Introduction

Connecticut women activists revitalized their campaign for women's suffrage in the early 20th century, building upon social justice movements and a commitment to reform. As Barbara Sicherman concluded, they sought “rights . . . freedoms . . . and a more equitable society.”1 In essence, they were rebels calling for a truly representative democracy. Towards that goal, they leveraged new technologies, tactics and strategies that resonate today; their efforts offer insights into the mundane as well as the extraordinary obstacles they faced. As new women, they displayed a sharp sense of self and mission, becoming highly visible in public spaces. In contesting traditional definitions of womanhood, they faced fierce opposition to their identities and their progressive agenda. Even though they spoke as if women were a unified category, racism and classism often divided them. African American women activists developed a comprehensive, intersectional agenda that most of their white counterparts routinely refused to embrace, thus underscoring the limits of the transformation promised. The successful ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment enshrining the principle of women's voting rights did not signal an end to their efforts. Instead, it was a significant milestone on the road to fighting for additional “rights and freedoms.” Thus, the articles in this section trace a continuing arc of activism among Connecticut women.2During the early 1900s encompassing both the Progressive and Jim Crow Eras, women activists responded to the challenges posed by rapid industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and the exploitation of labor with more association building, initiatives, and programs designed to address them. Their involvement, especially in the labor movement, catalyzed a return to the issue of woman suffrage, as Jessica D. Jenkins makes clear in “Marching Shoulder to Shoulder: New Life in the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Movement.” The impact of the British Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) surfaces in three articles reprinted here: Jenkins's piece, Kelly Marino's “Making a Scene for Suffrage in Connecticut: Emily Pierson and Educational Theatrics, 1910–1917,” and Kathleen Motes Bennewitz's “Alyse Gregory: Finding Her ‘Voice’ through Woman Suffrage.” WSPU co-founder Emmeline Pankhurst galvanized Gregory during her stay in England in 1909, while Pierson underwent a similar conversion when Pankhurst visited Hartford in 1913. Pankhurst's address, “Freedom or Death,” framed women's voteless state as an urgent matter requiring extreme measures. The militant tactics of the WSPU, based on a forthright, public and provocative demand for the vote as a given right, made their way across the Atlantic through activists Gregory, Pierson, and Alice Paul, among others. However, Americans reshaped them into their own non-violent rendition. Finally, activists conceptualized themselves as a fresh wave of organizers and as heirs to a longstanding women's movement, defying boundaries to make history.Activists came to consider suffrage essential to a progressive reform agenda. Urgent problems of the day became intertwined with women's voting rights. As cited by Marino, Pierson argued that the 50,000 employed, poorly paid, and overworked women in Connecticut needed the vote as a means of protection. She referred her audience to the devastating Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire as “a wake . . . up call.”3 Alyse Gregory's investigation of her Norwalk hometown yielded a telling conclusion: “Few people can fail to see the connection between women's disfranchisement and the sordid revelations” of women's work in the factories.4 Furthermore, Gregory appealed to men, insisting that opposition to woman suffrage was anti-democratic. She maintained: “Not to have a voice in government is not fair in a democracy. The basis of democracy is that all resident[s] of that country shall have something to say in its government.”5 She went a step further and connected democracy with feminism in an address to the Hartford Equal Suffrage League: “Feminism is that part of democracy which demands for women self-expression in this sense – it seeks to abolish all sex discriminations.”6 As Mark H. Jones demonstrates, Mary Townsend Seymour, co-founder of the Hartford branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), believed democracy could be achieved but only if white suffragists rejected “expediency” and supported the enfranchisement of African American women throughout the United States.7Centering women's suffrage as a mechanism for change and a democratic measure attracted new leadership, attention, and methods, as Jenkins illustrates through the March 1914 Hartford suffrage parade. In combination, they created a kind of synergy, electrifying the base and expanding the coalition of supporters. The parade signaled changes already underway in Connecticut, even with a reconstituted national campaign as the Congressional Union—later the National Women's Party—split from the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Both organizations coalesced around a federal amendment to the Constitution. The split did not impede the growth of the suffrage movement in Connecticut. As the parade reveals, activists capitalized on the groundwork laid to organize a successful, well-received, and high-profile event. They projected an image of unity and widespread support. The “shelf life” of the event extended before, during, and after the parade with newspaper articles, film footage, and photos; organizers rode “a wave of energy” in unexpected directions.8 As Marino explains, Emily Pierson, already a national figure, and her co-workers employed consciousness-raising techniques through “educational theatrics” to inform, recruit and empower. At that same parade replete with pageantry and eye-catching floats, Pierson and fellow organizers incorporated tributes to movement founders and notable women achievers alongside marchers that spanned generations, thereby melding past and present. The growth between 1910–1917 of the Connecticut Women's Suffrage Association (CWSA) from 300 to 38,000 members provides a straightforward index of efficacy; at the same time, the number of sections multiplied exponentially to 100.9Both Marino and Bennewitz offer a granular view of the painstaking efforts necessary to effect change. They also supply a vivid portrait of women's bold, daring and frequently, inclusive leadership. As they occupied the public arena in prominent ways, CWSA co-organizers Pierson and Gregory addressed workers in their native languages, supplied testimony at legislative hearings, showed up at annual town events, and established additional venues for advocacy. They used trolleys, automobile tours, and urban locations to attract notice; in the process, they built alliances across class lines. Ever innovative, Pierson pioneered the “voiceless” speech, “a silent suffragist positioned next to an easel flipping cards with relevant words or phrases for onlookers as they passed.”10 Gregory managed a production tour of the play “How the Vote was Won” across portions of the state. In reflecting on their collective efforts to secure suffrage, Gregory suggested: “We felt that we in our generation were taking our place in the age-old struggle of enlightenment against ignorance, of liberty against fatality.”11 As they did so, they embodied new womanhood.The subjects of the articles under consideration were indeed new women, the product of successive generations, increased educational and employment opportunities, and the 19th century women's movement. The term, attributed to Irish writer Sarah Grand (born Frances Bellenden Clark), entered common parlance by the early 1890s. Grand issued a declaration of women's revolt against tradition: “she proclaimed for herself what was wrong with the Home-is-the-Woman's-Sphere and prescribed the remedy.”12 The media noticed and referred to new women as “restless,” “discontented,” and “unquiet”; a ripple of concern churned into controversy.13 Journalist Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, convener of the first conference of African American women activists in Boston in 1895, named her journal “The Women's Era.” New women asserted their capacity for self-definition, autonomy, and purpose. As college students, reformers and club women, professionals, artists, and as wage earners, they gave every impression of challenging limitations imposed on them while fighting for equity and social justice. Pierson, Gregory, and Seymour were representative of this trend. Each was a second-generation activist, a suffragist with a robust agenda, and a special interest in the difficulties working women endured. Pierson was a self-supporting graduate of Vassar who later devoted herself to public health concerns. Abandoning a career in opera, Gregory eventually became an editor, literary critic, and an essayist on social issues. Seymour undertook a number of initiatives to fight discrimination, build interracial coalitions, and administer the local branch of the NAACP she had co-founded. Chicago-based reformer Fannie Barrier Williams declared: “The Negro woman is really the new woman of the times and in possibilities the most interesting woman in America. This is the woman who is destined to play an important part in the future.”14 It was the new woman's destiny that attracted significant notice and opposition, especially on the topic of voting rights.Activists encountered significant obstacles in attempting to effect change. Entrenched, well-resourced, and organized adversaries followed them into every space; antisuffragists, or “antis,” appeared at the 1914 parade, legislative hearings, meetings, and in debates, ads, and newspaper columns. Both of Connecticut's U.S. Senators, the Republican Party establishment, and Governor Marcus H. Holcomb remained staunch antis. As Lizette Pelletier's “Governor Holcomb and the 19th Amendment” reveals, Holcomb refused requests to call the state legislature into special session to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment, anchored in the belief that “the majority of women of this State (sic) do not desire . . . [the vote].” He reversed course only after potential confusion around the November 1920 general election alarmed him.15 Antis organized. At the statewide level, Grace Markham launched the Connecticut Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (CAOSW) in 1910. By 1915, approximately 161 grass roots anti groups had materialized.16 Markham's counterpart in the District of Columbia, Grace Goodwin, showcased the arguments used in appealing to various constituencies.17 She positioned “votes for women” as a distortion of democracy, a “dangerous,” unwanted and unnecessary ”experiment,” and an un-American, unpatriotic export from Great Britain.18 Xenophobia, racism, and misogynoir informed her discourse.19 She referred to “our Negro and our alien problem” and singled out “the negro (sic) women . . . [as] more helpless and ignorant than the men,” with some exceptions.20 Her arguments also rested on a contested definition of womanhood. For antis, women were distinct from men, politically “indifferent and uninformed,” and unentitled to the franchise on the basis of humanity. The demand for the vote, Goodwin insisted, stood at the “acme of hysterical feminine thoughtlessness and unrest,” a rhetorical flourish that intermingled anxiety around new womanhood with old-fashioned misogyny.21 Activists confronted these charges by counter-protests, letters to the editor, articles, debates, and speeches. Pierson and Gregory proved adept at handling the opposition. Seymour responded to critics effectively as well but faced more complex systems of oppression.As Jones explores in “‘To Tell Our Story’: Mary Townsend Seymour and the Early Years of the Hartford Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1917–1920,” Seymour and her allies navigated an agenda interconnected by issues of race, class and gender. They raised funds for anti-lynching efforts, established programs to benefit women and girls, and fought a proposal to segregate night classes for African American migrants from southern states. The last plan persuaded Seymour and her husband Frederick to convene the meeting that established the Hartford branch of the NAACP in 1917. Within a year, she assumed responsibility for sustaining the local branch's interracial coalition and served as liaison to national headquarters. Seymour joined with others to assemble aid for Black soldiers, decry discrimination against African American nurses, and condemn the brutal lynching of Mary Turner in Georgia for the crime of identifying her husband's murderers. As a Red Cross volunteer visiting the families of Black soldiers stationed overseas during World War I, Seymour learned of unfair labor practices. She went undercover to expose the abuses women tobacco workers experienced; she also collaborated with white ally Josephine Bennett to organize a short-lived union. Furthermore, Seymour was a staunch supporter of woman suffrage. She refuted the statement made by Alice Paul of the National Woman's Party (NWP) that Black women in South Carolina were uninterested in voting. Mary Church Terrell, inaugural president of the National Association of Colored Women, spoke for many African American suffragists when she wrote: “how can anyone who is able to use reason and believes in . . . justice . . . think it is right to withhold from one-half the human race rights and privileges accorded to the other half which is neither more deserving nor more capable of exercising them?”22 Like Terrell, Seymour regarded the vote not only as critical tool for Black women but also as a matter of civil rights. When she publicly pledged funds in favor of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, it was on behalf of the Hartford NAACP. According to Jones, for Seymour “racial and gender rights” were inextricably linked.23The successful ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment was cause for celebration, but not a cessation in activism. These articles concur with Carole Nichols's findings in Votes and More for Women: Suffrage and After in Connecticut. Each compellingly argues for continuity in pressing a social justice agenda, with and without explicit feminist content.24 Pierson, who aligned herself with the NWP by 1917, briefly taught at DePauw University, and then earned a medical degree from Yale, the only woman in her class. She practiced medicine, maintained a public health agenda, and adopted her daughter Anne. Gregory also turned to the NWP, organizing for the Women's Political Union and training suffrage recruits along the eastern seaboard. She established a home in Greenwich Village, edited The Dial, married, and retained her birth name. She conducted research and wrote on important issues. Although the record is less clear, Seymour worked to maintain the Hartford branch of the NAACP and challenged oppression everywhere. Other suffragists went on to promote peace, battle for improved labor conditions, promote an equal rights amendment, and secure bodily autonomy through birth control. In other words, they persisted in trying to achieve “right . . . freedoms . . . and a more equitable society.”