The Votes for Women Grocery Store and Other Tales of Upper West Side Suffragists

by Pam Tice
Pam Tice is a member of the Bloomingdale Neighborhood History Group

The opening of the Votes for Women Grocery Store at 2540 Broadway at West 95th Street in February 1913 made news across the country. The store was a project of Sophia Kremer of 233 West 83rd Street, a Hungarian immigrant and the wife of Dr. Geza Kremer. The profits from the store were to be used for suffrage work in the “upper part” of the city.

Sophia Kremer was just one of several suffragists who lived on the Upper West Side. Their determination to pursue the right to vote resonates today as women struggle to gain and regain rights.
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The campaign for women’s suffrage re-ignited during the Progressive Era. Women in neighborhoods all over the city took up the cause, launching a new movement after the deaths of both Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in 1902. Stanton is commemorated today in the renaming of the building at 250 West 94th Street where she lived with her daughter, Harriet Stanton Blasch, who herself was an important suffragist. After failing in 1915, the New York suffragists reached success in 1917 in passing an amendment to the New York State Constitution granting women full suffrage. This was a first for an eastern state and helped lead the way to the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1919.

Mrs. Kremer had incorporated as Suffrage Pure Foods Stores Company as she cleverly combined two big issues of the day: woman suffrage and pure food. Her board members were Sarah Meyer, Alice Snitjer Burke, and Aimee Hutchinson. They had hopes of opening more stores “further up Broadway and perhaps in the Bronx.” There’s no evidence that this happened and it’s not clear how long the first store stayed in business. William Astor’s Market opened across Broadway in 1915, a much larger enterprise.
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The Votes for Women Grocery Store products and operations tell us a lot about grocery store shopping in the Progressive Era.
Upton Sinclair’s 1906 book The Jungle was one of numerous efforts around the country that got Congress to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906, an effort to produce hygienically and properly labeled products. In 1913 consumers used the Westfield Book of Pure Foods produced by chemistry professor Lewis B. Allyn of the Westfield (Massachusetts) Normal School. He analyzed manufactured food products and shared his knowledge in the book that Mrs. Kremer sold at her store. She committed to stocking only those products.

The Votes for Women store stocked foods produced on local farms in New York and New Jersey. These were sent to the store directly, avoiding middle-man costs, and passing the savings onto the customers. The products included chickens, home-cured ham, butter, eggs (35 to 40 cents per dozen), and honey. One farmer’s wife had agreed to supply country sausage, unsalted butter, head cheese, pig’s feet, scrapple, and sauerkraut. All “ordinary” groceries of the best grades would be available at regular prices.

The store opened at 7:30 a.m. Yellow was the suffrage color, so it had a yellow front, yellow banner, yellow parcel cord, and a yellow delivery wagon, although “good suffragists” were asked to take home their own packages, Each egg was labeled “Votes for Women,” and a suffrage brochure tucked into every package.

On opening day, it was reported that a man “came to rubber” (slang for gaping), and perhaps buy a pack of matches. When he left, he’d bought six pounds of cheese, two dozen eggs, a large bottle of olives, and three pounds of candy.

One newspaper report about opening day confirmed that the only man regularly in the store would be the ice-man making a delivery. Women would handle the customers and clean the shop. The New York Times described what the women working there wore: white linen waists and dark blue woolen skirts with a white butcher’s apron. Mrs. Burke wore a crushed raspberry linen skirt with a white apron, and Miss Hutchinson a green dress with a white apron. All of them had “Votes for Women” buttons on their white aprons. Zip, the store dog, had the same button on his blanket. He belonged to Mrs. Nevins, a Captain in the 15th Assembly District, who was working in the store also, along with Mrs. Elizabeth Morton, her counterpart in the 17th AD.
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The yellow delivery wagon with its “Votes for Women” signage was originally handled by two boys who handled the purchases of women who chose not to carry them home. Within a month, the boys suddenly went on strike one day, too upset to work any longer due to the teasing they had to endure. Mrs. Kremer asserted “Girls wouldn’t have deserted us during a busy day. We put on our hats and did the deliveries ourselves.” She did admit to having some help from “regular” delivery boys and a couple of Boy Scouts. Later, there were reports of “two strapping women” hired to do the job.

​The publication of the Woman Suffrage Party, The Woman Voter, referenced regular Saturday evening meetings at 96th and Broadway, enrolling both men and women who supported the suffrage cause. The grocery store served as “a rostrum” for Wednesday afternoon meetings for high school students when Aimee Hutchinson would speak.

The grocery store was not Sophia Kremer’s first suffrage project. In September 1911, Sophia Kremer was featured in news articles as the “originator” of the first women’s political club at 120 West 85th Street. Here, she hoped to prove that her suffrage clubhouse would demonstrate the successful combination of politics and domesticity. “Pure food will be our slogan,” she said. “Indeed, one of the reasons many women want to vote is to protect themselves and their families from slow poisoning and improper food supplies put on the market by the dealers.” The club served three meals a day in their restaurant. There were rooms for rent for women on the upper floors. Yellow was the predominant color for the wallpaper, candle shades, and stationery. There was a library, and weekly lectures and meetings were held there. They planned to have a “women’s exchange” shop where they would sell their specialty, preserved fruits as pure food, named for the leaders of the New York suffragists, “Cherries Penfield,” “Raspberry Laidlaw,” and “Peach Nathan.”

In October 1911, Mrs. Kremer was arrested at Broadway and West 87th Street as she and the leaders of the 15th Assembly District conducted an open-air meeting on the suffrage issue. The owner of a men’s furnishings store did not appreciate the disruption and called the police. Mrs. Kremer insisted that “headquarters” had approved of the event but she was taken to the precinct on West 100th Street. Meanwhile, 25 new members of the Woman Suffrage Party were signed up, and the women said their husbands would never shop at the haberdasher’s. Later, in a letter to The New York Times, Mrs. Penfield, the Chair of the Woman Suffrage Party, sought witnesses to this “irregular procedure.”
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By late 1912, the local political clubhouse for women, under the direction of Mrs. Kremer, was called the Interborough Suffrage League, located at 227 West 83rd Street. Mrs. Kremer’s photograph was splashed across the country by the newspapers when she and two friends decided to paint the clubhouse themselves after the landlord refused. She purchased “69 cent blue coveralls” which provided a great attraction, feeding on men’s fears that women who voted were both losing their femininity and taking on men’s tasks. The women commented that the coveralls were so practical, that they expected to wear them for all sorts of household duties.

The final story found about Mrs. Kremer was a brief mention in August 1917 that she was on her way to Washington D.C. to picket the White House.

Mrs. Kremer’s colleagues on the board of her grocery store company were also suffrage activists. Aimee Hutchinson was a young woman who gained some notoriety when she was fired from her job as a teacher at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament school at Broadway and 71st Street because she participated in the massive suffrage parade in August of 1912. Harriet Stanton Blatch seized on the opportunity to make a “martyr” of Miss Hutchinson, as an example of the kind of intimidation of pro-suffrage women faced from their employers. Hutchinson’s youth created comments that she “rivaled Inez Mulholland as the most beautiful suffragette.” She played an active role politically through 1917 when she began developing her career as an actor and a writer.

Alice Snitjer Burke also served on Mrs. Kremer’s board. In her thirties, she had been widowed twice: her first husband, Captain Armstrong, had been killed in the Spanish-American War while serving as one of Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Her second husband, Dr. Richardson Burke, died shortly after they were married. In the 1910 federal census, Mrs. Burke was living alone in an apartment at 2453 Broadway. She became a well-known suffragette by making speeches at Broadway and 96th Street for 165 consecutive nights.

In April 1916, Mrs. Burke and her friend Nell Richardson made history by embarking upon an automobile trip across the United States. The women chose this presidential election year, before each political party’s convention, in the hope that they would add a suffrage plank to their party platform. Alice Burke spent time in 1915 driving around New York State and speaking in support of woman suffrage in an auto labeled “Victory 1915.”

For the U.S. trip, Burke and Richardson drove in a yellow Saxon, nick-named the Golden Flyer, a lightweight car donated by the company which also worked out an itinerary for them that would bring them to a hotel every evening as they had no plans to camp out. Carrie Chapman Catt broke a bottle across the radiator as they left 42nd Street on the ferry to New Jersey and headed south.
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The auto was loaded with two yellow trunks, a “hand” sewing machine, a typewriter, a “fireless cooker” and the tools needed for repairs. When questioned about a woman’s ability to manage a car, Mrs. Burke noted that she “can run this machine without any help and without getting all messy.” The media coverage also included a black kitten named Saxon that someone gave them early in the trip.

​Intending to cover 75-100 miles a day, the women started down the eastern seaboard, traveled through the south, headed west to Texas and Arizona, and then reached the west coast. They headed north to Seattle, then across the west and mid-west to Chicago, and back to New York City. From time to time, Mrs. Burke wrote diary-style articles that were reported in various newspapers. She had a sense of humor, reporting on a horse that would not move across the road and how she talked suffrage to it in “equine” terms. Men gathered around when she had to change a sparkplug one day, and as she earned their respect for her mechanical skills, one commented, “A woman’s hand in the machinery of politics might have the same effect.”
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They created a media stir and were in the news quite often as they went across the county. The Saxon company began featuring them in their advertising as their automobile held up well. The trip lasted for 178 days and covered over 10,700 miles. This trip is often cited as an example of the strong connection between independent women and cars.

In his book, Notable New Yorkers of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Jim Mackin notes other suffragettes who were active during this same time. Mountaineer Anne Smith Peck, performance artist Jean Earl Moehle, educator May Gorslin Slosson, British suffragist Bettina Borrmann Wells, and perhaps the most well-known, Carrie Chapman Catt and her companion Mary Garrett Hay.

Sources
Tom Miller’s Daytonian in Manhattan (daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com)
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Various articles in the archives at www.newyorktimes.com, particularly Christopher Gray’s article on October 7, 2012, about Kremer’s apartment building
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