The Gotham Center for New York City History: “When the Suffrage Movement Got Its Makeover On” by Brooke Kroeger

Take the lace handkerchiefs tucked into the waists of every speaker. “I really believe women will never be emancipated until they abolish the handkerchief from sight,” Bly scoffed. “It suggests tears and weakness, and to be in prominent view looks as if it were in constant demand.” “Frightful” was the get-up of Alice Stone Blackwell, editor of the Boston-based Woman’s Journal.

Never had a skirt hung so badly or been so terribly made, and why, Bly wanted to know, had she not banished that old double-breasted broadcloth coat with oversized pearl buttons?No, no, no, was her reaction to the corset-free garments that most of the speakers chose to wear. In Bly’s view, “the shapeless rage of dress reform” was  a truly unfortunate late Victorian trend, the grandmother of the mid-century sack and muu-muu. To Bly of the self-celebrated “wasp-waist,” a dress without body-skimming contours was no dress at all.

Bly thought Charlotte Perkins Stetson‘s oratorical prowess and dainty “high-bred” face served her well as she lectured on “The Spiritual Significance of Democracy and Woman’s Relationship to It.” But not that poorly tailored outfit in a dreadful shade of mud. “Mrs. Stetson could have preached to all men and won favor,” Bly said, “if she only dressed becomingly.”

The chocolate-colored skirt of Elizabeth A. Yates “hung like a bag” and whatever had possessed Emma Smith De Voe of South Dakota to keep on her large black plumed hat? “In striving to gain rights held selfishly by men,” Bly said, “it might be well to copy some of their few good points.”

The ensemble of the movement’s leader, Susan B. Anthony, got a pass from Bly (who, incidentally, snared an interview with Anthony during the convention. The Sunday profile she produced still has place in the annals for the personal details the great suffrage leader revealed.) And the dark green tailor-made suit of Anthony’s eventual successor, the Rev. Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, at least fit that “little dumpling of a woman.”

Bly’s point was this: intellectual or not, for a woman, neglect of appearance is a weakness, not a strength. “And in working for a cause,” she went on, “I think it is wise to show the men that its influence does not make woman any the less attractive.” Even more to the point, she said, “Dress is a great weapon in the hands of a woman if rightly applied. It is a weapon men lack, so women should make the most of it. Why not use the powerful means of pretty clothes?”

The transformation started getting more attention in 1908 with the founding of the Equal Franchise Society, led by the socialite Katherine Duer Mackay, the wife of the communications mogul, Clarence Mackay. Even the consistently anti-suffrage New York Times took note  of this potentially game-changing addition to the suffrage arsenal, explaining that Mackay’s by-invitation-only initiative was meant “to take the organized work more into the ranks of society than it has yet been.”

At a lavish luncheon at the Hotel Astor in January 1909, the movement introduced Mackay in her new guise. The Times dutifully quoted in full from her speech to the “500 women and a few men (who, naturally, did not count)” who were present. No doubt because the newspaper’s readers — the article appeared in the news, not the women’s section — would also want to know, the reporter offered a full paragraph of description of the guest of honor’s “handsome gown of a soft gold-color chiffon velvet with old gold lace and a large brown hat with lace and brown plumes.”

In mid-March of 1909, Harper’s Weekly emoted over its new portrait of Mackay in a head-turning gown trimmed in Alençon lace. The writer gushed over how quickly she had become influential in “bringing the question of Woman Suffrage into general prominence.” Along with Mackay’s portrait were four images just as fetching of some of her fashion-conscious recruits. Pictured were the treasurer, Mrs. Helen Wise Miller; Rita de Acosta Lydig, known at the time as “the most picturesque woman in America” and the wife of Capt. Philip Lydig; Anne L. Ide Cockran, the wife of US Representative W. Bourke Cockran; and Edith Kingdon Gould, the actress wife of the financier George Jay Gould.

Williamsport Gazette-Bulletin, December 1, 1909, p. 1

In late July of 1909, summer students at Columbia University filled Hamilton Hall to the doors for the opening event in a suffrage speaker series Mackay had organized. Even with the eminent philosopher John Dewey giving the lecture, the Boston Globe reporter seemed far more taken with Mackay in her “picturesque frock of cream lace with a high girdle of black satin” and a “new shaped French toque with a big bunch of aigrettes ticking perkily up the back.”​

Speaking of aigrettes, they gave Alva Vanderbilt Belmont a little trouble in one instance. Her Political Equality League formed at about the same time as Mackay’s society, but encouraged a broader membership. For instance, Belmont recruited actively among African American women, which was one of many aspects of her work and largess cited favorably in the press. Late in 1909, after she was quoted expressing a hyperbolic wish to horsewhip men from time to time, the front page of the Williamsport Gazette-Bulletin of Pennsylvania carried her photograph in an ominous-looking hat of the dark spikey feathers, which, the caption said, required the capture of live mother birds to snatch the long plumes, leaving their young to starve in the nest.

Not two months later, on January 30, 1910, the New York Sun took the better part of a page to document the rise of “Suffragists in All Ranks: The Cry ‘Votes for Women’ Heard on All Sides,” as the headline proclaimed. The article featured comments from two celebrity divas of the day, the Russian soprano, Lydia Lipkowska of the Metropolitan Opera, and the American sensation, Lillian Nordica.

Large photographs of both women in elegant costumes attracted the reader’s eye to the piece. Also included were the names of dozens of distinguished, mostly male, academics with positions at various universities and colleges, and a headshot of William Peterfield Trent, a professor of English literature at Columbia.The 1911 New York suffrage parade brought into public view the first organized brigade of men representing the year-old Men’s League for Woman Suffrage of the State of New York, gentlemen all, and all counted among Gotham’s most prominent and influential figures.

By this point the suffrage makeover was complete. A movement that for decades had been dismissed as dowdy had become downright dazzling.Bly’s instinct was right. Since the suffrage cause was a women’s movement, fashion and style notes would follow, even when the references veered well off point. At the end of March 1912,

Mackay and Shaw sparred publicly on the stage in Carnegie Hall over Mackay’s expressed contention that American men held women in great reverence. The New York Tribune‘s reporter found it relevant to highlight Mackay’s “low-necked tunic gown of black velvet over white lace spangled with silver, with tuberoses at her breast” against Shaw’s “white hair and square-set face showing above a plain dark dress.”

Just over a month later, as a curtain-raiser to the 1912 Suffrage Day parade in early May, the Tribune asked Harriot Stanton Blatch to explain why the movement placed so much emphasis on producing lavish spectacles. Blatch had several talking points, among them, how critical it was for a movement that lacked political power to be able to demonstrate arresting style, or as she put it, “that we have a sense of form and color.”In fact, each parade and pageant was masterful in presentation. There were bands and banners denoting every marching group; college graduates in caps and gowns; elaborate historic costumes for symbolic tableaux and re-enactments; and flowing Grecian gowns.

Harmonious flow on the avenue was a breath-taking given, as participants responded to the day’s color call in rivers of white; or white, purple, green; or yellow; or white and gold. Shirtwaist workers, after the Triangle factory tragedy of 1909, strikingly strode the avenue in mourners’ black.

New York Evening Journal, March 3 1913