Stuck in the Mud in Kansas

“Like Odysseus I have many experiences to relate,” Sara telegrammed Erskine from Emporia. ”Stuck in mud half Monday night, walked through water and mud a mile to farm house for assistance. Arrived 15 miles west of Hutchinson at two in morning. No bad results except cold.”

Kansas started out a little tough for Sarah and the Swedes.  I guess no one told them about the short cut across from Kinsley, so they followed the road to Great Bend and Lyons. But it had been raining hard and a mud hole swallowed their car outside of Nickerson. It was 10pm; they’d driven through the rain from Dodge City and had hoped to make it to Hutchinson to spend the night before taking off for Emporia the next day.

They couldn’t budge the car themselves, so they sat there and called for help. When it was clear none was forthcoming, Sara climbed out of the car into the knee-deep mud and made her way to a farmhouse they’d passed earlier- from one to three miles back depending on the newspaper article you read…But hey, even one mile in a pitch black, rainy, cold autumn night would be a rough walk. There she rousted the farmer, who agreed to hitch up his team and haul them out of the mud hole. That all took time, though, so they didn’t make it to Nickerson until 2am. They hunkered down there for several hours, lucky just to scrounge up a place out of the rain; hot drinks, food, and wash water were only a dream.

In the morning they learned that some men in Nickerson had heard them calling for help but, knowing they were suffragists, jerkishly decided that they should figure out how to take care of themselves and didn’t come to their aid.

That really irritated Sara, and she pointed out in various interviews that providing help was a matter of simple humanity. She’d gotten up at 2 AM any number of times to take care of a man who wouldn’t lift a finger to help himself, she pointed out. (I guess there were man-colds a hundred years ago, too.)  

Anyway, they eventually made it to Hutchison where Sara found a tailor to clean up their outer garments while they dined at the Bisonte, and then they were on their way again.

The Bisconte Hotel in Hutchinson, Fred Harvey Collection,
Main Library Special Collections
University of Arizona, Tuscon

Sara remembers the farmer who hauled them out saying “You girls have guts,” and in fact the bragging rights they earned from that event gained them a lot of respect as their trip wore on and the news spread.

Kansas has treated me much better so far. For starters the weather has been stunning- clear and warm. I got to drive some back roads and see fields stretching for miles with sorghum and wheat. If you like mono-culture and rural landscapes, Kansas is a treat.

In “Hutch” Mary Clarkin interviewed me for the Hutch News, and I was treated to a delicious lunch by Dennis Perrin and his wife Ladonna Fulmer. Dennis teaches technology at the Hutch High School, so after lunch he and his aide did a radio interview with me for Salthawk Radio in this cool studio they have set up just down the hall from his classroom. That was a blast- when the students finish the post-production I’ll post the link in this blog.

On Saturday morning I met with several members of the Emporia League of Women Voters. We talked about how Kansas is in a pretty tough financial bind right now because Governor Sam Brownback decided to conduct the Tea Party’s dream experiment and slash taxes, especially for businesses. The conservatives’ theory (some sort of voodoo, trickle-someway economics) is that new businesses will flock to Kansas because of the low taxes, and existing businesses will expand, and that will replace all the lost revenue. But it hasn’t happened. So public schools, and social services (things that women tend to care a lot about) have been hit hard. Kansas has also not accepted the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) which benefits the working poor, including a large number of women. 

They groaned when I asked them about Planned Parenthood (PP) funding- check out this effort by the Governor to slam PP back in August when the doctored videos came out- Keep in mind that it was in Wichita, Kansas that an anti-abortion nut murdered George Tiller back in 2009. Tiller was a doctor who provided abortion services, and was one of a few physicians nationally who would do late stage abortions. Kansas conservatives are doing their best to shut down abortion services for women, and judging by a huge “Abstinence Works” billboard I saw coming into Emporia family planning might not be too popular either.

Emporia League of Women Voters

According to the Guttmacher Institute, there are now only 3 clinics in Kansas offering abortions, and most services are limited to situations where the mother’s life is in danger. In some cases- including plans offered in Kansas’ health exchange under the ACA- not even pregnancies resulting from rape or incest are covered. Crazy!

One of the League women I met with said that back in 1968 she was planning to get married, and she went to her doctor to get birth control. He (of course it was a he- there were almost no women MDs back then) told her that he wouldn’t give it to her until one month before her wedding. “You won’t need it until then,” he told her. And what made it his business?

It feels like in the red states we’re sliding back in time to a much scarier place, closer to what Sara and the Swedes had to deal with. Kind of like a giant mud pit. And, like Sara and the Swedes, we’re can’t rely on men to haul us out of there, we’re going to have to wade through the political mud and fight for our safety and our rights. 

Rural Kansas landscape

(Lack of) History Repeats Itself, Unless We Prevent It

Ingeborg, Maria, and Sara arrive in Denver

Sara described Denver to Erskine as a “nightmare,” due mostly to her exhaustion and a “whirlwind of activity” that had been organized for them.[1]  These included “a great meeting at the Capitol attended by throngs,” an hour with the Speaker of the US House, Champ Clark, who happened to be in town, and various other lunches and receptions.

When she tried to beg off she was admonished and told “Why, they’ve been planning it for days and days,” so she had to struggle on. Luckily, they seemed to strike a chord in Denver; the day after their arrival they were recognized and “greeted with shouts and applause” (as well as the occasional jeer, but not many of those.)

They do seem to be looking a bit grim in this photo from the Denver Post. Sara was complaining of a weak heart well before she left San Francisco, and the higher altitudes she'd been in during the previous couple of weeks, the long days in the car, and having to be on stage when she arrived in any town really took it out of her. 

When the meetings were all done she was scooped up by a Mrs. Cuthbert and brought to Colorado Springs, where she was pampered and cosseted for a day and a half. Picture this contrast to the rigors of the previous few weeks.

Afterwards the dear lady sped me here in a luxurious car, all cushion and softness. Such a wonderful place…Great windows from which to watch the skies spilling their cloud foam onto the peaks…I was given a whole suite of exquisite rooms in rose pink and white. A maid came in to wait upon me. She prepared my bath of fragrantly scented water and assisted me (to my embarrassment) in all my toilet. Then I was put back to bed in a dreamy gown of lace and silk and breakfast brought on delicate china and mirror-bright silver.

Damn. My trip has been a lot easier but that still sounds pretty good to me. Not so sure about the maid...but a shower and a cozy room and a beer or two usually makes me pretty happy.

It’s not clear to me what the Swedes did during this interlude. They had been expecting money to be wired to them in Denver, but it wasn’t there when they arrived, and according to Sara this caused them a lot of anxiety, so they followed her around like little ducks until she found a banker to sort it out. It sounds as if she needed a bit of a break from them but I wonder how they felt when they saw her whisked away by the Cuthberts.

My heart goes out to the Swedes, who so generously offered their car to bring the envoys to DC in a spirit of genuine solidarity with the Congressional Union’s goals, only to be silenced and treated as lowly support staff both during the trip and by history. TWhen they were interviewed by reporters it was always about the car, never really about their views on suffrage. No one completed an oral history with them later on, as Amelia Fry did with Sara, Mabel Vernon, and Alice Paul. 

A once-in-a-lifetime cross-country trip that they could have completed at their leisure, stopping when and where they would, was suddenly subjected to a tight deadline that required long days in the car and no time for sightseeing. While they were always invited to be on stage at events and were usually in the published photos, Sara did all the public speaking. Their accents, frumpy clothing, and clearly foreign demeanor made them unsuitable for public roles according to Alice Paul’s vision for how community organizing should work. Frankly, I’d have been a little pissed off had I been in their shoes and might have been tempted to leave Sara at some dreary outpost to find her way to DC on her own.

Sign in the Pueblo rail station historical exhibit

This feeling was reinforced when I stopped by the Pueblo Railway Museum in Pueblo, CO, and saw signs like this one. Swedes aren’t names specifically in this long list, but given the other ethnicities there I’m not sure that they would have been feeling all warm and fuzzy about the reception they got when they came to town. It's to the town's credit that they acknowledged this bigotry existed.

Sign in the Pueblo rail station historical exhibit

It was in Pueblo that I suddenly had the bright idea to ask about old newspapers in other languages besides English. As a railroad hub and a steel town Pueblo attracted a lot of people looking for work, and by 1915 had a pretty diverse population, including several thousand Swedish immigrants. Maybe Maria and Ingeborg had reached out to them? Maybe the Swedish language newspapers had covered the envoys' arrival?

But when I checked with the museums, historical society, and library, only English speaking newspapers had been preserved.

Really? Given the tenor of these signs I guess I’d been naïve to think that anyone would have cared enough about immigrants to have preserved their history. And the immigrants themselves lacked the resources to do it.

History is written by the victors, I’ve always heard, and I guess that means it’s preserved by them as well. I’ve now been through a bunch of these smaller museums and while Native Americans are often featured, they’re presented almost as a phase of human development that somehow went almost extinct, kind of like the dinosaurs. “Geesh, one minute they were there, and then they kind of disappeared. Not really sure where they went.” Sometimes clashes between settlers and Indians are mentioned but it’s rare that they acknowledge that hey, maybe the Indians had a legitimate beef with the settlers since they were stealing their land, killing their game, introducing diseases and alcohol, and disrupting civilizations that had been in place for hundreds or thousands of years. Instead, the settlers seem to emerge as heroes who survived the tough conditions and hostile attacks from the savages to bring civilization to this new land.

Then I started to wonder if the lack of information I’ve found about women’s efforts to achieve equality with men is related to the fact that men were in charge of the newspapers a hundred years ago. The men in charge then were no more interested in preserving women’s history than they were in preserving the experience of poor immigrants and Native Americans.

I talked about this before I left San Francisco with Marian Doub, and was reminded of that conversation when I interviewed Andrea Herrera, PhD Director, Women's and Ethnic Studies at University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. It’s easier to focus on the experience of one group of women, many of whom are privileged due to race and class, but that story would be incomplete. Andrea reminded me that we need a deeper analysis of how race, class and ethnicity influenced women’s experience a hundred years ago and how it continues to affect it today.

This has made me determined to reach out to minority communities throughout the rest of this trip to try to uncover their relationship to the woman suffrage movement a hundred years ago, and also to hear their views on women’s issues today. If you have suggestions for people to talk to or places to look, please send me a note at agass@maine.rr.com.

Random shot of eastern Colorado landscape. 

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

Wyoming Claims Some Firsts, but Other Changes Slow to Come

Wyoming entered the union as an equal suffrage state, so it claims a number of firsts in connection with women. For example, Wyoming had:

·       

     *  the first woman Justice of the Peace: Esther Hobart Morris

·       *  the first all-woman jury

·       *   the first woman statewide elected official: Estelle Reel Meyer was elected as           Superintendent of Public Instruction in 1894.

They try to claim the first woman voter but it turns out there have to be some caveats.

Louisa Ann Swain, first woman
voter (since 1807)

According to www.womenshistory.about.com, some Native American women had rights similar to voting before white settlers arrived. At least some women could vote when America was still a British colony, and New Jersey gave women voting rights in its state constitution in 1776 and then took them away in 1807. So in 1870 WY had the first woman to vote after 1807...Still, better than a lot of other states.

There are a few theories floated for why WY chose to let its women vote. One was that, since the territory was mostly male, giving women the vote would encourage them to move out there. That seems a little bit of a stretch, given how arduous the journey was, and how tough life on the frontier would be. I mean, people these days can’t be bothered to get off their couches to vote, so I can’t see voting rights being a sufficient draw to make such a huge, life-altering (and maybe life-ending) decision. Another is that they somehow needed women’s votes to qualify for statehood, which seems more plausible to me, but I haven’t figured out yet how that worked.

Interestingly, while women could vote in WY there were a number of things they were legally prohibited from doing, including coal mining, which they were legally barred from until 1978.[1] Since Wyoming is the country’s biggest coal producer, this prevented women from getting access to the better paying jobs in the mines. 

Michele Irwin, former miner.
Photo for her recent campaign for
state office

I spoke about this with Michele Irwin, who now runs a buffalo ranch with her husband outside of Evanston, but who worked in the mining industry for over 20 years. She started out as a secretary, which was the only job she could get, and then switched into planning. That paid better, but not as well as the hourly wage jobs in the mines, so (because she legally could) she ended up applying for one of those. She finished up her career in the mines working as a shift supervisor, supervising an all-male team, a role she’s proud of but which she also described as being “hell on earth.”

I was really struck by something Michele said, which was that doing a man’s job and earning a man’s wage helped to boost her self-esteem. It also allowed her to support herself in a much better way than a secretary’s wage ever would have done. Think about a world where the law prevents you from having that sort of opportunity, only because of your sex? Crazy, right? But the law was only changed less than 40 years ago- that’s in my lifetime. I didn’t grow up in WY, but if I had I’d have seen that the better paying jobs were reserved for men, and I’d have been encouraged to choose some more traditionally female job that didn’t pay as well. Luckily, we had some gutsy foremothers who stood up and said- “This isn’t fair, and we want it to change.”

I should note that Michele got laid off from her mining job a couple of years ago, and decided to get into politics, a job for which the rough and tumble of mining ought to have prepared her well. She hasn’t won yet; WY changed its district structure so that it was harder for women and minorities to get elected (this was an interesting discussion because it related to the one I had with Paula Lee in Sacramento (see my Why Don’t Women Run? Blog from Sept. 23.) But at least she’s trying! As she said to me, “It was a great experience. I could walk into any room and hold my own. I may look like a little girl but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have [uh, equipment] as big as anyone else’s.” Go Michelle!

Amy Williamson, from the
Laramie LWV, and I in the 
Wyoming House for Historic Women

While I was in Laramie I met with the local League of Women Voters, and had a private tour of the Wyoming House for Historic Women. They agreed that the way WY does state elections these days makes it harder for women and minorities (and in WY, Democrats are minorities too) to get elected. It was awesome to meet all these bright, engaged women working to improve their community.

I also had lunch with University of Wyoming professor Colleen Denny and one of her students, Jamie Smith. Colleen is an art historian who is in the Gender and Women’s Studies department, which gives her a unique ability to look at visual imagery is used by women- and against them- in forging their identities. When I get back to Maine I plan to order her recent book, “Women, Portraiture and the Crisis of Identity in Victorian England: My Lady Scandalous Reconsidered.”

Colleen, Jamie and I in front of the statue of the
first woman voter (after 1807)

Jamie’s majoring in women’s studies, and is clearly very bright and thoughtful. She talked about how people these days have a false sense that women have equal opportunities to men. She sees a lot of ways women are treated unequally; they’re still judged more on their appearance (by women and men.) “Fat shaming” is pretty rampant, and while it’s often couched in health terms, she thinks it’s still the feminist issue we’ve been talking about for at least a couple of decades.  

Colleen suggested that I look up the new statues that grace the Gateway Center at the University of Wyoming. The back story of these was that the two final proposals for the statues were for a man riding a bucking bronco (the UW athletic teams are called the “Cowboys” and the “Cowgirls.”)

 Some of the wealthy donors paying for the statues, some of whom were women, suggested gently that perhaps the statue didn’t completely reflect the UW student body, a little over half of which are women. So they compromised by doing two statues, one of which is a “cowgirl.” The statues are beautifully done, actually. The young woman astride a bucking horse breaking through the wall is a fun idea, but the accompanying plaques suggest that the space she’s broken through to isn’t all that different from the other side of the wall. So what’s the point?

 The plaque on the male statue is about the horse (Steamboat, a famously unrideable bronco) as much as the rider. Together, the plaque says, the horse and rider represent the best of Wyoming. There’s no mention of the clothes the rider is wearing, who made them, or what material they’re made of.

The plaque for the young woman suggests that she’s smiling because she’s mastering a horse her brother couldn’t ride. (OK, maybe, but is that really all that motivates her?) Also, several sentences are devoted to what the cowgirls wore. Really? Haven’t we moved a little further down the path here, so women’s prowess can be described without reference to her outfit and who made it, enshrined in a brass plaque? I mean, this was completed in 2014, for heaven’s sake. And while I’m at it, how come she had to break through a freaking wall to prove herself? Who built the wall and why? Why couldn’t she just ride a horse like anyone else? Clearly she was capable of it if she was just given a chance.

Just wondering…So it seems like Wyoming might be able to claim a bunch of firsts, but still has some attitudes it needs to change regarding ts women.

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[1] Phil Roberts, The Wyoming Constitutional Convention and Adoption of Wyoming’s Constitution, 1889, and the Aftermath  http://www.uwyo.edu/robertshistory/wyoming_constitutional.htm

Wyoming, the Equality State

We loved Wyoming; vast stretches of high desert with occasional glimpses of steers and sheep, or small bunches of elk. While we glided through in relative comfort on I-80, I imagined Sara and the Swedes bumping along in their Overland Six. They were trying to make about 100 miles a day; with a top speed of 15 mph, and often much slower when the road was rough, which meant many weary hours in the car. They stopped in Evanston, Rock Springs, Rawlins, having small meetings there, and then had larger events in Laramie and Cheyenne.

Shot of the main drag in Rawlins, c. 1916, from the Carbon County Museum.
It probably looked a lot like this when the envoys came through, except they were headed in the other direction.

The long, open stretches of road offered time for introspection, though Sara complained the voluble Swedes interrupted her contemplation. She was pretty consumed by thoughts of her lover, Erskine, who was much older than she was. Sara seemed to have a thing for father figures as her first husband, Albert Ehrgott, was 19 years older than she was when she married him. She was just 18. Her devoutly religious father had refused to send her to college ecause her older sister Mary, after enrolling in the University of Michigan, had rebelled against their strict upbringing and left the faith.  So the only exit strategy from her father’s house was to marry, and Albert, a dogmatic Baptist minister, was planning to be a missionary in Rangoon, Burma. That at least seemed like some sort of an adventure, and so Sara encouraged his courtship and married him in 1900.[1]

Ironically, the travel proved to be as broadening as the education her father refused to give her, and it sowed the seeds of her later exit from the church and from her marriage to Albert. She was fascinated by Asian religions. She was also struck by how coldly her husband treated people from other religions (even Christians) if they weren’t Baptists, even as she appreciated the many kindnesses they showed her. She became pregnant during the trip over and had her first child in Burma, so as a young mother away from family, and in a completely alien culture, it was her friendships with other missionaries that got her through.

Sara and Erskine, Cerca 1920. Photo obtained from
Sara's oral history, part of the California Digital Library.

She’d met Erskine in Portland, OR around 1912 through their mutual friend Clarence Darrow. Darrow described him as a “philosophical anarchist” and by all accounts he was brilliant, engaging, and possessed of a poet’s soul. Erskine was also married but believed in free love, so Sara became his newest mistress and eventually divorced Albert in 1914.

Our knowledge of the envoys’ trip is due in large part to Sara’s letters to Erskine. With him she shares the details omitted from the official accounts given to the newspapers. Complaints about the physical ordeal and her traveling companions are interspersed with passionate declarations of her love for him and the anguish she feels at their long separation. “I am gnawed with hunger for you,” she wrote him from Cheyenne. “I am physically nervous with the spiritual ache for you. And I must cry a little cry of gratitude for your wonderful precious letter. Oh my darling, that you so love me brings tears to my eyes.”[2]  Her seeming dependence on him stands in marked contrast to courage and independence and grit she'd shown in divorcing Albert and pursuing her own life, and of course in this trip as a suffrage envoy.

She had hoped to be pregnant with his child but her period coincided with their arrival in Salt Lake City. Erskine had come down from Portland to witness the spectacle of the envoys’ launch from the Panama-Pacific, and they’d had a few nights together, but it sounds as if they’d been trying for some time. “As to our own child,” she wrote. “When I found myself unwell I was stabbed anew with disappointment but even, had I conceived, I doubt if I could have escaped a miscarriage on account of the awful shaking and jouncing…How…could I expect that the womb would retain its precious and frail freight if love had placed it there?”

Given how hard the trip was for Sara it’s hard to imagine that she would have been able to manage a pregnancy. Even if she had, she would have just made it to DC by the time she was starting to show. I can just imagine the headlines “Suffrage Envoy Pregnant with Married Lover’s Child” or something to that effect. That wouldn’t have made Alice Paul too happy, I suspect; she tightly controlled the image of the Congressional Union, and while she privately might have supported Sara shifting the conversation from voting rights to free love wasn't in the plans.

Adultery, divorce, and (attempted) out-of-wedlock babies; these were all frowned on in 1915, especially for someone washed in the blood of the lamb. They show just how far Sara had traveled from her repressive Baptist childhood.

One of the ways things have changed for the better in the last 100 years is the ability of people to love and live with each other outside of marriage, if they choose, and for same-sex couples to love openly and to marry. I was struck by that as we came through Evanston and I met Nonie Profitt, a sheepherder and part-time librarian. Nonie was born and brought up in Evanston, and knew pretty early that she was interested in women although rural Wyoming was not the place to figure it out. Luckily she went off to college, returning several years later with her (woman) partner. Nonie credits their acceptance to her being from Evanston, going back several generations, but I’m guessing it also helped that she’s blessed with a great grin and outgoing personality, which make her easy to like. Whatever the case, the town quietly accepted her relationship with her partner, with whom she adopted a son, and later supported and grieved for her through their very painful break-up.  

Nonie Profitt (right) and Cora Courage (left).
From the National Center for Lesbian Rights

A couple of years later she started dating Cora Courage, a psychologist at the local hospital who was also in the army reserves. Cora ended up getting deployed three different times; in Desert Storm, in the subsequent surge in Iraq, and eventually to Afghanistan. According to Nonie, Cora had been “witch-hunted” out of the military years earlier, but had re-enlisted under the army’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. In the first two deployments the new couple suffered through lengthy separations, afraid to voice their feelings for each other because their communication was monitored. “That’s a long time to go without being able to say ‘I love you’,” says Nonie quietly. It also meant that, although they were a committed couple, they had none of the rights that married couple would have (access to benefits, etc.)

But society was changing. First the military revoked "don’t ask, don’t tell” (2011) and then the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), paving the way for same sex couples to marry. Nonie and Cora had long since married in another state, but conservative Wyoming didn’t respect that legal tie even after DOMA was struck down.

With help from three law firms and the National Center for Lesbian Rights, Nonie and Cora sued the state of Wyoming in March 2014, challenging Wyoming’s laws that prohibit same-sex couples from marrying and ignore the legal marriages of same-sex couples who married in other states. They were joined by three other same-sex couples. This was a gutsy move in the state that became synonymous with hate crimes following the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard, a young gay student at the University of Wyoming, in 1998. Nonie recalls that some members of her extended family were clued into her sexual orientation when the local newspaper broke the story on its front page.

There were various legal shenanigans along the way but the long and short of it is that same sex couples in Wyoming are now permitted to marry and they have the same rights as hetero-sexual couples. So Wyoming can once again lay claim to its state motto, “Equal Rights.” Challenges remain, but in this area, at least, it's headed in the right direction.

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[1] Suffragists Oral History Project, Sara Bard Field: Poet and Suffragist, Conducted by Amelia R. Fry, c. 1979.

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[2] Sara Bard Field to C.E.S. Wood, October 9, 1915, WD Box 276, C.E.S. Wood Papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 

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