PIONEERS of WOMEN’S RIGHTS in MANHATTAN Gale A
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
A WALKING TOUR PIONEERS OF WOMEN’S RIGHTS IN MANHATTAN Gale A. Brewer MANHATTAN BOROUGH PRESIDENT Brewer_WomensHistory_Final.indd 1 2/25/20 4:08 PM One Hundred Years of Voting A century has passed since American suffragists girded for their final push to win the ballot for women in every corner of the United States. Under the skilled and persistent direction of Carrie Chapman Catt, and spurred by the energy of Alice Paul’s National Woman Party, the 19th Amendment won approval on August 26, 1920. In this pamphlet, we find reminders of the struggles and achievements of New York women who spoke, marched, and even fought for the vote and the full panoply of rights. These were women who marched to Albany in the winter, or demonstrators who were jailed for their protests in Washington. Crystal Eastman, a young activist, spoke a large truth when she said, after ratification, “Now we can begin.” To complete one task is to encounter the next. Indeed, even after a hundred years we must still seek to complete the work of attaining women’s equality. Sincerely, Gale A. Brewer, Manhattan Borough President Brewer_WomensHistory_Final.indd 2 2/25/20 4:08 PM Sojourner Truth Preacher for Abolition and Suffrage Old John Street Chapel 1 Sojourner Truth was born Isabella Baumgold and lived as a Dutch-speaking slave in upstate New York. With difficulty, she won her freedom, moved to New York City, and joined the Methodist Church on John Street. She then changed her name to Sojourner Truth and spent the rest of her long life speaking against slavery and for women’s rights. In May 1867, she spoke before a meeting of the Equal Rights Association at the Church of the Puritans on what was then known as Union “Circle” (now Square): “ Well, Sojourner has lived on through all the scenes that have taken place these forty years in the anti-slavery cause, and I have pleaded with all the force I had that the day might come when colored people might own their soul and body. Well that day has come, although it came through blood . I am sorry it came that way. We are now trying for liberty that requires no blood—that women shall have their rights . Give them what belongs to them; they ask kindly, too. I ask it kindly. ” Brewer_WomensHistory_Final.indd 3 2/25/20 4:08 PM Ernestine Rose Orator, Freethinker, Agitator 2 Broadway Tabernacle Ernestine Rose (1810-1892), was born to a Jewish family in Poland and reached the United States via Germany and England. Fluent and nervy, she soon developed a career in public speaking, emphasizing her views on slavery and women’s rights. She frequently spoke at the now vanished Broadway Tabernacle, at Broadway and Worth Street. In 1853, Rose spoke at the Tabernacle on married women’s rights: The law allows the widow . one cow, all sheep in “the number of ten, with the fleece and the cloth from the same, two swine, and the pork therefrom (Great laughter). My friends, do not say that I stand here to make these laws ridiculous. No; if you laugh, it is at their own inherent ludicrousness; for I state them simply and truly as they are; for they are so ridiculous in themselves, that it is impossible to make them more so. In allusion to laws respecting wills, I wish to say that according to the Revised Statutes of our State, a married woman has not a right to make a will. The law says that wills may be made by all persons, except idiots, persons of unsound mind, married women, and infants. No, a married woman has no right to bequeath a dollar of the property, no matter how much she may have brought into the marriage, or accumu- lated in it. Not a dollar to a friend, a relative, or even to her own child to keep him from starving. And this is the law of the nineteenth century, in the enlightened United States, under a Republic that declares all men to be free and equal. ” Brewer_WomensHistory_Final.indd 4 2/25/20 4:08 PM Susan B. Anthony Elizabeth Cady Stanton Revolution in Our Time 3 The Revolution, 37 Park Row Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) are honored with a street sign, “Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton Corner,” at the place where these two long-lived suffrag- ists published their newspaper, The Revolution, from 1868 to 1870, in a building now replaced. Stanton was also honored in a 1947 opera, The Mother of Us All, by Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson. With only a few years left in her long, vigorous career, in 1894 Susan B. Anthony spoke reflectively as its first president to a meeting of the National American Woman Suffrage Association: “ We shall someday be heeded, and when we shall have our amendment to the Constitution of the United States, everybody will think it was always so, just exactly as many young people think that all the privileges, all the freedom, all the enjoyments which woman now possesses always were hers. They have no idea of how every single inch of ground that she stands upon today has been gained by the hard work of some little handful of women of the past. ” Brewer_WomensHistory_Final.indd 5 2/25/20 4:08 PM Augusta Lewis Typesetter and Organizer, 4 New York Era, 26 Ann Street In the 1860s, Augusta Lewis (1848- 1920) came to Ann Street to learn to set type by hand, and became one of the best and fastest of the printers known as the Swifts. Women printers were then often hired to scab—to supply cheap help during labor disputes. Among these employers were the genteel ladies who had founded the Revolution. Gussie Lewis did not scab. She organized the (first) Women’s Typographical Union. Later she married another printer and moved to New Haven, where a school is named for her. At the 1870 convention of the all-male National Typographical Union, Lewis read this: Heretofore women compositors have been used to “defeat the object for which you have organized—have been the prey of those philanthropic persons who employ women because they are cheap—their labor has been used during strikes to de feat you. When that object has been accomplished they are set adrift, disorganized and unprotected, their necessity compelling them to work for a price at which they cannot earn a living, and which tends to undermine your wages. Believing the interests of Labor—whether that labor be done by male or female—are identi cal, and should receive the same protection and the same pay, we, the women compositors of New York, have taken the initiative in this, and formed the Women’s Typograph ical Union No. 1, of New York. ” Brewer_WomensHistory_Final.indd 6 2/25/20 4:08 PM Emily Warren Roebling Pioneering Engineer Brooklyn Bridge 5 Emily Warren Roebling (1843-1903) became co-engineer in the construc- tion of the Brooklyn Bridge when her husband, Augustus Roebling, was disabled with decompression dis- ease, and oversaw its successful completion in May 1883. She was the first passenger to cross the bridge that has been called “New York’s supreme icon.” A contemporary account said: “She and a coachman had crossed over from Brooklyn in a new Victoria, its varnish gleaming in the sunshine. She had taken a live rooster along with her, as a sign of victory, and from one end of the bridge to the other, the men had stopped their work to cheer and lift their hats as she came riding along.” The New York City statesman Abram Hewitt offered this tribute at the dedication: “ So, with this bridge will ever be coupled the thought of one, through the subtle alembic of whose brain, and by whose facile fingers, communication was maintained between the directing power of its construction and the obedient agencies of its execution. It is thus an everlasting monument to the self-sacrificing devotion of woman, and of her capacity for that higher education from which she has been too long disbarred. ” Brewer_WomensHistory_Final.indd 7 2/25/20 4:08 PM Dr. S. Josephine Baker Department of Health 6 Worth Street Dr. Sara Josephine Baker (1873- 1945) began her life’s work in 1908, when, looking at the city’s mortality statistics, she found that children under 5 made up a third of the annual total. As new chief of the Division of Child Hygiene, she assigned nurses to visit every newborn in one district where 1,500 babies might die. She later wrote in her memoir, Fighting for Life (1939): “ I selected a filthy, sunless and stifling nest of tenements on the lower east side. The Registrar of Records used each day to send me the name and address on the birth certificate of every baby whose birth had been reported on the previous day. Within hours a graduate nurse . visited the address to go into the last fine detail of just how that baby should be cared for. Nothing revolutionary; just insistence on breast-feeding, efficient ventilation, frequent bathing, thin summer clothes, out-of-door airing. During that summer there were 1,200 fewer deaths than there had been the previous summer. ” Brewer_WomensHistory_Final.indd 8 2/25/20 4:08 PM Ida B. Wells Fighting Lynching With Brave Words The New York Age, 4 Cedar Street 7 Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) is a hero of journalism and human rights. Born into slavery in Mississippi, she became a journalist in Tennessee.