From parlor to prison: Five American suffragists talk about their lives

by Sherna Berger Gluck

paperback

Genres: History, Feminism

285 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1976

About the author

Sherna Berger Gluck (b. 1935) is an American activist and oral historian, and Director Emerita of the Oral History Program at California State University, Long Beach. Her first book, From Parlor to Prison (1976), is an oral history of the women's suffrage movement. An advocate for the Palestinian people, she is a co-host of the Radio Intifada show on KPFK; her most recent book is An American Feminist In Palestine. Her historical work led to the recognition of women's oral history as a distinct discipline. Gluck received her undergraduate education at Shimer College in Illinois, where she enrolled at age 15 through the early entrance program. She later received advanced degrees from UCLA and UC Berkeley. (from Shimer College Wiki)

Reviews

[Tom Schulte · Rating 4 out of 5]

These five, elderly suffragists in their late and final years speak openly and candidly about their front-line involvement in winning the right to vote for women. I am amazed at the far-left radicalism so pervasive in these histories and the general extremism as would be seen today. Wages, labor organizing, birth control, and more were foremost to these women who were variously and at times themselves or fellow-travelers with anarchist, socialists, and communists. This made me look into the significant labor actions of the day including meat packers and other groups. Antiwar was big around WWI, too.

Even ex-president Cleveland in 1905 felt he needed to come out against this self-organizing women we doing with clubs. From this informal fraternizing grew over the decades a substantive and successful national network. Despite initial hostility, the General Federation of Women's Clubs grew to two hundred thousand members by 1902, and in 1904, a discussion of suffrage was included in their biennial convention, with a woman voter, Sarah Platt Decker of Colorado, elected president.

By 1902 membership in the clubs constituting the General Federation of Women's Clubs had reached two hundred thou-sand. This remarkable growth occurred despite relentless ridicule and hostility from the press. Men were clearly aware of the threatening implications of women organizing, even in this most genteel way. Of even greater significance than the numerical growth of the club movement was its change in direction. No longer a mere resting place for the middle-class matron, the women's clubs were paying more and more attention to current events and to civic improvements in their com-munities. That this change was a self-conscious one was amply demonstrated at the biennial convention in 1904. Not only did a discussion of suffrage take place for the first time, but a woman voter, Sarah Platt Decker of Colorado, was elected president.

It is not just activism but their lives as declared in the subtitle we get here. Jessie Haver Butler recalls a rampant lesbianism at her college that was buried in the reporting of a love-triangle murder-suicide:

As a matter of fact, it was not a healthy environment, in a way. There was a great deal of homosexual relations going on there, and we had a terrible tragedy in our class that nobody had coped with. There was a girl who was a very masculine type of girl, head of the basketball program, and another who was a very beautiful, sweet, delicate, typically feminine girl. The two of them lived together. The one girl loved boyfriends and dancing, and she went up to Dartmouth a great deal. A boy in Dartmouth fell in love with her, but her roommate was determined to break that up. That summer during our junior year the roommate persuaded her to cancel the engagement; she had found out that the mother of this perfectly brilliant, gifted young boy had been in a mental institution.

How it was reported:
Press Democrat, Volume XXXV, Number 99, 30 April 1909

MURDER AND SUICIDE
Senior at Smith College Shot for Breaking Her Engagement

Northampton, Mass., April 29.—Enraged because she had broken her engagement with him and refused to renew It, Porter Smith, of Chicago, who was graduated from Dartmouth College, last year, today shot and fatally wounded Miss Helen Ayer Marden, a senior at Smith College, and then committed suicide. Miss Marden Is a daughter of Frank Marden. of Somerville. She died shortly before noon today.

Butler like other had other goals than the vote and one was fairer wages for women.

that a I didn't know what to think! As soon as the women had the vote, they just quit. It's one of the tragedies of the whole era slump took place. Women stopped seeking higher degrees in college, they stopped trying to be better educated. Many young women left school for marriage and many went to work to help husbands secure degrees. Over the years this custom has become commonplace-a strange reaction to the fire and the drama of the fight for woman's suffrage.

Maybe we needed new issues. Alice Paul was right. She began immediately to plan to introduce to the Congress the equal rights amendment. Although she had helped to secure woman's suffrage, she still believed that woman's suffrage alone was not going to give women everything they wanted and needed. They had only secured the right to vote. Even now the U.S. Supreme Court has stated that the only status women have in our government is as voters. Any state today can still pass any law they'd like against women, and they have no recourse except perhaps to vote against them. There are now a thousand very bad laws on the records of state legislatures against women. This is added proof that Alice Paul is a woman with a profound mind. Getting woman's suffrage was not enough, it was just the first...

Deforestation, and even an fighting the anti-evolution backlash took energy.

After 1922, when Maynard had his first heart attack, he was not well enough to do very much. It was enough to be going around doing all the lecturing and all the writing. And then, from 1924 until 1932 we were absorbed in the anti-evolution fight. That took up all the energy either of us had.

Maynard founded the Evolution or Science League because one state after another began having these anti-evolution bills.

He had written to every scientific and scholarly organ you can think of and they all answered that "yes, somebody should do it, but it wasn't their line." Finally, in despair, when he was doing a long lecture series, at the end of one of them he out-lined the situation and we started right there. That night we collected eleven dollars and nineteen members, and that was the beginning. This was before the Scopes trial. In fact, most of the witnesses for Scopes were our members. We were very, very select. We had practically every well-known scientist in the country, but we didn't have an awful lot of them.

We had a secretary who was supposed to do the office work, but his salary got so far in arrears that he had to get a job some-where and I did most of it from that time on. We organized branches in Los Angeles and San Diego and Sacramento and we'd take organizing tours. Sometimes I went along, sometimes I didn't.

At one time we had something like a thousand members, not all scientists, of course. Anybody who wanted to could join. I remember there was an old man in Nevada who hadn't any money and he used to send rabbits he'd kill. Once a rabbit arrived on Saturday, when we weren't there, and when we opened the door Monday morning, it was horrible. It was like a grave. There was another old man, in Georgia, an old Spanish War veteran who would sometimes be paid five dollars for someone to sleep in his bed while he slept on the floor. He'd send us the

five dollars, which was very touching. The League lasted until 1932, when Maynard's health got so bad that he couldn't go on with it. We just had to let it go, and by that time it was long after the Scopes trial.

There is also an insider account of cruelties (forced feeding, beatings) and resistance by imprisoned suffragists (don't call them by the demeaning Britishism "suffragettes") which is darker than reported here:

THE NEW YORK TIMES, FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5, 1917

'PICKETS' MUTINY IN WORKHOUSE

Eighteen Suffragist Prisoners Attack the Superintendent of Washington Institution.

SUPPRESSED BY NEGRESSES

Fierce Rough-and-Tumble Fight Attends Removal of Mrs. Johns to Asylum Hospital.

It is generally interesting how anit0feminist the early 20th century NYT was.

THE NEW YORK TIMES, THURSDAY, JANUARY 11, 1917
EDITORIAL
"SILENT, SILLY, AND OFFENSIVE"

That the female mind is inferior to the male mind need not be assumed: that there is something about it essentially different, and that this difference is of a kind and degree that with votes for women would constitute a political danger is or ought to be plain to everybody.

[Rosie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow!!! A very fascinating book. Recently I've been learning more about English women's struggle for suffrage, so this book, which focused on American women, was illuminating, and I learned several things which I was previously unaware of.

"The failure of feminists to become involved in the birth control issue also had an impact on the orientation of the birth control movement. Without feminist support, Margaret Sanger increasingly had to turn to the eugenics movement for support, using its arguments in her own propaganda and de-emphasizing the earlier feminist ones. In other words, rather than stressing the need for women to control their own reproductive processes, the argument became focused on the need for society to control undesirable genetic characteristics. By the mid-1920s the die was cast, and by the end of the 1930s the birth control movement had shed almost all of its feminism and radicalism." (41-42, Introduction)