When I walked out of Hamilton almost ten years ago, I was enraptured and obsessed like everyone else. But I still wanted “girl version” of that great, sweeping historical story. Even then, I thought about the suffrage movement: it had the noble quest for equality, powered by complicated women with dynamic personalities, and eventual triumph. It had friendships, feuds and love stories. And now, with the arrival of Suffs on Broadway, that story is being told in a big, glorious way.
Suffs tells the story of Alice Paul and the final years in great fight for women to get the vote in America. It opens with a bunch of nice older ladies including Carrie Chapman Catt, the leader of the Suffs, singing “Let Mother Vote.” It’s 1913, the fight for the vote has been going on for a long time now (over sixty years) and it is being waged politely, by older conservative women.
And then Alice Paul shows up. She is our Hamilton. Our brilliant, hyper-focused, dedicated radical ready to die for the cause she believes in...or even more powerfully, ready to devote her life to it. There will be no marriage or motherhood for Alice, only suffrage.
Alice leads her fellow radicals Suffs—Doris Stevens, Lucy Burns, Inez Milholland, and Ruza Wenclawska—in increasingly more provocative stunts that capture the attention of the nation and revitalize the women’s cause. They start with the spectacular parade of 1913, the campaign against President Wilson’s reelection. They move onto picketing the white House before embarking on hunger strikes in prison. Finally, their ferocity pays off.
The show doesn’t shy away from the divisions within the Suffrage movement. One of the most powerful threads in the story is the tension between establishment leader Carrie and upstart Alice. But it also leans into the real divisions between Black and white women in the movement and gives leaders like Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell their rightful place in the narrative.
There are two things that I missed from the show. First, a sense of how long women had been fighting for the vote when the story begins. The legendary Susan B. Anthony had already lived a long life and died years before the starting number. To me, an awareness of how long this had been going on adds a sense of urgency and frustration.
Second—and this should not be a spoiler alert—but I wanted a bigger moment of celebration when women did get the vote. The Suffs did the impossible! They got men to vote them into the constitution! It is INSANE to me that they accomplished what they did—and when and how. It’s a major achievement that deserves celebration.
One thing that is really special about this story and this production is this: in a world where women had only 35% of speaking roles and only 28% of films had female protagonists in 2023, Suffs was 2.5 hours of women talking, singing and portraying complicated, complex and heroic female characters. Not only that, but women of all ages, of all colors, or different abilities are on that stage. But that has what the Suffrage movement has always been abou: giving women a chance to speak up, to make a difference, to be the difference.
It’s no small thing that these women are finally getting their moment in the spotlight. We have all overlooked the original Suffs for too long. This show is such a joyous, entertaining and wonderful way to rediscover them.
Check out: this segment includes highlights from the show, interviews with the show’s creator Shaina Taub and producers Hillary Clinton and Malala Yousafzai, plus fun behind-the-scenes footage.