VIDEO: KATHY ROBERTS FORDE ON THE ENDURING PROBLEM OF WHITE SUPREMACY

In her Afterword for Front Pages Front Lines, Assoc. Prof. Kathy Roberts Forde of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst returns to white southern suffragists’ ‘unholy alliance’ with white supremacy, including through the support of the leading suffragist periodical in the South. She points out that in the early 20th century, the National American Woman Suffrage Association capitulated to southern prejudice, for example, by acknowledging the right of southern chapters to exclude black women from membership.

VIDEO: JINX BROUSSARD ON AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN SEEKING THE VOTE

Prof. Jinx Broussard is the Bart R. Swanson Endowed Memorial Professor at Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communications. With Robin Sundarmoorthyith in Chapter 4 of Front Pages Front Lines, she addresses black women journalists and coverage of black women’s positions on suffrage, looking at both the suffrage activities of black women journalists and the black press coverage of black women’s participation in the movement, which was controversial in black communities across the country.

VIDEO: JANE RHODES on THE NEW NEGRO IN THE BLACK PUBLIC SPHERE

In Chapter 5 of Front Pages Front Lines, Prof. Jane Rhodes, the head of African-American Studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago, examines the positions on suffrage and black women’s suffrage activism of black periodicals attached to socialism, the Communist Party, and black nationalist papers. She focuses on the post–World War I era, when black periodicals conveyed the anxiety and grievances about a widespread backlash against black American soldiers, urban antiblack violence, and lynching.

Video Interviews with the Authors of Front Pages, Front Lines

Links to all video shorts for the chapters of Front Pages Front Lines are below. Read more about the book here.

“Lumsden offers a comprehensive historiography of suffrage and the media that highlights the near one-dimensionality of much of the early scholarship. She analyzes what historians, journalism studies researchers, and sociologists have found—and what they have ignored—beginning in the 1970s, when feminist scholars began to look back at both suffrage editors and mainstream news media coverage of the campaign.”

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“Steiner argues that the suffrage and women’s rights papers of the nineteenth century created and experimented with very different versions of the new woman, and then dramatized and celebrated these identities.”

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“Bennion shows how the prosuffrage arguments of the Women’s Exponent, published for Mormon women, were reformulated in response to regional political shifts, using various rationales to counter attempts to disenfranchise polygamous women.”

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“Broussard addresses black women journalists and coverage of black women’s positions on suffrage, looking at both the suffrage activities of black women journalists and the black press coverage of black women’s participation in the movement, which was controversial in black communities across the country.”

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“Rhodes examines the positions of black periodicals attached to socialism or the Communist Party, as well as black nationalist papers, regarding suffrage and black women’s suffrage activism. She focuses on the post–World War I era, when black periodicals conveyed the anxiety and grievances about a widespread backlash against black American soldiers, urban antiblack violence, and lynching.”

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“Grasso compares the approaches to women’s suffrage adopted by the NAACP’s The Crisis, under W.E.B. Du Bois, and The Masses, edited by Max Eastman and primarily serving white readers. Both magazines vigorously supported women’s suffrage, but Grasso analyzes their ‘differently radical’ approaches.”

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“Finneman draws on US news coverage to examine the rhetorical strategies of the anti-suffragists in representing themselves and their adversaries in 1917, when they began to lose significant ground with journalists as the progressive arguments of the suffragists gained more traction with journalists.”

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“Marcellus offers a close reading of the Nashville press as the country watched to see if Tennessee would become the final state to ratify the 19th amendment. She contends that for both the Nashville Tennessean and the Nashville Bannert, competing views of Southern white masculinity were at stake.”

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“Kroeger shows the importance and influence, especially during the suffrage movement’s final decade, of high society women and men who enjoyed elite status as socialites, businessmen and professionals, especially as editors and publishers of important newspapers and magazines, and how suffrage leaders cultivated these recruits and the useful resources they brought.”

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“Beasley examines how suffrage organizations and their new outlets shifted their policies, positions, and philosophies in the 1920s, analyzing the after-enfranchisement efforts of suffrage activists to decide whether to enter the existing male power structure or concentrate on women’s advancement outside of it.”

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“Kitch analyzes how cover stories in Time, Life, and Newsweek, in the context of reporting on the so-called second wave of the women’s movement, both remembered and forgot the women’s suffrage movement and alternated between or combined celebration and dismissal of feminism, using suffrage memory at both ends.”

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“Forde’s Afterword returns to white southern suffragists’ ‘unholy alliance’ with white supremacy, including through the support of the leading suffragist periodical in the South. Indeed, she points out that in the early twentieth century, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) capitulated to southern prejudice, for example, by acknowledging the right of southern chapters to exclude black women from membership.”

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BOOK: “Why They Marched” By Susan Ware

From Harvard University Press comes Susan Ware‘s new book, Why They Marched, which trains its focus “beyond the national leadership of the suffrage movement” to “give voice to the thousands of women from different backgrounds, races, and religions whose local passion and protest resounded throughout the land.” Ware has written about parts of her work in the Washington Post history blog, arguing that black women need to be returned to the center of suffrage movement history. And Harvard Magazine published this feature about the book. Ware, a distinguished scholar, is leading the Schlesinger Library’s suffrage centennial commemoration initiative. Alex Kane interviewed her for sufrageandthemedia.org, which can be found at this link. Among the early reviews of Why They Marched are these from Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly.

AUDIO: NPR’s All Things Considered: Sally Roesch Wagner, Editor, New Anthology on Women’s Suffrage

Women’s historian Sally Roesch Wagner has edited a new Penguin Classics anthology of classical writing on the topic from a diverse array of suffragists. It’s titled, The Women’s Suffrage Movement, with an introduction by Gloria Steinem. Here, Wagner is interviewed for  a March 22, 2019 episode of NPR’s “All Things Considered.”

NEW RESEARCH, INTERVIEW, PODCAST: Nancy C. Unger, “Legacies of Belle La Follette’s Big Tent Campaign for Women’s Suffrage”

Nancy C. Unger analyzes of the “big tent” yet “Janus-faced” suffrage arguments promoted by Bella La Follette in the pages of La Follette’s Magazine, demonstrates how, over two decades at the start of the twentieth century, La Follette deftly melded social justice and expediency arguments with the aim of attracting as diverse an array of suffrage supporters as possible. This included La Follette’s willingness to chide middle class white suffragists for their overt racism. While Unger concludes that the wide-ranging arguments of La Follette and others helped bring the Nineteenth Amendment to fruition, “they also reinforced lasting cultural, political, economic, ideological, and social differences between the sexes and among women. Listen to this podcast from the Journalism History site of Dr. Unger talking about her article, links to which are below. Taylor & Francis has opened access for the period April 15 to July 15, 2019.

(This page will take you to all the synopses of articles in American Journalism’s special issue, “Women’s Suffrage and the Media.”)

Here below, Dr. Unger  responds to the questions: What prompted you to choose this topic and what surprised or fascinated you as you conducted your research?

“As a scholar of the long Gilded Age and Progressive Era, I have long been fascinated by the progressive reform tradition coming out of the Midwest.  After writing Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer (University of North Carolina Press, 2000; Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2008), I turned my attention to Bob La Follette’s wife, Belle Case La Follette (1859-1931).  Belle La Follette: Progressive Era Reformer (Routledge 2016) was the result.  I admire this married couple’s lifelong dedication to reform.  She, for example, was not only a journalist, outspoken proponent of civil rights, and ardent advocate of world peace and disarmament, but also a leader in the women’s suffrage movement.  However, some of her activism, especially her “big tent” approach to the latter, gave me pause.

“Belle La Follette used mutually exclusive arguments to promote women’s suffrage.  Even as she made feminist appeals for suffrage, advocating equality of the sexes, she also used traditional gendered arguments, presenting women as qualified to vote by virtue of their domestic natures.  By combining these approaches she (and others like her) certainly brought a wide-ranging set of supporters to the cause—but at what price?”

“It is discouraging to me that even today, some of the old arguments espoused by La Follette, that women are naturally more domestic and altruistic than men, still contribute to society’s disparate treatment of the sexes.  So I think it’s important for groups seeking reforms or a particular candidate’s election to ponder such questions as: Do the ends justify the means?  Do the reasons matter why a reform or candidate gain support, or should gaining support be the sole consideration?  What unintended consequences can result from promoting a contradictory campaign, especially a winning one?  What’s the risk of not promoting an argument that could enhance the chance for victory?

Despite my criticisms of some of La Follette’s tactics, in the process of research this article, I was impressed all over again by the breadth and depth of her dedication to reform based in democratic principles.  Even as she was fighting for women’s suffrage, I was particularly struck by this white woman’s equally intense efforts to combat efforts by the Woodrow Wilson administration to racially segregate Washington, DC.  The African-American community responded with enthusiasm and gratitude.  African-American activist Nannie Helen Burroughs hailed La Follette as “the successor of Harriet Beecher Stowe,” and lawyer James Hayes told La Follette, “We thank God for such a white woman as you. We thank God for sending you to us and we thank you for coming. A few more like you would awaken the sleeping conscience of the nation.”  Despite my concerns about some of her tactics, I find her an inspiring example of a person truly dedicated to uplifting all Americans.”

VIDEO: “Women and the Vote: Opposition to Women’s Equality, from Suffrage to the ERA”

From the US National Archives: “Leading up to the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment and the opening of the National Archives’s ‘Rightfully Hers’ exhibition in March 2019, a panel explored how the feminist movement has been shaped and changed by the systems, institutions, and individuals who have worked against women’s equality. Panelists include Elaine Weiss, author of The Woman’s Hour, Marjorie J. Spruill, author of Divided We Stand, and Carol Robles-Roman, co-president and CEO of the ERA Coalition. The program was presented in partnership with the National Woman’s Party, the 2020 Women’s Vote Centennial Initiative, and the ERA Coalition.”

Here’s a link to the video:

Interview: Rebecca Boggs Roberts on “Suffragists in Washington, DC: The 1913 Parade and the Fight for the Vote”

Rebecca Boggs Roberts’ book, Suffragists in Washington, DC: The 1913 Parade and the Fight for the Vote, is a concise, well-told and visually appealing narrative of the 1913 suffrage parade organized by Alice Paul, the activist known for employing militant tactics to push for women’s right to vote.

Boggs Roberts, a journalist, tour guide, and current program coordinator for Smithsonian Associates, explores the organizers behind the march, divisions among suffragists and how the event influenced the trajectory of the suffrage movement.

Alex Kane, a researcher for this website, spoke with the author on the phone about the parade organizers’ media strategy, how Boggs Roberts researched the book and much more.

Alex Kane: I wanted to ask about your research process. One thing that is always interesting to me is how authors of popular history books do their research. So, I was wondering if you could tell me what the most helpful sources were in constructing the story.

Rebecca Boggs Roberts: I came about this story in a sort of backwards way on the 90th anniversary of suffrage in 2010. I am on the board of a historic cemetery here in Washington and I was looking around to see if there were enough suffragists buried there to create a walking tour themed around suffrage. And there absolutely were. But what I mainly used for that research was obituaries, keyworded to suffrage. And what I kept finding was women who had been involved in this 1913 march. And I started with newspapers, but not necessarily the news section of newspapers. And obituaries are not a great source for women’s history, as The New York Times is discovering now with their new “Overlooked” project. But the advantage to writing 20^th century history is that the newspaper coverage is very well preserved and searchable and keyworded, though coverage of women’s issues was dictated by male editors. I still use newspapers as my main source for this book, but I assume it is biased and the coverage is breathlessly sexist.

The articles are amazing in their phrase choice, the way they patronize these women. And then they were also known editorially to be for or against suffrage. So The New York Times for instance was unapologetically anti-suffrage. So, yes my main source was newspapers, but with an asterisk, understanding that these sources had their own point of view, which is probably a valuable less for anybody, but certainly when you’re talking about a controversial issue.

On top of that, there were letters. Letters in women’s history are often extremely valuable for all the reasons that newspaper history can be limited. But again, by the 20th century, with an issue this newsworthy, you don’t need to rely on letters so much. I think letters can be the only primary source for women’s history in 17^th, 18^th century writing. And then there are scrapbooks that a lot of the suffragists kept. The National Women’s Party maintains a collection, and they’re wonderful not necessarily in terms of the information they provide, but as a window into what women wanted to keep. And then there were the biographies of the women involved.

AK: You looked at newspapers and recognized the patriarchal bias behind their accounts of newsworthy events. How did you grapple with using information tainted by sexist bias?

RBR: You take that sexism as part of the story. It’s one more thing that these women were fighting against and having to strategize around. Obviously, from my own 21^st century lens, there was some of it I could laugh at or read between the lines of. But, the very fact of their bias was part of the story. That’s one of the reasons that suffrage was so hard to come by and why it took so long.

AK: You have worked at as a journalist, and so I’m curious whether you think your journalistic background brought a particular lens to writing this sort of history that academic historians might not have.

RBR: I would say we have a different perspective, though one is not better or worse. But I think that any journalist, certainly any political journalist—I spent a long time as a science journalist and one of the things you’re constantly doing is making the human beings real human beings. The people are always more interesting than the stuff. And I think that history tends to forget that these are actual, real, thinking, breathing, complicated, frustrating humans.

A journalistic perspective helps you remember that this isn’t just about accomplishments and laws and dates and events, but it’s about the people that made those things happen. Any good contemporary journalist has to understand the human element as well. And there’s no reason not to have that be true, and with history even more so because the complicated, weird, stinky, strange, complicated side of humans gets lost in history.

AK: Pivoting to the book itself, can you explain for readers of this interview who might not have read your book, what the media strategy was for the suffragists behind the march and whether they were successful in using that strategy to generate a lot of press coverage.

RBR: I get asked a lot about the most surprising thing I learned researching this book. And my answer is always how incredibly savvy the press strategy was, and for that I give total credit to Alice Paul. I mean, she was so good at figuring out how to play a message, how to make sure the photos looked good in the paper, how to manage a set back to her own advantage. She really was just a master.

There were a couple of priorities before the parade. They really wanted it to be Pennsylvania Avenue. The symbolism of Pennsylvania Avenue, marching where the men marched—going literally from the Capitol to the White House—right down the corridors of federal power. That message was very important. So that was played up in the press a ton.

Then there was the strategy of including women from all over. Women came from all over the country to march, and there was a good list of who they were and what their hometown newspapers were covering and what sort of stories might be fed back to local newspapers around the country.

There was the visual element. So, how was everything going to play in a photograph? Not just the bands and the floats and everything of the parade itself, but the crazy pageant on the Treasury steps was entirely designed around how it was going to look in pictures. And we’re still impressed by those pictures. The armored “Columbia” standing there with her staff is still the cover of my book over a hundred years later because that image is so striking.

And the timing of the whole thing, to be the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, is a strategy that was borrowed for the Women’s March of 2017—it coincided with the inauguration of the president that these women didn’t vote for, to remind them from the very first minute in office that you ignore women’s voices at your peril. So, all of that strategy leading up to the march was very much part of the media plan, and how to get suffrage in the news when it had been languishing for a while, and how to keep it there long after the event.

But then of course there was a near riot. The march did not go as planned. It could have been an absolute disaster. The crowd was awful, and the police did nothing to stop the crowd, and in some cases, joined in with jeering and spitting and tripping the women. Not a single bit of that glorious day went the way it had been meticulously planned out. And I think where the real genius comes in is that Alice Paul recognized immediately that that was the best thing that could have happened. A perfect day would have been in the newspapers for a couple of days, and a near riot was going to keep suffrage in the newspapers for months. And so you can be the best media strategist in the world, but the real test is when it all goes pear shaped and you still make it work for you.

AK: It was like how water hoses and dogs being turned on black civil rights activists lead to newspapers devoting a lot of coverage to the issue.

RBR: Right. And then there were congressional hearings looking into the crowd, so that stayed in the news. The continued fallout from the day kept being newsworthy.

AK: You mentioned the striking photos, and your book has published a lot of them.

There’s more photos in your book when compared to others, and it’s not just one section, but photos are interspersed throughout. What went into your decision to emphasize the photos?

RBR: Yeah. So that’s another source we didn’t talk about. The photographs are a historical source and they are fantastic. The number of photographs and the interspersing them within the text is actually a model of the History Press [the company that published the book]. That was a mandate from my publisher. All their books are very photo heavy. They care a whole lot about the resolution and quality of photographs. They think through how the text on the images are going to match up from the very beginning. I pitched the History Press on purpose because the parade itself is such a visual story.  You’re involved in suffrage history so you probably had seen a lot of those pictures before, but a lot of people really haven’t. And they’re amazing! I love those pictures, and I intentionally wanted this to be a photograph heavy narrative from the very beginning. So, it was a good match. History Press likes it that way. I wanted it that way. It’s a story told best that way.

AK: The parade was a pivotal moment in the history of the suffrage movement, but I don’t think a lot of people know that. So, lay out for me why the parade was such a pivotal moment in the women’s suffrage movement and how it influenced the trajectory of the movement going forward.

RBR: Yeah, I’ve thought a lot about this, and I think it was important for both short-term and long-term reasons.

I think it was a big exciting event that people could get involved with at a time when the movement was languishing. There’s that Harriet Stanton Blatch quote, that the American suffrage movement “appalled its opponents and bored its adherents.” It was in trouble. People weren’t excited about it, and the younger generation of American women weren’t involved. It was this fusty club lady cause.

So, it was a shot in the arm in terms of an event that people could get involved with and get excited about. So that mattered. And it mattered because it was a shot across the bow to the Wilson administration. One of the people that Wilson defeated was Teddy Roosevelt, who had a suffrage plank in his platform. It wouldn’t have been crazy for suffrage to have been supported in the 1912 presidential election. But Wilson didn’t support it and he won, so it was an opening shot to this new, self-proclaimed progressive administration.

And it was a definite change of strategy, which gets overlooked in the pomp of the day itself. After the big split in the suffrage movement over the 15^th Amendment and Reconstruction, two fractious groups got back together under the umbrella of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. They agreed to advance this state by state strategy, which wasn’t a crazy idea and had some success, but it was a very long, slow, expensive, hard to explain, hard to get people excited about strategy, and the march reintroduces the federal amendment as a strategy for the suffrage movement. It didn’t do away with the state by state strategy. They continued in parallel. But right behind Jane Burleson, who was the parade marshal, and Inez Miholland on her white horse with a big star on her forehead, there was a big banner that said, “We demand a constitutional amendment enfranchising women.” One sentence, one demand, subject, verb, object, incredibly declarative. And that banner then went with the National Women’s Party everywhere.

So it was very much a new announcement of revitalizing an old tactic. It wasn’t just a spectacular day. It was a shift in strategy.

AK: You mentioned Reconstruction and the 15^th Amendment and race. I was intrigued by the role of Ida B. Wells, the great African-American journalist, in the march. Could you explain what her role was and what her role tells us about the role that race played in the parade.

RBR: Not just Ida B. Wells, but the Delta Sigma Theta sisters from Howard, who have their own interesting story.

Alice Paul was pretty young and green, and she was ambitious and she had some really fantastic ideas. But on the issue of how to handle black women who wanted to march, she fumbled, and she fumbled badly. When Ida B. Wells wanted to march with the Illinois delegation and Delta Sigma Theta wanted to march with the college group, Paul fretted that an integrated parade would mean that Southern marchers would drop out and settled on this very patronizing racist, “OK you can march but you have to march in the back” message. Ida B. Wells ignored that completely and marched with the Illinois delegation. And if you want symbolism there it is. She just went about doing exactly what she needed to do for her own priorities, and wherever she could work with white women she could, but if they stood in her way she worked around them.

Delta Sigma Theta split over marching and whether they’d accept the demand to march at the back. And that’s how that sorority was born. They are very proud of that legacy. I’ve been hearing from Delta sisters out of the woodwork since my book came out, and they have a sorority oral history that a lot of the women did not march at the back, that they jumped into the middle of the parade. I’ve tried to track down something more than an oral history source on that, but maybe there isn’t one. Regardless, it has been passed down for over a hundred years, that the Delta sisters jumped on in.

The history of the American women’s suffrage movement has a serious race problem. And there were times when it was overt, as when Susan B. Anthony tried to encourage Southern states to pass suffrage by saying that it would counteract the black vote. And there were times when it was more subtle—”you can march with us but you have to march in the back.” And there were black women’s suffrage organizations that did enormously important work. And there the ratification fight was another complete showcase for the racism inherent in the whole voting rights issue.

There is to be seen more scholarship on that issue. Elaine Weiss’ book touches on it with Tennessee, but I think as we approach this centennial in 2020, there’s going to be some really good work on the role of race in the suffrage movement. I look forward to it.

And of course, it’s about class too. Race and class are so hard to parse in this country. But the suffrage movement could also be accused of being classist. You can’t take a day to picket the White House if you work at a factory. And there were women who came to suffrage through labor activism who found it frustrating that it seemed to only appeal to women of a certain class. And I think all of the complicated, overlapping levels of that are one of the things I’m really looking forward to as more and more books come out on this topic.

AK: Last question: What do you think is the most important lesson that your book can impart?

RBR: So I read your Q and A with Elaine Weiss, and she and I draw the same conclusion from our research on the suffrage movement.

I mainly concentrated on the National Women’s Party, and they used more militant, in your face tactics. But I really don’t want people to take away the lesson that “some women sat in front of the White House and we got the vote, yay!” The slow and steady, color within the lines strategy is just as important, and neither would have succeeded without the other. And I think in every political movement the radical serves to make the moderate look more reasonable. You can say that the radicals need the moderates, because the moderates are the ones with their nose to the grindstone getting stuff done. But the moderates need the radicals too, because a member of Congress can say, “well, I won’t meet with that crazy Alice Paul, but I’ll sit down with that nice, polite Carrie Chapman Catt.” Both aspects—the people who were willing to throw some bombs, either literally or figuratively, and the people who were willing to do the slow and steady lobbying grassroots—make massive social change possible.

Interview: Elaine Weiss on her book “The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote”

Journalist and author Elaine Weiss‘ new book The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote is a page-turning history of the fight over suffrage in Tennessee. The state’s 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment clinched suffrage for the whole country.

Alex Kane, a researcher for this site, spoke with Weiss on the phone about her new book, her research method and the role of the media in Tennessee during the intense battle over women’s rights in the state. (For further reading, see the Smithsonian Magazine’s article about the book.)

Alex Kane: Before getting into questions related to the content of your book, I’d love to hear about your research process for writing it. What were the most helpful sources you used in constructing the story, and was there any genre of media, like newspapers or private letters, that you used more often than other types of sources?

Elaine Weiss: I’m trained as a journalist and was a journalist all my career. So, for me, it’s the combination of reading the newspaper accounts and the archives and juxtaposing them that I find so fascinating.

My first line of research was at the Tennessee State Library and Archives. Carrie Catt, the president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, is in residence in Nashville for six weeks during this final fight. She’s directing the National’s campaign there. She either donated or just left all her correspondence from the months of May, June, July and August [1920 to the archives].

The state archives have a very nice collection of documents, memoranda, letters that go between the Tennessee suffragists who are trying to encourage her to mount a fight, to mount a ratification campaign in Tennessee, even though it does not look terribly promising at the beginning, in the early summer months. They’re trying to convince her that Tennessee can do it. And there are all kinds of problems for Tennessee. And they’re discussing that. So that was incredibly valuable. And there are newspaper clippings, and best for me was the clipping service—the national headquarters would send all the relevant clippings from other newspapers to Carrie Catt in batches. Those are there, and those include cartoons from other publications around the country and editorial articles about it. So, there’s a very rich archive for me to reconstruct those days almost by the hour. That was my first source.

Also, at the Tennessee State Library and Archives, I was able to buy microfilm so I could have the letters of the prominent anti-suffragist, who was also working in Nashville during this time. I could get the official letters of the governor, who’s very involved in this fight.  Just there in Nashville, I was able to have a pretty nice beginning. They also had a vertical file which had an assortment of articles, including during the 1940s and 1950s, of people reminiscing who were still alive. That was very useful.

The second line of archival research was the Library of Congress. There were the official papers of both the National American Woman Suffrage Association and the Women’s Party. And the Women’s Party papers were especially useful to me because these were the daily memoranda and the letters and notes that were going back and forth between [suffrage leader] Alice Paul, who remained at headquarters in Washington, and her lieutenants, who she sent to Tennessee. They’re organized in the Library of Congress file on that microfilm chronologically, which was great for me. I could read from May until September or October, but I had to go through the archives every day. I had to wade through a fair amount. But it was a gold mine. It was everything that went in and out of the office. And so I could have some things that you wouldn’t think would be useful, like the secretary at the headquarters’ office writing to women who would donate ten dollars and giving an update on what the mood was at headquarters that day. And she’d say, “we’re very upset because this has happened and this has happened. We don’t believe that the men are going to do this,” and so I could get an unofficial sense of what was going on from the wonderfully catty secretary. And that’s all in the Library of Congress.

The next line was the daily newspapers in Tennessee, and I could get most of this either through microfilm from the Tennessee archives or on the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America. That usually ends at the first phase ends in 1922, which is perfect for me since this is all taking place in 1920. A few of the smaller Tennessee newspapers and one of the Memphis papers is in that catalog of newspapers.

And then I needed The National Tennessean, which is on ProQuest. I could do a search and have all the papers they subscribe to which are the major ones for me: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, and The Christian Science Monitor. And all of these newspapers have different attitudes toward suffrage, and you could see the difference between the editorial policy and the reportage—very interesting for a journalist to observe. And they all give me different perspectives and they covered what was happening in Nashville in different ways. Many of them have reporters on the scene. Some of them just took AP wire reports. It was really interesting to use a combination of the Tennessee newspapers, which in some ways were more detailed, and then the major national newspapers which were covering this.

AK: What was the media landscape like in Tennessee regarding suffrage? What kind of division or consensus existed among newspaper publishers on the issue of suffrage?

EW: In Tennessee, it’s fascinating. One of the prime subplots of my book is the feud that is playing out between the two major newspaper publishers in Nashville at the time. So you have Luke Lea, who is the founder and the publisher of The Nashville Tennessean, a pretty major newspaper. And he had been a U.S. Senator. He had been a war hero in World War I and he founds The Tennessean to be a mouthpiece for his political views, which are pretty progressive for the time. He’s always been a suffrage supporter, even when he was in the U.S. Senate. He’s also a Prohibitionist. He’s a dry advocate. And that’s very clear in his newspaper because he is supporting the suffragists and the ratification fight.

The other major national newspaper at the time is The Nashville Banner, which is founded and published by a man named Edward Stahlman. He is a German immigrant—came as a boy—and self-made man who, before he bought the newspaper, was an executive of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, which had enormous economic and political power in the state. These two men are mortal enemies.

It gets really ugly. The Tennessean calls Stahlman unpatriotic during World War I because he’s German. There’s an FBI investigation of him as an enemy alien. And this is playing out during the suffrage fight. The Banner has never been a real supporter of suffrage, but was kind of neutral, and was okay in its reportage. But then comes this big fight. Stahlman promises the suffragists that he’ll support them and then he betrays them, and it has very much to do with this personal feud and newspaper feud because they slam each other in the editorials. They call each other names. It’s really quite colorful.

But this has real ramifications for the suffrage fight in Tennessee. So it’s really fascinating seeing these two media barons who hate each other personally duke it out in their newspaper column inches, and the way they cover the events are very, very different too. In some ways The Banner, the anti-suffrage publication, gives me a perspective and some reporting from the other side that’s very valuable to me to recreate what’s happening. In the rest of the state it really depended. This is a time when every little place had its own newspaper. In Memphis there’s The Commercial Appeal, which is kind of neutral or negative on suffrage, and The Memphis Scimitar is very pro-suffrage

In Chattanooga it gets even more interesting. Imagine MSNBC and Fox News in each city in Tennessee, and they have really different approaches and different attitudes. You have a newspaper called The Chattanooga News, which is owned by a very progressive newspaperman named George Milton. His wife is the president of the Tennessee suffragist organization. So she’s in the battle, he’s there in Nashville writing complimentary editorials for the suffragists. The other major newspaper in Chattanooga is Adolph Ochs’ Chattanooga Times, which was his first newspaper before he bought the New York Times. So like The New York Times, it is rabidly anti-suffrage. So The Chattanooga Times is mind boggling in its editorial coverage. It is way over the line in its animosity toward suffrage. But the reporting is very detailed. The reporting is excellent and very valuable to me. So you can see how I can have all these different streams of contemporary reporting, and I make this timeline really by the hour because things change by the hour.

AK: And what about the national coverage? How extensive was it?

EW: Very extensive. Because it’s not just Tennessee. Everyone realizes this is going to decide whether the 19th Amendment is ratified anytime soon.

Because if it fails in Tennessee, chances are it’s not going to happen for a long time because most of the other Southern states have rejected it. It only takes 13 states to reject it and it’s dead. There’s already nine or ten that rejected it. And there are three states that are going to refuse to consider it for political and corporate reasons—they’re under corporate pressures. Those are Connecticut, Vermont and Florida, and in Connecticut and Vermont the legislatures would probably ratify, but the governors refuse to call them into special session.

So everyone realizes 27 million women could get the vote if this passes and so they do send reporters. Of the major national newspapers, everyone pretty much has a reporter. For instance, by this time New York women have the vote. The Times’ animosity towards suffrage is still really there, especially in the editorial. But it’s covering it in a little more neutral way because the women citizens of New York now have a vote. I think they are moderating that tone in New York, though not in Chattanooga. So The Times is there and covering it pretty much every day. The Washington Post covers it thoroughly. The Christian Science Monitor does a very good job. It’s a major newspaper at this point. The Baltimore Sun is against and the 19th amendment has already been rejected in Maryland.

AK:  Was there anything particularly unique about the debate and vote in Tennessee that didn’t come up in other states that voted on suffrage? What role did Tennesse’s political divisions and culture have on the debate?

EW: It wasn’t just what’s happening on the ground [in Tennessee]. It’s what’s happening in the nation because it’s a presidential election, and so that enters into it very heavily. It’s the mood of the nation moving from an unpopular war and debate over the League of Nations, about what America’s role in the world is. A lot of nervousness about immigration, about automation, about people losing jobs to automation. It’s everything we’re talking about now.

And I could see also that all the themes of American history come coursing through the events in Tennessee because of the culture and because of what’s happening. And so those are:

States’ rights and racism, which plays a huge role in this. Sexism, of course. Corporate money in politics because corporate influence is a big part of the story—there’s a lot of secret, dark money funding the anti-suffrage campaign. So, in Tennessee, what you see happening is something that we will also see repeated all through the 20^th and 21^st centuries in subsequent civil rights campaigns. You’ve got the general anti-suffragists who don’t want women to vote, and that includes clergymen who say “this is against God’s plan.”

But then you also have the corporate interests. The railroads are against it. The textile manufacturers are afraid women are going to abolish child labor and they depend on that. And also the liquor industry—you know, Jack Daniels. And the bourbon and liquor industries are very big in Tennessee. Prohibition has just been enacted but they’re hoping it won’t be enforced, and they’re afraid if women can vote they’re going to insist on strict enforcement.

Then you have the states’ rights argument. The shadows of the Civil War are all over this story. They use Confederate imagery and Confederate language in the broadsides, in the photographs that the anti-suffragists distributed. The argument is that if all women can vote, black women can vote, and they’re not going to stand for that. Black men, of course, have had the vote legally since the end of the Civil War, but they’ve been disenfranchised effectively by Jim Crow laws, by onerous poll taxes and crazy literacy tests. The Grandfather Clause has actually been struck down, but they have many creative ways, including physical intimidation and lynchings, to stop black men, and they don’t really want to deal with black women. They’re not sure they can suppress them the same way. That is the main theme going on. The secondary one is states’ rights. They don’t want the federal government coming in, like they did in Reconstruction, and telling them what to do. And this is a federal amendment, and they don’t want the feds looking into their polling booth and telling them who can vote.

We see that again in the 1960s during the campaign for voting rights. Same thing for integration, and same thing now happening with voter suppression—states’ rights issue.

So, these themes which we think are historical and play a big role in the story in Tennessee, we’re still dealing with, which is what I’ve found so fascinating.

AK: I have a final question: If you could choose, what do you think is the most important lesson that readers would take away from your book?

EW: I can tell you what surprised me and then I’ll tell you the lesson.

The thing that surprised me in the research, is a), that it took so long. This is seven decades of women working for this— three generations. Carrie Catt had a rough estimate and says it’s over 900 campaigns that they’ve done at the local, state and national level—a huge organizational and political effort. So, the first thing that struck me is that this took so long.

Second the racial aspect of it—I had not anticipated that. And not just what happens in Tennessee, which is explosive. But that race was an issue in suffrage from the very beginning because it comes out of the abolition movement. They’re almost sibling causes that grow up together with many of the same participants. The women we think of as the foremothers, Stanton and Anthony, Lucretia Mott and Lucy Stone, are really abolitionists first. They come to suffrage through their experiences and this idea of universal personhood and universal suffrage. And they really expect to get it after the Civil War and of course there’s a huge split.

The other abolitionists who they work with closely for decades say, “the woman’s hour is not now. This is not the woman’s hour.” And that’s where the title of my book comes from. And the women wait for another 50 years, and then the racial aspect comes back in the last phase of the movement when it’s going to be decided in the Southern states. So that was very surprising to me.

Also surprising is the fact that there were women who opposed suffrage so stridently, like the muckraking journalist editor Ida Tarbell. She’s vice president of the anti-suffrage league. Eleanor Roosevelt’s not a suffragist. So that’s surprising. I think the reader will be surprised.

I think the lessons to come out of it are for activists. I think there are strong lessons to be learned from the suffragists and one of them is yes, you have to stand up. These were ordinary, grassroots women, school teachers, shop girls, factory workers, society women—they’re all standing up and saying this is wrong, “we are citizens, we should vote.”

But they didn’t just protest. They also had to develop very sophisticated political strategies. And the other thing is to realize how sophisticated their political operation was—and I’m talking about both the mainstream suffragists and Alice Paul’s National Women’s Party.

And then also, that reform movements almost always split at some point. And that’s true for the abolitionists, for the African-American civil rights movement, the labor movement, the gay rights movement, the new iterations of women’s movements. It’s natural to have different strategies and different tactical paths. And the lesson is to try to harness those different energies rather than allow it to dissipate the momentum. So that’s what I see as lessons for now.