Audio
And Nothing Less Extras: The Flu
Transcript
Retta: We’re looking back on this history while in the middle of a pandemic. And I don’t know about you, but when I’m putting my mask on just to try to get my cat food, this all feels really far away.
Rosario Dawson: Yeah, a lot has changed in a hundred years. But I’m sure the suffragists couldn’t have imagined a world without hugging, right?
R: Well, you know actually, we probably should not be forgetting that just two years before women secure the right to vote, the world was facing another pandemic.
RD: That was the 1918 Spanish flu, which infected one third of the world’s population. The impact was devastating -- more than 50 million people died worldwide, and over six hundred thousand died here in the United States.
But that led to unexpected social changes, especially for women.
Allison Lange: the 1918 flu crisis, which is very much similar to our own this global crisis really shaped the way that the 19th Amendment was passed.
R: Allison Lange is a professor at the Wentworth Institute of Technology and is a consulting historian for the Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission.
Lange: it first came to the united states in a major wave in the fall of 1918. It's September 30th, 1918, when Woodrow Wilson addresses the Senate, asking them to endorse suffrage. And it's the week later that the speaker of the House falls ill.
In response, the nation’s capital shuts down. You can imagine it, having experienced something similar today.
And obviously this wouldn’t mean quick progress for any legislation, but women were mobilized in response to the flu crisis, which had a disproportionate impact on young men.
To put it in perspective, look at World War One. That ended just as the flu was at its worst in November of 1918. The war killed around 17 million. That’s only a third of the flu deaths. More American soldiers died from the flu than in battle.
Lange: Women were nurses on a large scale and a lot of them had been nurses and were one and came back to the United States and continue to do so. They were caregivers for their family, but also many of them were enlisted to work more professionally. Another component is that during World War One, the American Red Cross did not deploy women of color to be nurses overseas. But because of the crisis in 1918, they did call up women of color to be nurses, which, you know, by by breaking that barrier, they were allowed to be included in future American Red Cross initiatives. So that was a really important shift in that in the nursing profession for women of color.
By 1920 women made up 21 percent of the workforce. While this gender boost is often credited to World War I alone, women’s increased presence in the workforce would have been far less pronounced without the 1918 flu pandemic. And that was something the public and politicians couldn’t ignore, says writer Elaine Weiss.
Weiss: it makes the old arguments about women's frailty and women's lack of citizenship and patriotism moot. And that's why it really propels things forward. And women have a better sense of themselves. It convinces a lot of women who did not support suffrage before. Now suddenly they've taken on a job, they've taken on public service in many different ways. And they realize that they do want a say in how their nation is governed.
Description
What did the flu epidemic of 1918 have to do with suffrage? More than you might think...
Duration
3 minutes, 37 seconds
Credit
PRX, WSCC, NPS
Date Created
09/02/2020
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