The "Ignorant" Vote: Suffrage and Immigration in Gotham

Lauren Santangelo will discuss the relationship between the suffrage movement and urbanization, paying particular attention to activists’ efforts to convert New York’s vast immigrant populations. Manhattan’s diversity convinced suffragists that it would be impossible to win the nation’s largest metropolis. But the city’s rich resources—its publishing industry, entertainment profession, restaurants and hotels, as well as its wealth—persuaded movement leadership to headquarter operations in Gotham. Their proximity to tenement-filled districts like the Lower East Side forced them to develop strategies that balanced the need to gain as many converts as possible with the danger of alienating xenophobic New Yorkers concerned about the electorate’s “quality”—a complicated algorithm that they sometimes badly miscalculated.