Changing Norms

Women on Staten Island and all over the country were politically active long before they had the right to vote. They joined national leaders such as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Frances Willard in movements advocating for the abolition of slavery and temperance in alcohol consumption. However, both laws and social norms kept women from participating fully in civic life.

Women’s exclusion from full citizenship was rooted in the idea that women and men should occupy “separate spheres.” According to this ideology, men should participate in public affairs like pursuing a profession or participating in politics, while women should focus on domestic matters, specifically raising their children to uphold these ideals.  Few women ever conformed strictly to this idealized domestic role, and as more women gained greater access to education, joined political movements, and harnessed newly available technologies in the early twentieth century, they expanded their influence further into the public sphere. The women who participated in the suffrage movement and argued that women should be equal citizens with men justified the expansion of women’s roles by offering an ideology that directly undermined the idea of “separate spheres.” 

Changing Laws

Staten Island women had two potential routes to the vote: Either the New York State Legislature would amend the state constitution to include women’s right to vote or the United States Congress would amend the Constitution to bar states from sex-based discrimination at the polls.

Nationally, suffragists disagreed over whether a state-by-state strategy or a federal strategy would be most effective. Staten Islanders were involved at all levels and during the entire suffrage campaign but gave special attention to changing New York State law during the Empire State Campaign, a roughly three-year effort focused on “Victory in 1915,” which ultimately fell short. However, on November 6, 1917, New Yorkers finally voted to amend the state constitution to include women as voters. 

1915 wasn’t the first time New York’s suffragists experienced defeat in their struggle to vote. They had unsuccessfully lobbied for an amendment during several previous state constitutional conventions called to rewrite or change the state’s main governing document. Political dynamos George William Curtis and his daughter Elizabeth Burrill Curtis represented Staten Island at the conventions of 1867 and 1894 respectively.

Changing Strategies

The Political Equality Club conducted its earliest meetings as lectures and discussions in the parlors of West New Brighton’s social elite. Eventually, local suffragists expanded their tactics to include broader recruitment efforts like automobile tours and open-air meetings, seeking to unite women from the various towns on Staten Island in an active campaign for the vote. They drove guest speakers across the Island, pulling over and addressing passersby on the street. Their aims were to engage with voters, recruit women to the cause, and encourage women to talk about suffrage with the men in their lives since only men’s votes could secure woman suffrage.