Three Women
Kauffman, L.A.
Three Women The LaFollettes espoused an early feminism BY L.A. KAUFFMAN Hidden away, like much of women's history—in archives, footnotes, out-of-print books, and yellowed newsprint—are...
...By 1914, she was traveling around the country to speak for suffrage and filling the page with discussions of the burden of war on women...
...They were, to describe them in somewhat spacious terms, respectively a populist, a Bohemian, and an iconoclast...
...When on the Chautauqua lecture circuit for women's suffrage in 1912, Fola came to one town only to find that opponents had blocked the distribution of all leaflets and tickets for the event...
...In her 1926 book, Concerning Women, Suzanne linked anarchism and feminism, and rejected suffrage as an ineffective reformist measure...
...While Robert LaFollette's style was to defend the victims of capitalism rather than attack capitalism itself, Suzanne—at least in the 1920s—called for the total abolition of the State...
...Undaunted, she found her own audience—the lecture hall janitor—and reportedly converted him to the cause...
...Sara Josephine Baker—who met on a regular basis to share insights and hash out political differences...
...The "Home and Education" feature became more political as the years went on and Belle's activism grew...
...Kauffman is a former editorial intern at The Progressive...
...Belle Case, Fola, and Suzanne LaFollette lived at the cutting edge of history, though history has taken little note of their lives...
...She wrote not for LaFollette's but for the radical and iconoclastic Freeman, a political and literary journal of the early 1920s which regularly denounced social reform, liberalism, and American socialism...
...A frequent contributor to LaFollette's and other publications, Fola worked with the famous Village Bohemians, and was a member of the Village's radical feminist organization, Heterodoxy...
...She assisted women strikers in New York, spoke out in favor of Actors Equity, and marched in the annual Fifth Avenue suffrage parade...
...In 1915, she became a charter member of the Women's Peace Party and used the page to espouse its platform...
...and Suzanne LaFollette, a cousin...
...Suzanne LaFollette was an aberration in the LaFollette family—a philosophical anarchist in the midst of progressive reformers...
...When The Progressive was founded as LaFollette's in 1909, Belle Case LaFollette assumed the task of editing a "Home and Education" page...
...Belle took the standard women's page of the day and gave it a prairie populist twist...
...At a major feminist forum held at New York's Cooper Hall, she delivered a speech defending a woman's right to keep her own name after marriage...
...They were, like most of us, neither heroic nor monumental figures, but they made important contributions to the struggles and, indeed, to the vitality of their time...
...uncowed by the lost subscriptions, she took to the lecture circuit to promote the cause...
...Fola LaFollette, their daughter...
...Several ideological progressions later, she helped found a second Freeman, dumping radical anarchism for conservative libertarianism...
...For Fola, the group provided a welcome sanctuary from public hostility over her father's Senate vote against America's entry into World War I. Fola LaFollette clearly had her father's fighting spirit...
...An assistant to her Uncle Bob in 1917, when he voted against U.S...
...Throughout Suzanne's life, though, one strain remained consistent: governmental authority over individual autonomy was, as she saw it, an intolerable evil...
...Founded in 1912, Heterodoxy was a group of activists and artists—including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Susan Glaspell, Crystal Eastman, Agnes de Mille, and Dr...
...Belle's daughter Fola, an actress by profession, found her home in New York's Greenwich Village...
...Beyond that, they shared a broad concern with women's rights, a deep personal commitment to social change, and, true to their name, an indefatigable spirit of insurgency...
...participation in The War to End All Wars, Suzanne wrote in her diary, "The only kind of war I believe in is revolution...
...KAUFFMAN Hidden away, like much of women's history—in archives, footnotes, out-of-print books, and yellowed newsprint—are fragments of the lives of three lesser-known members of the LaFollette family: Belle Case LaFollette, wife and partner of "Fighting Bob...
...Meanwhile, Belle's audacious attacks on segregation sparked a heated controversy among LaFollette's readers...
...It was one of the magazine's most eclectic offerings: Alongside tips on cooking with corn meal and washing woolens ran updates on the women's suffrage movement, profiles of such activists as Mother Jones, and information on women's union organizing...
Vol. 48 • July 1984 • No. 7
