ANTHONY AND STANTON | Statue Campaign

L to R: Stanton, Anthony, Mott.

March 12, 2018 – Gary Ferdman's birthday is today and he wants you to give money to his campaign to have statues erected in New York City memory of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the first of the two to become committed to the Votes for Women cause. Stanton was at the Seneca Falls Convention; Anthony was converted to the cause a couple of years later, although her Rochester-area Quaker family was long committed to the abolitionist movement.

Stanton met Lucretia Mott in London at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Conference and the were told that women should keep quiet and sit in a special section reserved for non-voting observers. They were outraged, but Lucretia Mott went back to Philadelphia where she was a famed Quaker orator. Stanton had several children in succession and found her life as a mother in Seneca Falls to be difficult.

There is no statue to Stanton or Anthony in New York City. Famously, the statues to women are of ancient Greek or Roman gods, or Mother Goose. Mott, Stanton and Anthony are remembered in a sculpture in the U.S. Capitol building. Edna St Vincent Millay, who married the widower of Inez Milholland, wrote a poem dedicated (in the printed version) to Inez Milholland, which she read out in 1923 at an unveiling of the statue. This is the ending of a play I wrote about Milholland that was read at a fund-raiser in Vienna, Va. in 2017.

Millay and Milholland were both New Yorkers in the sense of New York City dwellers (Milholland was born in Brooklyn and lived there and on Madison Square; Millay became a Greenwich Village aficionado). It would be just as appropriate in due course to have monuments to these great women in the City. Millay was a student at Vassar when Milholland visited the college as an alumna with her husband, my mother's uncle, at Vassar's 50th Anniversary.

I have donated toward the erection of the statues to Stanton and Anthony. My second contribution is this appeal, in addition to the one I posted in 2016. Please give!

INEZ | 100th Anniversary of Christmas Memorial

Inez Milholland Boissevain preparing to lead the March 3, 1913, women’s suffrage 

         parade in Washington, D.C.                                                              Library of Congress

[The following appears in the East Hampton Star dated yesterday and delivered this morning, Dec. 23.]

A Suffragist Warrior, by John Tepper Marlin

 December 22, 2016

Christmas Day this year will be the 100th anniversary of a huge memorial service on Capitol Hill for Inez Milholland Boissevain, a New Yorker who died on Nov. 25, 1916. Her death played a crucial role in the passage of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote. 

Inez was the probably the most famous American feminist alive in 1916. She led the 1913 Woman Suffrage Parade in Washington, D.C. Later that year she secretly married Eugen Boissevain, who was my mother’s uncle. It was front-page news all over the United States because feminism and marriage were then considered incompatible. The New York Times described Inez as “the fairest of the Amazons.”

She died weeks after collapsing in Los Angeles during a speech urging a vote against the re-election of President Woodrow Wilson because he opposed women’s suffrage and what was called the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. Her shocking death sparked hundreds of tributes and memorials around the country. The huge Christmas Day funeral service in the Hall of Heroes led to a White House meeting of members of the National Woman’s Party with President Wilson to urge him — in memory of Inez — to support the constitutional amendment recognizing the right of women to vote. 

Wilson’s response to the delegation was condescending. He explained that it was impossible for him to hold together the southern wing of the Democratic Party if he championed a federal amendment, as they would have known if they had done their political homework. The fuming delegation went back across Lafayette Square to the Woman’s Party headquarters and decided to picket the White House every day until Wilson changed his mind.

The picketers were in due course arrested and transported to the Occoquan Women’s Workhouse in Lorton, Va. They promptly went on a hunger strike and were force-fed like geese. When descriptions of this torture were smuggled out of the workhouse, public opinion shifted decisively, and Wilson decided to support the 19th Amendment. It was passed by both houses of Congress and became law in 1920.

New Yorkers were prominent in the achievement. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were from the Rochester area. Inez was Brooklyn-born and Vassar-educated. Her portrait on a horse has been hung over the mantelpiece in the National Woman’s Party headquarters in Washington for nearly a century. Money to support the party came from Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, whose castle at Sands Point on Long Island is widely viewed as the model for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby” mansion.

One reason for Inez’s effectiveness was that she understood the media, as the daughter of a Lincoln Republican newspaper editor who in midcareer became wealthy by promoting underground tubes for the distribution of mail. Her father, an Irish Presbyterian, was the first treasurer of the N.A.A.C.P.

She championed the cause of the small upstart activist Delta sorority at Howard University to be represented in the women’s suffrage march when others in 1913 feared a backlash among whites in segregated Washington and the Southern states. I attended the 100th anniversary of that march three years ago. It attracted 5,000 Delta marchers from around the country, outnumbering by more than 10 to 1 representation by the traditional women’s organizations that existed in 1913.

In the wake of the defeat of the first female major-party presidential candidate in U.S. history in 2016, American women’s groups are organizing a Women’s March on Washington on Jan. 21. The urgency and passion with which Inez and her colleagues in the National Woman’s Party pursued their cause turned around the media, the public, and then the president, in that order. Remembering how women succeeded in the years 1913 to 1920 and translating that to a radically transformed media environment might be useful for those planning the 2017 march.

© 2016 by John Tepper Marlin and The East Hampton Star.  To reprint email john@boissevainbooks.com.

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John Tepper Marlin wrote a play about the women’s suffrage movement that was staged at Rochester’s Geva Theatre in 1998 and twice at the Springs Presbyterian Church in 2005. He has lived in Springs since 1981.

VOTES FOR WOMEN | July 19–Seneca Falls Convention

Site of Wesleyan Chapel, Seneca Falls.

At the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, N.Y., a woman’s rights convention–the first ever held in the United States–convened in 1848 with almost 200 women in attendance.

Why It Was Organized

The convention was initiated by Quaker Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, previously united in opposition to slavery.

They first met at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. Even though Mott was a full delegate, both Mott and Stanton were barred from the convention floor because they were women. Their anger flared and then simmered for eight years.

When Mott visited Stanton in 1848, they arranged for a tea at the home of Mary Ann McClintock. Also attending were Martha Wright and Jane Hunt. Together the group decided to advertise (on July 14 in the Seneca County Courier) a women’s conference to be held at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls. The announcement read:

A Convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women will be held in the Wesleyan Chapel, at Seneca Falls, N.Y., on Wednesday and Thursday, the 19th and 20th of July current; commencing at 10 o’clock A.M. During the first day the meeting will be exclusively for women, who are earnestly invited to attend. The public generally are invited to be present on the second day, when Lucretia Mott, of Philadelphia, and other ladies and gentlemen, will address the Convention. 

What Happened

On July 19, 200 women and some men convened at the Chapel, and Stanton read the “Declaration of Sentiments and Grievances,” which she had drafted over the previous few days, modeled on the American Declaration of Independence, which in turn is widely believed to have been modeled on the 1320 Scottish Declaration of Arbroath. The preamble of Stanton's Declaration began:

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights… 

The Declaration of Sentiments and Grievances detailed injustices to U.S. women and called upon women to petition for their rights. The men who attended the first day, even though they were only invited for the second day, were allowed to stay. One of them spoke–Frederick Douglass, who urged the women to introduce the suffrage demand.  Stanton favored it, but Mott was opposed.

On the second day the Declaration of Sentiments and Grievances was adopted and signed by the assembly. The convention also passed 12 resolutions–11 unanimously–which called for specific equal rights for women. The ninth resolution, on suffrage (“It is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise”) was the one of the 12 that was passed over opposing arguments.

The Seneca Falls Convention was followed two weeks later by a larger meeting in Rochester, N.Y. After 72 years, the 19th Amendment was adopted in 1920, recognizing the Federal rights of American adult women to vote.

Related Posts

Inez Milholland—Herald Uniform . Her Engagement to Marconi . Short Biopic on Her

TAKE UP THE SONG | Music

Dedication of the Portrait Monument,
at which Millay presented a poem.

I am looking again at the Take Up the Song Play that was produced in 1998 in Rochester, N.Y.

It might be feasible in a new production to use music for the sonnet "Take Up the Song" by Edna St Vincent Millay, upon rededication of the Portrait Monument of Stanton, Anthony and Mott.

But so far I have only found a somber composition by James Q. Mulholland. Take Up The Song | 10-96395 - Colla Voce Music. I think it needs something celebratory. Marching, something like "John Brown's Body".

HomeCatalogJames Mulholland Choral SeriesTake Up The Song | 10-96395. Take Up The Song | 10-96395. Take Up The Song. from "Mementos Of Millay" ...

"Take up the Song (forget the Epitaph)" by James Mulholland - YouTube

▶ 6:23

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0Xzv5gc4JQ

Apr 15, 2012 - Uploaded by adcahela

The Southern Miss Concert Choir performed "Take up the Song (forget the Epitaph)", from "Mementos of ...

SENECA FALLS | First Day, July 19

July 19–This day in 1848 the Seneca Falls Convention opened, convened because of the meeting of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who lived there, and Lucretia Mott, who was a visiting preacher for the Quakers.

Stanton and Mott had met eight years before in London, when both accompanied their husbands to an Abolitionist conference. They were told to sit in the balcony and keep quiet.

They seethed for eight years as Stanton raised her three sons and Mott honed her speaking skills at Quaker meetings.

The 150th anniversary of the convention was celebrated in several places in 1998. The best-attended of the celebrations appears to have been in the Geva Theater in Rochester, the nearest big city to Seneca Falls.

The theater, which holds 550 people, was filled. There was a standing ovation for the show, which featured a pageant showing how the spark of the convention lit the fire of woman suffrage that eventually spread across the United States. Roberta Wallace played the part of Inez Milholland. The three-term Mayor of Rochester, Bill Johnson, played the part of Frederick Douglass, who championed votes for women until after the Civil War. It then came down to a choice between universal male suffrage and votes for white women, and Douglass chose universal male suffrage. It took until 1920 for women to get the vote.

Back in 1848, there was no record of women voting in public elections that Elizabeth Stanton was aware of. (Actually women voted in some colonies and states. They voted in some New England town meetings before 1776.  Women owning property could vote in New Jersey for many years starting in 1776.  The Kingdom of Hawaii had universal suffrage starting in 1840, but years later it was cut back to male property-owners.)

When Elizabeth Cady Stanton suggested that women should seek the vote as one of their demands, Lucretia Mott responded: "Lizzie, thee will make us ridiculous."

Douglass disagreed. He was one of 40 men who showed up at the convention on the first day, July 19, despite the specific notation in the announcement that the first day was "exclusively for women". Men were admitted but were told they could not speak on the first day. Douglass spoke anyway, arguing that women should seek the vote because without the vote they would never have any power to redress violations of whatever rights they might claim.

Related Posts: Turning Point Suffrage Memorial . 100th anniversary of the 1913 March on Washington . June 11, 2017, Play Featuring Suffrage Leaders