 Good evening. Welcome to the William G. McGowan Theater at the National Archives. I'm Debra Wall, Deputy Archivist of the United States, and I'm pleased you could join us for tonight's program, whether you're here in the McGowan Theater or joining us through Facebook, YouTube, or C-SPAM. Tonight's discussion of women suffragists and the men who supported them, the suffragents and their role in the struggle for the vote, is part of the series events related to our current special exhibit, Rightfully Hers, American Women and the Vote. Our partners for tonight's program are the 2020 Women's Vote Centennial Initiative, and the One Woman One Vote 2020 Festival, and we thank them for their support. Our special exhibit, Rightfully Hers, tells the story of women's struggle for voting rights. To secure these rights, women activists had to win allies among men in influential positions. It was men who sat in the state legislatures that would ratify or reject the 19th Amendment, whose centennial we now celebrate. When Rightfully Hers opened in our Lawrence O'Brien Gallery last May, guests at the opening reception were offered a yellow rosepin as they entered the museum. That pin evoked the badges worn by members of the Men's League for women's suffrage. To many guests, this nod to the role that men played came as something of a surprise. So tonight, we're going to take a look at those suffragettes and their contributions to the voting rights struggle. It's my pleasure to welcome Nancy Tate to the stage. Since 2015, Nancy has served as the co-chair of the 2020 Women's Vote Centennial Initiative, and is also on the board of the Turning Point Suffragist Memorial. From 2000 to 2015, she served as the executive director of the League of Women Voters. Previously, she served as the chief operating officer of the National Academy of Public Administration, and in the Department of Energy, the Department of Education, and the Office of Economic Opportunity. Please join me in welcoming Nancy Tate. Well, thank you. It's wonderful to be here, especially at the National Archives, since they have opened this really lovely exhibit on women in the vote. And as she said, it's called, rightfully hers, American Women in the Vote. I myself have toured the exhibit twice. It's great, and I encourage everybody else to come and see it, too. So as she mentioned, I'm the co-chair of the Women's Vote Centennial Initiative, and I'm also 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, and that group, which in shorthand is WBCI, was formed as an information sharing collaborative of the many organizations and scholars who are working in this area. We want to celebrate the anniversary of the ninth passage of the 19th Amendment, which will be, of course, officially next year, 2020. And we want to, in doing that, we want to shed light on the powerful but little-known stories behind that very long and hard struggle to win the vote. The League itself was founded in 1920 by Cary Chapman-Cat, who was the head of the largest suffrage organization, the National American Women's Suffrage Organization, and the League, under her guidance, was formed six months before the amendment actually passed. Therefore, the League is also having its own 100th anniversary next year. So there is a League in every state and approximately 700 cities and counties around the country. And the League has been spending nearly 100 years now continuing the fight for full equality for all Americans, and we do that through both education and advocacy. But let me just say a few more words about the 2020 Women's Vote Centennial Initiative. We work to establish and connect people, networks all around the country, Girl Scout troops, universities, any kind of organization who is interested in learning about our suffrage history and how they can be part of these celebrations that they may even want to create themselves next year. Here in the D.C. area, these educational programs that we put on with the archives and other groups is the main thing that we undertake. So tonight, as Deborah said, this particular evening is part of WVCI's Women in the Vote Symposia series. This is actually the fourth one we have done here at the archives, and we hope to do at least one more in 2020. But when we pick the topics, each one of these focuses on some of the little told stories about what went on to enable women to finally get that vote. And all of the panels, including this one, will look at how some of these lessons show relevance to the issues of today. As many of you know, 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 times and how to navigate it. You can learn more about WVCI by visiting our website, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter using the hashtag at 2020centennial. So now I'm pleased to introduce tonight's panel. You have their full biographies in your program, so I'm just going to call them up by name. So come on up, ladies. We have our moderator, Betsy Fisher-Martin, who is the Executive Director of Women in Politics Institute at American University. Brooke Kroger, who is the author of The Suffragettes, How Women Use Men to Get the Vote, Johanna Newman, who's offered the author of Gilded Suffragists, and Susan Ware, who is the author of Why They Marched. So, Betsy, I turn it over to you. Thank you very much, Nancy, and welcome, everyone. Really nice to be here with you today. So we have a special treat, three terrific experts, and I will tell you just personally, I had a wonderful time reading and learning so much about this issue in preparation for tonight, so I'm excited for you all to hear it as well. So, Brooke, let me start with you. Your book tells the story of rich and powerful men, mainly in New York, that came together to help women earn the right to vote. Take us back to 1908 and tell us what brought these men together for the movement, and how did they first come together to form the Men's League for Women's Suffrage? It's actually a pretty good story. Starting around that time, Anne Compton Sanderson, who had been in prison in Britain, came to the United States on a lecture tour. Because she'd been in jail, she could not come through a normal port, so she snuck in through Canada, causing quite a big stir. And she lectured around the country, and one of her themes was how pathetic the wealthy women of America were in terms of understanding how to engage in a political process, and further, how the men of England had been very supportive of women in their fight for the vote, and how nothing of this nature was going on here. So this was in the press, and very much in people's consciousness, at least people in certain circles. Around the same time, Anna Howard Shaw wrote to Oswald Garrison-Villard, who was the editor and publisher of both The Nation magazine and the New York Evening Post. That's a nice combination. I was going to say that's a heck of a combination right now, but it was at the time. He was also the son of Fannie Garrison-Villard, who was an important suffragist, and the grandson of William Garrison, of course, the abolitionist and suffragist. And she wrote to him remembering that when he was at Harvard in 1904, he had made a wonderful speech at the Massachusetts Suffrage Organization and wanted him to speak at a convention. And so he wrote back saying, he's taxed to the limit of his strength, didn't think he could commit to anything of like that nature, but that he was thinking it would be a very good idea, and I think this was in the zeitgeist, that a group of men of prominence would come together not to do much more than lend their names and trot up to Albany or to Washington to speak to legislatures and politicians if the need arose. She wrote back and said that this was not a new idea, that the suffrage organization, which at this point was very much in the doldrums, had had the idea before. And in fact, there actually was a men's suffrage league that started in 1874, 1875 in the East Village in New York, met about 80 times, and then fell out of existence and memory. And I think this must have been what she was referring to because she said, the men who've been willing to engage are so full of isms, and we have so many women full of isms, it's about the last thing we need. The men who we really need, you Oswald, you know, it was basically what she was suggesting, never seemed to have the time for our cause. So he wrote back and he said, you know, of course I'm paraphrasing. He said, I think I could find a group of men, he didn't say I can find, he said, a group of men could be found who would do this work as long as there is someone to do the heavy lifting. And so some time passed and she writes back again, and of course in perfect women's style says, and we'll do all the work to get this organized. And to his enormous credit, he said, that is not a good idea. The more strategic plan would be for us to form this ourselves, providing we can find someone to do the work. And that would be the way to make this really effective. So he summons Rabbi Stephen Wise and John Dewey, the philosopher and Columbia professor as his, you know, triumvirate. And they, Dewey's student at Columbia was Max Eastman. He was a philosophy student starting to have a writing career, obviously short of funds, living down in the village. And he becomes the secretary treasurer of the organization. His charge was to put together a list to keep this very secret and put together a list of 100 names that would, you know, just wow the world from every profession, clergy, professors and names that America knew. And then announced this as a group that was organized to promote the suffrage cause. And so he gets to work. He gets the help of his mother, Reverend Annis Ford Eastman, who's from upstate Elmira. She comes down. They're writing letters. They're traveling. All the letters are going everywhere. So it's unimaginable that with what, 10, 15 newspapers in New York at the time, that someone would not get wind of this. And of course, the New York Times did and runs a very, very chiding front page article with a headline that was something like, you know, men's voices to join the soprano chorus for women's votes. And then it names all these people whose names they had gotten wind of. And of course, there were only 25 at that point. One exact, one actually, the director of Bellevue Hospital resigned. He was so embarrassed. But most were okay. Eastman was mortified. And he, but he had recruited George Foster Peabody, who became the financial mainstay of the league. And Peabody said, don't worry about it. By the time we're really ready to announce everyone will have forgotten this and all will be well. And that is what happened by November. He didn't have 100 names. He had 150 names. They had their first meeting in early November. By January, they had produced their first booklet with all these names and addresses listed with their charter and constitution. By later in the year, they gave their first banquet 600 people to honor Ethel Snowden, the wife of the British MP. This was, you know, very elite in its construction in the beginning. Later, they invited men of all sorts because it was understood that what you needed was men who voted. I mean, this was, this was really the point. And, and having this kind of male support was key. And then that leads us, and I'm sure someone else can tell the story of the parade, but they march as a group of 89 men in top hats and bolers in the second annual New York suffrage parade in May of 1911, where they are pilloried and mocked and, you know, just every sort of insult is hurled. And they embrace this, it galvanizes them. And from them, they are no longer just offering their names. They are really ready for work. Johanna, why was this, why was this so controversial to have men? And what did they, they were ridiculed in a lot of cases? Well, I did want to pick up on Brooke's point. So there were 89 men in the 1911 parade. One year later, in 1912, there were 1000 men. So that's how much the movement grew in a very short period. And a year later, they were in 35 states and bring in the tens of thousands. And one of the men who marched, and I was just looking for this quote, was Rabbi Wise. Rabbi Wise was a major progressive. He often lectured in the city on progressive causes, those isms that you spoke of, that was just a time of great ferment. There was debate among students at Columbia and in Max Eastman Circle in Greenwich Village. Is capitalism the right thing? Should we look at socialism? Should we explore free love? It was everything, imagine a time where everything was up for debate. And Rabbi Wise participated in the 1912 parade, where many of the men he knew from elite circles were in their clubs, looking down on Fifth Avenue, hurling insults, as Brooke suggested. Those guys were rolling their eyes. They were rolling their eyes. On the street, the rabble was hurling insults. He wrote, I dug out his diary, and he wrote of the mockery that he encountered that day. For a few moments, I was very warm and took off my hat. We're upon someone shouted, look at the long haired Susan. Some of the other delightful explanations that greeted us were, who's taking care of the baby? Oh, flossy, dear, aren't they cute? Look at the mollycoddles. Another male suffragist, also another suffrage husband, as they were called, was George Middleton. He recalled hecklers crying, take that handkerchief out of your cuff. Oh, you gay deceiver, you forgot to shave this morning. So I think we have there some suggestion of why it was so controversial, because it disrupted this gender role expectation that men had. And throughout the 1910s, what I think happens is that there's a succession of events that help to normalize the idea of women voting. And the, you know, the great fear among men, after all, the only voters here, the only people eligible to vote for women suffrage, either as voters in their states on referenda, or as members of legislative committees or lawmakers in Congress. There was this great fear that politics would harden women and emasculate men and also hurt the family. And a lot of things that the suffrage leaders did in those years was to reassure the public that women could be in political life and still maintain their femininity. But it it's probably worth saying somewhere that men have always stood, some men have always stood with women. There was a famous judge in Massachusetts, in the American Revolution, who wrote to John Adams and suggested that they consider universal suffrage. So here we have at the founding some agitation for women to have the vote. After the Civil War, when Elizabeth Katie Stanton and Susan B. Anthony split the movement, the women's movement apart by vowing that they will not support the 15th Amendment, which removes the barriers to black men voting, they won't support it unless women are also included. And this horrifies the other women who start a rival organization. So for 20 years, you have these two rival groups working at cross purposes. And but one black man named Robert Purvis stood up for Elizabeth Katie Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in this rather unexpected decision to fight the 15th Amendment. And Purvis said, if my daughter cannot have voting rights along with my son, I won't vote for it, because she has a double curse of being a woman and a black woman. So I think you, you know, we have to say that there are always some men who have stood with women. And I just wanted to throw that into the conversation. I think what we have to this what's distinct in this particular era is that they organized absolutely. And, and, you know, celebrity endorsers, there has always been back to Thomas Payne, John Stewart, I mean, there's always been those. But this was really a unique happening. I agree. What else is strange about it is that the few people in their memoirs who write about it at all, write about the 1911 parade, or the 1912, and, and the response from the crowds. I mean, that seems to be a very affecting experience. You know, and the lard talks about it also. It's the only thing he mentions. No one ever mentions the league by name. Only James Lee's laid laws, obituary mentions it because his wife probably wrote it and she was, you know, such a great suffragist. They never talked about it again. And I, you know, I wondered why like, was it chivalrous to not ever take credit? Were they just, you know, the consummate allies as we would talk about today? Or was it insignificant in the history of these very active lives? And by the time they died, you know, six decades later, it's, it's, it wasn't an important aspect of who they were. Only only laid laws and Eastmans make any mention of it. It's kind of fascinating. And yet, they were next, I mean, George Creel, you know, as soon as he becomes head of the committee on public information, he's not talking about it at all. Because Wilson, of course, wasn't supportive. So it's interesting. It's interesting. Susan, I'm going to get back to sort of the home life, if you will. And, you know, a woman goes off and joins the suffrage movement. What does that mean for the home life and for the husband? During that time? I think it really changes can really change all aspects of it. Because if, especially if a woman signs on to the suffrage movement, it's, it's kind of like having a religious conversion. And if she's all in, it's like having a full time job. It's an unpaid job, but it's full time. And this is likely something that she hasn't done before. And you can see how there would be a ripple effect that the kind of wifely or daughterly duties that she might have done before like being there when the kids come home from school or being there to entertain at dinner. Those things aren't going to happen anymore. And I think that what we need to remember is that it's not just if a woman says, okay, I'm going to support suffrage. It can affect all kinds of other things in her life. It can affect her family of origin, her who she's partnered with her colleagues. It can affect where she lives, where she travels can affect how she dresses. And so it's a really, it's a big commitment. And one of the places where you see it really hitting home literally is in suffrage marriages. You write in your book why they marched about a married couple Ray and Gertrude Foster Brown. Tell us about tell us about them. Well, Ray and Gertrude Foster Brown were very much a suffrage couple. She was head of the New York State women suffrage organization, quite powerful position. And he was a journalist and he wrote a book, a pamphlet published anonymously. He didn't put his name on it called how it feels to be the husband of a suffragette. And in that in that pamphlet, you can tell that he is a true feminist. I mean, he supports women's economic independence. And he talks about how having a wife who does things beyond the domestic sphere is just so much more interesting to have around than someone who just stays home. And he's sort of saying all the right things. And so he puts on this wonderful public cheerful face of this is great. This is what it's like being married to a suffragette. And yet in private things are a little more complicated. She is off traveling. She goes to conventions. She's giving speeches. She's out every night. And he's at home and he's missing her. So there's this sort of difference between the cheerful public endorsement of it. And that sometimes on the home front, it's a little harder to make it work and that he's the one who's really feeling left behind. And this had happened once before in their marriage, she was a talented singer and musician and she had gone off on the road, had a very successful career. And he then felt like he was being left behind. I think what's interesting is that both times they managed to work their way through it. And they stayed married until his death in 1944. And I think it's just a good reminder that we always need to think about the personal as well as the political when we're telling the story. Yeah. Brooke, I want to ask you about the press and how the men were depicted in the press at the time. Well, first of all, as a curiosity, yeah, I mean, it was interesting. So it made news. More importantly, the men who were involved initially made news because they always made news. So it was these were people that were followed on the social columns, they were followed for their business dealings, they were followed for everything. So being followed for suffrage was an extra fill up for the movement because it just drew attention. Another thing to be cognizant of is that a huge proportion of these men who were engaged from the beginning were editors, publishers, writers, poets, dramatists, I mean, they were people who had media access. So they were also able to guide coverage. We're talking about Catherine Dewar Mackey a few minutes ago. You know, one of the suffrage publishers was the publisher of Harper's. So there's this four page puff piece spread about her you know when she starts her equal franchise society, which was a parallel organization to the men's league also directed at attracting the elite women which Johanna can certainly talk more about than I can. And that kind of access to print, to having things published that were positive from a movement that for 70 years had been seen as dowdy and dull and, you know, a lot of verragos. I mean, it wasn't really a group that was attractive in a celebrity like way. There's a wonderful cartoon from 1911, I think it is, where it shows, you know, two suffrage women, one who looks like a scold and one who's shapely and very attractive in a beautiful hat. And it says, you know, the type has changed. And part of that was this group that had now become part of the image. I mean, you even hear flattering conversation, flattering descriptions of Anna Shaw's clothes, you know, really? So things had really quite changed. And I think this part of the movement really, that elite attraction had brought something that was needed. Yeah. Johanna, you want to say something? Well, Brooke is looking at me because my first book on this topic is called Gilded Suffragists, the New York women, the New York socialite who fought for the vote. And my conclusion on studying them was that they were the Oprah Winfrey of their day. That when they embraced this cause, it just gave a burst of energy to the concept. It popularized the movement. Many more recruits came in after they joined. There was just an excitement in the in the wind. I wanted to add, though, on the question of press, that most of the coverage was not favorable. And especially, we mentioned earlier, the New York Times, there was not a hostile news organization than the Times, who greeted the men with editorialized, really virulent editorials against what they what they were doing. It sort of suggested that they didn't know their own way, you know, that they were a little misguided. Perhaps they had been so one one editorial in the Times suggested that some of the men might have been trying to curry favor with female seamstresses to make their suits. Unbelievable stuff. There was a great deal of hostility. But then there were other papers, like Velards, who were very, very pro and the Herald, there were others that were kind of, but previously they were all like that. So that was the big difference. That was the big change that you had this wave of positive response that started to create that turn. I think there's something else that's going that's sort of a con a general context for what your two books are about, which is your organization starts in 1909 years. 1908. There is a the phrase I use is a kind of quickening of suffrage activism right around that period. 1908 to 1910, where things really burst out into public in a way that for the first 70 years or so of the movement, it really was taking place in church parlors and lecture halls. It wasn't engaging the public. And for a variety of reasons, things really begin to pop. And it makes and then there's a sort of self fulfilling. And then you have this escalation for the really the next 10 years leading leading to I think the reason for that is that as you said until this period, basically suffrage people were talking to each other. It was, you know, preaching to the converted. And I think there was a dawning realization to get the word out that you have to reach the public. And so in the 1910s, they start to use all the new science of public relations, weapons of spectacle, the public parades, all kinds of things. They had suffrage days at the polo grounds. They had women pilots dropping air dropping flyers from airplanes. They had marchers call us off day calling people at the baseball field, they would have fans that said, be a suffrage fan. They tried all kinds of stuff. They just got savvy about public relations. Where's the term suffer gents come from? From England. It was one of the pejoratives. It's not an official term. And on this side of the puddle, it's you know, mere man, husbandettes of the suffragettes. There were a lot of diminutives. Well, and suffered jet is also a fraught word in the United States context. And that was one of the things I noticed when Ray Brown uses it in the title of his pamphlet. And I think he was maybe making a kind of subtle jab at his wife. I don't know. But most American suffragists tried to distance themselves from the term, because it was associated with the British movement, which was more willing to embrace violence against property, which is something that the United States movement never did and very much wanted to draw those lines. So you find that I don't I can't really think of hardly any instances where America where women in this country would call themselves suffragettes. But you find that the term is very often used to describe them. And it has a somewhat pejorative cast to it. And we're finding that again today, as we're facing, looking forward to the centennial, the term suffered gent suffer jet is coming back. Yeah. And I find myself often waging battles and saying, no, no, that's not the right term. Even Hillary Clinton used it in her book. And I wrote her a letter and as a fellow Wellesley grad, why she shouldn't use it? She never responded. I think it's just people don't know the difference. Maybe she didn't get the way. Brooke, I wanted to ask you about the financial support that was significant in terms of funding, the suffrage fight even behind the scenes or some cases from the grave, some of these men, these titans of industry were funding the suffrage movement or their widows. Well, yeah, that would be Alva Belmont, who had divorced and widowed and used all that money towards the movement. Mrs. Frank Leslie actually made back the money that her husband lost in Leslie's illustrated, which is sort of a precursor to the old Life Magazine, beautiful pictorial publication. She made the money. And when she died, gave $2 million to the movement. She wasn't even really a big activist, but was obviously very supportive. That made a huge difference. Huge. That money. And so did Alva Belmont's because all the headquarters were built by by those funds. And then couples like the Laid Laws and other wealthy New York couples who were engaged with the movement were financially supportive. They would do a challenge grant, you know, during a convention. Most of these men served on the finance committee and were, you know, very involved in after the 1915 defeat in New York. There was a huge gearing up for the 1917 battle, which actually succeeded and was extremely important because when the suffrage amendment passed in New York in 1917, that brought 44 congressmen who were pro suffrage in which gave Wilson away with that much support in Congress to counter the opposition from the South. So, so all these things really fed into creating that burst of activity through the decade that really did make the difference. Susan, I wanted to ask you, you mentioned the Southbrook, what role that did African American men play? Well, we could all talk about that. I think Susan was going to. Yeah, I think it's very important as we think back about the history to pay attention to the large roles that African American men as well as African American women played in this movement. If you go back to Seneca Falls, there's Frederick Douglas with Elizabeth Katie Stanton supporting the women's women's right to the vote. And he splits with her in the aftermath of the Civil War over who will get priority about voting, but he never loses his faith in the importance of votes for women and universal suffrage. And then if you think about someone like W. E. B. Du Bois, as especially as the editor of The Crisis, when you read The Crisis was the magazine of the National Association of Color, people who just found it in either 1908 or 1909, it practically reads like a suffrage magazine. There are so many editorials that he is writing. And there's a reason for that. It's because African American men who fought so hard for in the Civil War and then received the vote after the war, only to have it taken away in the South by Jim Crow restrictions. They knew how important the vote was and could see why it was important for women as well. Because all the arguments that were given against giving women the vote had also been used about against men. And so Du Bois makes that point many others in the community do. And Du Bois makes another point, which is kind of an obvious one. But if women get the vote, black women get the vote too. So I think it's very important as we tell these stories and we think about a movement which has a reputation rightly for being predominantly white and middle class, that we can't let the racism of that movement keep us from acknowledging and making really front and center the contributions of both African American women, which are so important. But here's a perfect case where putting the men in the story just adds so much. So I'm glad for that question. Joanna, I read in one of your papers, a quote from Frederick Douglass, and he said, when I ran away from slavery, it was for myself. When I advocated emancipation, it was for my people. But when I stood up for the rights of women, self was out of the question. I found a little nobility in that act. I think one of the more interesting questions about this discussion for me is motives. And for Frederick Douglass, and I love that quote too. So thank you for digging it up. For Frederick Douglass, and for many other people early in the movement, there was a certain nobility in their act. When we get to the modern movement, the League, Men's League, I see a couple of groups of people. The first are what are called the bohemian sexual radicals. And these are Max Friedman and his friends down in the village. Max believes that women should have the vote because it will make them better lovers. They'll be in equalizing of gender roles, and women will stop being silly, and men can stop being profligate, and that might get to a better relation. Floyd Dell was another of his friends there who thought that women, that the women's movement, really the feminist cause, would liberate men because they wouldn't have to work, that there wouldn't be an obligation on their shoulders to support women and children. And they are quite enthusiastic. Max Friedman calls suffrage the great fight for freedom in my lifetime. So this is at a time of all these isms. He's saying suffrage is the main cause here. But they soon lose, I don't want to say they lose interest, but they leave the league. They start to leave the league by about 1912. Max says that he prefers a cause where you can suffer a little for the good. And by 1912, it's getting very mainstream and they sort of peel away. Most of the members of the club of the league are now good government reformers. These are people who join any movement to reform the public space. They join all kinds of causes. They join the causes to rid city hall of corruption, to improve sanitation for immigrants, to improve working conditions for factory workers, to end racial lynching in the south. They have myriad causes. But what I think they welcome women because it doubles their numbers. So it makes their progressivism even stronger. If women get the vote and can help. And so I think there are these different people come to the cause for different reasons. And I think one of the great lessons of the suffrage movement is that what finally succeeds is a huge broad umbrella that takes in everyone from working class to celebrity socialites, librarians, actresses, professionals, housewives, men. It's just it conveys in its breath public acceptance. And if I can just take one more minute, I think one of the least studied aspects of the women's suffrage movement is the role of the state. You know, it's a great lesson that social change begins at the grassroots level. And the states start rolling from the West. Wyoming is the first state in 1890. You have Colorado in 1893. By 1911, California becomes the fifth state. And it is extremely close election in California. The suffrage initiative passes by one vote per precinct. But the impact is huge. Because in the 1912 election, there are 1.2 million women eligible to vote for president. And by 1916, four years later, analysts say that Woodrow Wilson would not have been reelected, but for the votes of people in the women's suffrage states. So there's this groundswell. And what happens when we get to the 19th Amendment, I believe, is that women are no longer petitioning Congress. Please, please can we have the vote? They're coming as constituents. And they're saying, we have the power to vote you out of office. And there's another point that just if you're having a cocktail conversation about the 19th Amendment, and someone says, Well, women, one got the vote or were granted the vote. I always hate that. But, you know, in August, but you can you can say, Well, actually, quite a few women were already voting and really does start in the West and move eastward. But it again, it is the role of the states. The flip side of that is that very few African American women were enfranchised by the 19th Amendment. And that was because most of them still lived in the American South, where they were restricted from voting by the same tools that kept black men from voting literacy tests and poll tax and things like that. So we always need to sort of keep both these perspectives in mind when people just say very easily, Oh, yeah, women got the vote. Well, it's a little more complicated than that. And Brooke, you spend a lot of your book talking about New York and the significance of that. Was that 1917? 1917. Yeah. And why was that so significant? Well, as I said before, because it was the first really big delegation to come into Congress and create a change. And it was the first state east of the Mississippi or Missouri, how you count Illinois, but Illinois had not a geography, something like that. I think it's east of the Missouri to come to come in, which created this avalanche of change. And it was understood that if it had failed in New York, that would have been the end. Right. And it gave Wilson cover, in a sense, to start changing his mind. He always use the state's argument, you know, this is a state's issue. We still hear that. Yeah, that's still an artful dodge. Yeah, that that avoided the question of the South for him. But this gave him a way to come forward and actually help change some minds and make this happen. So fast forwarding to ratification in the state of Tennessee. Harry T burn. How who wants to tell us that story? The great story. We volunteered her. Harry was a young legislature in the Tennessee Senate. The setup for this, of course, is that to get an amendment, a constitutional amendment through Congress took the vote of two thirds of the House and two thirds of the Senate need to ratify to ratify. No, to get it through Congress. That was the Congress role in that happened in 1919. But to get it ratified by the states took three fours. So suffrage leaders spent about a year and a half going from legislature to legislature, trying to get ratification. And at first it was going along swimmingly, you know, a drum roll of approval, some five, I think three states rushed to be the first to ratify and they now stand in history together because nobody made it in the others. Same thing happened with the ERA. But and then they, you know, they parade through the states. And by then there is a groundswell of what we call the anti anti suffrage forces also see this as the big battle of their lifetime. And they marshal for it. And none more powerful, of course, than the liquor lobby that fears that the prohibition, the temperance movement, which was fueled really by women, that women have other things up their sleeves, that's just the opening wedge. And they're going to come with all this social legislation that's going to be very costly to their business and other businesses. So everyone's marshaling, everyone's descending on these state capitals. And they get to 35. But they need 36. And everyone understands that Tennessee is going to be the last state. They either make it in Tennessee or they don't. And everyone goes there. Many of the key players take rooms at the Hermitage Hotel in Nashville. The liquor lobby takes I think it's the eighth floor. And they call it the Jack Daniels suite, where they're offering if not bribes at least a lot of liquor. And the vote is extremely close. Harry is one of those who is down as an anti. This is signified by the wearing of colored roses for the anti's. And I think the the pros wore yellow. And all of a sudden, on a on a many procedural votes, he changes his mind and he votes yes, and tips the thing. And he pulls out a letter from his pocket that basically says my mother asked me to vote. And he hadn't he had, he said he was sympathetic to the cause, but he was going to vote no, because that is how his constituents had made very clear to him they wanted him to vote. But he got this letter from his mother and it touched his heart. And he vote and he voted the way he did. He was then hounded. He was accused of taking bribes. You know, the anti's were very powerful in Tennessee. They actually filed a lawsuit. This is a little known story too. I I hope someone is looking at it more closely, but they actually filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the 19th amendment. And that was finally you know, ran through the courts and it was rejected 1922. So but but Harry said it tickles him to contribute to history. And to make his party look good. So we all have the right to vote because a young man listened to his mom. It's a great story. Susan or Brooke, do any do either of you have another man to highlight who you thought is really the one of the most important people that we maybe don't know about? I do. I think laid law is the one. Yeah, he was the national president of the men's league. He could count his lineage back to colonial days through 50 different lines. He was on the board of what became standard and pours. I mean, he was a real player. His wife was a very important New York suffrage. And if I can read the the mission statement of the league, let me see if it's here. And I can see it, which would be a trick. If you can't. Yeah, maybe it's there. While looking for that, I just I can add that laid law. When he led men at the 20 at the 1912 parade, he was asked why they were marching. And he said, we are here to give moral support to the women and courage to the men. And I always thought that was quite poignant. Here's the statement in full. He goes, there are many men who inwardly feel the justice of equal suffrage. This was written in around 1913, but who are not ready to acknowledge it publicly unless they're backed by numbers. There are other men who are not even ready to give the subject consideration until they see that a large number of men are willing to be counted in favor of it. The man who is so prejudice that he will not consider it at all will pass away with this generation if not sooner. The usefulness of the men's leagues politically to women constitutes one of the unanswerable arguments for women's suffrage. Legislators are mainly responsible to voters and to voters only. In the majority of states in this country, earnest, determined women are besieging the legislatures, endeavoring to bring about the submission of a women's suffrage amendment to the people. How long and how burdensome is this effort on the part of non-voters everyone knows. But if a well organized minority of men voters demand equal suffrage legislation from the legislatures, they will get it. After that, it is only a question of propaganda and the men's leagues come in again on the first proposition of moral support. It's pretty great. It's pretty great. Susan, does anyone come to mind for you? I would give a shout out to a man named Fred Nathan. And I think it's partly because he's married to one of the characters in my book. Mod Nathan, who is a prominent suffragist. And she's in my book because I use her relationship with her sister, Annie Nathan Meyer, who was an anti-suffragist. She also was the founder of Barnard College. So it introduces this interesting sibling rival rivalry, but also reminds us that not all women were supportive, wanted to support women getting the vote. But Mod and Frederick had another one of those suffrage marriages and they did things like a cross-country automobile trip in like 1912 at a time when there were no cross-country roads. I remember he turns up at one of the international men's leagues. The international dimension of the suffrage movement is very important. And when we finally get to this critical turning point that we've all talked about of the 1917 November 1917 referendum in New York State, he is quite ill and he is pushed in a wheelchair or something equivalent so that he can cast his vote for the suffrage amendment. So I think I think he belongs in there. Definitely. He was one of the original figures also important. But Brooke, as you alluded to earlier, there's not a lot known about some of these folks. I mean, as you were writing your book, how did you go about finding a lot of the information, a lot of the stories that you have in there about the men? Because you mentioned that they didn't boast about it. It wasn't in their own bits necessarily. Nowhere. And interestingly, historians have not picked up on this. When I started, there were a page, a paragraph. There weren't even really academic papers that did much more than mention it in passing. So I went into, I mean, Fultonhistory.com, these incredible sources of, you know, buried small town newspapers just to find and trace where there were speeches, what they were doing. I almost, you know, did a full chronology of the 10 years to figure out that it really was a movement and there was more to it than celebrity endorsement, which is of course what they set out to do, but then clearly became deeply engaged. But quietly. Yeah, quietly. And then I think also, you know, we have to say that, I mean, as I got the idea to write this and put out a proposal, most of the response was who cares what the men did. It was a very typical response. And what was your response to that? Well, what was there to say? For somebody else, we didn't have that response, but printable. Yeah, it took a while. It took a while. Johanna. When you were talking about the men that that should be included in this conversation. My mind went to Teddy Roosevelt. Because he was, you know, the disciple of manliness, vigor, you know, some would argue that we went to war in 1898, because he thought it was going to help the vigor of the male population amid a period of feminization of politics. And of course, at the beginning, he is not very interested in women's suffrage. When he's first asked about it around the turn of the century, he says, this, you know, women will get the vote when they ask for it. And until then, the whole thing bores me. Let's move on to something interesting. Only in 1912, when he's running to recapture the presidency, and needs the votes of women, as he embraced the cause. But what I love about him, and I end my book with it, is that after women get the vote in New York in 1917, in 1918, Theodore Roosevelt is setting off for the polls. And he gets in the car and he finds his wife is already there. And he says in that wonderful Teddy Roosevelt accent, Edie, what are you doing here? And he she said, I'm going to vote. And the enormity, I mean, it was one thing for this man to embrace suffrage as a political endorsement. But for him to understand the enormity of the social change that he had reluctantly and belatedly endorsed. To me, it was like witnessing the human toll of social change. And it was a generation of men who had to decide. And I don't think the suffragettes, the suffragettes were ever a majority. But they were the activists among them. I think they also understood, as Laidlaw at once said, that they could make it easier, happier work. Things that were very, very difficult for women to accomplish. They could just do. I mean, take something as simple as a meeting at the Lotus Club, one of the exclusive men's clubs in New York, where women reporters were coming to report and couldn't get in the door. And Laidlaw immediately could open his offices and his cafeteria so that the meetings could be held. I mean, there just was an ease of being able to fix things that women didn't have in class. Well, I also think their role at the end of the day was to normalize the idea. To make it a natural part of everyday life. To make what? Voting? Yeah. Women voting. Women voting. I think what's always endeared me to the men's leagues, and this comes out of my training as a women's historian, where you see all of these organizations that are founded in the 19th century, religious organizations and political organizations. They're men's organizations. And then there are women's auxiliaries, which often do all the work and raise all the money and are actually central, but they don't get the credit. And what has always tickled me about the men's leagues is that they really were the auxiliaries and they embrace that role. And so it's a it's a model of role reversal. They actually took direction. Yeah, they actually use the term when they get thanked at the 19 seven victory and Laidlaw comes up, he says, we have learned to be auxiliaries. That's pretty good. It doesn't happen all that often. So let's let's give them some credit. Well, in fact, the governor of New York Whitman at the time was asked after the 1917 vote, who won women's suffrage? And he said, Well, I thought that the men of New York had a lot to do with that. I mean, there were all these newspaper and magazine articles at the time saying that this faction or that faction of women had actually won the thing. And Whitman is reminding us that the voters were men. So we have some time for questions. And we have two microphones on each side here. So if anyone has a question, please make your way to the microphones. Oh, I see a gentleman here with a question happens to be my husband. I know an auxiliary. Hey, guys, thanks. Thanks for taking the questions. And thanks for the great presentation. The question I have and the moderator wasn't bad either, by the way. The question I have is, you touched on this at the outset of this, but why the West? Why is it? Do you think that this first came out of Wyoming? And then obviously California and Colorado? Was it the sort of pioneer spirit, the fact that the genders were more equal in the West, whereas more stratified in the traditional East? Or what was it that sort of really took took fire prairie fire, if you will, on the West? Thank you. I think in a lot of cases, rather than generalizing about the West, we need to look at specific states. And there very often are stories within those states that have to do with political alignments and whether they're third parties. And basically, whether someone believes that having giving women the right to vote is going to help them. Having said that, if you one of the things that's really the most instructive if you're trying to get a handle on suffrage history is to look at a map of the United States and see this, the West, where you have these victories, and then there is this black hole of the south, where there are no victories, and the industrial northeast, where there are very few until New York. So the geography is really important. As a historian, I find it I'm a little uncomfortable using phrases like pioneering spirit or whatever. But something is going on out there. And I just think thank goodness for that because once you had all these women voting in the West, number one, the world hasn't come to an end. So that's important to show people because you really didn't know that. But it also gets people used to the idea of women voting. And you also have increasing numbers of women who actually vote, and then they can be a political force, both in their own states, but also in this national movement. So without the West, we might women might still be. Well, I just want to add that there were there were I think there were some political motives by men who saw adding women to the roles in the West as an opportunity to double their influence to get more representatives in Congress. But I also think they needed women to come populate very sparsely populated states. They also say that the strategies in the West were stronger, that they were very good at giving arguments that both appealed to the converted and could still appeal to those who hadn't made the change. There are several papers that try to deal with why why that was possible. Not until 1917. It took a while. But again, it is a it is a Western state that elects the first woman to Congress. And that's that's not a fluke. I also want to ask something about the West like when you were talking, you were talking a lot about like wealthy men in New York. But things happened out West. I mean, did you have anything comparable places out in like in, you know, like San Francisco? Yes. So in California, there was. Sorry. But the other thing I wanted to ask you is, you were talking about the fact that these men did things behind the scenes. And yet you also said that this became a more popular because you had these celebrities and people of influence endorsing it. And that helped. I didn't understand that it sounds kind of contradictory. I'm saying that they were people who were in the news already. So that became a vehicle for more attention to the suffrage movement in a way that was palatable. That was the point. But California had a important league run by a man named John Braley. He founded it. It was coeducational, but felt it was the most important work of his life. And, and Massachusetts had an important league, Chicago had an important league. They were 35 states had had men's leagues. And as I said, through the women's journal vehicles. This was heavily promoted, that women were asked to encourage men to the men in their lives to become very much a part of this. Hi. I was going to ask, how do you think the man in an average American household would have reacted to the idea of women voting? Not well. What do you think? I'm not really sure. I would have hoped it would have wouldn't have been like, Oh, no, that's a terrible idea. But I also don't think everybody would have been like, Oh, yeah, let's do that right now. I think if you want to take a broader look at the question of why this bias exists, you can in my new book, I go back to the American Revolution. Because I don't think suffrage begins in 1848 at Seneca Falls. I think it begins in that revolutionary moment when some women are agitating for the vote where New Jersey gives women and free blacks the vote if they have the same amount of property that men voters have. And there is this, what's one historian has called a revolutionary backlash, where all of that gets taken off the table. And women are asked to become the guardians of patriotism that teach the new generation of patriots about this new Republic. And many of them do this willingly, many of them use it as a wedge to suggest that they get a better education. They stick their toe back into politics slowly. They are instrumental in the drive to oppose Andrew Jackson's Indian removal policy. They are instrumental in the abolitionist cause to end slavery. But I think by the time you get to this period we're talking about the 1910s, there is this gender construction, this paradigm of gender roles, where women are to be the moral influence. And men are the ones that are supposed to get down into the dirty smoke filled cigar rooms where politics takes place. And there is, as I mentioned earlier, this fear about what will happen if women go into that room. And I think it just takes a public reassurance that we've been talking about to convince the public. Again, if you look at movements for social change in our lifetimes, if you look at how gay marital equality happens, it starts at the grassroots, it starts at the States. And people have to be convinced, the public has to be convinced. And there are campaigns, there are losing campaign after losing campaign softens public opposition. And that's I think what happened here with the men. I think I would add to that that I think we need to remember that even though the vote doesn't seem like that scary a thing, I mean, how can you go to the polls once a year? But it was it was kind of seen often as like an opening wedge. And that if, if that's going to change all kinds of other things about women's roles could change. And for many people that would be seen as a positive thing. But for many others that would be seen as an as not a positive thing. And we see that playing out through the rest of the 20th century. And we see similar ideas on both sides of the equal rights battle. So I think we need to, to always remember that something that seems like a fairly minor reform, like giving women the vote, although it is not minor, as we all know, please go vote in 2020. It often stands for something much bigger. And in this case, it is really women's equality in the modern world. One of you mentioned that there was a constitutional challenge to the amendment. But in general, I thought that once an amendment's approved, it's basically instant. What surprised me was I was googling Harry during your talk, and he barely survived his reelection campaign. And I would have thought he would have been a shoe in with say 50% of the voters in Tennessee. So why was he just why did he barely pass? Well, he's Tennessee, I mean, you need to look at the political situation there and see why it would have been hard for him to not breeze to election. In terms of the constitutional challenges, it is possible to challenge. There were two that were filed very quickly, beside the one that was in Tennessee that almost held it up, where luckily within two years, the Supreme Court ruled that there that the 19th amendment was valid. And there could not be any challenges to it, because that would have been a very poor start to women's political emancipation and equality. If it happened under the shadow of being knocked down by the by the Supreme Court, so they moved, they moved very quickly. I know I have read those two court cases. They're going to be in the Library of America anthology on women's suffrage that will be out next next summer that I edited, but I can't for the life of me remember the details of those cases. One other thing. And thank you for having read them. I've not done that. But I am. And it's a sad note really. And I don't know if this is partly why Harry Byrne had trouble subsequently, but the 1920 election is the first one where women nationally black and white in the North are eligible to vote. And the showing is not good. Very few of them percentage wise come to the polls. And there are a lot of reasons for that that we could talk about. But the magazines of the day, you know, they're all sorts of headlines about apathy, the apathy of women and so forth. And it's possible that that played a role in Tennessee as well. There are unfortunately, there is a perception that once women got the vote, it really didn't matter. There are articles with names like women's suffrage is a failure. I think one of the ones I found most interesting was by from 1924 by Ida Tarbo, who was a very prominent anti suffragist, and the ladies home journal sent her out around the country to see what women were doing with a vote. And she came back quite impressed with what women were doing with the vote. They aren't voting at the same levels as men. Remember, this is something most women have not done. It takes a while to learn how to be a voter, which is why the League of Women Voters is so important. But I think that one of the things I hope that the Centennial celebrations can help us see is this continuum of women's political activism that starts well before the passage of the 19th Amendment and doesn't end in 1920. Women just don't go home and go to sleep and not do anything. You see it continuing through groups like the League of Women Voters. You see it in the New Deal with women like Eleanor Roosevelt. You see it in the 1950s with the Civil Rights Movement. It's an ongoing continuum. And what I try and remind myself sometime is to think, could they have done that without the vote? Or try to imagine the 20th century without the vote. It's been less than 100 years that women have had it. And so what I try and do is take the long view. Think of it as the long 19th Amendment stretching beyond 1920 and starting like you do before 1848 because I think the roots of it are much broader than that. So no one should feel bad about the ERA not having passed because it's only just begun. 100 years. Hi. Do you think men are becoming more interested in the role they played in women's suffrage? We could take a poll. What do you think? I didn't really get it. They're becoming more interested in learning what they did. I don't know. Do you get at speeches? When you give lectures to people? The audience would be like this. A good selection of men who seem to be interested. I've had maybe one or two hostile comments, but not many. And usually from women, not from men. Well, just concerned about bringing up any credit to the men. People sometimes find that offensive. And of course, the suggestion is never to say that this was a men's victory. It's simply to recognize that social change requires everyone. And I think what's interesting about this movement as opposed to some other movements for social change is that it's a one issue thing. It's not a complicated question. It was single. It's not like bringing up abortion or it's not like bringing up birth control. Birth control. I mean other issues that become complicated on numerous grounds. This is simple and straightforward and a moral wrong. How can a citizen who has to pay taxes, who has to go to jail for wrongs, who has to abide by contracts, who has to do every single thing any other citizen has to do and has no say in determining what happens. It's just a moral wrong. It's interesting. So that's that's easy to get on board from in a way. You know, it's those who didn't agree would have to pass away because it's just wrong. But then it took so long. You know, it was really Susan B. Anthony who narrowed. Elizabeth Katie Stanton wanted a broad agenda. She wanted divorce reform. She wanted church, you know, the Bible would have was under attack. I mean, she she had a broad agenda, property rights, educational opportunities. And it was Susan B. Anthony who said, No, we're just going to focus on the vote. And she was probably right. This sort of validates. But you also notice that because there are so many horrific things going on that women's issues tend to always get subordinated even by women, you know, it's like, this is horrible, but this is not as horrible as fill in the blank. And and that seems to happen over and over again. Still in women's. But I do think that one of the things I've noticed as I go out on the hustings for the suffrage centennial is that I think maybe 10 years ago, if we were doing this, you would think about voting or the women getting the vote is of, you know, a kind of unimportant wasn't such a big deal. Well, I think recent events have opened all our eyes to the importance of voting and voting rights and voting suppression in a way that make what could have been a quaint centennial celebration much more relevant and much more timely here here than I think we would have expected. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think we have time for one more question. I was wondering if you know when did women get the right to keep their salaries if they were working? Was that part was that part of the movement before the right? Was that something? I mean, at some point, we got the right to own property and to keep keep your salary if you worked. And what when was that? Well, one one one important New York is a very important state in a lot of these legal reforms. And in 1848, they passed a married women's property act, which meant that married women could hold property. In 1860, they passed a law, the legislature passed a law that said that women's women could control their own earnings. And this is New York. This is New York. So what about the model of federal, the federal ever a federal law that said that women had the right without their husband's permission to earn money and keep their own money. This is to me, I was incredibly important thing. And I can't believe that it got subordinated to to being able to vote. I just it goes with it or before it, doesn't it? Do not have the right to keep your own money. I think most states by the time women's suffrage passed in 1920, that in most states women would have been able to control their own earnings. There were many other. But you don't know. If you worked with your husband, got everything. You had no entitlement. So we can do one more quick question here. So we are so fortunate to have six wonderful exhibits going on in DC about women's suffrage and women's accomplishments and we're just, we can feel the momentum that's going on here. Is that happening in other places across the country? Oh, God, yes. Good. It is. Do you have a favorite exhibit that you've seen somewhere? Any favorites? To me, the most exciting thing is that they're happening in all of the states. And I just have to give a shout out to the League of Women Voters who are playing such a central role in this, but also the state, many of the states have set up commissions and that this is just, it's a wonderful networking opportunity for people to find each other and also doing what we all try and do as historians, which is to take a very inspiring but complicated historical story to a broader public who really doesn't know very much about suffrage history. And I think it's a, it's a story that needs to be more widely known. And I think that a lot of the state efforts that are going on are going to get get the word out there. And I hope that it will just encourage all kinds of interest in learning more about it. And the place they can start is by reading all of our books, right? Yeah. The one that I have heard about that charmed me the most was on New Year's Day at the Rose Parade, there is going to be a float about women's suffrage. And they have invited people to dress as suffragists and walk behind the float and sort of recreate the moment that we've been talking about here tonight. And I just think it's a, it's a wonderful coming together of our history with a cultural icon of our presence. We run a site called suffrageinthemedia.org out of NYU, suffrageinthemedia.org where just anything that has a media aspect to it, which is everything, which is everything, that really, you know, sort of rises to the surface we put up and we change it, you know, almost weekly. So there's always new material and it has one of the best search elements ever you can search by post-suffrage, suffragera, academic, not academic, movies, etc. It's all like that. So come, it's all free. Great. Well, please join me in thanking our terrific panel and thank you all for coming.