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dolphingirlfriend · 5 years

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america’s women, gail collins

chapter 14: reforming the world: suffrage, temperance, and other causes

“like all things too long postponed, now gets on everybody’s nerves”

at the turn of the century, the woman suffrage movement revolved around susan b. anthony and elizabeth cady stanton (like before the civil war) - they were friends for more than 50 years

anthony - never married, stanton - wife and mom

susan b anthony regarded children and maternity as a betrayal of the cause

stanton was an idea person - speech writer and essay writer, anthony was an organizer, worker bee - stanton was a lot more self confident. they both wanted emancipation of slaves

“they turned on old friends and aligned themselves with a racist benefactor, arguing for woman suffrage by comparing educated white women like themselves to semiliterate black men who were getting the ballot first”, “it was a bitter, dark period during which stanton shocked her friend frederick douglass with her denunciation of ‘patrick and sambo and yung tung making laws for... the daughters of adams and jefferson”.

the women’s movement split, leaving radical feminists like cady and stanton on one side, and the more moderate women, like lucy stone on the other.

“much of the money to run anti-suffrage campaigns came from the liquor industry, which realized it would be out of business if women get to vote on prohibition”

yellow was the color for the suffrage movement - 1912 there was a parade for women’s right to vote in Manhattan - attracted 10k marchers -(cut across class lines - corset makers, nurses, social workers, schoolgirls, writers, society women, laundresses, teachers)

“there is no alice paul. there is suffrage”

american women hard parades - but british women were willing to smash windows, throw rocks, get arrested - emily davison - she threw herself in front of the king’s horses during the running of the english derby in 1913 - and died

alice paul spent her political apprenticeship with the english suffragists. she didn’t like the state by state strategy and felt women needed a constitutional amendment

woodrow wilson - “the foundation of every evil in this country” (what he thought of suffrage in his youth)

carrie catt was a more mainstream suffragist - she was well-to-do, well-educated and respectful of authority - and she and her friends didn’t like alice paul

alice paul picketed the white house, people were arrested, trips to police station, fines, shot at - she served a six month sentence

“in the sympathy of women”

1913 was when alice paul stole the thunder from woodrow wilson’s inauguration with her parade. ida wells-barnett - black journalist and activist arrived to the march- part of a 60 member delegation of african american women from alpha suffrage club in chicago - paul did not want them there to placate southern suffragists

lynchings after reconstruction - part of political and social intimidation - 1918 in georgia, mary turner - a pregnant black woman tried to intervene a lynching of her husband, she was tortured, her body slashed open and the fetus pulled out before she was burned to death

the georgia federation of white women, president - said that the lynching would not end “until you teach your people not to molest the whites”

“lips that touch alcohol”

most women were not interested with the right to vote - they were concerned with temperance. “the liquor industry was right, many women wanted to vote just so they could use the ballot box to ban the sale of alcohol”

this entire chapter is a bit eye roll - basically paints these women as shrill harpies...... women wanted to shut down saloons and drive all forms of alcoholic beverage out of the country

“assaults” on saloons - occurred in 1k communities, urged by male temperance leaders

prohibition became the law in 1919

“temperance advocates could be mind-bogglingly self-righteous, and they tended to blame alcohol for everything bad except the weather”

frances perkins, secretary of labor in franklin roosevelts admin, apparently was “stunned” that the impoverished residents didn’t drink (because she thought alcohol caused property)

“ a drunken husband was an emotional burden, a potential physical danger, a drain on family finances”

carry nation - walked into an elegant bar of the hotel carey in wichita , kansas - threw stones at a huge painting of “cleopatra at the bath” ripping the canvas

she was apparently obsessed with the evils of alcohol and tobacco - she was not a temperance leader, part of a “lunatic fringe” - but millions of mild mannered american women defended her ends, if not her means

“do everything”

the women’s christian temperance union - biggest mass political organization of american women in h istory - 1890s 10x as many new york women were in the wctu as in all the suffrage groups combined

frances willard (president of wctu) for twenty years - “although she would hint vaguely about other romances, all of Willard’s known close personal relationships throughout her life were with women) --- this person is homophobic.....

she encouraged people to fight for reform in which every way struck them as best

women talked about “general sanitation, improving education, child labor laws”

“beautiful white girls sold into ruin”

the purity campaign - third strand in women’s reform movement - like temperance, its bottom line was “forcing men to behave”

campaigned for men to wear white ribbons, showing they had taken a pledge to be sexually pure until marriage and faithful to their wives after

they wanted to censor movies, and cover up paintings of naked women “nude art never helped a soul to belief in the lord jesus christ” a protest against the bostom museum of fine arts. frances willard supported this but her priority was “more serious” - raising the age of sexual consent for girls, which was as low as ten years old in a number of states

1920- wtcu succeeded in making it illegal to seduce a girl under eighteen

purity campaign, like temperance (according to this author) was based on the idea that middle-class women were morally superior and therefore had the right to tell everyone else what to do

“but also like temperance it targeted a real social problem that brought its worst evils home to torture innocent housewives”

“they did not approve of trying to keep venereal disease in check by treating prostitution as a public health issue” - in 1970 st. louis legalized brothels and required licensed prostitutes to pass weekly health inspections “only to have that program killed by opposition from clergymen and female reformers. elizabeth cady stanton also hated the idea - they did not want men to sleep with prostitutes safely, but to stop using women as sex objects altogether”

ending prostitution had always been a primary goal of women’s reform movements - the sexual purity campaign created a panic over “white slavery” - white girls would be used by pimps in brothels - “the idea fit into white women’s gut conviction that none of their sex - and race - would fall into prostitution voluntarily” the author refers to this as “hysteria”

“can they not use self-control?”

sexual purity crusaders blamed “falling birthrate” on venereal disease - but women were using birth control

anthony comstock

artificial birth control wasn’t an issue for which women reformers had much sympathy - women’s rights advocates argued for “voluntary motherhood” - the right to say no to marital sex

“the idea that women would want to indulge in intercourse while avoiding pregnancy was strange to many people who still believed that women were too pure to be interested in sex”

“what every girl should know”

margaret louise higgins - middle child in eleven, father was a stonemason

her older sisters earned money - and margaret went to school to be a nurse

sanger marriage was troubled - she gave birth to three children, and her husband was not a good breadwinner

women “who were ruining their health with too many pregnancies” she met in lillian wald’s visiting nurses

opened the first birth control clinic in America

#women in popular music #summer 2019

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