WHO WON WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE? A CASE FOR “MERE MEN”

Abstract

Scholars of women's suffrage have long debated credit, a meditation on which leaders won the campaign to enfranchise American women. Many argue that victory came because of Alice Paul's militancy in picketing the White House. Others insist it was Carrie Chapman Catt's pragmatism in winning state victories. Still others note that both were needed, a political “one-two punch” of strategic effectiveness. This article suggests that one contingent often excluded from this narrative is men. Male suffragists are often portrayed as driven more by a hunger for quixotic political or sexual adventure, or by a chivalrous posture toward women. Examining the records of the New York Men's League for Woman Suffrage and the archival footprints male suffragists left behind, this article argues that whatever their motives, male suffragists made palatable to other men the once radical notion that women could join the coarse, corrupt, and cigar-filled world of politics without losing their femininity—or robbing men of their virility. By their very activism, they conditioned the public to see women—and men—beyond the gendered construct of the domestic sphere and in the light of the interest politics that dominated the Progressive Era.

After New York's male voters enfranchised women in November of 1917, suffragists threw a celebratory rally. Carrie Chapman Catt, who had headed the Empire State Campaign two years earlier and who now directed the National American Woman Suffrage Association, began her remarks with the words, “Fellow citizens.” For what seemed “a long time,” recalled one witness, “she could go no further. The packed auditorium was in a tumult of joy. Women cheered themselves hoarse and men cheered with them.” ¹

Later, a reporter asked Governor Charles Whitman who had won the ballot for women. Was it the painstaking effort by suffragists to get out their vote in a disciplined division of districts, the decision by Tammany Hall to remain neutral, the endorsement by Main Street businesses, the waning influence of the liquor lobby, the growth of the working class and immigrant vote, the record of service by women during the First World War? “I rather thought that it was the men of New York who carried that amendment,” Whitman noted dryly. “But what matter who wins the praise as long as the work is done?” ²

The initiative lost by a slim margin upstate, rescued by 103,863 male voters in New York City who pulled the lever to enfranchise their wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers. ³ Much historiography has examined the publicity and marketing efforts of suffrage leaders, the tactics of persuasion and protest that finally convinced male voters to extend political rights to women after earlier attempts had failed. ⁴ But little attention has been paid to the male suffragists who stood with them, often enduring considerable ridicule from other men.

Anti-suffrage newspapers of the day dismissed them as “bachelors” who were drawn to the movement in hopes of meeting beautiful suffragists, their interest tinged with a subtext of sexual conquest. ⁵ In writing their memoirs after ratification of the constitutional amendment in 1920, suffrage leaders rarely included them in the story, perhaps to protect the primacy of female activism. Historians have been little kinder, portraying male suffragists as driven more by a hunger for political adventure, sexual danger, or “chivalrous condescension” ⁶ than by any idealistic support for the cause. Some scholars have gone so far as to delete mention of men whose personal behavior toward women was reprehensible. ⁷

Examining the records of the New York Men's League for Woman Suffrage and the archival footprints left behind by male activists, this article argues instead that progressive men accepted women's entry into politics. Attuned to the zeitgeist of modernity swirling through the city, these men viewed their embrace of women's suffrage as part of their civic, even manly duty to the polity. Records are sparse—the main archives of the Men's League for Woman Suffrage are housed within the papers of a leading female suffragist, Harriet Burton Laidlaw, whose husband James Lees Laidlaw in later years served as the League's president. ⁸ But the extant record suggests that the Men's League—first in Chicago, then in New York, and then nationally—drew a corps of white, progressive men to the cause.

Their participation had its own vocabulary—a certain moral chivalry, civic awareness, belief in female citizenship, and perhaps a bit of noblesse oblige. Their motivations were diverse—from socialists who thought enfranchising women would help topple laissez-faire economics to descendants of abolitionist families embracing reform, to suffrage husbands eager to support their wives. What they shared was an understanding that at a time of social upheaval, when critics were questioning every aspect of modern life from the meaning of art to the excesses of capitalism and women were expanding their experiences in education, career, and the strenuous life, the imperative for change invited them to support women's suffrage, in the process offering a new vision of masculinity.

Restoring male suffragists to the frame of women's suffrage is not to absolve them of the assumptions of male hegemony, only to notice what their involvement says about the civic causes that came to be known as the progressivism, and about the attendant debates over chivalry and manliness that were often laced with sarcasm. Much has been written too about this period's extraordinary if fitful cross-class mobilization of female union leaders, wealthy socialites, and middle-class clubwomen, around a shared agenda of reforming government, improving sanitation and workplace conditions for immigrants, and enacting votes for women. ⁹ The era's cooperation between progressive men and women across gender expectations was no less a feature.

That male activists were ostracized by anti-suffragists, both male and female, is not a surprise. They represented a new tactical weapon in the campaign, and a threat to gender norms. What is noteworthy is that they were welcomed, even celebrated, among progressive audiences. In their campaigns to rid the city of Tammany Hall corruption, they had pushed for electoral reforms, including secret ballots and separation of municipal elections from state and national ones. As a result, these men saw the enfranchisement of women, in popular image unsullied by the partisan mud of city politics, not as a concession of male turf or as an assault on their manhood but as an adjunct to their previous work. In their eyes, the fight for women's suffrage was not, as one observer put it, a conflict between men and women, but between progressives and the rest. ¹⁰ As one newspaper explained, “This is no contest of women against men. The average man is not tyrannical, he is only prejudiced. This is a contest of the women and men who are ruled by reason against the women and men who are ruled by custom.” ¹¹

***

The timing of their entry into the campaign was not insignificant. From the beginning, a few men had stood with women in the fight for the vote, most abolitionists and many African Americans. Famously, Frederick Douglass rose at the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention to defend Elizabeth Cady Stanton's call to grant voting rights to women, ¹² an idea so controversial that Stanton's cosponsor Lucretia Mott feared its inclusion would “make us ridiculous.” ¹³ For Douglass, the issue was an extension of his campaign for equal citizenship for African Americans. “When I ran away from slavery, it was for myself,” he remarked later in life. “When I advocated emancipation, it was for my people. But when I stood up for the rights of woman, self was out of the question, and I found a little nobility in the act.” ¹⁴

By the time of Douglass's death in 1895, the women's suffrage movement had descended into what its adherents called “the doldrums,” riven by a searing rivalry between two factions whose principals had been at odds since the end of the Civil War. Stanton, who spent a lifetime trying to convince her father, a New York judge, that women were the equal of men intellectually, campaigned against the Fifteenth Amendment enshrining black voting rights into the Constitution. Lacing her rhetoric with blatant pleas not for universal but for educated suffrage, she criticized Republicans for ignoring the rights of fifteen million women while empowering two million black men who “do not know the difference between a Monarchy or a Republic, who never read the Declaration of Independence or Webster's spelling book.” Joined by Susan B. Anthony, she bolted from abolitionist roots, forming a new organization to focus strictly on winning the vote for educated white women.

Much scholarship about the nineteenth-century movement revolves around this moment, a splintering of the cause into two organizations led by Stanton and Anthony on one side and Lucy Stone and her husband, Henry Blackwell, on the other. James McPherson has argued that the two-decade rivalry between the two groups “weakened the feminist movement” and tagged suffragists as opportunists who would cashier African American causes whenever expedient. ¹⁵ Ellen Carol DuBois has countered that in parting company from their abolitionist colleagues, Stanton and Anthony ensured primacy for a women's rights agenda until then tethered to larger reform goals. “Ultimately, the development of a politically autonomous woman suffrage movement was feminism's greatest achievement in the postwar period,” she wrote. ¹⁶ More recently, Lisa Tetrault has suggested that Stanton and Anthony crafted “the myth of Seneca Falls” as the movement's foundational narrative precisely because they were on the defensive about the schism. Seeking to remind readers of their contribution to the movement, they minimized the impact of efforts before Seneca Falls—such as the 1846 petition for voting rights to the New York legislature or the pioneering lecturing by Stone and the Grimke sisters—to guard their own place in history. Anthony had not attended Seneca Falls, but was inserted into the narrative as the protector of the Stanton legacy, later to eclipse her partner in historical memory. ¹⁷

As women ventured into the public square and more specifically into politics, their incursion sparked what Michael Kimmel has identified as a “masculinist response” to this “perceived feminization of American culture” by men re-creating exclusively male institutions. ¹⁸ Kristin Hoganson has argued similarly that the gendered challenge posed by the New Woman prompted men to demonstrate their courage with “death-defying” stunts, and with military forays of questionable national security import into Cuba and the Philippines. ¹⁹ Gail Bederman challenged the idea that new male interests such as hunting and Bull Moose exploits represented a “virility impulse.” ²⁰ As she noted, “There is no evidence that turn-of-the-century men ever lost confidence that people with male bodies had the right to wield power.” ²¹

But this study suggests that for one influential group of men who joined the women's suffrage movement in the 1910s, progressivism required voluntarily shedding the presumption of male entitlement. Taking their lead from female suffrage groups, sharing podiums with their wives, marching at the back of suffrage parades, they demonstrated a new kind of masculinity. Response from male hecklers was pointed precisely because these men posed a threat to the male order. More, this article argues that they were no less typical of men of their times than the Rough Riders of Teddy Roosevelt's San Juan or the Wild West cowboy shows of Buffalo Bill Cody. Progressivism was for some as much about reforming manhood as asserting it.

The Progressive Era, after all, was a time of upheaval and wide debate over social change, and the campaign for women's suffrage was one of the causes that reignited interest among white middle-class men and women. In that historical context, male reformers joined not a women's cause but a progressive campaign, one that for all its presumed enlightenment shunned participation by African Americans. Female suffrage leaders repeatedly rebuffed efforts by black activists to join their ranks, fearful of alienating southerners. Seeing this allegiance to white privilege for what it was, W.E.B. Du Bois took a jaundiced view about the likely results of enfranchising women. “There is not the slightest reason for supposing that white women under ordinary circumstances are going to be any more intelligent, liberal or humane toward the black, the poor and the unfortunate than white men are,” he wrote. “On contrary, considering what subjection of a race, a class or a sex must mean, there will undoubtedly manifest itself among women voters at first more prejudice and petty meanness toward Negroes than we have now. It is the awful penalty of injustice.” He supported the cause not because he thought women were more moral but because he thought it would spark public debate “on the fundamentals of democracy,” a discussion that would accrue to the benefit the disenfranchised of color, both male and female. ²²

This fraught alliance between white women leading the suffrage movement and black men and women applauding their cause was further complicated in the late nineteenth century by a crisis facing white manhood. Theodore Roosevelt, who had recovered from a childhood of sickliness by embracing a cult of vigor, now promoted a return to large families. The age of the bachelor, some called it, ²³ had led to a lower birthrate among native-born whites and caused a backlash against the New Woman, who was better educated, more independent, and more often employed than her Victorian Era predecessors. As immigrants bulging with satchels and clinging children surged through Ellis Island, Roosevelt expressed fear that these cultural currents would lead to white race suicide. Later, as the nominee of the Progressive Party in 1912, winning support from female reformer Jane Addams, he embraced the cause. For now, convinced that a woman's first duty was to the nation's demographic future, he argued that women would get the vote when a majority of them insisted on it. Until then, he said, the nation had other priorities. ²⁴ In this cauldron of clashing politics, the new Men's League for Woman Suffrage was born.

***

The idea for a Men's League was actually the brainchild of a woman. Fanny Garrison Villard was the daughter of abolitionist and suffragist William Lloyd Garrison and herself a speaker for women's rights who lectured frequently on the topic. ²⁵ She may have heard of the idea after a group of left-wing British intellectuals, including Henry Nevinson, Laurence Houseman, and Israel Zangwill, formed a men's League for Women's Suffrage in Britain in 1907, “with the object of bringing to bear upon the movement the electoral power of men.” ²⁶

In 1908 she urged her son, crusading editor Oswald Garrison Villard, to write Anna Howard Shaw, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, suggesting “a men's club favoring equal suffrage.” The subject had been much discussed in suffrage circles, and Shaw was mindful that some female activists were wary of a male takeover. In a carefully crafted reply, Shaw encouraged Oswald Villard to focus on men who might be too busy to campaign but “would be willing to give their names and the influence [emphasis hers] which goes with them.” ²⁷ In Shaw's formulation, the League would give social cover by its very presence, but like a cadre of silent soldiers would not threaten female leadership. This feint was not to last long, whether because the men grew more activist or the women less threatened by their presence remains unclear. In any event, as Shaw had feared, the League quickly became an active suffrage organization, its members often speaking on the same platform as female suffragists and welcomed at their conventions.

Villard reached out to Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, an early advocate for women's suffrage. The Hungarian-born Wise, a descendant of rabbis, had declined an offer to head the congregation at the city's most influential synagogue, Emanu-El. As he explained, he wanted to change the status quo, not preside over it. ²⁸ Forming a Free Synagogue, he used Sunday lectures at Carnegie Hall to address a secular audience. About suffrage, he was outspoken. “As long as women are shut out from citizenship and the exercise of the ballot, which is the symbol of citizenship, ours is no democracy,” he said, but “a manocracy” where men could use “brute power to shut women out from the right of equal citizenship.” ²⁹

The two reformers agreed to “share the ignominy, provided someone turned up who would do the work.” That someone turned out to be Max Eastman, a charming if arrogant personality who by his own account had earlier discussed the idea of a men's league with a reporter for the New York Herald. ³⁰ Influenced by his sister, suffragist Crystal Eastman, and by what he described as “the general mood of America,” ³¹ he was eager to seize on what he saw as an opportunity to “demolish traditional, monogamous marriage.” ³² Later he would become the editor of the radical magazine The Masses. For now, he agreed to work under Villard's direction to organize men around the idea of the woman's vote.

A child of prominence, Villard intuitively felt the group should shimmer with distinction, the better to persuade reluctant legislators of equal rank, an indication he thought class would trump concerns about gender upheaval. He began by giving Eastman letters of introduction to twelve men of “civic importance,” along with $2 in dues. In reaching out to men of prominence—he called them “civic wonders”—Eastman encountered some resistance. Hector S. Tyndale, claiming to be a suffrage supporter, practically threw Eastman out of his office, saying he'd “be damned if he'd see [the cause] made ridiculous.” Had he balked at a request from Eastman to lobby Albany or speak at a suffrage event? Eastman does not tell us, but given Eastman's subsequent recruitment pitch, this seems likely. His next visit was more successful. Charles Culp Burlingham, president of the New York Bar Association, a reformer sometimes called “the first citizen of New York,” ³³ was all in. Burlington, whose wife was an anti-suffragist, told Eastman he supported the cause because he hungered for a partner of lively mind, believing “women ought to try to be more intelligent than they are, if only for the sake of their husbands.”

In subsequent mailings to prospective members, Eastman made two promises, “the importance of which I had learned in my visits to the original twelve.” One was that there would be no public announcement until one hundred men had signed up, offering the comfort of a crowd even as it suggested the likelihood of social ostracism. The instinct to gather one hundred men to the fold before going public may have stemmed from the nineteenth-century stigma of suffrage as the campaign of a radical few. In fact, after one recruit leaked Eastman's letter to the anti-suffrage New York Times, the newspaper broke the story. “Did Their Wives Insist?,” asked another newspaper in henpecked mockery. ³⁴ At least one of Eastman's recruits bolted, suggesting that public support of suffrage for women was still threatening to the establishment. Dr. John Brannan was a trustee of the Bellevue and Allied Hospitals’ board of directors and may have feared repercussions from the board if he remained a member. He later rejoined the League, quietly.

Eastman's second assurance in recruiting was that “no member would be called upon to do anything. The main function of the league would be to exist.” ³⁵ This assurance of non-engagement was extraordinary for a cause seeking social change, and may have been a concession to Shaw and other female suffrage leaders wary of male attempts to seize the agenda. Or it may have been a freelance idea by Eastman after the Tyndale encounter. In any event, at a time when New York boasted twenty-nine daily newspapers, ³⁶ a stealth campaign was simply not possible. By the time the Men's League held its first meeting at the City Club in late November, press interest vanquished all thoughts of a silent brigade of men symbolically bolstering the cause. “Female suffrage got a decided boost yesterday at a meeting at the City Club, when an organization of men was formed whose object it will be to stand sponsor in all suffrage movements,” reported Brooklyn Daily Eagle. ³⁷ Derision quickly followed among men for whom the idea of a male suffragist seemed unimaginable. “Men's Leagues for Woman's Suffrage are chiefly favored by bachelors,” explained the Eagle in an editorial comment six days later, this “an inevitable reflection” by the editors. ³⁸

Despite Eastman's assurances of inactivity, the pledge to go public was embedded in the organization's 1910 constitution, which promised “to express approval of the movement of women to attain the full suffrage in this country, and to aid them in their efforts toward that end by public appearances in behalf of the cause, by the circulation of literature, the holding of meetings, and in such other ways as may from time to time seem desirable.” ³⁹ By 1912, one thousand men marched in the New York suffrage parade ⁴⁰ and 20,000 men had signed up for a national Men's League, an umbrella organization for state affiliations. ⁴¹

By then, thirty Leagues dotted the country, ⁴² an indication that progressive men did not reside only in Manhattan. The Men's League for Woman Suffrage in Chicago was the first to organize, and its first mass rally in early 1909 featured Jane Addams, founder of Hull House; Maud Wood Park, noted suffragist from Boston; and Catharine Waugh McCulloch, a lawyer and the first woman justice of the peace elected in Illinois, speaking in a hall where “the house was packed.” ⁴³ In Iowa, a delegation of the local Men's League traveled to the capitol in Des Moines to appeal for a joint resolution on women's suffrage. ⁴⁴ And the Men's League in Connecticut hosted British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst as a featured speaker. ⁴⁵ Leagues sprouted at colleges, including one at Harvard University, formed by John Reed, whom Eastman had converted to the cause. ⁴⁶ Yale and Dartmouth soon followed. ⁴⁷

Credit: Carrie Chapman Catt Collection, Bryn Mawr College Library Digital version: http://www.brynmawr.edu/library/exhibits/suffrage/men.html

Photo 1 In 1912, three weeks after the sinking of the Titanic, one thousand men came out to march for woman suffrage on New York's Fifth Avenue. Rabbi Wise marched with his 10-year-old son, who carried a sign saying, “We want our mothers to vote.” The men endured considerable jeers from onlookers, who shouted, “Oh you gay deceiver,” and “Oh Flossy dear, aren't they cute.” Asked why they were participating, League President James Lees Laidlaw said, “We are marching to give political support to the women and moral support to the men.” The next week, new male converts descended on suffrage headquarters, eager to join the parade.

As the women's suffrage campaign gained steam in New York, the League's profile increased. In 1910, the League was officially recognized at the New York Woman Suffrage Party's second annual convention, where the platform urged men to join the League “in order that our appeals may not go forth from women alone.” ⁴⁸ Weeks later the League hosted a suffrage dinner at the Aldine Club at 200 Fifth Avenue. British suffragist Ethel Snowden, wife of the future Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Snowden, ⁴⁹ gave a spirited keynote. The Times called “the largest woman suffrage dinner ever given in this city … notable for the many men present.” Six hundred people attended “and paid three dollars and stayed until midnight.” ⁵⁰ Eastman called the evening “truly inspiring.” ⁵¹

***

The members of the Men's League were hardly monolithic in their motivations. Among them were dreamers and pragmatists, egos that bruised easily and souls able to laugh off derision. Some wanted women to have the vote to improve the heart of the polity; others because they thought it would improve the minds of women. Some joined the Men's League to tear down the Victorian Era's sexual constraints, others to uphold the civilities of gender decorum. Some meant to honor family connections of reformist zeal, others to challenge the industrial capitalism that was the bane of many moderns. For all of them, as writer Max Eastman suggested, women's suffrage was part of the era's drumbeat for reform, the latest milestone in what seemed like an arc of linear progress toward civic egalitarianism, representing “the big fight for freedom in my time.” ⁵²

For Greenwich Village radicals who joined the New York Men's League, the ballot represented but one piece of a larger socialist vision that would end female dependence on men, and free them from the burden of economic and sexual responsibility. Floyd Dell, a socialist known as a ladies’ man, argued that capitalism was corrupt because it encouraged wives and children to be dependent on men for support. Feminism, he argued, “would make it possible for the first time for men to be free.” ⁵³

For his part, Eastman was an advocate of free love and red politics, and thought the ballot would improve women's intellectual skills, the better for both socialism and sex. ⁵⁴ To a sold-out crowd at Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn Heights, he explained, “Full citizenship would be a stimulant to the women; it would be the greatest thing to wake them up, to make them discontented with their condition after they got the ballot.” ⁵⁵ In a speech delivered at Poughkeepsie in 1910 that was reprised as a bestselling pamphlet, Is Woman Suffrage Important?, ⁵⁶ Eastman insisted that the ballot would liberate all citizens from stereotype. “When we have abolished that double standard of morality which allows the ‘ideal woman’ to be ignorant and silly, we shall see the disappearance of that double standard which allows her husband to be profligate and self centered,” he argued. “When we have less innocence and more virtue in women, we shall have less vice and more virtue in men.” ⁵⁷

As the League gained traction with middle- and upper-class men, Eastman and other “bohemian sex radicals of Greenwich Village” ⁵⁸ left the fold. Eastman said he was furious at the derision visited on the men, especially when it came at the hands of sarcastic journalists. “Even when we occupied five blocks, four abreast, marching solid in the (1912) suffrage parade last May, the press could see only a grudging thousand of us,” he complained. ⁵⁹ In fact, Eastman had not been there. As the Men's League planned its participation in the parade, he left for a romantic interlude in Europe. “I was miles away on the Atlantic when it took place,” he recalled jauntily. While still a draw on the suffrage circuit, he stiffed appearances. Suffragists leading a ballot initiative campaign in California in 1911 asked the Men's League to send Eastman West. The passage of women's suffrage in California was close—the referendum won by a margin of 3,587 votes, one per precinct ⁶⁰ —and advocates in San Francisco had requested a speaker, someone who could “awaken interest, drive home an argument and clinch the matter of securing votes.” The League relayed the invitation. Eastman never showed, and California activists conveyed their displeasure. ⁶¹

Flaunting convention, they had been attracted to a quixotic movement for social change. When the cause turned resolutely pragmatic, they left. As Eastman put it, by 1912 “the suffrage movement was getting too fashionable to appeal to that in me which desires to suffer a little in some high cause.” ⁶²

And fashionable it had become. The League's letterhead, which listed twenty-seven names at its inception in 1910, by 1915 featured sixty-seven men willing to publicly declare their support and lend their names and their time. ⁶³ Villard and Wise stayed the course, as did Tiffany vice president George Kunz, architect William A. Delano, editors George McClelland Harvey of Harper's Weekly and Hamilton Holt of The Independent, and the Rev. John P. Peters of St. Michael's Episcopal Church. So many Columbia University professors joined the organization—philosopher John Dewey, historian Vladimir Simkhovitch, pathologist Simon Flexner, historian Charles Beard, law professor George Kirchwey, economist Henry Rogers Seager, and literature professor William P. Trent—that the League might well have served as a satellite office for the Faculty Club.

Many of these men knew each other through the City Club, founded in 1892 to “aid in securing permanent good government for the City of New York through the election and the appointment of honest and able municipal officers and the establishment of a clear and stable system of laws.” ⁶⁴ Here the connective tissue of reform took hold. Richard Welling, a lawyer and Harvard classmate of Theodore Roosevelt's, had launched many a club campaign to improve the city's water supply, end police graft, and change election laws to derail bribery. ⁶⁵ With Burlingham and lawyer Charles H. Strong, he now joined the Men's League. So did other professionals of their acquaintance, men they had met during the City Club's reform efforts, including the League's first president, banker George Foster Peabody. ⁶⁶ This network of reformers—Metropolitan Museum of Art curator William Ivins, Republican Congressman Herbert Parsons, businessman William Jay Schieffelin, and muckraker Lincoln Steffens ⁶⁷ —embraced suffrage, seeing the vote as an extension of other causes.

The very diversity of their reform causes suggested the breadth of the Progressive Era umbrella. Several were passionate about racial inequality, resonating to calls for an end to economic and civic disadvantage and to lynching of black men. John Milholland, the son of an Irish immigrant; and Villard, grandson of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, were founders of the NAACP, at its birth in 1909 an interracial organization. Rabbi Wise was asked to join later. ⁶⁸ William Jay Schieffelin, a wealthy businessman and descendant of John Jay whose ancestors were Lincoln Republicans, served as chairman of the board of the Tuskegee Institute, and of the Hampton Institute, a college for African Americans. ⁶⁹ Tactical differences between Booker T. Washington, who saw education as a stepping-stone to progress, and W.E.B. Du Bois, eager for political action to stem racial injustices, wrenched black activists. Whether these clashes of approach also affected relations among the white racial reformers of the Men's League for Woman Suffrage is unknown.

The most sizable constituency within the Men's League flew under the banner of municipal reform. Despite the City Club's “chastity rule” that urged its members not to take a city or state position for at least a year after their reform efforts had created new jobs, quite a few tested their ideals inside the government's tent. Calvin Tompkins, a building manufacturer who headed the Municipal Art Society, was named Commissioner of the Docks after William Gaynor, a former Supreme Court justice elected mayor in 1910, turned against Tammany Hall. After John Purroy Mitchel was elected mayor in 1914 as a reformer, with help from the Women's Fusion League for Good Government, he appointed Dr. Henry Moskowitz as chairman of the city's Civil Service Commission. Frederick C. Howe, whose wife Marie Jenney Howe, a Unitarian minister, had started the unorthodox Heterodoxy Club for women, served as Woodrow Wilson's Commissioner of Immigration at Ellis Island from 1914 onward. A prolific author—titles ranged from The City: The Hope for Democracy (1905) to Confessions of a Reformer (1925)—he once explained how suffrage abetted reform. “I want woman suffrage because it will also free men,” he wrote in Collier's in March 1912. “I want woman suffrage for what it will do for woman, for what it will do for men, for what it will do for the muddle we have made of politics. … I cannot myself be happy in a world where there is so much poverty, so much hunger, so much suffering that can be so easily be cured.” In this he parroted the ideological turn within the suffrage movement, from an argument for the ballot as the just rewards of citizenship to a pragmatic one about the moral influence of mothers. Righting society's wrongs “will come more surely, more wisely, by the cooperation of those who suffer most from the costs of the present system—by the votes of women.” ⁷⁰

There was also a large contingency of members who saw themselves as husbands supporting their wives’ causes. In their eyes, manhood was less about defending the barricade of exclusive access to the political process than of expanding the definition of citizenship. Whether they were drawn to the campaign because of their wives’ activism or attracted to their wives because of their support for progressive ideals is difficult to say. Either way, their gaze brought dividends, as their endorsement conferred male political power on a female cause. As Ida Husted Harper, press agent for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, observed, “Behind many a woman who worked there was a man aiding and sustaining her with money and personal sacrifice.” Though this no doubt disturbed Shaw and other feminists, a suffragist with a man at her side had more credence with male voters. The moniker of “suffrage husband” became “a title of distinction.” ⁷¹

Playwright George Middleton became a regular on the suffrage circuit, and a member of the Men's League, after he married Fola La Follette, daughter of Wisconsin progressive Senator Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette. The couple made news after she had asked to keep her given name on marriage, and he championed her right to do so. “When I defended Fola's right to do as she wished, a teapot tempest spilled over,” he recalled. “Editorials, interviews, and what not followed, for we were accused of starting another of those ‘feminists’ demands’ which were ‘breaking up the home.’” ⁷² A member of the Men's League, he gave speeches solo “at street corners and ‘store’ meetings on Fifth Avenue during the lunch hour.” ⁷³ He preferred to appear with his wife, who drew crowds. Her verbal gifts, her training as an actress and her background as the daughter of a prominent politician, gave her a presence that delighted him. Once, preceding her at an event in Catskill, New York, he recalled, “I died on my feet. Never have I felt so lifeless an audience.” Handing her the podium, he marveled that as his wife spoke, she melted “all the ice I left.” ⁷⁴

Henry Wise Miller, another League member, likewise campaigned with his wife. Alice Duer Miller, who descended from colonial fame as well as fortune, had shocked her family by enrolling in Barnard, the new college for women. Despite her father's financial ruin amid a banking collapse, she vowed to pay her own expenses by tutoring others. She later won acclaim as a writer, but it was her facility on her feet that most impressed her husband.

“There was a perfection in what she said from the platform and in the press,” he would write in an affectionate memoir. “Dangerously controversial as the subject was, … this influence, coming from one of her background, contributed an authority to the campaign, and did much to silence the venom and ridicule of the opponents of women's rights.” Like Middleton, Miller too was called on by mainstream organizations to share the podium as a suffrage husband. “One of the stunts of the suffrage campaign was a husband and wife speaking as a team,” he recalled. He thought the tactical result “as good as anything we have had since the Boston Tea Party … a model of propaganda, combining in nice proportion premeditated violence with an appeal to reason.” ⁷⁵

George Creel, who later became director of President Wilson's wartime propaganda arm, the Committee on Public Information, was not a suffrage husband. Far from it, he had to negotiate an arrangement with his wife, Blanche Bates, to devote time to the cause. “My wife and I worked out a financial arrangement,” he recalled. “When—and if—I made enough money to take care of my share of household expenses for the year, the rest of the time would be mine” to spend on progressive reform campaigns, including suffrage. Although he described his wife as “a vociferous anti,” he admired greatly her independent career as an actress. More, he ascribed his enthusiasm for the cause to “the deep conviction that my mother outweighed any man when it came to brains and character,” although she too had “held firmly to the Southern insistence that woman's place was in the home.” Against this backdrop of domestic indifference or even hostility, Creel enunciated a passionate appeal for the vote. ⁷⁶ “Equal Suffrage is part and parcel of the great big struggle for equal justice and real democracy,” he wrote to new members in his role as the Men League's publicity director. “It is as much the man's fight as the woman's.” ⁷⁷

Among his initiatives, he organized a committee of ten men to respond to anti-suffrage material in the newspapers. “It will be the member's duty to read the anti-suffrage letters and editorials in the … papers assigned to him and either answer them himself or, if necessary, have some member of the Publicity Committee … do so,” Creel explained. ⁷⁸ He also reached out to well-known authors across the country to write articles on the subject. Creel wrote William Allen White, the respected owner of the Emporia Gazette in Kansas, in the fall of 1915, suggesting that suffrage campaigns in New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New Jersey “could have no greater boost than an article” in the Saturday Evening Post. “All of us are working night and day, and unless things go wrong at the last minute, I think we are going to carry in New York and Massachusetts,” he wrote. (They did not). “For heaven's sake, come to the front with a sane article that will bring some facts into this eastern nightmare of falsehood.” ⁷⁹

***

Of all the men who joined the League, few were as notorious as Dudley Field Malone. A lawyer and fiery campaign speaker, Malone had first joined the women's suffrage movement in 1908, when he was seated next to Anna Howard Shaw at a dinner. When it was suggested to her that she try to recruit Malone, Shaw replied, “I am too good a suffragist to try to convert any man to anything before he has had his dinner.” Shaw never mentioned suffrage during their conversation. “I was converted then and there by this exhibit of good sense and insight into human nature,” ⁸⁰ he recounted. There were no doubt other reasons for his activism, perhaps the lure of an increasingly popular cause to a man of political ambition.

During the pivotal 1912 presidential election, Malone had stumped for Woodrow Wilson, and was rewarded with appointment to the lucrative position of Collector of the New York Port, with a salary of $12,000 a year, roughly $300,000 in contemporary terms. ⁸¹ When Wilson ran for reelection four years later against former New York governor Charles Evans Hughes, Malone went west, to win over California's newly enfranchised female voters. According to an account in the New York Times, he told crowds that Wilson was “sympathetic toward equal suffrage and that if the women of California would support the Democratic National ticket he would do all he could to help them obtain a national vote.” ⁸² Doris Stevens, a leading figure in Alice Paul's Congressional Union, was also on the campaign trail. Rebutting Malone, she told female voters, as one newspaper account described it, that Wilson “was not sympathetic and that the cause of universal suffrage could expect little aid from his Administration.” ⁸³

By this time, women had won suffrage in twelve states. In 1916, they provided the margin of difference. Without the women's vote in California, Kansas, Washington, and elsewhere, noted one commentator, “Mr. Wilson would not have been continued in the White House.” ⁸⁴ Once reelected, however, Wilson, a Virginia-born southerner, continued to maintain that suffrage was a state, not a federal issue.

To rally public attention, suffrage leader Alice Paul staged pickets at the White House, the first political protests in front of the president's residence. After Congress declared war on Germany, authorities began arrests, on charges of obstructing sidewalk traffic. Sent to Occoquan Workhouse, “a notoriously filthy Virginia prison where the women were fed vermin-infested food and suffered beatings,” some suffragists began hunger strikes, enduring tube feeding. ⁸⁵ In July 1917, as sixteen picketers were tried, three members of the Men's League—Frederick C. Howe, Amos Pinchot, and Malone—watched as the suffragists were sentenced to sixty days in the workhouse. They were eyewitnesses to judicial travesty, whose accounts bolstered those of female suffragists. Later Malone went to the White House and resigned in protest. He was a Wilson man, who felt the president had made him look a hypocrite. Wilson, who considered Malone a friend, was deeply wounded, telling his aide Colonel Edward House, “I know of nothing that has gone more to the quick with me or that has seemed to me more tragical [sic] than Dudley's conduct, which came upon me like a bolt out of the blue. I was stricken by it as I have been by few things in my life.” ⁸⁶

On hearing of Malone's grand gesture, suffragists were ecstatic, seeing chivalry and personal sacrifice in the action. “Although we disagree with you on the question of picketing, every suffragist must be grateful to you for the gallant support you are giving our cause and the great sacrifice you are making for it,” Vira Whitehouse telegraphed. Harriet Laidlaw agreed, telling a reporter, “I was thrilled. I didn't know the suffragists had such a knightly friend. I didn't dream any man would do such a chivalrous thing for us. It can't fail to have a splendid effect on the voting men in our referendum this fall.”

Male suffragists were more suspicious of Malone's motives. Newton Gilbert, an Indiana official and briefly governor-general of the Philippines, argued the resignation wouldn't help suffrage because the picketing had hurt the cause. “Mr. Malone is too closely connected with the pickets,” he observed. “And the pickets have hurt suffrage, which is too bad, for it's too good a cause to be hurt. I did not support Woodrow Wilson, but he is my President, and I object to having him called ‘Kaiser Wilson.’” As James Lees Laidlaw told the New York Sun, the results of Malone's action “would depend somewhat on whether he got out and rolled up his sleeves for Votes for Women.” ⁸⁷ In fact, aside from his membership in the League, there is no record that Malone ever did.

Four years later, he and Doris Stevens married, a stealth wedding officiated by a justice of the peace in the back of a hardware store in Peekskill, New York, and then quickly left for Paris, ⁸⁸ where Malone worked his trade as a divorce lawyer and Doris suffered the insults of his public humiliations. He was “given to drunkenly insulting Stevens in public,” flaunting his extramarital affairs, and once hitting her. ⁸⁹ On their divorce in 1929, all commentary about Malone as a feminist withered.

***

Offering its members as speakers, holding fundraising pageants, organizing a cadre of writers to rebut anti-suffrage editorials—the League quickly became a fixture on the circuit. Entreaties sought volunteers to speak at street meetings, organize chapters, canvass voters, raise funds, or serve as poll watchers at elections. ⁹⁰ Like the Women's Trade Union League or the Equal Franchise Society, the Men's League became an accepted feature of New York's suffrage landscape. It would be an exaggeration to say that the Men's League changed the trajectory of the women's suffrage movement. What is clear from the record is that the League changed some hearts and minds, even as it rattled others. Assessing the impact of their activism is best seen in the reflection of those who responded.

For many men, the very presence of male suffragists was an assault on their perceptions of manhood, and they responded with the ridicule that is the refuge of the insecure. U.S. Senator James Heflin of Alabama famously said during a congressional debate, “I do not believe that there is a red-blooded man in the world who in his heart really believes in woman suffrage. … I think every man who favors it ought to be made to wear a dress.” ⁹¹ Belfort Bax, a social critic, disparaged women for using sex to manipulate men into supporting the cause. “Any success women may achieve in their ‘anti-man’ crusade is entirely due to the help given them by ‘rats’ from the camp of men themselves,” he wrote. ⁹²

Much of this stemmed from long-held notions of manhood, which conflated misogyny with virile masculinity. On observing a mass rally conducted by the Men's League for Women's Suffrage in England, one American reporter expressed surprise that the League's speaker, “instead of being an anaemic [sic], henpecked appearing old gentleman with furtive eye and drooping whiskers, is a robust young fellow of 25 or thereabouts who looks as if he might have been drafted by the ‘cause’ from the football field.” ⁹³

Perhaps to upend these stereotypes about what the Progressive Era male suffragist looked like, or how he behaved, James Lees Laidlaw now hit on a novel idea. Looking for ways to expand the circle of suffrage support, he suggested members wear a blue button of courtesy, signaling to anti-suffrage women on streetcars that, as one newspaper put it, “the days of chivalry were not over when it came to giving a woman a seat in a crowded car.” ⁹⁴ His appeal was not to anti-suffragist males but to their wives and daughters, women perhaps wavering, an effort to assure them that citizenship need not come at the price of courtesy.

The anti-suffrage Brooklyn Life was quick to pounce at this contortion of gender messages. In an article titled “Ostentatious Gallantry,” the magazine pierced the hypocrisy of preaching equality while offering privilege. Calling the League “that knightly organization,” Brooklyn Life noted that true “gentlemen never make a special feature of courtesy and consideration for women. They do not have to. It is second nature with them and the last thing they would think of bragging about.” Instead the magazine belittled the men, suggesting male suffragists ask women for help carrying their luggage. “It seems to us that this would be much more consonant with the aim and purpose of the league,” said the magazine, “which is to drag women into politics before a majority of them has signified the slightest desire for political equality.” ⁹⁵

Arguably nothing the Men's League ever did achieved the notoriety—or provoked the backlash—that attended its participation in the 1912 suffrage parade in New York. That year's march was particularly contentious, occurring just weeks after the sinking of the RMS Titanic, when more than fifteen hundred passengers had plunged to their frigid death. The tragedy sparked a debate over chivalry, that unwritten law of the sea—the call of “women and children first”—that prompted John Jacob Astor IV and other men to forfeit their seats on lifeboats for female passengers. If men had protected women from death, wondered the critics, should they enjoy rights of citizenship in life? An outpouring of mail to editors faulted suffragists for their hypocrisy in seeking equality at the polls when men had made the ultimate sacrifice at sea. ⁹⁶ Identifying himself as “Mere Man,” one wrote, “Would the suffragette have stood on that deck for women's rights or for women's privileges?” ⁹⁷

In response to the male chivalry represented by the Titanic's fateful ending, suffragists offered female discipline. Parade organizer Harriot Stanton Blatch banned automobiles, believing they shielded wealthy or lazy activists from the chore of actually walking—or of having been seen walking—for suffrage. “Riding in a car did not demonstrate courage. It did not show discipline,” Blatch wrote later. “Women were to march on their own two feet out on the streets of America's greatest city; they were to march year by year, better and better.” ⁹⁸ They were to dress in white—Macy's was the official headquarters for suffrage paraphernalia ⁹⁹ —and march in step with one another, column after column of women, “a mass of gleaming white.” ¹⁰⁰ Eager to feminize the street parade—with its male overtones of military combat—she concluded, “Men and women are moved by seeing marching groups of people and by hearing music far more than by listening to the most careful argument.” ¹⁰¹

In 1911, only eighty-nine members of the Men's League marched in the parade. “The crowd generally assumed that we were not there of our own free will,” commented Villard. ¹⁰² As the New York Sun reported, among the three thousand female marchers—architects, typists, aviators, explorers, nurses, physicians, actresses, factory workers, cooks, painters, writers, milliners, hairdressers, librarians, and the like—”the only jeers to be heard came, and came in plenty, when the eighty-nine mere men of the Men's League for Woman Suffrage hove into view.” ¹⁰³

This time, more than one thousand men joined the parade along New York's Fifth Avenue, and the derision they encountered suggested both the threat they posed to the stability of gender relations and the growing backlash of anti-suffrage abuse. The anti-suffrage New York Times reported that one band, “as if to give courage to the less courageous of the mere men marchers, … broke into a lusty marching tune as the men swung from Thirteenth Street into Fifth Avenue.” It is doubtful the drum and fife corps ¹⁰⁴ drowned out heckling from onlookers: “Tramp, tramp, tramp, the girls are marching.” ¹⁰⁵ Seeking to undercut their influence, the Times noted that some had participated in the parade to curry favor with female customers, singling out tailors and dentists. ¹⁰⁶

In his diary, Wise wrote of the mockery he encountered that day. “For a few moments, I was very warm and took off my hat, whereupon someone shouted, ‘Look at the long-haired Susan.’ Some of the other delightful exclamations that greeted us were: ‘Who's taking care of the baby? … Oh, Flossy dear, aren't they cute? Look at the Mollycoddles.’” Still, he experienced the event as uplifting, because while both male and female “rowdies” shouted insults, “the most hopeful thing” was the “respect (shown) by the intelligent class of people.” ¹⁰⁷ George Middleton recalled hecklers crying, “‘Take that handkerchief out of your cuff,’ ‘Oh you gay deceiver’ and ‘You forgot to shave this morning.’” ¹⁰⁸

Other Men's League marchers were not as sanguine. “One felt like an early Christian in the arena,” wrote journalist Will Irwin. ¹⁰⁹ Raymond Brown, whose wife Gertrude Foster Brown was an official in the Woman Suffrage Party, reported that the men felt isolated. “Tagging after the girls—that's what we were doing; and nobody would let us forget it,” he recalled. In an article titled “How It Feels to be the Husband of a Suffragette,” written under the pen name, “One,” he addressed “the over 11,863 of you (who) requested me to go home and wash” dishes. Writing under a pen name, he reassured detractors that neither he nor his wife did the dishes. While not wealthy, the Browns were privileged. “She values the dishes too highly,” he wrote. “They are safer in the hands of a well-trained maid.” ¹¹⁰

The week after the 1912 parade, new converts descended on League headquarters, including quite a few men “moved by the guying their brethren got in the parade.” ¹¹¹ When New York lawyer William Benedict learned the Union League Club had voted to oppose the franchise, he resigned, donating his dues to the New York State Woman Suffrage Party. “About this time of year I should have been paying my annual dues to the Union League Club had I not resigned on account of its action on the equal suffrage question,” he wrote Harriet Laidlaw. “I accordingly take pleasure in sending you a check for the amount of said dues to be used as you may think best in furthering the cause.” ¹¹²

In November, suffragists planned a torchlight parade to celebrate recent victories in California and Washington. Robert C. Beadle, the League's secretary, complained that suffragists had requested a male parade marshal who wasn't “too handsome,” raising again the issue of what a male suffragist was supposed to look like. He suggested one candidate who might do, as he was bald, and this, Beadle said sarcastically, “might do something to remove the impression that all men suffragists have long hair. ¹¹³ Perhaps he was referring to the “long-haired” taunts that rained down on male reformers, or perhaps to a narrative that male suffragists were sexual outliers. Either way, the fever of criticism suggested that anti-suffrage sentiment was soaring, even as suffrage was gaining. Mocking this “most pretentious celebration ever attempted,” the New York Telegram reserved its greatest sarcasm for the men, suggesting they were only chasing women. “Don't think that Mere Man will be left standing on the sidewalk, balancing himself on one foot and then on the other, while lovely women go marching by,” sneered the paper. “Any man is at liberty to enter the ranks, provided he obtains an ordinary chrysanthemum for the buttonhole of his coat.” Sarcastically, the paper added, “What up to date man, with red blood in his veins and with a discerning eye for the beautiful, can resist the captivating glances of a suffragette?” ¹¹⁴

Credit: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Digital Version: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ggbain.14075/

Photo 2 Members of the Men's League for Woman Suffrage of New York, including League Secretary R. C. Beadle, gather in front of the Woman's Suffrage Party headquarters. The Men's League began in 1909 at the suggestion of a woman, Fannie Garrison Villard, daughter of famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. The idea was propelled forward by three men—her son, crusading editor Oswald Garrison Villard; Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, a fixture of Progressive Era politics; and Max Eastman, a Greenwich Village radical who later edited The Masses. By 1912, thirty Men's Leagues dotted the country and 20,000 men had signed up for a national Men's League.

In fact, the Men's League gave ballast to women who aspired to a political role without surrendering their influence as female reformers. Many of the women who marched in the 1912 parade never forgot the strength they derived from men in the procession. “It took so much more courage for a man to come out for woman's suffrage than it did for a woman,” recalled Laura Ellsworth Siler, a junior at Cornell University marching in her first parade. ¹¹⁵ Many singled out Laidlaw, an outdoorsman equally at home in the men's clubs of Manhattan and in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, ¹¹⁶ for making them braver. “It meant much for him to do this, for he was in the very forefront and faced the derision of the men in his own clubs, as they sat in their windows and watched us go by,” recalled Charles Strong. Harriet Laidlaw agreed, writing a friend, “all Mr. Laidlaw's banking firm were against him in it.” ¹¹⁷ Frances Perkins, a social worker who later became Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor, the first female Cabinet officer in U.S. history, agreed. “I recall him so plainly and am heartened by it still, as he joked and encouraged us on East 10th Street as we waited to ‘fall in’ in the great suffrage parade,” she said. “I can never be thankful enough for the courage he gave to many of us—young and doubtful—when he took up the suffrage movement on his own. ¹¹⁸ Laidlaw was the only man honored on a suffrage plaque at the state capitol in Albany, ¹¹⁹ but Carrie Chapman Catt failed to mention his role in her memoirs or in an authorized biography.”

The Men's League's greatest contribution, however, may have been to buck up the men. As James Lees Laidlaw, by then president of both the New York and the national organizations, suggested when asked why the League joined the parade, “We are marching to give political support to the women and moral support to the men.” ¹²⁰

***

In New York, it took suffragists more than seventy years—from the first petition by six women in 1846 ¹²¹ to the successful ballot initiative in 1917—to convince male voters to enfranchise women. For members of the New York Men's League, the cause was part of a progressive agenda of reforming governance. They weathered abusive newspaper treatment and derision barbs from men threatened by their activism. In the end, they were male reformers as much as they were male suffragists, embracing Votes for Women as a part of their progressivism. Driven by reformist zeal, their involvement was one of the gears that turned the wheel of public opinion, emboldening other men to vote for women.