JULY 9, 1977: ALICE PAUL & "SUFFS"
Alice Paul was the militant, charismatic, young suffragist who produced “street theater” -- parades, pageants and pickets -- to attract attention to a federal suffrage amendment. The dazzling Broadway hit SUFFS chronicles the fight for the Nineteenth Amendment and centers Paul as its heroine. Voted “best musical” by the Outer Circle Critics, SUFFS was nominated for six Tonys.
Shaina Taub, the creative genius who plays Paul, won two, for “best book” and “music and lyrics.” I hoped SUFFS would win the Tony for “best musical.” It’s sensational, passionate, powerful, outraging, uplifting and educational. The Nineteenth Amendment, which barred denying the vote “on account of sex” and doubled the electorate, was ratified in 1920.
(Author’s photos)
SUFFS’ non-traditional cast includes every variety of female. They play every role, including Woodrow Wilson and Dudley Malone, identified as his chief of staff. Malone did not serve in the White House. Casting a Black actor in that role was jarring because the Wilson administration segregated the federal government.
Two of the producers are headliners. As the program notes, “trail-blazing, popular-vote-winning presidential candidate Hillary Clinton makes her Broadway debut,” as does Malala Yousafzai, the girls’ education activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. After being photographed with Clinton, she faced backlash from pro-Palestinians.
SUFFS is historical fiction. Not every scene is technically accurate. Some facts are embroidered or rearranged for dramatic effect. Without dimming SUFFS’ brilliance, I offer some background biography and footnotes (XXX in italics below). The cast recording is available online. Every song is a showstopper.
Paul was born in 1885 in New Jersey to prosperous Quakers. Her father was a banker and a “gentleman farmer.” Her mother had attended Swarthmore College, which her father had founded, based on the Quaker values of equality, justice and peace.
Paul also attended Swarthmore. She participated student government and played basketball. Before enrolling in a masters’ program at the University of Pennsylvania, she worked in a settlement house. In 1907 she moved to England for field work.
Left: Paul (center) in bloomers with her basketball team (Smithsonian) Right: In her doctoral regalia, wearing her WSPU pin (Library of Congress)
After hearing British suffragist Cristobel Pankhurst speak, Paul joined the rallies and riots organized by Cristobel’s mother. Emmeline Pankhurst led the Women’s Social and Political Union, the radical branch of British suffragists. Its motto was “Deeds, Not Talk.” WSPU followers demonstrated, broke windows, bombed mailboxes and risked lives.
The doe-eyed, diminutive, pacifist Paul was arrested seven times, jailed three times and force-fed, with jaw clamps and rubber tubing, twice daily for four weeks. She returned home in 1909, with precarious health and a prison record, to begin a doctorate in sociology at Penn. Her dissertation detailed “The Legal Position of Women in Pennsylvania, 1638-1912.” XXX Paul was not a “loud little girl,” as Taub sings. She was quietly intense. Her peers described her as “cool, practical, rational” and “indomitable.”
Home again, Paul found suffrage stalled. Harriot Stanton Blatch, another expatriate, was appalled to find the campaign “in a rut . . . It bored its adherents and repelled its opponents . . . smothered by uninspired methods of work.” To recharge it, she welcomed Pankhurst to New York, launched an equality league, and marched with Black women in a 1907 suffrage parade.
In December 1910, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) invited Paul and Blatch to discuss “outdoor tactics.” (XXX SUFFS depicts Paul as imploring Catt for help in 1912, before Catt led NAWSA.) Blatch took volunteers to Pennsylvania Avenue to practice shouting from a soap box. Most NAWSA members considered street action vulgar; others conceded they added “gusto.”
In 1890 NAWSA merged the rival National and American associations, led by Stanton, Anthony and Lucy Stone. Anthony handpicked their second-generation successors, Carrie Chapman Catt and Anna Howard Shaw. They were groundbreakers, college graduates, with professions in journalism and the ministry. Both ended their lives in long-term partnerships, Catt with Mary Garrett Hay (XXX revealed in the finale) and Shaw with Lucy Anthony, Susan’s niece.
Catt served two terms as NAWSA president, 1900-1904 and 1915-1920. In between, Shaw was a weak leader but a compelling speaker. Having abandoned action on a federal amendment, NAWSA had no presence in Washington and no national headquarters. No new state had endorsed woman suffrage; six referendums had lost. Women in only six western states voted in 1912.
Catt replaced rhetoric about equality with arguments about expedience. Childless, she asserted that mothers should undertake “municipal housekeeping.” (XXX SUFFS opens with Catt singing “Let Mother Vote!”) Catt allied with labor leaders, appealed to settlement house workers and abandoned “educated suffrage,” intended to cut out immigrants and African-Americans.
NAWSA did not actively ally with Black women, who had founded and led suffrage organizations since abolition. Other than Sojourner Truth, few were acknowledged. Among many others, Stanton did not include Charlotte Forten, Angelina Weld Grimke, Frances Watkins Harper or Anna Julia Cooper in her History of Woman Suffrage. NAWSA could not ignore Ida B. Wells or Mary Church Terrell, founders of the National Association of Colored Women and the NAACP, because they were members. XXX SUFFS depicts their frustration with Wells refusing to “Wait My Turn.”
Right: Mary Church Terrell (Library of Congress). Left: Ida B. Wells Barnett (public domain).
Paul represented the third generation. Younger suffragists had graduate degrees and were more militant, more career-oriented and more likely to be single. They dismissed NAWSA’s doyennes as “old fogeys,” prompting Catt to recall Anthony’s observation: “Every young woman was convinced she could have won suffrage long before, had she been in charge.” XXX Catt and Paul express this tension in “This Girl” and “She and I.”
In 1912, Blatch proposed that Paul and Lucy Burns become NAWSA’s Washington Congressional Committee, even though a federal amendment was not its priority. Paul had met Burns in a London jail. (XXX Not while playing field hockey at Swarthmore; Burns went to Vassar.) Paul, 27, lobbied for the role. To counter her enthusiasm, NAWSA refused to underwrite her efforts.
Paul in DC (Library of Congress)
Like Shaina Taub, Paul produced a theatrical tour de force. (XXX Unlike Taub, Paul directed rather than starred in her productions.) She raised $14,906, secured permits and, on March 3, 1913, the day before Wilson’s inauguration, staged a spectacle. Inez Milholland, a labor lawyer, led the march riding a white charger. XXX Inez describes herself, singing, as a “Great American Bitch.” She was annoyed the emphasis on her beauty rather than her brains; journalists called her a prima donna.
Parade program & Inez Milholland (Library of Congress)
A banner declared the parade’s purpose: “We demand an amendment to the Constitution of the United States enfranchising the women of this country.” The program outlined the order of march: three heralds, four mounted brigades, nine bands, twenty-four floats and 8,000 women lined up in sections, in columns of four. Black women came last, where Terrell marched with the Delta Sigma Thetas from Howard University. Wells joined the Illinois delegation. Paul marched in her academic gown. XXX Pursuing a “Southern strategy, both Paul and NAWSA insisted on segregated ranks in a segregated city. XXX SUFFS’ costume designer duplicated Catt’s white cloak.
The “old fogeys,” Shaw and Catt at the 1913 March (Library of Congress)
Marching down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the Treasury Building, where a pageant was staged, participants made it four blocks before a stampede of hooligans pinched, punched and spit on them. (XXX “The March (We Demand Equality”) The riot dominated headlines.
Paul’s street theater focused national attention on a federal amendment. It put suffrage on a resistant President’s agenda, energized the amendment’s enemies, underscored the racial schism, cemented a generation gap, and introduced Paul as an impatient partisan.
Banished from NAWSA in 1916, Paul founded the National Woman’s Party. Distraught over Wilson’s narrow victory in 1916 (XXX His opponent did not concede until Thanksgiving) and thirty-year-old Milholland’s death, from pernicious anemia campaigning against Wilson, Paul launched the first White House pickets in January 1917. (XXX In “Show Them Who You Are,” Paul urges Milholland to persist.) Milholland’s last words, “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?” were stenciled on an NWP banner.
After America entered the Great War, quoting Wilson’s words and calling him Kaiser provoked violence. The “Silent Sentinels” were attacked as unpatriotic and arrested for blocking the sidewalk. When fines did not dissuade them, they were sentenced to disproportionate jail terms. White suffragists objected to being housed with Black women.
XXX SUFFS presents Paul as a frequent picketer. Physically frail, she did not join the line until October, wearing a fur coat. She had reassured her mother, directed a stenographer to visit weekly and had her five daily newspapers delivered to the jail.
Two thousand women picketed (XXX “The Young Are at the Gates”), including Terrell and her daughter. 218 were arrested, 97 were jailed and three were force-fed: Paul, Burns and Rose Winslow. (XXX In SUFFS Rose uses her real name, Ruza Wenclawska, a fiery Polish-American actress and labor organizer.) Dudley Malone, who was having an affair with NWP secretary Doris Stevens, finally secured their release. Charges were dropped. XXX In “Respectfully Yours, Dudley Malone,” he quits his post in protest. After divorcing his wife, Malone married Stevens in 1921. In “If We Were Married,” she delineates the institution’s disadvantages for women. Stevens later divorced Malone, alleging “the impossibility of two persons of equally strong mind living harmoniously.”
Lucy Burns in Occoquan Workhouse, 1917 (Library of Congress)
The picketing stopped. Instead, Paul burned Wilson’s speeches in Lafayette Square. XXX “Fire and Tea.”
To pass any amendment requires approval by two-thirds of both houses of Congress and ratification by three-quarters of states. While Paul was incarcerated, Catt engineered a huge victory: New York, the largest state, enfranchised women.
Catt and Paul differed fundamentally. Paul, the radical thinker, had adopted a parliamentary mindset, holding Wilson and Democrats, the party in power, responsible. A pragmatic politician, Catt won bipartisan Congressional backing and wooed Wilson. He endorsed suffrage as a war measure.
Catt called Paul “stupendously stupid.” Shaw doubled-down: “It requires . . . more courage to work steadily and steadfastly for 40 or 50 years to gain an end than it does to do an impulsively rash thing and lose it.” XXX Catt and Paul never spoke or met in person after 1917. SUFFS captures their hostility.
Thanks to Catt’s “Winning Plan,” a dual, state and federal strategy and a short-lived, multi-ethnic, cross-class coalition, suffrage advanced to ratification. After thirty-five states affirmed it, Tennessee was the only viable option. XXX SUFFS depicts Catt and Paul meeting in a corridor of Nashville’s Hermitage Hotel. Catt was in Tennessee, working behind the scenes, supporting local suffragists like Juno Frankie Pierce, who organized Black support. Paul stayed in Washington. XXX Despite their reprise, “I am not your enemy,” the two leaders detested each other.
XXX Another kudo: in the hotel scene, Catt holds a blue dress. She’d had it made when she thought the amendment would first pass the Senate. After it failed, Catt vowed to wear it when suffrage was secure.
Despite pressure from segregationists and the liquor lobby, who maintained a twenty-four-hour hospitality suite, the Tennessee senate sobered up and passed suffrage. In the house, Republican Representative (XXX not Senator) Harry Burn, 24, its youngest member, read a letter from his mother. Phoebe Burn urged him to “be a good boy” and vote yes. Harry changed his vote and changed history. XXX “A Letter from Harry’s Mother” does not include her entreaty, “Please help Mrs. Catt put the Rat in Ratification.”)
Harry Burn, 1918 (public domain)
SUFFS then fast-forwards to the 1960s. Paul is “an old fogey,” lobbying for the Equal Rights Amendment, which she introduced in 1923. She urges NOW to make the ERA its priority. SUFFS reprises “Finish the Fight” (XXX which was Catt’s slogan) and ends with the rousing “Keep Marching.” The audience cheered, cried and stomped. SUFFS deserves a national tour, with free tickets for students. It should empower everyone to vote
Paul, 92, died on July 9, 1977. President Carter arranged for a female military honor guard at her memorial at Washington’s National Cathedral. Midge Costanza, his Assistant for Public Liaison, wore a white pantsuit. On the first anniversary of Paul’s death, a humid Sunday, 40,000 women and men, wearing white, marched up Constitution Avenue to support the extension of the ERA’s seven-year ratification deadline until June 1982. NOW members carried a banner, “ALICE PAUL: WE ARE HERE.” The extension passed but the ERA failed.
Paradoxically, Paul did not espouse the lessons SUFFS teaches: that coalitions matter, that disparate allies are not enemies, that it takes collaboration to enact change. Suffrage won because Paul influenced public opinion and Catt tallied votes.
We need to tell our country’s story in every way possible, with books, blogs, classrooms, documentaries, podcasts, historic sites, monuments, museums, and musicals. Taub’s SUFFS challenges historians to be equally engaging and exciting, with footnotes.
SOURCES:
Author’s Playbill from June 28, 2024.
Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States, rev. ed. (Harvard, 1975).
Robert Booth Fowler, Carrie Catt: Feminist Politician (Northeastern University Press, 1986).
Elisabeth Griffith, FORMIDABLE: American Women and the Fight for Equality, 1920-2020 (Pegasus, 2022).
Lena Kleiman, “Alice Paul, a Leader for Suffrage and Women’s Rights, Dies at 92,” https://www.nytimes.com/1977/07/10/archives/alice-paul-a-leader-for-suffrage-and-womens-rights-dies-at-92.html
J.D. Zahniser and Amelia Fry, Alice Paul: Claiming Power (Oxford, 2014).