Planned Parenthood, Religion, Politics, and Funding Madness

There are two themes emerging from my discussions with women during this trip. The first is anger at the outrageous attacks on Planned Parenthood funding by conservatives. The second is exasperation over the fact that the Equal Rights Amendment was never passed- but I’ll deal with that in a later post.

Sara Bard Field
Courtesy, Library of Congress

I don’t know for sure what Sara Bard Field thought about abortion rights, though I suspect she would have supported women’s right to choose, and she certainly would have wanted women to have access to reproductive health care and education. She was married very young, and had been told nothing of about sex. She recalled much later that as she was headed off to her honeymoon her mother sort of awkwardly shoved a book into her hands that was supposed to enlighten her.[1] I wonder just how she was supposed to read the book before her husband demanded his marital rights. “Sorry, honey, I’m only through Chapter 2; maybe tomorrow…”

Ingeborg Kinstedt
courtesy,
Library of Congress

We don’t know much about what the Swedes thought, but they’d been around for a while and had seen a lot, and from Sara’s letters I’m guessing they would have been vocal supporters. Maria had been a midwife, delivering some 2000 babies in her career, and she must have helped mothers who didn’t know how they could manage one more child, or women who had babies out of wedlock. Ingeborg was much more vocal on the subject. When they were discussing illegitimacy, she said “Don’t talk to me about such foolishness. I’ve worked in institutions for the illegitimate. We knew who was the mother but in every instance—well, the Holy Ghost was the father.”[2] This pattern of women getting punished for our sexuality has been around a long time…

A few weeks ago Utah’s Governor Gary Herbert effectively blocked federal funding for the Planned Parenthood Association of Utah (PPPAU) by telling state agencies they couldn’t pass through the funds to the nonprofit. The money pays for STD testing and reporting, education around abstinence and taking responsibility for sexual activity, and a small amount of funding for pregnancy tests and STD screenings for rape victims. The funds at stake aren’t huge, a little over $215,000, but the principle is enormous, especially since Hebert specifically cited the trumped up the video released by the “Center for Medical Progress” as justification for his decision.

The PPAU is fighting back, and luckily they’ve got a new set of hands to help them out. Kate Kelly joined their staff a few weeks ago as their Strategic Policy Advisor, and she’s uniquely qualified to help lead the counterattack. She’s a Mormon feminist who was excommunicated by the church in 2014 for insisting that women should be ordained.  She also has a law degree from American University, with a focus on human rights.

Kate Kelly
http://utahvalley360.com/

The LDS church should have guessed she would be trouble. I asked her how she got started in activism and she recalled that the first protest she ever organized was at Brigham Young University, for free speech. “It was one of the first protests ever at the college,” she said with a laugh. In law school, she was involved in a lot of other causes, including the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Kate got on the track of getting women ordained in the Mormon Church when Mitt Romney was running for President in 2012. “The whole time he was running they kept talking about his Mormonism,” she said. She kept saying someone should use the opportunity to bring up the ordination of women, but no one ever did. “So I finally said, ‘I guess that’s me.” She founded Ordain Women in March 2013, and in 2014 she was excommunicated for apostasy, for demanding something that was contrary to the church’s teaching. She appealed it to the highest levels of the church, and it was upheld. That’s kind of jaw-droppingly medieval, to someone like me who wasn’t raised in a church. I guess she’s lucky, though; in another time she might have been burned at the stake…

While the experience must have been very difficult, if anything it’s made her more determined. “The Governor has violated our constitutional rights of equal protection and freedom of association,” she pointed out. The day I spoke to her, PPAU had just delivered 4,000 letters to the Governor from women demanding that the funding be restored. PPAU had also filed a lawsuit to block his order, and a judge subsequently issued a restraining order preventing it from going into effect. This round goes to PPAU!

There’s still a lot of work to be done, though. “The Mormon Church is very repressive about sex education and sexual mores,” says Kate. “But patriarchy is not just in the Mormon Church, it’s in our own country and all over the world.” She notes that whenever men are making decisions about women’s health- often behind closed doors- women will lose.

In order to succeed against the many attacks against it, Kate thinks that Planned Parenthood has to be willing to be more aggressive. “We should say ‘yes, we do abortions. They’re safe and they’re legal.’” (As is recouping costs from fetal tissue, by the way.) By focusing attention only on the fetus the conservatives have somewhat succeeded in silencing the voices of women whose lives were immeasurably benefited by not being forced to have children they didn’t want and couldn’t support.

PPAU is planning a celebration of Roe v. Wade for January, and along with that an “abortion speak-out” to encourage women who have used the procedure to say what it meant for them. “Every abortion story is also a story of a woman who’s been able to move on with her life,” says Kate. “The conservatives are really effective at rallying their base. We have to get better at rallying ours.”

In recent days there’s been some welcome positive news for Planned Parenthood, which had a pretty rough summer. In an NBC/WSJ poll released a few days ago, 61% of respondents opposed cutting its public funding- this is despite that crazy video and the braying of the Republican political candidates.

Speaking of which, Carly Fiorina, who evidently scored some points in the second debate based in part on her anti-Planned Parenthood vitriol, is now in trouble for having claimed that she personally had seen footage in the video of a fully formed, aborted fetus lying on an operating table, legs kicking, while someone talks about harvesting its brain. But as even Fox News had to acknowledge, the footage is just described by someone on the tape, it isn’t shown. So given all the other lies that have been told about this, we can reasonably conclude that the incident never occurred in the first place, it was just invented to encourage conservatives to froth at the mouth some more.  

Yesterday I was talking to a museum director about all this, and she said, “You know, somehow this [pregnancy] stuff has gotten all tangled up in politics and religion. But it’s nobody’s business but our own. Women should decide what we do with our bodies.” Well said.

The forced birthers should give up and go home. But they won’t, so we need to support Planned Parenthood with everything we’ve got; oh, and elect candidates for public office that support women’s right to safe and legal abortions.

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[1] Suffragists Oral History Project, Sara Bard Field: Poet and Suffragist, conducted by Amelia R. Fry, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.

[2] Sara Bard Field to C.E.S. Wood, October 6, 1915, WD Box 276, C.E.S. Wood Papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Tribute to Florence Brooks Whitehouse

Tomorrow we leave for Wyoming. I'm excited about that, in part because my great-grandmother, Florence Brooks Whitehouse, was there in the fall of 1916 on suffrage business, and had a great time. Alice Paul had hired her to travel to Wyoming from Maine to persuade women and men to vote against the Democrats in the upcoming elections, on the grounds that they hadn't done enough to push the federal suffrage amendment through Congress. This was a campaign the Congressional Union launched throughout the 12 western states where roughly 4 million women already had the vote, trying to use their political muscle to force swifter action on national suffrage. It was a bold move, and a controversial one.

It was researching Florence's activities that got me interested in suffrage history in the first place, and she's the subject of my book Voting Down the Rose: Florence Brooks Whitehouse and Maine's Fight for Woman Suffrage. Her story had been lost over the years, in part because her more conservative colleagues basically wrote her out of Maine's suffrage history because of "radical" actions like her trip to Wyoming. She also picketed President Wilson on the same trip...

A few people had asked me how I got interested in suffrage history, and I realized I was remiss in connecting those dots. All due to Florence!

Lost in the Desert

The envoys got lost in the desert in eastern Nevada, at night, on their way to Salt Lake City.

This was despite having hired a fellow who supposedly knew the route (this was the second and last time the Swedes hired a driver; from then on they relied on their own prowess.) At midnight, overdue at the ranch in Ibapah where they were supposed to rest and refuel, Sara told the driver to stop at a crossroads so she could look around for a signpost, and almost stepped on two “cowpunchers” rolled up in their blankets asleep. The sleepy cowpunchers were able to direct them to the ranch, though they had to retrace many weary miles and didn’t arrive until just before dawn. The ranchers lit fires and gave them hot coffee and food, but as Sara wrote Erskine they were chilled to the bone. “Our teeth chattered and we shook as with ague. We were half-tipsy from the wind’s continuous beat against our eyes, and we were dead from lack of sleep…”[1] But they left the ranch after a few hours’ rest; they didn’t trust their driver in the night again and the ranch owner had advised them to take an 86-mile detour from the Lincoln Highway due to bad roads. Sara sat in the front seat next to the driver, keeping him awake, “calling directions and being general prodder and boss” until they reached Salt Lake City after midnight.

Despite its hardships, Sara remembered the beauty of the night trip through the desert, and the “great wonderful sense of infinite space” surrounding them. At top speeds of 15 mph they had plenty of time to enjoy it… Here’s a link to a little video my husband shot with a Go-Pro camera of Highway 50, which gives you a little better sense of the landscape than a single photo can convey.

In Salt Lake City Mabel Vernon had worked with local activists to plan the official ceremony, and it sounded pretty magical. A band led a cavalcade of cars from the Hotel Utah, where the envoys were staying, up to the steps of Utah’s brand new State Capitol, built on a hill above the city. As Sara described it “Behind it are the great black mountains. Before it is the whole world…The sun was sinking in golden fire into the lake…” Various public officials, including the Governor, the Salt Lake City mayor, and a US Representative were lined up on the steps to greet the envoys. Utah’s own Emmeline B. Wells, (whom Sara described as a “darling old lady, 88- a Mormon, a pioneer in suffrage, an intimate of Susan B. Anthony”) introduced the envoys to the men, and speeches commenced. “There was music and a deep, reverential sort of spirit abiding in the great crowd that swarmed the steps and Capitol grounds,” wrote Sara.

Photo from envoys' event at the Capitol. From Salt Lake Herald, Oct. 5, 1915. I love how none of the important men present is mentioned...

Bust of Emmeline at the Capitol

I got a tour of the state capitol from Jenn Gonnelly, Co-President of the Utah League of Women Voters and a state house regular, and it certainly is magnificent. There’s some nods to women’s history, like this bust of Emmeline B. Wells and a lovely statue of Martha Hughes Cannon, the first woman to be elected state senator in the United States. 

Emmylou Manwill, Visitor Services &
Community Engagement Coordinator
at Utah State Capitol

Luckily, the Capitol employs Emmylou Manwill, who among other cool things leads women's history tours around the building and grounds. Jenn brought me over to meet Emmylou and I was delighted to find that one of the posters she uses to advertise her tours features Sara Bard Field.

Jenn Donnelly

Born and raised a Mormon, Jenn likes to say she “came out of the womb a feminist” and is no longer part of the church, but her background gives her an interesting perspective on Utah’s politics and history. 

Over lunch at Salt Lake City’s historic Lamb's Grill we discussed Utah’s unique suffrage history, which is integrally entwined with the Mormon Church. The territorial government granted women the right to vote (though they still couldn’t hold office) in 1870, to thwart threats by Congress to end polygamy. Mormon leaders believed that their women wouldn’t use their votes to end the practice, and Eastern politicians were surprised to discover this was true. Utah was the first state, after Wyoming, to enfranchise its women.

Congress wasn’t ready to give up, though. Despite strong opposition from national suffrage leaders, Congress passed the Edmunds-Tucker anti-polygamy act in 1887, which also stripped voting rights from Utah women.

Thus, after being able to vote for 17 years, with no apparent ill effect to society, women were back to square one. With support from Mormon church leaders, their wives, daughters and other prominent women within the church mobilized to win back the vote, mostly through the church’s existing committees and organizations. But they made little progress until 1884 when Utah was allowed to become a state, and began planning a constitutional convention. Utah’s suffrage leaders, including Emily S. Richards, Margaret N. Caine, Zina D. H. Young (wife of Brigham Young), and Emmeline B. Wells, fought hard- and successfully- to include the following language in the new state’s constitution. “The rights of citizens of the State of Utah to vote and hold office shall not be denied or abridged on account of sex. Both male and female citizens of this state shall enjoy equally all civil, political and religious rights and privileges." (Note they got the office holding language in there too, just to be sure...Pretty sure that was a smart thing to do, given how hard women have had to fight for other rights along the way.)

It's funny to think that Utah was an early leader in giving women civil rights, primarily because the Mormons needed their help to protect polygamy, because you’d be hard put to it to find much progressive about Utah’s treatment of women these days. According to Jenn, the state is falling behind on lots of measures. Just as an example, women in Utah earn 70% of median male earnings, compared to 79% of women nationally. Fully 35% of female-headed households with children live below the poverty line compared to 9% of married couples. 

A huge frustration for Jenn and for the Utah League of Women Voters is the state’s failure to adopt Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. The legislature is controlled by conservative Republicans, mostly men, who don’t want to take any money from Washington. Because of this stance, over 123,000 Utahns who would be eligible for the expansion remain uninsured. The state’s own research shows this pigheadedness will cost it thousands of jobs and several billion dollars in negative economic impact. The League has been doing a lot of lobbying around this issue, but so far without a lot of success.

“It’s really hard to talk about poverty in this state,” says Jenn. The Mormon church runs its own welfare programs, so its poor are largely taken care of, and the tea-party Republicans figure everyone else should just pick themselves up by their own bootstraps.

I got a taste of that attitude when chatting with a security guard at the Utah State Archives, where I’d gone to do some research. Just down the block from the Archives are several nonprofits serving people who are homeless, and there was quite a gathering of them across the street from the building. The guard, who said he’d been homeless once after his first wife kicked him out, was proud to report that he’d sought no help from anyone. Instead, he’d advertised in the newspaper that he’d work for room and board, and eventually worked his way out of the hole he was in. He was certain that the sad looking people wandering the streets could have made a different decision but had chosen homelessness, and that many could point to four or five generations of relatives before them who’d done the same. Nothing I could say would change his mind. That’s what the League is up against in this legislature.

The state has also effectively blocked funding for Planned Parenthood Association of Utah. Following the release of a “sting” video by anti-abortion activists, Gov. Gary Herbert told state agencies that they couldn’t pass through federal funding to the organization any more. I’m going to address the whole Planned Parenthood craziness in my next blog, but it definitely seems as if Utah’s a lot less friendly to women than it was a hundred years ago when Sarah and the Swedes came to town.

In later newspaper coverage of the envoys' trip they're quoted as saying that the only time they hired a man to drive them he got them lost. I feel like that may be a metaphor for women generally; when we put men in positions where they can make important decisions for us we're likely to find ourselves lost in the desert. Let's do our own damn driving, ladies!

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[1]  Sara Bard Field to C.E.S. Wood, October 6, 1915, WD Box 276, C.E.S. Wood Papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California

Crossing Nevada’s Great Basin- Then and Now

The envoys started in San Francisco with a brand new car, as did we, but after that the similarities between our trips are pretty much over.

The Swedes had traveled by boat from their home in Rhode Island to San Francisco to visit the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE), rounding the tip of South America en route. They had planned all along to drive back, buying a car in San Francisco in which to make the trip. So when they stopped by the Congressional Union booth at the PPIE and learned about the petitions and the desire to drive them to DC, they offered the envoys a place in their car. A good thing they did, too, because the departure date was coming up fast and if Alice Paul had another plan no one seemed to know about it.

Ad for the Overland Six that Maria and Ingeborg purchased. 

There were lots of different car companies back then, and in an effort to grab some market share the Willys-Overland company of Cleveland OH had put together a special deal for the PPIE. The deal came with a special price of $750, fully $325 less than the previous year. According to Old Cars Weekly, "The car offered 35 hp, high-tension magneto ignition, five-bearing crankshaft, thermo-siphon cooling, underslung rear springs, demountable rims (with one extra, which was not a common addition back then), electric starting and ignition, headlamp dimmers, a one-man top and cover, magnetic speedometer and left-hand drive…" Whew! Everything you'd need for a cross-country road trip. 

We spent quite a bit more in today’s dollars, but our car has glass windows and a roof that allow us to motor along in air-conditioned comfort, and at far greater speeds than the Overland could achieve. We also have a computer in the dash, Bluetooth capability, GPS, and the ability to lock our gear in the car, all of which add to the ease and comfort of our journey. We like it, except for being one of the 11 million car buyers duped by Volkswagen into thinking the car was less polluting than it is. Not too happy about that.

We also have much better roads. Here is a map of the envoys itinerary, which was put together by Amelia Fry, who did oral histories with Sara Bard Field, Mabel Vernon, and Alice Paul, among others.

Map of the envoys' itinerary created by Amelia Fry

A good chunk of the trip followed what was then called The Lincoln Highway, a pretty grandiose name for what was really no more than a cart track, especially in rural areas. Directions were always a little iffy; these are the ones the envoys followed from Laramie to Cheyenne, for example. They seem pretty specific, but…I wonder how clear they were at night, or in rain or snowstorms? And forget about street signs.  Who needs those when you’ve got an abandoned mine to serve as a guidepost?

Directions the envoys followed from
Laramie to Cheyenne. 

Within larger towns and cities the road beds were pretty solid, but once you left them behind they abandoned all pretense of being anything other than a glorified game trail. Sarah describes jolting along for hours in the Overland, so pummeled that by the end of the day every part of her ached. In some stretches she said they were almost ploughing through deep dust. And while the Overland did sport some sort of top that could be raised, they were mostly exposed to the sun and wind.

This isn't from their trip, but illustrates Sara's "ploughing through dust" comment.
Courtesy of the Churchill County Museum, Fallon, Nevada. 

Their passage east from Reno and through Nevada’s Great Basin, which has been our route the last few days, must have been terribly unpleasant. The so-called Fallon Mud Flats, 12 miles of road through alkali “salt pan”, were considered to be the worst section of the entire Lincoln Highway. Interestingly, the region was also going through a long dry spell, so conditions were very dry and dusty, and hellishly hot during the day. We felt parched sitting in our climate-controlled car; I can’t imagine how they brought enough water to quench their thirst.

  

Nevada’s Great Basin is a stunning series of vast, sweeping desert valleys punctuated by mountain ranges. You climb up and up through passes and then descend to cross an immense valley floor, only to repeat the process over and over again. We read in a guide book that the Great Basin is the size of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined, but with only about 21,000 residents. Even on today’s well-engineered roads, as you crawl across a valley floor you feel like a very small speck in the universe, separated from all humanity. It’s hard to convey in a photo. While the Lincoln Highway was gaining in popularity, there might be only a handful of cars crossing that area in any given day; serious car trouble, or losing the way, could potentially be fatal. While they appreciated the beautiful scenery, it must have been a huge relief to get across it safely.

Today Rick and I took a rest day, if by rest you mean hiking to the top of 13,000 foot Wheeler Peak in Great Basin National Park. Such amazing country, and the aspens were at peak color, a stunning gold color against the blue sky and deep green of the pines. It was a magical day. Tomorrow we drive all the way to Salt Lake City; I'm looking forward to being back on the suffrage trail.

Reno Welcomes Suffrage Envoys (and Me!) with Open Arms

Yesterday we left California behind us, heading east out of Auburn on I-80 and up over the Sierras. The dry oak forests of the Sierra foothills gave way to pine and fir as we climbed, the darker green of the pine needles providing some welcome color after the sere landscape of the San Joaquin valley.

Sara and the Swedes, Maria and Ingeborg, did the drive at night, hiring a man in Colfax to drive them over the steeper parts of the Sierras (the first of two times they hired a driver.)[1] Sara loved the trip. “The moonlight drive through the wooded mountain roads was indescribably beautiful,” she wrote her lover, Erskine. “Now and then we dropped on a bit of crystal wonder- a clear, mountain lake lying face to face with the moon.” The only negative was that Ingeborg wouldn’t shut up. “She talked all the time from Auburn to Reno- about ten hours,” Sara complained. They reached Reno by midnight, staying at the Riverside Hotel and having an event at the 20th Century Club, as well as at least one street meeting.

Even for a desert,this land is dry. We dropped down out of Donner Pass toward Reno on old Route 40 (which is what they would have traveled) and wound through Truckee past Donner Lake. Donner Lake is many feet below its normal levels, as this photo shows. The docks all have these little signs on them warning against diving…Yikes. 

Sign at the end of the docks on Donner Lake

Water levels are low at Donner Lake

We couldn't linger by the lake because waiting for me in Reno, at the lovely home of Lynn Bremer, was an amazing group of women who have taken it upon themselves to document and record Nevada women’s history. Nevada women got the vote in 1914 through a statewide referendum, and the website these women put together for the Nevada Suffrage Centennial is a terrific model for other states as we enter the five-year countdown to the centenary of  national suffrage getting approved. Another great idea they had was to write a play highlighting different aspects of their suffrage history, which they performed all over the state. Finally, through the Nevada Women’s History Project they’re continuing to document women’s experience and contributions through oral histories. What a tremendous gift they have given us.

I told them some about the envoys' trip and what I've learned about them so far. I also listened to them talk about changes that have happened for women since 1915. There was a palpable frustration as they described the obstacles they had faced and overcome in their lifetimes that were solely related to their sex. I have to say I found their stories disturbing because they didn't happen that long ago. It was an important reminder for me that even as we enjoy the benefits that activists have won for us in the past, we have to remain vigilant against slippage and continue to press for protection of women’s rights, both in law and policy. I actually remember the business about pregnant teachers having to leave from when I was in grade school. 

Here are some of the stories they told:

• In 1970, a woman who was a teacher wanted to buy a house with her husband. She earned more money than he did, but when they went to the bank to get a mortgage, they wouldn’t count her income, saying that there was a risk that if she got pregnant and stopped working they wouldn’t be able to repay the mortgage (this was standard practice in the mortgage industry.)
• A woman couldn’t take out a loan without her husband’s signature, and couldn’t make changes on her insurance policy without his permission, even after a divorce.
• Another woman said that in 1966 she had gotten a credit card and had established credit in her own name. When she married, the company automatically extended credit to her husband (he had not previously had a card of his own.) Twenty years later they divorced, and the credit card company attributed all of the credit history to her husband; hers had been wiped clean although she was the one who had opened the account in the first place.
• As late as 1970 school districts were still requiring women who became pregnant to either quit or take an unpaid leave of absence after the first trimester (once their pregnancy started showing.)
• In the 1960s, women couldn’t get hired in the History Department at the University of Nevada. The Department simply wouldn’t hire women even if they were equally qualified.

Crazy stuff. Let’s always remember that the rights we take for granted today once had to be fought for.

As we continued to connect the dots between the suffrage road trip of 100 years ago and women's experience today, the group decided that they wanted to send a message along with me to DC. So Lynn whipped out a yellow legal pad, and they wrote a petition that said “We support passage of the Equal Rights Amendment,” and all ten of them signed it. They asked me to carry it along with me and have other people sign it along the way as I drive to DC.

Another great suggestion they had for me was to track a few indicators, such as community property for married couples, treatment of pregnancy and family leave, and equal pay for equal work, and see whether there was a pattern for how soon more progressive laws were enacted. Did the western states where women already had the vote adopt more progressive, pro-woman legislation earlier than the eastern states where women only got the vote through the federal amendment?  It would be interesting to know. So I'll try to see if I can get hold of that information in every state (and in DC.)

It was a great discussion and hours later I was still fizzing with excitement over it. I look forward to more of these types of meetings in the days and weeks ahead.

Some of Reno's Women's history buffs.
Thanks for a great discussion and exchange of women's history! 

Feel free to enter your personal stories in the comment section of the blog about barriers or opportunities you’ve encountered in your life that are directly related to being a woman. It would be great to have more examples, especially if there are issues that are still unresolved and need addressing.

Before leaving Reno earlier today I spent a couple of hours at the Nevada Historical Society looking at old photos and newspaper articles. It was great fun and I’m deeply indebted to the staff of the Research Library for letting me in before it was officially open! Later in the day we stopped in at the Churchill County Museum in Fallon, NV, and got a chance to look at some old suffrage papers as well as their wonderful exhibits. Even when their material doesn’t directly reference the suffrage envoys it can help provide background to, for example, what traveling across country was like 100 years ago. All food for thought.

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[1] Sara Bard Field to C.E.S. Wood, September 27, 1915, WD Box 276, C.E.S. Wood Papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California

Why Don’t Women Run?

For public office, that is.

According to Paula Lee, an electoral system reform activist and co-President of the Sacramento League of Women Voters, only about 19% of our Congressional representatives (the US House and Senate) are women. On the state and local levels, only one out of four legislators is a woman (check on your state’s legislative gender parity at this website created by FairVote- it's alarming.)  Why such a low number? 

Paula Lee and me in Sacramento, 

Paula pointed out that women toiled over 70 years for the right to vote (if you date it from the 1848 Seneca Falls conference), and while things have improved in many arenas there are still not that many female politicians. “One thing that hasn’t changed in the last 100 years,” she noted, “is that women are still dependent on men to vote in our best interests- on issues such as equal pay for equal work, funding for Planned Parenthood, family leave, and so on- because there are so few women in public office.” Paula says that women should be working as hard for equal representation as they did to get suffrage in the first place.

The US has also been slow, relative to other western countries, to elect women as top leaders. Angela Merkel has been Chancellor of Germany since 2005, and Margaret Thatcher served as Prime Minister in the UK from 1979-1990. Maybe Hilary Clinton will make history in the US in our 2016 presidential election; or just maybe her choice of fashion styles will cost her the election. It would be so nice to get beyond this.

Politicians are the ones who set policy and decide about how public money gets spent, and we women are leaving these tough decisions up to the men…Which might just be why the military gets more and more funding while our schools crumble and people in need lack food, housing, health and mental health care, and treatment for substance abuse. But it isn’t all our fault; there are structural issues within the two-party system that discourage women from running and make it harder for them to run, win.  See this great article, Men Rule: The Continued Under-Representation of Women in U.S. Politics, for a longer discussion about this.

The article explores seven reasons that women don’t run, including “women are much less likely than men to think they are qualified to run for office,” and “female potential candidates are less competitive, less confident, and more risk averse than their male counterparts.” Women are doing amazing things now that they certainly weren’t doing when I was growing up; running big companies, going to space, serving in battle, becoming research scientists, whatever. There’s no question we can do whatever we put our minds to. But politics has just not been a popular choice for us. I’ve been asked several times to run for state representative and have said no, pleading family responsibilities and the demands of running a small business. While those were real issues for me, I’ve also done a ton of volunteer work for nonprofits and in my town. So if I’m willing to devote considerable time to serving on the school board, land conservation, or supporting affordable housing development, why hasn’t running for public office been an option I’d consider? Need to do some soul searching on that one…

One of the electoral reforms Paula has been working for over the last 20 years, and which she thinks would make it easier for women to run for- and win- state and local elections is called proportional representation. Our current system is all or nothing, winner-take-all. A simple majority gets a candidate elected, and even when the losing side has a substantial minority (think of a 51-49% split), they get no power. Paula and other believe that multi-winner ranked choice voting, used in cities such as Cambridge MA and Minneapolis, MN, offers voters better options and fairer representation.

Paula and I didn’t just talk about politics, though. She spent 10 years working for the El Dorado Women’s Center in Placerville, CA (now the Center for Violence-Free Relationships). Another thing that hasn’t changed for women in the last 100 years is that they’re still victims of sexual and domestic violence; in childhood, in high school, on college campuses, and beyond. “’No’ still does not mean ‘no’,” says Paula.  

I can vouch for that because I stopped by the Stockton Public Library on Monday to look for articles about the suffrage envoys’ trip in 1915 (and found some!). When I browse through old newspapers I always like to look at what else they were talking about at the time; in 1915, WW I in Europe was frequent front page news, for example. But it was sad and disturbing to see articles about a man having “unnatural relations” with his 7-year old niece who was left in his care after her mother died, a farmer who murdered his wife and four children, or a man who, when he found his mistress with another man, shot and killed her. We have rape crisis centers and domestic violence shelters to help protect those who can escape, but 100 years later we’re still not doing a great job as a society preventing this violence from happening in the first place.

Maybe if there were more women in public office we could create policies and programs that support families better, treat mental illness, and provide education to prevent violence against women and children.

Rick, Harry and me in Stockton

Monday night we stayed in Stockton with an old friend from college, Harry Mersmann, who’s doing amazing work as a professor at San Joaquin Delta Community College, and having fun playing the ukelele. Great to catch up with him after all these years.

Then it was a short drive to Auburn, CA, en route to Reno, NV. We stayed in a nice AirBnB, ran in the beautiful Auburn State Recreation Area and cruised old town Auburn for evidence of the Lincoln Highway, which the envoys followed for a big chunk of the trip. 

It was nice to decompress for a night from the intensity of the last few weeks, but I'm meeting with some history buffs in Reno later today and really looking forward to that. Sara Bard Field had spent quite a bit of time in Nevada in 1914 helping women win the vote there, and had also lived there for a year when she was divorcing her first husband, so she had a lot of friends and the envoys' arrival was cause for quite a celebration.

Auburn started as a gold rush town- here I'm hanging with
the statue of a prospector in old town Auburn

And Now we Begin

48 cities

20 states and the District of Columbia

Eight weeks

That pretty much sums up our itinerary. The 48 cities are those in which the envoys spent at least one night, and we’ll be following their route pretty precisely, except for a few days in Kansas when they backtracked a bit and we’ll take a more direct route. 

The weather here has been crystal clear and hot the last couple of days, with cool, starry nights, which sounds similar the weather leading up to the envoys’ departure. (Pretty much all similarities between our departure and theirs end at this point, however.) Alice Paul and the Congressional Union (CU) were masters at staging political theater, so the envoys’ send-off came at the end of a three-day conference that was the country's first-ever meeting of women voters. The CU recruited delegates to the conference from the 12 states that had already granted women voting rights, and the schedule was carefully orchestrated to bring women to the point where they “elected” the envoys to be sent to DC. In fact, Alice Paul had already cajoled Sara Bard Field and Frances Joliffe into serving as the envoys (some earlier picks had refused), and of course the Swedes had the car, so while their identity was kept a secret until they were nominated, that had all been agreed to ahead of time.

The women voters of the west were sending the envoys as messengers to Congress and the President to demand an amendment to the US Constitution enfranchising women. Implicit in this was a warning; support the federal amendment or we’ll organize the 4 million women voters to oppose you in 1916. President Wilson would be running for re-election then, as well as a third of the Senate and all of the Representatives, and the Democratic Party was in the majority. If you don’t support our amendment, the women were telling the Democrats, you risk losing the Presidency and your majority in Congress.

This was a flexion of women’s political muscle the country was not accustomed to and which many found abhorrent. Women simply weren’t supposed to behave this way. While it didn’t produce the amendment immediately the strategy sure got the Democrats’ attention.

The envoys were launched at night from the Court of Abundance at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE). According to the San Francisco Bulletin, a crowd of some 10,000 people was on hand to witness the event. The CU had recruited a huge women’s chorus to sing “The Song of the Free Women,” which Sara Bard Field had written and set to the tune of the Marseillaise, a French freedom song. A couple of the verses went as follows:

We are women clad in new power.

Detail of the Palace of Fine Arts- courtesy of Bob Thawley

We see the weak. We hear their plea.

We march to set our sisters free.

Lo! Has rung the chime from Freedom’s tower…

No more we bend the knee imploring.

No longer urge our cause with tears.

We have rent asunder binding fears.

We are women strong for women warring.

At the appointed hour, the crowd escorted the envoys to the gates. Here’s how the Bulletin reporter described it:

"Then, all at once, the great brightly colored picture and its dark background began to disintegrate and fade. The court darkened, but bright masses of women were forming in procession to escort the envoys to the gates of the Exposition. Orange lanterns swayed in the breeze; purple, white and gold draperies fluttered, the blare of the band burst forth, and the great surging crowd followed to the gates."

Close to midnight the Swedes met the procession in their car in front of the gates, and then the two envoys climbed in. Finally the gates opened and the car slipped through into the night, followed by the cheers of the crowd, “…ending the most dramatic and significant suffrage convention that has probably ever been held in the history of the world.”

Okay, so our departure isn’t going to be anything like that. It will be daylight, and there won’t be any crowd cheering us on, except maybe in my head. I like to imagine that scene at the PPIE, though. It also amuses me that the envoys didn’t actually leave San Francisco for another week or so; they apparently needed to register their car and it took a while to sort that out (no Fed-ex in those days…) So in the end they left just as we plan to this morning, they got in their car and drove away.

Yesterday we went and strolled around the Palace of Fine Arts, which is the last remaining building from the PPIE. It’s set in a lovely park, fronted by a narrow lagoon filled with swans, ducks, and egrets. While it’s only a tiny portion of what was there (the PPIE covered some 640 acres) it was fun to imagine people strolling around the grounds 100 years ago.

Rick and me at the Palace of Fine Arts

So off we go. It’s been great reconnecting with the Doubs, and exploring San Francisco a little, but I’m looking forward to our adventure.

Marian Doub, her Dad Bill, and husband Bob Thawley
Thanks for a great visit. Love you much!

Getting to Know San Francisco’s Activists and Radicals, Past and Present

It’s fitting, perhaps, during these few days in San Francisco that I’m staying with my husband’s cousin, Marian Doub, her partner Bob Thawley, and her Dad, Bill Doub.  

Poster on Marian & Bob's kitchen wall

I say this because they embody the sort of non-violent activism that the suffragists employed in their fight for women’s political rights. All of them have been arrested, countless times, mostly for protesting nuclear weapons and power plants, but they also raise their voices against racism, gentrification, and reckless development that puts profits ahead of neighborhoods. But I don’t want to suggest that they simply oppose the things or systems they don’t like; over the years they’ve also worked to create or support recycling programs, cooperative childcare, and affordable housing, to name a few. Bob has worked with people diagnosed with AIDS/HIV, and is currently helping to develop harm reduction strategies for youth who are homeless and struggling with addiction. Their walls are adorned with posters from the Occupy movement, notices of upcoming non-violent protests, and anti-gentrification actions. I've included a few of my favorites.

Poster on Marian & Bob's bulletin board

Marian, who majored in Women’s Studies undergrad, has been helpful in thinking about the questions I want to ask people about how women’s lives have changed, and how they haven’t, in the 100 years since the envoys did this trip. There are lots of different lenses through which this could or should be considered; issues of class, race, sexual orientation, and gender are some examples. The impact of incarceration, both of women themselves and on women when their fathers, sons, brothers, or partners are imprisoned, is another. While I know it makes this topic impossibly broad, my current plan is to stay open to all of these and talk to a wide range of women along the way, and see which themes rise to the top. Maybe I'll narrow it down as I go along.

Yesterday I had a fascinating visit with another activist, graphic artist and author Robert “Bob” Cooney, who put together a stunning book called Winning the Vote: The Triumph of the American Woman Suffrage Movement. Bob spent years researching suffrage history and rescued a lot of images and artifacts from obscurity, featuring their images in his book along with insightful narrative. He’s also recently released Remembering Inez: The Last Campaign of Inez Milholland, Suffrage Martyr. Inez literally worked herself to death for suffrage, and her sacrifice was used as a springboard to rally women to fight harder for their political rights.  Remembering Inez is about the campaign she was working on leading up to her collapse.

Bob and I had a great chat on his beautiful deck overlooking the Pacific Ocean, nibbling on cookies his wife had provided and enjoying the rare chance to geek out around suffrage history. Both of our spouses have been patient and supportive, but their eyes glaze over after a certain point… We traded stories and information about sources, and Bob was a wealth of information and wise advice about how to approach this trip. I’m grateful to him for his generous support of my project, and for his determination to further explore and share this amazing chapter of American and women’s history.

This afternoon I met with Sue Englander of Bolerium Books, in San Francisco’s Mission District. The bookstore has played an integral part in San Francisco’s radical politics over the last several decades, and its collections are helpfully arranged by social movement. The bookstore is on the 3^rd floor and you have to get buzzed in, which was a first for me and made me feel right away like I was a member of some select radical club.

Sue is a lecturer at San Francisco State University and at the City College of San Francisco. She’s also the author of, among other things, Class Conflict and Class Coalition in the California Woman Suffrage Movement, 1907-1912: The San Francisco Wage Earners' Suffrage League. We talked about Sue’s book, some of San Francisco’s notable women of 100 years ago (such as Maud Younger and Mrs. William McHenry Keith), radical politics, and her concerns about gentrification and evictions that are displacing long time city residents. Sue is a blast to talk to and I could easily have spent hours with her, but she had to get back to work and I needed to move on with my day. I spent some time perusing the bookstores incredible collections. Here’s the selfie we took with a poster in the background that reads “Sisterhood is Blooming.”

I wandered back toward Marian and Bob’s clutching Sue’s book and some other Bolerium purchases I couldn’t resist, including a US Dept. of Labor pamphlet on Married Women in Industry that was written in 1924 by Mary Winslow (a former Congressional Union/National Woman’s Party organizer); The President’s Address from the 9^th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality (1918); a book called Leave the Dishes in the Sink: Adventures of an Activist in Conservative Utah by Alison Comish Thorne (2002); and another book of essays entitled Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, edited by Toni Morrison. Whew! Why these? I don’t know, why the hell not? They seemed interesting and will be useful background reading.

As I made my way home Mission St. was booming with lots of people out and about, a rap concert, an amazing graffiti art-making event in an alley, street vendors, and lots of trendy new bars and restaurants catering to the city’s more affluent residents, while their less fortunate peers stagger past, checking garbage cans for food and hugging the walls for support. Quite an eyeful.

My husband Rick flies in from Maine tomorrow and we leave on our trip Monday morning. I’ll be sad to leave San Francisco when there's so much to see and explore, but I’m also eager to launch this trip that I've been thinking about for a long time and actively planning over the last year.

Love this poster from Marian and Bob's collection