PHOTOGRAPH: Publicity Photograph of Anita Pollitzer as National Chairman of the National Woman's Party.
[Suffrage]. Pollitzer, Anita. Publicity Photograph of Anita Pollitzer as National Chairman of the National Woman’s Party. [NP], [ND].
Glossy photograph: 5 x 7,” with typed caption attached at lower edge: “Anita Pollitzer, Chairman of the New York City Committee, National Women’s Party is the newly elected National Chairman of the National Woman’s Party”; fine.
Anita Pollitzer (1894-1975), suffragist and equal rights activist, was born in Charleston, South Carolina. As a young woman, she developed an interest in art and in 1913 she entered Teachers College at Columbia University where she met Georgia O'Keeffe, a fellow student. Pollitzer’s enthusiasm for the latter’s work led to the most enduring and important relationship of O'Keeffe’s career — Pollitzer showed the nascent artist’s work to Alfred Stieglitz and thus initiated one of the most remarkable associations in American art. But shortly after her graduation, Pollitzer found her own interest in art subsumed by her new conviction in the woman suffrage movement; within a short period, she met Alice Paul, joined the National Woman’s Party and, though she may not have realized it fully, had made a lifetime commitment to women’s rights. The attractive Pollitzer, as this photograph conveys, combined a winsome appearance with a soft Southern charm that belied the steely determination of her convictions. Paul recognized that her new recruit would be an effective lobbyist. For the last years of the campaign for a woman suffrage amendment, Anita Pollitzer crisscrossed the country organizing and lobbying. With her National Woman Party colleagues, she picketed the White House and was arrested. However, she proved most effective, not on the front lines, but behind the scenes talking to politicians at all levels as the party’s “Legislative Secretary.” When the Susan B. Anthony amendment went to the states for ratification, she traveled from state to state as each considered ratification. Pollitzer dined with the young Tennessee legislator Harry Burns just before the vote on ratification and NAW credits her with persuading him to cast the deciding “Yes” vote (though we like to think that his mother’s words also moved him).
If passage of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment marked a great victory, Pollitzer realized with Alice Paul and others that another great campaign — that for equal rights — had just begun. The National Woman’s Party proposed an ERA amendment in 1923, and Pollitzer gave the seconding speech. She continued to work for women’s rights nationally and internationally, earning a Master’s in International Law from Columbia in 1933. When the United Nations formed in 1945, she participated in the San Francisco conference and sought to ensure women’s rights in their charter (as well as other international conventions).
When Alice Paul decided to remove herself as President of the National Woman’s Party in 1945, she designated Anita Pollitzer, then a close colleague of nearly twenty years, as her successor. This photograph likely dates from that year. Though Pollitzer herself thought her predecessor a far more able strategist, her tenure as National Chairman (1945-1949) showed her an able and sometimes brilliant leader.
NAW, The Modern Period, pp. 551-552.
Susan B. Anthony Slept Here, by Sherr and Kazickas, p. 406.
“Up Hill With Banners Flying,” by Irwin, pp. 126, 336-446, 452, 455, 465-468, 473.
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