- Hi, everyone.
Welcome to today's "Homeroom."
I'm very excited about the conversation
we are about to have.
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With that, I'm really excited
to introduce our guest, Martha Jones,
who's a professor historian
at Johns Hopkins University.
Thanks so much for joining us, Martha.
- I'm really happy to be here.
Thanks for having me.
- So a lot to talk about,
but maybe the thing most
relative to what day it is,
it's the hundredth anniversary
of women's right to vote,
the 19th Amendment, getting ratified.
We've learned a certain narrative there
about Susan B. Anthony and Seneca Falls
and the Suffragettes,
and then 1920, women
have the right to vote,
which every time I say
that it feels a lot later,
like my brain does a check.
Was it really that late?
(Martha chuckles)
But you're an expert in this space.
If you could tell us a little bit about,
a little more color on that narrative?
What are we getting right in
the traditional history books,
and then maybe what more texture
is gonna help us fill in the gaps?
- Sure, so you're right
to point to the story
I think a lot of us have encountered,
the women's vote to the vote
begins in 1848 in a village
in upstate New York,
Seneca Falls and culminates
more than 70 years later
in the ratification of the
19th Amendment in 1920.
And I think this is a year for us
to rethink some of the myths
and some of the misunderstandings
about that story.
I tell a story that begins
in the earliest decades
of the 19th century as American women,
including African American women,
are first and foremost,
developing a political philosophy,
a critique of the
position that they occupy
or the positions they don't
occupy in American politics.
And that requires criticizing
both racism and sexism
and the ways in which
they keep American women,
particularly Black American women,
at the margins of politics.
Now, I wish I could tell you that in 1920,
American women got the vote,
but the 19th Amendment
doesn't guarantee the vote
to any American women,
and Black American women will continue
to be disenfranchised even after 1920,
by state laws that are
designed to keep them
and their husbands and their fathers,
if you will, from the polls.
So when I tell this story,
it begins in that early sort
of philosophical reflections
by African American women,
and it takes us all the
way forward to 1965,
when we have federal legislation, finally,
that gives teeth to the 19th Amendment,
and now guarantees to all Black Americans,
including Black women, the right to vote.
It turns out to be a much longer story,
and in some ways, a more troubled story,
than the one we might've encountered
in our schools, in our textbooks,
or maybe even in popular culture.
- This is super valuable,
and I wanna encourage folks
to ask questions on Facebook and YouTube.
We have team members who will
be surfacing those questions
to myself and Martha.
One question that I've always had,
even before I really understood the nuance
that you just alluded to is,
why do you think it took so long?
What was the rest of the world doing?
Was the U.S. late to the game?
Was it early to the game?
And how do you see
these parallel movements
that as you just pointed
out, to some degree,
converged over time,
where you had the suffragette movement,
the women's right to vote movement,
and then of course you had
coming out of the Civil War,
the right for at least African
American males in theory,
to be able to be citizens and vote.
In history, how are those
weighed against each other?
And did they help each other?
Were they just two separate movements?
- So where does the
U.S. sit in this story?
Relatively early,
the 19th Amendment
follows just on the heels
of transformation, for
example, for British women.
But it'll take many more
decades, for example,
for women in France to
win the right to vote.
And so it's a long story
about how women in the
world come to power.
We could come forward to the
founding of the United Nations,
where you have then women
from across the globe
coming to talk about colonialism,
the legacy of slavery,
and how women of color
across the globe share a ongoing
concern about oppression.
So this is a big story, not a small one.
But to take us to the story in the U.S.
and the relationship between what had been
two important, radical social movements,
on the one hand anti-slavery,
and on the other hand, women's rights,
both having their origins
in the decades before the Civil War.
It turns out to be an uneasy relationship
that by the time we get to the 1860s,
and remember that in the 1860s,
the Constitution is being rewritten.
A revolution is happening
in the United States.
Slavery is abolished.
Birthright citizenship is established.
And as you alluded to, the 15th Amendment
is going to prohibit states
from using race as a criteria
in meting out voting rights.
Within this old and important
political coalition,
there is really a
extraordinary range of views.
Some who advocate educated
suffrage is the way forward,
which is oftentimes a way of
alluding to white suffrage
and particularly the
suffrage for white women.
Others will make the case
that for African American men,
the vote is a matter of life and death,
that they are facing not
only political challenges,
but literal challenges.
When it comes to their physical wellbeing,
Black men need the vote in
order to protect themselves.
In that story, I always like to introduce
a third position if you will,
and that is one taken by
an African American woman
in these meetings, Frances
Ellen Watkins Harper,
who comes to the meeting to challenge
both of these positions.
Why, because Black women, of course,
can't pull apart their
race from their sex.
They live at the crossroads
of these two vexed positions
in American politics,
and Watkins Harper urges this coalition
to stay together and to, as she puts it,
work for the interest of all humanity,
and this will become the core
of how Black women approach
the question of women's
rights going forward,
this keen eye, yes, on their
own political empowerment,
but for a broader interest,
for how Black women can then
work, use political power,
to serve the needs of their
families, their communities,
but as Watkins Harper puts it,
"one great bundle of humanity."
And so we can see the stage being set
for many approaches to thinking
about voting rights in the
United States going forward.
And you're right to point out
that African American men,
while briefly they will enjoy
the vote after the Civil War
will find themselves disenfranchised,
and Black women will, in a twisted sense,
join them after 1920,
now seemingly authorized
to vote by the Constitution
and still kept away from the polls
by laws and by violence and intimidation,
especially in Southern
states that is aimed
at keeping Black Americans
out of body politic.
- And I wanna focus a little bit
on the time in which it happened.
1920, just to give everyone
historical context,
obviously we had just
finished the Great War.
Later, we learned it's World War I.
We actually were, I think,
still going through,
or in the later stages
of a global pandemic,
the Spanish Flu.
Was that relevant to women finally getting
the right to vote?
What was the argument before?
Why did it take so many decades
from Seneca Falls until 1920,
which we normally associate
with a fairly modern time?
- Yeah, sometimes I think
when we say women's suffrage,
it somehow exceptionalizes
this political movement
from everything that's
happening around it.
So you're so right
to point to the election
of Woodrow Wilson,
the entry of the U.S. into what becomes
the First World War, the flu pandemic,
all of these things challenge
the women who are leading
the fight for what becomes
the 19th Amendment.
There are those who think, for example,
that American women should, if you will,
stand down from the
fight for voting rights,
once the U.S. enters the war effort,
somehow it's unseemly,
to challenge the state
or to burden it,
when it's a time for a kind of cohesion
and national cohesion
around the war effort.
And at the same time, there
were those suffragists
in the U.S. who see the
war as an opportunity
to, if you will, turn up the fire
on the feet of the Wilson administration.
As we know, Alice Paul
will lead picketers,
women who will stand
outside the White House,
even into the war with
placards, with signs,
that challenge the administration
that begin to liken
the Wilson administration
to authoritarian leaders in Europe,
because they will not sign off
on a women's suffrage amendment.
So this struggle is very
much caught up here.
The pandemic, the flu pandemic,
provides American women
with another opportunity, if you will,
particularly African American women
understand it is an
opportunity to show themselves
to be loyal, effective,
committed citizens.
I write about Mary Church Terrell,
a suffrage leader in Daytona, Florida,
who transforms her girl's
school in a small hospital
into a major facility for treating those
who have been stricken by the flu.
This is a way that Terrell embeds herself
and her politics into
this local community,
even as the struggle for
the vote is still going on.
So women's politics is not an exception
from what's happening.
Women's politics is interlaced
with many of the histories
that we already know.
And if I could say, I think for educators,
this is important and useful
because there are some subjects
that are in our curricula
and others that may not be,
and sometimes when we can
make those connections,
it helps us to widen the scope of lessons,
but it also helps students
to situate new stories
amidst the kinds of stories
they may already know.
- Yeah, absolutely 'cause
the traditional narrative
in a lot of these things
is decades of protest and organizing.
And at some point
essentially the men said,
"Yeah, I guess we'll let them vote."
But to your point, maybe
there's a little bit of that,
but there's a lot of a historical context.
As we saw in both world wars,
as men went to go to fight,
society had to lean much
more heavily on women
to even keep society going.
And I suspect that that
also played a major role.
There's a great question
here from YouTube,
from Joshua Cadavil.
The question is, "How have the ideas
behind women's empowerment
evolved over time?"
So we're talking, we're commemorating
the hundred year anniversary
of the 19th Amendment,
women getting the right to
vote in the United States,
but that's clearly not been the end
of whatever you wanna call it,
women trying to ensure that
they have more equal rights
in our society.
So how has that evolved
over the last hundred years,
and where do you think we are?
- Well, I think one measure
is that which is, if you will,
right under our nose, sitting
here in August of 2020,
and that is yet again,
a major party with a woman
on the ticket in this case,
Senator Kamala Harris on the
Democratic Party's ticket.
This, while not unthinkable in 1920s,
is almost unimaginable on the other hand,
and particularly because
the 19th Amendment
rests so heavily on the assumption
that Black women will
remain without the vote,
will remain outside of
politics, even after 1920,
when we have Senator Harris on the ticket,
it's hard to resist the conclusion
that something has changed,
that African American women, for example,
have worked deliberately,
consistently, creatively
to transform their place
in American politics.
Nobody gives women much in this story,
but we certainly see many
examples of how women
earn things, win things, take things
across the course of this history.
And so I think on that measure,
I would say that we can
recognize the transformation
that we've lived through
at least figuratively,
not all of us have lived
for the hundred years,
but figuratively, the transformation.
And if we looked then
into the fabric of American politics,
we would recognize something
like 250 American women
running for Congress this year,
nearly half of them women of color,
that is a radical sea change
from a hundred years ago,
that rests, to an important
degree, upon the 19th Amendment,
rests, to an important degree,
upon the Voting Rights Act in 1965,
and of course, rests on
women's insistence that they
are not only forceful
candidates for these offices,
but positioning themselves for when,
I like to say, when the rest
of the country catches up,
women are ready.
And we saw that as Joe Biden
vetted more than a dozen
women for the vice presidency,
and we all had to study and figure out
not only who they were,
but how they were similar,
how they were different.
It was a rich and diverse slate of women
who were vying for that office.
And that is one sort of testament
to what has changed since 1920.
- And do you think,
we've been talking so far
is a women's right to vote
is just that's something
that should happen.
You have half the population
that was disenfranchised.
How do you think women
getting the right to vote
and then actually acting on that right,
and then being able to act on that right,
especially since 1965,
how do you think that's changed
the nature of our democracy?
Has that changed the type of policies
we enact or don't enact,
how we act in foreign
policy, our laws generally?
- That's a great question.
I think that that force
is still, if you will,
gaining momentum,
but I'm interested in the question
of what we think women's issues are.
One of the things that's
said in 1920, for example,
is that racism is not a women's issue,
that somehow race is an
African American issue.
But I think today, our sense
of where the boundaries
of women's issues are,
are really shifting.
So that when we speak about relief
related to the coronavirus,
whether it's for business owners,
or it's for individual
heads of households,
whether it's for schools,
these are all, I think today,
understood to be women's issues
in a way that doesn't
exceptionalize American women,
but recognizes how American women
are absolutely at the center
of nearly any major question
that we might ask.
But I do think there is
another, I guess, a layer,
another layer to your
question, because there is,
particularly from
anti-suffragists in 1920,
the assertion that American women
will make no difference at the polls
because they will merely, if you will,
vote like their husbands
and their fathers.
So it won't change the balance
of power between parties,
it won't change the
outcome on election day,
it won't change or influence law making.
Women are like men,
but it turns out that one of the troubles
with the 19th Amendment is that,
while white American women are expected
to in a sense, split
between the two parties,
like their husbands and fathers are split,
Black American women are
expected to vote as a block.
And we see with 1920,
the small numbers of
Black women who do vote,
do indeed vote as a block.
They support the Republican
Party in those years,
and its candidates.
And while that doesn't tip the
balance of power nationally,
it can tip the outcome
of elections locally
and at the state level.
Black women from the city of Chicago
will be critical to the
election of Oscar De Priest
to the U.S. Congress in 1928.
De Priest is the first
African American man
to be elected to Congress
since Reconstruction.
So two, almost three generations,
and this is because Black women in Chicago
have learned how to use
their power at the polls
to change the outcome of elections
and to vote as a block in a
way that does tip the balance
In 1928, when Oscar De Priest runs
and much more recently in 2017,
when Senator Doug Jones runs
in the state of Alabama,
98% of Black women vote for him.
And they are the slim
margin that flips that seat
from red to blue in the state of Alabama.
So, this fear that gets expressed
about how women's votes
might be a game changer,
turns out to be founded.
- And I'm curious, you
know, given where we are,
you mentioned Kamala Harris,
before that we've had Geraldine Ferraro,
and we had Sarah Palin,
obviously there's policy difference
between the Democrats and the Republicans.
But if Kamala Harris does
become the next vice president,
what do you think that will mean
for this hundred year long movement?
Do you think it will,
obviously it's symbolically
very, very powerful,
do you think it will
somehow change governance,
will it get women more active in politics?
And then what do you think is
the next leg of the journey
on actually both of these
strands we're talking about,
both on the issue of women's rights
and on the issue of
civil rights generally?
- When I think about your question,
my mind goes to my daughters
and really to my granddaughters.
And I don't think we have to imagine long
to appreciate the way in
which not only Senator Harris,
but Senator Harris as an
example of how the ambitions,
the imaginations, and the
political lives of young women
are being transformed in this very moment,
as this campaign is still unfolding.
In 2009, Michelle Obama was in the Capitol
to unveil a bust of the
19th century suffragist,
the former slave Sojourner Truth.
And what Mrs. Obama said at the unveiling
is now when girls like my
daughters come to the Capitol,
they will see a woman who looks like them.
And that is, it turns out,
to be powerful stuff in American politics.
That in a sense, we have to see it.
We have to imagine it.
And women in politics will tell you this,
if you ask them, that they had models,
that they had figures,
they had sheroes who were
essential as they figured out
who they could be in their own lifetimes.
So in some ways we are at a moment
where we are in the best sense
unleashing a next generation.
And I think very specifically,
my expectation is that
American women in politics,
are going to, if you will,
move the needle on the question
of voting rights in important ways.
American women,
particularly women of color,
know the burden of what it
means to be kept from the polls,
as keenly as anyone in this country.
And we are still not a
democracy that guarantees
the right to vote to every American.
There are still too many of us
who are kept from the
polls by state level laws,
by subterfuge and more.
We still don't have a
constitutional amendment
that guarantees to us a ballot,
that guarantees to us that
we can cast that ballot.
That's what we're seeing
played out right here,
as we are hurdling toward November,
and we're watching political leaders
fumble over how on earth
we're gonna get to the polls
in the midst of a pandemic.
I expect American women
to really take the lead
in getting us to the next
level on voting rights
and not being satisfied with the idea
that if you live in Georgia,
you vote one way if you can vote.
If you live in Maryland,
you vote another way.
You live in New York, yet another way.
I don't know about you, my
husband is not American.
And he is just flabbergasted
that we are a 21st century democracy
where literally your zip code determines
whether you can vote and
how you'll have to vote,
what kind of hurdles
you'll have to overcome.
So I'm hopeful that this
generation of American women,
who live and have come through the legacy
of voter suppression
to be powerful figures,
will get us to a place where that ideal
that has been bandied
about for a very long time,
which is the ideal of
universal voting rights,
a guarantee of the vote.
I think these are the figures
who might just get us there.
- And just to double click on that,
'cause you hear this argument,
obviously we're going through a pandemic.
People are talking about mail-in votes,
and you're hearing
arguments from our president
whether it's secure, whether
it's reliable and all of this.
This argument that we've heard
over the time, I'm curious,
what are the frictions, the barriers,
that you think exist today?
How would you change them?
Are there good examples of other countries
that have done this well
and that the other argument
that if you make it super easy
for everyone to vote,
it might also make it
super easy to double vote
or have fraud or something like that.
What's your view of
those types of arguments?
- Well, let's start at the end.
There just is no evidence
in the United States
of widespread consequential voter fraud.
It just does not exist.
And we have five or is it
six states in this country
where Americans vote all the time by mail.
Voting by mail is not
an innovation in 2020.
It's a necessity perhaps,
but there are states
that have long ago gone,
for example, to voting by mail
without any ill consequence.
And so the good social science tells us,
there are many ways to
get people to the polls.
Why isn't election day a holiday?
Why don't we all have
the time and the leisure
to exercise this fundamental right,
and come to the polls, to bring
our children to the polls,
to bring our elders to the polls,
to have this be a national ritual?
Why is it that the burden is on us still,
for many of us, I'm afraid too many of us,
to choose between the risk of coronavirus
and the prospect of casting a ballot?
In my view, the burden
should be on the state
to get me the ballot,
to get you the ballot,
to get us our ballots, to
make sure we cast them.
That should be our right.
It shouldn't be a privilege
that we risk ourselves
to exercise as it appears,
some of us are gonna be called upon to do.
And so I think that there's no evidence
that older regimes or newfangled regimes
are more vulnerable to
voter fraud than any other.
There's just no evidence of
widespread voter fraud at all.
And the price we pay as a democracy
is the de-legitimization of
our very political fabric.
Because there's no secret now
that your cousin in Wisconsin
can't get to the polls, but maybe you can,
there's no secret.
But in Oregon,
people have been voting for
a very long time by mail.
But in my state, it's going
to take two or three steps
to get that paper ballot
and put it in a mailbox.
This is now an open secret
in the United States.
And I think it undercuts our faith
in the vote and the
centrality of the vote.
We wonder why the numbers
at the polls go down
in so many communities.
We lament the low level of
voter turnout in this country.
But in some sense, we
have ourselves to blame
for having diminished the centrality,
the value access to the polls.
And now we are in a position, I think,
to have to restore faith
in the vote as fundamental.
I come from African American ancestors
who could not vote for a very long time.
And I'm a girl who was taken to the polls
long before she could vote as a lesson
in my civic responsibility
to the struggles that
Black Americans had waged
for a very long time in
this country for too long.
And I think there are other Americans
in their own families who have stories
of what it has meant to
have access to the polls.
So one of the things I
encourage people is for elders
to tell those stories out loud,
so we can learn from
them and for young people
to ask the elders in their
midst about the right to vote,
because these are poignant stories,
oftentimes that tell us a great deal
about who we are and who
we can be as a democracy.
- Super valuable.
And there's a really interesting,
it's almost a technical question,
but it is something that I
think most of us first asked
when we first learned about
the suffrage movement.
There's a question from Facebook,
Madhura Chitnavis-Marathe asks,
"What is the origin of the term suffrage?
Where and when was it first used?"
- It's a great question.
Suffrage is an old term
in the English language,
and it gets used interchangeably
with the ballot and the vote
throughout the 18th and 19th century
in the early United States.
But it does come to have
a specialized connotation,
I think now, when we look back
on the history of voting rights,
one that is closely tied
to this particular movement
for voting rights, which
culminates in the 19th Amendment.
So women's suffrage, I'll
say that my students,
when I say suffrage, give me that look,
that, boy, you hate when
students give you that look,
but it happens.
That is to say it doesn't
resonate with young people.
And so I, more and more,
have been advocating
that we speak even of this
moment in the early 20th century
as part of a longer
story of voting rights.
I think that is fair to say
that we have always been engaged
in struggles and questions and movements
for voting rights in this country,
going back to the
founding and the movement
for women's votes is just one part
of the larger story of
American voting rights.
So I'm somebody who could set
aside suffrage altogether,
if you'd let me, but it's
hard to get away from,
especially in an anniversary year.
- Yeah, absolutely.
I think after this, we can
all do a little bit homework.
I'll look up the
etymology because I think,
obviously it seems to have connections
to the word suffer, but-
- It has many, many meanings.
I will say somebody sent me recently
the entry in Merriam Webster,
and it's an interesting and long one.
And the connotation of the vote
is one of the more recent
connotations of the term,
one of the last connotations in Webster's.
Maybe on its way out, I don't know.
- Okay, I'm gonna do
some research on that.
Maybe it's like the
word passion, you know,
when people say passion of the Christ,
they're talking about the
suffering of the Christ,
but now modern term is
passion is you care so much
about something that you suffer, I guess.
Just one last question.
I always like to ask this
because we have a lot of
young people watching,
folks who are trying to
chart their own lives.
What got you interested
in becoming a professor,
becoming a professor of history,
focused on both civil rights
and the women's rights movement.
What was your journey to
getting to where you are now?
- Thanks for that.
I like to tell young people,
I began as a psychology major in college,
and I share that to say,
it's wonderful when in life
you can follow many kinds of passions
and chart your own path.
And I'm definitely
someone who has done that.
I went to law school after
college and spent 10 years
as a public interest
lawyer in New York City.
And there I was deeply involved
in work related to economic
and racial justice.
But when I had an
opportunity to take a break,
I was a history buff,
but I'd never had a
chance to study history,
and I took a little time
off to study history,
including the history of my own family.
It was something that I was
specially interested in.
And honestly, I got hooked.
For me, history is like a treasure hunt.
We work with old texts and documents,
and in materials that nobody has looked at
in a very long time,
trying to discover the answer to questions
that still challenge us,
like this history of
Black women in the vote.
But I also love being a historian
because I'm part of a
community of scholars,
of historians, of writers, of researchers.
I don't work alone.
Some days I do, I have to write,
and it's quiet and a little lonely,
but most of the time I'm part
of really exciting discoveries
and conversations and debates
with other historians.
And I get to spend my time
with young people and students,
and that really is the thing
that gets me up in the morning,
the thing that sort of
gets my adrenaline going.
I used to be somebody who spent every day
in a courthouse, fighting
with other people,
and I decided maybe I wanted
to be a lover, not a fighter,
and come to the classroom every day
and discover new things about the past
and have opportunities
to share what I know.
So for me, it's been a
somewhat unorthodox journey,
but it's been a supremely fascinating one.
In this book, "Vanguard,"
I'm able to bring together
my legal training and my understanding
of the Constitution with
my historical training
about how constitutional questions
actually happen on the
ground and in people's lives.
And then I get to talk with
folks like you all about that,
and that's the teacher in me.
So, thanks for that question.
- No, well, that's super
valuable and super inspiring.
Well, Martha, thank you so much.
I think you've given us
a lot more dimensionality
to this conversation of
the suffrage movement
and how it intertwines with
the civil rights movement.
Really valuable.
- I'm really glad.
Thanks for having me on, Sal.
- Thank you so much.
Well, everyone, thanks again for joining,
I guess we could call these episodes,
another episode of the
"Homeroom" livestream.
Hopefully you've enjoyed
this as much as I have.
As you can tell, this is
really a cold learning journey.
I'm learning, I think, as
much as any of y'all are
about things that I thought I knew
the first time that I went through history
or actually other subjects.
We've even had experts on
epidemiology and other sciences
on here as well.
But there's something when you
get to talk to the experts,
and look at what's going on,
and look at it with the lens
of the world we live in,
and the context of history,
you realize that there's
a lot more dimensionality,
as I just said, to the
world and our stories
than we first might realize
just when we read the textbook.
So thank you all for
joining and I'll see you,
I think, in a couple of
days, I always lose track.
Oh, there we go, on
Thursday I will see you.
I will see you on Thursday
where I am going to,
well, actually Wednesday and Thursday.
Sorry, it was covered in my screen.
On Wednesday, we're gonna talk
about some of the new
features at Khan Academy,
and then excited about a
conversation on Thursday
on really what's going on in education,
especially globally really.
So I'll see you all then.
(logo tinkling)
