New Musical Brings a Different Spin to Suffrage Story

The women are wearing white dresses, carrying banners, occupying the steps of a public building framed by white columns. This looks familiar, a suffrage spectacle that has becomes a cliché in the visual culture of American history. Look more closely: The women are old and young, with a range of skin tones, and one of them is in a wheelchair. Listen: They are singing, not in triumph as expected, but a song of warning: “Watch out for the suffragettes.”

We have not time-traveled to the early 20th century, but are in the 21st-century audience of Suffs, a thrilling musical play at New York’s Public Theater that brings a different spin to the standard votes-for-women story, shining a light on some of its darker aspects, including conflicts among women — class divides, racism — and physical torture at the hands of police and prison guards. Thirty-three-year-old singer-songwriter Shaina Taub wrote the script and plays Alice Paul, the American Quaker who cut her political teeth in the British suffrage movement, where she witnessed incarceration, forced feeding, and hunger strikes and came home impatient to prod the American movement to move faster, increase the pressure, and defy an older generation of activists by taking it to the streets, which meant committing acts of civil disobedience.

Against a cultural tradition of seeing suffragists as serious, humorless women to be treated with reverence, Suffs is also full of wit and energy, the toe-tapping sounds of Tin Pan Alley and jazz, and the satirical ironies of an all-female cast switching to male drag and back to dresses. Imagine, please, President Woodrow Wilson, historically no fan of the suffrage movement, as a woman in top hat and tails onstage, twirling his (phallic) cane and singing sweet, sneering praise for “the ladies.”

Suffs, eight years in the making, reflects not only the intense activism of Taub’s generation, but the desire — and the tools — to reveal hidden truths about American history, to make it a living thing relevant to how we live now. As with Hamilton, its kissing cousin, the research here is impeccable, the events actual — Inez Milholland on her white horse, Ida B. Wells being instructed by Paul to march at the back of the 1913 parade, Silent Sentinels picketing the White House. Paul’s forced feeding is harrowing to watch.

The cultural memory Suffs displaces is a stubborn thing. A short subway ride uptown from the Public Theater, Central Park boasts a much-heralded statue commemorating voting rights for women. Unveiled in 2021, the result of a long, excruciating battle and massive fundraising activity by activists, are Stanton, Anthony, and Sojourner Truth in stunning marble, visited daily by people who are surprised to learn that those women, visionaries though they were, failed to win American women the right to vote.

Enshrining the Stanton/Anthony generation, wrapping them in an aura of triumph, and ignoring what came after them, is a long tradition. In 1946, after the Second World War ended, as part of a massive patriotic celebratory binge, Gertrude Stein was commissioned to collaborate with composer Virgil Thompson on something about an American hero. She considered Abraham Lincoln, but in the end produced the text for The Mother of Us All, an opera based on her version of the life of Susan B. Anthony. Few even knew, at first, who that was, but the approach perfectly suited its times. As American women were displaced from wartime jobs and participation in public life, here is a distraction, a perverse reversal of reality: a goddess-like woman of power and presence, front and center.

Thompson’s musical score echoes 19th-century American hymns, marches, and patriotic airs, but when Anthony appears, trumpets blare. This Susan B. Anthony is larger than life. She flattens statesman Daniel Webster in debate, much as Shaina Taub’s crew will hold men’s actual objections to women voting up to ridicule — these mostly revolve around the question of who will cook dinner and mind the babies. Anthony, Stein’s goddess, is a warrior not only for women’s right to vote, but against restrictive social conventions, especially marriage. She insists on women’s right to speak for themselves and be heard, an insistence many people understand as reflecting Stein’s chagrin at her dismissal by some literary critics as a writer of nonsense (“Rose is a rose is a rose,” etc.). The “nonsense” phrases are reserved, in Stein’s piece, for the men — dinner and babies — while the women make sense: “I understand that you undertake to overthrow my understanding,” Anthony sings. She is ignored.

As the Civil War unfolds around her, the operatic Anthony tell us: “Naughty men, they quarrel so.” These “quarrels,” however, form the spine of our collective memory. Hamilton, we notice, revolves around men who “quarrel so.” What, besides the drama of wars (Civil, World, Vietnam), is the small matter of 70 years of fighting for the simple right to be considered a citizen of this country? And the decades after ratification of the 19th Amendment, during which women of color remained disenfranchised?

In Alice Paul’s generation, the campaign for women’s voting rights became not only a political battle, but a culture war as well, using every means available to argue the case: eye-popping street theater, attention-demanding parades, cartoons, theatricals, billboards, movies, radio, paintings, and sculptures. On February 15, 1921, after the 19th Amendment to the Constitution had finally passed and been ratified, the spirit of victory was embodied by a ceremony in the nation’s capital. The date was significant: The birthday of Susan B. Anthony, known as “Aunt Susan” among “the troops,” became an unofficial holiday still celebrated in some quarters today.

On that day, a marble statue by long-time suffragist sculptor Adelaide Johnson was unveiled to much hoopla. It depicted Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony. The celebratory spirit did not last long. Critics mocked the sculpture as “three women in a tub,” and the very next day, it was removed from Statuary Hall to the basement, where it languished for decades.

In 2020, the centennial of the 19th Amendment’s passage was expected to not only celebrate, but educate the public about a swath of American history usually whitewashed or oversimplified or dismissed. But the COVID pandemic changed everything, causing cancellation of innumerable in-person events, including conferences both popular and scholarly, in communities and on campuses, concerts, art shows, and theatrical productions — Suffs among them. We’re playing catchup. It is still possible to be oblivious to the uncomfortable past and to leave a theater after a rousing show like Suffs saying, as so many did, “How come I didn’t know that?”

Because cultural memory is hard to change.