In 1878, a Woman Suffrage Amendment was introduced in Congress (though it had been proposed as early as 1848). It failed. It was reintroduced every year for the next 40 years. In 1918, the House voted on it before a large crowd. One congressman was brought in on a stretcher to cast his vote, and another one left his wife’s deathbed, at her request, to vote in favor of the amendment. It passed the House, and eventually the Senate, and by August 26, 1920, it had been ratified by enough states to become law. The 19th Amendment reads: “The right of the citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex."

Women in England over the age of 30 were granted the vote in 1918, but equal suffrage did not become law there until 1928.

Mary Shaw and “The Woman of It”: Mary Shaw was a popular actress, feminist, and suffragist. In the early 1900s, she toured the country in Ibsen’s Ghosts and G.B. Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession (a play so controversial that its New York premiere was followed by the issue of arrest warrants for the entire cast!). Wherever she toured, Shaw spoke at women’s clubs about the importance of theatre in the struggle for women’s rights. She wrote two suffrage sketches, “The Woman of It,” and “The Parrot Cage” in 1914. Both were performed as fundraisers by “The Twenty-Five Players of the Twenty-Fifth District,” the Manhattan Suffrage Party theatre company.

Cicely Hamilton, Christopher St. John, and “How the Vote Was Won”: Hamilton toured England as an actress in a Shakespearean company before she turned to playwriting in 1906. She was a member of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), the Women’s Freedom League, and a founding member of the Actresses Franchise League and the Women Writers Suffrage League. Christopher St. John is the pseudonym of Christabel Marshall. Marshall was a novelist who turned to theatre when she fell in love with Edith Craig (Ellen Terry’s daughter, who had formed an all-women theatre company, The Pioneer Players). Marshall and Hamilton wrote the play for the Actresses Franchise League in 1909, and Edith Craig produced it with great success. The papers reported that “it kept [the] audience brimming with excitement and in roars of laughter” and that it “engenders the wish that political questions could be made as lively and as pleasant in another place."

Charlotte Perkins Gilman and “Something to Vote For”: Gilman was a tireless reformer and well-known writer and speaker on socialism, suffrage, and women’s rights. “Something to Vote For” was published in Gilman’s journal, The Forerunner, in 1911, and reflects the domestic feminism, or “civic housekeeping” argument for suffrage. Gilman spent three months at Jane Addams’ Hull-House Settlement in a Chicago slum in 1898. She may well have drawn on the cross-class solidarity and the emphasis on practical concerns she experienced there when she penned “Something to Vote For”; certainly both she and Mary Shaw were great admirers of Addams, and many of the reforms prescribed in Gilman’s later works parallel similar ones in place at Hull-House.

Ethel Smythe and “The March of the Women”: Smythe attended the Leipzig Conservatory. “Mass in D,” composed for a deeply religious young woman with whom she’d fallen in love, and “Serenade in D” helped establish Smythe as the most important woman composer of her time. A strong advocate of women’s rights and a dear friend of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, Smythe became a member of the WSPU and spent three months in prison for her militant activities. She wrote “The March of the Women”—WSPU’s battle song—with Cicely Hamilton in 1911. .

[October 2004]

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