The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  While the image of the New Woman glowed and glittered in suffrage literature, and admiring onlookers praised the hijinks and valor, the realities were more complex. Despite their self-mythologizing, these New Women were no more exempt from the difficulties of ordinary life than any other women, New or Old. Committed, creative, and often reckless, they idealized modernity even as they lived amid the emotional clutter of history and the ordinary constraints of love and the female body. Careening along the fast track of politics beyond the usual limits, they could still not outrun the retributions of normal life. Inez Milholland, a beautiful and wealthy Vassar graduate and lawyer, ascended to celebrity status in the movement. Radiating devotion to the cause, she led parades clothed in flowing white robes and riding a splendid horse—mounted in a regular saddle, astride, no lady’s sidesaddle. The image fused Joan of Arc with neoclassical nobility. But Milholland died tragically in 1916 at age thirty, from untreated pernicious anemia exacerbated by the exhaustion of the suffrage trail. Sara Bard Field exemplifies a more mundane mixture of vulnerability and political commitments. An Oregon divorcée and journalist, Field was obsessed with her long-running affair with a married man; stumping for suffrage in timber camps in the backwoods of Oregon was punishing work, but she won votes and she also found relief there from all-consuming obsession with a lover who promised much but delivered little.22

  Maud Younger epitomizes the feminist temperament at its most ebullient and least conflicted. She was an unlikely New Woman when she joined the cause. A San Francisco heiress, forty years old and unmarried, she might have been a patron of the arts or a doyenne of better landscaping in public parks. Younger, though, mixed a rich girl’s insouciance with serious politics of the first order. Prepared by her upbringing for a society lady’s life, she instead took up residence in a New York settlement house in 1901, when she was thirty-one. Convinced that working people could best improve their lives by unionizing, she devoted herself to organizing a waitresses’ union when she returned to San Francisco. As she fought city hall politicians who refused to enforce ten-hour-day laws already on the books, she discovered how much votes and elections mattered. Thus she moved easily from her labor commitments to the suffrage campaign. Reform women like her—and there were thousands—gave little credence to politics as a vessel for women’s civilizing mission, the assumptions Younger mocked as carrying “the blessings of our civilization” to the downtrodden. Nor were they primarily interested in same-sex unity—either its emotional pleasures or its supposed political power. Younger’s most spectacular suffrage feat—driving a six-in-hand team of white horses in a San Francisco parade—demonstrated the élan of a woman for whom men’s tasks, even the most daunting technical feats of strength (like driving six horses in harness), were all in a day’s work.23

  Impressed by the renaissance in the West, Carrie Chapman Catt, a moving force in international suffrage for a dozen years, took up a leading role in NAWSA in 1913 and the presidency in 1915. Catt was brisk, single-minded, and practical. She was never a principled exponent of democracy, and with her essentially white middle-class outlook she brought elements of the older class-based movement into modern suffragism. She grasped, though, the lesson of the West Coast example: NAWSA must change its assumptions about who was in the movement and who was out. The white Southerners were definitely out; labor and white men were in (and soon, even black men’s votes were in her sights), although African-American women were not. She set out to crack the Northeast, using Tammany Hall–style ward-by-ward organizing in New York and Boston. Eminently pragmatic, she once told a congressional committee that the rationale for voting didn’t much matter. She didn’t know whether suffrage was a right or a privilege, but “whatever it is, the women want it.”24

  With newly tolerant leadership at the top, cosmopolitan sympathies worked their way into the movement. In America, this meant openness to immigrants, exiles, and expatriates, many allied with the political left. In New York in 1912, a band of Chinese women students joined the New York suffrage parade. They were part of a milieu of Chinese students abroad that reached from Japan to New York. They were excited by the 1911 Revolution at home, where women’s newspapers and suffrage sentiments were part of the insurgency. In Nanjing earlier that year, sixty women inspired by the Pankhursts’ example had stormed the parliament of the new republic demanding the right to vote and stand for elective office. In New York, the spokeswoman for the marchers spoke glowingly of the connection between activity in the United States and China. A reporter from The New York Times noted wryly that it was odd that the United States hadn’t given women the vote when China (implicitly so backward, so feudal) had. In New York City, international suffrage made for good publicity: A banner declared that America was “Catching Up with China.”25

  Catt learned to drum up suffrage sentiment among working-class immigrants using college women to canvass. To court men’s votes and women’s support, workers trudged up and down tenement stairwells and marched into factory yards. Soapbox speakers set up on street corners, sometimes with translators in Yiddish, Italian, and Arabic. On New York’s Jewish immigrant Lower East Side during the 1915 state referendum on women’s suffrage, the match paid off handsomely. Organizers brought in men’s votes by winning over neighborhood women, courting labor sentiment, and appealing to immigrant ideals of democracy. Gertrude Brown, who worked there, found suffrage to be an exciting topic for everyone. A good time was had by all:.

  The East Side loved the night parades, with music, and great balls of yellow light bearing suffrage messages. Mothers … with babies on their hips, the green grocer, the delicatessen owner, all came out to watch. Children and dogs swarmed under foot, shrieking with joy at the lights and the bands, and it was all so lively and appealing that even tired housewives and young working girls fell in to help carry the banners.26

  The work could be monotonous and discouraging—doors slammed in your face, harangues from antagonists. Florence Luscomb, a Bostonian who went out to Iowa, quipped that in one town she found everyone dead but unburied. But the travel was thrilling, the pleasures of the road intense, the comedy of odd encounters and unexpected sympathies exhilarating. There was a hint of elation when respectable women broke the rules of where they could go, what they could do, and how they should act. Suffrage work was fun. Maude Wood Park, a skilled NAWSA speaker, fell in with a traveling circus in rural Ohio and rolled into town behind the elephants, her car swathed in suffrage signs and streamers. Under the big top, she gave a speech, but the dog act in the next ring drowned her out with barking, so the helpful ringmaster had the clowns distribute her leaflets.27 Spectacle and mobility created a buzz of zany energy, popularized arguments for the vote, and, in victorious state campaigns, built up the ranks of women voters.

  Everywhere, men materialized as allies and co-conspirators. As the ideology of women’s moral superiority abated, suffragists appealed more easily to working-class men. The need for support softened ingrained views of workers as drunks, wife beaters, and lugs who lacked the refinement and chivalry of middle-class men. Letters back to headquarters during four (unsuccessful) state campaigns in the East for suffrage referenda lingered over heartwarming encounters. “Men are the funny things!” marveled Florence Luscomb about her visit to a rubber boot factory. Luscomb was an architect with an MIT degree, and there was a touch of the upper-class charity lady in her description of “the dear creatures,” but regardless, she delighted in the easy tone she established with the men once, in New Woman fashion, she assured them they could smoke in her presence.28

  Enthusiasm for a common effort with men fostered faith that equality could be willed. By virtue of right feeling and feminist confidence, women could vault into easeful reciprocal relations with the sympathetic men who (in theory) awaited them, in labor and love. “Feminism Will Give—Men More Fun, Women Greater Scope, Children Better Parents, Life More Charm,” rhapsodized Edna Kenton in a magazine article on attaining equity on men’s terms. Feminism did stre
ss women’s unique character—their large souls, their nearly mystical capacity for sexual pleasure. Yet these differences were not seen as dividing women from men, but rather as explosive powers that would rocket them out of the domestic sphere into a cosmopolitan realm where they could do everything that men did. In the land of the human sex, the ancient battle of the sexes would finally end. A “true companionship and oneness” would blossom between the sexes, promised the Russian-born anarchist Emma Goldman, who became a sort of patron saint of revolutionary heterosexuality on the left-wing lecture circuit.29

  The women-only habits of the older movement appeared stuffy and Victorian, useless for the lives that modern women planned as men’s exuberant peers. Most assuredly men could be feminists, too. Some complied, stepping forward as New Men to meet the New Women in the as-yet-fantasized precincts of the human sex. In New York, a Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage enlisted prominent intellectuals and spawned men’s clubs elsewhere. These turned out to be paper organizations, lists of members who turned out once in a while to march in suffrage parades. But feminists took their existence as a sign that women’s suffrage was gaining a place in broad democratic debate. The suffrage worker Mary Beard was a partner in a New Woman/New Man marriage to fellow historian and progressive Charles Beard. She later became a pioneer historian of women, but in 1914 she was working for suffrage in New York state. To an inquiry from a political science journal about the tenor of the new politics, she observed that for her and her female colleagues, working with men was a hallmark of their efforts—even if they did do all the work, she joked. Nor were their collaborators only middle and upper class. “The men, in their beneficial societies, labor unions, Catholic and Jewish associations, etc., have all had their part, and it will be difficult to disentangle their activities from ours.” All this was as it should be, insisted a female co-worker.30

  This was nothing new for African-American women, who had always worked for suffrage with men’s help. Now they too picked up the pace. In Western states where suffrage triumphed, black women went to the polls. The NACW had a suffrage department; black suffrage clubs sprang up in Tuskegee, Alabama, St. Louis, Memphis, Boston, Charleston, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. In 1913, Ida Wells-Barnett formed one in Chicago that suffered the standard racist rebuffs from NAWSA. Undeterred, the club went on to become a force in Chicago ward politics, helping to elect the first African-American alderman there in 1915 (Illinois women got the vote two years earlier). In 1914, the Baptist Women’s Convention, led by Nannie Burroughs, convinced the main body of the Negro Baptist Convention, representing 2.5 million church members, to endorse votes for women.31

  The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded by W.E.B. Du Bois in 1909, put women’s suffrage on its agenda. “Votes for women, means votes for black women,” Du Bois’s journal The Crisis reminded readers in 1912. The Crisis gave extensive coverage to the issue, noting repeatedly the strength of support among black men. Mary Church Terrell used The Crisis to urge black men to join in: “For an intelligent colored man to oppose woman suffrage is the most preposterous and ridiculous thing in the world.” Neither Du Bois nor Terrell harbored illusions about white women: “There is not the slightest reason for supposing that white American women under ordinary circumstances are going to be any more intelligent, liberal or humane toward the black, the poor and unfortunate than white men are,” Du Bois wrote bluntly. But he reasoned that any expansion of democracy helped blacks, and that over the long run, white women, having known injustice firsthand, were likely to gain sympathy toward blacks where they were disenfranchised. He was unequivocal. “Every argument for negro suffrage is an argument for woman’s suffrage; every argument for woman suffrage is an argument for Negro suffrage; both are great movements in democracy.”32

  With African-American men in the North and West casting votes for state measures that had a chance of passing, NAWSA leaders turned on a dime. In 1915, with thousands of black men’s votes in play in the New York referendum and black women out in force, white leaders suddenly appealed to a biracial ideal of universal democracy. African-American women spotted hints of encouragement, not in any diminution of white women’s prejudice, but in the prospect of the vote itself. Racism did not vanish, but collaboration with Jim Crow no longer set the tone and determined the direction of the movement.33

  The companionship feminists imagined with men was in part erotic, with roots in the free-love tradition. The acceptance of premarital sex was part of a trend already in evidence in the American middle class (there had long been greater tolerance for nonmarital sexuality among working-class people, white and black). But feminists in the first decades of the century endowed love affairs with so many transformative meanings that they essentially revived free-love beliefs. The penchant for sexual freedom was expressed only elliptically, in florid romantic language, because frank discussion, particularly of female sexuality, remained impossible: Taboos were too strong. Even Emma Goldman and other Eastern European radicals, who inherited from the Russian nihilists a variant of nineteenth-century free love, kept to the high ground of generalities when they discussed sexual matters, assiduously avoiding any discussion of body parts or erotic acts. There were no feminist manifestos for free love in the 1910s, despite the tremendous emphasis feminists put on sex. Rather, the impulse toward sexual emancipation took the form of a call to legalize contraception.

  Contraceptive devices, while widely available, could only be acquired on the black market. State laws and the federal Comstock law criminalized the sale and distribution of “obscene” matter—pornography and birth control devices (condoms and pessaries) and information. Poor and working-class women, who had little money for private doctors, had some difficulty getting the pessaries—diaphragm-like cups—that were the most reliable forms of contraception.34 Beginning in 1912 and continuing up to America’s entrance into World War I, feminists on the left agitated for legal contraception, fashioning themselves as champions of working-class men and women. “One of the most important and fundamental things we can do to-day to lighten the burden of women and strengthen the hands of laboring people is to distribute information which will teach them how to limit their families,” Ida Rauh Eastman, a Greenwich Village lawyer, proclaimed to a rally in New York’s Union Square. Socialists, anarchists, and feminists courted arrest by openly distributing information. Margaret Sanger, then a nurse and member of the Socialist Party, opened a birth control clinic in the poverty-stricken neighborhood of Brownsville, Brooklyn.35

  Birth control—or family limitation, as Sanger called it—was distinct from the eugenics movement, which was allied with Social Darwinism and dedicated to ensuring that the fittest would multiply while the unfit would demographically dwindle away. It seems illogical, but eugenics advocates opposed contraception, on the grounds that educated white women should be reproducing instead of limiting their pregnancies.36 In the twentieth century, birth control and eugenics activism would sometimes converge, but there was an inherent tension. Although feminist birth controllers believed that the poor should be able to limit their births, it was not because of population reduction, but because they believed that unwanted pregnancies afflicted women so terribly.

  The birth control campaign spluttered out, to be revived by Sanger after World War I as a very different kind of crusade, an elite top-down effort tied to the medical profession. But regardless of the failure, a faint, quavering, and sublimated line of thought had emerged as a central demand for modern women. It was a step toward considering a form of women’s self-sovereignty over the body that Stanton and utopian socialists had once called for. What later came to be called reproductive rights took shape in these years, and the legalization of birth control gave substance and a practical aim to the quest for self-realization that was becoming a paramount goal of feminism.

  Even as the suffrage drive picked up momentum, tensions troubled relations between older and younger suffragists. The newcom
ers’ enthusiasm for birth control and sexual emancipation, their support for workers and leanings toward socialism, their disinterest in separatism and enthusiasm for men were at best alien, at worst anathema to women formed by the nineteenth-century movement.

  Yet in a culture that systematically stripped women of value and esteem as they aged, the mothers’ need for respect and gratitude from their political daughters was large. Looking back to those who had prepared the way for them, and now forward, they counted on it being their time to be honored and consulted. They tried to instill in the young a regard for the founding mothers and an understanding of the obligations of generational succession. Middle-aged and elderly dignitaries lectured new arrivals on their “debt to the women who worked so hard for them,” to make them understand “that one way to pay that debt is to fight the battle in the quarter of the field in which it is still to be won.”37 The lesson was to abide by the wisdom and direction of their seasoned predecessors.

  The problem was that deference to the elders ran against the grain of modernist thought of all varieties, which construed the end of the nineteenth century as a sea change in history and the twentieth century as a time like no other. In feminism, the result was an outbreak of mother disdaining, mother contempt, and mother hating. Heartfelt testimonies to the need to live a life different from that of the mothers—the women this generation knew they never wanted to be—saturate the published and unpublished materials of the times. The “revolt of the daughters,” first used in Britain in 1894 as the title of a magazine article, had flowed back and forth across the Atlantic as a literary trope for two decades and entered Anglo-American culture as a cultural truism. Now feminism made it a condition of political sophistication.