Gilded Suffragists

This book was such a learning experience for me. I was not aware of these brave women who used their place in society to fight for women's rights and improve the world. I also liked reading about the men that supported these women. Some of them even joined in the fight with these courageous women. This is one of my favorite topics to read about, and the author did not disappoint. I could tell it was well researched and it was also very readable. I loved it! Highly recommend!

A big thank you to Johanna Neuman, Washington Mews Press, and Netgalley for the copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review.

In the days when New York circulated over 20 daily newspapers and birth control was an arrestable offense, women named Astor, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt along with the likes of Katherine Hepburn's mother bonded in the fight to win the women's vote.

In the shadow of the days of the fin de siecle women were viewed as emotional, weak vessels with the home as their domain. But as a certain class made the climb to celebrity inspiration drew the together to create The Colony Club on Madison Avenue, a social society with its own building housing a running track, a restaurant, bedrooms, and holding enrichment programs for its members, which was capped at 700. As these ladies became more civically-minded their talks leaned toward the suffrage movement.
These women reminded me of the mother in Mary Poppins. A lovely, engaging personality who couldn't do more for society could not be found than one of these ladies. So respected were they that they won the respect of thousands of men who also fought for the cause.

Neumann explores history with an unclouded eye in this book. These women were not perfect and often made headlines, but they certainly weren't the violent types of Great Britain. The rights of all females were based upon the movement of yesteryear. Neuman does an excellent job informing the reader how indebted we are to these brave souls.

I felt that this book was very well written and worth my time in reading. I have always had an interest in the suffragist movement and this helped remind me why.

In the superb 2004 HBO film ‘Iron Jawed Angels’, Molly Parker plays Mrs Emily Leighton, the wife of Senator Tom Leighton. When the film begins Emily, in line with the doctrine of the separate spheres, regards politics as her husband’s realm and contents herself with supporting him and bringing up their two daughters. Gradually, though, she takes more of an interest in the suffragist cause. At first her support is financial but gradually she becomes more radical and more active, even joining those women who picketed Wilson’s White House and as a consequence is imprisoned, and goes on hunger strike.

The character of Emily Leighton is fictional but Johanna Neuman’s book ‘Gilded Suffragists’, subtitled ‘The New York Socialites who fought for women’s right to vote’ tells the actual story of those upper class women who lent their support, albeit in much less dramatic ways than Emily, to the campaign for votes for women, which eventually triumphed when women gained the right to vote in federal elections in 1920, as a result of the 19th Amendment.

According to Neuman it was over 200 socialites, including “women named Astor, Belmont, Harriman, Mackay, Rockefeller, Tiffany, Vanderbilt, and Whitney” who made a decisive contribution to that constitutional change when, in 1908, they reanimated the suffrage cause by exploiting their social status to ‘de-toxify’ and normalize it.

This celebrity endorsement was, it is claimed, so potent - ultimately helping to “push women’s suffrage over the finish line” - because these women had the ear of the media and because their glamour undermined the anti-suffragist taunt that women who demanded their rights were somehow ‘unfeminine’ and threatened the emasculation of men.

Neuman is an award-winning journalist turned historian and ‘Gilded Suffragists’, her second book, represents a revised version of her doctoral dissertation. It is a great pity that the Colony Club, which was founded in 1907 as the first exclusive women’s club in New York City, and which plays a central part in Neuman’s account, refused her access to its archives. She nevertheless makes a strong case for her claim that the gilded suffragists in general and Vira Boarman Whitehouse and Alva Vanderbilt Belmont in particular, made a key financial and cultural contribution to gaining women the vote only to be “methodically airbrushed from the metanarrative of women’s suffrage”.

Neuman writes with great verve and her general analysis, notably of the relationship between Carrie Chapman Catt’s NAWSA and Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party, is astute. Above all, she deserves praise for shedding light on a topic which has hitherto been neglected.

Having said all that, a nagging doubt remains. If History is written by the winners and the gilded suffragists played such a decisive role in winning women the vote, then why did they need rescuing from oblivion by Neuman? For such supposed mistresses of media manipulation they seem ultimately to have missed a rather major trick.

Subtitled, The New York Socialites Who Fought for Women's Right to Vote, Johanna Neuman's book credits the forgotten women of the upper class who joined the movement for suffrage.

Just as today the media loves wealth and beauty, a hundred years ago the media loved the elite denizens of New York, helping to establish the power of the 'celebrity endorsement.'

When socialites decided to form their own club, become involved with the betterment of the immigrant and the poor, and support women's right to self-government, they provided much-needed funding and a public voice from within the establishment.

They thought it important to be well dressed and feminine to counter the stereotype of suffragettes as masculine or hysterical. Some took to soap boxes while others held elegant soirees. The women publicly paraded in white with banners, an act of nonconformity that brought ridicule and angry threats. Eventually, enlightened men supported their wives, marching with them, while others' disapproving husbands sat grimly on the sidelines.

WWI had a huge impact on the movement. The Suffragists were criticized for drawing the president's attention away from the war, and it was then that they became targets of police brutality and inhumane treatment in prison.

I was moved by the story of Jeanette Rankin, a pacifist Montana Republican and the first women elected to the U.S. Congress. When President Wilson asked Congress to approve entering WWI, Rankin was under huge pressure. Should she stand by her pacifist beliefs? Or, representing all women and their political future, must she prove that women could rise to the occasion and support war when circumstances required it?

When Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony published their History of Woman Suffrage they omitted or distorted the history of the movement, emphasizing their own roles as founders. Over the years, the Gilded Suffragettes were relegated to the sidelines of history and then were forgotten.

Neuman locates the movement in the history of the early 20th c., a time of great social change, including the establishment of the federal income tax, laws overseeing business, and population shifts from rural to urban areas.

I finished this book August 18; it was on August 18, 1920, that the 19th Amendment was passed. In some ways, women have come a long way, and yet our rights for self-determination and political and equality are under threat. A hundred years ago society's darlings, dressed in couture fashions and big hats, stood up for social equality. I would like to know, are today's women of the 1% as willing or interested in standing up for political equality? Or is it only the new class of elites from the entertainment business that have the courage?

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.