Differently Radical: Suffrage Issues and Feminist Ideas in the Crisis and the Masses

Abstract

The 1915 women’s suffrage issues of two periodicals, the Crisis, the NAACP magazine, and the Masses, an irreverent outlet for left-wing political eclecticism, compel a reassessment of what constitutes feminist radicalism. Given that a bedrock principle of 1910s US feminism was the valuing of all women and girls as human beings—then a radical claim—both periodicals circulated differently radical feminist messages in their suffrage issues. The Crisis insisted that black and white women were equally entitled to voting rights. The Masses promoted white women’s emancipation and regarded women’s suffrage as part of that crusade. Comparing the contents of both issues makes clear that considering race in gendered radicalism and gender in race radicalism are essential when examining suffrage media rhetoric.

Notes

1 David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. DuBois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 409. Masses 7, no. 2 (1915): n.p. In 1915, the Masses was located on 87 Greenwich Avenue, and the Crisis was located on 70 Fifth Avenue. Begun within a year of each other, both periodicals have complicated histories. The Crisis began in 1910 and continues publication to this day. The Masses began in 1911, ceased publication in 1917, and was subsequently reincarnated as the Liberator (1918–1924) and then the New Masses (1926–1948).

2 “Statement of the circulation of The Crisis, December 1915.” W. E. B. DuBois Papers (MS 312) Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. Elliott M. Rudwick, “W. E. B. DuBois in the Role of Crisis Editor,” Journal of Negro History 43, no. 3 (July 1958): 214–40. Rudwick notes, “In 1913, there were 30,000 paying readers, and about three-fourths of the copies during this period were sold to Negroes,” 214. The circulation numbers for the Masses are inexact because there are no office records or subscription lists. In Rebels in Bohemia: The Radicals of the Masses, 1911–1917 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), Leslie Fishbein says that “monthly circulation averaged 14,000, and its readership extended well beyond the bounds of doctrinaire socialists,” 18. In Gender and Activism in a Little Magazine: The Modern Figures of the Masses (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), Rachel Schreiber says circulation was “40,000 at its peak,” and the magazine always had to rely on outside funding to stay viable (10).

3 Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 107–35; Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), 123–29; Garth F. Pauley, “W. E. B. DuBois on Woman Suffrage: A Critical Analysis of His Crisis Writings,” Journal of Black Studies 30, no. 3 (January 2000): 390–93.

4 W. E. B. DuBois, “The Crisis,” The Crisis: Record of the Darker Races 1, no. 1 (November 1910): 10.

5 Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello, Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State (Ithaca: Three Hills, 2017), 77.

6 Adella Hunt Logan, “Colored Women as Voters,” Crisis 4, no. 5 (September 1912): 243.

7 Mary Chapman, Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and US Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 8–9; Brooke Kroeger, The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017), 155–75.

8 The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races 10, no. 4 (August 1915); Masses 7, no. 1 (October–November, 1915). Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent references refer to these issues. There was no October issue of the Masses. The November issue reads October–November because a national newsstand distribution deadline required a twenty-two-day advance printing, and it was too expensive to publish two issues in the same month. See “Announcement,” 18. The 1915 issue of the Crisis was the second devoted to women’s suffrage. For the first, see Crisis 4, no. 5 (1912): “Woman’s Suffrage Number.” More were to follow. Garth E. Pauley notes that editor DuBois wrote more than twenty essays on women’s suffrage, delivered a speech at an annual National American Woman Suffrage Association convention, which the association subsequently published, and interacted with “several influential suffragists, including Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells, and Jane Addams,” 383. See Rachel Schreiber for a comprehensive analysis of suffrage illustrations and cartoons in Masses, 125–57.

9 Mary White Ovington, “Socialism and the Feminist Movement,” New Review 2, no. 3 (March 1914): 143. The New Review was housed in the same building as the Masses and included articles written by Masses editors Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, and William English Walling and Crisis editor W. E. B. DuBois. All four are also listed on the “Board of Editors” in 1914 (vol. II, no. 5) when the magazine announces it will be “edited co-operatively.” On socialist women’s suffrage activism, see Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 1870–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 214–45.

10 W. E. B. DuBois, “Forward Backward,” Crisis 2, no. 6 (October 1911): 244. For a trenchant analysis of white women’s racism in the suffrage movement, see Valethia Watkins, “Votes for Women: Race, Gender, and W. E. B. DuBois’s Advocacy of Woman Suffrage,” Phylon 53, no. 2 (Winter 2016): 3–19.

11 Jeannette Eaton, “To Suffragists,” Masses, 19. Eaton is referring to a Masses cover illustration that critiques southern white bigotry by linking the unjust conviction and death sentence of Leo Frank, a Jewish superintendent in a Georgia factory, to the lynching of African Americans. Drawn by Robert Minor and captioned “In Georgia: The Southern Gentleman Demonstrates His Superiority,” the cover depicts Frank, who was accused of murdering a thirteen-year-old female employee, and a black man, hanging crucified on crosses. See Masses 6, no. 11 (August, 1915). DuBois briefly comments on the Leo Frank case on the Editorial page that precedes the suffrage symposium in the 1915 Crisis. In a short article, titled “Frank,” he writes that the “case only offers illustration of the truth in the South all things may be brought about by an appeal to prejudice,” 177. The Georgia governor commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment, but Frank was subsequently lynched in August 1915. Carrie Chapman Catt founded the Woman Suffrage Party in 1909. She was president of NAWSA from 1900 to 1904 and then again from 1915 to 1920.

12 Ann Ardis, “Making Middlebrow Culture, Making Middlebrow Literary Texts Matter: The Crisis, Easter 1912,” Modernist Cultures 6, no. 1 (2011): 18–40. Ardis discusses advertisements on pages 32–34. After several name changes, Cheyney University is now considered “the oldest Historically Black College/University (HBCU) in the nation.” URL: http://www.cheyney.edu/about-cheyney-university/

13 Mary White Ovington, “The White Brute,” 17–18. Inez Haynes Gillmore, “Stray Thoughts on Chivalry,” 22. Gillmore was a cofounder of the College Equal Suffrage League (CESL), an organization that recruited a new generation of young, educated women into the suffrage movement. On Gillmore’s labor activism and the founding of the CESL, see Mary K. Trigg, Feminism as Life’s Work: Four Modern American Women through Two World Wars (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 52–53.

14 W. E. B. DuBois, “Votes for Women,” 177.

15 Nina Bull, “In Answer to a Critic,” n.p. [4].

16 Floyd Dell, “Adventures in Anti-Land,” n.p. [5], 6.

17 Max Eastman, “Confessions of a Suffrage Orator,” 7, 8, 7, respectively.

18 Faye E. Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 202, n. 16.

19 L. M. Hershaw, “Disfranchisement in the District of Columbia,” 183.

20 Mrs. Carrie W. Clifford, “Votes for Children,” 185, and Mrs. Mary B. Talbert, “Women and Colored Women,” 184, respectively.

21 Reverend Francis J. Grimke, “The Logic of Woman Suffrage,” 178.

22 Mrs. Coralie Franklin Cook, “Votes for Mothers,” 185.

23 “Doll-baby” is a term used by Masses writers and illustrators to refer to women who valued, and were valued for, their appearance and frivolity. See, for example, Max Eastman, “Confession of a Suffrage Orator,” 8, and Maurice Becker’s illustration, “Society Cherishes the Doll-baby Idea” on the same page.

24 In her article, “Beauty under the Knife” (Part Two) in the Atlantic Monthly 285, no. 2 (February 2000): 98–102, Holly Brubach discusses Sander Gilman’s study, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery and notes that the “pug nose” symbolically represented Irish immigrants, who were considered servile and doglike. Several scholars have commented on the inconsistent and sometimes prejudicial representations of African Americans and ethnic minorities in the Masses. See, for example, Amy Helene Kirschke, Art in Crisis: W. E. B. DuBois and the Struggle for African American Identity and Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 32; and Rebecca Zurier, Art for the Masses: A Radical Magazine and Its Graphics, 1911–1917 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 148, 151.

25 The captioned picture of the banquet, which appears on page 170, contains a note directing readers to page 165, where they are informed that the tenth anniversary celebration of the City Federation of Colored Women’s clubs in Kansas City, MO, which “includes nineteen clubs interested in painting, needlework, philanthropy, school work and social study,” was held in “the new $100,000 Y.M.C.A” and attended by 220 people, 165. This item is in “Social Uplift,” a subcategory of “Along the Color Line,” a regular column that contained news about individuals, institutions, clubs, churches, meetings, court cases, crimes, and foreign affairs.

26 Susan Goodier, who generously shared her ongoing research into this photograph, believes that the unidentified eight women may be members of a Howard University sorority. Susan Goodier e-mail message to author, April 11, 2018. The quoted words are used by Miss Ann H. Jones, “Woman Suffrage and Social Reform,” 189.

27 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 5.

28 W. E. B. Dubois, 201; “Editorial,” Crisis 1, no. 1 (November 1910): 10.

29 The Library of Congress, “A. Lincoln showing Sojourner Truth the Bible presented by colored people of Baltimore,” Executive Mansion, Washington, DC, October 29, 1864. On the Crisis Contents page, this cover image is listed as a “composite photograph by Hinton Gilmore.” In her biography of Sojourner Truth, Margaret Washington identifies the image as a painting by F. C. Courter, which he made from paintings of Lincoln and Truth. See Sojourner Truth’s America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), n.p. After the picture was misidentified in a New York Times book review, editor Steve Coates pieced together its complex history. Essentially, the image was commissioned by a white, female abolitionist friend of Truth’s after her death, and it was displayed at the 1893 Columbian Exposition and then in the lobby of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, where it was destroyed in a 1902 fire. However, the image continued to circulate because it had been photographed by Frank Perry before it was destroyed. See Steve Coates, “Abraham Lincoln and Sojourner Truth,” New York Times, October 29, 2010. National Association of Colored Women president Hallie Q. Brown includes the image in the chapter on Sojourner Truth in Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction (Ohio, Xenia: Aldine Publishing, 1926).

30 In Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), Nell Irvin Painter explores at length the ways in which Truth mythologized her meetings with US presidents, including Lincoln. See especially 200–08.

31 On references to Lincoln in the Masses, see Nina Bull, “In Answer to a Critic,” n.p. [4] and Gillmore, “Stray Thoughts on Chivalry,” 22. Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 68.

32 Critical Fictions: The Politics of Imaginative Writing, ed. Philomena Mariani (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991).

33 Ovington, “The White Brute,” 17. Subsequent references are included parenthetically in the text.

34 Mary White Ovington, “Letter to the Editor,” Masses 8, no. 3 (1916): 20: “If I did not make the reader feel [Sam’s] inevitable helplessness, I shall never write again.”

35 Jeannette Eaton, “The Woman’s Magazine,” 19.

36 There is scant information about Kelsey Percival Kitchel. Census records identify her as white; “artist” is listed as her “occupation”; and she published poems and short stories in newspapers and modernist magazines such as the Craftsman and Smart Set (New Jersey State Archive; Trenton, NJ; State Census of New Jersey, 1905; Reference Number: L-17; Film Number: 30). In the introduction to the anthology “Girl, Colored” and Other Stories (Jefferson: McFarland, 2011), a complete collection of stories published by African American women in the Crisis between 1910 and 2010, Judith Musser notes that twelve of the 106 stories by women were by white women. Further research may reveal whether Kitchel had ties to the Crisis through Mary White Ovington. Kitchel reportedly lived in Jamaica (http://tellersofweirdtales.blogspot.com/2012/02/), and Ovington vacationed there in 1910, even writing about the trip in a 1930s reminiscence. There are intriguing correspondences between details in “The Rains” and Ovington’s recollection in “Jamaica—An Island Where England Rules by Encouraging Caste. Two Per Cent of the People Have All of the Best Jobs,” Baltimore Afro-American, December 3, 1932, reprinted in Black and White Sat Down Together: The Reminiscences of an NAACP Founder, edited and with a Foreword by Ralph E. Luker (New York: Feminist Press, 1995), “The West Indies,” 61–65.

37 The “White Brute,” Ovington said in a Letter to the Editor printed in the January 1916 issue of the Masses in response to several readers who doubted the veracity of such a story, was based on an actual occurrence. A “Southern white woman of the Gulf States” had told her about “the difficulties the colored girl met with who tried to live a virtuous life,” Ovington explained. In her 1947 autobiography, she says hearing about “the unforgettable incident of white brutality … burned into [her] consciousness” and motivated her to write the story. Ovington, Letter to the Editor, Masses 8, no. 3 (January 1916): 20. Mary White Ovington, The Walls Come Tumbling Down (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 80, 87.

38 Crisis, 193. Subsequent references are included parenthetically in the text.

39 1 Corinthians 13:12.

40 Miss N. H. Burroughs, “Black Women and Reform,” Crisis, 187. For a brief biographical overview of Nannie Helen Burroughs, see Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s entry in Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, Volume 1, ed. Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 201–05.

41 Goodier and Pastorello, Women Will Vote, 141, 74, respectively.

42 Lewis, W. E. B. Dubois: Biography of a Race, 480, 483; Carolyn Wedin, Inheritors of the Spirit: Mary White Ovington and the Founding of the NAACP (New York: Wiley, 1998), 137–43, 148.

43 Paula Giddings, “Missing in Action: Ida B. Wells, the NAACP, and the Historical Record,” Meridians 1, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 1, 8. For Dubois’s contradictory attitudes and behavior towards women, see Amy Helen Kirschke, “Dubois and The Crisis Magazine: Imaging Women and Family,” Notes in the History of Art 24, no. 4 (Summer 2005), 35–45. Kirschke argues that Dubois’s “relationships with women present a paradox” (42). While on one hand, he publicly championed women’s issues and their “right to personal freedom and social equity” (40), on the other, he expected his wife to assume traditional caretaker roles and he did not regard female peers as equals.

44 Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “The Northern Negro Woman’s Social and Moral Condition,” Original Rights Magazine 1:2, April 1910, 83–87 rpt. in Ida B. Wells The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader, Edited with an introduction and notes by Mia Bay (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), 432–33.

45 On white suffragists’ racism, see Trigg, Feminism as Life’s Work, 64. Burroughs, “Black Women and Reform,” 187.