Hey fam, Hello Sunshine. Today on the bright Side, it's election Day, as we celebrate the power of making our voices heard. We're joined by a claimed historian, doctor Martha S. Jones, to discuss the brave, courageous women who fought to make the Nineteenth Amendment a reality and to honor the unsung heroes who have carried that torch into present day. It's Tuesday, November fifth. I'm Danielle Robe.
And I'm Simone Boyce and this is the bright Side from Hello Sunshine, a daily show where we come together to share women's stories, laugh, learn and brighten your day.
Danielle.
From day one of our show, we knew that there were a lot of things that we wanted to do right. We wanted to talk about wellness, We wanted to have interviews with inspiring authors, women who have made powerful pivots. But there was one area where we said we would never go. We wanted this to be a politics free zone. But forgive us if we break our own rules for today, because today is of course election Day, a reminder that we have the power to change the narrative.
Yeah, we were going to be the Dolly Parton of podcasts, but we are breaking our rules today. And you know what, in the spirit of that, I'm going to share my favorite quote because you and I when we started this, we actually bonded over talking about how we both were patriots. Yes, and I think this is a really patriotic quote that I actually post this a lot on July fourth on Memorial Day sometimes, and it's a quote from President Bill Clinton. He said, what is right with America can fix what
is wrong with America. And I think it reflects this optimistic belief in the strength and values of the American people to address and overcome any challenge.
And one voter block in particular that has identified those challenges and has vowed to overcome them is women. Women and our collective turnout will decide this election. Historically, that wasn't always the case.
It wasn't until June nineteen nineteen that Congress passed the nineteenth Amendment, ensuring that no one could be denied the right to vote on the basis of sex. But even then it took until August nineteen twenty for it to become part of the constitution. That fall, twenty six million women had the opportunity to vote for the very first time a monumental step forward that paved the way for generations to come.
Today, we're honoring the women who fought for our right to vote, many of whom never made it into the glossy pages of our history books.
Here to help us learn about the history of the nineteenth Amendment and how the suffrage movement has continued up to our present day is Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, Martha S.
Jones.
She's the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Director of Graduate Studies.
She's also the.
Author of Vanguard, How Black women broke barriers, won the vote and insisted on equality for all.
Doctor Martha S. Jones, Welcome to the bright Side.
I'm very happy to be here. Thanks well.
This is a very historic day, perfect for a historic conversation. I'm so excited to walk through the history of the suffragist movement with you. And as we talk about the significance of the passing of the nineteenth Amendment, can you paint a picture for us of the social and political landscape in the US in nineteen twenty What were the conditions that led to the onset of the suffragist movement?
The onset of the suffragist movement in some ways is a very long story. But by the time we get to nineteen twenty, American women are really building on many, many, many decades of activism, which is to say there is no blank slate. But by the time we get to nineteen twenty, the suffragist movement as we sometimes think of it, is well established on the American political landscape. It is characterized by radical and mainstream factions. It had as insiders
mostly elite white women, and outsiders women of color. It has allies in many quarters in American politics. As it becomes clear that American women can emerge for political parties as an important element of their constituencies. So by nineteen twenty, American women have made the case for their political competency and the effectiveness of their votes. It's important to remember that by nineteen twenty, women are already voting in many
individual states. In California since nineteen eleven, in Illinois since nineteen thirteen, in New York since nineteen seventeen, so many major states already have experience with the power of women voters, even before we get to the nineteenth Amendment.
And what were the issues that these women wanted to vote on vote for everyone goes to the ballot box for different reasons. Our civic duty, of course, but we all have different priorities and needs and issues and spaces in our culture where we want our voices heard.
What did they want? Well, there isn't one thing, and that's part of the story. One of the things that we hear from the opponents of women's suffrage in the run up to the nineteenth Amendment is that women don't need the vote because they're simply going to vote like their husbands, their fathers, like their brothers. In other words, they are sort of redundant in the body politic and
to some degree that turns out to be true. But it is also the case that, for example, among African American women, the vote is an opportunity not only to realize their full potential as citizens, but also to use their force as Black Americans in a time during which what's happening at the ballot box in many places are initiatives that are furthering and setting in place Jim Crow or segregation. Many American women come to the polls because
it is the actualization of their full citizenship. Even if they vote like their fathers and their husbands. But for some women, particularly Black women, there are very specific concerns, and those concerns are Jim Crow segregation, racism, and Black women believe that the ballot box is one place at which they can combat that.
Why was there such opposition to women voting before the passage of the nineteenth Amendment? What were the counter arguments from people at the time.
If we go back, there are some very fundamental arguments that are made about women's literal, physical, and intellectual capacities. Politics is perhaps somewhat rightly perceived to be a rough and dirty game, and there are opponents of women's suffrage who simply say women are not up to the challenges and to the fight that is American politics. A more paternalistic view that is used to oppose women's suffrage says women should be protected from the violence of American politics
and more. There are certainly those who importantly argue that to empower women politically, to bring them into politics, is to disrupt family life, to distract women, to pull women away from their what are said to be their primary obligations as homemakers and mothers. Of course, these are middle class women, but as the Nineteenth Amendment campaign game steam.
There is a real important distinction that comes to be drawn, and it is one linked to the history of segregation, the worry that if African American win the vote, they will vote with black men and begin to move the needle on election day in a challenge to Jim Crow segregation.
If we look back at the debates in Congress that lead to the putting forward of the Nineteenth Amendment, if we look at the debates in the individual states, thirty six of them that ratify the Nineteenth Amendment over time, if we look at the arguments that are made by proponents of women's suffrage, everyone in the nineteeneens is speaking openly about the necessity that whatever Congress might do, however the Constitution might be amended, it is essential that this
change not empower Black women at the polls.
So the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified on August eighteenth, nineteen twelve. But there were some key moments that happened leading up to that data and I want to ask you about one of those. The Seneca Falls Convention, happened in the mid eighteen hundreds.
What changed there eighteen forty eight is a moment in Seneca Falls, New York. For anyone who knows Seneca Falls even today, it's a small village in rural upstate New York, but it is home to some very radical thinking women who locally are coming together. They hold a convention, they issue a statement of principles that include many things, including
the demand that women should vote. One of the important things to say about Seneca Falls is that though there are local African American women living in Seneca Falls, active in Seneca Falls and its civic life, as best we know, there are no African American women at Seneca Falls. Where are Black women? Well, in eighteen forty eight, the year of the Seneca Falls Convention, African American women are in Philadelphia organizing there to challenge their premier institution, or one
of them, which is the African Methodist Episcopal Church. And so black women are not organizing around a declaration of sentiments in upstate New York. They are organizing in Philadelphia and are demanding equal rights in church bodies. For example, they want licenses to preach, they want to control over the interpretation of the Bible. And so these are two scenes that are I think coming very much out of the same criticism right the ways in which what we
call today sexism is keeping American women marginalized. But black and white women are active in very different spheres in some of those early scenes.
So another cultural moment for this movement occurred during the First Great War. How did World War One shift momentum in favor of women's suffrage.
American women become a part of the work of war or the war effort. So we see many more American women who had not typically or traditionally worked outside the
home being drawn into the war effort itself. At the same time, the White House, which by the end of the war is headed by Woodrow Wilson, is vulnerable to political criticism, is deeply invested in a united home front related to the war, and so the criticisms and the challenges of suffrages are heard differently during the war because there is this deep desire to hold on to a national front that is united, that is not troubled by domestic questions, and the debate over the night what becomes
the Nineteenth Amendment will resume and have to find new traction after the war, and so it isn't quite the turning point that it might have been or that suffragists might have hoped it would be.
After the break. More on the history of the Nineteenth Amendment with professor and doctor Martha S. Jones. The nineteenth Amendment was a watershed moment in history, but it did not include all women. And you've written about this and spoken about this extensively. In one article I'm thinking of in Politico, you wrote that there were two point two million Black women living in the South who are kept off the registration books because of existing Jim Crow laws.
And you also wrote that August nineteen twenty was really the start of a new fight, new political fight for so many Black women.
What happened next African American women in the fall of nineteen twenty, not unlike millions of other American women, organize, prepare themselves, and attempt to register to vote. And in many places, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, poll taxes, intimidation and violence prevent them from registering, prevent them from casting their ballots. And that means later that fall, when they look out across the political landscape of the nation, it's patchwork. Black
women are voting. He's like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, but in too many places, particularly in the American South and to some degree in the American West, they are unable to cast ballots, and the question is what to do. They have in hand a nineteenth Amendment, but they recognize that these laws, state laws are doing an end run
around the Nineteenth Amendment and keeping them. Just as those same laws have kept their fathers and their sons and their husbands from voting, now they are blocked at the polls. Some of the responsibility for this falls to a character someone I really admire, Halle Quinn Brown. And Halle Quinn Brown is an educator, a suffragist, and in nineteen twenty she is president of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, which is the big umbrella organization that oversees Black women's
struggles for the vote in this period. And Halle Quinn Brown determines that the way forward is now to lobby to win federal legislation, that if Congress can pass laws that give teeth to the Nineteenth Amendment, they can override the state laws that are keeping Black women from the polls. In every election cycle. Despite how they are discouraged, black women are attempting to register. When they can register, they
are casting ballots. They are becoming members, active members of the Republican Party, raising money, helping to set the agenda and the party platform, supporting candidates. The best example comes from Chicago, where by nineteen twenty eight, black women send an African American candidate to Congress, Oscar de Priest, and they do that by voting as a block in Chicago. He's the first black man to go to Congress since
the advent of Jim Crow. It's a huge sign of the ways in which black women can in fact move the needle, just like people fear they will on election day. But the last piece, of course, I think is the piece of the story maybe we know the best, and that is, by the nineteen forties the surfacing of what becomes the modern civil rights revolution. Black women, we know, will be the foot soldiers of that revolution. They will
be the architects and the masterminds. They will be the organizers, using largely nonviolent direct action in a series of campaigns, much of it culminating in Selma, Alabama, holding the feet of the nation to the fire of voting rights. But only forty five years after nineteen twenty will they succeed in winning what is in that year, the Voting Rights Act. That is really the culmination of the struggle for women's votes for African American women.
I know that we touched on some of these women, but would you tell us about some of the most fearsome Black female suffragist advocates.
Yes, I want to hold up and introduce Mary MacLeod Bethune. Missus Bethune is born in Florida in eighteen seventy five. She is the child of former slaves, the baby in a large family, and because she's born after the Civil War, because she's born during reconstruction, she is sent away to school and she can be educated. She begins her public life as a teacher and migrates to Daytona, Florida, where she opens a school for African American girls. There. Today
it is known as Bethune Cookman University. It bears her name. Missus Bethune by nineteen twenty is an organizer for the National Association of Colored Women's Club. She travels Florida preparing Black women for the likelihood of the Nineteenth Amendment, teaching them how to pay poll taxes, how to pass literacy tests, and more. But in the state of Florida. It is
a very, very, very violent season. There is organized, widespread kukux Klan opposition, and she, like all black voting rights advt kits in Florida in those years, face terrible retribution. The Klan actually visits the campus of her school on the eve of election day in nineteen twenty in an effort to indiminate Missus Bethune, her faculty, and the Black
women of Daytona. I raise her story because she's a lesson in how nimble black suffragists had to be in the face of the violence that was endemic in the state of Florida. She shifts her attention to Washington, and when she does, she meets up with a new presidential administration, the Roosevelt administration, which is working to bring the United
States out of the depression. And Franklin Roosevelt is passing New Deal legislation, wrestling with the Supreme Court around his schemes, but he is also working informally with Black Americans in Washington, bringing them into this new administrative state that is responsible for distributing federal resources and bringing Americans out of the depression. And Missus Bethune befriends Eleanor Roosevelt his wife and becomes part of what comes to be known as Roosevelt's kitchen Cabinet.
So there she is. She can't vote, she can't be elected out of Florida, but she learns that politics also runs by way of relationships, by way of informal bodies that are convened by figures like the President, and she is able not only to influence Roosevelt's policies, she's able to bring many, many black women into the federal government in Washington, where they too will help to shape law
and policy. Despite not having representation in Congress. She lives until nineteen fifty five, and that means that her vision and ambition grows as the century unfolds. She is present, for example, at the founding of the United Nations. Now she's taking this vision that began for her in rural South Carolina as a girl germinated in Florida at the height of Jim Crow, flourished in Washington during the advent
of the New Deal. Now she's part of an international community of women that are asking who can women be? Who must women be? In this new post World War two configuration of nations. So she shows us the way in which suffragists are, yes, deeply committed advocates of voting rights, but really always carry with them this far reaching, ambitious, nimble, malleable vision for the rights of women. Missus Bethune, I think, advises that so beautifully. Her figure was just installed in
the National Statuary Collection in the Capitol. She replaced a Confederate officer that had long represented the state of Florida. Now she represents the state of Florida in the Capitol. Amazing. Thank you.
Well, we have to take a quick break, but don't go anywhere. We'll be right back with doctor Martha S. Jones.
Doctor Jones, it's interesting to think about the Nineteenth Amendment in the context of the election this year, in twenty twenty four, because the debate between federal of our state rights is high on everybody's mind. In what ways did the nineteenth passage shape what we're seeing today with voting and voting access.
It's a great question. The Voting Rights Act in two thousand and eight is gutted, and the US Court does away with what we call the preclearance requirement of the Voting Rights Act, and so today we live in a post of Voting Rights Act nation in which individual states are no longer subject to the kind of scrutiny that
the Voting Rights Act had initially provided for. And this is why you see real time questions and real time contests over many sorts of voting rights regulation voter suppression mechanisms, because no longer does the Voting Rights Act function to prohibit those things in advance of an election. Until today, we see the legacy of the nineteenth Amendment in the distinct voting patterns among American women. It is still true that American women, at least until today, we do not
vote as women. White American women divide between the political parties. That was true in nineteen twenty that continues to be true today. African American women, on the other hand, come out of a distinct tradition, which is voting as a block, voting as a whole, using their small numbers to mighty effect by deliberating over candidates, deliberating over positions, and then using their vote in a concerted way. I think this
is one of the questions for twenty twenty four. And we will see, won't we in short order whether there's been a shift. But I think one of the legacies of the struggle and the unevenness and the discrimination that persisted after the nineteenth Amendment is that until today, black and white women in America vote very differently.
There's things online during election days. Women sometime times will post Ruth Bader Ginsburg sent me to the polls, or whichever name of a woman that they feel inspired by, saying that you know this woman sent me. As I was going to the polls, was thinking about who I was voting for this year, and I think what I came up with was that I'm voting for all of
the women whose names I don't know. We focus so much, of course, in history, on these really remarkable people whose names are in our history books, and there are so many women who did remarkable things that we don't know about.
I love that, so thank you for sharing it with me. One of the things I hope people take away from this history is a bit what you've said, which is that there are so many extraordinary heroes in our past. Yes, there are fraught, difficult, regrettable, even right elements and dynamics in the story of women's suffrage in the United States, But along the same route, there are women who have been courageous and righteous and ambitious for themselves and ambitious
for us, those of us who come behind them. And I do think that there's something so powerful about reaching back for them. Some names we know, and you're so right, many names we don't know, but reaching back for them, bringing them with us to the polls. We have to carry with us that political history, because it is not a political history that can be told simply through the stories we already know. So I'm glad to hear that,
and I love the idea that we do. Indeed, as some of our women leaders have put it right, we all stand on the shoulders of other women on election Day.
Well said, thank you for that, Professor Jones, thank you so much for joining us today.
It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Thank you.
Doctor Martha S. Jones is a professor of history and the author of Vanguard, How Black women broke barriers, won the vote, and insisted on equality for all. Her new book, The Trouble of Color, an American family memoir, is out next year.
It is election day. Your voice truly matters. The best way to honor those who came before us and all of their sacrifices is to vote. To check your pulling location, go to vote dot org. That's it for today's show. Tomorrow, it's International Stress Awareness Day. We're talking to psychologist and Northwestern University professor Judith Moskowitz all about cultivating positive emotions so that we can better deal with our stress.
Join the conversation using hashtag the bright Side and connect with us on social media at Hello Sunshine on Instagram and at the bright Side Pod on TikTok oh, and feel free to tag us at Simone Voice and at Danielle Robe.
Listen and follow The bright Side on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
See you tomorrow, folks, Keep looking on the bright side.