A New Story of Suffrage

MONTAGE From Chu’s oeuvre: a marked by a focus on human quirks and 2019 comic book tied to diversity. In her Red Sonja holiday special, KISS’s “End of the Road” tour and a for example, the Hyrkanian warrior takes a comics imprint created whirlwind tour of the many holiday tradi- by rapper DMC, with a tions represented in New York City. graffiti-artist heroine. Her work is not all heavy metal and su- ics in 2011, but Chu kept perheroes. Chu’s first full-length graph- writing. The following ic novel, Sea Sirens, drawn by Janet K. Lee year she self-published and being published this June by Random her own book, Girls Night House, is the story of a Vietnamese-Ameri- Out and Other Stories, a can girl who tangles with an undersea world collection of short com- of mermaids and sea serpents. ics, and started promot- It’s an unusual thing to start a new career ing it at conventions and at 45, let alone one as talent-driven and dif- comics stores around ficult as comics writing,let alone to thrive at the country, which even- it. But Chu says every twist and turn in her tually led to profession- own story has contributed to her current al writing jobs. Soon she career; on her LinkedIn page, her bio says “mind-blowing” happened: the instructor was being entrusted with legacy characters simply: “I tell stories.” loved it. “A little light bulb went off,” she at the two biggest comics publishers, DC “I don’t think I could have done this when recalls. “I could actually be semi-decent at and Marvel—characters like Ant-Man, I was 23,” she says, heading out the door this. People are having a reaction to some- Deadpool, even KISS. (Yes, the band. Yes, of Midtown Comics with a stack of fresh thing I made up.” they have a comic book.) No matter what books in her hand. “I wouldn’t have been Lee and Chu launched Alpha Girl Com- character she’s writing, Chu’s comics are good at it.” of online activism can A New Story of Suffrage feel deprived of that Why They Marched: vitality—which makes Untold Stories of the Fresh portraits of foot soldiers for women’s right to vote Susan Ware’s Why They Women Who Fought for by marina n. bolotnikova Marched: Untold Stories of the Right to Vote, the Women Who Fought for by Susan Ware the Right to Vote, all the (Harvard, $26.95) f the women’s suffrage movement rode through the country on horseback, more of a delight for a took place today, what would it look shouted through town squares, dropped modern reader. Ware tells a new history like? Radically different, surely, from leaflets from airplanes, and marched in of women’s suffrage through portraits of I the way it did in the nineteenth and neatly choreographed pageants to spread 21 women (and one man) both famous and twentieth centuries, when its organizers the word about their cause. Today’s world obscure, from the 1848 Seneca Falls Con- vention through the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. “How can someone demand the vote without having that basic political right in the first place?” asks Ware, Ph.D. ’78, an independent scholar of women’s history and associate of Har- vard’s history department. Part of the answer is that the suffragists were intrepid and relentless. They were the first political pro- National Women’s Party members picket the White House, 1917. In the years leading up to the Nineteenth Amendment’s passage, the protesters were a regular presence in Lafayette Square. 72 May - June 2019 Photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 MONTAGE testers to picket the White House (and to burn President Woodrow Wilson in effigy), The rapid rise of biological psychia- for which nearly 500 were arrested and 170 OPEN BOOK try assured that, eventually, the field went to prison between 1917 and 1919. Au- was bound to overreach. It did so thorities were cracking down on dissent spectacularly, argues Ford professor during World War I—and the activists Misguided of the history of science Anne Har- were considered disloyal to the war effort. rington, as psychiatrists from the In the summer of 1918, after a group of suf- 1980s onward sought purely biological fragists were arrested and released on bail, Mind Fixers explanations for mental illness, and they resumed their protests immediately corresponding pharmacological cures. and were arrested again and again. She delves into these often disturbing efforts in Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search One of them, Hazel Hunkins, cabled for the Biology of Mental Illness (W.W. Norton, $27.95). From the introduction: her anxious family in Montana: “TWEN- TY SIX OF AMERICAS FINEST WOM- By 1988… psychiatry’s transformation turned everyone’s heads, and led the EN ARE ACCOMPANYING ME TO JAIL into a biological discipline seemed field into a scientific wasteland for ITS SPLENDID DONT WORRY LOVE complete. That fall the psychia- more than half a century. Finally, HAZEL.” Their experiences provided the trist Samuel Guze gave a lec- however, exciting new devel- women a sense of camaraderie resembling ture at London’s Maudsley opments in neuroscience, that of men in war; both suffering and ex- Hospital provocatively genetics, and psycho- hilaration were entangled in the horrid and titled: “Biological Psy- pharmacology had humiliating conditions in prison. Hunkins chiatry: Is There Any changed things. Irre- returned home in an ambulance and, one Other Kind?” His futable evidence that friend wrote, “violently ill.” They were answer was implied mental disorders honored by the National Women’s Party, in the title: of course were brain diseases one of the two major organizations orches- not. Psychiatry was had emboldened a trating the suffrage fight, with brooches in a branch of medi- new generation of the shape of a prison cell. cine, and all medi- biological psychia- For the centennial of the Nineteenth cine was “applied trists to overthrow Amendment, Ware wanted to tell a broad- biology,” end of sto- the Freudians and er, more inclusive story about “woman suf- ry. “I believe,” he con- to bring back the frage,” as it was known then. A common cluded, “that continu- brain as the primary narrative about the suffragists, she said ing debate about the object of psychiatric in an interview, is that they were racist, biological basis of psychia- research, diagnosis, and wealthy white women—and many of them try is derived much more treatment. It was a simple DOMAINWIKIPEDIA/PUBLIC were. They mirrored the racism of American from philosophical, ideo- explanatory story, one society, organizing segregated parades and logical and political concerns Modern psychiatrists with clear heroes and vil- disparagingly objecting that black men had than from scientific ones.” revived the effort to link lains, and above all a satis- mental illness to biology, been granted the vote before them. And it All this added up to noth- begun in the 1840s by fyingly happy ending. was largely only the wealthy who had the ing less than a palace revolu- scientists like Emil The only trouble with this ability to volunteer their time. But this nar- tion in American psychiatry, Kraepelin. story is that it is wrong— rative, Ware argues, erases the history of an astonishingly rapid, 180- not just slightly wrong but both black suffragists who sought to inte- degree turnaround in understanding and wrong in every particular. The nine- grate race and gender into the movement approaches to ailments of the mind. Why teenth-century brain psychiatrists were and working-class suffragists who saw did it happen? What caused an entire not early versions of the 1980s biological the vote as an important tool for the urban profession to reorient itself so quickly revolutionaries, save perhaps for the fact poor, many of whom were women. As its and so completely? that they wore longer waistcoats and had portraits encompass women from differ- For the psychiatrists who heralded more facial hair. Their project did not fall ent class, race, and religious backgrounds, these developments in the 1980s, the victim to the siren call of psychoanalysis. Why They Marched provides glimpses of the answers seemed clear. In the late nine- It failed on its own terms. The Freudian movement’s connections to many questions teenth century, they believed, the field psychiatrists came into positions of sig- about the fabric of society: the rights of fac- of psychiatry—especially in German- nificant power only after World War II tory workers, the relationship between pa- speaking Europe—had actually been (not before), and they did so not because triarchy and white supremacy, and what it on the right track. Under the leader- they were briefly able to persuade enough means to be female. ship of Theodor Meynert and Emil people to buy into their nonsense, but At the dawn of the modern period, it Kraepelin, it had pursued a robust bio- because they appeared to have grasped was not just received ideas about the role logical research program. Unfortu- the mental health challenges of the post- of women, but also new anxieties about the nately, the Freudians had come along, war era better than the biologists had…. social shifts under way in an industrializing Harvard Magazine 73 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 MONTAGE Left: The banner of a men’s group that supported women’s right to vote. Right: Inez Milholland leads the 1913 suffrage parade in Washing- ton, D.C.

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