A Geek History of Time - Episode 331 - Interview With Dr. Mona Siegel on Her Book Peace On Our Terms Part II

Episode Date: August 29, 2025

Item one, hit the grocery store, item two, laundry, item three, over three, capitalism. You know, for somebody who taught Latin, your inability to pronounce French like hurts. Oh, look at you getting to the end of my stuff. Mother fucker. But seriously, I do think that this bucolic, luxurious, live your weird fucking dreams, kind of life is something worth noting. Because, of course, he had. I got into an argument, essentially, with some folks as to whether or not punching Nazis is something you should do.

And they're like, no, then you're just as bad as the Nazis. I was like, the Nazis committed genocide. I'm talking about breaking noses. Drink scotch and eat strict nine. All right, you can't leave that lying there, luxury poultry. Yes, yes. Fancy chickens. Yes, fancy chickens.

Pet, pet, fancy chickens. Pet fancy chickens. This is a geek history of time. Where we connect nerdery to the real world. My name is Ed Blaylock. I'm a world history teacher here in Northern California. And I gave an exam to my students. a few days ago, and I did my absolute best to build the highest floor into this test

that I possibly could because the test wasn't really the point. The point was the review packet that I wanted them to do beforehand, right? And so I wanted the test to be basically like an afterthought and like this is going to help everybody's grades, you know. And so, like you do, I included some, you know, joke answers in the multiple choice options. And one of my favorites, because the curriculum for seventh grade, or sixth grade, this was, talks about early Christianity. And so one of the answers that I had, the question was, who were the apostles? and one of my, you know, obviously this isn't it, answers was John Paul, George, and Ringo, which, you know, I thought it was hysterical.

All you need is love. All you need is love. I mean, you know. And apparently that was what one of my students thought because I actually had a kid give me that as an answer. So, you know, it just. It just shows that no matter how hard you work to develop a high test floor, some students are going to try to dig a sub-basement. So that's what I had happened professionally this week.

How about you? Well, I'm Damien Harmony. I am a U.S. history teacher up here in Northern California. and okay so the cliche in the world is at least in maybe not in the world i can't speak to the world but the cliche in america seems to be look out once they're dangers and i teach high school i have always always always always found that group of kids to be the group of kids that i vibe with the best that does not mean i haven't loved every stage of my children's development but at no point they'd ever want to slow things down we've talked about this

before i am now uh as of this recording uh the proud parent of two teenagers and i do say proud because that means i didn't let them die at this point so i am proud to have kept them alive in this that is an achievement it is anybody who's been a parent will agree uh-huh good despite their their best efforts oh yeah but um but i have two teenagers and i I love it. I absolutely love it. And I was told that that is quite a contrast with how other people regard their teenagehood. So like when my daughter was turning 13, you know, she'd be like, I can't believe, I can't believe I'm going to be 13 in a month. I'm like, I can't wait. This is so cool. And it's not like she's materially that different from 12 and 13 because she's

always been whatever age going on 40. But you beat me to saying it. Yeah. But. But, But like, you know, now that she's crossed through that, that threshold, now that she's pierced through that membrane, I'm, you know, it's a little extra. It's now I don't have to say, well, she's a 12 year old, but she acts older. It's like, no, I got two teenagers. Other people have been like, no, I am not going to accept that she's turning 13. There's no way. No, I want them to be my babies forever. And I'm just like, I could not disagree more.

and there's room in my world for both to exist. Obviously, I think it's whatever age you really, really appreciate. You really appreciate it. My partner, she loved them when they were like three to five. We've talked about this. Oh, yeah, a few times. Oh, my God. It is so rad having teenagers in my house.

It is just the coolest thing. So that's it. I love that for you. And I hope that when my son gets there, we have the same relationship to it. Yeah. Well, you know, what is the phrase? Don't let them do at three what you don't want them doing at 13, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's and so I took it the opposite way. You know, like, you know, the golden rule is pretty cool unless you're a maniac. You know, do unto others as you would have them do under you. If you're a maniac who wants to beat them to death while wearing a Bugs Bunny outfit, then that's a messed up world. But don't do to others what you don't want done to you. That's a better golden rule, right? Okay. I go the other way with the, you know, with, with this part is like, don't stop what you don't want later.

It's encourage what you do want later. Yeah. And I do that. And, you know, I dropping my son off to school, I always throw him one of these and he always throws me one of these. And it's so weird to the people dropping off their kids. For the, for the audience experiencing this as an audio medium. So everyone. Medium, yeah. Damien, uh, through, uh, devil horns, essentially.

No, the I love you. What's what's wrong with you? Oh, I don't know. Well, I, I'm not. I'm not. Okay. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I threw the I love you in sign language, which, oh, okay. And apparently thinks the deaf people are the devil. Um, you heard of you know, you can't trust them. Like, you're kidding. Just because it's an audio medium doesn't mean you should be picking on deaf people. Yeah. Well, you know. Uh, but I threw that son throws him the finger. There you go. So.

And it is hilarious every single day. It is so fun. So to the point where now they'll flip me off at home and I'll, I'll take that and I'll, I'll, like, loop my finger in on it. And I'll be like, oh, birdie swear. So. Nice. It's fun.

Nice. Anyway, enough about us. Yeah. We have convinced to come back, uh, Dr. Mona Siegel, history professor at Sack State, uh, author of two books, including peace on our terms and New York Times contributor, Dr. Siegel, Mona, how you doing? I'm doing all right. How are you guys? Oh, I'm just living the good life. I get into interview people, hung out with some teenagers today. It was a good day. When last we talked about your book, we were determining that the underlying thesis was that men should be nowhere near peace talks because they're too testero.

and emotional. I'd like to continue that line of inquiry. By asking, actually, so this is 1919. Okay, we're going from January to, I want to say like August or September in your book. November. November. It does get to November. Okay. I don't remember that being part of one of the chapter titles. Yeah, Autumn. Okay, Autumn. Yeah, there you go. I thought Autumn. I thought August. But, okay, so it goes January to November of 1919. Influenza brought over by American soldiers from Kansas on American transports to the point where there were some American transports that I believe the number was one in every five was dead. There were some transports where that was true because I was reading in the biography of Smedley Butler that he actually

had to organize. So he wanted to be in charge of the war efforts, but Pershing got it for the American Expeditionary Force. So Butler, though, was in charge of bringing people and basically onboarding them. And he immediately noticed that a whole lot of people are coming off dead from a disease. So he's like, okay, how do we segregate this out in such a way that it saves lives? And he starts putting duck boards everywhere and getting them out of the muck. And just like, he really kind of revamped it and what I noticed was what wasn't being mentioned was the flu but it absolutely was the flu like and and so 1919 you know the war is over by November of 18 partly due to the the influenza epidemic like just tearing out like the the guts of a lot of

battalions um so now everybody's taken it home which is worse and uh it's it's It's saying basically, you know, it's nature saying, hold my beer to humanity, killing 10 million people. What impact was the influenza epidemic having on these peace efforts? You know, it's so interesting as I was finishing up my research and writing on this project as COVID-19 was taking hold. When were you doing that, by the way? Well, I had finished, I shouldn't say that. I had finished writing this came. My book was released in the very beginning of 2020.

So I did my first couple of book events and then we all got sent home. Wow. But as I was reflecting on my book that had just come out and we were all getting sent home. And COVID-19 was putting us all on lockdown. I just started thinking, my God, how was it that these people were traveling all over the world and, you know, locking themselves into these state rooms for hours and days on end, and it wasn't anyone concerned. And, you know, to a large degree, they just went on with the business of diplomacy and the business of activism.

And when they fell sick, they took to their beds and hopefully came out again. But there's moments when the Spanish flu wears its. head in the book. There's a period of time in the middle of the negotiations where now people are pretty sure that President Wilson had contracted the Spanish flu and, you know, it had greatly weakened him. And in fact, the women who won an audience before the League of Nations Commission, whom I talk about in my book, kept getting delayed and delayed and delayed about when they should come because they had the commission on hiatus while they waited for Wilson to recover. But for the most part, they didn't, they didn't stop.

They just kept going. Wow. That's, I mean, that makes sense in that, like, we prior to, we just interviewed a bunch of teachers. We did a series of those who stayed. We did a series of those who left. And eventually I'm going to do a series with professors of like, what are we sending to y'all? because I just love being depressed. And so, but what we noticed with those who stayed was what had changed pre-COVID, post-COVID.

And a lot of us said, you know, I don't work sick anymore. Whereas that was such the norm. Like if you've got the flu, okay, maybe it's a movie day at work, but it's probably you're going to sit at your desk. You're going to have them working independently. Like there's punt days, you know. Um, but just everybody did work sick. And, and back then, that makes perfect sense. Masks were a big deal at for a time that plenty of people violated. Uh, thank goodness we learned. Um, but, um, I also remember there were two or three different outbreaks of smallpox in the United States from about 1902 until about 1928, um, where I, I know this because I made an assignment for my students. about anti-vax societies.

And so there were anti-vaccination cards from Tara Hout, Indiana in 1902, you know, and stuff like that. It's we actually, I found out we had an anti-vaccination society before we had vaccinations. We were ahead of their time. Yeah. It's very elation at the time, but, you know, same idea. But, but yeah, so it's, it makes sense that, I guess, that they would go on with their business. and at the same time it's something that killed so many people that you would expect it to have like before you'd expect it to have an impact

and and I'm remembering that when COVID happened I was teaching world history for the first time in like 10 years and the week that we went home Garvillo Prinkip had just taken aim the the car had stalled couldn't figure out reverse and I remembered after World War I was going to do a three three week lesson on the influenza epidemic and it was a new thing I was doing and I was going to say I was my rationale was it killed 10 times the people that this war killed and I spent at least three weeks on the war week one causes week two conduct week three consequences should sound familiar um but um and then I was going to do three weeks on on the pandemic and treat it kind of the same way. And then I was going to do two weeks on the rise of fascism. And instead,

because of the rise of fascism, I didn't get to teach, you know, we so badly handled the pandemic that I didn't get to teach either thing. And so there's a whole classful, a class worth of kids who have no idea how World War I ended now. Yeah. So, but God, it's, it's just, it, it boggles my mind that as big as it was, people just did kind of. go on with it yeah yeah that's so um want to switch to sumay chang chang or is am i mispronouncing that's chang okay um going from being a bomb hiding revolutionary to a delegate seems kind of a jarring uh transition um did she express at all the amplitude of change in her life going from one to the other?

So we're talking about a woman by the name of, who went by Sumai Chang in the West. Her given name in Chinese was Chang Yu Shia. And she was the only allied woman to be officially appointed as a delegate to a peace delegation during the Paris Peace Conference. And she was charged with the Chinese government with representing women because they assumed that all these modern Western nations

were going to have women delegates and women's issues on the table because that's what modern nations did. And she was also appointed as a liaison with the West. So who was this woman, the only woman, to be appointed a delegate when America, Britain, none of these so-called civilized countries could wrap their brain around it. while she was from a super wealthy Mandarin family in Guangzhou in southern China and had received a pretty impressive education for a woman of her era. She had refused to have her feet bound when her grandmother tried to have her feet bound.

She had the bandages ripped off and through such a tantrum that they didn't try again. and eventually was drawn to Dr. Sun Yat-San's Revolutionary Alliance, which was seeking to overthrow the Qing Dynasty, which was the last dynasty in China. And she played a significant role. There were hundreds of women who joined the forces of the Revolutionary Alliance, and she did indeed smuggle explosive material into Beijing in 1911 leading up. to this revolution. From there, though, her family eventually packed her off to Paris.

Her life was threatened. Her family packed her off to Paris. She had longed to have a Western education for much of her life, and she enrolled in the Sorbonne to study law. And so she had been in Paris during the war. She was a firm supporter of the Allied effort. She was a firm supporter of of China joining the war on the ally side, which they did in 1917, in part because the Americans also pressed them to do so. And from there forward, she helped to recruit Chinese laborers who came over to France and, well, France in particular, and replaced men in the factories so that they could go off and fight at the front.

So it's in that context. She was back in China. at the end of the war as the peace delegation was being put together, and she was invited to do so. So from revolutionary bomb smuggler to only female peace delegate, on the one hand, it seems to like two different extremes, peacemaking and revolution making are not the exact same activity, but for Suu Me Chung, this was primarily tied up with the desire to establish, a modern sovereign Chinese state that would in turn be democratic and serve to advance women's rights as well as those of all Chinese people. So it was all part of a package of Chinese patriotism

wrapped up in an anti-imperial and anti-colonial? Yeah, anti-colonial context. And in that respect, it was all one of a piece. Okay. So just as a clarification for folks who aren't entirely familiar with the timeline of modern Chinese governance, she was working with Soniazzan. And at this time, immediately post-World War I, we're talking about the Republic of China, correct? Yeah. I mean, we're talking about a period of time where there were still kind of different warring parties trying to establish what the shape of a post-imperial China was going to look like.

But she had aligned herself with the nationalist government, which had originated with Sun Yat-San, was now increasingly under the control of Chiang Kai Shack and would secure control over China. she throughout her entire life actually during this time period and after world war two as well uh sume chung was an adamant patriot and nationalist but she was never a communist okay yeah uh sonya san is uh sonya san is gonna die in 25 if i recall so um yeah yeah given you know it's interesting a through line that i found and i didn't bring it up in the in the last episode um but it works here too. Everybody seems to just really, really think that Wilson is a different person

than who he actually is and that Americans are different than who they are. And he somehow keeps getting all this good faith despite all of the bloom being knocked off repeatedly. There's a huge anti-Chinese sentiment in America in America's government at this time, right? And it's it's going to be in 1924 that they just make permanent the ban on Chinese immigration. And that doesn't lift until 43 because it's kind of embarrassing during World War II.

But like they were happy to just keep extending the the Chinese Exclusion Acts. So why is why are Chinese delegates also thinking like America? All right. These are the people we can really, really work with to. you know, is it because America came out claiming to be anti-colonial the whole time? Yeah, America was seen as less colonial than the major Western European powers. So relatively speaking, less involved in meddling, not uninvolved, but less involved in meddling in internal. Honduras would like a word.

Right. In internal Chinese affairs. Okay. And, you know, really kind of talked to the talk. during World War I of being supportive of this new Republican government, at least in name, in China. But it's interesting, Sue Me Chung, for reasons I won't even go into, when she traveled from China to Paris for the peace negotiations, actually first crossed the Pacific and landed in Vancouver,

worked her way across the United States, and then cross the Atlantic. Atlantic. So she took about the longest route you can almost imagine to get there. But she held a number of press conferences in the United States and came back through the United States afterwards as well. And she was somewhat critical of Chinatowns, the idea that Chinese people were being somewhat segregated. But largely held her tongue. She was very much a diplomat in every, you know, by instinct, I would say. and was much more attuned to pressing for full recognition of China as a sovereign power free from old, you know, treaty obligations and with full territorial integrity. And that's what she was really focused on when representing her country in 1919. Okay. Had she and Shirawi been active 20 years prior, do you think they would have linked? women's liberation and national liberation as one in the same? I mean, 20 years prior, it's just not imaginable that these two women could have been in the

position that they were in, the access that at least some women, elite women had to education, to a broader national and international outlook. There's just so much context behind what made them capable of acting as activists and anti-colonialists and nationalists in this era. Sure. You know, the question almost doesn't make sense. I get that sometimes.

Fair is fair. There's this wonderful story about the Rose Bush gun. And I know that people don't know what that is. Could you please tell us the story of the Rose Bush gun? Yeah, yeah. Although I still dream of when it's going to appear as a major motion picture action story. But maybe someone will listen to your podcast and pick it up. So Sue Mae Chung, when she arrived in Paris,

and she arrived in April of 1990, so the negotiations were already fairly advanced by that point in time. When she got off the train, she told journalists that she was excited to work with other feminists and to focus on women's rights. But that's not what happened because right at the moment that she landed, the big four, actually the big three by then, the United States, France and Britain announced that this particular part of China known as the Shandong Peninsula, which had been controlled by the Germans prior to the war, was not going to be returned to China. Instead, it was going to be granted to the Japanese. And that was seen as an absolute betrayal of the allies of China and was completely unacceptable. And so Tsumai Chung, along with a handful, well, a couple hundred Chinese students who were in Paris at the time, some of them still soldiers who hadn't, or not soldiers, workers, who had been come over during the war and had not yet been sent back home,

began trying to set up demonstrations to catch the attention of the peacemakers saying, no, this isn't right. In the meantime, protests broke out in China itself, known as the May 4th movement, which would become a major turning point in Chinese history. So anyway, time ticks on, and the Allies don't relent. They're still intent on giving the Shandong Peninsula to Japan,

and Tsumai Chung is among those who believe that China simply needs to walk away from these negotiations and refuse to sign the Bersai Treaty because of the treatment of China. And this is a scary diplomatic move to contemplate. And for the Chinese delegates, the plan of potentiaries who ultimately had to make the final decision, they did not get any clear guidance from the government back at home. Their government essentially left the decision in their hands. And so the night before the signing of the Paris peace treaty, the Versailles Treaty, sorry, so in Versailles, which is in the suburbs of Paris, the chief delegate representing China disappeared from Paris. Nobody,

initially knew where he went. And one of the wives of another of the diplomats eventually told Sumei Chung that he had gone to stay in a villa in the outskirts of Paris, known as a suburb known as Saint-Clu, which is on the way to Versailles. And so Simei Chung and the others immediately assumed he went there to get away from the protesters and the young people and anyone that might tie his hands so that he could go and still sign this treaty that was so unpopular. Once Tsumai Chung found out where he was, she hopped in a taxi with one of her friends and booted out to get there at the same time sending word to her to the others, get out to the suburb as soon as you can.

They found the house where he was kind of hold up, demanded that they be let in to speak to him. He refused to open the door. And they staged a sit-down protest in the garden outside this house. At one point in time, the secretary to the Chinese delegation showed up in a car, got out of the car with a big briefcase stuffed with papers that they assumed to somehow be related to the signing of this treaty. And so he went into the house and they said, when he comes out, we've got to get our hands on those papers. So Sumai Chung broke a branch off of a rose bush and rubbed it in the dirt. So it looked vaguely as though it was shaped like a revolver. And when he stepped back out of the house, she essentially held him up with her rosebush gun and said, give us those papers. He dropped

to the briefcase in flight and was terrified. And then eventually in the early morning hours, the next day the chief delegate relented, allowed the protesters who had spent the night in this garden, in vigil, let them in. And as Sumei Chung tells the story, they talked and talked and talked and wore him down. And the signing ceremony came and went. And China's delegates were the only ones who didn't show up and who refused to put their signature on the very very Treaty. So she played a dramatic role along with others in insisting that China not bowed to the will of the great allied powers in the moment. Very cool. The Rose Bush gun ended up, what was it, in a drawer somewhere? Yeah, she says that she kind of, she held onto that branch.

She brought it home with her. She carried it from one place to another. She had a very interesting post-war career, but it was still in that drawer when the Japanese invaded in World War II, and it disappeared in that point in time. But I've always imagined had China had a different kind of series of events later that might have ended up in a museum somewhere. Yeah.

it just to me okay so the role playing game enthusiast in me is like that's that is a pulp game mission yeah like you know because the Japanese invade in what 31 uh yeah manchuria yeah and later yeah and so your story can be absolutely in that pulpy time of Indiana Jones and and you have to find that talisman of Chinese and independence you know that kind of thing it's just it's such a great story yeah um i love when history gives us these little gifts you know like uh i was teaching my students about um the american american german american bund and the fascist parties that preceded those right and uh one of them was was led by a man named spank noble uh which is great and then he ends up getting deported uh because

of a power struggle within their organization. This is what predates the Nazi Bund, the German-American Bund. And I think it's Friends of New Germany or something like that. And so he ends up getting deported. He goes back to work for the propaganda ministry in Germany. And as I recall, he's like the guy who teaches, I forget his exact title, but he's the guy who teaches Germans living abroad what propaganda to say about Nazi Germany, right? but it doesn't pay that much

so he basically buys ownership into a leather working factory and I just loved that a man and I explained to the kids I said sometimes history gives you a gift and you just have to accept it. The man's name was Spank Noble and he bought a leather factory. I came in over a budget

I've been naughty, you know, just so this is a way cooler story but could you please explain the approach that Mao seemed to have toward discussing women's liberation because you said specifically she

did not align with the communist she aligned with the nationalists yeah yeah so she went on and became China's first female lawyer briefly briefly first female judge she was briefly or she was a president of the law school

in Shanghai for a while but was not won over by the communist movement when And after World War II and after the founding of the communist state in China, it was very much the line that it was the Communist Party and Mao in particular who had liberated Chinese women who had destroyed the ages of Confucian practice that kept women bound to the home and bound to the family and that this was really the work. and the gift of the state. And what that erases is decades of organizing and of activism and of work by Chinese feminists, some of whom did eventually align themselves with the Communist Party, but many

who did not, like Sima Chung. And what's particularly interesting and kind of lost to history is, there was this brief period of nationalist rule in China in the 20s and 30s that promised to build a kind of constitutional Western-style Republican government that never came to fruition that was always more authoritarian and that faced Japanese invasion just years after it had come into power. But it did start setting up some of the, structures of what this government might look like. And in the late 20s and beginning of

1930, Su Mechang was part of a five-member commission that drafted a new civil code for China that went really, really far towards equalizing the role between husbands and wives and marriage, making sure that both the young man and the young woman agreed to the marriage in the first place, giving them both equal rights to divorce, equal rights to control property. It gave women the right to maintain their own maiden name if they wanted to in marriage. You know, this is in 1930, basically. So it wasn't a perfect document, but Tsumai Chung was one of five lawyers on that commission that created this code that the Chinese Communist Party then built upon and

continued, but hardly originated. Right. It felt like it was an attempt to lure women away from communism, but the communist had just too much of the initiative. And so they were like, yes, and we're going to do that too. And so how did the rest of the International Allied Women's Conference see the labor arm of their organization? Was there classism involved? Was that any kind of a block? Because we've talked about, like most of the women who were, the major players here were very upper class. But there were some who were not. So was there classism that interfered or did they set things aside and work for solidarity? So I mean, the question of women's work and women's labor had been an issue of the very earliest women's movements going all the way back to the 1880s and the International Council of Women, people like, you know, Susan B. Anthony in the United States and some of the really founding members of international women's movement. But most of the earliest women that were involved

on this issue were from very upper class upbringing themselves and were viewing this issue as outsiders. What, now this, of course, was different within social. socialist circles by the beginning of the 20th century when there were other women beginning to voice their demands and their needs, but those were often quite marginalized within socialist circles as well. In 1919, it was a group of women from Europe and the United States and drawing in from other countries as well. that together advocated to make reform of women's work part of the peace negotiations in Paris initially, but really the primary discussions happened in the United States in Washington, D.C. in autumn on the Potomac to get to that final chapter, where an international federation of working women quickly organized, or the Americans quickly

organized it so that women could speak in one voice when the international labor organization, which continues to exist today, but which was brought into being by the Paris peace negotiations, when they came to establish how this organization was going to look, how it was going to work, and what some of the conventions were that they were going to try and press on the international community. And so in the International Federation of Working Women, there were wealthy female allies of laboring women who played a part. But there were quite a few women who had sweated in the factories and worked largely in various industrial jobs that played a very active role in laying out women workers' demands. Okay. In D.C., how much racial segregation

did they have to navigate? And what were the European reactions to that? So first of all, there were not any African American, there were no African American women who participated in the American delegation at this International Federation of Working Women. In part, this was the bias of looking at labor through the lens of industry and factories and industrialization, whereas the vast majority of African American women were engaged either in farm labor or in, domestic service and so that's where part of that exclusion came from but they were also in a city that was a segregated Washington DC was a segregated city and I don't I can't say how the delegates reacted to it some of these delegates came from Latin America some of them came from us there's a prominent one who came from as far away as Japan so it's not as though they were all white women participating in the conference. But there was a protest, a written protest issued by

Black American women. Mary Church Terrell, whom we discussed in the last episode, was one of the signers, protesting the essential structure of this meeting that had the effect of excluding Black women and asking probably in overly polite terms for these women to expand their idea and definition of labor and work and to include women of color going forward. Okay. Did, I mean, this is D.C. This is 1919. Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, Carrie Chapman, Cat.

Ida B. Wells, was there any cross-pollination with the American suffragists in this specific convention? Yeah, the really kind of major players in American suffrage that the names that were all probably most familiar with from either history classes or the media were not a part of this particular conference. I know there were some who were very folks, we only work on suffrage, but then there were others who were, we work on all the women's issues. Right. I think, though, that in this moment of 1919, suffragists were so focused on the question

of suffrage, on needing to get this passed initially through the Senate and then on a state-by-state level. But that's where their attention was turned. And so it was really women who were mostly active in the unions and the union movement who were most involved in representing the United States and helping run this conference. Ed, do you look like you had something going there? No, I did. And then it got answered. Oh, okay.

So do you think the. You're welcome. Thank you. Do you think the feminized language of the women's Congress helped or hurt their cause? Can you just tell me what you mean by feminized language? Oh, sure. So focusing on like making it very much a women's issue, very much a protect the family issue, very much a protect us that way. You know, this is in many ways it's my thesis kind of creeping its way back in.

I'm wondering if that was happening here too, if there was a essentialism that worked its way into the language that and then if so how it affected the cause i mean the the laboring women the labor feminists who gathered who really organized who then turned around because much like the paris peace conference at the international labor organization there were no women appointed to represent either their countries or the both labor and industry got to appoint people people to this meeting, but neither elected women. So they served in an advisory function, but they had their act together. But to answer your question, I mean, some of their demands had nothing to do with the

essentialism or gender difference. They wanted equal pay for equal work. They insisted that women should be, that there should be a demand or requirement for female representation and future ILO meetings. And so there were a number of issues that function more on just language of equality, eight-hour day for everybody. One particularly divisive issue was the question of night work. Should women be banned from working at night because it wasn't safe for them? There were some laboring women who thought that that would be a pretty major improvement on their lives if that was the case.

but the International Federation of Working Women instead took the stance that nobody should be forced to work at night. And they refused to turn that into a gendered issue. But where maybe this feeds more into your question, the issue on which they ultimately got the most traction and made a remarkable stamp on this first ILO meeting was on the question of maternity leave. Yeah, I was going to say it's going to be maternity protection. And paid maternity leave. So this is at a period of time. There were different rules and practices in place in different countries. But in most of the world, there was either, well, there was generally either no maternity leave

whatsoever. You just had to leave your job. Or it was all unpaid maternity leave. So, yeah, you could leave your job and come back. But good luck paying for your, to feed your family in the meantime. Right. And the women came forward. They had their data.

They had really done their research, and they absolutely insisted that a minimum of 12 weeks paid maternity leave should be the bare bottom necessity or bare bottom minimum of what should be required of countries across the world. And they fought hard, and that became the maternity protection convention of 1919, one of the first conventions passed by the ILO. And it took a hard fight. The employers were not happy at this. And, but, you know, on the one hand, it got the traction it did because it still cast women workers as mothers. That's the, yeah, that's what I was, I think I was looping in on. Yeah. So, you know, it could be framed in terms of protecting the, you know, the nation's body, protecting children, as well as women workers.

but it was a really important starting point. It's taken nations a long, long time to get there. Although in the world today, at least on paper and for the large part in practice, every industrialized, actually most nations in the world have met that 12 week standard as a minimum with the exception of the United States of America. Because we more than tripled it, right? I mean, we clearly do way better for people, no? You are bringing your comedian hat and putting it into the podcast because the answer is no.

There's no federal mandate for paid maternity leave in the United States. There's state mandates. In California, we do have one. And I don't know the number. But in more than a dozen states in America, it's in existence. But there is nothing at the federal level. And that makes us very much a pariah in the global community. Well, and we have a graduated system, too, where it's like six weeks.

And then after that, you're getting much less pay. And it's like, yeah, yeah. I'm never been a mother. Yes. Well, I've made things. I've made it so I won't be. But I've never been a mother, but I've supported mothers through their pregnancy, one through two. And six weeks is a ridiculous expectation.

It is, I mean, just, yeah, absolutely dehumanizing on its face. So did the eugenics movement have any influence on any of these efforts in Europe or the U.S.? Because, I mean, these things are all happening around the same time. That's a really excellent question. I mean, the eugenics movement in the United States and in parts of Western Europe to, you know, kind of painted its brush on a lot of different discussions. And certainly, you know, the language around the need to protect the health of children was often tied into needing to protect the health of the nation. and in the United States that got tied up in a kind of a racialized lens that blurred into eugenics

very, very easily. Protecting maternal health immediately goes toward like and making sure that they breed more. Right, exactly. That they breed more, but the right people. Yeah. Yeah. So I've read the, you know, the entire kind of. notes and minutes of the that original ILO meeting. I don't recall eugenics playing

any kind of determinative role or you know it might have creeped in here or there but that language was largely absent it was it was focused on certainly mothers being a or I'm sorry working women continuing to be able to have children but right not so much through the kind of racialized or, you know, able-less type lens that so much of the eugenics rhetoric was tied up in. But it was related, to be sure. Okay, so you mentioned a notable Japanese woman and Tanaka-Taka was her name. Could you please explain? Because, Ed, do you know anything about Tanaka-Taka? I do not recognize the name, no.

Okay. Could you please explain Tanaka Taka's ruse to Ed? Because I want to watch his face when he hears about this. Sure, yeah. So, Ed, let me tell you. So Tanaka Taka was one of the women appointed an advisory role by the Japanese delegation. She was a more middle class woman, had studied kind of labor relations, in college, but she brought with her as her own aid, a young woman whom she met through the

labor movement in Japan, who had been a weaver, had worked in a weaving mill in Japan. And so when the issue of, now I could have grief, I can't remember if it was night worker, paid maternity leave, I haven't read my own book in a while. Damien, you can remind me. It was the night work. The night work. That's what I thought. Thank you.

When the issue of whether or not women should be banned from nightwork came up, the industrial representatives of industry from Japan said, oh, absolutely not. Japanese women are happy to work whatever hours. Besides that, the factory owners are always looking out for the best interest. of women workers they um they um they you know we're a family protect them they protect them and um so but the problem uh for the japanese delegation is the man who wanted to give this speech and explain all this didn't speak english and tanaka taka did so was that kamata pardon was that kamata yeah yeah yeah and so he handed tanaka his speech as his comments that he wanted had read and he said, will you please read them for me in English? She started reading what he

had actually written. And then at some point, she moved those to the back, pulled her own comments out and said, let me tell you what Japanese women really want. They don't want to be exploited anymore. They don't want to work all through the night anymore and then have to take care of their families through the day. And she proceeded to lay out what was Japanese women's opinion at the time, which is that they did not want to be forced to engage in nightwork. And when the Japanese male delegate realized what was going on, this explosion in the room, and she was silenced, it later came out that she was actually four months pregnant at the time of this conference. And so the Japanese delegates tried to say that she was

essentially insane by pregnancy and shouldn't be listened to. And they tried to silence her that way. But some members of the more liberal press in Japan were kind of getting word of this and following this. And they actually took the female delegate's side. And ultimately, the male delegates had to eat crow and treat her with respect and present her position. After all, she's pregnant. You can't get her. I love the fact that everything about that.

ties in with what I have said repeatedly on this show, which is that one of the defining characteristics of the Japanese national character is having no chill. Just like, you know what? This is bullshit. I'm here. Let me tell you. Here's what's actually going on.

That's garbage. And you should feel bad. No. That's that is, that is awesome. That's, I love that. Yeah. So, yeah, it was really, it was quite the scandal. But, but she made her voice heard. And it was kind of a stance against, like, it's so multi-layered, too, because it's a stance against Western chauvinism, too. Right. Yes. And that's exactly true. Because the Western women were pushing much more, like I said, they were trying to make sure that men and women were being traded equal.

and in the eyes of the Japanese women in the particular industrial context they were working in, they thought that they needed the protection from exploitation. Did she get any backlash when she came home? Or was she fairly well protected? You know, it's interesting. She largely dropped out of the public eye when she went back home.

Dorothy Sue Cobble is a Rutgers historian who's done a lot of research on her and tried to kind of follow her trail after the war. But this moment in 1919 was really her one big moment on the public stage. Hell of a moment. Yeah, that's pretty awesome. Yeah. And she's, again, the flawless English.

I believe she was a Stanford alum. Yeah. You know, she benefited a good deal from the, again, Americans do our racism so weirdly. The super anti-Chinese, therefore the Japanese are the civilized ones, kind of sentiment. The gentleman's agreement, the gentlewoman's agreement. the gentlewoman's agreement. All these things line up to set her up to knock this one out of the park. So to knock this one out of the park.

So the first woman to serve in both the U.S. and the U.K. executive government at the national level was the Secretary of Labor and the Minister of Labor. So these are just the things that I found. I found that interesting because I know what labor used to encompass, and it seemed like it was more of a feminized role. It's that protective legislation. It's that protecting the children aspect of it allows people to think of, okay, if a woman's going to be in the cabinet, it's going to be Secretary of Labor, and that makes sense. do you do you think that that's that's kind of the read on it in terms of like you know because she's not going to be secretary of war come on now you know you know I mean it's hard to say in a way because you know both in England and in the United States and elsewhere

you know the union movement the AFL CIO here unions and elsewhere you know we're very, very masculine, centered, very hostile to women, you know, understood that women workers were part, you know, were colleagues on some level, but also, you know, they were protecting their male privilege in the factory and at home at one in the same time. So having women rise up through the ranks in the labor movement, I don't think was kind of a foreordained conclusion in the same way that it was different in a way than women who, for example, would be put in charge of like social affairs and that type of thing that was seen more as natural and nurturing and protective and female.

But it is also true that women organized around labor and working conditions, that and marriage were essentially the two issues that women organized around the earliest, even before suffrage was even on the agenda, because those were the two things that most immediately affected them in their daily lives. And so there were women who were able to obtain expertise and eventually legitimacy that did, you know, eventually emerge in the 20s and 30s and afterwards with real positions of power. Charlotte, Perkins, not, I'm sorry. Francis Perkins I was saying you said as soon as you should

Charlotte Perkins I'm like Gilman but yeah Francis Right yeah wrong Perkins Yeah I also find it interesting that The same kind of personality ends up being Secretary of Education with Margaret Thatcher and Linda McMahon

I'm thoroughly detestable Okay So I'm going to butcher this name because we have a long running theme on this show that Damien cannot pronounce anything in French, in French, despite learning Latin. And I would say it's because I learned Latin. Could you please explain the problem that Gene Bouvier?

No. No. Please say it for me. Really? Jean. Jean Bouvier. Okay. I could have said Bouvier.

I could have figured that one out. What was the problem that Jean Bouvier ran into on the steamer ship going back to France in 1919? It's, again, I love these little stories, these little. Yeah. So Jean Bouvier was one of the delegates. She was a French delegate, or I'm sorry, she wasn't a French dog. She was an advisor to the French delegate, but also who participated in that International Federation of Working Women. In fact, she was a big driver behind organizing depressed for this maternity protection convention.

and had played a major role even though she grew up very much in poverty and new work inside and out. But they'd had this relatively successful moment. They were going back across the ocean in the steamer and the chief male labor delegate insisted on bringing his mistress with him to the dinner table. at the, you know, in the dining hall. And then the representatives of industry refused to sit with him because he was viewed as coarse and, you know, unsophisticated. And so there was this big brouhaha. So while other national delegations, the workers and the managers

and everyone was able to sit together in French, in France, were all separated. And she went back and just was blew up in union meetings saying, how is it that this kind of inherent sexism is going to, you know, taint our image and also drive us apart when we're engaging in this important industrial work? Yeah. Just. Yeah. And she, she experienced a lot of ostracism. You know, they, at moments in time she was able to have a real impact she worked with another woman during World War I in France and helping pass stronger legislation to protect women homeworkers because so much work you know was done in people's addicts and at home but so there you know

she had moments but whenever she really raised her voice in union circles she was pushed out and ostracized largely because of this this because of because she she raised her voice in venues like this, but also because she just kept coming back to women's rights as workers as well. Yeah. So there's a bunch of disfranchised women from white countries in general, or white majority countries. Did they chafe not only at their own lack of suffrage, obviously they did shave at that but at the how to put this um the stymied superiority that non-white democracies confronted them with so do you see where i'm trying to get at this like you've got these women who are like we're here for you know democracy for labor we're here for

all these things we also are all representatives of countries that have held other entire people's down for, you know, three generations going back. Did they chafe of being reminded of that? Yes. Okay. At times. But again, it depends on which women we're talking about. This isn't exactly your question, but as we look into the 20s and 30s, you know,

obviously American women with the 19th Amendment began being able to vote in 1920, women and Central Europe largely obtained the right to vote in 1920, or 1919, 1920. Yeah. Weimar Republic opened it up for them. Weimar Republic did Austria. But in France, women never voted until 1944 in Italy, in Spain, in the Mediterranean countries. But for example, women in Turkey in the new secular Republic of Turkey, got the right to vote in the 1930s.

And so there were inversions in Western women's sense of white Christian nations that, of course, are more modern and more progressive and superior, finding themselves fighting for rights that those that they had considered somehow not below them, but behind them. Oh, that's a good distinction. Now, enjoying rights that they were still striving to achieve. So, yeah, there were times that white Western women were kind of slapped back by reality already in the 1930s anyway. Do you think that heightened their language? Because I know famously, Emmeline Pankhurst compared not getting to vote to slavery.

And nowadays, people are like, that's, you know, very entitled. of her to speak in such terms but like do you think that that inversion that she was bearing witness to in other countries um do you think that led to a heightened language uh well i mean we're what's the point of being part of the empire you know she was using that language in the early 20th century when no no women had the right to vote okay good point yeah and so that was no longer the case by the 1930s. Yeah, that... And by then, I think it was Sylvia that had taken the Pankhurst line forward anyway.

So, yeah. But to come back to your British suffragists who you, you know, studied so beautifully years ago, you know, they were confronted with an issue. This doesn't come up in my book, but it's exactly the same time period. In 2019, the British Parliament debated and... ultimately gave greater home rule to India as part of trying to stave off the nationalist movement there. And so the question came up if Indians are going to have greater vote at the municipal level and over certain issues, should women be given the vote as well?

Right. And British women over the age of 30 had just gotten the vote in 1918. It would take another decade until they got equal rights with men. But many, many, I'd say the vast majority of British suffragists did support Indian women in their quest for equal representation as home rule, you know, as debates about home rule began to come out, you know, on the understanding that women's advancing elsewhere ultimately raises boats everywhere. And so, You know, that doesn't mean that they were anti-colonialists or enlightened up and down the line, but there were worldwide strategy. There were meeting points of solidarity that, for strategic reasons, they embraced. Sure.

So Mussolini makes a very empty promise on suffrage. Have we seen anything similar to that in our lifetime? Told you it's softballs. Yeah. I mean, we're living in this moment of retrenchment, of backlash, of, you know, all kinds of heightened rhetoric around women's rights, you know, protecting women's bodies, all kinds of things that have fallen by the wayside one after another. So it's actually, oh, my gosh, all right, we're going to just X this one out when you do your editing. Okay, I'm going to mark this down. Okay.

So it's Simone de Beauvoir, who much later, after World War II, in the 50s and 60s, who wrote all that takes as one moment of national crisis for women's rights to be. taken away. That's not an exact quote, but that's pretty close to what she said. And I think that that is exactly what we're living through in this moment right now. You want me to add that out? You don't have to edit that out, but by um and on all that. Oh, God, we keep all those. That's how Ed Phil's time. Um, you know, um, you know, we have an entire bumper that we use that I made that is just Ed saying, no, no, 30 different ways. And it lasts for like more than a minute.

And the email I got from him after, he's like, okay, you're right, but also up yours. It's just, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And then at the very end, yes, yes. So I studied in the early 2000s, a lot of Muhammad Yunnan. the Grimeon Bank, microloans. He's Nobel Prize winner, I think, of 2006. He had it not been for the housing collapse, it's possible that we would have, God, I really think that, like, I don't like saying this term because it's, it just sounds off to me, but this really does feel like the worst possible timeline. Like, every time there's a choice, we just go for the worst possible one. So had it not been for the housing collapse, the Gramean Bank was making huge inroads into pulling everyone out of poverty. Like, it was showing itself as a method. And what it is is like in a very small village in Bangladesh, you give a woman, you say, what skills do you have?

And she says, I can sew. And it's like, okay, how much money do you need to start up a sewing business? Maybe I'm going to, Damien Fries, maybe $5. Great. Here's $5. Go buy the needle and the thread and the patchwork. And then she starts taking in the sewing for people. And you don't charge her interest. You just have her pay back the loan over time.

And if she can't pay it back one week, you reduce the amount of payments or the amount of payment that she needs for the next week. Because sometimes things can slow. Once she pays it back, she can then borrow more money and buy multiple colors of thread. And then same thing, same thing, same thing. And then pretty soon she's got herself a sewing machine. And so this is Grameen Bank. He started it in the 70s, like shortly after Bangladesh became a country. And he and I forget her name, but she was the bank manager for the longest time.

He's currently the interim president of Bangladesh, at least as of this recording. And it was just microloans. And that's all it was. And it brought millions and millions of women out of poverty. And then he said, okay, now that we've done. done that for you. And you've done that for yourself because it's all women who run the bank and women decide on the loans and they have like a 97 payback, 97% payback rate. And so like corporations are somewhere like just north of 50, you know. And so he says, okay, well now

we're going to sell you penny packets of seeds so you can grow your own vegetables because your kids need. And then Dan and yogurt gets involved and it just explodes. This is his huge thing. And he's taking it, taking it all over the world. There's Grameen Africa, Grameen, there's Grameen the United States. They did it in Queens, I want to say. The Clinton Foundation put a bunch of money into the Grameen Bank. Yeah. It is phenomenal.

And I'm not a huge capitalist by any stretch, but it's entrepreneurship on the micro level, and it's enriching and pulling people out of poverty. They have these 14 points. They have to, you know, they agree to send it. If you're going to be a member of the bank, you have to always grow vegetables. have to always send your kids to school. You have to do all this stuff. It's just amazing how innovative people are. And, you know, it's, Al Franken once said, you know, pulling yourself up by the bootstraps is fine, but you have to have the boots. Right. And, and this is that,

but just like so much more. So now with all of that, do you think that such things are kind of the, the in the tradition of or in the legacy of these women's efforts at peace like this this economic model because when you have we we we've got the science to show we've got the the statistics to show that like if you have less starvation you have less warfare right yeah no I mean I think that part of what a lot of different women argued in 1919 coming from different national and class and other perspectives, was that peace is built not just by deciding on borders and setting arms limits or, you know, treaty obligations in that way, but that peace really has to be built from the ground up, including people.

Right. And, you know, that's something like, you know, whether or not a girl can be married at the age of 12 matters, not just to her own individual rights or happiness, it matters to global peace because it's going to influence the power dynamic within our family. It's going to influence the education that her children someday are going to have. It's going to, you know, that these things that seem tangential to big diplomacy and peace issues actually are completely integrated into it. And, you know, women were not the only ones seeing the kind of social basis of something like peacemaking, but they were a particularly

strong voice advocating for it over a hundred years ago. And so, yeah, I do think, you know, I mean, they weren't envisioning microloans when they were in front of the League of Nations Committee, but they were already arguing that a world health organization was necessary, for example, to sustain global peace because they saw health and disease. And we've already talked about poverty and all of those issues as being wrapped up. And so. Yeah, we saw that in Syria like a dozen years ago. Like just climate change leads to civil war.

like yeah yeah it i come back to how we ended the last episode which is um maybe these men need to be kept away from the the table because they're they're too emotional and irrational um and i don't what's that you know the i don't think a single one of the women who i studied in 1919 were separatists or you know in any way shape or form it's not that they were saying women necessarily will do it better, they said that we all need to work together and to be able to do that, we all need representation, we all need to have the concerns that we're able to bring in from the viewpoint of our lived experience be part of the discussion of what it takes to construct a lasting peace. And it's interesting, the United Nations over the last 20 years has

done, has collected a lot of data about women and the involvement in post-conflict resolution and peace negotiations. And whenever women are involved in significant numbers, there is, there's better outcomes. And it's not because women are better than men. It's because they're able to emphasize things that the men don't coming from their life experience. So I, So I'm going to push back on that just a little bit in saying that I think what we've seen also in the last 20 years is that any time it's an all boys club, it's bad for everyone. And we could look at Penn State. We could look at the Vatican. We could look at a lot of places.

And we can see when it's all boys, that's when it's a problem. And so yes to everything, but for just a slightly different reason. And I'm kind of, you know, I'm also okay with like racial profiling for gun ownership. If you look like me, sorry, no. Like not, let's take 20 years, just deny everybody who looks like me and just see where we go. You know, let's run that experiment because we've had, you know, I come back to, we've had how many generations of having the men basically have the all voice club or have just nominal women, you know, participating. and and we keep looking at decisions going like well these were terrible so I'm like I don't mind separatism for a generation let's just try it you know I'm I I'm a mediocre person anyway so I don't mind leaving me out of these decisions anyway like I you know but but I'm happy to carry him out but like I I don't know I I dare say it just I I'm thinking about like

I think it's Belgium has specific, yeah, it is Belgium because I was talking about this when I talked about the Smurfs. I did three episodes on the Smurfs, but that Belgium actually has instituted like quotas. Like you cannot elect more men to office if you have less than this many women in office, some sort of graduated system like that because. Yeah, France has a system. It's called parity is the name of the system. And France has a system.

It works imperfectly, but it makes a huge difference. Yeah. You know, and it's because if it's, it feels like there's so much cultural weight put on just assuming men being the majority as the norm that what these women were advocating for, I love it. and also I want like three steps more because maybe that'll chip away at those cultural assumptions that kind of get us to replay. I mean, we did have a sequel to World War I, you know, it just. Yeah, I think there's a catchy name that was given to it. Yeah, you know.

There's a whole meme all on its own. Yeah, and it killed six times as many people, at least half of which were women again, you know. So, um, but, uh, so the last, the last thing is, uh, I would be remiss if I didn't look to the acknowledgements. You took the time to write multiple pages of acknowledgments. And, uh, it is such a kick to me that you and Becky Kluchen, two of my most influential mentors, have become such pals. And, you know, you, you, you helped each other. other with each other's stuff. And I just, how lucky was I? Because she were very lucky, Damien. I was. I really, really was. But for your readers, Becky Cluchin and I still are teaching together at

Zach State. So come fill our classrooms with your voices. Please. Actually, a few months back, I was talking about, I played hooky from work one day and I went to a eugenics conference because I'm fun at parties and it was because the two of you were leading it so or the students of the two of you were leading it so okay well well actually let's clarify it was an anti-ugenics conference a conference covering the evils of eugenics okay i think i think that's that's an important important clarification there definitely yeah um ed do you have any questions uh to close this out with um i really don't everything this this has been illuminating in in wonderful ways for me so thank you for for coming on and and talking about this because this is this is an aspect of

um this era that i was woefully lacking in knowledge of and and i've learned an awful lot and it's been amazing so thank you very very much yeah none of this shows up in the U.S. history textbook or standards. No. No, but it's going to appear in their classrooms now. Damn right. Yeah. Hell yes.

I'll be getting into the good trouble for that. That'll be fine. So, my goodness. Mona, thank you for joining us. Ed, is there anything that you want to, you want people to read or imbibe or take in? Yeah. Continuing with the theme that you,

your recommendation had last time the novel that you recommended talking about the just absolute rank stupidity of World War I I'm going to strongly recommend since World War I did have a sequel the spiritual sequel to the novel that you recommended I think would be catch 22 by Joseph Heller which is a really really amazing absolutely pitch black comedy novel about

World War II and more broadly about war and industrialization of violence and the dehumanizing impact that it has on everybody involved and I

read it in my junior year of high school and there were parts of it that I hated at the time. But it is a work of searing brilliance, and I think everybody ought to read it. So Catch 22 by Joseph Heller. Nice. How about you? There you go. I'm going to recommend peace on our terms, the global battle for women's rights

after the First World War by Dr. Mona L. Siegel. It's available pretty much anywhere you can get books. It is a very good read. You know, I got to say, as brilliant as you are, your books are accessible. And that is a hard line to walk for academics often. But Becky did the same. You did the same.

I mean, Michael Van did it by making it into a comic book. But it's accessible. The seasonal approach is really a good model for people to be able to pick it up for a chapter and then put it down. And they'll still be able to find the hints of the others as it goes through. So I'm going to recommend peace on our terms. Mona, is there anything you want to recommend to people to read, take in, and buy, watch, listen to? Well, I gave your listeners a memoir recommendation last time, so I thought I'd throw one more out this time. If you've become intrigued by the life of Sumei Chung, the gunslinger turned peace diplomat, turned lawyer, turned women's rights advocate.

Her memoir is a little hard to track down. It's under the title My Revolutionary Years. And it's published under her married name, which was Madam Wei Tao Ming, M-I-N-G. It's out of print, but you can easily order a reprint edition or get it out of the library. And it reads like a novel, too. And you'll have a new heroine in your life once you finish that book. Very cool. And Mona, where can you be found if you want to be found?

Where can folks find you? Besides enrolling at Sack State, as they should. You can find my books at your local bookstore or big evil bookstores as well. And Google me. I've got some videos up online of events I've done. I've got newspaper, journalism, a little bit of whatever. Ed, where can they find us? We collectively can be found on our website.

at wabawabababwobah.gehistorytime.com and we can be found also on the Apple Podcast app, the Amazon podcast app, and on Spotify. Wherever you have found us, please take a moment to give us the five-star review that you know Dr. Siegel deserves and be sure to hit the subscribe button to hear more awesomeness from our guests

and more pretty good stuff from the two of us. And where can you be found, sir? Let's see. You can find me and Justine and Emily accruing capital punishment in Sacramento on the first Friday of every month at 9 p.m. at the comedy spot downtown in Sacramento. Satcomitiespot.com. Go to the calendar. Find our show. Capital punishment. Capital with an O because it's a pun. So yeah. Let's see. You missed August 1st. So September 5th, August 3rd, November 7th and December 5th. can't wait to see you there suggest pun topics get involved by some merch so that pretty much covers it uh dr seagull thank you so much for being a part of this uh letting us let you keep you up for so long thank you both it's been fun i'm glad uh well thank you very much for a geek history of time

i'm damien harmony and i'm ed blaylock and until next time keep rolling 20s