Adams’s attitude prevailed among the creators of the Constitution, and when it was ratified in 1791, it established free white males as the only Americans eligible to vote. Defeated, activist women turned instead to the abolitionist movement, working to eradicate slavery and assuming that by helping black men get the vote, they would be helping themselves as well. One of the first indications that this idea might be pure folly came at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. The United States had sent Lucretia Mott, a leader of the women’s abolitionist movement, as its delegate. Upon arriving, she learned that women would not be allowed to speak.
Nevertheless, the gathering was the beginning of one of the most important relationships in the history of women and the vote. There, Mott made the acquaintance of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who would soon emerge as one of the guiding lights of the women’s suffrage movement. By 1848 the two had crafted a plan to hold the first women’s rights conference, “to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman.” It attracted some 260 women and about 40 men—not a great number, but still enough to get noticed. But Stanton and Mott’s plans were thrown off course by the Civil War, when many women abandoned the cause. When the fighting was over, though, the suffrage movement—strengthened by the organizational skills its women had learned doing war work—scored its first victory. In 1869 Wyoming became the first state in the union to grant the vote to women. Technically it was still a territory, but when Congress tried to object to granting it statehood because of the recent change in voting laws, the intrepid legislature simply said, “We will remain out of the union a hundred years rather than come in without our women.”
Then suffragists took the battle national. Susan B. Anthony, another former abolitionist who devoted her life to suffrage, appeared in front of every session of the U.S. Congress from 1869 to 1906 to ask for the passage of a national suffrage amendment, but it was to no avail. Instead, the group took the only approach it could, a state-by-state one. It organized rallies and attempted to cast votes (Anthony herself was arrested for one such attempt in 1872). Finally, in 1870, Utah granted women the right to vote, followed by Colorado in 1893 and Idaho in 1896.
But this initial burst of enthusiasm for bringing women to the polls faltered quickly in a country where the majority of women had no public voice and in most cases were incapable of even imagining themselves in any roles other than the domestic ones they were used to. By the turn of the century, more than fifty years after Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott had made their Declaration, matters had not progressed. The powerful Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), formed in 1874 in Ohio by women who wanted to close the state’s saloons to prevent the “immoral” effect of alcohol on family and community life, had expanded to advocate for a variety of social programs. Its president, Frances Willard, quickly realized that the WCTU could not hope to bring about any of the changes it was lobbying for without the power to vote, so she made the enfranchisement of women the group’s main goal. The result was that many women who had opposed the vote on the grounds that it would distract them from their roles as homemakers now began to support it. A new generation of suffragettes had also cropped up to run the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), formed under Cady Stanton’s leadership in 1890 when the National Woman Suffrage Association merged with the more conservative American Woman Suffrage Association.
But neither they nor the WCTU seemed able to reanimate the movement. Despite their best efforts, no more states granted women voting rights between 1896 and 1910. At a 1902 Senate hearing regarding a sixteenth amendment on women suffrage, the frustrated organizer of the New York State suffrage movement, Harriet May Mills, pointed out how much everything else for women had changed.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century no married woman could own a cent of property. At the beginning of the twentieth century women, married or single, may own and often do own millions.
Then another reason for this large increase in the property of women is that they are now allowed to earn their own living in almost any business, and there are to-day at least 4,000,000 of us earning independent incomes. We feel that it is a great injustice, gentlemen, when we are such large shareholders in the Government, when we are such large participants in business affairs, to be denied any voice in the Government.
It was quite different in the old days, when married women were always under tutelage, and had no rights of their own, when they did not even own the clothes they wore. There might have been a little more justice in giving the votes to the man and denying it to the woman, but certainly it can not be fair to-day.
Some people say that this property is all represented by the men, and that they cast the votes for us. Gentlemen, in my State of New York there are 40,000 more women than men; and is it not a great burden to put upon the men to ask them to represent not only themselves, but 40,000 more women than the double of themselves?
I do not see how it is possible for any man to represent a woman.
It would take until the next decade, when activists finally brought into their ranks the lower-class workers who had been laboring for so long without protection or representation, for the suffrage movement to revive. But this time there was no going back. When Harriet entered Wellesley in the fall of 1910, the signs of impending change were everywhere. The Wellesley Equal Suffrage League was founded that same autumn, and when new president and Wellesley alumna Ellen Fitz Pendleton was inaugurated during the fall of Harriet’s sophomore year, she made it clear that the mission of the college—any college, whether for men or women—had been conspicuously updated in anticipation of the changes to come. “I ask you to consider this morning the two-fold function of the college, the training for citizenship and the preparation of the scholar. The exigencies of our mother tongue compel me to use the masculine pronoun, but it will be understood that references are made to college students of both sexes.” Preparation for participation in national civic duty was now a part of the curriculum.
As in the nation, however, support for suffrage was not guaranteed on the Wellesley campus. In 1911 California approved giving women the vote even as the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage was founded. Opinion was equally divided on campus. Early that year a vote was taken to see how many students approved of giving women the vote, and the majority did not. The Wellesley College News thought it was because of “lack of knowledge and indifference” on the part of anti-suffragists on campus, though in truth they opposed the movement on the well-thought-out (if strangely self-defeatist) grounds that men and women were bound to vote differently and thus granting women the right would sow discord in families and, indeed, in the nation itself. But by 1912, following the trend in the rest of the country, the majority of Wellesley students supported women’s right to vote.
These idealistic young women arrived on campus ready to change the world—in the latest fashions, of course. In their trunks were long, tight “hobble skirts,” which, while they were the height of style, had a tendency to impede their wearers’ strides thanks to the narrow hem. The girls wore them with low heels that made for easy—or at least easier—walking on the hilly campus paths, and tied up their hair in ribbon bows. One issue of the campus paper described the usual garb for a day of classes: “White buckskin golf shoes, a long narrow white linen skirt, shirt-waist with long sleeves and a negligee ruffled collar; the whole ‘toned’ by a dash of color in the form of a violent green sash two feet wide. This costume is usually set off by what might be called the ‘society slouch,’ which aims to give a bored listlessness to one’s posture.” In the privacy of their cluttered rooms, the girls wore boudoir caps and played the latest dance tunes on their mandolins, guitars, or banjos. “Can you dance the Boston, / Can you dip and gently rise?” they sang, scandalizing themselves ever so slightly in the process. As an editorial in the paper saw it, “modern dancing” was a big problem for the Wellesley girl. “People who wish to be broadly tolerant are
countenancing dances which their instincts tell them are disgusting, and which doctors have pronounced full of danger from a physiological point of view . . . We would not be prudish, and yet we would be decent.”
Wellesley girls were a vibrant group of young women, curious about the world if somewhat more socially conservative compared to their counterparts at other women’s colleges. In an editorial to the freshman in the fall of 1910, the Wellesley News encouraged the new class to “be alive, be awake and active in every phase of college life into which you enter.” But, like all women away at school in those years, they operated under strict rules of conduct. They were not allowed to go off campus without registering a time of departure, a destination, and time of return, which could be 7:15 P.M. at the latest, and leaving campus in the evening without a chaperone was not allowed under any circumstances. They were not to even consider entering “the precincts of any men’s college or building used as a dormitory for the student of such college . . . [which] shall be understood to include the Harvard Yard.” They could not be seen eating anything on the street in town or “stand[ing] about the railroad station without a hat,” but they were venturing into the town of Welles-ley more and more (an activity referred to by a local priest as “the 4 o’clock invasion”) and even to Boston, where the ideal afternoon included a play and some shopping topped off by a marsh-mallow fudge sundae. Their numbers on these outings could be literally overwhelming—as a spoof poem in the News joked: “One day to Boston I did go / To watch the crowd, the passing show, / I thought to walk on Tremont Street / And gaze on Boston’s true elite. / But every swell at whom I’d stare / Had such an old, familiar air: / The truth at last came over me,—/ The whole crowd was from Wel-les-ley!”
With its enormous parcel of land, Wellesley had ample grounds for recreation of other sorts within its own walls. There were plenty of playing fields as well as excellent aquatic facilities. Harriet herself played tennis, field hockey, and softball, and swam and rode horses when she could. In addition, a new class called “Physical Training” was required of all students in their first two years at the college, combined with a course in “Hygiene.” “The department of Hygiene and Physical Education . . . seems to me a very important development of the College,” asserted the college president. “Without health a woman’s life is sadly handicapped. She is the natural guardian of the health of children. To maintain and improve her own health, whatever her walk in life, is one of the prime essentials of living; to instill right principles in those under her care is one of her highest duties.” The era in which girls were expected to sit inside embroidering was at an end, and Wellesley was at the forefront of creating young women who were confident in both mind and body.
For her major, Harriet chose music and English composition, but it was the history of religion courses she began to take in her sophomore year that she always counted as her favorite. In them, she believed, she had learned that “if one strips each of the great religions down to its basic concept one will find that the philosophy is the same: a reverence for deity, kindness to one’s fellow-man, and a belief in life after death. It is only when man himself adds a lot of superfluous ideas and customs that misunderstandings occur, even to a point of bloodshed. The answer is tolerance.” These were the tenets of a noble life, and she held herself to them strictly.
The rigors of a Wellesley education were far greater than those of Barringer High School. Harriet was, by her own account, “an average student because of too many other interests.” Among other things, she was deeply curious about the suffrage movement. She was an enthusiastic participant in the activities of the Wellesley Equal Suffrage League, which invited prestigious speakers on the issue and took note as voting rights were granted, state by state, over the course of Harriet’s four years at Welles-ley—Washington in 1910, followed by California in 1911; Arizona, Kansas, and Oregon in 1913; and in 1914, Montana and Nevada. At one point, the league went so far as to assert that “in any non-military country, woman suffrage is natural, logical and right.” In early 1912, just after Chinese women were given the vote—a short-lived gesture toward equality that was taken away again almost immediately—the group implored in the News: “Let us . . . be glad for them, and then let us be a little bit ashamed of our own position in contrast, and buckle to change it! American women have public spirit and patriotism. Can we better show it than by assuming responsibility—and being worthy of it?”
After writing home exuberantly about her activities with the league at one point, Harriet received a chastening, if loving, letter from her father, reminding her that while suffrage was certainly important, she should not let it distract her from her studies. Her passion ran in the family, apparently. Edna wrote to her enthusiastically and often about the movement in Harriet’s first years at school, saying gleefully at one point: “Are you a suffragette? I am!” Both girls were electrified when NAWSA announced plans to disrupt the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson—Progressive candidate Theodore Roosevelt had run and lost on the first pro–equal voting rights platform in history—with the March for Woman Suffrage. Scheduled to arrive in Washington on March 3, 1913, it was designed specifically to attract an enormous amount of attention from the press waiting to cover Wilson.
On February 12, 1913, twelve marchers left New York City to walk down to Washington for the parade, traveling through New Jersey on their way. “Next Wednesday morning between 9:30 + 10, the walking suffragettes are going to pass through Newark,” Edna wrote to Harriet, with whom she was carrying on a lively exchange about the upcoming event. “Mrs. Harris has invited me to see them . . . I think I’ll join the procession and walk to Washington eh! Meet my old friends Taft and Wilson halfway!”
When the New York marchers reached Washington, they joined more than five thousand other protestors behind the beautiful and charismatic Inez Milholland, who led the parade down Pennsylvania Avenue dressed in a white cape and riding a white horse. Tiara on her head, dark curls tumbling down her back, she brought her true believers to a stop on the steps of the Treasury Building, where they performed an allegorical pageant that depicted “those ideals toward which both men and women have been struggling through the ages and toward which, in cooperation and equality, they will continue to strive.” Among the crowd were famed reporter Nelly Bly (whose piece on the march ran under the headline “SUFFRAGISTS ARE MEN’S SUPERIORS”) and Helen Keller, who was scheduled to speak but was so exhausted by the effort required to cut through the masses to reach her post that she had to cancel. Thousands of men in town for the inauguration the next day had begun to heckle the marchers just a few blocks into the procession, shouting indecencies and, among other things, “Where are your skirts?” The disorderly conduct prompted a Senate hearing in the following days to determine what had gone wrong. There, one panelist pronounced: “There would be nothing like this happen if you would stay at home.”
As for Wilson, he was warned in a letter carried by the New York marchers that advocates of suffrage would “watch your administration with an intense interest such as has never before been focused upon the administration of any of your predecessors.” Alas, the missive was never delivered, and when approached by a delegation from the organization after he took office, Wilson, hedging, claimed that he had never even given much thought to the matter. It was hardly surprising, given his reaction to the presence of the March for Women Suffrage at the time of his inauguration. Arriving in town to accept the presidency on the day of the march, his staff was so unaware that one of them actually asked the police where all the people were. Though Wilson would eventually come to support suffrage, it would take another seven years before the vote was finally granted during his last year in office.
Cosseted up at Wellesley, Harriet could not participate in the march. But she continued to do her part with the Equal Suffrage League. She also enjoyed numerous other extracurricular activities. Paramount among her nonacademic pursuits was her role at the Wellesley Press Board, first as an enthusiastic m
ember after its founding in 1912 and eventually as president. As it was at all of the elite eastern schools, image was of enormous importance to Wellesley, and the Press Board, like similar organizations at other schools, was designed to control the flow of news about the school to the outside world. It supplied local newspapers, primarily the Boston Globe and the major New York papers, with approved items about the goings-on at the cloistered women’s college in the Massachusetts hills. If a student wished to send an item to her own hometown paper, she had to join the board temporarily and have the contents vetted. Prior to its formation, according to the Wellesley News, information got out through “the disconnected work of a number of students engaged by the newspapers for which they reported, and responsible only to these papers.” In other words, the school had no say in how it was being depicted to the outside world. Among recent infractions at the time of the Press Board’s creation was a story in a California newspaper characterizing a student who had recently been elected a fire captain for one of the college houses as “[a] Wellesley girl who ran the only hose-wagon in the country driven by a woman.”
Clearly this kind of vile misrepresentation would not do. As a member of the Press Board, Harriet sent carefully worded news items about her beloved school to the Boston Globe, the Newark Sunday Call, and the Newark Evening News. An economics class had taught her about the plight of women factory workers and taken her on a tour through some of Boston’s housing projects, but she was so sheltered from the world of financial concerns that she had never seen a check. When her first payment arrived from the Boston Globe in that form, she believed it was “for information only” and pasted it into the pages of her memory book as a souvenir. Though she later peeled it out, leaving an empty space in her book that always made her laugh in later years, she had clearly never experienced the necessity of earning a living.
Girl Sleuth Page 7
