Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights

10. Working Women, Class Relations, and Suffrage Militance: Harriot Stanton Blatch and the New York Woman Suffrage Movement, 1894 &mdash 1909 (1987)

Working Women, Class Relations, and Suffrage Militance Harriot Stanton Blatch and the New York Woman Suffrage Movement, 1894–1909 More than any other period in American reform history, the Progressive Era eludes interpretation. It seems marked by widespread concern for social justice and by extraordinary elitism, by democratization and by increasing social control. The challenge posed to historians is to understand how Progressivism could simultaneously represent gains for the masses and more power for the classes. The traditional way to approach the period has been to study the discrete social programs reformers so energetically pushed in those years, from the abolition of child labor to the Americanization of the immigrants. Recently, historians ’ emphasis has shifted to politics, where it will probably remain for a time. Historians have begun to recognize that the rules of political life, the nature of American “democracy,” were fundamentally reformulated beginning in the Progressive Era, and that such political change shaped the ultimate impact of particular social reforms. Where were women in all this? The new focus on politics requires a reinterpretation of women’s role in Progressivism. As the field of women’s history has grown, the importance of women in the Progressive Era has gained notice, but there remains a tendency to concentrate on their roles with respect to social reform. Modern scholarship on the Progressive Era thus retains a separate spheres flavor; women are concerned 10 176 Originally published in Journal of American History 74 (1987). with social and moral issues, but the world of politics is male. Nowhere is this clearer than in the tendency to minimize, even to omit, the woman suffrage movement from the general literature on the Progressive Era.1 Scholarship on woman suffrage is beginning to grow in detail and analytic sophistication, but it has yet to be fully integrated into overviews of the period.2 Histories that include woman suffrage usually do so in passing, listing it with other constitutional alterations in the electoral process such as the popular election of senators, the initiative, and the referendum. But woman suffrage was a mass movement, and that fact is rarely noticed. Precisely because it was a mass political movement—perhaps the first modern one—woman suffrage may well illuminate Progressive -Era politics, especially the class dynamics underlying their reformulation . When the woman suffrage movement is given its due, we may begin to understand the process by which democratic hope turned into mass political alienation, which is the history of modern American politics. To illuminate the origin and nature of the woman suffrage movement in the Progressive Era I will examine the politics of Harriot Stanton Blatch. Blatch was the daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the founding mother of political feminism. Beginning in the early twentieth century , she was a leader in her own right, initially in New York, later nationally . As early as 1903, when politics was still considered something that disreputable men did, like smoking tobacco, Blatch proclaimed: “There are born politicians just as there are born artists, writers, painters. I confess that I should be a politician, that I am not interested in machine politics, but that the devotion to the public cause . . . rather than the individual, appeals to me.”3 Just as her zest for politics marked Blatch as a new kind of suffragist, so did her efforts to fuse women of different classes into a revitalized suffrage movement. Blatch’s emphasis on class was by no means unique; she shared it with other women reformers of her generation. Many historians have treated the theme of class by labeling the organized women’s reform movement in the early twentieth century “middle-class.” By contrast , I have tried to keep open the question of the class character of women’s reform in the Progressive Era by rigorously avoiding the term. Working Women, Class Relations, and Suffrage Militance | 177 Characterizing the early twentieth-century suffrage movement as “middle -class” obscures its most striking element, the new interest in the vote among women at both ends of the class structure. Furthermore, it tends to homogenize the movement. The very term “middle-class” is contradictory , alternatively characterized as people who are not poor, and people who work for a living. By contrast, I have emphasized distinctions between classes and organized my analysis around the relations between them. No doubt there is some distortion in this framework, particularly for suffragists who worked in occupations like teaching. But there...