Laura Ruttum's blog

“Men! Give Women Votes to Protect the Children!”

This sentiment, originating during WWI, is an example of the many tools first wave feminists used in their efforts to obtain the right to vote. Women of the first wave argued that the vote would allow them to fix social ills such as poverty, child labor, alcoholism, and the war, and they used these issues as political levers to achieve their suffrage goal. This was not a cynical calculation, however: these early feminists and suffragists believed in their causes and would go far to fight for them. Numerous activists were put on trial, arrested, force-fed, hounded and harassed in the papers for their adherence to the belief that women deserved a political voice, just like any man.

In the U.S., the first wave is generally considered the period from the mid-1800s, with the conference at Seneca Falls, through the installation of universal suffrage in 1920. While the women involved were most often from the privileged class, they understood a fact that is still central to the tenets of the feminist movement today: the condition of women as a whole has a great impact on the well-being of society. Thus, among the feminist causes of the era were pacifism, birth control, temperance, dress reform, Anarchism, free love, and the improvement of social and economic conditions for immigrants and the poor.  read more »

Working as an archivist I often come across collection items that change the way I see the world around me. I had such an experience recently when processing a manuscript collection. As I sorted through the papers of a woman who had donated her papers to the library, an article title caught my eye, “Is Feminism Dead?”

Those who are interested in the Feminist movement will remember the Time magazine cover from 1998 that asked this question, featuring the images of four women across a stark black background: Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and…Ally McBeal. The lead article by Ginia Bellafante chastised the newest generation of women for falling down on the job, being frivolous, inactive ingrates generally focused more on their own glitzy appearance than anything substantive. Ally McBeal was presented as the embodiment of the young generation’s lack of mettle.  read more »

Residents of New York City, members of a metropolis that somehow simultaneously operates as a small village, are all familiar with certain “characters” who frequent public spaces. Today it is the “Naked Cowboy” one can find entertaining the tourists in Times Square, the affable gentleman selling vegetable peelers in Union Square, or even the kids who perform gravity-defying acrobatics on the A train. A similar character who was surely familiar to many in the streets of NYC during the nineteen-teens through the nineteen-thirties was Kitty Marion, hawker of the Birth Control Review.  read more »

“Is there a Jew in the House?”

Thus began a meeting of the “Great Pro-American Mass Meeting in Behalf of Free Speech and Americanism,” a gathering of several anti-immigrant, anti-Communist, reactionary organizations, on May 24, 1939. The crowd, turned away from their first meeting location at Carnegie Hall, had re-congregated at the Great Northern Hotel a few doors down 57th street. Police swarmed the lobby, shouts went around to “keep the newspapers out,” and journalists were violently jostled aside. The individual who delivered the threatening question above soon turned on a young man, menacing towards him until the man protested that he was Italian, not Jewish. Among those present at this nationalistic rally were speakers for the American Patriots, Inc; the Christian Front; the American Nationalist Party…and a diminutive, pacifist Hungarian Jew, Edith Wynner.  read more »

Get the boys “out of the trenches by Christmas!

Thus began the Ford Peace Expedition of 1915, an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to convince warring European parties to make peace. The brains behind the project, short, stocky, bespeckled pacifist Rosika Schwimmer convinced automaker Henry Ford to finance the venture. Together, they chartered a ship—the Oscar II—and enticed a number of intellectuals, social and political luminaries, students, journalists, three small children, and one stowaway to join them on their voyage across the Atlantic.

The inspiration for the journey did not appear entirely out of the blue: Madame Schwimmer had met with diplomats from several of the warring countries earlier in the year, securing signed documents agreeing to consider a neutrally-brokered peace. She kept these letters safely tucked into her small leather purse, producing them when she met with President Woodrow Wilson and argued for an American role in peaceful intervention. His lingering isolationist tendencies forced her to search elsewhere.

And search she did, eventually landing upon Henry Ford, who agreed to lend his considerable wealth towards her goal. Once committed to the endeavor, Ford called a press conference at which he declaimed the famous phrase above, setting in motion the exciting preparations about a month before the actual launch date of December 4. On the 4th, the ship was seen off from the Hoboken port by a cheering crowd, including William Jennings Bryan and Thomas Edison.  read more »