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Tag: womens suffrage
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

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.

Woman’s Face On U.S. Currency Shouldn’t Be A Politician’s Face

Woman’s Face On U.S. Currency Shouldn’t Be A Politician’s Face

Whoever the woman is on the next $10 bill, here’s who it shouldn’t be:

A politician. A Cabinet member. A First Lady.

Put a poet there. A scientist. A musician with a social cause. A social worker. A teacher. A suffragette. An abolitionist.

But, please, not someone primarily associated with politics.

Since Wednesday, when the U.S. Treasury Department announced that a woman will finally star on our paper money, opinions have heated up over who that woman should be.

The excitement is fun to watch, even if this is hardly an advance on par with the first moon landing.

In fact, it’s a bit of a letdown to some people. The honoree will be on a $10 bill instead of on a $20, a disappointment to those who wanted to oust Andrew Jackson.

The lucky winner won’t have the whole bill to herself either. She’ll have to cohabit with its current occupant, Alexander Hamilton.

And the redesign won’t arrive until 2020.

Still, it’s a breakthrough. As others have cracked, a woman is about to shatter the cash ceiling, at least for the first time since Martha Washington, wife of George, appeared on a silver certificate in the late 1800s.

But which woman?

A few women in the political realm are strong contenders.

One is Frances Perkins.

Perkins was U.S. Secretary of Labor under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. She fought for child-abor laws. She established the country’s first minimum-wage and overtime laws. I’ve heard her referred to as kickass, and she was.

If she became the face on the next $10 bill, I’d be proud to carry that cash.

But the new currency is the perfect opportunity to think beyond Washington, D.C., to consider the fact that people with power and courage exist beyond the narrow political realm.

That’s why First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, grand as she was, wouldn’t get my vote.

When I was thinking about this topic, someone asked me why we put people’s faces on our money at all.

Why not put an excerpt of the Constitution instead?

Why not birds or butterflies, the way the Costa Ricans do?

Why not pizza?

The best answer, I think, is that people contain stories. Through individual stories we get to tell our bigger, collective ones.

As Jacob Lew, the Treasury Secretary, put it, “America’s currency is a way for our nation to make a statement about who we are and what we stand for.”

Who we are extends into art and culture, the environment and education, social work, and while all of those overlap with politics, they’re different too.

Other countries have acknowledged that fact on their money for a long time.

The women on the Swedish krona include an opera singer and a Nobel Prize-winning writer. Turkey, Mexico, New Zealand and Australia all have women on their paper money. England plans to put the 19th-century writer Jane Austen on its 10-pound note.

Regardless of which woman winds up on our money, the discussion about it is useful.

Thinking and talking about it is a way to review history and learn it.

I was entertained by the names that popped into my mind when I pondered candidates.

What about Louisa May Alcott?

She was a feminist, abolitionist and the author of Little Women, a book that has inspired generations of plucky girls. I wouldn’t mind carrying her around in my wallet.

How about Jane Addams?

That woman did everything. She was a writer and philosopher. She campaigned for women’s right to vote. As the co-founder of Hull House in Chicago, she helped immigrants and the poor. She won the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize.

Handing Jane Addams to a cashier would make me stand up taller.

Rosa Parks, who bravely rode that segregated bus in Alabama? She’s high on my list too.

But when the argument is over, I hope the winner is the apparent frontrunner, Harriet Tubman.

I hadn’t thought of Tubman in years, frankly, but reminded of her life — an abolitionist born to slaves — I can’t imagine anyone better to represent who we’ve been and who we hope to be.

Whoever it is, it’s good to be reminded that the cash we carry represents the stories we tell ourselves.

(Mary Schmich is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Contact her at mschmich@tribune.com. You can follow her on twitter.com/maryschmich or contact her on facebook.com/maryschmich)

Photo: Elii Christman via Flickr