Suffrage Rummage Sale, A.
Winsor, Mary. A Suffrage Rummage Sale: Play in One Act. [Haverford, P.O., Pa, Privately printed, 1913].
Pamphlet: 5-1/4" x 7-9/16"; 12 pp.; printed self-wrappers (stapled); minor touches of wear; near fine.
Friedl, in her anthology of suffrage plays, writes that Mary Winsor served as President of the Pennsylvania Limited Suffrage League after its founding in 1909. (The League supported votes for women, but sought other restrictions on the franchise.) Despite adopting a more conservative stance toward the vote than NAWSA and its affiliates, the Pennsylvania Limited Suffrage League, under Winsor's leadership, welcomed more radical suffragists such as Alice Paul, Emmeline Pankhurst and Charlotte Perkins Gilman as speakers. Winsor also encouraged the group to put on suffrage plays and pageants. Emily Sargent Lewis, for instance, wrote "Election Day" in 1912. The following year, Winsor produced this sketch which she intended to be staged in the midst of a real auction. The piece depicts three anti-suffrage characters—Mrs. Grundy, Mrs. Partington and The Mad Hatter—attempting to disrupt a suffrage auction. Mrs. Grundy represents the affluent and comfortable anti-suffragist ("Her manner is…honeyed, patronizing, very determined and dictatorial…She is quite aware of her own importance"). Mrs. Partington, a stock British anti-suffragist figure, is a stout, strong woman of the working class, usually depicted with a broom (with which she intends to 'sweep back the tide' of woman suffrage). The Mad Hatter "is the last male crazy enough to support Mrs. Grundy's dictum for proper womanly behavior…" [Friedl]. The auctioneer rebuts their arguments in "The Auctioneer's Speech.” The speech, however, existed only in typewritten copies. When an organization staged A Suffrage Rummage Sale, Winsor supplied a single copy of the speech and insisted it be returned to her [and, thus, does not accompany the printed play, as here].
Mary Winsor (1869-1956) was a member of a prominent Philadelphia family; she advocated socialism, birth control, feminism, woman suffrage and peace and disarmament. She founded the Pennsylvania Committee for Total Disarmament and worked throughout her life in the cause of world peace. Her papers are now in the Swarthmore College Peace Collection. OCLC notes only one copy of A Suffrage Rummage Sale at Brown University; likely Swarthmore also holds a copy. Friedl reprints the sketch in her anthology, On To Victory, pp. 243-251. Not in the NAWSA Collection at the Library of Congress. Extremely scarce in the original printing.
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