Homeroom with Sal & Martha S. Jones - 19th Amendment and Women's Voting Rights

Hi everyone, welcome to today's homeroom. Uh, I'm very excited about the conversation we are about to have. I will start with my standard reminder, reminding everyone that Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization. We can only exist through philanthropic donations from folks like yourself, so if you're in a position to donate, please uh, think about that.

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Uh, with that, I'm really excited to introduce our guest, Martha Jones, who's a professor historian at Johns Hopkins University. Uh, thanks so much for joining us, Martha.

I'm really happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

So, uh, a lot to talk about, but maybe the most uh, uh time, uh the thing most relative to what day it is, it's the 100th anniversary of women's right to vote—the 19th Amendment getting ratified. You know, we learned a certain narrative there about, you know, Susan B. Anthony, Seneca Falls, and the suffragettes, and then 1920 women have the right to vote. Which, every time I say that, it feels a lot later than, like, my brain does a check. Was it really that late? But you're an expert in this space. You know, if you could tell us a little bit about— a little more color on that narrative. You know, what are we getting right in the traditional history books, and then maybe what more texture is going to help us fill in the gaps?

Sure, so you're right to point to the story. I think a lot of us have encountered. The women's road to the vote begins in 1848 in a village in upstate New York, Seneca Falls, and culminates, um, more than 70 years later in the, uh, the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Um, and I think this is a year for us to rethink some of the myths and some of the misunderstandings about that story. I tell a story that begins in the earliest decades of the 19th century, as American women—including African-American women—are first and foremost developing a political philosophy, right? A critique of the position that they occupy or the positions they don't occupy in American politics. And that requires, um, criticizing both racism and sexism and the ways in which they keep American women, particularly black American women, at the margins of politics.

Now, I wish I could tell you that in 1920 American women got the vote, but the 19th Amendment doesn't guarantee the vote to any American women. And black American women will continue to be disenfranchised even after 1920 by state laws that are designed to keep them, and their husbands, and their fathers, if you will, um, from the polls. So when I tell this story, it begins in that early sort of philosophical reflections by African-American women, and it takes us all the way forward to 1965, when we have federal legislation finally that gives teeth to the 19th Amendment, and now guarantees to all black Americans—including black women—the right to vote. It turns out to be a much longer story, and in some ways a more troubled story than the one we might have encountered in our schools, in our textbooks, or maybe even in popular culture.

And I want to—and this is super valuable—I want to encourage folks to ask questions on Facebook and YouTube. We have team members who will be surfing the surfacing those questions to myself and Martha. You know, one question that I've always had, even before I really understood the nuance that you just alluded to, is why do you think it took so long? What was the rest of the world doing? Was the U.S. kind of late to the game? Was it early to the game? And how do you see these parallel movements, uh, that, as you just pointed out, to some degree converged over time? Where you had the suffragette movement, the women's right to vote movement, and then of course you had, coming out of the Civil War, the right for at least African-American males in theory to be able to be citizens and vote. In history, how are those weighed against each other? And did they help each other? Were they just two separate movements? So where does the U.S. sit in this story?

Um, relatively early. The 19th Amendment follows just on the heels of transformation, for example, for British women, but will take many more decades for example for women in France to win the right to vote. And so it's a long story about how women in the world come to power. We could come forward to the founding of the United Nations, where you have then women from across the globe coming to talk about colonialism, the legacy of slavery, and how women of color across the globe share an ongoing concern about oppression. So this is a—this is a big story, not a small one. But to take us to the story in the U.S. and the relationship between, um, what had been two important radical social movements—on the one hand anti-slavery, and on the other hand women's rights—both having their origins in the decades before the Civil War.

It turned out to be an uneasy relationship that by the time we get to the 1860s—and remember that in the 1860s the Constitution is being rewritten, a revolution is happening in the United States, slavery is abolished, birthright citizenship is established, and as you alluded to the 15th Amendment is going to prohibit states from using race as a criteria in meeting out voting rights. Within this old and important political coalition, there is really an extraordinary range of views. Some who advocate educated suffrage is the way forward, which is oftentimes a way of alluding to, um, white suffrage and particularly the suffrage for white women. Others will make the case that for African-American men the vote is a matter of life and death, that they are facing not only political challenges but literal challenges when it comes to their physical well-being. Black men need the vote in order to protect themselves.

In that story, I always like to introduce a third position, if you will, and that is one taken by an African-American woman in these meetings, Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, who comes to the meeting to challenge both of these positions. Why? Because black women, of course, can't pull apart, um, their race from their sex. They live at the crossroads of these two vexed positions in American politics. And Watkins Harper urges this coalition to stay together and to, as she puts it, work for the interests of all humanity. And this will become the core of how black women approach the question of women's rights going forward: this keen eye, yes, on their own political empowerment, but for a broader interest, right? For how black women can then work, use political power to serve the needs of their families, their communities, but as Watkins Harper puts it, um, one great bundle of humanity.

And so we can see the stage being set for many approaches to thinking about voting rights in the United States going forward, and you're right to point out that African-American men, while briefly they will enjoy the vote after the Civil War, will find themselves disenfranchised. Um, and black women will in a, in a twisted sense, join them, um, after 1920, um, now seemingly authorized to vote by the Constitution and still kept away from the polls by laws and by violence and intimidation, especially in southern states that is aimed at keeping black Americans, uh, out of the body politic.

And I want to focus a little bit on the time in which it happened. You know, 1920—you know, just to give everyone historical context—obviously we had just finished the Great War, not, you know, later we learned it's World War I. Uh, we actually were, uh, I think still going through her in the later stages of a global pandemic. Uh, the Spanish flu. Was that relevant to women finally getting the right to vote? What was the argument before? Why did it take so many decades from Seneca Falls until 1920, which we normally associate with a fairly modern time?

Yes, so, um, it's important sometimes, I think, when we say women's suffrage, um, it somehow exceptionalizes this political movement from, um, everything that's happening around it. So you're so right to point to, um, the election of Woodrow Wilson, the entry of the U.S. into what becomes the first World War, um, the flu pandemic—um, all of these things challenge the women who are leading the fight for what becomes the 19th Amendment.

There are those who think, for example, that American women should, if you will, stand down from the fight for voting rights once the U.S. enters the war effort. Somehow it's unseemly, right, to challenge the state or to burden it when it's a time for a kind of cohesion, a national cohesion around the war effort. And at the same time, there are those suffragists in the U.S. who see the war as an opportunity to, if you will, turn up the fire on the feet of the Wilson administration. Um, as we know, Alice Paul will lead picketers—women who will stand outside the White House even into the war—with placards, with signs that challenge the administration, that begin to liken the Wilson administration to authoritarian leaders in Europe because they will not sign off on a women's suffrage amendment. So this struggle is very much caught up here.

The pandemic, the flu pandemic, provides American women with another opportunity, if you will. Particularly African-American women, um, understand it is an opportunity to show themselves to be, um, loyal, effective, committed citizens. I write about Mary Church Terrell, a suffrage leader in Daytona, Florida, who transforms her girls' school in a small hospital into a major facility for, um, treating those who have been stricken by the flu. This is a way that Terrell embeds herself and her politics into this local community even as the struggle for the vote is still going on.

So women's politics is not an exception from what's happening; women's politics is interlaced with many of the histories that we already know. And if I could say, I think for educators this is important and useful because there are some subjects that are in our curricula, um, and others that may not be. And sometimes when we can make those connections, it helps us to widen the scope of lessons, but it also helps students to situate new stories, um, amidst the kinds of stories they may already know.

Yeah, absolutely. Because, you know, the traditional narrative in a lot of these things is, you know, decades of protest and organizing and at some point essentially the men said, "Yeah, I guess we'll let them vote." Uh, but to your point, maybe there's a little bit of that, but, uh, there's a lot of historical context as we saw in both world wars. Uh, as men went to go to fight, uh, society had to lean much more heavily on, on women to even keep society going. And I suspect that that also played up, played a major role.

There's a great question here from YouTube from Joshua Cataville saying, the question is: how have the ideas behind women's empowerment evolved over time? So we're talking, you know, we're commemorating the 100-year anniversary of the 19th Amendment, women getting the right to vote in the United States. But that's clearly not been the end of, of whatever you want to call it: women trying to ensure that they have more equal rights in our society. So how has that evolved over the last hundred years and where do you think we are?

Well, I think one measure is, um, that which is, if you will, right under our nose, um, sitting here in August of 2020 and that is yet again a major party, um, with a woman on the ticket—in this case, Senator Kamala Harris on the Democratic Party's ticket. This, while not unthinkable in 1920, is almost unimaginable. On the other hand, and particularly because the 19th Amendment rests so heavily on the assumption that black women will remain without the vote, will remain outside of politics. Even after 1920, when we have Senator Harris on the ticket, it's hard to resist the conclusion that something has changed—that African-American women, for example, have, um, worked deliberately, consistently, creatively to transform their place in American politics. Nobody gives women much in this story, but we certainly see many examples of how about, of how women, um, earn things, win things, um, across the course of this history.

And so I think, on that measure, um, I would say that we, um, can recognize the transformation, um, that we've, uh, lived through, at least figuratively. Not all of us have lived for the hundred years, but, uh, figuratively the transformation. Um, and if we looked then into the fabric of American politics, we would recognize something like 250 American women running for Congress this year, nearly half of them women of color. That is a radical sea change from 100 years ago that rests, um, to an important degree upon the 19th Amendment, rests to an important degree upon the Voting Rights Act in 1965, and of course rests on women's insistence that they are not only, um, forceful candidates for these offices but positioning themselves for when I like to say when the rest of the country catches up. Women are ready.

And we saw that as Joe Biden vetted more than a dozen women, um, for the vice presidency, and we all had to study and, um, figure out not only who they were but how they were similar, how they were different. It was a rich and diverse slate of women who were vying for that office, and that is one sort of testament to what has changed since 1920.

And do you think, you know, where we've been talking so far is women's right to vote? You know, that's something that should happen—you have half the population that was disenfranchised. How do you think women getting the right to vote and then actually acting on that right and being able to act on that right especially over the last, especially since 1965? How do you think that's changed the nature of our democracy? Has it changed the type of policies we enact or don't enact, how we act in foreign policy, our laws generally?

That's a great question. I think that, um, that force is still, if you will, gaining momentum. But I'm interested in the question of what we think women's issues are. You know, one of the things that's said in 1920, for example, is that racism is not a women's issue—that somehow race is an African-American issue. But I think today our sense of sort of what the boundaries of women's issues are, um, are really shifting. Right? So that when we speak about, um, relief related to the coronavirus, um, whether it's for business owners or it's for individual heads of households, whether it's for schools, these are all, I think today, understood to be women's issues in a way that doesn't exceptionalize American women but recognizes how American women are absolutely at the center of nearly any major question that we might ask.

But I do think there is another, I guess, a layer—another layer to your question. Um, because there is particularly from anti-suffragists in 1920 the assertion, um, that American women will make no difference at the polls because they will merely, if you will, vote like their husbands and their fathers. Right? So it won't change the balance of power between parties, it won't change the outcome on election day, it won't change or influence lawmaking. Women are like men. But it turns out that one of the troubles with the 19th Amendment is that while white American women are expected to, in a sense, split between the two parties like their husbands and fathers are split, black American women are expected to vote as a bloc.

And we see with 1920, the small numbers of black women who do vote do indeed vote as a bloc. They support the Republican Party in those years and its candidates. And while that doesn't tip the balance of power nationally, it can tip the outcome of elections locally and at the state level. Black women from the city of Chicago will be critical to the election of Oscar De Priest to the U.S. Congress in 1928. Um, De Priest is the first African-American man to be elected to Congress since Reconstruction, so two almost three generations.

And, um, and this is because black women in Chicago have learned how to use their, uh, their power at the polls to change the outcome of elections, um, and to vote as a block in a way that does tip the balance in 1928 when Oscar De Priest runs. And much more recently in 2017 when Senator Doug Jones runs in the state of Alabama, 98% of black women vote for him, and they are the slim margin that flips that seat from red to blue in the state of Alabama. So, um, this, um, fear that gets expressed about how women's votes might be a game changer turns out to be founded.

And I'm curious, you know, given where we are, you mentioned Kamala Harris before, that we've had Geraldine Ferraro and we had Sarah Palin. You know, obviously there's policy difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, but if, uh, if Kamala Harris does become the next vice president, what do you think that will mean for this hundred-year-long movement? Do you think it will, you know, obviously it's symbolically very, very powerful. Do you think it will somehow change governance, will get women more active in politics? And then what do you think is the next leg of the journey on actually both of these strands we're talking about, both on the issue of women's rights and on the issue of civil rights generally?

When I think about your question, my mind goes to my daughters and really to my granddaughters. And I don't think we have to imagine long to appreciate the way in which not only Senator Harris but Senator Harris—excuse me, Kamala Harris—is as an example of how the ambitions, the imaginations, and the political lives of young women are being transformed in this very moment as this campaign is still unfolding.

In 2009, Michelle Obama, uh, was in the Capitol to unveil a, uh, bust of the 19th century suffragist, the former slave Sojourner Truth. And what Mrs. Obama said at the unveiling is, now when girls like my daughters come to the Capitol, they will see a woman who looks like them. And that is, it turns out, to be powerful stuff in American politics. That, in a sense, we have to see it, we have to imagine it. And women in politics will tell you this if you ask them, um, that they had models, um, that they had figures, they had shiros, um, who were essential as they figured out who they could be in their own lifetimes.

So in some ways, um, we are at a moment where we are, in the best sense, unleashing a next generation. And I think very specifically my expectation is that American women in politics are going to, if you will, move the needle on the question of voting rights in important ways. American women, particularly women of color, know the burden of what it means to be kept from the polls as keenly as anyone in this country. And we are still not a democracy that guarantees the right to vote to every American. There are still too many of us who are kept from the polls by state level laws, by subterfuge, and more. We still don't have a constitutional amendment that guarantees to us a ballot that guarantees to us that we can cast that ballot.

That's what we're seeing played out right here as we are, you know, hurtling toward November, and what we're watching, um, political leaders fumble over how on earth we're going to get to the polls in the midst of a pandemic. I expect American women to really take the lead in getting us to the next level on voting rights, and not being satisfied with the idea that if you live in Georgia you vote one way. If you can vote, if you live in Maryland you vote another way. You live in New York yet another way.

Um, I don't know, but you—my husband is not American and he is just flabbergasted that we are a 21st century democracy where literally your zip code determines whether you can vote and how you'll have to vote, what kind of hurdles you'll have to overcome. So I'm hopeful that, um, this generation of American women who live and have come through the legacy of voter suppression to be powerful figures will get us to a place where that ideal right that has been bandied about for a very long time, which is the ideal of universal voting rights, a guarantee of the vote. I think these are the figures who might just get us there.

And just to double-click on that, because you hear this argument—obviously we're, you know, we're going through a pandemic, people are talking about mail-in votes, and you're hearing arguments from our president that, you know, whether it's secure or whether it's reliable and all of this. And I—you know, this argument we've heard over the time. I'm curious, what are the frictions, the barriers that you think exist today? How would you change them? Are there good examples of other countries that have done this well? And that, you know, the other argument that if you make it super easy for everyone to vote it might also make it super easy to double vote or have fraud or something like that. What's your view of those types of arguments?

Well, let's start at the end. There just is no evidence in the United States of widespread consequential voter fraud. It just does not exist. Um, and we have five or—is it six states in this country where Americans vote all the time by mail? Um, voting by mail is not an innovation in 2020; it's a necessity, perhaps. But there are states that have long ago gone, for example, to voting by mail without any, um, ill consequence.

And so the good social science tells us there are many ways to get people to the polls. Why isn't Election Day a holiday? Why don't we all have the time and the leisure to exercise this fundamental right and come to the polls, to bring our children to the polls, to bring our elders to the polls, to have this be a national ritual? Why is it that the burden is on us still, for many of us—I’m afraid, too many of us—to choose between the risk of coronavirus and the prospect of casting a ballot?

In my view, the burden should be on the state to get me the ballot, to get you the ballot, to get us our ballots, to make sure we cast them. That should be our right. It shouldn't be a privilege that we risk ourselves to exercise, as it appears some of us are going to be called upon to do. And so I just—I think that, um, there's no evidence, um, that, uh, older regimes or newfangled regimes are more vulnerable to voter fraud than any other. There's just no evidence of widespread voter fraud at all.

And the price we pay as a democracy is the delegitimation of our very political fabric, right? Because there's no secret now that your cousin, um, in Wisconsin, right, can't get to the polls. But maybe you can. There's no secret. But in Oregon people have been voting for a very long time by mail. But in my state, it's going to take two or three steps to get that paper ballot and put it in a mailbox. This is now an open secret in the United States, and I think it undercuts our faith in the vote and the centrality of the vote.

Um, we wonder why the numbers at the polls go down in so many communities. We lament, right, the low level of voter turnout in this country, but in some sense we have ourselves to blame for having diminished, um, the centrality, the value, access to the polls. And now we are in a position, I think, to have to restore faith in the vote as fundamental. You know, I come from African-American ancestors who could not vote for a very long time, and I'm a girl who was taken to the polls long before she could vote as a lesson, right, in my civic responsibility, right, to the struggles that black Americans had waged for a very long time in this country for too long.

And I think there are other Americans in their own families who have stories of what it has meant to have access to the polls. So one of the things I encourage people is for elders to tell those stories out loud so we can learn from them, and for young people to ask the elders in their midst about the right to vote because these are poignant stories oftentimes that tell us a great deal about who we are and who we can be as a democracy.

And super valuable. And there's a really interesting, it's almost a technical question, but it is something that I think most of us first asked when we first learned about the suffrage movement. There's a question from Facebook: Madura Chittnavis Marathi asks, what is the original origin of the term suffrage? Where and when was it first used?

It's a great question. Suffrage is an old term, um, in the English language, and it gets used, um, interchangeably with, um, the ballot and the vote throughout the 18th and 19th century in the early United States. But it does come to have a specialized connotation, I think, now when we look back on the history of voting rights, one that is closely tied to this particular movement for voting rights which culminates in the 19th Amendment.

So women suffer to the same—I'll say that to my students. When I say suffrage, give me that look that boy you hate when students give you that look, but it happens. Um, that is to say it doesn't resonate with young people. And so I more and more have been advocating that we speak even of this, um, moment in the early 20th century as part of a longer story of voting rights.

Um, I think that is fair to say that we have always been engaged in struggles and questions, um, and movements for voting rights in this country going back to the founding. And the movement for women's votes is just one part of the larger story of American voting rights. So I'm somebody who could set aside suffrage altogether if you'd let me, but it's hard to get away from, especially in an anniversary year.

Yeah, absolutely. I think after this we can all do a little bit of homework and I'll look up the etymology because I think, you know, it obviously seems to have connections to the word suffer, but it has many, many meanings. I will say somebody sent me recently the entry in Merriam-Webster, and it's an interesting and long one.

Um, and the, um, connotation of the vote is one of the more recent connotations of the term, um, one of the last connotations in Webster's. Um, maybe on its way out, I don't know.

Oh, I'm going to do some research on that. Maybe it's like the word passion. You know, people say passion of the Christ; they're talking about the suffering of the Christ. But now modern term is, you know, you care so much about something that you suffer.

I guess, um, you know, just one last question. I always like to ask this because we have a lot of young people watching—folks who are trying to chart their own lives. You know, what got you interested in becoming a professor, becoming a professor of history uh, focused on both civil rights and the women's rights movement? What was kind of your journey to getting to where you are now?

Thanks for that. Um, I like to tell, uh, young people I began, uh, as a psychology major in college, and I share that to say, um, it's a wonderful when in life you can, um, follow many kinds of passions, um, and chart your own path. And I'm definitely someone who has done that. Um, I went to law school after, uh, college and spent 10 years as a public interest lawyer in New York City. Um, and there I was deeply involved in work related to economic and racial justice.

But when I had an opportunity to take a break, I was a history buff, but I never had a chance to study history. And I took a little time off to study history, including the history of my own family, was something that I was especially interested in. And honestly, I got hooked. Um, for me history is like a treasure hunt. We work with, um, old texts and documents and, um, in materials that nobody has looked at in a very long time, trying to discover the answer to, um, questions that still, um, that still challenge us, like this history of black women in the vote.

But I also love being a historian because I'm part of a community of scholars, of historians, of writers, of researchers. I don't work alone. Some days I do—I have to write, and it's quiet and a little lonely, but most of the time I'm part of really exciting discoveries and conversations and debates with other historians. And I get to spend my time with young people and students, and that really, um, is the thing that gets me up in the morning, um, the thing that sort of gets my adrenaline going.

Um, and so, um, I used to be somebody who spent every day in a courthouse fighting with other people, and I decided maybe I wanted to be a lover, not a fighter, and, um, come to the classroom every day and discover new things about the past and have opportunities to share, um, what I know. So for me, it's been a somewhat unorthodox journey, but it's been a supremely fascinating one.

And, um, and in this book Vanguard, I'm able to bring together, right, my legal training and my understanding of the Constitution with my historical training about how constitutional questions actually happen on the ground and in people's lives. Um, and then I get to talk with folks like you all about that, and that's the teacher in me. So, um, so thanks for that question.

Well, that's super valuable and super inspiring. Well, Martha, thank you so much. I think you've given us a lot more dimensionality to this conversation of the suffrage movement and how it intertwines with the civil rights movement. Really valuable. I'm really glad.

Thanks for having me on, Sal.

Thank you so much. Well, everyone, thanks again for joining. I, I guess we could call these episodes another episode of the homeroom livestream. You know, hopefully you've enjoyed this as much as I have. As you can tell, this is really kind of a co-learning journey. I'm learning, I think, as much as any of y’all are about, you know, things that I thought I knew the first time that I went through history or actually other subjects. We've even had experts on, you know, epidemiology and other sciences on here as well. But there's something when you get to talk to the experts and look at what's going on and look at it with the lens of the world we live in and, and the context of history.

You realize that there's a lot more dimensionality, as I just said, to the world and our stories than we first might realize just when we read the textbook. So thank you all for joining, and I'll see you, I think, in a couple of days. I, I always lose—oh, there we go. On Thursday, I will see you. I will see you on, uh, Thursday, uh, where I, uh, I'm going, uh to—well, we're gonna have a, actually Wednesday and Thursday. Sorry, I was covered in my screen. Uh, on Wednesday, we're gonna talk about some of the new features at Khan Academy and then, uh, excited about a conversation on Thursday on really what's going on in education, especially—oh, well, globally really. So I'll see y'all then.