Louise Bernikow

New York City: a hotbed of female activism throughout its history.

New York City: media capital, financial capital. What happens here resonates around the country and across the ocean.

New York in 1917 is the most populous state in the Union. The West has been won, the suffrage campaign has stalled. Victory for women here will double the number of women eligible to vote in the entire United States.

The long,dramatic history of women's fight for the vote in New York City begins before the Civil War, when a suffrage meeting at the Tabernacle so incites the public that it becomes known as the "mob convention." Later, when Stanton & Anthony seek a publisher for the history of their movement, they find Fowler & Welles, a city business specializing in the "science" of phrenology -- reading skull bumps as keys to psychology-- a firm that also dares to publish Walt Whitman.

By the early 20th century, Fifth Avenue has become a canvas for the unfolding panorama of seamstresses and millionaires, cavalry and automobiles, until marchers number in the tens of thousands and spectators nearly half a million. The Statue of Liberty offers a ready symbol from the day she arrives, a symbol of democracy in a place where democracy does not apply to women. Suffragists make sure the public understands that. Soapboxes on steet corners from Wall Street to 125th Street draw ready audiences of pedestrians. If they don't like the message, they throw eggs or tomatoes or drop water on your head from the buildings above.

Bonfires in Staten Island. Torchlight parades in Brooklyn. Stores on upper Broadway selling banners and buttons.Italians. Jews. Irish. Atheists. Socialists. Black club women. William James. WEB Du Bois. If you live in New York City, you know about The Cause and you take sides.

If the company running the subway system supports the antis, women simply have to parade up and down the cars wearing signboards advocating their right to vote, even if their "good" families are horrified.

If a state referendum loses in 1915, you re-group, re-frame, re-organize and try again, until a second referendum passes in 1917.

If, after victory, the lights go out on the spectacle and the political lessons are lost -- gone missing from NY history and American history-- fear not. They have all been retrieved.

Setting off from Washington Square, 1912.


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