Shaina Taub
Last summer, writer and performer Shaina Taub was in the middle of band practice when she got the call that would change her life. “I can’t believe it, but we were rehearsing my song ‘She Persisted,’” Taub says, when she answered the phone and learned that Suffs, her musical about the fight for women’s suffrage from 1913 to 1920, was officially headed to Broadway this spring. “I fell to the floor,” Taub says. The next step was finding producers to help bring this often-untold chapter of American history to life.
“There really wasn’t a conversation,” Taub says. She wrote letters to Hillary Clinton and Malala Yousafzai, two longtime women’s rights advocates who became enamored with Suffs after seeing the show during its sold-out run at the Public Theater. Clinton says she was touched to find out her own work had been influential for Taub: “She said that, when I was running for president, she felt compelled to write something that would make women’s history come alive and help audiences realize that women had changed the world in the past, often in very difficult circumstances, and that we can do it again.”
Hillary Clinton and Malala Yousafzai.
For Taub, the move to Broadway will not only be a chance to shine theater’s biggest spotlight on women’s suffrage, but also a childhood dream come true. “My first time seeing a Broadway show was in 1996, when we saw Beauty and the Beast,” she recalls. “I was like, I’m in.” Now, at 35, Taub is making some history of her own: She is not only making her Broadway debut as a star of Suffs, but has also written the book, music, and lyrics. “Part of why I’m wearing so many hats,” she says, “is because I want a young girl to see me and be like, ‘Oh, I could do that.’”
Taub will play Alice Paul, the radical leader of the National Woman’s Party who is hell-bent on securing women the right to vote, even if it means dismissing women of color in the process. A central theme of Suffs is the intergenerational tension between the younger, restless suffragists, like Paul, demanding change now, and the battle-scarred suffragists, such as Carrie Chapman Catt, who understand that change often takes time. It’s a dynamic any politician or activist will recognize. But perhaps no one understands that path to progress better than Clinton and Yousafzai.
Co-producers Rachel Sussman, Jill Furman, and Clinton.
History-book legends in their own right, Clinton made an indelible mark on American politics as the woman who’s come closest to being president, while Nobel Peace Prize winner Yousafzai has fought for equitable access to girls’ education since the Taliban banned girls in her Pakistani village from going to school in 2008. “I have been doing this work for as long as I can remember,” says Yousafzai, now 26. “You wonder, Will this ever change? The suffrage movement is one of the success stories.…I want to remain optimistic and positive about the future of girls’ education. And Suffs gave me that hope.”
Both Clinton and Yousafzai have produced for the screen and have founded production companies—HiddenLight and Extracurricular, respectively. “When I started my activism, I was 11 years old, and all I had was my story,” Yousafzai says. “When I think about activism for girls’ rights or gender equality, I believe storytelling is the heart of it.” But this is the first time the theater lovers have produced a Broadway show. “Art—particularly narrative art—truly has the power to change minds,” Clinton says. “And art has always been a part of every successful social movement. So in a very profound way, Suffs is a form of activism.”
The company of Suffs.
Suffs, which Taub began writing as a volunteer for Clinton’s 2016 campaign, will now premiere during another election year—and in a divided country where millions of women have little to no access to abortion. “To me, this story is important because it’s evidence we’re able to push back against impossible odds,” she says. Clinton adds, “We live in a world where people increasingly expect change to happen overnight and get discouraged when it doesn’t, but it takes time and a lot of hard work….Suffs reminds us that progress is possible, but not guaranteed.”
Suffs and the women behind it are also here to remind us that, come November, we have one specific tool in our hands: “Everybody who’s eligible has the right to vote,” Clinton says. “Don’t waste it. This is what the suffragists fought so long and hard for.”
A version of this article appears in the April 2024 issue of ELLE.