 Welcome to the National Archives. Would you please welcome our speakers to the stage? Thank you. Thank you. Welcome folks. Thanks for being here. And welcome to our online audience as well. I'm Rebecca Roberts. I am delighted to have the chance to introduce Dr. Elizabeth Griffith and her new book, Formidable American Women and the Fight for Equality, 1920 to 2020. The book will be available for sale and signing after the program just up one level by the gift shop. And so will Rebecca's book. Betsy is one of my best promoters here. So first of all, congratulations. What an accomplishment. It is 100 years of women in less than 400 pages, which is extraordinary. One reviewer called it hefty. I would like to think comprehensive. You know, broad coverage of essential facts. How did you, you couldn't introduce every woman, right? How did you decide who to include and who to leave out? This book is full of formidable women. And there are lots of them. And too many of them were unknown to me, a woman who has spent 40 years teaching American women's history and should have known more. And those are especially black women, Hispanic women, LGBTQ women, immigrant women, all of whom I wanted to include in this book. Because my original question to myself was, with all the hoopla over the 100th anniversary of suffrage in 1920, what happened next? So they won. But what did they do? Did they vote? Did they register? Did they lobby? Did they run for office? Did they pass major legislation? Not. And so what did they do to accrue the power they have today, which I would still say is not quite enough power? And who were those players and what were their goals? And there were white women who had been engaged in the suffrage fight, who splintered in 1920 to pursue their different causes. And there were black women who had also been involved in the suffrage fight. And their causes were different. They wanted safety. They wanted protection from lynching. They wanted the end of Jim Crow laws. They wanted to safeguard their communities. So their women's movement was really a community movement. And because of the depth of racism and segregation in our country, these activist women were really on parallel tracks for a long time. If I may take a moment. You all can't see this, but the black and white photo here. But when you purchase a copy, you will see it up close and personal. Up close. It's from the 1977 International Women's Conference. You'll remember, it's a picture of lots of diverse women. They carried the torch from Seneca Falls, women runners all the way to Houston. And that was a photograph we could put on the cover because the designer knew I wanted to talk about black and white women. They had great difficulty finding any older photographs from the 20s or the 30s or the 40s because these women didn't interact. These were middle class educated leaders in their communities and their interaction was minimal. Maybe the best example is that black and white minister's wives in southern towns would come together to work on things like playgrounds or clean water. But those were segregated playgrounds and clean water in segregated communities. So it took a long time for the world to change enough and for paths to cross, really, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the women's movement finally begins to bring people together. But it is not an easy alliance. Well, I think starting with 1920 is so smart because when the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment shown this, you know, brief but bright spotlight on women's voting rights and equality, it sort of treated it as and then the 19th Amendment was ratified, done and done, right? And not only were plenty of people left out of the 19th Amendment but it also, I think, removes women's history to over a century ago. And even the New York Times review of your book, which was glowing, the pictures they used were Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, all of whom had been long dead by 1920. Yes, yes. It never stopped, the fight never stopped. They were organizing immediately but they were not organizing cohesively. You had social justice women working for protecting immigrants and factory working women, worried about maternal and infant health and death rates, which were, we were 20th among industrial nations then, we're 78th now, it's not an area in which we've improved. You have Margaret Sanger and the very controversial birth control effort going in another direction. You have Alice Paul always following her own drum, introducing the Quite Divisive Equal Rights Amendment in 1923. And keeping it up well through the 60s. Right. And the Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Cat couldn't stand each other, hadn't spoken to each other for the last five years of the Suffrage Campaign and when Cat converts the National American Women's Suffrage Association into the League of Women Voters because Cat hates Paul, the League of Women Voters opposed the Equal Rights Amendment until after it was ratified by the Congress. But so you have white women splitting their energies and you have black women focusing very much on protecting their right to vote. So just to clarify, the 19th Amendment enfranchised black and white women. The right to vote shall not be denied because it was bridged on account of sex, to American citizens on account of sex. And they were both considered citizens. Native American women were not considered citizens. Most immigrants were not considered citizens. People, women and men who live in territories, not citizens, any district, any resident of the District of Columbia, women married to foreigners took on the citizenship of their husbands. That was the first thing to change because those were privileged right women who had access. Also the reverse was not true. Of course, because common law, you are your husband's property and you have his residence. So they're working on a bunch of different courses. So they are active, but they are not successful because women are not voting. White women are not encouraged to vote. Black women are encouraged to vote but so discriminated against by state voting laws that their access is minimal. A journalist says in 1930, the 19th amendment promised almost everything and accomplished almost nothing. And that was pretty true in 1930. I think everyone who studies women's history quickly comes to realize that a lot of American history is told in this sort of Hall of Fame model, right? We hold up these singular, important, usually men because they are the people who were able to hold the offices or accrue the wealth that allowed them that power. And that women make history differently and that whole Hall of Fame model doesn't really hold when you're talking about women as agents of change. So how did you balance wanting to introduce your audience to some really interesting individuals while also just not making it a whole list of singular humans? There's a lot of singular humans. I sort of subscribed to the Stay Her Name theory that if these women have been ignored for so long, we're going to list as many as possible. So there's a lot of women in this book. I want to credit your mom, Cookie Roberts, author of lots of books of women's history because one of the reasons women are not written about and a lot of other people are not written about is because there were no sources. We know about Abigail Adams. We might not know about Abigail Adams if her husband had not been traveling so there was correspondence. And then if he hadn't become famous and somebody decided to save the correspondence, a lot of colonial women's correspondence might have ended up in an attic valued and a lot of colonial women did not have the leisure, the money for the paper, the ink, the education, the literacy to write. And if that's true of white colonial women, we then went and wiped out the languages of Native peoples. We did not allow African-American enslaved people to be educated, to write, to read and so you have an oral tradition but who's capturing that? Whose stories are told? How you even know that someone was a heroine takes along, requires some documents and eventually you begin, eventually those women by the middle of the 19th century are better educated writing down. If you're Elizabeth Cady Stanton, you're full of yourself so you're publishing your autobiography which is inaccurate and your letters. But then people begin to tell their lives but there's a lot of, a lot left out. Most of many of these heroines from the suffrage movement from 1900 on I would say, I'd say at least a dozen might have been in lesbian partnerships in long-term 50-year relationships that their friendship networks knew about and nobody wrote about and biographers have not written about because they did not want to, quote, damage the reputation of these heroines until current times when of course we would recognize some of those women never would have been leaders and not had a wife. I think your grandmother said when she succeeded to Congress she wasn't sure she wanted to take the seat because she didn't have a wife. How would she do it? Right, right. Well, I think that brings up another question especially when your primary sources are letters that weren't necessarily meant for public consumption. They're often quite frank, right? I mean, men who knew they were making history or hoped they were making history curated their images because they knew that there'd be public scrutiny. I think you and I both agree that Frank's assessment of anybody in history is much more interesting, accurate history anyway but there's a little bit of pressure, I think, to sort of lionize women to justify their inclusion in the canon. You are quite frank about the flaws of a lot of these women. Well, I learned my lesson. My first book was about Elizabeth Cady Stan and why I mean she clearly was a flawed woman. Fascinating. People ask whom you would invite to dinner, not Elizabeth Cady Stan. She would have dominated the conversation, not a word in edgewise. She was full of herself, she was very funny and she was shrewd and she was a brilliant writer and she really did have huge impact on the suffrage movement but she had many flaws including moments where she just fell into horrific racial language and behavior and created such schisms within the women's movement in the 1870s that lasted more than 100 years so she has a lot to be responsible for and lots of people have been picking on my books, that book in the last 10 years which was good learning for me so I am very aware that I want to put in people's flaws but here's another piece of that, that's also because Beck and I are serious fact-based historians. We want to tell the whole story but people exist in their environment, in their time period and that's not to excuse egregious behavior, genocide, slavery, internment but I don't think you can damn everybody and not write about them or dismiss them because there's more to any individual. Individuals are flawed human beings and they behave in certain ways and maybe it's awful and you can't forgive them but maybe they redeem themselves in some way. One of my younger readers in the book, a woman I used to teach with, one of my first, one of the chapters opened Susan B. Anthony called it the long-hard fight referring to suffrage and she wanted me to say, Susan B. Anthony, basically that racist called it the long-hard fight. Susan B. Anthony was a lifelong abolitionist. She corresponded, had black women to her home, invited them to speak at meetings of the National American Women's Suffrage Association at which not too many Southern women would be present so she was navigating her environment but I think we have to be, there has to be some empathy for the characters about whom we are writing or we learn less. How do you think that conversation fits into contemporary conversations about controlling history curriculum and worrying that people's feelings will be hurt if they learn certain things? Oh, you just pushed my button. No, I just teed you up completely. I already told you I'd been teaching for 40 years. September's coming. I think it's the new school year. I'm so excited that I'm thinking, what are those kids going to be learning? We just have to learn it all. Our country is striving to be a more perfect union. It's an experiment in democracy. It is built on immigration and some involuntary enforced immigration but we are what we are and why deny any of it? There are lessons in all of it. You have to talk about the treatment of enslaved people. You have to talk about the horrors of Jim Crow. You have to talk about the treatment of Jews throughout our history until sort of into the 50s and 60s and the lingering prejudice everywhere. I blame patriarchy, which is just generally every all white man, but not all white men, for sexism and racism. It is so deeply rooted that if we don't at least name it and attend to it, we're never going to fix it. And if we don't do a better job of educating our children about our country and our country's values, we aren't going to have citizens who are able to make good judgments. Going back to your mom's era of history, the colonial federal period. So women, no rights, no power, barely educated, but then the founding fathers create this country and they have their redraft to write the Constitution and figure out that even with the limited voting that they are allowing, a few white property-owning men to have, except for New Jersey, which allowed both black and white women property owners to vote for a minute. Until 1807. But then enough men had been dressing up like women that they decided it was voter fraud. They had to just eliminate the women who had not perpetrated the fraud. They realized that democracy was going to depend on an educated voting base. And so they needed to educate sons. So they call on Republican mothers to educate their sons, you know, around the hearth, around the kitchen table. So what's happening to the daughters? Are they all Cinderella sweeping the hearth? No, they're learning the same things. That leads to the beginning of a formal education system for girls, the seminary system, Emma Willard, Mount Holyoke, all of those schools. It begins partly because they figure they can pay them less. The entire class of female teachers comes from this sense that we need education in this country. So public education is a blessing of our country, but we need to make sure that without barging in and threatening members of school boards, that there are curriculums that are offering fact-based, age-appropriate history, very inclusive. If we need to teach all of it, and I totally agree that we do, it feels like classrooms are just one piece of the puzzle, right? You need books. You need museums. Statues. Statues. So there's been a lot of talk about representation of women in statues. I think you called it the bronze gaps. The bronze imbalances. The bronze imbalances. And you know, there's a new statue in Central Park and there's a new effort to have a national suffrage monument here in town. Becca's on that board. Yeah. And what... At the same time, there's been conversations about removing confederate statues or contextualizing them. What do you learn from a statue? It seems to me to be a very blunt instrument. What is important about monuments? Well, I haven't written the book yet, so I have lots more thinking to do about this. But... Are you writing a book about it? I am. I'm hoping it's the next one. I've started a box under my desk throwing things in. But lots of... There are several good books out about statues. The new one is called Smashing. But it's sort of a capturing of memory. So a memorial monument. What are we trying to capture? Whom are we trying to remember? We've learned because of all the statue smashing that these confederate soldiers and generals were not put up until the 1890s. They were paid for by the daughters of the confederacy. In part because they were still mad not only about losing the war but about the way confederate dead were treated after Union battles about what happened in graveyards and burial ceremonies. These widows, many of them, had to drive the wagon with the mule to the burial site and dig up a decomposing corpse to bring back to the south. So they are mad and they are committed to the Cavalier myth and white supremacy. So I think statues are a blunt instrument and they are so big and you drive past them or you walk past them that nobody stops to read the text. So my original solution was we just need lots more text to explain. But that's not going to do it. So the conversation about who is remembered why they're remembered and if it's time to stop remembering them what do you do with it? When we've torn down statues in this country the famous one, George III in New York City gets toppled during the revolution there was a reason. We were revolting. That happens in European countries in the Middle East a lot. So what are we demonstrating when we take them down and what is the lesson? There's still a confederacy. There was still Jim Crow. There was still a fight over slavery a major civil war about an economic system that enslaved people. So we have to find a way to create conversations. The reason I actually got the idea about monuments was I was invited to speak in AP history class at Langley High School in McLean and the assignment was for every kid was to make a maquette of a statue that they thought ought to be built and a young woman of my acquaintance a feminist wanted to do a feminist statue and invited me to come to the day of the presentations and what people thought about that they ought to be remembering and how just really opened this idea to me. So I have no answer, Becker, really but I find it intriguing. Mostly I want as much exposure to history as possible. I'm going to add a footnote because I was thinking I wanted to, I didn't get a chance to thank the archives for inviting us but I have two archives personal stories that are important to me. The first time I ever visited the archives they were developing materials for high schools to use to teach women's history and since I was in high school as a principal but teaching women's history Lucinda Robb was working here and invited me to come and so to introduce me to this whole idea so I got an insider's tour of the archives back into the vaults where there are these large metal cabinets that sort of look like architects offices with the long narrow thin drawers and Lucinda opens a drawer and there is Franklin Roosevelt's Day of Infamy typed speech with his penciled in changes. I mean clearly, I'll never forget it. It was one of those moments just deeply engraved and the other related to women's history is at a tribute to your mom after she died the archives projected pictures of founding women over those murals in the Rotunda so you had Mrs. Hamilton and I can't remember the mom and Adams I mean there were four or five women and for a moment you thought that's what's missing when school kids on classroom field trips come into this room and see these founding documents and no evidence of the women behind the scenes and some of them not so behind the scenes. Well this is the women make history differently they weren't signing the documents they weren't holding the offices but it doesn't mean that half of the population was not agents of social change throughout our history. That's a good transition to this point one of the things about black women after 1920 because of the danger in which all black people in America were the level of lynching I think in 1920 I believe there had been 3,000 lynchings there were a lot of lynchings and nobody was doing anything about it and every anti-lynching bill was defeated by the Southerners in the Senate and then in the New Deal when they had a better balance the Southerners still controlled the Senate and FDR would not support any of those bills because he needed their vote but whereas white women after 1920 could at least do their attempted politicking their attempt to pass they did pass the Shepherd Towner and out to vote enough to scare politicians into supporting women's issues but white women were functioning in public roles running for office not very many but still they were in public roles black women a few were in public roles Mary Church Terrell the Democratic and Republican Party hired black women to recruit black women to their parties but most women were in their church basements were working as agricultural agents or public health nurses or teachers in communities underground because it was safer behind the scenes partly because black men had been so emasculated in any leadership roles during Jim Crow that you wanted the minister or the politician to be up front you were not going to compete with him and then they do have to compete with the charismatic black ministers of the civil rights movement when you have women, Ella Baker, Daisy Bates Diane Nash and it's less risky to them then but they're having to function in an entirely different way than white women because of the history of our country Tell me about a woman you kind of met for the first time doing this research Well, there were some names that I didn't know at all and there were some that I might have read once but didn't focus on but my new heroine is named Septima Clark African American and Charleston in the segregated public school system so she's very well-degreed, very talented teacher and she has given segregated schools with no resources and lousy buildings and farther and farther outside of Charleston because the school district includes the sea islands so she's teaching children in the daytime and she's teaching their parents at night and not only teaching reading and writing but she's teaching them the Constitution and American history and how to register to vote how to have a credit union or just skills that they will need in life she's fired by the Charleston Board of Education because she's a member of the NAACP and that's illegal to be a teacher and a member of the NAACP at that time, this is 1946 to 1950 on a parallel track labor unions and people interested in immigrant and factory rights had begun to offer summer school opportunities one was at Bryn Mawr College one was at a place in Tennessee called Highland where they brought together white people to teach sort of these same kind of skills to empower them in the case of those two schools it was how to organize a strike or how to demand better wages but by the end of the 40s to be organizing people to strike was viewed as communist so those schools were pressured to close down so the Highlander School which is south of Nashville and Tennessee decides well let's expand our curriculum because there's all this civil rights stuff going on the Brown decision will be coming down soon because people knew about it so let's integrate let's invite other people to come black people to come and we'll offer a citizenship education and they hire the recently fired Septima Clark to come to Tennessee in Grundy County, Tennessee she was the only black woman in the whole county in the entire county she's the only black woman she cannot cash a check she can't go to church she can shop if she goes to the back door of places but she stayed and she created this freedom curriculum and eventually well one of the reasons Rosa Parks didn't move was because she had attended the Highlander Freedom School the summer before her tuition paid for by a white woman in Montgomery for whom she did extra sewing so by the end of the 60s by the end of the 50s citizenship education is huge because it's okay to be pressing for voting but if people don't know how to rid her they're never going to go take the risk of passing the test so it trains you to pass the test to recite the preamble to the Constitution whatever it is you had to do prior to the Voting Rights Act so the Southern Christian Leadership Conference hires Septima Clark and together with Andy Young and I'm Dorothy Cotton are really responsible for registering something like 70,000 African-Americans between 1959 and 1970 when she retires returns to Charleston runs for the school board gets a seat on the school board gets her salary replaced so it has this fabulous ending there's much more to it than that and Elaine Weiss who wrote the book called The Woman's Hour about just the final days of the Tennessee ratification the final days that got us and we'll be publishing a book soon on Clark and the Highland schools okay I'm gonna do one more this is the problem with history teachers they always want to add one more fact we'll put a note over here that's why we're here so Friday is the anniversary of when Wilson's 3rd Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby certifies the 19th amendment you may have heard on NPR and other news sites that the suffrage was ratified we got the 19th amendment that was the first vote in the Tennessee legislature that passed it but there was a vote for reconsideration there were three more days of fighting people left the state and had to be brought back to vote it was a mess so it did not reach Washington until 3.45 a.m. on August 26th and because the anti's were bringing a suit to enjoin the secretary from he signed it at home at 8 o'clock and the courts didn't open until 9 so we have the right to vote we have the right to vote because two white men did the right thing in Tennessee Harry Byrne gets the most credit and he does deserve it because if he hadn't changed his vote it wouldn't have helped that the other guy held his vote but Harry Byrne was 24 Republican from East Tennessee and he goes into the chamber wearing the red rose of the opposition the stop the ratification and he takes it off when he casts his vote because his mother had written him a letter saying he would bring her some sheet music for the piano and would he please vote for ratification and be a good boy and so Harry changes his vote and at the press conference he says a young man should always do what his mother says I quote that to my son his mother voice and had Harry and the other guy's name is Banks Turner he just he held his vote despite the speaker of the house who had changed his vote looming over his desk he does not change but by one vote 26 million women get the vote and had Harry not voted they would have had to start all over again and they might not have been able to pass the congress, the states because of new administration, new political makeup so we are very lucky the only people who voted for women to get the vote were white men Jeanette Rankin the one term she was in congress did get to vote when it came up in the house but it didn't pass in the house so no one voted to pass suffrage successfully except for white men so we need to look for allies still amending the constitution is hard it should be hard it's why the document is not swinging with fads the germs of this book started in a book about the ERA which also is a through line for this whole century since the national women's party drafted it just after the 19th amendment what role has the ERA played throughout that time and what do you see as its prospects now especially considering Carolyn Maloney lost yesterday I was grieving that loss Carolyn Maloney has been a huge factor in keeping the Equal Rights Amendment alive I'm going to answer your question in three parts what impact did the ERA have so from 1923 until almost 1972 when it was certified by the House and the Senate it was a source of division within the women's movement because Alice Paul had grown up doing graduate work in Britain she had a parliamentary point of view about politics and she believed you hold the party in power responsible for whatever is happening so she blamed Wilson for everything and during the suffrage fight and only wanted to work with Republicans she would have never passed suffrage if you didn't have bipartisan support so she annoys Kat who refers to her as stupendously stupid three years after suffrage has passed Alice Paul I mean everybody pretty much recognizes that voting isn't quite enough it would be good if more things changed and the idea of passing a blanket bill that would just change every piece of discriminatory legislation at once was appealing to women's rights abuses and equal rights amendment at that time 1923 it was viewed as something that would damage the protections that had been gained for poor women, immigrant women, working women that there was there was no true equality and so those women needed being propped up by some protective labor legislation and she also asked only Republicans to introduce it so she makes it a partisan at the very beginning so social justice Democrats basically any Democrat is annoyed with Alice Paul they're opposing the equal rights amendment and that's going to be people like Eleanor Roosevelt, Mollie Doosan, Francis Perkins the power women of the 1930s are anti-ERA the Republicans take credit partly because they know they have an issue by putting it in their platform in 1940 they of course were the first to take it out in 1980 and Roosevelt Eleanor gets pressured to allow it to be put in the Democratic platform in 1944 so the Democrats are supposedly for the equal rights amendment too but she was never that keen but it's never having hearings it's never passing because there is such patriarchal sentiment that women may deserve equal rights in some things but we don't want to do anything that would change their status as wives or mothers or intrude on their domestic roles basically the language of the Carl Hayden amendment that gets attached to it from 1950 into the 60s and every time it gets attached to it that allows people to say hey I'm for equal rights amendment with the Hayden amendment so Alice Paul pulls it she's no one should have allowed it to pass with that amendment so it's messy and it's creating divisions among white women and black women don't care because they've got their own issues that are much more important than the equal rights amendment at that time but there's this interesting interplay between black civil rights and women's rights the abolition movement was a little more united effort and then you have a women's rights effort and then they divide so you have black and white women working together but by the end of the 1950s into the 1960s they're coming together a little more white northerners, white liberals want to support the civil rights movement so you begin to have some alliances that creates more interest in a new equal rights amendment or if we're talking about black civil rights we need to again, not unlike the abolition movement we ought to be talking about white women's civil rights, everybody's equal rights so and the labor union movement had been infiltrated by enough women workers after Rosie the Riveter that they began to have women in leadership positions and the protective legislation that in 1908 said you shouldn't be crawling on your hands and knees through a coal shaft if you're female or lifting 30 pounds had begun to shift because a lot of women realized if you didn't work the overnight shift or you didn't lift 30 pounds which was less than your children weighed, then you were never going to move up in union leadership so they pressured the unions to change their position but not until 1968-1970 major unions were based in Detroit, Martha Griffiths congresswoman from Michigan longtime democrat liberal says I'm taking this on and she manages a discharge petition, she manages bipartisan support, she manages to get it passed Alice Paul is semi supportive but not very keen about the seven year deadline and there's still some opposition from unions and the labor union but then it's passed and within a year the Roe decision comes down and people were thrilled about the Equal Rights Amendment ratified by 21 states in the first year but between the people who were not that keen about the pace of social change and the Roe decision you have the beginning of an anti-movement and Phyllis Schlafly rises to the occasion and channels all those people Southern Democrats who were mad about the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act evangelical Christians from all over the country conservative men and women who didn't like their long-haired children or people disrespecting the flag or the anti-Vietnam war movement they all sort of get pulled together in this anti-ERA anti-abortion and I believe that it contributes possibly creates the realignment of the political parties Phyllis pulls all those people to Ronald Reagan and there's this huge turning point in the progress that women make women are making a lot of progress 1968 to 1980 your grandmother's Equal Credit Act there's Title IX there's anti-pregnancy discrimination there really supportive Supreme Court decisions about working women and states and jury duties all that things most of them brought by Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she said the ACLU and then Reagan is elected new justices are appointed they much changed the course of the rate of progress that we're making but because there was that big swirl and upheaval people think that we were doing lots better until then you get some sort of wake-up calls with some decisions that remind you that women have less agency than they might have assumed and the future prospects it's dead I was asking when I arrived about the arrival because whereas the Secretary of State certified amendments in 1920 it's now the archivist's job and there's pressure on the archivist to say that since the three remaining states who had not ratified before the 1982 deadline have now voted 50 years later that that should count we could just sign a piece of paper and say it's ratified but it expired the legislation said if it hadn't passed it expired and if you had three more states you can also count all the recisions that happened during that time would be a huge messy lawsuit I certainly wish there were an Equal Rights Amendment in the Constitution but that one is not going to fly and I think I just think it's dead and an added argument to dead is beginning in 1983 the Congress reintroduced it every session so you can't say that the old one is still but now with without bipartisan support in the Congress with what is it 32 state legislatures controlled by Republicans there's not a prayer this used to be a bipartisan measure with almost equal Republican and Democratic support when Martha Griffiths was trying to get the discharge petition signed your grandfather said you needed 218 signatures your grandfather said do or come back when you've got 200 so she got to 199 and called on Speaker Boggs and he was number 200 but she still had 16 to go and she calls on Jerry Ford, Republican Minority Leader and he gets 16 Republican signatures discharge petitions were very dangerous things because they threaten the power of committee chairs but she pulled it off there's no chance anybody could pull that off today so it's dead two minor footnotes to that equality of sex every state shall not deny or abridge equality of rights under the law on account of sex is the wording of the Equal Rights Amendment sex you need to think about how we would want to define sex today Neil Gorsuch in the best decision he's made on the court about an employment issue about a gay man who lost his job because he played on a gay baseball team I'm not remembering I can't remember it begins with a B two years ago he was protected under Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act which doesn't allow discrimination and employment on account of sex and that that sex needed to cover the LGBTQ community so is the rights amendment sex going to cover everybody just imagine having that conversation and the Nebraska legislature it's messy and it may be that if the court just would say that the first section of the 14th amendment applied to everybody all the time that we wouldn't need it I'm not optimistic about the Equal Rights Amendment thank you for asking well the risk of course when you write a book that finishes a year and a half ago is that things update right so where in I was struck considering you published this or had to have handed in your manuscript before the Dobs decision how much you telegraphed you thought Roe was in serious trouble in this manuscript where in the process was that when you finally had to put down your pen I certainly try to summarize all the ways that the people who oppose reproductive rights have narrowed the choices that women have what is so you can see this change in the Supreme Court up until 1992 with the Casey decision the court is batting down and fighting parental consent, spousal consent required ultrasounds 24 hour waiting periods all these things which were meant to narrow choices and make it more difficult, more expensive more burdensome and that's where Sandra Day O'Connor came in and said no on-do burden you can have some limitations but it can't be so harsh that people don't act and since then everything that they had ruled against as unconstitutional under Roe from 1992 after Casey it goes the other way they're allowing things that they had previously denied so it was there to see so many laws introduced to make it harder and harder and encouraged by Trump's appointments his appointments to the court really gave a green light to state legislatures to start passing this legislation because then they could bring cases that would be upheld rather than knocked down and all of these cases are those kinds of cases laws in Mississippi or Texas that you look at and you think wait this is just egregious and they're saying no no we'll do that so the book will come out in paperback in March and I'm hoping that there'll be an opportunity to amend the epilogue because so much is happening I really hope the book I hope you all buy it I hope you all give it to all your relatives male and female excellent graduation gifts Christmas gifts especially for younger people because this fight is not over and we need we need everybody energized for another long hard fight I want to give audience members a chance to answer questions there are two mics in the aisles here if you have a question go ahead and line up I wanted to ask you about the epilogue which you call not enough and you say I know it's terrifying to have yourself quoted back to you if I get to the right card you said when you start at barely any and advance to more the line in a graph tracking women's progress might suggest dramatic improvement however over a century less so well here are some statistics that annoy me women are more than 50% of the population we are the majority of registered voters and we turn out by 10 percentage points more than men do and our representation in any political body is less than 35% we are 34% of school boards which is about the lowest level we are 29% of state legislative bodies we are 23% of the congress now there are also 23 women in the senate so that's 23% of that 100 we are 9 state governors 18% of the total we are not all that well represented and of course those are republican and democratic women it used to be that when women got to congress all of those women up until the middle of the 80s we say we know there aren't that many of us but we represent everybody and people wrote to them the reason we get women in medical trials now for breast cancer and heart disease was because those women were for quote women's issues and of course everything is a women's issue but if you're only going to you might as well go to a vet because no women had been in any of the trials you know if you're going to see everything through a partisan lens then you also need to be voting because you're not only going to need those percentages you're going to need those percentages of people who support your causes sorry venting yes sir thank you so much to both of you for being here today I'm a recent graduate of Montgomery College and I've long had a special interest I've long had a special interest in history which was actually sparked by meeting Koki Roberts your mother right here at the National Archives actually right here in this room when I was in middle school in 2004 and she inscribed my copy of founding mothers and I still remember what she wrote enjoy your history and I'm currently living overseas and I'm planning to attend teaching college and ultimately to teach American history overseas and my question is I was reading about Edith Noros Rogers and one thing I find of great interest is that she was a co-sponsor of a bipartisan bill which would have admitted I believe which would have admitted a certain number of Jewish children from Europe in the mid to late 1930s and I was wondering if you might be able to speak a little bit about that because I thought that that's drachemies particularly noteworthy in one final thing I just wanted to ask is if you would come across the fact that former First Lady Grace Coolidge had announced that she and her neighbors living in Northampton, Massachusetts would take in a certain number of Jewish children themselves I didn't know that, I'm glad to have that fact about Mrs. Coolidge, thank you Edith Noros Rogers represented Massachusetts a Republican from Massachusetts so in the total decade of the 1920s eleven women were elected to Congress three Democrats, eight Republicans and only three of them lasted any length of time at all and Edith Noros Rogers is one of them saved the others but Edith North Rogers was these women get there in part because people weren't giving these nominations away if a seat could be won they weren't going to give it to a woman so there had to be a fight to get your nomination but she's very shrewd most of the women who ran and stayed and accrued a clout these three women had done war work they had been nurses or administrators in veteran hospitals they had dealt with immigration and displacement issues during the first world war so they came with some credentials and that gave them an interest in military issues so they were sort of pushing the envelope on what were quote women's issues my best story about Mrs. Rogers is that in she lasts a long time I think she lasts until the middle of the 1950s but in 1950 after the 1950 census there's what am I thinking when you reassign districts redistricting there's redistricting in Massachusetts and John McCormick who's the speaker of the house goes to the state legislature and says you cannot give away Mrs. Rogers' seat we are protecting her seat because she votes with us when we need her and she's honorable when we don't when she opposes us so that would be a great person to do more research on and write about do teach we need lots of people teaching and lots of students of American history so I'm glad you have enjoyed your history thank you I'm really glad that you guys came out here to talk I am actually an alumni of the Madeira school I can't see you so tell me who you are I'm Mary Clark Mary Reinhardt is my grandmother oh my gosh she forwarded me an email to come and see this and it's been amazing through your research what is the biggest lesson you've learned that you want people of future generations to carry forward Madeira girls ask the best questions I remain shocked and dismayed by the depth of bias in our country and you graduated after I retired but for 22 years my first talk every September was called the book bag talk because you brought your nap sack your book bag whatever it was and it was filled with pencils and your notebooks and your hopes and your expectations you were so excited about the new year to create your bias and your preconception and your that you're coming into this community with an open heart because education does a lot to get rid of false facts and bias and sort of ingrained training from your childhood and exposes you to a wider world that's the whole purpose to challenge you to help you become a critical thinker to be able to assess facts but it is a really hard job and I think more so now because there used to be a much greater respect for facts if somebody said there's a footnote there's two sources this actually happened as opposed to something that you cannot prove ever happened people are sort of seduced by the by the nonfactual information so clearly you know people who come to conversations like this and read books are committed to learning and to challenging themselves I learned an enormous amount in this book and I'm happy to that I'm still learning a lot so I wish it were easier for human beings to have empathy toward each other and to break down those barriers that keep us from seeing people as individuals with their own lives and maybe reasons to have values different from us but that you can have conversations as opposed to fights or violence I'm so glad to meet you come say hi there I think that is a wonderful place to end the book again, Formidable and those of you who are here can purchase it upstairs outside of the gift shop Betsy will be signing them I also think they have my book on the suffrage movement if you want to buy that too if you are part of the online audience I hope that you have enjoyed this time with us and we'll seek out the book on your own and thank you all so much for being here and thanks to the archives for having us and if you are Madeira related let's take a picture thank you