The Facilitators

Key to the suffrage movement’s remarkable turnaround in the 1908-1920 period was a swath of new elite supporters: women with high social standing and powerful, influential men who served prominently among the movement’s most active framers, funders, and facilitators. They provided underwriting, funding, and access to government leaders, legislators, and other important influencers. With their own celebrity-like aura, they also brought mainstream media attention to the suffrage movement as popular writers, publicists, editors, and publishers. This chapter uses the insights of social movement theorists who focus on success to assess the concrete actions of these elites and their media influence. In that final, determinative decade, they enlivened both the stalled state-by-state suffrage campaigns and the long-awaited passage and ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.