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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.

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Photo: Abigail Adams. Wikimedia Commons/ Gilbert Stuart.