Class as a Factor in Feminist Leadership

The selection from the text that I've chosen to discuss is the following:

The situation was exacerbated, according to Lisa Tetrault, because women could earn a living through the lyceum lecture circuit in the 1870s - 1880s, a popular form of entertainment and adult education featuring traveling lecturers and performers. They came to expect similar payment, typically between $10 and $100 per lecture, for an appearance at a suffrage meeting. Suffrage organizations thus had to compete with the lecture circuit when they paid speakers appearing at meetings or at their annual conventions at the state or national level.[1]

I chose this excerpt to establish the cause and effect, respectively, between the professional lecture circuit of the early 20th century and the increased influence of money on the politics of the women's movement. Although the first impression of the thesis of this article might be that money affected the culture of the women's movement, this passage demonstrates that the relationship ran in both directions. Because women could earn money as lecturers, they expected that, regardless of the cause for which they might be speaking, they would be paid to speak at suffragist meetings. As a result, the infusion of larger amounts of money became necessary to stage these lectures, which were themselves integral to convincing people of the righteousness of the cause.

Beyond this point, the article does not really clarify the economic hardships of women campaigning for suffrage. Rather, the article focuses almost entirely on wealthy women and the impact they had on the movement. The one place in the article I could find that discusses women who were not wealthy was the following: "Similarly, women began to give large amounts to make change for women in society, not simply to assist poor women but rather to broaden women’s educational opportunities, as well as political and reproductive rights."[2]

Money, it seems, was a major factor in identifying targets, devising strategies, and even locating political offices. Class, it turns out, was a major factor. On second thought, however, perhaps this fact is not very surprising. Lenin said that revolutionary parties could only be successful under the leadership of party vanguards of professional revolutionaries of bourgeois background – himself a chief example. Revolutionary as the women's movement was for its time, perhaps we ought not be surprised that this observation of Lenin's held in this case.

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     [1] Joan Marie Johnson, "Following the Money: Wealthy Women, Feminism, and the American Suffrage Movement," Journal of Women's History, 27, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 65-66.
     [2] Ibid, 64.