- Generation yet unborn.
And they take that
responsibility very seriously.
- And, in a sense, the one
that is not chosen by a woman
has accountability, then,
to all the women.
- To all the women, yes.
- That as a--
- And to me. (laughing)
- And to you. (laughs)
And one of the things that
is, boy, for a white woman,
it's a little hard to
get my mind around this,
amazing as it was for the suffragists,
when they saw, imperfectly.
You know these are women who
have no right to their bodies.
They had no right to their children.
A husband could will away an unborn child,
and that child would be
given to its rightful owner
when the child was born.
Had no right to your own property.
Anything that you earned
became your husband's.
Women were considered dead in
the law, once they married,
had no legal existence.
So, living in that kind of a world,
husbands had the right
to rape their wives.
Marital rape wasn't
outlawed until the 1970s,
with the second wave of feminism.
And there are still some states in which,
under some conditions, men have the right
to rape their wives.
Husbands had the right to beat their wives
as long as they did it without
inflicting permanent damage.
Now, think about you're a woman,
a white woman at that time,
and you meet up with someone like Betty,
one of her ancestors,
and you are gonna have
your mind blown, you know.
You are gonna see a
world that you were told
was not possible.
Religiously, you are told that you are
to be under the authority of men.
Biologically, you're told
that you're the clinging vine
to the mighty oak.
Well, you meet some mighty oaks,
and you launch a women's rights movement.
And my thought is,
and I don't expect anybody to
accept anything that I say,
but if you will look at
the book, the anthology,
it begins with the suffragists
Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
Matilda Joslyn Gage, Alice Fletcher,
as they are inspired by native women.
One quick story, Alice Fletcher,
at the International
Council of Women in 1888,
this is the first time that women gather
on United States' soil to
talk about their rights,
women from all over the western world.
They listen to Alice Fletcher
talking about her interaction
with native women.
And she tells a story.
One of the stories that she tells is,
now sitting with a group of native women,
these were Omaha women in the Midwest.
And one of the women gave away a horse.
And I, without thinking
said, hadn't you better check
with your husband?
And she said, the merriment
with which my words were met.
(laughing) You know, it's kind of like,
what planet did this woman come from.
(audience laughing)
You know, they're just
laughing their heads off.
And then she goes on to say,
that the women that she's
talked to, and the men.
And one of the men that
she cites is Sitting Bull.
I was able to figure out
that's who she was talking to.
And Sitting Bull said to
Alice Fletcher the suffragist,
he was worried that when his
women, the women, native women,
came under United States' law,
they would suffer even more than the men
because they would lose
their rights as Indians,
but they would lose
their position as women.
They knew what was going on.
- Okay, I'm gonna take a quick moment.
Sharon is here; come on up Sharon.
We'll swap out.
It's my pleasure to introduce
my colleague, Sharon Nelson,
who is the founder and CEO of CREW,
Civically Re-Engaged Women,
who we are partnering on.
And to keep the cadence, I'm
just gonna turn it right over,
back to the panel.
So, thank you.
- Thank you Dean Peterson.
I apologize, and let's go on.
Julie, I know that
you've done amazing work
in adding voice to the
women's rights movement
and championing things like equal pay,
and all of these things.
What do you think, when
you read Sally's book,
and you really have a past connection
to why things are staying the same?
What are your thoughts on that?
- Well, it's very complicated.
So, my work is primarily
as a legal scholar,
rather than as an activist.
And I've been interested in how
women in constitution making
which is both transgenerational
and transnational.
And it's transgenerational
in that the 19th Amendment
to the US Constitution,
which prohibited the denial or abridgment
of the right to vote on account of sex,
is really ratified in 1920.
And many of the suffragists that take up
most of Sally's book, actually,
began the movement around
the time, as abolitionists,
around the time of even
before the Civil War.
So many of the suffragists did not live,
like Susan B. Anthony did not live
to see the 19th Amendment ratified.
But, at the same time,
these writings give meaning
to what we understand the
19th Amendment to be about.
And what's so interesting
is that some of the things
that Sally began to mention
in this conversation
about women's lack of legal status
before the 19th Amendment.
Although, it's interesting,
as a legal matter,
it's not the 19th
Amendment that changes it,
but changes in both judicial
interpretation of existing law,
and legislative change that happens
even before the 19th Amendment
is actually passed and ratified.
And I'm talking about all of the ways
in which women actually had
no independent legal status,
independent of their husbands,
if they were married.
So, if they worked.
Often they would be discriminated against,
and not able to work.
But even if they were able to work,
the husband would own their earnings.
And women did not have equal guardianship
over their own children.
And so, in many other respects,
women really had no legal status
independently of their husbands.
And they certainly didn't
have the right to vote.
And so, the struggle that we often group
with the Suffrage Movement,
dating to the 19th century,
is actually not really a struggle
that's just about the vote.
The vote becomes a symbolic entry point
for everything else that's
wrong with women's subordination
and women's lack of legal status,
before we get to the 19th Amendment.
And what's very interesting
is that the 19th Amendment
is an amendment that really
only refers to voting rights.
It does not refer to equal
rights as a general matter.
And so much of my work actually focuses
on the struggle for equal rights,
which is born out of the 19th Amendment.
Because it's right
after the 19th Amendment
is ratified in 1920.
And there are a lot of
fights involving litigation
as to whether or not the 19th Amendment
is actually a valid amendment.
And there's a bunch of interesting
cases in the early 1920s
about that before the Supreme Court.
But, right after the 19th
Amendment is ratified,
and then women have the vote.
Part of the reason women
wanted the right to vote
was not simply to be able to vote,
but to be able to have a
voice in changing the laws
that gave them no legal status.
And so, once the 19th
Amendment is ratified,
Alice Paul, who is
probably the most active
and significant suffragist
by the time the 19th
Amendment is ratified,
introduces the Equal Rights Amendment
to the US Constitution in 1923.
And the Equal Rights
Amendment was designed
to remove all remaining barriers
to women's equality of rights as citizens.
Which was to say, anytime that
the law makes a distinction
or treats men and women differently,
the Equal Rights Amendment,
which was supposed to be the
twin of the 19th Amendment,
the Equal Rights Amendment
was meant to fully guarantee
women's equal citizenship.
And what happens with the
Equal Rights Amendment,
and just getting us to today,
is that there are fights
about, and not fights
just between the
anti-suffragists and suffragists,
the Suffrage Movement
actually splits in the 1920s
over the Equal Rights Amendment.
Because, prior to this time,
there had been laws that
actually protected women
in the workplace.
So there were laws that protected women
from certain dangerous jobs.
There were laws that
were maximum hour jobs,
recognizing women's role in reproduction.
And many social reformers believed
that we needed to have
those laws to protect women.
But the Equal Rights Amendment
was widely understood,
and certainly by Alice Paul,
the most significant person
in the suffrage movement,
up until this time.
It's understood that
you can't protect women
because they're women or
because they're mothers,
consistent with the vision of sex equality
that's advanced in the ERA.
And this is a struggle
that continues to today,
when the ERA was finally
adopted by Congress in 1972.
It didn't get ratified by the
requisite number of states.
It came three states short
because Phyllis Schlafly
and other women on the right
claimed that if you had
equal rights for women,
it would actually be bad for women,
it would take away all these protections
that wives and mothers needed.
And this--
- Let me just sort of jump in,
I'm sorry, I don't mean to cut you off,
but there's some very good
points that you brought up
and I don't want us to loses
that flavor as we go along.
And also to incorporate
Dr. Wagner into this thing.
When Alice Paul, in 1923,
in front of that Presbyterian church
and she had this epiphany of an idea,
I wonder what Matilda Joslyn
Gage felt about this stuff.
And I wanna turn it over to Sally
to just sort of talk a little bit
about where suffrage meets ERA,
meets all the cacophony
of voices in the movement.
- Well, what Matilda Joslyn
Gage thought about it,
we'd probably have to decide
what happens in the afterlife.
(laughs)
But we could look at what
she said during the time.
In 1862, she was asked to give
the flag presentation speech
to send the boys from
Fayetteville off to war.
And she said there will
be no permanent peace
until there is absolute
equality for every group,
women and men, blacks and whites,
native born and immigrant, rich and poor.
And sometimes I speculate
about whether the Civil War has ended,
given that definition.
But I want to speak for
a minute to Julie's,
I feel like I'm in between two things
that are very, very connected.
Because I just read a summary,
thank you Julie for that
brilliant paper that you've done
looking at that difference
between the equality suffragists
and the social suffragists,
and the need to implement parenthood
into an equal rights thinking.
And I think that that, you know,
when we think just in terms of equality,
we miss the knowledge that we could learn
from native women.
But I wonder if you might
say just a little bit more
about how can that be,
that looking at parenthood?
Other countries, as you
write in your paper, do it.
And how can that be incorporated,
which you do so well in your paper.
- Well, I always say that
we're women citizens,
or we're women included in the
term citizen at the founding,
when the US Constitution was adopted,
where they included in the term citizen,
after the Civil War, when
the Equal Protection Clause,
the 14th Amendment was adopted.
And the Supreme Court,
after the Civil War,
in Minor versus Happersett says, yes,
women actually are citizens,
but voting is not a
privilege of citizenship.
So that's how the law kind of goes.
But I actually think the
exclusion of women from the vote
and other public rights at the founding
is not an accident.
You can think it's an accident.
I mean, legend has it that Abigail Adams
said to her husband,
don't forget the ladies.
And, oh, did they forget the ladies
when they wrote the Constitution?
And they did not actually
forget the ladies.
The exclusion of women from rights
is actually quite deliberate.
And I think the deliberate,
but we shouldn't regard
the deliberate nature
of excluding women as an act of hatred.
It's actually the framework
that existed at the time
for raising the next generation.
There's a legal status,
which is the family.
The family involves a
married couple with children.
And only one person in that married couple
can represent the family
in the public sphere,
have voting rights,
because the other person
is going to be very busy
raising the children and keeping the home.
And this is the legal,
our legal institutions,
including the Constitution,
are built on the assumption
that that's how a nation gets reproduced.
Somebody has to raise the children.
And if that person is too,
is in Congress voting.
And these are the debates
that are actually going on,
if you look at the history
of the 19th Amendment,
around the time of ratification.
So, I think it's not an accident
that women are left out.
They're left out because
this was the arrangement
for how a nation is reproduced over time.
And a Constitution is a document
that's supposed to make
sure that a polity survives
beyond the people who draft it initially.
Our institutions have been
around longer than we have,
and will continue to
be around after we die.
And so, if you think of it that way,
then, of course, once you
shift from inequality,
exclusion of women, to inclusion of women,
and not just inclusion, but full equality,
it does mean that full equality
has to have a new plan.
How are people going to get raised?
Because, if you're no
longer assuming that women
with subordinate status
are going to stay home
and raise the children,
you have to have, not just full equality,
that's what the law says,
but you actually have to start
building your institutions
around the assumption that
everybody who participates
in the public sphere is equal,
and is equal, not only
in the public sphere,
but also at home.
So, my understanding of what
it means to have equal rights,
or even suffrage, based on debates
that took place at the time,
is that you can't just have
the equal right to vote.
You actually have to have
a whole set of institutions
that support equal parenting
and a 21st century understanding
of how a new generation
of citizens gets raised.
- You have to understand, too,
that America, compared to
the contemporary countries,
is a fairly young country.
We're a nation of immigrants.
And everybody that founded
this country, in a way,
was running away from something
that they had at home.
- We're a young country,
but we have the oldest
Constitution (laughs)
- Right, right.
But my point is, about the
whole circle of life thing
coming through.
- Actually, no, you're not
the longest living democracy.
- Well, I mean the Constitution,
the written document.
- Constitution, right.
- Setting out the political institution.
- So, on the shores of Onondaga Lake,
which is only about four and
a half hours north of here,
was the birthplace of democracy.
It's where they brought our
five warring nations at the time
together under a great law of peace,
giving us all responsibilities.
Responsibilities to Mother Earth,
and the responsibilities of men,
the responsibilities of women.
And that's the balance, the natural world,
male, female; there's a balance there.
So, I would say, and I
understand what you're saying,
but what I'm saying is that
democracy didn't even happen
in the United States until
everybody got the right to vote.
Until then, until then it was (laughs).
So it hasn't been that long.
And it was Obama, I think,
just a couple of, was it 2012?
He said, on the floor of the UN,
that the US was the
longest living democracy.
And my uncle said, not so fast.
He's 89 today and he said
not until everyone was given
that equal right.
I think it's so important
to think about where
it went off the rails.
It went off the rails because
women weren't included
from the beginning,
and they left out the
voice of Mother Nature.
And we always say, my aunt,
Tonya Gonnella Frichner,
who's no longer with us, and
my aunt, Nan, her sister,
is here with us today.
She would always say,
Mother Earth is a relative,
not a resource.
And although it seems that
those things are separate,
they're not; they're very much connected.
And I think that that's
where the problems lie.
- Well, our country, as we all know,
is famous for borrowing
things, conveniently.
So, when we came, my point of
being a nation of immigrants,
when we came and we found
the indigenous people here,
we learned from the indigenous people.
And there are things that
are omitted in history,
which, really, Dr. Wagner
just brilliantly brings out
in her melding of the voices
in the women's suffrage movement.
I urge everybody, it's an incredible read,
to check it out when you have a chance.
And because Dr. Wagner has
told the truth in so many ways.
This is a very controversial
thing that we're talking about
that we are setting up here.
Because what happens,
and everybody's seen the
New York Times' articles,
and everybody has seen the
various people chiming in,
oh, suffrage had no space for black women,
there was no mention of that.
There hasn't been as much clamor
about Native American women.
But, really, I was delighted and excited
about moderating this thing,
because we do have a
chance at the truth here.
And I would love for Dr.
Wagner to just sort of give us
a little bit of a feeling of that.
- You know, if I could,
if you'd allow me to,
I think if we look at different
phases of the movement
that we can get a clearer
sense of what happened.
So I think if we think,
maybe, of a timeline,
and it's thousand years
here, maybe even further.
And then we come to white settlers.
And, in the Colonial Period,
the definition of voting,
and if you could help me with this, Julie,
was really based on property
and the ownership of property.
And so, in some cases, in the colonies,
when women owned property, they voted.
- Well, we had that in New York,
with the Property Act of 1848,
for the married women.
- Yes, that was in New York.
Actually, the earliest
one was in Mississippi,
and it was based on native law.
A native woman took a case to court
where she was demanding her property.
And Mississippi said,
based on I think it would
have been Choctaw law,
that married women could
own their own property.
And so they established
that in Mississippi.
So there were women that were voting.
And the suffragists, some of them said,
we're not asking for a new right,
we're asking for the
restitution of a right
that our foremothers had.
So, Colonial Period, and
they know this is going on.
Then we come to the
1830s and the formation
of the female anti-slavery societies.
The very first one was
African-American women
forming in Salem, Massachusetts.
And, by 1837, they formed
a national organization.
It is African-American and
white women working together.
And not only are they working
for an end to slavery.
This blows my mind.
This is a time period
when I always assumed
that women couldn't talk about
anything that was unseemly,
related to sex.
They're calling out the institutional rape
of enslaved women.
The female anti-slavery societies
in the 1830s are doing this.
Now this is where the women are learning,
African-American and white,
are learning to organize.
They're learning political strategies.
They're developing their political voice
in these anti-slavery movements.
1848 is typically,
okay, I'm gonna commit
another heresy here,
I hope I commit at least 10 today.
(audience and panel members laughing)
Count them please, if you would (laughs).
One of them is 1848 in Seneca Falls.
That's, ta-da, the moment
that we say we began.
- Go ahead and do it.
- Well, maybe we should
put it back to 1837.
But I also, 1848 was a local convention.
And I am waiting for the
moment when a fourth grader,
who's doing her women's
history project discovers,
going through her local papers,
that, wow, there was a women's
rights meeting here in 1846.
These historical moments are ones
that we can keep pushing back.
But we do know that by 1850,
the first national women's
right convention was held.
The 1850s are a time
period in which every,
almost every single issue
that we're still dealing
with today was raised.
Equal pay for equal work was just a given
as something that had
to be won in the 1850s,
and even before in some cases.
A woman's right to her own body
was an issue that was raised then.
It was violence against women.
It just, they, boom,
come out of the chute,
and they're raising all of the issues.
1860 the war starts and women say,
well, the other thing that's going on
during this time period
is that the American Equal
Rights Society is formed.
And, every woman's rights convention,
they've timed them to
meet at the same time
that the American Anti-Slavery
Convention is meeting.
And you scratch a suffragist
and you find an abolitionist.
You scratch an abolitionist
and you find a suffragist.
And I'm talkin'
African-American women and men,
white women and men.
And really, their work
is almost inseparable.
They're both doing the same thing.
1862, the war starts,
and the women say, we're
going to suspend our work,
and we're going to support the war effort,
but not under the conditions
that Lincoln is saying.
Lincoln, at this point,
is saying that the war is being fought
to preserve the Union.
They gather 400,000 signatures.
The largest number of signatures
that has ever been gathered
on United States' soil to this point,
and they say, we will only
support this war effort
as long as it is being
fought to end slavery.
The end of the war, the
American Equal Rights Society
and the Women's Rights
meetings that have begun again,
they come together,
and they form the American
Equal Rights Society.
Anti-slavery, women's
rights, working together
with a common goal, a single
goal: universal suffrage.
- Quick question, is that
where the parenthesis
in the Emancipation Proclamation says,
"in warring states," comes from?
Because of that technicality,
with Lincoln and the
freeing of the slaves?
Because it was really a
document for the North,
because, like you say,
he's preserving the Union.
But when you look, it
says "in warring states,
"that they are thenceforth
and forever free."
"In warring states."
So, if you're not a warring
state and you had a slave,
you were good.
- You could probably speak to that better.
But it is, it limits it to
where it's unenforceable.
- Exactly.
But these are the loopholes
that have carried through
in the law that.
- That's a good point.
- We really sort of,
it's like having the walls of prison,
and you get out of prison.
But you depend on those
walls after a while
to sort of preserve you.
But, I wanna come back to the whole point
that you were making about
the race and class system.
Because I think that
I wanna take advantage
of the diversity we have
here, and also in the room.
And I know that Brian is
gonna give me a signal
when it's time to do some audience Q&A,
so we don't get too
far ahead of ourselves.
But, anyway, if we can just
sort of bridge in this timeline
with the whole thing,
because the New York Times has
been specifically vehement,
there are several writers
about the loss of the voice
of the black women, in this
whole suffrage movement.
Even to the point of saying
there're 22 significant suffragists,
and of which seven were African-American.
Nameless and faceless,
still, in the New York Times,
because they did not
enumerate these seven women.
- Can I call out some of them?
- Please do.
- And then I also
would really like to
talk about what happens.
Here's this incredible coalition
between African-Americans and whites,
and what happens to it.
But I'm just gonna call out a few names.
The entire Purvis family,
the Forten family,
the Rollin sisters in South Carolina
who are the political operatives.
These are families of people.
Charles and Sarah Remond.
Well, of course, Frederick
Douglas, Harriet Tubman,
Sojourner Truth, you know,
we just go on and on and on.
But the unsung.
Here's one: Mary Ann Shadd
Cary and her sister Amelia.
Mary Ann Shadd Cary was the
first African-American woman
to publish a weekly newspaper
in the North American hemisphere.
She goes on to, when the war starts,
she comes back from Canada,
where she's publishing her newspaper.
She comes back and becomes
a military recruiter,
recruiting African-American soldiers.
She goes on to law school.
She becomes an attorney.
And she is a strong operative
in the National Women's
suffrage Association.
One single woman.
We could spend a day or two
talking about it.
- Why does history
forget these people?
I mean that's very
significant, what you said.
And yet, I'm sure, everybody
in this room has been to school
and we've never heard of this woman.
- Well, this is the
painful part of the story.
1890, there are two different
women's rights organizations
that form, in 1869.
1870s, they're working separately.
American works for the
vote, state by state.
Well, think about the implication of this.
This is a time when the southern states
are working to stop
African-American men from voting.
If I say, please give
me the right to vote,
doesn't that also say
you can take the vote
away from black men.
Because when the nation's
trying to figure out
who gets to decide who votes?
Is it the states or the feds?
This plays into states'
rights, the American work.
National says, nope, we're
going for a Federal amendment.
1890 the two groups merge.
It is a messy, dirty, political move.
I dish the dirt in my book.
(panel laughing)
And what happens after 1890,
and this is the place of
accountability that we must take
before we can celebrate 2020.
And that is that the National American
Women's Suffrage Association
practices racism as policy.
They say give women the right to vote
because white women outnumber
Negroes and immigrants.
And women's suffrage is a way to maintain
white, native-born, supremacy.
They use that language, white supremacy.
And that becomes policy.
They also allow the state auxiliaries,
they're practicing state by
state, give women the vote.
And they allow their state
societies, who have autonomy,
to work for the vote for white women only,
some of them do.
They allow them to segregate,
which some of them do.
And they allow them to
work for Jim Crow laws.
Here's the painful admission:
part of the reason the
Jim Crow laws had strength
was because suffragists fought for them.
- And it's important to mention,
with the National Women's
Suffrage Association,
this was a direct link back
to Elizabeth Cady Stanton
and Susan B. Anthony,
as the founders of that group.
- Well, actually, the National
American, when it merges,
really takes on the American's,
their constitution, their
state's rights focus,
all of that is really.
And the interesting thing is,
that while Anthony and
Stanton are absolutely racist
in their statements
during that 13th, 14th,
15th Amendment period.
Guess where the African-Americans go.
Do they go to the American?
Or do they go to the National?
They go with Stanton and Anthony.
- And nothing changed
over the course of the 200 years since.
You know, it's very interesting,
in the racial and economic,
and so forth, dynamic,
because it's a caste and class system.
- Well, I think this raises
some very interesting questions
about how we should remember the legacy
of the 19th Amendment.
Because, on the one had, you
could read in Sally's book,
some of the amazing and
ahead-of-their-time ways of thinking
that you see in the suffragists
of the 19th century.
But really, what enables the
19th Amendment to be ratified.
And just a quick primer on
Constitutional Amendments
of the United States,
we have, notoriously,
one of the most difficult
constitutions to amend
under Article V.
You need two-thirds of
both houses of Congress,
and then three-quarters
of all the states legislatures to ratify.
That's how hard it is to get an Amendment.
And I believe the last time
we amended the Constitution
was before I was old enough to vote,
and I'm in my 40s (laughs).
So, because it's so notoriously hard,
what it means is that
you'll only get an amendment
when there's sufficient consensus
by people who have influence
and people who vote.
And what it means is
that the 19th Amendment,
part of its success,
is a success brought to you by politics
that we might actually think
of today, looking back,
as being against the original
principles of the suffragists.
But the reality of this
country is that things
that are politically successful
tend to come with a
politics shared with people
with whom we might disagree.
But we have to make coalitions with people
with whom we vehemently disagree,
sometimes people who hold
pretty offensive views,
in order to actually get an amendment,
or in order to get something
that actually succeeds politically.
And that's something I
think that's very difficult
about American politics and
about the Constitutional change
in this country.
- You know, the one thing
that I wonder about with that, though,
is that there's a way in which historians
have looked at an inevitability to.
You know, had to get the South.
Had to play to racism to get it.
But, I wonder if we might
think about that question differently.
What if they had chosen different allies?
What if they had chosen to support
the rights of
African-American men to vote?
What if, instead of
fighting against immigrants,
they had fought for immigrant rights,
and courted the immigrant men
rather than alienating them?
By the time the suffrage
amendment was ratified,
the Klu Klux Klan endorsed it.
By the time it was ratified,
I'm gonna be honest with you,
I don't know if I would've supported it.
Because, they had brought in
the Women's Christian Temperance Union,
that wanted to put God
in the Constitution,
prayer in the public schools.
- So I'm actually writing
about the Women's Christian
Temperance Union, right now.
- Good.
- And I think this is actually very,
that's been written out of
suffrage history, in a way.
And I think, if you actually
look closely at the documents,
Francis Willard was actually
very interesting figure.
And there are ways in which
they were actually trying
to draw in black women, in the South.
And the Temperance
Movement is actually one
that is advocating for changes
in married women's property laws,
the liberation of women in
the context of sexual assault,
raising the age of consent
so that you could
actually prosecute people
who sleep with 12 year old girls.
So they're advocating for
a lot of the same things
that the early suffragists
are advocating for
in the late 19th century.
But there's also very complicated
anti-immigrant and racist politics
that developed later.
- In the church, you know.
- Right, I'm not--
- The policy
of put God in the Constitution
and Jesus Christ as the
head of the government.
- They never actually advocated that
as a matter of--
- Yes they did.
- Well, I was also gonna say,
did we qualify what the
Temperance Movement was?
Did we explain that?
'Cause I don't think everybody
might be familiar with it.
That's another class that was
missed in the history lessons.
- So, the Women's
Christian Temperance Union
is formed in 1873, in a
moment where there're crusades
all around the country.
And what's really interesting,
and then they have a very
charismatic president,
Francis Willard, who takes over in 1879.
- Matilda Joslyn Gage called her
the most dangerous woman in America.
When the WCTU took the policy
of placing God in the Constitution,
destroying the wall of
separation of church and state.
- But they also very
significantly advocated
for home protection.
Which is, they said, women needed the vote
in order to protect their
own status within the home.
So they were actually
advocating for things
like women's equal guardianship
over their children,
advocating for raising
the age of consent to sex,
advocating for women's right
to own their own earnings.
These were all things that they thought.
So it wasn't just we need the
vote just to have the vote,
but we need to change all the laws
that make it, actually, a myth.
It was often said,
it was said in the Supreme Court,
concurring opinion by a Justice
in a Supreme Court decision
upholding the exclusion of
women from the legal profession.
Supreme Court Justice says
that it's because women,
their divine province is the home.
And, if you think about
what the legal reality
of women in the 19th century,
women actually did not have
dominion over the home.
And the Christian Temperance Union thought
that by focusing on alcohol
regulation, prohibiting alcohol,
and actually addressing the
problem of drunk husbands
either committing domestic violence
or drinking away the family wage,
thereby making it
necessary for women to work
and own their own earnings,
that was the way in which they
advocated for prohibition.
There were parts of the
Christian Temperance Union,
of course, that were
more interested in things
that you're calling
dangerous, and rightfully so.
But so much of the movement
in the 19th century
was actually focused on
positions that we would, today,
would describe as feminist.
And that's a legacy of prohibition,
which I think has been somewhat
written out of the history.
But many historians, there's
a rich academic literature
by historians in the
mid to late 20th century
that reconstruct that history.
- One of the problems that it raised
was that it really brought
the anti-suffrage movement
into its full strength
because the liquor industry
brought in tremendous amounts of money.
- That's why the 18th Amendment,
it is prohibition.
- They get temperance before--
- I think that the origin
of all of this, though,
is the doctrine of discovery.
And that's the beginning
of the bigger problem.
That's what it's brought,
all of this, to today.
When they came here, Europeans came here,
under the guise of the
doctrine of discovery,
that they were gonna subdue, vanquish,
any non-Christian people.
That included their women, right?
I mean, whether we were
Christian or not Christian.
They owned them.
There was an ownership in that.
And that's what we're
talking, that's where,
so if we wanna fix it,
you almost have to go all the way back,
to look at the very beginning.
How did that start and
how did we get this far?
- I think we're built, America's built,
on a Judaeo-Christian society,
and Judaeo-Christian tradition.
And I think, if we look
all the way back to 1066
with William the Conqueror,
when he put the Magna Carta together
and they put all of these rules,
and the states shall do this,
and the citizen shall
do that, and so forth,
all of these things are
really amazing and wonderful
because there is no
originality in this stuff.
All of our laws, it all ebbs and flows.
So somewhere, the same way our
Declaration of Independence
and our Constitution ebbed and
flowed from indigenous law.
So, I would love for
Betty to just enlighten us
for a few minutes on that point.
- Absolutely, I think it's so important.
You brought up Constitutional law.
It wasn't written; we
were an oral tradition.
That doesn't make it any less substantial.
Our founders, when our Great
Law of Peace came to us,
we have laws and instructions
of behavior and personal
conduct, that follow us through.
And something that you just said too,
that it was built on, what did you say?
- Judaeo Christian.
- Judaeo-Christian values.
It was, actually it's born
out of pure dominance,
this doctrine of domination,
it's born out of racism.
And the term racism, you can look it up,
it really means, it's like
the absence of spirituality.
It makes sense when you say it that way.
But when you really look at it,
and you break it down to that point,
it was about how to control
and dominate to their favor.
And all the way through, up until now.
And I think that's the difference.
You know, when you leave
out everybody's voice,
you can dominate, you can control,
you can determine what
somebody else is gonna do.
But that's what brought us to this place.
So this administration right now
is really, it's kind of,
it was inevitable,
the administration that we have now.
The Trump administration was inevitable.
If you're beginning from
a doctrine of discovery,
he's just an inevitable product of that.
- Can you say what the
doctrine of discovery is?
- Oh sure.
- I don't think
everybody knows.
- So that was a papal bull
given by St. Nicholas.
And it basically gave the
right to Christian countries
to take over, if they
were to come upon lands
that were considered
uninhabited by Christians,
then they were what's called terra nullus,
meaning void or empty lands.
We had rich, cultured,
we don't call them religions;
this is a way of life.
I don't go to church every Sunday.
It's something that I
practice every single day.
Which is completely different.
It's completely intertwined,
and it's deeply rooted in Mother Earth.
And so, this papal bull
gave them the right,
Europe, France, to come here,
and say we're gonna claim
this land for our own.
And this happened even on my nation.
So the French Jesuits
came with a proclamation
that they were gonna own
600 square miles of land.
Can you imagine the audacity?
I'm just gonna roll up
to the Queen of England,
or to France, and hand over,
and say, no, I own all of this area.
And they were gonna do it regardless.
And that meant killing,
raping, burning villages.
And they know that the heart
of our community is our women,
because we have such a strong presence.
And that if you really destroy the women,
you're gonna destroy that community.
And that's what happened
throughout North America,
and South America, Central America,
Australia, New Zealand.
I mean, all of these countries,
it's all based on that one doctrine.
And to get the Catholic
church to repudiate it
because you don't want
it to just rescind it,
you want it repudiated because
to repudiate it would mean
that they, that has legal implications.
- And that still has effect today.
- It still has effect today.
It's still used, as recently
as 2005 in the United States,
and 2011 in Canada.
And I can't even imagine,
my sister from Australia's
not here right now,
but I'm sure she could tell you
how it affects her communities as well.
So, I'm fortunate.
I always say that I'm
grateful and fortunate
for where I come from.
- Well, you know Betty,
the wonderful thing about
what you just shared with us,
this is the notion of power.
And you see, when you have people,
and it's broken down by
gender, by race, by class,
you stumble on something that
people who've never had power
could never access.
So therefor they never
had a voice or a say-so
because, frankly, they were like cattle.
They were chattel.
And a long time ago, we
all learned in school
about white man's burden.
You know they had to come
in and they had to teach
the indigenous people
because, you know, about God and religion.
Because this was the
savior method and mechanism
by which to control.
The slaves were never taught to read
because that, again, is power.
So, once you really understand,
racism and other things we
can't control were constants.
So it doesn't make sense
to cry and weep about stuff
that you have no control over.
Because, by virtue of our
DNA all being different,
we look different, we are different,
we have different habits and attitudes.
It's never going to be one
Kumbaya chorus, as they say.
But, what we need to do
is learn how to respect,
and tolerate, and
celebrate our differences.
Because, here is another element of power
that, if we really could figure it out,
we might have a new playbook.
And that's where I would really like
to sum up our discussion.
I wanna thank Dr. Rose
Wagner for this amazing book,
The Women's Suffrage Movement,
which you will all be able
to get your own glance at.
And it was, really, a wonderful read
of the many different who's asking
and who's telling stories.
So, I want to thank her for this amazing,
this is a life work, really,
that's summed up on these pages.
And I wanna thank her
for being with us today.
I wanna thank Betty for sharing with us
all the wonderful stories
and the indigenous way.
And I wanna thank Julie for
bringing the Constitution
to the party.
(panel members laughing)
So on that note, I'd like
to turn to the audience
and see if we have any
questions that we can field.
That Brian will just
take the mic and just see
who has a question.
Gentlemen, right here?
- [Man In White Shirt] My question was,
you mentioned, Julie, something
about the 19th Amendment
that there was some
challenge to its legality.
Could you explain that or
talk a little about that?
- So, there was some litigation in around,
in around 1920.
And it was argued that the 19th Amendment
was not a valid amendment because
you couldn't actually have
a federal amendment
that would change voting
which really belonged to the states.
And it wasn't really based
on any textual provision.
So, in modern constitutional law parlance,
I think this was a way,
the challengers would say,
this was an unconstitutional,
constitutional amendment,
if that concept makes any sense.
There are some constitutions today,
that have certain un-amendable provisions.
So, the German Basic Law
says that the provision
guaranteeing the protection of
human dignity is un-amendable
which means, if you wanted to say
there's no longer human dignity,
you'd have to have a revolution
and write a new constitution
because you can't amend it
within the terms of that constitution.
So there was an argument that was made,
and that was not successful, in 1920,
that, if you try to give
a federal right to vote,
'cause remember, back in those days,
they really thought about states
as being the source of citizenship.
Until you had the 14th
Amendment after the Civil War,
you didn't have an idea of federal,
the idea that the federal government
could give any one state citizenship.
And so, similarly here, it's being argued
that if a federal constitutional provision
says that you can't deny the right to vote
on account of sex,
that that actually violates something
that we fundamentally understand
to belong to the states.
And because the federal system,
and we also have a
constitutional provision
that preserves powers not
mentioned in the constitution
to the states, the 10th Amendment,
that having a federal amendment
that suddenly gives
women the right to vote
is just an unconstitutional,
constitutional amendment.
It's an argument that
fails, but is attempted.
- The young lady right here/
- [Woman In Black] Oh, you had mentioned
we need a new playbook.
Well, that was pretty much
here when Europeans came
to this country.
And it's not so much a playbook
as it is a cultural
reorientation to the Earth.
And when people arrived,
the Haudenosaunee actually convened
with the founding fathers
of this country to create
a new form of democracy.
And we are from Central New York.
I grew up two miles north
of the Onondaga nation,
I am a Mohawk citizen at Akwesasne.
And my husband directed a repurposing
of the Jesuit fort that was
at Onondaga's sacred lake.
And this is where the
Confederacy was formed,
the place, the sacred place,
where these five nations came together.
And we've worked
diligently to pull together
all the educational
institutions in the area
to tell this story.
And we arrived to the name for this place,
we call it Skanonh, the
Great Law of Peace Center.
And the very first thing you learn
when you come into the center
is what skanonh (speaks in
foreign language) means.
It means we are thankful that
you are well, and be at peace.
And for you to become peaceful,
you can only do that through
your proper relationship
with the natural world.
And that's why women were so
powerful at this encounter,
because they understood that
proper place that's in balance.
They distribute the clan.
They connect each child
that's born to the earth.
And it's not that we're
all different, racially.
That has really, nothing to do with it,
because as varied we are in race,
the earth is multifaceted.
So we have to listen to the
earth, it's ever changing,
moment by moment.
And what it provides us are
the gifts to sustain our lives
as human beings.
- Thank you for that.
Please give my regards to Chief Porter.
Th young lady in the back.
- [Audience Member] Yes, hello.
I just wanted to enlarge
a little bit about
what you said on the
doctrine of discovery.
I think the basic issue here would be
that we're talking about the church,
the church
ruling over,
somehow it gets itself involved in ruling
in this country.
And what Sally said about keeping God
out of the Constitution was
the most important thing.
You had said why didn't we learn
about such and such in history?
Well that is the most, unfortunately,
the people in charge,
say, of this country,
have left out of history the things
they don't want you to know.
And that's why we keep coming up
with all kind of discoveries.
And mostly can find them
in local newspapers,
and things like that.
It takes one or two generations
for events to be lost
from memory if they're
not coming down to us
in written form.
And one of the things that's,
most important thing that's,
in Sally's professional
life, is the unearthing
of the writings of a woman
named Matilda Joslyn Gage,
who was best friends with Susan B. Anthony
and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
And she said, and that's why
she disappeared from history,
that religion is the
greatest oppressor of women.
And I mean you see how it
crops up every so often
among a conservative people
in order to deprive
women of certain rights,
et cetera, et cetera.
So, it's very radical,
I mean a radical idea.
How are you gonna keep the church
out of our political business?
There you have it.
- But it's not necessarily
about keeping the church out of it.
It's about boundaries, frankly.
And I think that, as we
grow older as a nation,
working together as we
understand peoples and cultures,
and as we work on an inclusion
and an intersectional
mentality in how we do business
and how we set policies,
I think that it is important
that there's a place for the church.
I mean, the whole reason for
the Seneca Falls Convention,
one of the main ones,
was because the women in church
could not read a Bible passage.
All the reading was done by the men.
You look back in history,
and Dr. Wagner can give
you chapter and verse,
it seemed like the Society of Friends
were the most progressive, the Quakers,
because they allowed women
to read in the church,
or the worship setting, as you would say.
Because they didn't really have church
as the Christian society deems church.
So, I think that I'm glad for your point
about Matilda Joslyn Gage,
because organized religion
is something else.
But we don't wanna go
into that at this point.
I'd like more questions
about suffrage, if we can,
while we have Sally here.
Young lady over here.
- [Julie] Hi, I'm Julie Walsh.
Thanks so much.
I read Sisters in Spirit,
and wanted to ask a
little bit about that book
and the new book,
if a lot of that information
is in the new book?
If there's new information
about the Haudenosaunee
and the Onondaga women's influence
on the early suffragettes,
and if there was anything,
I wanted to ask you, what was
the most interesting story
that you have learned over the
years, this book or before,
about those early
suffragettes direct encounters
with the Onondaga?
- The book that you so kindly referenced,
Sisters in Spirit, the
Haudenosaunee Influence
on Women's Rights,
looks at the general picture of,
but it doesn't include
the original writings,
just snippets of.
This book begins with the writings
of Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
Matilda Joslyn Gage,
and Alice Fletcher,
about how, clearly, they're
influenced by native women.
So, it's the Haudenosaunee but it's also,
they're looking internationally
at indigenous women
and their influence.
And it's a pretty impressive scholarship
for the time, that they.
One tiny piece, if I
might just answer that.
Lucretia Mott, before she came to Waterloo
and she and five of her Quaker friends
and Elizabeth Cady Stanton
planned the Seneca Falls Convention,
she had been spending time,
I think about a month,
at Cattaraugus, which
is a Seneca community.
And she, in the one account
that I've been able to find,
the only written record of
that summer by Lucretia Mott,
was a letter that she
published in the Liberator,
the anti-slavery paper.
And it's in the book, and
it's three or four paragraphs
about the Haudenosaunees
spending time with the Seneca.
And it's this wonder at
how they lived their lives.
There's a small paragraph
about Seneca Falls and the Convention.
So I don't know if that's her.
She also spent time that summer
with the Freedom Community,
the fugitive slaves,
the Freedom Takers,
that had gone to Canada
where they could have freedom,
after the Fugitive Slave Act.
This actually was before,
but there already was a good community
that had gone to the
greater freedom in Canada.
So she writes a little bit about that.
But mostly it's about the Seneca.
- I just wanna clarify for some people,
because we heard at two
different points in the audience
about the Haudenosaunee,
and also from Betty before,
it's the same thing
as saying Iroquois Nation and Federation.
There're six tribes coming together
that consist of the Iroquois Nation.
- Yes, the word Iroquois
was a derogatory term
given to us.
But we're not Iroquois;
we're Haudenosaunee,
that's our own word for each other.
So if that helps to clarify it.
And I just wanna say that
women's rights are inherent,
as is Mother Earth's.
We have the right and
responsibility to protect her
and all living beings,
or we will cease to exist.
And then how can women's
rights, even within the US,
and I'm thinking of the US
and not the Haudenosaunee.
But how can they propel that forward?
