American Experience (1988) s33e01 Episode Script

1
♪♪
♪♪
CROWD (chanting):
Sisterhood is powerful!
Join us now!
Sisterhood is powerful,
join us now!
Sisterhood is powerful,
join us now!
Sisterhood is powerful,
join us now!
WALTER CRONKITE:
50 years ago today,
the 19th Amendment
to the U.S. Constitution
gave women the right to vote.
On this anniversary,
a militant minority
of women's liberationists
was on the streets.
CROWD:
Join us!
CHANT LEADER:
Women!
CROWD:
Join us!
REPORTER:
So remember, men,
if you come to work tomorrow
and your secretary refuses
to do the filing,
and then go home and find
that your wife has refused
to do the cooking,
don't blame them.
Remember, you gave them the vote
50 years ago.
(crowd chanting)
NARRATOR:
It had been the opening act
in what proved to be
an epic struggle for equality
A crusade carried out
by millions of women
over the better part
of a century
to secure for themselves
the right to vote,
and thereby participate
in America's democracy.
MARCIA CHATELAIN:
To be disenfranchised
is to be told
that you do not matter,
because the right to vote
is about the power that governs
your possibilities.
MICHAEL WALDMAN:
The right to vote
is the heart of democracy,
and if half the country
doesn't have the right to vote,
you're nowhere near
being a democracy.
PAULA GIDDINGS:
Women would go out canvassing,
and the men
would be terrible to them.
They'd say, "Are you trying to
wear the pants in the family?"
And, "This is male territory,"
and, "How dare these women begin
to come in
and make a difference."
MARTHA JONES:
This struggle is going on
at the same time that the nation
is resolving the Civil War.
So to introduce women is
to disrupt a political culture
that is built on exclusion,
that is built on the notion
that politics
is a white man's business.
ELAINE WEISS:
It's a civil rights battle.
We don't think of it like that,
but it truly is a great
civil rights battle.
Suffragists have to change
the idea
of what women's role in society
will be.
What is her claim
on citizenship?
ELEANOR SMEAL:
The textbooks
when I went to school
said women were given the vote.
We weren't given anything.
We took it.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
On June 29, 1909,
a 24-year-old American student
named Alice Paul
made her way through the streets
of London
and joined a contingent
of some 200 other women
headed for the Houses
of Parliament.
Once there, they planned
to insist on an audience
with the prime minister
and press him for the right
to vote,
a fundamental exercise
of citizenship,
known as suffrage,
that was then denied to women
in most of the world's
democracies.
ALEXANDER KEYSSAR:
The right to vote is
fundamental.
It's a key ingredient in letting
people have equal voice
and equal power.
It gives you a way
to protect yourself.
And the opposite of it
Not having the right to vote
In some political sense,
leaves you helpless.
NARRATOR:
When Alice Paul had arrived
in England two years earlier,
she'd had no thought
of joining the crusade
for woman suffrage.
She'd come, as she put it,
to "see something of the world,"
and had enrolled
in a graduate economics class
at the University of Birmingham,
the first woman ever to do so.
Then, one day on campus,
she'd spotted a notice
about an upcoming lecture.
The name was one she knew.
Christabel Pankhurst,
along with her mother. Emmeline,
was a co-founder of the Women's
Social and Political Union,
Britain's notoriously militant
suffrage organization.
J.D. ZAHNISER:
Alice Paul had followed
the Pankhursts
with her mother
in the newspaper.
They were getting a lot of
newspaper coverage in America,
and a lot of people were excited
about what they were doing
Things that were
so controversial
that American women
could not imagine
them happening in America.
JAD ADAMS:
There have been votes
in the House of Commons
since the 19th century
in favor of women's suffrage,
but there's no real progress
taking place.
And so, in anger at this
political stagnation,
they actually start doing things
which will get them sent
to prison.
♪♪
ELLEN DUBOIS:
They started with
mass demonstrations
Demonstrations of 10,000,
20,000, 30,000 people
demanding the right to vote.
TINA CASSIDY:
They were passing out pamphlets
on the street.
They were standing
on literal soapboxes
on the street corners of London
and explaining why women
deserved the right to vote.
At the time, standing
on a soapbox on a street corner
was something that only men did.
ZAHNISER:
They would go
to political meetings
and they would
interrupt politicians,
which was considered
extremely rude.
And they were literally dragged
out of these meetings.
Nothing like this
had ever been done before.
The idea was to really get
enough attention
in order to draw the members
of Parliament,
but also the public,
into the cause of suffrage.
NARRATOR:
So aggressive were the women
of the Pankhurst army
that a British journalist
had concocted
a twist on the term "suffragist"
to identify them,
derisively dubbing them
"suffragettes."
DUBOIS:
Ridicule is one
of the great weapons
against women's assertion,
and that's what was going on
with calling suffragists
"suffragettes."
It minimized them.
It turned them into a
small version of what they were.
NARRATOR:
No amount of mockery
in the press, however,
had prepared Alice Paul
for what happened
at Christabel Pankhurst's
lecture.
There were lots of male students
from the University
of Birmingham there,
and they were hooting
and hollering
and singing songs
and throwing things.
Someone threw a mouse,
a dead mouse.
And it was total pandemonium.
ZAHNISER:
Alice witnessed
Christabel Pankhurst,
who was no slouch
on the speaking platform,
essentially being shouted down
and being unable to speak.
NARRATOR:
Paul would remember it
as a turning point.
PAUL (dramatized):
I became from that moment
very anxious
to help in this movement.
You know if you feel some group
that's your group
is the underdog,
you want to try to help
It's natural.
And when I saw
this outbreak of hostility,
I understood everything
about what the English
suffragists were trying to do.
♪♪
MARY WALTON:
Alice Paul was a Quaker.
Quakers believe that everyone
is equal in the eyes of God,
regardless of gender,
regardless of race,
regardless of religion.
ZAHNISER:
Quakers believed in educating
boys and girls equally,
and so she had never experienced
the reality of inequality.
And she began to realize
that there was a whole
other world out there
where women were not necessarily
treated equally.
NARRATOR:
Some months after the lecture,
Paul had written to her mother
back home in New Jersey,
"I have joined
the suffragettes."
♪♪
Now she was marching with them
to Parliament
to demand for British women
the right to vote.
WALTON:
Emmeline Pankhurst
leads the deputation
up to the gates of Parliament.
And suddenly,
they're stormed by police.
Women are thrown to the ground
and they're trampled.
PAUL (dramatized):
The scene was one awful
nightmare.
The police grabbed the
suffragettes by the throats
and threw them
flat on their backs
over and over again.
Finally, when the police could
not drive the women back
or control the scene,
the suffragettes were arrested.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
In all, 112 women were hauled
off to the police station,
"half-fainting," one observed,
"and their clothes torn
to pieces."
Alice Paul was among them.
It was the first time
Paul had been arrested.
But having become, as she said,
a "heart-and-soul convert"
to the cause of woman suffrage
A cause now reaching
its crescendo
This arrest would by no means
be her last.
♪♪
In the United States,
the suffragettes' so-called
"siege" of Parliament
was met with incredulity
and scorn.
This was not,
newspapers made plain,
the way that women
should behave.
By 1909,
it was a familiar refrain.
More than six decades had passed
since the clamor for woman
suffrage first was raised,
most loudly at a convention in
Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848.
♪♪
Some 300 people
had come that July
to discuss the rights of women,
and had listened
as 32-year-old abolitionist
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
decried the lack of them,
provocatively comparing
her condition,
as a free married woman
with children,
to slavery.
"We assemble to protest
against a form of government
existing without the consent
of the governed,"
Stanton proclaimed,
"to declare our right
to be free as man is free."
♪♪
DUBOIS:
At the time of Seneca Falls,
a woman had no legal existence.
When married,
she was "absorbed into the
person of her husband."
Now, that would be fine
if there were women
who weren't married,
but adult women were
overwhelmingly married women,
and they had no legal standing.
WALTON:
Married women could not
sign a contract.
If they worked outside the home,
they couldn't keep
their paycheck.
It went to their husbands.
If they dared to divorce,
husbands retained custody
of the children.
The doors of public universities
were closed to them.
There were just many, many ways
in which they were
second-class citizens.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
The Declaration of Sentiments
adopted by the convention
had been modeled on the
Declaration of Independence.
And included a list
of resolutions
outlining the rights
to which women, as citizens,
should be entitled.
WEISS:
Seneca Falls is the first
very public demonstration
and announcement
that women are asking
for a whole series of rights
that they feel
they've been denied.
And it is considered
really radical.
They're fighting for education.
They're fighting for the right
to own property.
They want to be full
adult American citizens.
NARRATOR:
Of the 11 resolutions
put forward by Stanton,
only one was considered
so controversial
that it failed
to pass unanimously:
Resolution Nine, which demanded
for women the right to vote
A right that had engendered
equal controversy
among the men who wrote
the U.S. Constitution.
♪♪
KEYSSAR:
One of the remarkable things
about the history of democracy
in the United States
is that the Constitution,
in its original form,
said nothing about the right
to vote.
When the founding fathers talked
about "we, the people,"
they were talking
about adult, white males,
and really, adult white
respectable males.
They had different views
about how broad the franchise
should be.
So instead of hammering out
a consensus view,
they punted and left
voting rights to the states.
In most states, the notion was
that in order to have
the franchise,
you had to be independent in
some economic and social sense.
And women had very few
opportunities to be independent.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
Opposed by Stanton's husband
And by her father,
who threatened to disown her
Woman suffrage found
its first male champion
in Frederick Douglass,
who had escaped enslavement
to become a leader
of the abolitionist movement.
From the abolitionist ranks
also came
the first generation
of suffragists:
Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone,
and Sojourner Truth,
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper,
Sarah Remond, Susan B. Anthony
Women for whom the two causes
at first were entwined.
(guns firing, men shouting)
When the conflict over slavery
finally exploded into civil war,
the suffragists
set their own agenda aside
to help secure rights for those
who'd been enslaved,
expecting, as Stanton put it,
that "when the Constitutional
door is open,
"we will avail ourselves
"of the strong arm
and the blue uniform
"of the black soldier
to walk in by his side."
Their rallying cry now was,
"Equal voting rights to all."
♪♪
Instead, under pressure from
congressional Republicans,
the party of Lincoln,
Stanton and her friends
were asked in 1869
to support the 15th Amendment,
which extended federal
protection for the franchise
only to African American men.
♪♪
WEISS:
The suffragists truly believe,
perhaps naively,
that once the war is over,
all eligible citizens are going
to get the vote.
They are shattered
when they're told
that the nation cannot handle
two great reforms at once.
They can't swallow black men
getting the vote
and women getting the vote
at the same time.
Frederick Douglass says,
"I believe in women's suffrage,
"I always will,
"but the black man
needs it first.
My people are being killed."
NARRATOR:
The question of compromise,
once introduced,
quickly became a wedge.
"If you will not give
the whole loaf of justice
to the entire people,"
Susan B. Anthony told Douglass,
it should be given
"to the most intelligent
and capable portion of women"
first.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
was less civil.
"Think of Sambo," she fumed,
"who never read the Declaration
of Independence
"or Webster's spelling book,
making laws for educated,
refined women."
JONES:
Stanton and Anthony
have constructed the debate
around the vote as one
that positions white women
against African American men.
And Stanton in particular
has made the argument
that she will not see
former slaves,
the sons of slaves,
enfranchised
over elite, educated women.
These are ideas
that are not uncommon.
But now racism is sort of
in a full-throated way
part of the deliberations.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
In the end,
the fragile coalition
forged by the Civil War
was shattered by the terms
of the peace,
and causes once regarded
as compatible
had been set in opposition,
to be prioritized
one over the other if expedient.
As Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
noted ruefully,
"When it was a question of race,
"I let the lesser question
of sex go.
"But the white women
all go for sex,
letting race occupy
a minor position."
JONES:
People will go
in one direction or another
out of this debate
Men and women, black and white.
There are those who say,
"We should remain
committed to our ideals."
Then there's others who say,
"This is politics,
and we need to compromise."
And that has consequences
far beyond any encounter
in the vestibule
of a meeting hall.
This is mapping, right,
political culture
for the nation
For women, but for the nation.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
By the time African American men
began to cast ballots
and hold office in the South,
in the early 1870s,
the first generation
of suffragists
had split over strategy.
Some sought
to secure women the vote
by petitioning for changes
to state constitutions,
believing voter eligibility
a matter
more properly determined
by the states.
The rest joined Stanton
and Anthony in their quest
for a federal remedy,
and tried to push through
what they hoped would be
the 16th Amendment,
barring the infringement
of voting rights
on the basis of sex.
But aside from a school board
election here
and a municipal election there,
the ballot remained elusive.
♪♪
Most people thought
that women's demand for the vote
was something of a joke
back in the 19th century.
It was so,
seemed so far-fetched.
WEISS:
Women were considered
too emotional,
not intelligent enough.
They were supposed to be
in the domestic sphere.
So the first job
of the suffragists
was really to completely
change attitudes
of millions of Americans
and convince very reluctant men
that this is an important idea.
Because only men could decide
whether women deserved the vote.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
Even after the two factions
joined forces in 1890,
under the umbrella
of the National American Woman
Suffrage Association,
the only place the cause gained
any real traction
was in the newer states
of the West,
where population was sparse
and women's votes were regarded
as an asset.
The first state in what came
to be known
as "the suffrage column"
was Wyoming,
which joined the Union in 1890
with its women already
fully enfranchised.
It was followed
over the next six years
by three more Western states.
Then, the forward march stalled.
KEYSSAR:
By the late 19th century,
in white middle-class and
upper-class American society,
there was a shrinking faith
in democracy.
In the North,
a lot of people are saying,
"Well, you know, democracy's
not an unalloyed blessing.
"We have all of these immigrants
coming in.
"They don't speak English.
"They're not very smart.
I don't think
we should let them vote."
In the South, of course,
the politicians were busy
disenfranchising
African Americans
who had been enfranchised
during Reconstruction.
DUBOIS:
The 15th Amendment
didn't say people have
the right to vote
regardless of race, color, or
previous condition of servitude.
It said states can't deny people
the right to vote.
Southern states realized,
well, they wouldn't deny
the right to vote by race.
They'd deny it if your
grandfather was a slave.
That's not specified
in the 15th Amendment.
KEYSSAR:
So the dominant movement
is to take voting rights
away from people.
And that is something which
the women's suffrage movement
runs up against
at the end of the century.
NARRATOR:
As states across the South moved
to bar black men from voting
by means of grandfather clauses,
literacy tests,
poll taxes, and brute force,
the National Association,
with Susan B. Anthony's assent,
adapted to the prevailing mood.
African American women who had
been prominent in the movement
were sidelined,
and Southern chapters permitted
to refuse black members.
In 1894,
Anthony even went so far
as to ask Frederick Douglass
to keep away
from a suffrage convention
in Atlanta
for fear of alienating
potential supporters.
GIDDINGS:
Frederick Douglass is the one
who stands up and says to women
who are ambivalent about calling
for the vote,
"Well, you must work
for suffrage."
So to say to him
that he's not welcome
in the South, in Atlanta,
is a, is a terrible thing.
And Anthony probably actually
believed that, as she said,
"When we get the vote,
when white women get the vote,
we'll make everything okay
for everybody."
But it certainly encouraged
the continuing segregation
and discrimination.
JONES:
African American women
are going to continue
to work toward women's rights.
They're interested in the vote.
But they are also
using those ideas
to transform and control
their institutions
in churches,
in fraternal orders,
in benevolent societies.
They're going to build,
by the 1890s,
an African American
women's club movement.
And within that,
they are also going to be
claiming women's rights
in their own terms.
CHATELAIN:
These are sisters who are
divided because of racism
and because of white supremacy,
and they're asking each other
to concede on the issue
of rights.
And it will impact
every single attempt to bring
women broadly together
in action for a better society.
NARRATOR:
By the close
of the 19th century,
the National Association
was comprised mainly
of white middle-class women,
but was no more effective
for being so.
♪♪
Between 1896 and 1909,
suffragists across the country
submitted
more than 160 legislative
measures for consideration,
yet managed to put the question
of woman suffrage
directly to voters
only six times,
four of them in Oregon.
All six referenda were defeated.
The federal amendment,
likewise, went nowhere.
Suffragists referred
to the period
As "the doldrums."
Even Susan B. Anthony
could not escape
the pervasive sense
of impotence.
As she lamented in 1906,
four years after Stanton's death
and just weeks before her own,
"I have struggled for 60 years
for a little bit of justice
and will die
without securing it."
♪♪
SMEAL:
At the beginning,
women were not supposed to be
interested in public affairs.
We were supposed to know nothing
about what's outside the home.
We were only supposed to know
what was in the home.
You were supposed to have
many children.
You weren't supposed
to complain.
(chuckles):
Make everything look easy.
You know,
they'd all eat together,
and then the men
would go into the library
or some other part of the house
to talk about the real things
of society.
You didn't want to bother
the pretty little woman's head,
right?
You know what I compare it to?
I compare it
to when you're little kids
and you're building
a tree house.
And they put up a sign,
"No girls allowed."
♪♪
NARRATOR:
On election day in 1909,
in New York City,
a 53-year-old suffragist named
Harriot Stanton Blatch
defied convention by daring
to enter a polling place
on the Upper West Side.
Having researched state law
and found
that it did not prohibit
non-voters
from serving as poll watchers,
she'd gotten herself
credentialed.
By day's end, she'd seen to it
that two drunken
election officials
were forcibly removed by police.
Elsewhere in the city,
on the Lower East Side
and in the Bowery,
other women were following
Blatch's lead.
(men clamoring)
DUBOIS:
The polls are in tobacco shops.
They're in saloons.
They're in places where men
are very comfortable,
where they carouse,
where their political bosses
can lubricate them with a drink
here and there.
WALDMAN:
It was a big party,
it was raucous,
it was drunk,
it was often violent.
Turnout among men was very high.
It was like a festival
and a spectator sport
all at once.
And well-bred women showing up
in that environment
would not have been
a very welcome sight.
(trolley bell ringing)
NARRATOR:
To New Yorkers,
Blatch's coordinated invasion
of the polls
offered a preview
of what election day might be
should women get the vote,
and, as Blatch noted,
the expected calamity
had not come to pass.
"We have lifted the veil,"
she crowed.
"We have entered
the Holy of Holies,
and yet the republic
is still going on."
♪♪
DUBOIS:
I call Harriot Stanton Blatch
the first second-generation
feminist.
She was a member of one of the
first classes at Vassar.
She had lived in England and was
friends with the Pankhursts.
And then she had the confidence
and the legitimacy
of being
Elizabeth Stanton's daughter.
She realized that whereas,
when her mother
had first pressed
for the right to vote,
women were largely
domestic creatures.
Now, a half-century later,
women had really moved
into the public arena.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
Amid the staggering
transformation of American life
in the 19th century
From rural to urban,
agricultural to industrial,
enslaved to free
The cause of women's rights
gradually had advanced,
improving their legal status,
expanding their opportunities,
and allowing many
to slip the bonds
of the domestic sphere.
By 1900, fully one-fifth of the
paid labor force was female,
with millions of women many of
them immigrants and unmarried
Working for wages in factories,
textile mills, shops.
Thousands more
were off to college.
Diplomas in hand, they delayed
marriage and motherhood
in ever greater numbers,
to pursue a profession
or to join one of the countless
progressive reform movements
that were remaking
American society.
So ubiquitous were they
in the cities,
with their streamlined,
corset-free style of dress,
their modern ideas
and ambitions,
they had given rise to a kind of
icon known as "the New Woman."
♪♪
WARE:
The New Woman is young,
she's in her 20s,
she's had some college.
She can move,
partly because she's not wearing
so many clothes.
And there's just a kind of
spirit to her
of curiosity
and embracing the future.
She sees possibilities
for herself
that her mother never had.
NARRATOR:
The fresh terrain
was nevertheless
littered with obstacles:
fields that remained stubbornly
closed to women,
especially African Americans;
hazardous working conditions
and unequal pay;
male bosses and colleagues
who were by turns dismissive,
hostile, and predatory.
For women who worked
outside the home,
the vote now was essential.
♪♪
CHATELAIN:
Women at the dawn of the
20th century were impatient
for the change that they were
realizing in their own lives.
Women are able
to circulate ideas.
They're meeting in clubs.
They're getting
more opportunities
for formal education,
and they're seeing themselves
as fully-formed adults,
as citizens.
DUBOIS:
The fact that women lacked
the right to vote
in the 20th century
was a totally antiquated
phenomenon.
And Harriot Stanton Blatch
was determined to resolve that.
Her vision is to bring
working-class women
into the suffrage movement
and to link them to middle-class
professional women.
So she puts these
two groups of people together
in an organization
that she calls
the Equality League
of Self-Supporting Women.
Blatch sees this organization
as a way
to seize control
of the New York movement,
which had become
quite paralyzed,
and to move it forward.
NARRATOR:
The Equality League was open
to any woman
who earned her daily bread,
Blatch said,
"From a cook
to a mining engineer,
and we have both of them."
Affluent, married,
her one daughter already grown,
Blatch had never had to earn
her own living.
She was, she joked,
the only "parasite"
in the Equality League.
But she believed
wage-earning women
were the key to finally
winning the ballot.
♪♪
WARE:
You start to get a broader range
of activists
involved in the movement.
And they know how to go out on
strike, they know how to picket.
And there's that willingness
to be confrontational
in order to win one's goals
that then they bring
to the suffrage movement.
NARRATOR:
It was a lesson learned
from the Pankhursts.
As Blatch told
The New York World,
the question of votes for women
had to be pushed
out of the parlor
and into the streets.
BLATCH (dramatized):
We have ceased to put
much energy
into discussing
the pros and cons of democracy
with doubting women
in the chimney corners,
and have instead gone out
on the street corner
to appeal to men
To the voters.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
Every hour spent perched
atop a soapbox,
being heckled by crowds and
sometimes pelted with stones,
heightened the movement's
visibility
and helped to broaden
its base of support.
Before long,
an auxiliary organization
called Men's League
for Women Suffrage
had been formed,
alliances with African American
women
Members of the Equal Suffrage
League of Brooklyn
Broached,
and high-society women persuaded
to lend not only
their checkbooks,
but also their considerable
influence.
By the fall of 1909,
the cause had become
actually fashionable,
and when Blatch brought her
friend Emmeline Pankhurst
to the U.S. for a lecture tour,
the throngs at Carnegie Hall
were such
that more than a thousand people
had to be turned away.
"Mrs. Blatch's whole idea,"
one of her campaigners recalled,
"was that you must keep suffrage
every minute before the public
"so that they're used
to the idea and talk about it,
"whether they agree or disagree.
I think she was quite right."
♪♪
KEYSSAR:
There was very little experience
with women
participating actively
in political life.
And nobody quite knew
what it would look like,
and that also made it possible
for, for people meaning men
To project their anxieties
about it, you know, onto this.
What would happen?
♪♪
There's a notion
that if women were permitted
to participate in elections,
it would destroy the family.
They genuinely feared
that familial relations
would be disturbed
and interrupted,
that women would be sullied
by participating
in the rough and tough arena
of politics.
There was a fear of the unknown.
WARE:
It's not just
about casting a ballot.
It is this window
on how people feel
about what women's roles
should be in public life.
And if you look at the cartoons
which show women
just looking like the devil,
and with hooves,
and smoke coming out
of their ears
They were demonized.
(crowd murmuring in background)
NARRATOR:
While the militant
Mrs. Pankhurst stirred up crowds
all along the eastern seaboard
in the fall of 1909,
journalist Richard Barry
was in New York,
marinating in the question
of votes for women.
Having noted the sudden,
unexpected flurry of activity
in the state's
suffrage movement,
the highbrow monthly
Pearson's Magazine
had commissioned Barry
to conduct
a major investigation.
So far, he'd dutifully attended
one of Pankhurst's lectures,
interviewed
to his mind the bombastic
Harriot Stanton Blatch,
and endured more street-corner
speeches than he'd cared to.
The angle he was following now
promised to be more congenial:
women who were opposed
to woman suffrage.
♪♪
Respectable, upstanding women,
such as Mrs. Grover Cleveland,
former first lady
of the United States,
who agreed
that men and women's roles,
as her husband once put it,
"had been assigned long ago
by a higher intelligence."
And Mrs. Gilbert Jones,
daughter-in-law of the founder
of The New York Times,
who acknowledged that there'd
been much progress for women
over the previous 50 years,
but hastened to point out
that all of it had been achieved
without the ballot.
And Mrs. Nathan Meyer,
champion of women's education
and founder of Barnard College,
who saw no reason for the female
of the species to vote,
and highly doubted such a vote
would make any difference.
So vehement was Meyer
on the point
that she'd stopped speaking
to her sister Maud,
an ardent and active suffragist,
almost entirely.
WEISS:
These are women
who truly believe
that women should not
have the vote.
Some are social conservatives
who are educated themselves,
but really feel that this is
a change in the social order
which is not healthy.
Some are religious conservatives
who believe
that woman's suffrage
goes against the will of God.
WARE:
Very often, the anti-suffrage
women were arguing
from a position of real class
and racial privilege,
and the vote was not something
that they felt was important.
SUSAN GOODIER:
They're protected in a world
where they could
knock on the door of the judge
or the legislator
and say, "Now, dear,
I would like such-and-such."
They might be able to get it.
So this indirect influence,
and this is often one of the
terms you'll actually hear,
"Indirect influence
serves us well.
We don't need the vote."
NARRATOR:
According to Barry's
lengthy report,
there were perhaps as many women
organized against woman suffrage
as there were women organized
in favor of it,
meaning legislators routinely
were treated
to the "remarkable spectacle,"
Pearson's editor noted,
"of two groups of women
each begging them
to refuse the prayer
of the other."
Where the vast majority
of American women
stood on the matter
was anyone's guess.
But Barry believed most agreed
with the impeccable logic
of Mrs. Selden Bacon.
"A woman can no more do
a man's work," she'd told him,
"than a man can do a woman's."
GOODIER:
Anti-suffragists believed
they were protecting women.
That their power came from
something other than the vote.
And that women would lose
something
in this sordid world
of politics.
(waves crashing,
seagulls squawking)
(ship horn blowing)
NARRATOR:
In January 1910,
Alice Paul bid farewell
to her fellow suffragettes
and to England,
and set sail for home.
When she'd left
the United States
two-and-a-half years earlier,
she'd been unknown
An ordinary American girl,
albeit plucky
and privileged enough
to indulge her curiosity
about the world.
But thanks to her time
with the Pankhursts,
she was returning
a minor celebrity.
The first news story had
appeared the previous November,
in a widely reprinted item
lifted from the national wires.
Miss Alice Paul, identified
as an "earnest young woman"
from Moorestown, New Jersey,
a Swarthmore graduate,
and a "very valued member"
of the Pankhurst organization,
had been sentenced to a month
in London's infamous
Holloway Jail.
"Reliable reports,"
The Fort Wayne News remarked,
"are to the effect that she will
"have to suspend
her Christmas stocking
from a steel slat
in a six-by-four cell."
It was Paul's third time
behind bars.
(glass shattering)
Like her fellow suffragettes,
and as per the Pankhursts'
evolving strategy,
she'd broken every pane of glass
in her cell
and declared herself
a political prisoner.
WALTON:
When they were arrested, they
wanted to be treated like men.
Men advocating for political
causes had certain rights
because they were designated
political prisoners.
They could receive mail.
They could read newspapers.
They could write letters.
The women were turned down,
and to protest this,
they just refused to eat.
♪♪
ZAHNISER:
No one wanted to have a woman
die in jail
because she had gone
on a hunger strike.
And the image of women wasting
away for want of a basic right
was something
that the Pankhursts realized
was a good idea,
first of all,
to get their protesters
out of jail more quickly,
but also, this was a way to get
more media attention.
NARRATOR:
Contrary to expectation,
however,
Alice Paul
and the other hunger-strikers
were not released.
Instead, British authorities
force-fed them.
CASSIDY:
Force-feeding is horrific.
They would stick a rubber
or glass tube
down the woman's throat
or up through her nose,
and then they would take
a funnel
and pour a mixture of eggs
and milk through the funnel
into the tube and down
into her digestive tract.
NARRATOR:
Paul withstood the ordeal
twice daily
for the duration
of her prison term,
some 55 times in all.
"One feels," she wrote
to her mother,
"as though one were an animal
about to be vivisected."
PAUL (dramatized):
While the tube is going
through the nasal passage,
it is exceedingly painful,
and only less so
as it is being withdrawn.
I never went through it without
the tears streaming down my face
and often moaned
from beginning to end,
and sometimes cried aloud.
CASSIDY:
The only way you can endure
something like that
is to believe that you're right,
and that you're doing it for
a cause bigger than yourself.
And Alice Paul really believed
in what she was doing.
NARRATOR:
When reports that Paul
was being force-fed
reached the United States,
they provoked an outcry
Not sympathy, but condemnation
of the suffragettes' wanton
disregard for the law.
CASSIDY:
Americans felt
a little superior.
"Well, thank goodness,
our suffragists
aren't behaving like that."
DUBOIS:
The assumption was that it
wasn't going to be necessary
in the United States.
The poor British,
they had a backward government
that was bullying them,
and they had to press
to give them equal rights.
But that wasn't true
of democratic America
in the Progressive era.
Women wouldn't
have to go that far.
(ship horns blowing)
NARRATOR:
By the time Paul's ship docked
in Philadelphia,
her notoriety was such
that a swarm of reporters
showed up to greet her.
"Will you take part in the
movement here?" one asked her.
"I didn't know there was
any movement here,"
Paul replied disingenuously.
"But if it becomes necessary
to fight to win,
I believe in fighting."
CASSIDY:
Alice Paul came back
from England
knowing that this was going
to be her life's cause.
There was nothing that she
thought she couldn't do.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
When the suffrage movement
finally scored a victory
in November 1910
The first in 14 years
It caught most everyone
by surprise.
Four states held referenda
on woman suffrage that fall.
In three, the measures failed
by wide margins.
Voters in Washington state,
meanwhile,
approved theirs
by nearly two-to-one.
♪♪
WARE:
The Washington victory
was important.
It was very important,
because it had been a long time.
All of a sudden, it begins
to seem possible.
There's almost a sense of,
"Oh, gee,
this really can happen."
NARRATOR:
By now, some 100,000 women
were dues-paying members
of the National Association,
up from just 9,000
a decade before.
Tens of thousands more belonged
to the pro-suffrage
National Association
of Colored Women,
to local Equality Leagues,
Franchise Associations,
and Votes for Women clubs.
Winning the ballot
in Washington state
renewed their collective hope,
reinforced their sense
of purpose,
and propelled
the boldest among them
into the streets of America.
WEISS:
There's this real pent-up
frustration.
And they're saying,
"Look, we've pleaded
long enough.
"We've been patient long enough,
this is ridiculous,
and let's go make a scene."
♪♪
NARRATOR:
The next year, in California,
they turned out in force,
an estimated 10,000 strong,
to sell woman suffrage
to the male voters of the state.
With just three months
until the election,
they feverishly
plastered posters
in shop windows
and on billboards,
peddled suffrage buttons
and suffrage tea,
and distributed more than three
million pieces of literature.
In Los Angeles, Hispanic
activists translated at rallies.
San Francisco's Chinese women
canvassed their communities,
while in Oakland, members of the
Colored Women's Suffrage Club
monitored polling places.
By the time their efforts
delivered California,
the sixth so-called free state,
to the cause in 1911,
votes for women had become,
as one journalist observed,
"the three small words
which constitute
the biggest question
in the world today."
WARE:
There is a kind of quickening
that starts to happen.
There are new tactics
and there are new strategies
and there are new recruits,
and things really just begin to,
to pop.
NARRATOR:
Week by week,
all across the country,
in New York, Connecticut,
Massachusetts, and Maine,
Michigan, Wisconsin,
Kansas, Arizona,
suffragists pressed to make
the next free state their own.
And week by week,
all across the country,
women flocked to the cause.
♪♪
WARE:
Women started doing things
like dressing in white
and putting on a suffrage sash,
and marching in a parade.
It's not like you just sort of
check off a box and say,
"I'm a suffragist now."
It affects a lot of things.
If you're married, it's going
to affect your marriage,
because all of a sudden,
your husband has a wife
who may not be there at the end
of the day to cook his dinner.
And she may be heading off
to a rally
or standing on a street corner
handing out leaflets.
And he may think
this is a great thing,
or he may think it's awful,
but he's part
of that conversation.
And if you're someone
who really goes all in,
it basically becomes a job.
These are real people, and
they're making this their lives,
and there's this kind of
snowball effect
that is happening.
NARRATOR:
As the summer of 1912
was winding down,
58-year-old Harriet Taylor Upton
was gearing up
for a special election in Ohio
A state referendum
on woman suffrage,
the first of six to be held
in the U.S. that fall.
Never in Upton's 20 years
in the movement
had there been such a chance
for progress,
and as the president
of the Ohio Woman Suffrage
Association,
she intended her home state
to lead the charge.
♪♪
Already, she'd put 50 campaign
volunteers in the field,
as well as a roster
of popular speakers,
and had tasked them
with canvassing voters
at picnics, county fairs,
family reunions.
State politicians
and the local press
generally agreed the suffrage
measure, Amendment 23,
was likely to carry,
perhaps by as many
as 40,000 votes.
Then, copies of an anonymous
and alarming handbill
began to circulate,
suggesting that,
if women were permitted to vote,
Ohio would join
the growing list of states
that had shuttered their saloons
and deprived their citizens
of beer.
It was a charge
that had dogged the suffrage
movement for decades,
not least because it rang true.
♪♪
SMEAL:
I don't think
that many people realize
that Susan B. Anthony
was a leader
in the temperance movement.
The temperance movement
was all about men's behavior,
by the way.
It was not just alcohol,
it was the abuse of alcohol
and the beating of women
by drunken men.
They would also spend
an inordinate amount of money
on it,
and on pay day,
they'd go to the bars,
and what would be left
for the wife and the kids?
So there was a whole movement
to restrict alcohol.
NARRATOR:
Perhaps nowhere was the link
between temperance
and woman suffrage
more established than in Ohio,
the birthplace of the Woman's
Christian Temperance Union.
The largest women's organization
in the country,
the WCTU had led the crusade
to ban alcohol
since the late 19th century,
and endorsed votes for women
as a
"weapon for home protection."
WALTON:
This activated the liquor lobby.
These are the distilleries,
the breweries,
the farmers who grow crops
for alcohol, alcoholic products,
cask makers.
It's huge.
So whenever a vote came up
in a state for suffrage,
the liquor lobby
poured money in to defeat it.
♪♪
WEISS:
They would do things like,
a bar would have a sign up
on election day and say,
"Vote against
the women's suffrage amendment
and you get a free beer."
They don't want
national prohibition,
and if women had some political
power, that might happen.
NARRATOR:
Aware that the association
with temperance
had become a liability,
Harriet Taylor Upton
had done her best
to create some distance.
"Let me explain
that the suffrage association
is not a temperance
organization,"
she'd insisted in an official
statement that summer.
But in a state where brewing
was a major industry,
such reassurances
struck many voters
as too little, too late.
On September 3, 1912,
Ohio Amendment number 23 lost,
with nearly 58%
of the electorate
voting against it.
♪♪
Two days later, the woman
suffrage referendum in Wisconsin
failed in precisely
the same manner,
as did the one in Michigan
in November.
KEYSSAR:
As women link suffrage rights
to social reform,
whether it means for women
who are working
in the garment industry
or the temperance movement
to ban alcohol,
major economic interests
who are tied to industries
that are profiting from this
begin to oppose
women's suffrage.
WARE:
There's money involved,
there's power involved,
and women are threatening them.
And a lot of people really
didn't want things to change.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
By the close of 1912,
the map told the tale.
Against three victories
for woman suffrage that fall
were the three defeats
at the hands
of the liquor industry.
After 64 years of struggle,
women were still without full
voting rights in 39 states,
and outside of the West
lay entrenched resistance.
To the East, economic concerns
and political machines
blocked the progress
of the cause.
To the South,
it was the scourge of racism.
♪♪
JONES:
The rise of white supremacy and
the imposition of Jim Crow order
has created a political terrain
in which white men control
political power.
So to introduce women
is to reintroduce this question
of the suffrage,
of its universality,
of its core relationship
to a democracy.
And that gets you
a little too close, then,
to the problem
of African Americans
and the vote, as well.
KEYSSAR:
The fear was that it would
reopen demands
on the part of black males
to vote,
and there was a further concern,
too,
which was often voiced
It was quite a remarkable
statement
Which was that, "If men try
to vote and get unruly,
"we can go in and beat them up.
"We can use force against them.
"That would be unseemly
to do against black women.
"So we really don't want to
permit them to be enfranchised
and then have to figure out
new modes of repression."
♪♪
NARRATOR:
When the women of the
National Association convened
in Philadelphia
late in November,
the suffrage map was hanging
across the balcony
at the back of Witherspoon Hall,
a nod to the movement's
progress,
however halting.
But to Alice Paul, who was among
the delegates from New Jersey,
it read more as an indictment.
WALTON:
She saw how difficult it was
to get a change
in a state voting law.
First of all,
the state legislature
had to approve it all men.
Then it had to go
to the voters all men.
And she thought it would be
much easier and much faster
to have a federal amendment
which would give all women
in this country the vote.
NARRATOR:
Although Paul
had been given permission
to raise the issue
at the convention,
she expected to meet
with resistance
from the National Association's
leadership,
not least from
President Anna Howard Shaw,
who had let the federal suffrage
amendment languish
throughout the eight years
of her tenure.
♪♪
An ordained minister,
Shaw had been the only woman
in a class of 43 at the
Boston School of Theology,
and had felt, as she later said,
"the abysmal conviction
that I wasn't really wanted
there."
After completing her education
in 1886, at the age of 39,
she'd joined
the suffrage movement.
Alice Paul had only
just been born.
BETH BEHN:
Alice Paul is not of the
generation that understands
the impact of Reconstruction,
that understands
the deep racial divides
that are foremost in the minds
of older suffragists.
So it's not a coincidence
that the National walks away
from a federal amendment
at the same time
that Southern states
are pushing back
on any federal intervention
into who's voting in the South,
and, in fact, drawing
a very hard
state-rights' stance.
So the National is cognizant
of that
In some ways,
complicit in that
And decides to focus
on state referenda.
NARRATOR:
Paul was convinced
the landscape had changed.
With more than a million
female voters in the West,
woman suffrage had become
for the first time
a factor in national politics.
In the recent
presidential election,
candidate Theodore Roosevelt's
insurgent Progressive Party
had even adopted a plank
endorsing votes for women.
"Now was the moment
to revive the push
for the federal amendment,"
Paul told the women
of the National Association,
"and to do so in a way
that could not be ignored."
(people talking in background,
drum beating)
ZAHNISER:
Alice was thinking
about staging a parade
along the lines
of the spectacular parades
that the Pankhursts had
in London.
And she wanted to bring one
of those to Washington, DC,
the premier focus of power
in the United States.
WALTON:
As it happened,
there had been suffrage parades,
three in a row,
organized by Harriot Stanton
Blatch in New York.
(crowd talking in background,
drum beating)
And Anna Howard Shaw
had marched in those parades.
And it turned out that
Anna Howard Shaw loved a parade,
and she liked this idea.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
By the time
the convention delegates
began boarding trains
back to their respective dots
on the map,
Alice Paul had been named
chairman
of the National Association's
long-dormant
Congressional Committee
in Washington, DC,
and given leave
to plan her parade.
To maximize the event's impact,
she intended to hold it
on March 3,
the day before President-elect
Woodrow Wilson's inauguration.
♪♪
CASSIDY:
Press from across America
was going to be there
and there were going to be
lots of spectators there.
So it was a captive audience,
and she knew that it would be
a really powerful message
to all of America.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
It was now November 27,
just 13 weeks
before inauguration day.
Paul rushed home
and started packing her bags.
♪♪
ZAHNISER:
We think these days
that national protests
in Washington are routine,
but they were almost
non-existent in 1913.
♪♪
There had been one previous
protest, in 1894,
when Jacob Coxey brought
veterans of the Civil War
to Washington
to protest their lack
of pension payments.
They marched
across the Capitol grounds
and were promptly arrested,
and that was the end
of the protest.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
As the curtain opened on 1913,
the nucleus
of the woman suffrage movement
already had begun to shift
to the nation's capital,
where the Congressional
Committee's new office
on F Street
soon buzzed
with so much activity
that one reporter dubbed it
a "suffragists' beehive."
♪♪
Alice Paul had arrived in town
in early December
with her friend and co-chairman,
Lucy Burns,
a fellow veteran
of the Pankhurst army.
Brooklyn-born to a close-knit
Irish Catholic family,
Burns, at 33,
was Paul's opposite
in nearly every respect
Exuberant, outgoing,
easy with a laugh.
To her would fall the task
of recruiting volunteers
and rousing crowds
on street corners.
Paul, meanwhile, spent most
of her time at the office,
in a chilly back room
behind a desk
that once belonged
to Susan B. Anthony.
ZAHNISER:
Alice Paul was
much more comfortable
as the stage manager,
as the director,
than she was as the star.
She nevertheless
had an emotional intensity
that seemed to encourage people
to follow her.
NARRATOR:
With a single-mindedness
that bordered on mania,
Paul wrangled a permit
to stage the parade
on Pennsylvania Avenue,
the symbolic conduit
of American political power.
She prevailed upon
suffrage leaders everywhere
to loan their floats,
banners, chariots,
and oversaw a revolving staff
of volunteers
As many as 20 a day
Who solicited donations,
arranged lodging
for out-of-town marchers,
and kept up a steady drumbeat
of anticipation in the press.
♪♪
ZAHNISER:
We're beginning to see
really a golden age
of magazines and illustrations,
newspapers beginning
to use more photographs.
And Alice Paul recognized
that this
represented something
that she could use.
♪♪
WALTON:
There was news every day
about some new person
who was joining the parade.
And her headquarters became
a mandatory stop for reporters
on a daily basis.
"What's new, Alice?
"What's happening?
What do you have to tell us?"
Alice's goal was to have
suffrage in the papers
every day,
18 inches in front
of the reading public.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
In February, Chicago journalist
Ida Wells-Barnett
Better known by her maiden name,
Ida B. Wells
Decided she would be among
the marchers in Washington, DC.
Born into slavery
just months before
the Emancipation Proclamation,
Wells, at 50, had dedicated
much of her adult life
to exposing racial injustice
in the South,
where the disenfranchisement
of African American men
had been accompanied
by shocking brutality.
DUBOIS:
The country had gone through
the most radical of changes.
It had taken a group of people
who were considered subhuman
and made them into the equals
of proud, white men.
And the political class,
the elite,
reacted violently to that.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
In 1892 alone, well over
a hundred African Americans
had been lynched,
among them
one of Wells' closest friends,
a doting father and the co-owner
of a thriving grocery
cooperative in Memphis.
JONES:
Wells confesses
that she had always assumed
that the victims of lynching
had somehow done a wrong,
even if it wasn't the wrong
they had been accused of.
But when her friends,
men who were known to her to be,
in her judgment,
sort of beyond reproach,
are lynched,
she's converted.
She's converted.
She understands now, right,
that there is something
essentially illegitimate, right,
that undergirds racial violence.
GIDDINGS:
She sees that
something else is happening.
And she's really the first
to understand it
in a kind of comprehensive way.
Blacks were progressing
so quickly
that they were threatening.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
Having been deprived
of the ballot,
Wells told her readers in 1910,
African Americans
had been robbed
of their only weapon of defense.
WELLS (dramatized):
With no sacredness
of the ballot,
there can be no sacredness
of human life itself.
For if the strong can take
the weak man's ballot
when it suits his purpose
to do so,
he will take his life, also.
Therefore, the more complete
the disenfranchisement,
the more frequent and horrible
has been the hangings,
shootings, and burnings.
♪♪
WARE:
African American women
had seen what it meant
to have African American men
disfranchised in the South,
and they realize
it's very important
for women to have the vote.
They see it as part of a larger
struggle for racial justice.
JONES:
If you can't vote,
you can't sit on a jury.
If you can't sit on a jury,
you can't determine what happens
in a local courthouse
when the perpetrators
of lynching
are brought before a court.
If you can't vote,
you can't be appointed a judge
and sit on the bench and preside
when the perpetrators
of lynching
are brought before a court.
These are the mechanics, right?
And Wells knows the mechanics
of how Southern courts
How all courts in the nation
Work.
And so the vote might be sacred,
but the vote is also, um,
a true instrument, right,
of political power,
political access.
Without access to the polls,
it's difficult to imagine
how black Americans
are going to turn
what's happening
in another direction.
NARRATOR:
Eager to mobilize
African American women,
Wells recently had founded
the Alpha Suffrage Club,
the first black suffrage
organization in Chicago,
and she intended to represent it
in Alice Paul's parade.
ZAHNISER:
Alice Paul had every expectation
that African American women
would march.
African American women had
marched in the New York parade.
She had already reached out
to African Americans,
encouraging them
to think about marching.
She was quickly disillusioned
that that was a good idea
when some of the
Washington women came to her
and said that that simply
was not acceptable.
♪♪
WALTON:
It's a very Southern city.
It's a very racist city.
These women come
to headquarters.
They're lifelong Washingtonians,
and they know the city.
And they tell her,
"This can destroy your parade."
NARRATOR:
In a letter, Paul confessed both
her quandary and her conclusion.
African Americans would not be
excluded from the parade,
but neither would their
participation be encouraged.
PAUL (dramatized):
The prejudice against Negroes
is so strong
in this section of the country
that I believe a large part,
if not a majority,
of our white marchers
will refuse to participate
if Negroes in any number
formed a part of the parade.
That being the case,
as far as I can see,
we must have a white procession,
or a Negro procession,
or no procession at all.
The best thing is to say nothing
whatever about the question,
to keep it out
of the newspapers,
to try to make this
a purely suffrage demonstration
entirely uncomplicated
by any other problems,
such as racial ones.
♪♪
JONES:
Alice Paul understands
her choices.
She understands the stakes
in decisions that she makes.
And the legacies
of those sorts of moments,
which, in the name
of expediency,
racism is re-imposed
and furthered
rather than challenged.
And then we have to remember,
like, the whole country
is remarkably troubled,
and racism is a political fact,
and it's a political strategy.
Which doesn't excuse women
who use racism,
but it's to say,
why do we expect, silently,
perhaps naively,
why do we expect American women
to be distinct from the ideas
that animate American,
white American men
in the same moment?
♪♪
SMEAL:
Reformers,
people who fight for change,
are always asked to be perfect.
But they're living in a society
where you make accommodations
to go to the next step.
Maybe you shouldn't, but
It's almost impossible
to get the whole loaf.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
They called themselves
"Pilgrims"
A band of suffragists, clad in
brown capes and heavy boots,
making their way on foot from
New York to Washington, DC
A distance of some 260 miles
To join the march for the vote
in the nation's capital.
In the lead
was Rosalie Gardiner Jones
Also known as General Jones
A 29-year-old Oyster Bay
socialite
who'd traded what she called
her "pink tea existence"
for a life
in the suffrage trenches.
She'd recently completed
a similar trek
from New York City to Albany,
not merely to petition the
governor for the right to vote,
but also, as she said, "to meet
the people along the way
and talk suffrage to them."
When they set out
on February 12, 1913,
the Pilgrims
were some 200 strong.
♪♪
By the end of the first day,
their number had dwindled
to a determined 16.
♪♪
WALTON:
It was winter,
and they're marching
through ice and snow and slush.
And they have a wagon
filled with leaflets.
And their idea is,
they will campaign for suffrage
along the way,
and they will hand out
these leaflets,
and they will give talks.
And they were followed every
step of the way by reporters.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
Over the last two weeks
of February,
as the women kept to a pace
of up to 20 miles a day,
crowds continually
lined their route.
Some, mostly men,
came to jeer.
In Pennsylvania,
the hikers were assaulted
with stones and snowballs.
In Delaware,
a group of small boys
released dozens of mice
into the Pilgrims' path,
reportedly provoking hysteria.
Others, of both sexes,
expressed support.
"These suffragettes are
certainly doing the world good,"
Hearst's Magazine enthused.
"Not only will we fall in line
"and hike with them
for a few miles,
"but we will in sympathy
fall in love
with the cause they represent."
Meanwhile, suffragists
from all over the country
were likewise headed
for Washington.
(train whistle blaring)
♪♪
ZAHNISER:
If you were a suffragist, you
wanted to go to this big event.
People were commissioning
special trains.
Chicago had a train,
including Ida B. Wells,
that roared into Washington
the night before.
There was an extensive
trolley system,
and some women were actually
able to get on the trolley
in Portland, Maine,
and transfer on one ticket
all the way to Washington, DC.
Anybody who could get to
Washington in any way possible
became very interested
in marching
in the first great
national parade.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
Alice Paul and Lucy Burns
had been expecting
perhaps 2,500 marchers.
By the time Jones and her
Pilgrims trudged into town,
on the afternoon of February 27,
there were at least
twice as many.
♪♪
Alberta Hill,
who'd come from New York,
summed up their mood:
"I am looking forward
to the parade," she wrote,
"with as much interest as a
little girl to her first party."
♪♪
WARE:
Think about what it would
be like to march
in your first suffrage parade.
Maybe you had a white dress
that you took
out of your closet,
or maybe you wore
a special suffrage hat
and a, and a sash.
You're not a bystander anymore.
And even if you felt a little
scared and a little nervous,
or maybe a lot scared
and a lot nervous,
you're surrounded by other women
who believe in the same thing
you do.
And there must have been
just this amazing rush
of feeling part
of something bigger.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
By mid-morning
on March 3, 1913,
the marchers already were
gathering on Pennsylvania Avenue
in droves.
♪♪
"We went out early,"
Alice Paul recalled,
"very early, to try to begin
to line the people up."
Anna Howard Shaw, the National
Association's president,
was there in her doctoral robes,
soaking up the enthusiasm
of the crowd.
♪♪
But as the kaleidoscopic mass
shifted into position
for drills,
a fracas broke out
among the marchers
from Illinois.
According
to the Chicago Tribune reporter
traveling with them,
the delegation's chair made
a last-minute announcement:
She'd been advised to keep
the delegation "entirely white,"
she said, "due to the objections
of Eastern and Southern women."
Although African Americans
were interspersed
throughout the procession
Among them members of
a Howard University sorority
It was decided Ida B. Wells
would have to march
with a contingent in the rear.
♪♪
GIDDINGS:
She was nationally famous.
She had been so much a part
of the suffrage organizations,
longer than most of those women
who were there.
So she is just, becomes
very emotional about this,
not feeling, not in a
a self-pitying way,
but she understands
what would happen
if it came out that,
that she was excluded
from this group.
NARRATOR:
Fighting back tears,
Wells addressed the 62 women
of the Illinois delegation.
WELLS (dramatized):
If the Illinois women
do not take a stand now
in this great democratic parade,
then the colored women are lost.
When I was asked
to come down here,
I was asked to march with
the other women of our state,
and either I go with you
or not at all.
NARRATOR:
When the delegation reassembled
for the procession,
just after 3:00,
Wells was nowhere to be found.
(people calling in background)
By then, Pennsylvania Avenue
was jammed with spectators.
The welcoming party for the
president-elect, by contrast,
was strangely sparse.
WALDMAN:
Woodrow Wilson steps off
the train in Washington, DC.
He's just been elected president
of the United States.
He's expecting
a, a huge welcome.
And there's nobody there.
BEHN:
And so he asks,
"What's going on?"
And somebody tells him
most of the people are out
watching the suffrage parade.
And it's this early indicator
of the role
that suffrage is going to play
in his term
as he's about to take office
the following day.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
Finally, at 25 past three,
a blare of trumpets rang out
and the procession's two dozen
horse-drawn floats, nine bands,
four mounted brigades,
and thousands of marchers
stirred into motion.
Leading them all
was Inez Milholland,
a 26-year-old attorney
the press had dubbed
"the most beautiful
suffragette."
♪♪
Lest anyone mistake the purpose
of the demonstration,
Alice Paul had displayed it
on the very first float,
the so-called great demand.
WALTON:
This was very bold.
Women did not demand
in those days.
And she was putting Wilson
on notice
that the women wanted action.
Alice also wanted it
to be a beautiful parade.
It was a narrative
of women's progress,
from pioneer days all the way up
to present day.
The present day consisted
of phalanxes of women
marching by profession.
You had your librarians.
You had your teachers.
You had your nurses.
The message was,
"This is the contribution
that women make to society."
♪♪
NARRATOR:
For roughly four blocks,
the parade unspooled
along the avenue as planned.
(people murmuring in background)
Then, rowdy onlookers began
to break
through the steel cables
lining the route.
(people murmuring in background)
WALDMAN:
You had 5,000 women marching
down Pennsylvania Avenue.
And surrounding them
were 100,000 men,
many of them drunk.
And the men began jeering
and spitting.
WALTON:
They spilled into the path
of the parade.
They hurled taunts at the women.
They threw lighted cigarettes
at them.
They plucked objects
off the floats.
WALDMAN:
They assaulted the marchers
and sent a hundred of them
to the hospital.
WALTON:
The police,
they weren't much better.
They turned their back on the
parade and they're smirking,
like this is all some kind of
big joke.
ZAHNISER:
So very quickly,
what were marchers marching
four or even eight abreast
became a single file
in a very, very threatening
atmosphere.
NARRATOR:
Only the arrival of the cavalry
enabled the marchers
to complete the route.
One later compared
the experience
to being forced
through the neck of a funnel.
"I did not know,"
another recalled,
"that men could be such fiends."
Ida B. Wells took advantage
of the chaos,
boldly stepping in
with the Illinois delegation
midway through the route.
"Illinois is Lincoln's state,"
she told a reporter.
"I don't believe Lincoln's state
"is going to permit Alabama
or Georgia or any other state
to begin to dictate to it now."
♪♪
Given the punishing afternoon,
many expected the mood
at the post-procession rally
to be grim.
But as one marcher recalled,
"To our great surprise,
the leaders were jubilant!"
"If anything could prove
the need of the ballot,"
Anna Howard Shaw proclaimed,
"nothing could prove it more
than the treatment
we received today."
♪♪
ZAHNISER:
Alice Paul and the
National Association leaders
realized they had
a media sensation
on their hands.
WALTON:
Alice was a public relations
genius.
She saw that this parade
on the front pages of newspapers
across America
was a better story
than her parade would have been.
And what was that story?
Men bad, women good, right?
It was basic.
WALDMAN:
This march overshadowed
the inauguration
of the president
of the United States,
because these non-violent
marchers were attacked
for just trying to fulfill
their rights as Americans.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
By the following morning,
the newspapers were in receipt
of an open letter,
penned in New York
by Harriot Stanton Blatch
and addressed to the soon-to-be-
inaugurated president,
Woodrow Wilson.
BLATCH (dramatized):
As you ride today
in comfort and safety
to the Capitol,
we beg that you will not
be unmindful
that yesterday, the government
Which is supposed to exist
for the good of all
Left women, while passing
in peaceful procession
in their demand
for political freedom,
at the mercy of a howling mob
on the very streets
which are being at this moment
so efficiently officered
for the protection of men.
♪♪
DUBOIS:
Paul pressed to have
a congressional investigation.
And this prolonged the publicity
that the demonstration
had gotten.
So instead of being intimidated
by the attack,
she used it as an argument
to get
Effectively to get the Congress
to begin to move
on the federal amendment.
♪♪
WALDMAN:
The idea of
a constitutional amendment
guaranteeing the right to vote
for women
was a pipe dream.
It wasn't on the agenda.
And then Alice Paul said,
"We're going to do this."
CASSIDY:
It put suffrage on the map
in a brand-new way.
NARRATOR:
The movement's leadership
continued to believe
the vote would be won
in the states,
but a higher profile for the
cause could only help in that.
"The National Association,"
Anna Howard Shaw told Paul,
"will never cease
to be grateful to you all
for the splendid service
you have done in its name."
♪♪
♪♪
NARRATOR:
That spring,
while the controversy
over the parade
was still splashed across
the nation's front pages,
the Thomas A. Edison Company
debuted
its latest film in New York.
The nation's movie houses
and kinetoscope parlors
had been awash in films
about woman suffrage
for years now,
most of them short comedies
about misguided, mannish women
unsuccessfully experimenting
with power.
Edison's new entry sought
to turn the popular stereotype
on its head.
Entitled Votes for Women
and featuring
five prominent suffragists,
each delivering
a 60-second speech,
the film was part of a series
of so-called talkers.
For 40 years,
these six reasonable plaints
have been placed
before Parliament
NARRATOR:
But no sooner had
suffragist number one
come into view
than the talk was drowned out
by hisses, hoots, and jeers.
Newspapers translated the uproar
into words.
"Vaudeville audiences
are not bashful
about expressing opinions,"
observed The New York Tribune,
"and it seemed to be
the general opinion
"that those women
were not good lookers enough
to deserve a man's vote."
WEISS:
It is important to realize
how vilified the women were.
The idea is that,
if you are a suffragist,
there must be something wrong
with you.
You must be a spinster.
You must be unsexed and somehow
psychologically unbalanced.
You must just want to be a man.
(crowd cheering)
(people talking in background,
band playing in distance)
NARRATOR:
Suffragists had expected
big things from Woodrow Wilson,
who'd been elected
on the strength
of his progressive reform
platform.
But throughout his first
hundred days as president
And for months beyond
He'd managed to avoid
taking any public position
on the question of votes
for women.
♪♪
BEHN:
Woodrow Wilson is a very
traditional Southern gentleman.
And his political interests
and leanings
mirror his upbringing.
He's not dismissive of women
or the role that they have
to play in society,
but he does believe
that that role is primarily
as nurturers,
as upholders
of morals and values
within families,
and he's deeply concerned
that allowing women
to enter the political realm
will disrupt the foundation
of society.
CASSIDY:
Woodrow Wilson
was against women's suffrage.
He never wanted
to state that publicly,
and was always very careful
when he spoke with deputations
of these suffragists
coming to see him.
He would say,
"Oh, well, you know,
"I understand your perspective,
and that's interesting.
"I have a lot of other things
on my plate right now.
We'll see what happens."
♪♪
NARRATOR:
By the fall of 1913,
Alice Paul had long since tired
of the presidential dodge.
When she and Lucy Burns
launched The Suffragist
A weekly newspaper meant
to track the progress
toward the federal amendment
They put Wilson
on the debut issue's cover,
depicting him as a smug obstacle
to the cause.
At home in Pennsylvania,
Anna Howard Shaw
perused the issue with dismay.
It was bad enough
that Paul and Burns
had published The Suffragist
without consulting
the National Association,
but to see such an unkind
portrayal of the president,
Shaw told Burns,
had made her "sick at heart."
The national suffrage
organization
was very hierarchical.
The people in charge believed
that they deserved
to be in charge,
young people must come up
through the ranks,
and Alice Paul was none of that.
She could see
what needed to be done,
and she intended to do it.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
Paul had been raising hackles
at the National Association
for months now,
ever since the parade.
Just weeks afterward,
she'd personally led
a deputation
to President Wilson,
who gave the women
ten minutes of his time,
listened politely,
and then shrugged them off,
claiming that Congress
was too busy
with tariffs and currency reform
to consider woman suffrage.
♪♪
"But Mr. President,"
Paul countered,
"do you not understand
that the administration
"has no right to legislate
"for currency, tariff,
and any other reform
without first getting
the consent of women?"
WARE:
It was going to be very hard
to get through
to Woodrow Wilson,
no matter what anybody said.
But Alice Paul
was confrontational.
She's impatient,
and she really sees him
as a huge adversary.
She was trying to make him,
as president,
deal with this issue.
NARRATOR:
Were such audacity not enough,
Paul and Burns also had formed
a separate organization,
the Congressional Union,
to push
for the federal amendment,
and had even raised their own
funds for the endeavor,
diverting them, in Shaw's view,
from the National's coffers.
But nothing was more troubling
than Paul and Burns'
public embrace
of Emmeline Pankhurst,
who by now had resorted
to waging what she called
"guerrilla warfare" in England.
(explosion roars, siren blaring)
(crowd murmuring)
♪♪
WALTON:
Until this point,
the most violent thing
they had done
was to throw rocks
through windows,
which is kind of a time-honored
form of protest in Britain.
Now they're cutting
electric lines, telegraph lines.
They're slashing seats
in trains.
They set fire to golf greens.
No votes, no golf.
♪♪
WEISS:
There were bombs
put in mailboxes.
There were bombs
at the doorsteps
of members of Parliament.
So there's a lot of fear
in the American movement
that that kind of violence
might come here.
ADAMS:
People in the National
felt that Alice Paul
had become a creature
of the Pankhursts.
She was going to import
Pankhurst attitudes
and approaches
to a situation in the U.S.
where these militant tactics
didn't belong at all.
ZAHNISER:
Alice Paul and Lucy Burns
never thought
that any kind of violent protest
would be successful in America,
but they never distanced
themselves from the Pankhursts.
So they became
more and more controversial.
NARRATOR:
The last straw was delivered
by Lucy Burns,
who advertised
a suffrage meeting
by illegally chalking
the sidewalk
across from the White House,
and thereby prompted
a much-publicized warrant
for her arrest.
Shaw's reprimand came by letter.
"Immediately plead ignorance
of the law
and pay whatever fine there is
upon it," she instructed.
"You may think we are all
a set of old fogies,
"and perhaps we are,
"but it requires a good deal
more courage
"to work steadily
and steadfastly
"for 40 or 50 years
"to gain an end,
"than it does to do
an impulsive, rash thing
and lose it."
♪♪
By December 1913,
tensions were so high
that the National
barred reporters
from attending
its annual convention.
Just days later, Shaw appointed
an entirely new committee
to oversee efforts
in Washington,
and ousted Paul and Burns.
The fledgling Congressional
Union's "militant" leaders,
Shaw told the press,
"know nothing
of American politics."
WEISS:
Schisms like this are very
common in social movements,
especially reform movements.
We see it in the labor movement.
We see it
in the civil rights movement.
There is an impatience
with the slow pace of progress,
and one group says,
"We have to be more radical."
♪♪
CASSIDY:
Alice Paul was very young
in 1913.
She was in her mid-20s
and she was probably naive.
But sometimes that level
of ignorance,
not really knowing
how hard the fight is,
is the only reason why you're
going to engage in the fight.
♪♪
(trolley bell rings,
people talking in background)
NARRATOR:
As the wan winter sun rose
on the morning
of February 7, 1915,
readers of The New York Times
turned the front page
of the Sunday editorial section
and encountered
a lengthy warning
about a grave
and imminent danger.
♪♪
A referendum
scheduled for November 2
that for the first time
would put the question
of votes for women
directly to the electorate
of New York state.
"Every man of voting age must
meet the issue courageously,
intelligently,
with clear vision,"
the editors urged.
"The grant of suffrage to women
is repugnant.
"Without the counsel
and guidance of men,
"no woman ever ruled a state
wisely and well.
"The defect is innate,
and one for which a cure
is both impossible
and not to be desired."
♪♪
It was enough to drive Harriot
Stanton Blatch to distraction.
♪♪
While others dreamed of changing
the U.S. Constitution,
Blatch had kept her focus
on New York,
and by now, she'd been working
for years
just to convince
the state legislature
to hold the referendum.
DUBOIS:
She understood that education,
pleading, petitioning
did not work.
You needed to evidence power.
You could do it by bringing
hundreds of women to Albany.
You could do it by having 10,000
women march down Fifth Avenue.
But you needed to show
that there was power
and intention,
and you had to force politicians
to act.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
The task of converting voters,
Blatch knew,
would be Herculean
by comparison,
but it had to be done.
Spurred by the furor over
the national suffrage parade,
the House of Representatives
recently had put
the federal amendment to a vote
for the first time,
and had proved
that the two-thirds majority
required for passage
was well out of reach.
"But if we win
the Empire State,"
Blatch told Alice Paul,
"all the states
will come tumbling down
like a pack of cards."
♪♪
DUBOIS:
At this point,
the federal Constitution
was still closed to women.
So it became the goal
to break through
and to have a victory
east of the Mississippi.
And there,
the big goal was New York.
GOODIER:
New York is a state
with a very large population,
many members
of the Electoral College.
It's such an influential
and prominent state.
So for decades,
women suffragists had said,
"New York is key."
♪♪
NARRATOR:
The National Association
had poured resources
into the campaign,
and over the course of 1915,
mobilized thousands of women
across the state.
They stood in shop windows
to make so-called
voiceless speeches,
carried a symbolic
suffrage torch
to meetings from Chautauqua
to Montauk,
and mailed suffrage valentines
to everyone they knew.
DUBOIS:
They are doing everything
to appeal to the emotions.
No longer interested in making
rational arguments for suffrage,
they want to have people
care about
and be interested in
and excited about
the suffrage movement.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
The fervor was palpable
all over the East that year,
as suffragists in New Jersey,
Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts
drove toward
their own referenda.
WALTON:
Thousands of women
marched in Boston.
They took a liberty bell across
the state of Pennsylvania.
Everybody planted
yellow gardens.
You know, and women worked
very, very hard.
GOODIER:
If women are going to get
the right to vote,
they need to convince
the most men possible
that they deserve
the right to vote.
Every individual man
who can vote
needs to be convinced.
NARRATOR:
Mindful of what was at stake
for tens of thousands
of African American women,
and for voting rights
in general,
the five-year-old
National Association
for the Advancement
of Colored People
put out a special issue
of its monthly magazine,
featuring endorsements
from some of black America's
foremost public figures,
who urged African American men
to vote "yes."
For Mary Church Terrell,
the former president
of the National Association
of Colored Women,
it was incomprehensible that any
black man should do otherwise.
"The same arguments
used to prove
that the ballot be withheld
from women,"
she pointed out,
"are advanced to prove
that colored men
should not be allowed to vote."
JONES:
Black women have a stake
in this question.
If one is to be a full citizen,
a true citizen
Not a second-class citizen
One will vote,
have access to the polls.
Keep a people away
from the polls,
you will raise the significance
of the vote tremendously.
"Why would you keep us away
from the polls so long
if it wasn't in fact
the route to power?"
♪♪
NARRATOR:
By the fall,
everyone was waiting to see
what Woodrow Wilson would do.
Expected to return to his
home state of New Jersey
to vote in the referendum there,
the president was inundated
with letters,
hundreds of them
from anti-suffrage women,
who begged him, as one put it,
to "leave us a little longer
"in the quiet of our homes
"to rear our children well
and care for our husbands
with undivided interest."
To such women's
profound disappointment,
Wilson announced on October 6
that he would vote yes.
♪♪
DUBOIS:
Wilson, because of his
reputation as a progressive,
can't publicly say
that he's against women
having political rights,
is basically
a States' rights man
when it comes to suffrage.
BEHN:
He does it as a private citizen
in a state-level vote
that doesn't have
any national implications,
and, in fact, is explicit,
speaking to his Southern base,
that he's not in favor
of a federal amendment.
But that is a huge win
in the minds
of many of the suffragists,
because now the president
has indicated
at least
he's personally pro-suffrage.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
On the eve
of the New York referendum,
opinion polls were running
almost even, for and against.
Harriot Stanton Blatch
was cautiously optimistic,
and predicted a win
by fewer than 10,000 votes.
Instead, the referendum lost,
resoundingly.
♪♪
A blow made more devastating
by similar routs
in New Jersey,
Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts.
WALTON:
These were four of the most
populous states in the country.
And there was a lot at stake,
and they lost every state.
♪♪
DUBOIS:
They failed.
The 1915 campaign was well-run,
well-funded,
but it could not break through.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
"I have never felt so vindictive
in all my life,"
Blatch raged to a reporter.
"Never again will I make an
appeal to an individual voter."
Just days later,
an embattled Anna Howard Shaw
announced she would not be
a candidate for re-election
to the National Association's
presidency,
and the country's pre-eminent
woman suffrage organization
began the search
for a new leader
and yet another
new path forward.
♪♪
KEYSSAR:
In 1915,
things looked very iffy.
The movement was at something
of a crossroads.
It had garnered
a great deal of support.
Its social base was broader
than it ever had been.
But it still faced
a lot of opposition.
♪♪
Figuring out what to do
Should they proceed
at the state level,
should they go
for a federal amendment
Was a very live issue,
and it was not obvious
that either path
was going to work.
WEISS:
We don't want,
it seems, everyone participating
in our democracy.
♪♪
And that becomes
one of the great themes
for the women fighting
for women's suffrage.
♪♪
Because how can you be
a democracy
if half of the nation
can't vote?
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪