Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [779]
With both hands-off and hands-on advocates concurring that government should be turned over to (in Godkin’s words) “thoughtful, educated, high-minded men,” representatives of both perspectives inched their way toward the conclusion that universal suffrage was the major stumbling block to professionalizing government.
One strategy for curtailing the influence of the urban masses was advanced by Simon Sterne, a New York lawyer and University of Heidelberg graduate who promoted the English idea of “cumulative voting,” a nostrum calculated to restore the influence of the educated minority. Others proposed giving extra weight to the ballots of college graduates or establishing literacy tests to screen out the uncultivated. Godkin suggested giving propertied taxpayers power to veto city expenditures adopted by “the representatives of mere numbers” or treating the city as a corporation and letting only those who held stock in it vote.
Though suffrage restriction remained a minority prescription, it won some sympathy in the most surprising quarters. In Democratic Vistas (1871) Walt Whitman denounced the terrible deficiencies of America’s democratic society in the age of Grant and Tweed. Looking his times “searchingly in the face,” Whitman found himself unable to “gloss over the appalling dangers of universal suffrage”—the “half-brained nominees,” the “savage, wolfish parties,” the governments “saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, maladministration.” Most distressing of all was the fate of his beloved cities, New York and Brooklyn. Certainly there was still much to admire: the “oceanic amplitude and rush,” the “hurrying, feverish, electric crowds,” the “costly and lofty new buildings.” But these aesthetic delights could not outweigh the “demonism of greed,” the “robbery and scoundrelism,” and the ascension of “a mob of fashionably dressed speculators and vulgarians” whose antics were matched only by the “plentiful meanness and vulgarity” of the masses below. The city had betrayed the promise of its artisanal republican youth, and Whitman could summon up only a nebulous hope for its moral renaissance.
“WOMEN: THEIR RIGHTS AND NOTHING LESS”
The booming metropolitan economy opened up opportunities for middle-class women to make their mark in professional and managerial positions—particularly those geared toward serving other women. Jane Cunningham Croly was a regular news columnist who published collections of her pieces under the pen name “Jennie June.” Dr. Clemence Lozier was a highly regarded obstetrician who had established the New York Medical College and Hospital for Women in 1863, from which Dr. Susan Smith, daughter of a Weeksville pork merchant, graduated in 1870 to become New York’s first female African-American doctor, and later founder of a Women’s Hospital and Dispensary in Brooklyn. Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, daughter of George Palmer Putnam, studied medicine in Paris, taught at the Women’s Medical College, and in 1872 would found the Women’s Medical Association of New York City. Ellen Louise Demorest’s Mirror of Fashions by now had sixty thousand readers, some as far away as mining settlements in Colorado and isolated farms in the Midwest. Sarah Payson Willis (Fanny Fern), now nearly sixty, was still the greatest circulation draw at Robert Bonner’s Ledger, and Margaret Getchell, general manager of Macy’s, was responsible for many of the firm’s innovations.
Despite these individual successes, which built on the prewar legislative victories that allowed wives to keep their own earnings, middle-class females in general found themselves repeatedly thwarted in efforts to crack male monopolization of professional positions. When three women applied to Columbia Law School, one trustee responded, “No woman shall degrade herself by practicing law,