usicals based on real-life events, if done well, can be compelling. This Broadway season brought us Suffs, nominated for six Tonys, which illuminates the final years in the campaign to obtain a federal amendment guaranteeing female suffrage. The production focuses on the movement leaders—Carrie Chapman Catt, Alice Paul, Lucy Burns (class of 1902), Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, Inez Milholland (class of 1909), Ruth Wenclawska, and Doris Stevens, whose hard work and determination ultimately led to the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920.

The musical stands out for a stellar, all-female cast, wonderful songs, imaginative sets, and striking costumes, making for a fun evening at the theater. Catt comes off as a forceful personality, with oratorical skills and confidence in her very strategic approach to pushing suffrage over the victory line. Alice Paul is young, energetic, determined, and unafraid to oppose Catt and her go-slower approach to the campaign, a conflict that ultimately led Alice Paul and Lucy Burns to break away from Catt’s National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) to form the National Woman’s Party. We see Milholland’s passionate commitment to suffrage and other social justice movements, and her sense of the theatrical. President Woodrow Wilson, portrayed satirically, is both patronizing and prevaricating in his approach to the suffragists.

The story of those last years before the passage of the 19th Amendment is one of many twists and turns. Suffs captures important moments in that history—the drama of the 1913 parade, which took place in Washington, DC, on the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, the picketing of the White House during Wilson’s second term, and the subsequent jailing and force-feeding of the picketers.

The musical certainly reflects some of the current scholarship on the suffrage campaign. For example, the play depicts Catt’s personal, decades-long partnership with Mollie Garrett Hay. By highlighting the activism of Polish immigrant Wenclawska, Suffs shows that the suffrage movement was not only composed of elitist, white women, but was, in the words of historian Robyn Muncy (“Gender, Race, Class, and the Vote from the 19th Amendment to COVID 19,” Kalmanovitz Institute for Labor and the Working Poor), a cross-class, cross-race coalition. The musical does a good job on the issue of race, underscoring the persistent efforts of African American women to claim their full rights as citizens by demanding the vote.

Suffs calls attention to two great Black activists, Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell, who worked on behalf of social justice and confronted the racism of many white suffragists. One highlight is the push by Black women to be included in the massive suffrage parade held the day before Wilson’s inauguration. In particular, the women of Howard University, led by Terrell, wished to march as a college/alumnae delegation alongside the other college groups, and Wells demanded that she be able to march as part of the official Illinois suffrage delegation, rather than in a separate Black group.

The play focuses on Alice Paul’s resistance to their demands for fear of alienating white southern women. Nevertheless, Terrell’s determination, and the help of her ally—a very persistent Milholland—paid off. The Howard group proudly marched as part of the larger collegiate delegation. The always resolute Wells took her place in the larger Illinois delegation. And, as historian Alison Parker writes in Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell (The University of North Carolina Press, 2020), because of widespread pushback against the effort to segregate the march, many African American women marched with their state delegations or as members of various occupations.

Suffs also highlights the tensions between the generations in the movement, with older women, such as NAWSA’s Catt, emphasizing more moderate tactics in pushing for suffrage, and the younger Paul, Burns, and others adopting a more militant approach. These divisions by age were not always so neat; the older Harriot Stanton Blatch (class of 1878) often allied herself with Paul. Terrell, also an elder, joined the younger women in picketing the White House during WWI, where they denounced Wilson for his refusal to endorse women’s suffrage, a move firmly opposed by Catt and NAWSA. Nevertheless, the narrative points to an important, age-old tendency of younger activists to be impatient with the tactics and approaches of their elders. This is brought home at the end of the play, when a young Black feminist of the 1970s confronts Paul, now an elder, on her unwillingness to push for African American women’s voting rights. Paul’s response, that she had to prioritize the one goal—to pass the 19th Amendment—is reminiscent of the kind of things Catt said some 50 years earlier to the younger Paul, who had pushed against NAWSA’s go-slower approach.

Providing an entertaining look at a complicated history in the space of an evening entails altering and simplifying some of the facts. Vassar alums might be disappointed to see no acknowledgment of how the Vassar experience influenced two of the most important leaders. There is much discussion of Paul’s coming to political consciousness at Swarthmore College, but no mention of Milholland’s college years. Long before she became famous for leading suffrage parades on horseback, Milholland made national news as a Vassar junior, when she responded to the College ban on campus suffrage activities by organizing a student suffrage rally in the adjacent cemetery, featuring speeches by well-known feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, alum Blatch, and labor organizer Rose Schneiderman. Lucy Burns is featured in the musical as a good friend and political partner to Paul. The show refers, several times, to their friendship developed at Swarthmore, though they were not in college together. Rather, Burns attended Vassar, where she befriended suffragist and social justice advocate Crystal Eastman, class of 1903, who became important to her growing political consciousness.

Nevertheless, Suffs leaves the audience with some historical truths that can be inspiring. We see that setbacks during the intensive campaign for suffrage were recurrent. But the passage of the 19th Amendment shows how perseverance can pay off. Today, we know that the march to truly inclusive social justice can stall and even move backward. As the cast sings at the end of the production, “progress is possible but not guaranteed.”