The music that celebrates female equality is old. It’s new. It’s this. Enjoy.
The music that celebrates female equality is old. It’s new. It’s this. Enjoy.
This is a reel of film clips that show what life was like in the 1920’s. It shows a lot of ways that women changed in dress, attitude, etc. in the 20’s just thought it was interesting. http://youtu.be/684n8FO68LU
Reason #102 why I love Tina Fey. This is the video I was talking about today. The reference is at the end of the video.
Abby Scott Baker, of Washington, D.C., came from a multi-generational military family. She was one of Alice Paul’s earliest associates and helped Paul and Burns plan their first major event–the March 3, 1913, national suffrage parade on the eve of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. She served as treasurer of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CU) in 1914 and quickly became one of the most effective lobbyists for both the CU and its successor, the National Woman’s Party (NWP).
Baker traveled the country as part of the CU’s “Suffrage Special” train tour of western states in April-May 1916. The envoys set off with fanfare from Union Station in Washington, D.C., and Baker was in charge of handling the press for the tour. The support that she helped raise from women in states that had already granted women’s suffrage culminated in a June 1916 meeting in Chicago to form what was at first called the Woman’s Party of Western Voters, or Woman’s Party, for short (later, the NWP). When the NWP was more formally organized in relation to the CU in March 1917, Baker was elected to the NWP executive committee and served as its press chairman (1917-18) and political chairman (1917; 1919-21).
Baker was among the first demonstrators to picket the White House; she was arrested in September 1917 and sentenced to 60 days in the Occoquan Workhouse. In February-March 1919, she served as publicity manager and speaker for the “Prison Special,” a three-week lecture tour by NWP activists who spoke to packed audiences about their jail experiences in an effort to generate support for the suffrage cause.
Baker was an important lobbyist during the key years (1917-20) that the NWP pressured for passage of what became the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Known as the diplomat of the NWP, Baker was a significant presence in the organization’s ongoing tactic of asserting personal influence upon leading authorities in public and private life. When the NWP’s patriotism was challenged, she reminded critics that her three sons were fighting in World War I. In the midst of the ratification process for the 19th Amendment, Baker was among the NWP members who attended the Democratic National Convention of 1920 in San Francisco and successfully brokered a pro-suffrage plank as part of the party platform. She subsequently lobbied the presidential candidates from both political parties, James M. Cox and Warren G. Harding, to support the women’s rights cause.
After suffrage was achieved, Baker became a member of the NWP’s Committee on International Relations and the Women’s Consultative Committee of the League of Nations. She also represented the NWP at the League’s 1935 international conferences in Geneva where the issue of equal rights was discussed.
“Woman must have her freedom, the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she will be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man’s attitude may be, that problem is hers — and before it can be his, it is hers alone. She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it.” —Margaret Sanger
Margaret Sanger, born in 1879, was the founder of the birth control movement in the United States, as well as the organization Planned Parenthood. Her efforts led to landmark Supreme Court legislation legalizing birth control in the United States.
The sixth of eleven children, Margaret spent much of her youth helping raise her younger siblings. With financial help from her sisters, Margaret went to nursing training at White Plains Hospital and the Manhattan Ear and Eye Clinic. At the request of her father, she returned home to nurse her mother who died three years later, at age 50, of cervical cancer and tuberculosis. Her mother, Anne Higgins, went through 18 pregnancies in 22 years with 11 live births.
As a nurse, Margaret viewed more devastation that came with unwanted pregnancy. She saw the relation between poverty, uncontrolled fertility, high rates of maternal and infant mortality, and deaths from illegal, botched abortions. This, along with her mothers death, made Sanger an ardent feminist who believed in every woman’s right to avoid an unwanted pregnancy. Her life became dedicated to the cause of contraception access and education, working tirelessly to end laws against them.
In 1911, Margaret began to write frank articles on sex in the socialist magazine, The New York Call. The reviews were mixed with outrage and praise. She published her own magazine, for a short time, called The Woman Rebel. She was indicted for mailing materials advocating birth control, but the charges were eventually dropped in 1916. The next year, she opened the United States first birth control clinic in Brooklyn. She was arrested and charged as a ‘public nuisance’, spending 30 days in jail. She appealed to reinterpret the Comstock Act of 1873, a federal law which deemed all contraception education and devices obscene. Her efforts allowed doctors to begin prescribing contraception.
In 1921, she founded the American Birth Control League, the parent organization of what became Planned Parenthood. She died at age 86, in Tuscon, Arizona from congestive heart failure. It was a year after the greatest accomplishment in her 50 year career, the Supreme Court case Griswold vs. Connecticut which legalized birth control on grounds of ‘marital privacy.’
The woman suffrage movement accomplished the goal of allowing woman the right to vote when the 19th Amendment was passed in 1920. However, if it weren’t for prominent woman role models such as Susan B. Anthony and Victoria Woodhull who knows how long it would have took for the Amendment to pass.
Victoria Woodhull made an impact on the woman’s suffrage movement by accomplishing multiple “firsts.” Woodhull was the first woman to operate a brokerage firm on Wall Street and the first woman to start a weekly newspaper. Woodhull’s well known for being the first woman to be a Presidential candidate for the United States. Woodhull soapbox for presidency included topics of “free love” and gender equality. Not only are her accomplishments impressive, her story is a true rag to riches tale.
Victoria was born in Ohio in 1838 and lived with ten other siblings. For a woman that was famous for her intelligence, surprisingly her schooling was limited, with only three years of formal education she was removed when her father was being charged for fraud and arson. At age 14 she met 28-year-old Canning Woodhull, a doctor from Rochester, New York who was treating her for a chronic illness. She was married to him a year later but discovered her was a womanizer as well as an alcoholic. She divorced Canning after bearing two children and kept his last name. In 1866 Victoria married for a second time to Colonel James Harvey Blood but divorced ten years later.
Woodhull made a fortunate when her and her sister, Tennessee, became the first women stockbrokers on Wall Street. The sisters invested their money into a weekly paper, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, primarily to use it as a tool for Victoria’s race for presidency. The paper would highlight controversial and taboo issues such as sex education, licensed prostitution, and vegetarianism. Woodhull argued that women already had the right to vote due to the 14th and 15th Amendment and needed to know how to use it.
“[W]omen are the equals of men before the law, and are equal in all their rights.”-Victoria Woodhull (Encyclopedia).
Woodhull was nominated for the President of the United States by the Equal Rights Party on May 10,1872. Then they nominated Frederick Douglas for Vice President, but he never acknowledged the nomination, which made her the first woman candidate. She was known for her support of “free love” which was a belief that marriage, divorce and child bearing should not have any government interference.
Only a few days before the election, she published a scandal in her weekly newspaper. Victoria exposed a renowned preacher, Henry Beecher for committing adultery. According to A History of the National Woman’s Rights Movement for Twenty Years Victoria, Victoria was arrested and tried for libel, or obscene information, violating the Comstock Law. She spent election night in jail.
Some historians still debate if Woodhull was truly the first woman to run for presidency. Some factors they emphasize: the government never printed her name on the ballot (the Equal Party printed it, but not the Federal Government), she was younger than 35 (wasn’t as significant in the 19th Century), didn’t receive electoral/popular votes (claim she received popular votes that were not counted), and she was a woman (women couldn’t legally vote until 1920). Regardless of the debate Woodhull made an impact on the woman suffrage movement and remained active until she died in 1927.
Carrie was born in 1859 in Wisconsin. According to lkwdpl. org there were two important moments in her life that helped form this suffragist. At 13 she asked her mother why she couldn’t go and vote with her father and was met with laughter and the explanation that voting was an important civic duty that should be left to the men. The next was in high school. After being introduced to Charles Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’ theory, she embraced philosophy and evolution and then applied it to improving the world with a peaceful and fair society.
She attended college at Iowa state and afterwords she worked as a law clerk, a school teacher, and a principal in Mason City, Iowa. At 24 she became the first women appointed superintendent of schools. In 1885 she married Leo Chapman who would later die of typhoid fever. In 1890 she married George Catt.
Catt joined the Iowa Woman’s Suffrage Association and went on to start organizing local suffrage movements throughout the state. In 1890 she became a delegate to the national convention. She became the president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association from 1890 to 1900. She worked hard throughout this time by leading campaigns in an attempt to amend the constitution which they got in 1920. Catt founded the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA). This group became recognized by a congress made up of Australia, Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, Holland, Norway, Sweden and the U.S. in 1902. She became its first president in 1923.
From there she continued her suffrage work on a national level. In 1911 she began her world tour through Sweden, Europe, Africa, India, Sumatra, the Philippines, China, Korea and Japan, among others. While in these places, she helped found other organizations and observed the women from these places. Later, she became the president of the League of Women Voters and by 1924, she spent a lot of her time working on pacifism in the aftermath of World War I. In that attempt, she organized the National Conference on the Cause and Cure of War.
Carrie Chapman Catt died of a heart attack in New Rochelle, New York on March 9, 1947
“Just as the world war is no white man’s war, but every man’s war, so is the struggle for woman suffrage no white woman’s struggle, but every woman’s struggle.” – Carrie Chapman Catt