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Suffrage and the City
Suffrage and the City
New York Women Battle for
the Ballot
Lauren C. Santangelo
1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Acknowledgments, ix
Introduction, 1
Epilogue, 149
Notes, 157
Index, 245
Acknowledgments
“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
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
4 Suffrage and the City
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
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
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
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Language: Hungarian
A TÖMEGEK LÉLEKTANA
BUDAPEST
FRANKLIN-TÁRSULAT
MAGYAR IROD. INTÉZET ÉS KÖNYVNYOMDA
1913
A TÖMEGEK LÉLEKTANA
IRTA
GUSTAVE LE BON
FRANCIÁBÓL FORDITOTTA
Dr BALLA ANTAL
BUDAPEST
FRANKLIN-TÁRSULAT
MAGYAR IROD. INTÉZET ÉS KÖNYVNYOMDA
1913
FRANKLIN-TÁRSULAT NYOMDÁJA.
TH. RIBOT-NAK,
A REVUE PHILOSOPHIQUE SZERKESZTŐJÉNEK,
A COLLEGE DE FRANCE TANÁRÁNAK
ÉS AZ INSTITUT TAGJÁNAK
AJÁNLJA
G. LE BON.
A TÖMEGEK LÉLEKTANA
ELŐSZÓ.1)
A tömegek kora.
A jelenkor fejlődése. – A nagy kultúrváltozások a népek gondolkodásában
végbemenő átalakulások következményei. – A mai kor hite a tömegek
hatalmában. – Ez változtatja meg az államok hagyományos politikáját. –
Hogyan kerülnek felszínre az alsóbb néposztályok és mi módon gyakorolják
hatalmukat. – A tömegek elhatalmasodásának szükségszerű
következményei. – Hatásuk csak romboló lehet. – Ők semmisítik meg
végképen az elavult kultúrát. – A tömeglélektant általában nem ismerik. –
Törvényhozóknak és államférfiaknak mennyire fontos tanulmányozni a
tömegeket.
A TÖMEGLÉLEK.
ELSŐ FEJEZET.