Tapestry Tuesday with Liz Tentarell

Thank you very much and I want to thank New Hampshire Humanities who funds many of these programs so my name is Liz Tantarelli and I am president of the League of Women Voters who created New Hampshire in 2019 when we were all anticipating the centennial of women getting the right to the vote, the league was also anticipating its centennial because we are a direct outgrowth of suffrage organizing, so I said, of course, I'll put together a slide presentation on this for New Hampshire Humanities and then that's what they're going to do. . Look, little did we know in 2019, you know, yes, it will happen with all of our Centennial plans, but you know better late than never, so 2020 was the Centennial of women getting the right to vote and I'll talk about that tonight, but I want to point out that what women were doing was not simply fighting for the right to vote, they were fighting for a broader type of civil rights for themselves and for others in society and learning to use their civic voices: the vote It is the tangible thing that we can We are also aware, but we will see in this that there is a broader picture.

Many of you have heard of the famous phrase that Abigail Adams used in a letter to John Adams when he was at the Constitutional Convention. Remember the ladies you know. We nudge our husbands when it matters, but I'm going to read a little more into that statement about Gill writing to John in 1776. Don't put such unlimited power in the hands of husbands. Remember that all men would be tyrants if they could. Apologies, your particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion and we will not subject ourselves to any law in which we have no voice or representation, so it is much more than just that phrase We know, so Let's think about where this all started and we have to go back to the 1820s and 1830s, when many women and men, of course, were part of the abolitionist movement that was trying to get rid of slavery.

Two of the female abolitionists were now the Grim Kay sisters of South Carolina. Imagine speaking out against slavery in South Carolina in the 1820s and 1830s and when they tried to do this they were silenced, told that women can't speak in public their voices have no meaning, they won't be heard, and they realized that That's how it was. not just the slaves whose rights were being infringed, but their rights simply because they were women, now two women whose names may be familiar from 11th grade history are Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Katie Stanton, they also started out as abolitionists and met each other. another in 1840 at an international convention in London in this country they have been active in the abolitionist movement they fought when they got there that they would have a role in the decisions made no, they were told ghosts in the gallery ladies and we don't I don't want to hear from you and that's how they met and I can imagine them nudging each other saying where are we going back to the US, we'll take care of this now, the photos we have of these women are from their older years.

We say that they were young women in 1840 when they met, in fact, Elizabeth Katie Stanton and her husband were there on their honeymoon, so it was eight years before they could take action, but in 1848 the Convention on Rights was passed of Women, the first in this country. held in Elizabeth Cady Stanton's hometown in upstate New York Seneca Falls 300 people came and dragged they had drafted a document these sentiments and resolutions that included 11 things women wanted now sound like civil rights if I start talking about they wanted access to higher education at that time only one university accepted women they wanted access to the professions to become doctors, lawyers and university professors they wanted the right to their own income instead of automatically becoming the husbands or the income of the father wanted rights over their children men had the right to stay, you know what would happen to the children, where they would go, etc., there were 11 of these civil rights that were included in this document, but then Elizabeth Katie Stanton added the 12 and that was the right. vote well when that came out when she first said it because of the way her husband, who until then had been a pretty understanding guy, said you can't do that Elizabeth and he left town yeah, they had the convention anyway and when they started arguing that if the others had unanimously approved, it seemed like this wasn't going to happen until Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Katie Stanton made this huge plea that the reason you need the right to vote is because that right It is so fundamental that it is the way the other will be obtained. rights and that is what we date the call for women's suffrage in 1848, which was the first public declaration on the matter.

Where did these women in upstate New York get this smug idea that they should have the same rights as them? Yes, they really got it. Their neighbors, like Denisoni, this is also called the Iroquois Confederacy, were six Native American tribes living in New York and Canada in which women had extremely powerful roles and rights, for example, they had primaries for the selection of Chiefs. . and then the men would vote from there they had a say in whether the tribe would go to war or not the Senecos the vote of three quarters of the mothers was needed to establish a peace treaty they owned the property it was not the man if a husband died.

Sorry, if a wife died, the children would go to her family to be raised, not the husband's family. You know, her brother would be the man in charge, for example, so white women, including Matilda Jocelyn Gage, you know? very involved with uh I've been assani and the convention said we want what they have so that's where we're looking at these rights including the right to vote now the famous name that everyone knows is Susan B Anthony she. She was not at that first convention but she did go to the one in 1851. This is how it developed in different parts of the country and in each year something to tell when they met again we see them as mature women when they met us young women they committed their lives to suffrage feminine and they worked on it until they both died before the Federal Amendment came in, of course, by then they would be in their 80s or 80s or 90s.

Sojourner Truth, the former slave, attended the convention of 1851. I gave her a famous speech, Am I Not a Woman? There were black women involved in the suffrage movement from the early days, uh, and Sojourner Truth was one of them, so let's think about what's going on. I said they wanted these basic civil rights. They were fighting for those in the states, particularly in the northern states, their own wages, oh, the right to own property, which was important, you know, the only way a woman could own property was to be a rich widow with no money. children and could then inherit her husband's property, divorce laws, etc., but did you know that in the early days of our country women had the right to vote?

There was nothing in the Constitution that said they couldn't do it, the word mail wasn't there, it's defining. a voter, does that mean that women voted well? Not really because those were the days when a voter had to own property and pay taxes and now you see that hooked women couldn't know property so only those rich widows, like I said, could have voted. and there was one in Massachusetts very, very rich, very famous, she was a ruling force in her city and she voted, but gradually the states removed women from the Constitutions and started adding the word mail to find voters, you know, in 1784 , that happened in New Hampshire, women were inspired not only by Abigail Adams' statement but by everything else that was happening: studying taxation without representation is wrong, we did it in the revolution, it's wrong now Lucy Stone in New Jersey She actually owned a property.

I'm not sure how that happened but she did it and refused to pay her taxes because taxes without representation are wrong so the authorities took her tables and chairs to sell at auction and then a friend of mine found out and told me that the neighbors thought this was wrong so they bought the tables in June but the women came up with all kinds of reasons to vote and of course they were denied and then the civil war ensued because most of these women had been abolitionists, they first put aside their own interests in voting and civil rights to fight for the abolition of slavery and because the only legal procedure women had access to was signing petitions Elizabeth Katie Stanton Susan B Anthony and others began to circulate petitions in favor of the 13th Amendment to abolish slavery and collected 400,000 signatures across the country, a large number at the time, so the 13th Amendment was passed abolished slavery and then the 14th Amendment was drafted because that is the equal protection of the law.

Amendment that was going to apply to freed slaves as well and the women said wait, it's going to apply to us, right, these equal rights of citizenship, if they were citizens, we should be able to vote, they tried to use that argument in court, it was shut down until the Supreme Court and it was struck down, no, that's not what it means, then we get to the 15th Amendment, what has happened so far is that black people have been free, they have some rights of citizenship but they don't have the right to vote, so the 15th amendment was going to grant freed blacks the right to vote, but only men and this caused a real divide.

First, we have people who advocate universal suffrage. You know, think of this 15th amendment as a way to get voting rights for everyone. Get rid of ownership requirements. Allow women to vote. ex-slaves, men and women, vote and this was a huge organization, black and white men and women, well it didn't work that way, the way the amendment was written it turned out that only men were going to get the right to vote and there was a split in the women's movement Lucy Stone Frederick Douglass and others use the famous phrase This is the black hour after going through slavery and now being freed and trying to establish economic independence they at least the men needed the vote, let's pass it that way Elizabeth Katie Stanton Susan B Anthony and others said that if we don't do it now it will be decades before women get the right to vote, so they were right, but it caused a divide that wasn't healed until 1890 between these two aspects of suffrage. movement I'm going to leave suffrage aside and talk about what else was happening in society and the important thing was that all the farm girls here looking for warmth went to Lawrence and Lowell to work in Mills because anything was better than working. on the farms here apparently in the minds of these girls they were gaining some independence they were working in very harsh unstable conditions long hours days a week for pennies but they did they went there en masse in 1828 the first strip organized by women occurred in a textile factory in Dover New Hampshire eh, it was the Cochico textile company, I guess they called it and the women organized a strike because the new owners of the factory had said that they were going to cut the salaries of only the women by 5 percent.

Now they're already beating them, you know, they're not cutting your hours, they're just cutting their wages, so they went on strike in 1828. Well, there were so many more peasant women hanging around ready to take their jobs that the strike failed and You know, the girls went back to work or went back to the farm, but this was the way women learned to speak for themselves, wasn't it? Weren't they learning to have civic voices? If we want change, we have to speak up and that's what they were doing in the workforce. It wasn't until 1912, in the famous bread and roses strike in Lawrence and Lowell, Massachusetts, that there was a real change in the working conditions of all these textile workers, but in that small time period women were learning to speak for themselves mark this photo was sent to me by a friend who moved to Ireland 10 years ago Margaret Hinchey was an Irish immigrant who worked in what we would now call one of New York's sweatshops The city was good for many immigrant women and if conditions were bad in those Mills and Lowell when Lawrence and more, they were also bad in the sweatshops, then Margaret Hinchey was a survivor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in 1911, this was in New York City.

It was a texo factory, it caught fire, the doors were locked for two reasons, one so that the women wouldn't take unauthorized breaks and also so that the labor organizers could come in and talk to the women, so when it caught fire, the women couldn't get out 146 people died, most of them women, she was one of the survivors and that made her move into active labor organizing like many other women and caught the attention of some of the very rich suffragettes of that we have the samecause. Here women need their rights, in this case they need safer working conditions and we are going to work together, so it was a merger in the early 20th century between the labor movement and the suffrage movement.

I started researching this, like I said before Covid and me. I took this photo in Washington DC at the Smithsonian and they had this wonderful exhibit that I saw right before Covet. This is one of the two brightly painted cars that they pulled to the demonstrations they were holding and you can see what it says up here. eight million working women need the vote equal pay for equal work there is a phrase down here that says that 90 of the teachers are women the nation needs intelligent voters okay and here it is difficult to see that it is the women's magazine that they are selling for five cents la Copia so in addition to these demonstrations and the cart and so on, they are publishing their arguments not only in favor of women's suffrage but also other civil rights.

And for labor rights, let's talk about how the roles of women were changing and I admit that these three women are exceptional cases but they were well known to the public and the public is starting to look at women a little differently than girls. work in the Molinos and let's see what these women are doing Annie Smith Peck was a mountaineer, she was the first person to climb the highest peak in Peru and a few years later she went and published this banner of votes for women on the top of one of the Taller. mountains and this is for the lady in black with her back turned who was talking about the medical book she had just read.

Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman to attend medical school in this country, they were just turned away when they applied because there were good women. She had some medical training and she applied and it was this school, Geneva Medical College Upstate New York, that said she is the most qualified of all the applicants that we have, so we are having trouble rejecting her, so I had the right idea to put it to a vote of the student body whether to admit a woman to medical school and the students, frankly, thought they were being pranked and also thought wouldn't it be silly to have a woman in class? and she will faint at the site of the blood and so on, so they voted for her and she had to accept the challenge and she surely showed them that she graduated first in her class, she did not faint when she saw the blood and that opened one of the professions to women, that was one of the demands from the beginning, remember that Clara Barton had organized a nursing course during the Civil War and then founded the American Red Cross modeled on what she had seen in Europe, so here there are women We move a little later to the 1890s, the Progressive Era, and meet people like Jane Adams.

Now we would call her a social services worker, you know, but also I don't think they invented the So in Chicago she bought a big property called the Call House, hired young middle-class women to work there, and then invited all the poor women. The immigrant women in the neighborhood where they would learn sanitation would learn English if they were immigrants. they would learn to capture the information they need to become citizens Child care sanitation nutrition all of this was replicated throughout the north eventually there were about 400, some of them founded by black women in strictly black neighborhoods, but it was mainly in the north, so The women said that if you don't help us improve our condition, we will help those who are even less fortunate than us.

Middle class women began to form women's clubs with the intention of improving society and the General Federation of Women's Clubs was founded in 1890. was doing that all over the country in their communities, volunteer work to improve the community and in In 1914 they officially joined the suffrage movement. Margaret Sanger is a bit of a controversial character, but what I'll talk about here is that at the time of, say, between 1890 and 1910 it was illegal to even talk about birth control, so women had huge families, it was even illegal to propagate the idea of ​​what we now call the rhythm method, you know, to publicly explain Margaret Sanger challenged the law that imported diaphragms from Europe that she had.

She knows classes where she taught about the Rhythm method because the belief that she also held firmly is that until you can control the size and time of your family you cannot control your life and how you can get out of it. Arrested, of course, you know, but this gave many women their first glimmer that they had control. We need to talk a little about New Hampshire. This is a photo from the New Hampshire Historical Society. There's a lot of voting and what do you notice about the people here? It's a shame, yes there are men here and in the New Hampshire Society men often had the role of treasurer or secretary or whatever or vice president, women may have been president, sometimes men were president, but this It was never just a man against a woman.

In the movement there were women and men for suffrage and women and men on the opposite side, so let's look at other people from New Hampshire. Julia Rugley was from Cornwall and was a very wealthy woman. She was the grand marshal of the 1914 grand suffrage parade in British Columbia. Mabel Park Lakeland in Churchill. also from a very wealthy woman from Cornwall, her husband was Winston Churchill, but not the one we know, who ran for governor, he was an author, etc., and she actually founded the Western New Hampshire type of suffrage organization , a little late, she did it around 1909, but it was important that these rich women had that role.

You know, Maxfield Parrish, he and his wife were members, but now I want to talk about Armenia. She and her husband Nathaniel lived in Concord. A very rich family. They attended the Women's Rights of 1868. The convention looked at each other and said we had to bring this back to New Hampshire and so they founded the New Hampshire Women's Suffrage Association and she served as its president almost until her death, which was before the amendment was passed. Now not only did she do that but she was an abolitionist, her house was part of the Underground Railroad, but she was also president of the New Hampshire Women's Christian Temperance Union, so let's think about what's going on in the 1870s. 1880s drinking is very important for men instead of going home.

They went out after work they drank They came home They ran out of money They beat their wives My children I'm sorry gentlemen I'm painting with a broad brush but the problem was such that women from all over the country came together and created the Women's Christian Temperance Union they said this is ruining our family life we ​​have to get rid of hard liquor so you see the triple threat and not just white Armenia but many women were part of that abolition suffrage temperance is now a good friend of white people was the senator Henry Blair, U.S.

Senator from New Hampshire, was famous, and I am very proud of him, for introducing the first proposed constitutional amendment in the U.S. Senate in 1886 to give women the right to vote. 1886 now fell in Queens because someone was turned away, it stopped there, but it was our Senator Henry Blair who did that and now my favorite New Hampshire suffragette is Narillo Marks Ricker, born in New Durham, she was one of those widows that She was talking about how she inherited property and married a much older man, he passed away, she was rich, she used her wealth to study law, she became a lawyer in Washington D.C., she took over her husband's property in Dover, New Hampshire, and tried to vote first in 1870.

Susan B. Anthony did so two years later, but Marilla Ricker tried in 1870. She went to the polls in Dover and said, I'm a taxpayer. Yes, she was, remember she was that rich one. Widow. I am an owner. I am over 21 years old. I'm literate, give me a ticket, well they didn't, but she did it every year for the next 50 years, so I said she passed the bar exam, she was a lawyer in Washington, she wanted to run for membership. from the bar in New Hampshire and they said, "Well, no, you can't do that, why not, because you're a woman." So she sued the New Hampshire Bar and won, opening the New Hampshire Bar to women who she never practiced but other women did in 1910.

It's 10 years before women can vote. She ran for governor, why did she do that? I have to read it word for word narella said I'm going to run for governor even though I don't have the slightest idea I've ever had I'm running to become governor so people get used to thinking of women as governors. You know, people have to think about one thing. For several centuries we have aggravated ourselves with the idea that I want to get the ball rolling. Well, that's how it was. It was only 82 years, 86 years later, that we elected our first female governor, but she sadly ran, you know, with the amendment that became law in August of 1920, allowing women the right to vote.

The November elections were the first in which the majority of women could. vote unfortunately suffered a stroke died a few minutes later a few days after the election it is very unlikely that she passed the vote we cannot find evidence that she did but I knew there were women all over the country who did it in 2015 The New Hampshire Women's Bar Association and the 2016 League of Women Voters teamed up to raise funds to paint her portrait. This is the inauguration and the gentleman you see on the right here is Representative Renee Cushing, who passed away just a year and a half ago. or that's what passed the legislation and you see Governor Maggie Nelson calling the court for the inauguration, so next time you're at the state house go see Marilla's service, another New Hampshire suffragette, Sally Woody , or the Portsmouth fans, she was allied with Alice Paul and I will say more about her later, but I will just say for now that this was the most militant branch of the late suffragettes, so, among other things, she picketed the Republican convention in 1920 when they didn't put a platform there for ratification and they barely did it. women get the right to vote so we have an equal rights amendment presented to Congress and she's lobbying in DC he was from Portsmouth a member of the league in Nashua gave me this photo which is his grandfather standing here in front and his Grandma is one of the two beauties in the taxi, this was a suffrage parade in Nashua, that's the famous Bell Tower, the women all dressed in white in the trucks as they do this suffrage parade, that's right, remember we said that the first women to speak out against slavery, us.

I was told to keep silent, that didn't last long, as in the early 1900's, the suffragettes spoke publicly. Reverend Dr. Anna Howard Shaw is seen speaking standing in a car on Wall Street, but they also had formal presentations and an event like this. They have been very popular and the suffragettes spoke out for this around let's say 1900 Stanton Anthony is very old Lucent Stone has passed away people are getting tired of seeing the same old people so who intervenes but what we call the golden suffragettes those famous women and rich people from New York City, you know the Gilded Age, their husbands are famous for their wealth and they decide to defend the cause of suffrage.

This is one of them. Catherine Dewar McKay not only fought for suffrage and organized debates about it, but she was one of the founders of the women's clubs have you heard of men's clothing, right, they were very popular in New York City, women said that we want ours and the men said: what do you mean you want the wrong club? But they did it anyway, they built their own clubs where they invited guest speakers, they had frank discussions about things like birth control, suffrage, their daughters went to college and came home with radical ideas, they invited labor organizers to come and talk about women workers' issues, so this is one of them, let's look at another one. an alpha Vanderbilt Belmont yes she is one of those Vanderbilts she had gotten in her divorce settlement from Mr.

Vanderbilt Marble House in Newport today we can buy a ticket and check it out you know well they didn't do it then they were totally private residences , so she decided to open Marble House to the public two consecutive weekends, you could buy a ticket for five dollars, if you put in today's money, it's about 135 dollars, and thousands and thousands of people wanted to see these houses on the that they had read and that is why they were trapped. and all the profits went to suffrage specifically for the Alice Falls National Women's part if they had been those rich women doing something that wouldn't have been too tremendous, but by then the gossip columnists were concentrating on what they were doing, so what these women wereIn the newspaper all the time they talked about each of their activities to raise funds for suffrage and ordinary people read about it, so they organized a suffrage parade in New York City, the first was in 1910, Now these are women who rarely walked further than from their house to their carriage to their friend's dining room, sure, but they are going to march down Fifth Avenue or wherever this famous photo from their 1912 parade with the most little suffragettes here, it's just beautiful, so these rich women are attracting attention again and raising the profile of women's suffrage one of the women who helped organize one of the New York parades, the one in 1917, was Mabel Ping Wally , born in China with a university doctorate and organized Chinese-American women to march in parades and when it's over, "I'll see why I find this so moving.

Leave it there for you. What else were the women doing to draw attention to the suffrage? Well, cars had been invented, the roads were terrible, but cars had been invented, so the two women in the photo above and their Cats made a five-mile trip, five pitiful five-month trips from the east coast to the west coast and back via another route, stopping in towns along the way to distribute suffrage literature and give suffrage speeches. Women still depended on suffrage petitions. and they gathered them around the country for delivery to Congress in Batesville Maryland and made that last trip with these boxes and boxes of petitions in a caravan of 80 cars driven by women.

Yeah, so here's perhaps the most impressive trick they've ever done. he did it on November 20, 1912 Woodrow Wilson had been elected the first Democratic president and almost two decades in those days the inauguration took place in March and not in January so the day before Wilson's inauguration the suffragettes planned this big parade and you know, don't worry. Fooled, yes, Woodrow Wilson was upset, let's look at some photos from the parade. I mean, arrive at the train station. You know, there's hardly anyone there to welcome him because everyone was in the parade, so they had this big parade or Tableau on the steps. from a treasury buildingwomen came from all over the country in march you know well dressed of course they only had women in the parade so these are winter troops on mountain horses there were four all women bands marching they marched by groups, this is called Housewives and they really made themselves a kind of uniform, they marched as groups of teachers, as groups of librarians, as nurses, university students came and marched and you can sell that for the banner, the things with flowers that They have been here and there were many of Those who came were between five and ten thousand people marching in this parade.

What year was this? This is 1913. March 1913. Now one of the sororities that wanted to march was Delta Sigma Theta from nearby Howard University and an all-black university, of course, all of them. black sorority and her advisor was a well-known suffragette internationally. She has very light skin, but she is black. Heritage Mary Church Terrell, the organizers of the parade were concerned about allowing the college group to march alongside the other college groups for two One reason is that in 1913 New York Washington was a segregated city, so this was a problem. The other was that if they made it an integrated parade, some of the white women might refuse to march, so at first they tried to ignore the black women, who might not want to.

I'll just walk away and forget about it when they tried to reverse, they finally did. They marched in the parade. Another black woman who was in the parade is Ida B Wells, the anti-lynching journalist from Chicago, and she was the only black person from the Illinois Brigade who came and expected to march with the Illinois Brigade. This parade had violence, so the organizers were right, there was going to be partly because the men there didn't want the women March and second to integrate, so for three hours the parade was delayed, it's just one stall until one of The suffragettes notified a relative of theirs in nearby Fort Myer that they were taking the Cavalry to the Cleveland Parade route and so, meanwhile, Ida.

B Wells had come out and they said maybe you should march with a black unit somewhere else in the parade, but then when the parade started she came back in and marched with the women of Illinois, where she belongs, so there was tension racial because There was racial tension in the country, but there were a lot of black suffrage, so here is Woodrow Wilson, who is with Wilson, you know his lovely wife, and he thinks he will have this beautiful presidency and before long we will have a world war that He is dealing and has to deal with all these struggles.

Yes, Woodrow Wilson was not opposed to women voting, but he was born and raised in the South, so he believed that if states wanted women to vote, they could grant them that this should not be a federal decision. Now we know that even today the states have a lot of control over how elections are run, we have to follow the US Constitution, but the procedures are the states and that was their position, it was a state's rights position , so let's talk about other reasons why people might have opposed suffrage there was a formal organization and guess who was the president a name we locals know from the movies John There is this matter too soft his daughter Alice not the Alice who lived there but her daughter was, so her daughter Alice was married to a U.S. senator, uh Wadsworth, from New York, and she became president of the National Association that opposes women's suffrage, so yeah, now her sister Helen was a suffragist. , so I would have loved to be at one of your things, yeah, yeah, so let's talk about Opposition Why were people opposed to women's suffrage?

Why was this so scary? Well, they would quote the Bible, but you can quote the Bible for anything. The cult of domesticity. We can blame this on good old Josephhahale, from Newport, she published these magazines in these. she was an anti-suffragette, she said that women's place is in the home, where they can nurture the next generation and develop their domestic skills at an early age Phyllis Schlafly yes, she was exactly here are some other reasons why women are mentally and emotionally Institute politics is not a place for a woman, do you like a sign at the bottom right?

I took that photo at that Smithsonian exhibit and then there was a sign underneath that said "um, okay, women are used to cleaning up after men, if the pool is dirty, we'll clean it." that women don't want to vote well some didn't that's true there were women that no the women are too busy this one I can believe that the farmer said that if you give women the right to vote, the women in the city will be able to do it. They vote easily, but the foreign women can't get to the city because they are too busy on the farm, so the city vote versus the farm vote will increase.

Think about that: the liquor industry was opposed to suffrage because if women start voting, I'll vote for prohibition, well yeah, that's what temperance is all about, but now I have to read something from a local newspaper at Warner. My friend found us at Warner. um, let's say, let me see what the independent newspaper The Cure Sarge is called. and times weekly and this is an editorial by Farmer Radford, so he starts by giving this reason against women's right to vote, the home is women's greatest contribution to the world and Hearthstone is their throne, our social structure is built around her and social justice is his responsibility and he continues that way American chivalry should never allow him to bear the burden of defending and maintaining the government that is how it ends, but directing the affairs of government is not within the sphere of women and political gossip would make her neglect matters at home, forget to mend our clothes and burn cookies, so there you have it, obviously the real reason behind this by the government is that voting is a matter of states' rights, so we have to continue to deal with that while women work in the states to try to get State amendments to allow voting.

The big debate in the early 20th century was whether we continue to do that to try to get a state to the Maybe allow women to vote or if we focus on a federal constitutional amendment and again the women's movement is divided by being those Believers, this wonderful map shows when women could vote for president, now women have partial voting rights in many places in New Hampshire, we got it in the 1880s to vote for school boards, big deal, but we got it anyway as did many many states, but when we start talking about voting for state legislatures, Congress and the President, that's when things got complicated, the blue state.

Sorry, big states had full voting rights even before they were states, since they were still territories. The first was Wyoming in 1869. now. Why is it like this? Because Wyoming men are such nice guys, probably not, it's probably another reason and the most likely reason is that at that time the ratio of men to women in Wyoming was six to one and one legislator publicly said if we give women the right to vote maybe some well-educated women from the East will move to Wyoming and become our school teachers and our librarians and, although he didn't say it, you could hear us and our wives thinking, so there were others. reasons why the West was progressive, but that was, you know, a big thing, it was the disproportion and the women who went there were hearty souls, so the blue states had full voting rights before the 19th was passed Amendment and where do you notice the gray? and the blue states, with only two small exceptions, are in the west, so the exceptions, well, we have New York state in 1917, those rich women in New York finally got it, they got the vote in the state and Michigan and yes, I know.

Part of it is Michigan too. I didn't draw the map. There was a lot of dispute about whether the Upper Peninsula was part of Michigan at the time, so that's as far as I can go. I've tried to make this more concrete than that so that those are the states that had full voting rights before 1920, the green states had some voting rights, they could vote for their state legislature, but probably not for congress, nor for the president, etc., but orange states like New Hampshire had to wait for the 19th Amendment. Isn't it a fascinating napkin? Meanwhile, war comes.

World War I. What's happening? Men go to war. Their jobs have to be filled. And these women who were too delicate to vote will now go and take over those positions. The YWCA. provided safe accommodation, the Red Cross recruited nurses, they were even recruiting women to work on the land. The army, as they called it, worked on the farms, but until the children returned, it was always thought that this was only temporary, some of the women didn't think it was that way, but that was the sign, look at the work they They made, they worked in the mines, they worked in the industry, oops, obviously, they were selling flags by the thousands at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, in this photo, the munitions industry was the largest employer of women in 1918.

They were making all of them. bombs and bullets, so we are doing heavy industry. Now you see them here in work uniforms. They would never go out on the street like this, but they are working in the railroad shipyard. Look at this close-up of women working in an ordinance theft company. These are delicate flowers. They took on roles as tram drivers, police officers. And when you see women marching in formation in uniform, you think of them differently and that's always happening. This was changing. public perception the national league for women's service in France the women were not only driving the ambulances but were repairing them when they broke down the wonderful book called The Hello Girls about American college students who, of course, are bilingual in French and English. recruited as telephone operators for the Allied Forces and there's a lot of stuff we had here in the library about that, did anyone see no, they thought they were in the Army, the Army signaling, yes, yes, there's a woman running around in New York?

Hampshire, who presented that show, called Hello Girls, the book and the documentary. Now, the Navy obviously recruited women because someone discovered that there were 11,000 women in the Navy in World War I, someone discovered that a Navy Yeoman, which means an employee doesn't have to be a man for women to take care of the administrative tasks and before going on the ships and fighting in the war, meanwhile, at home, the women are still pushingto Congress trying to pass the federal Amendment. annoying the president and Congress and the cat Carrick Chapman appears and says that we have to get enough states that have the right to vote to be able to ratify the amendment that is approved, so he united the movement by focusing on those two fronts in an almost dependent way. of the other. and here's Alice Paul, that's the name, you probably know she lived until 1977, I think he was young at the time, you know, well educated, she had gone to England, she met the Pankhursts in England, these are the militant suffragettes and you are listening. in using that word for the first time tonight in this country they were not suffragettes, they were suffragettes the term suffragette was coined by a British newspaper trying to diminish the efforts of those women in England, but just as black men have sometimes appropriated the n- word we wouldn't use um the suffragettes in England appropriated that term suffragette they were very diligent they were violent they blew up railways they tried to set fire to the prime minister's house all kinds of things well Alice Paul knew them she was a good Quaker girl, no She was willing to do none of that when she returned, but she adopted the philosophy that the party in power must be held accountable, so after four years Woodrow Wilson had done nothing for suffrage and she leaves. to see him defeated and that is why he organizes an anti-widro Wilson campaign, this is what he saw in one of his parades, yes, paying for it, you can say that Alice Paul and Woodrow Wilson were not friends, in fact, she started picketing in front of the White House.

They were called Silent Sentinels and they stood there with their sashes folding banners six days a week, that was all well and good until we entered the First World War in April 1917 and then it was considered unpatriotic, so you can see on the right how the unpatriotic cats All Kaiser Wilson types, you know you're fighting in Europe for the freedom of those people. What about the 20 million Americans? There was violence on these pickets and uh. Onlookers came and twisted the women's clothes, destroyed their banners, and threw things at them. so they were arrested, none of the people who were doing the violence, they were arresting the suffragettes, thank you, yes, that's right, and they were thrown into the Aqua Quan asylum in Virginia, this was so dirty and the vermin infested it, they even They closed it, they opened it to house the Lucy suffragettes.

Burns, who is this kind of secondary commando for Alice Paul and you see a photo of her in prison. There was speeding, it wasn't as bad as we heard in England, but Alice Paul was in prison for different periods of time, a total of seven. months she let that stop her, no, so she finally burns Woodrow Wilson's effigy, now it doesn't sound so dramatic, so you read more and find out if there's a two foot tall paper doll and a bunch of his speeches, but We are burning it. in front of the White House, so of course I think that led to 65 women being arrested, since now the war is over and Woodrow Wilson has to realize that the war would not have been won without the efforts of the women on the home front and abroad.

What the suffragettes want is for Wilson to use the power of the pulpit to convince Congress to pass the amendment and he ultimately does and that is why the House passed it. The Senate is reluctant and tries again. Ultimately, both the House and Senate approved the amendment. June 1919. Now all we need is 36 state legislatures to ratify it to get it to the states and where NewHampshire is the 16th to ratify it every time the state ratifies it. Alice Paul says the new flag on her party banner here and we get to the spring of 1920 and we have 35 states, we need 36.

Vermont and Connecticut didn't ratify it because there are things, I'm sorry, they're governors, they'll be nice, the governors are They refused to call a special session, they only met every two years in those days, so we're out of luck, we have 35 states, which leaves us in the south and where states' rights are strong. The discussion in the South and the race question, so you can see the poster here for a meeting at the Ryman Auditorium, yes, the Grand Old Opry to save the South from the Susan B. Anthony Amendment and those complete images of rebuilding people who are forced to swallow this. but Tennessee is the only state where there might be a chance in the South to get us ratified.

July in August 1920 the suffragettes come down to the state as do the anti-suffragists and these are some of the statues in the park there, so they're coming, they were there to try to convince one by one to convince the legislators to ratify the Amendment 19 and make women's suffrage the law of the land. Its emblem was a yellow rose. The anti-suffragists had red roses, so they could talk sweetly. legislator to accept his position they put a small rosebud in his lapel it was quite easy to count the votes it wasn't that um but they were doing serious people County passed the house Sorry it passed the senate in Tennessee now it has to pass the house on the last day After the debate, it looks like there's going to be a tie and, as you know, I don't win in government, so young Harry Byrne, the youngest of the state representatives, is handed a note on the floor of the room. legislature on that last day and vote for suffrage, don't leave them in doubt and she closes with don't forget to be a good boy and help Mrs.

Carriage now Harry Byrne had thought it was a known vote maybe they've seen you with a red rose, we're not sure, but they thought I was going to vote no and that would have created a while while roll call Harry Byrne votes yes, pandemonium breaks out from another legislator who had been abstaining until then. I just found out he had the courage and voted yes and basically the amendment was passed now, the next day Harry Byrne is asked to come back for some formalities and he speaks on the floor of the house and says I voted for suffrage because it was the right thing to do and because it is always good for a child to listen to his mother, so there is the amendment ratified in Tennessee on August 18.

It became the law of the land when the U.S. Secretary of State signed it on August 26, 1920, almost 103 years ago. So what do we have? Well, the first election in which eight million women can vote is approaching. Women voted out of a possible total of 20 million in the country. It's not a huge turnout, but the southern states made it nearly impossible. They said you missed the registration deadline so you can. I didn't vote, there were all these other complications, they're still doing it, yes, you still know the technicalities, but women took this responsibility seriously and they had always fought for civic voices and now they're going to use them and you see. these old newspaper photographs of women going to the polls had to learn to do this um the researcher that you had last week last month, Jenna Carroll from Keene, discovered this fascinating fact that when some of the women were registering at Keene in 1920, I had to answer questions like what's your name and they said Mrs.

John Anderson because that's how you did it, you didn't say reassuring, they didn't like it? Then the registrars said and how old are you? they were saying how old are you and they also had literacy tests at that time so a woman was handed a literacy test and she looked at the young man and said young man, I was your third grade teacher of Of course, I can read, like this that women had to learn how to do those things to register and that's when the League of Women Voters was born. Each state that ratified the cost of the constitutional amendment was allowed to change its name to American Women's National. suffrage association to the League of Women Voters with the goal of helping people understand the mechanics of voting that I just showed was not easy and also learn to study issues so that women can vote from a position of knowledge, it is that's why we celebrated our centennials at exactly the same time, here in New Hampshire, two women instantly ran for office, they missed the filing deadline, remember it was ratified in August, but they had to apply in writing, a She was a Republican, the other was a Democrat, they both won, so we immediately had two women. in our state legislature and we had a senator 10 years later, but she didn't vote in 1920.

Well, Native Americans remember they started it all. They had Denisoni. They did not gain full citizenship until 1924. Therefore, Chinese-born immigrants would not vote. like Mabel Lee, who had organized a parade, did not gain citizenship until 1943. In the South, black men had been harassed, intimidated, and tricked into not voting for decades. Black women faced the same problem in the South, it wasn't until President Johnson signed the 1965 voting rights agreement in which he said there was tea behind enforcing black voting rights and of course, We are old enough to remember that 18, 19 and 20 year olds could not vote until 1971.

There were still many people who could not vote, reaching 71. In the 1960s, more women voted than men and that is still true and, uh, we vote differently than we did back then, we've heard of soccer moms, you know, and NASCAR dads, etc. different voting philosophies, so what happened to the suffragettes? Well, Harry Chapman's Pat organization became the League of Women Voters. We still do that kind of nonpartisan work. Alice Paul's National Women's Party immediately started trying to get Equal Rights Amendments, yes, and as you know, they haven't. however, anti-suffragists like Alice Haye disbanded but remained anti-communist and anti-progressive on the part of workers and I think they liked being mobile phones.

This wonderful photo from January 2013 is after the 2012 election in New Hampshire. became the first nation in the country to have an all-female congressional delegation and we elected a female governor so Governor Maggie is here and of course Congresswoman Harrell says Porter and Senators Kelly Ayotte and James Shaheen, this was the front page of the New York Times. but they all had an office set up and one hundred years after the 19th Amendment, our first vice president, Pamela Harris, and I will be happy to answer questions or comments if you haven't. Yes, we will go out. Yes, it's 8pm.

We'll finish. I just had a couple of questions. I know we have another event coming up.