The Woman's Hour

by Elaine Weiss

  Catt returned to Memphis: Described in A. Elizabeth Taylor, The Woman Suffrage Movement in Tennessee (New York: Bookman Associates, 1957), 23, 68.

  She knew that if the political men: Catt to Katherine Burch Warner, July 16, 1920, in Catt Papers, TSLA.

  Just a few weeks earlier: Description in Peck, 348–49.

  When her father had discouraged: Biographical details from Peck; Van Voris; and Robert Booth Fowler, Carrie Catt: Feminist Politician (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986).

  “a team to work for the Cause”: From Carrie Chapman Catt, “A Suffrage Team,” The Woman Citizen, September 8, 1923, 11–2; and in Van Voris, 20.

  They were a formidable pair: Catt and Hay’s relationship is also discussed in Lillian Faderman, To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 61–78.

  The reports she’d wired: Shuler’s telegrams are in Catt Papers, TSLA.

  And, he had hinted darkly: Catt to Warner, July 14, 1920, in Catt Papers, TSLA.

  During the past few days: described in Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1926), 432.

  “Newspaper attack on chief executive”: Western Union wire, Marjorie Shuler to Mrs. Frank Shuler at NAWSA headquarters, July 14, 1920, Catt Papers, TSLA.

  Everyone was away: Kenny and Catt’s frustration with the absence of the other Tennessee suffrage leaders is evident in their letters during early July, contained in Catt Papers, TSLA.

  Mrs. Catt insisted she would stay: Catt’s reluctance to travel to Nashville, and her intention to stay only a few days, is documented in her correspondence just prior to her departure from New York City on July 16, especially Catt to Anne Dallas Dudley, July 12, 1920, and Catt to Kenny, July 14, 1920, Catt Papers, TSLA.

  These regional differences and animosities: For an example of careful Grand Division representation at suffrage conferences, see “Tennessee Activities,” The Woman Citizen, July 19, 1919.

  “You know we Tennesseans”: Kenny to Catt, July 11, 1920, Catt Papers, TSLA.

  Kenny was in charge: Kenny’s role in the campaign is detailed in Carole Stanford Bucy, “Catherine Kenny: Fighting for the Perfect 36th,” in Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Lives: Women in American History, ed. Kristie Lindenmeyer (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Books, 2000), 204–5.

  “This [bill] will place”: Taylor, Woman Suffrage Movement, 100.

  And in a moment: Seth Walker’s conversion is described in the NAWSA publication The Woman Citizen (April 26, 1919): 1021.

  It would be a “crime and a shame”: Taylor, Woman Suffrage Movement, 100.

  he signed the bill in the last hour: Kenny to Nettie Shuler, June 29, 1920, Catt Papers, TSLA.

  Suffrage had been Catherine Kenny’s ticket: Biographical details from Bucy, “Catherine Kenny,” 197–200; Kenny’s obituary in the New York Times, July 2, 1950.

  “When you hand her the ballot”: Taylor, Woman Suffrage Movement, 78.

  She’d directed it all: Bucy, “Catherine Kenny,” 199.

  “do something else besides fuss”: Kenny to Nettie Shuler, June 29, 1920, Catt Papers, TSLA.

  “Get the biggest and most important men”: Catt to Kenny, June 29, 1920, Catt Papers, TSLA.

  men who couldn’t agree on anything in the world: The origins of the long-standing animosity between Stahlman and Lea is described in Robert O’Brien, “The U.S. Government’s Investigation of E. B. Stahlman as an Enemy Alien: A Case Study of Nativism in Nashville,” master’s degree thesis, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, 1996.

  “I don’t believe the ‘nigger question’”: Kenny to Catt, July 11, 1920, Catt Papers, TSLA.

  “The suffragists organized them”: Ibid.

  “Our Governor says Woodrow is his Moses”: Kenny to Rose Young, June 21, 1920, Catt Papers, TSLA.

  “I conceived the idea”: Ibid.

  Catt studied the poll results: These preliminary polling results of the Tennessee legislature were reported in the Nashville Tennessean, July 18, 1920, 12.

  They all sang a version: Catt’s visitors’ assurances are mentioned in “Mrs Catt Sure Suffrage Will Gain Tennessee,” Nashville Tennessean, July 19, 1920.

  He was the scion: Biographical details from Lea obituary, New York Times, November 19, 1945; and Luke Lea entry in the Tennessee Encyclopedia by Mary Louise Tidwell and “Luke Lea” in the World War I section of “The Volunteer State Goes to War” online exhibit, TSLA, http://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com/tsla/exhibits/veterans/ww1.htm.

  He decided it was simply: Accounts of Lea’s attempt to kidnap the Kaiser include: Theresa Jensen Lacey, Amazing Tennessee: Fascinating Facts . . . and Historical Oddities about the Volunteer State (Nashville: Rutledge Hill Press, 2000); The Hopkinsville Kentuckian, April 19, 1919; “No Penalty for Trip,” Baltimore Sun, April 2, 1919; “Rumors of Attempt to Deport Ex-Kaiser,” New York Times, January 12, 1919; “Ex-Senator Led Party to Kidnap Kaiser,” Washington Times, April 1, 1919; “Raid on Ex-Kaiser Reported to Baker,” Washington Post, April 2, 1919; “Had Lea on Carpet for Kaiser Exploit,” New York Times, April 7, 1919; “Luke Lea, Tried to Kidnap Kaiser,” New York Times, November 19, 1945.

  Lea came home a hero: Lea’s homecoming is described in The Chattanooga News, April 1 and April 4, 1919.

  But also the news he’d received: “Death Claims: Wife of Col. Luke Lea Dies Suddenly,” Chattanooga News, March 10, 1919; “Col Luke Lea Weds,” Washington Post, May 2, 1920.

  Chapter 3: The Feminist Peril

  They were horrified: Pearson, “My Story.”

  Before he even met her: A description of the Vertreeses grooming Pearson for leadership of the Antis is in Pearson, “My Story.”

  Vertrees was a respected attorney: Biographical details from “John J. Vertrees—October 23, 1931,” Memorial Resolution, Nashville Bar Association, https://www.nashvillebar.org/index.cfm?pg=MemorialResolutions#V, and Carole Stanford Bucy, “John Jacob Vertrees,” Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture.

  “modern Eve asks”: J. A. Pearson, letter to editor, Nashville Banner, August 5, 1914; Josephine A. Pearson Papers, TSLA.

  The Vertreeses organized: The establishment of the Tennessee chapter of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage is described in Taylor, The Woman Suffrage Movement in Tennessee, 80–85.

  his 1916 manifesto: “An Address to the Men of Tennessee on Female Suffrage,” by John J. Vertrees, pamphlet (Nashville, 1916) in Abby Crawford Milton Papers, Scrapbooks, TSLA. Also reprinted in Wheeler, Votes for Women!, 197–213.

  “I do not believe”: Ibid.

  giving her strict instructions: A fine discussion of Vertrees’s attempts to control the woman antisuffragists can be found in Anatatia Sims, “The Radical Vision of the Antisuffragists,” in Wheeler, Votes for Women!, 111–3.

  despite William Jennings Bryan’s big pro-suffrage speech: Taylor, Woman Suffrage Movement, 96. Defeat of the partial suffrage bill in the Senate in 1917 is discussed in Carole Stanford Bucy, “Catherine Kenny: Fighting for the Perfect 36th,” in Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Lives: Women in American History, ed. Kriste Lindenmeyer (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Books, 2000), 202–4, and in “Senate Deals Blow to Suffrage,” unidentified newspaper clipping, January 18, 1917, in Abby Milton Scrapbook, TSLA.

  that humiliating defeat: The Tennessee legislature’s consideration of a bill granting women partial suffrage in 1919 is discussed in Taylor, Woman Suffrage Movement, 99–103.

  Women were at the polls: Bucy, “Catherine Kenny,” 204–5; Anita Shafer Goodstein, “A Rare Alliance: African American and White Women in the Tennessee Elections of 1919 and 1920,” Journal of Southern History 60, no. 2 (May 1998).

  They had their own reasons: For a succinct discussion of corporate interests opposed to woman
suffrage see Sims, “The Radical Vision of the Antisuffragists,” 105–28, and Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 286–99. Also see Camhi, Women Against Women; Anne Myra Goodman Benjamin, Women Against Equality: A History of the Anti Suffrage Movement in the United States from 1895 to 1920 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991).

  Chapter 4: The Woman Question

  “Many a man who advocated”: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan Bronwell Anthony et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol 1. (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1881), 53.

  At Cousin Gerrit’s house: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More. 1898. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993), 58.

  The British Parliament: Descriptions of the proceedings of the World’s Anti-Slavery Conference in London in 1840 may be found in: Kathryn Kish Sklar, “‘Women Who Speak for an Entire Nation’: American and British women Compared at the World Anti-Slavery Convention, London, 1840,” Pacific Historical Review (1990), 453–99; Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (London: Routledge, 1995), chapter 7, “The Woman Question”; Clare Midgley, “Women, Anti-slavery and Internationalism,” in Women and Social Movements International 1840 to Present, ed. K. K. Sklar and T. Dublin (Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street Press, 2001); and Donald R. Kennon, “An Apple of Discord: The Woman Question at the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840,” Slavery and Abolition 5 (1984): 244–66; Stanton and Anthony et al., History of Woman Suffrage, 53–62.

  “It was really pitiful”: Stanton, Eighty Years, 81.

  “After battling so many long years”: Ibid.

  Their treatment in London: Stanton and Anthony et al., History of Woman Suffrage, 61–62.

  In one girlish fit of rage: Stanton, Eighty Years, 31–32.

  “My experience at the World’s Antislavery Convention”: Theodore Stanton and Harriot Stanton Blatch, eds., Elizabeth Cady Stanton As Revealed in Her Letters, Diary, and Reminiscences (New York: Harper and Row, 1922), 141–50.

  They swiftly created: Stanton and Anthony et al., History of Woman Suffrage, “Seneca Falls,” 67–75; Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 68–69. For an innovative analysis of the suffragists’ use of the Seneca Falls event as their origins story, see Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

  her own Declaration of Sentiments: Stanton and Anthony et al., History of Woman Suffrage, 70.

  Henry was appalled: Flexner and Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle, 70.

  “Lizzie, Thee will make us ridiculous”: Ibid. Also in Sally McMillen, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 93.

  unabashed “Woman’s Rights Man”: Philip S. Foner, ed., Frederick Douglass on Women’s Rights (Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 1976), 10–15.

  Douglass admired the courage: Ibid., 10.

  “I knew Frederick”: Foner, Frederick Douglass, 13, and Faye E. Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle Over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 5.

  “In respect to political rights”: Douglass editorial in The North Star, July 28, 1848, in Foner, Frederick Douglass, 49–51.

  Newspapers denounced it: Stanton and Anthony et al., History of Woman Suffrage, 803.

  “So pronounced was the popular voice”: Stanton, Eighty Years, 148.

  “That is just what I wanted”: Elizabeth Stanton to Lucretia Mott, September 30, 1848, in Stanton and Blatch, Stanton as Revealed, II: 20–22.

  “I expect to plead”: Flexner and Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle, 64.

  “I was a woman”: Woman’s Journal, April 15, 1893, quoted in Carol Lasser, “Stone, Lucy,” in American National Biography Online, American Council of Learned Societies, Oxford University Press, http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-00663.html.

  “When she once”: Matilda Joclyn Gage to Lydia Becker, August 30, 1878, in Stanton and Blatch, Stanton as Revealed, II: 38.

  Stanton was “thought”: This description of Stanton and Anthony’s relationship as expressed by Stanton’s daughter, suffragist Harriot Stanton Blatch, is quoted in Jean H. Baker, Sisters: The Lives of America’s Suffragists (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005), 89.

  “I forged the thunderbolts”: Stanton, Eighty Years, 165.

  “Here then is work for you”: Henry Stanton to Susan B. Anthony in Wendy Hamand Venet, Neither Ballots nor Bullets: Women Abolitionists and the Civil War (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 101.

  Women did not have bullets: Venet, 94.

  With Stanton and Anthony in charge: Descriptions of the work of the Woman’s Loyal League can be found in Flexner and Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle, 103–6; Venet, 94–122; Dudden, Fighting Chance, 51–57.

  even William Lloyd Garrison protested: Venet, 108.

  Chapter 5: Democracy at Home

  The logistics were going to be: White’s report to Alice Paul, June 29, 1920, in NWPP, LoC, microfilm reel #79; also in “Suffs Ask for $10,000 for Tennessee Fight,” Baltimore Sun, July 5, 1920.

  drained its bank account: The dire financial situation is revealed in numerous documents in NWPP, LoC, during the summer of 1920, including bounced checks (Lexington Hotel to Anita Pollitzer, June 21, 1920) and a July 15 telegram from headquarters to Alice Paul in Ohio, warning her that the Party’s bank balance was $130 and unpaid bills totalled about $1,000 (Emma Wold to Alice Paul, July 15, 1920).

  Miss Paul was a wizard: See White’s report used in a fundraising appeal, July 3, 1920. NWPP, LoC, reel #80, and “Suffragists Seek Funds for Tennessee,” New York Times, July 5, 1920.

  “Opportunity to win this last state”: An example of this direct appeal is Paul to Mrs. Henry Justice, June 24, 1920, and Paul to a list of possible donors, June 28, 1920, in NWPP, LoC, reel #79.

  “To the Suffragists”: On National Woman’s Party letterhead, April 2, 1920, in NWPP, LoC, reel #77.

  When America entered the war: White’s war work is described in Betty Sparks Huehls and Beverly Greene Bond, “Sue Shelton White: Lady Warrior,” in Tennessee Women: Their Lives and Times, vol. 1, ed. Sarah Wilkerson Freeman, Beverly Greene Bond, and Laura Helper-Ferris (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 151–54. White wrote of her efforts to register men and women for war work in Jackson, TN, in the NAWSA publication, The Woman Citizen, June 16, 1917 (“Tennessee Women and the Duties of Citizenship”), in Sue Shelton White Papers, Schlesinger Library.

  “I see a determination”: Undated MS, possible letter to editor or article for a suffrage publication, signed Sue S. White, Jackson, TN, in White Papers, Schlesinger Library.

  “disloyal, pro-German”: Sue White to Carrie Chapman Catt, April 27, 1918, in White Papers, Schlesinger Library, reprinted in Wheeler, Votes for Women!, 182–87. White’s involvement with the Woman’s Party tour of Tennessee and the allegations against her are detailed in Huehls and Bond, “Lady Warrior,” 156–59; in Wheeler, Votes for Women!, 182–87; and in Reminiscence of Sue White by her friend and suffrage colleague Rebecca Reyher, dated September 26, 1958, in White Papers, Schlesinger Library.

  “I saw with my own eyes”: Sue White to Catt, April 27, 1918, in White Papers, Schlesinger Library.

  In Jackson, where White lived: Reminiscence of Sue White by Rebecca Reyher, September 26, 1958, in White Papers, Schlesinger Library.

  Her attackers included: Huehls and Bond, “Lady Warrior,” 157.

  “I prefer to presume”: White to Catt, April 27, 1918, in White Papers, Schlesinger Library. Also in Wheeler, Votes for Women!, 185.


  Catt jumped to the conclusion: Catt made her accusations in a letter to the President of the Tennessee Equal Suffrage Association, Katherine Burch Warner, who relayed the message to White. Catt to Mrs. Leslie Warner, April 24, 1918, quoted in James P. Louis, “Sue Shelton White and the Woman Suffrage Movement in Tennessee, 1913–1920,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 22, no. 2 (1963): 179.

  her own calmly reasoned letter: White’s correspondence with Carrie Catt is in the Sue Shelton White Papers at Schlesinger Library, and reprinted in “Correspondence Between Sue Shelton White and Carrie Chapman Catt, 1918,” in Wheeler, Votes for Women!, 181–93.

  trying to “wake up”: White to Catt, April 27, 1918, in White Papers, Schlesinger Library.

  “Take your stand”: Catt to White, May 6, 1918. Ibid.

  “In spite of every effort”: Ibid.

  “inclines to hydrophobia”: Sue White to Abby Scott Baker, June 1920, NWPP, LoC, reel #79. See also “Delegation Declines to Hear Militants,” Nashville Tennessean, June 30, 1920, Abby Milton Papers, TSLA.

  already tried, and failed: White’s telegram to Gov. Roberts is quoted in the Nashville Tennessean, June 27, 1920, NWPP, LoC.

  Roberts really didn’t want women: White to Abby Scott Baker, June 26, 1920, NWPP, LoC.

  “I hope never”: Ibid.

  “So all the political leaders”: White to Abby Scott Baker, late June 1920, NWPP, LoC.

  Chapter 6: The Governor’s Quandary

  The firefighters in Memphis: “Arrest Six in Fireman’s Strike,” Nashville Tennessean, July 17, 1920, and “Strikers Jobs Filled by Men of Experience,” Nashville Tennessean, July 18, 1920.

  The labor people: Gary W. Reichard, “The Defeat of Governor Roberts,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 30, no. 1 (1971): 96.

  The Memphis mayor: Western Union Telegram, Mayor Rowlett Paine to Gov. Roberts, July 16, 1920, Gov. Albert H. Roberts papers, TSLA.

  Roberts hadn’t had it easy: Biographical details from Roberts Papers, TSLA; Reichard, “Defeat of Governor Roberts,” 94–109. Gov. Roberts entry in the Tennessee Encyclopedia by Jeanette Keith; Ray Hill, “Governor Roberts,” Knoxville Focus, April 27, 2014, http://www.knoxfocus.com/2014/04/governor-albert-h-roberts/; National Governor’s Association Biographies; Obituary, New York Times, June 27, 1946; Kenneth S. Braden, “The Wizard of Overton: Gov. A. H. Roberts,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 43, no. 3 (Fall, 1984): 273–94.