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Hillary Thanks Our Foremothers

Hillary Thanks Our Foremothers

Hallelujah, we lived to see the day — as Hillary Clinton spoke with grace to claim her place in American history. Nothing’s over yet, but as the Democratic Party standard-bearer, Clinton is riding high. And she worked for it.

Waking from the long gone, Quaker abolitionist firebrand Lucretia Mott reached for her favorite volume, “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” a passionate polemic by Mary Wollstonecraft, written as she witnessed the French Revolution.

“Thank thee, Mary,” she said quaintly in the Quaker way. “The journey to Philadelphia in July is almost done.” Mott founded the women’s equal rights cause in antebellum America. Clinton spoke of that convention’s declaration like a secular prayer. Mott, famed for a revolutionary voice and vision, was the star at Seneca Falls.

Say the names: Mary, Lucretia, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan, B. Anthony, Alice Paul — all gave us suffrage, sisterhood and a legacy named Hillary, whom they have watched for years. There’s no greater testament to how past is prologue. You’ll be seeing their faces on the money — the new $10. The Treasury turns out to have nimble timing, what is the world coming to — and “Hamilton” on Broadway, too? Suddenly, history is cool.

To meet our foremothers in the right light, note they are among things they never told you in history class — likely, not even the teacher knew.

Clinton confidently hit the right notes, a promising omen for the general election. She was gracious to her opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders, who, with his campaign staff, resembled a sulky child.

Moving on lightly, she said how hard it is to lose a campaign when you’ve poured your heart into it: “I know that feeling well,” she added, in rare public self-deprecation, a crowd-pleaser. She let her own walls down, in sync with her artful passage about bridges being better than walls, an arrow at Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee.

Vindication is so sweet, readers, we must do this more often. The modern women’s movement, such as it is, has been drowsy or dormant in the last decade or two. President Bill Clinton (Hillary’s husband!) signed major legislation to allow parents (read, women) to take leave from work for family and medical leave — unpaid. That was almost 25 years ago.

From the onset, when a cheery Clinton went to Iowa for the summer political rituals for the state Caucuses, I asked my pundit friends if she couldn’t skip the snowy state that dealt her a blow eight years ago. In my mind, she had every right to do cross Iowa off her map. No, she has to go to Iowa, a seasoned columnist told me. So she did. And so she won, barely. That showed character, to cross over to the fray.

A few points struck me as changed about Clinton’s victory speech. Compared to her wrenching loss to Senator Barack Obama in 2008, she came across as softer round the edges, with subtle touches on her hair and dress. (Yes, that matters.) Pleasing to the ear, her voice was pitched lower. Her gratitude for great good fortune seemed genuine, which she shared with “all of you.”

It was the best night for American womanhood since Alice Paul wrested the Votes for Women mass movement over the finish line in 1920. Despite Woodrow Wilson, no friend to woman suffrage, in the White House.

Clinton covered that nicely, noting her mother was born in 1919, with Congress on the cusp of passing the suffrage amendment.

As outsiders to American democracy, women could only count on themselves — there were few men in the suffrage movement. Many, like Paul, were part of the first wave of college graduates — Paul was in the Swarthmore class of 1905. They expected more from the turn of the 20th century.

Mott, a Quaker pacifist, has one reservation about Clinton: her support for the Iraq War authorization. Yet Clinton sent a message that she learns from her mistakes, and second, that she has done well along the way.

Revolutions happen on their own time, and it sure as heck feels like one is on the horizon. I might add Mott’s parting promise about the Democratic convention: “It’s 2016, not 1776. This July in Philadelphia, it will be ladies first.”

Photo: Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks during her California primary night rally held in the Brooklyn borough of New York, U.S., June 7, 2016.  REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

We Are Waiting No More, Ladies: From Abigail to Hillary

We Are Waiting No More, Ladies: From Abigail to Hillary

We are ladies in waiting no more, gentlemen. Tired of traveling third class to the revolution.

Heroines Harriet Tubman, Lucretia Mott, Alice Paul and Eleanor Roosevelt on the money herald the start of something big.

And by we I mean American women here now in 2016, voters from 18 to 98. Heck, count girls and babies; they inherit the new world being born and they can campaign, too. April brings Hillary Clinton as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

How sweet it is. A victory from sea to shining sea. Long time coming.

Dial back to 2008, the bittersweet spring when Clinton lost to Barack Obama in the Democratic primary, though she was far better seasoned. But who said the world was fair? Witnessing an American president break the color barrier one wintry day at high noon was breathtaking.

To be clear, Obama’s victory over Clinton turned a page in our oldest story. The historical theme is clear. Women are often expected to wait for their rights. Wait their turn for political power.

In 1776, Abigail Adams wrote to husband John a famous letter saying, “Remember the ladies” in the new republic. Did he listen to her? No. Though she warned, ladies might “foment a rebellion.”

In Philadelphia in 1776, Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence signers in that hall completely cut us out of their revolution’s documents. “All men are created equal” means what it says. Fourscore and seven years later, Abraham Lincoln expanded the phrase to mean black men. The founding fathers didn’t remember us.

As the Broadway hit musical, “Hamilton,” puts it, we weren’t in the room where it happened. Only one man in the Revolutionary generation believed in the rights of women: the truly talented Aaron Burr, Jefferson’s vice president. The man who dueled and slew Hamilton at sunrise on July 11, 1804. If not for the tragic duel, Burr might have become president and our struggle, our story, might have been different. Nobody knows.

The “Negro’s Hour” episode, however, could not be clearer. After working for the abolition of slavery for 30 years (1833-1863) women in the anti-slavery movement also created the women’s rights movement in 1848.

The first convention was held in Seneca Fall, New York, now a national historic site. It is to women what Philadelphia in 1776 was for men. Lucretia Mott, the Philadelphia Quaker champion of rights for slaves and women, was the main speaker. Frederick Douglass, abolitionist orator and publisher, was among hundreds in the throng. He urged Mott to make the vote one of the demands.

Hillary Clinton has visited Seneca Falls, as first lady and as senator from New York. She’s pretty perfect to take the past to present and future. The sisterhood’s fight for our rights is the march she’s on — and it’s not over.

Not Mott, not Susan B. Anthony, nor Elizabeth Cady Stanton — the three depicted in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda suffrage statue — lived to see the day women won the vote.

Here is where the earth shattered: In 1865, the Civil War’s political settlement extended voting rights and citizenship to black men only, excluding women.

The cut happened after women had worked for abolition and their own rights together. Republicans told women to wait, this was the “Negro’s Hour.” (Except Lincoln, who had died.) Even great Douglass sided with that political refrain.

The vote is the passport to democracy. Trouble was, history’s major change trains run only so often, and you have to catch one if you can. Here was the chance.

Suffrage took a long time coming, from 1865 to 1920. That’s two generations. The vote was never given, but taken over years from a grudging Southerner with three daughters — Woodrow Wilson.

Spirited Alice Paul changed the game by moving it from private to public, out on the streets of Washington. In vivid vigils and parades, “go ahead, arrest us,” was the template of her nonviolent resistance — and the police did, in the public eye. So much for ladylike. Like Mott, Paul was a “birthright” Quaker. She arrested national attention and sympathy for suffrage.

Anna Quindlen, the luminous novelist and journalist, stated that since serving as secretary of state since 2008, Clinton’s vast experience puts her at the top of the class of candidates — ever.

Our time is now. Ladies, we are waiting no more. There’s a train to catch to Philadelphia in July.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit Creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COM

Photo: Abigail Adams. Wikimedia Commons/ Gilbert Stuart.

Woodrow Wilson And Women: Let Us Eat Wedding Cake

Woodrow Wilson And Women: Let Us Eat Wedding Cake

Woody and women in the White House — let’s remember good times and bad. Wedding cake and Champagne shall be served at his residence to raise a glass to that hopeless romantic, President Woodrow Wilson. I’m all in for his Lord Byronic streak. But there’s more to the story. Wilson’s public and private selves were like night and day.

Reconciliation is not easy. But we can try.

The sweet side of Wilson deserves light shone today because his wedding to his second wife, Edith, happened 100 years ago — Dec. 18, 1915. As president, he lost his first wife, Ellen. He soon fell for Edith Galt, a rich widow, and made no secret of it.

The Democratic president proposed to glamorous Edith, who golfed and drove — the first woman in Washington to do so. He adored her, as shown in love letters and his “uxorious” — excessive — attention. Many believe she acted in his stead after Wilson suffered a stroke in 1919.

Wilson’s shameful record on race is now under serious scrutiny at his alma mater, Princeton University. Indeed, he set social progress back for decades by bringing Jim Crow segregation to the federal workforce, scarring the life chances of untold families.

Yet little has been said on Wilson’s fierce opposition to women as equal citizens, even as the suffrage movement’s winds blew outside his Oval Office. His stance on race and gender arose from being born in Virginia before the Civil War. Never forget that Wilson was a cultural Southerner who expected women and blacks to stay in their place.

Lovely, bold, young Alice Paul, leader of the modern mass movement, spent her days for seven straight years making the president the focal point of her scene-stealing, street-theater strategy. Vigils, parades and marches were always there to greet him, from the moment Wilson arrived at the train station as president-elect in 1913. He demanded to know where the crowds were. The answer: “Everybody’s at the suffragette parade, sir.”

Without Twitter, Paul turned out thousands to signal Wilson that he’d never seen political organizing like this before. Some women were harassed and hurt by the police. But the news was Paul’s public pressure on the leader of our democracy. Later scenes included women chaining themselves to the White House gates.

As a Quaker and a Swarthmore College alumna (1905), Paul advanced nonviolent resistance for women’s rights. The key was taking the streets of the nation’s capital so the quest for votes was visible. No more conventions in Cleveland. She crossed the line to victory.

For years, Wilson resisted “Votes for Women.” Truth is, he didn’t stand a chance against Paul’s force and strategic skill. He once ordered the ladies outdoors into his office for a lecture. Worse, he did nothing when Paul and others were arrested and abused in jail, when the cause gained sympathy in the public eye.

The president contended with joining a great world war. Women participated in the mobilization effort — legions like my great aunt Caroline trained as Army nurses — which gave Wilson political cover to relent to the rising tide on suffrage. In 1920, the vote was taken, not given. Did Edith Wilson have a hand in this? Wilson had three daughters, besides.

There’s much to admire about Wilsonian idealism and government. He established the Federal Reserve. A Princeton man, as student, professor and college president, Wilson is the only president ever to earn a Ph.D. He’s the last president to write his own speeches, famed for the lofty line about keeping the world safe for democracy.

A visionary statesman, Wilson had a stubborn, haughty veneer that served him poorly in dealing with Republican leaders on his doomed League of Nations.

Protesters at Princeton deplore Wilson’s name on the walls because of his racism. Ironically, the Ivy female students don’t know he was no friend to us, either. More ironic, I studied history at Swarthmore and never heard about Paul’s revolutionary launch to victory.

Washington has its charms. Where else can you mark a president’s 100th wedding anniversary? Let us eat cake and see that like America itself, Wilson was brilliant yet flawed, a Southerner yet to shed the sins of white male privilege — or supremacy.

The men who built the nation were a lot like him. Their sins are still cargo but getting lighter as we go on, with the current.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit Creators.com.

Photo: Suffragists demonstrating against President Woodrow Wilson in Chicago, Oct. 20, 1916. Via the Library of Congress.

Hillary Clinton And Alice Paul: Suffrage Strategy For A Hard Road Forward

Hillary Clinton And Alice Paul: Suffrage Strategy For A Hard Road Forward

WASHINGTON — If only Hillary Clinton and Alice Paul could have a cup of coffee. A major figure in American history, suffrage champion Paul was a political strategist with few equals. Her winning blueprint for social change gives Clinton the best way forward.

Upfront: Heck yes, becoming the first female president is a rockier road than that faced by Barack Obama, the first black president.

Bleakly, Paul might say, Hillary, nothing is simple and Iowa is stubborn. Clinton can’t afford to lose the first 2016 contest again, but Iowa has never elected a Democratic woman to statewide office.

The “Votes for Women” leader opened way for Clinton and her brilliant career to run for president. Right now, Paul’s storied movement yields lessons relevant to Clinton’s quest. The truly great, unsung heroine was old — or young — enough to be Clinton’s grandmother.

How woman suffrage was won, 95 Augusts ago, is a riveting drama that played out in street scenes in the nation’s capital. Boldly, Paul focused her mass movement on the federal government. Woodrow Wilson never had a chance against her.

President Wilson, head of the federal government, was front and center of all Paul’s plans. No conventions in Cleveland for her. She never wavered from her White House strategy.

Wilson hated always having to pass by women’s vigils and signs by his gates. No political leader had done such organizing before, historian Jean B. Harvey tells us. Paul took the suffrage movement across the finish line in 1920. She’s also the author of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Starkly, Paul might urge Clinton to ditch a gender-blind bid, the 2008 campaign model. When social revolution is in the air, she’d say, be the change we want to see. Women feel embattled, and in fact they are, a point Clinton could press to her advantage.

Emphasizing her own historic candidacy would energize waves of women. It’s true many don’t like her lawyerly zeal, but Abraham Lincoln had it, too.

Paul waged a modern movement with thousands of women, volunteers drawn mostly from America’s first generation of college-educated women. Imagine, without the Internet.

Emboldened, they flocked to the National Woman’s Party townhouse headquarters, based near the Capitol. This was a night-and-day female operation with morale, cohesion and purpose.

There were no men in the vanguard of ranks or marches, because suffrage was not “given” by men. Paul knew it must be “taken” by an army of women working for it.

Clinton’s camp is co-ed, rightly. Yet, Paul would say, keep a sharp sense of struggle. Paul and others were arrested, jailed and force-fed at one point in their nonviolent resistance. Wilson let the abuse pass, as outrage grew. Paul’s literal hunger for justice meant vigilance against incoming fire. But then, nobody needs to tell Clinton that.

As public as scenes were, the movement was also a personal match of wills between a brilliant woman outside and a brilliant man inside the Oval Office.

Striking and self-possessed, Paul was not yet 30 when she threw down the gauntlet in 1913. President-elect Wilson arrived in Washington by train, the story goes, demanding, where were people to greet him?

The answer: “They are out watching the suffrage parade, sir!” Paul’s pageant led the newspapers. Wilson didn’t like it one bit.

In the 19th century under Susan B. Anthony, suffrage languished. In 1906, Anthony died. Another at the helm for decades, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, died in 1902. So a path cleared for Paul to infuse a staid movement with new techniques she learned from London’s “suffragette” struggle.

Contrasts between Paul and Wilson are so rich. Descended from William Penn, the colonial founder of Pennsylvania, Paul was a birthright Quaker, educated at co-ed Swarthmore College, class of 1905. Wilson, a cultural Southerner and a Princeton man, was born before the Civil War.

Visionary on foreign affairs, Wilson was no friend to female nor people of color. He shifted on suffrage, partly because of the first World War, when women joined the war mobilization.

Finally, Paul might add a fact never to forget: The vote, democracy’s passport, went to black men in 1865 — 55 years before the “Votes for Women” constitutional amendment. Enlarging democracy is never easy, Hillary, I can hear her say. A sage.

As the nation enters a phase with more promise for a woman president than ever, her suffrage movement speaks across the sea of time.

Photo: Women’s suffrage activist Alice Paul, via the Library of Congress.