- So today, I want to talk
about the intersection of age
and power in US women's rights
arguments from 1870 to 1920.
I'm going to draw on
archival sources that
are in the Schlesinger Library
here at Radcliffe's, especially
those that look at the
antislavery and women's rights
activists Susan B. Anthony
and Harriet Tubman.
And then after my talk,
we're going to go over,
and we're going to see some
of this stuff in person.
So that's really
the highlight here.
OK, first I need
to explain what I
mean by the intersection of age
and power in American history.
There are many ways to look
at issues related to aging.
So here at the
Radcliffe Institute
this year, we have
scientists that
are looking at the
degeneration of human cells
or how childhood trauma
impacts health in later life.
We have poets and
filmmakers and sociologists
that are exploring the ways in
which memories get passed down
within generations and families.
And we have people looking
at how individual longevity
depends upon the sustainability
of our environment.
We also have-- and
I'm so lucky to say--
Robin Bernstein, Tunisia
Ford, and Evie Shockley
whose work on youth
and childhood and race
has so deeply influenced my own.
And I'm just thrilled
to be in conversation
with all these people.
That's not what I'm going
to talk to you about.
I'm going to talk about
old age and middle age
as political categories
in US history.
So Margaret Gullette,
who's also here today,
has shown that whatever
happens in our bodies,
we are in her words
aged by culture.
And she's asked us to
think in particular
about middle and old
age as key periods
where this happens
in ways that are
culturally defined but highly
variable and contingent.
Now this headline proclaims
Harriet Tubman the oldest
ex-slave.
She's not at all.
But the fact that people thought
she was and held a reception
for her as such is politically
and culturally significant,
and these are the things that I
want to draw your attention to.
So this souvenir from Anthony's
80th birthday celebration
juxtaposes two dated
portraits of her--
one a family
daguerreotype taken when
she was a 36-year-old
relatively marginalized reformer
and the second an official
portrait for her 80th birthday
when she had become the leader
of the national movement
and arguably one of the most
famous women in the world.
The souvenir draws attention to
both precise birthdays 36, 80,
and the long stage of life
in between, the middle years.
And these are two ways,
age and stage, in which
we are aged by culture.
Now can any of you tell me why
suffragists might have begun
with a portrait at age 36--
just after her 35th birthday?
President-- yes.
OK, so according to
the Constitution,
you have to be at least 35
years old to run for president.
In practice, Americans have
chosen men much older than men.
In 1900, a man under 45
had never held the office.
Now if I were you, I
would start googling this,
so I just did it for you.
The youngest man to
ever hold the office
was Roosevelt. He
was not elected.
He was elevated after
McKinley's assassination.
Kennedy is, in fact,
the youngest at 43.
Trump is our oldest ever at 70.
Reagan was 69.
Clinton, if she'd
been elected, would
have been 69 and Sanders 75.
The point I want to make here
is that our young presidents--
they're not really that young.
In what other context do we
talk about young people of 45.
And our old presidents
aren't really that old.
It's really an office
for middle-aged men,
and this was a problem for women
because, in the 19th century,
single women reported that
they became old maids at 30,
and married women often
wrote about feeling
pushed to the background of
their family circles by age 45.
So how is a woman to become
president or senator or even
city councilor?
In drawing attention to
Anthony's life after age 35,
suffragists challenged
Americans to imagine her
not just as the President of
the National American Women's
Suffrage Association,
but I think
as a credible candidate for
the presidency of the United
States.
So the historian
Alison Lange points out
that this profile pose was
new for women in the 1880s,
and that suffragists
turned to that
to model their leaders
after Roman states.
So this souvenir is drawing
on that visual convention
to imagine a very particular
passage through middle age.
So Anthony leaves the ornate
but rather confined frame
of a family portrait and grows
not just in age but in stature.
She looks back at
her former self
but not with a longing
for lost youth--
with pride in her
accomplishments over time.
As these two birthday
programs suggest,
suffragists modeled
Anthony's celebration
on those for George Washington.
They used the birthday to
insert a founding mother
into a national narrative
built around founding fathers
and to suggest
that even at a time
when most women could
not vote for president,
there was at least one
woman in the nation that
was qualified to be president.
By 1900, Anthony had become
not just an old woman
but a grand old woman, and
she was not the only one.
The archives of women's
suffrage are filled with efforts
to elevate mature women
as national leaders.
Suffragists built
organizations that
put middle aged women
in executive power
and gave them a public voice.
They theorize the significance
of the age in their writings
and speeches, and
they circulated
images of older women
and described these women
as beautiful and charismatic.
Now suffrage is just one
angle on age and power
in American history, and what
I'm hoping with this work
is that it encourages you
to think about others.
And I'm very curious in the
questions where you were
thinking of age popping up.
But what I'm going
to do today is
I'm going to focus very
narrowly on public celebrations
for Susan B. Anthony and Harriet
Tubman using both as case
studies that I think show
why suffragists focused
on these connections
between age and power
and also how they
disagreed with each other
about what women's
leadership should be
and what ends it should be used.
So I want to start right after
the Civil War when supporters
of Anthony and Tubman worked
to sustain them in middle life
and compared both of
them to Army generals.
So Tubman was already famous
as the Moses of her race
for leading enslaved people to
freedom during the Civil War.
She worked as a spy
and helped pilot ships
on the Combahee River
where Union troops
destroyed Confederate
supplies and liberated
more than 800 enslaved people.
Many Union soldiers referred
to her as General Tubman.
Yet because she had
not formally enlisted,
the US government did
not pay her a salary,
nor did she receive a
pension for her disability.
The government did pay pensions
to both white and black Union
soldiers who had been
injured in the line of duty,
but Tubman's
injuries had occurred
before the war when she
was an enslaved child
and right after when she
was coming home on a train
and a white conductor violently
threw her from the railroad.
These were not arenas
that the US government
recognized as battlefields.
Tubman's allies,
black and white,
were outraged that
she return to her home
in Auburn, New York with
no official recognition.
They took up a subscription
to fund a biography
and organized a public fair at
which the book and other items
could be sold for her benefit.
Now these were
tried and true ways
for supporting formerly
enslaved people.
But what I think is
new here is the way
that supporters are
comparing Tubman
to a male military
commander, a general.
So for instance, one supporter
wrote to the local paper
captains, colonels,
brigadier generals
have been created during our
late war who never accomplished
the shadow of the service
to the country which
this noble woman has performed.
Now many male veterans
were entering politics.
Comparing Tubman to
these men suggested
that she, though
female, illiterate,
and a manual
laborer, was not only
a citizen and a veteran but
a potential political leader.
Middle age and indeed
chronological age
had a particular resonance
for Tubman and her family
because as she explained to
Bradford, her biographer,
her mother had a legal
claim to be freed at age 45
along with her children--
a directive in her master's
will that his heirs be
concealed from Tubman's family.
Tubman liberated herself
and then her mother.
Now this kind of age
fraud was quite common.
Under both private wills and
gradual emancipation laws,
many black families had to
sue for the freedom that
should have been theirs on the
basis of chronological age.
Other fugitive slaves protested
that enslavers freed old people
when they could no
longer work and that this
wasn't benevolence but a
form of abuse or neglect.
And as was true of
many enslaved people,
both Tubman and her mother
had been denied access
to any documentation
of their birth dates.
So Tubman's biographer
reported that quote
"she was born as near as she
can remember in 1820 or 1821."
Harriet Tubman
grows famously old,
but she never knows her age.
And she never has a birthday
that she can celebrate.
In contrast, white
women suffragists
emphasized their birthdays.
So that the first
public birthday
for a middle-aged woman
in the United States
was Susan B Anthony's is 50
in 1870, or so she claimed.
And I haven't proven otherwise.
So I want to make a
crowdsourcing plea for anybody
who comes across mention of
a public birthday for a woman
in 19th-century
America, please let
me know because I'm
trying to put together
this comprehensive list.
I'm a little obsessed.
So for Anthony's birthday,
the New York World
claimed in the hyperbolic
style of the day
Miss Anthony is again
the Moses of her sex.
She has perpetrated a
daring innovations in regard
to that subject, which has
been with woman the most
sacred and inviolate.
No more talk of women of a
certain or uncertain age.
Susan squarely owns up to 50.
Papers as far away
as San Francisco
and the Hawaiian Islands
noted that Anthony
was particularly transgressive
to announce her age because she
was unmarried.
For years, journalists
and critics
had been dismissing
women's rights activists
as sour old maids who
couldn't get husbands.
But in this moment, Anthony
her and her supporters
reclaimed and redefine the term.
She was-- the New York Sun
declared-- a brave old maid.
Matilda Joslyn Gage
explained the significance
of Anthony's 50th
birthday this way.
Here to for tell one's age has
been looked upon as the death
knell for a woman.
Her value has been only in
her youth and good looks.
Her intellect and soul
have been passed aside,
and no terms of reproach have
equaled that of old woman,
old maid.
And I just want to pause on
this and emphasize how often I'm
seeing in the archives that this
generation of women suffragists
argued that white men maintained
power in part by sexualizing
young girls and then ignoring
or denigrating older women.
And I just think it's worth
pausing on this idea right
now in this context.
OK, this was also
all about money.
So the idea for the
party seems to have
originated as a fundraiser.
Many guests brought $1 for
each year of Anthony's life
and other gifts, such
as this gold brooch.
Anthony desperately
needed the money.
The paper she published, The
Revolution, was deeply in debt.
In the late 1860s,
she had alienated
her former anti-slavery
and Republican Party allies
when she decided to oppose
black men's suffrage until women
could be enfranchised as well.
Rather than reforging
ties with black leaders,
Anthony decided that
she should appeal
to prominent white people who
had money and had connections.
The birthday
perfectly suited these
aims as it functioned
to mute criticism, raise
money, and generate
positive publicity.
So to be clear, the event did
not cause the racial and class
divisions in the women's
suffrage movement.
What it did was
justify, even celebrate
Anthony's
controversial decisions
as a form of brave leadership.
Said the poet Phoebe Cary
wrote an ode for the occasion.
We touch our caps
and place tonight
the victor's wreath upon her--
the woman who outranks us
all in courage and in honor.
This is really more
aspirational than true in 1870
there are arguably
other women who outrank
Anthony at this moment--
not least, as I'll talk
about, Harriet Tubman.
So notice how Anthony,
her supporters,
and the hyperbolic journalists
all took up titles widely used
to describe Tubman,
Moses, general,
while failing to
mention Tubman herself.
Anthony certainly
knew of Tubman,
as they had many
friends in common,
and people who congratulated
Anthony on her birthday
also helped organize
Tubman's fair.
These connections
are very direct.
Further, Frances Harper, another
leading black suffragist,
had directly told Anthony
and her colleagues
to focus on the needs of
Moses and other black women.
Instead, the birthday
promoted Anthony's lone status
as a woman general.
So what we have here by 1870
and Tubman's fair and Anthony's
birthday are two efforts
to elevate and sustain
the public careers
of mature women.
They presented different
and indeed incompatible
models of women's leadership.
Tubman's redistributive
politics did not
appeal to most of the prominent
liberals gathered for Anthony's
birthday, and Anthony's
focus on women's suffrage
without mention of race
or class seemed misguided
to those organizing
Tubman's fair.
Both women would become even
more prominent as they aged,
and that's the story
I want to turn to now.
So in the late 19th
century, public birthdays
grew in popularity,
but they became rituals
to honor the achievements of
old people in their 70s and 80s.
After the Civil
War, all Americans,
not just women's suffrage,
just paid more attention
to chronological age in general
and old age as a stage of life,
in particular.
So by the 1890s, the
US Pension Bureau
began using chronological age
as a proxy for disability.
Private companies
experimented with
the first age-based
retirement programs,
and doctors specialized
in what would come
to be known as gerontology.
Age also mattered
for young people
as schools instituted
age graded classrooms,
and states passed the first
age-based child labor laws.
Historians explain these changes
as part of a broader effort
to bring scientific
tools of management
to bear on an
industrializing democracy
and a diverse citizenry.
Printers, caterers,
and merchants
also commercialized birthdays.
Prosperous Americans
celebrated children's birthdays
before the Civil
War inspired largely
by Queen Victoria it appears.
By the 1850s, publishers
and political parties
held some birthday
celebrations for prominent men.
Then in the 1880s, printers
marketed the first commercially
produced birthday cards.
Most women still didn't want
to announce their exact age
but congratulating each other
on the day of their birth date
became more common among
friends and family.
Members of the National
Women's Suffrage Association
continued to innovate
ways of publicly honoring
older women leaders
on their birthdays.
In 1885, they not only hosted a
lavish party for Elizabeth Cady
Stanton in New York City
but also sent out directions
for how local suffrage clubs
could hold parallel events
all over the country,
and they then
documented this in
the souvenir program.
This was the occasion at which
Stanton read her often quoted
essay on the pleasures
of age in which she
declared that 50, not 15, is
the heyday of a woman's life.
Other suffragists
meanwhile resisted
the idea of public birthdays.
So Lucy Stone, for example,
was shocked in 1888
when people sent her gifts and
telegrams congratulating her
on 70 years, as she had
quote no idea the day
was known except by relatives
and a few near friends.
This convention program for 1893
presents middle aged and older
white women as the public face
of the National American Woman
Suffrage Association.
Lucretia Mott on the
left died in 1880.
She appears here
as the four mother
of Stanton, Stone, and Anthony.
The speakers listed below
include younger white women
born between the
1840s and 1860s.
They have a voice, but
they aren't elevated yet
into this pantheon
of great leaders.
The implication is they're
going to have to wait for that.
Black women do not
appear at all here,
despite the fact that
the women pictured were
all part of the antebellum
anti-slavery movement
and all collaborated throughout
their lives with black leaders.
So what I want to emphasize
is that this segregation
of women's suffrage
leadership by race and age
was not natural or inevitable
or even really accurate,
but it was artificial,
constructed,
and a misrepresentation
to be sure.
One that was done for
political purposes to
empower older white women.
So a more accurate
image would include
younger women and white
women as prominent leaders.
It would emphasize Mott's
connection to black women,
including Harriet Tubman.
In the 1880s and 1890s,
Tubman campaign for women's
suffrage and
fundraise to establish
a home for elderly
African-Americans
on her property in
Auburn, New York.
She moved among
suffragists, black women's
reform organizations, and the
African Methodist Episcopal
Zion Church, always
linking the vote
to economic justice
for African-Americans.
Interestingly, evidence suggests
that some white suffragists
sought to find some
kind of day that
could function for Tubman
the way a birthday did
for white women.
So in 1894, Edna Dowd
Cheney sent funds to Tubman
describing the contributions
as quote "a gift to herself,"
a birthday gift to herself.
In 1901, the woman's
journal printed an appeal
asking for contributions
by December,
so these could be
bundled and presented
to Tubman as a Christmas gift.
So you can see them
trying to present
these dates as get give now.
But the largest boost
to Tubman's reputation
came from black
women who invited
her to attend the founding
meeting of the National
Association of Colored
Women's Clubs in 1896.
The black feminist
theorist Brittany Cooper
points out that
this organization
sought to counter the
quote "civic unknowability"
of black women.
What I want to add here
is that celebrating Tubman
enabled them to emphasize black
women as national leaders.
So in women's air under a
reprint of Tubman's civil war
portrait, Victoria Earl
Matthews wrote the fact
that we know so little that
is credible and truly noble
about our own people
constitutes one of the saddest
and most humiliating phases
of Afro-American life.
Matthews rallied black women
to come to the convention
and meet them in person.
In a grand spectacle of
intergenerational solidarity,
Tubman took the stage at the
convention, holding an infant--
the son of anti-lynching
activist Ida B, Wells-Barnett,
as she stood there the hall
overflowed with emotion--
as Matthews reported, the scene
was impressive and thrilling.
It was the clasping of hands
of the early 19th and 20th
centuries.
Anthony's 80th birthday in 1900
functioned in a similar way.
The highlight of
the evening came
when 80 children marched
across the stage,
each handing her a rose.
Now as far as I can tell from
press reports on this memorial
portrait, all of the
children were white,
but Anthony did invite
African-American suffragists
to speak at her
public birthdays.
And this I just
want to underline
was really striking at a
moment in American history
when almost all
public celebrations,
even Lincoln's
birthday celebrations,
were racially segregated.
So she is bringing black
women into the movement.
At Anthony's 80th, for example,
Coralee Franklin Cook spoke,
and she praised Anthony as
quote "the courageous defender
of rights wherever assailed."
Anthony, in turn, made a great
show of affection towards Cook,
but this did not translate
into coalition building.
A year earlier, Anthony
blocked a resolution
that would have
condemned Jim Crow
segregation on the railroads.
So Anthony's
birthday celebrations
function to include black
women in the suffrage movement
while simultaneously
pushing their leadership
and their political
priorities to the margins.
Anthony's 80th birthday
staged a grand spectacle
of generational succession in
which she represented the past.
Middle-aged women took
power in the present,
and white children
represented the future.
This I think is a very early
presentation of an idea
that we've come to know
as a feminist waves.
So in the 1960s,
feminist coined the term
"second wave" to both connect
themselves with and distance
themselves from this
historical period.
Then in the 1980s,
we got younger women
saying they were a third way.
We're now on to a fourth,
fifth, maybe sixth way,
depending who you talk to.
Historians and
activists generally
agree that it's time to
let go of this metaphor,
that it's divisive,
that it's inaccurate,
but we remain very
trapped inside it.
And I think it's
in this moment--
surprisingly in
celebrations for older women
not the rebellion of youth
but in the celebrations
for old women that we see
this idea taking form.
OK, so after Anthony's
event in 1900,
many prominent women
had 80th birthday galas,
and not all were suffragists.
So in 1982, when Elizabeth Cary
Agassi, the first president
of Radcliffe, heard
that supporters
wanted to hold a concert
for her 80th birthday.
She wrote in her diary
quote, "it is a lovely plan,
but I have sworn that
I would never have
one of these public birthdays.
I must yield not without dread."
Her dread turned to delight when
on the morning of her birthday,
she received a surprising gift.
Does anybody know what
Agassi's birthday gift was?
Agassi house-- Elizabeth Cary
Agassi on her 80th birthday
received $116,000 to
build Agassi house.
That is the equivalent of almost
actually more than $3 million
today--
quite a birthday present.
Her son later wrote
that Agassi would
quote "like a second
festival provided it could
be as lucrative as the first."
So you can see that these
public birthdays are functioning
very effectively to
channel resources
towards women's institutions
and women's causes
to publicize the
achievements of older women
and to inspire young women.
And this is all an achievement
and so really effective
in a lot of ways.
The amount of money
raised, of course, vary.
The same year that Agassi
received $160,000 birthday
gift, Tubman's
supporters struggled
mightily to raise
1,700 as a Christmas
gift that would pay off the
mortgage on her old people's
home.
So in many ways,
these celebrations
didn't alleviate
that exacerbated
existing inequalities.
OK, what about political power?
Did women suffragists succeed
in convincing Americans
outside their movement to
take older women seriously
as national leaders,
to view them
as potential congressmen
and senators and presidents?
Boiler alert-- not so much.
So as Christian
Hopkinson points out
in our study of the
Spanish-American war,
expansionists label the
anti-imperialist aunties
to render their leadership
illegitimate and absurd.
So cartoonists targeted
old white women
in particular as a
threat to male potency.
Here prominent anti-imperialists
are dressed as busy old women
pulling down a
statue representing
the administration,
the army, and the Navy.
Older African-American women
had to contend with a different
stereotype--
aunt as loyal servant
more dedicated
to her enslavers
family than her own.
This bogus idea took
off in the 1890s
when the RT Davis
Mill Company began
to market Aunt Jemima pancake
mix, one of the first branded
and widely advertised
foodstuffs.
The publicity
campaign dubbed this
invented character quote "the
most famous colored woman
in the world?
And made up a
biography for her--
the fake life of an
older black woman.
An illustration claim to be a
truthful representation of Aunt
Jemima feeding Confederates
after the gunboats destroyed
the master's plantation.
Now whether consciously or not,
this precisely and insidiously
erases Tubman's
actual leadership
navigating gunboats
during the Civil War,
and I think we have
to read these images
as a direct backlash
against efforts
to empower older women
during this period.
Now if this was all that
suffragists had to fight--
these misogynistic and racist
images in popular culture--
that would have been difficult
enough, but by the 1910s,
they also had to contend with
women's suffrage leaders who
began to market youth.
I know, right.
It's subtle.
So white suffragists focused on
appealing to white male voters,
and this is how they did it.
They prettier, conventionally
attractive women out front
as the face of the movement.
This is actually my favorite.
Beauty brigade in canvas
for votes for women.
So these beauty brigades are
part of this massive propaganda
campaign that mobilized
the techniques
of modern advertising, public
spectacle and celebrity--
all of which turned
on circulating
images of conventionally
attractive white, often quite
wealthy women.
None of these women are over 35.
Old women remain
active in the movement.
They join these massive
suffrage parades,
but they were put
behind the beauties,
set apart in motor cars,
and treated as curiosities.
Their birthdays continued
to receive attention,
but young women had become
the face of the movement.
Black women adopted
this strategy too.
The journalist Pauline Hopkins,
editor of The Colored American
magazine here in
Boston, wrote often
about the leadership
of mature black women,
including this really
important profile of Tubman.
But the visual culture of
the magazine as a whole
centered on picturing young
black women as glamorous, as
modern, as beautiful.
And I want to underline that
this is really important too.
A lot of Americans felt that
black women weren't beautiful
and claiming them as beautiful
is political, is powerful.
Even for white suffragists
who face the charge
that political activism
would make them unattractive,
this was important to say
that suffragists could
be beautiful and glamorous.
But what drops out of
this effort entirely
is the connections
between maturity and power
that women were drawing
in the late 19th century.
So beauty sells.
And suffragists
took up advertising,
and then advertisers
appealed to suffragists.
And this marketing accomplished
what Anthony and her supporters
had been unable to
achieve, the ratification
of the 19th Amendment in 1920.
Now we should not describe
this as the winning
of women's suffrage.
It just removed
sex as a barrier.
State governments used
literacy tests, poll taxes,
and identity verification to
disenfranchisement many people.
And in fact, the
voter ID laws that
are being passed in state after
state today are a continuation
of this strategy.
So voting is not a secure right.
It's a privilege that
states can regulate,
and voting is also very
different than running
for office or getting elected.
So after 1920, American
women did not effectively
organize to elect women to
national office and progress
in this phase has
remained remarkably slow,
which brings us back to the
construction of Susan B,
Anthony as a great statement,
equivalent to the most
beloved president.
So after 1920, members of
the National woman's party
gather every year on February 15
in the crypt of the US capitol
where there was this
statue of Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, Lucretia Mott,
and Susan B. Anthony.
It's the closest suffragists
have to a national monument.
They gather.
They lay flowers.
They give speeches.
Black women continue
to attend these events.
So that's Mary Church
Terrill, the first president
of the National Association
of Colored Women's Clubs
in the lovely fur collar.
She talked about how Anthony
was an abolitionist as well
as a suffragist just trying to
keep alive these connections.
Rose Arnold Powell whose
papers are at the Schlesinger
campaigned relentlessly
to turn Anthony's birthday
into a national holiday.
That Anthony had
been born in February
was a happy accident she used
to promote the idea of three
great emancipators.
So Washington freed his country.
Lincoln freed the slaves,
and Anthony freed women,
or so the story went.
Powell wrote every calendar
company in the US year after
year urging them to list
Anthony's birthday February,
along with Washington's
and Lincoln's.
A few states, including
Massachusetts,
did turn Anthony's
birthday into holidays.
As far as I know, this
is no longer a thing,
but it was briefly.
Massachusetts had a holiday,
but we still in this country
have no national holiday that
honors a woman as a leader.
And what about Tubman?
African-American women named
a number of social service
organizations in her honor,
including the Harriet Tubman
House here in Boston founded
when Thompson was still alive,
and she was actually
present at the dedication.
This clipping from
the Delta Sigma Theta
papers at Schlesinger
shows schoolchildren
celebrating the 50th anniversary
of the Tubman home in 1959.
So even though Tubman
didn't have a birthday,
these institutions named after
her could have anniversaries
and rallied people
around her memory.
Under President Obama,
the Treasury Department
planned Tubman's face on
the redesigned $20 bill.
Trump's Treasury
Secretary Steven Mnuchin
has announced that
this plan is on hold.
In 1978, Tubman did become
the first black woman
to be put on a postage
stamp, and Pauline Murray,
the civil rights lawyer
an Episcopal priest,
read a beautiful
benediction at the day
of this year's ceremony.
The point I want to
make here is that we
know about Anthony and
Tubman because women worked
to convince people that they
were national leaders as worthy
of recognition as white men.
Now most Americans
never accepted the idea
that these women were on a par
with Washington or Lincoln,
but that we remember
them at all is
an important legacy of black
and white women's organizing.
That white women like
Powell downplayed
the contributions of black women
is also, of course, a legacy.
But what I want to
leave you with today--
what I want to draw
your attention to--
is another facet of
this memorialization,
and that is how white women
remembered Anthony's age.
By the 1930s, Anthony's
longevity was a curiosity.
Ripley's Believe It or
Not for February 15, 1938,
read Susan B. Anthony
died at the age of 86.
Her mother died
at the age of 86.
Her grandmother died at 86.
Never change the style of
her hair dress in 70 years.
It's true.
You could look at the photos.
Soon a much younger
Anthony began
to appear in popular culture.
So this Wonder Woman comic
is my favorite example
of a particularly
fresh-faced Anthony.
In this comic,
she does grow old,
but her supporters all
remain remarkably young.
In 1939, a year after
the Ripley's cartoon,
Ethel Adamson of the national
woman's party planted--
the word she used--
this picture in newspapers
for February stories
on Anthony's birthday.
It shows Anthony at age 48.
Adamson explained
to Powell quote
"we all love Susan at every
age, but a little youth
does seem more
attractive for a change."
Powell agreed.
She thought schoolchildren
would relate more to this image,
and this is the
image that stuck.
So here's Anthony on her
126th birthday looking younger
than she did when
she first celebrated
her birthday in 1870, and
she's still young in 1971
when the National
Organization for Women
joined the birthday
celebration ritual.
And again, on the
coin minted in 1979.
By the 1970s,
Anthony had undergone
one of the greatest anti-aging
treatments in American history.
The result is that
we can remember her
without engaging in the
politics of age and power
that her generation
was so concerned with.
So look again at this
image that I started with.
Anthony at age 80--
she's posed against
a black cloth that
emphasizes her white hair
in harsh light showing
every wrinkle.
This image was on a calendar
that suffrage just before
and hung in their homes.
As they use the
calendar, they may
have planned their
own time in new ways,
looking forward to
growing older themselves,
certainly looking
forward to the day
when Americans would
recognize a woman like Anthony
as having demonstrated
the political skill
and experience to be elected
president of the United States.
To get to that point to
elect a woman president,
we will need to innovate
a new politics of women's
midlife empowerment--
one that somehow resists
the tendency to divide women
by age, race, and
class and instead finds
ways to build
political coalitions
that work across divides
for shared purposes,
and this won't be easy.
We can just hope
that young women
will do this work on their own.
Middle aged and older women need
to work with them and for them
in particular movements,
and young women
will need to partner
with their elders.
If we can understand that
age itself has a history,
a history deeply connected to
gender, race, class, and power,
we may be able to
generate better
strategies-- at least that is
my hope in talking to you today.
Thank you so much for listening.
[APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
