Lavinia Dock
Every day is a good day to pay tribute to nurses, esp now. Lavinia Dock helped professionalize nursing before devoting the second half of her life to suffrage. She began her career alongside Clara Barton, then spent 20 yrs as a settlement house colleague of Lillian Wald. 🧵 <br /><br />A head nurse at @<a href="https://twitter.com/JohnsHopkins" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">JohnsHopkins</a> @<a href="https://twitter.com/IJHNursing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">IJHNursing</a>, Lavinia Dock wrote nursing’s 1st textbook in 1890, wrote a column on global public health for the American Journal of Nursing, helped organize the National Assoc. of Colored Graduate Nurses, and co-wrote 2-volume “History of Nursing.†<br /><br />She became more radical as she aged. She joined the Women’s Trade Union League & walked the picket line in the 1909 shirtwaist strike. She advocated for access to info. about birth control & STDs. She insisted nurses should embrace their working class patients, not remain aloof.<br /><br />Lavinia Dock walked both the Albany & Washington suffrage hikes in the winter of 1912-13 as “Surgeon General†to the hikers. I am fairly sure she is the woman on the far right below, en route from NYC to Washington for the Inaugural protest. <br /><br />In 1917 she joined the Natl Woman’s Party picketing the White House. She was arrested 3x & jailed at Occoquan Workhouse. Photo👇of 1 of her arrests. “I believe that going to jail gave me a purer feeling of unalloyed content than I ever had in any of my other work.†#Suffrage100Â
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1239046579954356225" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
15/03/2020
Leonora O'Reilly
Leonora O’Reilly had a hand in umpteen important organizations of the Progressive Era. She was a founder of the Consumers League, the Women’s Trade Union League, and the NAACP, to name a few. “Leonora O’Reilly attracted people like a magnet.†- B.Wertheimer ☘ï¸ðŸ§µ <br /><br />Born in New York City, Leonora’s mother Winifred took her to labor meetings as an infant. Leonora worked in a factory from 13. She joined the Knights of Labor at 16. (Mother/Daughter 👇) <br /><br />In 1886, as a teenager, she founded her 1st organization: the NY Working Women’s Society. <br /><br />The Society helped pass the nation’s first factory inspection law. <br /><br />O’Reilly was a gifted recruiter. She brought many activists and benefactors into the movement for labor reform, including Josephine Shaw Lowell and Mary & Margaret Dreier. In 1890 she founded the Consumers League of NY, which later became a national power, passing protective laws under Florence Kelley’s lead. <br /><br />In 1897 O'Reilly founded a local of the United Garment Workers. In 1903 she was a founding board member of the Women’s Trade Union League. <br /><br />O’Reilly was terrific on the stump: “the League’s most famous orator.†For 23 years she fit her activism around full-time factory work, until WTUL paid her to travel and lecture. 1909-1910, <br /><br />“Leonora O’Reilly gave a speech almost every day for the League or some affiliated cause.†She co-founded the NYC Wage Earners Suffrage League w/Clara Lemlich. It was a space for working women only - not society benefactors. In 1912 O’Reilly testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, delivering “plainer speaking than the committee had ever heard from a woman.â€<br /><br />“There are 8 million of us in the US who must earn our daily bread. You have been making laws for us and the laws you have made have not been good for us. We working women want the ballot as our right. You say it is not a right but a privilege. Then we demand it as a privilege.â€Â
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1240100985206386690" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
17/03/2020
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
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1243005956419719175" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
25/03/2020
Working women
Work. Throughout the 19th century, even suffragists saw paid work as something poor women _had_ to do, not something women would _want_ to do. Most of the movement’s full-time activists (both white and Black) had family money or a husband who supported them. Thread. <br /><br />While some women made their own money as lecturers, editors, doctors, or lawyers, at century’s end this was still rare. Laboring women: domestics, factory workers--Irish, Italian, Jewish immigrant women--were seen by “club women†as people to be pitied and aided, not organized. <br /><br />Harriot Stanton Blatch helped change that. Harriot returned to the U.S. in 1902 because her mother was dying. As a suffragist, she lived in her famous mother’s shadow - a new problem for a woman! (Here: Harriot w/her mother and her daughter.) <br /><br />Harriot’s years in England gave her space to craft her own identity. There she was deeply involved in the Fabian Society, where she absorbed socialism and a class analysis that was new to her. She developed a feminist philosophy that valued working women as agents of power. <br /><br />In other words, she grasped that the vote mattered to all women. Not only to wealthy women who wanted to improve the law _on behalf_ of the poor factory girls, but to the factory girls who wanted power to make the laws themselves. Duh, right? But it was a significant shift then. <br /><br />At the beginning of the 20th century, working-class women and wealthy women were beginning to organize collaboratively for the first time. In 1903 they created the Women’s Trade Union League. The WTUL’s primary goal was to promote unionization among working women, and it did. <br /><br />It was also a place for working women and elite women to engage in a shared political effort as partners. Harriot Stanton Blatch embraced it immediately, and became one of the first wealthy women to join the WTUL's New York chapter. <br /><br />She could see fierce immigrant activists like Rose Schneiderman and Leonora O’Reilly as partners - and she could explain to elite women why they needed to work together. <a href="https://dailysuffragist.omeka.net/items/show/275" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Read about O'Reilly if you missed her</a>👇 And then... <br /><br />Stay tuned for how the Women’s Trade Union League helped the suffrage movement shake off its torpor. #Suffrage100 Apr 30, 2020
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1255696556021428224" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
29/04/2020
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
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1257881405570322434" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
05/05/2020
Funding, and the class politics of activism
Activism needs resources. Wealthier women provided funding that working class suffragists needed: to print leaflets & posters, rent meeting halls, and most of all to pay salaries so activists could quit their factory jobs & organize full-time. But money inevitably means control.<br /><br />Here’s how it works, then and now: imagine you’re a donor to grassroots community activists. Let’s say a group you support endorses a political candidate you dislike. As a result, you give less, or nothing. Other middle-class donors do too. Next time, the group hesitates. <br /><br />Or they don’t hesitate, but they lose funds and their impact shrinks. Ideally, they stick to their principles and build a broader base of donors so they aren’t dependent on a handful of wealthy people - but that only works if they have the ability to reach a broad base.<br /><br />Working-class suffragists didn’t have access to a broad base. The Socialist and union men who could have supported their work with lots of small donations were skeptical about the value of women’s suffrage. 👀 <br /><br />So they needed the financial support of wealthier women, who were often uncomfortable with their radical politics. Rose Schneiderman, Leonora O’Reilly, Clara Lemlich and Pauline Newman negotiated for support and control of the agenda across multiple organizations. First, WTUL: <br /><br />The Women’s Trade Union League was created in 1903 to unify working women from different trades and encourage unionization. WTUL’s members included union women, women not yet union members, and “allies†- upper- & middle class women who brought money and clout. <br /><br />In 1907, Harriot Stanton Blatch created the Equality League for Self-Supporting Women. She imagined it as WTUL's political arm; Schneiderman and O’Reilly were the star speakers. But the wealthy women squirmed at Socialism, and didn’t get the urgency of the labor struggle.<br /><br />They had never had Rose Schneiderman’s experience of making $2.16 for a 64-hour week - or $6/week if she brought her own sewing machine. Louise La Rue of the San Francisco Waitresses Union explained the disconnect as follows: “We got along fine with [the mainstream suffragists], we endorsed everything they did; but the street car strike came along, and of course we had to walk. Some of those women objected to walking. So you can just imagine how we felt about it. <br /><br />"We had to pull out from them but we thought it quite important that we should have a suffrage league, so we organized a Working Girls’ Suffrage League.†-Barbara Mayer Wertheimer <br /><br />That was in 1909. In 1911 Leonora O’Reilly and Clara Lemlich organized a New York City Wage Earners May Suffrage League - their inaugural meeting was just days before the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. (@<a href="https://twitter.com/AnneliseOrleck1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">AnneliseOrleck1</a>) Unlike the WTUL or the Equality League, in the Wage Earners Suffrage League only workers could be voting members with a say in policy. #Suffrage100 #CenturyofStruggle May 10, 2020
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1259280889114132480" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
09/05/2020
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
5th grade reports
Kvelling: my son's 5th grade presentation on garment workers, WTUL, #TriangleFire. I gave him @<a href="https://twitter.com/AnneliseOrleck1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">AnneliseOrleck1</a> & Barbara Wertheimer, but hadn't seen his final paper. He was awesome. Crying: his classmate presented on the Brooklyn Bridge without mentioning Emily Roebling. 🤦â€â™€ï¸ðŸ˜ Â
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1261018109781082112" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
14/05/2020
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
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1274875078908563461" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
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>
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
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1281721502027653124" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
10/07/2020