Most Jewish newspapers endorsed the cause and
published articles promoting it. Prior to 1920, women
were rarely allowed to speak from synagogue pulpits,
but some rabbis made an exception for suffragists and
invited them to address their congregations.

Goldstein’s Funeral
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not formally endorse the cause. White Protestant leaders like Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, Alice Paul and Harriet Stanton Blatch frequently
expressed anti-Semitic attitudes and did not mingle with Jews.

“The suffrage movement was not a perfect movement by today’s
standards. It was racist. It was xenophobic,” Klapper said. “Not every-
body who belonged to the movement expressed these things, but the
suffrage movement was not necessarily welcoming to everybody.”
White suffragists often did not address racism in their platforms,
and Black women continued to be disenfranchised by violence and
voter suppression tactics like poll taxes until the passage of the Voting
Rights Act of 1965. Native American women did not get the right to vote
until the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, and even then
states could pass laws barring them from exercising their rights.

The suffrage movement was also divided on the basis of class. Upper-
class women often did not want to be associated with working-class
women and feared they would tarnish their reputations. American-
born Jews harbored their own prejudices toward Jews who came from
immigrant backgrounds.

Samira Mehta, assistant professor in the Department of Women
and Gender Studies and Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado
Boulder, said working-class contributions to the suffrage movement
often get overlooked.

New York State eventually voted to enfranchise women because
working-class suffragists mobilized labor unions in New York City.

“That’s going to be a more Jewish-looking movement [and] a more
Catholic-looking movement,” Mehta said.

Working-class Jewish women in Philadelphia also rallied to support
suffrage. In her book “Jailed for Freedom,” Doris Stevens recorded the 1919
arrest of Rose Gratz Fishstein, a union leader who immigrated to
Philadelphia from Russia, for taking part in a protest outside the White
House. She was sentenced to five days in District Jail. Her sister-in-
law, Temple University graduate Rose Fishstein, also was arrested and
received the same sentence.

Olga Gross, a department store worker, sold homemade peanut
brittle during her lunch breaks to raise funds for a local suffrage orga-
nization. “She didn’t have that much time and she had very little money, but
she really believed that women needed the right to vote so that poor
working-class girls like her could have better lives,” Klapper said. l
spanzer@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0729
34 THE GUIDE 2020/2021