A Historian Faces the Music

Historians are detectives. We read other people’s mail, mine archives, devour obituaries. We are storytellers who are passionate about facts. That obsession can make it difficult to enjoy even the most engaging historical fiction, like the dazzling Broadway show Suffs. Voted “outstanding new Broadway musical” by Outer Circle Critics in 2024, Suffs won Tonys for best book and best original score.

The show closed in January, after a nine-month run. Its national tour begins in September. Among its producers were Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai and Hillary Rodham Clinton ’69.

Women and nonbinary people play every role—​including President Woodrow Wilson and Dudley Malone, identified as Wilson’s chief of staff. Malone never served in the White House. More disconcerting was casting a Black actor in that role, because Wilson’s administration segregated the federal workforce.

That was not the first moment I annoyed my seatmate with whispered corrections.

Suffs is about the fight for woman suffrage. After decades of failed state referendum and Congressional campaigns, Suffs covers the final push, culminating with ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. It outlawed denying voting rights “on account of sex” and enfranchised 27 million white and Black women.

Suffs focuses on the generational conflict between partisans. Alice Paul, a militant Quaker, led the younger cohort. She had been jailed and force-fed while supporting British suffragists. Returning to the U.S. in 1910, Paul introduced “outdoor tactics” to a moribund movement. Overcoming objections that street action was vulgar, Paul staged a spectacle in Washington, D.C.

On March 3, 1913, the day before Wilson’s inauguration, attorney Inez Milholland, on horseback, led nine bands, 24 floats, and at least 5,000 women down Pennsylvania Avenue, toward a pageant at the Treasury Building. Mary Church Terrell joined Howard’s Delta Sigma Thetas. Ida B. Wells marched with white Illinois allies.

Marchers made it four blocks before being attacked by hooligans and drunkards. The riot dominated the headlines, elevated Paul, and alarmed senior suffragists. Suffs captures Paul’s impatience with “old fogeys” like Carrie Chapman Catt, of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

Catt was a brilliant organizer. She created a short-lived, biracial, multi-ethnic, cross-class coalition and directed a two-tiered state and federal strategy. It won the required two-thirds vote in Congress and ratification by three-quarters of the states. Catt dismissed Paul as politically naïve and “stupendously stupid” because she eschewed bipartisan politics.

The two never appeared together or spoke after April 1917, the year Paul launched the first-ever White House pickets.

Suffs is fiction—a passionate, outraging, uplifting depiction of a suspenseful political drama. My objection is that it is misleading. Too many Americans know too little history, so why embroider an already action-packed story?

Why claim that Paul met Lucy Burns playing field hockey at Swarthmore when they met in a London jail? Why depict Paul as a frequent picketer when she only joined the “Silent Sentinels” once, wearing a fur coat, having arranged for her five daily papers to be delivered to the jail and her secretary to visit weekly?

Most alarming to historians like Elaine Weiss, whose book The Woman’s Hour informed the musical’s plot, is sending Paul to Nashville for the final vote. Only Catt was there when Harry Burn, a 24-year-old Republican member of the Tennessee state legislature (not a senator), got a letter from his mother (not a telegram). It urged him to “Be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt … with ratification.” That line is not included.

To its credit, Suffs captures not only generational conflict, in the song “This Girl,” but also the racial tensions within the movement. Ida B. Wells never confronted Paul directly, but she refused to “Wait My Turn,” as she sings. The musical also acknowledges the twice-widowed Catt’s longstanding partnership with Mary Garrett Hay.

Suffs challenges historians to be equally engaging and exciting storytellers, with footnotes. The finale, “Keep Marching,” had the audience cheering, stomping, crying, inspired to “Finish the Fight!”—which was Catt’s slogan, not Paul’s.