Gilded Suffragists

The New York Socialites who Fought for Women's Right to Vote

Johanna Neuman

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781479818280
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Donne nella storia

New York City’s elite women who turned a feminist cause into a fashionable revolution In the early twentieth century over two hundred of New York's most glamorous socialites joined the suffrage movement. Their names—Astor, Belmont, Rockefeller, Tiffany, Vanderbilt, Whitney and the like—carried enormous public value. These women were the media darlings of their day because of the extravagance of their costume balls and the opulence of the French couture clothes, and they leveraged their social celebrity for political power, turning women's right to vote into a fashionable cause. Although they were dismissed by critics as bored socialites “trying on suffrage as they might the latest couture designs from Paris,” these gilded suffragists were at the epicenter of the great reforms known collectively as the Progressive Era. From championing education for women, to pursuing careers, and advocating for the end of marriage, these women were engaged with the swirl of change that swept through the streets of New York City. Johanna Neuman restores these women to their rightful place in the story of women’s suffrage. Understanding the need for popular approval for any social change, these socialites used their wealth, power, social connections and style to excite mainstream interest and to diffuse resistance to the cause. In the end, as Neuman says, when change was in the air, these women helped push women’s suffrage over the finish line.

1

A Club of Their Own

In New York Society, the older families never allow the turmoil of outside life to enter their social scheme.

Henry Cabot Lodge1

CLAD in his gold-laced uniform, the watchman on duty at the Spouting Rock Beach Association knew by sight every carriage in Newport, Rhode Island. Only the elite could pass through his gates to sunbathe at Bailey’s Beach, a stretch of sand claimed by the wealthy in 1890 after trolley service made an earlier and more desirable plot, Easton Beach,2 accessible to all sorts of people—“including domestics and Negroes, some of whom one would rather prefer not to meet in the water.”3 Unless the visitor was the guest of one of the members or bore a note of introduction “from an unimpeachable hostess,” no pleading, “no power on earth could gain them admission.”4 As the New York Times put it, “Only the swellest of the swell” could penetrate “the walls of exclusiveness surrounding the place.”5

At the turn of the century, few tributes to Gilded Age excess glittered as brightly as Newport. The mansions that dotted Bellevue Avenue were America’s answer to the grand castles of Europe—fortresses of marble with enormous winding staircases and intricate architectural detail, filled with the sculptures, portraits, tapestries, and paintings that the new titans of industry had hungrily imported from France, Italy, and England. Every summer, wealthy families descended on Newport from Boston and New York and as far away as Charleston to reside in their “cottages,” play golf, polo, and tennis, sail their boats, race their horses, indulge at the casino, and attend lavish balls. They hired or brought servants to attend to every creature comfort and famous chefs to oversee multicourse meals. Mostly, they came to claim their place in this storied fraternity.

At Bailey’s Beach, women were shielded from the elements—and social offense—by enough gauze, linen, hats, bloomers, stockings, and gloves to stock a small milliner’s shop. Catherine Kernochan, whose brother Pierre Lorillard developed the Tuxedo Park Country Club, once appeared at Bailey’s wearing “bathing shoes, a black blouse, black pantaloons, a full black skirt, a jacket with billowing sleeves and a large Mother Hubbard bonnet.”6 Marian Fish, wife of Illinois Central Railroad president Stuyvesant Fish, may have set a beach fashion standard one day by wearing “a full dark green satin skirt with a flounce and piping of white satin. White satin and lace lined a pointed vest and there was also lace on the belt and collar and on the wrists of the sleeves. This outfit was worn with bloomers, stockings and sandals.” Swimming would have been an act of acrobatics.

Modesty—and club rules—required that bathing dress cover even the ankles. Elsie Clews, a New York heiress who summered at the family home in Newport, caused something of a stir—and received “a serious warning from the house committee”—when she put her naked feet into the sea water to experience the Atlantic Ocean without stockings, incidentally exposing her well-shaped legs to admiring stares. Eager to uphold Victorian standards amid this generational assertion of immodesty, the board of directors laid down the law: stockings for women were required at all times.7 Still, the younger set continued to test the limits of parental permissiveness by convening for nude bathing parties at midnight on Bailey’s Beach. One dowager commented tolerantly, “I don’t suppose the young people realized what they were doing. I understand they were all very drunk.”8

One warm August day in 1902, five women steeped in the wealth that gilded Newport met to challenge male privilege.9 It is unlikely that they set out to spark a nationwide debate over the contours of relations that had dictated behavior between men and women for over a century. Nor did they intend to give new spark to a political movement long given up for dead. By their own accounts, they meant only to end their exclusion from one of the great habitués of gentility—the book-lined, hushed men’s clubs that catered to the urban gentry in Manhattan and London. Still, the effect was riveting. Years later Virginia Woolf would write about a woman’s need for “a room of one’s own.” Now, five well-bred socialites from “good” families, all listed in the Social Register, met to plot a club of their own.

It is hard to overstate the audacity of the idea, the revolution in gender assumptions created by the very notion that women could build their own club in the city. After the land was purchased on Madison Avenue between East 30th and East 31st Streets, after the organizing committee had hired Stanford White to design the building and Elsie de Wolfe to furnish it in a way that would clear out the musty curtains of the Victorian era, still there were doubters. The Princeton Club put its own plans to build in the city on hold, “in abeyance on the ground that the [women’s] club would soon fail and be for sale cheap.”10

Even more destabilizing to men of a certain class and time was the idea that women would want their own space, separate from the home. The threat to masculinity was such that one man remarked, “Women shouldn’t have clubs. They’ll only use them as addresses for clandestine letters.”11 The gentleman failed to mention that this was precisely how men used their clubs, often receiving letters from paramours that “a tactful servant would always bring . . . on a silver tray, butter side down; this was, of course, on the chance that the lady might be connected, in some fashion, with another member.”12 When news of the women’s club venture became public, a German newspaper decreed that it presaged “the swan-song of the American home and family.” Former president Grover Cleveland took to the pages of the Ladies Home Journal to proclaim that woman’s “best and safest club is her home. A life retired is well inspired.”13 One newspaper called the club a “Death Knell to the Home.”14

Instead, in ways that surprised even its founders, the Colony Club became a site of debate over the controversial issues of the day, none as vexing as the heretical idea that women should cast ballots in local, state, and national elections. This unlikely outcome, the legacy of unexpected consequences, owed something to the turmoil of change swirling through turn-of-the-century New York. As one scholar put it, “The tides of modernity, which had washed over Paris in the 1870s and subsequently over Vienna, Prague, Munich, Berlin and London, had finally reached American shores.”15 It was an era of experimentation, a time when Anne Morgan, a new moneyed aristocrat whose father, J. Pierpont Morgan, was the titan of Wall Street, attended lectures on socialism, and Fanny Villard, an old-school liberal whose father was famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, lectured so often about women’s suffrage that she often grew hoarse.16 Scott Joplin opened an office at 128 West 29th Street to experiment with a new form of music called ragtime, and Ida B. Wells moved to 395 Gold Street in Brooklyn to escape arsonists who had burned down her newspaper in Memphis and to create a New York chapter of her anti-lynching Women’s Loyal Union.17 By the 1910s, the Washington Square home built by Cornelius Vanderbilt at the height of the Gilded Age would be torn down for apartments and “shabby rooming houses,” where artists, writers, and radicals came for cheap spaghetti dinners and abundant debates over meaning.18

The names of those who met in Newport that warm August day are in dispute. So auspicious was the occasion that, much as those who convince themselves they were at the scene of great history, some may have deceived their own memories, their stories repeated and embellished in years since by journalists and scholars. What is unchallenged is that Florence Jaffray Harriman, thirty-two-year-old wife of banker J. Borden Harriman, whose family called her Daisy, was the spark for this nascent experiment in female independence.

Daisy had been privately tutored, joining J. P. Morgan’s children for school at their home at Madison Avenue and 36th Street, the first residence in Manhattan boasting electrical lighting.19 Her family’s home, at 615 Fifth Avenue, pulsed not with electricity but with political ambition. Her father, F. W. J. Hurst, was a shipping magnate with deep ties to the Washington establishment and an abiding pride in his tenure as president of the New York Yacht Club. Daisy was three years old when her mother, Caroline Hurst, died, leaving her to be raised by her father and maternal grandparents.20 She had early memories of leaning over the banister to watch the 1876 presidential torchlight parade through the streets of Manhattan or listen to the conversation of visitors in the downstairs parlor, among them John Hay, James Garfield, and Chester Arthur.21 Among those attending her 1889 wedding were Grover Cleveland and John Jacob Astor IV, reflecting her father’s fascination with the bookends of New York’s political and financial power.22 She was an avid sports fan and athlete, once confessing, “which was the more glorious at Newport, yachting or polo, I could never decide.”23 Now, with a five-year-old daughter and homes in New York, Newport, and Mount Kisco, Daisy Harriman embarked on a more public role. It was a journey that would, improbably, take her to the highest ranks of the Democratic Party, and to a harrowing post as President Franklin Roosevelt’s chief of mission to Norway during the Nazi invasion.24

As was their custom, the Harrimans were renting in Newport for the season, this year at the Yardley Cottage at 91 Rhode Island Avenue.25 Daisy was making occasional treks back to the city, usually for a few days at a time, to oversee renovations to their townhouse at 128 East 36th Street. One evening in Newport, complaining about the dust and disruption in their home in Manhattan, she told her husband, “I can’t stay in the mess. What hotel shall I go to—the Waldorf?” In 1893 William Waldorf Astor had opened an “opulent thirteen-story Waldorf Hotel,” quite popular with the elite, at a Fifth Avenue corner where the Empire State Building would later rise.26 Borden was president of a bank so decorous that in 1906 it would offer a separate branch for female customers.27 Now he harrumphed that he did not approve of women going to large hotels unaccompanied, lest they be taken for harlots. “But Bordie, what can women do?” she asked, perhaps with a hint of coquettishness. Almost as an afterthought, she added, “There ought to be a woman’s club and we go to that in the summers and have parcels sent there and do telephoning.”28

The next day she shared her vision with Kate Brice, whose father, Calvin Brice, had been a U.S. senator from Ohio and lately a railroad president. “She had been at a ball the night before, and was only just up and rather sleepy, but she responded at once,” Harriman recalled. Kate dressed and the two of them made the rounds. “Before the August day was over,” they had corralled enthusiasm from Ava Willing Astor, a Philadelphia heiress and wife of the richest man in the country. Also on board was Emmeline Dore Heckscher Winthrop, an auburn-haired pixie whose husband, Egerton Winthrop, “a cultivated man,” had introduced a young family friend, Edith Wharton, to the glories of Darwin, Huxley, and the great French novelists.29 Maud Bull, whose husband, Henry, would later preside over the exclusive Turf and Field Club, was busy planning a dinner for the Newport Horse Show, but readily agreed.30 So did Margaret Lewis Morgan Norrie, who, along with Eleanor Roosevelt, would become a fixture of reform in the Hudson Valley’s Dutchess County.31

Once Daisy Harriman returned to the city, by her own account, the idea drooped in lethargy until one weekend when she went on a hunting expedition with her husband’s family. The party included his cousin Mary Harriman and likely Mary’s younger brother Averill, who in 1955 would become the forty-eighth governor of New York. While at Barnard, Mary had volunteered at a settlement house on the Lower East Side, and was so moved by what she saw there that she reached out to other debutantes to continue the work. Soon the idea of their Junior League, an educational and charitable volunteer organization, had spread nationwide.32 Now she told Daisy that she often dreamed of having squash courts on the roof of some building in Manhattan. “I fizzed up again, quite as I had in Newport,” Daisy Harriman recalled. After that, word of mouth found converts. By December 1903 she had corralled a forty-woman organizational committee, one that glittered with wealth, leavened by spunk.

Anne Tracy Morgan, youngest of J. P. Morgan’s four children, “sent word she was keen, especially if we included a running track in our plans.”33 Growing up at Highland Falls, a country home overlooking the Hudson, Anne had enjoyed the outdoor life—riding, fishing, hunting, golfing.34 Now, at 170 pounds, the twenty-eight-year-old Morgan longed for the kind of athletic facilities offered by the Union and Metropolitan Clubs, especially a swimming pool. Her father supported the venture, joining the male advisory committee.35

Elisabeth Marbury, known as Bessy, was all in too. One of the first women to excel as a theatrical agent, Bessy would represent, among others, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, W. Somerset Maugham, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and Eugene O’Neill, and was credited with all but inventing the modern American musical comedy.36 She lived in the heart of Union Square, at 17th Street and...