
gist to learn more. They simply needed to visit headquarters any time between
10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m.86 The location itself underscored city organizers’
burgeoning savvy. Ten East Fourteenth Street sat in one of the metropolis’s
few feminized districts: Ladies’ Mile, known for its high- end shopping.87
An 1892 travel guide celebrated Ladies’ Mile as home to “prominent retail
establishments” that “are the wonder and the admiration of all who see them,
and in extent and in variety of goods they are not surpassed elsewhere in
the world.”88 Le Boutillier, an elegant dry goods store, Macy’s, and Tiffany’s
Jewelers were located near suffrage headquarters.89 Such stores worked to at-
tract bourgeois women by providing a safe and respectable space to leisurely
browse, installing electric lights, telephones, and even air ventilation systems
during the last decades of the nineteenth century.90 Headquarters then pro-
vided the Manhattan campaign with a degree of stability and visibility, and did
so in a way that tapped into the city’s highly feminized consumer geography.
However, it was not mainstream suffragists’ strategic approach to the
metropolis that brought the Gotham campaign unparalleled attention in the
months leading up to the Constitutional Convention. The frenzy over women’s
rights in New York City was fueled by the participation of a new coterie of
supporters in 1894—Manhattan socialites. By the early 1890s, 30 percent of
the nation’s millionaires resided in New York City. Some had lived there for
generations, whereas others like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie
had arrived more recently.91 Manhattan’s deep business resources combined
with its social clout attracted such members of the nouveau riche. A wealthy
American could not claim to be au courant in the Gilded Age without a resi-
dence in New York City.
The New York City Woman Suffrage League had long understood the
benefits the campaign would reap if it attracted socialites. Elite women might
donate money to a cash-starved operation. Their participation would certainly
enhance the movement’s reputation and also garner press attention.92 Prior
to 1894, though, establishment leaders like Blake generally found only ap-
athy and antipathy among the wealthy. The elite women of Fifth Avenue and
Murray Hill even mobilized against enfranchisement in 1885, sending a pe-
tition to the state senate.93 Their participation in 1894 thus rightly surprised
long-time supporters. One woman canvassing the financial district in early
1894 grew so annoyed by “head of monopolies[’]” reluctance to donate money

that she urged Blake to fundraise by cobbling together small sums from every
individual in Gotham, rather than a few sizable donations from a handful of
wealthy New Yorkers. Such haphazardness seemed more efficient than targeted
fundraising, given wealth’s long-standing ambivalence about the ballot. “It is
the servants[’] ten cents,” she reflected after her ordeal, “that have made the
Catholic Church so powerful in this Country.”94
That some robber barons did agree to sign her petition (albeit in lieu of
donating money), however, marked a significant shift in society sentiment.
Mary Putnam Jacobi deserves much of the credit for this breakthrough. A well-
respected physician by 1894, Jacobi spent much of her adult life connecting her
professional work to her passion for reform. She fought to improve medical
training during her tenure at the Woman’s Medical College, while advocating
for women’s health in the Consumers’ League and the Working Women’s
Society, organizations devoted to aiding the working class. Suffrage interested
the physician only marginally until the early 1890s, when Anthony successfully
recruited her.95
Jacobi— with her years of outside experience and established medical
reputation— did not simply listen to Anthony, however. She doubted the
canvassing plan, like Blake, and instead hoped to convert a few highly respected
women, predicting that these women, once recruited, would draw in their
friends.96 Jacobi could expect to capitalize on her contacts in the reform world
as well as in intellectual and elite circles, thanks to the reputation of her father’s
publishing house, G. P. Putnam’s Sons.97 Even with these connections, her
strategy proved difficult to enact. The first woman Jacobi approached swiftly
rejected her arguments, fearful of “ignorant and irresponsible” women voting.
Unfazed, she pursued her top-down plan and ultimately helped to found the af-
fluent, Manhattan-based Volunteer Committee.98 Anthony did not find an ob-
sequious supporter with Jacobi, but she did find someone with moxie, someone
willing to mine her own rich resources for the crusade’s benefit.
The other founders of the Volunteer Committee constituted hubs in
New York’s intricate, elite web. Lucia Gilbert Runkle married an esteemed
lawyer, who died suddenly in 1888. She remained active in New York after his
death, gaining recognition within literary circles.99 Widowed three years after
Runkle, Lee Haggin had married the son and partner of a millionaire mine
developer and horse breeder.100 Catherine Abbe also lost her first husband,
the Nineteenth Century Club’s founder and free-thought advocate, Courtlandt
Palmer. But, unlike Runkle and Haggin, she remarried, wedding the influen-
tial New York surgeon Robert Abbe in 1891.101 Eleanor Butler Sanders’s hus-
band was Henry M. Sanders, the reverend of the Central Presbyterian Church
and later the Madison Avenue Baptist Church. Her father was the late Theron
R. Butler, former president of the Sixth Avenue Railroad Company and a no-
table art collector.102 Unlike the other five founders, Adele Fielde never married
and did not come from a prominent family; she gained her celebrated status
through missionary work in China instead.103 All told, these women traveled
comfortably in a world that the wider masses could only imagine.
Those joining in the new campaign that the Volunteer Committee initiated
ranged from individuals with old money and decades-long ties to Manhattan
to newcomers whose fortune still reeked of new money. At a single meeting,
a journalist counted almost “ninety representatives” of the Four Hundred, a
designation applied only to the most prestigious families in the elite orbit.104
Margaret Chanler proved the most active member of New York’s old money.
Her background combined blue-blood status (she was William B. Astor’s great-
granddaughter and Caroline Astor’s great-niece) with reform impulses (her
great-aunt was abolitionist and suffragist Julia Ward Howe). But, because her
parents had died when Chanler was a child and before they could leave a mark
on New York’s social world, and because her last name did not reflect a direct
connection to the Astor dynasty, newspaper reporters did not always piece to-
gether her genealogy.105
Laura Spelman Rockefeller and Olivia Sage could not claim the same
deep attachment to Manhattan and its haut monde as Chanler. Both moved
to Gotham following the Civil War, after their husbands had acquired their
immense riches.106 However, their last names were familiar to the public in a
way that Chanler’s was not. In 1894, they threw their celebrity behind suffrage.
Both Laura and Olivia (along with John D. and Russell) signed the suffrage
petition and agreed to host lectures in their homes.107 One meeting at Sage’s
Fifth Avenue residence in April 1894 drew more than two hundred individuals,
including Helen Gould, Jay Gould’s daughter, and Harriot Stanton Blatch,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s daughter.108 The elite settings did not temper suffrage
rhetoric. Jacobi refused to “act in a conciliatory manner” amid a crowd of three
hundred people crammed into the Rockefellers’ home. Calling her peers to
arms, she roared that she was on the “warpath” for suffrage.109
Newspaper reporters craved such campaign details. The doings of
New York’s social world fascinated their readership; publications had even
created gossip columns cataloging highbrow scandals in the 1880s.110 The
Volunteer Committee’s elite status made suffrage suddenly fashionable. The
World promised to triple its regular sum if Blake wrote a column about the
movement’s progress, an offer she could only dream of a year earlier.111 But the
Volunteer Committee’s target audience required that it strike a delicate bal-
ance between publicizing the cause and protecting potential enrollees from
ridicule. Exclusive parlors housed meetings. Supporters refused to disclose to

the media the names added to the suffrage petition.112 And leaders did not pub-
licize notices for upcoming gatherings. One woman lectured a reporter on this
secrecy, admonishing, “We can’t have unpleasant women in the drawing-room,
you know.”113 Still, journalists detailed meetings in parlors from Forty-Fourth
Street, the home of Henry M. Day, a lawyer and New York Stock Exchange
member, to the Tiffany Building on Seventy-Second Street, home of Caroline
De Forest and May Callender.114 The coverage, including visual renderings of
meetings and selections from speeches, suggests that reporters had made their
way inside. The political nature of suffrage work required that sometimes the
need for publicity trumped the desire for secrecy—a necessary compromise
that even newly minted elite leaders seemed to recognize.
Some of the reporters treated the campaign respectfully. Others mocked
the upper crust’s commitment to enfranchisement. One journalist teased that
“restless young women” simply wanted a “diversion” from boredom.115 Another
claimed that the “gay world is dead; [so] the fashionables want something to
do.”116 A political cartoonist aimed his pencil in the Volunteer Committee’s
direction. In “Society’s Latest Fad,” the illustrator drew an elegant woman
hovering over a dapper, mutton-chopped man as he scrawls his name on her
“suffrage equality petition.” A sign in the background announcing “This Is My
Busy Day” ridiculed the gentry’s “conspicuous leisure” and lampooned these
newcomers’ dedication.117 New York was mired in an economic depression in
1894. Triggered by European banking instability and compounded by railroad
speculation, the Panic of 1893 left seventy thousand jobless in Manhattan alone
and twenty thousand without homes.118 Elite women’s newfound political in-
terest provided an outlet for some in the media to question the economics of
the age and its culture of extravagance.
The press ridicule could not stop the elite suffrage juggernaut. Like the
New York City Woman Suffrage League, the Volunteer Committee established
headquarters to make itself more visible and accessible. Its members’ wealth
gave them entrée to spaces largely out of mainstream suffragists’ reach; their
rearing made them acutely aware that certain venues—elite hotels, restaurants,
and concert halls— conveyed status precisely because of such exclusivity.
Whereas the League tucked its tiny office into a place convenient for shoppers,
fashionable women opened headquarters in one of Manhattan’s most elegant
restaurants—Sherry’s, a respected eatery where society already felt at home.119
Separated from the main floor by blue drapery in a room the New York Times
described as a “feminine snuggery,” the Volunteer Committee welcomed
supporters and talked politics in the famed venue.120 As one reporter remarked,
it took “political skill” for these women to realize that installing “their citadel
In an 1894 political cartoon, a socialite pressures a businessman to endorse equal

rights, which the cartoonist dubs “Society’s Latest Fad.” Although journalists
regularly poked fun at elite women’s commitment to enfranchisement during the
1894 New York State Constitutional Convention campaign, they also made the
cause more visible to a public that had largely ignored women’s rights. National
American Woman Suffrage Association Records, Reel 1, Manuscripts and Archives
Division, New York Public Library.
on the crest of Murray Hill” was more effective than “trailing their skirts in
the byways of the city.”121 The location served as a reminder of the Volunteer
Committee’s social cachet, while also making suffrage accessible to others in
Gotham’s monied world.
Remarkably, leaders took it a step further and encouraged all citizens over
the age of twenty-one to call at Sherry’s.122 New Yorkers took tours up Fifth
Avenue to gawk at the opulent mansions and waited outside opera houses to
catch sight of the fashionable world.123 Now, the Volunteer Committee invited
them into one of the elite’s most luxurious establishments; the entrance fee
was simply an interest in enfranchisement. It was like “being asked to drop
in at Mrs. Vanderbilt’s.” This “alluring bait,” noted one reporter, “was eagerly
taken.”124 The Volunteer Committee capitalized on its access to elegant, lei-

sured spaces to lure in individuals to sign the petition. Socialites might fiercely
protect the privacy of their individual parlors, denying entrance to anyone out-
side their contacts. But their 1894 suffrage activities cracked the door open to
Sherry’s, even if not many New Yorkers took advantage of it.
That the Volunteer Committee and the New York City Woman Suffrage
League did not pool resources to establish a joint headquarters hints at the
friction simmering between newcomers and the suffrage establishment in
Manhattan. Socialites made it a point to distance themselves from the “pro-
fessional ‘woman’s rights’ agitators” in the press.125 Partly they hoped to avoid
tarnishing their reputation by association. Irritation with the slipshod quality
of campaign work also drove their decision. Chanler publicly labeled League
members “poor organizers” decades after the fact.126 Privately, Jacobi expressed
concern about the campaign’s disappointing state in an 1894 letter to Blake
herself. “With twenty years in which to prepare for this convention,” she
criticized, “I am surprised that some skeleton of organization . . . had not been
arranged.”127 Such commentary doubtlessly ruffled the feathers of establish-
ment activists who had spent years fighting for the ballot with none of the
resources available to the newcomers. Perhaps most frustrating, fashionable
women’s activities regularly eclipsed the League’s undertakings, leaving it at
pains to point out that the campaign extended beyond the affluent.128 Because
the associations remained separate, the press easily compartmentalized the
movement into respectable ladies who happened to support the vote and ag-
gressive activists who happened to be female. In this way, society women’s
support both helped the movement and reinforced tropes about it.
Still, leaders in both organizations understood that cooperation would
carry the cause further than conflict—a scenario the press would quickly turn
into newspaper fodder. Chanler delicately proposed an alliance in an informal
report. “While we are in no wise bound to each other,” she acknowledged, “as
much and as constant interchange of work, of methods and of result as is pos-
sible, will both simplify and enrich what each of us does.”129 And the Volunteer
Committee and League did collaborate, exchanging arguments and informa-
tion.130 They seemed to have unofficially split up metropolitan work as well.
Blake’s League targeted working-class men and women, including immigrants.
Its efforts proved relatively effective. Ultimately, in New York City, suffragists
claimed endorsements from labor organizations representing more than a
hundred thousand men.131 Meanwhile, the Volunteer Committee pursued its
privileged peers; other converts made in the process were merely welcome
byproducts of this elite-centric focus. The work on one early April evening re-
flected this division of labor: Blake’s League delivered the “same arguments”
to a “strictly cosmopolitan” group in the tenement-filled Lower East Side that

society leaders provided to rich New Yorkers in an uptown parlor, the Herald
reported.132
An unexpected enemy further crystallized the relationship between the
League and the Volunteer Committee. In mid-April, a group of Brooklyn
women met to protest enfranchisement in New York State. Fearful that
suffragists might actually achieve success in 1894, they felt compelled to let
delegates know that many women opposed the measure.133 The ideas from
the Brooklyn Women’s Anti-Suffrage League rapidly jumped the East River,
spreading to Manhattan and the rest of the state.134 The Brooklyn Daily Eagle
predicted that anti-suffrage had gained enough momentum to block enfran-
chisement until the year 2014.135
Gotham “remonstrants” copied their foes’ strategies, establishing a
campaign with an elite following and opening posh headquarters. On the
committee organizing the resistance were such influential women as Frances
Tracy Morgan, the wife of the powerful financier; Helena de Kay Gilder, the
wife of the editor of Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine; and Sarah Hewitt,
the wife of the former mayor.136 The fashionable Hotel Waldorf, “a resort vying
with Sherry’s in social reputation,” served as headquarters.137 Like their suffrage
counterparts, they circulated a petition to present to Constitutional Convention
delegates. Only women could sign their names on the anti-suffrage version,
a prescription meant to emphasize that women themselves did not want the
ballot.138 Their arguments ranged from concern that enfranchisement would
lead women to accept public office to outrage that voting would be an additional
chore for women to perform.139 They mobilized anti-immigrant sentiment as
well. Amending the constitution, according to anti-suffragists, would increase
the quantity, not the quality, of the electorate—a concern shared by the first
woman Jacobi had tried to recruit and one they could expect would resonate in
a nativist-leaning populace.140
At first suffragists celebrated this resistance. Blake actually exclaimed that
“opposition is a healthy sign,” and Stanton hoped that it would push apathetic
women to pay more attention.141 Despite the flippant tone they struck with
reporters, both the League and the Volunteer Committee worked to vanquish
anti-suffrage attacks. One member of the Volunteer Committee designed a sta-
tistical analysis based on census data that anticipated and responded to the
argument about immigration.142 Adele Fielde claimed that female enfranchise-
ment would not result in immigrants dominating the electorate, but rather
would improve the balance between native-and foreign-born voters.143 That
New York City contained nearly 109,000 more native-born white females than
foreign-born white females, compared with just 106,000 more native-born
white males than foreign-born white males, proved pivotal to her argument.
Enfranchising women would mathematically improve the ratio between
foreign-and native-born voters. She complemented this quantitative argument
with a more qualitative justification: since “tribes” of Germans, English, and
Irish composed the diverse immigrant population, newcomers would not co-
here to threaten the “native” voter.144
With 80 percent of immigrants coming into the United States in 1894
through New York City, activists doubtlessly expected this to be an effective
argument.145 And they were not shy about broadcasting it. Fielde boasted
of her findings to a New York Times reporter, celebrating that her numbers
proved the “kitchen” would not “outvote the parlor” if delegates amended the
state constitution.146 Future organizers would radically revise most of these
early strategies, but such nativism did regularly re-emerge during later cam-
paign moments.
The Volunteer Committee and League refocused on the Constitutional
Convention itself in early May. One hundred seventy-five delegates were ex-
pected to travel to Albany for the summer-long convention. Activists hoped
the Suffrage Committee would endorse their proposal—a step that would ease
its passage through the general convention. The convention opened on May
8, on the heels of two early May suffrage rallies in Manhattan that attracted
upwards of two thousand people.147 Sixteen days later, the state suffrage presi-
dent addressed the Suffrage Committee. Delegates allowed four New York City
campaigners to present their positions the following week. Blake and Harriette
Keyser spoke for the League; Jacobi and Chanler represented the Volunteer
Committee.148
Perhaps the most reflective of her class position, Chanler’s speech told
of a propertied young woman with “responsibilities and social claims . . . for
whose proper discharge she felt the need of the suffrage.”149 Meanwhile, the
physician struggled to balance universal rights, nativism, and upper- class
distrust of laborers in her hour-long address. At some moments a philosoph-
ical treatise and at others a defensive response to anti-suffragists, Jacobi’s
speech focused on women’s evolution, stressing that she and her colleagues
demanded the vote “as a right” and need not depend on expedient ideas to per-
suade the delegates. At the same time, she seethed that “the white woman—the
American woman—the woman in whose veins runs the blood of those heroic
colonists . . . is excluded,” but immigrants and African Americans “share in
the sovereignty of the State.” She reassured those worried about the “illiterate”
vote that “the women who are now busily engaged in civilizing the hordes of
uncivilized people in our midst will be utilized . . . to guide ignorant women
voters.”150
Blake gave the most legalistic of the four speeches, likely a product of her
years studying the suffrage situation in New York and her position as president
of the New York City Woman Suffrage League.151 Harriette Keyser was the sole
advocate to focus exclusively on working women. A largely forgotten figure,
the League “Organizer” celebrated working women as “uncounted political
factor[s]‌,” including a wide swath of women in this category—from industrial
laborers to doctors and teachers. It was these women, not their leisured sisters,
who made the suffrage movement possible, according to Keyser, since their toil
proved women’s equality to men.152
Both League and Volunteer Committee leaders traveled to Albany to ad-
dress the Constitutional Convention, but their opponents asked men to rep-
resent them. In mid-June, Francis M. Scott delivered the first speech. In
Scott, anti-suffragists had found a surrogate with political experience. An ac-
tive member of the New York City Democratic Party, he had run for mayor in
1890.153 He began his address with rote anti-suffrage positions: the ballot was
not a right, those who voted needed to be able to enforce the laws, and the suf-
frage movement was simply a “fad” started by women looking for something
“new” to do. A more novel one crept in toward the end of Scott’s address, one
that, given the cultural zeitgeist, he might reasonably hope would appeal to
delegates. He worried about the forty to sixty thousand “unfortunate women”
living “outside the law” in New York City who would gain the right to vote if
delegates amended the state constitution.154 New York City’s reputation—one
darkened by assumptions about the lasciviousness that the metropolitan land-
scape bred and one that the League had left unquestioned—became a weapon
brandished against enfranchisement.
The Suffrage Committee ultimately reported adversely on the proposal. We
cannot know for certain which strategies carried the day for anti-suffragists, but
suffragists had their theories. They saw a conspiracy spearheaded by Joseph
H. Choate, the convention’s chairman and an influential Gotham resident, who
supposedly hoped to use the convention to catapult himself into the gover-
norship. A rumor spread that Choate deliberately stacked the committee with
opponents so as to avoid alienating potential backers by seeming friendly to
enfranchisement. This was a personal blow to organizers, since Choate’s wife
supported their cause and even hosted “suffrage teas” at their home. Choate
himself, though, refused to become embroiled in the suffrage controversy.
Political opportunity trumped familial loyalty and democratic principles, at
least in activists’ retelling.155
Scott’s metropolitan-dangers comment seems to have struck a chord as
well, with some delegates echoing his rationale during the August debate on the
Suffrage Committee’s recommendation. One man from rural Genesee County
worried about the corruption inherent in urban life. In “cities where drunk-
enness prevails and where votes are sold by the hundred,” Nathan Woodward
preached, political equality “would only enable the drunken husband to sell his
own vote and that of his wife and daughters.”156 The chairman of the Suffrage
Committee lectured that using Wyoming as a precedent for New York State was
inappropriate, since New York teemed with cities that were “seething caldrons
of political heat and excitement, hotbeds of vice and corruption,” and home to
“swarms of criminals.”157 One official from Manhattan felt so offended by such
swipes that he used his time on the floor to defend his city and its “hundreds
and thousands of women . . . whose loveliness and whose purity and virtue”
were undeniable.158
The general convention agreed with the Suffrage Committee’s deci-
sion. Fifty-eight delegates voted in favor of suffrage; ninety-seven opposed it.
Delegates provided a panoply of reasons defending their verdict: enfranchising
women might lead to disputes in families and thereby increase the number of
“separations, and [result in] the consequent destruction of home”; only those
who could enforce the laws should vote; no benefits would result if women pos-
sessed the franchise.159 Just as suffragists were beginning to see the resources
in Gotham mobilized for their cause, they were thwarted, in part, by the very
perceptions of the city that they themselves had not only helped to spread, but
that many believed.
New York City’s first generation of suffragists began its work in the 1870s
anxious about urban life and highly aware of the metropolis’s geography of re-
spectability. The power of money and the sanctity of the contract provided one
way they navigated through this geography. But, for a cause always desperate
for funding, this could provide only a temporary salve. Meetings frequently
retreated to the privacy of individual homes. The city drowned the crusade in
its sea of frenetic energy. Organizers struggled to make a mark on the land-
scape, unable to consistently target Gotham’s various enclaves, read its so-
cial networks, or breach its elite fortresses. Instead of recognizing the various
communities that made up Gotham, lobbyists saw one overwhelming, mono-
lithic, and inaccessible behemoth.
Still, a wave of firsts buoyed New York City suffragists in 1894. The op-
portunity created by the New York State Constitutional Convention drew a
new phalanx of elite women into the movement with a different relationship
to urban space than the middle-class suffrage establishment. They politicized
the exclusive Sherry’s restaurant, turning it into a base for enfranchisement.
The New York City Woman Suffrage League itself began to read the metropolis
more strategically, establishing headquarters in the city’s consumer hub. As
quickly as the crusade landed in newspapers, though, it disappeared. In the
succeeding months, the Volunteer Committee morphed into the League for
Political Education, an organization that prioritized civic education over polit-
ical mobilization.160 Socialites’ actions seemed to fulfill journalists’ prophecies
about elite suffrage. For many, suffrage was indeed a “fad.” Reporters’ interest
waned as affluent women looked elsewhere for productive outlets following
defeat.
Monied women’s involvement did not have the desired effect on delegates.
It also served to reinforce stereotypes about suffragists, as journalists drew
distinctions between unladylike, stalwart activists and the elegant, wealthy
newcomers. Yet, 1894 remained a milestone year in suffrage memory. Activists
in Massachusetts distributed the New York State campaign report to educate
citizens there the following year.161 California strategists used New York’s model
of petitioning combined with mass meetings during that state’s unsuccessful
1896 suffrage bid.162 Even a decade later, the 1894 crusade remained a cam-
paign highlight, with Carrie Chapman Catt referring to it as a “critical time” in
a letter to Catherine Abbe.163 The city contained dangers for women, but it also
had advantages. Before campaign leaders could learn to harness them, though,
intra-suffrage conflict threatened to destabilize the movement in its entirety as
a separate metropolitan identity cohered and roiled the institutional landscape.
2
Becoming “A Lover of the
Metropolis,” 1895–1906
Elizabeth Cady Stanton had a lot to celebrate in November 1895. Women in

Wyoming and Colorado could vote. Most states had suffrage organizations af-
filiated with her National American Woman Suffrage Association, and its reach
was growing; it held its first annual convention below the Mason-Dixon Line
that winter.1 And, the previous year, New York came the closest it had ever been
to enfranchising women. Suffrage had arrived onto the political scene. The
fete for Stanton’s eightieth birthday would showcase these achievements, and
party hosts needed to find the most fitting venue for the event. They ultimately
selected the opulent Metropolitan Opera House, since, in Susan B. Anthony’s
words, it provided a “handsome setting for our army of white haired pioneers
[emphasis in original].”2 Organizers hoped this landmark—“one of the great
opera-houses of the world,” a travel guide boasted—would underscore Stanton’s
importance.3
Three thousand women poured into the Metropolitan Opera House that
November evening. Fashionable women who participated in the 1894 New York
State Constitutional Convention drive left the quiet of their homes to navigate
the urban thicket and attend the gala. Lillie Devereux Blake made the trip,
presenting Stanton with an inscribed silver cup on behalf of her New York City
Woman Suffrage League.4 Even Mariana Chapman, an active suffragist who
would take charge of the state association the following year, traveled from her
beloved Brooklyn into Manhattan for the event.5
The New York Recorder could barely contain its excitement, crowing that
the “Reunion of Pioneers” was the “Event of the Century.” The gathering, the
newspaper reported, “was an event . . . the like of which will never be repeated.
It brought together on one platform the pioneers of woman’s advancement in

the arts, sciences, and politics.”6 The journalist extolled the fete’s historic na-
ture but, in so doing, correctly sensed a generational shift on the horizon. No
such reunion would be possible a decade later—Stanton would pass away in
1902, Anthony in 1906, and Blake would largely withdraw from the movement
by 1908.7
Historians have debated how to understand these transitional years, with
some considering this period a nadir and others viewing it as a “renaissance”
for the national movement.8 Neither of these national paradigms, though,
captures the city campaign’s erratic nature as the nineteenth century slipped
into the twentieth. Rather than grinding to a standstill following defeat at the
1894 New York State Constitutional Convention, city work continued and
new organizations emerged. The Manhattan suffrage movement broadened
its agenda, reimagined women’s place in the metropolis, and mobilized elite
spaces. But it was also far from relishing in a “renaissance.”
Instead, a complicated and divided institutional landscape developed
in Manhattan at century’s end, destabilizing suffrage networks that once
had connected the city campaign with its state and national counterparts.
The municipality’s haute geography provided urban advocates like Blake
opportunities to advertise the movement’s respectability. At the same time, met-
ropolitan suffragists promised to purify other parts of the urban landscape with
the ballot, capitalizing on gendered notions of morality and revising perceptions
of the city to make their case. Not everyone celebrated these developments,
subtle and unintentional as they were. The redesigned city agenda confounded
some in the state and national movements who did not have the same access
or claim to it that those within the metropolis did. Consolidation and personal
animus threw the growing divide between Manhattan insiders and state/na-
tional outsiders into stark relief, severing links in the process. The harmony
at Stanton’s 1895 gala hid the brewing conflict that was about to surface over
New York City’s place in the state and national movements.
The 1894 New York State Constitutional Convention had enlivened the
metropolitan women’s rights campaign. American aristocrats had rushed
headlong into the drive, unprecedentedly politicking in their grand homes
and luxurious retreats. They even created a parallel campaign to promote the
ballot. As quickly as the elite world opened, though, its door slammed shut
following the amendment’s defeat. The League for Political Education, with its
more abstract commitment to civic literacy, immediately attracted the attention
of socialites who campaigned for the vote in 1894. Many who spearheaded the
work at Sherry’s would fade from the suffrage scene, as civic education became
their primary focus.9 Nevertheless, mainstream lobbyists in Gotham seemed
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heen, in struik en teelt onder vruchtboomen en hagen,
gloeide middagzon. ’t Groen stroomde lichtglans af,
zilverig, goudvlammig en fijn beschaduwdoezeld in al
andren gloei, tegen ’t licht. Onder de dichtgegroepte
vruchtboomen lommerde ’t koel als in ’n
kreupelboschje. Enkele in hoogen uitgroei waaierden
wat kronkeltakken uit, betrost met appeltjes, zacht
rose blozend als warm gestoeide kinderkopjes. Overal
onder getwijg, groen en rozerood, vlekte vruchtglans
tegen doorschemerend luchtblauw, takkenprieel in
zware dracht van vruchten, die vergoudden in vloed
van zonnevuur. Kleintjes zwollen de vruchtjes áán,
dof, tintwarm en pastelteer. Vlak bij den mossigen
stam verdrongen ze elkaar om licht en lucht. Wat
takken, harpig uitgebogen, goud-groenden in
zonnejool en appeltjes gloeiden dáár in glanzenden
wasem. In wilderen uitgroei stonden de pereboomen,
bronzig-dof bevrucht en de pruimen, donker
voldragen, groen als groote olijven. Op naakten hoek
tegen luchtblauw in, stronkigde vlak vóór Kees, op
woest onkruid-plekje, één appelboompje, smal en
tenger-rank voorover gebogen, luisterend naar de
zoemende zomer-geruchten.
En rondom vervloeide de geur van doorstoofde

gouden vruchtenhofjes, zèlf behageld van rozeroode
wang-appeltjes, nog gesmoord in groeigloed.
Afgevallen peertjes en appeltjes verwurmden
bleekgroen en gelig, overal verwaaid en uitgestrooid
onder de boompjes in ’t heet-geschroeide gras en
onkruid, tusschen koolen en zoete fransjes. [258]
Piet, met triestig gebaar wees naar ’n pruimeboom.

—Kaik Kees, wà vol die stoan hee? aa’s t’ie moar nie
’t weggetje naimt van sàin doar op ’t hoekie! die
gladekker! bai de biete main ik! die hep tug puur sain
aige dood draigt hee! snó’f’rjenne! da hai je d’r puur
nooit sien! die hep ’r sóó veul had dá’ tie nie raip hep
kenne worde hee? t’jong ’n skoon sicht da’ waa’s.. da
hep je d’r vast nooit sien!
Er ruischte weer stilte in den tuin en boomblaren

windsuizelden golf-zacht.—
Kees plukte door, sjouwde de volle bakken naar den

dorsch, waar al ’t marktgoed, buiten zonnebroei
opgestapeld stond. Op elkaar tegen stal áán, op groep
en voorgang, dromden de kisten met versche sla,
dopperszakken, aardbei-vrucht, frambozen, roode en
gouden bessen; één feest van kleur, saamgebroeid
met zweet, ùit zonnelaai naar koelenschouw en
dorsch gedragen.—Door den tuin klonk zangerig
gejoel en jeugd-jubel van kinderstemmen; meisjes die
meeplukten en meesjouwden. Dirk was van ’t
peenbossen naar de snijboonen gesjòkt, hurkte
tusschen d’enge wanden van hoog goud-groen, die
poortten als ’n hal van lommerlicht op ’t pad, waar de
zon goud schroot over uitgescherfd had, rijzen en
latten in gloei verglinsterend.—
—Aa’s wai dá’ weertje nou d’r moar houê, riep ouë
Gerrit in ’t voorbij gaan tegen Dirk.
—Nou op haide smoor je van de hitte en strak-en-an

bibber je van de kou.… hee.. Ouë!.. set rais ’n kerel an
de andaifie hee! Mot nou skoffele! Sel’k d’r sellefers
wel de bolletjes opknappè!
Gewroet van laat-zomersche drukte woelde rond in
Wiereland en Duinkijk. Het haventje, op marktdagen,
daverde en mokerde vol van woel en klank. In alle
hoeken schreeuwden en sjacherden de koopers weer
met duizenden kilo’s roode bessen, zwarte, gouden en
paarse; frambozen en aardbei, in zoetrookige geuren,
verwasemend door de groenten. De Haven lag
volgestort van nieuwen kleurbrand en vruchten.—De
groentekarren, [259]in d’r frisschen uitbouw van sla en
wortelen, bakken en manden, ratelden áán, hortten
weg, als steeg er weer razernij van mid-zomerschen
uitvoer en pluk. Vóórklank van boonentijd weerschalde
er, boonentijd die in den helleroes van kermis had
moeten vallen. Maar van alle kant werd er geraasd op
de Haven, dat ’t leelijke weer van half Juli den boel
had bedorven, dat ’t gek-laat zou worden, nou met de
boonepluk.
Wiereland koortste weer in fellen zomerbrand en

zonnelaai. Zeegasten stormden áán, iederen dag
meer, en ’n woelige kinderbende, meisjes, prachtig
bekleurd met roode en blanke japonnetjes, cier- en
stroo-hoeden stoeiden rond. Moedertjes jong, met
bloei-bloemige mousselientjes, teêre krepjes en
neteldoek-blank, in dartele cier, kuierden met parasols
statig tusschen de schooierige plukkertjes van
Wiereland; stedeke-kinders, die stil afgunstig ’t
vakantie-jolende stadsvolkje van rijkaards begluurde.
’n Por van moeders en broers in hun ribben en gauw
hurkten ze weer neer, de verbrande tronietjes naar de
heete aarde gebukt, plukkend van knie op knie, in
beestigen zwoeg, àl voort.—
Langs hun akkers strooide de tingelingende bellezang
van tramkoetsiers vroolijke jubel-klanken rond,
vergalmend over de zwoegkoppen, als een trillend
zomersch vreugdgeluid door de zonnige lucht en ’t
landgroen.—Rijtuigen stoften áán en wèg in
zandorkaan; fietsen snorden voorbij, in spakenfonkel.
En heel de brandende ploeterstreek drukte en raasde
van zomergenot, omtooverde met hittekleur en licht,
de gasten en ’t joelend vakantiebezoek. Dwars door
den zwoeg van ’t land joeg de zeetram de menschen
en kinders, met kleurig speelgoed, spaden en
emmertjes, scheepjes en harken. Wierelands
notabelen zwierden mee in zomerpronk; nuffige
dametjes met blank spel van felle kleuren òpzengende
parasols, kleur-zonnen in ’t helle groen, in den
zonneregen van licht en vlam.—Zomerkostuumpjes
lichtten en blankten tusschen de stille lommerlaantjes,
overal drentelden dametjes en heertjes, met
kraakschoen-gestap, rijkelui’s-lekker op de zand-
zachte paadjes.—Zoo, met den dag, [260]stroomden
meer gasten aan, door de groote beukenlaan, die als
’n wondre goud-groene poort lommerig den weg naar
zee opende. En langs heel den weg van Duin- naar
Zeekijk, gloeide en zand-koekte het heete gruis,
brandde en zengde ’t zomerleven, omschroeiend in
stuifselwolken boerenkarren, rijtuigen en trams, dat de
landwerkers, achter de hagen, vlak aan de straat,
onder zuilen van stofwarrel verstikten. Loom
passeerden de tuinders ’t zomergewoel. In hùn
ploeter, voelden ze ’t dwaas, ’n gang naar zee, voor
hùn zelf. De zee, waar ze vaagjes, in teisterenden
winterstorm en schal, alleen ’t gerucht van hoorden
aandruischen achter veréénzaamde duinen. Ze
verroerden geen stap voor ’t pronkende, schreeuwige
stadsvolkje, dat brutaal zich nestelde in hùn streek; de
verhuur-kamertjes van verdiengrage luitjes bejoelden,
de wegen bestoften in stikzand. Ze wisten van geen
zeelucht de zwoegers; van geen zilte zouten
ademhaal, geen frisschen stoei van strandstorm. En
Zondag’s, als ze vrij hadden, rookten ze liever hun
pijp, wandelden ze met de meiden naar den
Lemperweg, of bleven hokvast broeien binnen de
mikken, in zaligen luier.—Dàt veel liever, dan op stap,
op den gloeizandweg naar zee, ’n uur gaans. En de
ouderen, vol van zorg en moeheid en weekzwoeg,
hokten in hun naar lucht-snakkende, behorde duffe
kamertjes, slurpten d’r koffie, koffie en weer koffie,
smakten d’r pijp, d’r pruim; besabbelden d’r sigaar en
loerden rustigjes naar ’t gewas. En ’s avonds de zuip,
stillekens de warme kroeg in, met ’t Zondaggegons
van alderlei spreeksel nog in d’ooren. Door de week,
ging van zelf voort hun zwoeg en zonnebrand, hun
sjouw en pluk, dat ze ’t bloed onder de nagels vuurde.
Niet meer keken ze òp, naar ’t vakantiegewoel op de
paadjes, langs hun akkers, bang voor ’n minuut
verlies, vóórt tot laat-avond, naar havenkant. En daar
nog zweet-doordropen van ’t gloeiende land, met ’n
afzakkertje, zogen ze in, ’t heete vocht, als zalige
lafenis voor dichtgebrande van stof verstikte kelen.—
[261]
[Inhoud]
IV.
Twee weken vóór de kermis was de lucht weer

gedraaid. De roode kolen stonden verkwijnd, met rot-
doorvreten bladeren. Angstige drukte en onrust joeg
er onder de tuinders.
—Daa’s t’met ’t lekkerstje weertje da je hebbe kèn,

zeurde Klaas Koome, voor ’n akker van Ouë Gerrit;—
ik konstesteer van daa’tje nou t’minste loope ken, en
d’r nie je aige f’rsmelt.. enne de boonebeweging goan
tog s’n gangetje.. want moànd blaift moànd … op dá’
terrain merkeere de boontjes de paàs …
—Hoor hemmis, hoor hemmis! hoonde Dirk bij de

andijvie gehurkt,—skoenmoaker hou je bai je leest
hee? bi jài besuikerd?—
Ouë Gerrit bromde wat mee, gejaagd en kramperig als

ie zich voelde in ’t onweer-zwoelige grauwe weer. Die
dreigluchten maakten ’m soms stikken, of ’r wurgangst
op z’n strot drukte, in vaaglijk onbestemde benauwing
’t bloed ’m naar den kop jagend.—Angst die ’m aan ’t
fantazeeren bracht, doorhollend hallucineeren, in al
erger benauwing om dingen die gebeuren kònden.
Angst die ’m zelf folterde, z’n brein martelde, hèm
allerlei dingen liet zien, die nièt bestonden, z’n oogen
in donkeren floèrs legden, waarin lichtende
sterrendans vonkte. En dan maar brommen en klagen
luid, luid, om iets ’r tègen te doen.
—Nou, da sel d’r ’n mooie worde, mit de boone!.…

hoho! d’r is gain son.. wá’ sit dá’ ding! aa’s tie moàr nie
wegblaift hee? ’t is te dol.. en.. en.. tug.. vier en vaif en
nie g’nog!.. daa’s één raige al raige! enn hoho!.. ’s
aofus hep je dâ dolle onwair, sonder daa’t hiet waa’s
hee?
Koome lummelde nog wat voor de haag, lolde met

Dirk over de kermis, waar heel Wiereland al vol van
was; slenterde eindelijk verder.
Drukker werd er geschoffeld tusschen de selderie.

Kees plantte andijvie uit en zette op regels.—Laat-
gezaaide sla werd weer in bakken uitgedragen naar
de markt. Tot schemer doken en verbukten de kerels
en kinders op de duisterende akkers. Wisselend [262]in
gang, trokken de werkers drie maal òp naar de groote
stad. Het groote kargerucht, de hos van ’t landvolk,—
één in hun epischen samengroei van man-paard en
kar-en-koopwààr, verklonk als onweer al over de
bekeide straatjes. De Haven daverde van herrie en
hartstocht-koop der venters.
Op ’t land trapten de kinders, nu vaders en bazen naar

stad waren, de verdorde erwtenranken òp, de goud-
gele slepende haarbossen. In alle tuinderijen nu,
schemerden tusschen jong-groeiend boomgroen en
boerenkool, de goud-verrotte leeggeplukte
erwtenranken, soms èven zonnig overgloeid, als
brandende braam, vlam-roerloos. In enkele dagen
fladderden de bossen op de rijzenpunten, harige
kopgedrochten op pieken, hóóg tegen donkere lucht.
—Aan voet van rijzen, waar ’t stroo opgehokt stond,
bloeiden al weer late sperzie- en snijboonen.
Ouë Gerrit wou niet drogen op rijzen, in dat vuile weer;
smakte de ranken op hoopen bij modder-greppeltje
achter ’t erf, toch zuinig ze bewarend voor
koestrooisel. Kees was druk in de weer, rankte nieuwe
aardbeibedden in, en zuiverde ze van vuil.—Elk half
uurtje, tusschen marktgang, werd gewied. Heele
akkers met leege rijzen bleven nog naakt de lucht
inpieken, om dat er geen tijd was ze op hok te
smakken. Toch waren ze blij, dat de aardbeipluk
gedaan leek, al kopten ze nog wat mandjes. Van de
vroeg-soorten begonnen de blaadjes al rood te
gloeien, bloedrood en meloen-goudheet bezoomd,
sterfzang van ’t loof in den zonnezomer. Andere
bedden kwijnden met roest op ’t blad, door plotsen
guren omdraai van weer, wind en regen, in ’t hart van
groei en bloei geslagen.—
Ouë Gerrit gromde van ’s morgens tot ’s avonds.—
Het was geen làvende zomerregen meer, die als ’n

koele dronk neersuisde op ’t land, en tegen den
avond, over de akkers zangerige regenruisch verzong
door de donkere boomen en ’t loof, en dán zuchtte als
ademhaal van orgelregisters; dan droomerig tikkelde
en zacht knetterde heel fijn en weemoedig,—maar ’t
bleef ’n nattige wind-wilde regenzwalp, ’n modderig
plassende, dorrend-vernielende grauwe nattigheid.—
Ouë Gerrit vloekte, vloekte, onder ’t inranken van de
beplaste aardbeibedden. Wàt ie aanraakte
[263]klefferde, was bemodderd. Z’n klompen zogen in ’t
natte zand, kledderden en smakten zuigend onder z’n
hielen. Rechts en links de bedden, rankte ie tegelijk de
jonge stekjes. Wrevelig groef ie de plantjes in, keilde
ie verrotte voor zich uit. Toch was ie dolblij dat ie
dezen zomer niet alles op één worp had gegooid met
de aardbeien, zooals die stomme dokter Troost dat
wilde. En lol had ie ’r om, dat ie die beroerde grimmige
Ant had gebonjourd.
Voor Kees nou nog alleen wat bij de boonen, en dan

die ook òpgemarcheerd. Die paar mandjes aardbei en
bessen kon d’r Guurt zelf nog wel halen, die toch ook
’t land had an Ant. Gister had z’n meid nog veertig
mandjes geplukt.… Toch ’n rakker die Guurt. Als ie
maar wist wat of ze vóór had, met d’r vrijers..
En die Piet! hep d’r nog acht sint moakt! Waa’s d’r
puur ’n meroakel! hoho! aa’s die noar stad gong.…
waa’s ’t alletait ’n kwart meer aa’s Dirk, die krek vaif
sint hoalt!
Ouë Gerrit wist zich niet goed meer te roeren. Dirk gaf
’m eerst na den grootsten worstel, de ontvangen
guldens uit den zak. De Ouë kromp van angst, als ie
’m dronken van den marktdag zag den dorsch
inschommelen, angst dat ie den heelen boel zou
verzopen hebben, of verspeeld. En als ie dan maar ’n
kik gaf, blafte Dirk hem nijdig tegen z’n hielen, dat ie
schrok, en afgebluft loenschte. Piet gaf alles dadelijk,
al gapte ie ’r later weer van weg voor de zuip, maar
Dirk hield de duiten in z’n ijzeren knuisten heet
gevangen.—Dan eindelijk, moest ie na z’n verbluffing
opspelen, schreeuwen, stompen en beuken in
bloedspuw van nijd, en traag ging de klepzak dan
eindelijk open, klefferden de morsige dubbeltjes,
kwartjes en centen naar buiten, naar hèm toe, onder
één grom en snauw. Ging hij natellen dan vloekte Dirk.
„Tel aa’s je je koarsies uitbloast”, hoonde die, en
sarrend liet ie ’m zien de notities, wel wetend, dat ouë
Gerrit toch niet lezen kon, ’n letter zoo groot als ’n
paardekop niet.—
Smartelijker, gejaagder voelde ie z’n onmacht, ouë

Gerrit, omdat ie zelf niet meer de stad inventen kon.
Soms, als ie wat beet had weer, kon ’m de heele boel
niet meer schelen; zag ie heel klaar z’n ondergang in,
hij op ’n hokkie, de kerels op ’t [264]land als knechten.
Dan weer bedacht ie, dat zoo iets toch maar niet in
een ging, hij z’n meeste geld toch bij de fabrieken,
vast liet liggen, tot hij November zelf betalen moest.
Soms, drensde ’m door z’n kop dat Dirk vroeger veel
beter voor ’m geweest was, toegevender en niet zoo
snauwend, maar dan zag ie later Dirk weer goeiiger
tegenover hem.—Als de vent maar geen geld zag,
want dàn wier ie dol.—
Vandaag had ie nog ’n bak bessen geplukt, ’n

dubbeltje per mandje. En nog ’n prachtig dotje
frambozen! Dat klein goed gaf toch nog heel wat.…
Hoho!.… dá’ beskouwde ie nog wel ’n vaiftien pop
veur.… hai most d’r vast meer van tele, al há’ je d’r
tuinders die d’r niks mee van doen wille hewwe.. Da
klain goed.. want aldegoar benne se tug doodarreme
poerders. Van murrege, van vaif tot ses op ’t ploatsie,
had ie ’t nog uitrekend.… veur de feule framboosies
moakte ie nog twoalef sint ’t mandje.. hoho! wa’ skol
’t? Nou hoalde ie di joàr an sain vruchies.… frank … ’t
hooi uut! Ommendebai honderdvaiftien pop veur twai
koebeeste.…
Maar angstiger iederen avond, nà z’n stil gemijmer,
keek ie òp naar de lucht, angst-verwurgd voor onweer
en regen. Tegen iedereen klaagde ie.… ’t werd ’m te
benauwd.—
—De boone groeie d’r wel in ’t gewas hoho! moar de

frucht set nie! mi die raige! Wa binne dá’ nou weer
suinige weertjes.. in ’t hart van ’t somer, je sit d’r puur
te rille.… en soàfus omwair!
—Jaò buurman, f’rlaije jair satte wai op haide

hardstikke in ’t drukst van de boonetait hèe?
—Hoho.… vier- en vaif en nie g’nog.… suinige

weertjes …
En iederen dag, dat ’t guur-winderige weer aanhield

werd Ouë Gerrit banger en grimmiger. Er zat angst in
z’n keel. De zware onweerswolken voelde ie pletten
op z’n borst. Dan weer wreef ie zich aan z’n strot als
zat ’r ’n wurgklauw die telkens z’n luchtpijp zachtjes
toekneep, en hem nog maar uit ’n spleetje ademen
liet! Angst voor z’n boonen groeide. Nu en dan zag ie
z’n wijf verdwaald rondzoeken in de tuinderij. Hoe ze’r
heengestapt was wist ze zelf niet meer, en waar ze
terug moest nog minder. [265]Ze drentelde maar wat en
sufte. Plots ’n woesten snauw, greep ie ’r bij den arm,
bracht ’r in huis.—
—Jou stommeling, je loopt d’r t’met hardstikke in main

seldrie mi je klaufe.… hoho! jai geep! dwarrel! moak
jai d’r gain kapsies hee?—
Woest had ie ’r thuis op ’n stoel geduwd, waar ze
versuft neerblokte, en grommend sprong ouë Gerrit ’t
achterend uit.
—Dâ sal d’r ’n mooie sain.… Net had ie sain seldrielap

f’rkocht, veur vier sint ’t kilo! Waa’s d’r in sint meer
aa’s verlaije joar!.… Hoho!… sel je dá’ lamme dooie
waif d’r mi d’r blinde klaufe instappe … Wá’ gong die
seldrie nou hain?.. noa febriek?… had die dàor nie
meer moake kenne?.. of noar Amsterdam? da lamme
waif!.… Moar s’n spersie en snaiboone … da gong d’r
noar Noord-Skarrefou.. en Aiselmonde.. of ie ’t nie
wist! Da stomme waif.. sel d’r f’rduufeld soo p’rdoes op
sain duute trappe!.… Moar de boone … mostte ’t tug
dâ joar goed moake … most de loodpot vulle.. aers
waa’s die d’r gloeiend bai.… gaf de seldrie en vruchies
tùg nies.. nies.…
In regen en plassende nattigheid werd op de akkers

gewied, gekerfd met spa, geplukt in bakken. Seldrie
verwasemend door regengeur, stond gesneden en de
aardappels werden voor eigen maal wat gerooid hier
en daar.
Op de bollenakkers, wijd-om de tuinderijen en

gaarden gecirkeld, rookten blauwige wolkzwierselen.
In de greppels, volgeschoffeld met rot loof, hadden de
werkers ’n brandje gestoken, dat niet vlamde, maar
smeulde, en zwaar hei-brandig dampte over de
velden. Soms, als achter regengrauwe lucht en
wolkzilverend grijs, nattig en bleek, even de zon kwam
koekeloeren, met bewaterde gelige tronie, strooide ’t
licht wat nattig goud, schijnselig en blas, door de
blauw-dampende in rook stikkende akkers. De rooiers
dáár, in den ijl-blauwen smeulnevel, die glansde in
bleek zongoud, gebaarden in rokigen gloed, in mist-
blauw en zacht zonnevuur aangegloeid, stralend en
omsluierend tegelijk. Zoo, ’n uur lang, de bollenakkers
trilden in ’t waas-blauwe, zacht begloeide rooklicht, als
welfde zich een dampige [266]reuzengrot boven ’t land,
waar kleurige nevel doorheen woei, in stoei en spel,
van grotgeesten, in-en-uit. En rond ’t rookende loof
verschuifelden de glansen van dag-goud en
grasgroen, onder de werkende luchten, vol
regengrauw en paars-duister onweergedreig.
Na ’n uur dook zon weer wèg, vertraande z’n bleek-

gele waterige tronie achter droef-grauwe
wolkburchten, stortte regen weer neer bij hoozen. En
over de avond-akkers bleef ’t donker ruischen, soms
kletteren door bladloover, heel vèr en snaterend-
monotoon.
Ouë Gerrit beefde, snikte van angst als in wolkdonker,

’n vuurflits ’t fosforesceerende zwerk vlammig
doorzeisde, zònder dat donderslag nadreunde.—
’s Morgens, zóó uit angst-doorschokten korten slaap

wakker gejaagd, keek ie ’t eerst naar z’n boonen. Dit
jaar had ie moffenboonen bijgeplant, waarvan ie ook
nog heel wat mocht verwachten. Maar ook dàt gewas
stond hoe langer hoe slechter. Met angst in z’n oogen
keek ie schuw naar den bloesem van de hooge stok-
boonen, of ’r niet te véél verdorden en afvielen. De
paadjes dáár, schemerden wit van bloesem. En in z’n
angst zag ie ’t al erger sneeuwen, vol afgewaaide
dorrende bloesems. ’n Paar dagen had ie achtereen in
huis, wat bollen gesorteerd. Maar nou, met de rooi van
wat narcissen moest ie eruit, sorteeren op den
klefferigen modderig verzogen grond, omdat zulk
goedje altijd buiten liggen bleef. En de kerels, achter ’t
erf, en op de Beek, tusschen de aardappels en
koolen, stonden verzopen en verflodderd van regen
en nattigheid, te wroeten in de vunzige aarde. Soms
zóó doorzogen tot op ’t hemd, dat ze zich iederen
avond d’r regen-stinkende kleeren uit te wringen en te
verdrogen hadden boven vuur. En voort over de
zomerlanden joegen de grauwe wolkensteden, laag,
bang-dreigend, vol duister-paarse ontzetting.
Soms kon Ouë Gerrit de heele boel geen drommel

meer schelen, al bralde en rotsblokkig-roffelde en
stortte ’t onweer in, boven z’n kop, al flitste ’t vuur zig-
zag vizioen-snel door den hemel, al had ie z’n centen
voor pacht en hypotheek nog voor [267]’n kwart deel
niet bij elkaar, al rotten z’n boonenbloesems ’m zóó,
voor de oogen weg. Die uurtjes leefden er zalig voor
’m, als ie pas wat gegapt had, en met heerlijk-woest
voluptueus steelgenot, met nog jeuk-brandende
knuisten van grijp-verlangen, naar z’n kelderhoek
holde. Vloeken kòn ie, als ie daar niet dikwijls genoeg
vrij mocht afzakken. Guurt in haar dralende
onnoozelheid, had in den voorhoek allerlei rommel
neergesmakt; mandjes, roestpannen, zaklorren,
houtblokken, takkebossen, waar ze nou telkens
tusschen snuffelde. Snauwig keek ze ’m aan, als ie
trapgat afstrompelde. Dan bitste ze ’m nijdig toe wat ie
in den kelder van doen had. ’t Was verduiveld, of ze
voèlde dat ’t dan hevig heet in ’m liep; dat zorgen en
angst in z’n strot dichtschroefden, dat ie àfwilde van
z’n benauwing, hem z’n roeszaligheid van-bij-z’n-
spullen-zitten, dáár kon verzwijmelen en zich
verdooven. Gauw moest ie dan ’n uitpraatje klaar
hebben, en zoo liep ie wel uren rond te scharrelen in ’t
vervuilde kelderhok, allerhande pestige vervelende
dingetjes doend, die hij niet wòu doen, Guurt
vervloekend, dat zij, in d’r smerigheid en
verwaarloozing van huishoudingen, noù, nou hìj heet
liep, zich daar vastzoog tusschen de lorren,
rondsnuffelde met Job’s geduld, en hèm belette z’n
rommel te grijpen, te omtasten, met z’n brandende
begeer-oogen te omgretigen.—Als ze eindelijk
opstapte, holde ie naar z’n hok, in woesten grabbel
met angst-argwaan, heet-gejaagd loerend op ’t
keldertrapgat, in duizelende verrukking en hart-
mokering, dat ze’m toch nooit zouên snappen. Hoorde
ie gedruisch boven ’t luik, voetgeschuifel en kreukig
rokgeschuur, dan beefde ie, bééfde ie, bleef ie toch, in
koorts-spannende angst-verrukking oogen-gretigend
waanzinnen bij z’n spullen, wagend, alles wagend tot
de laatste gevaar-sekonde.—
Aan tafel ’s middags keek ie angstiger Guurt áán, of

ze wat zeggen zou, wat gemerkt had, maar er kwam
geen woord uit z’n meid, daarover.
—Ouë nog ’n spekkie? was ’t eenige wat ze zei, klonk

’m gemoedelijk, na z’n overspannen angst voor
gesnapt-zijn, fantazie-angst die ’m folterde en doorreet
van schok-gevoel, elk [268]oogenblik: noù-zal-je ’t
hewwe.—En vriendelijk-lekker antwoordde ie:
—Heul groag maid, heul groag!
Daarna zei ie in zich zelf, de vraag van Guurtje wel

tien maal over, dat ’t van binnen in ’m druischte en
klonk:.. Ouë nog ’n spekkie?.. Ouë nog ’n spekkie?..
Maar telkens veranderde ie toon-accent, zich zelf dan
afvragend of ze ’t wel zoo ècht gemoedelijk bedoeld
had, als hij ’t eerst meende.—Voor zijn wijf had ie
heelemaal geen angst meer. Ging ie ’s nachts soms
nog naar z’n kelderhok, voorzichtig in de paar uurtjes
duister maar, dan bleef ze’m soms aanstaren, keek hij
haar terug áán zonder dat ze ’n stom woord kon
uitbrengen. Meestal kon ’r spraak zich niet eens meer
op den naam van ’r man smakken. Dan voelde hij zich
overmoedig, demonisch-sarrend, lolde ie ’r even
zachtjes in de ooren.
—Gerrit goan d’r bai s’n bulle waif, sain bulle waif!
hoho!
—Bulle.. bulle? klankloos haperde en teemde ze

idioterig terug, zonder besef de woorden van ’r lippen
versullend. Dan grinnikte ie zoetjes-gesmoord, bang
voor de anderen die wèl beseften. Kwam ie terug uit
den kelder, dan lag ze weer te lip-puffen of staarde ze
wakker naar ’m òp, zonder begrip, met staar van ’n
stille idiote in d’r doffe oogen.
Maar nou, in die broei-grauwe luchten, met al dat

onweer, dat ’m deed stikken van benauwdheid was z’n
overmoed tegenover haar ook dikwijls wèggezakt.
Z’n boonen! z’n boonen! als die maar bleven!

Van de stamsperzies hadden de jongens al wat
gehaald. Kees was bedankt, mocht weer eens
aanslenteren in ’t drukst van den pluk. Ouë Gerrit
raasde, schold, giftiger onstuimiger op ’t weer. Hij
berukte z’n baard, z’n haren, zich-zelf omfolterend met
angstvragen, hoe dat afloopen moest. Nou had ie
gedacht er zoo onverschillig mogelijk onder te blijven.
De bloesem en afval sneeuwde áán met z’n angst
mee, en telkens keek ie bangelijker hoe de ranken
zich hielden.
—Hoho … vier-en-vaif en nie genog, kaik d’r rais

waa’n woar d’r lait! doar ken je ’n huurtje van
beskouwe.. snof’rjenne, [269]teemde ie naar Dirk die ’m
met ’n snauw afgromde, en zonder ommezien op z’n
uitgeplante andijvie aanstramde, kopgebukt en spier-
gespannen, als ’n paard dat vrachtkar aansjort in
eersten opzet.—
—Is da nie vast ’n skande, soo veul nat weer, in ’t

harretje van Augustus t’met. Z’n kinderkop wrangde
elk uur knorriger, en z’n bisschopsbaard trok ie met
woeste handvegen, heen en weer. Wat had ie d’r nou
an dat stelletje moffeboonen, en die dubbele
stamsperzies.… aldegoar grof goed.. aa’s de
stokboone nie gonge! kaik! nou had Piet d’r f’murge ’n
tàchtig boontjes fònde.. ’t Waa’s god-gekloagd!
Skande.. skande! En hep d’r Dirk nie veuls te loat
d’andaifie uitplant? en soo waid van malkoar.. Dá’ had
d’r end Juli op regels motte stoan. Nou most tie d’r
nog òpbinde.… aa’s ’t goed gong! Somers-andaifie
òpbinde! wie hep d’r ooit soo sout gaite? Die staifkop!
hoho! D’r had al ’n gaile krop insitte kenne.. aa’s tie se
op malkoar plant had.…
Morrend en vloekbrommend liep ie overal door den

tuin, loerender en banger, iederen dag. Ja, wel was ie
stom geweest om die spruitkool tusschen zijn boonen
te zetten.
—Sel d’r is ’n nat klompie gaife!
Langzaam zetten de boonen áán. ’t Weer bleef guur,

grauw-zilverig, al stroomde de regen niet meer. De
spruitkoolen, omzaaid van kleine bolletjes, dropen van
water, in glans-plassig nat. Gloei-droppels trilden op
de vette roode kolen, op de bieten, sla en ruche-fijne
gekartelde boerenkool. ’t Groen rondom blonk en glom
nattig onder ’t grijze luchtzware grauw. Onrustiger,
banger sjokkerde ouë Gerrit door z’n tuinen, dan op
de Beek, dan achter z’n huis, dan in ’t duin, wel
voelend met scheutjes blijdschap dat er wat hitte
aanbroeien ging onder ’t onweer-zwoele grauw.
De landwerkers zongen opgewondener onder hun

arbeid. Nog drie dagen en de kermis zou er zijn, de
groote uitbarstende pret voor hun zomerzwoeg, het
kleurigbonte wonder van tenten, kramen en spullen.—
En overal rondom, de kristallen fonkel van kronen en
de helle gloeilichtflakker van lampen, verduizelend
[270]voor hun begeer-oogen. Nou kwam de kermisgloei
die ze bekroop als ’n achtdaagsche koorts, ’n krisis
van hevig leven bracht, waarin ze uitbarsten en
verzwijmelen zouden, zich rollen, met hun zware
boerenpassie, in de modder van diergenot. Daarin
zouden ze zich wreken òp bijeengespaarde woede,
haat en wrok. Nou mochten ze vechten, mokeren,
zuipen, geilen.
En overal koortste ’t lied uit, zongen ze op de akkers,

in de straatjes, zalige onbestemde dwarrel van
ronkende geluiden; krijsch naar genotsroes die
opvuren kwam. Hun wreede kelen raasden, en
verschalden kermiszang van ’t vorige jaar. En
klankengalm bevend en rauw van hartstocht,
verschorde over ’t grauwend-zomersche land.
Ouë Gerrit vloekte tegen de kermis die z’n boel nog

meer ging verpesten; de kerels lambeuken zou van
vermoeiïng, slaperigheid en hangerigen kregel.—
Dàt ging nou opstormen, dwars door ’t zware

boonenwerk. Maar toch wilde ie smoren z’n razernij,
want hóórden ze’m grommen, dan zouden ze’m vast
heelemaal laten stikken met den grooten haal, in de
blakerende kermisjool.— [271]

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Suffrage and the City : New York

Women Battle for the Ballot Lauren C.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress

Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

1. “The Wickedness of the Masses”: The Perils of Suffrage, 1870–​1894, 8

2. Becoming “A Lover of the Metropolis,” 1895–​1906, 33

3. Ushering in a “New Era,” 1907–​1909, 50

4. Geographies of Suffrage, 1910–​1913, 76

5. “Suffrage ‘Owns’ City,” 1913–​1915, 99

6. From Confrontation to Collaboration, 1916 and 1917, 124

Appendix: Key Suffrage Organizations in Manhattan, 155

Selected Bibliography, 225

One daydreaming strategy I developed while struggling with a difficult text

As a graduate student, I was fortunate to receive funding from the City

always complicated dynamic between gender, urbanization, and the women’s

my case urbanization and urbanity, in Sneider’s empire-​building—​to uncover

second-​generation leaders used spaces more strategically, although not always

encounter daily.2 Suffrage organizers in Manhattan proved unwilling to chal-

Manhattan’s leading women’s rights organization throughout the late nine-

In the story, gender discrimination is pervasive. Laura flees her family

the 1850s to expand this legislation. Representatives in Albany finally conceded

Whenever possible, though, Blake did try to tailor strategies to Manhattan’s

1894 grew so annoyed by “head of monopolies[’]” reluctance to donate money

ridicule. Exclusive parlors housed meetings. Supporters refused to disclose to

In an 1894 political cartoon, a socialite pressures a businessman to endorse equal

taken.”124 The Volunteer Committee capitalized on its access to elegant, lei-

to a “strictly cosmopolitan” group in the tenement-​filled Lower East Side that

Elizabeth Cady Stanton had a lot to celebrate in November 1895. Women in

It brought together on one platform the pioneers of woman’s advancement in

Kees zweeg. Z’n wijf kon ’m geen zier schelen. Woest

—Nou, da’ sel main ’n godsliefeheer skele! of je àchter

—Joa … aa’s je soafes stopt, soek je vast noà wá’ je

—Nou, je bint t’r nou op kommende waige hee?.…

Stil ’n poos bleven de kerels doorkruipen, ritselend in

En rondom vervloeide de geur van doorstoofde

Piet, met triestig gebaar wees naar ’n pruimeboom.

Er ruischte weer stilte in den tuin en boomblaren

Kees plukte door, sjouwde de volle bakken naar den

—Nou op haide smoor je van de hitte en strak-en-an

Wiereland koortste weer in fellen zomerbrand en

Twee weken vóór de kermis was de lucht weer

—Daa’s t’met ’t lekkerstje weertje da je hebbe kèn,

—Hoor hemmis, hoor hemmis! hoonde Dirk bij de

Ouë Gerrit bromde wat mee, gejaagd en kramperig als

—Nou, da sel d’r ’n mooie worde, mit de boone!.…

Koome lummelde nog wat voor de haag, lolde met

Drukker werd er geschoffeld tusschen de selderie.

Op ’t land trapten de kinders, nu vaders en bazen naar

Ouë Gerrit gromde van ’s morgens tot ’s avonds.—

Het was geen làvende zomerregen meer, die als ’n

Voor Kees nou nog alleen wat bij de boonen, en dan

Smartelijker, gejaagder voelde ie z’n onmacht, ouë

Vandaag had ie nog ’n bak bessen geplukt, ’n

—De boone groeie d’r wel in ’t gewas hoho! moar de

1. “The Wickedness of the Masses”: The Perils of Suffrage, 1870–1894, 8

2. Becoming “A Lover of the Metropolis,” 1895–1906, 33

3. Ushering in a “New Era,” 1907–1909, 50

4. Geographies of Suffrage, 1910–1913, 76

5. “Suffrage ‘Owns’ City,” 1913–1915, 99

my case urbanization and urbanity, in Sneider’s empire-building—to uncover

second-generation leaders used spaces more strategically, although not always

to a “strictly cosmopolitan” group in the tenement-filled Lower East Side that