The Lady and the Tiger: Women's Electoral Activism in New York City Before Suffrage

The Lady and the Tiger: Women's Electoral Activism in New York City Before Suffrage S. Sara Monoson In 1894, twenty-six years before national woman suffrage in the United States, a poUtical club caUed the "Woman's Munidpal League" emerged in New York City. The women of the League sought to take part in heated mayoral eledoral battles raging at the time. By 1901, acting independently as weU as in aUiance with prominent men, the League had secured for itself a distind, integral role inside the movement to wrest control of City HaU away from the professional poUtidans of Tammany HaU and deüver it to "good governmenf ' reformers. The League's part in these contests has gone largely unnoticed as weU as unexplored, despite the fad that its active members included such central figures in Progressive Era United States history as Josephine Shaw LoweU, Margaret Dreier, Liltian Wald, and Maud Nathan.1 This study therefore reports the history of the League's poUtical activism in considerable detaU. The League's electoral activism during the years 1894 to 1905 provides vivid evidence of women's independent, direct, and effective involvement in mainstream pohtics long before they got the vote. By the last quarter of the nineteenth-century women were players in municipal pontics in New York, as shapers of welfare, education, and sanitation poUcy, for example. As members of charities and reUgious organizations they often advised or lobbied eleded officials. But involvement in a poUtical campaign was highly unusual in this period, and the estabUshment of an autonomous women's poUtical club was even more so. In Chicago, for example, HuU House women partidpated in three campaigns in the 1890s to oppose an incumbent alderman they beUeved to be corrupt. Their modest efforts were coordinated, however, by the "HuU House Men's Club."2 This study examines the pecuUar set of poUtical developments, cultural assumptions, and class confUds that made possible the League's independent work in the spedficaUy electoral dimension of New York City poUtics. More precisely, this article shows how reform's rhetoric of nonpartisanship figured in League women's negotiations of the tension between a claim to poUtical partidpation based on women's moral superiority and the view that women's spedal moral talents rest, at least in part, on their exdusion from the sphere of poUtics. During this period of rapid urbaniza- © 1990 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 2 No. 2 (Fall)____________________ I wish to thank Jennifer HochschUd, Helene Silverberg, and Fred I. Greenstein for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. 1990 S. SaraMonoson 101 tion and industrialization, concerns such as education, sanitation, pubUc health, and police and fire protection came within the purview of munidpal government. Civic reform groups asserted that deUberations on these problems needed to be independent of partisan maneuverings or "poUtics" if they were to be resolved satisf adorily. League members agreed and claimed that by virtue of women's greater moral sensitivities their partidpation would enrich these deUberations. The old, "dirty" business of poUtics remained no place for a lady. But the new, "clean" arena of nonpartisan work on dty problems was, they asserted, women's territory as weU as that of progressively minded men. And since this nonpartisan territory was meant to include City HaU, campaign work was not off limits. The logic of nonpartisanship was also consfraining. The League chose, for example, not to link its cooperation with the reform coaUtion or endorsement of and labors for a candidate to his stand on suffrage, even though the League's founder was a supporter. Both League members and their male alties considered Unking these issues to be in conftid with women's claim to be nonpartisan, disinterested advocates of reform. The interaction of class and gender figure significantly in the story of the League. On the one hand, League women's partidpation played a crudal role in the reform coaUtion's efforts to enlarge its class base, and gender played a central part in the reform movemenf s efforts to articulate its candidate's agenda and goals. On the other hand, reform poUtics did not stretch the dass limits of these eUte women...