The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  31. Rep. Stanley Bowdle (D-Ohio), Congressional Record, 63rd Congress, 3rd Session 1914/1915, Jan. 12, 1915, p. 1456. Antisuffragists dined out on former president Grover Cleveland’s contention in a leading women’s magazine that any kind of public activity, even women’s clubs, was “a weapon of retaliation upon man.” See Cleveland, “Woman’s Mission and Woman’s Clubs,” Ladies’ Home Journal, May 1905; “Menace to the Home,” Washington Post, April 24, 1905; “Replies to Cleveland: Susan B. Anthony Defends the Equal Suffrage Clause,” Washington Post, April 26, 1905; “Cleveland and the Women: Alice Stone Blackwell in Reply,” Washington Post, May 8, 1905; “Sees No Good in Suffrage: The Former Mrs. Cleveland Opposes the Ballot for Women,” New York Times, June 2, 1915.

  32. Meyer, in Newman, White Women’s Rights, p. 72.

  33. Flexner, Century of Struggle, chapter 16.

  34. Harriot Stanton Blatch and Alma Lutz, Challenging Years: The Memoirs of Harriot Stanton Blatch (New York, 1940), p. 92; Shaw to Aletta Jacobs, February 24, 1905, in Politics and Friendship: Letters from the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, 1902–1942, ed. Mineke Bosch with Annemarie Kloosterman (Columbus, Ohio, 1985), p. 59.

  35. Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994); Pamela Scully, “White Maternity and Black Infancy: The Rhetoric of Race in the South African Women’s Movement, 1895–1930,” in Women’s Suffrage in the British Empire: Citizenship, Nation, and Race, ed. Ian Christopher Fletcher, Laura E. Nym Mayhall, and Philippa Levine (New York, 2000).

  36. See the introduction to Politics and Friendship, ed. Bosch and Kloosterman, on the ambitions of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance.

  37. Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), pp. 35–36.

  38. Marilyn J. Boxer, “Rethinking the Socialist Construction and International Career of the Concept ‘Bourgeois Feminism,’ ” American Historical Review 112 (February 2007), pp. 131–58; Charles Sowerwine, Sisters or Citizens? Women and Socialism in France Since 1876 (New York, 1982). Ellen Carol DuBois has made a different argument, more sympathetic to socialism, in “Woman Suffrage and the Left: An International Socialist-Feminist Perspective,” New Left Review 186 (March–April 1991), pp. 20–45.

  39. Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism 1860–1930 (Princeton, N.J., 1978), chapters 7–8; International Encyclopedia of Women’s Suffrage, ed. June Hannam et al. (Santa Barbara, Calif., 2000), p. 257.

  40. DuBois, “Woman Suffrage and the Left,” pp. 20–45; Richard Evans, The Feminists: Women’s Emancipation Movements in Europe, America and Australasia 1840–1920 (London, 1977); Martin Pugh, “The Rise of European Feminism,” in A Companion to Modern European History, ed. Pugh (London, 1997), pp. 154–73.

  41. In Rubinstein, Before the Suffragettes, p. 147; Sandra Holton, Feminism and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage and Reform Politics in Britain, 1900–1918 (New York, 1986); Caine, English Feminism, p. 161. See also Martin Pugh, The March of the Women: A Revisionist Analysis of the Campaign for Women’s Suffrage 1866–1914 (Oxford, U.K., 2000). In 1906 the Liberals came back into power, but Asquith, soon to be prime minister, was implacably opposed to women’s suffrage.

  42. On working-class women’s involvement, see Jill Liddington and Jill Norris, One Hand Tied Behind Us: The Rise of the Women’s Suffrage Movement (London, 1978).

  43. Women taxpayers could already run for local elections. See Holton, “ ‘To Educate Women into Rebellion’ ” pp. 1121–22.

  44. Laura E. Nym Mayhall, The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860–1930 (New York, 2003); Martin Pugh, The Pankhursts (London, 2001).

  45. Vicinus, Independent Women, chapter 7.

  46. Ibid.; Caine, English Feminism, pp. 158–66.

  47. Burton, Burdens of History; Nupur Chaudhuri, “Clash of Cultures: Gender and Colonialism in South and Southeast Asia,” in A Companion to Gender History, ed. Teresa A. Meade and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks (Oxford, U.K., 2004), pp. 431–35; Jayawardena, White Woman’s Other Burden, pp. 90–94.

  48. Chaudhuri, “Clash of Cultures,” p. 434; Vera Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment, and Sexuality (Cambridge, U.K., 2003), p. 30; Yukiko Matsukawa and Kaoru Tachi, “Women’s Suffrage and Gender Politics in Japan,” in Suffrage and Beyond, ed. Daley and Nolan, p. 174; Sheldon Garon, Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (Princeton, N.J., 1997), pp. 98–104; Sima Bahar, “A Historical Background to the Women’s Movement in Iran,” in Women of Iran: The Conflict with Fundamentalist Islam, ed. Farah Azari (London, 1983), pp. 175–76.

  49. Louise Edwards, “Women’s Suffrage in China: Challenging Scholarly Conventions,” Pacific Historical Review 69 (November 2000), p. 620; Sharon H. Nolte and Sally Ann Hastings, “The Meiji State’s Policy Toward Women, 1890–1910,” in Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945, ed. Gail Lee Bernstein (Berkeley, Calif., 1991), pp. 151–74; Joanna Liddle and Sachiko Nakajima, Rising Daughters: Gender, Class, and Power in Japan (London, 2000); Elizabeth B. Frierson, “Women in Late Ottoman Intellectual History,” in Late Ottoman Society: The Intellectual Heritage, ed. Elisabeth Özdalga (New York, 2005), pp. 154–56; Jayawardena, White Woman’s Other Burden, passim, and Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, pp. 17–19, for a succinct overview of journals; Margot Badran, “Competing Agendas: Feminists, Islam, and the State in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Egypt,” in Global Feminisms Since 1945, ed. Bonnie G. Smith (New York, 2000), p. 15.

  50. “A Doll’s House,” in Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House and Other Plays (1879; New York, 1965), p. 228.

  51. Laurel Rasplica Rodd, “Yosano Akiko: The Taisho Debate over the ‘New Woman,’ ” in Recreating Japanese Women, ed. Bernstein, p. 177; Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, pp. 14, 18, 184–85, 223, 284–85; Barbara Molony, “Frameworks of Gender in Twentieth-Century Asia,” in A Companion to Gender History, ed. Meade and Wiesner-Hanks, p. 535; Jung-Soon Shim, “Recasting the National Motherhood: Transactions of Western Feminisms in Korean Theatre,” Theatre Research International 29 (Spring 2004), p. 145; Barbara Sato, The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan (Durham, N.C., 2003), p. 15. Jayawardena notes the importance of Ibsen but also mentions other writers male and female whose work became lightning rods for controversy about feminism and New Women in particular regions and countries. Feminism and Nationalism, p. 18.

  52. Najmabadi, The Story of Daughters of Quchan: Gender and National Memory in Iranian History (Syracuse, N.Y., 1998), p. 183. See also Joan Judge, “Talent, Virtue, and the Nation,” pp. 765–803; Judith Tucker, “Rescued from Obscurity: Contributions and Challenges in Writing the History of Gender in the Middle East and North Africa,” in Companion to Gender History, ed. Meade and Wiesner-Hanks, pp. 399–404. The 1907 autobiographical play of Kalliroi Siganou-Parren, a Greek feminist writer, exemplifies the pull of national motherhood on the New Woman. See her “The New Woman,” in Modern Woman Playwrights of Europe, ed. Alan P. Barr (New York, 2001), pp. 50–84. On New Women more generally, see my American Moderns: New York Bohemia and the Creation of a New Century (New York, 2000) and Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France (Chicago, 1992).

  53. Jayawardena cites multiple examples of this connection in Feminism and Nationalism.

  54. Ludwig W. Adamec, Afghanistan’s Foreign Affairs to the Mid-Twentieth Century: Relations with the USSR, Germany, and Britain (Tucson, Ariz., 1974), pp. 90, 132–34, 137, 140, 183; Hammed Shahidian, Women in Iran: Gender Politics in the Islamic Republic (Westport, Conn., 2002), pp. 36–37; Leon B. Poullada, Reform and Rebellion in Afghanistan, 1919–1929: King Amanullah’s Failure to Modernize a Tribal Society (Ithaca, N.Y., 1973), pp. 82–86. Soraya’s photograph is on p. 83. For a first-person account after Amanullah’s abdication see Kohrab K. H. Katrak, Through Amanullah’s Afghanistan:
A Book of Travel with Illustrations (Karachi, Pakistan, 1929; 1963), pp. vi, 27. See too the Afghan exile Sima Wali’s account of her country’s history in an interview with Gayle Kirshenbaum, “A Fundamentalist Regime Cracks Down on Women,” Ms., May–June 1997, p. 34.

  55. Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York, 2000).

  56. Ibid., chapters 6–7.

  57. Dorothy Ko, Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet (Berkeley, Calif., 2001); Alison Drucker, “The Influence of Western Women on the Anti-Footbinding Movement,” in Women in China: Current Directions in Historical Scholarship, ed. Richard W. Guisso and Stanley Johannesen (Youngstown, N.Y., 1981), pp. 179–99; Margot Badran, “Competing Agendas,” in Global Feminisms Since 1945, ed. Smith, pp. 17–18.

  CHAPTER SIX: MODERN TIMES

  1. Lippmann, Editorial, New Republic, October 9, 1915, p. 5.

  2. Stansell, American Moderns, pp. 60–61; Maureen A. Flanagan, “Gender and Urban Political Reform: The City Club and the Woman’s City Club of Chicago in the Progressive Era,” American Historical Review 95 (October 1990), pp. 1032–50; Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work (New Haven, Conn., 1995), pp. 171–205.

  3. Blatch, in Stansell, American Moderns, p. 241; Gilman, The Home (New York, 1903), pp. 315, 321; Schreiner, Woman and Labour (New York, 1911), p. 126; Ellen DuBois, “Woman Suffrage: The View from the Pacific,” p. 545; DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch, p. 67.

  4. Stansell, American Moderns, pp. 244–45; Nancy Schrom Dye, As Equals and as Sisters: Feminism, the Labor Movement, and the Women’s Trade Union League of New York (Columbia, Mo., 1980), p. 5; Frances Bjorkman, in Lucy Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century (Cambridge, U.K., 2007), p. 84.

  5. On the AFL, see Flexner, Century of Struggle, p. 246; Philip Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement from Colonial Times to the Eve of World War I (New York, 1979), pp. 300–301.

  6. Hinchey, in Kraditor, Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, p. 160; Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 1870–1920 (Urbana, Ill., 1981), pp. 214–45; Blatch and Lutz, Challenging Years, p. 95; Kraditor, Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, p. 160.

  7. Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, Conn., 1987), chapter 1; Stansell, American Moderns, chapter 7.

  8. Delap, Feminist Avant-Garde, chapter 2; for British hauteur toward Americans in the previous decade, see Holton, “To Educate Women in Rebellion,” p. 1120.

  9. New York Sun, 1917, and Dell, in Stansell, American Moderns, pp. 231, 234.

  10. Howe, in Cott, Grounding of Modern Feminism, p. 39; Flynn, in ibid., p. 38.

  11. Ibid., p. 38; Stansell, American Moderns, pp. 271, 274; Delap, Feminist Avant-Garde, pp. 27–29.

  12. Eastman, in June Sochen, Movers and Shakers: American Women Thinkers and Activists, 1900–1970 (New York, 1973), p. 51.

  13. See Ellen Carol DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (New Haven, Conn., 1997), pp. 110–11, for other horrified reactions.

  14. Strachey, in Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907–14 (Chicago, 1988), p. 78; Susan A. Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), p. 133.

  15. Anonymous and Meyer, in Women’s Suffrage in America: An Eyewitness History, ed. Elizabeth Frost and Kathryn Cullen-DuPont (New York, 1992), p. 304; Blatch and Lutz, Challenging Years, p. 181.

  16. The point about the evocation of Broadway musical theater is from Glenn, Female Spectacle, p. 149 and chapter 5; New York Tribune, in Women’s Suffrage in America, ed. Frost and Cullen-DuPont, p. 305; Gertrude Foster Brown, in Glenn, Female Spectacle, p. 132; Biographical Introduction to Gertrude Foster Brown Papers, Schlesinger Library.

  17. Glenn summarizes the rich literature on suffrage techniques in Female Spectacle, chapter 4; DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch, pp. 148–56.

  18. Gayle Gullett, “Constructing the Woman Citizen and Struggling for the Vote in California, 1896–1911,” Pacific Historical Review 69 (November 2000); Susan Englander, Class Conflict and Coalition in the California Woman Suffrage Movement, 1907–1912 (Lewiston, N.Y., 1992).

  19. Blatch and Lutz, Challenging Years, p. 109.

  20. The Chaplin film has been reissued. For the general subject see Kay Sloan, “Sexual Warfare in the Silent Cinema: Comedies and Melodramas of Woman Suffragism,” in History of Women in the United States: Historical Articles on Women’s Lives and Activities, ed. Nancy F. Cott, vol. 19, “Woman Suffrage,” part 2 (Munich, 1994), pp. 514–38.

  21. On Parsons, see Delap, Feminist Avant-Garde, p. 42; on Hunkins, see Christine A. Lunardini, From Equal Suffrage to Equal Rights: Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party, 1910–1928 (New York, 1986), pp. 78–79; on the British caravans and bicycles, see Liddington and Norris, One Hand Tied Behind Us, pp. 133–35; Susan Pedersen, Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience (New Haven, Conn., 2004), pp. 118–19.

  22. Milholland appears throughout the suffrage literature. On the 1913 New York parade see DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch, p. 153; on the Washington, D.C., parade see Linda G. Ford, Iron-Jawed Angels: The Suffrage Militancy of the National Woman’s Party 1912–1920 (Lanham, Md., 1991), p. 49. On Field, see Stansell, American Moderns, pp. 278–79; Sara Bard Field Oral History, Online Archive of California, http://ark.cdib.org/ark; Sara Bard Field Collection, Huntington Library, Pasadena, California.

  23. Younger, “Revelations of a Woman Lobbyist,” McCall’s Magazine, September 1919, p. 7; Katherine Marino, “Maud Younger and the San Francisco Wage Earners’ Suffrage League: Standing Firmly for Working-Class Women,” California Historian (Fall 1997), pp. 17–23.

  24. Catt, in Kraditor, Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, p. 45.

  25. On the women students who went abroad to study in Japan, see Judge, “Talent, Virtue, and the Nation,” pp. 765–83. On New York see “Chinese Women to Parade for Woman Suffrage,” New York Times, April 14, 1912. Columbia University had strong ties to China, so the women may have been at Barnard College. On the feminists at the Nanjing parliament, see Louise Edwards, Gender, Politics and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage in China (Stanford, Calif., 2008), pp. 74–83. See also “China,” in International Encyclopedia of Women’s Suffrage, ed. Hannam et al., pp. 63, 295; DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch, pp. 142–43. Carrie Chapman Catt and Aletta Jacobs, international suffrage leader from the Netherlands, made a world tour in 1911–12 exploring women’s rights movements and were thrilled by the feminist activity in China. See Politics and Friendship, ed. Bosch, p. 95.

  26. Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy, p. 64; Brown, in Elinor Lerner, “Jewish Involvement in the New York City Woman Suffrage Movement,” American Jewish History 70 (June 1981), p. 452.

  27. Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy, pp. 75–76.

  28. Luscomb in ibid., pp. 67–68; see also Field Oral History.

  29. Kenton, “Feminism Will Give—Men More Fun, Women Greater Scope,” Delineator 85 (July 1914), p. 17; Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (1917; New York, 1969), p. 239.

  30. Beard, “The Legislative Influence of Unenfranchised Women,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 56 (November 1914), pp. 54–61; Michael S. Kimmel, “Men’s Responses to Feminism at the Turn of the Century,” Gender and Society 1 (September 1987), p. 274; Men’s League for Woman Suffrage of the State of New York, Letter Collection, Woodsen Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University, Houston, Texas.

  31. Terborg-Penn, “Nineteenth Century Black Women,” p. 21; Giddings, When and Where I Enter, p. 120; “The Suffrage,” The Crisis, November 1914, p. 15; Savage, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us, p. 169.

  32. Du Bois, “Votes for Women,” The Crisis, September 12, p. 234; August 1914, pp. 179–80, April 1915, p. 285; Terrell, “The Justice of Woman Suffrage,” The Crisis, September 1912, p. 243.

 
; 33. Contributions from Anna Howard Shaw, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Mary Garrett Hay, “Symposium,” The Crisis, November 1917, pp. 19–20; Suzanne Lebsock, “Woman Suffrage and White Supremacy: A Virginia Case Study,” in Visible Women, ed. Hewitt and Lebsock, pp. 62–100.

  34. However, Andrea Tone shows persuasively that the birth control movement, for political purposes, greatly overstated the lack of access. See Tone, Devices and Desires: A History of Contraception in America (New York, 2001), pp. 80–81.

  35. “Birth Control Demonstration on Union Square,” Mother Earth 11 (June 1916), p. 526; Stansell, American Moderns, pp. 234–41.

  36. A view that President Theodore Roosevelt, for example, articulated in his 1903 speech warning that native-born women were guilty of “race suicide” in pulling back from marriage and childbearing, thus putting the country in danger of being overrun by nonnative stock. See Gordon, Moral Property of Women, p. 86. Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge, Mass., 2008), chapters 2–3, delineates the tensions between the birth control and eugenics movements.

  37. Maude Wood Park, in Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy, p. 46.

  38. Woolf, “Professions for Women: A Paper Read to the Women’s Service League,” in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (London, 1981), p. 150; Pedersen, Eleanor Rathbone, p. 37. See Barbara Taylor, “Mother-Haters and Other Rebels”; Genevieve Taggard, in These Modern Women, ed. Showalter, p. 66.

  39. Previous histories state that black women were excluded, but this appears to have been a claim replicated from one source to another without verification. The Crisis, April 1913, pp. 267, 297, reports on the protest and the upshot. On the parade more generally, see Lunardini, From Equal Suffrage to Equal Rights, chapter 2.

  40. Hinchey to O’Reilly, in Kraditor, Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, p. 160; Shaw to Jacobs, March 19, 1914, in Politics and Friendship, ed. Bosch, pp. 132–33.