Ohio Days

Sara and the Swedes in Ohio
Cleveland Plain Dealer, 11.16.15

Ohio gave the envoys a mixed reception. Sara was back in her old stomping grounds, actually; she’d been born in Cincinnati (though she’d grown up in Detroit) and had lived with her first husband in Cleveland from 1903-1910. It was in Cleveland that Sara had become a Socialist and met Clarence Darrow, who encouraged her free thinking and later introduced her to Erskine.[1]  She had done a lot of growing and changing in Cleveland, but the church where her husband ministered had fired her husband for trying to apply Christian principles to those less fortunate, so I wonder how she felt as they rolled through the farm fields an into the city.

By the time they reached Cleveland they’d already been to Dayton, Columbus, and Toledo, where they’d gotten good support. Each city had delivered a number of enthusiastic women who escorted the slightly battered little black car and its weary occupants to the rally location where speeches were made, the women and other important people signed the petition, and then they were whisked off to a reception or dinner.

The Governor signed the petition in Columbus, and I’m pretty sure the mayors of Dayton and Toledo did as well, but in Cleveland Mayor Baker refused. He didn’t like the word “Demand” in the petition. Darn. I think he found it a bit uppity.

Turns out he wasn’t alone. In Ohio, Harriet Taylor Upton had pretty much had a lock on the Ohio Woman Suffrage Association since 1899. From 1903 to 1910, the same years Sara had lived in Cleveland, she’d also served as treasurer for the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA.) NAWSA was the more conservative “legacy” suffrage organization that loathed the CU’s “We Demand” approach.

The CU’s Ohio president Mrs. Cyrus Mead came up from Dayton, and Mrs. Louis A. Dickinson form Fremont had personally appealed to OWSA’s governing board to encourage them to support the envoys, but they haughtily refused. “The Woman Suffrage party does not indorse the antiparty policy of the Congressional Union,” they announced. “Woman suffrage is a basic principle of human rights and not a political offshoot.” Mrs. Mead pointed out that they were “working toward a common end, namely, votes for women, and there should be no friction.” We all want the federal amendment, so they should all just work together, she told a reporter. But OWSA would have none of it, though other more daring women did show up to the event, along with a congressman or two. And since the other cities had been supportive Ohio wasn’t a total loss. So they said their farewells, loaded the car onto a boat, and headed off to Buffalo.

Rick and I enjoyed our time in Ohio. We got to see a lot of the state, stayed in two nice AirBnBs, and crashed two nights with my sister Elizabeth and her husband Jim. 

In Dayton LWV Executive Director Susan Hesselgesser organized a luncheon at the historic Dayton Women’s Club, which has served as a center for social, civic and literary activities since 1916. How cool for women to have their own space, which included a restaurant and a ballroom! I talked some about the original trip and my project, and asked about what’s happening with women in Ohio.

From The Cleveland Leader, 11.14.115 

Governor Kasich, of course, is running for President and is trying to appear more moderate. So he expanded Medicaid under the ACA, but he (along with a majority of the legislature) is vehemently anti-abortion. Half of Ohio’s abortion clinics have closed in the last four years and the forced birthers keep looking for ways to make it harder for women to get this help. I also heard a lot of the same complaints that I’d heard in other Republican-led states; their efforts to suppress voting, and to gerrymander districts to ensure they retain and strengthen their political power. A new bill the LWV is helping to champion will make the redistricting process fairer. While the last two issues affect men as well as women, there’s no doubt that women’s interests are better protected when they can vote and when districts are drawn in such a way that women and minorities can vote and get elected.

One woman told me she’d been working on women’s rights issues for 46 years and had helped organized demonstrations in the 1970s. I was really moved thinking about those years of dedication, and thanker her for her service. 

The LWV president in Toledo, Ann Fabiszak Payne, hosted a reception for me at her house, where we had another great discussion. This was another group of really smart women who have worked for decades to help protect against threats to our civil rights. We owe them a huge vote of thanks! I messed up the scheduling so I wasn’t able to meet with the Cleveland LWV but hope to in a future visit. Since my sister lives there I now have multiple reasons to go back.

Elizabeth and Jim had arranged for Rick and me to visit the Crawford Auto Aviation Collection of the Western Reserve Historical Society and meet Derek Moore, the Curator of Transportation History. Derek was a wealth of information about vintage cars (as you might expect from his title) so he was able to answer all the questions we’d been saving up over the last 5 weeks. The Museum doesn’t have an Overland Six but had a 1916 Chandler which was pretty similar, so we took a look at that. Derek has put the word out through his contracts that I'm looking for a restored Overland Six to look at, and he also wondered if it might be possible to find the original car Maria and Ingeborg bought. Wouldn't that be amazing?

In the meantime, here are some fun factoids about the car Sara and the Swedes drove:

1)  The top would roll up and fasten to the sides of the car. There were plastic windows that could be fitted in as well. While they helped some they were not dustproof or rainproof.

2)  Derek conformed that the car and top weren’t insulated- he was impressed that they made the trip in fall/late fall.

3)  The car could run at its top speed with the top up.

4)  Top speed was likely 45-50 on good roads. That would really be pushing it, and there weren’t that many good roads, so mostly it would have been quite a bit slower.

5)  The earliest cars ran on white gas. Around 1915 they were starting to make a higher octane gas for cars, but he guessed that this wouldn’t have made it out to rural areas, especially in the western states. Once the car got hot it could burn almost any type of gas.

A 1916 Chandler from the Crawford Auto Museum

6)  Early cars had a place on the running board for three types of cans. There was a red can for gas, a green can for oil, and blue can for water; that’s how they carried their spare fluids. They would have topped up water, gas, oil, and transmission fluids at rest stops.

7)  The tires then were more like bike tires. There was a tube inside, and they carried replacement tubes and patch kits. It sounded like patching the tube was fussy work; the surfaces had to be clean to make the patch work which must have been hard in the desert sands. The tire itself could handle punctures since that’s not what held the air.

8)  Headlights were adequate to drive at night, especially since they weren’t going fast.

9)  Cars were reasonably comfortable, but the roads were bad so he confirmed that they were jounced around a lot.  

10) The cars were all mechanical (as opposed to computerized) and things like the brakes required frequent mechanical adjustments which would have required Ingeborg to go under the car.

While in Cleveland I also met with about 15 students and a smattering of teachers at the Hawken Middle School, where the school has a feminist club called “We for She” which includes both girls and boys; I think the founding inspiration for the Hawken club came from student Lucy Watson and a young teacher named Judy Merzbach.  I hadn’t realized this before this trip, but these feminist clubs are kind of a thing and are springing up in schools around the country, which makes me very happy. Anyway, we had about 20-30 minutes or so to talk about this over lunch. They asked a lot of sharp questions and I really enjoyed talking with the younger set about this history!

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[1] Sara Bard Field, Poet and Suffragist, an Interview Conducted by Amelia R. Fry, Suffragists Oral History Project, University of California.

Detroit Welcomes the Envoys

I’m dreadfully behind on the blog at this point, but trying to catch up! Blogging has had to take a back seat, as it were, to travel, research, visiting with old friends and family, and planning the celebration in DC. I’m in Boston right now, staying with daughter Emma, who has been helped me with website and blog design. Back to Detroit…

I’ve spent decades working in affordable housing and community revitalization so I was eager to see Detroit, which has been struggling to manage a city footprint that is far larger than its shrinking population and tax base will support. In community development circles Detroit’s housing vacancy woes are legendary, as is its solution; to simply demolish blocks of housing and turn them into fields. We stayed in the Jacob Arms, less than a mile from the city center and a stone’s throw from the Comerica Park. In just about any other city the view from our 6^th floor window would have been rooftops; instead, we looked down on quite a bit of open space.

Photo from our rental unit in Detroit, courtesy of Rick Leavitt

Still, I found myself more upbeat about Detroit than I had expected. There were lots of signs of new development going on. Much of the remaining housing in the neighborhood we stayed in was gorgeous and many units had been restored. All the open space has supported a new locavore movement and we ate at a great restaurant on Cass Street with delicious food at reasonable prices. And you can’t beat the street art! I know lots of challenges remain for Detroit but it seems as if it’s moving in the right direction. If I was looking to homestead somewhere, that’s where I’d go.

Beautifully restored Victorian house a block from where
we stayed in Detroit. Photo courtesy of Rick Leavitt.

Sara had grown up in Detroit though she’d left in 1900, when she married her first husband Albert. But her parents were still there and I thought perhaps there’d be a big celebration for her homecoming. On a Saturday evening 40 autos, decorated with lanterns flags, yellow balloons and the CU colors of yellow, white and gold, assembled at the corner of Woodward Avenue and Edmunds and Place. Led by the little black car and the envoys, they sped to the steps of the county building.[1] There they were met by a number of local dignitaries, including Detroit Mayor Ira W. Jayne and Mrs. Jennie Law Hardy, the local CU president. During the event beautiful young women kept red lights burning in 4 urns on the building’s steps (might be hard to pull that off today.) The Detroit Times described the effect as being “like pictures of Rome in the time of the Caesars.” Those suffragists surely knew how to stage a mass meeting…

Unusually, at the event the envoys were also presented with 4,000 signatures for the petition. I’m not sure what prompted this, since no other city had done gathered signatures in advance. Perhaps that was their way of welcoming their prodigal daughter.

If Sara had a moment to visit with her parents there’s no record of it. She was somewhat estranged from her father, but had remained close to her mother.  

The street she’d grown up on was about a half mile from where Rick and I were staying, so we walked over to see if we could find her house. In her oral history Sara spoke glowingly of her childhood home. “No one who knew Detroit as I knew it could dream of it now. It was so lovely. It was half-city, half-town. Every street was tree-lined…” The street was paved with cedar blocks for the horses, which sent a nice fragrance into the air. Their house on Charlotte Avenue had a porch that to her childish eyes had seemed like the “great prow of a ship.”[2] It was then a quiet side street that met Woodward Avenue at one end, which was a bustling thoroughfare. When she’d gone back after her father died to help her mother move, she was shocked at the changes and never returned. The street had been widened and paved for cars, the trees had been cut down and an ill-kept boarding house had been constructed in the yard next to her house. That was pretty much the state we found the street in. Her home had been torn down and the few that remained looked in need of some TLC.

In the Bentley Library at the University of Michigan I was delighted to find the papers of Lucia Isabelle Voorhees Grimes. I’ve had difficulty finding collections of papers from women who had been active in the Congressional Union. My theory is that when the vote was finally won, NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt directed all the local affiliates to preserve their histories and write them up. Alice Paul didn’t do that, so most of the women who were involved in the CU just moved on to whatever they wanted to work on next.

From the Lucia Isabelle Voorhees Grimes Papers,
Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan

But Grimes had been active in the Republican Party for decades, and had even run for the state legislature in 1924, so her family must have felt her papers were worth preserving. I couldn’t find any mention of the 1915 visit from the envoys; I think it’s because she was in DC, putting together the system the CU used to track and record every member of Congress’ stance on suffrage and getting ready for the envoys’ arrival there. She’d brought her six-year old daughter Emily with her; I loved this photo of Emily outside of CU headquarters in DC holding signs advertising the mass meeting that would feature the suffrage envoys.

Grimes’ collection at the Bentley was rich in all sorts of material, but I was also thrilled to find a couple of old NWP sashes that hadn’t seen the light of day too much. They retained their bright colors of purple, white, and gold.

 

Sash from the Lucia Isabelle Voorhees Grimes Papers, 
Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan 

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[1] “Women Voters Envoys Reach the East”, The Suffragist, November 20, 1915, p. 3; also “Suffrage Party Reaches the East,” Detroit Free Press, Nov. 13, 1915, p. 9

[2] Sara Bard Field, Oral History 

Trip Logistics

We’ve been in Michigan the last couple of days, and are on our way to Cleveland. Yesterday I had a fun interview with Cynthia Canty at Michigan Public Radio- you can catch it at this link. Thanks to Patrick McLaughlin of Caldo Communications for setting this up and for hosting us in Ann Arbor.

I’ll post later about our travels in Ohio and Michigan but today I want to share some musings about navigation, communication, and money.

There were rudimentary maps of the Lincoln Highway and the areas in between cities, but floods and route changes were common and I wonder how they found out about those? When Sara and the Swedes blew into an unfamiliar city cold and weary, desperate to get to their hotel or running late for an event, were there street signs or did they have to stop and ask for directions?

When I tell women that the second (and last) man the envoys hired to drive for them got them lost in the desert, they always laugh and nod their heads and say “he must not have been willing to stop and ask for directions.” In his defense I’m not sure how many people there were to ask in that vest and empty space, especially once it got dark. But I wonder whether that stereotype about men was present right from the beginning or whether it evolved over time in the brave new world of automobile transportation?

On this trip we’re navigating almost entirely by GPS, with occasional reference to old-fashioned maps. The flat, electronic voice of the GPS calls out our turns and exits, generally getting it right but not always, as when we were trying to find our B & B in Detroit and it was oblivious to the fact that some streets were completely blocked off due to construction. Most mornings we start our day with Rick asking Siri politely “where’s the nearest coffee shop?” followed by his stream of invective when she tries to direct us to someplace hopelessly inappropriate. It still makes me chuckle, which I guess is a good thing after 5 weeks on the road.  

Letter from Erskine to Sara.

We’re fortunate to be able to communicate with cell phones, email, and texts, not to mention this blog. A hundred years ago they relied on telegrams and good old-fashioned snail-mail. The mail service was only as reliable as the addresses the sender had, and as the envoys’ itinerary evolved sometimes letters would show up after they’d already moved on to the next city and would have to be forwarded. Erskine seemed to have a lot of difficulty keeping up with Sara, as this letter suggests, and he was worried about her. "Where are you?" he asks plaintively.[1]

This telegram from Sara to Erskine illustrates the difficulty of
keeping people informed of their whereabouts. 

Telegrams were like texts, in a way. There was a bit of an art to reading them, as they were usually written in all capital letters without punctuation. "You misunderstood my wire," Sara tells Erskine in this telegram- was that an issue of timing or simply a misinterpretation of what she'd written?[2]

Sometimes telegraph operators would get it wrong and include several nonsensical words- kind of like auto-correct on your cell phone sometimes creates gibberish. In the telegram below Sara says "my thoughts are with Eyrie." [3](?) I'm not sure what that refers to; from the context, it should have read "My thoughts are with you."

Telegram from Sara to Erskine.

Telegrams were also expensive, so they had to balance their convenience with their cost, especially since funds were tight. Much more information could be conveyed in a letter, too. Finally, telegrams weren’t entirely private, so sometimes politically sensitive information could only be hinted at, with a promise of a longer letter forthcoming.

  

The CU was chronically short of funds and Mable Vernon had definitely drunk the Kool-Aid about keeping the expenses low. But it was costly to hire bands, print literature, book hotel rooms, and cover restaurant meals, not to mention her own and Sara’s salaries (I don't think the Swedes were paid), and as a result Mabel was often out of money and had to move funds from her personal bank account to cover CU expenses. The letters and telegrams back and forth from CU headquarters attempting to resolve this seemed to go astray pretty regularly. Alice Paul would telegram that she’d wired $75 to Denver, for example, but Mabel somehow wouldn’t see it and she’d have to send another telegram about how they were out of funds, and they’d go around again. It was a heck of a way to run a campaign, and must have been very frustrating.

We just go to the cash machine or use our credit cards…Several people have asked me who’s funding my trip, and really it’s my Mom and Dad. They’re both gone now, but they would have loved this trip, and the money I inherited from them made it possible for me to do it without having to spend time looking for sponsors or grants, which is a pretty sweet spot to be in. Thanks Mom & Dad!

My Dad, A. Allen Gass with grandchildren Silas and Emma

My Mom, Anne Bradstreet Whitehouse Gass

 [1] C.E.S. Wood to Sara Bard Field, November 29, 1915, WD Box 276, C.E.S. Wood Papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

[2] Sara Bard Field to C.E.S. Wood, October 29, 1915. WD Box 276, C.E.S. Wood Papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

[3] Sara Bard Field to C.E.S. Wood, October 31, 1915. WD Box 276, C.E.S. Wood Papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Beyond Voting; Chicago Women's Efforts to Protect and Strengthen Women's Rights

I have new sympathy for Sara who was supposed to be writing accounts of the trip for The Suffragist (the CU’s newspaper). She could also earn a bit more money writing articles for a Portland, OR paper. But they were logging long miles, often leaving before light and reaching their next city in the evening. Receptions, speeches, dinners, and interviews with reporters ate into her time as well, so when she had a scrap of time she really wanted to write to her kids, and (of course) Erskine. She poured out her heart to Erskine, often writing 10-15 page missives in which she jumbles tales of the trip, comments on his letters to her, complaints about her health, advice on the publication of his upcoming book of poetry Poet in the Desert, and always, always, how much she loves and misses him. Frances Joliffe was supposed to make the trip but it was really Erskine who occupied that fourth seat, if only his spirit.

Anyway, I can attest that it’s hard to block out time to write- we can barely get laundry done, and I have no idea how they did that. I’m afraid my blogging’s taken a back seat, as it were, to travel, doing my own advance planning (no Mabel Vernon to help me there), research, and meetings with local people. We’re currently in Columbus OH, heading to Toledo, and on to Detroit tomorrow. I’ll try to catch you up on where we’ve been.

We reached Des Moines on a Sunday, which was unfortunate since it meant I couldn’t visit the library or archives, and had no local meetings set up. On the way to Clinton the next day we detoured through Iowa City so I could visit the Iowa Women’s Archives (IWA) and lunch with Curator Kären M. Mason. 

IWA Founders Louise Noun and
Mary Louise Smith

It’s purpose is to “document the experiences and achievements of the women of Iowa,” and though it’s only been around since 1992 they’ve built up quite a remarkable collection. Not a ton of stuff on suffrage history, as of yet, but who knows what’s still lurking in someone’s attic? Anyway, I thought it was a great model. The IWA was established by two women, Louise Noun and Mary Louise Smith. Louise was an art collector, and auctioned a Frida Kahlo painting “Self-Portrait with Loose Hair” to endow the archives, which seems fitting somehow.

Frida Kahlo's self-portrait, auctioned
to endow the IWA

By the time they reached Des Moines Sara had come down with a bad cold, and  the doctors told her she had to have some rest in order to recover. Knowing that Chicago was coming up and would be a big event, Sara decided to wait a day or two and take the train to Clinton. The Swedes drove on by themselves, stopping in Cedar Rapids.

They then pushed on to Chicago, where Mabel Vernon had organized a grand event on the steps of The Art Institute of Chicago. They were staying at the old LaSalle Hotel, and at the appointed time 50 automobiles (all driven by women) met them there and escorted them up the broad sweep of Michigan Avenue to the steps of the Art Institute. There they were joined by Mayor Thompson and his wife and about 1,000 other suffrage supporters, mostly members of the Political Equality League.

The Envoys in Chicago- The Day Book, 11.20.15.
Looks cold, doesn't it?

I should note that Illinois had weirdly granted women the ability to vote in Presidential elections only; not in any state or local elections in which you might think they’d have more direct interest. This was a strategy suffragists used throughout the weary years of struggle for voting rights. If they couldn’t convince men to give them full suffrage they’d go after voting in municipal, state, or presidential elections. They could use the partial rights as a foot in the door to full suffrage later on.

In Chicago I had the good fortune to speak with three amazing activists for women’s rights, all working on different issues. I came away feeling more hopeful than I had after being in red states for a while.

Maria Socorro Pesqueira, President & CEO of Mujeres Latinas en Acción

I spoke by phone with Maria Socorro Pesqueira, who is President & CEO of Mujeres Latinas en Acción (MLA.) MLA’s roots go back to 1973, when the civil rights and feminist movements were being dominated by white women.  A group of Latina activists decided to form their own organization to address the issues within the Hispanic community. They empower women through a range of services, from helping domestic violence survivors and rape victims to training women to be entrepreneurs and work toward economic self-sufficiency. They recognize that Latina women are often the decisionmakers in their households and they try to nurture and encourage those strengths. Registering women to vote is also a big focus.

Maria’s also focused on helping the next generation of kids avoid some of the pitfalls their parents encountered, so MLA provides youth programming as well. They have a youth curriculum which (among other things) provides “medically accurate” sex ed, and which challenges stereotypes about Hispanics in the media. “How often do you see a white gang banger in the movies?” Maria asked me. “They’re almost always people of color. We need to push back as a community and say ‘that is not who we are and that is not what we will embrace.’”

MLA encourages young Latina women to “own up to being independent”; to do well in school, to go to college, and to choose partners who will support them in their lives. This can mean challenging their families’ culture so MLA has mother-daughter and mother-son groups to work that through. There’s so much more work than one organization can do, and funding is always an issue, but MLA is battling away and is making a difference.

I next had lunch with Kaethe Morris Hoffer, Executive Director of the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation (CAASE.)  Kaethe told me that as a child she’d gone to a feminist summer camp in Vermont where we would sing songs about Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Harriet Tubman (among others.” She actually sang me one of the verses! Who knew that such a thing existed?  I would have sent my daughter there.

It isn’t surprising, then, that Kaethe went on to spend her life working for women. In high school she got trained by Planned Parenthood to serve as a peer educator on birth control. “Teachers would actually invite me into their classrooms and I’d give a talk on birth control,” she told me. Can you imagine how much more effective that would be than having weird Mrs. Robinson or someone recite you the facts, or those static-y film strips they showed us when I was in school? Amazing.

It wasn’t long before girls started sharing their stories of being pressured for sex and of being raped, so Kaethe decided to work on those issues. She majored in Women’s Studies in college and after considering an MSW opted to get a law degree instead.

CAASE’s mission is to address “the culture, institutions, and individuals that perpetrate, profit from, or support sexual exploitation”; basically domestic violence, rape, prostitution, and sex trafficking. CAASE provides prevention, policy reform, community engagement, and legal services. Kaethe described progress CAASE and its allies have made in Chicago to build a toolbox that decriminalizes prostitution and shifts the focus to what she referred to as the “demand side.” The power differential in prostitution is very clear, Kaethe pointed out. Women are in the sex trade to survive. Many are victims of sexual exploitation from an early age, starting with their families. CAASE has done research that shows that the majority of men use prostitutes only occasionally- once a month. “This is discretionary spending,” says Kaethe. “They aren’t homeless or missing meals because of this. They have the cash and that’s how they choose to spend it.”

Among many other things CAASE has begun trying to reduce the demand side by providing a four-part series in high school; done separately with the boys and girls. “We try to unpack messaging around sex-trafficking- media, social attitudes and stereotypes, and ways to say no,” she says. They do pre-post tests with the boys asking about their interest in visiting a strip club (as a proxy for prostitution, and because the high school parents would lose their s*&# if they asked them about their interest in hiring a prostitute.) In Pre-tests the boys almost all indicate strong interest in visiting a strip-club, but in the post-tests this is reduced dramatically.  Furthermore, they say they’d be willing to talk with their peers re: their reasons for saying no. This seems like an amazing model and I’m glad to hear that they’re being asked to share their curriculum with others.

Talking with Kaethe made me feel hopeful that there actually is progress being made despite the numbers of women who are still abused and trafficked. Changing attitudes and laws and policy is slow work, but it can be effective. A case in point is sexual harassment in the workplace. Did you know that the US Supreme Court only ruled against this in 1986? That’s just 30 years ago! And the case that they heard was a woman who had been raped repeatedly by her boss over the years, and had to put up with it in order to keep her job.

Nowadays, people gripe about the annual mandatory sexual harassment training at their workplace, but it’s been successful in changing workplace behavior. Unless you’re in the military chances are you aren’t going to be raped at work, and you can bring a complaint against co-workers who use demeaning language or pat you on the butt. So kudos and thanks to Kaethe and all of the other amazing women who work to make women’s lives safer, at home and at work!

Anne Ladky, Executive Director
of Women Employed

My last interview was with Anne Ladky, Executive Director of Women Employed (WE), another organization with roots in the 1970s civil rights era. Anne moved over to Wein the late 1970s from working with the National Organization for Women, and has been with it ever since, giving her a great perspective on efforts to win equal opportunities for women in the workplace.   

Early on WE targeted two groups of women; secretaries (largely with high school or AA degrees) and those who were college-educated. They tried for a long time to partner with labor unions to represent clerical workers, but sadly without success. The unions simply weren’t interested in going beyond their traditional, male-dominated professions.

For women coming out of college they used classic grassroots organizing strategies to pressure businesses to expand the jobs available, so they wouldn’t get stuck in low-level positions. “We ended up having to go to the government to do that through affirmative action. Government action was essential to making that happen,” says Anne.  We hear so many negative things about affirmative action (and about government) that it was refreshing to be reminded of what a critical role the federal government especially has played in identifying and protecting women’s rights.

Next time you hear of a bunch of dopey conservative men deciding behind closed doors that women can’t get access to birth control or abortion, you can trace their lineage right back to the guys who were denying women voting rights. It took concerted action, and often by the government, to change the laws giving women the freedoms and protections from abuse that we enjoy today. But those changes were made only as a result of pressures that people like Anne Ladky and her colleagues brought to bear.

These days WE is focused on making workplaces fairer for working women, especially those with families, and in helping women succeed in post-secondary education so they can get access to higher paying jobs. Fairness centers around things like increasing the minimum wage, paid sick time and family leave, and predictable schedules.

We discussed that a lot of big companies these days use a “variable scheduling” approach which treats workers like just another input into whatever products they sell. This is especially true in retail. So, for example, say you work for a coffee shop chain. In one week they might have you work two 6-hour shifts and three 4-hour shifts. The following week they think will be slow, so maybe they just schedule you for three 5-hour shifts. And by the way, be prepared to work until 11pm one night and be right back in at 6am to open the next morning. If you’re a parent, try scheduling child care (good luck with that), and also paying bills when you don’t know from one week to the next how much you’re going to earn. It’s a crazy system. And all of it helps companies ensure that they keep their hourly workers in part-time status so they don’t have qualify for health insurance.

Anne says WE and others are making some progress on raising awareness of this issue. It’s kind of like the women in the west who had voting rights and didn’t realize their eastern sisters didn’t have them. Most professional women have never worked in a job that gave them unpredictable hours and income, and we need to wake everyone up to what an awful bind that puts women and their families in. Fortunately, there’s increasing research that shows that variable research costs employers money because of employee turnover and poor morale. (I might be tempted to spit in the occasional grande skinny half-caf latte as I made it for my employer who didn’t give a damn that my kids were sick and the rent was due next week.)

Thanks again to Anne, Kaethe, and Maria, and to all their colleagues across the country who are working to help women have a better chance for themselves and for their families!

Nebraska Brings Conservative Views and Meltdowns

Original illustration of  Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz.
If the witch figure was captioned an anti-suffragist,
this could have been used in a suffrage campaign...

I want to pick up where I left off in the last blog and note that L. Frank Baum, the author of the Oz books, was a big suffrage supporter. He married Maud Gage, whose mother was noted radical feminist and suffrage activist Matilda Joslyn Gage, and he developed female leaders in many of his books- notably Dorothy, but others as well. So it wasn’t completely random to mention Oz, it turns out.

I’m pretty sure that Sara and the Swedes could have used some yellow brick roads around this time. Things got a little better through Nebraska, at least there’s no mention of bad roads, mud holes, snowstorms, or the car breaking down. Still, it was a slog and they were in the part of the country that was least enthusiastic about their message.

In her later oral history Sara recalled that the western states were very enthusiastic about their mission, but the Midwesterners were more skeptical.  “The attitude seemed to be, ‘Oh, women never get together on anything,’” she said. There was a lot of doubt that women would agree to the CU’s strategy of holding the political party in power accountable for failing to pass the federal suffrage amendment, especially if it went against their own party.

 Sara did recall, though, that “the more remote a settlement was, the more glad it was to see you.” While they filled the car with gas in some little town, the proprietors would bring them coffee or tea, and beg them to stay and visit. Sara always explained that they had to be in some larger city in time for an event, and so off they’d go in a shower of warm wishes. When they got to DC she told Alice Paul, "You know, I am a symbol and I want you to know that as a symbol the Women's Party has had more blessings heaped on it than I think it can possibly evade. I think it will always have to admit that it had a special blessing."

Maria and Ingeborg, being older and from another culture, thought Sara was a little too free and easy with the men at the service stations they stopped at. But if a little light flirting lifted the tedium of the long miles, and encouraged the men to finish the servicing a little faster when the envoys were behind schedule, what was the harm in that?

Still, that general disapproval, combined with her simmering resentment at not being allowed to speak at the rallies, sent Ingeborg over the edge. “She suddenly turned on me and said that I was grabbing all the limelight, that while she and her companion sat on the platform every time, I always described them as driving the car at a time when women seldom would have undertaken such a journey and of being able to take care of the car, as if they were just, she said, menials. ‘You make all the speeches.’”

Sara tried to soothe her, explaining as delicately as she could about their broken English, and her own knowledge of the West and past organizing experience. “But it didn't mollify her at all,” Sara recalled, “and finally she said to me, ‘I'm going to kill you before we get to the end of this journey.’ She said it with a fierceness and with a look in her eye that was a little terrifying…”

I could understand that the rigors of the trip and the schedule were such that they might have made anyone a little nutty, but Sara goes on to say that they later learned that Ingeborg was a former mental patient who had only recently been released from some sort of home. 

Image of Ingeborg's rage

Sara’s assertion that Ingeborg was mentally ill has been widely accepted, but I wonder. Labeling someone as “crazy” can be a convenient way to exert social control, and there are certainly stories, for example, of husbands putting their wives in an asylum when they got too uppity. Ingeborg was clearly outspoken and a radical, and seems to have had a bit of a temper, a combination which put her at odds with the prevailing image of ideal womanhood, and at risk of being labeled deviant. And it must have been irritating to have thought at the outset they were equal partners in this glorious venture, only to be shunted aside as the lowly chauffeur and “mechanician.” Even if they did get to sit on the platform and have their pictures in the paper, it was Sara who was extensively quoted and fussed over. Sara, who's constantly pining for Erskine and whinging about her bad heart. Sara, who sits in the back seat and does NOTHING except deliver a little speech now and then, while Maria drives and Ingeborg patches tires and crawls under the car in the mud and snow to fix it. I mean...

Though I will say that Ingeborg does appear to look progressively cranky and weird as the trip goes on… Still, we know so little about either of the Swedes that I feel like we need to resist the rush to judgement. I mean, haven’t you ever been terminally pissed off by a traveling companion?

I’m also surprised that the incident didn’t appear in Sara’s letters to Erskine, or in any communication with the Congressional Union’s DC headquarters. If Sara really felt threatened, wouldn’t she have flagged it for someone? Tell Mabel? Sara did make a push to have the errant Frances Joliffe replace her in Chicago, although her excuse was fatigue and illness, not a murder threat.

At any rate, the threesome in the little black car did make it through Nebraska, stopping in Lincoln and then Omaha. These days the roads are lined with eerily identical cornstalks drying in the fields, and huge grain silos spotted at regular distances. I’m not sure what their views were like- probably a lot more small farms, but still a lot of corn, wheat, and hay though perhaps of different varieties. It’s not just me- Nebraska has become sort of metaphor for bleakness and misery, and I wonder if that also contributed to Ingeborg’s meltdown.

From the Omaha Daily News.
Honestly, I think they almost all look a little
wiggy in this photo...

Evidence of their chillier reception can be seen from their stop in Omaha, Nebraska, where only a handful of local suffragists dared to come out and support them. I had a feeling that was going to happen when I was looking at some suffrage history in the Nebraska state archives. The Nebraska Woman Suffrage Association was firmly in the camp of the state-by-state approach to enfranchising women. The Omaha Daily News took note, reporting the low turnout even though the event had had widespread publicity.  It also correctly identified the issue.

 Despite this, Mayor Dahlman and County Commissioner Johnny Lynch were glad to sign; maybe they were Republicans and all too happy to stick a spoke in Democrats’ wheels. They both joked that they reserved the right to vote another way, suggesting that they really did have other reasons to sign.

From the Omaha Bee

This division over suffrage strategies and tactics would become increasingly bitter in the next few years, especially once the Congressional Union started picketing the President at the White House gates. The National American Woman Suffrage Association, even though it eventually did put a lot more muscle behind passing the federal amendment, was adamant that its members would be strictly “non-partisan.” Campaigning against the party in power, and generally letting their elbows fly in the rough and tumble world of politics, were not part of their image of how women should behave. This blog is titled “We Demand…” in part to capture this difference in philosophy.

With League members at the library in Lincoln, NE

I was in Omaha on the weekend so I wasn’t able to meet with anyone locally, but I had a great reception in Lincoln courtesy of the local League of Women Voters. President Sherry Miller organized a lunch with several League members, and then we went over to the local library and I did a little talk about the original trip and what I’m up to. There was a small but enthusiastic crowd and we had a great discussion. Nebraska is yet another state that hasn’t enacted the Medicaid Waiver, where voting rights are under threat, and where women’s access to safe and legal abortions is restricted. Incidentally, my sister Vicki set around a link this morning to an article which explained in part how the red states have gotten to be red- see Democrats in Deep Trouble. This is precisely the pattern I’ve seen in my travels so far.

Afterward, one woman told me her own voting story. Her husband was in the service and stationed in Nebraska. Newly married and just turned 21, she went off to register to vote and was told that she had to vote at her husband’s listed home address, which was his parent’s home in Kentucky! A state she had never lived in. She had the gumption to protest and they eventually, reluctantly, as a special exception, allowed her to vote where she was then living and working. While this was over 40 years ago, it illustrates how in the not-too-distant past women’s rights were still really subservient to their husband's. Weird. And a little scary.

Wait, How many Signatures?

“Wish this trip were over it is no joke…” Sara wired Erskine from Pueblo.[1] It was grueling beyond what she and the Swedes ever could have imagined before leaving San Francisco. But as time went on she could see the positive energy and momentum the trip was building, and she became more confident of her speaking abilities.  In and out of mud pits, dealing with hostile men, losing and finding their way; these setbacks and more Sara and the Swedes overcame. And it made for great press.

“Oh, these men…” Sara said to a Kansas City Star reporter. “Will they ever get rid of the idea that men and women are made of two different kinds of clay? We didn’t need any men to help us drive across the country, through all kinds of hardships and into situations that would have tried any man.”[2]

The truth was, there was great symbolic value to the vision of women doing a car trip across the country unaccompanied by men, even if it wasn’t the first one that had ever been done. Alice Ramsey had done this in 1911. But it was still rare enough that many people hadn’t seen it, or perhaps even heard of it. Still, it wasn’t entirely true that the envoys had no help from men along the way. Maria and Ingeborg had hired a man to drive them over the Sierras, and while he got them lost they’d hired another male driver to get them through the desert and into Salt Lake City.

From Topeka Capital, 10.24.15

From Topeka Capital, 10.24.15

I’ve been amused, though, at the way the accounts in the newspapers appear to be getting more exaggerated. I don’t know if Sara was just getting punch drunk, or if the reporters flat out got it wrong. Both are possible, I suppose. But the Emporia Gazette says they’d collected one million names on the petition, and a Kansas City MO paper quotes Sara as saying they had 1.5 million signatures. News articles refer to the “mammoth petition” or “monster petition.” They left San Francisco with 500,000 names, supposedly, and there’s no way they’d collected even half a million more in just a few weeks.  And when they arrived in DC some accounts say they still only had 500,000 signatures, though they must have picked some up along the way.

The truth is, I’m starting to have my doubts about this petition. One news article claims that when they left San Francisco the petition was already 18,000 feet long. Hmmm, that’s equivalent in length to 50 football fields; you can also think of it as almost 3.5 miles. That’s one hell of a petition, even if they wrote it on the flimsiest toilet paper. And check out this front-page photo in the Congressional Union newspaper showing Sara with the petitions under her arm. She wasn’t a big person, and she doesn’t seem as if she’s struggling to hold them up. Does that look like 500,000 signatures to you? And would something that big have even fit in the car? Where did they put it? How did they protect it from the sun, wind and rain?

From 10.16.15 The Suffragist

It’s a mystery. None of the accounts I’ve seen of this trip have ever questioned the petition story. I’ll have to look into this some more…

I enjoyed my tour through Kansas, trying to ferret out some new information about the original trip and the effect it had and talking with some amazing women about women’s interests and issues in 2015, including Anita Epps and Mariana from the LWV of Topeka. The League is doing great work around protecting voting rights for everyone, not just women.

One of the people I met with was Sylvia Stevenson, who’s the founder and president of the KC chapter of the National Congress of BlackWomen. Since she’s about 20 years younger than I am I was curious about Sylvia’s thoughts on why women don’t get more involved in politics. She thought it was a lot about our DNA. “Women don’t wake up in the morning and say ‘I’m ready for conflict,” said Sylvia. “By nature we’re nurturers, and it’s hard for us to give up what we hold most dear- our children and families.”

Sylvia Stevenson

Women carry the majority of responsibility on the home front; we’re more likely to be the lead cooks and child care providers, point people for school and the doctor, and caretakers for aging parents. While men do help out, the Family Caregiving Alliance estimates that women provide two-thirds of the care for families, and will spend up to 50% more time providing care than men do.

I’m not sure what we do about the DNA issue. But Sylvia also thought that it was hard for women to run because they can’t afford it. Here’s where things like getting paid less than men, and being more likely to work part-time (in order to care for their families) works against women’s political careers. They make less money, they’re less likely to rise to influential positions within their companies, and honestly it’s hard to be out there networking when you’re home changing diapers or taking Dad to his third doctor appointment this week. So better pay and more supports for families providing care to their aging parents would be a huge help.

A hundred years ago Alice Paul would get frustrated with women who weren’t willing to concentrate exclusively on suffrage. But even she had to disappear from DC to take care of her family’s New Jersey farm when someone got ill, and so did many of her most faithful organizers. It just seemed to be understood that when someone in your family got really ill, it was the women who gave up everything they were doing and came back to help. Men can also be nurturers and there are lots of examples of them providing great support, but it still feels like the sex roles haven’t changed an awful lot in the last 100 years.

Some of this was echoed in a phone interview I did with Robert Barrientos, from Latinos of Tomorrow in KCMO. When I asked him “why don’t women run?” he also cited home responsibilities. “Women are the first to volunteer,” he told me, and they make the greatest volunteers.” But they’re often busy at home raising kids, and so they aren’t able to establish a broad network which makes it hard for them to get elected.

Rick in front of the Oz Mueum

Darn. What do we do about that? Maybe having more high-quality, affordable child care would help…But to get that we’d probably need to have more women in office, and oops we’re back to the same old problem. Meanwhile, take a peek at this sobering look at what happens when you photoshop men out of important moments- kind of alarming, isn’t it?

Maybe we just need to go to Oz…Dorothy and the witches were pretty powerful there. We came through Wamego KS today and discovered the OZ Museum. We were short on time so we didn’t go in, but here’s a photo of Rick.

'Bye Kansas. On to Lincoln, Nebraska tomorrow, and a date with the Lincoln League of Women Voters.

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[1] Sara Bard Field to CES Wood, October 15, 1915, WD Box 276, C.E.S. Wood Papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California

[2] “The Suffrage Car Gets In,” Kansas City Star, 10.21.15.