The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote by Brooke Kroeger (review)

In April 1899, Susan B. Anthony took the podium at the National American Woman Suffrage Association Convention in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to read a letter from her dear friend and lifelong colleague, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Reflecting on the lack of male support for the suffrage cause after fifty years of activism, Stanton lamented, "It is pitiful to see how few men ever made our cause their own" (Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper, History of Woman Suffrage [Indianapolis: Hollenbeck Press, 1902], 4:338). Stanton would have been somewhat heartened had she lived into the next decade to witness the formation of the New York Men's League for Woman Suffrage. At the prompting of National American Woman Suffrage Association president Anna Howard Shaw and his mother, Fanny Garrison Villard, Oswald Garrison Villard, the editor of the New York Post and the Nation, coordinated the first formal meeting of the Men's League in the late fall of 1909. Suffrage advocate and reform rabbi Stephen Wise assisted Villard, his close friend, with the league's founding. The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote, is Brooke Kroeger's chronicle of the Men's League activities from its inception at the City Club of New York through the end of the campaign for suffrage in New York in 1917.

The rapid societal and political transformations the United States experienced during the Progressive Era provide a backdrop for the final phase of the suffrage movement that Kroeger concentrates on. From the beginning of the book to its coda she offers intriguing biographical details about the men and women who helped change the public sentiment toward suffrage. Well connected in Greenwich Village radical circles, Men's League secretary Max Eastman, a young Columbia University graduate student with a growing reputation as a writer and speaker, emerges as the central figure in the league's nascent years. Kroeger traces Eastman's activities and those of the other gentlemen suffragists—or, to use the British moniker, "Suffragents"—by drawing heavily from countless newspapers and magazines from the early decades of the twentieth century. When Eastman resigned from the League to assume the editorship of the Socialist Masses in 1912, investment banker James Lees Laidlaw, husband of Harriet Laidlaw, a leader of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association, stepped in to lead the organization. Not only did Laidlaw prove instrumental when it came to increasing the league's visibility and finances in the Empire State, but he and his wife traveled across the country to promote men's support of the woman suffrage movement by helping to found other men's leagues as far west as Montana.

While it is difficult to assess the full impact that men's leagues had on male politicians and, more importantly, on male voters, Kroeger does an admirable job of informing the reader about the appeal the organization had among the upper echelons of society by focusing on distinguished men listed on league membership rosters. Her images include a number of official Men's League documents, such as the league's constitution and membership lists, but unfortunately they are difficult to read. The yearbook-style portraits located across from each chapter's opening page are a bit more useful, albeit in some cases the named portrait is the only mention of that member in the entire book. The impressive variety of illustrations, including portraits, posters, cartoons, campaign publicity, and more goes a long way in giving readers a broad sampling of the suffrage propaganda that inundated the American public during the closing years of the campaign.

Driven by newspaper headlines pertaining to the New York Men's League, Kroeger's most important contribution to suffrage scholarship is in the compendium of primary source materials that she has compiled relating to the New York men's place in the state and national woman suffrage...