Virtual Archive: Tennessee and Passage of the 19th Amendment

The Tennessee State Library and Archives put together an online archival resource that documents the state’s pivotal role in passing the 19th Amendment, which ended the exclusion of women from using the ballot box.

36 states were needed to ratify that amendment. By the time the suffrage debate reached Tennessee, 35 states had ratified the change. In August 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment. The state, and the rest of the United States, will celebrate the centennial of suffrage in 2020.

The state’s archives features documents, photos, cartoons and audio from pro-suffrage and anti-suffrage forces. The website explains:

This initial collection focuses on pro- and anti-suffrage activity in Tennessee in 1920, primarily drawing from the papers of suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt, anti-suffragist Josephine A. Pearson, and Governor Albert H. Roberts. In addition to letters, telegrams, political cartoons, broadsides, and photographs, it contains three audio clips from an interview conducted in 1983 with Abby Crawford Milton. As the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment approaches, we plan to add to this online collection, expanding the chronological and narrative scope.

 Check out the whole website here.

Lady Gaga Parody: Caught in a Bad Romance ‘Til We Have Suffrage

Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” is an infectious hit that easily gets stuck in your head. So it’s no wonder that Soomo Learning, an education company, decided to create a parody version for use as a teaching tool. Soomo Learning created the song, which has been watched over a million times, to teach students about the push to pass the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.

The parody video, which won the Emmy for Informational or Instructional Program at the 27th Annual MidSouth Emmy Awards, features Meredith Garrison as Alice Paul, the women’s suffrage activist. Garrison as Paul sings:

Hey! We’ll raise our banner
Across this land hey!
‘Cause franchise isn’t just
The right of a man

It shows women activists marching for their right to vote, and also depicts efforts to suppress them.

Soomo Learning has put together an easy-to-use website about the parody, complete with sample lessons for teachers and lyrics.

In 2015, Sony/ATV, which published Lady Gaga’s song, filed a copyright claim with YouTube, which eventually took down the Soomo Learning parody, as the education company explains in a blog post. However, numerous copies of the parody exist online.

The Suffrage Roots of Wonder Woman

As Jill Lepore explained in a 2014 interview on the NPR program “Fresh Air,” her book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, chronicles the iconic superheroine’s suffragist roots. Lepore’s exploration of Wonder Woman creator William Molton Marsten’s involvement in women’s suffrage is capsulized in an NPR Books review by Etelka Lehocky. It began while he was a student at Harvard and, as a member of the Harvard League for Woman Suffrage, he joined a vociferous 1911 protest by students and alumni against the university’s refusal to allow the militant British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst to speak on campus. Lehocky writes:

Marston had been a committed feminist for decades by the time he created Wonder Woman in 1941. He’d been exposed to the women’s suffrage movement while in college, and Sadie Holloway, whom he married in 1915, was “something of a revolutionary,” Lepore writes. 25 years later, Marston’s determination to depict Wonder Woman in chains was partly inspired by women’s suffrage imagery. (He had a rather forced argument for why the chains actually represented liberation.) Wonder Woman’s first artist, Harry G. Peter, had himself once drawn suffrage cartoons.

Lepore wrote about Wonder Woman for the New Yorker in a piece titled, “The Last Amazon,” in which she talks about Marston’s suffrage connection. Among the many reviews and notices of Lepore’s book are those that have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Nation, and the New York Times.

Recording: Rabbi Stephen S. Wise’s 1918 Speech “Women and Democracy”

Rabbi Stephen S. Wise of New York City’s Free Synagogue was one of the most sought-after suffrage speakers of the 1910s. This 1918 recording is representative of his most common pro-suffrage arguments. For more about Wise’s suffrage involvement—he was a founder of the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage of the State of New York, for instance—see Brooke Kroeger’s March 27, 2017 article in Tablet magazine, “Wise vs. Silverman, or New York’s Historic Rabbinical Women’s Suffrage Smack-Down.” The flip side of this recording is of remarks by Gertrude Foster Brown, one of the prime movers in the New York State campaign, featured here.

To read more about the roles men played in the struggle for women’s voting rights, see Kroeger’s book, The Suffragents.

Listen to a 101-year-old Clarion Call for Women’s Suffrage Preserved in Shellac

At this link, New York public radio station WNYC‘s Andy Lanset elucidates on remarks recorded for Pathé by Gertrude Foster Brown, one of the paragon’s of the New York suffrage campaign, and on the flip side, the “Woman and Democracy” speech of one of the founders of the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, which can be heard at the link below or here. See also, this article by Brooke Kroeger, author of The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote in Tabletmag.com about the suffrage publicity generated by a public smack-down over suffrage between two of Reform Judaism’s most eminent rabbis, Wise and Rabbi Joseph Silverman of Temple Emanu-El, both of New York City.

The Root: How Racism Tainted Women’s Suffrage

This commentary by Monee Fields-White for The Root, republished by NPR on March 25, 2011 explores the complicated relationship between racism and women’s rights during the late 19th century. Fields-White focuses on the anti-lynching campaign by journalist Ida B. Wells and on the clashes between civil rights and women’s rights in the the era of woman suffrage efforts.

The Sturdy Oak: A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors

This unusual work was first serialized by Collier’s Magazine in 1916 and then as a novel by Henry Holt & Company in 1917. Fourteen prominent authors each contributed a chapter, working without payment an donating donated the proceeds of the book’s sales to the women’s suffrage movement. This was in advance of the November 1917 referendum vote in New York that granted the vote to the women of the state. The authors include some of the best known and most popular writers of the day: Samuel Merwin, Harry Leon Wilson, Fannie Hurst, Dorothy Canfield, Kathleen Norris, Henry Kitchell Webster, Anne O’Hagan, Mary Heaton Vorse, Alice Duer Miller, Ethel Watts Mumford, Marjorie Benton Cooke, William Allen White, Mary Austin, and Leroy Scott.

The novel was first serialized in Collier’s Magazine in and then published as a book by Henry Holt & Company, both in 1917.

As the book’s preface tells it, although The Sturdy Oak was written to support the cause of women’s suffrage, “the novel itself is first of all a very human story of American life today. It neither unduly nor unfairly emphasizes the question of equal suffrage, and it should appeal to all lovers of good fiction.”

At this link, Google has digitized issues of the magazine and the entire novel in weekly serialization can be read in Collier’s,  Vol. 59, Part I for 1917. The chapters begin with illustrations in the September 22, 1917 issue and proceed weekly thereafter, two per week for seven weeks. Norman Hapgood and Mark Sullivan, both suffrage supporters, comprised the magazine’s editorial leadership.

You can access the novel, including a Kindle version, for free here, via Project Gutenberg.

You can also listen to and download free audio recordings of The Sturdy Oak here, via LibriVox.