Women's Suffrage: Crash Course US History #31

Episode 31: Feminism and Suffrage Hi, I'm John Green, this is a

crash

course

on American

history

and today we're going to talk about

women

in the progressive era. OMG, that is a fantastic hat. Wait, votes for

women

? So between Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and all those guys heading off to war, women in this period have been surprisingly footnoted... Mr. Green, Mr. Green. I would NEVER put a woman in a footnote. She would be the center of my world, my reason for being, my joy of living. Oh, me from the past. This reminds me of why you got a C+ in French 3.

Let me tell you, Past Self, that your strange adoration of women is a kind of misogyny because you imagine women as these beautiful, fragile things that can be possessed. It turns out that women are not things. They are people in precisely the same way that you are a person, and in the progressive era they demanded to be seen as full citizens of the United States. In short, women do not exist to be your joy of life. They come to have their own joy of living. introduction So it's tempting to limit ourselves to the discussion of how women gained the right to vote with the passage of the 19th Amendment, but if we focus too much on constitutional

history

, we'll miss a lot.

Some historians refer to the thirty years between 1890 and 1920 as the “age of women” because it was during this time that women began to have greater economic and political opportunities. Women were also helped by legal changes, such as gaining the right to own property, control their salaries, and make contracts and wills. In 1900, almost five million women worked for wages, mainly in domestic service or light industry, such as the textile industry. Women in America have always been vital contributors to the economy as producers and consumers and have always worked, whether for wages or taking care of children and the home.

And as someone who just returned from paternity leave, let me tell you, this is no joke. And American women were also actively involved as reformers ever since America became a thing. And those reformist movements brought women into state and national politics before the dawn of the progressive era. Unfortunately, their greatest achievement, Prohibition, was also our greatest national shame. Oh yeah, okay, okay. It's not actually in our top five national embarrassments. But probably women's greatest influence came through the membership AND leadership of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. The WCTU was founded in 1874 and by 1890 had 150,000 members, making it the largest women's organization in the United States.

Under the leadership of Frances Willard, the WCTU adopted a broad reform agenda. As if it included pushing for women's right to vote. The feeling was that the best way to stop people from drinking was to pass local laws that made it more difficult to drink, and to do this it would be very helpful if women could vote. Because American men were a bunch of alcoholic scoundrels who weren't going to vote to get rid of beer hoses. In 1895, Willard boldly declared: “The women of America are coming to broader freedom. For too long it has been argued that women do not have the right to participate in these movements (…) Politics is a woman's place.” But women's role in politics expanded greatly during the progressive era.

As in previous decades, many reformers were middle and upper class women, but the growing economy and the expansion of what might be called the upper middle class meant that there were more educational opportunities and this growing group of college-educated women leaned in and They became leaders of new movements. Sorry, there was no way I could get through this without "leaning in." I love that book. So, as we have said before, the 1890s saw the rise of the American mass consumer society and many of the new products manufactured in the second wave of industrialization were aimed at women, especially “labor-saving” devices such as washing machines.

If you've ever had a baby, you may have noticed that she poops and vomits mostly all the time. I recently called the pediatrician and said, "My 14-day-old daughter poops fifteen times a day." And he said, "If anything, that seems low." So the washing machine is a real game-changer. And many women realized that being the primary consumers who shopped for the home gave them powerful leverage to make change. Chief among them was Florence Kelley, a college-educated woman who, after participating in various progressive reform causes, came to head the National Consumers League. The League sponsored boycotts and shaped consumption patterns that encouraged consumers to buy products made without child labor or what we would now call labor exploitation.

Which at the time was often simply known as "work." And there was also a subtle shift in gender roles as more and more women worked outside the home. African American women continued to work primarily as domestic servants or in agriculture, and immigrant women mostly held low-paying factory jobs, but for native-born white women there were new opportunities, especially in office jobs. And this shows how technology created opportunities for women. Almost all telephone operators in the United States were women. In 1920, office workers and telephone operators made up 25% of the female workforce, while domestic workers were only 15%. A union leader named Abraham Bisno commented that working gave immigrant women a sense of independence: “They acquired the right to personhood, something foreign to the highly patriarchal family structures of the old country.” Of

course

, this also meant that young women often had conflicts with their parents, as a job provided them with more freedom, money, and perhaps, if they were lucky, a room of their own.

Oh, is it time for the Mystery Document? Please let it be Virginia Woolf, let it be Virginia Woolf. The rules here are simple. I assume the author of the Mysterious Document. Either I'm right or I'm surprised. Alright, let's see what we have. “The spirit of personal independence of women today is sure proof that a change has taken place... the radical change in the economic position of women is advancing upon us... The increasing individualization of democratic life brings inevitable changes for both our daughters and our daughters. our children... One of its most notable characteristics is women's demand not only for their own money, but also for their own work for the sake of personal expression.

Few girls today fail to manifest some signs of the desire for individual expression…” Well, that's not Virginia Woolf. Stan, I'm going to be honest, I don't know the answer to this question. However, it's been Woodrow Wilson for the past two weeks. You wouldn't do that to me again, would you? I guess Woodrow Wilson. Final answer. Damn. Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the book Women and the Economy? That? Aaaaaah! The idea that having a job is valuable only for the independence it brings and as a form of “individual expression” was quite radical, since most women, and especially most men, were not comfortable with the idea that being a housewife was similar to being a servant to one's husband and children.

But of course, that changes when staying home becomes one of many options and not the only option available. And then came birth control. Hurrah! Women who needed to work wanted a way to limit the number of pregnancies. Being pregnant and having a baby can make it difficult to hold a job, and babies are consumptive, diaper-wearing, things-breaking machines. They basically eat money. And we love them. But birth control advocates like Margaret Sanger and Emma Goldman also argued that women should be able to enjoy sex without having children. To which the men said: "Can women enjoy sex?" Believe it or not, that was seen as a pretty radical idea and led to changes in sexual behavior, including increased consumption of skoodilypooping in general.

Goldman was arrested more than 40 times for sharing these dangerous ideas about female sexuality and birth control and was eventually deported. Sanger, who worked to educate working-class women about birth control, was sentenced to prison in 1916 for opening a clinic in Brooklyn that distributed contraceptive devices to poor immigrant women. The fight for birth control is important for at least three reasons. First, it put women at the forefront of debates over free speech in the United States. I mean, some of the most ardent advocates of birth control were also associated with the IWW and the Socialist Party. Secondly, birth control is also a public health issue and many women during the progressive era entered public life to bring about changes related to public health, leading the crusade against tuberculosis, the so-called white plague and other diseases.

Third, it transcends class lines. Having or not having children is an issue for all women, regardless of whether they went to college, and the contraceptive movement united upper-, middle-, and lower-class women in a way that other social movements never did. Another group of progressive women took on the role of addressing the problems of the poor and spearheaded the Settlement House movement. The key figure here was Jane Addams. OMG, is there still Adams in American history? Oh, he spells it Addams-family-Addams, not like the founding fathers-Adams. Anyway, she founded Hull House in Chicago in 1889. The settlement houses became the incubators of the new field of social work, a field in which women played a very important role.

And Addams became one of the most important spokespersons for progressive ideas in the United States. And yet, in many places, while all this was happening, women technically couldn't vote. But their growing participation in social movements in the early 20th century led them into electoral politics. It is true that women were voting before the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Voting is a state issue, and in many Western states, women were granted the right to vote in the late 19th century. States could also grant women the right to run for public office, which explains how the first congresswoman, Jeannette Rankin, was able to vote against America's entry into World War I in 1917.

That said, passage and ratification of the 19th Amendment is a big issue in American History. It is also a recent agreement. For example, when my grandmothers were born, women couldn't vote in much of the United States. The amendment says that states cannot deny people the right to vote because they are women, which is not as interesting as the political organization and activity that led to its passage. Alright, let's get to the thought bubble. The

suffrage

movement was extremely fragmented. There was a first wave of

suffrage

, exemplified by the women of Seneca Falls, which metamorphosed into the National American Women Suffrage Association, or NAWSA.

Most of NAWSA's leadership was made up of middle and upper class women, often involved in other progressive causes, who unfortunately sometimes represented the darker side of the suffrage movement. Because these upper-class progressives frequently used nativist arguments to demand the right to vote. They argued that if the vote could be granted to ignorant immigrants, some of whom barely spoke English, then it should also be granted to native women. This is not to say that elitist arguments prevailed, but they should be recognized. By the early 20th century, a new generation of college-educated activists had arrived on the scene.

And many of these women were more radical than the early supporters of suffrage. They organized the National Women's Party and, under the leadership of Alice Paul, pushed for the vote using aggressive tactics that many early generations of women's rights advocates considered unseemly. Paul had been studying in Britain between 1907 and 1910, where she saw the most militant women's rights activists at work. She adopted her tactics, which included protests that led to imprisonment and loud denunciations of the patriarchy that would make Tumblr proud. And during World War I she compared Wilson to the Kaiser and Paul and her followers chained themselves to the White House fence.

The activists then went on hunger strike during their seven-month prison sentence and had to be force-fed. Woodrow Wilson had half-heartedly supported suffragefemale in 1916, but the war divided the movement even more. Most suffrage organizations believed that wartime service would help women earn respect and equal rights. But other activists, like many progressives, opposed the war and saw it as a potential threat to social reform. But in the end, the war ended up helping the cause. Patriotic support for the war by women, especially those working in wartime industries, convinced many that it was simply wrong to deny them the right to vote.

And the mistreatment of Alice Paul and other women in prison for her cause generated outrage that further pushed the Wilson administration to support granting rights to women. Thanks, thought bubble. Thus, women's long struggle to gain the right to vote ended with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. But in some ways, the final granting of suffrage was a bit anticlimactic. For one thing, it was overshadowed by the 18th Amendment, Prohibition, which affected both women and men in large numbers. Also the Gatsbys. Many bad things could be said about Prohibition, and I have, but the anti-alcohol crusade galvanized and politicized many women, and organizations like the WCTU and the Anti-Saloon League introduced even more political activism.

But while the passage of the 19th Amendment was a major victory, Alice Paul and the National Women's Party were unable to muster the same support for an Equal Rights Amendment. Paul believed that women needed equal access to education and job opportunities. And here they came into contact with other women's groups, especially the League of Women Voters and the Women's Trade Union League, who opposed the ERA for fear that equal rights would mean the unraveling of hard-won benefits such as mothers' pensions and laws that limited women's working hours. labour. So, the ERA failed and then another proposed amendment that would have given Congress the power to limit child labor gained ratification in just 6 states.

So in many ways, the period from 1890 to 1920, which roughly corresponds to the Progressive Era, was the high tide of women's rights and political activism. It culminated in the ratification of the 19th Amendment, but the right to vote did not lead to meaningful legislation that truly improved women's lives, at least not for a while. There were also no immediate changes in the roles women were expected to play in the social order as wives and mothers. Still, women were able to increase their autonomy and freedom in the burgeoning consumer market. But it is important to note that, like other oppressed populations in American history, women were not granted these rights, but instead had to fight for rights that were said to be inalienable.

And we are all better for their fight and their victory. Women's liberation is certainly a complicated phrase and will take a new turn in the roaring 20s, which we will talk about next week. See you later. Crash Course is produced and directed by Stan Muller. Our script supervisor is Meredith Danko. Associate producer is Danica Johnson. The show is written by my high school history teacher, Raoul Meyer, Rosianna Rojas and me. And our graphic team is Thought Café. Every week there is a new title on Libertage. You can suggest subtitles in the comments where you can also ask questions about today's video that will be answered by our team of historians.

Thanks for watching Crash Course and as we say in my hometown, don't forget to be awesome. I'm going to go this way, Stan, just kidding! Suffrage -