Ballot Blocked Episode 3: Remembering History's Complexities

Entrance hallway of the Belmont Paul Women's Equality National Monument.

National Park Service

This episode explores the fight for women's suffrage in the pivotal decades before and after ratification of the 19th Amendment. It explores the changing tactics of the suffrage movement as well as the battles for inclusion and equity that took place within women's organizations in the early 20th century United States.

To learn more about this history, we interviewed Susan Philpott. A public historian and National Park Service ranger, Philpott has worked at the National Mall and Memorial Parks for over a decade. She volunteered to be one of the first rangers at Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument when it was designated in 2016. In this conversation, Philpott reflects on the challenges of researching and interpreting the complex history of women's voting rights.

• Ballot Blocked Episode 3: Remembering History's Complexities

  
  

  In this episode, we examine the history of the women's suffrage movement in the pivotal decades before and after ratification of the 19th amendment. Susan Philpott, a National Park Service ranger and public historian, discusses the movement's changing tactics, as well as struggles for inclusion and equity within early 20th century women's organizations. The challenges of commemorating complex histories are also explored.

  Credit / Author:

  Eleanor Mahoney

  Date created:

  07/07/2021

  Audio Transcript

  Eleanor Mahoney: Welcome to Ballot Blocked, a history of women's fight to access the vote. I’m Eleanor Mahoney. In this six-part series, we talk to historians and scholars to learn about women’s path to the ballot, from the period of the Civil War, through the women’s suffrage movement, the Civil Rights movement, and the 2020 election. It’s a story of courage and perseverance, of disappointments and hard won victories. Some of the people you will hear about are well-known, their names on monuments and memorials. Others may have received less recognition, but their achievements are no less impressive. The history of women’s voting rights isn’t a progressive or linear narrative. Passing legislation is only one step along the way to the ballot box. The laws have to be enforced and that takes more organizing and more struggle. New barriers to voting access are still being created today. One hundred years after the 19th amendment barred states from denying the vote based on sex, the fight for social, economic, and political equality continues. Ballot Blocked explores how we got here and asks where we might be going next when it comes to voting rights. In this episode, we pick up our story in Washington, D.C. at a stately brick mansion just steps away from the U.S. capitol and Supreme Court. A sign outside the building reads Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument. The site is managed by the National Park Service and is staffed by uniformed rangers. For much of the past century though, the mansion was home to the National Women’s Party or NWP. You’ve probably seen old black and white photos of the women who founded the NWP. Images of picket lines and parades, of women wearing white dresses and big hats, marching down wide boulevards and holding banners. The leaders of the NWP, like most of the women in the photographs, were white and from middle and upper class families. But these pictures don’t tell the whole story - not even close. Women from diverse backgrounds were also fighting for the right to vote, but their contributions were not always welcomed by the mainstream suffrage movement. To learn more about the struggle for women’s voting rights and the battles for inclusion and equity within the suffrage movement, I talked to Susan Phillpott, a historian and National Park Service ranger who has worked at the National Mall and Memorial Parks for over a decade. She volunteered to be one of the first rangers at Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument when it was designated in 2016. I asked her to tell me more about the creation of the monument and what the brick mansion in Washington, D.C. meant for women’s voting rights across the country. What stories did it hold, and whose voices had been left out from many accounts of the women’s suffrage movement?

  Susan Philpott: Since 1929, this historic house has been the headquarters of the National Woman's Party founded by Alice Paul. And Alice Paul was in the new generation of women fighting for equality and particularly the right to vote in the 20th century. And she led what became the National Woman's Party, which was a small organization in the much larger National Women's Suffrage Movement, but they were the ones that were really good at getting publicity. If you have seen any photographs of women fighting for the vote in the early 20th century leading up to the passage and ratification of the 19th Amendment, you probably have seen pictures of the National Woman's Party people, because they were the ones that were out there causing good trouble, to borrow a phrase from John Lewis. They were the ones picketing the White House, and planning parades, and doing all sorts of disruptive things in their demand for the right to vote. Alice Paul came to the movement actually not from meeting any U.S. suffrage leaders, but when she was going to graduate school in Europe and particularly at the London School of Economics, she encountered the militant suffragettes there of the Women's Social and Political Union led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters. They used the tactic of being disruptive, being visible. Their slogan was “Deeds not words." Up till that point, most of the work for all social change really, not just the Women's Suffrage Movement, the tactics were things like giving speeches, writing articles, publishing newspapers, getting the word out. This idea that you could convince people of the rightness, the justice, the logic of your movement, and that was going to bring about change. And the suffragettes didn’t think that was going to work.

  Eleanor Mahoney: Deeds not words. The slogan of the British suffragettes. In England, Alice Paul saw these women using tactics designed to provoke confrontation. They petitioned Parliament, yes, but they also organized big demonstrations, they threw rocks, they broke windows and they even burned buildings and set off mailbox bombs. Susan Philpott told me that Alice Paul brought this spirit to America with her when she came back in 1910. She thought American suffragists were too reserved. She wanted to push the movement toward more direct action. And, she found a partner in this: the wealthy women’s activist Alva Vanderbilt Belmont. Susan Philpott: So you have a couple of things happening in the late 19th and early 20th century. One is this new class of super wealthy people in the Gilded Age, including women, women who have money, have more opportunities than previous generations of women have had, own property, and start to use that money, that standing, people like Alva Belmont, to support these movements, including the labor movement, that you have wealthy women giving their voice and giving their money to the labor movement. The level of leadership among white women is still primarily privileged, although not at Vanderbilt level. But women like Alice Paul and Lucy Burns of the National Woman's Party, and then of the larger National Women's Suffrage Organization, women like Carrie Chapman Catt, are still from fairly privileged backgrounds. But they are, as you mentioned, learning from labor leaders. Some of them, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton's daughter, Harriet Stanton Blatch, are actually involved in that labor movement and supporting the labor movement. And so then you also have women who have been labor leaders joining the suffrage movement. That was one of the arguments that Alice Paul would make is that, "Anything else you care about, whether it is labor reform, whether it is health reform, whether it is improving conditions for immigrants or Prohibition, whatever it is, women, if you have the vote, you will be more likely to be able to get that done. So join us in our fight for the vote, and then you will have the power of the ballot to work for all of those other things." But this period of time is also the period of time that is very much a worsening of race relations, of increasing segregation, and racial oppression and violence. Although the Women's Suffrage Movement started among abolitionists, and it was a very interracial movement, by the time of the 20th century, it has become as segregated as everything else in the US. So Black women have always been forming their own organizations, but they find themselves increasingly not being able to get anywhere with the white leaders and focusing their efforts on their own organization. So the Black Women's Club Movement sort of overseen and supported by the formation of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 with Mary Church Terrell as president. Black women are fighting for many different things all of the time, including the vote. Supporting Black men being able to vote, which they should have had that right according to the Constitution, but it's not happening. They're getting pushed out of being able to have the vote, and other social and civic issues including women having to vote. Still, some of them are continuing to work with or fight for recognition in the white women's organizations, but often finding themselves only able to make marginal progress there and having to form their own organizations. Eleanor Mahoney: Segregation and racism were all too common within the women’s suffrage movement. For example, in 1913, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, or NAWSA, organized a big parade in Washington, D.C., to demand the vote for women. It was the day before Woodrow Wilson’s presidential inauguration in 1 913, and thousands of women came to march. Organizers Alice Paul and Lucy Burns wanted to shine a light on the fact that they were excluded from the electoral process. Prominent Black activists, like Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell, also showed up that day to demand the vote. Susan Philpott explains what happened next.

  Susan Philpott: Alice Paul, her vision of this story that they're going to tell in the landscape is really only the story of white women. Very quickly, she discovers that there's Black women who are saying, "Great, sign me up," like Mary Church Terrell, like women from Howard University. Immediately, there is this tension of, well, can we have Black and white women marching together? Is that telling another story that we don't want to get into? We're only talking about women voting. We're not talking about racial issues. So, there's a lot of back and forth. It's hard to tell in the record what the intention was, particularly because Alice Paul's trying to downplay this tension and, sometimes in the history, you might hear that Black women were forced to march in the back. It's certainly clear that that's what Alice Paul wanted. What's less clear is that Black women agreed. It seems pretty clear that they did not. That they marched where they believed they belonged. Ida B. Wells is one of the clearest parts of that story, that she is lining up with the delegation of women's suffragists that have come from Illinois. She's arguably the most famous woman there in that delegation. As they're getting ready to start, the white women's suffragists turn to her and say, "Oh, you know what, we heard that they don't want Black women to march with the white women. So, Mrs. Wells-Barnett, you're going to have to go to the back." Ida is just absolutely incensed. She says, basically, “What are you saying? If you tell me to go to the back, what story are you telling about equality and justice?" She storms off, but she doesn't go to the back. She waits along the parade route. And when the Illinois delegation comes by, she steps right out in front.

  Eleanor Mahoney: Stories like this remind us of history’s complexity. The centennial anniversary of women getting the vote would seem like a moment for celebration. But Park Service staff knew the story wasn’t so simple. They had to bring forward the voices of those marginalized by the mainstream suffrage movement and those who still had to fight to vote after 1920.

  Susan Philpott: So that was one of the foundational ideas of the planning of this anniversary. In fact, one of the first decisions that was made very deliberately by the 19th Amendment Centennial Working Group led by Dr. Megan Springate was to call it a commemoration and not a celebration, that we want to use this as an opportunity to tell all of these stories and let that tension of the recognition of these amazing accomplishments with the failings and the failures, to be inclusive and to recognize equality of all, that we wanted to be, that the National Park Service wanted to be a place where we were telling all those stories. One thing, of course, you notice when you walk into the museum at the Belmont-Paul is that you see all of these photographs and paintings and sculptures of women, and it's all white faces. You're struck by that right away. I could definitely see that as I started to give tours in the faces of the visitors as they stood there and looked around, and how many visitors were not seeing themselves represented there. One of the things that's in the first area that you enter when you go into the museum at Belmont-Paul, in addition to having pictures and statues all around you, there's a huge mirror and, on that mirror, is a sticker that looks like a frame. The idea is that, when you look at yourself in that mirror, it's as if you're in the frame. And so, the sign says to see yourself here, that you are here among these suffragists, these fighters, and you are one of them. Right away, we could see that there were lots of people who come and who don't see themselves there. And so part of this work for commemorating this important moment in civil rights history is to help tell those stories, have all people, all parts of the story represented so that we aren't ignoring or shying away from the difficult parts, so that everyone who comes can engage with the story and see themselves in this story of what it means to work for change, and what it means to stand up and demand that you be treated equally...So there are many people who fought for this amendment who said, "Good, we're done. All right, that's it for me. I'm going back home. I'm living a normal life, no more fighting," which is a perfectly rational way to respond to having gone through all this. But then there are others, and there are new people who are joining this movement who said, "No, now that we have the ballot, that's just the beginning. Now we've got the power to fight for everything else."

  Eleanor Mahoney: So what happened after ratification of the 19th amendment? Members of the National American Woman Suffrage Association started the League of Women Voters in 1920. For more than a hundred years, the League has championed the issue of voter education. The National Women’s Party became an advocacy group focused on social equality for women. Getting women the vote was only the first step. The U.S. Constitution still did not formally recognize women as equal citizens. This led to a fight for the Equal Rights Amendment as Susan Philpott explains.

  Susan Philpott: So they wrote a new amendment which said, "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged on account of sex." The Equal Rights Amendment. That started in 1923. That's not an amendment that they were successful in getting added to the Constitution. There is still nothing officially, if you're talking about originalists and looking at the words, there's still nothing in the words of the U.S. constitution that says women are equal citizens, need to be treated equally. If you look at the intentions of the people who wrote the words, there certainly is the argument to be made, that the people who wrote these words didn't think of women as equal. One thing that white women in general don't do is pay attention to the issue of the vote, and who's still able to exercise the vote and who isn't. So right from the beginning, you have Black women from the South who are contacting the National Woman's Party and saying, "Hey, we are trying to register, and they are keeping us out. We need your help." The National Woman's Party's response was, "You're being denied because of your race, not because of your sex. That's not our issue." Even though over the years, over and over again, Black women are coming to the National Woman's Party and saying, "Support us as we try to fight against continued racial violence, as we fight against literacy tests and poll taxes and other forms of intimidation that are keeping us from our rights." Over and over again, the National Woman's Party does not respond, even though they look for Black women to help them support the Equal Rights Amendment. So that racial divide continues. Ironically, one of the biggest things that makes a difference for women is the Civil Rights Act of 1964. So here, white women's groups tend to not be getting involved in civil rights issues and racial issues. But it is the Civil Rights Act and one word in Title VII that's about employment discrimination, the word sex in the prohibition against employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, they get the word sex in there. With employment equality, at least in law if not in practice, that begins the process of women being able to move closer towards economic equality, and then from that, political equality. So it always makes me wonder, historians don't like the counterfactuals, but I wonder, what if, what if white women like Alice Paul had joined with all of these Black women who were fighting and said, "Yes, we are making common cause, that we are fighting for equality for all." Maybe they could have gotten there faster. I can understand in a way the desire to say we need to make our demands simple and limited, that that's the way you get change. You say, “I want this one thing and I'm going to fight for this one thing.” But in doing that, it's so easy to exclude people. There's always this response of, "Okay, well, we'll get to you later." As Dr. King said, "That answer of wait has always meant never."

  Eleanor Mahoney: "This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never’." Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote these words in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” more than two years before the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Dr. King knew that the vote would not be given; it must be claimed. In the next episode, we'll pick up our story with Irish-American suffragists, who used their background in the labor and Irish independence movements to push for ballot access. Ballot Blocked is produced and hosted by me - Eleanor Mahoney. Dr. Sylvea Hollis conducted research and interviews and helped plan this podcast. Drew Himmelstein is our producer and editor. Our music is by Podington Bear. This project was made possible through the National Park Service in part by a grant from the National Park Foundation and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Credits

Ballot Blocked is produced and hosted by Dr. Eleanor Mahoney. Dr. Sylvea Hollis conducted research and interviews and helped plan this podcast. Drew Himmelstein is the producer and editor. Music is by Podington Bear. This project was made possible through the National Park Service in part through a grant from the National Park Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.