Wealthy women in the movement
It’s easier to research rich suffragists than poor ones. Wealthy women’s contributions to the movement were well-documented, their correspondence is more likely to be preserved, and they were profiled and gossiped about in the papers. One rich woman’s contribution... 🧵 <br /><br />Katherine Duer Mackay’s life seems ripped from the pages of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel: outrageous wealth, a scandalous divorce, and more. Given her extreme privilege and narrow, conformist social circle, her approach to suffrage and public welfare is notable. <br /><br />Mrs. Mackay, as she was known, joined the cause in 1908. She consulted leading suffragists like Harriot Stanton Blatch to devise a plan. Mackay wasn’t interested in joining NAWSA’s dull NY chapter, nor Blatch’s deliberately cross-class Equality League of Self-Supporting Women. She wanted her own project. In creating the Equal Franchise Society, Mrs. Mackay recruited a board of serious and capable suffragists (including Blatch), and began funding lobbying in Albany as early as 1910. <br /><br />Few resources for New York legislative work existed then. Her funding laid the groundwork for the 1915 New York referendum, and eventually the 1917 win. Along with better-known Alva Belmont, her involvement made suffrage seem safe for prominent society women who had hesitated to be associated with a cause that threatened patriarchy. <br /><br />Mrs. Mackay’s upper-crust viewpoint sometimes left her at odds with her own organization -- for example, when she insisted that the Albany headquarters be a suite at the posh Ten Eyck Hotel, not a storefront on State Street. Mackay was deeply dismayed when the Franchise Society board voted to join the first big NYC suffrage march, in May 1910. She feared that street demonstrations threatened the movement’s respectability. <br /><br />See 👉 <a href="https://dailysuffragist.omeka.net/items/show/404" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">How we learned to protest</a> <br /><br />But to her credit, she accepted the decision -- and cared to see the Society would show up handsomely, though she herself refused to attend! <br /><br />Wealthy doesn’t really begin to describe Katherine’s lifestyle. Shortly after she married gold/telegraph/financier Clarence Mackay, they hired Stanford White to design their Long Island estate. Katherine worked closely with White on the design and construction of Harbor Hill, a castle on 648 acres. <br /><br />Katherine’s efforts on behalf of the local community were genuine. She donated funds to renovate the public library, and then in 1905 ran for school board. She served 5 years, the first woman ever elected. <br /><br />And she sent her children to public school! As she told the newspaper: “If we wish to establish confidence in the public school system, it is necessary for the rich as well as the poor to patronize them. If we draw such caste distinctions as in the past, it is inconsistent to preach the benefits to be derived from government aid in education.†<br /><br />Katherine had stepped back from active involvement with suffrage by the time her cousin Alice Duer Miller began publishing her witty suffrage column “Are Women People?†in the New York Tribune. <br /><br />See 👉 <a href="https://dailysuffragist.omeka.net/items/show/458" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Why We Oppose Pockets for Women</a><br /><br />That year Katherine’s life got much more complicated. She fell in love with a doctor who had treated her husband, and sought a divorce. She lost custody of her children, and was stripped of her American citizenship when she and the doctor moved to Paris. After the war they returned to New York & later divorced. Katherine’s private life was extensively covered in the papers, always in a tone viciously judgmental of her. She died of cancer in 1930 at age 51. <br /><br />A footnote for all the new theater folks following tonight - Katherine’s daughter Ellin Mackay married Irving Berlin! Then her father disowned her because he was Jewish.😣 Father & daughter later reconciled, and Irving & Ellin were married 62 years. #Suffrage100 #19thAmendmentÂ
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13/08/2020
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
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09/05/2020
Eliza Jackson Eddy's $50,000 bequest
Daily Suffragist doesn’t usually go down a genealogy rabbit hole, but a good trusts & estates case is a dangerous trigger. Long thread... <br /><br /><a href="https://dailysuffragist.omeka.net/items/show/278" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Francis Jackson embraced women’s rights after his daughter was stripped of her children.</a> <br /><br />Who was Eliza Jackson’s ex-husband? Did she ever see her children again? I haven’t yet found anything directly on point - nothing about the divorce or his abduction of the children. But I did find all of her children, and both of her husbands. <br /><br />Eliza gave birth to 7 children in 17 years. Two died in infancy. One died a few months after his fourth birthday. I used to wonder if losing a child hurt as badly for the millennia that infant mortality was higher. Then I had children. <br /><br />Eliza married Charles Meriam when she was 20, he was 22. They had 3 children: Francis Jackson, named for his grandfather; Eliza Frances & Charles Levi, who died at 3 months. I haven’t yet found her divorce records, but less than 5 years later Eliza married James Eddy in Boston. <br /><br />Assuming Eliza lost custody of her children before her remarriage, her son would have been no older than 10 and her daughter no more than 7. Eliza and James Eddy moved to Rhode Island and she had 4 more children.<br /><br />Their daughters Amy and Sarah survived to adulthood. Sarah Eddy carried on her family’s suffrage commitment, along w/other causes. She was also an artist who painted Susan B Anthony in 1901. <br /><br /><a href="https://portsmouthhistorynotes.com/2019/11/14/sarah-eddys-suffrage-work/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Read more</a> in Gloria Schmidt’s blog about Portsmouth, RI. <br /><br />When and to what extent Eliza reunited with her 2 oldest children is unknown. Her daughter Eliza “Lizzie” Meriam lived in Boston by 1865. She died at 40, one week after her mother. (Her widower, Mr. Bacon, is the one who contested Mrs. Eddy’s will.) <br /><br />Eliza’s oldest child, Francis Jackson Meriam, was in Virginia in October of 1859. How do I know? He joined John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. <br /><br />Francis survived the raid and escaped to Canada. During the Civil War he was a captain in the 3d South Carolina Colored Infantry. Alas, he was “erratic and unbalanced,” of “little judgment and in feeble health,” but “generous, brave, and devoted.” <br /><br />Eliza Jackson Eddy left $50,000 to the suffrage movement, and her younger daughters Amy & Sarah supported the bequest. The money enabled the publication of the final volume of the History of Woman Suffrage. Its editors noted their gratitude: We deeply regret that we have been unable to procure a good photograph of our generous benefactor, as it was our intention to make her engraving the frontispiece of this volume…” <br /><br />Here is her photograph.
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21/03/2020
Death and taxes
Was suffrage a legitimate charitable cause? "501c3" refers to a section of the tax code. Tax exempt status for voluntary, religious & educational orgs took its current form between 1894-1913. But before that, trusts & estates law was where the question was argued. Thread. <br /><br />In 1861, a Boston abolitionist named Francis Jackson bequeathed $5,000 to Susan B Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Wendell Phillips, “in trust...to secure the passage of laws granting women, whether married or unmarried, the right to vote, to hold office...to hold, manage and devise property, and all other civil rights enjoyed by men. My desire is that they may become a permanent organization, until the rights of women shall be established equal with those of men.” <br /><br />A Massachusetts court invalidated the gift. <br /><br />The court noted that it had no comment on whether the stated goals were wise or desirable. But accomplishing them would require changing the law - the Constitution, even! It held that overthrowing or changing laws is not a charitable use. <br /><br />The movement got the money anyway. Francis Jackson anticipated this would happen, and had given the $5,000 to Wendell Phillips while alive. Plenty of abolitionists didn’t care much about women’s rights. So why did Jackson? <br /><br />Sally Roesch Wagner @<a href="https://twitter.com/Swagner711" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Swagner711</a> explains that watching his daughter suffer awakened him to the injustice women faced. His daughter Eliza lost custody of her young children when her husband absconded with them. In 1850s Boston, she was powerless. <br /><br />When Eliza herself died more than 20 years later, she left $50,000 to the movement. Just as her father had, she divided the funds between Lucy Stone and Susan B Anthony - now the leaders of two separate suffrage associations. <br /><br />Susan B Anthony, an unmarried woman, could inherit outright. For a married woman the will had to be more specific: “to Lucy Stone, wife of Henry B. Blackwell, as her own absolute separate property, free from any control by him.” <br /><br />Disappointed relatives challenged the will, arguing that Eliza was trying to do just what her father’s will couldn’t: create an unlawful charity. But Wendell Phillips - to whom Francis Jackson entrusted the original $5,000 gift - had written the will himself. <br /><br />The highest court in Massachusetts - 7 men, including Oliver Wendell Holmes - held in 1885 that Eliza's will was airtight. Lucy Stone and Susan B each got almost $25,000. Even after legal fees, it was the largest gift a woman had yet given to the cause. #Suffrage100
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19/03/2020
<a href="https://dailysuffragist.omeka.net/admin/items/show/327" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Eliza Jackson Eddy's $50,000 Bequest</a>