Harriot Stanton demolishes her mother's argument for "educated suffrage"
It’s easy to disagree with your mother in private. In public, less so. Especially when your mother is Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Harriot Stanton Blatch was the 6th of ElizCadyStanton’s 7 children. She grew up to become an accomplished suffragist and feminist in her own right. 🧵 <br /><br />I’ll spend a few days on Harriot, who led some of the ideological and strategic shifts that helped the suffrage movement shake off its turn-of-the-century doldrums. Harriot Stanton went to @<a href="https://twitter.com/Vassar" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Vassar</a>, then married a wealthy British man and lived 20 years in the UK. <br /><br />In 1894 she spent some months back home in New York, helping lobby the state legislature. She found that while she had been studying class conflict in England, the radical suffragist movement of her childhood had become much more conservative. <br /><br />Still, her mother’s support for an “educated suffrage†law for male voters--literacy tests that would exclude many immigrants and working men--was a shock. Harriot said so in print. Writing in the Woman’s Journal, suffragists’ weekly paper, she begins: “My honored mother.†<br /><br />She then proceeds to demolish ElizCadyStanton’s argument: -- first pointing out that her mother knows more than a few lettered men who are awfully ignorant; -- then chiding her for being so parochial as to think English is the only language that matters; -- then noting that her mother’s elitism leads her to false conclusions about working people. Harriot archly points out that not so long ago, men who could read and write held all the power in “the whole southern section of the United States,†and the results were dismal. <br /><br />“[W]e are ever vainly trying to get morals and character out of intellect, but they grow on quite other soil.†Though ElizCadyStanton fired back a few weeks later, apparently their mother-daughter relationship was undamaged, and Harriot had asserted her political independence.
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04/27/2020
Mrs. Pankhurst at Carnegie Hall
While Alice Paul was in London’s Holloway Prison with a feeding tube forced down her nose, Emmeline Pankhurst traveled to the US to raise funds and promote the cause. <br /><br />American women were fascinated to see the British radical up close. 🧵 <br /><br />On Monday, October 25, 1909, all 3,000 seats of Carnegie Hall were filled, almost all by women. The line stretched around the corner; 1,000 people were turned away. <br /><br />Vassar and Barnard students wearing Votes for Women sashes served as ushers - we’ll meet some of them tomorrow! <br /><br />Harriot Stanton Blatch’s Equality League for Self-Supporting Women sponsored the evening. 400 working, wage-earning women were seated onstage behind Mrs. Pankhurst: teachers, doctors, dentists, nurses, social workers, lawyers, civil service workers & trade unionists. <br /><br />Blatch presided; Anna Howard Shaw from NAWSA & Margaret Dreier Robins from Women’s Trade Union League gave welcoming remarks. <br /><br />However, 4 days later a different group of women met at Carnegie Hall to create a more conservative local suffrage group. There’s a photo of that night. <br /><br />Back to Mrs. Pankhurst...<br /><br />In her memoirs, Harriot Stanton Blatch says the crowd expected someone more fearsome than the elegant Englishwoman. (Meryl Streep played Emmeline Pankhurst in the movie "Suffragette." The movie was eh but the casting seemed right.) <br /><br />“I know you have not all come here tonight because you are interested in suffrage. You have come to see what a militant suffragette looks like & to see what a Hooligan woman is like… <br /><br />I am not going to tell you why we need the vote but how we are going to get it.†<br /><br />She spoke for two hours, explaining that polite demonstrations simply weren’t enough. <br /><br />“It is by going to prison, rather than by any arguments we have employed that we have won the support of the English working man.†<br /><br />As for rock-throwing, it was a British political tradition--and a necessity. <br /><br />“Around every one of these [stones] was wrapped a piece of paper with a question on it. We only threw them because we were not admitted to Liberal meetings and had no chance to ask our questions any other way.†<br /><br />Later in her visit Pankhurst urged the US government to intervene on behalf of Alice Paul. She noted diplomatic interventions on behalf of other Americans jailed abroad, and asked why President Taft was doing nothing for Miss Paul. #Suffrage100 #CenturyofStruggle
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10/07/2020
The Martyr
Inez Milholland graduated from @<a href="https://twitter.com/Vassar" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Vassar</a> in 1909. She applied to law school, but @<a href="https://twitter.com/Harvard_Law" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Harvard_Law</a> @<a href="https://twitter.com/ColumbiaLaw" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">ColumbiaLaw</a> @<a href="https://twitter.com/UniofOxford" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">UniofOxford</a> @<a href="https://twitter.com/Cambridge_Uni" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cambridge_Uni</a> refused her. She was accepted @<a href="https://twitter.com/nyulaw" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">nyulaw</a>, which began admitting women in 1890. (By the time the others admitted women, Inez was dead.) 🧵 <br /><br />She practiced law and fought for labor rights, as one of the wealthy women who committed themselves to the NY Women’s Trade Union League. She supported strikes by shirtwaist makers and laundry workers, walking picket lines in 1910 & 1916. She was an early member of NAACP.<br /><br />She played a role in the exoneration of Charles Stielow, sentenced to the electric chair for a murder he did not commit. Inez Milholland isn’t named in the National Registry of Exonerations, <a href="https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetailpre1989.aspx?caseid=312" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">but the summary refers to pro bono attorneys taking up his case.</a> <br /><br />Suffrage was Inez's top priority. Alice Paul cast her as the cover girl of the 1913 Inauguration march, literally. The image of Inez on a white horse, in heraldic garb, graced the commemorative program the organizers sold to raise funds for the march. <br /><br />Inez, who took two semesters of medieval history at Vassar, designed her own costume to evoke a crusader, as @<a href="https://twitter.com/MDockrayMiller" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">MDockrayMiller</a> explains in her <a href="https://daily.jstor.org/why-did-the-suffragists-wear-medieval-costumes/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">great piece</a> @<a href="https://twitter.com/JSTOR_Daily" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">JSTOR_daily</a> 👉ðŸ¾<br /><br />Alice Paul wanted a beautiful woman to rebut the stereotype of sexless, spinster suffragists. Inez’s romantic life was indeed busy: she had an intense fling with Max Eastman, radical editor & brother of Crystal; and was briefly engaged to G. Marconi, inventor of the radio!<br /><br />In 1913 Inez married a Dutchman named Eugen Boissevain - she proposed to him. He was proud of her leadership and wasn't intimidated by strong women; after Inez died he married Edna St. Vincent Millay. The image at the top of this thread comes from NYC, May 3, 1913.<br /><br />Inez would live only a few years more, dying at 30 of a bacterial infection while on a Western states suffrage tour. Her last public words, before collapsing onstage, were: “How long must women wait for liberty?†#Suffrage100 #CenturyofStruggle
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21/06/2020
<a href="https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetailpre1989.aspx?caseid=312" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">CHARLES STIELOW</a><br /><br /><a href="https://daily.jstor.org/why-did-the-suffragists-wear-medieval-costumes/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Why Did the Suffragists Wear Medieval Costumes?</a>
Trolley tour in the Capital Region
New York’s most compelling suffrage spokeswomen toured the state in the spring of 1908. They began in Seneca Falls and traveled from town to town by trolley. <br /><br />Through World War I, electric railways connected the cities and towns of central NY - and much of the nation.🚋 thread <br /><br />Apparently it was once possible to travel all the way from NYC to Chicago by local light rail. Woulda been a lot of stops - which is why it was perfect for a suffrage campaign. <br /><br />Harriot Stanton Blatch, Maud Malone, Charlotte Perkins Gilman & Rose Schneiderman stumped 200+ miles. <br /><br />Albany, the capitol, was a conservative town and an anti-suffrage stronghold. Mayor Charles Gaus tried to quash the gathering. <br /><br />Troy, across the river, was more welcoming.<br /><br />Kate Mullany & Esther Keegan founded the Collar Laundry Union in Troy in 1864. It was the first female union in the nation, and Troy remained a stronghold of women’s trade union militancy. The suffragists held a successful open air meeting there. <br /><br />In Syracuse they found factory workers to talk to because Harriot Blatch knew the wife of the factory owner. They spoke to the workers of the Solvay Process Company. <br /><br />When they arrived at @<a href="https://twitter.com/Vassar" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Vassar</a> College they found they were barred from campus. <br /><br />Pres. James Monroe Taylor was educating “not leaders but good wives and mothers,†and he forbade suffrage activity. Inez Milholland - later to lead marches on a white horse - was a student, and she worked with Blatch to organize a mass gathering off campus… in a nearby cemetery. <br /><br />At the cemetery, speakers included Charlotte Perkins Gilman, well-known to the Vassar students as a writer and renegade. But according to @<a href="https://twitter.com/EllenDubois10">ellendubois10</a>, “it was the passionate trade-union feminist [Rose] Schneiderman who was the star.†<br /><br />In her annual report, Harriot Stanton Blatch wrote: “This campaign fully convinced all those who took part in it that the out-door meeting is the popular method of reaching the people.†<br /><br />Thanks to @<a href="https://twitter.com/albanymuskrat" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">AlbanyMuskrat</a> & Ernie Mann for local & RR info. #Suffrage100 #CenturyofStruggleÂ
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18/06/2020