In the fall of 1917, an Italian immigrant mother in East Harlem walked into a polling station for the first time in her life. She had never imagined this moment — not when she left Naples, not when she learned to navigate the crowded streets of upper Manhattan, not when she bargained with vendors in a language she was still learning. The ballot in her hand was lighter than a grocery list, and heavier than anything she had ever carried.
New York had just become one of the first states east of the Mississippi to grant women the right to vote. For the suffrage leaders who had organized parades down Fifth Avenue and lobbied lawmakers in Albany, this was a hard-won victory — the culmination of decades of marches, petitions, and arrests. For the women of East Harlem’s Italian immigrant neighborhoods, it was something more complicated. A door had opened that many of them hadn’t asked to walk through.
That tension — between a right being won and a community deciding what to do with it — is the part of the suffrage story that rarely makes the history books.
The great suffrage parades that filled the newspapers were spectacles of determination and courage. In 1915, more than 25,000 women marched up Fifth Avenue demanding the vote. When the referendum failed that year, they regrouped and fought harder. By 1917, they had won New York.
But the experience of suffrage looked very different depending on which block you lived on. For the working-class immigrant families in East Harlem — Italian, Irish, Jewish, Eastern European — the vote arrived wrapped in complications that the society women leading the marches didn’t always see.
Many immigrant women couldn’t vote even after the law changed, because they weren’t citizens. Their husbands might be eligible, but citizenship required navigating a bureaucracy conducted entirely in English — a barrier that kept countless families on the outside of the rights technically available to them.
And for some women, the barrier wasn’t just bureaucratic — it was marital. Under the Expatriation Act of 1907, an American-born woman who married a non-citizen lost her citizenship automatically. Not as a punishment. Not through any legal proceeding. As a consequence of marriage. The day she said her vows to a man who hadn’t naturalized, she became, in the eyes of the law, as foreign as he was.
In a neighborhood where marriages were arranged within the community — where a girl’s family chose her husband based on his family’s reputation and his prospects rather than his immigration paperwork — this meant that American-born daughters were quietly, routinely stripped of a right their country had just finished fighting to give them. The vote their sisters had marched for could vanish with a wedding ring.
That detail — the marriage trap buried inside the citizenship law — is one the standard suffrage narrative almost never reaches. But it’s the detail that matters most for understanding what the fight for the vote looked like from inside a tenement kitchen in East Harlem, where a mother might celebrate her country’s progress and mourn her daughter’s vulnerability in the same breath.
For women who had crossed an ocean and built new lives in tenement kitchens, the ballot box felt like it belonged to a different country within the country they already lived in.
And then there was the question of whether voting was something a respectable woman did at all. In the campanilismo of southern Italian culture — that deep loyalty to your own village, your own block, your own people — a woman’s world was the family. Politics was men’s business. A daughter who marched with a sign wasn’t just exercising a new right; she was drawing attention to herself and her family in a community where reputation was survival. The cost of becoming a political person was paid partly in the currency of belonging.
If suffrage felt distant to many immigrant women, it was the settlement houses that brought it close.
Places like the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side — founded by the nurse and reformer Lillian Wald in 1893 — were already the place where immigrant women came for English classes, health care, and vocational training. Wald was a fierce suffrage advocate who understood that the cause had to meet women where they lived, not just where it was convenient to march. She campaigned for the vote while simultaneously fighting the anti-immigrant attitudes that some suffrage leaders used to argue their case. When the 1915 referendum failed, a prominent suffrage leader blamed immigrant voters for the defeat. Wald pushed back, insisting that immigrants — far from being obstacles to democracy — were often the people most eager to exercise the political rights they had been denied in the countries they’d left behind.
The Woman Suffrage Party, recognizing that the movement couldn’t win New York without working-class support, began printing their literature in Italian, Yiddish, and Chinese. After the 1917 victory, they formed an Americanization Committee that visited tenements, taught English, and helped women navigate the path to citizenship. These weren’t abstract gestures. They were women knocking on doors in neighborhoods where a pamphlet in Italian could mean the difference between a right that existed on paper and a right that existed in someone’s life.
For a young woman like Lucie Santoro — the daughter of Italian immigrants, coming of age in 1919 East Harlem — the settlement house was the place where the old world and the new world collided most directly. It was where you might hear a suffrage argument between an English lesson and a childcare class. It was where the idea that you could have a voice beyond your family’s kitchen first became thinkable. And it was where the cost of wanting something your mother never imagined became painfully real.
The suffrage movement and the labor movement were never separate struggles for working-class women. The same factories that locked their doors during shifts — the same conditions that killed 146 workers, mostly young immigrant women, in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911 — were the conditions that radicalized a generation of women who might never have picked up a suffrage banner otherwise.
At a suffrage parade in 1912, just a year after the Triangle fire, working women from the Wage Earner’s Suffrage League marched carrying signs that read “We Want the Vote for Fire Protection.” The connection was blunt and devastating: if women could vote, they could elect officials who would enforce safety laws. If they couldn’t, they could only watch while the men who let their sisters burn faced no consequences.
Rose Schneiderman — the garment worker and labor organizer who had risen to prominence after the Triangle fire — became one of the suffrage movement’s most powerful voices precisely because she refused to separate the vote from wages, from safety, from the daily indignities of factory life. For women like her, suffrage wasn’t an abstract right. It was a tool — the only tool they hadn’t yet been allowed to use.
The macro cost of suffrage is well documented. Women were arrested, beaten, and imprisoned for demanding the right to vote. The most infamous episode — the Night of Terror on November 14, 1917, at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia — came just days after New York’s women celebrated their state-level victory at the polls.
Thirty-three women, including the formidable Lucy Burns, were arrested for picketing outside the White House, where they had been standing for months as Silent Sentinels demanding President Wilson support a federal amendment. That night, guards at Occoquan attacked the prisoners. Women were thrown against iron beds and slammed into walls. Burns was chained to her cell door with her arms above her head and left that way through the night. When the women went on hunger strikes, they were force-fed through tubes — a practice that left them bruised, choking, and vomiting blood.
The public outcry was enormous. Newspapers carried the stories, and suffrage leaders used the brutality to turn public sentiment against a government that claimed to fight for democracy abroad while denying it to half its citizens at home. By 1918, President Wilson endorsed the amendment. Congress passed it in June 1919.
On August 18, 1920, Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state to ratify what became the Nineteenth Amendment — by a single vote, cast by a young legislator who changed his position after receiving a letter from his mother urging him to vote yes. Seventy-two years of organizing, and the final vote came down to a mother’s letter.
It is a story of courage and persistence, and it deserves to be told. But it is not the whole story.
For every Lucy Burns who endured a prison cell, there were thousands of women whose costs were quieter, more private, and no less real.
There was the immigrant mother who walked into a polling station bewildered and proud in equal measure — proud because someone had fought for this right, bewildered because no one in the world she came from had ever imagined she would need it. The cost for her wasn’t violence. It was disorientation — the slow, wrenching recognition that the ground beneath her life had shifted and she hadn’t been consulted.
There was her daughter, who had whispered suffrage slogans in her bedroom and marched with a sign her mother didn’t know about. Her cost was the look on her mother’s face — the moment when ambition and gratitude collided, when wanting something new meant rejecting the life her mother had sacrificed everything to build. In East Harlem’s Italian community, where family loyalty was the bedrock of identity, a daughter’s political awakening could feel like betrayal.
There were the Black women who marched alongside white women for a right they would be systematically denied for decades afterward. The Nineteenth Amendment didn’t mention race, but Jim Crow didn’t care about amendments. Black women in the South faced poll taxes, literacy tests, and outright intimidation designed to keep them from the ballot box. Native American women didn’t gain citizenship until 1924. Chinese-American women like Mabel Lee, who had marched in New York’s 1917 suffrage parade, remained barred from citizenship by the Chinese Exclusion Act. And American-born women who had married non-citizen husbands remained legally stateless until the Cable Act of 1922 began — slowly, incompletely — to untangle citizenship from marriage.
The cost of suffrage, like every other cost of becoming in early twentieth-century America, was never evenly distributed.
And there were the women who watched from windows. The seamstress who paused mid-stitch as the marchers passed. The young mother who pulled her daughter back from the curb. The old woman on the fire escape, wrapped in a shawl, studying the procession below with an expression no one could read. These women didn’t march. Some couldn’t afford to. Some had husbands or fathers or priests who would have made their lives unbearable. Some simply weren’t ready — not yet, not today, not with the children needing dinner and the rent due Friday. Their cost was watching and staying still, carrying the knowledge of what was possible without yet having the means to reach for it.
By the spring of 1919 — the year the Promise Trilogy begins — the suffrage fight had entered its final chapter. Congress was debating what would become the Nineteenth Amendment. New York’s women had been voting for two years, and the sky had not fallen. The republic, as the suffragists had predicted, had not crumbled.
But in East Harlem, the atmosphere was charged with more than suffrage. The influenza pandemic had swept through the neighborhood the previous fall, killing thousands and leaving behind a grief that didn’t have a public vocabulary. Returning soldiers were flooding back into a city that had changed while they were gone. The Red Scare was making immigrants targets of suspicion. And the ratification battle that would decide whether the rest of America’s women could vote was playing out against all of it.
For Lucie Santoro — seventeen, the first daughter in her family to graduate high school, caught between her mother’s expectations and her own growing sense of what her life could be — the question of the vote was tangled up with every other question about women remaking their lives in early 20th-century America. Could you honor the sacrifices your family had made and still want something they never imagined? Could you step into public life without losing your place in the private world that had raised you? Could you become something new without breaking the people who loved the person you used to be?
These are the questions that the suffrage parades raised but couldn’t answer — because the answers were different for every woman, on every block, in every family. They are the questions that play out in the Promise Trilogy, where the cost of becoming is never abstract. It is always personal, always specific, and always paid by someone who didn’t get to choose the price.
This is part of the world Sherilyn explores across all her fiction — read more about women remaking their lives in early 20th-century America.
Loved this update and prompt to reflect on what I enjoy, unearned, but in debt to ancestors.
Thank you
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