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Women__ Suffrage: Crash Course US History #31

From: U.S. History by Crash Course

In which John Green teaches you about American women in the Progressive Era and, well, the progress they made. So the big deal is, of course, the right to vote women gained when the 19th amendment was passed and ratified. But women made a lot of other gains in the 30 years between 1890 and 1920. More women joined the workforce, they acquired lots of other legal rights related to property, and they also became key consumers in the industrial economy. Women also continued to play a vital role in reform movements. Sadly, they got Prohibition enacted in the US, but they did a lot of good stuff, too. The field of social work emerged as women like Jane Addams created settlement houses to assist immigrants in their integration into the United States. Women also began to work to make birth control widely available. You'll learn about famous reformers and activists like Alice Paul, Margaret Sanger, and Emma Goldman, among others.

Full Transcript

Womens Suffrage Crash Course US History 31

speaker01 00:00:00

Hi I'm John Green, this is Crash Course us history and today we're going to talk about women in the Progressive era. My God, that is a fantastic hat. Wait, votes for women between Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and all those do boys headed off to war women in this period of sort of been footnoted shockingly Mr Green Mr Green I'd never make a woman a footnote.

speaker01 00:19:00

She'd be the center of my world, my rason de tra, my boy to VI ho me from the past. I'm reminded of why you got AC plus in French, let me submit to you me from the past that your weird worship of women is a kind of misogyny because you're imagining women as these beautiful, fragile things that you can possess. It turns out that women are not things. They are people in precisely the same way that you are a person. And in the progressive era, they demanded to be seen as full citizens of the United States. In short, women don't exist to be your joie de vivre, they get to have their own joie de vivre.

speaker01 01:01:00

So it's tempting to limit ourselves to discussion of women getting the right to vote with the passage of the 19th Amendment. But if we focus too much on the constitutional history, we're going to miss a lot.

speaker01 01:10:00

Some historians refer to the 30 years between 1890 and 1920 as the women's era because it in that time that women started to have greater economic and political opportunities. Women were also aided by legal changes like getting the right to own property, control their wages and make contracts, and will. By 19 900, almost 5 million women worked for wages, mainly in domestic service or light manufacturing. Like the garment industry, women in America were always vital contributors to the economy as producers and consumers, and they always worked, whether for wages, are taking care of children and the home. And as someone who has recently returned from Pat, let me tell you, that ain't no joke. And American women were also active as reformers since like America became a thing. And those reform movements brought women into state and national politics before the dawn of the Progressive Era. Unfortunately, their greatest achievement, prohibition, was also our greatest national shame.

speaker01 02:01:00

No, yeah, all right, okay, actually not our top 5 national shames, but probably women's greatest influence indeed came through their membership and leadership ship in the Women's Christian Temperance Union. The WCT was founded in 1000 and 870 two-four, and by 18 1 90 it had 150000 members, making it the largest female organization in the United States. Under the leadership of Francis Will, the Wctu embraced a broad reform agenda, like it included pushing for the right for women to vote. The feeling was that the best way to stop people from drinking was to pass local laws that made it harder to drink. And to do that, it would be very helpful if women could vote because American men were a bunch of alcoholic scoundrels who darn well weren't going to vote to get rid of beer hoses.

speaker01 02:40:00

In 1895. Willard Be a wider freedom is coming to the women of America. Too Long has it been held that woman has no right to enter these movements.

speaker01 02:50:00

Politics is the place for women, but the role of women in politics did greatly expand during the Progressive Era. As in prior, many reformers were middle and upper classs women, but the growing economy and the expansion of what might be called the upper middle class meant that there were more educational opportunities and this growing group of college educated women leaned in and became the leaders of new movements.

speaker01 03:11:00

Sorry, there was no way I was going to get through this without one lean in that. So as we've talked about before, the 1000 and 890 S saw the dawning of the American Mass Consumer Society and many of the new products made in the second wave of industrialization were aimed at women, especially labor saving devices like washing machines. If you've ever had an infant, you might notice that they poop and barf onto everything all the time. Like I recently called a pediatrician and I was like my 14 day old daughter poops 15 times a day, and he was like, if anything, that seems low. So the washing machine is a real game changer. And many women realized that being the primary consumers who did the shopping for the home gave them powerful leverage to bring about change. Chief among these was Florence Kelly, a college educated woman who after participating in a number of progressive reform causes, came to head National Consumers League, the league sponsored boycotts and shaped consum patterns, encouraging consumers to buy products that were made without child or what we would now call sweatshop labor, which at the time was often just known as labor.

speaker01 04:08:00

There was also a subtle shift in gender role as more and more women worked outside the home. African American women continued to work primarily as domestic servants or in agriculture, and immigrant women mostly did well paying factory labor. But for native born white women, there were new opportunities, especially in office work. And this points to how technology created opportunities for women. Almost all the telephone operators in the us were women. By 1920, office workers and telephone operators made up 25% of the female workforce, while domestic servants were only 15%.

speaker01 04:39:00

A union leader named Abraham biso remarked that working gave immigrant women a sense of independence. They acquired the right to personality, something alien to the highly patriarchal family structures of the old country. Of course, this also meant that young women were often in conflict with their parents, as a job brought more freedom, money, and perhaps, if they were lucky, a room of one's own.

speaker01 04:59:00

No, it's for the mystery document. Please let it be Virginia Wolf. Please let it be Virginia Wolf. The rules here are simple, I guess the author of the mystery document. I'm either right or I get all right. Let's see what we got the spirit of personal independence and the women of today is sure proof that a change has come.

speaker01 05:14:00

The radical change in the economic position of women is advancing upon us. The growing individualization of Democratic life brings inevitable changes to our daughters as well as to our sons. One of its most noticeable features is the demand in women, not only for their own money, but for their own work, for the sake of personal expression. Few girls today fail to manifest some signs of the desire for individual expression. It's not Virginia Wolf. I'm to be honest, I do not know the answer to this one. However, it has been Woodrow Wilson for the last two weeks, You wouldn't do that again to me, or would you? I'm going to guess Woodrow Wilson, final answer it, Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the book Women in Economics, what the idea that having a job is valuable just for the independent that it brings and as a form of individual expression was pretty radical, as most women and especially most men were not comfortable with the idea that being a housewife was similar to being a servant to one's husband and children.

speaker01 06:12:00

But of course, that changes when staying at home, one of many choices rather than your only available option. And then came birth control. Women who needed to work 1 and a way to limit the number of pregnancies. Being pregnant and having a baby can make it difficult to hold down a job. And also babies are diaper using stuff, breaking consumption machines. They basically eat money and we love them.

speaker01 06:33:00

But birth control advocates like Margaret Sanger and Emma Goldman also argued that women should be able to enjoy sex without having children, to which men said women can enjoy sex. Believe it or not, that was seen as a pretty radical idea, and it led to changes in sexual behavior, including more overall scooter be pooping. Goldman was arrested more than 40 times for sharing these dangerous ideas about female sexuality and birth control, and she was eventually deported. Sanger, who worked to educate working in-class about birth control, was sentenced to prison in 1916 for opening a clinic in Brooklyn that distributed contraceptive devices to poor immigrant women.

speaker01 07:07:00

The fight over birth control is important for at least three reasons. First, it put women into the forefront of debates about free speech in America. I mean, some of the most ardent advocates of birth control were also associated with the IWW and the Socialist Party. Secondly, birth control is also a public health issue, and many women during the Progressive Era entered public life to bring about changes related to public health, leading the crusade against tuberculosis, the so-called white plague, and other diseases. Third, it cut across class lines. Having or not having children is an issue for all women, regardless of whether they went to college, and the birth control movement brought up middle and lower classs women together in ways that other social movements never did.

speaker01 07:47:00

Another group of progressive women took up the role of addressing the problems of the poor and spearheaded the settlement house movement. The key figure here was Jane Adams. My God, they're still Adams is an American history. Oh, she spells it, Adams family, Adams, not like fathers Adams. Anyway, she started the whole house in Chicago in 1889, settlement houses became the incubators of the new field of social work, a field in which women played a huge part, and Adams became one of America's most important spokespeople for progressive ideas. Many places.

speaker01 08:14:00

While all of this was happening, women could not technically vote for their increasing involvement in social movements. At the turn of the 20th th century led them to electoral politics.

speaker01 08:23:00

It's true that women were voting before the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Voting is a state issue, and in many Western states, women were granted the right to vote in the late 19th century, states could also grant women the right to run for office, which explains how the first congresswoman, Jeanette Rankin, could vote against America's entry into World War 1 in 1917. That said, the passage and ratification of the 19th Amendment is a big deal in American history. It's also a recent deal. Like when my grandmothers were born, women could not vote in much of the United States. The amendment says that states cannot deny people the right to vote because they are women, which isn't as interesting as the political organization and activity that led to its passage. All right, let's go to the Thought Bubble.

speaker01 09:04:00

The suffrage movement was extremely fragmented. There was a first wave of suffrage, exemplified by the women at Seneca Falls, and this metamorphosed into the National American Women's Suffrage Association, or NASA. Most of the leadership of NASA was made up of middle to upper class women, often involved in other progressive causes, who unfortunately sometimes represented the darker side of the suffrage movement. Because these upper-class progressives frequently used nativist arguments to make their claims for the right to vote, they argued that if the vote could be granted to ignorant immigrants, some of whom could barely speak English, then it should also be granted to native born women. This isn't to say that the elitist arguments won the day, but they should be acknowledged.

speaker01 09:43:00

By the early 20th century, a new generation of college educated activists had arrived on the scene, and many of these women were more radical than early suffrage supporters. They organized the National Women Party and, under the leadership of Alice Paul, pushed for the vote using aggressive tactics that many of the early generation of women's rights advocates found unseemly. Paul had been studying in Britain between 19 9, 0 7 and 1910, where she saw the more militant women's rights activists at work. She adopted their tactics that included protests leading to imprisonment and loud denunciations of the patri achy that would make Tumblr proud. And during World War 1, she compared Wilson to the Kaiser and Paul and her followers chained themselves to the White House fence. The activists then started a hunger strike during their seven month prison sentence and had to be force fed.

speaker01 10:27:00

Woodrow Wilson had half-heartedly endorsed women's suffrage in 1916, but the war split the movement further. Most suffrage organizations believe that wartime service would help women earn respect and equal rights, but other activists, like many progressives, opposed the war. And regarded it as a potential threat to social reform. But in the end, the war did sort of end up helping the cause. Patriotic support of the war by women, especially their service working in wartime industries, convinced many that it was just wrong to deny them the right to vote. And the mistreatment of Alice Paul and other women in prison for their cause created outrage that further pushed the Wilson administration to support enfranchising women.

speaker01 11:02:00

Thanks so women's long fight to gain the right to vote ended with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. But in some ways, the final granting of the franchise was a bit anti CMAC to. For one thing, it was overshadowed by the 18th Amendment prohibition, which affected both women and men in large numbers. Also Gatsby, you can say a lot about things about prohibition, and I have the crew say it against alcohol did galvanize and politice many women in organizations such as the Wctu U in the anti saloon week introduced yet more to political activism.

speaker01 11:31:00

But while the passage of the 19th Amendment was a huge victory, Alice, Paul and the National Women's Party were unable to muster the same support for an equal rights Amendment. Paul believed that women needed equal access to education and employment opportunities, and here they came into contact with other women's groups, especially the League of Women Voters and the Women's Trade Union League, which opposed the era, fearing that equal rights would mean an unraveling of hard won benefits like mother's pensions and laws limiting women's hours of labor. So the era failed, and then another proposed amendment that would have given Congress the power to limit child labor.

speaker01 12:05:00

1 ratification in only six states. You go America.

speaker01 12:13:00

So in many ways, the period between 1890 and 1920, which roughly corresponds to the Progressive Era, was the high tide of women's rights and political activism. It culminated in the ratification of the 19th Amendment. But the right to vote didn't lead to significant legislation that actually improved the lives of women, at least not for a while. Nor were there immediate changes in the roles that women were expected to play in the social order as wives and mothers. Still, women were able to increase their autonomy, freedom in the burgeoning consumer marketplace. But it's important to note that, like other oppressed populations in American history, women weren't given these rights. They had to fight for the rights that were said to be inalienable, and we are all better off for their fight and for their victory.

speaker01 12:52:00

Women's liberation is, to be sure, a complicated phrase, and it will take a new turn in the roaring 20s, which we'll talk about next week.

speaker01 12:59:00

I'll Crash Course is produced and directed by Stan Miller. Our script supervisor is Medi Dano, the associate producer is Danica Johnson. The show is written by my high school history teacher, Raoul Meyer, rosiana Rojas, and myself. And our graphics team is Do Cafe. Every week there's a new caption to the Libertarian. You can suggest captions and comments where you can also ask questions about today's video that will be answered by our team of historians. Thanks for watching Crash Course. And as we say in my hometown, don't forget to be awesome. Let me to go this way. Stand, just kidding.