 Good afternoon and welcome to the William G. McGowan Theater here at the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, the archivist of the United States, and please you could join us for today's program, whether you're here in the theater or joining us through Facebook or YouTube, and a special welcome to our C-SPAN audience. Before we hear from Susan Ware about her new book, Why They Marched Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote, I'd like to let you know about two other programs coming up soon in this theater. Today at 4 p.m., Kate Campbell Stevenson will combine music and theater and a one-woman performance called Dementing America, How Women Won the Vote, which tells the story of the early 20th century fight for the ratification of the 19th Amendment, and where are you? There she is. She'll be here on this stage at 4 o'clock. And on Thursday, May 16th, at noon, David Moranis will discuss his new book, A Good American Family, the Red Scare and My Father, which tells the story of his family's ordeal from blacklisting to vindication. Check our website at archives.gov or sign up at the table outside the theater to get email updates. You'll also find information about other National Archives programs and activities, and another way to get more involved with the National Archives is to become a member of the National Archives Foundation. The Foundation supports our education and outreach activities. Visit its website, archivesfoundation.org, to learn more about the foundation. Today, our new exhibit, Rightfully Heirs, American Women and the Vote, opened upstairs in the Lawrence F. O'Brien Gallery. This exhibit is a cornerstone of our centennial celebration of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. The 19th Amendment is rightfully celebrated as a major milestone made possible by decades of suffrage, just relentless political engagement. It is just one critical piece of the larger story of women's battle for the vote. Rightfully Heirs begins with the struggle for suffrage, but doesn't end with the 19th Amendment's ratification. The final section examines both the immediate impact of the suffrage amendment and the voting rights struggles that persisted into modern day. In Corrine Porter, stand up, Corrine, is the curator of that exhibit. One of the goals of the exhibit is to recognize both the broad diversity of suffragette activists and the many bases on which American women have been barred from voting. As Susan Ware does and why they march, the exhibit looks beyond the familiar names, such as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Alice Paul, and brings to our attention activists from a variety of backgrounds, showing that the cause of suffrage was advanced by American women across race, ethnicity, and class. Susan Ware, a pioneer in the field of women's history and a leading feminist biographer, is the author and editor of numerous books on the 20th century U.S. history, including American Women's History, a very short introduction. Still missing, Amelia Earhart in the search for modern feminism and the letter to the world, seven women who shaped the American century. Educated at Wellesley College and Harvard University, she's taught at New York University and Harvard, where she served as editor of the Biographical Dictionary, Notable American Women, completing the 20th century. Since 2012, she's served as the general editor of the American National Biography, whereas long been associated with the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where she serves as the honorary woman's suffrage centennial historian. She's also a member of the National Archives Foundation's honorary committee for rightfully hers and participated in our charrette before creating this exhibit. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Susan Ware. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. And all of you who have turned out from my talk, you as part of the price of admission, you should go and see the exhibit, which is fantastic. It really both tells the story of the suffrage movement but also brings it up to the present and makes the case for why this is very important history for us all to be engaging with. And so I think that being here today on the opening day is, for me, also a perfect way to launch my book, which was just published on Monday. So this feels like an exciting event. Why They Marched is a book of stories about women's struggle for the vote told through the biographies and objects. So it seems appropriate to start with one of those objects, a tree plaque, and the story behind it. In the spring of 1919, just as women's suffrage leaders were facing the final arduous process of winning ratification of the 19th Amendment, Carrie Chapman Cat and her longtime personal companion and fellow suffragist, Mary Garrett Hay, bought a 17-acre farm in Westchester County called Juniper Ledge. Soon after moving in, Cat commissioned a series of 12 metal tree plaques, memorializing the giants of the suffrage movement. Women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Francis Willard, and Anna Howard Shaw. And later that summer, she carefully installed the tree plaques throughout the property. Now, suffragists had a deep sense of history. In many ways, they were our first women's historians. And they had begun documenting this history long before the movement was successful. And taking a walk in the woods with Carrie Chapman Cat was practically like taking a course in suffrage history. But as charming as Carrie Chapman Cat's Woodland Tableau was, it provides an imperfect model for this book, which aims to probe more deeply into some of the more complex and hidden pockets of the history of the struggle for the vote than suffragists at the time were willing to acknowledge. Racism is an obvious place to start. Consistent with the deep-seated prejudices held by most white suffragists, Cat included no plaques to commemorate the thousands of African-American women who participated in the struggle. Then there's Eurocentrism. The international suffragists honored in Cat's suffrage forest were all from Western European countries, not from countries in South America, Asia, or Africa, which Cat condescendingly believed needed to look to first world women for guidance. And add to that regional chauvinism, all the domestic suffragists were from the East Coast, with New York State heavily overrepresented, no one from California, no one from the West, and no one from the South, unless you count the Grimcase sisters who were born there but left because of their abhorrence of slavery. And finally, it is hard to ignore a clear personal snub. No plaque for her rival Alice Paul, whose upstart National Women's Party caused much consternation for Cat and her mainstream organization in the final stages of the suffrage fight. For too long, the history of women's suffrage has put forward a version that closely parallels Kerry Chapman Cat's suffrage forest, a top-heavy story dominated by a few iconic leaders, all white and native born, and the national organizations they founded and led. Moving decisively away from that outdated approach uncovers a much broader, more diverse suffrage history waiting to be told. This new suffrage history shifts the frame of focus away from national leadership to highlight the women and, occasionally, the men who made women's suffrage happen through actions large and small, courageous and quirky in states and communities across the nation. Telling these stories, these suffrage stories, captures the broad-based movement where it actually happened on the ground. Now, over the long duree of the suffrage campaign, women who had never before participated in politics suddenly found themselves doing things they never would have thought possible. Filing lawsuits, holding public protests, collecting signatures on petitions, lobbying members of Congress, marching in suffrage parades, even risking arrest and imprisonment for the cause. Women may not have fundamentally changed politics when they began to exercise the franchise. And as an aside, I would ask, does anyone ever hold men to that standard? But, leaving that question unanswered, many women's lives were profoundly affected by participation in the struggle to win the vote. And my book, I hope, captures those personal and political transformations. But history isn't just made up of written documents and texts. Objects and artifacts play key roles as well, especially in the creation of personal and group identities. And this insight is especially relevant for a social movement like suffrage, which came to embrace popular culture and public spectacle as a primary strategy to win support for its cause. Suffrage objects like buttons, banners, leaflets, and posters are especially evocative in connecting everyday lives with the broader movement. In many cases, they literally were, to borrow a phrase from novelist Tim O'Brien, the things they carried. So this diverse cast of characters, broadly defined to include both human actors and inanimate objects, hints at the richness of suffrage history waiting to be tapped. And my stories cover the span of the suffrage struggle, but with a definite tilt lilt towards the 20th century, the profiles and objects from the West, South, and Midwest promise a more representative national story. And the inclusion of African-American and working class suffrage stories remind us that the movement was not just white and middle class. With the exception of Susan B. Anthony, none of them held a top tier leadership position. Instead, they represent the broad diversity of rank and file suffragism. So what are some of these suffrage stories you have never heard of? Let me start with the cookbook published by the Washington Equal Suffrage Association as part of their successful campaign to pass a state suffrage referendum in 1910. In addition to the cheerful logo, votes for women, good things to eat on its cover. The cookbook contains what to me was a somewhat surprising chapter on mountaineering, specifically what's to cook when you are on a mountaineering expedition. And so I use that to set up the story of Cora Smith Eaton, a pioneering Western physician. She was the first woman licensed to practice medicine in North Dakota, who served as treasurer of the Washington State Suffrage Organization. Eaton was also an avid mountaineer who climbed all seven major peaks in the Mount Rainier range and planted a votes for women pennant on the summit of the Columbia Crest in 1909. Unfortunately, that pennant has not survived, or I would have chosen that object to accompany her biography. Then there's the first issue of the Salt Lake City periodical The Woman's Exponent from June 1, 1872, which mentions, whoops, that went by too fast. There we go. There, here we have it. But you're still not going to be able to read this small type. So I will tell you that this front page mentions both Susan B. Anthony and polygamy. And that sets up the story of its longtime editor, Emmeline Wells, a polygamous Mormon wife who was also an avid suffragist. Now Utah holds a special place in suffrage history because the territory enfranchised its women in 1870. Wyoming was the first territory in 1869. However, unlike Wyoming, since the vast majority of Utah voters were Mormons, it proved impossible to separate voting from the issue of polygamy. And suffragists split between gingerly acknowledging Mormon women as allies versus emphatically refusing to have anything to do with them. And the story of Emmeline Wells' suffrage career shows how the seemingly straightforward question of votes for women became entangled in one of the most hotly contested legal and moral questions of the 19th century. This poster from the International Woman Suffrage Alliance Conference in Budapest in 1913 reinforces the international dimensions of the suffrage cause and sets up the story of a local favorite, Mary Church Terrell, an African-American suffragist. Terrell's suffrage philosophy was built around an intersectional vision that embraced race as well as gender, an implicit challenge to white suffragists who tended to focus only on the subordination created by their sex. Her vision for suffrage and race relation was also grounded in an international framework that placed the domestic situation in the United States in dialogue with customs abroad. But when she spoke at foreign conferences, such as the International Council of Women in Berlin in 1904, she was often the only woman of color in attendance. Hazel Mackay came to suffrage from the world of theater. Her claim to fame is staging a pageant called Allegory, right here in Washington, on the steps of the Treasury Building as part of Alice Paul's suffrage parade, time to coincide with Woodrow Wilson's inauguration in 1913. And this is something that you can learn more about in the exhibit, led by the commanding figure of Columbia, and this is a commanding figure, if there ever was one, approximately 100 actors, all female, except for one boy, staged a series of tableaus as marchers streamed past on Pennsylvania Avenue. Mackay demonstrates the bold ways that suffragists took over public space and deployed spectacle to build support for their cause. And finally, a personal favorite, a totally unknown Massachusetts woman named Claiborne Catlin, who in 1914 decided to ride across the state on horseback, alone. And without having raised any money, which meant she was dependent on donations to cover her expenses and also to feed her horse. And she did this in order to rally support for the cause. Over the course of four months, she organized 59 meetings, visited 37 cities and towns, and covered 530 miles. All of her personal belongings, plus a parcel of leaflets, a horse blanket, and a shoulder strap, which said votes for women had to fit in a pair of brown canvas saddlebags, which she later donated to the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe. Now Claiborne Catlin is an example of an ordinary woman who was driven to do extraordinary things in support of the suffrage cause. Other stories describe a husband and wife team, two sisters who were on opposite sides of the suffrage divide, a lesbian couple whose neighbors dubbed them the farmer suffragettes. I don't think that was a compliment. A best-selling southern novelist who wrote a suffrage novel that tanked, an artist who gave up her painting career to become a suffrage cartoonist, an African-American activist, Ida B. Wells, who refused to march in a segregated suffrage parade, and several more I don't have time to mention. Even though each story and its accompanying object stands on its own, when read together, they provide a surprisingly comprehensive history of the entire movement. And if I have chosen my 19 objects and subjects well, the whole truly will add up to more than the sum of the parts. And if there is a clear takeaway to these suffrage stories, it's that we need to keep individual lives in focus while we also track the big picture, even though they were often only the foot soldiers. And remember, not everybody wants to be head of an organization or a president or a general. Their rank-and-file contributions made a difference to the larger movement and to the participants themselves. Their hard-fought suffrage victory, the culmination of three generations of sustained political mobilization and spirited public advocacy, represented a breakthrough for American women, as well as a major step forward for American democracy. Important as the goal of suffrage was, however, the struggle was always far broader than just the franchise, speaking to fundamental questions about women's roles in politics and modern life. Who gets to vote also raises profound questions about the relationship between citizenship and suffrage over time. Think of suffragists as the voting rights activists of their day. Now, the suffrage campaign honed women's political skills and they put those skills to good use in the decades after the vote was won. In this enlarged perspective, the suffrage victory is not a hard stop, but part of a continuum of women's political mobilization that stretches across all of American history, not just between Seneca Falls in 1848 and the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. It is still appropriate indeed welcome to celebrate the upcoming centennial as an important marker in American women's history. But rather than positioning 1920 as the end of the story, it is more fruitful to see it as initiating the next stage in the history of women's political activism, a story which is still unfolding. Another reason for decentering 1920 concerns the plight of African-American voters for whom the 19th Amendment was at most a hollow victory. In 1920, the vast majority of African-Americans still lived in the South, where their voting rights were effectively eliminated by devices such as whites only primaries, poll taxes and literacy tests. For African-Americans, it was the Voting Rights Act of 1965, not the 14th, 15th or 19th Amendments that finally removed the structural barriers to voting. And in a parallel disfranchisement, few Native American women gained the vote through the 19th Amendment either. Now, in addition to the importance of women's suffrage for American political history, women's demand for the vote emerges as an integral part of the history of feminism. Because to protest women's exclusion from voting demanded an assault on attitudes and ideologies that treated women as second-class citizens. And to formulate that challenge involved conceptualizing women as a group whose collective situation needed to be addressed. And even though white suffragists were often clueless that they were speaking primarily from their own privileged class and race positions, the growing consciousness of women's common concerns fostered a sense of sisterhood unusual in early 20th century America. The fact that certain groups of women, especially women of color, were often excluded from representations of this supposedly universal vision demonstrates how racism intersected with feminism throughout the women's suffrage movement and its aftermath. Contemporary feminists have significantly broadened their commitment to recognize the diversity of women's experiences and work hard to include multiple perspectives within the broader feminist framework, but it is still a struggle. The suffrage movement is part of that story, warts and all. Stepping back, I see a direct line from the spectacles of the suffrage campaign to the sea of pink pussy hats worn at the women's marches held across the country, indeed around the world in January 2017 to protest the inauguration of Donald Trump. The playbook that suffragists pioneered right down to their distinctive colors and seizure of symbolic public spaces provides a clear blueprint for the mobilization of women in our contemporary political landscape. The wave of female candidates in last year's midterm elections and the unprecedented numbers of women who have already declared they are running for president in 2020 are another clear legacy. The diversity of these candidates, black, Latina, Muslim, Asian, Jewish, may seem like an aberration when set against the all white history of suffrage that historians used to tell, but these breakthroughs directly build on the demands for fair and equitable access to the political realm that were central to the struggle to win the right to vote in the first place. In 1920, a Brooklyn suffragist named Oriola Williams Haskell published a book called Banner Bearer's Tales of the Suffrage Campaigns, which I discovered fairly early in my research and I returned to it many times when I was writing my book comprised of a series of fictional sketches. The book tells the story through the eyes of ordinary and often extraordinary suffrage workers going about their daily business of the incredibly difficult task of winning the vote. Haskell puts human faces on the collective drama of broader social change. Even though we're writing almost a century apart, Haskell's goal and mine are remarkably similar to recreate the passion and commitment that three generations of American women brought to the suffrage cause and to tell that story from the perspective, this is a quote from Haskell, of those who have waged its battles and won its victories end of quote. That means bringing the story down to the personal level to individual acts of courage and political defiance to stories of quiet commitment alongside the displays of public spectacle. As Haskell wrote, may these pages seem like the diary they never had time to write or like the portfolio of old photographs that though faded made the once vivid past live again. At the very least, I hope I have uncovered some fresh candidates for Kerry Chapman Katz's Suffrage Forest. Thank you. And I'm happy and eager to take questions but you have to cooperate by coming to a mic on either side of the auditorium. Hello, thank you so much for your work and your research that you're doing in this field. It's so important. My question is looking around this room, I'm noticing that I'm one of the youngest women in here and I would love to hear some of your thoughts on actions that we can take to engage the younger generations in this critical conversation and to encourage those younger women to exercise this right that so many people have fought so dearly for. Well, I think in many ways the Suffrage Centennial is a good way to open a conversation about the importance of the vote. And the way I think of it is these women fought so hard to get the vote, we better use it. And I think that that is in some ways the biggest takeaway point but there's also a way in which I think the Suffrage movement kind of speaks to the way in which young people and older people come together in coalitions and one of the things that the Suffrage movement did was bringing together multiple generations. You had the older generations who had been at it forever but then you had young women flooding at the end and I think it's those cross-generational conversations that keep movements vibrant and going on. And I also think that when we're talking about political mobilization women have been key to that. They were key in the Suffrage movement, they've been key in recent political developments and I think it behooves us to keep moving things forward and that would be the message I would have. Just encouragement to keep at it even though sometimes it does seem a little discouraging and just to have those conversations with whoever you can. Okay, and where's the best place to get your book? Oh, there's gonna be a book signing up in the gift shop. Thank you so much. I hope to see you up there. Yes, on that side. I would just say about young people's attendance today. I wouldn't become too discouraged because it is in the middle of the work day and in the evening events leading up to this, the foundation had a lot, there were a lot of young people at the fundraising event for this last year. Yeah. The kids upstairs that they're going through the exhibit. Right. It sort of made your heart good. So I'm wondering what your research showed about post-civil war women of the South and what their engagement was to push suffrage for women. Well, the suffrage movement came later to the South than it did to other parts of the country and I think there are specific regional reasons for that, fairly conservative area and also one that was reeling from the after effects of the civil war. And so for, especially for white women, then the whole issue of suffrage in the South was tied up with voting for rights for African-Americans as well. And yet there are a quite hearty band of Southern suffragists that you start to see popping up in the 1890s and then they stay through the duration. But one of the things that was hard that I don't wanna get too deep into the weeds of suffrage history, but the two routes to try to get women to vote, one was by amending state constitutions and the other was by a federal amendment. Well, in a region like the South, there's not going to be much support for federal amendments that bring in what was seen as an outside force to threaten their state's rights. So I always think that the Southern women had an especially hard role and then you're really quite amazed to see what they were able to do within limits. I think there were only four Southern states that ratified the 19th amendment. But we have to give credit to Tennessee because that was what put it over the top. I'm alternating. Well, I have two questions that are like at opposite ends of the universe. One is, is it true that the Western states were inclined to encourage women's vote on state and local issues like for school board and things like that because that would help their numbers for qualifying to become a state. They'd have a certain number of population. They'd have a certain number of active citizens. So let's inflate the vote. I don't have the specifics on that. I think you're right to point out something that probably most people don't know, which is how many women actually were voting in different ways in different places before the 19th amendment. And often it was in what was called partial suffrage and it was school suffrage and things like that. I think what historians have found is when they get into telling specific stories, especially of the Western states where it happened so much earlier, that very often there is a specific political situation in that state, either they're angling for statehood or you have competition between maybe the two major parties and an upstart third party and that somehow then everything lines up correctly and having women vote seems like a desirable outcome, but it's hard to generalize. And yet I think that we really do need to remember the critical role that the West played in this because by the time we got to the 1910s when the movement was finally becoming a mass movement, there were women voting in almost all of the Western states and that really showed what could happen. Women were using their votes and I think it made politicians think, hmm, this is coming, I don't wanna necessarily alienate these future voters, but the fact that there were so many women already voting I think really did help put it over. Now you really have a second question you're gonna ask me. So there was an international Congress in Europe at the beginning of the First World War and it was a Congress of women and women from all, from many countries got together and I can't remember exactly where it was, but do you think that that experience, women went over and they were hoping to not have a First World War? It's a huge woman's- We know how that worked out. Right, well it never, yeah, that's what happens. So do you see that as something that helped women then feel a need for more engagement or how do you see how that interacted with old Wilson? I think it's a very important theme for suffrage history and I think it's also a good reminder for those of us who do American history not to just narrowly tell the story of this one country because one of the things I've always been struck by is how indefatigable these suffragists where they were traipsing around the world, they thought nothing of going to a conference in Budapest or one in London or occasionally ones in places like Japan. And I think to their credit they had a sense of a sort of more universal womanhood which we know doesn't really hold up all that well but even though we can say that wasn't necessarily the best model I think we have to recognize that for many women they really did see reaching out across national borders as an important way of mobilizing on a global way the political rights of women. And it also reminds us that this story, these stories of women battling for the right to vote. I hate the phrase being given the right to vote. They weren't given the right, they had to fight for it. These happen in specific countries all over the world and it behooves us to put the United States story and conversation into that. Okay, nobody over there, so you. Hi, could you say a little bit more about the role of men in the movement? You flashed a banner early on about that and I'm just curious about that particularly the importance of having men as allies and what kind of an approach they might have had towards bringing in those allies. I've heard Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg talk about the importance in her career of choosing cases that showed that discrimination hurt men as much as it hurt women and I'm wondering what kind of an approach the suffragist movement might have had towards that. Well I think the way to start to answer that question is just to remember that suffragists are part of family units. They're not just on their own and many of them are married and so if a woman signs on full time to be a suffragist it's going to have an impact on the way things used to be on the home front. She might not always be there at dinner time and she might be rushing off to Ohio to campaign and so you really did need often to have a supportive husband who was willing to go along with it. But much more broadly than that I think that certainly by the last decade the suffragist, the female suffragist realized that having separate organizations of men that were deliberately saying they're supporting women, suffrage could be a good political tool and so when you had these various suffrage parades and marches and especially in New York City the men would march separately with their banners like the Harvard banner in support of the women and I must admit I have a couple of places in my book where I talk about that and it does give me a certain satisfaction because for so long in history women have always their associations have always been there to help the men's associations and here we have a case where the men's association is not trying to lead, it's not trying to take over it's just trying to be supportive and so they're out there lobbying and marching and whatever. So I think that's an important part of the story and luckily I found a married couple that I could tell their story and the guy, Ray Brown, wrote a charming pamphlet called How It Feels to Be the Husband of a Suffragette which I highly recommend. Yes. I live and vote in the last colony in North America, Washington DC and I think a lot about the parallels of dynamics and campaigns and so on with the campaign for women's right to vote. In the women's campaign every senator had a mother and yet they still thought women weren't quite real people and DC won't get statehood. We have no congressional voting rights that the white man feels bound to respect unless we change the hearts and minds and wake up hundreds of millions of Americans who have senators and such like, how do you do that? There's just so many issues involved in who matters and who's real and what can you do about it and when is the same dynamic at a deeper level and I maintain the reason the country is the way we have with the national debt and war in Afghanistan is because it starts at home that we're not real people and people are blind and deaf to us and how do you change it? I'm not gonna have a full answer to that. I want you to keep on thinking. It shouldn't be a fly by answer. It should be keep on thinking. No, and I think that one of the things that I've really noticed about just trying to figure out what was it that finally got the 19th amendment through and you can point to certain factors like entering World War I and the years of mobilization, of political mobilization and the militants of the National Women's Party and it all comes together but sometimes it's just there has to be that constellation of preconditions that make something like that happen and with getting votes for the District of Columbia you've had several moments where you got it. You at least got it to go to the states, right? Or got it passed and it just didn't have that forward but the sufferer just would say, they would say onward, just keep trying. So yes. One of my arguments is that we're like Colonials and Colonial isn't healthy for anyone, for children and other living things and the rest of you are like co-colonials which is like being a co-alcoholics. It isn't healthy for you too. And so we need to find that kind of argument and why it matters to everyone. I think you have a lot of support in this room. Yes. What suggestions would you have for how we can use the celebration of the passage of the 19th amendment to advance the women's cause today? It sounded to me from what you were saying that you've thought about that. You've thought about the suffrage movement as a precursor to other things that have happened in women's rights. What issues do you think are really important right now that might be a part of our conversation about the celebration? Well, let me step back and answer that a little more broadly. One of the reasons I decided that I wanted to write this book several years ago, more than several years ago, was that I was looking ahead to the centennial and I thought that this might be a moment where we really could be having public conversations about women's history and women in politics. And this was something that I really wanted to be able to encourage and to participate in because one of the things that I've always tried to do as a historian, I've mainly written on 20th century history and the history of feminism, is to try and keep my historical work in conversation with where we are today. And I don't think I need to tell any of you that there are all kinds of reasons why the history of women's activism and feminism is an important discussion to be having today. I think right now, maybe it's just because I'm so deep in the suffrage story, I just keep thinking about the importance of the vote. And I really do think that issues of voter suppression and redistricting and whatever, these are ways of trying to keep people from voting and we need to really be pushing back on that and also encouraging women to register, women and men to register to vote and then to actually vote. I know at times it's hard because you think, well, why does my vote matter? And there have been points in my life where I've thought, you know, does this really make a difference? But I just think we have to keep trying. And so for me, it comes back a lot to voting rights. And I think we have plenty of areas where it's clear that voting rights are under attack and that that to me would be the highest priority. Do you think the passage of the ERA is important? Well, I sure wish it had passed back in the 1970s and we had it on the books. Whether with all the pressing problems we're facing today, whether that I would put at the top of the list, I'm not sure anymore. I mean, luckily someone earlier mentioned Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the laws have changed in ways that women have through the 14th Amendment, many of the protections that would have come from an equal rights amendment. And there are also many state ERAs that are enforced. But the main reason for doing it is, it would be such a symbolic statement of support. And so, so I'm of two minds, but I actually would have thought it was dead in the water, but it seems to be having another life. So we'll see, yeah. One question about the woman in the middle, our own local heroine, Mary Church Terrell. She's a, I always, I'm a native Washingtonian. I've always thought of her first and foremost as a civil rights activist, integration of, those of us who live here know that there's a place, Terrell Place right up across, just on Seven Street, the old heck company. I mean, if you want to talk about that, but she had the additional issue besides the race and the sex issue. She was a native as the previous questioner asked. She was a native of DC. We have no, no home rule in DC, particularly in her time, no voting rights for anything until 1964. So how did she, she had more than a full plate. So how did she balance, how does she work the intersectionality of black rights, of women's rights and DC home rule rights? Well, I think in some ways the answer is she, it was the, it's the strengths of an intersectional vision where you can't separate out any of those things. And that one of the reasons I've enjoyed so much, learning more about African-American suffragists is that they often had a much broader approach to voting. It wasn't just the vote. It was thinking about the role of African-Americans in the larger society and how to uplift communities and families and change, challenge racism. So there's a breadth to their vision and this is one element of it. But we keep coming back to that question of DC's vote, boatlessness and how, how she might have done that. I, I think for her, she's, she probably saw it as just all part of a larger struggle. And, you know, as some of you know, she kept at it her whole life. I love the picture of her from the 1940s where she's protesting segregation in accommodations here. And here she is a woman I think in her 80s with her purse looking very respectable but out there on the picket lines as she had been her whole life. And I just find the commitment of women like that, I find it very inspiring. And I think there's a way in which by framing these issues broadly, it always helps. So she's one of, she's someone I was very glad to be able to include her. Anything else? Okay. Oh, one more. All right. Sorry. Don't trip. I get a little shy. I just wonder what you think about the idea of mandatory voting, like they have in certain countries. Do you think it hinders or helps? I cannot see any scenario in this country where we would have mandatory voting. But so I would say no. I do think it's an interesting question that really hasn't gotten as much attention as it should. There are two that I've seen in the suffrage centennial. One is we really do need to engage the anti-suffragists. There were quite a lot of them, including a lot of women who said, well, we don't need the vote and we don't want the vote. And that was a very powerful statement that was used against the suffragists. But there's also a larger trend that sociologists and political scientists write about, which is the non-voters. People who are not registered, who do not vote, and who comprise a huge part of the population. And I do hope that as we're thinking about women's struggle for the vote and what it meant, that we can be thinking about ways of enlarging that conversation to think, well, who's not voting and why and is there a way of bringing them in? So that would be one of the questions I would really want to put on the agenda. Yes? Hi, thanks for your work, it's wonderful. And I'm looking forward to reading your book. But I was wondering if you cover in the book or in your research the intersectionality between the women's movement and the pro-choice movement and how they too go hand by hand and historic all the way to the present time and the place we find ourselves right now with the states going the way they're going in terms of the pro-choice movement. Thank you. Well, that is very obviously, and someone asked me earlier about the important challenges for women and feminism today. And certainly the question, that is one of the key questions. It was not really a question that was on the table at the height of the suffrage movement. You have a parallel development with the beginnings of the birth control movement with Margaret Sanger and somebody, oh, I'm blanking on her name. Margaret Sanger will do for now. But the suffrage movement didn't have to deal with as divisive and an issue as that is. It had plenty of other opposition that was having to overcome. But I think another thing it shows is that it is very important when we use a phrase like women that we remember that women is far too broad a category to be able to include everyone. And going back to that earlier question about the sense of the international feminists and they're hoping that women as women could come together to endure and improve the world. It isn't quite, it isn't easy and it doesn't really work that way. And I think the challenge when you're mobilizing women is both to identify the commonalities and themes that can be agreed on but recognizing the differences. And that's something that is going to be our challenge as we go forward. As we must, onward, that's what I always say. So thank you for coming. There is a book signing one level up at the archives bookstore. The books are at the cash registers. We'll be up there in just a few moments.