Fifty Books Project 2023

 

Gilded Suffragists by Johanna Neuman

 

Neuman is a journalist and historian.  Gilded Suffragists is the first of two books she has written on the battle to get women the vote.  It is a very specific slice of that history- looking at the activity and contributions of New York’s wealthiest women, the doyennes of high society who financed and took leadership in much of the fight and who, Neuman argues, have been left out of much of the subsequent history.  It is a fascinating deep dive into a few years of political and social ferment in a small geographic area – largely made up of 5^thAvenue in Midtown Manhattan.

 

Neumann begins with the formation of the Colony Club in 1905.  The turn of the last century was a kind of heyday for the private social club among the wealthy in NY.  The club offered a getaway from the dirt and chaos of the city, a place where the service, food, décor and clientele would be predictably within the expectations of one’s social class.  Until 1905, these clubs were exclusively male, and then Florence Jaffray Harriman (yes, her family donated the land that became the park), Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (yes, she later founded the museum) and Anne Tracy Morgan (yes, her father was J.P.)  simply decided to copy the model and make a club that was exclusively female – give the ladies somewhere to go for tea when they were in town, perhaps shopping, perhaps waiting for a train to take them to Newport or Saratoga.  

 

The idea was shocking to late-Victorian New York – that these guardians of domestic morality might look for someplace other than home.  But it proved to be more revolutionary than even its founders intended.  As part of the workings of a club, the Colony offered regular lectures and discussions – on art, science, music and the issues of the day.  It soon became clear that suffrage for women was one of the issues of the day and that there was enough disagreement among the members – the Club filled to capacity upon opening, every member a name from the Social Register – to warrant regular debates and discussions.  These debates caught the attention of the press – who liked nothing better than to report on the activities of these bold-faced names and contributed to the movement towards a state referendum to allow women to vote in NY State, which failed several times before finally passing in 1917.

 

Neumann follows the women of the Social Register most active in the movement over the next dozen years, dividing them into camps.  The more pragmatic, moderate camp of Katherine Duer Mackay (the Duer’s were active in the American Revolution) was known for her handsome figure and was not above flirting with state legislators as part of her lobbying effort.  She particularly eschewed the violent agitation that Emmeline Pankhurst was using in London, where suffragettes were throwing rocks at Parliament and attacking its members physically, and tried to make clear that if women got the vote they would continue to act like ladies.  The more assertive and demanding camp centered around Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, who made little secret of her financial and political support of Pankhurst and saw her power as coming from her wallet rather than her fashion sense.  Mackay gained the movement valuable publicity by associating herself, her followers and thus the movement with femininity and fashion.  One of her friends, Rita de Acosta Lydig, later donated her wardrobe to the Metropolitan Museum as the basis for the Costume Institute.  Meanwhile, Belmont financed campaigns to unseat legislators who opposed suffrage.  

 

Neumann stays focused on these divisions and rivalries as she outlines the role of men in the campaign and the evolution of tactics.  She observes along the way that the first time anyone pickets the White House, it is women fighting for suffrage and that the first time a house is opened for a tour in the tony section of Newport Rhode Island (such house tours are now a major tourist activity) it is Ava Belmont’s home and the tour is a fund raiser for her suffrage organization.  Contemporary activists might benefit (and continue arguing) over these tactics.  

 

Neumann has an interesting analysis of how World War I affected the suffrage movement.  Many of the suffragists were also pacifists and in the early months of the war the entire movement was accused of a lack of patriotism.  The first woman elected to Congress, Jeanette Rankin (elected from Montana, one of the first states to allow women the vote) served only one term in part because of her opposition to the war.  (She was re-elected 24 years later, again serving only one term after voting against World War II.)  Carrie Chapman Catt had become the leader of the moderate wing after Mackay’s ugly divorce forced her out of the public eye.  She turned against pacifism, arguing that suffrage was the hallmark of patriotism – women should be given the vote so that they could more fully support their country in its time of need.  At the same time, Alice Paul pressed on with picketing the White House, antagonizing Wilson, and running candidates against anti-suffragist politicians.

 

For Neumann, this represented a one-two punch, and neither tactic deserves to claim primary responsibility for the victory, though she argues that Catt’s success in getting the press and the general public to see suffrage as patriotic won the passage of the 19^th Amendment in 1920.  She makes a strong case that the victory in New York’s state amendment was key to the national change, as New York represented 10% of the nation’s voters at the time.  She also raises the possibility that the male support that was necessary to extend the vote (since in most states, only men could vote to ratify) may not have been terribly deep.  Apparently, on the election day a few months after the amendment took effect, Teddy Roosevelt called for his car to be brought around to take him to his polling place.  When he got in the car, he discovered that his wife was already in the back seat, waiting for him.  She, too, was going to vote.  Roosevelt rode to the polls in shocked silence.

 

Perhaps the only element of the book that is not entirely satisfactory is its very thesis.  Neumann argues that the more general movement involved a coalition of forces – working class women, union organizers, progressives, intellectuals and housewives in addition to New York’s gilded elite.  She outlines how the focus on the goal of getting the vote helped keep together a coalition that was otherwise rife with conflict, jealousy, rivalry and suspicion.  The working class elements of the coalition never fully trusted the elites who, from their perspective, were simply dabbling in politics for the fun of it.  Neumann also makes clear that some of the wealthy activists were openly campaigning for the vote so that educated elites could be a counterweight to immigrant laborers who were increasingly eligible to vote, but in their eyes not truly deserving.  With victory, these fissures in the community broke open and there was a concedrted effort on the part of more professional progressives to write out the contributions of Mackay, Belmont and others.  She cites a number of histories and autobiographies that make no mention of anyone from the Social Register.

 

Her discussion of these rivalries is fascinating – even if it does dwell too much on petty jealousies – but I have a hard time believing that she is righting some historical wrong.  The notion that history as written is not entirely accurate is a given.  The idea that it was the contributions of the rich and powerful that were left out is harder to accept.  Perhaps this is clarified in her other, longer and fuller history of the movement.