 Good evening, and welcome to the William G. McGowan Theater here at the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, I'm the Archivist of the United States, and I'm pleased to welcome you this evening, whether you're here with us in the theater or joining us through our YouTube or Facebook channels. And a special welcome to our C-SPAN audience today. I'm pleased you could join us for tonight's conversation about women and the vote, the 19th Amendment, power, media, and the making of a movement. Representing this program in partnership with the 2020 Women's Vote Centennial Initiative and the National Women's History Alliance, and we thank them for their support. Before we get started, I'd like to let you know about two other programs coming up soon in this theater. Tomorrow at noon, we will show part one of Ken Burns' documentary, Not For Ourselves Alone, the story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Part two will be shown on May 24th. And on Thursday, May 23rd, at 7 p.m. in American University, history professor Pamela Nadel will be here to tell us about her new book, America's Jewish Women, a History from Colonial Times to Today. Check our website at archives.gov or sign up at the table outside the theater to get email updates. You'll also find information about other National Archives programs and activities. And another way to get more involved with the National Archives is to become a member of the National Archives Foundation. The Foundation supports all of our education and outreach activity. And a little known secret that I keep telling everyone known has ever been turned down for membership in the National Archives Foundation. Tonight's discussion is part of a series of programs related to our recently opened exhibit, Rightfully Hers, American Women and the Vote. Rightfully Hers commemorates the centennial of the 19th anniversary and tells the story of women's struggles for voting rights as a critical step toward equal citizenship. The exhibit explores how American women across the spectrum of race, ethnicity and class advanced the cause of suffrage and follows the struggles for voting rights beyond 1920. The decades-long fight for the vote in the 19th and early 20th century engaged large numbers of women in the political process. And a critical part of that campaign was getting their message out to the nation and shifting public opinion to support their cause. Tonight we'll learn about the suffrage movement's communication machine and how it contributed to the movement's success. To introduce our panelists, I'd like to welcome Nancy Tate to the stage. Since 2015, she has served as the co-chair of the 2020 Women's Vote Centennial Initiative and also is on the board of the Turning Point Suffragist Memorial. From 2000 to 2015, she serves as the executive director of the League of Women Voters. Previously, she was chief operating officer of the National Academy of Public Administration and also served in the Department of Energy, the Department of Education, and the Office of Economic Opportunity. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Nancy Tate. Well, thank you. It's so wonderful to be here at the National Archives, especially in light of their new exhibit that he's just mentioned, rightfully hers. And I've just seen it and I encourage any of you who have not seen it yet to be sure to make a point of doing so. Well, as he mentioned, I am Nancy Tate. I am the co-chair of the 2020 Women's Vote Centennial Initiative and I am the former executive director of the League of Women Voters of the United States. The League is one of the co-founders of the Women's Vote Centennial Initiative, which is an information sharing collaboration of women's organizations and scholars around the country. And our goal is to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment in 2020 and to shed light on the powerful but little-known history of the 72-year struggle to win that constitutional right to vote. The League was founded in 1920 by Kerry Chapman-Cat, the leader of the largest suffrage organization, the National American Women's Suffrage Association. So 2020 is also the 100th anniversary of the League and we will be celebrating that across the country in our nearly 800 state and local leagues. But just a little bit more about WVCI, which is our acronym. We do two main sets of things. One is working to establish networks around the country of interested organizations and individuals who would like to know more about the centennial because we want to promote efforts to learn about this important aspect of American history and to commemorate it and to commemorate the full story of that struggle. Here in the D.C. area, we sponsor educational events like this one and we coordinate with exhibits starting to be held, as this one is, at the various museums and libraries around the city. So tonight, this program is part of our Women in the Vote Symposium Series. This is the third one that we have done in collaboration with the National Archives and we aim to have several more here in 2019 and 2020. Each of these will focus on different and probably not well known aspects of the overall suffrage movements and its struggle and will highlight points of relevance to contemporary issues. The 72-year fight for women's suffrage is a powerful historical story and it can be used to enhance our understanding of our own world and how to navigate it. You can learn more about WVCI and the resources we are making available by following us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram using the hashtag at 2020 centennial. But now I'm pleased to introduce tonight's panel. So we have our moderator, Tamara Keith, who is a White House correspondent and part of the Politics Monday team on the PBS News Hour. She's going to lead a conversation with Betsy Griffith, author of, in her own right, a book about suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Linda Lumsden, author of the book, Rampant Women, Suffragists in the Right of Assembly, and Rebecca Boggs-Roberts, author of Suffragists in Washington, DC, the 1913 Parade and the Fight for the Vote. So panel and Tamara, I turn it over to you. Thank you, everyone, for being here and thank you for the panel for being here. I'm going to let you carry all of the heavy weight on this. But, you know, we know how this story ends. This story ends with the 19th Amendment to the Constitution being ratified and we all get to vote. So the question that I'm hoping that we can cover tonight is how we got here and how we got to the end of that story in 1920, starting, though, in the 1900s, because it's a long story. So, Linda, I think that you have at least a bit of an overview that you can give us and maybe, and also, you can start at the very beginning of, or the early part of this century. Okay, yeah, and I'll condense it because it is a long story. But basically, I would say, and thank you so much for having me. When you're talking about the suffrage movement, so much of it is about communication and targeting. And very simply, what really was an impetus for women winning the vote in the 72-year struggle was in the 20th century when the women took to the streets. And basically, it's the emergence, I would say, of public women in the United States. And I know in Washington everybody's very familiar with the famous 1913 parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, which was a mob by a bunch of men. But actually, women had first started assembling in the 19th century. That was a big deal. It was threatened even for women to get together in conventions where they could share ideas and get a sense of community. From that, they moved on in the 20th century to soap boxing. And this is a big deal because women would claim a little bit of the public turf. Traditionally, male territory had been the public sphere. Women had been relegated to the domestic sphere, which basically cut them out of the political process. So I would say women taking to the first soap box was a really big deal. Also, two women started to petition going back to the abolition movement in the mid-1800s. This was a big deal for a woman who was supposed to be happy to just be in her house, to go outside that house and down the street and knock on somebody's door and ask them to sign the petition. And that was a political act not only for that solicitor, but also, too, for that woman who signed that petition. And it also started raising their consciousness about the own oppression in their lives. But basically, by the time we get to maybe the 1910s, which I think we're going to focus on, women are going to take one more step and they're going to start to parade. The first real suffrage parade I know of in New York goes back to 1908, where a woman named Maude Malone, who has been influenced by the British Suffragettes, will, I think, organize a group of six women to march down the street. But a thousand people follow them because it's a big deal. It's so unusual for women to take the streets and think of all the negative association that goes with that. Again, women are going to get bolder. There'll be the annual Fifth Avenue Parade to New York City. You're going to become a huge event. The first national suffrage parade is going to be quite a spectacle. And I think it's really interesting that, and suffrage are going to create their own media. They have a mixed relationship, symbiotic relationship with mainstream media. But I would say creating their own press is really going to be an impetus for, it really helped women emerge in the public sphere. And that's going to change them both. It's going to change women's rule and it's going to change our concept of what the public sphere is. Yeah, that's it. The petitions that Linda is referring to are actually here in the archives among the many other treasures that are here. No one would have known that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Cretia Mott and three other Quaker women had had the meeting in the middle of July in 1848 in the Seneca Falls if the telegraph wire had not recently been strung along the Erie Canal. And when word got out that women had, women and men had voted on 11 resolutions, one of which was the right to vote across the telegraph lines. People were outraged. But had there not been the telegraph line, no one would have known but the Seneca Falls newspaper. You need to think that these women were communicating by corresponding. Elizabeth Cady Stanton is constantly writing to her chum, Susan B Anthony, who didn't get involved until 1852. Come mind the children, come stir the pudding, I need to write a speech, I need to convene a convention by correspondence. Then fortunately, typewriters are invented, mimeograph machines are invented. And these relationships with the newspaper or creating your own. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony created a newspaper in 1870 called The Revolution, which failed almost immediately, because they refused to take advertisements from quack medicines. They thought they murdered women. So they refused the advertising revenue, and they failed. In contrast, Lucy Stone with her women's journal publishes it that was another faction of the suffragists publishes it until 1935. But I want to start by actually challenging the premise of the panel. Power media and the movement. I think media made the movement, but power, the power of women voting made the amendment. And they are two, they are used in two different ways in the suffrage movement. The media is really represented by Alice Paul and third youngest generation of suffragists. And the power is represented by Kerry Chapman cat, who could count votes and lobby and influence the president. I also think that Linda's point about marching in the streets, taking this little, little bits of the public sphere and then bigger bits of the public sphere. That's what the women were counting on. The outrage worked for them, right? That's why it was newsworthy. That's why they all wore white so it looked great in pictures. That's why one of the pictures that just went by was the pageant that was on the Treasury steps during the 1913 March. This one. Isn't that a great picture? So the Treasury steps as, you know, then as now of this big, broad marble plaza in front. And there was this whole sort of vaguely tortured allegory of Columbia summoning the virtues. It had nothing to do with suffrage. But boy, does it look great on the newspaper. I mean, it's still the cover of my book 100 years later. So all of those considerations about, you know, what they're doing is a little bit transgressive and a little bit shocking. And that's what makes it newsworthy. They knew that the public sphere was not theirs to own. Well, one thing that was remarkable in reading about this period is, at some point, they decided that they should go picket or protest outside of the White House. And yet, this was like, really controversial. That whereas you go, go there right now, there'll be 50 people every day that I walk outside the White House. Nuclear people basically live there. They do. Yeah. Feel free to remind them it was Alice Ball's idea. So the idea that this was controversial. And yet this was a way that they got attention. It was controversial at two levels. Excuse me. Alice Paul was, I mean, she was just an expert in publicity. She really, really was. She was a beginning. She was an expert in public relations before the term was evolved. These women really helped create the whole field. And also, too, when they first started picketing the White House, you know, we weren't quite at war yet. And they were tolerated. They were silent sentence. It was very transgressive. Once we declare war in April, four months later, that's when it really enraged the public. They were considered as traitors, a scum of the earth. There were a lot of sailors roaming around Washington, DC, and they would get drunk and they attacked them. And who do you think got in trouble? The women did. They were sent off to jail. Well, that created a whole other level. They leaned in, right? I mean, there was that whole debate, you know, do we keep picketing the White House during wartime? Criticizing your president during wartime? People think it's treasonous, right? It suddenly becomes a much bolder statement. So not only did they keep the pickets up, they got much more pointed. I don't you guys can't read this, but this is, first of all, what would these women do with social media, right? This is a tweet. It's two tweets. It's right. But it's this very directly critical message directed to the Russian envoys about tell the president that he's the biggest challenge to American liberty. And there's one, I don't know if we have a picture of there's one where the called the Kaiser Wilson banner, where they yeah, there we go. There we go. Kaiser Wilson, take the beam out of your own eye, right? These women were not backing down from the idea that wartime was a time when they might lose sympathy. But they were not in fact breaking any laws when they were arrested. They were arrested for something completely made up. They were arrested for something called obstructing the traffic on the sidewalk. But not a thing. I want you to talk about how they made the most out of being arrested. Well, first of all, just just for women to pick it. They chose women volunteered in in droves until the arrests began. And then black women like Mary Church Terrell and her daughter Phyllis Wheatley Terrell and working women and mothers stopped picketing when the arrests got serious because they couldn't interrupt their lives in that way. But from January until April, really January until inauguration was the first batch of picketing 1917 and March was inauguration at that time. It was just so shocking that women would hold picket signs no matter how well dressed and put together and matronly or college delegations, whatever it was, that alone was shocking to people. The president would walk out of the White House, tip his hat, offer coffee. They ignored him. But then when they start ratcheting up deciding that they will protest during the war, they actually get pushed off the headlines. They're out of the news until June when the Russian picket goes up. And then they decide they can't pick it every day. The tensions have gotten too great. So they wait until the 4th of July and they carry not only their picket signs, but an American flag thinking who's going to attack the American flag. And then they Alice is actually in the hospital at Johns Hopkins and Lucy Burns whom she met in a jail in London when they've both been arrested for picketing takes over and she's even bolder. She's the one who comes up with the Kaiser Wilson picket. But they are shrewd enough to begin to quote the president's words. So the judge cannot charge them with sedition. They can only be charged with obstructing traffic. And for that, because they are not caving, the judge has to keep adding to the sentence. The original sentence was a three day jail term or $25 fine. And the women in a pattern that civil rights marchers would follow said we'll fill the jails. So these women are going to jail and people are shocked that that the government would put women in jail. And then the government ends up putting women in jails for one month and two months and Alice Paul for seven months. Alice Paul and Rose Winslow were the only two to be force fed because Alice and they go they go on hunger strike. They go on hunger strike but they go on hunger strike because they're protesting that they are political prisoners. So they ought not to be there and protest. They do the hunger strike. They're the first Americans to ask for political prisoner status, which is pretty amazing. But they had to sneak the news out to the to their friends through the jail bars or throwing rocks out the window because nobody knew what was happening inside the jail. So in part of the communication strategy was getting the news out. And Alice got sort of stuck hunger striking because she probably would have preferred not to having been made so ill by it previously. But once she started, she couldn't quit because the newspapers did know about it. And she had there's a great story about the only thing she had to read was her Oxford book of English verse. And somehow she scribbled a note on there to her people outs her compatriots outside that like, make sure you use all this, it makes excellent ammunition in the press. And somehow she smuggled that out. And they did. They did not sure that's true. I heard she had all five of her daily newspapers delivered to the jail, and she had her stenographer come once a week to take her correspondence before she got before she got put in. Well, she writes her mother that that's the plan. But maybe she's just trying to reassure her mother. But so was declaring themselves political prisoners? Did that help the movement? Or no, was it just going to jail help the movement? It was taken entirely from the Pankhurst Sinningland, right? That was a strategy that Emeline Pankhurst and her daughters, which were the more radical wing of the British suffrage movement. And, you know, ultimately, Alice Paul and the National Women's Party were called radical here. They had nothing on the British movement. I mean, the radicals of the British movement were throwing bricks through windows. At one point, they tried to set fire to the Prime Minister's house. They would smack policemen in the face together. I mean, yeah. And the American women were standing outside. I was standing on a corner with a sign. Right. Okay. But that strategy, if you are arrested, demand political prisoner status, if they refuse it, go on hunger strike. That was Emeline Pankhurst. That's borrowed whole clock from her. And I think Alice Paul, I agree with you, Linda, that she was a brilliant strategist and PR person, and she managed to turn amazing situations to her advantage. But I think she had a little bit of a blind spot there, where she would follow Pankhurst's examples and not think through whether or not they translated to an American system. So for instance, in like 1915, 1916, when she tried to that party in power strategy, where she campaigned against even pro-suffrage Democrats to try to hold their feet to fire, that's a that works much better in parliamentary system, not only, you know, representative bureaucracy. So I think that the political prisoner thing was a little bit similar, that she, it was a tactic that had worked elsewhere. And she didn't necessarily think through whether the situation is Rebecca's put her finger on the major weakness of Alice Paul. She was politically naive and an American system. She imported not only these outdoor tactics, but a parliamentary plan, beginning as early as immediately after the March. She wants to hold the Democrats in power because Wilson had won the presidency, the Democrats had taken over the House and the Senate. But there were, there was bipartisan opposition, mostly Southern Democrats, and there was bipartisan support. So Kerry Chapman Cat refers to Paul's strategy as stupendously stupid. But that's Kerry Chapman Cat. I mean, that's the two of them. I feel like they, they would have had to dream each other up if they didn't have each other, you know, Kerry Chapman Cat was this unbelievably diligent lobbyist organizer. You know, if this state needed a referendum in that state, it needed to be passed by two successive legislatures. She had all that down. But she never would have been bold enough to pick at the White House. You know, she didn't want to pick at the White House because she was trying to woo Wilson. Right. Right. She wanted to be considered that, Oh, that nice, unthreatening Mrs. Cat, I'll meet with her. She's not crazy like Alice Paul. So it's like an inside game outside. Right. You need the extreme to make the moderate look more moderate. Somebody, several historians have argued that, you know, they were perfect good cop, bad cop relationship. You know, it was a bit easier for Wilson to deal with Kerry Chapman Cat because she looks so much better in her large, much larger, more conservative organization, looks so much more patriotic in comparison to these Alice Paul's radicals. I think it's two. I mean, there's these three generations of suffered. You've got Stanton and Anthony and Lucy Stone. And then you have Kerry Chapman Cat and Ann Howard Shaw. And then you have Alice and Lucy. And it is a sort of mother daughter competition. Both Cat and Paul were these dynamic, charismatic, very attractive, powerful speakers whose followers would have followed them off a cliff to the White House to Tennessee for the ratification. But what Cat had and what wins suffrage is women getting the vote and from all those referendum, all those state legislatures, we wouldn't have gotten the vote if it had only been Paul and the protests. You had to have Cat and you could have won the vote if you hadn't had Paul. So and I also once, sorry, once it went to the state's for ratification, the fact that Cat had all of these state level organizations was vital. Yeah, so I was hoping we could sort of tease that out a little bit. So in terms of the political structure of how this worked, they were out in the states trying to build movements in the states or trying to get state level things passed. And then there was also the national movement and that so very briefly a long painful history. When when the 15th Amendment was passed and it enfranchised black men and no women, there was a huge split in the suffrage movement. There were people like Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe who said, we're abolitionists, we're going to take this amendment as written and we'll fight for women next. And there were people like Stanton Anthony who said, if we accept the 15th Amendment without women, it's going to be a whole generation before women get the vote and we can't accept it now. And they split and they not only split into rival groups, but the Stone Howe group pursued a state by state strategy specifically because that federal amendment and the reconstruction amendments had been so threatening to the southern states. And the Anthony and Stanton group pursued a federal amendment. So for a lot of the end of the 19th century, they were working kind of at cross purposes. And when they came back together and rejoined and the American Women's Suffrage Association and National became a national American woman, they decided to pursue the state by state strategy. So one of the reasons that the night, which isn't crazy, right? I mean, it sounds like a lot of work, but the plan was that if you get enough states to pass suffrage, then a federal amendment is inevitable because enough men are representing women. Well, it sounds like paid family leave or federal minimum wage or many of these things that are happening at the state level, gun control, some of these things that... But one of the reasons the 1913 March mattered, in addition to it being a big spectacle that got a lot of coverage, was it was an announcement that the federal amendment went back. So you had the Herald and you had Ainez, Mel Holland up on her horse, and then there was a big wagon that said we demand a constitutional amendment in franchising women. And that was a deal. She went totally wrong. This was a brave gutsy PR move all on her own. But to get an amendment, you need three quarters of the states, they needed 36 states, and you need two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress. So the dual strategy was not entirely wrong. It eventually comes together. But they all lost. There was no... There were very few federal hearings until really 1914. There were six states who had given women presidential suffrage by the election of 1912. The Alice Paul effort in the parade then really stirs up some momentum at the state level. And you have more states beginning to fall in line. So that by 1916-12 states allow women to vote. Now some of those states are allowing them only to vote for president. Presidential suffrage only. Others are giving them universal suffrage from tax bond to school board to Congress to president. But presidential voting began to have impact on the parties because that's electoral college votes as well as members of the Congress. And I would add on to that too. And that the years before that too is when women started going public to go back to media. You know, I think, let's see, there were years when there were only four states had granted suffrage, most of them in the West. And nothing happened for like 20 years. And it didn't start to get that momentum going into women in New York, mainly, started going again and going out to the public and getting the word out and starting to at least refocus attention. Previously, you know, women would have the suffragists would have these conventions like in church basements in the 19th century. And I think when they realized and became more aware to if media, media is really burgeoning right at the beginning of the 20th century and getting some attention etc. Again, going out in the public. That was boy really how they got their message out. So can you sorry go back to the Washington Post headline because I've heard you all giggling about it. This is what the Oh, yes, there it is. So this is what going out in public was covered by the like breathlessly sexist male press of the day. Women's beauty, grace and art bewilder the cow. I love that headline. They had no idea what to do with it. And then there's a whole paragraph about the badly behaving crowd. And then sorry. One more. That's Chicago Tribune. This is my favorite. So the 1913 march was time to coincide with Woodrow Wilson's inauguration. His inauguration was the next day. So this headline should be Woodrow Wilson inaugurated the 28th president of the United States. It's not. And there in that editorial cartoon is there's like pencil neck little Woodrow Wilson thinking he gets the headline and ta-da! There's a suffragist stealing the spotlight from him. You know, Alice Paul, they wanted Alice Paul to have this parade. They didn't want her to have a parade. And then they went in the boondocks. And she fought with them until it was down Pennsylvania Avenue. She wanted it the, what's it called, the superintendent of police. The superintendent of police thought that ladies should not march on Pennsylvania Avenue because there were bordellos and bars as well as government buildings lining lining the street. He, the Sylvester, Mr. Sylvester suggested that they march from Dupont Circle down to the White House, way away from the public. You can still land at the White House. And Alice absolutely said no because she wanted, she frankly wanted a drunken crowd. She wanted the conflict. I don't think she expected it to be quite as rowdy as it was. They didn't get any farther than 4th Street before young men from the University of Maryland and Boy Scouts joined hands to make a little wedge. They'd only started out four bodies apart in these regiments of women, but they could barely make it any farther than that. So the women in the Tableau, Columbia, and this Tableau vivant where you froze in place, were freezing because the parade had not shown up. And they were barefoot on marble in March. So they went back inside and it took like three more hours before the suffragists showed up. Just playing on what Linda was saying. For women to take any of these roles was so against their public image. If you think about, we refer to sex role socialization today, how we learn our role. 19th century women, early 20th century women were meant to be ladies. When Alice Paul comes back from England and is invited by Nasa to talk about the pinkers and the outdoor tactics, she and Harriet Stanton Blatch, Stanton's daughter, offered volunteers to go down on the street. We'll practice speaking on our soapbox. We'll go, we'll just march right down in Washington DC. We'll be on the street. The older women were horrified because no women were to be on the street was to be a street walker, was to be disrespectful. So this whole idea of having outdoor tactics was a shock. When the police had to arrest the women who were picketing, the idea that these could be their mothers, their daughters, their sisters. They didn't really know how to handle throwing women into patty wickets. And had to constantly be reprimanded by their supervisors that your job is to arrest those women with their signs. So how does this move from public awareness to public persuasion? Well, they had a lot of methods, and they tried them all to various degrees of success. I think that, like any public movement, there was sort of a tipping point when it became less shocking. But also, these women worked really, really hard to convince men to vote for these laws. I mean, that was the ones, this whole movement is buying for women until the final step, right? You could not introduce or vote for legislation while female. So they had to depend on men for the last thing. So they had these amazing card files and research, and this is another media use. So the National Women's Party gets a lot of press for all these visual tactics. They also had this unbelievable database with like 20 cards on every member of Congress that not only talked about how he voted, whether he ever said anything about suffrage was his mama suffragist, whatever. But then also, actually talked to his wife, she's a lot smarter than he is, you know, or he's a drinker talked to him before 5pm. And these cards would trigger, you know, if one of them said in public, Oh, you know, no one in my district in Ohio wants suffrage. That was the queue for 400 letters from Ohio to show up in that man's office. So they were unbelievably organized and targeted to the specific objections that anti suffragists had. There wasn't much you could do with the garden variety women or two stupid fragile emotional to handle the vote. But other objections, they had strategy. And they were very they use their own media to really to do organizing too. You can open up a copy of a woman's journal or the suffragist or dozens of other smaller ones and regional ones. And they would tell you the status of the the legislative process. They would tell you where your congressman's address is where to write to. They would ask you to sign this petition. They would ask you to come out and pick it. They were just a font of information besides the fact of giving I think women a sense of empowering being something larger than themselves and sort of inspiring this collective identity and inspiring collective action. So their media was really important, I think, in the organizing. I have not studied this as closely as Linda because one of the questions I would have is in which media markets were the pickets and where the march is being covered. The 1913 march because it allied with the with the inauguration got pretty broad coverage and the pickets did increasingly as they got ever more scandalous and seemingly on patriotic and then the violence that followed the women went after they were jailed. But what really changes the public mind in addition to people voting in by 1918 was at 22 states. So you've got a lot of people voting. Millions of women are voting is the war because women participated in the war. They worked in factories. They worked on farms. They worked on the front as those telephone call girls for general Jack Pershing. They worked as nurses and ambulance drivers and the war and Mrs. Cat's strategy worked on Wilson because he was so adamant against it as a southern gentleman northern governor but southern roots because he was really relying on the southern Senate to pass the reforms of the Wilson for which the Wilson administration is known. He didn't want to rock the legislative vote. So Kat said to him make it a war measure. Say that we're so respectful of women for the sacrifices they are making. And he finally waits till October 1918 when the Senate is voting and they turn him down. But he finally makes his plea on behalf of women. And when he's doing that Paul's in jail. Well I hear a lot nicer about Woodrow Wilson than I am. I think that Woodrow Wilson opposed suffrage because Woodrow Wilson was a sexist. Woodrow Wilson didn't oppose suffrage because he didn't think it necessarily worked as a southern Democrat. He could have been a lot more progressive on the issue. He could have done a lot more for the issue. And ultimately what changed his mind was like 1917 New York was for suffrage. He thinks well gosh they're all going to vote. They might as well vote for me. I mean it was it was craven. It wasn't suddenly feeling that women deserve it. The New York vote which was November 1917 again Paul's in jail by a margin of 100,000 votes. Tammany Hall chooses not even to oppose it. Democratic city bosses and saloon keepers had opposed suffrage because they thought these lady do-gooders were going to get the vote and change politics and they had tried. But they were less successful in that. But the largest state, the largest congressional delegation, the largest number of electoral votes New York passes. And then the House votes in January of 18. I don't think it's totally coincidence too that the House comes out for suffrage like a year to the day after the picketing started too. I don't think that hurt. And I do think that even though Kat and the women working for the war if it was really crucial. I'm not going to argue that. But in contrast to the Civil War, Stanton and Nancy dropped women's suffrage to do war work for the north of the Civil War. And they were betrayed. They got nothing from the government as far as votes for women go. And I do think it's interesting after World War I it does make a difference. And I think it's partly that Kat is very effective and they're saying women are worthy deserving of the vote. But also, too, you have the National Women's Party much smaller, much more radical. But kind of I think interesting reframing militant notions about patriotism is, you know, they're quite noted and not doing women's war work. So I do think they provided a nudge in sort of pushing Wilson to coming out for the vote. I think if they hadn't been on the scene at all, I think it would have been a lot easier for the US government and for the Congress to ignore these women who have been rolling bandages for the last three years. I also think that you shouldn't underestimate how they manipulated the press coverage. So it's one thing to say like, oh, the 1913 parade got press coverage because it was a mob. Well, you saw women's grace and beauty bewilder the capital. That's not the coverage you want. That doesn't help your cause. That's just it's a nice picture. But what Alice Paul had all those women who had come in from out of town, write first person accounts of how that terrible mob treated them and send them back to their hometown paper. So now the Springfield Illinois paper says Mrs. George Smith was mishandled at the hands. That was really good PR. That wasn't just doing something big and hoping it got covered. But our other piece of PR was Alice is the one who says the women need to wear white if they're not wearing their academic gowns, that the writers are wearing red and the doctors are wearing blue. It wasn't an all white march. It was a color coded march. They had enormous fights over the dress code. But she was she said you will wear this and march in this order because she wanted to demonstrate that women voting would be graceful and harmonious and would not be as disruptive as of course these underground. They were going to be very disruptive. Everybody knew it. Both Cadd and Paul were sort of disguising the radicalism of wanting women to vote was by itself pretty revolutionary. Can we touch on something that we've brushed past a couple of times, which is the racial dynamics of this movement? And one question I have is whether this was a movement of privilege. Definitely. And I think you know these White House pickets actually they were a bit insulated by their class and their their color. If socialists had been picketing the White House they would have been in jail for years and years. I think that made a difference. Race is not the strong suit of I would say of the suffrage movement. And actually the parades are one of the more blatant ways where you could see the racism because both Cadd and Paul went out of their way to they didn't want the African American women to march. Although they did. Well, they were worried that lose southern women if they had an integrated parade. So Paul and it's it's horrifying to say it now. When Ida B. Wells Barnett wanted to march with the Illinois delegation when a sorority from Howard that Delta Sigma Theta wanted to march as their first act they formed in order to be politically active in 1913 with Mary Trestrell as their advisor. They were told they had to march back. So Paul initially says no blacks are going to march at all. And then she gets such pressure because there were black women in the Illinois suffrage delegation like Ida B. And there were there were Howard they weren't very evident because it was a segregated racist country at the time. But the National American National Association of Colored Women was almost as large as the general federation of women. So there were activists African-American women who had their own reasons to want to get the vote for to stop lynching and to improve their situations. So Paul at first says none at all. And I'm not having anybody else either. No Native Americans. And then she gets pressed and creates the section at the back. But not everybody marches there. The Howard deltas do. But Ida we know marches with the Illinois delegation because the Chicago Tribune found a photograph. We're not sure where Mary Church Terrell marched. She doesn't cover it in her autobiography. And with two white grandfathers she was quite a light skinned woman. But we do know that she picketed. And we do know that working women picketed. So I know clearly class and race and geography were issues to disrupt the suffrage movement. And race was an issue throughout. But I go back to what I was saying at the beginning. The media makes the movement but the power makes the amendment. These women came together in a temporary coalition. A temporary sisterhood because everybody had a self interest. They wanted the vote to accomplish labor reform or anti lynching or to elect their owner to pass social justice. They had lots of issues to hang together and to put up with each other because they were much stronger together than they would have been in any separate way. But as soon as suffrage passes the sisterhood splinters and they all start fighting among competing against each other again. And I also, excuse me for being a contrarian, Tamra. But I wouldn't say that it ends in 1920 because not every group of women got to vote in 1920. And the race issue rises again. When Mary Church Terrell and her organization appeals to Alice Paul. It's 1921 National Women's Party. What are you going to do to help African women protect their vote in the South? Paul turns them aside and gets damned by her own friends and members for her racist attitude. So after 1920, Native American women didn't get the vote until 1924. African American women struggled with it until the amendments and the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act and are still struggling with it with issues of voter suppression. Poor women were also hurt by the poll tax, kept them from voting. Women in the territories because the amendment was drafted before America had become an imperialistic country. It didn't say territories. So if you were in Hawaii or Alaska or Puerto Rico, Puerto Ricans didn't give women suffrage until 1935. And of course, if you lived in the District of Columbia, you didn't get it until 1961, only presidential suffrage. So neither Woodrow Wilson's widow nor Mary Church Terrell, residents of DC, ever got to vote in their lifetimes. I also think that not only did white suffragists fail to recognize the contribution of African American suffragists, not only did they put forth this elitist image, but they actually often used overtly racist arguments. So during the state by state strategy, there was an effort to go into southern states and say, if you give white women the vote, we will overwhelm the black male vote. All those things, you are trying to dismiss. It never worked, by the way, because the southern states were systematically dismantling black male vote with Jim Crow laws, and that was working for them. But it was an overt strategy of the suffragists. And they said the same thing in the Midwest about immigrants and nativists. These were elitist, racist, nativist women. But again, I'm not excusing them. And I agree with you about Wilson. But it's sexist, racist. Anti-Semitic. But these are women who have worked, they're now in the third generation of effort. And the people they need to persuade to vote for them are white men from all over the country, which is why having women vote in every state and different legislative districts made such a difference because that was power they would respond to. The only woman who ever voted for suffrage was Jeanette Rankin, elected in 1916, serves 1917 to 1919. And that vote in January 1918, she introduces suffrage in the House. And she votes for it. And it passes. It's the first victory for suffrage since the amendment had been introduced in 1878. So one woman. And we could give credit to Phoebe Burns, Harry Burns' mother, who told him how to vote in Tennessee. Because Harry Burns changed a vote in the Tennessee Legislature ratification fight, the vote of one man, maybe Bank's Turner, maybe two men. But Harry gets the credit. Because one man voted 27 million women were eligible to vote, even if state parties and organizations found ways to cut them out. And maybe that is why the women being cut out, even though they had the right in theory. How long did it take for the women's vote to change things or to become a parent? Or has it yet? I would argue that you did see it as a new deal, in a way, was in the 1930s in a way that it grew out. The women who had been active in the suffrage movement and some who had been elected had talked about issues of government getting involved and providing some sort of relief in the 1920s. Socialists too, I would argue, for that. So I think it carried over a bit into the 1920s when you started seeing the government become a little more tentative. I sort of feel like there was a lot of legislation passed in fear of a woman's vote. And then when it didn't materialize, it was repealed by the Shepherd Towner Act, which was a health care bill. The anti-child labor amendment made its way through Congress. And then when women didn't vote substantially differently from the men in their lives, and of course... Or at all. Again, this is the kind of thing that makes you so mad, right? Like, of course, that was then covered as they're just voting the way their husbands and fathers tell them to. Or... I think there are still stories like that. Or the other demographic parts of their lives, they are voting more like the men who live near them, who share their race, their economic background, or whatever. And it's not that they're being told how to vote. But there was not a woman's vote. There wasn't a gender gap for, like, 60 more years. So the fear of women voting was very effective from 1921 until 1924, as Rebecca says, Shepherd Towner, several other major pieces of legislation. When women don't vote in large numbers at all in 1924, those acts are repealed. And women don't vote. And the other challenge is nobody's counting the women's vote. Only Illinois counted men and women's vote. So you had to sort of speculate what happened in the rest of the country. There are not exit polls. There are not national polls. Not until 1964 did they start counting the women's vote separately from the men's vote. And you can see that the numbers are increasing. And it's not then until 1980 that the gender gap of partisan difference arises and continues. But they... And what Linda says is right, too, when they weren't able to be effective in the Congress, there were very few women serving. The men were ignoring them or repealing their actions. Then women like Eleanor Roosevelt and her social justice network who really came out of the settlement houses, women like Florence Kelly and Jane Adams, begin to work behind the scenes, getting women appointed to different positions in the New Deal. But it's the New Deal that says that no married woman married to a government employee will hold a job. So then again, it takes another war. The Second World War begins to give women more positions. There's an Equal Pay Act, the Equal Rights Amendment resurfaces. And then you have the baby boom and women, white women, go underground. African-American women are never stopped. African-American women are active in the 20s and anti-lynching throughout the 30s, increasingly active in the 40s through either marching again or the threat of marching, a Philip Randolph's threat to march on Washington in 1941 or through the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Thurgood Marshall hires Constance Baker Motley. You've got all these women attorneys laying the groundwork for the cases that will change the laws in the 1950s. I just have to add this footnote because I love it. Mary Church Terrell. OK, so Mary Church Terrell has been around since 1885 in Memphis. Whenever she was born, she goes to Oberlin, has two degrees, enormously wealthy. Mary's a municipal judge, the first Black judge in Washington. Her husband's a Harvard graduate, gets involved in these organizations and the marches and the pickets. Doesn't ever quit as active and organizing through the 30s. In 1950, she has photographed picketing Washington restaurants with her cane in one hand and her pickets tying in the other that it's time to desegregate Washington's restaurants. These women were sensational. Part of the promise of this panel is that we would also discuss how what these women did in the early 1900s has ripples today. How the movement back then has informed today's women's movements or even maybe today's hashtag movements. Well, I do think you'd see it when the women's march, the first one, 2017, on the weekend of Trump's administration. It didn't look that different than this. No, I know. Exactly right. And it was interesting then to see in 2017 all the pictures of Ines Millhouse on a white horse and on Pennsylvania Avenue resurface and things like that. And I'm always surprised, too. You would mention like one of the pickets could be a hashtag or could be a tweet or something. I'm always surprised like at the parallels and the way they communicated and how it's all these new kinds of social media and targeting digital media. You can kind of see it a century ago. Draw that. The suffragists. Pull that out. Well, imagery, for instance, OK, cartoons, et cetera. Let me talk about memes or memes. Are you saying? Right. Memes. OK, thank you. I actually, this is a long going maybe. I usually lose it. So we'll go with memes. OK, OK. But anyways, the cartoons, OK, that the suffragists created in their newspapers and the beautiful banners and the things like that. They often were very, they used sort of humor and horror to make their points, et cetera. And again, you see that, I think, in social media now. You see that things like Tumblr, et cetera. I think the communication networks, too. I think when you see like women's hashtag Women's March, right? It's how that big protest organized. When you have these networks of women who are communicating together that, you know, the suffrage newspapers did it much more slowly more than a century ago. But I see some parallels that way. I also think just the concentration on how things look, we think of that as so contemporary that everybody is looking for the perfect selfie moment or whatever. These women were very aware of how this all looked for both the live audience and how it looked in pictures. Right. Look at that picture. That's amazing. But, you know, the banners when they pick it at the White House were these very clear, easy to read fonts, dark print on a light background that reproduced well in black and white pictures in press, that was none of that was an accident. And so all this idea of getting the perfect image to represent you because people are going to look at images more than they're going to read the story, they absolutely pioneered that. No question. I mean, think of the power of suffrage white. We know now that not everybody in the parade wore suffrage white in a banner. They were probably fewer women wearing white than wearing anything else because you were supposed to wear your sort of professional outfit, a nurse or whatever. But suffrage white is now worn by women in Congress on the day of the State of the Union. It was worn at the opening of this celebration. Our archivist was in a white suit when the exhibition opened and the pink pussy hat. So you've got the white dress, the purple sash, the pink pussy hat. You have these symbols that people look at them now and they know immediately what they represent. And the white dresses at the State of the Union served exactly the same purpose. I mean, it wasn't just a nod to the history. They looked really striking against all those navy blue suits. You know, it was a visual shortcut to women men. But the other piece that I think is really important is that what happened after the 2017 march? An enormous outburst of energy and urge to activate and to go write your postcards once a week and to call your Congress members and to organize for women candidates. Every march since then has been smaller. Alice Paul knew never to try to repeat the march. It's why she had to come up with the pickets and the automobile tour around the country because she had to have new things that weren't going to bore people. But a march does not make, does not automatically generate power. If everybody in that march goes home and organizes and registers voters and those voters vote for the cause and the candidates that you care about, that's power. So you have to figure out how to make the connection between the publicity and the coverage and the energy into something that's going to be a factor for change. And you know, I think women did and I think we saw it in the 2018 midterms. You did for those women who went home and did that. Right, right. But I think I'm going to guess almost every single woman who was involved in the midterms et cetera maybe had a pink pussy hat somewhere. Or certainly had become aware of like, oh, there's a embryonic Trump resistance that I want to be a part of. And they did and then it turned and they went to electoral politics for their organizing. Yeah, so I think you're absolutely right. You could march is fine, but you've got to take it to the next step. And in our democracy right now, you can do that in electoral politics. Some places it doesn't work so well. It's true of any publicity. It only works if you have something to back it up. Publicity for its own sake is just a splash. Though there have been lots of splashes. Yeah, but they don't laugh and they don't matter. Right. And so it sounds and you guys could have a fresh argument about this, but it sounds like you're saying that the publicity was successful. The messaging was successful because there was a political undergirding. But that's exactly right. And it's why when Nancy was making reference to the League of Women Voters, whenever suffrage passed in a state, I mean, Wyoming and Colorado, they'd passed in the 1890s. But she kept her organization going because she kept saying, when we get ready to ratify, I'm going to need representatives in every state legislative district in the country, every congressional district she wanted to have a NASA member ready to go. So she didn't let you become a League of Women Voters until your state had ratified. And that power of staying in connection, of holding them ready to do the job at the state level was enormously important to the success. Alice Paul never went to Nashville. She sent one representative. She'd run out of money. And she had very few, she didn't have a national network of members that was very large. Historians estimate that while she may have had 3,000 members during the suffrage fight by 1921, she was down to 600. Whereas CAT had this enormous operation, more than two million women. And even when it transferred to the League of Women Voters, it was only a hundred thousand because people, you know, their interest diffused. It is kind of an interesting question too. Somebody might pursue that the League of Women Voters after women won the vote became basically a non-political, right? A neutral organization didn't take a political stand. Whereas Paul went the other way and created this women's national women's party that was so one issue focused and ignored so many constituent women. It was kind of powerless. But it is kind of interesting if there had been another alternative. In retrospect, it's easy to say perhaps women, once they got the vote, they thought that automatically solved so many problems. Perhaps it's rethought how they might organize to take advantage of that power. Well, there was the Women's Trade Union League. There were many other organizations that suffered. I've only recently learned, Nancy probably knows this, it was news to me. I thought that it was Carrie Chapman-Cat who was responsible for sort of the do-good government education will educate women for how to be good citizens. But it was really Jane Addams influence at the final convention that set up the League, the final convention of the National American Women Suffrage Association. And these two women were iconic. They were probably the two most powerful and respected women in the country in 1920. And so Cat says, well, we need to be organizing and we need to be running people for office and we ought to have some senators before we know it. She's all for political organizing. And Jane Addams says, no, let's just go back to community organizing because Hall House was really, the first settlement house was really community-based organizing. You went into a neighborhood and you fixed the problems of the neighborhood but you didn't necessarily translate that into legislative power. And Jane Addams view one and lots of people were disappointed. But people went back to their causes. Cat went back to international peace. Jane Addams also founds the ACLU. I mean, people, they once suffered so they could do other things. But also being an educated voter is an important goal. I mean, voting is a habit. There's a lot of logistics around voting that if you've never done it can be a little intimidating. And so the idea that the League of Women Voters was then to help women be responsible voters. What are you, not, what issues are you going to pass with this power but how are you going to use it in a way that you feel confident and responsible with? She had 18 million women who'd been voting in the 27 states it was by the time they got ratification. I said, one thought there about, Addams bought, I'll come back to it if I think of it, sorry. I think the culture might have been, in the 1920s too, might have sort of factored in this too, why all of a sudden we have women are voting, why didn't we have this great block of voting women that power? As you know, the 20s were kind of the jazz age. And in the 1910s when you have this idea of people working communally for change, I think women, once they got the vote, sort of went off to like you say, to pursue individual pursuits, which very much reflected the 1920s. And who's the symbol of the woman in the 1920s? That is the flapper, you know? And it was all about sort of pleasure and sort of individual and women went on to pursue their individual careers, not quite realizing, they were ready to move on to individual things, but not quite realizing how much power they were losing by going off on their own. How many times have we thought that we won? I know, but a good point. But I will say, I'm encouraged by the 2018 elections, I think it's pretty exciting to say, still have a long way to go. Women are still not represented on a par with the population, but I think in some of these younger women, and men too, women of color, it's sort of the new people who are coming in in Congress. I don't know, you have a front row seat. I'm optimistic, I think it boasts good things. So the great thing about having an audience is that I get to stop asking questions. And you all get to ask questions. So we have microphones on either side of the room. I have one request, which is that you ask a question. So if you could make it approximately 20 seconds long and have it end with a question mark, that would be awesome. We can get to as many people as possible that way. Oh, and tell us who you are. Oh, my name is Jason Gendrich. So it hasn't been really mentioned yet, but like a main parallel movement is occurring amongst women at this time, which is support for the temperance movement and the passage of prohibition. And there's a lot of entanglement between those. And then the dual passage of those also seems to have something to do with the pretty much the dissipation of political energy for women at this time. If you could just speak to that, I'd appreciate it. I didn't put a question mark at the end, there's no time. So, yes, did everyone hear the question? A lot of women came to the suffrage movement because of temperance. What they really wanted was temperance and they figured they couldn't get it without the vote. And in the early days of the suffrage movement, that association was more useful because a lot of suffragists got sort of crash courses in field organizing and publicity and stump speeches and all of the things we've been talking about from the temperance movement. As you got into the 20th century, the associations became sort of less useful in part because they competed for funding and attention, but also that caricature of suffragists as joyless hags, which was caricatured everywhere in editorial cartoons and all over the place was really reinforced by, and by the way, they're gonna take away your booze, right? So, the 20th century suffrage movement spent a little time distancing themselves from that image. And we talked a little bit about editorial cartoons in the suffrage press. The women's party organ, the suffragist, had a cartoonist named Nina Allender who created this Allender girl who was young and lovely and stylish and aspirational. She was as far from the warty crown who was gonna take your beer as she could possibly be. And so, there were some ways that the connection was useful and there was ways the connection was destructive, for sure. The taking away the beer was a big deal because as prohibitionists as the Women's Christian Temperance Union allied itself with NASA, it brought all its enemies with it. So brewers and saloon owners and big city democratic bosses and immigrants in the Midwest were not thrilled to have that association. Just recently, a scholar has published a study analyzing the vote of the members of Congress who voted for suffrage and who voted for prohibition. Those votes were within four months of each other, I think. And they are not the same. People had always supposed that there would be overlap. But the men who vote for suffrage are men who have women voting in their district. And the men who vote for prohibition have other ties, have church issues, have southern issues, have a different social outlook. But it's not the same group which has surprised a lot of people. It's also really hard to amend the Constitution as it should be, right? There's all exhibit here about how hard it is to amend the Constitution. And so if you're only going to get one of them, you start to compete with each other about which it's going to be. Let's go over here. Yeah, John Whitmore, this last election we saw a big imbalance between which party was getting the most women into office, at least on the federal level. What do you see as the future trends for, is this going to be a permanent imbalance on which party women are drifting towards, or what are people's predictions? We should let Tamara answer that. No? Hi. Well, yes, there were significantly more democratic women elected to Congress in 2018 than there were Republican women. And I mean, the fact is that is sort of a longstanding trend that it was just particularly dramatic in 2018. One Republican woman, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik from Upstate New York thinks that this is a problem. And she is now actively working to recruit more Republican women, to raise money for Republican women. She has a pack that she has formed with the specific goal of getting more Republican women into Congress, so that it will be a bit more representative. Some people laughed at her and wrote her off initially, some of her colleagues. But she seems to be getting some traction. Who knows how it'll work out electorally. You have to make it through a primary to get into a general election. And often that, actually, on both sides of the aisle, is a challenge for female candidates still. Well, this is Nancy Tate again to make a few remarks about the legal women voters, which I should have emphasized in my remarks. When Carrie Chapman Kat was founding the league, she did envision that we were there to continue the fight. In the fight, of course, we've interpreted broadly. And you do that with both education and advocacy. And part of education is not just for each individual to know what's on the ballot, but for the public to understand, that's what candidate forums and a lot of other education is, for the public to understand the issues, as the suffragists had to do, to understand why some of those arguments against the vote were not valid. The league also began accepting men as members in the early 1970s. So we have been fighting for full voting rights and other equality for all Americans. And the league today is very active in fighting all of the voter disempowerment laws around the country. So I'm just saying. Okay. But like a lot of organizations, the league did not admit black women immediately. There were some leagues of black women voters. There were some states that would insist on having black votes, Ohio, Indiana, not Indiana, Ohio and Illinois, wanted to have black women members. But that did not become commonplace until the civil rights movement. Let's move to this side and we'll bounce. Hi, Sam Kersner, first of all, thank you for being here. You talked a lot about the really tough and smart SUFs that got this through, but there was also a very tough and smart group of Anties. And so what did they do wrong or what strategies did the SUFs employ that were better or more effective than the Anties? I would, the Anties almost won in Tennessee. Yeah, I would say though, they weren't as media savvy. I remember there was one thing, they showed up at a suffrage parade, while wearing a Scarlet A letters, meaning anti, but... Oh, yeah, yeah, they weren't quite as adept to think of the media message. And also too, they were pretty reactive, I think, more reactive than they were, they really didn't have a, I think that hurt them. The anti-suffrage, the opposition women were very powerful and the two heads of the National Organization were the wife of Senator James Wadsworth of New York, New York never voted for suffrage until after the state had passed it. And Robert Lansing's wife, Mrs. Lansing, the wife of the Secretary of State. So they were not a small unknown group, they were filled with prominent women who because of their elite status thought that they did not need the vote. But in Tennessee, they were very effective with their PR, you had the War of the Roses, the pros wore yellow roses and the Anties wore red, which is why everybody was surprised when Harry Burns changed his vote because he entered the chamber with the red rose. But the Anties tried everything, they threatened primary challenges and business boycotts and they said they would kidnap members of the legislature to keep them from voting. So Cat actually using Tennessee women as her surrogates had people patrolling the railroad station so that nobody could get whisked out of town and miss their vote. I don't undercut those women. I think it's really lucky that we won in Tennessee because there was no other state that was gonna pass in that legislative session and had it gone past 1920, it might have had the same fate as the child labor amendment. But the other thing is the anti-suffragists, there were a lot of different groups who were anti-suffragists for different reasons. So there were the organized, led by women, the official anti-suffragists. But then anyone who had employed child labor, the Catholic church, the liquor lobby, there were plenty of other anti-suffrage groups that didn't necessarily share an agenda with the women who were leading the officially named anti-suffrage groups. So it wasn't that coherent in movement. Good question. All right, it's over. Hi, my name is David Price. My question, I too, if I may. The first is, we talk about the history tonight and I have to admit, I thought I knew a little bit about history and one area that didn't was the women's movement, quite honestly, until Rebecca was kind enough to give me her book. And you go back and you read, and I don't know as an educator, I spent a long time as an educator. I don't know the schools. I don't know if we do a really good job of pointing out just how difficult it was. I think it goes in passing. So my first question to the panelists, do you think we should or could do a better job? And the most important question is, would that help? That's the easy question. The second one is this. Pick your favorite person, whether it's Alice Paul. This has not been a great week or a great month for women. If they were alive today and they came back, would they be surprised at where we are now? Or do you think they would have expected we would be here? So, but you spent a lot of time with them. I know you can't speak for them. But what do you think? Pick one and go with it. I'll pick one. I think Margaret Sanger must be rolling over in her grave. She was the suffragist too, besides a birth control advocate. Although Margaret Sanger wanted birth control, so there wouldn't be any abortion. Oh, that's cool. But Sanger's a heroine, no doubt about it. We decided in the green room, we weren't going to raise that topic. Leave it to the question. I've been in schools for most of my professional career at the college and high school level. So, your question about civics obviously appeals. The entire country needs more civics education. And I appreciate the kinds of things Tamara does on the news hour. To have constant conversations, or Cokie Roberts and her NPR coverage in the morning where she's telling us history stories about how our government works. But I think if nothing else, in the week before every November election, every school needs to talk about the fight for women's suffrage, the fight for African-American suffrage, voter suppression, how these issues are not stopped. They're still current issues, whether people have access to the ballot and how we can guarantee it. And why it's not a bad thing to let everybody vote. Let them show their ID when they show up. This country is a democracy and needs to vote. It's kind of grown into its democracy. It always used to annoy me teaching that Jacksonian democracy, which only gave white men who didn't own property the right to vote, gets so much more attention. Than either the 15th amendment or the 19th amendment or the Voter Rights Act. And I would add to that, that not only is civic education important, why learn women's history, right? Like occasionally you get this sort of pat on the head. Oh, it gives girls a role model. No. The reason to learn women's history is that history without women is wrong, right? There is no way that women have not been agents of historical change since there have been women. And if we do not learn that, we are not learning enough history. And it is a shared history. It's our country. We're all citizens. It's our history. Whether it's women's history, men's history, it's American history. Amen, sister. And I just have to add, and I don't know if you guys will have thoughts on this or not, but I mean, you're steeped in the history. So this is your reality all the time. But for me, thinking that it's only been 100 years, right, but it is mind boggling. It is just absolutely mind boggling. But I also think that it, so my grandmother, who was born in 1913, right? So before women had the right, 1916, there's my mother correcting me. So before women had the right to vote, she went on to become a member of Congress and an ambassador, right? So in her lifetime, she lived the change. And we are still connected to women who lived the change. And that, although it is shocking and horrifying that it's only been 100 years and that's crazy, it does mean that we still have a connection to this story. And also 20th century history is really good pictures. So that's really nice. All right, let's go over here. Hi, Hannah Wagner. I just was wondering with kind of the electric mobility that we've seen around the 2018 election and also recent laws out of like Alabama, what would you say is the most important or one of the most important pieces of wisdom, the suffragettes could teach those of us who are beginning the move again today? Never quit. Right, don't give up. But also everything we've been talking about, think about how things look, know your opposition, make friends, count votes, count votes. Do your homework. All of these lessons that they accomplished so well and occasionally failed at and we can learn from that too. So there's the big headline, never give up. But the slow and sometimes fascinating and sometimes tedious process of making societal change, they're an amazing model of. You can learn so much about how to be a good activist from the suffrage movement. It might teach you patience. But I'm sort of- It's not the word that just came to mind. The 72 years is a little too long. Patience and fortitude, I want things to go faster, but the fact that they didn't give up for all that time and they did finally succeed and then it's taken almost another 70 years before women became effective political actors and how they voted and whom they elected and the kind of legislation they backed. But I'm very optimistic with Linda about this, about where we are now. I think the power of the 2018 election, those new young women, if they handled themselves effectively, I think were blessed by leader Pelosi in terms of demonstrating women's leadership roles. I mean, just to have the most powerful woman in the country, just to have a most powerful woman in the country in that position so close to a presidential position, it's very empowering, I think, for everybody else. All right. Thank you. My name is Andrew Henley. I had a question. You had spoken quickly about the flapper movement. More of a question with the move towards urbanism. Where do you think the amendment could have been passed if it was five to 10 years later? Good question. Yes. Yes. So 1920 is the first time that more Americans are living in cities than on farms, which changes congressional representation. It's also about the first decade of the great black migration. So blacks are moving into northern cities, as well as California, and they for the first time have political organizations and state and local representatives and newspapers. So I think you might have had quite a large voting base in favor of suffrage before the crash, because poverty really killed the women's movement. Thank you for the question. Sorry, I'm a bit shorter. My name is Jen Ophry, and my question is, at a time when it seems that politicians' involvement and or rather their advocacy for women's rights tends to be a partisan issue, how can we encourage more female political participation across the board when you see the fight for basic rights really going towards one side? How do we keep kind of the richness of the bipartisan electorate going? I would say start by not tearing each other down. I think that more often than not, one of the reasons that women's issues seem partisan is that women make it that way. And if you don't think that someone has a valid point of view that is opposite from yours, and you are not respectful of that, then you're part of the problem. And that doesn't mean you're not committed to your own cause, and it doesn't mean that you don't think you are truly right. But I think the fractiousness comes from us taking each other out. I wish women could sort of take a deep breath and step back from their most fierce partisan positions and think about where they can come together. The Violence Against Women Act, childcare legislation, rules about adoption. There must be some common ground where they could really be leading the way in bringing male allies in with them. One of the things that the Center for the American Women at Politics is a wonderful think tank at Rutgers University. It publishes all kinds of charts and measures. And if you wanna know the absolute number of women in the legislature in New Hampshire in 1970, you can find it or today. So any kind of piece of data that you want. But they have found that when in the 60s and 70s, when there weren't anywhere near as many women in Congress as there are now, those women came together over women health, your grandmother's credit bill. They found common ground because there were so few of them that women in the country wrote to them with their problems. They represented many women and they found ways to work across the line. Of course, I like to think that in those Halcyon days, we weren't quite as partisan, but then you think of Lyndon Johnson, we were pretty partisan. So, but they found common ground because they saw themselves as representing more than their district and not worried about being primary. They saw themselves as representing women voters. I also think just women aren't a monolithic entity, you know? I think it's an unrealistic thing. It's almost insulting. If he said that about, say, an ethnic group or something. And I kind of think maybe instead of it being a male-female issue, it's, I mean, my own bias. There are many men who are better feminists than women. And I guess I would like to see, I would like to see an agenda of just people who care about humanity and those values, those American values together and genders. The men on the banking committee, we're not writing in the piece about women getting equal credit. And the men in the Health and Education Services Committee, we're not writing in research for women's cancer. So it did take women in the room to make a difference. Women on both sides of the aisle. Definitely, yeah, definitely a part of it. Yeah, but I think it takes more than just women. I agree with that. And it's never gonna happen, it's just, you know, it's some. And I agree about the diversity. You know, people expect us all to disagree, to agree there's such wonderful diversity among American women. We have a lot of different competing self-interests. You're up. Thank you for the conversation. This has been great. My name is Lucia, and I would like to know, can you tell us the status of the Equal Rights Amendment today? I mean, I know that we need one more state. I know that Virginia recently addressed it and failed. Where are we with this? She wants to take it. Okay. Deep breath. This was a subject of a book I abandoned to write the one I'm working on now. The Equal Rights Amendment was introduced in 1970 and passed in March, 1972. It had a seven-year deadline as almost every amendment had had for a long time. Failed to ratify enough states in that time, got the extension, failed by 1982, the Equal Rights Amendment that failed. So for states that did not vote on it before, or states that have since changed their vote to vote now, will lead to an immediate court challenge because whose amendment are they ratifying? There was a sense that you had to have timeliness. The Equal Rights Amendment that Martha Griffiths pushed through was supported on both sides. It had huge bipartisan support. Now, many of those men, primarily men, was a majority of men who voted for it at that time, never expected it to come to the floor and to have to actually vote. But they did vote for it and it had huge bipartisan support. So you can deal with the old Equal Rights Amendment and there will be a court challenge no matter if other states vote for it now. And then you also have to ask what happens to the states who rescinded it during that time period because while it got to 35, three states rescinded. So maybe they only had 32 states. If you start with a new Equal Rights Amendment in the Congress, it will not pass. There is no support, there is no bipartisan support. Carolyn Maloney, congresswoman from New York has just been valiant. She introduces it, she attempts to get hearings. There were actually hearings just last week, I think, in the Judiciary Committee. You know, I think it's right. I think there's a constitutional argument to have it happen, but we do not have the power to pass it. We do not have the power in the Congress. We do not have the power in the state legislatures. It would never, a new one would not be ratified and the current one will be challenged. All right. So depressing. It seems as though all of the microphones have disappeared except for ours. I think that's a sign. I think it is a sign. Do any of you have closing thoughts on this? Vote often. Vote early and often. Even in the weird, off-year school board elections. Do it. And knowing how hard these women, they did, somebody said they fought for the vote. It wasn't handed to them. I mean, it's a precious thing. So get here. I would also argue, not only do I hate the, they were given the right to vote construction because of course they fought for it, but I would argue they always had it. It was just finally recognized that they had it. If you're a citizen of the United States, you have the right to vote. Right, well, thank you. Study history. Rebecca Roberts, Linda Lumson and Elizabeth Griffiths. Thank you guys. It was great.