NYU Features: What Allies Today Could Learn from ‘Suffragents’ Who Helped Women Get the Vote

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When actor and investor Ashton Kutcher announced his intention to co-host (with Effie Esptein, his partner from venture capital firm Sound Venture) a live discussion about gender equality in the workplace on his Facebook page this summer, the social media backlash was swift and fierce.

Many women, including Paradigm CEO Joelle Emerson, pointed out that embedded in the list of potential questions Kutcher proposed for the event—such as “What are the Rules for dating in the work place? Flirting?” and “Should investors invest in ideas that they believe to have less merit so as to create equality across a portfolio?”—were misguided assumptions that actually reinforced the kind of sexism he meant to combat.

“I’ve already offended some folks by asking the wrong questions,” Kutcher wrote on Twitter, acknowledging the misstep. It was only the latest iteration of an old story with familiar elements: a famous face, a well-intentioned effort, the seemingly inevitable public blunder that revealed a lack of meaningful engagement with the chosen cause.

In an age of casual social media activism, many of us have become so used to cringing at tone-deaf or self-aggrandizing attempts at solidarity that it can be difficult to envision a more effective alternative.

What can those with visibility and influence do—beyond stating support for a particular movement—to combat injustice? Can those with power and privilege advance the interests of others—without hijacking or getting in the way of the efforts of the marginalized groups they mean to support?

These are, of course, questions that have dogged activists for generations; there are many wrong answers and few obvious solutions.

But a would-be feminist champion like Ashton Kutcher might have avoided a few common mistakes had he read NYU journalism professor Brooke Kroeger’s latest book, which relates lessons from the little known story of how a group of powerful men offered themselves as foot soldiers in the fight for women’s suffrage a century ago. Timed to the centennial of women gaining the right to vote in New York in 1917 and focusing on the activities of the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage between 1909 and 1917, The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote reads almost as a manual for how one might sensitively approach allyship today.

The strategy worked, with league chapters soon fanning out from New York across the country. And the growing membership did more than brave hecklers in parades: Taking direction from Shaw, Carrie Chapman Catt, and other NAWSA leaders, men used their connections and political clout to advance the suffragist cause in spheres women couldn’t otherwise have reached. They argued in favor of women’s suffrage in prestigious publications, sometimes devoting entire issues to the cause; lobbied political operatives to get it into party platforms and served on committees to get suffrage bills before legislatures; pounded the pavement and raised campaign funds in advance of votes on suffrage amendments; and in at least one case even agreed to perform in a suffrage-themed vaudeville routine.

“If you think of who they were and what they were willing to do, it’s sort of remarkable,” Kroeger says—especially considering that in Villard’s original pitch, he’d suggested that league members would have to commit little more than their names to the cause. “It’s also impressive to me that they were Democrats, Republicans, independents, and socialists,” Kroeger adds. “It’s hard to imagine a similar issue that everybody could get behind today.”

By articulating the case for suffrage in terms that would appeal to their particular audiences, the men helped replace older, sentimental arguments about women’s moral purity with stronger logic about democratic justice. In one speech, criminal justice reformer Judge William H. Wadhams made reference to the Boston Tea Party, framing the suffrage debate in terms of the right to representation. Women “must obey the law and pay the penalties of the law,” he reasoned, adding, “those who have the penalties imposed should have the privileges of citizenship.” The black civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois repeatedly turned the pages of his magazine Crisis over to the cause, at one point urging black voters to temporarily forgive the “reactionary attitude of most of white women to our problems,” and take a longer view. “Every argument for Negro suffrage is an argument for woman suffrage; every argument for women suffrage is an argument for Negro suffrage,” he wrote. “Both are great movements in democracy.”