 Hi, welcome everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. I just wanted to take a moment to welcome everyone and talk a little bit about this program, which is co-sponsored by Mechanics Institute and the League of Women Voters of San Francisco, as well as our community partner, the JCC of San Francisco. My name is Kimberly Skirfano and I'm the Executive Director of Mechanics Institute. As many of you know this day commemorates the 72-year struggle of American suffragists and their supporters around the world. From the first convention in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848 to the women who marched, protested, and were incarcerated, to the divisions and delegations that carried Black, Native American, and other diverse voices across the country, and those who fought to be included in the movement. And finally, to the ratification of the 19th Amendment and women's right to vote in the United States in 1920. The history of the suffrage movement is a complex, impassioned fight for women's equal rights. And now I'd like to turn this over to Lara Shepard, our Events Director at Mechanics Institute. Welcome everyone. Tonight's program, Women in Politics Today, a progress report, celebrates our own leaders and representatives. Tonight we will hear from Congresswoman Jackie Spear, California Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kunalakis, Alameda County Supervisor Wilma Chan, Amy Allison, Founder and President of She the People, Marisa Lagos, KQED Political Correspondent, who is our moderator, and Allison Goh, President of the League of Women Voters of San Francisco. We'll also be joined by historians, suffrage historians, Elaine Ellenson and Jennifer Heldon, who will offer commentary in between our speakers, highlighting moments from the suffrage campaign that brought us to today. Our distinguished guests will offer perspectives from their engagement in public service, government, and social justice work. They will share their inspirations and aspirations and how women can lead our country and preserve democratic values, from community organizing to legislating in Congress. Please note, this event is a non-partisan program. Now I'd like to introduce our moderator, Marisa Lagos. Marisa Lagos is a correspondent for KQED's California Politics and Government Desk, and co-hosts a weekly show and podcast, Political Breakdown, with Scott Schaffer. At KQED, Lagos conducts reporting, analysis, and investigations into state, local, and national politics for radio, TV, and also online. Previously, she worked for the San Francisco Chronicle, covering San Francisco City Hall and state politics, and also at the San Francisco Examiner and Los Angeles Times. Marisa has won numerous awards for her work, investigating the 2017 wildfires and her ongoing coverage of criminal justice issues in California. Please welcome Marisa Lagos. Thank you so much. Laura, I really appreciate your introduction and having me here today for this amazing event, just jam-packed with phenomenal women, who I am lucky enough to know in my capacity as a journalist. It's been interesting, I think, for me as somebody approaching 40, but still in my 30s, learning so much in these last months about the suffrage movement. I think like a lot of things, honestly, in American history, we're taking a new look at, you know, how they were framed as we were growing up, and what we learned in school versus what we know by actually studying history and sort of archival documents and footage. And I've been really heartened to see how nuanced the conversation has been, especially in, you know, my sphere in the media, around the issues about, you know, the racial sort of divisions within the movement, the problems there, but also the fact that it is nuanced, that everybody is not sort of, like, you can't ever paint a historic event with one brush. And so it's been really exciting for me to learn more, talk to some of our amazing panelists tonight on other panels, and really get a better sense of these things. And I'm going to stop talking because our next, our first guest, Jackie Spear, has a lot on her plate as well. You are all familiar, I'm sure, with the Congresswoman who has had an illustrious career in Washington and in Bay Area Politics. Congresswoman Jackie Spear currently represents California's 14th congressional district. She serves on the House Armed Services Committee. She's chair of the Military Personnel Subcommittee, also on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, where she serves on the subcommittees on Environment and Government Operations. Spear is also co-chair of the Democratic Women's Caucus, the Congressional Armenian Caucus, close to my heart, the Bipartisan Task Force to Insexual Violence and the Gun Violence Prevention Task Force. She's currently championing the Equal Rights Amendment for final passage, which I'm sure she'll be talking about. I also just want to say I was lucky enough to have the Congresswoman on my show last year when her book came out. And she is a phenomenal politician, but also just an amazing human, and I would really encourage folks to go out and read it because I learned so much from you. Congresswoman, take it away. Oh, Marissa, thank you. We are undaunted, and that's the title of the book, and we have to remain undaunted. So I want to thank the League of Women Voters and Mechanics Institute for hosting this very special forum, and I see Wilma Chan, who I had the good fortune of serving in the state legislature with and all of the other powerful women that will be joining us and certainly looking forward to hearing the Lieutenant Governor as well. Let me just say that we celebrate today because in 1971, it was Bella Absuk with those big hats that she used to wear. We can't even wear hats on the House floor anymore, so I don't know how she got away with it, but in any case, she actually authored the resolution to create Women's Equality Day on today, which was the first day that women got the right to vote 100 years ago, and I just want to read one phrase of the resolution. The women of the United States have been treated as second-class citizens and have not been entitled to the full rights and privileges, public or private, legal or institutional, which are available to male citizens of the United States. Little strong, but you know what? You could say that today because in so many respects, women are still second-class citizens, and as Marissa said, African-American women didn't even get the right to vote until 1965 with the Voting Rights Act, and we are still working through so many of the restrictions and suppressions of the vote even today. I was asked to speak a little bit about how I all got started in this great business called politics. I was 16 when I worked on my very first political campaign. It was for then Assemblyman Lee Orion, and I was young and impressed by what could be done, but I must tell you, I never thought I had what it took to run for office or get elected to office. So for all of you who doubt that maybe you don't have what it takes, believe me. I was thinking the same thing way back when, and I was able to overcome those fears or reluctance and eventually to run for office. In fact, I like telling people that this is what a three-time loser looks like because I lost for student body president in high school. I lost the first time I ran for Congress after Congress and Ryan was assassinated, and I ran for his seat and lost, and I ran for lieutenant governor in 2006 and lost, and it took another 10 years before we finally got a first woman lieutenant governor who you will be hearing from in a short while. So lots of reasons to celebrate because now we have our very first vice presidential candidate soon to be our vice president, I hope, and I'm not trying to spin anything here, but our first woman as a vice presidential candidate since Geraldine Ferraro, but a first woman of color and someone who's unapologetically fierce. What we do know is that women make a huge difference in elections. It shifted the House of Representatives in 2018 and we hope that it has a powerful impact this year as well. I just want to take us back in time to 1871 when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony sent a letter to Congress saying, please, we implore you give us the right to vote. I have a framed copy from the archives of that document in my office, and right next to it, a letter dated November 2017, excuse me, 1917, by the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, and it was a list of women who were opposed to women getting the right to vote, and they said things in the letter like, if we give women the right to vote, it will create a national policy to make nagging something that is appropriate in this country. At the time, there were so many that wanted to make sure that women didn't get the right to vote. The very first picket of the White House was done by women in November of 1917 in their white dresses, and on November 14, 1917, the Night of Terror, as it's referred to, there were 33 women that were arrested, beaten. One was actually stabbed between her eyes with scissors, and they were put in jail, put in jail because they wanted the right to vote. They were fed rotten foods, some of them went on hunger strikes, some of them then got force fed, and it was, in fact, a Night of Terror that has been forgotten, but we all need to recognize that we still have a lot of work to do, and I hope that as we celebrate today, we recognize that we are still not in the Constitution of the United States. The Equal Rights Amendment has not been approved to be put in the Constitution yet. 156 countries around the world have an Equal Rights Amendment in their Constitution and the United States is not. Now, in 1972, when it was first actually passed by the House and the Senate, in a paternalistic manner, it was included in the preamble a deadline by which it had to be passed, and as that deadline became close, they then struck the deadline and increased the number of years. So my legislation actually strikes the deadline completely. We now have 38 states that have passed the Equal Rights Amendment, the most recent being Virginia earlier this year. We passed the resolution in the House, H.J. Rez 79, it's sitting over in the Senate, so we have to get that passed, and the reason why we have to get it passed is until it's in the Constitution, not only do women have to establish in court that they have been discriminated against, they have to prove that it was intentional. It is not considered a suspect category, like races, for instance, or religion. So I'm very optimistic that, given the right mix in the Senate next year, we would be in a position to pass that. I want to just close by talking about a couple of issues that are still unaddressed. That includes child care. If we've learned nothing in this pandemic, it is that there is no economic recovery until we have universal child care. We can't continue to pay child care providers $11 an hour and expect them to be able to live in any manner that is appropriate. And we have to do much more to make sure that we address the wage gap, which continues to especially encumber women of color. While white women make 80 cents for every dollar in Bioman, an African American woman will make 64 cents, and a Latina will make 56 cents. So we still have a lot of work ahead of us, but we're up for it. And I think we just have to recognize that we can never say no. We can never take no as an answer, and we have to pursue it under every imaginable aspect. Let me end by telling you this last story. It's a story about who was the first woman who actually voted in California. I have to tell you a story about Charlie Parkhurst, who was a stagecoach driver, was called One-Eyed Charlie, was well received throughout the California region. And when he died, well, before he died, he voted in 1868. But when he died, we found out that Charlie was not really Charlie. He was Charlotte Parkhurst. And he became the first woman to vote in the United States in 1868. He's now buried in Pioneer Cemetery in Salinas. And we are reminded that if you have to dress differently in order to vote, that's exactly what Charlotte did. We don't have to dress differently. We just have to make sure that we get the ERA, that we get so many of the other issues we want to dress in the Congress of the United States and in state legislatures across the country. Thank you so much, Representative Speer. It's really an honor to be on this panel with you. And thank you so much for your leadership in bringing back the Equal Rights Amendment. It really shows that California women are leading the way. And actually, that's been true for a long time. What many people might not realize is that California women actually fought for and won the right to vote in 1911, almost a decade before the 19th Amendment was passed. And you raised so much about the opposition. There was a lot of opposition then as well. There was, for example, a resolution in the state legislature in 1893 that California women would have the right to vote for not for the main offices, but for boards of education and educational positions. It actually passed the legislature, but the governor vetoed it. And the reason he gave was that because in the privacy of the voting booth, it was too much of a risk, California women might actually vote the whole ticket. And again, when California women went to lobby the legislature in 1896, they were told that they should go back home and look after their daughters because their daughters might be walking the streets. So it was due to some very strong women who challenged the fact that women couldn't vote. And in fact, it took a turn of activism after the earthquake when women sort of came out of the parlors, the sort of elite women who were running the suffrage clubs at the time and into the streets. And I'm going to be talking a little bit later about some of those women who took the campaign into the streets, had sit-ins in San Francisco City Hall, had sit-ins in the San Francisco Chronicle offices when they ran lies about what suffrage would bring. And we're so glad that you're carrying on this tradition for us today. Thank you, Elaine. I'm really appreciate your thoughts. We'll hear from her again in a bit. I am next very excited to introduce Lieutenant Governor Elaine Ikunalakis. She is the first woman ever elected to this position, if you can believe that. She was sworn in as the 50th Lieutenant Governor by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2019. Prior to that, from 2010 to 2013, Ikunalakis served as President Barack Obama's ambassador to the Republic of Hungary. And her memoir, Madam Ambassador, Three Years of Diplomacy, Dinner Parties and Democracy in Budapest Chronicles the Onset of Hungary's Democratic Backsliding, which we continue to witness. Governor Jerry Brown appointed Ikunalakis to the chair of the California Advisory Council for International Trade and Investment in 2014. And she's also currently a director of the Association of American Ambassadors and a National Democratic Institute Ambassador Circle Advisor. Lieutenant Governor, thank you so much for joining us today and for all the work that you're doing. Thank you so much, Marissa. It's great to see you. It's wonderful to be here. I love the Mechanics Institute. I wish we could all be in that beautiful building together. But this is certainly the next best thing. And thank you all for putting together the opportunity for us to celebrate today and celebrate women and all of the achievements and how far we've come. If I could just note, I caught the very end of Congresswoman Spears' comments. I hope she told her personal story or parts of it, or you can read it in her book. But she really is a shero, an extraordinarily brave person with the commitment to public service that literally she would not let anything stop her. In fact, the more challenges that came her way, the more inspired she was to get out there and lead. And she's just a shero, a hero of mine. So I think that, Marissa, you wanted us to kind of talk a little bit about our personal stories, tell our personal stories, how we got to where we are. My story always starts with my grandmother in Greece. Her name was Karina. She passed away about a year before I was born. She was born and raised in a village in Greece. She never left the village where she was born and raised or the village where she married my grandfather and lived for her whole life. She never learned how to read. She never learned how to read or write or even sign her name. But she was really smart and really fierce and really well respected and kept her family safe during the terrible years of the Second World War and the Civil War in Greece that followed. She also was the one who had this belief in the United States of America and advocated for my 14-year-old father who insisted that he wanted to go to America where he had two uncles, one in Chicago and one in Lodi, California. And so he left home alone, no money, no English, came to the United States by himself, traveled first to Chicago and then to live in Lodi. And he worked in the fields as a farm worker and he often tells the story not of one as hardship but one as incredible opportunity. He often would say that he felt he had landed in paradise living in California. The road forward for him was wide open and he ended up taking advantage of California's extraordinary institutions of public higher education, came to Sacramento and went to Sacramento State University. I grew up in a very, very vibrant Greek American community and there's no question that the models for me were very much, you know, to pick a husband from the church and be a homemaker. And that's my mother was started out. She had a teaching credential but only taught for a short period of time before she started having her four kids. And that was all great and I loved to cook and my mother taught me how to sew. But in school, I got a very different message from my teachers about what opportunities might be available to me. And I learned about extraordinary women leading the way. And even though I couldn't have crystallized it at the time or really know where my life is going to take me, I was excited about the models who I had an opportunity to meet. So growing up in Sacramento, I came and I worked in this building where I am right now, my senior year of high school for a Greek American state senator, Nick Petrus. And then after high school, I went to Washington. I worked for Bob Matsui, the summer after my senior year of high school, I went to college. I've always been interested and fascinated with international affairs. I went and lived in Greece for a while, came back, went to business school. But all along the way, I've always been interested not just in government, not just in politics, but in democracy and in particular what it was about our system that would allow people like us who in any other place in the world couldn't possibly rise up the way that we did. What is it about this system that allowed for these pathways, this pathway of the American dream, the pathway of the California dream? And I got a clue once talking to my father about Cesar Chavez. And he was telling me how Cesar Chavez was his hero. Because when he heard other other workers talking about how they were going to pressure them to give them better conditions in the field, he said, I thought, well, that's crazy. Why would they do that? How could these farm workers, leaders possibly get them to do that? And what he realized with the success of the farmer movement is that the way our democracy works is that if you organize, if you get people together and if you advocate around an issue, that issue can become the law of the land. And that lesson is something that really fundamentally was passed down to me, that I've always been intrigued by and interested with, but that I also felt that as the daughter of an immigrant, that it was partially my responsibility to make sure that the system continued to work into the future. So there's so much that I could talk about, but I really do want to focus on a couple of experiences that I've had as a woman. So I worked with my father for 18 years with one foot in political activism and the other in housing. And I worked mostly with men and I never felt that being a woman held me back at all. Everybody was very nice to me. I worked really hard. I was friendly. And what I realized is that our predecessors had broken a lot of those glass ceilings. I was probably protected because my boss was my father. So probably none of his employees were going to mistreat me or make me feel less than because of my gender. But it was only when I started getting to the higher levels that I started to see all the ways that women help each other and need to help each other in all the ways that people can be held back. And so in terms of the ways that women help each other, I will tell you that Nancy Pelosi has been my biggest champion. I thought I might run for Congress from Sacramento one day and she was teaching me and grooming me and mentoring me. I ended up going overseas to serve as a U.S. Ambassador. She was the one who championed me and promoted me and recommended me and helped me with things like framing my bio to fit in a press release and make sense. I mean, just very, very much a mentor to me in things that I would take for granted now, but at the time I just didn't know. And then when it came to my confirmation hearing, they told us you should have one person introduce you, your home senator or a Congress member, maybe two, but not more than that. Well, I asked Diane Feinstein to say a few words and I asked my friend Olympia Snow, Greek American Republican, and I thought, well, that'll be a nice balance. Well, on the morning of my confirmation hearing, there was a message sent from the Congress that the speaker of the House would be coming over to the Senate to listen in on a Senate hearing. Protocol-wise, this is highly unusual and requires a protocol process for her even to be able to do it. And she wanted to come and watch the hearing. As it started to progress, Barbara Boxer said, well, wait a second. I'm on this committee. I'm going to introduce Aleni. So then she said, well, Nancy, you're here. Surely you want to say a few things. So I've been told to have one person maybe two introduce, you know, to be within the protocol and wait for extraordinary, powerful women. Three senators and the speaker of the House all spoke for me. And the thing is, is that I thought it was too much. They knew that even though I was having my confirmation hearing, this was not over. And my nomination could easily get too delayed or held up. And they wanted to make sure that when a woman is standing at a precipice of success, that they were going to make sure to push her over. And it was an enormously important lesson to me, not to take things for granted, but also to take every opportunity that I could to root out areas of discrimination and do something. So I'll give one story of one way, one of the early ways that I found that I could make a difference. So we had, and Marisa, give me a note if we're getting to the end, maybe I'll just finish with this. We had an opening in our embassy for a person to do community outreach, a communications lead. And my deputy, as was typical, brought me three names. And we talked about them and I said, well, who's the first guy? Your first choice? Oh, he's a rock star. We don't even know why he could go anywhere. And he put Budapest. And this is really exciting. So obviously, we want to put him first. Okay. Second person. Oh, yeah, I know he seems like a good guy, pretty competent people like him, good interviews. Okay. Who's the third on your list in priority? Oh, yeah, you know, she, well, she's just didn't have a great interview. She said she had the flu, but, but it just wasn't a great interview. And then one person didn't send in the recommendation, which is a sign maybe they're not, you know, great. And I said, wait, she had the flu. Yeah. And I said, well, what, what are you sure maybe it was just a bad interview? Well, maybe. And I said, and tell me, tell me a little more about her. And she said, well, actually she served in Budapest when she was a junior officer and she speaks Hungarian. The most important qualification for our communications person was language skills. So I said, why don't you go back and call her and do another interview? See, you know, see how it goes when she's feeling better. A couple of days later, he comes back and he says, you're not going to believe this. I have this interview and it went great. She was terrific. I think we should put her as the first person. And you know, she speaks Hungarian. So we did and she came and she was terrific. But what I realized is that there are a lot of different small subtle ways when you again, get to these levels where women really have been over the last generation, since we've had so much progress in women's equality, where they're still held back. And sometimes it's in very subtle ways. So I won't tell the story, but I will say that I was very proud to be part of a group of people, including a lot of women, who felt that our recommended nominee for Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris, was not getting well represented by the media. And that people who had other interests were supporting other candidates were saying things and doing things that was undermining what we knew of her, which is that she is the best partner and friend that anybody can have when it comes to solving problems and working in government. And so a group of us got together and we stood up and we asked for a meeting with the VP selection committee. And it was the honor and honor for me to organize it, because I'm an organizer, but to be part of a series of testimonies that I think it's safe to say didn't just impress them, but really blew the committee out of the water to hear from so many Californians who know Kamala Harris personally and stood up to go to bat for her. So Marisa, I hope that's what you were looking for. Plenty of stories. I'm just so grateful to you to invite me here, but more importantly to be bringing people together to share stories, to recognize how far we have come since our pioneering mothers broke through those glass ceilings and got us the right to vote, but still how much more we have to do and how much we can accomplish when women root out those areas of sexism and help each other to address them and get the kind of recognition for work and leadership that we deserve. Thank you so much, Lieutenant Governor Jennifer. Yes, I'm here. Go for it. Hello, Lieutenant Governor Kunalakis. Thank you so much for that. It's really an honor to be on the panel with you and with so many other distinguished women. I really appreciated hearing about your family's immigration experience. And I thought today as we celebrate the 19th amendment, I would highlight a couple of women who were immigrants who were important in the passage of suffrage here in the United States. The U.S. has always benefited from the energy and the ideas of women who have immigrated here and the women's suffrage movement is certainly part of that. One woman that I would like to recognize in particular was a woman who immigrated from Poland. She came in 1836 to New York and her name was Ernestie Rose. She was a Jewish woman and she left home because she had been supposed to marry somebody and she didn't want to marry him. So she left, went to Berlin, London, and then came to the U.S., where she really became one of the founding mothers of American feminism. It's her activism which sort of successfully led to the passage of one of the first feminist laws in U.S. history, which was the 1848 Married Women's Property Act in New York state. And the tactics and the methods that she used to get that law through the legislature really provided inspiration for two activists whom she mentored, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth K. B. Stanton. So in a way she is a real pioneer of the suffrage movement and I thought it would be good to recognize some of her contributions today. Rose was eventually able to become a citizen of the United States, but many immigrant women in the 19th and early 20th centuries could not become citizens. One woman for whom this was true was another immigrant who was important in the suffrage movement, Nabel Pinghua Li, who immigrated to the United States in 1900 from China. And though she could not become a citizen she was very passionate about the issue of suffrage and when she was an undergraduate at Barnard College she spoke, she organized, she organized suffrage parades, she wrote editorials publicizing the suffrage cause, and organizations and grassroots efforts such as hers were instrumental in getting New York State to pass a state suffrage law in 1917 and that was really that the passage of that law was a major impetus for the passage of the 19th amendment at the federal level. So maybe Li later on went on to become the first woman to graduate from Columbia with a PhD in economics and though she lived the rest of her life in the United States we still do not know whether or not she ever became a citizen and voted. In 1952 the law that had prevented her from becoming a citizen was finally repealed. But I thought it would be nice to highlight the efforts of immigrant women in the passage of the 19th amendment. Thanks Marissa. Thanks Jennifer that's super interesting. I'm excited also for our next speaker Supervisor Wilma Chan. She is an Alameda county supervisor who represents District 3 including the cities of Alameda, San Leandro, parts of Oakland including Chinatown, Jack London, Fruitvale and the San Antonio neighborhoods and the unincorporated communities of San Lorenzo and Heywood Acres. That's a supervisor job you've got everything. She's currently chair of the health committee and all in a multi-stakeholder initiative to end poverty in Alameda County. From 2000 to 2006 Supervisor Chan served in the California State Assembly where she became the first woman and first Asian American to be a majority leader. Prior to that she served four years on the open board of education and then became the first Asian American elected to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors in 1994. Supervisor Chan we're so happy that you're here and really appreciate your time. Just getting used to this forum. Good evening everyone. Thank you to the Mechanics Institute and the League of Women Voters for allowing me to speak on this great powerful panel of women. I particularly want to call out Congresswoman Jackie Spear because she was a great mentor to me when I first entered the state assembly and that woman is absolutely fearless. She'll take on anything. I just wanted to I'm going to talk a little bit about social justice but first let me say that I'm from an immigrant family. I'm a second generation Chinese American immigrant and my grandfather was very disappointed when I was born because I have an older sister and he was very very disappointed that my mom had another girl. He was waiting for that grandson. My dad was the oldest child in the family and so he sent a Chinese name over. He did that for all the grandchildren and my Chinese name meant change and what he meant was he wished that I would change to be a boy baby. Of course that wasn't possible so I knew this story from when I was little and I think maybe that's why I decided to work for social change for my entire life. I've been active for a long time from my days at Wellesley College when Hillary Clinton was also on campus through many years of volunteerism and public office and I've just been very fortunate to work with some wonderful women. We should never forget that the right to vote was a very hard fought battle. It wasn't something that was given to women just like everything else that we value we usually had to fight for and so we have to continue the fight. I found this quote today that I really liked and it was from Nanny Burroughs from 1910 and she was an African American suffragette and she said at their best suffragette set the bar high. They were charged with using their power to secure human rights for all and I think that runs in the blood of a lot of women. Social justice runs in the vein of women leaders and a lot of times women leaders from my experience are very concerned about social issues and what they can get done much more than what position they hold and I think that that's a great attribute and something that really adds to democracy and to social change in this country particularly at this time. I wanted to talk about a few issues related to social justice that are going on right now. First of all in 2016 we passed an amazing housing bond in Alameda County, $580 million for low income housing which has provided housing for homeless veterans and other low income people. This campaign which I began was also led by a steering committee of almost all women including Gloria Bruce from the from the housing excuse executive director of East Bay Housing Organization Amy Fishman from NPH Housing and we were relentless in terms of the campaign. The two main organizers of the campaign were women. We went door to door, we made phone calls and it passed by over 70% of the vote and it's really provided a lot of housing for people who otherwise would have had no opportunity to have housing. Another really important campaign we did a couple years ago was to provide child care for more women in Alameda County. It would almost make Alameda County a universal child care county and also to pay workers who are mainly women $15 an hour as you know child care workers many of them only make about $10 an hour. This campaign was very grassroots. It was led by parents by a group called Parent Voices by child care workers and most of the campaign team again was women. Now we weren't quite able to get the two-thirds vote but since it was a community-led initiative we're still waiting for a court decision that may allow us to pass this on a 50% plus one and we're very hopeful this will happen as it goes forward through the appellate court and to the California Supreme Court. This is an extremely important issue as Congresswoman Speer noted in her remarks and this was led by women. During the COVID crisis right now we have very very strong women leadership at the county. Our county administrator is an Asian woman. Our health care director is an Indian and Japanese American woman. Our social service director is an African American woman and our public health director was the Chinese American woman who was so good that Governor Newsom recruited her away to Sacramento and now she's the acting director of public health there. We have tremendous leadership in the county on dealing with the COVID-19 crisis. Asian health services like Clinica de La Raza have led in us developing a community-based model that isn't just talking to people but actually working with the community because we found that there are many different reasons why people don't get tested, why they're not able to isolate at home and we've come out with some groundbreaking initiatives based on community feedback. For instance giving people who need to isolate at home a $1,250 check so that they can stay home and have money coming in to pay for food or rent or whatever it is, their utilities because people were going to work when they were sick because they had no way to stay at home. We also are doing food delivery and providing people with all the services they need in order to isolate and to clamp down on the quarantine. This particularly affects Latin X and Black families. The Latinx community, our COVID rate is at about 30% of those tested and there are many, many barriers to these mainly immigrant families to being able to receive aid to get better and to prevent the spread throughout their community. There are so many other stories that I can tell you social justice as I said is just on the minds of women and we still have a long way to go. Today I'm the only woman on the Alameda County Board of Supervisors with five men and I definitely will say with all due respect to my male colleagues that our office is the go-to office when you need to get something done. So today I celebrate the 100th anniversary of the right to vote with all of you. The right to vote was an indication that women are smart, women have the right to vote, women are political, women have a voice and in fact in California today in Alameda County and I believe in the nation women are the majority of registered voters. So we have a great deal to do in terms of determining the future of this country and we have a lot of very intelligent young women coming up. I have a lot of young women who I work with in the office who I mentor and our future is going to depend very strongly on these young women learning the leadership skills and coming forward to be our future leaders. So thank you very much for this opportunity. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much Supervisor Chan and you have demonstrated such leadership in social justice issues and actually I want to share with our listeners that your district actually was the home of the first woman led suffrage march in 1908. Women led a march in Oakland, 300 women, they were marching on the Republican Party Conference demanding that there be a suffrage plank in the party platform. The Republican Party did not adopt that plank at that time but it certainly drew a lot of attention and the women that were part of the suffrage movement really grew out of different kinds of social justice movements as well. So for example in the African-American community there was a very strong suffrage campaign in the black churches and in the black clubs and African-American men were the strongest supporters among men for women's suffrage. Thay Leung was a Chinese American suffrage activist who had been instrumental in fighting trafficking of Chinese women who had been brought to the United States forcibly brought sometimes and sold literally on barracoons on the port of San Francisco and she helped to rescue those women and then went on to become an activist for a suffrage leadership and again this was at the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act but she spoke to Chinese men who had been born here and were allowed to vote. Another wonderful suffragist that I'm very fond of is Selena Solomon's. She was very skeptical of the society-led suffrage movement so what she did was rent out a hall near San Francisco's Union Square on Sutter Street and she opened the Votes for Women Club and there she cooked and she served lunch to the working girls, the waitresses, the shop girls, the laundresses, the telephone operators and she invited them to come for lunch and then she organized them to walk precincts and join in the campaign for the women's suffrage movement. She was the one who actually led a sit-in of working class women in the San Francisco City Hall and then after suffrage was won here in 1911 many of the women went on to become involved in other social justice movements in the labor movement in the reproductive rights movement in the LGBT movement and so we can see that suffrage is part of a long history of fighting for women's rights in this country which thank you Supervisor Chen are very much a part of. Thank you. Thank you Elaine. I'm also very excited to introduce our next guest Amy Allison as the founder and president of Shida People. They're a national network of women of color. She's hosted the nation's first presidential forum for women of color in 2019 and leads national efforts to build inclusive multiracial coalitions led by women of color. She has appeared in numerous media outlets including KQED, Politico of the New York Times and PBS and Amy thank you so much for being here tonight. I'm so happy to be here. Thank you Marissa. Good to see you. I think I when I was asked about celebrating 100 years I thought about you know who I am. I as a biracial black woman am a beneficiary of generations of black women who fought for our full citizenship rights and the right to vote and for women of color including Latina and Asian American and Muslim and indigenous women. Gender is not cannot be separated from race and from 100 years ago in the activism led by black suffragettes like Ida B. Wells and Sojourner Truth even the first woman the first American woman to talk about women's right to vote and politics in in front of a crowd of men and women of both genders was a black woman named Maria Stewart. So from the very beginning back in 1832 we have black women and other women of color who have built up a movement and contributed to a movement. 100 years ago the white women benefited from that movement and I think like many institutions and movements in American life it was infected by racism that led for you know the Susan B. Anthony's to tell black activists and other women of color to go to the back of the march who actively argued against the you know the full citizenship in the 15th amendment that had language that excluded the humanity and the civil rights of black and brown women and that led to a very very long schism amongst women of different races that continues even till today and it's important to say that and to say that you know this country owes a great debt to suffragettes of color to activists of color to to the black and brown women who didn't give up after the 19th amendment only guaranteed access to the ballot box for white women and they continue to fight but the fight never was simply on gender it was a fight for racial justice and for economic justice very deeply rooted in struggles for racial equality that ended you know and guaranteed the access to the ballot box when the Voting Rights Act was signed I think when I when I think about my own organizing and activism in the wake of the 2016 election you know for a lot of people who had this idea that there was a women's movement that was crafted and shaped by the suffragette movement didn't fully understand the racial dynamics and didn't understand that even today even 2020 race is more of a determinant for how people vote than gender and there is a schism and a divide between how the majority of white women they're as political actors the role that they play nationally and women of color it's not everybody it's not an essentialist argument but it is it is political fact it is also true that women of color are a the majority of voters uh majority of women voters in our state of california uh new mexico uh arizona texas florida many of the states that are now going to determine uh who wins the white house and and who wins the majority of the senate and who wins down ballot so um when we look at the importance of uh the activism that grounded the initial initial expanding the franchise all the way till today we see women of color being um so central and key to expanding the right to vote for everyone um i have been uh organizing in california but across the country in 2020 is really around uh states in the south and southwest um where women of color are a quarter of the electorate or more um and what we're finding in a lot of states is that voter suppression is uh undoing the work of the suffragettes the women of color that worked so hard 100 years ago 50 years ago to secure and expand the right to vote it's undoing that work it's like death by a thousand cuts if we look at what's happening in we look at georgia the primary this year where um voter uh you know uh voting machines were moved and voting locations uh eliminated we look at kentucky's election where um in the main area of the state where most black voters and majority of black voters being black women uh would go to cast their vote it was all consolidated to one um location that closed at five p.m the doors were locked you might have seen pictures of people trying to exercise their right to vote the parking lot there was half a mile away people had to park rush if they had to go to work and try to try to exercise their right to vote it was terrible and undemocratic we have situations in places where the unrest um in the wake of shooting another unarmed man at the the hands of police in wisconsin which is a battleground state we have a situation where in 2016 some 700 000 people were removed from voting rolls majority people of color majority women of color we have a situation where um uh uh the voting voter suppression where people are removed from the voting rolls and the fact that um uh the the republicans are spending more than 20 million dollars uh hiring what they're calling poll watchers which are which could look like that 17 year old armed guy uh who shot and killed someone yesterday during the i mean i'm saying that the the the the stakes are so high that the unfinished business of the suffragette movement which was inherently multiracial from the beginning is to get right with racial justice that to unite women across race in a country that's soon becoming a majority people of color where there isn't a majority like there isn't a majority any one group we're multiracial our democracy can only be just as focused we're just as can be the law of the land if we are able to uh continue to expand the franchise by defending the vote of people um of of of women of women of color who are the most likely to be targeted for voter suppression i mean this year this year is such a critical year but what we see is unless we have significant changes many of which the league of women voters has been backing for a long time but unless we see significant long term changes things like automatic voter registration like we have in california but across the country things like pre-registration of of 17 year olds um everyone receiving a paper ballot having uh transparent tracking systems um if we we have um uh other ways of ensuring that every person's vote is counted and i think that's where our movement it's a it's a it's a natural progression of the suffragette movement the struggle and fight for justice and it was never just about being a woman inherently just being a woman it was about what we want to do with our vote and the the amazing potential of this moment for women of color who have stepped into view for the rest of the country we are recognized as a powerhouse constituency i heard senator comel harris her name um mentioned many times in this uh in this event for good reason because she is an affirmation that women of color have now the space in our political culture in order to lead because we don't just want to be the voters we want uh uh to be a partnering governments and i think that's where um our work and lifting up the significance and telling the story retelling the story of the passage of the 19th amendment and putting black women and women of color into our understanding both of uh of the potential the struggle and the limitations of solutions and what we have to do today i think that is ultimately where um she the people's focus is going to be is elevating those who will um protect and expand uh our right to vote and also what leaders look like now and in 2018 we saw that women of colors um uh turnout uh despite 2016 being um a year where even amongst the highest turnout group which is black women nationally and also in california it was back down to average we saw in 2018 those trends reversed so that women of color across the board's turnout increased 37 percent our goal for 2020 is to have historic turnout amongst uh women of color who are holding down the most critical and transformative justice issues economic justice gender justice and uh racial justice and for us to build a multiracial truly powerful women's movement we have to organize ourselves and be able to speak the language of solidarity from here on out there cannot be a win a cannot be like a gender focused uh women's movement that does not take into its center race because that's what corrupted our advancement to justice a hundred years ago and that's the unfinished business that we can deal um deal with um today so i am uh so beyond thrilled she the people took a leadership role in very early on this year um making the case for a woman of color vp and then we uh we polled uh a national or national groups we had listening sessions of women of color we met with the biden campaign and we worked with the uh media outlets to tell the story of how this would motivate um and inspire a group of voters who have never really seen ourselves ever uh there so it was historic but we also don't want to stop there it's it's never a democracy is never really about one person or one candidate you know it's about all of us and so we want to see women of color who are the least you know least represented uh in every level of government uh we want to see women of color elected um in historic numbers uh dwarfing 2018 numbers and we know that it's possible because an historic number of women who uh color are running for senate congress and down ballot so um that is that is my uh that is where i'm at uh that is where i feel optimism despite the present difficulties and just so very glad to to be with you here today Amy thank you so much it is so inspiring to hear about the work that she the people is doing and and as i was listening to you and i was listening to supervisor chan um talking about really the grassroots organizing efforts um especially from diverse communities both in the past i really am inspired to sort of think back to the women um as you said a hundred years ago even 200 years ago 250 years ago who despite the fact that you are absolutely right they were not welcomed necessarily by white women in the suffrage movement but nevertheless despite um those kinds of barriers that they faced they organized anyway because they recognized sort of fundamental truth that voting is power and without the vote you do not have the power um that you need to make the kinds of changes in the society that you need for the benefit of your community for the benefit of your children and your future um and um you had mentioned um idb wells who um was president of the alpha suffrage club in illinois and the alpha suffrage club was really instrumental in pushing illinois to grant equal suffrage rights to women in 1913 six years before the 19th amendment um and wells herself was very well aware that she was building on the activism of a century of um black women who came before her starting with um mariah steward who um in the 1820s um stood up in a public audience to speak for women's rights and for the abolition of slavery um and continuing on through a really powerful generation of women um around the civil rights era that i think most people are sorry the civil war era that i think most people don't know too much about and just in case anyone wants to read more a couple of names are mary shad carry who was one of the first black women in the united states to become a lawyer and she actually testified before congress on civil rights issues um in the 1860s in the 1870s um another and she was she was sort of central in organizing um the the women's rights campaigns after um the 15th amendment another important organizer from the period was a woman by the name of naomi anderson who came to california and was very active in the um 1896 california campaign including speaking here in san francisco and in oakland pretty extensively so there's a very long history of african-american women in the suffrage movement um particularly in the west um in the american west there's extensive suffrage activism on the part of many latina women as well in california in the 19 uh 1911 successful um suffrage campaign maria delopaz was president of the college equal suffrage association in cal southern california which was really the organization that was sort of instrumental in helping to get the vote out and um to get the amendment passed um in states such as colorado in new mexico which also had significant um latin x populations women leaders there were very important also in getting suffrage passed and in getting the 19th amendment ratified and i also just want to um with a uh recognize the really it's significant important role of indigenous women in the suffrage movement as well um one of the first um elected officials in the united states i think most people don't know this was an indigenous woman um by the name of helen clark who was elected superintendent of schools in montana in 1882 um and she had connections to the montana suffrage movement um all the way through through 1914 um and there were many indigenous women who worked for suffrage as well um but um when the 19th amendment was passed most of those women were not enfranchised by the 19th amendment because indigenous people were not considered to be new citizens until the passage of the 1924 indian citizenship act and women's activism again particularly a Lakota activist by the name of the sikhalists were critical in getting that law passed but as um several folks have mentioned um even with the passage of the 19th amendment and other laws such as the 1924 citizenship act the indian citizenship act many women had the right to vote on paper but they did not have it in practice because there were many voter suppression tactics that were used to disenfranchise women um uh from particularly from um in the west many latino women many um indigenous women and in the south of course um jim pro laws which prevented black women from exercising their franchise and in fact those voter suppression tactics in many parts of the country actually got worse after the passage of the 19th amendment because you had a new constituency of people who were trying to exercise their right to vote and so the reaction to that was the passage of even more voter suppression measures and um you know as folks have highlighted voter suppression is something that we need to keep our eye on today as a as a historian of suffrage i can tell you that there have been many times in american history when suffrage has been granted but it has also been taken away and so the fact that you have a right does not necessarily mean that you're going to keep that right and that you're going to continue to be able to exercise that right and so i will leave everyone with that thought thank you thank you jennifer um we are going to move on to our final speaker tonight and um she is one of the people who helped make this happen allison goes the current president of the league of women voters of san francisco previously she served as vp of voter services and pros and cons guide chair allison's passionate about voter education voting rights and women's representation in elected offices and has had a career dedicated to political campaigns and social justice issues allison thank you for having us all here tonight and for all the work you and the league is doing thanks um thanks so much for having me um it wasn't all just a single woman effort there were a number of other women um in the league that definitely pitched in i want to thank our volunteer coordinator at kathy bar for really pitching in and helping put this together it's been really inspiring for me to hear from some of our felt my fellow panellists who came before me uh lieutenant governor uh congresswoman spear supervisor chan any allison just really amazing for me to hear all these their stories and just really thank you for your leadership so like mrs just said i'm allison i'm the president of the league of women voters of san francisco uh we are a non-partisan volunteer-run organization and we're focused on non-partisan voter education and advocacy efforts in san francisco it's my little personal story my family immigrated to the united states when i was three years old we moved from singapore to the chicago suburbs in the middle of february which is when we experience our first snowstorm followed by a tornado that spring and this is probably why we eventually settled in the bay area um i remember the first time my parents voted they were really proud to cast their ballots in the 2000 presidential election and they voted in every single election ever since my mother basically raised me listening to whatever our local npr station was wherever we lived uh reading the newspapers and discussing politics over the dinner table and she's the real reason why i'm excited to be part of this event today and talk to you all and hi mom so at the start of this event i can really describe today's event as the commemoration of a 72 year old struck 72 year struggle from senica falls to the ratification of the 19th amendment and i really think it's a good description for a suffrage celebration because that we've been discussing it's really important that we remember that not all women got the right to vote 100 years ago um as we've been saying women of color we're still fighting for the right to vote long after 1920 many black women native women that we've named asian-american women would be denied citizenship and the right to vote for decades to come and of course as we know women were absolutely influential in the civil rights movements of the 1960s and today we're still fighting a lot of the same fight uh we're protecting the right to vote when it's challenged whether it be the closing of polling locations restrictive voter id laws or gerrymandered districts and there's a real reason why women's rights and racial justice efforts have long been intertwined going back to the strong connections between women's suffrage and abolition movements as frannie lu framer once told the national women's political caucus nobody's free until everybody's free and like many others here i'm sure many in the audience i've been inspired by this centennial celebration to read more about the fight for suffrage 100 years ago and honestly what stood out to me the most are the women that history textbooks have overlooked um the black and brown women the queer and lesbian women the native women all of whom played a role in the passage of the 19th amendment even though they found themselves excluded from the rights for which they fought i read about bertha pitz cambell who led her sorority in the 1913 suffrage parade in washington dc but they were relegated to the segregated sections the back of the parade were the queer women who held leadership positions in the suffrage movement like alice don bernelsen and kerry chapman cat dr anaheim harrickshaw who at the time they may have had no name for their partners or relationships but they were no less fierce fighters for voting equality and i know like i'm with the league of women voters and i know what some people think when they think of the league and i usually get the response well my grandmother was a member and uh we're not sitting around someone's living room drinking tea although we do like sitting in living rooms drinking tea um we're gathering we're gathering on zoom calls or facebook groups we're talking on twitter to discuss issues that are important to us as women and an engaged citizenry right now we may not be marching in the streets wearing suffrage at white but we are participating in socially distanced rallies and maybe rating postcards to voters um this league of women voters we're carrying on the same fight a hundred years later our league of women voters were modern we're multi-generational we're diverse over half of our board members identify as queer or a person of color we have a diversity equity and inclusion policy that guides our work committed to a fully inclusive organization and if you think i'm a young president of the league our our last president she hasn't even turned 30 yet and she was recently elected to the national league of women voters board so people come to us all the time and they say how do i get involved and there's the old saying that all all politics is local and that's because it is it really begins in our home in our block or in our neighborhood and at the league of women voters here we focus on san francisco issues and races next month we'll be hosting several candidate forums for the border supervisors races specifically in districts one seven and 11 every election we also produce a voting a nonpartisan voting guide it's called our pros and cons guide um in our volunteers research and write summaries of all of our ballot measures explaining the pros and cons of each one in an easy to understand nonpartisan manner and i i can speaking on behalf of our volunteers and as a former chair of this this product thank goodness newly have 12 also our advocacy team makes ballot recommendations every election you can look out for those on our website and our team of volunteers makes recommendations off of existing league positions and studies and these positions and studies mind you are extremely thorough in a no way rush to be put together and they read these and the materials about the ballot measures and make our informed ballot recommendations for each election so i mentioned a lot of things if you'd like to find this voting information or check your registration your address if you've had a name change or maybe you've moved you can go to our brand new page at lwvsf.org slash vote we're going to keep it updated through the fall as we release new materials such as the candidate forum recordings uh videotaped ballot discussions and video statements from the candidates our league also registers voters and we usually find ourselves at street fairs or office cafeterias during lunch or maybe even your neighborhood bar and this year we're still continuing that work just online we're going to be having asked the league hours over zoom working community members can come ask questions about how to turn in their ballots assist with registering how to vote we'll also be working with colleges and universities to engage and register students we're working with ucsf and usf to provide nonpartisan education for their students faculty and community um in addition to that we're working with ucsf to provide voter registration information vote by mail assistant and educational materials in their clinics and their doctor's offices so that people can make a plan to vote safely we're also voting we're also working with the aclu and let me vote to help those who are in jail have access to voting um another thing we do is we have the league observer core uh we started this program uh to change a couple of years ago actually to train community members like yourself to observe government meetings with a focus on police and district police district and police oversight commission meetings ensuring government transparency and accountability so we're an entirely volunteer run organization we have volunteer opportunities of all sizes if you're interested in joining us looking at all of our volunteer materials um or just want to see you some of our our educational materials for the fall we're at lwsf.org we're also very active on twitter or on facebook and so let's continue this fight for voting equality in the next ten year sorry a hundred years uh thank you for having me this evening um and it's it's been really a pleasure and hearing from everybody okay so i'm i'm this is i see that a lot of people have been uh putting in some questions into the chat room um i think i will uh i'm pam croy i'm the events assistant here and i will take a few questions and answer them if you'd like um one of the questions that was asked um and i think that uh alice the elson might have just covered it but it's basically about from sally whitehead and it's um how really can regular folks help out this year to make sure people can get to the polls or submit their mail-in ballots properly on time to the right place mailbox or other options um aside from being a poll worker what um are there other organ volunteer organizations that you know of that are working on this ham should i just jump in sure absolutely i appreciate the question um for those of us who who live in california often we have this calculus about oh california who's going to vote a particular way we're not going to really be uh the the distance maker in the in the senate and the white race race and um but i do think there is some concrete things that we should plan to do as bay area women as california women um one is that um that when we all vote organization uh she the people is partnering with it's michelle obama galler jared's head of the board it has deep ties to the the obama era white house office on women and girls uh you can trust that there's a focus on women of color and there's a focus on you know just getting everybody the right to vote and they have um incredible resources and so if you go to um uh when we all vote that's one way um to make sure that you have the resources for your friends and family to be registered and second i want to encourage you to go directly to the groups who are led by women of color on the ground in some of the states so you might say well okay we have work to do in california and i respect that however if you are interested in um uh verifying registrations and talking to voters in arizona the organization is one arizona up with these up with the addresses in texas where 26 percent of the electorate of color have in black women who are typically ignored by both parties uh the group texas organizing project is is taking out of state volunteers sometimes people would go and just like do a caravan that's not going to happen because a lot of the organizers aren't going door to door but what i can say is there's organizing new georgia project run by insa ufa a black woman in georgia as well as uh andrea mercado uh and florida new majority every single one of these groups has a way for volunteers to call uh to text voters and and uh eligible voters to make sure that we take them uh through the registration process and make sure they're on the voter rolls that's what i would do and i'll put the links in here because i think that's the most impactful way for us to spend our time and effort over the next 69 days and uh one more question and this is from uh judith con do you think voter suppression efforts will be effective in november do you think that they are they pose very serious i mean the serious danger to um to having a fair election how how optimistic is everybody about these about how far the current administration will go or pessimistic um so hi this is jennifer so um you know i i talk about history not necessarily about the present but i think i would just like to remind everybody that voter suppression has a long and very successful history in the united states um and part of that is because we do not have a constitutionally guaranteed right to vote okay amendments such as the 19th amendment and the 15th amendment they prohibit discrimination on the basis of you know race and sex but that's all they do they don't do they don't have a positive affirmative um protection for the right to vote and so i think that um you know there are because of that um states are free to pass laws on all kinds of criteria that may not look like racial or gender discrimination that have that impact and there's a very long and as i said successful history of doing that in the united states and um once one sort of pathway to that gets shut down another way you know revs up and i think that looking at florida is a good example right so in florida you had a bill or you had a referendum which um enfranchised um people who had been incarcerated and then so then another law comes along which says well okay you can't vote until you pay your fines and so there's this kind of constant back and forth um and as i said if you look at sort of the history around voting rights there's this kind of constant struggle uh between the folks who want to expand them and folks who want to keep them constricted and that's just a very real part of our history so i can't really i'm not an expert on what's going to happen in 2020 but this is a very real part of of who we are as a nation and it's something that you know we need to sort of constantly be grappling with i think and and i'll just add to what jennifer said and say that look um we know uh voter suppression is going to be the main way that the republicans are really seeing a path to victory and messing with the post office is one of those but there's a lot of others that we saw at play during the primaries really astronomical long lines in texas southern and in houston eight hours for the for one the person who last person to vote and to expect regular people to stand in line that long is is part of that um so we know that here's the thing i want to tell you as uh a voting day for us is not november third voting day has to start earlier so we can get make sure everybody gets their vote in and gets accounted so a lot of us are aiming toward uh october 15th and then having the last two weeks but get out the vote you know get their family friends trusted trusted community out to cast their ballot most ballots we believe will be cast in person which means really really long long lines and uh we need people to vote early i i think the other thing we should just get our minds wrapped around is i we do not believe that the election will be called on november third there's a lot of pressure from the uh networks and for media to call it but we think there are going to be millions and millions of votes yet to be counted that will determine the results um even even weeks after the third so because of this it's important for organizations to stay strong and make sure that we take the time to make sure everyone's vote is counted and we don't to come to the pressure of just calling it i'm not not this year not with all the voter suppression that's happening okay well we're going to wrap up now so i want to thank uh amy allison and allison go and our other incredibly inspiring guests tonight congresswoman jackie spear lieutenant governor eleni cluelacas and alameda county supervisor wilma chan and of course our moderator for the evening um marissa lagos and also want to thank our our colleagues and our friends at the league of women voters particularly kathy bar and her entire staff and remind everyone please get out and vote and thank you for joining us on the 100th anniversary of suffrage we hope that you'll join us again soon at mechanics institute i'm laura shepherd director of events and good night