Today in Herstory: NAWSA Releases Pro-Suffrage Film (15 june 1912)

[niyad]

Today in Herstory: NAWSA Releases Pro-Suffrage Film

June 15, 1912: Always eager to take advantage of any opportunity to promote the cause, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (N.A.W.S.A.) has made the first pro-suffrage motion picture. The two-reel epic, suitably entitled “Votes for Women,” was shown for the first time today to an audience of suffragists gathered at the Bryant Theater on 42nd Street in Manhattan.

The new film will go nationwide on the 26th, and features a number of prominent suffragists cast as themselves. Among the best known players are Jane Addams of Hull House; Rev. Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, President of N.A.W.S.A.; Inez Milholland, Mary Beard and Harriet May Mills. All turned in fine performances.

That the drama was made at all is a tribute to suffragist creativity and quick thinking. N.A.W.S.A. was suddenly given the opportunity to use this relatively new medium, but only if its members could write their own script and be ready to perform it at 11 a.m. the next morning. As always, suffragists rose to the occasion, in this case employing the writing talents of Mary Ware Dennett, Harriet Laidlaw and Frances Maule Bjorkman, all of whom appeared in the film.

The story they came up with revolves around the actions taken by settlement workers, in concert with suffragists, to reform the uncaring owner of a run-down tenement, who also happens to be a State Senator whose vote is crucial to suffrage legislation. Not having votes, the women must resort to “indirect influence” on the Senator. They do this through his fiancee, who they win over first.

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http://feminist.org/blog/index.php/2015/06/15/today-in-herstory-nawsa-releases-pro-suffrage-film/