 Greetings from the National Archives in Washington, D.C. I'm Deborah Stydell-Wall, Deputy Archivist of the United States. I'm pleased to welcome you to today's discussion, Working for Suffrage, How Class and Race Shaped the U.S. Suffrage Movement. This program is just one of the many ways the National Archives is celebrating Women's History Month this March. At the National Archives, we hold many of the records that help tell the stories of women who fought for the right to vote, including petitions, legislation and court cases. Our records also contain the stories of lesser-known women, including working women and women of color whose activism played a role in the suffrage movement. Many of those stories are highlighted in our centennial exhibit on women's suffrage, rightfully hers, American women and the vote. The exhibit will close on April 10th, but the important conversation about women's fundamental civil rights will continue. One of the notable quotes from rightfully hers dates to the 1915 garment workers' strike, when Leonora O'Reilly stated, equal pay for equal work. Ms. O'Reilly championed much-needed reforms, and equal pay was just one of them. Our panel today will discuss how women like Leonora and many other working-class women seeking reforms for themselves and their families were involved in the suffrage movement. I'm pleased to introduce today's panel, moderator Paige Harrington, author of Interpreting the Legacy of Women's Suffrage at Museums and Historic Sites, whose book outlines a modern strategy for telling the fuller story of the fight for the right to vote. Panelists Kathleen D. Cahill, author of Recasting the Vote, How Women of Color Transform the Suffrage Movement, which examines a number of heroines often ignored in the suffrage movement. And Allison M. Parker, author of Unceasing Militant, The Life of Mary Church Terrell, which tells the story of one of the most prominent activists of her time. Thank you all for joining us today. Hello, everyone, and thank you so much for joining the program today. Our program, Working for Suffrage, How Class and Race Shaped the United States Suffrage Movement. I'm Paige Harrington, and on behalf of my colleagues, Dr. Kathleen Cahill and Dr. Allison Parker, I would like to thank the National Archives, the Deputy Archivist of the United States, Deborah Wall, and the National Archives Foundation for convening this program today. Let me introduce my colleagues, Dr. Kathleen Cahill. Hello. She is an Associate Professor of History at Penn State University, where she focuses on women's working and political lives and asking how identities such as race, nationality, class, and age have shaped them. Her recent book, Recasting the Vote, How Women of Color Transform the Suffrage Movement, is published by University of North Carolina Press in 2020. Also, Dr. Allison Parker, History Department Chair and Richards Professor of American History at the University of Delaware. Her recent book, Unceasing Militant, The Life of Mary Church Terrell, is published by University of North Carolina Press also in 2020. Thank you both and welcome. We're excited to start this conversation with you today. Dr. Cahill, can you tell us a little bit more about your book? Sure. I'd be happy to, and thank you. I'm really honored to be here at the National Archives. It has played a large role in my research for both my books. I also was just able to get to Washington to see the exhibit last week during spring break. And if you are able to get there, it's really fantastic. So I highly recommend it. As Paytrenton mentioned in my recent book, Recasting the Vote, I write about six women who were active suffragists and I talk about their motivations for joining the movement, which often differed from some of the women that we're used to talking about. So what I thought I would do is quickly introduce them to you and talk about how their experience is sort of raised some questions about labor and work, as well as class and race. So slide number one, please. So as I said, it's a collective biography of six women who all faced prejudice, not just due to their gender, but also to their race, ethnicity, or citizenship status. And moving sort of clockwise, starting in the top left, the woman getting into the car, is Adelina or Nina Otero-Warren, who was from a powerful political family, Hispanic family in New Mexico. And in New Mexico, they called themselves Hispanic rather than Mexican-American. She was a leader in the New Mexican suffrage movement and insisted that the movement be bilingual so that it would address the needs of Spanish-speaking New Mexicans and politicians. She was a teacher and a superintendent of schools in Santa Fe County, and then also an inspector for federal Indian schools in New Mexico. Next to her is Marie Botnobaldwin, who is a member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Nation in what is now North Dakota. And she also worked for the Federal Indian Service, the employees of the Bureau of Indian Affairs or the BIA. But she worked in Washington, D.C., and she lived there for a number of years. She's also one of the very first Native women to earn a law degree, and here she is showing her collection of Native women's artwork. On the far right is Mabel Lee, who is a Chinese woman living in New York City, but she couldn't become a citizen of the United States due to the Chinese Exclusion Act. Nonetheless, she's a suffrage advocate, and she becomes the first Chinese woman to earn her PhD at Columbia University and potentially in the entire country, and it was in economics. Below her is Laura Cornelius-Kallogg, a member of the Wisconsin Oneida Nation who also worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a teacher and was an author and activist. In the middle, Carrie Williams Clifford was a poet and activist, a founder of the Ohio Federation of Colored Women's Clubs and a member of the Washington, D.C. NAACP branch. And last, but certainly not least, is Gertrude Bannon, or Zit Kalasha, a member of the Yanktan Sioux Nation in what is now South Dakota. She was an incredibly busy woman. She worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She was an author, a musician, and an activist. So, as you can see, for all of these women, they were working in often white-collar or professional jobs and were middle or even upper-class in their communities, but due to racial prejudices of the time, their class standing doesn't always translate into the same kind of respect that white, upper-middle, or upper-middle-class women had. So, to start our conversation, I wanted to use their stories to highlight the variety of different kinds of work that women in the suffrage movement were doing. And we often think of work as the industrial labor, which absolutely played an important role in the suffrage movement, but I wanted to introduce some of these other kinds of work to think about. So, in the next slide, it's some images from the 1913 Washington, D.C. suffrage parade. Parades are a really good place to start when thinking about labor and race in the suffrage movement. This 1913 parade was the first national suffrage parade in Washington. And parade organizers often thought about women as workers, and you can see this in the image on the left and then the section from the program on the right. At the top of that program, you see there was a float about labor. There were wage earners in a section, so really highlighting women as workers. Below that, in government, it means civil servants, so women in that profession. And then in the bottom section, it's women in a whole variety of, again, white-collar professional jobs. And the suffragists also recognized homework in their parades. And so in this parade, there was a section for homemakers that Carrie Rollins suffered actually, marches in. And much of this was driven by the idea, as you see in the picture on the top, the woman on the left, her sash says, basically no taxation without representation is what she's alluding to. And this is something that suffragists had been talking about for a long time. I also want to point out that the woman in the very middle of that photograph is Ida B. Wells, an African-American suffragist from Illinois, and we'll talk about her in a minute. In the next slide, you'll see that perhaps not surprisingly, a number of female lawyers were involved in the suffrage movement. And in Washington, there's a very strong connection. The Washington College of Law, which is now American University's law school, was founded by women lawyers to train other women because they were rejected from most law schools in the country because of their sex. And many of the women who enrolled there were civil servants who were hoping to advance in their careers, but often hit glass ceilings. And so frustrated by these gender inequalities, they turned to the suffrage movement. On the right is Florence Ethridge, who's a white woman who worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and was also vice president of the Federal Employees Union when it was founded in 1917. And on the left is Marie Botnobaldwin, who was a co-worker with Ethridge, and worked together. And you can see in this paper, she was sort of emphasizing her capacious identities. And she's also emphasizing the political power that Native women had in their own communities that really pushed back against some stereotypes that white Americans held. And we'll talk more about this. In the next slide, the flyer that's on the right-hand side is very similar to the flyer that is in the exhibit. And the flyer on the left is indicative of the work that Spanish-speaking women like Nino Otero-Warren were doing in the Southwest. This one was translated by Maria Lopez, who was a teacher in Los Angeles during the California suffrage movement. And again, teachers are talking about wages, about paying taxes, and about the kind of work that they were doing. And there are many, many teachers involved in the movement. And then in my last slide, I want to emphasize the work of writing and speaking. Many suffragists were writers. They were also journalists. And speaking was a career for women that a number of suffragists take up. Not all of them in the next slide do that for a living, but some of them do. And I think there are two really important points that I want us to take away from this. One is, again, that writing and speaking is labor and sometimes paid labor for these women, but also that it's because of these writings that we have been able to recover the histories of some of these women who had been left out of the story. So they left us sort of the resources with which to recover their histories. So I'll pause there with that quick overview and then we can dig into some of this as we move into our conversation. Thank you. Wonderful. Dr. Parker, tell us a little bit more about your work. Okay, thanks. And then we'll be interested in hearing about yours as well. So hello, I'm honored to have been invited to participate in this discussion of class and race in the U.S. suffrage movement. And to set the stage for our broader conversation, I'd like to first give you a quick overview of my book Unceasing Militant, which is a biography of a prominent black suffragist and civil rights activist, Mary Church Terrell. And Unceasing Militant gets its title from Paul Robeson, who was the black activist, singer and actor, whose 1954 eulogy of Terrell commemorated what he termed her unceasing militant struggle for the full citizenship of her people. Some writers have argued that Terrell was an elite black club woman who could not relate to the majority of poor and working class black women and also that she was less confrontational or radical earlier in her career and only moved to direct action when she was in her 80s because she felt she had less to lose and was frustrated by the lack of progress in her civil rights goals in the post-World War II era. I argue that Terrell was not newly radicalized in her old age and instead from early on she made cross-class coalitions and bravely challenged things like lynching and segregation while engaging in direct action protest tactics including, of course, for voting rights and that's in terms of marching in parades and also in picketing the White House. Now let me give you just some highlights of who Mary Church Terrell was. She was born enslaved in 1863 in Memphis, Tennessee during the Civil War and lived until 1954, the same year that the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education. During her life she accomplished many firsts. Terrell was, among other things, one of the first black women in U.S. history to earn a bachelor's degree in 1884 from a predominantly white college, Oberlin, and then a master's degree soon after. She taught in the preeminent black public high school in Washington, D.C. and became the first black woman to be appointed to the District of Columbia's Board of Education. Terrell also became the first president of the New National Association of Colored Women or NACW in 1896. And on the far left with the feathers and the hat fruit on the hat, that's Mary Church Terrell. Sitting on the floor below the baby is Ida B. Wells Barnett and that's her baby and she's being held, so it's Charles Barnett and she's being held by Alice Dunbar Nelson. So it's quite a remarkable group of black activist women in their first year of 1896. Black women organized into the NACW in part to create a national platform from which to defend themselves against slander by hostile whites. Mary Church Terrell engaged in cross-class efforts to achieve equality by, among other things, challenging racist and sexist stereotypes about black women as sexually impure. Throughout her life, Terrell gave speeches and met with governors and prosecutors to defend the lives of poor black women who were unfairly caught up in the criminal justice system, sometimes even being threatened with the death penalty for usually responding to assaults by white men or women. Mary Church Terrell was a feminist and a voting rights advocate and she was one of only two black women along with Ida B. Wells Barnett to be a founding member of the National Association of Colored People or the NAACP in 1909. During World War I, she picketed the White House for women's suffrage with the National Women's Party along with her teenage daughter and she also created the Wage Earners Association during World War I to encourage unionization amongst African-American women workers. In the 1920s, she was one of the founding members of the International Council of Women of the Darker Races and in the 1930s, she joined with the Communist Party's International Labor Defense on behalf of poor African-Americans treated unfairly by the criminal justice system such as the Scottsboro Nine. In the 1940s, she helped Athea Brandolf organize the March on Washington movement and supported striking black cafeteria workers who were resisting signing anti-communist pledges. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Terrell spoke before congressional committees in favor of an equal rights amendment and she also chaired a committee affiliated with the Communist Party that organized direct action protests and picketing and she's in the white hat in the middle in her very late 80s and a series of legal challenges. And these legal challenges went to the U.S. Supreme Court and in 1953, they managed to successfully dismantle segregation in the nation's capital a year before Brown v. Board but because it was the District of Columbia, it didn't apply nationally. Over the course of her long life, Mary Church Terrell's range of women's rights activism and cross-class alliances was extraordinary and I hope that we can use it as a way into thinking about black women's participation in the suffrage and women's rights struggle. Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Dr. Parker. So before we get to our conversation, let me tell you just a little bit about my work. So I differ from Dr. Cahill and Dr. Parker. I'm not a professor. I'm a public historian or a history practitioner and my work often spans from curating exhibits to producing public programs and then often to a myriad of day-to-day tasks that come with running a women's history site. My first book, The Legacy of Women's Suffrage, comes from that very first-hand experience as the director of the Seoul Belmont House and Museum, which is here in Washington, D.C. Some of you might know that that museum was the fifth and final headquarters for the National Women's Party, an organization founded by Alice Paul. And I think we have a slide of that museum if I'm not mistaken. The NWP is widely known as the group that introduced the controversial tactics, such as picketing the White House into the final years of the suffrage campaigns prior to the ratification of the 19th Amendment. On April 12th, 2016, President Obama designated the Seoul Belmont House and Museum as the Belmont-Paul Women's Equality National Monument, now operated by the National Park Service. It is currently the only national monument named after two women, Alva Belmont and Alice Paul. I think we might need to go back to the previous photo. It's of the exterior of the museum. In any case, as the director of that museum, one of my very first goals was to delve deeper into the history and curate the exhibits that highlighted not just the middle to upper-class white women, such as Alice Stokes-Paul and Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, but to also include the stories of the many working-class women, immigrants, and women of color across the country who worked equally hard for enfranchisement. For many reasons, this proved to be easier said than done. The book also contains a series of informative case studies written by four women's history practitioners as they outlined their ongoing efforts to address the bias and racism in their museum content. Now, to do this, the authors delved deeper into the history of Francis Willard, the National Woman's Party, the Greater Federation of Women's Clubs, and also more broadly to examine how black suffragists in Tennessee form networks within their churches to support their work for enfranchisement. In 2020, we acknowledged the centennial of the 19th Amendment, and one significant outcome was the uptick in new material and scholarship about the suffrage movement that highlights the many women of color across the country. The work of noted scholars here today, Kathleen Cahill, Allison Parker, also Martha Jones and Marjorie Sprule, among so many others, challenged the lingering assumption that it was primarily the white women who worked for enfranchisement. History practitioners such as myself rely on this type of current scholarship to inform our work, which can include exhibits, adult programs, and K-12 educational materials. There are two projects that I want to highlight today, and I'll note that both are free to the public and available online. I think the links have been put into the chat. Can we go to the next slide with the toolkit? Thank you. The first is a suffrage history toolkit produced by Girl Scouts of the USA. It is geared toward elementary and middle school students in which the materials and activities in the toolkit are set to prompt girls to discover the history of women's voting rights and civic engagement, engage in multi-generational conversations within their communities, and better understand the gender barriers that have been broken and celebrate the women who broke them. Can you go to the next slide? I'm happy to share that in the toolkit, we were able to... There you go. In the toolkit, we were able to share some of the content from Dr. Cahill and Dr. Parker's exhibit, pardon me, books. I was very excited about that. Next slide, please. And you'll see some of these images there because they've been used in their books as well. Next slide. So the next piece I want to share with you is called a Historic Decisions Issue Guide, and it is based on the research done by the National Woman's Party in collaboration with the Charles F. Kettering Foundation and written by Lila Brammer. Now, these issue guides are geared toward adults and they help to foster the development of deliberative democratic skills through examining the difficult choices Americans faced in the past and linking them to contemporary issues. In this instance, they examine the tensions between the suffragists and the White House on the eve of World War I and how the issues of race and bias increased that tension. Next slide, please. As I mentioned, the content from both the toolkit and the Kettering Foundation issue guide are both reflective of and influenced by the research and scholarship of Dr. Cahill and Parker, among others. I hope that you had an opportunity to explore, either in person or online, the National Archives exhibit, rightfully hers. It's curated by Corrine Porter, and the exhibit takes a very thoughtful look and a more inclusive look back at suffrage through a present-day lens. And today we recognize that that overarching path to women's enfranchisement was both circuitous and contentious. And I'm excited to start our conversation today with Dr. Parker and Dr. Cahill so we can really dig into the subject. Let me start with an opening question that both of you touched on just very lightly. One lingering misconception is that the 1913 suffrage procession that took place on March 3, 1913 on the eve of President Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, one misconception is that it was racially segregated with one or two exceptions. And I think we've gotten past that, but I know both of you have done extensive research on this, and I'm hoping that we can take a moment to really clear up that misconception and tell me a little bit more about your research and what you discovered. Okay, I think I'll take a first crack at that because one of the things that really struck me and still strikes me is that there's a particular narrative that even though I think we've established it amongst historians that the parade was integrated and that women of color participated, I still don't know that it's hit popular culture and you still see certain ideas and I'll give you the one that is true but is limiting and it was a slide, in one of the slides that Kathleen Kale had, she actually showed the picture of Ida B. Wells inserting herself into the Illinois delegation and marching in this predominantly white group of suffragists. The story has been that she was the only black woman to do so and the implication had been that the other black women had marched at the back. Some black women's historians had figured out quite a few decades ago that this was not in fact the case and a few of them wrote about it but it hadn't really entered into the historical conversation or popular culture ideas and then wasn't even picked up by other historians to be honest and so one of the things that when I started working on my biography of Mary Church Terrell the more I did with it, the more it seemed implausible that she would have agreed to march at the back and in all of her writings about it she does not talk about marching at the back but it was bothering me as a historian that I couldn't really pin down where's the proof of what happened and so I finally just decided to stop my other research and really look into that specific question and that's when I found the evidence that all kinds of black women participated and there was in fact a debate and a struggle over it no question about that but it just was not only Ida B. Wells Barnett so for example Mary Church Terrell and the women in the National Association of Colored Women those who were together as a group of NACW activists they were invited by Mary Beard who was a progressive era historian and some other white women to march with the New York City delegation and so they marched with the New York City delegation then there were other women like Kathleen mentioned the fact that Cliffords actually marched with the homemakers and then I found lots of newspaper articles from the time that actually detailed examples of where black women were and they were in fact in all these different professional categories they were marching as housewives, as teachers, as seamstresses whatever they were they were marching in various places but then also the Delta Sigma Theta sorority which was a brand new sorority associated with Howard had to negotiate with Alice Paul to march with the other groups of college delegations so they did want to march separately in the sense that they wanted to be Howard University Delta Sigma Theta chapter next to the Cornell University women so they got that in part because within a debate with Alice Paul Mary Church Terrell brought in her friend Ines Mulholland to help the argument and Ines Mulholland is the woman who is known in the iconic photo of her with a white outfit on the white horse who leads the parade and she's a lawyer and a suffragist so what I think we need to understand from this story is okay how did it get to be that even though Alice Paul was trying to pacify white women from the south and actively tried to get black women to go to the back why is it that she didn't succeed and this has to do with the fact that black women protested they sent in petitions to the National Association I'm sorry the National American Women's Suffrage Association and so they sent in petitions they sent in protests and they demanded and insisted on a place but what was happening is that there were actually all these kind of contests on the ground on the day of and that's where the whole issue gets confusing is that there's not one clear moment when black women are told you may march with us and instead it's this multiple series of constant contestations and assertions and I know that Kathleen has other points to raise about this as well. Yeah thanks Allison. What's so interesting is exactly the parade to me is this moment where we see very clearly kind of the racial hierarchies in US history because while black women had to really push and insist on their inclusion which they think is very important right that they are fighting for these rights they want to be part of this historic moment and they have to fight for that Native women and Chinese American women are actually asked by the organizers to participate so they have a very different experience. Now two things are important. One the numbers are much smaller so the numbers are much smaller and sort of the ideas about those groups of women are really different. As Allison mentioned right white southerners are adamant against black women participating and white southern politicians organizers feel like they need to appease them to try to win their vote it doesn't work but there's a different idea about Native women which is a much more kind of stereotypical romantic idea that they in the past had these matriarchal societies and in the past there was this sort of historic precedent for women's political power but the important thing is white Americans really thought they were disappearing or stuck in the past. So they know Marie but know Baldwin because she is attending the Washington College of Law she's training to be a lawyer she works for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and so many of the separate organizers are with her in the Washington College of Law and so they ask her will you create a float that represents kind of this past image of Native women's political power. Now Marie but know Baldwin has her own agenda which many Native women and men who are members of a group called the Society of American Indians which is kind of similar to the NAACP they were pushing back against this idea that Native people were disappearing didn't have a future in a modern America and we're asserting that in fact they did so she says look I'd love to be in the parade but I'm not going to do a float that represents this sort of past and she insists marching with the other women the group of lawyers and law students who march in their law school regalia right so she's wearing that her graduation robes essentially in the parade so she's actually not very visible because she doesn't look like what most white Americans think of when they think of an Indian or a Native person at the time so her visibility is much lower the Chinese woman there's one Chinese woman who does participate in the parade and again she's asked but she's asked to participate as a representative of China not of a Chinese American woman so parade organizers again are kind of thinking about Chinese women not as US citizens but as part of the wider worldwide suffrage movement and again this is related to the Chinese Exclusion Act which was passed in 1882 and essentially said that no Chinese immigrants very tiny numbers so it's essentially no Chinese immigrants are allowed into the United States and the very small number that aren't able to come in cannot become US citizens so the Chinese woman's on a float she is representative of China and the recent Chinese Revolution which Americans think has enfranchised Chinese women it's complicated but again this representative of a global movement where there are Chinese suffragists and again kind of an example of a place women are winning rights so again thinking about women's these kind of intersections of their race their citizenship status and the way white Americans are thinking about them really matters when we have these conversations because it means that those women's experiences in the movement were really quite different in many ways it is incredibly significant and I like what you said about the racial hierarchies because I don't think we talk about that enough and let me I want to add to that I believe in your book and please correct me if I'm wrong you talked about the fact that there wasn't a lot of pushback not only were was this Chinese American woman was she invited but she was given a place on the top of a float in the front section of the parade I think and there was little to no pushback from the other women correct so this was seen as broadening democracy across the world which then meant all of the other suffragists to participate in could get behind that concept unlike the southern women the southern delegates who absolutely told Alice Paul and the other the other people that were convening the parade that they would not participate that they would boycott if African American women were not segregated to the back of the parade so that's a very distinct look and I like the way that you spell out this racial hierarchies is there anything else that we didn't touch on for that topic because if not then I do want to move on to a couple of other questions I think we've covered it so we also talk about issues of race class citizenship and labor and the different divisions within labor from the suffrage campaigns and those outcomes and how they were impacted by regional differences so maybe we can talk a little bit about that we were talking about east coast industrial workers and we haven't talked yet and I hope that we can talk about western women from western states who were perhaps working in a more rural or agricultural environment so maybe we can talk about that a little bit Sure Alison do you mind if I start? One of the things that scholars have really emphasized about the women's suffrage movement is it's a mass movement there are many many women involved and often times it is in these sort of local communities and so the history of women's suffrage is really quite regional we've sort of talked a tiny bit about how the Jim Crow south had a particular kind of politics and the American west is an important part of this story as well because it's actually in the west where the first states it's in the west that women first win full suffrage in a number of states and in fact by I think it's 1914 all of the states from the Rockies west except New Mexico have fully enfranchised women now this there are limitations often like language requirements so they're in essence enfranchising mostly white or African-American women but this is very different from the east coast or the south and in those places to take an example of South Dakota which as I mentioned Gertrude Bonner is a college eyes from South Dakota and in South Dakota you see some really interesting ways in which work is being held up so white South Dakota women are making the argument that South Dakota had just a few years earlier been this sort of vast wilderness which is how they talked about it and that white women were part of the group of pioneers who came and turned it into a civilized American place and so they deserve the right to vote because they had done this work and they talk about it as work that right of homesteading kind of helping to farm this hard agricultural work of you know kind of wrestling this place into an agricultural state and at the same time you have people arguing that the native people who lived in South Dakota should be disenfranchised it should not be part of the citizenry precisely because they're not quote unquote civilized right and so right after statehood which happens in 1890 in South Dakota basically the constitution state constitution said we'll figure out women suffrage the next the first year of statehood they hold a referendum in which women suffrage is on the ballot as is suffrage for native men and so you see this tension in that place over kind of labor and who can be a citizen and both of those referendas fail but the number they fail slightly different ways and they're really held up as this one is on native men and this one is about white women even though race wasn't in the one about women suffrage but it becomes sort of this contest between the two and they both fail the one for women suffrage actually fails so white women and this is a theme you'll see a lot feel very frustrated that it seems as if white men are more willing to enfranchise men of color than they are white women so the other thing I want to quickly mention and this becomes an issue a little bit later but for migrant farm workers in particular the way in which voting often requires residential requirements means that in the American west migrant farm workers who are often Latino Latinas, native people or other kind of immigrant groups are often disenfranchised just on the basis of they don't have a permanent residence where they can register I'll stop there but yeah regional difference is very important yeah and I think I would just add to that to say that if you're looking at the northeast and the south and the midwest that you have some other factors that we haven't explicitly talked about but in the northeast and the midwest especially in bigger cities like Chicago or New York City you have this working class labor movement that really turns to suffrage as a way to try to fix some of the long term problems with safety on the job and Paige you mentioned the idea that working class women were talking about wage equality the other thing they were saying is literally a vote will get you a fire escape for your building and after things like the triangle shirt makes factory fire that was a very persuasive argument so a lot of working class women found that compelling and wanted to fight for suffrage in that context and especially in the northeast and the midwest and then if you look at black women the cases are slightly different in the sense that during the early 20th centuries the period of migration from the south but there's still the earlier period majority of black women are in the south and so they're disenfranchised twice over in the sense that they're disenfranchised as women they're disenfranchised as black people and so one of the things that they continuously say in all of their suffrage work is they are fighting for the right of black men to vote even though the 14th and 15th amendments gave them those rights because those rights had in effect been rescinded throughout the south after the end of reconstruction and so this is something that is distinctive for black women's history you see this unity amongst black women to support black men's disenfranchisement and then after women gained the right to vote in 1920 black women are still experiencing disenfranchisement all throughout the south as our black men and so they continue to say to groups like the national women's party and Alice Paul you need to take this seriously and deal with disenfranchisement and again Alice Paul in the NWP disagrees and says that's a racial issue not a gender issue and so they're unable to see the intersectionality of these things in the way that black women were unable to disaggregate them right? Exactly and I think this question in particular I think is very indicative of the difficult task in trying to interpret the United States suffrage campaigns this is complicated history and it's complicated by everything that we've just talked through class, race, regions citizenship, etc and we still are discovering as Dr. Cahill pointed out still discovering new information when we dig in and start to do the research so I think that's a fascinating piece of this there was one question that came from the audience and I'm hoping that Dr. Parker it's directed for you and then I'm hoping you can tell us a little bit more about some of the work that Mary Church Terrell did later in her life because suffrage in the suffrage campaign was only a short portion of that which is she had an amazingly long and productive life so I would like to spend a little bit of time talking through that so the question is wasn't Mary Church Terrell a leader in the fight to present the shutdown to prevent the shutdown of Storer College that's interesting I don't actually know that it's possible because I really couldn't cover every single thing she did but I didn't write about that and what she did do is she really trumpeted education for black men and women she wasn't educated herself and she taught Greek and Latin in the DC public schools so she was in the Du Bois camp of thinking that black people needed to be able to be fully educated to the same extent as white people and to be able to have access to professional jobs in a way that you know Booker T. Washington's vocational track for southern especially blacks was a different thing and she respected what he did there but she was a classically trained liberal arts person and so she was always fighting hard to keep historically black colleges open she was really interested in promoting black people going to predominantly white colleges too because she had gone to Oberlin which was of course among the very first in the country to open its doors to blacks and women in the 1830s as part of the abolitionist and women's rights campaign of sorts and so she was a very strong advocate of any kind of way to get especially black women access to education at a time when it was restricted so in fact in the end of her life in the late 40s well not the end closer to the end of her life in the late 40s she actually helped sue the American Association of University women to let blacks join black women who had college education join as members of the AUW and this campaign was successful in the end but it was something that she had in the I think the 1910s had actually started in her house a group of for black college educated women because the AUW was discriminating against them so she both created spaces that were safe and welcoming for black women and then also tried to get in to the ones where she was not able to get in that's incredible I just wanted to add what's significant about the women all of them were talking about is that as sort of leaders in their communities as highly educated women who were certainly experiencing racial prejudice and gender prejudice but often had this class privilege in their communities were very aware that a lot of the women in their communities did not are often very much advocating for those women and so you see a lot of the black club women like Terri Rowan Sliford, Mary Church Terrell talking about the difficulties that working class black women have and trying to do things like set up kindergarten or set up kind of reading rooms for them and so seeing themselves as leaders and there's a little bit of kind of paternalism in there but also very aware of what most women in their communities are working against and the native suffragists that I write about are also constantly advocating and trying to educate their white audiences about the real poverty and difficulties that native people face often because of really restrictive government policies where they were losing land and therefore their livelihoods and so again many of these women see themselves as advocates for a much broader group and kind of coalitions across class Thank you for pointing that out. Let me also say that I think something that loops all of this together and from as a history practitioner so somebody who works in museums who interprets this history for the public one of the things that I argue for in my book is that we need to take when we talk about suffrage we need to not start with 1848 which is of course Susan B. Anthony or excuse me Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Seneca Falls and then stop at 1920. These are not tidy little bookends that just said now all women have the right to vote. It simply didn't work that way because we know that there were way too many challenges after that. The 19th amendment simply removes the gender restriction from voting. It doesn't grant and guarantee women the right to vote and so I know that there's also misconception around that but I also want to add that when I've talked about this or frequently when I talk about this I try to make sure that people understand that 1920 which is the ratification of the 19th amendment was simply one piece of that fight. There were decades and decades of work that had to be done by women in all communities including Mary Church Terrell and the rest of the work that she did in her life to extend through citizenship and voting rights because you know that voting rights can be given and they can be taken away and it does very much like Dr. Cahill you pointed out if you don't have a permanent residence you may not be able to register to vote and there's nothing illegal about that because that's what the statute that's what the local statute said. I also encountered a lot of information which was fascinating about the years before the Civil Rights Act and then the Voting Rights Act and how the National Women's Party chose to support or chose not to support some of the additional work that was going on and we all know or perhaps we don't know that in 1923 the original Equal Rights Amendment was introduced to Congress and that's what the National Women's Party and Alice Paul focused on for the rest of the through the late 1970s even into the 1980s so it's definitely an extended timeline and I'm excited that we were able to work that in and talk a little bit about what happened after 1920. I know that you're both working we're coming up we've got a few more minutes but I want to give you both time to talk about the new projects that you're working on because I know both of you have something in the works but I also want to add is it possible that you can talk a little bit about your process for research this is a program that is convened by the National Archives and I'm sure that you both have like myself researched there many many times now exhaustive amount of research goes into this as you were working on both of these books did you find anything that really surprised you or perhaps cleared up any misconceptions or something that was even surprising so maybe you can talk just a little bit about that and then we'll close it out Dr. Cahill correct so yeah the National Archives are such a national treasure and for me part of this was written while I was moving so I was actually using digitized newspapers a lot but for the National Archives piece two of the really key sources for me one was the personnel files of the native women that I write about as I mentioned they all worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the federal government kept personnel files keeps still keeps files on all of its employees and these were really treasure troves the government still figuring out how to be a bureaucracy in the early 20th century and so there's lots of information in there that letters from their employees it's really before they start using a lot of forms and so there's a lot more information in there than maybe you would see later in the exhibit itself there's a photograph of Marie Botnobaldwin and it is her personnel that's the photo she submitted to the personnel file when they under Woodrow Wilson begin to require photos so that it was an effort to keep black applicants from getting jobs so you could visually see what race people were and the picture that she submits is kind of it was certainly a surprise when I found it it took me a while to figure it out because it's a photograph of her very much in she's wearing these beautiful dentalia earrings she has kind of a beaded shawl around her shoulders her hairs and braids so she's looking very much like that stereotypical image that she actually pushed against in the parade but in her personnel file that's the picture she submitted and she had many other pictures of herself in kind of high Victorian fashion that she could have used and my theory is that she's making a very strong statement about the value of indigenous cultures which as I mentioned federal policy at the time was assimilation or trying to really stamp those out religious practices were outlawed children were being sent boarding schools to kind of get them away from their cultural traditions and so for her to submit that photograph I think she's making a statement about the value of those cultures in the same way that her collecting of Native women's art also made that statement so she's demonstrating this sort of complicated nature of her identity which all of the Native women did and they were really advocating for sort of a joint dual citizenship that they were advocating for the government to support uphold treaties and recognize their nations but also arguing that they were American citizens who deserve rights so that photograph is in the exhibit as I said and it was a really surprising moment for me Mabel Lee's immigration file is the other piece that was really powerful that again Chinese were really restricted that couldn't become citizens and if they left the US it was very hard to get back in and so she had when she went to visit China after having graduated from Columbia she had to request permission and they required sort of statements from witnesses and they had to be white witnesses that she was indeed a student and had been a student and therefore would have been eligible to come back and the other piece of evidence that she clearly gives them it's written up in the file to prove her status as a student is her like 640 page dissertation right so but she had to go through this whole process to come back into the country because of the laws so those two were really surprising and helped me really think about their experiences puts it in a different context doesn't it that's fascinating just out of curiosity how how long did it take you to do the research for this book I'm just curious oh probably about almost a decade I also had children in between the sort of first book in this book but it was great fun but I was trying to hit 2020 so academics aren't known for their punctuality but having that the 100th anniversary is only coming around once so I had to hit it that's true thank you very much thank you very much for that Dr. Parker yeah I would say also 10 years so biographies are big products as well and for mine I actually spent a lot of time at the Library of Congress and one thing that I'd love to say is that now unlike before Mary Church Terrell's collection is generally speaking digitized and mostly transcribed even so that's a super exciting development that unfortunately happened after I finished all my research but nonetheless it makes it much more searchable and there really are her life she lived for 90 years and she was an activist for almost the entire time so she did so much and I tried to write a definitive biography but it's almost impossible to put everything in so I just it was incredible to try to even not make it be a doorstop I didn't want it to have to be something that you could barely pick up but I also spent time at various other places like the Schomburg in the New York City Public Library and then also Howard University has a big collection of her work and then I helped with the family to facilitate the gift of other papers that they had been holding on to that I was reading there at their home to Oberlin College which now has changed the name of the library to the Mary Church Terrell Library and so there's also a collection of papers now at Oberlin so those are the main sources that I was able to use for the collection and it's very exciting to be able to travel and see the different collections but it's also really important to get them accessible via digitization and so that's something that I hope we can do a lot more of with all of these records because then students in far-flung parts of the United States and the world can access this history so much more easily and that's I think a very huge benefit that we are enjoying today. It is and I do hope I will add to that that when I was the director of the Soul Belmont House we wanted to reinterpret and dig deeper into these stories because the museum at that time was presenting a very limited storyline that included Alva, Alice, Lucy Burns and a few other people, Ines Malahaland and a few other people but they were largely just the white women who were leaders of the movement and not having all of the papers digitized or even a good number of papers digitized from these archives across the country really prevented us from doing that work because this is again and it's not surprising many, many museums are very small and don't have a budget for travel so not to mention there's usually a very small staff so I hope that the digitization and what we're seeing is this push for digitization will actually start to help practitioners who are curating these exhibits and hosting these public programs it will help them find more up-to-date materials and then relying on scholarship from academics like yourself will be able to jointly really get ourselves beyond some of those deconstrued misconceptions so it will be nice when that is more of a I hope more of a practice for everyone so we're running quickly out of time but can you each take just a couple of minutes and describe the next project that you're working on? Let's start with you Dr. Parker Sure, this is at the absolute very beginning stages but I'm working on a project on Mary Hamilton and she that moves me into the civil rights movement period of the 50s and 60s and she was a core the Congress of Racial Equality Organizer in Tennessee and other places but she sued and the case went to the Supreme Court where she won a ruling against a judge in Alabama where the courtroom and the lawyers refused to call her by an honorific like Ms. Hamilton and instead only called her Mary and everybody else had an honorific like Mr. Mrs. whatever it was and so the court determined that the courts always have to use honorifics for every person in the court not just white people you know things like that and so she's a really interesting person and the Michaels actually came up with the idea of the concept of Ms where you take the married aspect out of the title for women so that's what I hope to be working on. That's tremendous, that's tremendous Dr. Cahill? Yeah, oh that's really interesting so I'm sort of following up on some of the stories in New Mexico and I came across a group of about 60 American women who tried to vote in the election of 1920 in New Mexico and again most of our sort of stories about black women trying to vote are from the south but in Columbus they go to the polls in this first election where women can vote in New Mexico and they're turned away and initially I thought well of course they're turned away because they're black women but the New Mexico state constitution says you can't discriminate on the basis of color so what's or race so what's happening here what judge should act and so digging into that I discovered that they are turned away because they're married to soldiers so the Buffalo so-called Buffalo soldiers in New Mexico and the judge is ruling that that their marital status is what is that they don't have residency right so they're part of this question about mobility and residency and so wanting to tell their story and think about who they were and the unit that their husbands are in is the 24th infantry which has a very interesting history and particularly had was sort of in some racial the attacks in Houston in 1917 a few years earlier so kind of the conjunction of the kinds of politics that they hoped that they could influence and then what they run up against even as you said right 1920 is not the end of the struggle no that's fantastic well we are just about nope we are out of time so let me say thank you thank you both for being here and for this deep dive into the work that you've been doing I hope that the audience enjoyed it I know I certainly did and on behalf of both of you let me say once again thank you very much for the National Archives for the National Archives Foundation and their supporters who made this program possible today so thank you all very much for attending