THE IMPACT OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE ON NEW YORK CITY POLITICS

My talk is about the variety of ways suffrage enabled women to enter mainstream politics in post-suffrage New York City.  Women made hardly any progress winning office in the 1920s, electing only a few members of the State Assembly, a County Register, and one Alderman [sic]; through their activism in party politics, however, a number of them received important political appointments, including judgeships.  Moreover, throughout the 1920s and 1930s women continued to use the political techniques and networks developed during the suffrage movement to support each other’s political careers and sustain progressive feminist agendas in the city, state, and nation.  A turning point came with the “Fusion” campaign of 1933 that elected Mayor Fiorello La Guardia.  Many New York City women supported the movement that brought him into office, and after his inauguration La Guardia appointed dozens of women to administrative posts and judgeships, including the first African-American woman judge in the nation.  I argue that women’s political work of the post-suffrage era had a lasting impact on La Guardia’s ability to modernize New York City government, an accomplishment that has received almost no historical attention.  I also argue that the women of the La Guardia administration provided the role models and inspiration for the New York City feminist politicians of the modern era.