Influence of Women in American History

Rockport History Book Club

Influence of Women in

American History

Wednesday, July 27, 2021

 

Wednesday, July 28, 2021. Influence of Women in American History. Wednesday, July 28, 2021. Influence of Women in American History. Women have been around as long as men, with and without a voice.  How have women tried to influence America?  Did they succeed or fail?  Why?  What kind of barriers did men construct to constrain women to a domestic life? Pick a time or an issue that was important to women and explore it from the female perspective. Read about Seneca Falls, NY; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Alice Paul; Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, ERA, Phyllis Schlafly, Gloria Steinem, Myra Bradwell; Domestic Violence; Reproductive Rights. [Proposed by Mary Beth Smith]

 

 Mary Walton, A Woman’s Crusade:  Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot, 2010. Palgrave, Macmillan: New York, NY. 284 pp.

             Imagine a country where only half the adults have the right to vote. 

                       Alice Paul was a pretty, slender, frail, modest and shy young Quaker woman who came from a family of means.  Her leadership, against tremendous opposition, propelled women into the Twentieth Century.

            Her fierce determination and strong leadership led women all over the United States to fight for the right to vote and provided a template for women and men to fight for causes right up to today.  

            Alice was the quintessential public relations genius.  She ranks with Gandhi in his fight for independence for India and Martin Luther King, Jr. in his fight for Civil Rights. When Alice asked an associate to do something, she asked quietly, with those “violet eyes”…  few could refuse. 

            Author Walton has had a career as a journalist, with 20 years at the Philadelphia Inquirer.  Her account of this Woman’s Crusade is fast-paced and filled with suspense.  You know that now women have the right to vote, but she shows the fierce, brutal opposition they faced from men, and often women.  It was a tough fight! 

            Alice, born in 1885 in Paulsboro, NJ, grew up in a “Quaker cocoon”. She attended Quaker schools and graduated from Swarthmore College in 1905. A friendly professor pointed her in the direction of a career in social work, and she began working in settlement houses in New York City.  She experienced the struggles of the urban poor, the newly arrived immigrants, the crime, and filth, and terrible living conditions in the Manhattan slums. Alice concluded that she was “not doing much good in the world—you couldn’t change the situation by social work.”  

            In 1907 Alice won a Quaker scholarship to a Friends study center in Birmingham, England.  There she encountered Christabel Pankhurst, as she led a drive to demand the ballot for women in England. Alice soon joined the cause of fighting for suffrage in England, marching to Parliament, joining in huge demonstrations, fighting in picket lines, getting arrested and jailed, starvation campaigns and force-feeding.  Alice, the Quaker from New Jersey met Lucy Burns, an Irish-American Catholic from Brooklyn, and a Vassar graduate there, and the two began their friendship and struggle for women’s right to vote.  

             In early 1910, Alice returned to America and at once got involved with the cause of American women’s suffrage.  In April of that year, President William Howard Taft agreed to deliver the welcoming speech before the nation’s largest suffrage organization. He said, “The theory that Hottentots or any other uneducated, altogether unintelligent class is fitted for self-government is a theory that I wholly dissent from.”  The President continued to declaim about his expectation that suffrage would be embraced by the class of women “less desirable” rather than those who are intelligent and patriotic.

             His remarks were met with a huge “hisssssss” by the women.

            Alice began to grow first in the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NASWSA), and then established her own. For much of the next decade there was a running gun battle between these two organizations, NAWSA working to obtain suffrage in each state, and Alice’s focusing on a federal amendment to the Constitution.  

            Alice’s big public relations event was set for the day before President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration in March 1913.  Nearly 28 years old, Alice obtained permission from the Washington, DC chief of police for her parade, right down Pennsylvania Avenue. In 1913 the concept of “marching on Washington” was almost unknown.  But Alice and her organization pulled women from suffrage organizations all over the United States. 

            What a parade it was!  Floats that showed the progress in American womanhood; females breaking the barriers of discrimination, fighting for their places in a man’s world; How it was here in 1840; women farmers, military nurses, college women, teachers, librarians, and on and on, and everyone wearing purple, white and green.  There was a beautiful, famous socialite (Inez Milholland) riding an elegant horse, and trumpeters and drum and bugle bands.  

            Women in New York staged a separate march of women from New York to Washington to join the parade. 

            The police, who shared the attitude of many American males toward suffrage, did a particularly miserable job of controlling the crowds at the parade, many of whom were roaring drunk. Fortunately, Alice had arranged with the Secretary of War to provide a company of Army cavalry, and they cleared the path for the thousands of women marchers.  When it was all over, the poor showing by police and drunks somehow worked to the advantage of the suffrage organizers, as it aroused public outrage and sympathy. 

            Alice organized rail trips of women organizers all across the United States to form stronger suffrage organizations, particularly in states that had already granted women the right to vote.  There were cross-country trips by automobile, no small feat in those days. 

“Suffies” at the White House, 1918. 

            Alice and her growing entourage next went directly after President Wilson, staged “silent sentinel” pickets along the gates in front of the White House.  Alice, ever the lady and the Quaker, ruled her demonstrators with an iron hand, cautioning them never to argue or fight with hecklers or officials.  

            In 1917, Wilson, who had labored to keep the country out of war, found that we had to fight and, with Congress, ordered troops to France to fight the Germans. 

            The banners came and grew in number, as they chided the President, using his own words against him; chiding him and America because Russia, now the budding Soviet country, allowed women the vote; calling the President “Kaiser Wilson” because he was sending men to fight for freedom, but women in America had not the freedom to vote. 

            On the fight went, with Alice increasing her attacks on Wilson.  Finally, women picketers were arrested and thrown into the D.C. jail, and down to the new D.C. prison at Occoquan, Virginia, where they encountered unbelievable conditions.  Here these women, many from very comfortable family settings, found themselves assigned a cot next to a syphilitic black woman with one leg amputated and the other crawling with maggots.  They ate oatmeal with worms and maggots in it and drank water from a bucket used by all the prisoners.  Toilets filled up and were rarely flushed.  Alice was put into what would now be called a psychiatric section for a time.  

            The women went on hunger strikes and were force fed; if they kept their mouths shut, tubes were stuffed down their noses.  

            Author Walton paints a graphic picture of this stage in the women’s fight for the right to vote.

            Eventually, on June 4, 1919, Congress passed the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, named after the originator of America’s fight for women’s suffrage, who had died in 1906. 

            On August 17, 1920, Tennessee became the 36^th state to ratify the Amendment, making it a part of the Constitution.   

            Alice shortly afterward introduced a new cause, the Equal Rights Amendment, which she presented to Congress in 1923. In 1972 it passed both houses of Congress and went to the states for ratification but failed to receive the requisite number before the deadline mandated by Congress. 

            Alice died at 93 on July 9^th, 1977. 

-end-

 

Here is a fascinating video commentary on Alice Paul by Mary Walton: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwFSi2fTZuQ

 

HISTORY BOOK CLUB TOPICS FOR 2021 

Arab Spring in Egypt

Wednesday, August 25, 2021. History of North Africa, from Morocco to Egypt, and including Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, Mauritania and more. Pick a nation or a group of nations in the northern tier of Africa and learn how they interact, how they came to be, what problems are they having, or had, that attracted world attention in the past.  Some examples: The Barbary Pirates and how America’s President Jefferson took them on; The Italian Colonial history in Abyssinia and Somaliland; World War II—Field Marshal Rommel in North Africa; “Carthago delenda est!” The Punic War between Rome and Carthage; Tunisia and he Start of Arab Spring. [Proposed by Sam Coulbourn]

Elizabeth Eckford goes to school, Little Rock, 1957

Wednesday, September 29, 2021. The Fight for Civil Rights. America began with the fight for Civil Rights for colonists and the fight continues for groups of Americans.  Pick a group – what are they fighting for, what’s their strategy, are they gaining or losing ground and why? [Proposed by Mary Beth Smith]

 

Karen women in Myanmar 

Wednesday, October 27, 2021. Mass Refugee movements in History. Movements of a large number from one nation to another can and have changed the face of the earth. Read about any era on this topic or read about the phenomenon as a whole. Consider the movement of Arab nationals today into Europe, or the pre-historic migration of peoples from Siberia to North America. Or perhaps Irish victims of the potato famine coming to America and Canada in the 1840s. [Proposed by Sam Coulbourn]

 Wednesday, December 1, 2021. [Moved back one week to avoid conflict with Thanksgiving.]  Reconstruction, 1865-77 Abraham Lincoln had a clear picture of what should be done after the end of the War Between the States, but his assassination meant that Andrew Johnson, the Democrat who succeeded him, would be President. Read about this dangerous, murderous time in our history as we sought to regain the 11 Confederate States in the Union.  Read about the growth of white supremacist organizations, and the different ways that America handled the end of slavery, and welcoming (?) millions of newly freed Africans to America.  [Proposed by Mary Beth Smith]

There will be no later meeting in December.

2022

Women defense workers,World War II

Wednesday, January 26, 2022. World War II at Home.  World War II raged from the jungles of Burma to the steppes of Russia, all over the world.  But this is a look at the Home Front, from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats to children collecting tin cans and lead toothpaste tubes, paper and even jars of grease for “The War Effort”. It includes the movement of many thousands of Black Americans from menial jobs in the South to better paying jobs in the North, working in defense plants.  Millions of women also joined the work force as men went to fight overseas. Also, how Hollywood helped with patriotic films and propaganda cartoons, as well as War Bond drives. [Proposed by Cindy Grove].

Landing of Pedro Cabral in future Brazil, 1500. Painting by Oscar da Silva, 1922.

Wednesday, February 23, 2022. History of South America. South America has a rich history, from Incas and other indigenous peoples to colonization by Spanish, Portuguese, and other European nations, onward to monarchy in Argentina, slavery, and struggling democracies. It’s the history of Machu Pichu, exploration and exploitation of the Amazon, Simon Bolivar, Pedro Cabral, Juan Peron, Hugo Chavez, Augusto Pinochet, The Falklands War, Shining Path.  Select any period, any nation or group, and let us learn together. [Proposed by Sam Coulbourn]