The Surprising Road to Women's Suffrage

[Music] funding for this program was provided by the UCLA office of instructional development [Music] thank you all for being here I'm I'm unbelievably honored to be one hundred and twenty fourth faculty research lecturer thank you to my friends and my colleagues so we have a lot to cover so let us begin in two years two and a half years we will celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the constitutional enfranchisement of women the 19th amendment but the women's movement to win this important fundamental right for women reached back much further 75 years behind 1920 constituting one-fifth of our national life I have the challenge I'm faced with the challenge of how to present this long and complex history to you in something like 50 minutes so I've decided to organize it I'll try and cover the whole period but to drop in at different points of what I'm calling for surprises on the road to women's enfranchisement women's women's suffrage so here's the first surprise we're going to start at start the woman's suffrage a constitutional amendment that never was here I am in the first decade of this movement immediately after the Civil War now I need to start with the following important point the federal constitution the US Constitution gives the national government almost no role in controlling voting it gives the state's total sovereignty over the right to vote that's so that's why you can change States and how you vote and where you vote and what the requirements are voting will change and the federal government has no oversight and from our viewpoint as individuals with the right to vote no way to protect us against actions of the state the something I'll come back to again and this first period I'm calling the period of universal suffrage and I hope you'll see why despite this fact that there are no no assertions of the right of citizens of the United States to vote on Election Day November 5th 1872 hundreds perhaps as many as a thousand women around the country from New Jersey to California went to their local polling places and announced that they were voters by virtue of being citizens of the United States and they were determined to submit their votes for president this was a consequential presidential election one of these women was the most famous suffragists in the United States susan b anthony this this cartoon of her shows her and of course wrapped in the garments of Uncle Sam but looking pretty forbidding and a little masculinized Anthony went to woke up early went with her friends and family to the polling place in Rochester New York and went up to the hapless man who had been appointed by the Republican Party to watch over the polling place and explained why she had the right to vote why she believes she had the right to vote and she placed her her argument on the recently passed 14th amendment ratified five years before in order to protect the citizenship of the former slave population here was her argument it says all poor persons born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens the United States no one can doubt that I am a person hence I am a citizen of the United States by the way not until the 14th amendment was there even any assertion of what Constitution constituted national citizenship in this country and then it goes on and says no state we most many of you are familiar with this it's one of the most important elements of our Constitution no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge so it's a limitation on the action of the states shall abridge the religious or immunities of citizens of United States or to deny them equal protection of the laws so then she went on and this was the crucial point not mentioned here she said who can doubt that the right to vote is foremost among the privileges and immunities of national citizenship therefore I am by virtue of my national citizenship a voter and the federal government has an obligation to protect my rights as such perhaps the brilliance of her argument convinced the poor guy who was checking off people more likely she was voting for the same candidate that he was General Grant so he let her put her ballot in the box and she went home well satisfied the next day America u.s. Marshalls federal marshals came to her home and arrested her for the federal crime of illegal voting this was a newly established crime directed not against middle-aged lady reformers but against recalcitrant Confederate rebels no matter Anthony was arrested eventually brought before a federal jury tried by a federal judge who was actually a US Supreme Court justice who was writing circuit and so determined was the grant government to make sure that that this I guess you would call the direct action voting was stopped in its tracks that the judge did not even let the the jury deliberate but he instructed them that they would find her guilty and so they did as a result of other parts of the way the judge ran the case she was unable to appeal her case but the goal of these voting women was to get their understanding of this constitution as it now stood as a result of the Fourteenth Amendment vindicated at the highest level that is at the Supreme Court so here's the Supreme Court in 1875 you may notice something about its homogeneity they heard and they rejected the case that made the argument about why women had the right to vote the case was called the minor which was the name of the woman her name was Virginia minor she was from Missouri who brought the case versus happersett who was the guy who was running that polling place minor vs. hopper said it's only the second case concerned with women's rights ever to be heard by the federal government I mean by the US Supreme Court the court ruled yes women were persons and yes persons were citizens of the United States but no voting was not a right of national citizenship voting was a privilege it was a privilege bestowed by the separate states on those who considered worthy it was a privilege this decision the minor versus happersett decision of 1875 not only affected the beginning of a major change for the suffrage movement but it it signaled changes to come as soon after the Supreme Court began issuing rulings that allowed States to do all kinds of things that got around the Fifteenth Amendment which prohibited States from disfranchising men on the basis of race color or previous condition of servitude so that by the time the court was finished the Fifteenth Amendment was virtually unknown but the suffragists were not done with their universal suffrage approach in 1878 three years later this woman who is Elizabeth Cady Stanton susan b anthony x' partner-in-crime came before a Senate committee and announced the suffrage amendment that that the woman suffrage movement intended to have its supporters put forward into Congress and here we have the woman's suffrage amendment that never was here is that amendment it follows the same logic that Susan P Anthony used only it brings it directly into the Constitution the right of suffrage in the United States shall be based on citizenship and shall be regulated by Congress and all citizens of the United States whether native or naturalized shall enjoy this right equally and then it's not until the very end of the text that you get any reference to gender the point here is that this approach fundamentally changed what have fundamentally changed the way citizens of the United States voted it disappeared quickly from history the Republican Party was no longer in a mood to extend democratic rights or even to protect those that it had issued a decade before and the universal suffrage approach disappeared from history from this point on the woman suffrage a movement for the next 40 years followed this constitutional approach to women's suffrage this is the text that ultimately 40 years later became the 19th amendment as you can see by my crossovers it is exactly the language of the Fifteenth Amendment we have race color and previous condition of servitude removed and replaced by six that's that's the only change in it I want to compare the woman's suffrage amendment that never was and the woman's suffrage amendment that was the difference between the two illuminates a lot about what eventually happened when women got the right to vote the woman's suffrage amendment that never was is different from the woman's suffrage amendment that was it is written in the positive the woman's suffrage amendment that was doesn't change anything fundamental about how how voting is shaped in the United States it still leaves it in the hands of the states and merely adds one disfranchisement disfranchisement by 6 which the states are prohibited from but everything else that the states do with respect to voting is left untouched whereas the women's suffrage amendment that never was as I indicated before would have fundamentally recast the general right to vote both in the affirmative as an assertion and as a right of national citizenship with the power of the federal government behind it and with that commitment to equal rights which the US Constitution had already established it is significant to think now you know this the woman suffrage amendment that never was was in some ways a passing moment in history but it does give us a sense of the larger issues at stake when half the population was to be that had been disfranchised would be enfranchised had this approach been passed and I understand this is a kind of utopian possibility nonetheless it would have brought with it a fundamental revision and Democratic expansion in the constitutional right to vote and we as a nation today would be far less vulnerable to what in the 21st century is called voter suppression which originates from the fact that the franchise is still under the control of state law and practice and and is not overseen by any constitutional assurance of equal protection under the law a second consequence of leaving behind the era of universal suffrage as I call this first decade woman's suffrage had been born out of the movements to emancipate and then in franchise emancipate the ex-slaves and in franchise the men of that community but that heritage was now left behind the country was descending at the end of the 19th century into an era of black disfranchisement Jim Crow and and terrible racial violence for the most part at this point the suffrage movement made its peace with this white with this whites only view of American democracy mainstream woman suffrage organizations no longer welcomed black women they became effectively all white white spokes women would regularly contend that women were degraded not just because all men had to vote over all women but because black men had the vote over white women black men who middle-class educated cultured white women considered their inferiors where their superiors when it came to political rights and this reputation for racial exclusivity and at times outright racism tainted the suffrage movement for the next four decades and after it continues as a damaging part of the movements legacy that said so this is a cartoon from the NAACP magazine the crisis 1912 showing a white woman carrying a votes for women sign and putting her hand up against the black woman also called carrying of votes for women's sign and saying the the headline is just like the men first of all there was always a minority of white suffragists who remain believers and champions of racial equality white suffragists like Jane Addams or Elizabeth Stanton's daughter were among the earliest members of the NAACP this image is from the Rochester Zion African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church a black church of course in Rochester and these are two stained-glass windows the right one is honoring Harriet Tubman but the left one is honors honoring susan b anthony and that's her portrait in the middle anthony was revered and for the rest of her life till the day of her death by african-americans there were also when I'll return to this in a moment there were always african-american women and men their numbers growing by the turn of the century who were determined proponents of women's enfranchisement despite the racial obstacles that they met from many suffragists so that's surprise number one surprise number two growing the base the role of the Woman's Christian Temperance Movement Temperance Union 1874 to 1900 so we move now into the next quarter century constitutional image was no longer possible it was now not until the nineteen teens than any other constitutional amendments were even possible with the Constitution as they said with the door closed to the Federal Constitution the task facing women suffragists was what we would call to build their base to make the demand for voting rights meaningful to significant numbers of average American women now in the late 19th century the face of the average American woman the female face of America as illustrated in this in the sentimental magazine graphic was such a woman was a small-town white church-going wife and mother whose interests did not much pass beyond the door into the larger world she was pious she was domestic and she was maternal and she faced she focused primarily on the welfare of her family and perhaps her immediate community she owned no property she paid no taxes and she cared little for the political issues that rocked presidential elections abstract claims of universal justice and equal rights of the kind that suffer just like susan b anthony rested on offered little appeal how might a woman like this come to understand the importance and power of women having political equality and political rights and this brings us to this second surprise woman's suffrage was first connected to the daily lives of large numbers of American women and I should add here black women as well as white women not by radicals like susan b anthony but by The Woman's Christian Temperance Union now The Woman's Christian Temperance Union to the degree that you've ever heard of it is ridiculed in public memory as a bunch of axe-wielding prohibitionists who are only in attending they only want to deprive men of their modest little vices and places to get out of the house and away from the little woman but actually the WCTU was the largest women's association in the late 19th century and particularly well organized when I might add women were drawn to the temperance movement initially because of its focus on how men's drinking impoverished families and subjected wives and children to physical abuse issues of men's drinking still remain powerful issues with a feminist edge to them for women nonetheless in 1884 a little bit over a decade after it was formed the WCTU became the first large organization outside of the suffrage societies themselves to announce that it was in favor of and to fight for voting rights for women 1884 the General Federation of Women's Clubs the secular equivalent took another 30 years to get to this point now the woman who was responsible for this achievement of building the WCTU and taking these very conventional conservative church-going women into the most radical women's movement of the decade was this woman Frances Willard this is her on the left I'll come to the picture on the right in a minute Willard was the daughter of abolitionists she was an evangelical Methodist born in 1860 you could say she represents the second generation of suffragists Anthony was born 40 years earlier the picture on the right I love this is a picture of Frances Willard learning how to ride a bicycle and riding a bicycle was one of the hallmarks of what was called the new woman generation because it caught first of all you can see that physically it was a kind of challenge to conventional ideas of women's propriety but also it meant all kinds of mobility and Willard she's probably in her 50s here determined to learn how to ride a bike and then she wrote a little book about it which was widely distributed so here she is you can see how tiny she is you can see she's not all that comfortable but she finally figured out how to do it Willard Frances Willard approached women's suffrage fundamentally differently than radicals like susan b anthony had she didn't say that women needed the votes because of abstract justice or equal rights she didn't say that women needed to vote because they had the same rights and the same capacities and the same obligations as men although she did think that they did but instead she argued that women deserve the right to vote because their obligations and the fear in which they lived and worked was so fundamentally different and the concerns the issues that concern them were so different from men that men could not be trusted to represent them women needed to go into politics to present to put to to protect their own interests in particular and this was her crucial argument women needed the vote to protect their homes in other words from that prior picture that that picture of women standing inside the door they needed to step outside the door and go into public to protect their families their homes their husbands and especially their children she Willard captured this argument in a brilliant move that we would call rebranding women's suffrage was a term which was considered radical associated with masculine women like that susan b anthony and so she took it and she rebranded it and she called it the home protection ballot and this was a brilliant move that vaulted these conventional late 19th century women over the alleged wall that separated women's private and men's public spheres in the next 15 years when Willard led the WCTU and brought it into ever new dimensions she argued for women needing the right to vote on the one hand as you might expect to regulate morality prohibition laws although mostly at the state and local level not at the national level the WCT was very interested in regulating obscene material and regulating prostitution in other words the vote was a tool for enforcing a what we would consider a conventional Christian morality but it but Willard leading the WCTU also led its members to to see the to engage with a broadly progressive program of the sort that the populist party which she was a leader of supported this included labor reform prison reform an international peace after Willard's death in 1898 this balance was lost and WCTU retreated to become a more conservative although always an important venue for rural women Midwestern women religious women to come into the suffrage movement but in the early 20th century a modernized version of the approach she pioneered which I would describe as votes as a tool not just a principle and votes to allow women to address political issues that were distinct from the issues that men cared about this approach was embraced by a new generation so we see here in a clever less religious form another version of the same thing which is women have to get the right to vote and go into politics and needed in in order to do their business to clean things up you got a call in the cleaning woman and this approach was embraced by new advocates social labor and urban were female social labor and urban reformers on behalf of a very dramatically changing American womanhood in the early 20th century less whirl now much more urban less Protestant or Catholic and Jewish less native-born more foreign-born and less exclusively Democratic more and more wage earners so you can see here these are the issues which now women need the votes to address food adulteration these are still domestic issues but also and white slavery in other words a form of prostitution but also the dirtiness of politics bribery and graft and they have to dig the dirt up I show you this famous incredible photo by Jacob Riis of children playing on the streets of New York around a dead horse - to illustrate the way that women in these years the early 20th century sought the vote to address different sort of issues with which women were concerned factory working conditions urban living conditions tenement safety and Public Health and sanitation we move on to the third surprise this is perhaps the biggest surprise at least I think so we have now arrived at a new century we are now in what's called in American history the Progressive Era it's a period in which women are actually extremely important individual women are extremely important and and take leadership roles how is it that women are using political power to affect issues important to them at the local and state level we are still 20 to 25 years before women get the 19th amendment and so here is the answer many American women were already seasoned voters by this time I return to my original point that despite the 14th and 15th amendments the states basically returned sovereign power over the political franchise so as suffragists waited for the constitutional door to open to reopen they went to the states themselves to win France Chai's rights if they could convince male voters to amend their state constitutions removing the word male or adding the word female women would gain and here's my crucial point full voting Roy rights up to and including the right to vote for Congress in president let me repeat this so the first example I'm going to tell you about is Colorado in 1893 wine after you know there of these states they were all western states amended their constitutions to give women voting rights when women when the Colorado Constitution and the California Constitution were amended the rights women got were not just to elect members of the state legislature they were able to elect they were able to cast their votes for their Congress people not for their Senators because nobody was allowed to vote for senators yet but for their Congress people and for President of the United States this is a crucial fact not particularly appreciated now this is an image of Wyoming women voting in the 1870s perhaps you know that Wyoming granted women the right to vote very early in 1869 but Wyoming was a territory it was not a state and what this meant was that when Wyoming women which was really quite a tiny number at least of white women could not vote could not vote in federal elections there were no state elections they were able to vote in a small handful of territorial elections here is the first place that the first major state campaign to convince male voters to amend their constitution their state constitution and support full voting rights for women and the state is Colorado and the year is 1893 the number of women in Colorado who were in franchised you know I said above that Wyoming was only white women by which I mean not Native American women there were at least 3,000 black women in Colorado and they an important part of this campaign and they were part of the victory this is a one of my favorite pictures of the period these women going in to vote in a frontier kind of polling place and looking quite proud of themselves and Krait quite a quite in charge of their right to vote as they enter the polling place by the time that the 19th amendment so this is 1893 by the time that the 19th amendment was ratified 27 years later the women of Colorado had already voted for president six times California became the sixth of these what were called suffrage or free states in the year 1911 it was by far the most important state to amend its constitution to give women full voting rights it was the largest although not yet the most populous or wealthy state in the nation but it was large and it was diverse and it had it and it was and had a modern economy the California campaign was the first truly modern suffrage campaign the first twentieth-century suffrage campaign it's the the coalition that won this victory was of a very different sort it was made up especially of college women college graduates who were now the actually the majority of women of people graduating college and and most of those women came from Co educational institutions land-grant institutions like Cal but also working hand in hand with wage-earning women so here we see them in a Labor Day Parade advocating equal pay for equal work regardless of sex I called this the first modern campaign the campaign featured modern technology the lower corner is you can't quite there's a there's an automobile there and women drove their cars all around the big state of California going into small towns then they would stand on the car seats and somebody would stand up with a trombone shoutout jack and and she would call everybody to come and then this woman would start talking about why members why man a California man should vote for suffrage on the upper right-hand corner is one of several suffrage movies the most of the women in here are actresses at this point the movie industry was in New York but the woman in the middle is actually an important suffragists and so these were both entertainment and propaganda and they were shown in what were called Nickelodeon's finally the California campaign was characterized by elegant visuals which began to help the movement shed its old-fashioned image and to become fashionable even glamorous this one in the left was the winner of a poster contest for the best poster to advertise votes for women in California so you can see it's California because it's full of gold gold well you know no the gold where the Golden State but she's standing it's a halo but also she's standing in front of the Golden Gate where there was not yet a bridge okay and this the Sun is is going down behind her as in Colorado women in California actively used their votes once they won them to address many political issues of concern to them here are some some of them listed on this sign raising the minimum wage for women workers raising the age of consent which in many states was something like 12 establishing juvenile justice courts and passing laws to control prostitution not by penalizing the women but by penalizing the men who profited from the trade franchise in franchising women state by state had its limits it would never enfranchise all American women so going from the left to the right in the Jim Crow South the Democratic self the specter this this racist cartoon captures this the specter of black thin women voting was an absolute barrier to change the Democratic Party in southern states had effectively disfranchised black male population they weren't going to open the door to black females who would be that much harder to get rid of and then in the right the republican-controlled industrial northeast was also opposed to women's suffrage because manufacturers there depended on large female and child labor forces and feared that the the low wages and difficult working conditions in which they're working forces were forced to work would be laws would be passed to control them the the fear of black women voting which was rising to hysterical levels in the South in these years was in many ways a response to the new level of organization and activism among African American women a mere generation after emancipation so here is a large group of women who are from the California State Federation of colored women's clubs this is 1915 one of the issues that African American women were most concerned with and was deeply linked to the desire to have the right to vote was the epidemic of lynching that was peaking in these years this is a leaflet a book about lynching written by Ida wells later Ida wells Barnett well-known this she's here as a very young woman but she had a long career she was an anti lynching activist but she was also a pioneering black suffragists she founded the first dedicated black suffrage organization in Chicago ultimately you could say that the most important impact of the growing numbers of enfranchised women state-by-state was to provide a lever to reopen the constitutional door and and make it possible to begin to read to reap to repress for a constitutional amendment that would enfranchise women nationally by 1912 10% of the nation's women were already casting their votes for president by 1916 it was 14% as you can see these states are all in the West I can talk a little bit about what the gray states mean if you want me to later at this point one branch of the suffrage movement which named itself the National Woman's party you can see that on the lower right determined to organized voting women in the states where women could vote to use their franchise strategically on behalf of a federal amendment now this branch the National Woman's Party I need to have a little a little point here most of the people who fought for suffrage were not called suffragettes they were called suffragists this group this group the National Woman's Party were the only group that called themselves and we're called and embraced the title suffragettes and I can explain that to you and also the different cat the different groups of suffrage activists were signaled by their different colors so the National Woman's Party colors were yellow purple and white I'm wearing one of their banners here and they're all wearing their colors there to try and get women voters to do something to enfranchise women nationally meant at this point we're here in 1916 to mobilize against the re-election of President Wilson like our current president President Wilson who was a Democrat his party controlled both houses and he was in charge of everything that happened in the federal government it's also the case like our current president his party was controlled by white supremacists who were dead-set against federal interference over voting titter okay despite the national and it's interesting because Wilson has such a reputation as a progressive but on the issue of race and gender he was not despite the National Woman's Party efforts he is re-elected albeit by a very narrow victory a very narrow margin he campaigned it's 1916 on the grounds he kept us out of war one month after and so here are suffrages picketing President Wilson they would have signs that said he kept us out of suffrage one month after he was inaugurated of course he took the United States into war the election campaign campaign defeated the National Woman's Party continued its pressure on Wilson with daily picketing of the White House this is the first time that anything like this is done that a protest movement is taken to the President himself after the u.s. entered the war the stakes for all this went way up President Wilson says he's for democracy around the world but he's keeping Americans care for the American people from from any kind of democratic rights and when foreign dignitaries came they had specific signs addressed to the Russian and Voice or whatever after the u.s. enters the war these women whose continued to protest day by day or assaulted by crowds they were arrested they were jailed and they were force-fed this is a great story but it's not a surprise so I'm not going to talk about it anymore and you have to read my book when it comes out in many ways even more than the picketing in 1917 the truly consequential change in national politics came again by the prospect of women empowered at the ballot box in November 1917 the men of New York became the first made New York the first Eastern State to amend its institution to enfranchise women New York was the most populous the most powerful state and had the largest congressional delegation which was now answerable to the votes of women and the great majority of its 45 congressmen immediately become congressional supporters of women's suffrage this turning point is marked by the president's decision after six years of holding holding out against this to support a constitutional amendment okay we're now in 1918 it's two years before what we know to be the final achievement of the 19th amendment but they did not know this and so here is the forint the fourth and final surprise the woman's suffrage amendment barely achieves congressional passage and ratification one could say it could easily have been defeated by one estimate 11,000 amendments have been proposed to the new to the US Congress six of these most famously the Equal Rights Amendment have gone through Congress but have failed of ratification there was nothing inevitable about the success of the women's suffrage amendment at this moment we might have been like that other great beacon of democracy France where women were in franchise not after the first world war but after the second in January 1918 there are three shoes that have to fall here the first is the House of Representatives in January 1918 the House of Representatives finally agreed to a full floor debate on the woman suffrage amendment I hope you can see here that the Congress person in the well who is who is putting forward the resolution is a woman this is Janet jeannette rankin from montana who was elected in 1917 another reminder that women were voting before 1920 here are the kind of arguments that were brought forward by the opponents of woman suffrage the classical one woman's votes will disrupt the family the second in which a congressman says if my wife would challenge my wisdom of a political question I would think the world was coming to an end the the nation was at war and war depends on the physical force of as one intelligent congressman said the manly man the mailman of the nation but finally and this of course was the most politically important one the amendment would create a condition that would absolutely be intolerable for southern states struggling to maintain law and order and white supremacy these were the days when you could say white supremacist white supremacy openly in the United States Congress the bill passed by not one extra vote by two-thirds majority and the assumption was that the Senate would quickly follow it had always been the stronger house for suffrage but the vote in the Senate took another 18 months and at times seemed impossible after more than a year of incredible lobbying the bill was still one vote short even after the war ended in November 1918 the Armistice did not change the situation instead it was the 1918 midterm elections which shifted control over the Senate from Democrats to Republicans that made the difference at this point the two parties were fighting against each other to claim credit and blame their opponents by the time that the Senate vote passes it is June of 1919 suffragists were desperate to get to get ratification over with in time for the 1920 presidential election because they expected and they were right that subsequent political turn of national politics would be very reactionary now you know ratification is a is a difficult very difficult the most difficult of the three shoes three-quarters of the states the majority of legislators and there was a powerful and well positioned and well-funded anti suffrage movement which put all of its energy into defeating ratification there are many images I could show of the ant eyes but I like this one vote no and then here are some household hands just in case one year after the Senate passage in the June or July of 1990 1920 they were still one state short 35 states Democrats controlling the deep south opposed on white supremacist grounds conservative New England Republicans also wouldn't ratify Vermont I think Maine is late Connecticut Rhode Island the final battle came down to the purple state their Tennessee it was the rare southern state which had a Republican as well as a democratic party in a broiling hot August week a special session was called by the governor and suffragists and anti separatist from all over the country descended on the state legislature up to the last minute suffragists did not think they had the votes their opponents bribed their legislative supporters or got them drunk tapped phones threatened the governor the legislature who finally broke this paralysis this tie was this young man who was 24 years old his name was Harry burn he's a Republican in a Democratic dominated State his mother sent him a letter urging him to be a good boy and vote for ratification and there's the letter the governor are fearful that the opponents of suffrage would figure another dirty trick signed the bill and sent it off in the middle of the night to Washington I should tell you here the last state to ratify the 19th amendment was Mississippi and the year was 1984 so here we have on the right and announcement that the secretary US Secretary of State danbridge Colby has signed the amendment signed the bill signed the amendment making the 19th amendment constitutional law he did it at 8 a.m. in the morning on August 26th fearful he won't did it right away and it was so early that there were no suffragists there to get their pictures taken with him as he signed and then here is a picture of suffragists later on celebrating although there was only what is it August to November of three months one-third of the women who were eligible to vote were able to register and vote and here's a picture of both white women and black women eagerly registering and then voting in the 1920 election there are many more things to say I hope you asked me some questions there are many more surprises we just lived through one and in in response to which I would say nevertheless they persisted no I'm doing what they do in the Philharmonic that was that was wonderful so I our handlers here have told me we have time for three questions lights are supposed to go down so that I can see yeah so there's mics around so there are only three so make them good oh I wanted to know if you could clarify so did Native American women get the right to vote when this was passed you know this is a very complicated question it's even hard to research it and find out I don't know if there any Native American historians in the room maybe Steve can't help me Oh Carol yeah I don't think until the 40s it's completely resolved under Roosevelt is that right remember the 14th amendment said and subject to its jurisdiction and also the 14th Amendment says Indians not taxed or not included in citizenship yes for a variety of reasons the 14th Amendment did not enfranchise or give citizenship to Native Americans who retained their tribal affiliation you so you said Colorado was the first to have people voting saying the presidential elections but what happened in Wyoming because they granted in 69 and the enemy becomes a state 89 did they yes they did the legislature defended the Wyoming woman's right to vote and I don't use them as the first state because there wasn't a popular campaign and it wasn't required of the men of Wyoming to change the constitution the the legislature fought against efforts to remove it you know it's interesting the state of why the territory of Washington also had given women the right to vote and when it came up for statehood anti-suffrage forces were able to remove suffrage from the new constitution and so it was not until I think 1910 that Washington became a state at 1910 many years later much after Washington became a state that women had the right to vote it was obvious someone of your slides that at least one woman ran for successfully for Congress could you just say more generally whether women ran for office and whether they could obviously they could run for office in states where they had the right to vote no they could run for office before they had the right to vote and in the states where they didn't have the right if they could run for office even though they couldn't vote yes they wouldn't win but they could Elisabeth Stanton ran for Senate and in 18 god I can't remember 1867 something like that and I think it's Australia or New Zealand they make a distinction between what they call active suffrage and passive suffrage I can't remember which is which but they actually have separate laws to allow women to hold office and allow women to vote but there was no law prohibiting women from holding office now needless to say women begin to hold office and consider a not inconsiderable but any numbers after they gain the right to vote in Colorado the next year after they gain the right to vote three women are elected to the state legislature first thanks for a great and very timely talk but how do you explain the surge of support for suffrage in the West before the East doesn't have to do with census struggles and attempt to get more congressional representation Sally right I guess yes so the standard explanation is that the West is freer or another explanation is that it's an attempt to attract women and a third explanation is that and this probably has more as more truth to it that the West had its own forms of racism and it was an attempt to it was an act against particularly Asians the answer that I think is best given is that the state is that the parties in these Western states were not entrenched they were new they were more flexible so at the very same time as suffrage starts to come to the west we have the populist movement which is a radical movement which is also in the West and Midwest and the populist movement is really the engine that brings suffrage into these states first the populist movement and then Western progressivism so these these more more flexible political movements are more likely to be found whereas in in places in the East New York and Massachusetts for instance the party party structures were so entrenched and so impenetrable that women could not they were not interested they had no interest in increasing the electorate and getting voters who they knew they couldn't control thank you very much thank you doctor - boy it's been a beautiful presentation here on my phone in Wikipedia concerning that it says here on my phone concerning Wikipedia considering the preamble to the Constitution that the courts have found that the founding fathers supported the basis of presence premise of everything that's guaranteed in the preamble to the Constitution to the preamble to the Constitution yeah the course is supported what the fund fathers were trying to state is our rights so considering the current climate wouldn't you say to be able or I'm asking you what's your opinion wouldn't you say we need a constitutional amendment to be able to support equal protection clause of voting rights in the States that would be great but just as I said about after 1880 the chances of having a progressive constitutional amendment or zilch we are much more unfortunately likely to have a right wing run constitutional convention which will take everything away for us so that would be great but it's not going to happen because the states are so you know it might have happened right after the Civil War because the southern states were were were confined and controlled but the states are not it's like the Electoral College the powers that are entrenched in that system and that structure will never let it be given up even though it's patently on the face of it unjust okay I'm not allowed to take any more questions [Applause] [Music] you video copies of this program are available for purchase from the UCLA instructional media library call toll-free 1-800 [Music]

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 41,677

Keywords: suffrage, gender studies, right to vote, women's rights, 19th amendment

Id: E5oB7-o_vzM

Length: 58min 22sec (3502 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 01 2018