Suffragists, Socialists & Socialites: Women's History Month

March is Women's History Month - a month-long celebration of history-making women and their accomplishments! Here at Staatsburgh, there are plenty of stories of remarkable women, groundbreaking achievements, and their contributions to local, national and international history.
 

François Flameng. Ruth Livingston Mills.
1909. Oil on Canvas. 

Of course we have to start off Women's History Month with our very own Ruth Livingston Mills. 

As a woman born into New York's high society, Mrs. Mills attended many charity events and contributed money to a variety of causes. Charity was one avenue for these ambitious society women to focus their energies, since many were not allowed careers in the era. According to newspapers, one of those causes was the fight for female suffrage - the right to vote! Activists and reformers such as Ida B. Wells, Dr. Mary Walker, and Jane Addams campaigned across the county for the right to vote during the Gilded Age.

Groundbreaking Gilded Age Women in Politics

The passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920 gave some women the right to vote on a federal level, but certainly not all.  As two examples: Native Americans were not allowed to be citizens in 1920, so indigenous women did not gain suffrage as a result. Despite their very active role in fighting for women's suffrage, Black women's right to vote was less clearly secured by the passage of the Amendment, but that did not deter them from advocating consistently for their right and engaging in electoral politics. In some parts of the country, some women had been allowed to vote in local elections long before 1920, and many women ran for office!  Exactly 100 years after the 19th Amendment was ratified, the United States elected the first female vice-president.  Because of this groundbreaking election, and amidst the backdrop of much controversy regarding voting rights in our current day, we want to highlight other women who also achieved political firsts.

Women's Political Union Votes for Women Sash
Photo Credit: Smithsonian Institution

This essay will explore the groundbreaking political campaigns of five different women during this era.  We will explore the first female to legitimately run for president as well as first woman elected to various offices including administrator of a statewide office, mayor, state senator, and US representative.

How Samantha Parkington Taught Me About the Past

Do the names Kirsten, Samantha and Molly ring a bell?  If they do, it is likely that you are a child of the 1980s and early 1990s...like me.  Beginning in 1986, Pleasant Company introduced these three young women who made up the American Girls Collection. Kirsten Larsen (1854) was a Swedish immigrant living on the frontier, Samantha Parkington (1904) was an orphan being raised by her grandmother, and Molly McIntire was living through World War II.  Each girl was represented by a doll, but the collection was much more than just a doll.  The story of each girl was told in a series of books which included a book about school, Christmas, her birthday, summer, and change.  Each doll had different outfits and accessories which all related to the content and illustrations in the books.  This clever marketing helped transform Pleasant Company into a multi-million dollar company re-branded American Girl after it was purchased by Mattel for $700 million in 1998.    

The original American Girls Collection released in 1986

François Flameng's Portrait of Ruth Mills and its Connection to Women's Suffrage

In the previous entry we explored the exciting new discovery of the artist who created Mrs. Mills' large portrait which hangs in the Boudoir. François Flameng, a French portrait artist, painted Ruth in 1909 during one of his many trips to the United States to paint well known ladies of society.  Yet finding the true artist of the painting was not the only discovery that we made.  We also discovered that Ruth's painting was part of an exhibition in February 1913 to raise money for women's suffrage.  Due to a comment made by a family descandant in an oral history interview many years ago, site staff were under the impression that Mrs. Mills did not look favorably upon the idea of votes for women.  Yet, with this new information, perhaps we can change our views on Ruth and what she did or did not support.

In 2017, we are thinking more about women's suffrage because it is the centennial for women's suffrage in New York.  It was still three years until the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote nationally, so New York was ahead of the game.  New York State will be commemorating the centennial in many ways including a new exhibition at the New York State Museum opening in November 2017.  At Staatsburgh, in honor of the centennial, we invited Dr. Susan Goodier , a professor at SUNY Oneonta, to speak at one of our “Gilded Age Tea & Talk” programs, to explore how this momentous issue of the day was viewed by people of Mrs. Mills’ social set.  As the author of a study on the anti-suffrage moment in New York State (No Votes for Women: The New YorkState Anti-Suffrage Movement. Univ of Illinois Press, 2013), Dr. Goodier brings a special expertise to both sides of this contentious early turn-of-the-century issue.  We also are continuing to research the relationship between Ruth Mills and the suffrage movement. This blog explores some of our findings about that relationship.