Ushering in a “New Era,” 1907–1909

A new generation far more attuned to Gotham’s resources took over the campaign’s management beginning in 1907, reconfiguring the relationship between suffrage and the cityscape. This chapter focuses on three leaders of the reconfigured movement—Maud Malone, Harriot Stanton Blatch, and Carrie Chapman Catt—and their efforts to recruit teachers by championing pay parity, and to rekindle elite women’s interest in the campaign. National leaders also increasingly recognized that Manhattan could enhance their organization’s prestige, profile, and treasury. In 1909, they unveiled lavish new headquarters on Fifth Avenue, convinced that the city’s dense newspaper industry could broadcast their message to the rest of the nation.

Becoming “A Lover of the Metropolis,” 1895–1906

Rather than grinding to a standstill following defeat at the 1894 New York State Constitutional Convention, city work continued and new organizations emerged. Lillie Devereux Blake and her peers more regularly decided to hold suffrage events in elegant spaces like the Waldorf-Astoria at century’s turn, capitalizing on the city’s haute geography to enhance the movement’s respectability. At the same time, they divided over how to respond to the good government initiatives reconfiguring the metropolitan government. Whether supporting them or remaining ambivalent, many inserted discussion of women’s rights into conversations about improving the municipality. A personal feud between Susan B. Anthony and Lillie Devereux Blake in the succeeding years produced a power vacuum in Gotham at century’s close. The resultant vacuum ensured that Gotham’s campaign would not be bogged down by outsiders’ mandates.

“Suffrage ‘Owns’ City,” 1913–1915

The 1915 state referendum required leaders like Carrie Chapman Catt and Harriot Stanton Blatch to move beyond recruiting female allies and instead convince legislators and men with the ballot to support women’s rights. This chapter describes how activists quickly rallied their urban army to do so: public health nurses courted immigrant support, actresses used their celebrity to draw attention, socialites poured money into the treasury, and teachers forfeited their summer vacations for organizational work. City organizations, including the Woman Suffrage Party, pooled resources to form the Empire State Campaign Committee. Everyone recognized that winning the state’s forty-five Electoral College votes would be a pivotal step toward achieving a national amendment. However, obstacles remained. Organizers chafed at police restrictions, faced resistance at sporting events, and needed to relocate headquarters in an ever-changing rental marketplace. Ultimately, more than three hundred thousand men voted against women’s right to the franchise at the 1915 referendum, ensuring that polling places would remain distinctly male terrain in an increasingly heterosocial city.

“The Wickedness of the Masses”

This chapter explores suffrage strategies from 1870 to 1894—from the Manhattan movement’s foundation to the New York State Constitutional Convention campaign. For suffrage leaders like Lillie Devereux Blake and those in the New York City Woman Suffrage League, the city remained a frustrating, if not dangerous, place. These beliefs informed movement tactics in the 1870s and 1880s, as organizers clung to the safety of supporters’ homes or rented commercial halls for meetings. The opportunity presented by the New York State Constitutional Convention in 1894 interrupted this routine and energized the campaign in unprecedented ways. Optimistic activists hoped they could convince delegates to support an amendment to the state constitution, and etiquette-obsessed socialites opened up a suffrage headquarters at the renowned Sherry’s restaurant. Not to be outdone, affluent opponents challenged their suffrage-seeking sisters. While unsuccessful in amending the constitution, the events of 1894 proved to mainstream activists that under the right circumstances wealthy New Yorkers could become outspoken suffrage advocates.

Introduction

In 1917, New York State amended its constitution to enfranchise women. That New York City men voted in support of the amendment stunned reporters, residents, and movement leaders alike who assumed that Gotham voters would oppose the measure. What explains their assumptions and their surprise? Why did so many city residents endorse the amendment? The introduction outlines how suffragists claimed a “right to the city” in order to convince metropolitan neighbors to support women’s rights, tracing the shift in their tactics from 1870 to 1917. Building on histories of the women’s suffrage movement and studies on the gendered metropolis, it summarizes how urbanization, gender norms, and political activism intersected in turn of the century New York.

Epilogue

In 1913, bystanders attacked suffragists during a parade in Washington, DC. Clearly, tactics developed in Manhattan inspired campaigns elsewhere, but the reception to these strategies differed. This epilogue summarizes the ways in which leaders in New York City claimed a “right to the city” in order to win the vote in New York State and how organizations across the nation appropriated their strategies—sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully. Victory in New York was as much a political victory as a cultural one, as suffragists reimagined women’s place in the nation’s largest metropolis. At the same time, they failed to completely dismantle gendered notions of propriety or combat gendered violence, reminding that revolutions have limits and claiming a “right to the city” is very different from achieving that right.

From Confrontation to Collaboration, 1916 and 1917

This chapter examines the second referendum campaign in 1917, as collaboration with public officials replaced confrontation. Less than a month after New York men rejected political equality in 1915, the Empire State Campaign Committee hosted a “Reorganization Convention,” one outcome of which was the birth of the New York State Woman Suffrage Party. For years activists had aggressively claimed a “right to the city.” Now, those in the Woman Suffrage Party used that right to help the city during a devastating polio outbreak and World War I: distributing medical information to tenement dwellers, tracking sanitary code violations, and facilitating the wartime military census. The change in strategy was stunningly effective. New York women finally won the ballot, with Gotham carrying the state amendment.

Geographies of Suffrage, 1910–1913

This chapter evaluates the metropolitan strategies activists developed in the early 1910s. Leaders like Carrie Chapman Catt and Harriot Stanton Blatch and organizations like the Woman Suffrage Party and the Women’s Political Union created a foothold for the campaign by opening headquarters in Murray Hill, a retail area in Midtown Manhattan. The suffrage district created there quite literally put the women’s rights crusade on the map, improving its visibility and professional status. At the same time, activists reached beyond this one district. A few aggressively moved into other parts of the city, claiming areas once deemed unsafe for middle-class women. Some tried to recruit nurses and actors to further publicize their message. Organizers capitalized on New York’s budding film industry to spread images of this diverse coalition across the nation. Celluloid views of the cityscape, parade footage, and scenes from headquarters helped to crystallize the image of suffrage as a distinctly urban affair, enabling women across the nation to vicariously participate.