Power and the Woman's Vote: How Can History Help? With Susan Ware

Alexander McCaig (00:08):

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to TARTLECAST. You are here today with Susan Ware and myself. She is, quite frankly, the world's top historian on women's suffrage. I don't know if she wants to take that coin from me, but I can assure she knows everything that she's talking about and the ability to thread the needle of multiple narratives, multiple lives of people coming together in very serendipitous moments to find what happened in history leading up to certain things like the 19th amendment. And one of those torch bears were Carrie Chapman Catt. And Susan, I know you really did a deep dive on this. This is not your first book on women's suffrage. And you also do a phenomenal job connecting what I would say is subjects and objects from the past, but also bring their relevance to the future, so that it's not something that's frankly out of time, but still very applicable to what we're seeing today. So thank you very much for coming on the show.

Susan Ware (01:20):

Thank you for having me.

Alexander McCaig (01:22):

So help me understand here from your own life. How did you get into women's suffrage? Where was the start for you? And from the quotes you put in the book, does that make you a feminist?

Susan Ware (01:35):

I sure hope it comes through loud and clear that I'm a feminist. And it really was my introduction to feminism, which happened when I was in college in 1970, and there was this fresh new movement, and it just made so much sense to me. But I also was a history major, and I wasn't hearing much, and I was a women's college. I still wasn't hearing very much about what women had done in history. And so I had this kind of epiphany where I realized I could combine my two passions for feminism and for history, and that is when I decided to embark on a career as a women's historian.

Susan Ware (02:23):

And it has just given me such satisfaction to be able to research and then share my expertise with audiences, with people who read my books, with the students I've taught, the lectures I've given, really trying to connect the past to the present, and then looking forward to the future. And when I contemplated doing a book on suffrage, looking ahead to the centennial in 2020, I think at first I was afraid that the topic, that somehow, women's voting would seem kind of tame, or it's not big deal, so women got to vote.

Susan Ware (03:02):

Well, I think that the current political landscape, or certainly the one from 2016 on, made everyone incredibly aware of the importance of voting rights, of women's roles in politics, all the things that the suffragists were fighting for. And so I found myself when I was out on what I call the suffrage hustings, talking about my book, having conversations where people were deeply engaged, learning the history, but were very easily fast forwarding 100 years and making the connections between what the suffragists were trying to do, what had happened since then, where we were now, and how much more still needed to be done. And I think that for me, one of the big takeaways was just feeling myself being part of something larger that I felt that the suffragists were fighting these battles, and then I'm writing about them and talking about them.

Susan Ware (04:03):

But they're ongoing. We still have so much to do when it comes to women's rights and voting rights, and guaranteeing our democracy and all kinds of things like that. And it really was quite an amazing experience to be doing this in the midst of the centennial, and then on top of that, in the midst of a global pandemic.

Alexander McCaig (04:25):

Right. So for those that aren't well versed in this, when people think feminism, I think a good body of them have the wrong idea about it. And I know that you used in the book, the historian Estelle Freedman. There was a quote on feminism is a belief around the fact that there's equal work between men and women. It's an inherent thing. But most societies are still privileging men as a group. Now they spoke about the result of that. And I know that Estelle was focused on political equality between men and women, but I think that there's a deeper social understanding or human understanding that people still tend to miss. So is feminism strictly from the suffrage ideology and movement, a political thing? Or is it more a social and human thing that is actually occurring when you would define it?

Susan Ware (05:41):

Well, I think of women's rights as human rights. And I think that a vision of feminism that is just about women or just about certain women, like white women, is an inadequate vision, and that it really behooves us to look very broadly at all of the structures and hierarchies that privilege certain groups, often men, and often white men, and disenfranchise or marginalize other groups. And so I think that feminism had a breadth of vision, which it doesn't usually get credit for. And I think that the suffrage movement, getting women the right to vote, most women, not all women, and I hope we have a chance to talk about that, in 1920, was part of that. But the vision of feminism now, the vision of feminism that I embraced in the 1970s when I became a feminist, is much broader than political rights.

Susan Ware (06:43):

And yet, you can't really get very far in society if men and women have unequal political rights, don't have access to political power. So it's economic rights, it's social rights, cultural, political. It's the whole shebang.

Alexander McCaig (07:00):

So then is it the responsibility of the government to define how we equally view one another? Or is it for us to come together and say, "Just because your sex is female biologically from birth, that doesn't make you lesser than me"? You are just a different function of a human being, but very much still a human being. And it's the responsibility of us as a collective as humans, men and women, to say, "We are all here of equal value, regardless of color, race, or creed." Is that how the function should be? Or is it truly necessary that a government has to define it for us first, or we as people define it, and then the government then takes it on secondly to actually codify it into policy?

Susan Ware (07:47):

I don't think it's an either or binary. I think you actually need both of those things. Frankly, if you can't change the hearts of the people and get them to realize that there's something fundamentally wrong with categorizing people by sex, or race, or anything else that puts one group above another, we're not going to get very far. But laws are helpful, for example, the 19th amendment, which guaranteed most women the right to vote. And I qualify that because voting is a states rights usually, states rights issue usually. And so for African American women in the South after 1920, men had already been disfranchised because of Jim Crow restrictions. And so when the black women tried to vote, register to vote, they were turned away as well. So it really, for that group, it's the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Susan Ware (08:48):

But again, those are two good examples of federal laws that had an enormous impact on the ability of citizens to vote and participate in the political system. And yet, that wasn't all there was. Think about the civil rights movement, and the sit ins, and the marches, and all of that. Social change is a complicated, messy, ongoing process. And I think one of the things I tried to do during the centennial and with my book was to make sure that the story of women's suffrage was included in that larger story because it really is a moment where it's the largest expansion of the voting population ever, by including half of the population.

Susan Ware (09:40):

And it's often just a sentence or two in textbooks. People don't really know how long it took. They don't have the stories to understand that women were willing to go on hunger strikes and risk their lives, and march in the streets and do all kinds of very unladylike things in order to get women the vote.

Alexander McCaig (10:03):

Actually, I think it's very ladylike. I think they're doing very human things [crosstalk 00:10:07].

Susan Ware (10:07):

These are my kind of ladies. You know?

Alexander McCaig (10:09):

Yeah. I know. Then I guess that is what ladies should be doing. I think that's fantastic.

Susan Ware (10:15):

Take to the streets, ladies. Well, that's what they did.

Alexander McCaig (10:18):

Ladies, I'm going to get you a T-shirt that says that.

Susan Ware (10:21):

But yeah, no, but I do think that it's rather than thinking of the 19th amendment and women's voting as some kind of narrow little silo, only having to do with the vote, it is much broader than that. And it is any social movement is always in conversation with other movement and other developments at the same time. No one ever achieves total success. And so it's part of a sort of up and down continuum. It's hard to write about something so big in that way, and you don't want to get discouraged. You don't want the takeaway point to be just go back to bed in the morning because you're not going to be able to do anything.

Susan Ware (11:06):

And what I've tried to do, and I think this is because I'm a biographer, is I always try to put human faces on the process of social change. And so I used stories of real women to tell the story, rather than just some huge overarching narrative of, meta narrative of how women got to vote. And I think that really sort of makes it clear to people because they can imagine maybe their grandmother did that. It's like someone they've read about in a novel. It's sort of brings it home. And for me, it is a way to make it come alive.

Alexander McCaig (11:52):

Yeah. And I have to, I'm going to say that I agree with that. I'm not saying that just because you're here with me on the podcast. When you talked about the Explorer's Club in New York, I love to hike, I love to rock climb. And when it spoke about women going out on those trips, climbing the peaks, doing all those things that apparently men would be able to do, I love the fact that Cora Eaton was hiking Yellowstone, wore whatever the hell she wanted to wear, and she was crushing those peaks whenever she wanted. And the fact that the women's suffrage movement are setting up base camps on mountains and bringing out other people for these try out trips, I'm like, "Hell yeah." I'm like, "That's what I'm talking about." But there's a face, there's a narrative that I connected with across many of the different narratives that you put in there. But they all still lead back to a pinnacle point. Right?

Susan Ware (12:51):

[inaudible 00:12:51].

Alexander McCaig (12:52):

Yeah. [crosstalk 00:12:53]. Yeah. It comes back to that focus, that very human focus that I think tends to get missed. And a lot of the time, you can say women's suffrage, but it goes over people's heads. But if you talk about the smaller aspects of it, it's like, "Why does marketing have to do pink razors for women, and then increase the price on it?" Why do smaller or other aspects where you're in the workforce, women are statistically paid less? And I think there are these aspects of it that will resonate with individuals at different levels that touch them on their own personal lives and bring them into the larger picture of what's been going on up to this centennial anniversary. And that's my thought when I look at this.

Alexander McCaig (13:41):

And I think these tools, these specific narratives help create that understanding in sometimes a roundabout process, but always drives it forward. There's always more work to do because there's great patriarchal aspects that are so entrenched in our society that don't directly hold people back or hold them down, but they indirectly do so. And then it also reinforced perspectives of other individuals to think that the world just operates like that when it doesn't need to operate so. Are you following me with where I'm going with that?

Susan Ware (14:14):

Yeah. And I think my whole career as a feminist historian has really been devoted to uncovering what women have done. And there's sort of the sense sometimes that, oh, it's only recently that women have been allowed out of the home and are sort of finally being able to participate in the broader world. Not true. Anywhere you look, you just see the history is built by women and men, but the women have been there, they just haven't gotten the credit. And so I think a moment like the centennial of the 19th amendment is a chance to remind people, to educate people, about women's contributions to society. And then you hope that they generalize from that and realize, well, if they're doing X, Y and Z to get the vote, then they're doing all kinds of other things. And why don't we know about that?

Susan Ware (15:15):

And once we do know about it, let's draw strength from it because for me, knowing that I'm not the first who's fought this battle is actually very empowering. As I said earlier, I feel like I'm part of something larger. And I don't write history just to create larger than life heroines. And certainly, there were enough aspects of the suffrage movement that were not always flattering, like its treatment of African American women. So you don't want to have whitewashing going on. And yet, I think we do need to know more about what women have done in the past. And the suffrage movement is interesting in its own right. It was an important moment in political history, but it also is one that is quite timely and relevant today as we debate and pass legislation, voting rights and voter suppression. This is something that's very real to people. It's not some abstract, unimportant little political reform.

Alexander McCaig (16:29):

Because it's something so real, what is going on today to capture the mindsets of individuals that are supporting this movement in a very micro or macro sense? Are their current tools that are in place? Is it still rallies and speak outs, and books like yourself? Or has it taken to new sorts of mediums that people can actually be a part of this? What steps or tools are they currently using today? Are they the same as they were 100 years ago?

Susan Ware (16:59):

Well, there was no social media for the suffragists, so if they wanted to get a crowd together-

Alexander McCaig (17:05):

There's pamphlets.

Susan Ware (17:06):

They had to do pamphlets. In some ways, the suffragists were at the cutting edge of new technologies like photographs and newspapers and news reels. And my sense is that any social movement is going to use whatever tools are available, and hopefully use them effectively. There's another question that's sort of lurking in how you phrased that, which is: How would a historian 100 years from now capture this moment we've just been through?

Alexander McCaig (17:42):

Wow.

Susan Ware (17:43):

Maybe they'd listen to podcasts like this, and say, "Oh, people were talking about this." Or maybe they would try and find representative individuals across a diversity of sexual orientation and geography and age and education and all kinds of things, and weave their stories together. But still, it won't be the full story, but it could be a way of capturing it. But I'm going to have to leave that for the next generation of historians. I'm not going to be here to do that.

Alexander McCaig (18:15):

I can't do all that work. That's for the next person. Right?

Susan Ware (18:17):

Right.

Alexander McCaig (18:21):

So I need to understand. We know that for a great body of time, society, global society has been quite patriarchal in its dominance. There's always a father figure. And you speak of founding mothers here in the book. When did the shift happen where the dominance became male throughout the world? I know this may be out of your wheelhouse, but was it after the end of really a Celtic Druid reign, where it was a very ... You know what I'm saying though, where it was very female forward, very matriarchal, our focus was on the Earth, the Earth mother, things of that nature. That dialogue, that way of speech isn't practiced as often and it's not as relevant. Where did the shift happen where it took the turn towards male dominance, and then from that, has limited the opportunity and evolution for the other sex on the other side? When was that before this point of the actual suffrage movement? Because I'm trying to understand the source of society as a whole.

Susan Ware (19:39):

Well, there's not going to be some moment in the year 536, when all of a sudden everything pivots.

Alexander McCaig (19:45):

It was 536, interesting.

Susan Ware (19:49):

Yeah. And just when you're talking about certain other traditions, if you think of Native American cultures, indigenous cultures, they have always had a much larger role, much more what we would call equal, but it's more complementary, matrilineal societies, where the lineage is through the women, not through the men. And so there are other cultural heritages that don't necessarily privilege men. Unfortunately, most of them do. And I don't really have an answer as to when that happened. But I think I've concluded, come to the conclusion that we can, women and feminists and other marginalized groups can raise these issues and make progress about inclusion and all. But once you stop pushing, it just defaults. It defaults back to white patriarchal privilege. And that's been-

Alexander McCaig (20:57):

Why is that the default?

Susan Ware (20:59):

Well, it is-

Alexander McCaig (21:00):

Susan, I can't understand why. Is that because of policy, law, structure, governments? Is that a religious thing?

Susan Ware (21:11):

Religion, I mean, it's pretty deeply baked in.

Alexander McCaig (21:13):

It's tough.

Susan Ware (21:14):

I think two of the things that I've realized over my 50 years now of being a feminist is I really, rather naively in the '70s thought all we had to do was point this out. This is wrong. Men shouldn't have all the power. Women can do anything they want, free to be you and me and all that, that we would just point it out, and everyone would say, "Oh, good point. Thanks for telling us things which-"

Alexander McCaig (21:41):

Yeah, great. See you later. Yeah, appreciate it.

Susan Ware (21:44):

But then it didn't change. And I think that especially the election of Donald Trump and the legitimacy of misogyny and the antifeminist things that he would say, among all kinds of other things that were going on, really took me aback to see how strong those attitudes, which I thought had at least been damped down. I think maybe they just went undercover, but they came back. And I think it was just a good reminder that the work of feminism will never be done, that we have to just keep raising these issues. And history is one way of doing it because even though there have been centuries of patriarchal domination, you also have centuries of women resisting that.

Susan Ware (22:39):

Even in religion, you have amazing saints and martyrs. And you have it in politics, and women writers and artists. There are plenty of examples of that. But they aren't the dominant story usually. And that's where I think history can help us.

Alexander McCaig (23:05):

So if it's not the dominant story, are there certain markers, and you've seen this throughout history, where we should look to say, "Something is wrong here"? Or something is growing that is not good, that is very anti equality, anti human right. How do you look for those things that are kind of entrenched and underneath the radar? How do we pull that out, get the dust out of the way, and start to see what's really going on?

Susan Ware (23:35):

You need to remember you're talking to a historian who is probably better at doing that kind of process in the past and recreating how it happened, rather than knowing how to sort of zero in on it now and see it. But I think a lot of it is the same kind of techniques of reading widely and thinking and asking tough questions, never getting complacent, and really just being on your toes all the time because if you're not, it's not that things go backward dramatically, but things stall. And there is the potential for regression. And I don't think any of us wants to go back to the world of the 1950s and what it was like then.

Alexander McCaig (24:30):

We don't need a Don Draper environment, none of that.

Susan Ware (24:34):

Excuse me just a moment.

Alexander McCaig (24:36):

Yeah, no problem. And so I want to ask then, this would probably be one of my final thoughts on this. You said it was this suffrage crusade. Can you help me understand why you chose the word crusade?

Susan Ware (24:58):

Well, I didn't use the word crusade all that often, and it's a [inaudible 00:25:02 for someone who has a very secular take on the world.

Alexander McCaig (25:08):

That's why I'm asking. I'm like, "I don't understand." Right? But I nitpick. I read a lot, so I'm just curious on word choice.

Susan Ware (25:15):

I think what I was trying to convey is what it felt like for ordinary women to be part of this movement. I mean, with the leaders you know, they tend to be exceptional. They devote their lives to the cause. This is what they do. But you can't have a movement without the rank and file. And so what is it that motivates a housewife in Evanston, Illinois to wake up one morning and say, "I'm going to go march in a suffrage parade, or I'm going to leaflet my neighbors, or I'm going to run for political office"? And I think what I concluded was that one of the things that motivated women to get involved in the movement and to stay involved was this sense of camaraderie, of working with other women on a really important issue, but also the joy of it, the joy of being together, working on a common goal, getting things done.

Susan Ware (26:22):

I mean, sure there was frustration. They would work for two years on a referendum, and then the male voters would vote it down two to one. And then they would get up the next morning and say, "Well, let's do it again next year," and then they would be successful. And so there's this sense of being part of something that I think was really important to a lot of women, and also a word like that is a good one for conveying the longevity of the movement.

Alexander McCaig (26:54):

Oh, I see.

Susan Ware (26:54):

We're really talking about three generations of activists, starting back in the 1840s with some of the early abolitionists, and then late 19th century, and then a third generation of the more militant younger activists, the ones who are picketing the White House and whatever. They weren't all young. Some of them were older. But you get a sense of it being a long movement that people have signed onto, and that when some of the women joined, let's say in 1910, there were other activists who hadn't even been born yet. I mean, there was just this sense of it had been going on for so long, and they were part of something larger.

Susan Ware (27:43):

And then I think the other thing we need, the point I always try to make, is that there isn't just a hard stop in 1920. Women get the vote and then they say, "We won," and they go back to bed and it's all over. They didn't see it as an endpoint. They saw it as a way station. And then there was more to be done. There was getting women elected to political office. There was working on women in the professions. There was pay equity, all kinds of things. And yet, it was very hard to do most of those things without having the basic political tool of a vote. Because if you're trying to influence government in any way, who's going to listen to you if you don't have the threat of voting them out of office? So again, I think it is part of this larger, I use the word continuum a lot.

Alexander McCaig (28:45):

I like that. I like that a lot, Susan. That's a good word,

Susan Ware (28:45):

Just moving forward. And again, it's what I feel like I'm part of. And I know that it will go on long after I'm gone, but I have been part of something larger. And it's something that I feel privileged to have been part of it. And I think one of the things I really regret about the pandemic is that it robbed me of the chance to vote in person in 2020. I voted absentee because I know I would've walked into my polling place in Cambridge, and just being there and voting, I'm sure I would've broken into tears just thinking about what it took 100 years-

Alexander McCaig (29:32):

Just for you to walk through the front door.

Susan Ware (29:34):

Yep. Yeah.

Alexander McCaig (29:37):

You are putting something in perspective for me that I was never really afforded the focus because it wasn't talked about much. And I never thought about the simple act of just walking through the door in a voting sense. I know I'm a six foot five white male, but listening to it from you and understanding after reading the book, the history involved, I can almost empathetically, with not being there or not being or identifying as a woman, saying, "Wow. That really did take a lot of work for something very, very simple, but can have a great, great achievement." And I thank you for ... I appreciate you for making me feel that way. It's a new way for me to learn and I really do appreciate that.

Alexander McCaig (30:28):

And so I would ask then, there are women in 222 countries that listen to this podcast. There are women business executives in developed countries over here that are dealing with these very entrenched patriarchal systems that we tend to default to. What would be a final telling message as a historian, in your understanding of history, that you could share with them now so they can write their history in this continuum going forward?

Susan Ware (31:00):

Well, I think I would go back to the insight that women's rights are human rights, and that any time you are talking, as we often do, about women's rights, it's something that's sort of separated off. They're not. They are actually rights that all humans should have. Unfortunately, it is often mainly women who have been denied right to education, or pay equity, or the ability to hold political office. But is much broader than the women. I would also say that there is a long, proud, noble history of women leading movements of other women and of men, providing leadership around the world, that is going ... Goodness knows we need a lot of leadership to get us out of the hole we've dug ourselves with problems like climate change and whatever. And very often, especially if you look at the local level, it's the women who are forming collectives. They're figuring out how to get things done.

Susan Ware (32:15):

And so I think what we always have to do is just look to the women, trust the women, work in coalition with men. But the women have always been part of history. They've always made a difference, and they will continue to. And if we don't honor that lesson, we're going to be in deep trouble. But I actually think that I am encouraged and inspired by what I see around the world as women individually and collectively recognize that something has to change. And to them as a historian, I can offer a proud history that they can draw on as they make history themselves.

Alexander McCaig (33:06):

That's amazing, Susan. And honestly, thank you for putting in all the work, years of research, and frankly, being on the front lines of the history itself just by recording the history. And I think you will be due a very nice bronze plaque one day. And I'll throw it up on the biggest tree I can find.

Susan Ware (33:27):

Well, you do know I have my own suffrage forest here on my farm, where I created, I have plaques for each of the women I write about. And I can walk down there with my dogs, and I just go from one to the next, and it's actually my gift to the future. It'll be there long after I'm gone. Right now, there's no plaque for me though.

Alexander McCaig (33:50):

Listen, I'm going to have one teed up. So when you're on the way out, no offense, I'm going to be there to put that thing up. All right?

Susan Ware (33:56):

I will.

Alexander McCaig (33:59):

All right, my friend, listen, thank you so much for coming on and sharing this with the world. It needs the attention. People need to be educated on it. And at the end of the day, women's right is a human right and we've got to maintain that focus.

Susan Ware (34:14):

Indeed, indeed. As the suffragists always said, onward.

Alexander McCaig (34:19):

Onward. Upward and onward. Thank you so much, Susan.

Susan Ware (34:31):

Thank you.

Speaker 3 (34:31):

Thank you for listening to TARTLE Cast with your hosts, Alexander McCaig and Jason Rigby, where humanity steps into the future and resourced data defines the path. What's your data worth?