"Equal Rights by All Means!": Beatrice Forbes-Robertson's 1910 Suffrage Matinee and the Onstage Junction of the US and UK Franchise Movements

On the afternoon of March 31, 1910, hundreds of people filled the Maxine Elliott Theatre in New York City for an afternoon of suffrage drama and variety entertainment. The event was organized by British actress Beatrice Forbes-Robertson to benefit the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women, created by Harriot Stanton Blatch, daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The suffrage matinee serves as a fulcrum in the genealogy of the US suffrage campaign, reaching back to the first convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, drawing together the suffrage activities of Seneca Falls and nearby Geneva, New York, at the turn of the century, and looking ahead to dozens of US performances of British pro-suffrage propaganda plays as well as other performative protest methods inspired by the iconic suffragettes across the Atlantic. By the early twentieth century, many of the protest strategies of American and British suffrage proponents differed widely. An examination of the eclectic series of performances at the 1910 suffrage matinee reveals how the movements became intertwined onstage, laying the foundation for future transatlantic transfers of activists, artists, texts, and tactics while illustrating the various journalistic attempts at dismissing such activism.¹ When the curtain rose on this performance in 1910, a new era commenced, marking a turning point in the US suffrage campaign.

In the early twentieth century, most high-profile US suffrage performances, parades, pageants, and protests were staged in large metropolitan areas. The 1910 suffrage matinee in New York City was no different. Yet the genesis of the US suffrage movement was located in the much smaller upstate New York community of Seneca Falls, host to the first Women's Rights Convention in 1848. While the early beginnings of the US suffrage movement are firmly rooted in Seneca Falls in the mid-nineteenth century, its neighboring community of Geneva housed an organization that was instrumental in the transformation of the theory and tactics of the US suffrage campaign at the turn of the century. The political activism in Geneva, although several hundred miles away from New York City, may have laid some of the groundwork for the pivotal performance at the Maxine Elliott Theatre. Much of the archival evidence of the 1910 suffrage matinee (as well as countless other events in the US suffrage campaign at this pivotal time) survives in scrapbooks compiled by Elizabeth Smith Miller and her daughter, Anne Fitzhugh Miller. As the cousin of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, it is hardly surprising that Elizabeth Smith Miller found her way to the suffrage cause. Residing a few miles away from Seneca Falls, Elizabeth and Anne created the Geneva Political Equality Club in 1897, which served as a hub for transatlantic exchange between US and UK suffrage proponents. The Geneva Political Equality Club hosted meetings, speakers, performances, and study clubs. They also often sent delegations to Albany and New York City as part of legislative action or to participate in protest or advocacy events. Through it all, Elizabeth Smith Miller and Anne Fitzhugh Miller painstakingly saved newspaper clippings, photographs, circulars, letters, programs, and other ephemera, creating an invaluable archive of turn-of-the-century US suffrage documents. The result is seven scrapbooks housed at the Library of Congress as part of the Miller National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) Suffrage Scrapbooks, 1897–1911 collection.² Were it not for this collection, the 1910 suffrage matinee would be known only through anecdotal accounts in memoirs and sardonic reviews in anti-suffrage newspapers, such as the New York Times. The geographic, familial, and political connections between Seneca Falls, Geneva, and New York City are exemplified through the suffrage matinee. Examining the matinee's possible inception reveals the vital role Geneva played in the US suffrage campaign in the early years of the twentieth century.

The 1910 matinee was part of a sea change in the early twentieth-century US suffrage movement. The iconic foremothers of suffrage—including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucy Stone—were gone and with them the tactics of nineteenth-century protest...