Respectability and Reform by Tara M. McCarthy

Author:Tara M. McCarthy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780815654360
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 2018-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

This chapter is derived, in part, from an article published in Women’s History Review 23 (Apr. 2014), http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09612025.2013.849143.

6

Twentieth-Century Connections

Suffrage Tactics, Trade Unionists, and the Lessons of Tammany Hall

In 1912 Literary Digest published a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of the Irish American suffragist Maud Malone. “Militant Maud Malone,” as she was dubbed, did not throw rocks as suffragettes were doing in Britain, yet she had been “howled at, booed at, insulted, ridiculed, [and] punched.” Arrested several times by then for interrupting political meetings, Malone helped lead the first wave of militant suffrage activity seen in the United States, beginning with the first open-air meetings in 1907. A pioneer in new suffrage techniques, Malone continued her militant activities with another militant Irish American—Lucy Burns, serving jail time with other members of the National Woman’s Party in 1917.1 Yet Malone is virtually unknown in histories of the movement today.

So who was Maud Malone? According to Literary Digest, she had “the nose of a political economist” and large and fearless “true Irish eyes with the glint of humor in them.” And according to the Woman’s Journal, she came “of fighting stock.”2 Malone, a second-generation Irish American, led the Harlem Equal Rights League in the early twentieth century and joined a group calling itself the American Suffragettes. However, in 1908 she broke with organized militants, accusing them of a desire to “attract a well-dressed crowd, not the rabble.”3 She also helped organize the first union of library employees, the Library Employees’ Union of Greater New York, which affiliated with the American Federation of Labor in 1917.4 Although called the “Lone Suffragette” in the press because she single-handedly interrupted meetings and staged protests, as a suffragist and an independent wage earner she also represented a larger trend: the revitalization of the suffrage movement in the early twentieth century through new campaigning techniques and the increased participation of working women.

Irish American women became more visible in the suffrage movement in the twentieth century for a number of reasons. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, a small group of female labor leaders began to show more interest in political rights for women, a trend that continued to grow in the early twentieth century. Furthermore, as the National American Woman Suffrage Association accelerated its efforts to get suffrage on state ballots, particularly in the East, they faced the key challenge of getting union votes, ethnic votes, and Catholic votes. Speakers who could appeal to these audiences were in demand in several states. The resurgence of Irish nationalism in the United States during the final Home Rule battle and the international crisis of the World War I era also led to greater connections between events in Ireland and American politics, and finally, as more Catholic women sought a role in social reform, they also began to accept the argument that votes for women meant protection of home and family, elevation of the downtrodden, and the preservation of morality. Therefore, Irish American women made three important contributions to the suffrage movement in

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