American History Tellers - The Fight for Women's Suffrage | Portrait of a Struggle | 6
Episode Date: April 6, 2022For Alice Paul and other leading white suffragists, image was important. They published their own newspapers and staged dramatic public protests to gain press attention and shape public opini...on. But all too often, white suffrage activists refused to make room for Black allies in their idealized image of a woman voter.In this episode, Lindsay speaks with Dr. Allison Lange, a historian who focuses on the intersection of gender and power, and how visual imagery shaped the battle for women’s suffrage. They'll discuss the way images were used both for and against suffrage, and how there are echoes of the suffragist's strategies in the way female politicians present themselves today. Find out more about Dr. Lange’s book, Picturing Political Power: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo50270913.htmlListen ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App. https://wondery.app.link/historytellersPlease support us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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Imagine it's February 1921 in Washington, D.C.
You're in a hotel ballroom for a convention of the National Woman's Party.
You were born enslaved during the Civil War.
You've devoted your life to fighting for racial and gender equality.
Inspired by Alice Paul's confrontational tactics,
you joined the National Woman's Party a few years ago.
Now, six months after the ratification of the 19th Amendment,
you're determined to help
shape the organization's future. All eyes turn to the stage as Paul steps up to the podium.
I know that these past few days, we've had our differences about how to focus our energies
moving forward. But it's plain to see that there is no goal more important than pursuing full gender equality.
Now that we have the ballot, this organization must devote itself to fighting all laws that stand in the way of equality between women and men.
Paul looks around the room expectantly.
Take a deep breath and stand.
Ms. Paul, I believe there are more urgent matters.
What about the repression of the black vote in the South?
So many women still cannot vote, despite the 19th Amendment.
All these poll taxes and literacy tests.
Black women are facing the same tactics that have stopped black men from voting for far too long.
I propose we urge Congress to appoint a committee to investigate this issue.
Paul taps her foot impatiently.
It's terrible what Black women face in the South, of course.
But that's an inequality based on race, not gender.
It's not our concern.
I was a silent sentinel, too.
I stood out in the cold at the White House gates.
I'm as much a member of this party as anyone.
And I'm telling you, this must be our concern.
We've been over this before.
Race is simply too divisive.
Ms. Paul, Black women are being terrorized in the South.
They will never be able to vote unless the 19th Amendment is enforced for all women.
Paul looks at you with a cold, steely gaze.
We'll take a vote.
All in favor of a resolution asking Congress to investigate Southern disenfranchisement?
Aye.
You raise your hand and look around the room.
You're disappointed, but not surprised
to see only a few white hands
raised alongside those of you
and your fellow black delegates.
All those opposed?
Nay.
A sea of hands shoots up.
There's no need for a formal tally.
Convention has rejected your proposal.
You sit back down, shaking your
head at the Black delegate beside you. You're frustrated that after all this time, leaders
like Paul still refuse to support the struggles of Black women.
From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers, our history, your story. In February 1921, the National Woman's Party held a convention to decide the organization's future.
Though suffragists had finally secured the ballot, they knew there was more work to be done.
But activists had different ideas about what that work should be.
Some suggested fighting for women's rights in the workplace.
Others hoped to focus
on birth control reform. Black suffragist Mary Church Terrell tried to convince NWP founder
Alice Paul that the path forward was to fight ongoing disenfranchisement of Black women in the
South. But Paul rejected her demands, once again refusing to center race in her pursuit of gender
equality.
Instead, two years later, Paul introduced the Equal Rights Amendment into Congress,
a constitutional amendment to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex.
She would fight for its passage for the rest of her life.
And for Paul and other leading white suffrage activists who pushed for the ERA's passage,
image was important.
For years, Paul staged dramatic protests to gain press attention and shape public opinion. But in her efforts to sway
a white male audience, Paul repeatedly sidelined Black women. Even after the 19th Amendment was
passed, white activists refused to make room for Black allies in their idealized image of a woman
voter. My guest today studies how visual imagery shaped the battle for women's suffrage and
how it's used at the intersection of gender and power to this day.
Allison Lang is an associate professor of history at the Wentworth Institute of Technology
in Boston and recently served as historian for the United States Congress Women's Suffrage
Centennial Commission.
She's the author of the book, Picturing Political Power,
Images in the Women's Suffrage Movement. Here's our conversation.
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Dr. Alison Lang, welcome to American History Tellers.
Thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.
Now, when we think of historical images, often we imagine documentary style photographs or other types of images, but often with a journalistic intent. But there are
many more forms of images with different intent, from persuasion to propaganda to polemic. In your
book, Picturing Political Power, you say images can explain ideas in ways that words cannot.
What do you mean by that, and why did you dedicate a whole book to that idea? Pictures are so part of our culture
in the 21st century, but I think a lot of times we scroll Instagram and any kinds of
image-based media without barely thinking about what those images mean, because it's so ingrained
in our minds to kind of interpret them very quickly without thinking much about it. But that really wasn't the case throughout much of American history
because images were not always as accessible as they are today.
And so people had to really kind of create the ideas that we have in our modern culture.
When we think about a person in power, for example, a president,
probably a lot of us kind of immediately think of an older
white man. And that's something that was created over the course of American history through things
like portraits that I'm sure many of us have seen, you know, in a textbook, on a museum wall,
on an institution wall. And so these kinds of images really create ideas and the ideas that we have also kind of create the images that we have most excessively.
And so one of the things that my book really focuses on is the ways that women's rights activists challenge those kinds of themselves. They were trying to make themselves on equal footing with the portraits of
white male leaders that were and are so familiar to us. The suffragists really tried to convince
people using propaganda, using political cartoons, using a lot of images distributed by their
organizations to suggest that these women would not only be political
leaders and good voters, but also good mothers. And so, yes, there's a lot of conversations
happening visually in the 19th century that are happening a little bit more explicitly than they
are now. But I think it's safe to say that even in the 21st century, there are echoes of these
conversations about what a person with political
power looks like even today. I want to explore this idea that images create ideas. Clearly,
it's the case, with one exception, that all U.S. American presidents have been white males.
So that's a fact. But the images of them, you suggest, are creating a new idea, a reinforcing idea.
Certainly. So when we see images of people in power, we kind of get this idea ingrained in
our minds. And I think that it's, as you note, there's only one president who doesn't kind of
fit that mold, but people often kind of point to Obama as an example, showing people who look like him that they could also
achieve that status. And I think one could say the same really about Vice President Kamala Harris,
who is also occupying a historic role right now, as is her husband as the second gentleman.
Both of those examples are really interesting representatives
of shifts in the way that we might imagine political power in the future, starting to have
these new ideas of who should be in those positions of power. It's both creating and kind of reflected
in the images that we have. For example, some of your listeners might be familiar with the
conversation about who should be on our currency.
There was a lot of conversation, a lot of backlash to discussions about having Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill.
And there's a reason for that, because having a woman who was formerly enslaved, a Black woman, someone who is an abolitionist, she represents a lot of things that a lot of the presidents
on our currency do not. To expand on that, as we try to debate which images to select for our
currency, let's talk about the images you selected for your book. Were there particular images that
stood out to you? And what was your process for including them? What did they mean to you?
One of the things that this book is trying to correct is the idea that these photographs and cartoons and things are not just kind of representations of the past. They were actually
making an argument in their own time. They were not unbiased windows into 19th century American history, I wanted to include images that
stuck out to me as representative of a much broader trend in images that I was seeing.
I have an archive just on my laptop of many thousands of images. And so I wanted to pick
ones that were really common or ones that were really unusual because it told us
something different. So for example, one of the reasons I came to this research was actually
the photographs of the National Women's Party who were picketing the White House in 1917
because they were the first ones to picket the White House ever. So when you come across these
images from 1917, these are the kind of the first types of images of women protesting in this way,
of anyone protesting in this way. And I really just wanted to find out more. You know, they
hired professional photographers for these photographs, decided who would appear in these
photographs. You know,
they wanted younger white women particularly to be on the front lines here. So photographs like
those really stood out to me, but they stand out. But of course, they tell us a broader story,
which is that they were trying to show that women could be part of these dramatic political protests
and called for the nation's attention.
There's a lot of controversy surrounding those images because they were, of course, picketing also as the United States entered World War I.
Yeah, I'm looking at some photographs of that moment, the silent sentinels in front of the White House.
And you can tell that these images are purposeful. There's some composition to them. So clearly there was strategy behind picketers, they didn't want the war to kind
of sidetrack the movement in the way that the Civil War had done. So those pictures were attention
grabbers. In contrast, one of the competing organizations, the National American Women's
Suffrage Association, distributed a lot of imagery that really emphasized women as mothers. So very much
in contrast to the picketers. So thinking about women as being good mothers, being good caregivers,
good supporters of the war effort, being great nurses. And another example of a photograph that
I think is incredibly telling about these strategies that suffragists are creating is actually Sojourner Truth's
portraits from the 1860s, so much earlier than the White House picketers. But these are remarkable
portraits because she is really one of the very first suffragists and anti-slavery activists to distribute her portrait purposefully in order to create a more
respectable idea of female activists. They're often her seated, they're often her with knitting
next to a vase of flowers, with a book, you know, in these very genteel settings. And so she is
aiming to show you that even though she's an activist,
even though she goes around the country speaking, which was not considered ladylike at all,
despite all of that, she is a very respectable woman.
So that's the portrait that the suffragists want to portray, that even though I'm a suffragist,
and even though I have, for the time, radical
ideas, I'm still, I'm looking at her now, sitting on my wooden chair doing some knitting. How is
the opposition using images to counter that idea? That's a really important question, right? Because
the suffragists are not creating these images in a vacuum. So their opponents, who are the ones that control the media, they're the
editors, they're the publishers, they're the artists, they're the people who are creating
the images that most Americans see throughout most of the 19th and early 20th century.
They're distributing cartoons that represent women who are seeking political power as ugly, as masculine women. They're wearing
bloomers often. They are smoking. They are even in like barber shops being shaved. They are
ignoring their children or handing their children off to their bemused and startled husbands because they're too busy to
watch over their children. So the idea here is that if women win power, people like Susan B.
Anthony are able to gain the vote that they are challenging these entrenched gender roles. They're
challenging the basis of American society and family life, and will be forcing men to do these
womanly tasks, these domestic chores. I'd like to go back, I guess, and discuss a particular
image that anti-suffragists might have tried to develop in the American mind, and that's of
the proper place for women, the ideal woman. In your book, you talk about how images of Martha Washington, the first First Lady, were used by anti-suffragists as an example of the ideal American woman.
This isn't a derogatory image of women, but a reinforcing some older, more American image of women's roles.
Why Martha Washington in particular?
That's a great question. And that's one I
definitely asked myself as I kept on finding her image over and over and over again in the archives.
She was probably the most recognizable American woman throughout the 19th century. And even though
we often think about her as an older woman with white curly hair and a cap on her head,
you know, maybe based on the Gilbert Stewart portraits of her that hang in the National
Gallery, the portraits of her that really circulated in the 19th century were of her
as a much younger woman who is a mother and who eventually becomes basically the first First Lady, not called that at the time,
but certainly is someone who is seen as a facilitator of politics. One of the things
that she was really well known for when she became a First Lady was her hostessing of parties.
And they weren't just frivolous parties. They were aimed at creating political connections, hosting people from other nations who were
visiting, hosting local political and powerful figures.
So these gatherings are really important.
A lot of opponents of suffrage, anti-suffragists, really look toward Martha Washington as an
example of how they would prefer women to act as people who
are supporting their husband's political ventures, but not themselves trying to have a political
voice. And Martha Washington was and is to this day, the only American woman whose portrait has
appeared on U.S. paper currency. And that was in the 1880s and 1890s.
So she was someone that really represented this idea of what American women should be.
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If you haven't listened yet, head over to Apple Podcasts to hear for yourself. Our series touched a bit on how Black suffragists were often pushed
to the margins by their white counterparts. I assume that also means that they were often
removed from the record of images. How does that affect how we see the suffrage movement today?
That is very true. There are a lot fewer images of Black suffragists, suffragists of color more generally than there are of white suffragists.
Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and many others worked on a book called The History of Women's Suffrage, which was actually a long series, volumes that were a thousand pages each, published between 1881 and 1922.
Although Sojourner Truth's portrait is really widely distributed, Susan B. Anthony had a copy
of it. She did not include it in the History of Women's Suffrage series. No women of color are
included in the History of Women's Suffrage series. And because that became really a foundational
text for telling the story of the suffrage movement, for a long time, women of color were
really pushed to the margins, as you said, were really, scholars didn't realize how many of them
were such significant leaders within the movement. And that's why looking back and
understanding the
power of someone like Sojourner Truth's portrait is really crucial. A lot of women like Ida B.
Wells, Mary Church Terrell, they understood the power of these images and they wanted to kind of
cultivate their own public image for the broader public. But Mary Church Terrell, who was the very first
president of the National Association of Colored Women, which was founded in 1896,
Terrell wanted her organization to have their own press committee and professionals to help
create that kind of public image, but they just simply didn't have the money. They couldn't
produce and publish
and distribute as much propaganda as white suffragists did.
The 19th Amendment is obviously the largest victory
of the American suffragist movement.
And we often hear that it's a guarantee
to the right to vote for women,
but it's not really a guarantee.
It's kind of in reverse.
It says that citizens shall not be denied
the right to vote on account of sex.
Of course, not all women were able to vote even after its passage.
Who was left out when this new amendment was ratified?
It points to this broader history of the Constitution, which does not guarantee the right to vote to anyone. And so the 19th Amendment is based on the 15th Amendment,
which also says that the vote cannot be denied based on race. They are very much linked amendments.
And by the 1890s, everyone knew that the amendments could be overridden, right? So in 1890,
Mississippi State Constitution starts putting in laws like poll
taxes and literacy tests, and they start spreading throughout the South and disenfranchising Black
men in the South. So by the 1910s, everyone knows that even if the 19th amendment passes,
that not all women will have the right to vote. So this is an amendment that enfranchises many
white women, but many people who cannot pay poll taxes, so poor women can still be disenfranchised.
A lot of people of color, especially in the South, Black women in particular. But in the West,
for example, there are laws disenfranchising Native American women, and that is ameliorated a little bit with the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.
Puerto Rican women cannot vote either. Asian American women actually can't vote in the United States until the 1940s. And historians point to the Voting Rights Act as the major turning point towards granting
a lot more access to the ballot for a far greater number of people. So the 19th Amendment is an
important turning point, but it really is only a building block towards expanding the vote rather than a major single dramatic moment
towards greater access to the vote for women. Because as I'm sure you know, many women were
voting before the 19th Amendment in states, at the local level, at the municipal level often,
and many women couldn't vote after it. So yes, the 19th Amendment is just a stepping
stone in the history of our voting rights rather than a transformational moment.
Let's investigate what the next stepping stones were. Certainly, Alice Paul immediately turned
her attention to another constitutional campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment.
What was so important about this that she made it her focus?
So Alice Paul, in 1923, with the National Women's Party, introduces the ERA, the Equal Rights
Amendment. And this is, as you know, an amendment that has never been passed. In 1923, one might
think that all women would support the ERA, but that was absolutely not true because there were
a lot of protections within the laws specifically for women because people believed women were
weaker physically. They believed women should really only be mothers. And so, for example,
there were labor laws that prevented women from working more than eight-hour days. And those did
not apply to men. And the fear was that they would lose all of those labor protections that they had.
That was one of the initial concerns about the ERA. Alice Paul knew very well that the
19th Amendment had not finished the conversation about women's voting rights in the United States. Mary Church Terrell,
the first president of the National Association of Colored Women, wrote to her and met with her
and asked her to devote her organization and her funds and her political clout to ensuring that
Black women in the South, for example, could vote after the 19th Amendment.
But Alice Paul just didn't care. She thought that it wasn't her problem, that the fact that a lot
of women still couldn't vote after the 19th Amendment was something that she had no concerns
over. So when we're thinking about this exciting new equal rights amendment that she was proposing, she was also making choices not to pursue ensuring that all women had access to the ballot, too.
The suffrage movement in general presented not just a political shift for women, but a perception shift, and probably it was hand in hand. We've already discussed how it was a
strategic choice to make these images so that America could envision a woman in public voting,
doing the things that men might only do at the time. It brought women into the public eye in a
way that that hasn't been done before. How did that change the way women were perceived in this country, perhaps beyond politics?
One of the things that my book looks at, for example, is the fact that early on in American
history, it's a lot of men who are artists, illustrators, editors, and publishers.
But what we see over the course of the 19th century is that women are entering that field.
And so by the time suffrage organizations are
starting to create a lot of the propaganda, they're able to hire female artists. There are
some female editors that are very powerful. And so one of the ways that the suffragists are changing
the perception of them politically is actually by having a lot of women enter a lot of professions
that they hadn't had access to before. As artists, for example, for major newspapers and major
magazines, the artists themselves are actually helping to change the conversation about women.
For example, Rose O'Neill is one of my favorite suffrage artists. She was actually
became famous by creating the Kewpie doll image. You might know of the very famous illustrations
that she created for a range of platforms, including the Ladies Home Journal. She also
created suffrage propaganda with these cutie babies who were doing things
like marching and saying, with signs saying, votes for our mothers. And this is a really
effective way of doing this. And so by having women being able to access things like professional
art training, and beyond that, of course, women by the late 19th century are entering college at a
far greater scale than they were in previous decades. Those types of things are really
shifting the conversation. Having women with professional kind of early media training who
can think about these strategies of how to grab national attention is contributing
to the suffragist's ability to kind of secure power, change the way people are thinking
about women politically.
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Let's move forward in time a little bit to a more modern era. You already mentioned that the
Equal Rights Amendment remains unratified. It actually has the requisite and 1980s, was the rise
of a counter organization, the Stop ERA organization, which was headed by Phyllis Schlafly.
And one of the things that strikes me as a historian, of course, is that a lot of the
rhetoric that Phyllis Schlafly and her colleagues were stating really echoed a lot of what anti-suffragists had been saying
a century earlier. So the argument was that women should focus on the home, they should be
not worried about being kind of equal with their male counterparts. So they would show up,
for example, with apple pies at a protest. So very much kind of
the anti-suffrage rhetoric that had been happening all along, maybe, you know, a la Martha Washington,
kind of helping their male counterparts with politics, but not having kind of the same
equal say in them. And so we see that echo, even in the 21st century, where there's still conversations about, you know,
what role women should have in American society. There's still people who are concerned about
having a female president or having a woman in public office. If a woman has too much power,
is she too masculine? But we see those implicitly in things like political cartoons or
smaller comments that people make about these women in power. And I think that the things that
Phyllis Schlafly and her colleagues were concerned about in the 1970s and 1980s,
things like women being subject to the draft, women and men having to use the same restrooms,
you know, all kinds of things that have actually, that there are, of course, conversations now about
having women subject to the draft anyway, without the Equal Rights Amendment passed.
These things, these conversations change, they evolved a little bit. But at the same time,
we still have a lot of the echoes that have actually
been part of conversations about women and politics and power for over a century.
They're just a slightly different form today. Well, today in recent years and recent as in
like the last 15, we've had more female candidates at the top positions than ever. Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton,
Kamala Harris. This use of image in depicting women candidates today still probably carries
on some traditions we probably shouldn't carry on. How are images used still even today to perhaps
mischaracterize women in power?
This is one of the things I love scrolling Instagram for. And this is one of the things I love to see people's, you know, how people are, how individuals like the women you mentioned are choosing to represent themselves.
And often they are really interested in balancing this idea of them as mothers. Sarah
Palin is an excellent example of this. Her status as a mother was something that she really
emphasized as part of her campaign, and Kamala Harris is another great example because even
though she has not had children,
she has stepchildren.
And when she was announced as vice president, there were conversations about her being called Mamala.
So emphasizing that even though she did not have children herself, she was a mother figure,
a caring figure for these children.
And what you'll often see on female politicians' accounts is kind of like,
you know, a photograph of them with their families pretty regularly. And you don't see that same
interest in kind of striking a balance between political power and kind of caregiving and
motherhood or fatherhood on like a male politician's account. And so we still see in the 21st century, this attempt to balance out, you know, represent
themselves as feminine, as motherly with the power that they have in a way that male politicians
just simply don't, aren't asked to do. So that is something that is very much indicative of what the suffragists did actually a century earlier,
that they can do all of these things and be all of these things, even as they are political leaders.
As I'm sure you know, one of the great pleasures and perhaps also pains of studying history is that
it's rife with echoes of the past and the present.
Much of what you just described as women's struggles today have a lot of echoes of the same kind of obstacles they faced at the beginning of the suffrage movement.
So what do you suppose is something important we can take from the suffrage movement of 100 years ago and apply to women's
struggles for equal representation today. So one of the things I think is really important
to remember that although a lot of the challenges that women are still facing today are ones that
the suffragists were talking about 150 years ago, for example, at the Seneca Falls Convention, the Declaration of Sentiments was concerned about equal pay.
And that is something that is still concerning to women, especially women of color.
One of the things to think about is that even though those challenges are still there, the nature of the conversation about those is very different. In 1848, people
had no intention. The idea that you would actually pay women and men equally was so far-fetched
at the time that this is one of the things that's causing these suffragists to be lampooned,
to be mocked at the level that they were. Although the conversation is still happening,
it's changing. There's a lot more awareness that this gap exists. There's a lot more research
trying to understand why it exists. And the fact that a lot of states, including Massachusetts,
where I live, has an equal rights amendment requiring equal pay, which allows for women or people who are
not being paid equally to actually create a lawsuit and seek equal pay. That is something
that has changed. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton could have hoped for that. We are
in a very different position now, even though we are
still having the same concerns today. I guess, finally, your book came out in 2020. So I assume
you are neck deep in your next publication. What are you up to? Well, I mentioned Instagram as one
of my favorite places to look at the images that are kind of reinforcing ideas, creating ideas. And so I am going to be looking
at these popular images that a lot of us are encountering that, you know, go viral related to,
you know, political power, political protests. And I'm going to be thinking about the history
behind those images. So for example, a lot of us have probably seen photographs of women at, for example, things
like the State of the Union wearing white or Vice President Kamala Harris wearing white, many other
women at a variety of levels wearing white. And that, of course, is reminiscent of the suffragists.
It's the suffragists that they're calling out with that color and thinking about the ways that
suffragists use that color as a political protest color that is still being carried out today.
So I'm really excited to be looking at these very popular images and telling the deeper historical story that I think will be really fascinating and surprising about how these images came to be so iconic in the 21st century.
I look forward to seeing it come out.
Dr. Alison Lang, thank you so much for talking to me
on American History Teller.
Thank you, it was a delight.
That was my conversation with historian Alison Lang,
author of Picturing Political Power,
Images in the Women's Suffrage Movement.
From Wondery, this is the sixth and final episode
of the fight for women's suffrage
from American history tellers.
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