Where they are. We have more events this afternoon, so youre welcome to stick around all day. Im pleased to welcome johan in neuman this afternoon to discuss her important new book gilded sufferragists about a group of new york socialites who fought for the becames right to vote. Among the more than 200 social figures she writes bass host or familiar names, and she reminds us what a radical, explosive notion the womens vote was in the early 1900s 1900s and and hn her own words, theres a moment when generations cross paths and aned ay that once seem radical loses its toxins. This is call one of the top books of the fall from independent publishing houses. Neuman is a scholar in residence at American University and an awardwinning journalist who has wherein for Los Angeles Times and usa today. Going to be in conversation with jude woodruff who she node from covering the white house. Judy is worked as correspondent for nbc, cnn, npr and many a places. He me welcome johan Joanna Neuman and jeudy wood drive. Im so excited to be here and johanna is. I have to start off, full disclose sure and say when johanna wrote me about this event a few months ago and said any chance you other be free, i wrote her immediately back and said, absolutely. Id love to see you. Book sound great. We go way back. We go back to the white house during the early 1980s, when both of us were just out of middle school. [laughter] we were early on in our careers as journalists, and i think we bonded back anyone, even though i was in broadcast, she was in print. We always kind of gravitated toward each other. I was such a huge fan of her reporting and she was a respected journalist. But johanna, you have gone on to great are things. Went on to earn her ph. D. She is a scholar in residence, done extraordinary historical work and this latest book is just a treat for all of you who havent had a chance to read it yet or peek at it. You are truly in for a treat. Johanna, without going any longer on all the prefaces, just why havent you changed . 30 years . Guest full disclosure, good doctors. Host you covered i knew you you as a reporter, Los Angeles Times, covering politics. Covered the white house, state department, the congress. How did you i want to do a quick background. How did you find your way from doing that to being interested in history . Guest well, actually, i was very happy as a journalist. I loved what i was doing. Can you all hear me, . But in late 2008, when the economy was collapsing, the Los Angeles Times, where i worked, decided to close the washington bureau, and i took a buyout, as many journal journalists have and i started free lansing, the Los Angeles Times called me back within a month and asked if i would do their Political Blog from washington any Morning Hours before anyone in los angeles was up. If anything happened in washington in the morning, it was mine. And one day im sure many of you remember this the obamas got a dog. And his name was bo, and he was a portuguese water dog. And of course everyone is going to have this tidbit, and my job as a blogger is to think how i can distinguish us . So i thought and thought and i did a blog post that was titled obamas get a black and white dog and i did a riff on post racial, biracial and what it meant for the country, we have black and white dog. And this thing went viral for about 15 minutes, and the National Editor called me several hours later and said, this was fabulous. Lets have more of this. This is fantastic. And later that evening, when i was having dinner with my husband, without title, jeff glazer, i said, i really have to find michigan more substantive to deal with. Host the dog lovers here may resent that. Guest that is the truth. And then we started brainstorming about what i could do that i love, and i had always loved history. My father was a great history buff and had given me the bug. And so i decided at a very advanced age to go back to school and get my ph. D in history. This is my first book as a historian. Its also for me its the first test of my conviction that you can marry the deep Archival Research imperative of the historian with the narrative skills of a journalist. Host why did you want to write about these women and the suffragist this was an aspect of the Suffragist Movement which has gotten no attention. Guest i knew very little about the Suffrage Movement. Not like they taught it in school. One of the topics that interested me while i was back in school. And i was first going to write about stuffage in the 19th 19th center when there was a terrible schism between the two pranks of the movement, between Elizabeth Stanton and suzanne b. Anthony on one side and lucy stone and Henry Blackwell on the other. Stone and blackwell are staunch analystists and believe that abolitionists and believe that the black men should be enfranchised first. That they 15th amendment which gives black men the right to vote should be ratified and then women can fight for their vote. Susan b. And Elizabeth Katy, if theyre going into the constitution, were going with them, or else were fighting it. And in this split the movement for almost 30 years, and they had rival organizations. It was deeply damaging for the cause. And i set out that was going to by my dissertation topic, prove that Elizabeth Katy and susan b. Were horrible and ruined the movement. Bit was so depressing and my factually advisor, who has kindly come here today and he can remember i walked into his office and i said i want to start thinking about what finally worked. I want to look forward to the positive news that women finally got the vote. And i started researching the early 20th century 0 to see what was going on. Started reading newspaper accounts and i tripped over these women. Nobody noticed them. They were sort or too famous to notice. Host you didnt know about them when you started this thing. Guest no. I was reading newspapers from the 1900s, and there would be occasional references to event where this fancy, uber wealthy celebrity socialites were coming out for suffrage. What happens, when they joined suffrage in 1908, this again is a movement that is sort of been in the dull dumbs, languishing, considered the cause of the fringe, the intellectual fringe or theres various code words, theres code words for lesbian fringe or radical fringe, but clearly not the mainstream. And then comp the Society Women ask theyre covered already. Celebrity figures, covered by the press for their take core, travel, entertainment. They over the top. One reason its such a fun read. Put when they came out for votes for women, it electrified Public Opinion. Sort of interested the mainstream. It would be like Angelina Jolie embracing suddenly u. N. Refugees get sexy. Who would have thought . Thats what happened, believe. Host and what was the moment and speaking of just touching back on your point about race, that comes up again as it turns out. What was the moment let me put it this way. When did you realize that they were consequential enough to devote this much attention to them . What made you realize that . Guest im not sure i did. I just like their stories and no one has covered them, and i just thought they were yeah, just thought they were delicious characters. Really. It was the journalist in me. And then as i studied them, noticed the consequences of their involvement. You could really see it. One of my favorite anecdotes in the book is a womped named florence nighting gale what was her last name a Canadian Immigrant and moved to new york and she opened a beauty business, and the reason i cant remember her last name is that she changed her name to liz arden, and Elizabeth Arden was never political, and she one day she shocked her staff by leaving her desk and going out to join one of the suffrage parades, those iconic suffrage parades you may have seen photos of long fifth avenue, and when she got back, her staffers were like, we didnt know you support it the cause. She says, oh, dont, but our clients do. And thats when i knew that they were consequential. Host who were talk a little bit about the instigators of this, the first women from this socialite group, class, whatever you want to call it, who were brave enough, bold enough, ahead of their times enough to stick their necks out and say, im going to do something about this. Guest the first one there was a first one was Katherine Duer mackey, the descendent of great old money in new york, and she married new money, the silver mining fortune of Clarence Mackey and his family, and they have this guildded existence, a place in manhattan, they rent every season in newport. A 628acre estate in roslyn, long island and katherine is beautiful. She is stunningly beautiful. She is covered for everything she does. When she decides to run for a seat on the school board of roslyn, long island, its a shock to everyone, and two years later she decided shes going in figure for womens right to vote. And it is electrifying. Theres a woman lucy stone, who i mentioned before, from the 19th century, her daughter, alice, wrote this beautiful description of what happens when macmacky joins the effort. When alices mother lucy was campaigning for womens rights and against slavery in the 1840s. Men hitted being the audience they hissed and threw rotten eggs and alice was beside herself that now makey speaks, people are clamoring for tickets. They cant wait to hear her. Theyre selling out events. Suffrage finally has spring in its step. People are excited about it again. I believe that is really one of the assets they bring. The other asset they bring, which we can develop this later, but i think theyre what you would call an obsession with fashion or their eye for fashion, but clearly their fascination with fashion trends was an asset they brought to the campaign. The understood that if you wanted to sell something to the mainstream, you had to present it in such a way that it would be appealing, as you would any consumer product. Right . They treated the campaign as if it were a consumer effort. So i think that was one of her great contributions. Host way ahead of their day. Talk a little bit, johanna, hot but they were received by he established what was then the movement. They came out of left field, right field, whatever you want to call it, but youre right, they were out of a field. Guest a field that most of us will never understand. I mean, the one thing can i tell a story . Host thats what we love. Weve to the story snooze one of my Great Research adventures was when i i went to many archives and libraries across the country because these women left bread crumbs every. Host where temperature the libraries . Guest they had all left their materials at the library of congress, it would have been much easier. But some of them left in the schlessinger library at radcliffe, the Huntington Library in pasadena, and so this was on a trip to los angeles, and there were just a few collection is wanted to look at, at ucla. And one of them was an oral history transcript of mrs. Mackeys secretary, ethel was her name. Im pretty compiled because as a journalist you interview people all the time, as a historian you learn to interview documents. You learn to talk to the people through the documents they left. You can ask them questions. They dont always answer. But i was very excited and i get there and i request the file and the file comes and i open it, and theres one page, and it says, this transcript is missing. And i dont know if any of you if ever seen a 60 something have a hissy fit but that is what i proceeded to do, and the librarians escorted me out of the research area. And then they summoned this marvelous lady, Teresa Barnes, the head of the Oral History Department at ucla, and i explained the problem. And Teresa Barnes barnett said i will promise to look for this. Will commission a research assistant. Well scour the library. Well try to get you this transcript, but because of the rules of oral history at the time this interview was done, which was in the 1960s, so this woman was interviewed in the 1960s about events in the 1910s. We cant send you a pdf. You have to come back to california. So, im a student on a little budget. But two weeks later i get an email from her and and she says, im sorry, we never found the transcript but we did find the tapes. And she said, were going digitize it, put it on a cd, you can come out here with your laptop and listen and take notes. Well, this was a great blessing in my life because i got to hear the voice of someone who knew one of my what ive come to called my ladies. Its about ace close as i historian can come to touching history. And the thing that tickled me about ethel ethel was an immigrant from hungary, and she talked about maki and how she had influenced her to dress. She said maki dressed her. She said she never overdressed me. She dressed me as a secretary should properly be dress but spoiled me for cheap clothe, and maki took her on the familys twice a year visits to paris and treated her to a finishing school, really, treated her to refined living, and what was interesting about and that maki understood the role that fashion played in getting people to her events, but she said including the reporters, because thats what they wanted to report on, what mrs. Maki was wearing. Host imagine the press. Guest i cannot being interested in that. Guest but she said that the reporters never left one of our events without a statement frommilesanhour maki about the womens Suffrage Movement. The other thing that was marvelous about listening to it instead of reading it, is that the historian was interviewing ethel gros not because she had been mrs. Makis secretary but because later in life she marries Harry Hopkins, and Harry Hopkins, as many of you know, went on to be one of fdrs key aides, and she historian keeps trying to push her to talk about harry, and ethel keeps wanting to talk about mrs. Maki, and she finally sort of connect the two by telling him, i just want you to understand, the reason Harry Hopkins married me is when he met me, he didnt see a hungarian immigrant, he saw a lady of refinement. Host fascinating. Quickly go back to the question about how did the movement receive these women. How did they guest it was mixed. There are were some people saw early they would be key to one of the emerging aspects of the movement, which was a broadbaseed crossclass coalition. So blank had already reached out to working class women, and factory workers, and immigrants, and professional women, and teachers and librarians, middle class club women. And now she could add this piece, and the idea of these parades along fifth avenue was really to demonstrate to men, again, that all kinds of women wanted the vote. It wasnt any longer the interest of a few. Host and i just want to say in five minutes well open it up for questions. So is that right thinking about questions you want to ask johanna. How did the when did it click is my question . You have so many wonderful stories about the tactics, the rivalry between two of these women. Theres some wonderful anecdotes about that. But when did it click . When was it clear that these women, who later did not get the attention or appreciation that you point out they rightfully deserved when what is clear they made the difference . They made difference . Guest i think it was clear by the mid1910s. Think by 1915, they were such a staple of the movement that they were actually, by 1912. In 1912, this middle portrait is alva belmont. Alva was mrs. Ma kys great rival, and thats interesting, too. The very fact that two women of a social class would both want to be queen bee of suffrage was pretty interesting. But in the early 1910s, harriet blatche tried to get them to join the paraded, and the parades at that time are controversial for women to first of all, a parade is seen as a very male, almost military kind of function. Secondly, the idea that women would be walking in the streets was offensive to them. Maki was horrified. Belmont retreated to her home in long island. They just there was a great deal of fear, not just among the elot women but also the middle class women, that they would be for had radicals or streetwalkers. In 1912, and maybe this is the turning point alva belmont decided that Public Opinion had shifted and would accept women of her standing walking in the streets. She led the a del gages, contingent in that years parade, and several journalists commented afterwards that the push she gave the movement, the public acceptance, the cover, was a singular contribution. So i dont know if that answers host it does. Theres so many fascinating questions. How hard was it for the i guess the you want to call them the intellectuals of the movement to accept the idea that it took this appeal to society to close to appearance, to broaden the popular appeal of the movement . Guest i think was very hard. Think they resisted a lot. They were accustomed to doing things their own way. There was also a great deal of tension over tactics, as you mentioned. There were sort of mainstream a mainstream movement called the imagine american womens suffrage association, which at it peak had 2 million members, the be light. And they were very the goliath and they were very much mainstream, they did legislative appeals, they did petitions. They courted the president , wanting to get his endorsement. There was a smaller sort of rag tag group of radicals headed by alice paul, called the National Womens party, and in 1917, alice paul starts picketing the white house. We are at war in europe, and a lot of people find this in with the era of jingoism pervading the society. This is a jailhouse door pin that was made for all the suffer suffragists who went to jail for the right to vote, and it to me its a meditation on the difference be