Mediating Political Mobility as Stunt-Girl Entertainment: Newspaper Coverage of New York’s Suffrage Hike to Albany

Abstract

In December 1912, a group of women calling themselves suffrage pilgrims left New York City on foot and hiked 170 miles to Albany to urge the Governor-elect William Sulzer to pass a woman suffrage amendment. At a time when women’s mobility was restricted and transgressive, their hike sparked public condemnation and the media’s fascination. This research examines the newspaper coverage of their hike and argues that reporters tamed and ordered the threat of the suffragists’ political mobility by featuring their protest as entertainment that conformed to the popular genre of stunt-girl serials in the 1910s. Journalists domesticated the transgressive protest by serializing the political pilgrimage through episodic coverage that captured the hikers at moments of stasis and made the hike more legible for potentially threatened readers. The numerous articles depoliticized the hike and constructed the women’s feat as palatable entertainment and an impressive stunt that merited a just reward.

Notes

1 “Six Tired Pilgrims End First Day’s Hike,” New York Times, December 17, 1912, 7; “Suffrage Message in Sulzer’s Hands,” New York Tribune, January 1, 1913, 9.

2 “Suffrage Message in Sulzer’s,” 9.

3 “Pilgrims’ Peanuts Will Ride in Auto,” New York Times, December 13, 1912, 9.

4 “Suffrage Message in Sulzer’s,” 9.

5 “Suffragists to ‘Hike’ to Washington Next,” New York Tribune, December 27, 1912, 7; “Over the Snow with Message to Sulzer” (Toronto) Star, December 26, 1912, 2; “‘On to Washington,’ after Albany, Says Miss Jones,” Christian Science Monitor, December 26, 1912, 1.

6 “The Hike to Washington,” The Woman Voter, March 1913, 10; “Three Million Dollars’ Worth of Advertising for a Walk,” Woman Voter, February 1913, 20.

7 Alice Park, Woman’s Journal, January 4, 1913.

8 Ella Hawley Crossett, “New York,” in The History of Woman Suffrage, volume 6, edited by Ida Husted Harper (New York: National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1922), 452.

9 Ishbel Ross, Ladies of the Press: The Story of Women in Journalism by an Insider (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1936), 124; Linda J. Lumsden, Rampant Women: Suffragists and the Right of Assembly (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 61–62; Jaime Schultz, “The Physical Is Political: Women’s Suffrage, Pilgrim Hikes, and the Public Sphere,” International Journal of the History of Sport 27 (2010): 1134, 1146; Georgine Clarsen, Eat My Dust: Early Women Motorists (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 79.

10 Ross, Ladies of the Press, 124.

11 Schultz, “The Physical Is Political,” 1149.

12 Clarsen, Eat My Dust, 79.

13 Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York: Routledge, 2006), 3.

14 Ross, Ladies of the Press.

15 Lumsden, Rampant Women, 52–69; Schultz, “The Physical Is Political,” 1135.

16 Cresswell, On the Move; Tim Cresswell and Peter Merriman, eds., Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013); John Urry, Sociology beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-first Century (London: Routledge, 2000); John Urry, Mobilities (Cambridge: Polity, 2007); Liisa Malkki, “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees,” Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1 (1992): 24–44.

17 Alyssa A. Samek, “Mobility, Citizenship, and ‘American Women on the Move’ in the 1977 International Women’s Year Torch Relay,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 103, no. 3 (2017): 1–23; Leslie J. Harris, “Rhetorical Mobilities and the City: The White Slavery Controversy and Racialized Protection of Women in the US,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 104 (2018): 22–46; Carly S. Woods, “(Im)mobile Metaphors: Toward an Intersectional Rhetorical History,” in Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies, edited by Karma R. Chavez and Cindy L. Griffin (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 78–96; Lisa Flores, “Mobilizing Race and Bordering Belonging in the Rhetoric of the Wetback Problem” (Paper presented at the 17th Biennial Rhetoric Society of America Conference, Atlanta, May 2016).

18 Virginia Scharff, Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age (Albuquerque: New Mexico Press, 1992); Virginia Scharff, Twenty Thousand Roads: Women, Movement and the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Armond R. Towns, “Geographies of Pain: #SayHerName and the Fear of Black Women’s Mobility,” Women’s Studies in Communication 39, no. 2 (2016): 122–26; Sarah Hallenbeck, Claiming the Bicycle: Women, Rhetoric, and Technology in Nineteenth-century America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016); E. Michele Ramsey, “Driven from the Public Sphere: The Conflation of Women’s Liberation and Driving in Advertising from 1910 to 1920,” Women’s Studies in Communication 29 (2006): 88–112; Harris, “Rhetorical Mobilities”; Samek, “Mobilities, Citizenship”; Vanessa Murphree, “Edward Bernays’s 1920 ‘Torches of Freedom’ March: Myths and Historical Significance,” American Journalism 32, no. 3 (2015): 258–81; Einav Rabinovitch-Fox, “Baby, You Can Drive My Car: Advertising Women’s Freedom in 1920s America,” American Journalism 33, no. 4 (2016): 372–400.

19 Twenty-seven of the articles appeared in the New York Tribune, twenty-one in the New York Times, fifteen in the Brooklyn Eagle, eleven in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, ten in the Cincinnati Enquirer, nine in the Louisville Courier-Journal, six in the Baltimore Sun, six in the Atlanta Constitution, five in the Washington Post, five in the Nashville Tennessean, four in the Hartford Courant, three in the Philadelphia Inquirer, three in the Boston Globe, three in the Austin American Statesman, three in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, three in the San Francisco Chronicle, three in the Chicago Tribune, two in the Los Angeles Times, three in the San Francisco Call, two in the Toronto Globe, one in the Christian Science Monitor, one in Missouri’s Joplin Daily Globe, one in the New York Press, and one in the Cedar Rapids Daily Republican.

20 Jennifer L. Borda, “The Woman Suffrage Parades of 1910–1913: Possibilities and Limitations of an Early Feminist Rhetorical Strategy,” Western Journal of Communication 66 (2002): 25–53; Belinda A. Stillion Southard, Militant Citizenship: Rhetorical Strategies of the National Woman’s Party, 1913–1920 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2011); Catherine H. Palczewski, “The 1919 Prison Special: Constituting White Women’s Citizenship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 102 (2016): 107–32; Cresswell, On the Move, 195–218.

21 Harriot Stanton Blatch and Alma Lutz, Challenging Years: The Memoirs of Harriot Stanton Blatch (New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 1940), 132, 180.

22 Schultz, “The Physical Is Political,” 1136–38; Tiffany Lewis, “The Mountaineering and Wilderness Discourses of Washington Woman Suffragists,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 21, no. 2 (2018): 279–315; Cresswell, On the Move, 195–218.

23 Michel de Certeau features everyday mobility as heroic, a way to resist and refuse the ordering and discipline of fixity and place. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 101; Cresswell, On the Move, 42–54; Samek, “Mobility, Citizenship,” 4; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions (1782; Reprint, Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth Edition, 1996); John Muir, The Mountains of California (New York: Century Co., 1907); Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” Atlantic Monthly (June 1862): 657–74; Einav Rabinovitch-Fox, “Baby, You Can Drive My Car: Advertising Women’s Freedom in 1920s America,” American Journalism 33, no. 4 (2016): 372–400; Scharff, Taking the Wheel.

24 Activists have made many political pilgrimages, including Gandhi’s 200-mile Salt March to the sea to protest British law and taxes, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, and Cesar Chavez’s 250-mile pilgrimage from Delano to Sacramento for farm workers’ rights. Second-wave feminists ran for women’s rights in the 1977 International Women’s Year torch relay to agitate for the Equal Rights Amendment. Lucy G. Barber, Marching on Washington: The Forging of an American Political Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Samek, “Mobility, Citizenship”; Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 50–60; Borda, “The Woman Suffrage Parades”; Josue David Cisneros, “(Re)Bordering the Civic Imaginary: Rhetoric, Hybridity, and Citizenship in La Gran Marcha,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97 (2011): 26–49; Karen A. Foss and Kathy L. Domenici, “Haunting Argentina: Synecdoche in the Protests of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 87 (2001): 237–58; Daniel C. Brouwer, “From San Francisco to Atlanta and Back Again: Ideologies of Mobility in the AIDS Quilt’s Search for a Homeland,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 10 (2007): 701–22; Sara C. VanderHaagen and Angela G. Ray, “A Pilgrim-critic at Places of Public Memory: Anna Dickinson’s Southern Tour of 1875,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 100, no. 3 (2014): 348–74.

25 Samek, “Mobility, Citizenship.”

26 Liisa Malkki, “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees,” Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1 (1992): 24–44.

27 Cresswell, On the Move, 213.

28 Schultz, “The Physical Is Political”; Cresswell, On the Move, 195–218; Harris, “Rhetorical Mobilities.”

29 Katherine H. Adams, Michael L. Keene, and Jennifer C. Koella, Seeing the American Woman, 1880–1920 (London: McFarland & Company, 2011), 96, 111–12.

30 Ibid.

31 Randall S. Sumpter, “‘Girl Reporter’: Elizabeth L. Banks and the ‘Stunt’ Genre,” American Journalism 32, no. 1 (2015): 60–77; Alice Fahs, Out on Assignment: Newspaper Women and the Making of Modern Public Space (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

32 Jean Marie Lutes, Front-page Girls: Women Journalists in American Culture and Fiction, 1880–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); Brooke Kroeger, Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist (New York: Times Books, 1994).

33 Alex Goody, “Spectacle, Technology, and Performing Bodies: Djuna Barnes at Coney Island,” Modernist Cultures 7, no. 2 (2012): 205–30.

34 Samantha Peko and Michael S. Sweeney, “Nell Nelson’s Undercover Reporting,” American Journalism 34, no. 4 (2017): 448–69; Lutes, Front-page Girls; Kroeger, Nellie Bly; Mike Sowell, “Nellie Bly’s Forgotten Stunt: As the First Woman to Cover a Championship Prize Fight, She Claimed to Have Gained Rare Access to Jack Dempsey,” American Journalism 3 (2004): 55–76.

35 Lutes, Front-page Girls, 4–5.

36 Ibid., 123.

37 Clarsen, Eat My Dust, 73; Nan Enstad, “Dressed for Adventure: Working Women and Silent Movie Serials in the 1910s,” Feminist Studies 21, no. 1 (1995): 67–90.

38 Enstad, “Dressed for Adventure.”

39 Ibid., 80.

40 Adams, Keene, and Koella, Seeing the American Woman, 86.

41 “General’s Mamma Bound Up State after Daughter,” Brooklyn Eagle, December 22, 1912, 5; “General Rosalie Jones: The Young Leader of the Christmas Pilgrimage,” New York Tribune, December 22, 1912, C6.

42 “‘Brown Women’ Finish March,” Woman’s Journal, November 23, 1912, 373; “General Rosalie Jones,” C6.

43 “Suffragists Plan Albany Pilgrimage,” New York Times, December 10, 1912, 3.

44 Schultz,” “Women’s Suffrage,” 1139; “Albany Reached ahead of Time,” Joplin Daily Globe, December 29, 1912, 1; Crossett, “New York,” 451.

45 “Suffrage Message in Sulzer’s,” 9.

46 “Suffragists Finish March to Albany,” New York Times, December 29, 1912, 16; “Suffrage Message in Sulzer’s,” 9.

47 Schultz, “The Physical Is Political,” 1138.

48 “Pilgrims Flounder in Rain, Mud, Snow,” Brooklyn Eagle, December 27, 1912, 3.

49 “Many Drop Out on Suffragist ‘Hike,’” Philadelphia Enquirer, December 17, 1912, 2; “Ten Suffragists Survive First Day of Long Hike,” Courier-Journal (KY), December 17, 1912, 1; “27 Pilgrims Quit March for Suffrage,” Pittsburgh Gazette Times, December 17, 1912, 15; “34 Suffragettes Started on Hike, Most of Em Quit,” Nashville Tennessean, December 17, 1912, 7.

50 “Doves to Disprove Tales of Militancy,” New York Times, December 14, 1912, 5.

51 “‘Spies’ out for Sulzer,” Baltimore Sun, December 30, 1912, 2; “Army: Of Suffragist Marchers,” Cincinnati Enquirer, December 30, 1912, 4; Ida Husted Harper, “Making Suffragists Turn,” New York Tribune, January 1, 1913, 9; “Pilgrims’ Sentries,” Brooklyn Eagle, December 30, 1912, 4.

52 “Suffragist Pilgrims Meet Vincent Astor,” New York Times, December 23, 1912, 5.

53 The three hikers that were picked up and returned home by car were Lillian Dubois Rockefeller, Julia E. Rockefeller, and Alethe Holsapple, their cousin. “Suffragists March 22 Miles in Snow,” New York Times, December 25, 1912, 4.

54 “General’s Mamma,” 5.

55 Margaret Watts DePeyster, “Suffrage Hikers Cause Vincent Astor to Flee,” Los Angeles Times, December 23, 1912, I2; DePeyster, “Suffragettes in Plan,” 1; Margaret Watts DePeyster, “Auto Accident All but Stops Suffrage Army,” San Francisco Call, December 28, 1912, 3.

56 “Rosalie Jones as Santa Claus, Los Angeles Times, December 26, 1912, 13.

57 “Suffrage Message in Sulzer’s,” 9.

58 “Weary Hikers Battle Snow for 22 Miles,” New York Tribune, December 25, 1912, 7; “Panic Seizes Suffrage Army When Auto Skids,” New York Tribune, December 28, 1912, 7.

59 “Ranks: Of Suffrage Pilgrimagers,” Cincinnati Enquirer, December 17, 1912, 5.

60 “Calls Back General of Suffrage Army,” New York Times, December 21, 1912, 11.

61 “Mrs. Stubbs Gets Some Joyful News,” Brooklyn Eagle, December 30, 1912, 4.

62 “Suffrage ‘Army’ Has Rest Day,” Nashville Tennessean, December 26, 1912, 1; “Suffragettes Marched but Five Miles Thursday,” Nashville Tennessean, December 27, 1912, 1; “Sulzer Says He Will Recommend Equal Suffrage,” Nashville Tennessean, January 1, 1913, 2; “Suffrage Army Hopes to Enter Albany Today,” St. Louis Post, December 28, 1912, 5; “Five Suffragettes Continue March,” Pittsburgh Gazette Times, December 18, 1912, 13; “Suffragist Army Keeps Christmas,” Pittsburgh Gazette Times, December 26, 1912, 12; “Brute with Gun Nearly Routs Suffragist Army,” Pittsburgh Gazette Times, December 27, 1912, 2; “Albany Reached,” 1; “Rosalie Jones as Santa Claus,” 13. Two articles in the Pittsburgh Gazette also cited “By International News Service.” “No Santa Claus for Hiking Suffragettes,” Pittsburgh Gazette Times, December 24, 1912, 2; “Suffrage Pilgrims Tossed from Auto,” Pittsburgh Gazette Times, December 28, 1912, 1.

63 The newspaper articles almost never named their authors, but the Hudson Register reported named ten reporters who were traveling with the hikers when the pilgrims reached Hudson on December 24. “Walkers Had a Christmas Tree,” Hudson Register (NY), December 26, 1912, 1. The Woman’s Journal also identified ten reporters traveling with the pilgrims. Jessie Hardy Stubs, “Pilgrims March Bravely Onward,” Woman’s Journal, December 28, 1912, 409. Ross also maintains that the following reporters traveled with the suffrage hikers: Emma Bugbee, Dorothy Dix, Ada Patterson, Viola Rodgers, Zoe Beckley, Sophie Treadwell, Martha Coman, Ethel Lloyd Patterson, and Virginia Hudson. Ross, Ladies of the Press, 124.

64 “Walkers Had a Christmas Tree,” 1.

65 Ibid.

66 Margaret Watts DePeyster, “Suffragettes in Plan to March on Washington,” San Francisco Call, December 27, 1912, 1; Crossett, “New York,” 452; “Romance Thrills Suffragettes”; “Suffragists Brave Both Guns and Snow; “Pilgrims’ Sentries”; “Albany Reached,” 1.

67 Zachary Michael Jack, March of the Suffragettes: Rosalie Gardiner Jones and the March for Voting Rights (San Francisco: Zest Books, 2016).

68 “Suffragists March,” 4.

69 “General Rosalie Jones,” C6.

70 “Weary Hikers Battle Snow for 22 Miles,” New York Tribune, December 25, 1912, 7.

71 “‘On to Albany!’ Cry Brave Spartan Sisters,” Cedar Rapids Daily Republican, December 21, 1912, n.p.

72 “Suffragists March,” 4.

73 “Pilgrims of Suffrage Continue Their Tramp,” Atlanta Constitution, December 18, 1912, 4; “One Pilgrim Drops Out of March of Suffragists,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 18, 1912, 15; “Spirit of Suffrage Pilgrims,” Cincinnati Enquirer, December 18, 1912, 2.

74 “Pilgrims Flounder,” 3.

75 “Suffragists Defy Drizzle and Fog,” New York Times, December 19, 1912, 24.

76 “Only Three Pilgrims Now,” Louisville Courier Journal, December 19, 1912, 2; “Suffragette Army Now Numbers Three,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 19, 1912, 1; “Pilgrims: Troop into Peekskill,” Cincinnati Enquirer, December 19, 1912, 9.

77 DePeyster, “Suffrage Hikers,” I2.

78 “Hikers in Hardest of Luck,” Nashville Tennessean, December 20, 1912, 9A.

79 “Ten Miles Nearer Albany,” Washington Post, December 18, 1912, 9; “Pilgrims of Suffrage,” 4; “One Pilgrim,” 15; “Six Pilgrims Cling to Trail,” Louisville Courier-Journal, December 18, 1912, 1.

80 “Pilgrims Flounder,” 3.

81 “On to Poughkeepsie! Suffragists’ Cry Today,” New York Tribune, December 21, 1912, 6. Other articles that discussed the hikers’ sore feet included “Ranks of Suffrage Pilgrimagers,” Cincinnati Enquirer, December 17, 1912, 5; “Suffragists March,” 4; “General Jones Dons Skates to Rest Blisters,” San Francisco Call, December 26, 1912, 7.

82 “Feet Blistered, Women March,” Atlanta Constitution, December 26, 1912, 1.

83 “Five Suffragettes Continue March,” Pittsburgh Gazette, December 18, 1912, 13.

84 “Hikers out of Fog Battle with Wind,” New York Times, December 20, 1912, 8.

85 “Suffragists Defy,” 24.

86 “Suffragists Finish,” 16.

87 “Pilgrims Flounder,” 3.

88 “Pilgrims March Bravely,” 409, 411.

89 “Xmas Suffrage ‘Hike’ for Spinsters Only,” New York Tribune, December 11, 1912, 9.

90 “On to Poughkeepsie!” 6.

91 “Nine Miles,” Cincinnati Enquirer, December 24, 1912, 1.

92 “Call Back General of Suffrage Army,” New York Times, December 21, 1912, 11.

93 “Suffragette Hikers Reach,” Brooklyn Eagle, December 21, 1912, 2.

94 “Suffragists Defy,” 24.

95 “Hikers in Hardest,” 9A.

96 “Forty Miles from Broadway,” Boston Daily Globe, December 19, 1912, 2.

97 Ibid.

98 “Suffragists Brave Both Guns and Snow,” New York Times, December 27, 1912, 4.

99 “Nine Miles,” 1.

100 “Suffragettes Keep Moving,” Austin Statesman, December 27, 1912, 2.

101 “Suffrage Army Thrown out of Auto into Mud,” New York Sun, December 28, 1912, 5.

102 “Suffragists March,” 4.

103 Cresswell makes a similar argument about Eadward Muybridge’s photographs. Cresswell argues that Eadward Muybridge helped make nineteenth-century movement less threatening by representing it as fixed, in multiple moments over time. Cresswell, On the Move, 58–71.

104 “General’s Mamma,” 1.

105 “Girls Desert Mill,” New York Times, December 22, 1912, 10.

106 “Suffrage Pilgrims Wade,” Brooklyn Eagle, December 24, 1912, 3.

107 “‘Hikers’ Spirits Drop at Sulzer’s Absence,” New York Tribune, December 31, 1912, 7.

108 “Suffrage Message in Sulzer’s,” 9.

109 “Suffragists Finish,” 16.

110 Ibid.

111 “Xmas Suffrage,” 9.

112 “Wedding in Sight in Suffrage Army,” New York Times, December 26, 1912, 1; “On to Washington,” Brooklyn Eagle, December 26, 1912; “Suffragists’ March Cause of a Romance,” Hudson (NY) Register, December 26, 1912, 1; Harper, “Making Suffragists Turn,” 9.

113 “Suffragist Army Halts for a Day,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 26, 1912, 2.

114 “Romance Thrills Suffragettes on March to Albany,” New York Press, December 26, 1912.

115 “Suffragist Army Halts,” 2.

116 “Wedding in Sight,” 1.

117 Ibid.

118 “On to Washington,” 2.

119 “Cupid Reinforces the Suffrage Army,” New York Tribune, December 26, 1912, 1; “Cupid Busy during ‘Hike,’” Washington Post, December 26, 1912, 4.

120 “Yates Breaks out of Sing Sing Prison,” New York Times, December 19, 1912, 7.

121 “Forty Miles,” 2.

122 “Suffragists Brave,” 4.

123 “Women Pilgrims Coast down Hills,” Atlanta Constitution, December 27, 1912, 1; “Suffragettes Marched,” 1.

124 “Suffragette Pilgrims are Nearing Albany” (Toronto) Globe, December 27, 1912, 2.

125 “Suffragettes Keep,” 2; the New York Times identified the local resident who shot the gun in Stockport as Louis Wilcox. “Suffragists Brave,” 4.

126 “Suffrage Army Thrown,” 5.

127 “Automobile Upset Almost Ends Hike,” New York Times, December 28, 1912, 1.

128 “Gen Jones Has Narrow Escape,” Boston Daily Globe, December 28, 1912, 5.

129 “Suffrage Army Thrown,” 5.

130 “Suffrage Pilgrims Tossed,” 1.

131 “Gen Jones Has Narrow Escape,” 5.

132 DePeyster, “Auto Accident,” 3.

133 “Automobile Upset,” 1.

134 Schultz, “The Physical Is Political,” 1146–47.

135 “Pilgrims Flounder,” 3.

136 “Suffragists Finish,” 16.

137 Ibid.

138 “Suffrage Army Wins a Victory,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 1, 1913, 1.

139 “Suffragists Will Hike Again,” New York Times, January 10, 1913, 3.

140 Bonnie Dow, Watching Women’s Liberation, 1970: Feminism’s Pivotal Years on the Network News (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014).