With Courage and Cloth: Winning the Fight for a Woman's Right to Vote

Rating:
Summary: Richie's Picks: WITH COURAGE AND CLOTH
Review: Richie's Picks: WITH COURAGE AND CLOTH: WINNING THE FIGHT FOR A WOMAN'S RIGHT TO VOTE by Ann Bausum, National Geographic, September 2004, 112 pages, ISBN: 0-7922-7647-7

"...a discussion of the rights of animals would be regarded with more complacency by many...than would a discussion of the rights of women."
--Frederick Douglass speaking about the public's response to the Seneca Falls women's convention of 1848 which he had attended.

"Though we adore men individually
we agree that as a group they're rather stupid."
--"Sister Suffragette" from Walt Disney's Mary Poppins.

The part of the story that they left out of the Mary Poppins movie is when Mrs. Banks is abused by a mob of men and young boys and arrested for causing a disturbance even though she and her sisters-in-arms are quietly assembled--holding banners that quote the US Constitution and the current President's own words--and it's the men who are causing all the disturbance. They also left out the part where Mrs. Banks is abusively dragged into a dark prison, thrown in with rats, common criminals, blankets that get laundered once a year, and a bucket for a toilet. Nor do they show prison employees shoving the hose up Mrs. Banks's nose to force feed her when she decides to go on a hunger strike.

" 'These women have raised neither hand nor voice,' wrote one female reporter who eventually stood on the picket line herself and was arrested. 'They speak no word and do not attempt to defend themselves if attacked,' she explained."

But those omissions and discrepancies could be attributed to the fact that Mary Poppins takes place in jolly, old England, and it was in America during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson that all of these abuses were being endured by the informed women who had resolve to organize and question how the US could be fighting for democracy in Europe while simultaneously denying democratic participation--the Vote--to women at home.

Being able to speak freely is what America is all about, right?

But students of American history know that there are times when Freedom of Speech seems to be reserved for only SOME Americans, those who agree with the government.

"Now, however, the growing nationalism of wartime made such protests seem, as reported in newspapers, 'unwomanly,' 'unpatriotic,' 'dangerous,' 'undesirable,' even 'treasonable.' "

(Sound familiar?)

The central focus of WITH COURAGE AND CLOTH: WINNING THE FIGHT FOR A WOMAN'S RIGHT TO VOTE is on the years of widespread activism and protest directly preceding the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. And it is during those final years of a fight that began in earnest back in Seneca Falls in 1848 that we so clearly see the parallels between the suffering of those brave Americans involved in the Women's Suffrage Movement and the violence and repression faced by those in the Civil Rights Movement; those images that so many of us watched either on television or firsthand; those images that so many of us will never forget.

Another parallel that I found interesting involves the fact that:

"The period from 1896 to 1910 (during which no states adopted woman suffrage) became known as the 'doldrums' of the movement. The wind seemed to go out of the sails of the cause. No matter how hard suffragists argued in support of votes for women, they could not muster the momentum to overcome the anitsuffragists, or 'Antis,' who opposed them."

It would seem to me not to be coincidental that the same year that the US Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that "separate but equal" was permissible, leading to baseball owners successfully conspiring to eliminate people of color from the Major Leagues for half a century, and leading to the growth of all those other insidious tentacles of apartheid that spread across America and took hold of it, that American women would face a similar fate at the hands of white paternalism.

"It's grand to be an Englishman in 1910
King Edward's on the throne;
it's the age of men"
--"The Life I Lead," from Disney's Mary Poppins

It is during this period that several award-winning historic novels dealing with oppressed young women are set: Jennifer Donnelly's A NORTHERN LIGHT and Jennifer Holms's OUR ONLY MAY AMELIA quickly come to mind. To read that scene in A NORTHERN LIGHT where the well-educated "Miss Wilcox" is offered the choice by her husband of either complying with his demands or being institutionalized as mentally unfit provides an understanding of what kind of power men wielded over women. WITH COURAGE AND CLOTH will make a great companion for these books.

Thank goodness for the Senator we meet in WITH COURAGE AND CLOTH, a man who listened to his mother and allowed this particular phase of injustice by the minority of the American population against the majority to come to an end.

Of course, eighty-four years (and 15 white male Presidents) later, some readers will surely pause to wonder why there remain such wide disparities between the portion of the population that is female (the majority) and that meager portion of America's decision making elite (President, Congress, state legislators and governors, top jurists, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, presidents of major universities, generals, and presidential advisors) who are women.

That's a debate we won't be seeing tonight.
(written the day of the first Presidential debate of 2004)