 Hi folks. Welcome to the future of democracy. My name is Sam Gill. And in this show, what we try to do is take a look at some of the big ideas, big trends, big controversies that are really animating our democracy, our national conversation and take you a little deeper than you might be able to get just hearing a debate on cable news or reading one article. And this month, we are teaming up with the Miami Book Fair to host an amazing set of conversations with authors with artists focused on different topics about what they think about the future of democracy. And this is all leading up to the 37th annual Miami Book Fair from November 15 to 22. The Book Fair is an incredible collection of authors, an incredible collection of books, a really vital conversation about ideas. If you're interested, please go to MiamiBookFairOnline.com or follow them at at Miami Book Fair. If you're not interested, then you're not paying attention to the incredible authors they're going to have this year. Natalie Portman, the actress is going to be a part of the Miami Book Fair Bill Nye the science guy is going to be part of the Miami Book Fair. And you can hear every single presentation every single talk for free, but only if you tune in from November 15 to 22. One of these conversations is one with Doris Weatherford. She is an acclaimed historian who has written a number of books about the history of women in the United States. And we had a chance to sit down to talk about her new book, Victory for the Vote, the fight for women's suffrage and the century that followed. And of course comes at the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment, which extended the franchise to women. And of course I had a chance to talk about that history and what it means for our democracy today. I hope you enjoy the conversation. All right, well thank you so much for joining us. I'm happy to be here. In, in reading the book, obviously this was a timely moment to be to be revisiting the history of the expansion of the franchise and the passage of the 19th amendment. Tell us just philosophically, you know, for those of us today who are unfamiliar with this history. What was the animating argument that powered the expansion of franchise what was the argument that really carried the day in this movement. Lots of them, but basically the advance of the future democracy exactly what you're talking about. I, I'm an old hand at this I published my first book titled for new female immigrant women in America in 1986. And since then I published a dozen books on women's history. And I wanted to, I had done this victory for the vote in a different format with a different title for the 150th anniversary of the Seneca Falls convention. That was the first call for the right to vote in 1848. So in 1998, I went up to Seneca Falls is did a lot of other people including Hillary Clinton. And we had a fantastic celebration. So I have been looking forward now for almost 25 years to 2020, which should be the centennial of the 19th amendment. And I, I wanted to reissue the book with an update. The subtitle of the book is the century that fall. And I do a lot of talking about how other issues arose during the 20th century, and the vote was not the solution for everything. But I especially like to talk about how women's rights are human rights, and women have made more change in the way the world is governed in the last century. Then in all the millennia before. And I really do believe that the path to peace, the path to prosperity, canceling corruption, people don't realize how corrupt government was prior to women voting. And that was a main reason why men opposed it. They knew they couldn't buy women's votes. And they, they did. I'm sorry, especially in the immigrant community, it was routine to have a saloon next to the polling place and buy a guy drink and have him go in and test the ballot that you want to pass. And these were a literate people are at least a literate in English, and they cast a vote according to the donkey or the elephant. And that was an outrage to Susan B. Anthony, and other people who were teachers and well educated into democracy seriously. And that was a large part of their motivation. It wasn't so much that they wanted these personal rights, but that they wanted to improve government. What do you see as the critical. So if that if it if 100 years ago, the battle was really formal inclusion in the opportunities and obligations of citizenship. What do you see as the frontier in 2020 for for equity and gender. For what equity for gender equity. It's, I like to frame it a way that most people don't. He said, all the question of quote states rights versus women's rights, individual rights. And we had this conversation during the Civil War. We had it again in the 1960s with with racial justice. But a lot of people still have to grasp most people still don't realize that a woman gains or loses personal rights when she crosses a state line. It used to be very true in terms of property that state laws very tremendously in Louisiana woman had no rights at all, not even to her own clothes. And in several states, a man could will the custody of her children to somebody else after he died. In most states at the beginning, a woman could not go to court and file for divorce. So she was simply trapped in a bad marriage. And these things vary tremendously as I said my state with Wyoming being the first liberal state. Wyoming was actually still a territory territory organized in 1869, the ratio of men to women was 51. So they wanted women move there. And the very first act in the legislature was to give women full rights, voting property, everything. And the same thing happened in Alaska later on in the Alaska territory was the first bill and the organizational legislature. The frontiers have always been more liberal than the urban areas. And it's another point that people don't grasp. But the main point is that your rights as an American should not vary depending on where you live. So this point I think it is does strike me in the history which is that kind of rights come from the periphery inward, you know that it's not the coastal elite was not the place to go looking for progressive thinking about gender the place to go looking was off the map. So to speak, why, why is that because pioneer cultures needed women and value them. The, the coastal, the East Coast was settled and wealthy enough that it could treat women as a decorative, at least among the people who wrote the law. Whereas in the West, they valued women wanted him to come and the upshot was that every Western state except New Mexico had in franchise women before any Eastern state did. And that was New York in 1917. And we had the 19th amendment I gave the vote to all women no matter where I 1920s three years later. So, you can see what a long and yet ultimately quick movement it was it was a very, very sophisticated political movement, millions of dollars, thousands of field organizers. Mary Chapman cat was a brilliant organizer, and doesn't get enough credit for that at all. One of the things that also really, really struck me just seizing on what you said and thinking about resonance today is, you know, certainly a convenient myth about social change in the past is there's kind of this general uprising, you know, society for change and of course you document. The pivotal chapter on the 19th amendment you document most of the chapters devoted to intense internet sign struggle within this movement about strategy, about tactics about goals. What do you see parallels today when you look at movements either for gender equity or for quality more broadly that you that we where we need to learn from what it really takes to produce change. Yep. Yeah, it, it is a perennial political problem and yet solution. In the 19th century, there was a lot of so between the forces led by Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth a stand and the forces led by Lucy stone and other Boston women including I'll cut and really award how who aren't known particularly for this, but they were leaders and they were moderates they produced a literary magazine. That state and business, whereas Susan B lesser heart insisted on a newspaper called the revolution that went bankrupt in three years. So there's, there's always that tension. And finally they got together again through their dogs, Alice stone black well and Harriet stand black, brought the two bodies together again. And then without competition, they kind of stagnated and not much happened for several decades. And then the Alice Paul troops arose to challenge the older organization. Ultimately, I credit the older organization for the political victory, but the Alice Paul people made a tremendous difference in visibility and PR and made the mainstream women look very sensible compared to their tactics. So that goes on today. In every movement you have competition between personalities and strata and tactics, and if you don't have it. It's a sign that you're dying. So is that like is that how you would interpret say, on the, on the left, green new deal and defund the police and on the right, a kind of intense pot like these are the flanking movements and the question is what's going to co here in the center. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I think November is going to be a big victory for Democrats, but I'm, I'm a historian more than political scientists. But you, you see that now with the fringes becoming more powerful. I experienced myself in that I've always been a member of the League of Women Voters, but I also was a member of now. And I think that now did a lot to push the legal league into doing things, as opposed to just taking positions on issues. The League still doesn't import endorse candidates, but they take strong positions on issues, including our on voting rights and other forms of getting out to vote and truly representing the people. So one, one really powerful theme in the book is the, and it's also where you leave us at the end of the book, which is the kind of swinging pendulum of race in the movement for for equal rights in, you know, the abolition is powering the movement. It's the critical moral warrant in the 19th century. Sort of you document starkly by the early 20th century racism is powering huge parts of the movement and racial fear becomes a really critical part of the arsenal. And now in the late 20th early 21st century, we're left with very complex questions about race and about race and gender. Tell us a little bit about that about what you found in the history and what you think it tells us about the this intersection today. Well, the main thing that people need to know is that almost all of these women were abolitionists before they were feminist and the key to the feminism was their exclusion at the World Anti-Slavery Conference in 1840. Several women paid their own way to go to London to represent their anti-slavery societies at this conference and the men there would not allow them to be seated. They were not recognized as delegates. They had to sit behind the curtain and listen to the debate and not participate. So Lucretia Mott and a Quaker and young Elizabeth K. Stanton, who was there on her honeymoon, got together and resolved that when they got back to America, they would add women to blacks to their agenda, and they called it the Equal Rights Society, and they intended both of them. So from 1848 to 1860 when the Civil War began, they had annual conventions, mostly northeastern states, but strong conventions that they publicized worldwide. But when the Civil War came along, they disbanded. They didn't meet for six years and instead concentrated on black rights. And that became a big problem after the war, when Congress adopted and forced the states to adopt the 15th Amendment, which guarantees the vote to all citizens. It does not say male citizens, but the assumption of everyone was that it meant male citizens. So Lucy Stone on her side decided to go ahead and support the 15th Amendment. Elizabeth Stanton and Susan B. Anthony did not because they wanted it spelled out that this was included gender. Well, as I said, nobody really thought it did, except these far-thinking women. And it went to court, a Missouri woman named Virginia Minor challenged the Registrar to vote in St. Louis, and it went to the Supreme Court, which this laughter hoarded the Bible more than the Constitution. It wasn't natural for women to vote. Of course, they meant male, even though they hadn't said it. So that was in 1874. And all those years afterwards, we had to work to add an amendment that spelled out that the 15th Amendment meant what it said. And finally got that with the 19th Amendment. Indeed, the constitutional project in some ways is about the original words meaning what they say in real life. So kind of last question, you're a historian, but we're going to ask you to be a bit of a historian of the future. So 1820, we're still a quarter century out from Seneca Falls, give or take. 1920, we expand the franchise. 2020, we're asking new questions about gender identity, asking new questions. We are in Me Too, we're kind of going off the map of the law and asking about culture and habit. 2120, what are some of the big questions between here and there that you think we should be asking in the quest for equal rights in this democracy? Reproductive rights. No question about it. No question about it. And again, people don't realize how recently this change occurred until the late 1960s. It was illegal to sell birth control pills in Massachusetts. I lived there at the time. I remember it. Connecticut sold them only to people who could prove that they were married. You had to take their marriage license along. And both of these cases went to the Supreme Court, Griswold v Connecticut and Baird v Massachusetts. And women won the right to buy birth controls without divulging anything about their personal lives. And of course, you know, we'll be weighed in the same era, 1973, almost 50 years later, just amazing that there are people who think it will be overturned, especially because the way that feminists got the 19th amendment was the right way of drafting the 19th amendment meant that I'm working and working to get it through Congress and the legislature. They have the opponents of reproductive freedom, never have even drafted a constitutional amendment. They know that it's not popular. And instead they intend to take it in through the Supreme Court. And this hypocrisy is just authoritarianism, which raises its face everywhere. Well, it's incredibly powerful conversation. And much more in the book, the author is Doris Weatherford. The book is victory for the vote, the fight for women's suffrage in the century that followed, and you can follow Doris at d weatherford dot ag dash sites.net. If I could add one thing, please. We forgot to point out that the book has an introduction by Nancy Pelosi. Indeed. Thank you. Can't miss that. And history by Doris Weatherford. Go out and find the book. We'll make all the information available on the website. Doris, thank you so much for joining us. All right, folks, every single one of these conversations is going to be released leading up to the 37th annual Miami Book Fair. It runs from November 15 to 22. Every conversation is free during that period. Check out Miami Book Fair dot com or go to Twitter at Miami Book Fair. And remember, the future of democracy runs every Thursday live at 1pm Eastern. You can learn more at kf.org slash FD show. You can also follow the FD podcast at Spotify, Apple Stitcher or wherever you follow podcasts. That's also where we'll be releasing every single one of these exclusive conversations in partnership with the Miami Book Fair. Of course, feel free to send a question at any time to me on Twitter at the Sam Gill. Thanks so much for listening.