>> next on american history, the reasons men supported the 19th amendment, this national archives event is one of a series associated with an exhibit, wifely hers, american women and the vote. >> good evening, welcome to the theater at the national archives. i'm deborah, deputy archivist of the united states. i'm pleased you could join us. whether you are here at the theater or joining us through facebook, youtube, or c-span. tonight's discussion of women suffragists and the men who supported them as part of a series of events related to our current special exhibit, rightfully hers, american women and the vote. our partners are here tonight and we thank them for their support. our special exhibit, rightfully hers, tells the story of the woman struggle for voting rights. women activists had to win allies among men in influential positions. it was men who sat in state legislatures that would ratify or reject the 19 amendment, whose centennial we celebrate. when rightfully hers opened, guests were offered a yellow rose pin when they entered the museum. that was worn by members of the men's league for women's suffrage. for many guests, this nod to the role that men played came as a surprise. tonight we will take a look at the suffragists and their contributions to the voting right struggle. it's my pleasure to welcome nancy tate, she has served as the cochair of the women's vote centennial initiative and is also on the board of the turning point suffragists memorial. she served as the executive director of the league of women voters, and previously she served as the chief operating officer at the national academy of public administration and with the department of energy, department of education, and office of economic opportunity. please join me in welcoming nancy tate. [applause] >> thank you. it's wonderful to be here, especially at the national archives, since they have opened this lovely exhibit on women and the vote. as she has said, it's called rightfully hers, american women in the vote. i have toured the exhibit twice and i encourage everyone to see it. i am the cochair of the women's vote centennial initiative. i'm also the former executive director of the league of women voters. the league is one of the cofounders of the women's vote centennial initiative, and that group was formed as an information sharing collaborative of the many organizations and scholars working in this area. we want to celebrate the anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendment, which will be next year, 2020. we want to shed light on the powerful but little-known stories behind that long and hard struggle to win the vote. the league itself was founded in 1920 by the head of the largest suffrage organization, the national american women's suffrage organization. the league was formed under her guidance six months before the amendment passed. the league is also having its own 100th anniversary next year. there is a league in every state and approximately 700 cities and counties around the country. the league has been spending nearly 100 years continuing the fight for full equality for all americans. we do that through education and advocacy. a few more words about the 2020 women's vote centennial initiative. we work to establish and connect people, networks all around the country, girl scout troops, universities, any organization interested in learning about our suffrage history and how they can be a part of the celebrations, which they may want to create themselves next year. here in the d.c. area, these educational programs that we put on with other groups as the main thing we undertake. tonight, as deborah said, this particular evening as a part of the series. this is after the fourth we have done at the archives and we hope to do at least one more in 2020. when we pick a topic, each of these focuses on some of the little told stories about what went on to enable women to finally get that vote. and all the panels will look at how some of these lessons show relevance to the issues of today. as many know, the 72 year fight for women's suffrage is a powerful historical story. it can be used to enhance our understanding of our own times and how to navigate it. you can learn more about wvcii by visiting our website, instagram, and twitter. i'm pleased to introduce tonight's panel, you have their full biographies in your program. so i will call them up by name. come on up ladies. we have our moderator, betsy fisher martin, the executive director of women in politics institute at american university. [applause] >> brooke kroger, the author of the suffragists, how women used mento get the vote. johanna neuman, the author of gilded suffragists. and susan where, the author of why they marched. betsy, i turn it over to you. >> thank you, and welcome. it's nice to be with you today. we have a special treat, three terrific experts. personally, i had a wonderful time reading and learning so much about this issue in preparation for tonight. i'm excited for you. brooke, let me start with you. brooke your story tells about the powerful man in new york who helped women gain the right to vote. what brought these men together for the movement and how did they first come together to form the men's league for women's suffrage? >> it's a good story. starting around that time, ann came in through canada for a lecture tour and she lectured around the country. one of her themes was how pathetic the wealthy women of america were in terms of understanding how to engage in a political process. and further, how the men of england had been supportive of women in their fight for the vote and how nothing of this nature was going on here. this was in the press and in people's consciousness, at least people in certain circles, around the same time anna howard shaw wrote to the editor and publisher of the nation magazine in new york evening post. he was also the son of fanny garrison who was an important suffragists, and the grandson of william garrison, the abolitionist and suffragists. she wrote to him, remembering that when he was at harvard in 1904 he made a wonderful speech at the massachusetts suffrage organization and wanted him to speak at a convention. he did not think he could commit to anything of that nature, but he thought it was a good idea that a group of men of prominence would come together not to do much more than lend their names and trotted to albany or washington and speak to legislatures and politicians if the need arose. she wrote back and said this was not a new idea, the suffrage organization was very much in the doldrums and had had the idea before. there was a men's suffrage league in 1874. it met about 80 times and then fell out of existence. she said the men who have been willing to engage are so full of isms. and so many women are full of isms, it's the last thing we need. the men we really need, you, oswald, never seem to have the time for cause. he wrote back and i'm paraphrasing he said i think i could find a group of men -- he actually said i think a group of men could be found, as long as there's is someone to do the heavy lifting. she writes back, and its in perfect style and she says we will do all of the work. to his enormous credit, he said that's not a good idea, the more strategic plan would be for us to form this ourselves, provided we can find someone to do the work. that would be the way to make this effective. so he summons rabbi stephen wise and john dewey, the philosopher and columbia professor as his triumvirate. and max eastman was a student at columbia who was starting to have a writing career, obviously short of funds living in the village. he becomes the secretary-treasurer of the organization. his charge was to put together a list, keep this very secret, and put together 100 names that would wow the world, from every profession, clergy, professors, names that american knew. and announce this as a group that was organized to support the suffrage cause. he gets his mother, anna eastman from ohio. the letters are going everywhere. there were 15 newspapers in the new york -- in new york at the time and it's unimaginable that someone would not get wind of it and the new york times writes a chiding front page article with the headline that was something like men's voices to join the soprano chorus for women's votes. and it names these people whose names they had gotten wind of, there were only 25 at that point. one with the director of bellevue hospital, who resigned in embarrassment. eastman was mortified. but he had recruited george foster peabody who became the financial mainstay. he said by the time you're really ready to announce everyone will have forgotten this and all will be well. that is what happened. by november he did not have 100 names but 150. they had their first meeting in early november. by january they produced their first booklet with these names and addresses listed. with their charter and constitution. by later in the year they gave their first banquet, 600 people, to honor ethel snowden, the wife of the british mp. this was very elite in its construction. later they invited men of all sorts, what you needed was men who voted area this was the point. men who voted. this was the point. having the support was key. i'm sure someone else could tell the story of the parade, they march as a group of 89 men in top hats and bowlers. they are pilloried and mocked, and every insult is hurled. it galvanizes them and they are no longer offering their names, they are ready for work. >> joanna, why was it so controversial to have men? they were ridiculed in a lot of cases. >> i wanted to pick up on brooke's point. there were 89 men in the 1911 parade, in 1912 there were 1000 men. that's how much the movement grew in a short period. >> a year later they were in 35 states and in the tens of thousands. >> i was looking for this quote, one of the men who marched was rabbi wise, he was a major progressive who often lectured in the city on causes, those isms you spoke of. it was a time of great ferments, debate among students at columbia and in max eastman's circle in greenwich village. is capitalism the right thing? should we look at socialism? should we explore free love? imagine a time when everything was up for debate. rabbi wise participated in the 1912 parade, where many of the men that he knew from elite circles were in their clubs, looking down on fifth avenue, hurling insults as brooks suggested. >> those guys were rolling their eyes. on the streets they were hurling insults. >> i dug out his diary and he wrote of the mockery he encountered. for a few moments i was very warm and took off my hat, whereupon somebody shouted look at the long-haired susan. some of the other delights that greeted us were who is taking care of the baby? aren't they cute? look at the mollie cottle's. another suffrage husband, as they were called, was george, who recalled hecklers crying take that handkerchief out of your coat, you gay deceiver, you forgot to shave this morning. we have some suggestion of why this was so controversial, it disrupted this gender role expectation that men have. and throughout the 1910s, what i think happens is that there is a succession of events that help to normalize the idea of women voting. and the great fear among men, after all, the only voters and the only people eligible to vote for women's suffrage, either as voters in their state on referendums, or members of legislative committees, or lawmakers in congress. there was this great fear that politics would harden women and emasculate men. and also hurt the family. a lot of things that the suffrage leaders did in those years was to reassure the public that women could be in political life and still maintain their femininity. it was probably worth saying somewhere that men have always stood, some men, have always stood with women. there was a famous judge in massachusetts in the american revolution who wrote to john adams and suggested that they consider universal suffrage. so here we have the founding from agitation for women to have the vote. after the civil war, when elizabeth stanton and susan b anthony split the movement apart by vowing that they will not support the 15th amendment, which removed the barriers to black men voting, they will not support it unless women are also included. and this horrifies the other women, who started a rival organization. for 20 years you have these two rival group working at cross purposes. but one black man named robert purvis stood up for elizabeth stanton and susan b anthony in this unexpected decision to fight the 15th amendment. and he said if my daughter cannot have voting rights along with my son, i will not vote for it. because she has a double curse of being a woman, and a black woman. we have to say that there are always some men who have stood with women. and i wanted to throw that into the conversation. >> what's distinct in this era is that they organized. celebrity endorsers have always been back to thomas payne and jon stewart. but this was really a unique happening. >> i agree. >> what else is strange is that few people in their memoirs who write about it at all, right about the 1911 parade or 1912, and the response from the crowds. that seems to be an affecting experience. nobody mentions the league by name. only an obituary mentions it because his wife wrote it and she was a great suffragist. they never talk about it again. i wondered why, was it chivalrous to not take credit? were they consummate allies? or was it significant in the history of these active lives, and by the time they died six decades later, it was an important aspect to they were. it's fascinating. george creel, as soon as he becomes the head of the committee of public information, he is not talking about it at all. it's interesting. that seems to be affecting his experience -- and affecting -- an affecting home wife, if you will, a woman goes off and joined the suffrage movement, what does that mean for the home life and husband at that time? >> it really changes all aspects of it, especially for a woman signs onto the suffrage movement. it's like having a religious conversion. if she is all in, it's like having a full-time job, unpaid but full-time. this is likely something she has not done before. you can see that there would be a ripple effect that the kind of wifely or daughter early duty she had done before, like being there when the kids come home or to entertain at dinner, those things are not going to happen anymore. i think what we need to remember is that it's not just as a woman saying, i will support suffrage, it affects all kinds of other things in her life. her family of origin, who she is partnered with, her colleagues, where she lives or travels, how she dresses. it's a big commitment. one of the places where you see it hitting home, literally, is in marriages. >> you write in your book about a married couple -- the browns. >> ray and gertrude foster browne were a suffrage couple. she was the head of new york state's women's suffrage organization. he was a journalist. he wrote a pamphlet, published anonymously, he did not put his name on it, called how it feels to be the husband of a suffragette. in the pamphlet you can tell that he is a true feminist and he supports women's economic independence and talks about how having a wife who does things beyond the domestic sphere is more interesting to have around. he says all the right things and he puts on this wonderful cheerful face publicly of its great, this is what it's like being married to a suffragette. in private, things are more complicated. she is off traveling, she goes to conventions, giving speeches, out every night. he is at home, missing her. there is a difference between the cheerful public endorsement, and sometimes on the homefront it's a little harder to make it work and he is the one feeling left behind. this had happened before in their marriage, she was a talented musician and she had gone off on the road and had a successful career, and he felt he was left behind. both times they managed to work their way through and stay married until his death in 1944. it's a good reminder that we always need to think about the personal as well as the political when we tell the story. >> i want to ask you about the press, and how the men were depicted in the press at the time. >> as a curiosity, first of all. it made interesting news. and the men initially involved made news because they always made news. these were people who wrote social problems and were followed for their business dealings and followed for everything. so being followed for suffrage drew attention. another thing to because to be cognizant of is that a huge proportion of the men engaged were editors, publishers, writers, poets, dramatists. they were people with media access. they were also able to guide coverage. we were talking about catherine dewar mackey a few minutes ago. one of the publishers was the publisher of harper's. so there is a four page puff piece spread about her when she starts her society which is a parallel organization to the men's league which was attracted at directing elite women. and that kind of access to print, to having things published that were positive for the movement that for 70 years had been seen as dull, it was not a group that was attractive in a celebrity way. there was a wonderful cartoon from 1911 where it shows two women, one who looks like ace gold and one who is very shapely -- looks like a scold, and one who is very shapely, and the caption was, the tide has changed. you could hear flattering descriptions of anna sharp's clothes. things had changed. and the elite attraction brought something that was needed. >> brooke is looking at me because my focus about the new york socialites who fought for the vote. and my conclusion on studying them was that they were the oprah winfrey of their day. when they embraced this cause, it gave a burst of energy to the concept. it popularized the movement. many more recruits came in after they joined. there was an excitement in the wind. i wanted to add, on the question of press, that most of the coverage was not favorable. and especially we mentioned earlier, the new york times. it was a hostile news organization, and the times greeted the men with editorialized virulent editorials against what they were doing suggestive that they did not know their own way, that they were a little misguided, perhaps they had been--. one editorial in the times suggested that some of the men might have been trying to curry favor with female seamstresses to make their suits. unbelievable stuff. >> there was a great deal of hostility. there were other papers that were very pro. previously they were all like that. that was the big change, that you had this wave of positive response that started to create that turn. >> there is something else that is a general context for what your books are about, which is your organization starts in 1909, 1908. the phrase i use is a kind of quickening of suffrage activism right around that time, 1908 to 1910, where things really burst into public in a way that for the first 70 years of the movement, it really was taking place in church parlors and lecture halls. it was not engaging the public. for a variety of reasons, things really began to pop. there is a sort of self-fulfilling. then you have this escalation for the next 10 years. >> i think the reason for that is that, as you said, until this period, basically suffrage people were talking to each other. it was preaching to the converted. i think there was a dawning realization that you have to reach the public. in the 1910s, they start to use all the new science of public relations, weapons of spectacle, the public parade, all kinds of things. they had suffered days at the polo grounds. they had women pilots dropping flyers from airplanes. they had marchers. >> calling people at the baseball field. they would have bands that would say, be a suffrage band. they tried all kinds of things. >> they just got savvy about public relations. >> where does the term suffragette come from? >> from england, it was one of the pejoratives. it was not official. there were a lot of diminutive's. >> suffragette is also a frought word in the u.s. context. that is one of the things i noticed when ray brown uses it in the title of his pamphlet. i think he was maybe making a subtle jab at his wife, i don't know. most american suffragists tried to distance themselves from the term because it was associated with the british movement, which was more willing to embrace violence against property, which is something the u.s. movement never did and a much wanted to draw those lines. i cannot really think of hardly any instance where women in this country would call themselves suffragettes. you find that the term is very often used to describe them, and it has a somewhat pejorative cast to it. we are finding that again today as we are looking forward to the centennial, the term suffragettes is coming back. i find myself often waging battles and saying no, that is not the right term. even hillary clinton used it in her book. i wrote her a letter and explained it to her, a wellesley grads, why she should not use it. she never responded. >> i think people just don't know the difference. [laughter] >> i want to ask you about the financial support that was significant in terms of funding the suffrage fight. in some cases from the grave, some of these men, titans of industry were funding the suffrage movement. >> miss wesley one back the money that her husband lost. she made the money, and when she died gave $2 million to the movement. she was not a big activist, >> that made a huge difference, that money. >> huge. all the headquarters were built by those funds. couples like delayed laws and other wealthy new york couples who are engaged with the movement were financially supportive. they would do a challenge grant during a convention. most of these men served on the finance committee. after the 1915 defeat in new york, a huge gearing up for the 1917 battle, which actually succeeded and was extremely important because when the suffrage amendment passed in new york in 1917, that brought 44 congressmen who were pro-suffrage, which gave wilson a way to counter the opposition from the south. all of these things fed into creating that burst of activity through the decades. >> what role did african-american men play? >> we can all talk about that. >> it is important as we think back about the history to pay attention to the large roles that african-american men and women played on this movement. there is some falls,

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