Hotbed On view November 3, 2017 – March 25, 2018

Selected PR Images

Hotbed explores the vibrant early 20th-century political and artistic scene of , where men and women joined forces across the boundaries of class and race to fight for a better world. At the heart of the downtown radicals’ crusade lay women’s rights: to control their own bodies, to do meaningful work, and above all, to vote. Immersive installations and more than 100 artifacts and images—drawn from New-York Historical’s archives and several private collections—bring to life the bohemian scene and its energetic activist spirit.

“Creates Sensation with Suffrage Plea Painted On Her Pretty Back” The Topeka State Journal, November 6, 1915 Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers,

Suffragists deployed many creative strategies to draw attention to their cause, including breaking convention to use their own bodies as signs. These stunts were designed to be widely seen, photographed, and discussed—to “go viral,” 1910s-style.

Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870–1942) Patchin Place, ca. 1917 New-York Historical Society Library, Jessie Tarbox Beals Collection

The allure of Greenwich Village lay in its cluster of tea rooms, restaurants, bookstores, art studios, and galleries, many of which were run by women. Jessie Tarbox Beals, the country’s first female photojournalist, moved to the area in 1917 and became a tireless promoter of its picturesque streets, businesses, and local characters.

Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870–1942) Grace Godwin Spaghetti Dinner, ca. 1917 Gelatin silver print New-York Historical Society Library, Jessie Tarbox Beals Collection

Grace Godwin’s restaurant Garret, on Washington Square South, was a typical bohemian establishment where men and women dined together in casual, candle-lit surroundings. Borrowed from their Italian neighbors, spaghetti was a novelty to the mostly white, middle-class bohemians.

Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870–1942) Charlotte Powell, ca. 1917 Gelatin silver print New-York Historical Society Library, Jessie Tarbox Beals Collection

Jessie Tarbox Beals was highly conscious of being a woman in a male-dominated profession. In her portraits of women artists and business owners in the Village, she presented her subjects as independent, capable, and androgynous. Here Charlotte Powell, labeled “the Village painter” by Beals, poses confidently with the tools of her trade.

Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870–1942) Lin in her shop, ca. 1917 Gelatin silver print New-York Historical Society Library, Jessie Tarbox Beals Collection

Sisters Lin and Joan Schromache ran Jolin’s, a typical bohemian store that sold a lifestyle as much as merchandise. Here, Lin poses in a loose artist’s smock, ironically in front of a display advertising corsets—exactly the garment that avant-garde women were eager to cast off.

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) Family Limitation, ca. 1914-15 New-York Historical Society Library

Nurse Margaret Sanger disobeyed obscenity laws to share birth control information with poorer women. In her 1914 pamphlet Family Limitation, Sanger wrote that “in my estimation a well fitted pessary is one of the surest methods of preventing conception.” It was illegal to send birth control information through the mail, but women distributed the pamphlet at meetings and through their own networks. In 1916, Sanger opened a clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn, to teach women to use these devices. It was shut down after nine days but marked the birth of the concept of “family planning.”

What is Feminism? flyer, 1914 Courtesy of Nancy Cott

The “New Woman” was a sweeping cultural phenomenon in the early 20th century: Young, glamorous, educated, and politically engaged, she sought broader horizons than her mother had known. “Feminism” went a step further, envisioning women as full equals to men. In 1914, the term was still new enough that Greenwich Villager Marie Jenney Howe, founder of the influential women’s group Heterodoxy, staged meetings to explain the concept. The speakers included writers, suffragists, and labor activists.

Suffrage and The Man poster, 1912 : The Metropolitan Printing Company New-York Historical Society, Bella C. Landauer Collection

Advertised as “a comedy of votes and love,” this 1912 film (now lost) was produced by the Women’s Political Union, founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s daughter Harriot Stanton Blatch. The film’s heroine, serving on a jury, manages to save her ex-fiancé from a lawsuit and win him back. Similar scenarios, with less happy endings, were often used by anti-suffragists to claim that women could not separate romance from politics.

Votes for Women playing cards, 1916 New-York Historical Society Library

Suffrage activists harnessed women’s consumer power to promote their cause through an array of items that could be bought, sold, worn, and displayed. From pencils to playing cards, buttons to jewelry, and cookbooks to dishware, suffrage support could reach into all areas of daily life.

Unidentified photographer Inez Milholland on horseback, 1913 New-York Historical Society Library

Through graphic design and photography, the modern suffrage movement transformed the image of a “suffragette” from a severe-looking grandmother to a stylish young woman. Inez Milholland—a glamorous Vassar graduate turned bohemian, labor lawyer, and suffrage activist— embodied the new look and spirit. She led parades on horseback in Washington, D.C., and New York and became a martyr when she collapsed and died on a speaking tour in 1916 at just 30 years old.

Unidentified photographer Women Want Liberty Airplane Group (“Suffbird”), 1916 New-York Historical Society Library

Modern suffragists worked hard to capture media attention for their cause. In a remarkable series of stunts, they took to the skies in biplanes to drop leaflets into crowds. Harnessing a powerful new technology, suffragist pilots displayed their determination and their daring.

“I Want to Vote But My Wife Won’t Let Me” postcard, ca. 1910 Collection of Ann Lewis and Mike Spondell

Advances in color printing allowed publishers to capitalize on the talents of artists and cartoonists and get a political or commercial message out to a wide audience in an eye-catching way. Pro- suffrage postcards portrayed attractive, dignified women sharing in politics with men, while anti- suffrage cards trafficked in satire. They frequently deployed insulting stereotypes of suffragists as either ugly spinsters or selfish wives and mothers who left their emasculated husbands holding the baby. Cheap, ubiquitous, and blunt, postcards were

the social media of their day.

Unidentified photographer Silent Protest against the St. Louis Riots, 1917 James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

For many African Americans, the anti- lynching cause and related issues of racial equality were the most urgent of the many movements for social change in the 1910s. On July 28, 1917, 10,000 black New Yorkers marched down Fifth Avenue in silence punctuated by muffled drums. Organized by the NAACP, the march was a response to recent riots in East St. Louis and protested the widespread violence of lynching.

Wake Up America!, 1917 Poster New-York Historical Society Library

After the United States entered World War I in April 1917, the fight for the vote took on new urgency. War propaganda drew on the visual iconography of suffrage, with idealized female figures representing patriotic ideals. Many suffragists who supported the war saw it as an opportunity to prove their patriotism and insist on their right to full citizenship. Others, however, were dismayed by the capitulation to militarism and continued to demonstrate for peace.

Women’s Strike for Equality (detail), 1970

New-York Historical Society Library, Eugene Gordon Photograph Collection

Women’s activism for political rights is ongoing, and many of the galvanizing issues of today— racial justice, labor rights, immigration, reproductive rights, and women’s political participation—were also at the forefront a century ago. Then, as now, it was not individual leaders that had the power to drive real change, but the collective action they inspired.