Cspan is your unfiltered view of government funded by these Television Companies and more including spark life. At spark life, its our home and we are facing our greatest challenges. Working roundtheclock connected such a little easier to do yours. Spark life support cspan as a Public Service along with these other Television Providers giving a front row seat to democracy. Today we have two us. Aordinary people with they joined together right a book called suffragist playbook. You can take a look here. You will learn about this book. And the suffragists were the first to do a parade down pennsylvania avenue, the first to picket the white house, and that we see that as commonplace here so let me tell youac about these two women appear lucinda robb once the project director for others before us, women and democracy, 1789making 20 at the center for legislative archives at this project we discovered thousands of overlooked original documents, and really she helped to organize the National Archivesna 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 pez dispensers which you will see. Article author Rebecca Boggs roberts has also a varied background picture is been many things, a journalist, producer, tour guide, a forensic entomologist, political consultant, a jazzon singer anda 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, her three thg fat dog. These two women have been friends since childhood, and took the risk to come together and write a book. And so they are going to talk us through how the Suffrage Movement drove institutional change and what can we learn from that. So take it away rebecca and lucinda. All right. So thank you so much for s havig us here today. Y this year is 100 anniversary of the 19th amendment which of course granted women the vote or ever being a technical removed gender as an obstacle to voting. And with all thats going on in 2020 i think its probably never been a p better time to look bak at the Suffrage Movement and see what other lessons that 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 went on for three generations. The first generation of suffragists lived a long time there in fact, many other leaders lived well into the 80s but at one point i was reading Sojourner TruthElizabeth Cady stanton and it aspect ofse them live to see the 19th amendment passed. S offer any activist who think the changes happening fast enough, and lets be honest thats probably all us on to others right there thats an important lesson for the Suffrage Movement. You would have to be inen 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 for or social peoph we think is a good thing. Thats why you should study it. The suffragists trusted and thee rights given to them by the constitution and they figured out how to win by working within the system. For change they managed o create was permanent and was enduring and best of all they left us the playbook on how to drive institutional change. So since we can cover everything today what we want to do is highlight some of our very favorite suffrage topics, some of them special the ones rebecca will talk about our once they invented. But right now i want to talk about one of the most 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 specific of a story is as narrative that you remember. They can be as ancient as the book of exodus or can be as modern as an eight minute video. But however you tell it, stories are ways to ignite change. Lucy stone was one of the first and the successful public speakers for womens rights and should go on to become one of the founding mothers of the Suffrage Movement but lucy still begin a career as an abolitionist. This is true of a lot of talented actors to the particular training in one cause and this gives you the confidence and skills to advocate for other causes you care about their back in the 19th century going to your speas what people did for entertainment are the way that today at least before the pandemic you would go to a movie or to a sporting event or it can be pretty dangerous especially for abolitionists because rowdy mobs would show up with clubs and every once in a while they would burn a building down. But in 1847 driven by her conscious lucy stone started giving speeches against slavery and very quickly she became a huge sensation. 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 to a women not supposed toli speak to an audience, it wasnt considered proper for them to make any noise at all. They werent even supposed to collector so 50n years later after lucy stone started speaking career you still find references to fact that when women go too speech and the like what it is they will waive their handkerchiefs. So women were not supposed to speak at all. Now, at first lucy would draw crowds just because the novelty of hearing one speaker people treated like a circus act but it turned out she was really, really good at it. Act but shes really good at it, how mesmerizing and impressive she was and she had crowds of thousands of people showing up to listen. Men came to mock her came out convinced she was on to something. From the beginning lucy would tell stories to slave women and then would add stories about the injustices women faced in general and was committed to both causes and began splitting her schedule talking about ending slavery on the weekends and womens rights on the weekdays. One reason i like what she says, she took an insult and made it a rallying cry. At Womens Rights Convention someone said she was a disappointed woman. Right then she went on to give an impromptu speech where she said yes, she was a disappointed woman great disappointed in education were almost no colleges would admit women in the professions where the only option was to be a seamstress and even their would make a fraction of what men made even though the baker charge for the same amount for bread. Women were told they were going to hell, she was disappointed in marriage because instead of marrying for love, women were often forced to marry for money. This would go on to be one of her most successful speeches that she would use again and again. The Nineteenth Century equivalent of going viral. There were phrases like nasty woman but 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 this is a 1970 equivalent of a tweet. Sure it reaches the people standing in front of the white house on Lafayette Square but reaches many more people in the picture in the newspaper. Thats why that banner isnt really easy to read dark against white background all about how its going to reproduce in the newspaper. And, in fact, later in 1917 as world war i of the u. S. Became involved in world war i, the National Womens party got much more provocative in their messages. So they went in with this Kaiser Wilson banner which is have you forgotten your sympathy with the poor germans because there were not self governed question 20 million american women are not self govern. Take the beam out of your own eye. Its potentially treasonous in the eyes of some periods of directly criticizing the president calling him kaiser while we are at war with germany. This is a a tacticc that activis use constantly here the outrageous come know youre going to lose some followers because of it but the attention youre going to get might be worth it. Once you start singing these tactics, you really do see them everywhere pickets really kind of timeless. News can only you got to actually havee some effort towards the long institutional change as well. For that i go back to lucinda. Every Movement Needs radicals because what they do is they move the goalpost but you also have your moderates because they help you move the ball. A successful tactic of the Suffrage Movement is one that almost as much attention that probably should. And that is important as engaging a wider audience. Whenever you do that specifically linking your caused popular goals, and theres probably nobody who is better at doing this than Frances Willard. So today almost no one has heard of Frances Willard but back in the late 1800s she was arguably the second most widely known and admired w