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Home , Betsy Wade, Crystal Eastman, Ernestine Rose, Frances Perkins, Inez Milholland, The Mother of Us All

A WALKING TOUR

PIONEERS OF WOMEN’S RIGHTS IN Gale A. Brewer MANHATTAN BOROUGH PRESIDENT

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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 , and spurred by the energy of ’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. , 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 Preacher for Abolition and 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 , 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 Orator, Freethinker, Agitator 2 Tabernacle

Ernestine Rose (1810-1892), was born to a Jewish family in 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 . 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 Revolution in Our Time 3 The Revolution, 37 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 , The Mother of Us All, by and . 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

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 de­feat 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 identi­cal, 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 Typograph­ical 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 . 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. She arrived in New York from Memphis in 1892 after her paper, Free Speech, was destroyed. She found a new haven at T.T. Fortune’s New York Age. Later she helped to organize the NAACP in 1909 and still later fought for racial justice in Chicago. She recorded the following not long after her arrival in New York:

Having lost my paper, had a price put on my life, and“ been made an exile from home for hinting at the truth, I felt I owed it to myself and to my race to tell the whole truth now that I was where I could do so freely . . . Accordingly, the fourth week in June the New York Age had a seven-column article on the front page giving names, dates, and places of many lynch- ings for alleged rape. This article showed conclusively that my article in the Free Speech was based on facts of illicit association between black men and white women. . . . I found that white men who had created a race of mulattoes by raping and consorting with Ne- gro women . . . these same white men lynched, burned, and tortured Negro men for doing the same thing with white women, even when the white women were willing victims. . . . [the Age] printed ten thousand copies of that issue . . . and broadcast them throughout the country and the South. One thousand copies were sold in the streets of Memphis alone.”

Brewer_WomensHistory_Final.indd 9 2/25/20 4:08 PM Founding the NAACP 8 Evening Post, 20

Mary White Ovington (1865-1951) was a serious student of race and race relations. A native New Yorker, she scandalized the South by attend- ing an interracial dinner in New York. In 1908, after a horrifying riot in Springfield, Illinois, she took action. In 1914, she wrote this about how the NAACP came into being: “ It was born in a little room of a New York apartment. . . . Of course, we wanted to do something at once that should move the country. It was January. Why not choose Lincoln’s birthday, February 12, to open our campaign? We decided, therefore, that a wise, immediate action would be the issuing on Lincoln’s birthday of a call for a national conference. . . . We at once turned to Mr. Oswald Garrison Villard, president of the N. Y. Evening Post Company. It was he who drafted the Lincoln’s birthday call. The Call expresses the spirit of those who are active in the Association’s cause: ‘The celebration of the Centennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, widespread and grateful as it may be, will fail to justify itself if it takes no note of and makes no recognition of the colored men and women for whom the great Emancipator labored to assure freedom.’ ”

Brewer_WomensHistory_Final.indd 10 2/25/20 4:08 PM Women’s Bodies, Their Rights Old Courthouse, City Hall 9

Here was once a grandiose building with both a post office and federal courts. It was the site of a case against Margaret Sanger (1879- 1966) based on her publication of The Woman Rebel, launched into the mails in March 1914. It pledged to give birth-control information, although there was none. She was arraigned in the federal court for violation of the Postal Code. When she was summoned to trial in October 1914, it became clear she would be sent to jail. She wrote later:

“ I was not afraid of the penitentiary; I was not afraid of anything except being misunderstood. Nevertheless, in the circumstances my going there could help nobody. . . . I had seen braver and hardier souls than I vanquished in spirit and body by prison terms, and I was not going to be lost and broken for an issue which was not the real one, such as the entirely unimportant Woman Rebel articles.There was a train for Canada within a few hours. Could I take it? Should I take it? . . . Could I ever make anyone understand? ” She fled and returned in 1916 to face the charges, which the govern- ment now declined to press, and Margaret Sanger’s campaigns eventually revolutionized the lives of American women.

Brewer_WomensHistory_Final.indd 11 2/25/20 4:08 PM Workplace Safety Reformer 10 Triangle Fire Inquiry, 165 Broadway (Now )

Frances Perkins (1880-1965) eventu- ally became Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of labor, the first woman named to a presidential cabinet. But she was a young social worker in when her life of protective reform began abruptly. When fire broke out at the Triangle Waist Company on March 25, 1911, she rushed out:

We got there just as they “started to jump. I shall never forget the frozen horror that came over us as stood with our hands on our throats watching that horrible sight, knowing that there was no help. They came down in twos and threes, jumping together in a kind of desperate hope. The life nets were broken. The fire- men kept shouting for them not to jump. But they had no choice; the flames were right behind them . . . . Out of that terrible episode came a self-examination of stricken conscience in which the people of this state saw for the first time the individual worth and value of those one hundred forty-six people who fell or were burned in that great fire and we all felt that we had been wrong, that something was wrong with that building, which we had accepted, or the tragedy never would have happened. Moved by a sense of stricken guilt, we banded ourselves together to find a way by law to prevent this kind of disaster. ” She was named to head state investigations of workplace safety, which led in turn to reform of the state laws and a career of protecting the lives of workers.

Brewer_WomensHistory_Final.indd 12 2/25/20 4:08 PM Emma Bugbee Foot Soldier for Suffrage Tribune, 154 Nassau 11

Emma Bugbee (1880-1981), a graduate, was hired by the Tribune in 1910. She startled her editor by asking to join a winter suffrage march to Albany, 170 miles away. Given permission, she set off with the plucky band (see photo). Late in December, the marchers reached Albany. Bugbee now wrote: “ The March to Albany is now history. The suffrage army marched in triumph into the city this afternoon and drew up with a flourish before the State Capitol at precisely 4:30 o’clock. The faces of the little band were flushed with the exaltation of victory, and they gazed long and wistfully at the great stone building, which is the repository of all their hopes as well as the goal for which they have endured cold and storm and hunger and blistered feet for two long weeks. Then they turned with a satisfied sigh and marched down the hill to the hotel where General Rosalie Jones disbanded her army. ” Alas, suffrage still lay five years away in New York State. However, Emma Bugbee settled into a long career at the Tribune, specializing in covering and writing children’s books designed to entice girls into careers in journalism.

Brewer_WomensHistory_Final.indd 13 2/25/20 4:08 PM Carrie Chapman Catt Strategist of the Last Battle 12 171

Carrie Chapman Catt (1859-1947) grew up in Charles City, Iowa, and was the only woman to graduate in her class at Iowa State. She made her own way thereafter, investing decades in the cause of woman suffrage. Ultimately, she headed the National American Woman Suffrage Association as the campaign reached its climax. Although individual states, including New York, had approved woman suffrage, she argued that only an amendment to the Constitution of the United States would serve. She challenged all forms of opposition: the South’s fears of black voters; the North’s anxiety about immgrants; the “wets” vs. the “drys,”and on and on. She argued: “ Ridiculous as this list of objections may appear, each is supported earnestly by a considerable group, and collectively they furnish the basis of opposition to woman suffrage in and out of Congress. The answer to one is the answer to all: Government ‘by the people’ is expedient or it is not. If it is expedient, then obviously all the people must be included. . . . Meanwhile the system which admits the unworthy to the vote provided they are men, and shuts out the worthy provided they are women, is so unjust and illogical that its perpetuation is a sad reflection upon American thinking. ”

Brewer_WomensHistory_Final.indd 14 2/25/20 4:08 PM The Suffrage Joan of Arc Washington Square 13

Inez Milholland (1886-1916) was a Brooklynite who joined the group of young Greenwich Village radicals soon after graduation from Vassar in 1909. She became a lawyer and used her skills in a variety of causes. She saved her greatest efforts for woman suffrage, and often led parades on horseback. The most dramatic suffrage parade took place in Washington on March 3, 1913, a day before ’s inauguration. Crowds of men pressed in on the marchers; Milholland fended them off with her horse. reported: “ Through all the confusion and turmoil the women paraders marched calmly, keeping a military formation as best they could. . . . Miss Milholland was an imposing figure in a white broadcloth Cossack suit and long white-kid boots. From her shoulders hung a pale-blue cloak, adorned with a golden maltese cross. She was mounted on Gray Dawn, a white horse belonging to A. D. Addison of this city. Miss Milholland was by far the most picturesque figure in the parade.” Later, Inez Milholland went to France to cover the Great War, and then abruptly married Eugen Jan Boissevain in London. In 1916, on a speaking tour, she collapsed and died a month later.

Brewer_WomensHistory_Final.indd 15 2/25/20 4:08 PM Crystal Eastman The Liberator 14 34 Union Square East

Crystal Eastman (1881-1928), daughter of a woman preacher, sought out good causes throughout her short life—first as a social investigator, later as a lawyer, editor, and co-founder of such durable organizations as the American Civil Liberties Union. With the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, Crystal Eastman wrote. “Now We Can Begin,”a speech and an article that has lived on, widely circulated and admired. It concludes: “ But with a generous endowment of mother- hood provided by legislation, with all laws against voluntary motherhood and education in its methods repealed, with the feminist ideal of education accepted in home and school, and with all special barriers removed in every field of human activity, there is no reason why woman should not become almost a human thing. It will be time enough then to consider whether she has a soul.”

Brewer_WomensHistory_Final.indd 16 2/25/20 4:08 PM Price of Freedom New Yorkers Imprisoned for Protesting at the 15 White House

In 1917 and 1919, the National Woman Party, led by Alice Paul, summoned suffragists to protest at or near Wilson’s White House. Here is of New York City women jailed and, often, maltreated: Eunice Brannan, , , Emily DuBois Butterworth, Mrs. Palys L. Chevrier, , Anna Ginsberg, Frances B. Green, Elizabeth Hamilton, Ernestine Hara, Mrs. H.O. Havemeyer, Louisa Hornsby, Peggy B. Johns, Kathryn Lincoln, Maude Malone, Vida Milholland, Belle Scheinberg, , Elizabeth Stuyvesant, Bertha Wallerstein, Cora Week, Joy Young.

Our gratitude to the Turning Point Suffragist Memorial Associa- tion, 5400 Ox Road, Fairfax, Virginia 22039 for compiling this roster. This nonprofit association is planning to build a memorial to the suffragists on the site of the Occuquan Workhouse, where many suffragists were imprisoned.

Brewer_WomensHistory_Final.indd 17 2/25/20 4:08 PM Debts & Acknowledgments

The staff of Borough President Gale Brewer—especially Penelope Cox, director of special events; Hector Rivera, map and graphics expert.

Other who have contributed include Pam Elam, who in her service to Borough President Scott Stringer in 2008, created “Women’s Rights, Historic Sites: A Manhattan Map of Milestones;” and the late Rita Henley Jensen, founder of Women’s eNews. After moving her office to Barclay Street, Rita commissioned a series of women’s history walks focusing on journalism. Betsy Wade and James Boylan researched and wrote several versions, including one sponsored by the New-York Historical Society.

Our thanks to the institutions whose online collections provided text and illustrations, among them the Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution and its Museum of American History, and the New York Public Library.

Betsy Wade James Boylan

Brewer_WomensHistory_Final.indd 18 2/25/20 4:08 PM Gale A. Brewer MANHATTAN BOROUGH PRESIDENT

1 Centre Street, 19th Floor South New York, NY 10007 (212) 669-8300

431 West New York, NY 10027 (212) 531-1609

www.manhattanbp.nyc.gov

March 2020 bug

Brewer_WomensHistory_Final.indd 19 2/25/20 4:08 PM 1 Sojourner Truth. Old John Street Chapel, 44 John Street. 2 Ernestine Rose. Site of Broadway Tabernacle, Broadway and Catherine Lane. 3 Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Site of Revolution newspaper, 37 Park Row. Note commemorative street sign. 4 Augusta Lewis. 26 Ann Street, site of New York Era. 5 Emily Warren Roebling. Brooklyn Bridge. 6 S. Josephine Baker. Department of Health, 49 Centre Street. 7 Ida B. Wells. New York Age, 4 Cedar Street. 8 Mary White Ovington. NAACP offices, 20 Vesey Street. 9 Margaret Sanger. Old Federal Building marker, . 10 Frances Perkins. 165 Broadway; former Singer Building, now Zuccotti Park. 11 Emma Bugbee. Former Tribune building, Nassau and Spruce Streets.

Not on map: 12 Carrie Chapman Catt. Suffrage headquarters, 171 Madison Avenue, near 33rd Street. 13 Inez Milholland. Washington Square Arch. 14 Crystal Eastman. Offices ofThe Liberator, 34 Union Square East.

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