Melissa R. Klapper
In this centennial year of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote, there has been a refreshing focus on complicating the story of the suffrage movement. For one thing, no one gave women anything. Women struggled over many decades and several generations to win this basic right of citizenship. Without it they were forced to rely on men voting in favor of women voting, since they could not vote on their own behalf.
For another thing, there were deep fissures within the suffrage movement that reflected a divided American society. A majority of American suffragists probably were white, middle-class, Protestant women, but very significant numbers of African American, Latina, working-class, Catholic, Mormon, and Jewish women, among others, also worked for enfranchisement and influenced the movement in ways large and small. While there were arguments in favor of suffrage that these diverse groups of women all drew upon, their differences also led them to approach their activism along divergent paths. Middle-class women were more likely to highlight the importance of their roles as mothers who should have a formal role in public affairs as part of their family and community responsibilities, while working-class women were more likely to focus on the necessity of gaining the vote as a means of improving working conditions and perhaps remaking social, political, and economic structures.
Some white suffragists drew on racism and xenophobia to emphasize the benefit of white women’s votes counterbalancing those of black and immigrant men. And Jewish women, while generally accepted as white by the early twentieth century heyday of the suffrage movement, found that antisemitism could be as much a problem among activists as among reactionaries. This essay, then, begins to tell the tale of the too-long forgotten participation of American Jewish women’s participation in the suffrage movement.
The question of suffrage was widely debated within the American Jewish community. As the American Hebrew, a periodical aimed primarily at acculturated American Jews, editorialized in 1914, “Whether we are suffragist or antis, or are occupying that most uncomfortable place, a seat on the fence, we find ourselves sooner or later discussing suffrage. It has crept into our favorite magazines, our heart-to-hear talks, and the family table conversation. Suffrage is in the air.”[1] Jewish periodicals in English, Yiddish, Hebrew, and German, representing every point of view from socialism to anarchism to Zionism to middle-class domesticity, ran symposia on suffrage. Der Fraynd (The Friend), the socialist Workmen’s Circle monthly publication, supported women’s right to vote alongside their right to work and unionize. Di Froyen Velt, a magazine for more religiously and politically conservative American Jewish women―which loosely translated its own title as the Jewish Ladies Home Journal―ran a column called “From the Women’s World” which covered suffrage activism around the world, though it disavowed any sign of the kind of militancy that characterized the British suffrage movement.
Across religious denominations, the American Jewish community was generally supportive of women gaining the right to vote. In the statewide suffrage referenda held in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts in 1915—all of which failed, though a second attempt in New York in 1917 succeeded—the Jewish districts voted more heavily in favor of enfranchising women than any others. A long line of prominent Jewish women—including Hannah Greenebaum Solomon, first president of the National Council of Jewish Women (founded 1893), and Maud Nathan, longtime president of the National Consumers League (founded 1899)—became very visible proponents of suffrage, as did numerous rabbis, including the well-known Reform rabbi Stephen S. Wise and Orthodox rabbi Jacob Levinson. In many American synagogues, the first woman ever to address the congregation from the pulpit was a Jewish suffragist invited to do so by the rabbi.
It would be disingenuous to pretend that all American Jews supported suffrage. There certainly were Jewish anti-suffragists. The symposia in American Jewish periodicals dutifully invited them to voice their objections, which were almost never Jewish in nature. Ironically, the most prominent anti-suffragist was Maud Nathan’s sister, Annie Nathan Meyer. It remains something of a mystery as to why Meyer, a founder of Barnard College, opposed suffrage. The lifelong personal animosity between the sisters may have been a primary factor. In any event, they made something of a spectacle of themselves by debating each other in public and writing dueling letters to editors. In general, though, there were probably more American Jews who just did not care much about suffrage than those who actively worked against it.
This apathy was one obstacle faced by Jewish suffragists, but they also had to confront the ongoing challenge of antisemitism. Racism was the more blatant prejudice within the movement, but there were notable moments of antisemitism as well. In 1895, the eminent suffrage pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton presided over the publication of The Woman’s Bible, a radical text that blamed organized religion and particularly Judaism for the patriarchy and misogyny that shadowed women’s lives. Mainstream suffragists roundly condemned the book, the reason being its anti-religious stance, not its antisemitism. A delegation from the recently founded National Council of Jewish Women visited Stanton to protest, but to no avail. And in 1915, after the New York state referendum failed, a number of suffrage leaders blamed immigrants and especially Jews for the disappointment, despite the demonstrable fact that, as Henry Street Settlement founder Lillian Wald pointed out, the highest levels of support had come from the most heavily Jewish areas. These episodes did not squash many Jewish women’s enthusiasm, but they did dampen the willingness of Jewish women’s groups like the National Council of Jewish Women, the National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods, and Hadassah to formally endorse suffrage, despite the fact that the (probably vast) majority of their members believed women should vote.
Jewish women participated in the suffrage movement in a variety of ways all over the United States. Sections from the National Council of Jewish Women held events to promote suffrage in their communities from the earliest days of the organization and invited leading suffragists to address the organization’s triennial conventions. The mother and daughter pair of Hannah Marks Solomons and Selina Solomons played a key role in the California suffrage movement, and Selina was central to an effort to organize working-class women ahead of the successful statewide suffrage campaign in 1911. Belle Fligelman became involved in the movement while attending the University of Wisconsin. She returned home to Helena, Montana to become a suffrage stump speaker even though her stepmother threw her out of the house for doing so.
Key Jewish labor leaders like Rose Schneiderman and Pauline Newman in New York emphasized the importance of gaining the right to vote among working-class and immigrant women whose primary concerns were often bread-and-butter economic issues. Agreeing with them, Philadelphia shop girl Olga Gross made cheap peanut brittle and sold it on street corners during her brief lunch breaks to raise money for the movement. Gertrude Weil, a Smith College graduate and founder of the North Carolina Association of Jewish Women, became president of her local suffrage league and also chief lieutenant to National American Woman Suffrage Association leader Carrie Chapman Catt in North Carolina. Miriam Allen DeFord and Rebecca Hourwich Reyher both gave countless street-corner speeches for suffrage in Massachusetts during the 1915 referendum campaign. Caroline Katzenstein took Alice Paul to her first street meeting in Philadelphia and ultimately joined her in the National Woman’s Party, the more militant wing of the American suffrage movement, in which Paul also worked closely with Anita Pollitzer of South Carolina and Felice Cohn of Nevada. Reyher, Pollitzer, and Cohn all remained involved with the National Woman’s Party and supported the push for an Equal Rights Amendment after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified.
Activists like these did not speak only to Jewish audiences. Maud Nathan, for example, held office in local and national suffrage organizations and also served as a translator at several International Woman Suffrage Alliance conferences abroad. But when Nathan and Hannah Greenebaum Solomon, Gertrude Weil, and other Jewish suffragists did address Jewish audiences, they called on Jewish themes as additional justification for enfranchising women. In a 1915 American Hebrew symposium on suffrage, renowned communal activist Rebekah Kohut―one of the most Jewishly educated women of her generation―pointed out, “The Fifth Commandment not only says, ‘Honor thy father and they mother,’ but the Bible tells us, ‘Thou shalt fear they mother and they father’ . . . his recognition of both sexes typifies the co-equal position which woman holds with man in the home and family life . . . but if the home was the world of the Jewess . . . today the world has truly become her home.”[2]
Similarly, American Hebrew columnist Adele Rabinovitz cited the biblical precedents of the judge Deborah and the queen Esther as Jewish models of women’s leadership and divinely sanctioned public and political activity. At a rally in Philadelphia just before the 1915 Pennsylvania referendum, Nathan also invoked history, exhorting a Jewish audience of thousands: “The Jewish people, more than any other, ought to realize the benefits of freedom . . . Let the Jewish men of Pennsylvania be true to their traditions and vote for a square deal on election day.”[3]
Once the Nineteenth Amendment passed, Jewish women well understood that enfranchisement would have implications for both their political and their religious lives. Nearly 50% of the new Socialist Party registrations in New York, most of them Jewish, were women. The National Council of Jewish Women openly rejoiced over the new power and influence its members would have as voters and immediately joined the Women’s Joint Congressional Committee, which lobbied Congress on legislative issues. Even former anti-suffragists understood this; one of the first things Annie Nathan Meyer did after enfranchisement was join the League of Women Voters. And, importantly, Jewish women brought their newfound power back into their own religious communities. Immediately after winning the vote, Jewish women across the country successfully demanded representation on their synagogue boards. As Marion Misch, whom Temple Beth-El of Providence elected as a trustee in 1921, explained: “Jewish women are . . . esteemed not only supreme in their households, but as direct agencies for influence upon the affairs of the time.”[4]
Jewish women in the suffrage movement have remained mostly invisible for too long. While the American Jewish community—unsurprisingly—did not unanimously advocate women’s enfranchisement, it did overwhelmingly support the cause, especially during the final years leading up the 1920 ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. A combination of a historical blindness to the diversity of suffrage supporters, some antisemitism within the movement itself, and a broader silencing of women’s voices has all contributed to Jewish suffragists’ invisibility, as has many historians’ focus on activism within the Jewish community. But American Jewish women were deeply engaged in all the social issues of their day, not on Jewish issues alone, and it does them a disservice not to explore their commitments to all kinds of social and political movements. Their activism was embedded in their Jewish identities but not exclusive to explicitly Jewish interests. This legacy of drawing on Jewish values to make right what is wrong in the world is one we can all honor today.
[1] “Of Interest to Women: “Little Corporal” of Woman Suffrage Party An Immigrant Jewess Miss Martha Klatschken Sees in Ballot Great Power.” The American Hebrew & Jewish Messenger (1903-1922), Jun 19, 1914. https://search.proquest.com/docview/884063188/32B1DDCF37EA41D8PQ/1.
[2] “Home and the Vote According to Mrs. Kohut.” The American Hebrew & Jewish Messenger (1903-1922), September 10, 1915. https://search.proquest.com/docview/880903882?accountid=9703.
[3] “Jews Besiege Theatre to Hear Suffrage Plea,” Philadelphia Record, November 1915.
[4] “Woman Suffrage Adopted by Jewish Congregation Here,” Union Bulletin (Providence), January 1921.
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