Kimberly Emerson

When I decided to devote the August columns to women’s history, the first thing on my to-do list was to watch the 2004 movie Iron Jawed Angels.  I’d heard it was an excellent movie, chronicling the events that led to women getting the vote.  An HBO picture staring Hilary Swank, it received excellent reviews, and seemed like a good place to start my research.

Nice thought, but the execution proved more difficult than I imagined.  Iron Jawed Angels wasn’t available on Netflix.  A shockingly large amount of women’s history is not available on my dear video-on-demand service.  No biographies on women of the movement.  A search of “women biographies” directs you to Lady Gaga, Marilyn Monroe, and some English queens.  I don’t want to disparage any of these women; they are all fascinating in their way.  I’ve watched a couple of specials on Elizabeth I. Try to find anything about the women who were instrumental in gaining my personal suffrage, however, and you come up empty.  Eleanor Roosevelt, who came to prominence after the passage of the 19th Amendment, has a 1965 documentary.  That’s about it for American political women, unless you count Sarah Palin’s reality show, which I don’t.  (Partisan differences aside, it didn’t happen until after she lost her bid for the vice presidency.)  No Susan B. Anthony or Sojourner Truth.  I think you can find Hillary Rodham Clinton in some Saturday Night Live  clips.

Of course, some of this is owed to Netflix’s ongoing battle with the television and movie studios over rights and royalties, and to what they think their viewers will want to watch.  You also won’t find any biographies of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson.  A few documentaries on the Civil War pop up, as well as a couple of films about Abraham Lincoln.  (Granted, one of them is Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies.)  Even allowing for the royalty and issues and popular interest, though, I found it disturbing that they feature eight Ken burns documentaries, but Not for Ourselves Alone, the documentary on Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, is not one of them.  Okay, so he’s done over twenty documentaries, so this wasn’t the only one omitted.  Still.  I find it difficult to believe that every piece ever done on the history of women’s struggle for equality is beyond Netflix’s economic reach, and that no one ever searched for any of this before me. (Even Hilary Swank’s mother? Really?)

No worries, I found Iron Jawed Angels on sale at Amazon.com for under $6.00.  (I tried not to be offended by that.  It was a made for cable movie, and it isn’t new. Other similarly dated HBO movies go for similar prices.)  I ordered it with Not for Ourselves Alone and a book called Sisters: The Lives of the America’s Suffragists by Jean H. Baker, and spent under $35.00 altogether.

When the bundle finally arrived I immersed myself in the sisterhood.  I watched the documentary first, since it covered an earlier era.  Great work on Ken Burns’ part, as always.  I found it interesting that his core team of four people was entirely male – himself, producer Paul Barnes, and cinematographers Allen Moore and Buddy Squires.  The primary editor was a woman, Sarah E. Hill, but that was the only woman department head that I could find.  (Ken Burns discusses the issue briefly in the extras, noting that there were a few moments of weirdness when they first approached the female staff at Susan B. Anthony House, before they all shook it off and got to work.)  It’s a good thing that these men found it worth their while to immerse themselves in women’s history, and a nice twist lay in Mr. Barnes arguing with his female editor to keep more footage in.  I do have to wonder, though, if it might have been a more comprehensive piece with some women on the core team. At 180 minutes, it has one of the shorter run times of his works. A compact narrative of the lives of two of the hardest workers for women’s suffrage, the piece fascinates the viewer and at least in my case, leaves her wanting more.  You could make a case that that is precisely the job of a documentary.

Enough about the process of my education.  Let’s get down to content.

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were dedicated and zealous in the cause of women’s suffrage.  As is the unfortunate case with human beings, the zeal sometimes came at the expense of others.  The era just after the Civil War is particularly wrenching to hear about.  Prior to the war, women’s rights advocates and abolitionists worked in tandem.  Susan B. Anthony’s father hid fugitive slaves, shielding them from those authorized to re-abduct them even from free states. Her father supported her when she smuggled a battered wife to safety – yes, her husband had the backing of the state to keep her at home – telling her, “You are legally wrong, but morally right.” (Sisters, p. 67.) The feeling held that the white male patriarchy made prisoners of all of them, and they needed to work for freedom together.  Unfortunately, the enfranchisement of black men and women of all colors was evidently too much for said establishment to take.

I found it immeasurably painful when President George W. Bush spoke long and loud about wanting an amendment banning gay marriage, but contrary to popular opinion, he would not have been the first person to write discrimination into the Constitution.  It was of course there from the start, written into Article I, Section 2, deciding that people of color would count for only three-fifths of a person, and Article IV, Section 2, in the Fugitive Slave Clause, enabling authorities to chase people who’d escaped from bondage clear into the free states and return them to the people oppressing them.  (The Constitution puts it differently, but it amounts to the same thing.) As to who would oversee the actual addition of prejudice to the Constitution, however, that dubious honor belongs to the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment, granting all male citizens the right to vote.  While laws existed limiting suffrage to men, the Constitution itself was remarkably gender-neutral, until then.  The pronouns “he” and “his” are used a few times, but as I’ve been told more times than I can remember without throwing up, I am not supposed to be offended by this.  As referring to an unspecified president as “it” would be considered insulting, “he” is an acceptable substitute for the more tedious “he or she.”  (Neat thing about that rule?  You can take it back whenever you want.  “Yes, ‘he’ can be neutral, but the author clearly didn’t mean that in this case.”)  Search the entire document for the words “man,” “men,” or “male,” and you come up empty until Amendment XIV.  At that point, the Establishment felt it necessary to make sure no one got any crazy ideas about letting women vote.

Discussions of the final passage of the Fourteenth Amendment make up the most disgraceful and sad times of the feminist cause.  Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton lobbied against the passage of the amendment, wanting it revised to include women. One of their arguments was that (white) women had a greater understanding of what it was to be a citizen than a newly freed slave.  One section in Not for Ourselves Alone specifically details a meeting where they argued the point with Frederick Douglass. Hitherto an ally to their cause, Mr. Douglass argued that black men needed the protection of the vote more than women, because they were subject to greater abuses.  Susan B. Anthony asked in response, didn’t the same conditions for black men apply to black women?  Things degenerated after that, and a lot of feminist materials asked how men could give the vote to their former slaves without granting it to the women they married.  Sadly, this probably just revealed the inherent racism that had been there all along.  While sincere in wishing them free from bondage, I think most white abolitionists never truly learned to see people of color as equal.

These truths pain me even to type, but ugliness is never healed by being swept under the rug.  Better to see this episode for what it was – a shameful episode in the history of women’s rights that set the whole suffrage movement back a couple of decades.

When will we learn to stop blaming fellow victims for our pain?  Black men didn’t write the Fourteenth Amendment.  Wealthy white men called the shots, and were responsible for the persecution suffered by both groups. (Not to mention the rape of all women of color, considered completely acceptable by white men.)  But no, instead of saying, “Okay, grant them the vote, then let’s all work together for suffrage for women of all colors,” the movement threw a racist tantrum, and in my opinion, shot itself in the foot.  While the white women spat ugly rhetoric, the wealthy white men in the South were free to make sure that the practical application of the Fourteenth Amendment was blocked at every turn.

Fast-forward fifty years to 1913, where not much has changed.  In one of the opening scenes for Iron Jawed Angels, Alice Paul (Hilary Swank) explains to an African-American suffragist that all the black women will be marching at the back of the parade.  Her fellow suffragist leaves, telling her, “I expected better from a Quaker.” (The unnamed woman had good reason to be disappointed.  Quakers had a reputation for activism in social justice.  Refusal to participate in war, opposition to slavery and the inhuman treatment of Native Americans, allowing women in ministry, just to name a few. )  They prettied this up a little in the movie.  According to Sisters, the parade wasn’t going to allow African-American suffragists to march at all, and then at the last minute decided to have them march in the back.  (Evidently one woman decided that wasn’t good enough, and found a way to march in the midst of the white women, but only one that the author could document.) Once a cause goes racist, you seldom see them find a way back.  Ms. Paul did help to achieve a constitutional amendment granting women of every color the vote, but you have to wonder how she would have reacted if anyone had offered her a “white women only” compromise.

The movie points out a lot of the ways human beings have found to treat each other miserably.  President Woodrow Wilson is portrayed (accurately, according to my other research) as being at best condescending to the suffragists, and at times outright complicit in their mistreatment.  Ms. Paul was at first allied with Carrie Chapman Catt and Anna Howard Shaw, the leaders of the National American Women’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA).  They were mostly flies buzzing around Mr. Wilson’s ears, right up until Ms. Paul and a few others decided that NAWSA didn’t move fast enough.  The National Women’s Party, her new group, started to picket outside the White House.  They were just standing there, holding signs asking what Mr. Wilson was doing to grant women the vote.  He tolerated them at first, but once World War I got started, they seemed to get on his nerves more and more, and he asked the D. C. police to do something about them.  It appears to have been a challenge.  Ms. Paul’s favorite tactic was to use Mr. Wilson’s own words about the fight for democracy on her banners.  It’s hard to raise a sedition charge against someone using the president’s own words. At last, they settled on “obstructing sidewalk traffic.”

None of the suffragists would pay fines, believing it unethical to pay money to a government in which they had no say, so they were sent to prison.  Mostly middle-to-upper class women (the ones who could afford to spend the day standing in front of the White House), they quickly got used to rats for cellmates, worms in their food, itchy clothes and abuse by the guards.  Ms. Paul insisted that they had the right to serve their sentences as political prisoners, entitled to wear their own clothes and have writing materials to document their demands. The police figured they’d go away faster without any such pleasantries.  Ms. Paul decided on the hunger strike as her means of protest.  She notes in the movie that it’s an old Irish way of protesting a wrong. In a society that placed a great value on hospitality, corpses on the porch had a negative effect on one’s social standing.  The police and later the president decided it wouldn’t reflect any better on them, so they had her (and the many suffragettes who followed her example) force-fed.

I couldn’t find a contemporary account by Ms. Paul of the feedings, but here is a description of the ones she underwent in London in 1909, during her early days of suffrage work:

I was taken from my bed, carried to another room and forced into a chair, bound with sheets and sat upon bodily by a fat murderer, whose job it was to keep me still. Then the prison doctor, assisted by two women attendants, placed a rubber tube up my nostrils and pumped liquid food through it into my stomach.

– Alice Paul

The movie shows her mouth being held open by a steel contraption, and raw eggs mixed with milk forced through a tube into her mouth. This seems to have been a method used on occasion, too.  Through mouth or nose, she was force-fed three times a day for three weeks. According to all the documentation I can find, the process hadn’t changed by 1917.  (Indeed, according to most articles it hasn’t changed too terribly much for the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay undergoing it in 2005, except that instead of eggs, they use Ensure.)

Eventually, word leaked out about all of this to the public.  Some of them definitely agreed with President Wilson that women were too delicate to understand voting, but not many were comfortable with the idea of such delicate ladies having tubes shoved up their noses and fighting the rats for bed space.

After too much bad press – the “Night of Terror” in particular, where the guards threw the arrested women into their cells and beat them, including a 73-year-old woman with a bad leg – President Wilson finally capitulated and recommended the passage of the 19th Amendment by Congress.  It passed both houses in 1919, and finally achieved the necessary ratification by thirty-six states in 1920.  The thirty-sixth state was Tennessee, where the passage of the Amendment was in doubt.  The “ayes” won when Rep. Harry Burns changed his position on the measure and decided to vote for it, on the advice of his mother:

Dear Son: Hurrah and vote for suffrage! Don’t keep them in doubt! I notice some of the speeches against. They were bitter. I have been watching to see how you stood, but have not noticed anything yet. Don’t forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt put the “rat” in ratification. Your mother.

– Febb Ensminger Burns, to her son Harry 

And thus, after women in New Zealand, Australia, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Canada, and Russia, women in the United States finally got the right to vote.

I don’t know about your history books, but mine didn’t dwell on this much.  It was a paragraph, maybe a couple of pictures.  Despite its checkered and racist past – or maybe because of it – women’s suffrage should be a MUCH bigger deal than it is.  Why?  So many reasons.  Our children should know that the process was messy, and that the people involved were by turns noble and extremely flawed. They should be taught that pitting one group of oppressed people against another is the elite’s favorite way of retaining power, and that it seldom works out well for the people doing the suffering.

But there is one other reason why this history – all of it – should be shouted from the rafters.  Read back through these descriptions, and notice the one thing you don’t see: violence by these women.  One of the suffragists’ banners during World War I read, “Kaiser Wilson: Have you forgotten your sympathy with the poor Germans because they were not self-governed?  20,000,000 American women are not self-governed.  Take the beam out of your own eye.”

When was the last time you heard about 20,000,000 people gaining the vote, without firing a single shot?  (Okay, a few were fired AT them, but I can’t find any record of the suffragettes using a gun on anyone.)

All the progress was obtained through passive resistance.  This is common now, but remember, this was before anyone in the U.S. knew who Mohandes Gandhi was.  These women figured out, as Mahatma Gandhi was doing thousands of miles away, that the system had a weakness, and they exploited it.  Most of the people oppressing women in the U.S. wanted to believe that they were doing it for the women’s own good.   These women stood their ground, refusing to be toppled by the easy pushes, until the men in charge were forced to barrel them over.  You can’t strap a woman to a chair for force feeding and put her on a pedestal at the same time.

History has so much to teach us, but we have to pay attention, and we have to start learning it the way it actually happened, instead of the way we might wish that it had.  I wish with all my heart that the middle class white women of the suffrage movement had believed in racial equality, instead of just giving it lip service for a while.  I wish that the men in power had realized that fairness meant giving the vote to both sexes, instead of having to be embarrassed into it by women willing to give their lives for the privilege if they had to. The truth, however, was uglier and messier. We need to understand that, in order to have any prayer of stopping ourselves from repeating the same mistakes.

All of these people who fought for our rights deserve to be known, and we need the inspiration.  Since writing this, I’ve watched Miss Representation and some pieces on racial profiling.  The fight for fairness isn’t over yet by a long shot.  Let’s learn from the mistakes, and work together to make our world a better place.

Kimberly needs to stop writing now, to examine her ballot for the upcoming local election.  Her feminist forebearers are counting on her to get this right.

Tags: constitution, discrimination, feminism, Hilary Swank, Iron Jawed Angels, Jean H Baker, Ken Burns, Not for Ourselves Alone, racism, Sisters, suffrage