Listen to co-curators Philip Palmer and Erica Ciallela discuss Belle Greene’s political activism during the Presidential election of 1916 and hear a passage from a pamphlet on women’s political activity.
WOMEN IN NATIONAL POLITICS
Greene served as treasurer for the Women’s Roosevelt League, a group organized in 1916 to support Charles Evans Hughes’s presidential campaign. In the September leading up to the election, she traveled with the league to Washington, DC, for a conference on the role of women in politics. The women photographed alongside Greene came from similar social circles. Maude Wetmore cofounded a camp for young women and was a friend of Anne Morgan—J. Pierpont Morgan’s youngest daughter and a prominent philanthropist in her own right. Katherine Davis was an advocate for women in New York reformatories. Alice Carpenter was an active leader in the suffrage movement and managed the women’s department at a Wall Street brokerage firm.
Members of Women’s Roosevelt League for Hughes. Left to right Mrs. Jos G. Deune, Sec’y., Miss Alice Carpenter, Pres., Miss Belle Greene, Treas., ca. 1916. Library of Congress, Photographs and Prints Division
PHILIP: Belle Greene became involved in the 1916 U.S. Presidential election to support the Republican candidate Charles Evans Hughes, who sought to extend the vote for women. She was tapped into the larger National Hughes Alliance, which supported the candidate, but also volunteered her time to the Women’s Roosevelt League for Hughes. This photograph was taken during a Roosevelt League gathering. A pamphlet about womens’ efforts to elect Hughes, shown nearby, begins with a foreword addressing the need to report their activities and celebrate politically active women.
ERICA: The Women’s Committee of the Hughes Alliance is publishing a report of its work in the recent campaign because it believes that its many thousands of contributors, workers and members should know what was done and how it was done. We believe that the work of this Committee has a message for women in future American political campaigns.
There is a second reason for this report. The deliberate misrepresentation concerning the women’s work has grown to such proportions that we believe the public is entitled to the facts regarding the women’s campaign in general and the women’s campaign train in particular. The women’s movement in national politics has come to stay. This report covers something of its manner of coming and may have a message for those interested in the manner of its staying.