Here's Where It Gets Interesting - The Formidable Change-Makers of Women’s Suffrage with Dr. Elisabeth Griffith

Episode Date: September 12, 2022

On today’s episode of Here's Where It Gets Interesting, Sharon talks with Dr. Elisabeth Griffith, who has written a new book called Formidable: American Women and the Fight for Equality: 1920-2020. Many times we think that the passing of the 19th amendment that gave women the right to vote was the finish line of women’s suffrage, but the struggle for equality has been a long road, and has not often been an equal journey for all women. Join the conversation today as Dr. Griffith shares some of the nuances of the history around the Women’s Rights Movement–the courage, the flaws, the race relations, the connections to temperance, Civil Rights, and more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Buy from dysoncanada.ca. With ANC on, performance may vary based on environmental conditions and usage. Accessories sold separately. Hello, friend. Welcome. So excited you're with me today. I'm sharing a conversation with Dr. Elizabeth Griffith, who has written an incredible work called Formidable, and it is about American women and the fight for equality. If we want to move forward in history with open eyes, we have to learn from the past. So let's step in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am so excited to be chatting today with Dr. Elizabeth Griffith. Thank you so much for being here.

It's a pleasure and how nice to be returning to the Midwest, even if only on audio. Oh, I read with such interest your book called Formidable, and the subtitle is American Women and the Fight for Equality. And the subtitle is American Women and the Fight for Equality. And I think we have this idea that equality happened for American women when women gained the right to vote. I think that's sort of the impression that many people have that, you know, like, hey, we can vote. Everybody's equal now.

And that was obviously not the case. And I would love to hear more about why you chose this topic. It's an important topic. And because of all the hoopla about the 19th Amendment, and it enfranchised 26 million white and Black American women, but it did not cover everybody. It did not protect those Black women. It was a federal rule that said that women could not be discriminated against on account of sex, but that did not mean that state laws could not discriminate in whether they were able to vote, what barriers were put up before them. A journalist said 10 years after suffrage passed that the 19th Amendment promised almost

everything and delivered almost nothing. There was such excitement over the possibility that women were going to vote. It's one of the reasons I chose the title because formidable is a word with many meanings. It means something dramatic and possibly dreadful. And that's how the people who opposed women's suffrage felt about it, that if suffrage passed, it would be a disaster. And it also means a very hard task. And getting suffrage, winning suffrage, was an almost 100-year campaign, and it barely won, even as it closed in on victory. So it was a formidable fight. And the women who conducted it were brave and gutsy. formidable fight. And the women who conducted it were brave and gutsy. But then it's over. And what happens next? That was my question. Once they got the vote, what did women do? What causes did they support? Did they run for office? Did they vote? How did they change America? Did they achieve equality? The answers to most of those might be no. The answers to most of those might be no.

The scope of history is very well illustrated in some ways by this fight for women's suffrage at the federal level, by the fight for equal suffrage at the state level. We have this tendency to think that injustice is occurring and we should snap our fingers and fix it. Because that's the human inclination of, I see a wrong, I want to write it. And it feels really frustrating when we are not able to write a wrong in a quick fashion. But the struggle for equality in suffrage was so long. It was so long, Betsy. How did- Long, hard fight. And Anthony called it the long, hard fight. And most of the time they were losing. Yes. Up until 1918, they continued to lose on the federal level. They had begun to win on the state level. So suffrage finally succeeds as a political campaign for maybe five factors.

It succeeds because Carrie Chapman Catt, who was head of the National American Women's Suffrage Association, she represents sort of the second generation of leadership, was brilliant. She was strategic. She was relentless. She directed a state and federal campaign. She wooed Woodrow Wilson, and she created a multiracial, multigenerational, cross-class coalition, which held together for barely three years, but it was the last three years of the fight, and they were able to get suffrage over the finish line. A national amendment requires a two-thirds vote in the House, two-thirds in the Senate, and then ratification by three-quarters of the states. This was not an easy thing to do. And among Katz's strategies was that as it passed in some states, women were able to vote in the 27 states prior to suffrage passing. In 15, they could vote at every level of a ticket, and in 12, they could only vote for president. But the fact that women were voting meant that some members of Congress were representing women voters and could feel their energy and their direction, and they thought maybe they should think more broadly on the topic of women's suffrage. So she is a brilliant strategist. She deserves sort of the credit for the political fight. The second person about whom there's enormous debate, how important was her role, is Alice Paul. Alice Paul represents the third generation of suffrage. Stanton, Anthony, Stone, Sojourner

Truth, Frances Ellen Watkins, they are the founding mothers. Alice Paul is feisty and militant and angry. And she did research for her graduate doctorate degree in England, where she aligned with the Pankhurst, who were these, some people referred to them as domestic terrorists. They were throwing bombs into mailboxes. They were protesting every member of parliament. One woman threw herself in front of the king's horse at Ascot. They were making a lot of news. And as a result, by the time Paul comes home, after only five years in England, she comes back to the United States in 1912. She has been arrested and force-fed seven times. Her health would never be robust again. But she brings back to America these tactics,

what were referred to as outdoor tactics, that women should stand on a soapbox, that they should march, that they should picket, that they should be in public. And she is brilliant at political street theater. The 1913 march, which ends in a riot, not her fault, but the riot put them on the front page of the newspapers. The pickets of the White House in 1917, which ended up with her being back in jail and force fed. She's changing attitudes, but she's not changing votes. But I think in any political campaign, you need sort of a vanguard of militancy, and then you need the vote counters coming behind and making sure all the ducks are in line. So women won on account of Katz's strategy, on account of Paul's street theater. They won because

the First World War, the Great War, had demonstrated women's patriotism. They filled in for men in factories and farms. They went overseas as nurses and ambulance drivers, and most importantly, as telephone operators, because America was in the war a very short time. We didn't have many weapons to contribute, but telephones were the brand new technology. They were the cell phones of the era. And these women, telephone operators, allowed military men to communicate between the trenches. So it made a huge amount of difference. The fourth reason was that all these women were voting. There were maybe six million women voting in these 27 states. And the last reason was the vote of one person, this Tennessee legislator named Harry Byrne. Harry is 24. He's serving his first term. He's a Republican. He's away from home. And he has

been persuaded that he should oppose suffrage. So he enters the state legislature on the day of the vote with a red rose boutonniere. But as he's walking into the chamber, he's picked up his mail and he has a letter from his mother and his mother saying, dear son, when you come back home, please bring me some new sheet music for the piano. And I want you to vote for suffrage. Please vote for ratification. Be a good boy and support Mrs. Catt. And he changed his vote. And that single action by this young man is why suffrage, the amendment passed. If he had not changed his vote, the entire fight would have had to start over again, back through the Congress, back through all the other states to ratify. All the rest were diehard Confederate states. They were never going to support suffrage.

The next day, he says in a press conference, I've learned that a young man should always do what his mother tells him to do. So it was, I mean, it was really very chancy that we ever won this very hard, long campaign, but we won. And then people thought, well, phew, we're done. We can now just push along and enact all these changes we wanted to, but they were not done and we're still not done. I love that Harry Byrne story so much because it shows the influence of a mother on her children that she had cultivated enough of a relationship with him that when he read her letter, his heart was

softened. His mind was changed. And had they had a different kind of relationship, he might have just been like, oh, listen to this old woman trying to tell me to vote for this amendment. But it demonstrates a certain type of relationship that they had that I've always just like, oh, I love that story so much. Well, and you know, when you're reading and writing women's history, there are a lot of those relationships, all of women's experiences, not only as volunteers or in the public sphere in their professions, but their domestic roles play a part in how they function in the wider world. There's a wonderful statue now in Knoxville of Harry and his mother, Phoebe, and he's seated

at a desk and she has her hand on his shoulder. And it captures just what you're saying, this affection and mutual respect. I have heard often the criticism that the women's suffrage movement was really about the suffrage of white women, that it was exclusionary to people of other races, or that it was sacrificing racial equality on the altar of women's suffrage. This is the cause we will work for now. It is not the cause of racial equality. Do you agree with that assessment or do you have a different view? That's mostly correct. The women's rights movement in America was rooted in, divided by,

racism and white supremacy and segregation. But that's not the whole story. The Black Freedom Movement and the Women's Rights Movement are closely allied. They are born together in the 1820s and 1830s in the American abolition movement. Lots of alliances. The women we think of as the founding mothers of the suffrage movement, Stanton, Anthony Stone, were active abolitionists and worked with Sojourner Truth, worked with Frances Watkins Harper. Lucretia Mott, in particular, was recruiting Black leadership women. But they did not always agree, and they did not always have the same priorities. When I was writing this book, I was committed to making sure that the heroic African-American female change agents got as much credit as they deserved because they have sometimes been ignored in this long history, which is quite ironic because white women were annoyed that they had been ignored

by white men in the writing of American history. So I wanted to make sure all these stories were told. And they are like threads in a tapestry. Sometimes they weave together and make a pattern. Sometimes they knot up. Sometimes they're going in completely different directions. So the abolition movement to get rid of enslavement spurs white women to think about their own rights. Their conditions were not comparable to that of enslaved women. But they began to think about their own rights. Their conditions were not comparable to that of enslaved women. But they began to think about that they were owned by their husbands under the common law. They had no rights to property, to their children, to their clothing, to their home, to their name, to their residency. So they began to see some legal parallels and thought, well,

maybe we should be fighting for our rights as well. So the abolition movement and the women's rights movement work in tandem from the 1840s into the end of the Civil War. And then the white women think, now we ought to be rewarded with getting the vote. Blacks deserve the vote. Whites deserve the vote. Everybody deserves the vote. This was a very naive point of view. It was called universal suffrage. And there were only four members of Congress in the entire Congress in 1868 who thought that was a good idea because white men not only didn't want women voting, they didn't want any more blacks voting than possible. So that eliminated black women. They didn't want immigrants. They didn't want Native Americans. They wanted to try to narrow the vote. So some white women opposed passage of the 15th Amendment, which gave the vote to Black men because it was not giving the vote

to Black women or white women. And Stanton and Anthony and a very few others fell into viciously racial rhetoric, which is hard to forgive when you read it. And it created a schism. Black women said, well, we're never going to trust you to support our causes. And the white women's movement divided between Stanton and a more conservative branch. Eventually, they would all work their way back together, but the distrust remained and the racism was endemic. So your question was related to actually the more recent era of getting suffrage passed from 1900 on. The second generation of women represented by Carrie Chapman Tatt were not idealists, were not visionaries. Chapman Cat, were not idealists, were not visionaries. They just wanted to win. And they needed to win with the votes of white men who had all the racist and nativist and know-nothing biases of the era. And so they would occasionally say when campaigning in the South that if you

enfranchise white women, we will, even if you enfranchise white and black women, there are more of us, we will outvote them. We will outvote immigrants. But when it came down to it, and the suffrage bill is in front of the Congress in 1914 and 1917 and 1918, Southerners attempt to add an amendment that says this is white-only suffrage, and it's defeated. The women unify and said, absolutely not. We're all in this. We're going to get it passed. They were pressed by their Black women allies, and maybe some of them were reluctant, but they did not back down. They did not allow a suffrage amendment that was going to be white women only. Where they failed was after suffrage passes and black women with whom they've worked, these upper middle class educated leadership women with

whom they correspond, with whom they attend meetings, they're on the same platform speaking, come to the white women's leadership and say, we really need your help. We need you to go back to Congress with us and pass some protections so that Blacks can vote in places where there are these discriminatory laws. And some white women, Alice Paul among them, say that's not a women's issue. That's a race issue. We're not dealing with that. So the white women really let down the Black women and the Black women were not all that surprised. But from 1920 on, as you know, because I know you've had programs on this, there are really two streams. There's a white stream of

activism. There's a Black stream of activism. There are offshoots of both. The white stream divides among a variety of causes, social justice causes, equal rights causes, those are different, and birth control causes. But Black women are unified, and they have a broader agenda. They want the protection of Blacks in America, the end of Jim Crow discrimination, the end of lynching, and opportunities for equal pay and access to jobs. It's a very broad agenda. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together, we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office

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Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. I want to get more into talking about the Jim Crow South and ways in which Black women were repeatedly disenfranchised over decades. But I do have two very quick curiosity questions that I think people are always interested to hear about, about women's suffrage. One is the inextricable ties between the women's suffrage movement and the temperance movement. You cannot tell one story without telling the other story. It's just like real, real messy and tangled in there. And a lot of people today are like, but why? Can you enlighten us? I'll try, but it's challenging for any woman today to envision the powerlessness of women in the 19th century.

Clearly, African-Americans who were enslaved had no rights at all. But African-Americans who were free in the North and in the West and white women also shared this same powerlessness. They had no economic power, no political power, no base of authority. So they didn't have tools to make change. And women who were the daughters of or the wives of men who drank were particularly vulnerable. You were physically vulnerable to violence and you could not escape because you owned nothing. You could take nothing with you. The clothes on your back belonged to your husband

and your children belonged to your husband. So when the Women's Christian Temperance Union was organized in the 1870s, it brought together women who'd been working on temperance since the 1820s and 30s in smaller ways because this was an immediate cause for women. Everybody knew somebody who was in this situation. Many of them needed to be protected. But think of the name, the Women's Christian Temperance Union. So they thought of themselves as Protestants. So they're

excluding Catholics. There's a bias against Catholics as drinking immigrants. They propounded stereotypes about Black men as slovenly and drunken. So, while it had an outstanding cause, it also was a flawed organization. But it is the largest women's organization in the history of America, larger than now, has ever been larger than any other organization. From 1870-something into the 1920s until Prohibition ends, it has a huge hold on the thinking of the country. And the temperance women realized that they should become suffragists because if they had the vote, they would have more clout to pass these rules. So they offered to become allies. And again, Carrie Chapman Catt with this sort of no-nonsense, we'll do what we have to do

to win. And so there is an alliance between suffrage and prohibition and temperance. But what it also brings is every enemy of prohibition. It brings the Democrats, the immigrants, the saloon keepers, the big city bosses. It creates a pretty powerful anti-block which has money. So it fires up the opposition. So the very long answer to your question is, yes, there are historical ties between temperance and prohibition and suffrage for good or ill. So interesting. Okay. My other one little curiosity question before we move forward in time is about the role of God. The light of God shines on all people. And so there was never a question of male and female equality. There was great respect within marriages and within meeting houses. And so four of the five women who organized the Seneca Falls

first official women's rights convention in 1848 were Quakers. Lucretia Mott, I return to her because she's just heroic. During her abolition period, where she founded the first women's anti-slavery society in Philadelphia, which is burned to the ground by protesters, but she never used sugar. She never used cotton products. She used nothing that could have been produced by an enslaved person. She drew people from the South, African Americans who escaped, knew they could get to Philadelphia and be protected by Quakers. It was this wonderfully liberating idea. And that's, you know, there are all these elements in this movement. There's the strengths, which would be all those Quaker values, and there's the weaknesses of the racism and sexism

that are deeply rooted and the bias. And so in some ways, it's amazing that they ever created a coalition and influenced enough people to vote to earn suffrage. You know, every time I vote, even if it's for something that is, you know, like this is, what is this, a waterboard? You know what I mean? Like it's seems like something really consequential. Yeah. Where I'm like, this is, do I need to do this? I am always reminded of the women who came before me, who struggled for hundreds of years to earn this right on my behalf. And I will roll up and vote for whatever, if for no other reason than to honor their sacrifice and work.

That is a really good reason to vote. And I hope you say that far and wide in the weeks before every election for the Water Quality Board. I share that sentiment. And when I was a high school principal, I gave that talk all the time for girls who were going out to register for the first time. I cannot imagine being brave enough to be force-fed, to protest, be jealous, and be force-fed. It was a horrific form of torture. a Black woman from the 20s, 30s, and 40s who's trying to work within her community as a church deacon, an agricultural agent, a public health nurse, just a neighbor or a teacher working quietly in her community to teach people literacy, how to register, how to pass those dreadful discriminatory tests, and having to do it knowing that your life was at risk. I cannot imagine in the 1950s when women

were slightly braver because it was now a public issue. People could march, but look what happened when people marched. They ended up beaten and in jail. Black women left home with toothbrushes and toilet paper in their purses so they would have them when they were jailed. But they weren't safe in jail. Fannie Lou Hamer is beaten so badly she remains frail for the rest of her life. And that was already after she'd suffered what was known at the time as a Mississippi appendectomy, an involuntary hysterectomy. I mean, the treatment was horrible. I also love what you have to say in the introduction of your book. What do you say? I believe in examining the context and allowing for nuance. People make mistakes or huge errors

in judgment based on their experience, environment, and era. Individuals are more than one action or one choice, and we can be honest about their failures and contradictions and still acknowledge their contributions. And I think one of the questions of our time is how do we judge characters of the past who made big mistakes in the eyes of today's values? How do we judge people who did make important contributions to the country, but who also did terrible things? And I really love that your outlook and your book allows for experiencing the full depth of the story. It's not just about holding people up on pedestals of like,

look at this amazing person who was such a shining light on a hill. We can acknowledge exactly how important their contributions were and still be like, and yes, he also cheated on his wife. We can do both of those things. Yes. Yes. How do we judge historic characters? I think we have to be very careful and humble. I think to be too self-righteous is very risky. Who knows what our behavior today, how our behavior today, which we might think is enlightened, will be judged by generations beyond us who look back and say, how could they ever have acted like that? Yeah. But I also, I mean, to be a historian, I am a fact-based, you need at least two sources. Let's look at the footnotes, sort of historian. You need to understand not only the action that you're writing about, but partly the

motivation for it. Let's go all the way back to the founding fathers. It does not necessarily mean that people who enslaved others could not envision a democracy in which everyone was equal, who could not give us the language that would prompt us to aspire to a more perfect union and to move the democracy along. We remain a democracy that people are trying desperately to come be part of, and that's the best place on earth. And I am thankful to live here. And I want us to reach those aspirational goals. And of course we're not. I mean, it's hard work to change people's thinking and environment.

We need to really think creatively about how to, I mean, I wish we had like an internal Peace Corps that every high school senior had to spend a year of doing service in a state and environment. If they're rural, they go to a city. If they're white, they go to a brown community, that there was more mixing and matching. I think before the U.S. Army became all voluntary, it was really a source of mixing and matching. it was really a source of mixing and matching. It is such a blessing to be in a place where people are different than you are because you learn to value them. And so before I'm going to be too critical of people who don't have the blessing of the diversity that surrounds me, I'm going to think, well, it's what their environment is. It's what they know.

But I also think every single one of us, this comes back to the book and reading history. I think we have a responsibility to learn and not to stop learning just because we're grownups. One of the reasons I wrote this book, I've been teaching women's history for 40 years. I have a PhD in American women's history and American history, not just women's history, all American history. And I learned in every page of this book, there were women whose names I might have read once, but now I want to know so much more about. And I think we have a responsibility to educate ourselves. And then as we're educating ourselves, share that information with our children. I really want to talk about how women of color, particularly Black women, influenced the civil rights movement, influenced gaining the right to vote throughout the, particularly the South. We tend to think of the civil rights movement in, you know, like we had Martin Luther King had a dream and Rose Parks didn't get, get off the bus. She didn't give up her seat. And then the Supreme

court said, integrate the schools and we fix it. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like that tends to be what many people remember from school is those three facts. Sharon, I'm going to be thankful if they know that much, but it's just the start. It's just the start. And one of the reasons that the names of so many women are less familiar to the wider public is because it was so dangerous for these women to be functioning in public. They were purposely trying to stay behind the scenes until really the beginning of the 1950s. And then because Brown is going to the Supreme Court, because the marching is becoming more public, because of the Montgomery

bus boycott, women are willing to step forward a little bit more. So we begin to know the names of Ella Baker, backbone of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Rosa Parks, obviously, Daisy Bates is the woman who organizes the Little Rock Nine and protects them for the year that they hadn't integrated. Diane Nash is a student at Fisk in Nashville in 1960 when the Freedom Buses are trying to go from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans, and they are bombed and burned and terrorized. And so she keeps sending buses and volunteers with the strategy that the jails will just fill the jail. There'll be so many of us, we will overwhelm them.

Andy Young eulogized Fannie Lou Hamer by saying that Black women throughout our history have been the backbone and the conscience of the civil rights movement. And that's exactly true. Martin Luther King, who was the minister of the Dexter Avenue Church in Montgomery during the bus boycott, and they organized in the basement of the church on the Monday after she was arrested on Friday. Monday was the first day of the strike. And on that night, they were voting that they would continue to boycott the buses, which was a very risky thing to do. They needed to organize transportation and Tencent cabs, and they recruited funeral parlors to provide hearses so they could drive people. But they

decided they needed a spokesperson for what they named themselves the Montgomery Improvement Association. And there was this bright, young, energetic minister. I don't think he was even 30 yet. And they said, well, Martin can be our spokesperson. So eventually, a year later, the Supreme Court hands down the decision that the bus system has to be integrated. They win the case. And Martin says, good, fine, done. I'll just continue my ministry here. And the church ladies of his congregation say, no, no, no, you're not done, Martin. You need to move on. You need to continue to lead us. Again, there was a lot of women backing up charismatic men because during, obviously during slavery and during Jim Crow, Black men were so emasculated by the wider society

that being ministers, being political leaders were really their positions. And Black women did not wish to undercut them or compete with them. They were supporting them. But those women said, no, no, we don't want you as our minister anymore. You have to do something bigger. And that's when he organizes the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, hires Ellen Baker, who had been funding him through the NAACP in New York. And then he's really annoyed because she's a brilliant organizer and is always nagging him to do something. And he eventually disrespects her and fires her. Rosa Parks had a long history of civil rights activity. She had been involved, joined the NAACP in the 30s. She had worked for the Scottsboro Boys during that nine-year trial. She'd tried to support Black women who'd been gang raped by white men and who were

never prosecuted in the 40s. So she was not an inexperienced novice as an organizer. But the summer before she didn't move her seat, she attended the Highlander School in Tennessee, which was a civil rights and labor organizing enterprise. And she was taught by a woman named Septima Clark, who's one of my new heroines. I love her so much. Oh, good. I love Septima Clark. If you've never heard of her, this is a reason to buy my book. I think shortly there are going to be more books about her as her records are uncovered. Septima Clark was a school teacher in Charleston, South Carolina, which was a segregated system. So she was with all her educational credentials, was teaching in poorly equipped schools and in distant districts. She was teaching for a while on the Sea Island. She would teach kids in the daytime and their

parents at night, the same sort of thing. And then she's fired because she is a member of the NAACP and that was illegal. She's hired by the Highlander School, and she creates really the framework of what would become the freedom schools of the 1960s, where you're teaching literacy and American history and constitutional rights, how to register, how to start a credit union, how to ride on a bus, how to do all these things. And she is probably responsible for registering between 70 and 100,000 African Americans between 1960 and 1970. When she retires and she goes back to Charleston, she's elected to the school board, her wages are reinstated, and it comes full circle, which is a very rare story of success

and redemption and retribution. But I know that there are thousands of women whose names I will never know, who made every sacrifice, who had courage greater than I will ever have, who advanced the rights of Blacks. Because we began talking about 1920. 1920 is an incomplete victory. Thus, Blacks and whites does not do Native Americans, does not do immigrants, does not do the residents of territories, the residents of the District of Columbia, women married to foreigners. But by not protecting the rights of Black voters, the suffrage movement, the women's rights movement, the voting rights movement is not complete until August 6th, 1965 and the passage of the Voting Rights Act. and the passage of the Voting Rights Act. And now all of those gains in the last 20 years have undergone challenges. And I think we're all aware of the legislatures which are narrowing access to voting in some states. The stories of women, particularly women whose names are not household names like Septima Clark,

are truly some of my most favorite stories from history ever. The incredible amount of courage that they had to exhibit. These were not things that happened to them. They were things that they made happen. Oh, that's so well said. And the courage it required to make those things happen, knowing the political conditions that they were up against, knowing the violence that they suffered often at the hands of white men, knowing the violence members of their community, Black men suffered at the hands of white men, knowing the obstacles in front of them, that they continued to press forward. I have one last question for you, which is, what about history gives you hope? Our country has struggled to achieve its goals, has grown dramatically in every way, including in the expansion of our democracy so that everybody does now have the ability to vote. But that then incorporates all of this diversity. So you have many different kinds of opinions. And I think we have a harder time finding a common expression of values. But when you look at history, we have come to the brink of crisis in our country more than once, and we have survived. We have survived international wars. We survived a civil war.

So we confront challenges, but I think it's a country capable of dealing with those if we prepare ourselves to take it seriously and try to have conversations that don't end up in fistfights and not make the worst assumptions about the people with whom we disagree. But that's all very hard work. It's one of the reasons I always, so having been a teacher this long, it's the end of August. I'm sort of feeling like September's coming back to school. I am ready to start the new year. And then I think about what the new year will entail for kids in schools and what will be in the curriculum, what books will have been in the library and might have been removed from the library. library. We need to allow the whole story to be told because that's the only way we're going to learn enough lessons to guide us into a future which is less acrimonious and I hope solves some problems. I love that. And I really think that your work is so important. The book, again, is called Formidable American Women and the Fight for Equality from 1920 to 2020. And if we want to move forward, we have to move forward with open eyes. So thank you so much for being here. I really

appreciate your time. This was a pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. This podcast was written and researched by Sharon McMahon and Heather Jackson. It was produced by Heather Jackson, edited and mixed by our audio

producer Jenny Snyder, and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. I'll see you next time.