Young WomEn’s Political CLub

The Young Women’s Political Club (YWPC) was an arm of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association (MWSA) created by and for young working women in 1899. Early attempts to interest working women in other cities had been unsuccessful, with more privileged suffragists concluding that factory women were “so overworked and so poor that they can do little for us.” (Dubois, 51) In Boston, some suffragists understood that “working women…didn’t have the leisure time…to carry on the work so much.” (Strom, 91)

The Boston YWPC was founded nearly a decade before national leaders of the women’s suffrage movement finally recognized working women as essential allies in the struggle for the vote. Its membership of young immigrant working women complemented that of its better known counterpart, the College Equal Suffrage League, also formed around 1900. Years later, national suffrage leaders acknowledged that “it will not be the educated workers, the college women, the men’s association for equal suffrage, but the people who are fighting for industrial freedom who will be our vital force at the finish.” (Progress, Nov 1907)

According to a contemporary reporter, “The evening school takes the immigrant soon after his arrival and assists him to become assimilated with American customs and ideas. Here he first hears the correct sounds of the English language, here he finds himself respected and assistance readily given him in whatever he might desire to know. Very often the teacher finds occupations for their pupils, which enable them to earn a living, thus showing the deep interest they take in each individual case.” Despite the reporter’s emphasis on male students, both men and women generally studied in the Boston evening schools within the same classroom. Trade classes for gender-specific occupations, on the other hand, were segregated by sex. (Boston Globe, 18 May 1905)

New immigrants attending night school in Boston’s West End were fortunate to have Ida Estelle Hall, a long-time public school teacher turned lawyer and suffragist, as the educator to introduce them to American democratic ideas. “Superintendent among working women” for the MWSA, Ida Hall recruited night school students, organized the first meetings of the Young Women’s Political Club in 1899 and 1900, and planned joint mass meetings “with great social value” for young activists in the YWPC and the CESL.

At work as dressmakers, tobacco strippers and other jobs during the day, YWCP members learned about trade unions and other labor issues. “Concerning socialism too, they heard various views advanced by the men of their families.” At night school classes and club meetings, they learned about “governmental rights and the liberties that these imply,” which took on a special meaning for them as working girls and women. Their teacher and club president Ms. Hall was impressed. “One has an idea that women of the old world are kept in the background by the men, but [their]…grasp upon public affairs is astonishing.” She learned as much from them as they from her. Hall recalled how “I had not been working long with my Political club girls before some of them asked me to have the tickets to our entertainments printed under the union label.” MWSA and suffrage organizations around the country would learn to print flyers and stationery with the union label. (Boston Globe, May 1902)

Ida Hall briefly served as president of the club, but her students and former students like Sarah Gorney, Heidee Kaminsky, Martha Prentke, Rose Alfovich and Rebecca Reisman helped lead the organization from the start. Young women would take over the position of president and report on club progress to the MWSA until 1909 when the club disappears from the MWSA records.

By participating in the governance of the club, the young women “learned on a micro-level the concept of democratic government.… This was particularly important for women and girls who lacked opportunities—in the public sphere as well as the private sphere—to govern their own lives” on account of their sex. (Larson, 212) The economic circumstances and immigrant status of many YWPC members increased those barriers.

The YWPC held monthly meetings at the Women’s Journal headquarters on Park Street near the State House, but their greatest impact was through the joint mass meetings and rallies they organized with the nascent College Equal Suffrage League (CESL). Composed of privileged women with more time and money to devote to activism, the CESL would become the Young Women’s Political Club’s better known and more influential counterpart. CESL members also had the leisure time to write their own histories.

On April 17 1901, the YWPC hosted its first mass meeting at Faneuil Hall to which the CESL and working girls’ clubs throughout Boston were invited. Dressed in traditional Russian attire, club members served Russian cakes and tea from samovers before hearing from a diverse body of speakers, including Irish-Amercian labor union organizer Mary Kenney O’Sullivan, Jewish lawyer and business woman Diana Hirschler, and Seniorita Huidobro of Chile.

In that influential meeting, Boston-based national labor organizer Mary Kenney O’Sullivan first publicly announced her support—and therefore critical Union support—for the women’s suffrage cause. O’Sullivan “declared that women suffragists did not practice what they preach—justice, equality with men, equal wages for equal work…that was one of the reasons why she had previously refused to speak on a woman suffrage platform.” (Boston Globe, April 17, 1901) However, a reporter paraphrased, “with the advent of such organizations as the hosts for the evening, there appeared to be a chance for new ideas.” (Boston Herald, April 17, 1901) O’Sullivan would famously go on to co-found the national Women’s Trade Union League in 1903 and speak from the labor perspective for the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NASWA) a the US Capitol in 1906. (Berenson, 104-5, Nutter)

That November, the YWPC and CESL invited “all the women of the North and West Ends” to a rally to register women voters in Wards 6 and 8 for the approaching municipal election. (Boston Globe, Nov 17, 1901) One club member, Rebecca Reisman, filed for US citizenship a few days later in order to be able to vote for School Committee members.

Just days before the rally and before filing for citizenship, YWPC member Rebecca Reisman made history as one of the first women to participate in Boston municipal caucuses, “something new in the political history of Boston.” (Boston Globe, Nov 11, 1901) This 27-year-old Jewish tobacco stripper from Russia was the only female representative from Ward 8, the West End ward run by Irish ward boss and opponent to woman suffrage: Martin Lomasney. Her harrowing experience in the caucuses must have strengthened her resolve to secure voting rights for women and help clean up politics.

Nearly a decade later in 1910, Martin Lomasney—assumed to be an absolute opponent to woman suffrage—would evidently change course and sponsor the use of a the ward hall on Blossom Street in the West End for a mass suffrage rally for potential female voters in the tenements organized by their more privileged peers. Until now, this 1910 rally, which took “some sense of duty, some devotion to our cause” on the part of its middle-to-upper-class organizers, was thought to be “the first of its kind in Boston.” (Strom, 74-75)

Young Women’s Political Club members from the tenements of the multi-ethnic neighborhood of Boston’s West End were active in the suffrage movement as early as 1900, spreading the word to friends, peers and neighbors about their democratic rights. Eventually, history will recognize the full spectrum of women involved in the long and difficult fight for the vote.

REFERENCES

Unfortunately, Young Women’s Political Club records have not yet surfaced. Since Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association records do not include details of its leagues’ reports, the activities of the club are known only through a few newspaper articles.

Woman’s Journal, Nov 10, 1900.

“Young Women’s Political Club,” Boston Herald, April 14, 1901.

“Joint Rally Conducted in Faneuil Hall,” The Boston Globe, April 17, 1901, p. 6.

“Woman Suffragists Meet at the Cradle of Liberty,” The Boston Herald, April 17, 1901.

“New in the Rally Line: Meeting of the Young Women’s Political Club,” The Boston Globe, Nov 17, 1901, p. 4

“Young Women Anxious to Vote,” The Boston Globe, May 5, 1902.

“Mostly Young People: Another Joint Meeting,” The Boston Globe, Oct 28, 1903.

The Boston Globe, May 18, 1905

Berenson, Barbara F. Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2018.

DuBois, Ellen Carol. “Working Women, Class Relations, and Suffrage Militance: Harriot Stanton Blatch and the New York Woman Suffrage Movement, 1894-1909.” The Journal of American History, vol. 74, no. 1 (June 1987), pp. 34-58.

Larson, Kate Clifford. “The Saturday Evening Girls: A Progressive Era Library Club and the Intellectual Life of Working Class and Immigrant Girls in Turn-of-the-Century Boston,” The Library Quarterly, vol. 71, no. 2 (April 2001), pp. 195-230.

Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association Records. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute.

Murolo, Priscilla. The Common Ground of Womanhood: Class, Gender and Working Girls’ Clubs, 1884-1928. Ubana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997.

Nutter, Kathleen Banks. The Necessity of Organization: Mary Kenney O’Sullivan and Trade Unionism for Women, 1892-1912. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

Strom, Sharon Hartman. Political Woman: Florence Luscomb and the Legacy of Radical Reform. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001.

Stonehurst Curator Ann Clifford wrote this biography in conjunction with “Anxious to Vote: Students, Workers and the fight for Women’s Suffrage,” a curriculum and public education project developed in partnership by Stonehurst the Robert Treat Paine Estate and Waltham Public Schools in commemoration of the national suffrage centennial in 2020. STONEHURST is a National Historic Landmark owned by the City of Waltham. The once-private estate of generous social justice advocates whose ancestors helped establish the democratic foundations of this country is now appropriately owned by the people.

The Friends of Stonehurst received support for this program through “The Vote: A Statewide Conversation about Voting Rights,” a special initiative of Mass Humanities that includes organizations around the state.

This program is funded in part by Mass Humanities, which receives support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and is an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.