New York City's elite women who turned a feminist cause into
a fashionable revolution
In the early twentieth century over two hundred of New York's most glamorous socialites joined the suffrage ...movement. Their names-Astor, Belmont, Rockefeller, Tiffany, Vanderbilt, Whitney and the like-carried enormous public value. These women were the media darlings of their day because of the extravagance of their costume balls and the opulence of the French couture clothes, and they leveraged their social celebrity for political power, turning women's right to vote into a fashionable cause.
Although they were dismissed by critics as bored socialites "trying on suffrage as they might the latest couture designs from Paris," these gilded suffragists were at the epicenter of the great reforms known collectively as the Progressive Era. From championing education for women, to pursuing careers, and advocating for the end of marriage, these women were engaged with the swirl of change that swept through the streets of New York City.
Johanna Neuman restores these women to their rightful place in the story of women's suffrage. Understanding the need for popular approval for any social change, these socialites used their wealth, power, social connections and style to excite mainstream interest and to diffuse resistance to the cause. In the end, as Neuman says, when change was in the air, these women helped push women's suffrage over the finish line.
The history of the US women's suffrage campaign in the twentieth century has often devolved into a debate about whether mainstream politics or militant agitation won the day. This article argues that ...this division-between those who credit Carrie Chapman Catt and her pragmatic approach and those who trumpet Alice Paul for her campaign of White House protests-is a faux debate. A reading of American history suggests that any political movement for social change-from civil rights to LGBTQ rights-requires a one-two punch. The inside politico engages the powers that be, courting sympathy, while the outside agitator throws rocks at the establishment's gates, stirring fear about the risks of inaction. The coming centennial of the nineteenth amendment's ratification offers an opportunity to assess whether this scholarly battle over credit is anything more than a historical distraction, and to lament the missing veins of scholarship lost in its gaze.
Scholars of women's suffrage have long debated credit, a meditation on which leaders won the campaign to enfranchise American women. Many argue that victory came because of Alice Paul's militancy in ...picketing the White House. Others insist it was Carrie Chapman Catt's pragmatism in winning state victories. Still others note that both were needed, a political “one-two punch” of strategic effectiveness. This article suggests that one contingent often excluded from this narrative is men. Male suffragists are often portrayed as driven more by a hunger for quixotic political or sexual adventure, or by a chivalrous posture toward women. Examining the records of the New York Men's League for Woman Suffrage and the archival footprints male suffragists left behind, this article argues that whatever their motives, male suffragists made palatable to other men the once radical notion that women could join the coarse, corrupt, and cigar-filled world of politics without losing their femininity—or robbing men of their virility. By their very activism, they conditioned the public to see women—and men—beyond the gendered construct of the domestic sphere and in the light of the interest politics that dominated the Progressive Era.
Rare is the revolution that arrives with such elegance. Invitations bearing the Tiffany hallmark were “very stunning and expensive,” “as gorgeously got up as smart wedding cards.” Complete with reply ...paper and envelope, 150 invitations summoned recipients not to a costume ball or a society wedding but to a political rebellion—a 1909 campaign by high society to win the vote for women.²
Katherine Duer Mackay, whose family name first appeared in theNew York Social Registerwhen that oracle of exclusivity began publication in 1887, was an unlikely choice to lead the suffrage charge.³ In her lineage she counted
MERE MEN Neuman, Johanna
Gilded Suffragists,
09/2017
Book Chapter
Business stopped in Rhinebeck, New York, the day Jack Astor was buried. The quaint town in Dutchess County, home of Ferncliff, the Astor estate, lowered its flags to half-mast. Bells tolled at noon, ...and residents crowded the train station as his body was placed on board for the trip to Manhattan. There, at Trinity Church Cemetery in Upper Manhattan, the forty-seven-year-old scion of real estate wealth and social prominence was laid to rest in the family vault next to his mother, the indomitable Caroline Schermerhorn Astor.² Outside the cemetery, thousands perched near walls and on the fence and “on either
WHO WON SUFFRAGE? Neuman, Johanna
Gilded Suffragists,
09/2017
Book Chapter
When New York’s male voters granted women the power of the ballot on November 6, 1917, Vira Boarman Whitehouse was widely credited with the win.² Orchestrating a disciplined statewide campaign, she ...rolled up huge majorities in the city and almost reached majority in the more rural counties upstate. New York would now send to Washington, D.C., the largest pro-suffrage delegation in Congress, forty-three men whose voters had opted to include women in politics, improving chances for a federal amendment. Commentators gushed. “No state political organization in the American Union contains half the political ability and intelligence of the group of
The Petit Chateau stood in visual contrast to nearby brownstones, a wedding cake surrounded by sand blocks. As gawkers stood on Fifth Avenue shivering on a cold March night in 1883, all was warm and ...aglitter inside. Hostess Alva Smith Vanderbilt wore a white satin princess gown, made in Paris, embroidered in gold, topped by a veil of velvet, a diadem of diamonds, and a strand of pearls once owned, it was said, by Catherine the Great.² With a guest list of 1,200, a price tag of $250,000 ($6 million in today’s dollars), and silver party favors from Tiffany’s, the
A CLUB OF THEIR OWN Neuman, Johanna
Gilded Suffragists,
09/2017
Book Chapter
Clad in his gold-laced uniform, the watchman on duty at the Spouting Rock Beach Association knew by sight every carriage in Newport, Rhode Island. Only the elite could pass through his gates to ...sunbathe at Bailey’s Beach, a stretch of sand claimed by the wealthy in 1890 after trolley service made an earlier and more desirable plot, Easton Beach,² accessible to all sorts of people—“including domestics and Negroes, some of whom one would rather prefer not to meet in the water.”³ Unless the visitor was the guest of one of the members or bore a note of introduction “from
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