Transcripts For CSPAN2 Lucinda 20240704

Booktv he could find us on Twitter Facebook and youtube. And Rebecca Boggs roberts who had joined together to write a book called the suffragist playbook. If you can take a look here, you will learn about this book more important you will learn about the suffragists and what they did, how they did it, some of the encouraging things and some of the discouraging things as they as they were working on a. So the idea is that we can learn a lot from suffragists and that the suffragists with the first to doo a parade down pennsylvana avenue, the first to pick the white house andow now we see tht as commonplace. To let me tell you about these two women. Lucinda robb was the project director for our mothers before us, we meet and democracy, 1789 hyphen in 20 at the center for legislative archives here and this project we discovered thousands of overlooked original documents and really she helped to organize the National Archives in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the 19th amendment in 1995. She lives in virginia with her husband, three children, one small dog and more than 500 as dispensers, which you will see. Article author Rebecca Boggs roberts, is also a varied background. N she hasas been many things, a journalist, a producer, a tour guide, a forensic anthropologist but an event planner, political consultant, a jazz singer and a radio talkshow host. Currently, she is the curator of programming for planet world, a new museum and historic Franklin School in downtown washington. Roberts lives here in washington, d. C. With her husband, three sons and a big fat dog. These two women have been friends since childhood, and took the risk to come together and by the book. And so theyre going to talk us through how the Suffragist Movement growth institutional change and what can we learn from that. So take it away, rebecca and lucinda. All right so thank you so much for having us here today. This year is 100th anniversary of 18th amendment which of course granted women the vote or if will be a technical removed gender as anec obstacle to votig and with all thats going on in 2020 i think this probably never been a better time to look back at the Suffragist Movement and see what are the lessons they can teach us today. First of all i want to get out that it was a very long movement, over 70 years, and it went on forer three generations the first generation of suffragists lived a long time but, in fact, many of the leaders lived well into their 80s. At one point i was reading Elizabeth Cady stantondi and Sidney Anthony all lived to be 86 but still none of them live to seeas the 19th amendment past so for any activist today who think the changes happening fast enough and lets be honest its probably all aspects come right there theres an important lesson in the Suffrage Movement. You have to be in it for the long haul and never give up but on the Positive Side it was the largest expansion of political power in u. S. History, and it happened without war or violence or social upheaval which we think is a good thinker thats why you should study it the suffragists trusted in the rights given to them by the constitution and he figured out how to win by working within the system the change they managed to create was permanent and within festival and left us a look at how we can track institutional change. Since we cant cover everything today what we want to do is highlight some of our very favorite suffragist topics, especially one rebecca will talk about, once a suffragists actually invented. Right now want to talk about one of those basic fundamental tactics that you need if you want to create change, and that is telling a story. No big movement can get anywhere without telling a story. Just to be and just toy is a narrative that you remember here it can be as ancient as the book of exodus to be as modern as an eight minute and 46second video. Lucy stone was one of the first and most successful public speakers revenge rights and she would go on w to become one of e founding mothers of the Suffrage Movement but lucy still began her career as an abolitionist or this is true of a lot of talented actresses today. You get your training of one cause and this gives you confidence and skills to advocate for other causes you care about their going to your speeches and what people did for entertainment the way today at least before the pandemic you would go to a movie or to sporting events. It can be very dangerous especially for abolitionist because mobs which help with clubs and if once in a while for a building counter that in 1847, driven by her conscious, lucy stone started giving speeches against slavery and very quickly she became a huge sensation. At the time and this is hard for us to understand but it was incredibly controversial for women to speak in public and they were routinely denounced from the pulpit. In fact, not only back then were women not supposeder to speak to an audience, it wasnt considered proper for them to make any noise at all. They werent even supposed to clap. 5050 years later after lucy stoe started speaking career used to find references to the fact when women go to the speech e what it is they will waive their handkerchiefs, have a salute. Women were not supposed to speak at all. At first lucy would draw crowds just because of the novelty theory one speaker people treat it like it was a circus act but it turned outin she was really, really good at it. All the newspaper accounts today they go on about how incredibly mesmerizing she was compelled to press that she was. Pretty soon she had crowds of thousands of people showed up to listen. Man who sometimes came to market with wind upp living maybe shes on to something. From the very beginning lucy would tell the stories of enslaved women at parties and she got started adding stories about the injustices women face in general appeared she was deeply committed to both causes and begin splitting her schedule talking about ending slavery on weekends and womens rights on the weekdays. One of the reasons i like her so much a she is a great example soto took an insult and made it a rallying cry. In 1855 which is at womens a ws Rights Convention in ohio someone in the audience heckled her saying she was just a disappointed woman right then and there she went on to give an impromptu speech where she said essentially yes, she was disappointed woman she was disappointed in the education for the almost no colleges that would admit when she was disciplined in professions where there is only option for her was to be a seamstress or a teacher, it even though she would make a fraction of whatt manmade even though bakers still charge the same of b the bret baier she was disappointed in religion were women were told they were going to help in choosing a disappointed marriage because instead of being able to marry for love, women were too often forced tohe marry men for money you Better Believe she was a disappointed woman. This was going to become one of her most successful features introduce it again and again for it was a 19th century equivalent of a you to see te parallel with women in place like nasty woman as she persisted. Far from the only way they were influenced. That is where i will pick it up. It is amazing there were so many activists. And sometimes they do it without knowing it. It is everywhere and very obvious examples, the way the womens march of 1913, the we had matching hats, very specifically in the Suffrage Movement but so many other places where they use tactics they invented or perfected and we tend to associate those with the 20thcentury part of the movement and that is absolutely true, but Susan B Anthony, in the Nineteenth Century she was pushing the envelope. It was pretty transgressive to be speaking in public, the way she embraced these tactics is continues to be part of the legacy. She was very recognizable. And the scarf was in this caricature. And and in the wake of the civil war, as lucinda mentioned so many of them were abolitionists when the fifteenth amendment and franchised black men and no women, there were suffragists like lucy stone and Frederick Douglass who said we will take the fifteenth amendment as written and fight for women next and people like Susan B Anthony who said we cant afford the fifteenth amendment if it in franchises black men and no women and a split with each other informed competing organizations and to give a sense of the radical moderate continuum here, the stone blackwell faction published a newsletter called the womens journal and proceeded statebystate for a slow and steady strategy to get suffrage past and anthony and stanton with the National Women suffer just association, their publication was called the revolution and they went straight for a federal amendment, and with strategic differences. And with federal overreach. Anthony and stanton not so much. Susan b anthony voted in 1872, gets turned away at the polls, she was able to cast her ballot, then what do you do, didnt work out the way you expected to and you see this all the time with contemporary activists, how do you turn and even to your advantage if it didnt go the way you planned . As it happened she was arrested a couple days later but the men who came to arrest her wanted her to quietly report to the courthouse and she wanted no part of that, she felt held out her wrists, she wanted the visual of a proper button double lady being led away by sheriffs, they did make her come with him and she insisted on that. So many instances of men underestimating this thought she would be silent, and so Susan B Anthony was the pioneer turning a story around for herself, milking the press for her own gain and that tactic, doing something attention grabbing and milking that attention no matter whether it is positive or negative, something you continue to see in the movement and other movements now and when black lives matter activists in Lafayette Square in front of the white house and the square was cleared so the president could go stand by st. Johns church and there were weeks of reporting about that. Who ordered this square to be cleared. Law enforcement was there, what tactics did they use, this massive Washington Post video investigation zoomed in on the emblems on different Law Enforcement officers to figure out what happened that night and curfew expired and the protesters just went home it wouldnt have been a story and it was the protesters who continued to keep this in the news even though the protests had not gone the way they anticipated. There are 19thcentury roots to this tactical make sure you make the press work for you, make sure you craft an image that works for you. This is something we think of as an artifact of the instagram age but suffragists were really good it paying attention to how things look and making sure they looked the way you wanted them to. Women in wyoming voting, wyoming was the first state where women i got that they were given the right to vote, they were never given anything, they fought like hell for it, they were american citizens, men in charge finally recognized the fact so wyoming was the first and the fact that these are nicely dressed polite ladies with a picnic basket and it feels very safe that imagery was really important because the antiplaps are trying to define the image of suffragists too, 1 million cartoons like this where there some hapless man covered in babies and dirty dishes while his carefree wife strides out of the house leaving him to fend for himself while she goes out to vote. This is an antisuffrage cartoon it is considered terrible, what is she doing leaving them with those babies, if you dont craft your image yourself someones going to do it for you and that is an important lesson for an activist. This whole notion of paying attention to how things look, we associate with alice paul. Alice paul was a reluctant suffragist in some ways, she grew up in new jersey, she was a quaker, she had learned the values in a general way but wasnt involved in the american Suffrage Movement largely because after the split over the fifteenth amendment, the movement languished, lost followers, lost momentum, not many states had been added to the role and even though the two factions did come back together in the 1890s a lot of time was lost, when they came back together they agreed to follow that statebystate strategy and anthony and stanton and stone live to a ripe old age but by the turnofthecentury they had all died so this movement was in trouble and alice paul wasnt interested until she went to england and she went to england for grad school and was radicalized. England did also have a slow and Steady Movement but the pankhurst movement was really militant, the faction of the American Movement alice paul would found, the National Womens parties called militant. They had nothing on the pinkers. They were intentionally throwing bricks through windows and slapping policeman in the face. I point they tried to set the prime ministers house on fire. They were not playing around so this sort of shows you the difference, this is the headline from a london newspaper, trouble expected in london tonight, suffragist determined to force their way into parliament after dark, the women will certainly break into the house, it was simply to be expected. This document on the other side i just love is an ad, suffrage it may break windows which if you got to bring to the window James Caldwell suffragists and suffragettes, the word is suffragist, the British Press made fun of the british activists by calling them suffragettes. It was meant to be patronizing, cute little suffragettes and just like lucy stone was a disappointed woman the british activists took the name and wore it with pride and coopted its power so most properly the word is suffragist. The project refers to the bridge movement, specifically the militant wing of the british movement. Alice paul take these tactics and when she comes back to america in 1910 she wents the American Movement to use some of the men pitches a parade down pennsylvania avenue. There have been celebratory parades, using pictures of the army of the potomac but the idea of a march on washington that was the suffragists idea. It is so common that we think of it as a traffic headache but it had never been done before, the idea of a political march through the corridors of federal washington from the legislative branch to the executive branch. That was alice pauls idea. In the 1913 parade which i will talk about at great length if given half an opportunity so i will restrain myself because we have a lot to cover today, did not go at all as planned. An event planned to the last minute but this massive crowd blocked pennsylvania avenue soap for secretary of on this image on thirteenth street you can see the capitol in the background, the large building on the right, now the trump hotel. Pennsylvania avenue is really broad street with wide sidewalks, there is no daylight between these two men. They were there for the Woodrow Wilson inauguration and they behave very badly, blocked the street, spit on the women, called them names, tripped them, the police did nothing to get the crowd back and in some cases the police joined in the namecalling and the sitting but again how familiar is this image now, right . This is the march for our lives in the wake of the marjorie stuntman douglas shootings, now this is a friendly crowd but this is the same picture 100 years later. Once you start seeing these parallels to tactics suffragists invented you cant and see them. And , picketing the white house. No one had ever done this before in 1917. This was the National Womens party idea so not only is picketing the white house now incredibly common, this is an image from this summer when there were so many black lives better protesters that they started adding their signs, but also what are these women doing . They are making a message go viral, this is the 1917 equivalent of a tweet. It reaches the people standing in front of the white house in Lafayette Square but it reaches many more people in a picture in the newspaper. That is why that banner is on really easy to read, dark against white background, thats all about how they are reproduced in the newspaper and later in 1917 as the us became involved in world war i the National Womens party got much more provocative in their messages so they went in with this kaiser banner that says have you forgotten your sympathy with the poor germans because they were not self governed, 20 million american women are not self governed, take the beam out of your own eye, this is not only very critical and controversial but potentially treasonous in the eyes of some of the public, directly criticizing the president , calling him kaiser while we are at war with germany. This is a tactic activists use constantly. The outrageous, know that you are going to lose some followers because of it but the attention you are going to get might be worth it and once you start seeing the tactics you see them everywhere. It is kind of timeless. On movement cant only consist of attention grabbing tactics. Youve got to actually have some effort towards the long slow steady institutional change as well and for that i go back to the singing. Every Movement Needs radicals. They move the goal posts. You also have your moderates because they help you move the ball. A successful tactic of the Suffrage Movement is one that doesnt always get as much attention as it should and that is the importance of engaging a wider audience and when you do that specifically linking your cause and nobody is better at doing this than Frances Willard so today almost no one has heard of Frances Willard been in the 1800s she was the second most widely known and admired woman in the world after queen victoria. For 20 years she was leader of the womens Temperance Union and that was the largest and most influential womens group in the Nineteenth Century and it wasnt just that she was an activist, she was a fullfledged celebrity. I sam is a cross between oprah and dolly parton. Thats how big she was. The kind of person who was so big she could write books on virtually anything and it would be successful and she did write a book titled how to win and another on how to ride a bicycle. She was so popular that when she died unexpectedly in 1898, tens of thousands of people came by her coffin to pay their respects. We talk a lot about statutes today but in 1905 she became the first woman to get a statue in statuary all of the us n she would not be joined by another woman for 50 years. All that is to say she was really big deal. These days people kind of roll their eyes when you hear about the Temperance Movement to abolish alcohol if you even know what temperance is but back in the Nineteenth Century drinking was a real Public Health problem particularly for women who are especially vulnerable. For many women if you were married you didnt own the right to your wages. Your husband could legally beat you. It was hard to get a divorce and if you did was hard to make a living so alcoholism was an issue a lot of women cared about more than that because it was seen as a moral issue, it was acceptable for women to get involved in temperance and women did in really big numbers. What she did for suffrage was bring the movement mainstream. People heard about the idea thanks to the work of early suffer just like stone and stanton and anthony and others but by no means was it in the top 10 or 20 issues people cared about and willard started to change. We basically know that will it was pretty much team suffrage from the beginning but she was extremely careful analysis oldest to members. Most of adjusts at the time were say women should have the right to vote because it was fair, because it was just, morally right. Willard makes a completely different argument. Willard a nice, respectable methodist that everybody liked and she used this image to her advantage, she talked about how mothers needed to the Public Policies that would be good for the family, she called the Home Protection ballot and this was brilliant marketing, able to get a huge following of mostly white evangelical christians to approve what was still pretty much a radical idea. This is a master class engaging a wider audience this is what linking your cost water goals is all about. In terms of modernday activists it reminds me of the gay rights but when they championed Marriage Equality by focusing on something people approved of it changed a lot of the debate. Under willards leadership the womens christian Temperance Union members got active in a lot of social reform. Willard called it her do everything policy along with labor reform, education reform and social purity. It may sound like a victorian antisex initiative and theres a Little Something to that but long before the me too movement this was an effort to hold not just women but men too accountable for their actions and in case you think it was important, one of the biggest successes they had was reaching the age of consent for girls was at that time it was 10 to 12 for most girls exit for delaware where it was 7. That is kind of shocking to us. Willard is by no means perfect. If anybody heard of her to date is because of the controversy of crusading journalist ida wells. We will talk about her in a moment. Wells accuses the womens Temperance Movement of using language that demonizes black men and immigrants and people of color in general, anyone outside the mainstream dominant group. You get a sense of this in a pro suffrage print titled American Woman and her peers that Frances Willard winds up being featured in. This was used to get people upset that women had the same Political Rights as idiots, criminals, the insane, and native americans which is no rights. Wells eventually forces willard to make a statement against lynching. This is something that is interesting when we look at this. Originally the womens christian Temperance Union was one of the few National Womens organizations who was integrated, when black women came to the convention black and white women were seated together over the vociferous objections of southern white women and for a time black women like Francis Watkins harper did have leadership roles in the womens christian Temperance Union. The racism is insidious and i compare it to a virus you may have heard of but cant always see and sometimes you have people without obvious symptoms who wind up being superspreaders, that is what happened with willard. Willard, her whole brand was nice, almost certainly never thought of herself as racist but the womens christian Temperance Union goes into full gear, willard spent a lot of time going down into the south to meet with white women and they are all just so lovely and so nice introduce such a gracious experience and gradually in the course of time willard and the other whites of adjusts start making works with arguments about educated suffrage which becomes code for white suffrage and how unfair it is that black men can vote and white women couldnt so willards legacy is complicated and that is something i will let rebecca talk about, that you have to be aware of, a lot of the racism in the Suffrage Movement. We take that seriously. It is tempting when you write womens history to elevate these women to saintlike status to justify their inclusion in the canon because theyve been excluded for so long but that is bad history and it is boring history but we felt strongly that not only did we want an accurate view of this movement and the women involved but that if the premise of our book is that you should take lessons from this movement to change the world now then sometimes you need to know what not to do and if you want to avoid making the same mistakes you need to know what those mistakes werent too often the mistakes of the Suffrage Movement were racist. There were overtly racist themes, statebystate strategies for the movement pursued in the 1890s, sometimes that meant activists going into Southern States and say women suffrage will ensure White Supremacy, making an overt argument that the white female vote would overwhelm votes from black voters and it was a way of ensuring White Supremacy and they made that argument. It never worked. Every place white suffragists made that argument the legislatures were systematically disenfranchising black men with jim crow laws and that was working for them and they were not interesting to the black voter. White suffer just made that argument then there were less over, less openly racist limits of the movement in these come up again and again and i think as incentives is the insidious ones are the harder ones to combat. Its easy to say im not like kate gordon, im not saying womens suffrage equals White Supremacy but lets learn from other examples too. This is a picture of the founding members, sorority founded at howard and they were founded in january of 1913 because these women felt the dominant authorities on campus were too social and they wanted to be more political and they wanted their first act to be to march in the 1930 suffrage parade and alice paul punted. He didnt even answer their letter at first, she just hemmed and hot and that wasnt like her at all, she was super organized, answered everything really quickly. And also wanted to participate, the telegrams back and forth between a. K. A. And Alice Pollard are in the library of congress and she was really nervous that integrated parade was going to alienate too many white women and she was much more interested in keeping the confidence of white suffragists than including black suffragists and she didnt know what to do and ultimately the National Said to her you cannot exclude marchers, youve got to include anybody who wants to be part of this and so she suggested the deltas march at the back in segregated fashion. It hurts you to hear that. You want her to do better. I am impressed with alice paul. I want her to recognize that when shes standing up against sexism she should stand against racism too, but it doesnt do anybody any good to pretend she was better on these issues and she was. I must say contemporary members of delta who are many and fierce say they marched wherever they want to. Photos dont survive because the white photographers werent pictures of the black sorority so these things get reinforced, you look for proof and there isnt proof because nobody was capturing the image of black marchers at the time because thats not the image they wanted to put forward. We know ida b wells who was a crusading journalist in chicago particularly antilynching wanted to march with the illinois delegation and when it was suggested that black marchers segregate themselves at the back of the parade ida b wells wanted no part of that. She stood in the crowd and jumped in to the parade as the illinois delegation went by. A terrible reproduction of a newspaper image but that is ida b right in the middle of the delegation. It was an interesting case study because she saw so many commonalities between the Suffrage Movement and the africanamerican Rights Movement that was nascent in the early part of the Twentieth Century and like generations of activists before her, it can be really useful to find allies in other causes and to learn chops from other causes, they learned about organizing and fundraising and speaking from the temperance and Abolition Movement but she was so uninvited by the white suffragists, ida b wells decided specifically africanamerican Suffrage Club in chicago working with black activists to pursue separatists on the other goals. The advisors who helped to create it, Richard Carol was, she spoke 4 or 5 languages, she passed a lot of the status symbols, often the only black woman invited to different suffrage meeting that is a trojan horse to wear beautiful clothes and speak the languages and get in the door and get in and say you have to pay attention, they are different and specific so she chose to work within the White Organization to get her message across to the women. Either of those tactics is acceptable and we see contemporary activists using each of them in turn. The big lesson here is you dont always have to do as you are told, it is time to leave and form your own group, sometimes it is time to march where you want regardless of what the people in charge say and that is an enduring lesson we want contemporary activists to take which i will say in 2013 on the centennial of the suffrage parade, this is a picture of that celebration, the deltas leading the parade, this is enough, this is lovely, a beautiful image, im delighted the deltas are out in force but its not enough to right the wrongs of history, you have to not make them again and thats why we feel strongly about including those lessons in the book. Another tactic, rebecca referenced it, the importance of recruiting allies, but not just any allies, you need the ally, you need to recruit the allies you need to achieve your goal. Once the separatists start coalescing behind a constitutional amendment the thing to remember about constitutional amendments is there like the legislative equivalent of they are unbelievably hard to pass. There is a reason why this only 27 of them. In the case of suffrage, the allies women need a men, they need mostly white men. In 1918 went past the house of representatives the first time, the first woman who served in congress to introduce the limitt was able to vote for it. It wasth an incredibly dramatic vote. This is where having those allies really came in. Lly came. You have allies from the beginning, Frederick Douglass is the one who stood up in seneca calls when it look like Elizabeth Cady stantons revolution for women for vote wasnt going to pass and his words were the ones that convinced the rest of the people that they should go ahead and vote for it and it passed the day and thats why we talk about that being the beginning of the savage Movement Thanks to that first hour, Frederick Douglass and you find men throughout the entire course but especially at the end. Once you have the vote in congress it comes down to the wire. There were four pronged suffrage congressman brought in on stretchers, including theater systems of tennessee, he broke his shoulder but refused to have it set. He stayed there in great pain because he wanted to make the other people feel guilty to vote i the one that always gets me is frederick x of new york. He came down from the deathbed of his wife who was an ardent suffragist, cast his vote, turned around and goes back to her funeral and the thing is that time in 1918 italy passed by one vote. They needed every single one of those male allies and when it did finally pass the women were watching from the galleries sinking oh 100 hymns, praise god. And with all that excitement it failed in the senate. I told you it was hard. Wilson who wasnt very much in favor was determined to get the whole thing over with went ahead and called a special session of the next congress and by june of 1919 both chambers finally passed it. Unfortunately jeannette riggins didnt get to vote on it having left office and at this point it goes to the states. The server just had to get 3 quarters of the states to ratify which in 1919 and 36 states and this is where that amazing grounds game of the national American Woman Suffrage Association and this is for the moderate wing to be so important and why it is so useful to have radicals and moderates even if they dont work together. The moderate suffragists had these i relationships with legislators in most states and they were able to lobby them, the legislators who werent very happy with some of the things women were doing, picketing in front of the white house and getting a lot of attention, this woman was working, at first everything is going swimmingly, the states were racing each other to see who could get their application in first and for the record, wisconsin and every time, alice paul, another star, state ratifications are coming along and you have to pass in both chambers in each state legislature but after a while they start to trickle down and many of so the momentum starts to dry up if we think of our struggle examples you dont have to go very far tost think about the e. As they start to have fewer and fewer options it basically becomes clear tennessee is going to be the make or break state on this. The handpicked header on the national American Woman Suffrage Association had extended national and set up shop. You she is a Photo Holding something children would never ever recognize. I have to thank rebecca because shes one doing all the photos in making this happen. Things down there are crazy. If you want to read more about it, a great book called the womans hour and its a lot of fun. Down a national they call it the war of the roses but if youre prosuffrage you were a yellow post. If youre at the suffrage you wear a red rose beer at the suffragists are making a full court press to stop the 19th amendment once and for all. There are two notable forces in tennessee working. One is not surprising considering all of the work the womens christian you need to get women too vote and that is the liquorni lobby. The stories they tell of the state legislatures who are stumbling drunkenly through the hallways and both sides accuse each other of starting rivers which they are both doing. But the other big group that is supposed to suffer this National Association of post women suffrage which to my great surprise was largely run by women despite the fact this is sort of a famous photo that most of the people are mint their Financial Association opposed to women suffrage women suffrage is mostly run by women and these are well organized politically savvy determined women. And again they may remind you a little bit of Phyllis Schlafly and her work ethic at the er group. Back in that day there were some woman who didnt think women should have anything to do at all with politics because it was so dirty and they felt their husbands and her brothers and sons, would all vote in the best interest. Right but there were others who were reformers themselves and they had a different tactic that argued that if women could vote for could, in fact, be nonpartisan experts and the men would be likely to listen to the right spirit is an excerpt from a petition we found in the archives here it has come its filled with nearly 30 minutes listed so and so and so. It says this amendment would immediately open up a new nation wide Suffrage Campaign in 48 states here it would give suffragists and socials opportunity to annoy and pastor every legislator in the United States until a majority of the men and 36 legislatures to surrender the judgment principal to the political threat to cajolery if it would mean that no legislature in the United States could meet without being surrounded by separate suffragist tickets but finally, it would be an official endorsement of nagging, of national policy. You can laugh when you read it, or i sometimes kinda kindo cry but the really were a very well organized club. The Tennessee State senate votes to ratify afterer exceptionally tense lobby and it all comes down to the house. The antisuffragists think they have the votes tong end it all with a young 24yearold state legislator cast his vote hes wearing a red rose on his lapel so he makes a lastminute change where he felt imac for suffrage and since he becomes the final state to ratify and pushes it over the line. Afterwards he gives several reasons for changing his mind but the only will anybody ever paid attention use ofbe this but he said he voted for it because his mother wrote a letter telling him just before the vote to cast his vote for suffrage and that every good boy does its best to follow the advice of his mother. I tell myad children this all te time. So his mom was able to recruit the allies the suffragists needed. Thats how we became part of the constitution. You know, its such a dramatic story, story of suffrage that we know that there are so many great books and resources about the scholarship that is, about the centennial has been terrific to watch and learn from. We purposely chose to make our book a playbook that there are specific lessons you could take from this movement in order to change the world yourself because not only is the Movement Worth learning about just as an educated american, its worth living about because they want, right . They were successful. We hope weve give you a couple ofe those lessons, secrets, tactics throughout this talk, and we thank you so much for having us and we would be happy to take your questions. Well, you guys are phenomenal, thank you so much for telling the story with such liveliness and energy for a couple people have asked yes, this is being recorded and yes, it will be available on the capital historical website and a couple of days but his registrable get a note telling them when it is ready and on the website also get information about getting the book, the suffragist playbook which lucinda and rebecca have an arrangement with the National Archives because they worked so hard with them that their gift shop promotes the book and so we will have that link because the Society Works with the National Archives on a regular basis. I amm trying to pull the questions. Frances willard, the first woman to have a statue 50 years before any other woman, you know, led the limits christian movement, something court i greww up with because my great grandma was an active member of the womens christian Temperance Union,hi gw up in a house on the underground railroad and so would regale us with stories when she was of course very old when i got to know about she would tell those stories. You talk in your lessons of crafting an image or being outrageous and working inside and outside, recognizing the flaws in building allies. Would you talk about the relationship with Frances Willard as both an experience of building an ally but also as an experience of really as rebecca talked about, how did that deal with some of the racism issues that were very much present, and what has that become lessons for us today . Well, i think what could be so to me is so fascinating about frances work was both how effective she was in changing the dynamic of what was happening at the time aspect Frances Willard desperately look at that i think that something that we really can learn from now but how she was so blind mistake she was making paradigm i think a lot of times we look back at the things people do in the past and the sort of one or two responses. One of them is to say you need to understand it in the context of the time. And sometimes it is helpful to understand contacts but that wasnt an excuse. And then theres now today were much more likely to say we want to condemn it and make sure Everybody Knows how wrong it is thats important as well but what that does is sort of lets us off the hook. As i think what rebecca was saying we cant just feel like they didnt when you better but we f should assume we will do so much better. No, i think its useful to look at what happened so we can see where might we potentially be going straight if it happens now. One of the things that really happens with limits christians Temperance Movement is again originally it was integrated at the did two things that were very progressive for its time but as they start getting more and more focused on the constitutional amendment and the want to spend more effort they realize have to get Southern States. Any effort to go and keep themselves, makeor themselves drafted desperate attracted to the women Southern State that i should say the white women in Southern States and the white male legislators that are trying to influence, they do wind up throwing black women under the bus. That is something, the only reason why ida b. Wells who was basically do what today we would call datadriven journalism over 100 years ago. The reason why she was recently posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize because she was putting all this information showing the really deadly impact of the language that the groups like that were using, how dangerous it was it was sort of the important bad of that day and how they changed the views of things. Whenge she condemns and calls ot willard, this is something that happened in europe that often gets lost in the debate. A lot of this is happening over in europe, and Frances Willard who herself is traveling and does speaking tours entersil wht europeans are thinking and thats part of what influences her. But it doesnt like to be an important issue as it needs to white suffragists in the u. S. Looking to see do you have the groups influencing emigrating, are we today paying attention to what can potentially go wrong . Are we paying attention . Dont be so concerned with getting your goal that you sort of lucite of whats right and whats more. Thats a difficult needle to thread when you think about activism because you do have to legitimately figure out how do you make compromises, is doing windows compromises are wrong, and that sometimes it is a tough thing to do. I hope it gets a little bit of an answer. So let me just tell you we have a couple of quick lets do lightning rod questions. One is of course with such a great audience, you said Smokey Robinson did not say got y ward in 2001. So let us understand that rebecca matches your mother but your grandmother. So i stand, you know, corrected and updated, thank you very much, jan we have a couple people have asked to completely different questions. One is they know that rebecca your family had a strong engagement with the pagee progrm and the house of representatives, and so do you have any thoughts whether the page program will ever come back . So somebody does say i think one of you was the page, that is my brother my brother was a page, that a a page from california to a dated when there were 16. S they got back together in the 20s and they have been married for 23 years and have three spectacular children. So we are sort of romantic about the page program in my family. I have no idea whether its going to come back. Theres a realid value to it jt in the sense that as we keep getting demonized as the h of us to care about these institutions like to have opportunities to show that there worthwhile. That something the historical site decibel and other institutions is that it gives ordinary americans a chance to realize that we are not some scary morally bankrupt group of people, that theres a real city here with real institutions that make real change i obviously have no power over the page program but im delighted it delivered my awesome sisterinlaw to the family. Well there you go. Ea second question, and will probably need to make this abt our last, is what are the lessons from suffrage that you would apply to the conversation and the campaign for the equal rights amendment, and do you think that we will see the equal rights amendment become part of the constitution . I dont necessarily want to make a prediction about the success of the era. I would say the biggest lesson is figure out what your opposition is scared of. I thinknk that the first generation of feminists were completely thrown by the opposition of other women. They didnt realize that there were women who felt really threatened by Something Like the era and the thunder spokesperson, schlafly. Asas lucinda said boats wound ws morally right, was not enough. You cant just say its the right thing to do but that doesnt sway a lot of my strategic fit who opposes and why craft your message to change in labor it will be people dont change your mind there were people in the movement of thought women were too stupid or fragile to handle the vote those are never going to change but if there are people who are just scared or pushed out of the comfort zone or illinformed, they get what theyre scared of and make it j better. And somebody mentionedfi something about the western states and women voting pick one of the real advantages that happens there and relates to era is that what was so successful in kanban against era stalking all these things that people thought were going to happen. To some extent a lot of them have come to pick when we do serve in the military. Y. Women do have genderneutral bathrooms, things like that. What made the difference in the Suffrage Movement is when claimant started voting in the west and things did not entirely collapsed, collapse, it kind of date an example to people to look atn that site gosh, that seems to work that is incremental change really does have l some value at that is another message, lesson of the Suffrage Movement i would say we can use today. Sometime you ared not always going to get big Sweeping Change but if you get the small steps and they really do buildups for its great. I tell you, cindy, theres one requester can you turn your camera so people can see your pez dispatcher . This is a fraction of the pez i have. The thing about that is they are cheap and the kids can get into the and they are fun. I should say label and on this note, i did this youre right that people in orange, connecticut, that pez acted so you will not to have a suffragist pez collection, collector sector i suggested that they do susan b. Anthony, lucy stone, Sojourner Truth and ida b. Wells. I have yet to hear back. Expert i love it. Well, ill tell you, our audience they think they would listen to several hours but we promise to do this in an hour. We are so grateful that youve given us your time, your talent here it would be, it has been recorded there it will be on the website. You will get information so people can tell the friends to come and listen. We hope you will join us next week for the freedom of work and the tour of the library of congress. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you, for being with us. Thank you for joining us. If youre enjoying American History deity and signed up for a newsletter using the qr code on the screen to receive the weekly schedule of upcoming programs like lectures in history, the presidency and more. Sign up for the american hdtv newsletter today and be sure to watch American History tv every saturday or anytime online at cspan. Org history. 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