Speak about a year ago. At the time, she said that she was doing research on what happened after women got the vote. And i thought that sounds like a really interesting program. Its clear from your response that you all do too. Give a warm welcome to robin muncy. Thanks for being here. [ applause ] thank you so much. For that introduction and the invitation to come back. That didnt go too badly. And thank you to everybody at the Smithsonian Associates who made this possible. People who worked on publicity and taken care of the logistics. Okay. Let me make sure i got this. Good. So the 19th amendment of course the womans suffrage amendment to the u. S. Constitution. Finally made it through congress in june of 1919. And it was ratified by three quarters of the states in august of 1920. After that, no state could deny the vote on the basis of sex. Tonight our job is to explore some of the meanings of the 19th amendment immediately in the aftermath of its passage. Before we drill down on that, however, i want to sketch out very quickly no more than ten minutes. Im trying to mold myself on this. Sketch out the context in which the womens suffrage amendment passed and which its first fruits were tasted. I want to lay out that some of these contexts, pause theyll help us understand the meanings. It will make Crystal Clear the meanings of the 19th amendment. Theyll help us understand the parameters of the womens voices political voices in ts 1920s and why were not hearing some womens voices in the 1920s. Because the context will shush some women and its going to magnify the voices of some other women. So ill try to really stay focused here and not dillydally. I think this context is important. So youll remember that the womens suffrage amendment passed through congress and was ratified in the middle of and immediately after world war i. Which included a campaign against immigrants and against radical politics. The result of that antiimmigrant and antiradical campaign was the deportation of hundreds of people perceived to be radicals, including immigrants. They included women like emma goldman, who was a feminist who was voice was mighty loud in the 1910s, but was deported in 1918. The deportation of radicals is part of the explanation for the whacking off of people from the left in the political culture of the 1920s. Even women who were not immigrants but who were on the political left were sometimes jailed and tried under an laws in the teens and early 20s. Even like whitney, a patrician women in california who was a member of the communist labor party and was arrested and tried under laws in the 1920s and kept fighting her case through the 1920s. And kept fighting her case through the 1920s. That antiradical and antiimmigrant campaign was both fed by and benefitted from the popularity of the ku klux klan. The klan, the first klan died out in the late 19th century. A new klan organized in the early 20th. It came into incredible prominence. And even electoral legitimacy in the 1920s. And women were both active in the klan and active in fighting the klan. And so we ill talk about that a little bit later. This aint immigrant antiradical climate that was dominant during and after world war i. Resulted in 1924 in a very restrictive Immigration Law the johnson reed act 1924. And the johnson reed act formalized the ban already existing informal ban on immigration from asia. And dramatically reduced immigration from europe. It was aimed especially at immigrants from eastern euro and southern europe. Italians, greeks are the target of that antiimmigrant law in 1924. And where as in the decades preefs to the 1920s, millions of immigrants had been flooding into american shores. Immigration is just cut down to a trickle after 1924. The immigration from Central America was not touched by johnson reed. And so there are several hundred thousand mexican immigrants to the United States in the 1920s. But nothing like the kind of numbers that youre seeing before the 1920s. The result of the antiimmigrant campaign and antiradical campaign was one of the result was that for radical immigrant women who stayed in the United States in the 1920s, the message to them was that if they were going to thrive in the United States, they needed to find their way to middle of the road politics. They needed to assimilate to much more conventional middle of the road politics. Im thinking of the silencing of the voices of italian immigrant women. And very important to labor actions like the strike in 1912. And the patterson strike too. Immediately thereafter. These are massive numbers of women who were involved in politics of anarchist sort. And the labor movement. Whose voices will be silenced in the 19020s. We wont hear from them in the 1920s. At the same time that the antiimmigrant and antiradical campaign was dominant in the early 1920s, the great migration of African Americans out of the south and into cities in the north eventually into the west as well and out of rural areas in the south and into cities in the south, that great migration had become significant. In the mid1910s by the time we get to the period immediate le after the war. That great migration created vital and larger African American communities in cities like chicago and new york and philadelphia and cleveland and detroit. When white veterans came home from world war i, in 1919, in fact exactly the summer when the women suffrage amendment was passing through congress. Summer of 1919. During that summer when the white vets came back, they often found themselves competing for jobs and housing with new African American communities. And some of those vets and their allies lashed out in horrific violence against those African American communities. One of the places that where the race riots were the worst was chicago. Across the country hundreds of African Americans lost their lives in just massacres that occurred in that one summer. Just that one summer. In fact James Johnson referred to the summer of 1919 as red summer because of the numbers of death and the horrific conditions of those deaths. And of course many more injured in 1919. So, racial conflict racial violence was also a part of the climate in to which the women suffrage amendment emerged. That great migration from the south into northern cities by African Americans also laid the foundation for the harlem renaissance of the 1920s. Another crucially important context for our thinking. Women were deeply involved in important writers and artist in the harlem renaissance. A novelist. And the late 1920s. And redman faucet who was a prolific writer herself. Also a promoter of other writers. Because she was the editor of the literary editor of the crisis. The newspaper of the naacp in. 1920s. And that migration of African Americans to the north and especially then the racial violence that met that migration in 1919. And there after. Helped to lay the foundation for black nationalist politics that were so important in many cities in the north. In the 1920s. And the most well known of the organizations of that represented black nationalism in the 1920s was of course marcus universal negro improvement institution. He was often in trouble with the law in the 1920s and the person who took his place as spokesman and organizer of the unia when he was in trouble, was his wife. And she was shes not only an important nationalist leader. She was an important black feminist leader in the 1920s. So these contexts the context of the antiimmigrant campaign and the antiradical campaign. Racial violence against African Americans in cities in the south as well as in the north, those contexts are important to understand in which voices were magnified among women in the 1920s and which voices are subdued or silenced altogether. In the case of the left in the 1920s. The range of voices that well hear about tonight will be much narrower than the range of voices we would have heard had the amendment passed in 1905 or 1910. It would have been a different context. And talking about many different sets of people. This wonderful quotation from 1925. Leads us to another dimension of the context in to which the women suffrage amendment emerged. That the quotation i hope. I think you can see it. It says the doll baby type woman is a thing of the past. The wide awake woman is forging ahead, prepared for all emergencies. And ready to answer any call. Even if it be to face the cannons on the battlefield. That quo fact from amy in 1925 points to the fact that in the 1920s, a modern gender system crystallized in the United States. That is a gender system a system of ideas about men and women about what they are naturally. Kind of relations they naturally have. In the victorian period in the mid19th century. A set of ideas emerge the gender system held really men and women were the opposite of each other. The victorian system held that men were competitive and active. And women were by nature a passive and cooperative. Nurturing and healing. These were men had nearly uncontrollable sexual desire. Women didnt have any sexual desire. There was just the opposites of each other. In a late 19th and through the early 20th centuries, that victorian gender system was very much in transition. And by the time we get to the mid1920s, i think we would say it has been replaced by a modern gender system. The kind of key characteristic of the modern gender system was it held painted men and women as much more like each other. Than the victorian gender system did. It didnt insist they were the same. Or they were equal. By no means equal. They were much more alike. Than the victorian gender system had imagined men and women to be. And one of the crucial changes in the from the victorian gender system to the modern gender system was that the modern gender system insisted that women indeed did have sexual desire. And that healthy happy woman had to have her sexual desires fulfilled or she couldnt be a held the happy woman. The sexual desire to women and the sexual need to women was a crucial change in the gender system that emerged in the 1920s. And it meant and that if we just looked at that component of the system itself, youd see that its claiming that women are more like men. Than the victorian gender system had imagined them to be. Not that again the sexual desire to women also demoted since sex becomes a more important component or imagine to be more important component of womens lives in the 1920s and thereafter. Motherhood gets demoted on the list of characteristics and values of women. So its harder after the emergence of this system to be sure that when you claim that the because women are mothers, and nurturing and care for life, dot dot dot. Because not everybody is going to think thats the case. Not everybody will think thats the most important thing. The kinds of appeals you can make in public life are going to change. Because of this reimagining of who women are. Who they are by nature. By the late 1920s. Lesbianism emerged as an accessible identity to Many American women. Because of the writing of the half. The author of the a very popular novel. And it was condemned in england and she was tried for obscenity. And that trial got a lot of press in the u. S. And in the course of that those conversations and that coverage of the trials, the whole notion of lesbianism, that became accessible to women that it had not been accessible before. It was liberating and relieving to many women but it also came with a stigma and it went that many women began to rethink the loving relations that they had with other women, now that, hum, if sex can be a part of that, whats going on in that relationship of mine . And it also the emergence of lesbianism also began to throw suspicion at times on womens friendships, Womens Organizations, institutions, colleges. A lot of foundations, actually, of womens advancement in the decades previous. So the changes in these ideas about womanhood and this neutrality of sex to womens identities, all of that required negotiating a whole new landscape for women in public life. Its going to require a whole new way of thinking and a way of accommodating these new ideas. In addition, in the 1920s, im almost to the end of this, 1920s broadcast radio emerges and it opened all kinds of opportunities for artists like betsy smith, people like earna phillips, who many of you think will know her even though you think you dont, she began the late 1920s but shes going to become an incredibly unbelievably prolific and successful writer of radio soaps in the 1930s and 40s and she would make the transition to tv in the 50s and 60s. She was the creator of the guiding light. It was the longest running show. Incredible. So i stray. I stray. Im not supposed to do that. Radio will become one of the important break throughs and new medium and women in politics are going to have to master in order to make their way in the politics of the 1920s and finally, i thought i would mention, this is the same moment when modernist painters are emerging and georgia okeefe are coming into their own and finding a following in American Life. So the nineteenth amendment is a part of all of this change, a part of all of this upheaval and it was participating of course fully in the transformation of the dominant gender system in American Life, because the nineteenth amendment was saying to americans that women were more like men in that they were now supposed to be participants in selfrule. They were supposed to be in polling places just like men. In the same way that the imputation of sexual desire to women suggested that women were more like men than the victorian system had imagined so did the nineteenth amendment by saying that women, like men, belonged in the polling place, belonged in politics, should practice selfrule. Theyre more like men than the victorian gender system had imagined. The nineteenth amendment is both an indicator and a creator of the modern gender system, a change in the gender system. The first meaning that we want to ascribe to the nineteenth amendment is precisely that. One of the meanings of the nineteenth amendment was that a new gender system had arrived and its going to help cement that system as the dominant system in American Life in the 1920s. All right. Well end there. We are back to the nineteenth amendment again. So another one of the crucial meanings of the nineteenth amendment, anybody who was here last year will have heard this part, i wont spend too long on this, i have to say it to make sure were all on the same page. Another thing that the nineteenth amendment represented was the existing political power of american women. That is one of the things that often gets lost in our discussions of the nineteenth amendment and the way we shorthand ways that we talk about womens voting, we lose track of the fact that before the 19th amendment ever passed, millions of american womens were already voting and, in fact, it is impossible to imagine that the nineteenth amendment could ever have passed the u. S. Congress if millions of women had not already been voting, right . Because its you can just see that the first place that american women get to vote is in wyoming. Its a territory in 1869 and as it formed, it granted women full Voting Rights in wyoming and when it became a state it equality of men and women as voters in wyoming. Colorado fully enfranchised women to vote. Women are already serving in the state legislature. The mormons and in idaho they franchised women by the type we get to the 1,900s we already have women voting in all the elections that there are. When with we get into the 1910s, we get by the time we get into the 1910s, millions and millions of women are exercising the vote. This i want to thank the center for american women and politics at Rutgers University for this fantastic map. You can find it online. Its part of, teach a girl to lead campaign and this i love this map because it shows us when women got to vote in which states and what kind of vote they got. I think you can see it pretty wide. Ill describe it just in case. What this shows us is who had to vote where before the nineteenth amendment passed, before it was ratified in 1920. So on all these peachy oh, wait. I love this so much. Rebecca said im too easily pleased, but i just love that. I dont have one of these at school and i think thats so great. Maybe ill just be doing that now. Over here this peachy colored states and new york is there, michigan, peachy but all those peachy colored states had fully enfranchised women before the nineteenth amendment. All of them. Women are voting in every single election in those states. The gray states, the gray states like nebraska, illinois, tennessee and vermont, i think it is, those gray states had enfranchised women in president ial elections and local elections, but not state level elections. We could talk about that later if you want to. I just love that. Really hilarious stories having to do with that. The light blue had granted president ial suffrage to women before the nineteenth amendment and then these kind of purplish, not showing very well, the purplish states including massachusetts, connecticut, new jersey, mississippi, kentucky, those states had granted women voting only in School Board Elections. The great progressive state of massachusetts had granted women school board suffrage and then the darker blue, which also is not showing too well, they had granted no suffrage at all, not Even School Board elections. But look at that. I mean, millions of women are already voting before the nineteenth amendment and, in fact, if you look at the womens bless you womens suffrage amendment had been introduced into congress multiple times beginning in the 19th century and introduced constantly in the 20th century and we have the voting. We can tally the votes in congress for each of those introductions. And you just watch that as more women are enfranchised by their states, more and more men in congress are willing to vote for a federal amendment to the constitution that enfranchises women elsewhere. It is the political power of women existing political power of women that made possible and pushed the federal amendment that we this is so important because it helps us understand how political change really happens, righ