Woodlawn Cemetery Blog: Woodlawn’s Suffragents, November 28, 2024

The Woodlawn Cemetery & Conservancy has put up a blog post honoring the “suffragents” in its midst, the men who supported the cause of women’s right to vote. Women, understandably and justifiably, are covetous of credit for their hard-won victories, so it took a little doing to get the many men on Team Suffrage inserted more factually into that history’s larger story. I mean, who had the money, the facilities, the power, the access? Who had the votes? Men were essential to the suffrage cause, which movement leaders—in real time—had no difficulty acknowledging or expressing. Among other men of special note but not at Woodlawn is my personal favorite, Dudley Field Malone, buried in an unmarked (!!) grave in Culver City CA. His campaigning for Woodrow Wilson in California brought the state’s women to the future president’s side and edged him closer to his first victory. Malone—later on the Skopes Trial team (gave the closing argument), bon vivant celebrity divorce lawyer in Paris, manager of channel swimmer Gertrude Erderle and boxer Gene Tunney (what a character, he was)—held top patronage posts in the Wilson administration, including head of the Port Authority (he signed off on the Lusitania’s departure). He then broke with Wilson in a grand and public gesture for Wilson’s continued waffling on support for the suffrage cause. As the poet Alice Duer Miller wrote at the time: “Of men who care supremely/That justice should be shown/Who do not balk at sacrifice/And make the cause their own/I know, I think, of only one/That’s Dudley Field Malone.” https://www.woodlawn.org/blog/woodlawns-suffragents/