Suffragents
<p><span style="font-weight:400;">Have you heard the story of the young legislator who was the hero of Tennessee’s ratification of the 19th Amendment?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight:400;">I’m not talking about Harry Burn.<br /></span><span style="font-weight:400;"></span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight:400;">Harry Burn has gotten way more ink than he’s due. He was a young member of the Tenn. Assembly who was noncommittal about suffrage. At the last minute he cast a pivotal vote in favor of ratification, crediting a letter from his mother that said “be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt.”</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight:400;">Changing your mind when you realize you are on the wrong side of history is a marvelous thing -- that’s the value of telling Harry Burn’s story. But if you are looking for a male hero of the Tennessee ratification fight, meet “suffragent” Joe Hanover.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight:400;">Men who supported women’s voting rights were known playfully as suffragents. This sounded clever when men were called “gents.” Today it reads as though they were women’s agents -- which of course they were, as no women could vote on suffrage bills. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight:400;">During Tennessee’s month-long battle to become the state to ratify the 19th Amendment, Joe Hanover was the second-youngest member of the state’s General Assembly. (Harry Burn was youngest.)</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight:400;">He was one of two Jews in the all-white, all-male legislature, and an immigrant. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight:400;">Joe was about 11 when his family immigrated from Poland. The story goes that when learning about American democracy with his parents, he asked: “Why can’t Mother vote?” He became a talented lawyer, and won a seat in the Assembly representing Memphis.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight:400;">When suffragists needed a capable floor whip for the ratification fight, Hanover stepped up. There were plenty of rotten men in the House, including the Speaker, who had double-crossed suffragists at the last minute. The vote was going to be very, very close. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight:400;">Hanover spent weeks corralling reluctant legislators, calling in favors, and fighting off entrapment and bribery. He got death threats and antisemitic slurs, and the governor assigned him a state trooper as a bodyguard. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight:400;">When a pro-suffrage legislator left Nashville because his wife was ill, Hanover found a wealthy supporter to charter a return train. But to no avail - going into the final vote, on August 18, 1920, Hanover knew they were two votes short. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight:400;">Every member of the General Assembly knew that the ratification of the 19th Amendment hung in the balance. Everyone in Tennessee and around the nation knew it.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight:400;">Two men changed their votes that day: first Harry Burn, and then - with the vote tied 48 to 48 - a member from western Tennessee named Banks Turner spoke up at the very last moment to vote “aye.” Suffrage had passed.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight:400;">Elaine Weiss @efweiss5 describes the scene: “The chamber shook with screams and cries, with thumping and whooping...There was weeping among both men and women. Joe Hanover was mobbed like the winning pitcher of a ball game.” </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight:400;">The story of Harry Burn’s last minute change of heart has been celebrated ad nauseum. @gailcollins is particularly fond of him. Making Burn the hero of ratification obscures the work of the women in TN and elsewhere whose accomplishment it really was. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight:400;">But if you’re looking for a gent who worked hard and truly delivered for women, try Joe Hanover.<br /></span></p>
Daily Suffragist
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August 22, 2021 - Happy birthday, Seth
Alpha Epsilon Phi
Guest post! Thrilled to welcome @<a href="https://twitter.com/shiram19" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">shiram19</a> to tell us about the suffrage roots of an early Jewish sorority. Read on..<br /><br />On October 24, 1909, Helen Phillips invited 6 friends into her dorm room at Barnard College in NYC. While her friends commuted, she lived on campus & “wanted something to keep her in closer contact with her friends.” That evening, the Alpha Epsilon Phi (AEPhi) sorority was born. <br /><br />Alpha Epsilon was technically not the first Jewish sorority. In 1903, Iota Alpha Pi began at Hunter College. Their purpose was similar to that of AEPhi – to provide camaraderie for young Jewish female collegians, who were few & far between at the turn of the 20th century! <br /><br />Because there’s no easy “I” sound in English to begin an acronym, the IAPi sorority women called themselves “the JAPs,” no relation to either the derogatory term Jewish American Princess or the slur used against Japanese people. <br /><br />AEPhi, like the other Jewish sororities that formed over the course of the 1910s, rose out of a need for Jewish female collegians to gain social and emotional support on college campuses that were often fraught with antisemitism, from the admissions processes to the social scene. <br /><br />Historically Protestant fraternities and sororities that closed their doors to Jewish women were the dominant campus social outlets on colleges across the country. Black and white Catholic women encountered similar exclusion and formed their own sororities during this time too. <br /><br />But back to AEPhi: apparently, Helen and her friends were quite busy because the evening immediately following the formation of AEPhi, the girls served as ushers for a big event happening in midtown – an appearance by UK suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst to discuss women’s equality. <br /><br />Reminiscing about AEPhi’s early years in 1963, founder Tina Hess Solomon brought up what suffrage meant to them: “We were young & full of college spirit…we had serious discussion groups concerned with the events of the day. The most important one was ‘Women’s Suffrage.’” <br /><br />It is slightly ironic that <a href="https://twitter.com/BarnardCollege" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">@BarnardCollege</a> served as the site of AEPhi’s founding and as the institution that gave these young Jewish women the inspiration for furthering their interest in suffrage by their participation in the Pankhurst rally. <br /><br />As @DailySuffragist has previously reported, the founder of Barnard, Annie Meyer Nathan, was a notorious anti-suffragist, though her older sister Maud Nathan warmly embraced the cause and was a visible figure within it, as Melissa Klapper has shown.<br /><br />For the founders of AEPhi, women should not only be granted the right to vote, but needed to be informed voters. Shortly after NY finally adopted suffrage in 1917, the @AEPhi Quarterly magazine urged its readership to take voting seriously & become educated on political affairs.<br /><br />In 1918, the Quarterly wrote that in suffrage, “an all-important power has been given to us...the right to vote…Care must be taken to prove the fallacy of the anti-suffrage argument that women voters will only double the number of unintelligent ballots.”<br /><br />Furthermore, AEPhi believed that its membership offered unique knowledge and services to female voters and their civic education due to their higher education and knowledge of “governmental affairs.” <br /><br />Later in 1918, prior to the passage and ratification of the 19th amendment, AEPhi’s Quarterly reminded members that “it is incumbent upon every woman to avail herself of the right of franchise bestowed upon her. It is not only her privilege to vote, but it is also a duty.” <br /><br />By 1918, AEPhi had one of their very own members running for New York office. Attorney Myra Marks was on the Democratic ticket for Member of Assembly in the 15th District. She lost by only 93 votes.<br /><br />AEPhi launched as a Jewish group for women with an investment in political issues & for the next century, the sorority engaged w/ all of the major social and political movements America witnessed, from assisting refugees fleeing Nazism to postwar anticommunism and civil rights.<br /><br />For more on AEPhi and the other historically Jewish sororities, see work by Shira Kohn or Marianne Sanua’s book on Jewish fraternities. For more on Jewish women and suffrage, see Melissa Klapper’s Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace. Cited material courtesy of AEPhi Archives
Daily Suffragist and Dr. Shira Kohn
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1282123040139116550" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
11/07/2020
Infighting on the left.
I’ve told the story of the WTUL/Wage Earners’ League suffragists at length because it resonates so loudly today. <br /><br />Two camps that should have been allies dismissed one another instead of collaborating, squandering opportunities for power. 🧵💪 <br /><br />(Photo Kheel Center c. 1910) <br /><br />Feminists were afraid of Socialism; Socialists disdained feminism as bourgeois. Sound familiar? In the years before and after the turn of the century, if they’d collaborated more, they could have benefited each other. Laboring men had votes that suffragists desperately needed, but suffragists resented these immigrant men for having the vote when educated white women didn’t. <br /><br />Had women been able to vote, the mothers/daughters/sisters/wives of laboring men could have made the progressive movement stronger sooner. <br /><br />But rather than find common cause against a power structure that rejected them both, they organized separately. They emphasized their differences and frustrations rather than their common ground. Rose Schneiderman, Pauline Newman, Leonora O'Reilly & more tried to break the logjam. <br /><br />This small cohort of Jewish and Irish immigrant women insisted that they could be suffragists AND Socialists, feminists AND working women. That both identities and both goals mattered. I always admired their accomplishments. I didn’t realize how lonely their work. #Suffrage100 <br /><br /><blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr">Rachel, I really hope you have plans to gather all of this incredible information you’ve put together this year into something we can continue to consult — a book, a blog, something! It’s a labor of love, I know, but also a terrific resource!</p>
— Christina Wolbrecht (@C_Wolbrecht) <a href="https://twitter.com/C_Wolbrecht/status/1260374462089887744?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 13, 2020</a></blockquote>
<br /><br />That's such a lovely compliment! I'm just taking scholars' wonderful books and breaking them into small pieces. I'll figure out a way it can live on, though. Thank you. Means a lot.Â
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1260373155471917056" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
12/05/2020
Serving two Gods
Rose Schneiderman and Leonora O’Reilly were featured speakers at NAWSA conventions as early as 1907. The leaders of the suffrage mainstream warmed to working class women when they saw how these fiery activists could ignite a crowd. [New thread!] <br /><br />But the middle-class suffragists grew uneasy when the speeches got too Socialist. Even the more daring suffrage groups, like Harriot Stanton Blatch’s Equality League and a group called the American Suffragettes (more on them later!) told Schneiderman and O’Reilly to tone it down. <br /><br />For a while they complied - they wanted to be part of the suffrage movement, and its leaders provided funds they needed to organize working women. But eventually they grew tired of watching their words. Frustratingly, they had nowhere else to go. <br /><br />Suffrage was almost as unwelcome in Socialist settings as Socialism was among suffragists. The men of the labor movement thought suffrage was a bourgeois distraction from the real work of revolution. Publicly the Socialist Party and the AFL supported woman suffrage, but privately they disparaged it as a waste of time. @<a href="https://twitter.com/AnneliseOrleck1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">AnneliseOrleck1</a> quotes a letter to Rose Schneiderman from a man who chastised her for squandering her talent: <br /><br />“You cannot possibly serve two Gods--you cannot fill efficiently two places in two movements...<br /><br />"You either work for Socialism and as a result for equality of the sexes or you work for woman suffrage only and neglect Socialism.” <br /><br />Schneiderman and O’Reilly, along with Pauline Newman and Theresa Malkiel and a handful of others, persisted in trying to balance both causes. <br /><br />Newman - whose friends all called her Paul - pointed out that it was easy for Socialist men to dismiss the importance of the vote; they had one. In the early years of the century we can see working class suffragists continually reorganizing. <br /><br />The same cadre of women form and reform, seeking a place to be fully committed to both women and labor. They keep trying to make a way to fund their work & set the agenda without being captive to wealthy women or disdainful Socialist men. How’d that work out? Stay tuned.
Daily Suffragist
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08/05/2020
Factory women
“The manufacturer has a vote; the bosses have votes; the foremen have votes, the inspectors have votes. The working girl has no vote.” - Clara Lemlich, 1912 White working women became suffragists in large numbers when they heard working women advocate for suffrage. [Thread] <br /><br />At the turn of the 19th century, Italian and Ashkenazi Jewish immigration was booming on the east coast. Immigrants who weren’t Asian became citizens easily, and the men quickly became new voters. But instead of seeking their support, national suffrage groups like NAWSA and WCTU decided they were the enemy: surely pro-liquor and anti-suffrage. <br /><br />Xenophobia and anti-Semitism contributed to their certainty that these men were to be resented, not recruited. If laboring men were resented, their sisters were pitied. <br /><br />In New York especially, upper class women began to take an interest in the working conditions of white women and girls, and the Consumers League became a force for reform. But factory girls were the objects of the League’s political organizing, not its authors. <br /><br />The settlement house movement began to bridge this gap, and Florence Kelley especially tried to unite suffragists and working women. But do-gooder social workers weren’t persuasive messengers to factory girls, at least not re:why they should prioritize the vote over labor rights. <br /><br />In 1907, the leading women of the labor movement began to speak for themselves about the crusade for voting rights. Rose Schneiderman, Pauline Newman, Clara Lemlich, and Leonora O’Reilly were stars of the labor movement in New York City. <br /><br />Their embrace of women’s suffrage infused it with energy and vitality at a crucial point. But friction between suffrage and Socialism meant they were endlessly pulled in two directions. Stay tuned this week for more! #Suffrage100 #CenturyOfStruggle
Daily Suffragist
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05/05/2020
Maud Nathan's sister, Annie Nathan Meyer
I was prepared to hate Annie Nathan Meyer because of her vehement anti-suffrage views. But it’s hard to hate a woman whose autobiography, published posthumously, is called “It’s Been Fun.” <br /><br />Annie Nathan Meyer founded @<a href="https://twitter.com/BarnardCollege" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">BarnardCollege</a> in 1889. Women couldn’t study at @<a href="https://twitter.com/Columbia" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Columbia</a> or anywhere in the city. She raised support for the college by appealing to New Yorkers’ chauvinism - Boston & Philadelphia already had liberal arts colleges for women. <br /><br />Unlike her older sister Maud (see yesterday), Annie had no formal education. While Maud and their brothers went to school, their mother kept Annie at home for company. Annie educated herself, reading Margaret Fuller, George Eliot & Elizabeth Barrett Browning. <br /><br />Annie became an accomplished author of nonfiction, fiction, plays, and many effective letters to the editor. She was a progressive in many ways, especially in her commitment to African-American rights. The NAACP called on her to broker Black/Jewish conflicts. <br /><br />She quit the DAR because they supported segregation. She was instrumental in making Zora Neale Hurston the first Black student at @BarnardCollege, and they became genuinely close friends. Hurston dedicated “Mules and Men” to her. <br /><br />Somehow this champion of women’s education, a public and professional woman her entire life, didn’t think women should vote. Her anti-suffrage views are odious. She argued that women’s primary obligations were domestic, and voting would inevitably corrupt domesticity. <br /><br />She wrote a polemical, never-produced play called The Dominant Sex, in which the protagonist, a suffragist and clubwoman, “neglects her home and child and shows nothing but icy contempt for her husband.” <br /><br />The only explanations historians offer for her persistent hostility are (a) contempt for some suffragists’ overblown claims that women’s votes would cure all social ills, and (b) sibling rivalry. <br /><br />The public enjoyed the spectacle of the sisters at odds, noting gleefully when Annie was invited to a suffrage luncheon at which Maud was to give the keynote. The New Republic published their dueling letters to the editor for decades. They both lived long lives full of accomplishment. Though Annie felt unappreciated by Barnard in her lifetime, today the @BarnardCollege website cites her as the founder--though it doesn’t mention her anti-suffragism. <br /><br />For more, read <a href="https://barnard.edu/magazine/winter-2015/sisters-house-divided" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Louise Bernikow's thoughtful compariso</a>n of the sisters for Barnard’s alumnae magazine. #Suffrage100 #HappyPassover
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1249146053351411715" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
12/04/2020
The Nathan Sisters
Two sisters were among New York’s most prominent society women at the turn of the last century…one a vigorous suffragist, the other an equally committed anti-suffragist. <br /><br />Guess which one founded @<a href="https://twitter.com/BarnardCollege" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">BarnardCollege</a>? <br /><br />Maud Nathan and Annie Nathan Meyer descended from an illustrious Sephardi Jewish family with roots dating to before the American Revolution. Benjamin Cardozo and Emma Lazarus were cousins. <br /><br />Maud and Annie’s childhood was chaotic, but they both married wealthy men they liked--and settled into lives as upper-class, society matrons - dues-paying members of the Daughters of the American Revolution. <br /><br />But they were both restless, and both radical. We’ll meet Maud Nathan today; Annie Nathan Meyer tomorrow. <br /><br />Maud’s life revolved around society galas and summers in Saratoga Springs - until her only child died at 8 years old. <br /><br />Her friend Josephine Shaw Lowell, a founder of the New York Consumers League, urged Maud to direct her grief into supporting working women. <br /><br />By 1897 Maud was president of the NY Consumers League, a post she held for 30 years. The League worked to improve working conditions and enlist consumers in taking responsibility for the conditions in factories and stores. <br /><br />Maud scandalized her family by embracing suffrage. <br /><br />She even defended the radical tactics the Pankhursts were using in the UK. She noted: “While the suffragettes were quiet and well behaved, members of the House of Commons paid no attention to them...†<br /><br />Here is Maud in 1913 at the Intl Suffrage Convention in Budapest.<br /><br />Her husband Frederick shared her convictions, co-founding the Men’s League for Equal Suffrage. Together they marched down 5th Avenue--pretty shocking for their class--and attended suffrage conventions. He was undeterred when newspapers snidely referred to him as Mr. Maud Nathan. <br /><br />After he died, Maud spent 25 years with her partner Corinne Johnson.ðŸ³ï¸â€ðŸŒˆThey bought a house in Litchfield, Conn., started a community action group and supported the local schools. <br /><br />Meanwhile, Annie continued her own activism - radical and contradictory in many ways. Stay tuned!Â
Daily Suffragist
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10/04/2020
"Rabbi" Ray Frank
Sometimes your heroes really disappoint. <br /><br />I’m not talking about Stanton or Anthony or Alice Paul. I’m talking about Ray Frank. <br /><br />Frank was the first Jewish woman to preach from a pulpit in the US - before a crowd of 1,000 people. Thread. <br /><br />The story is that she arrived in Spokane WA on the eve of Rosh Hashana 1890 to find a tiny Jewish community so fractious that no service was planned. She said she’d give the sermon if a minyan - surely of men - could be found. Her offer was announced in that evening's paper... and a crowd gathered. @<a href="https://twitter.com/umanskyellen" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">UmanskyEllen</a> says she preached that night, the next day and on Yom Kippur, launching a proto-rabbinic career. Though never ordained, she created congregations throughout the west. She was offered a job leading a congregation in Chicago, which she declined. <br /><br />Frank was there in 1893 at the founding of @<a href="https://twitter.com/NCJW" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">NCJW</a>👇She delivered a formal address on Women in the Synagogue at the Jewish Women’s Congress. <br /><br />But she opposed women’s suffrage. <br /><br />Her speech “The Jewish Woman and Suffrage†was . . . against. <br /><br />Though herself unmarried and kid-free, she argued that Jewish women should focus on their domestic lives. <br /><br />In an 1895 newspaper interview, Frank said “I am not a suffragist because I do not believe that a woman can properly fulfill her home duties and be out in the world, too.â€<br /><br />Not only did she eschew voting for women; she would gladly restrict the vote to select men. In the same interview she said the right to vote should be “granted strictly according to the intelligence and capacity of the individual for government.†<br /><br />Ray Frank married at age 40 and retired from public life. Her husband was an economics professor. They settled in Illinois and for the next 40 years she volunteered with local groups, including her synagogue and eventually the League of Women Voters. #Suffrage100Â
Daily Suffragist
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09/04/2020
National Council of Jewish Women
The desire to be proudly Jewish + fully American animated the founding of the National Council of Jewish Women. <br /><br />The US Jewish pop. in the 1880s was still heavily German and Sephardi - small, successful groups. The massive influx of Eastern European Jews was just beginning. <br /><br />NCJW was created in 1893, in conjunction with the World Parliament of Religions at the Chicago World’s Fair. (The Parliament was the biggest event at the Fair; the Congress of Representative Women, where many of our heroines spoke, was the 2d-biggest.) <br /><br />In its first two decades, @<a href="https://twitter.com/NCJW" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">NCJW</a> combined upper-class clubwomen and the growing cohort of more politicized Jewish women working in settlement houses. “The two factions came together in their commitment to social justice, the preservation of Judaism and the Jewish community in the US, and a vision of religion that combined the two.”<a href="https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/national-council-of-jewish-women" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> --Faith Rogow</a> @<a href="https://twitter.com/InsightersEd" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">InsightersEd</a> <br /><br />NCJW study circles were modeled on existing women’s clubs, but studying Jewish texts instead of European literature. NCJW tried to educate Jewish women while straddling denominational divisions in American Jewish life, which was never easy. <br /><br />Though politically progressive, NCJW never formally endorsed women’s suffrage. No single, clear reason for their reluctance has been identified. It irked the many ardent suffragists in its own membership, and disappointed suffrage leaders across decades. <br /><br />Susan B Anthony and Anna Howard Shaw cornered NCJW leader <a href="https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/kohut-rebecca" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Rebekah Kohut</a> on a visit to Congress in 1896. They “demanded to know why Jewish organizations did not take their place among American women’s groups fighting for their rights.” (Melissa Klapper) <br /><br />NCJW’s recalcitrance doesn't reflect American Jews' overwhelming support for votes for women. Over the next few days we’ll meet some of the most colorful Jewish suffragists and anti-suffragists, including a pair of warring sisters. Chag sameach, Happy Passover. #Suffrage100
Daily Suffragist
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08/04/2020
Scale of atrocity * caliber of organizing
Why do some tragedies generate change and others don’t? <br /><br />109 years ago today the Triangle Shirtwaist fire killed 146 people - mostly Jewish & Italian immigrant women. The fire was key to winning labor & safety laws. The political power women built in its aftermath contributed directly to suffrage. <br /><br />But many horrifying examples of venality and mismanagement don’t lead to any change at all. So why did this one? Here’s a simple equation: Scale of atrocity * caliber of organizing = possibility of change. <br /><br />The Triangle fire was big - it's still one of the biggest industrial disasters in U.S. history. At the time of the fire, immigrant organizers like Rose Schneiderman, Pauline Newman, and Clara Lemlich were fresh from a significant success in the Uprising of 20,000. <br /><br />In 1910, garment workers struck all winter - and won. The leaders built skill and fortitude in that fight, and were ready to take it further. They knew women who died at Triangle; Newman had worked there for years. For the public, the horror of women jumping from the Triangle factory's windows was catalyzing. <br /><br />What will we make from this moment?
Daily Suffragist
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25/03/2020