How the Socialites of Edith Wharton's New York Took Woman's Suffrage from Frumpy to Fashionable

The nineteenth century woman’s suffrage movement sputtered through what historians have dubbed “the doldrums” with few victories, plagued by a political assessment that its cause was unpopular and a pressroom opinion that its adherents were dowdy.  In the early twentieth century, the movement began to attract members of Mrs. Astor’s Four Hundred, elite women who because of their wealth and social standing were the media celebrities of their day, at a time when New York had 29 daily newspapers and a vibrant immigrant press. This paper looks at the Equal Franchise Society, an invitation-only suffrage group founded by Katherine Duer Mackay in 1908 to attract New York’s wealthiest women to the cause. Examining newspaper coverage, archival scrapbooks and marketing ephemera, the paper will trace the Equal Franchise Society’s boom in popularity and examine what happened when the Astors, Belmonts, Goulds, Harrimans, Morgans, Vanderbilts, Whitneys and other society suffragists lent their social cachet to the cause. Defying class and gender expectations, these feminists on Fifth Avenue sometimes encountered opposition from the husbands and fathers whose wealth served as the taproot of their power, and from women of their own circle who feared the ballot would rob them of their social influence. At this intersection of history, politics, sociology, marketing, dress studies and popular culture, in the vortex of modernism, this paper also explores the value of a celebrity endorsement in changing the suffrage movement’s image from frumpy to fashionable, mainstreaming the cause.