of women voters who support our knowledge about the candidates so that we can make informed decisions and all the women here who have the ability to vote it's hard to imagine that we we didn't have  so i just want to say something else about the suffrage movement in massachusetts i was going to speak about that and to kill or it's fascinating i think i like about it since i'm from washington d c so i think all of us will be enlightened and maybe it will trigger memories for your families and relatives and might even help barbara with her book and she's going to talk about the same process so one book went on this is our sixth one locally and regularly so we have a historical theme through many of them to really this book because it corresponds to the history of boston the history of women in boston the history of all of the immigrant groups that made boston where it is today and the first twenty years of the abbey bounce life were enormous changes and and as you find her character through that we experience each one of those changes in some way or another there are a number of events coming up this weekend tomorrow's another book discussion group the  final one before they leave it tomorrow at eleven thirty wednesday april thirteenth in the flag room and then on saturday there is a walking tour of the north island and it meets in develop the the path that you're going to travel it sounds really interesting and i hope you know that you can sign up for you have to contact the information actually is on the  street center and a big space so bring all your friends cause it's going to be a wonderful a wonderful event and i say i'm going to turn the program over to barbara she's an attorney at the supreme judicial court of massachusetts but she's also an author and historian particularly about boston and he she wrote a book for her first book was boston had a civil have the second revolution and i guide to boston civil war sides and walking tours of civil war boston and frankly being a southerner i didn't know there was much civil war action in boston so i know i'm going to have to get your walking into  and especially a woman lawyer so i'm going to turn the program over to barbara she's much more interesting than i and enjoy thank you all for coming tonight so look brought me here was i gave a talk with some of your at on my book boston the civil war hope of the second revolution i believe last december and i'm not quite certain which month and at the end of that talk i believe that i mentioned to at least some of you that i was working on a next book on massachusetts of the woman suffrage movement and that's what i'm going to speak about this is quite different from the last book talk because the last book talk i had finished the book it was published i was polished and ready to go  this time what i'm going to do is really outline for you my research as i'm doing it this is a work in progress and so what i'm going to do is tell you about the woman suffrage movement in massachusetts with a particular focus on the last twenty years  it took nearly a hundred years that was until nine hundred twenty of course that the nineteenth amendment was adopted and ratified and women gain the right to vote so although i'm going to focus on the last twenty years it wouldn't really make any sense to jump in there unless they gave you a high level overview of what came first so what i've done is i break down the woman suffrage movement into three parts and i'll go over the first two relic rather quickly as we go along but the first part is the years really leading up to the civil war when the women's rights movement of the abolitionist movement and at that point it was a movement of moral persuasion and part of what led me to want to write this book was writing the book about the civil war and really thinking about the wonderful woman who had become abolition ts and started at arguing and speaking for women's rights at the same time as they talked about the horribleness of slavery the second part of the movement corresponds to the years right after the civil war through about one thousand nine hundred five and i'll talk about that  we'll spend the most time but to give you a preview i first want to just tell you how the woman suffrage movement emerged from within the abolitionist movement because you have to understand where it all starts and where it started was the garrison they were black they were white they were men they were women one of the things that garrison and his followers did was encourage women to join them in the anti slavery movement they thought that women would be naturally drawn to them movement in part because of the natural sympathy that they might have for slave woman and for children who were sold away from slave mothers for slave woman who were raped by masters and masters relatives and so forth and as i said garrison was a tru well the first two woman who became real public speakers in the abolitionist movement were two absolutely wonderful sisters named angelica and say were they were actually southerners from charleston south  carolina i don't know some of you may have heard of them anyway but they are the subject of a wonderful historical novel that came out just a few years ago the invention of wings some of you may have read it usually wherever i go some people have read it it's quite wonderful in any event angeli became converted to the evolutionist cause when they had reason to go to philadelphia actually the older sister sarah with her father who was ill who wanted to consult a quaker physician and even before the abolitionist movement had really got going quakers were the proto anti slavery advocates in this country because the quaker religion had taught them it was impossible for one human being to own another human being so while sarah was in philadelphia with her father she became a quaker and became an abolitionist she returned home to charleston south carolina her father died she talked about what she had learned to her younger sister angela and by the early eighteenth thirty's the two of them had moved to philadelphia w philadelphia in eight hundred thirty five wrote a letter to william lloyd garrison complimenting him on his stance praising the liberator his new album wishing this newspaper and saying to him this is a cause worth dying for well garrisoned got that letter from a southerner who could talk about the evils of slavery as it really was not as northerners claimed it was he knew how valuable that might be and he had angelica and sarah trained to be anti slavery speakers they actually attended a program of about ten weeks in new york where they were trained about harder argue and try to persuade people against slavery and in the summer of eight hundred thirty seven with the help of the woman's anti slavery society of massachusetts they began traveling through massachusetts to little towns all over the place to talk about abolitionism now when they began their talk of nine hundred thirty seven it was envisioned that they would talk to a woman that they would talk and parlors and dining rooms and kitchens and schoolyards wherever there would be gatherings of woman but what happened was they became really popular they were very great speakers people were interested and so let's say he had been in belmont expected a group of only woman to show off but then some men came to and more and more men began to attend her talks the congregational church of massachusetts which is of course the was the puritan church was very upset at the group the sisters speaking out they viewed that as a violation of the domestic sphere the separate sphere that it was that women belong to him and they natural and essentially if they're allowed to continue the world as we know of will virtually come to an end and they expected the greenpeace sisters to stop but the sisters not only didn't stop they actually expanded their talk so they no longer simply talked about anti slavery and why slavery should end they began to talk about women's rights and while woman had a right to speak out of why it was important that women should speak out and they sat and wrote did most of the speaking they both did a lot of writing but there are arguably did even more and they began to talk about all the girls that were to die to women in society including running for office holding office and even voting although they only really touched on a little bit and so that's really the beginning of the women's rights movement and with all due respect to elizabeth cady stanton and seneca falls and eight hundred forty eight which we'll talk about a few minutes that's a very important event but that is not the beginning the real beginning of an actual women's rights movement in this country happened in massachusetts in the summer of a temporary seven sicking with phase one of the movement i wish i could introduce to you about a dozen or twenty wonderful characters who played a key role of these years before the civil war but i've had issues just a few so very important during the eight hundred forty s who continued with the group the sisters had done our abbi tally foster and lucy stone both of whom are from the area of massachusetts foster was a quaker lucy stone was not foster was a little bit older and she was a school teacher in lynn where in eighteen thirty seven when tea sisters gave their talks she went and heard them and she herself became an anti slavery speaker and also a speaker in favor of women's rights very importantly lucy stone emerged on the scene in later in the eighteenth forty's lucy stone was also a teacher one of the very few occupations as you probably know that were available to young woman of that time before they got married or in some cases instead of marriage was of course being a school teacher particularly primary school teacher so lucy stone had been working as a teacher but she was determined to go to college and she had learned that oberlin college had opened in ohio and had accepted woman and she worked for seven or eight years to earn enough money to pay for it to attend oberlin college she went to oberlin college very she learned a lot about the anti slavery movement and she also had already heard about the gritty sisters and abbie cally foster and when she graduated in the eighteenth forties she became an anti slavery lecturer and joined this lecture circuit but she also like abby kelly foster in the group the sisters wanted to talk about women's rights to some extent she wanted to talk about parallels between woman and  slaves because women really although they weren't bought and sold the way slaves were being woman had absolutely no legal rights whatsoever i mean women could be beaten by their husbands they had no rights in divorce they had no right of custody they were vulnerable to husbands who absconded with money that they might have brought into the marriage and so forth i mean woman really were little better than slaves so lucy stone began talking about this she was told by the a much about women's rights and that that was distracting some people they wanted to draw out of the anti slavery cause because not all people who might be abolitionists were sympathetic to a potential new role for a woman and so what lucy stone did in one of my favorite things about her is she developed maybe she didn't develop it but she certainly employed the concept of job sharing and she said to the abolition this well i'm not going to give up talking about women's rights but i'll tell you what i'll do a stick about women's rights monday to friday and then i'll talk about the anti woman from pennsylvania named christian maad decided in the summer of eight hundred forty eight that they would hold a convention and brought together people interested in talking about women's rights and they did hold a convention and actually you could still go and see the site where it was held in eight hundred forty eight it was a convention it was small and it was local i mean literally there were just about ten days of advance notice given notices were just given in the local paper it was important but it was upstate new york gathering but at that gathering of course elizabeth cady stanton had taken the lead in drafting what we all know today as a direct declaration of sentiments in which she had modeled after the declaration of independence a statement of rights for woman which included that woman ought to have the right of suffrage the right to vote that was actually the most controversial resolution offered at the seneca falls convention and the only one that wasn't adopted unanimously by those in attendance  that was an eight hundred forty eight but it eighty fifty massachusetts hosted what was the first actual national women's rights convention you know in these years leading up to the civil war when the anti slavery movement was very divisive of course it was very divisive in terms of the country and national convention was a northern convention i mean just as southerners hated the abolitionist movement they also hated any talk of women's rights i mean they were wedded to their ways which was the rights of slavery and women in their place in this separate sphere the domestic sphere but an eight hundred fifty led by lucy stone and abby kelly foster and a few other of their allies they actually called with six months notice a convention of people interested in talking about women's rights they held it in worcester i mean it was obviously convenient because it's a place that stone and kelly foster knew well from growing up there and all but more importantly it was an industrial town on railroad lines someplace that was easy to get to whether you were coming from ohio or pennsylvania or new york and so forth so this convention was held in eight fifty in wister at this building which no longer stands and actually a thousand women came together from eleven different states and they passed resolutions they set up committees and they agreed that they would meet the following year and in the meantime they would go out and talk more about women's rights they were talking about suffrage but they were talking broadly about women's rights at this point about the right to own property and retain it during marriage about their right to have custody and access to children if divorced about their right to divorce in the first place and so forth and during these next two years in the eight hundred fifty s it was actually a convention held every single year until eight hundred sixty not all of them were in massachusetts they moved around syracuse new york akron ohio cleveland ohio and other places but susan b anthony of course i haven't mentioned yet emerges on the scene in eight hundred fifty two when she attends the convention in syracuse new  york and that's really when she first becomes publicly identified with the women's rights movement previously she too had been a quaker school teacher and also was a worker in the temperance movement which was another reform movement like the abolitionist movement and of course the temperance movement was a movement to reduce the consumption of alcohol later on we would know it as a course the prohibition movement so basically that's what's going on during the eight hundred fifty s the women's rights cause very very small it's indorsed by radicals the media makes terrible fun of the i will be quoting in my book it's hard to remember them offhand but some of the absolutely horrible offensive descriptions given of these convention gatherings  the local media calling them a gathering you know chickens running around with their heads cut off and much worse so it was certainly not popular certainly not interest by most but it was growing particularly it was really rooted within the radicals in the abolitionist movement well when civil war broke out the women's rights movement basically put itself on hold to support the northern war effort and they did many things during the war when this picture which actually i slow homer shows you a few of them and women's roles changed tremendously during the civil war they worked as nurses they sewed for the soldiers they raised money to send supplies for soldiers they worked in factories and actually perhaps that's that's a sewing picture but here is a factory picture actually of women working at a u s arsenal that was then in watertown they managed homes and farms and businesses while their husbands sons father brothers were away fighting it war and in addition these leaders from the women's rights movement and particularly right now i'm going to focus on lucy stone and susan b anthony and elizabeth cady stanton who are really emerged in this powerful persuade lincoln first to issue an emancipation proclamation and then to issue it and then to persuade congress to adopt the thirteenth amendment to bar slavery forever from this country and they did that successfully they were a key part of the of what propelled lincoln to issue the emancipation proclamation and then congress ultimately to pass the thirteenth amendment so women's roles expanded during the war even though the official women's rights movement was put on hold well when the war ended and slavery had come to an end the abolitionist the people in the abolitionist movement which right now of course was very large came together to form what they called the american equal rights association and now that slavery had been abolished they had several goals they included better treatment for the newly freed former slaves in the south it also included the right to vote for both african americans the former and slaves and for women there were there was the right to vote for some black men in some northern states black men could vote in massachusetts they couldn't vote in many northern states and they certainly couldn't vote southern states and during the course of the civil war the focus on the future had become focused on the ballot a lot of that was due to frederick douglass who talked with great articulateness abo ballot and now that black men were able to fight in the union army which they ultimately war and as he said they could shoot bullets and now they have to be able to mark ballots and so on the american equal rights association came together just after the war in the in one thousand sixty five was the first meeting the expectation was that it would sponsor in a congress that was still populated by many radicals from the civil war days a new amendment that would grant voting rights to both black anybody know why i'm just curious if i have a theory as to why they might have decided that it was the negroes our first well you know it's a certainly because they were male seven that's certainly one reason if i'm excellent thought it's because they were men that is true it's also because it was deemed that they had suffered even more than woman because they had been enslaved but probably most importantly of all was the political ramifications congress at this point was still control for a bit longer by what we call today the radical republicans the were radical republicans they knew that black men who were great to the vote were going to vote republican they were of course created both for the party of lincoln but woman they would vote all over the place they would often vote the way their husbands voted perhaps or their fathers this certainly was not the ability to predict precisely how women would vote that's probably the main reason why it was to clear that it was the negro's hour but certainly plain old sexism played a key role as well voting and then the fifteenth amendment which granted of course the right to vote regard to all men regardless of race color or previous condition of servitude and when that happened the always a division within the women's rights movement wing that was headed by elizabeth cady stanton and susan b anthony they left and broke with the american equal rights association because they refused to support the fifteenth amendment and they said many racist things as part of their refusal to support it they said the white intelligent woman certainly should have a vote before formerly enslaved not well it not educated at all black men and other comments but they were adamant that they would form an organization that would fight going to give the vote to a woman but i'm faithful if anybody gets out of the terrible pit that woman and blacks have been and if they come first that's ok we'll get it next and at that point the animosity the division between stanton and anthony on the one hand and stone on the other was really for the rest of their lives really they reconciled a little bit which we'll get to in a moment but basically the movement was divided for the next twenty years it's also during those next twenty years with stanton and anthony who are far better at public relations and self promotion than a very very humble self effacing lucy stone that's when stanton and anthony wrote their book history of woman suffrage and really gave themselves and elizabeth cady stanton and seneca falls and so forth the credit and really largely wrote of the people from massachusetts from the story we've that's really why i've been that's the essence of why when you think about the suffrage movement you might be inclined to think about anthony and stanton before you think about somebody like stone and one of the reasons i'm motivated to work write this book is because the met the american woman suffrage association that was based in boston for the next twenty years really was very important stuff or just socio it's the one that made things happen because stanton anthony felt that all that they wanted to argue for was a new constitutional amendment that would franchise woman after the fifteenth amendment they wanted a sixteenth amendment and so they spent their time to rocking to congress trying to lobby congress but they made no progress because congress wasn't going to be inclined to act unless they were pushed to do so by the people in their states by their constituents the american woman suffrage association understood that and they established branch organizations all throughout the states including local organizations and they began to advocate for suff state basis and they succeeded first in the western part of the country places like wyoming idaho utah and so forth for a variety of reasons which each day we can get into but the upshot is that those new places were much less wedded to the traditions of the past also it's true that there were fewer women out there so there was no danger that more woman would be able to somehow a vote of the men because there were fewer of them and there was also just a picture excuse me a pioneer spirit i mean these were woman who had come out in wagon trains and worked equally alongside the men the notion of this rarefied domestic sphere just didn't have the same resonance in the west as it did in the east but the american woman suff association based here sent speakers and provided help including financial help to state and local campaigns all throughout the country to try to promote suffrage and one of the things that they did is start a newspaper it was printed in boston massachusetts every single week starting in january eight hundred seventy the main editors throughout its life were first lucy stone and her husband henry blackwell and then later on their twenty and it wrote about what was going on everywhere people with said to news and talk about talks and campaigns and what was happening and it was very very important i mean it's really probably impossible to the importance of the woman's journal in addition one of the things that the american woman suffrage association did was argue for partial suffrage so in other words they knew that to  able to vote equally with men would pretty much require a constitutional amendment or would require a constitutional amendment whether federal one for it to be nationwide or a state one for it to be statewide so they focus and that's very difficult because you need two thirds of the votes in the legislature and then it has to be ratified in a popular vote so they focused on what they thought they could achieve by trying to persuade a bare majority of legislators and so they focused on as well as seeking full suffrage what was called partial suffrage and that could mean different things and many school suffrage men were not surprisingly the first kind of suffrage that men begin to support for a woman was the right to vote for school committee because of course the ability to help to choose the people who would run the schools will see that's consistent with a woman's role as the primary parent who would nurture and raise and help educate the children  suffrage which was suffrage for sitting in tallinn elections because again women were seen as having more of an interest in hygiene and clean streets and safe school buildings and things like that and that was true in massachusetts as well the reason why the picture here of louisa may alcott is because hundred seventy nine massachusetts passed one of these partial suffrage was a school committee law and louisa may alcott who lived at that point in concord massachusetts as you probably know was actually the very first person to vote for a school committee in the town who looked at the movement and said this is ridiculous this shouldn't be two movements why did you have this argument it was twenty years ago it doesn't matter now we would be stronger if we join together and have one movement and they actually did join back together  hundred ninety it was called the national american woman suffrage association and even though susan b anthony became the president of the organization it carried out all the principles of massachusetts and other words they still wanted united states constitutional amendment but they were determined to work on a state by state basis because that was the only way they thought they could be effective then they were turned to washington the other major thing that happened in one thousand nine hundred five in this will finally let me get to add a bomb legislatures let the legislature more legislate tory's have become convinced that there really was no basis no reason to deny women the right to vote at least in city in town elections and but there arose a new group of what was called anti suffragists and these were men and women absolutely adamantly committed to preserving woman separate speech and denying women the right to vote and massachusetts actually had the largest and most active anti s association in the entire country by the time we were done and in eight hundred ninety five when it looked like municipal suffrage my pass this group of antis who was very well financed include big businessmen harvard professors other people with money and influence they said to the legislature don't pass this law let's split the population vote let's have a referendum and see if in fact woman really want to suffer and what they did was they actually voted to hold a referendum that was non binding in which men and women would be allowed to cast of those of whether or not they wanted to have been a civil suffered and the woman the men could vote if they were registered to vote and the woman c vote if they registered in school committee elections so if they were already registered to vote for school committee which chose to register for school committee they would be able to vote in the election and they had that election eight hundred ninety five and this is one of the my favorite cartoons this is the kind of propaganda piece that the antis would use of course you can all see it but a woman is going off to a suffrage movement and there is her poor husband holding the two babies in his lap because that large margin the woman who voted it actually overwhelmingly supported it but most women didn't vote which is not a surprise because most people are not activists you know most people aren't necessarily inclined to go out and take action that's usually a small part of the population and what the antis did is they changed they used this referendum with to great effect essential change the nature of the argument they understood by eight hundred ninety five that they were losing out there were all these changes in society which will get to the moment there were new jobs for woman higher education new colleges for a woman in the world was changing electric lights subways bicycle street cars i mean all these things were happening we were moving into a modern world and they understood the theory really weren't any persuasive arguments against women having the vote in terms of justice and so forth and they understood that this notion to argue that woman just belonged in their homes and never of in the world was not going to be successful for much longer so they change strategy and what the new strategy was to say that ok woman should get the vote if they want it and what this referendum has proved totally convincingly is that women don't want it and this was the first time that there was ever a popular referendum like that and this is both in massachusetts of eight hundred ninety five haunted the woman suffrage movement all the way until one nine hundred twenty it really did i mean you can pick up any book about women's suffrage whether the talking about oregon or california or texas or the whole country or the eastern new york or whatever and you will find a discussion about the massachusetts referendum of eight hundred ninety five and the terrible terrible harm that did to the woman suff make a case for the fact that women should only have suffered when they say they want it and of course that's never have voting is supposed to be you're supposed to have the right to vote ideally you'll exercise it but that is of course a matter of individual choice and so this really brings us to where added begins in the boston girl because she was born in the year in one thousand nine hundred and so what happened how did we get from eighteen ninety five where things were such a mess to a suffrage movement that could succeed twenty five years later and the answer is i said that the suffrage movement had waves the answer is that the third wave of the movement began and the third wave which is what i'm going to talk about the rest of talk had many different parts to it it included new leaders a new image and most importantly reaching a new law and beyond the old narrow group of suffrage activists to all sorts of woman who might be able to be persuaded why the vote would matter women who went to college women who worked in factories immigrant women and so forth and that's really what happened over the next twenty years basically which will bring us to nine hundred fifteen and then we're close to the end of the story so new leaders for about ten years when her husband was ill and then he died and she returned in one nine hundred fifteen and she was considered an absolutely brilliant organizer brilliant campaign who really was the master strategist of a lot of what i'm about to tell you immigrants to people of all ethnicities all races all economic classes and so forth she is very open and believe that the woman suffrage movement should expand beyond its sort of middle class middle class protestant radical image that it had in the past and so she was a very very important leader she was sort of the reach idealist and carry step excuse me and carry chatman cat was really the master strategist also a unattractive i'm happy woman and so one of the things that the suffrage movement did was create a new image and this also corresponded to the heyday of magazines like life magazine and the woman's home journal there was a lot of mass media and so there were artists who drew people differently and this cartoon kind of sums it up the line at the bottom written by the cartoonist it says the type has changed and what is showing on the left of course is the image of the suff very important because that image helped to attract new woman to the suffrage movement and it made them feel like this is something i might want to be a part of one of the places in which the new image was revealed most clearly was the invention of the bicycle which became enormously popular at the turn of the century it gave woman an ability to get around and be independent in the athletic it led to changes in clothing so that women could pedal people began to wear but it wasn't just a bicycle and that's one example and i chose these photos but right out of the boston girl i don't all of you have read it some of you probably have but addie's older sister betty does anybody remember where she's working on the book she's working in a department store another new invention of the late nineteenth century turn of the century woman worked in department stores they also worked as telephone operators that in fact i read in the book works as a telephone and telephone switchboard they worked in offices and abby herself works at a typewriter and has type writing lessons i mean woman all of a sudden had new careers new opportunities and the bicycle plus subways and of course boston opened in some way around this time to give women the ability to get around so huge practical changes were taking place on the ground here's mud parkway mentioned earlier mugwort park attended radcliffe which started off as the harvard and xo that had become its own separate school radcliffe by the end of the nineteenth century and in one of her classes in the late eighty's ninety's a professor assigned the students to write an essay about suffrage and madhur park but she was only one of two students in the entire class who wrote in support of woman suffrage that everybody else wrote against it and after that she went to a meeting of the massachusetts woman suffrage association she talked to alice stone blackwell and she very memorabl described that attending her first national meeting in washington d c and she described a group of very well meaning the very elderly woman trickling in slowly many of them some of them giving updates from what was going on in their local state suffragist sociate in iran and she was quite horrified and thought this is no way to have a successful movement and that led her with a friend of hers to decide to form what they called the college equal suff motherhood park believed very very strongly that her opportunity to attend a school like radcliffe had come because of the earliest the earlier suffrage pioneers who even though they hadn't yet got woman the vote woman had advanced in so many ways and they were the seven sisters schools and other schools some women were even doing things like going to law school by that point in time which we'll talk about more in a moment and maude would park felt that she had an extreme a she put it obligation of opportunity and  opportunities that she had been given require her to have this obligation to extend and further the movement and make things better for the next generation so she of us fred founded the college equal to women schools first all over besa chances and then out of state they went to bryn mawr they went to vassar they went to barnard as as well schools and they helped find people who would form college people suffragists o c a sions and have meetings and bring in speakers and so forth and that was tremendously important and bringing a whole group of new woman both college students and also young the lungs into the movement and many of these women before they married because this was still an era of course were most women would stop work when they married but many of these women who worked for some period of time before marriage and they would talk about soccer gyms fred there were some of them also volunteered these college women in places like the north bennett street school where addie and goes for the saturday book club the settlement house movement was part of the era when they were arts and crafts and reading groups and speaker series and all these things offered to woman at these places and they talked about things like suffrage to these young immigrant girls to the college equal suffrage association which was based in massachusetts was again a huge factor in the early part of the twentieth century also one thing i haven't mentioned yet is anybody who's african american and a couple of reasons for this the first is that for the most part african american woman or really more focused not entirely but many of them on  of the overall african american race then on women's issues i mean there are certainly some exceptions that by and large that was true it's also true that up through this point in time massachusetts had a very small african american population during the civil war there were only about two thousand african americans living in the city of boston for example and eight hundred ninety s it was only about eight thousand and during this period of time the city's population had exploded with the influx of irish italian jewish and other immigrants so the number of african americans was very very small but josephine roughen was the recognized a leader a black woman in the starfish movement in boston and because lucy stone and abby kelly foster and the other the new england's women's club that many of these women belong to she was a member of the massachusetts woman suffrage association and so forth and then in the eight hundred ninety s she josephine roth and founded a woman's error club which was a club a sucker a suffrage and general advancement club for african american woman based in boston and also a newspaper that unfortunately only published for several years but it was a newspaper for the rights of black woman and you can read definitely played a role here but they were a very small part of the massachusetts population and that's a picture of the national the first meeting called the josephine ruff and a black women's clubs from across the country and they form the national association of colored women's clubs and their wonderful slogan was lifting as we climb meeting as they climb we will lift others take them with us in addition to bringing new people into the movement there were also new tactics and florence lusk is one of the key figures also in massachusetts in both those regards she herself went and spoke in tenements spoke to immigrants would go to factories would go any place that people would let her speak she herself was actually a graduate of mit who were trained as an architect then she devoted her life to the suffrage movement first and old and then to other radical activist movements  she also popularized new tactics that people were hearing about from england i don't any of you saw the movie suffragette when it came out at this point the suffragists in england were not yet really doing the militant things discussed in that movie in terms of bombs and breaking windows and so forth but they had begun to speak out have parades stand on soap boxes and parks and so forth and soon they would become more militant come read about that those tactics and she said to other woman in massachusetts you know if we have a talk like in the belmont why bury assembly room the only people who are going to come and listen are people who generally agree with us we're talking to people florence less come and several others literally would get into a car they now had access to cars some of them or they would take the subway and they would take this soap box and they would go out to little town greens in town commons and they would stand on it and some would out leaflets and somebody would speak and she wrote these wonderful things about how it would be and she said at the beginning we were surrounded by a few kids who were playing ball and maybe a group of dogs but then a few more people one driver over and then a few more people and then gradually more people and that is how we reached more people doesn't mean they persuaded them all but it meant that they got they got newspaper coverage and more and more people heard about the movement so she spoke both out in public this new so called open air campaign which is a new tactic and also speaking to intervene communities all over the place very very important and this is a picture it's not a great picture but this shows florence less home and seven and two of her colleagues in front of the car that they used sometimes to dry places and of course that was very frowned upon by the conservatives as well margaret foley was a bit bigger who worked a lot with lawrence less come i particularly wanted to call attention to her because she was a catholic she was a daughter of irish half of the immigrants and the catholic community the irish catholic community in massachusetts at this point was very large there had been an enormous influx as many of you know of irish as a result of the potato famine and the irish population in the city of boston part was probably about thirty percent well maybe it wasn't that high by now but it was very high but the catholics really did not embrace women's rights largely because they  largely because the leaders of the catholic church preached against it and was very hierarchical religion a very hierarchical times so there were very few catholics who supported suffrage for women in cities like boston and margaret foley was very important because she was one who broke with that convention and made a lot of outreach to the catholic community but still by and large the catholic community did not support women suffrage one of the arguments that woman made this was also and i know this is kind of like a rock for american history at the same time as to the suffrage movement this was of course the progressive movement in the early one nine hundred the era of fights against political corruption of improving sanitation and of all the things that we associate with the progressive movement the era of the other roosevelt and then later of woodrow wilson and so one of the arguments that woman made this is part of their new image as well as having a new image of dressing elegantly and looking famine in they also try to make arguments both in terms of justice in poor rights we are women we should have the same rights as you but they want to appeal to everybody and so they wanted to have arguments that would be tailored to whoever their audience was and so one of their arguments a very very successful one was what became known as municipal housekeeping and that's just what it said woman argued that if we have the vote we will clean up your cities we know how to clean that's what we do we keep palaces we will keep house in the city and we will clean your streets we will clean the schools we won't have corruption we will have clean water you know we will have sewers that work we will have all of those things because we know how to clean and i didn't put in a slide i should have but there's a wonderful one that shows several woman to be armed with a broom you know sweeping out all the cobwebs and problems of the city they also try to appeal to wealthier women who were inclined some of them not to be sympathetic to the suffrage movement to the grounds that they had everything they needed they have loving husbands they had lots of money life was good they had the labor saving devices that had been invented in the late one nine hundred the only twentieth century they had domestic help often in the form of young irish woman or  young of irish woman or african american woman and many of them were not drawn to the suffrage movement that they had money and they had influence or reaching them was really important too and so one of the ways they did that was by appealing to be a better instincts and so this is a poster for instance that says to the woman in the home and on the left you see a very loving mother sitting there with her child or children in their rocking chair in this lovely home and life is good she really doesn't need anything more she does might not think she needs a vote but then she says but look at the other people look at the children child labor children working in factories women working in factories there were horrible fires about the catastrophes as you may know in certain factories so the argument was that woman should also take care of other woman and other children so that was another strategy they used mary kay o'sullivan is actually another irish woman although she was not from massachusetts but moved here and she was the founder of in massachusetts the woman's trade union league which reached out to a woman who worked in factories the garment trade and so for health and to unionize that was really what she did she was a labor organizer but she also helped him to see the connection between their conditions and what the vote might bring if they couldn't vote they could support a minimum wage if they couldn't vote there could be a law that would not allow work on saturdays or sundays if they couldn't vote they could have an eight hour day if they couldn't vote they could be on child labor at least for children under fourteen if they could vote they could require all children to go to school so very very important so all this is going on in the twentieth century so there was the horrible disaster of the eight hundred ninety five referendum big meanwhile this reaction all these new strategies to try to persuade people of the importance both of woman suffrage i mean that was the focus but also of improving woman's conditions and women's rights more  little practice and works as a lawyer they were few they were far between but that was another change that took place in women's lives during that era i'm sorry of the menorah society yes i found this picture because  was i wanted to find some early jewish organization of course the law school and a menorah society was actually founded i learned in one nine hundred nineteen but the picture that i found that i could find online and just borrow for a purpose its power point is actually women who were drawn to the suffrage movement who became prominent one of the most prominent in massachusetts as jenny and baron i wish i had a photo of her as a young woman i'll have to find one this shows for much later in life when she had actually become the first woman appointed to serve as a judge in the state of massachusetts but she herself was grew up in the west and went to a girls high school very probably although i have to verify this it wouldn't surprise me if i learned that she attended a reading group similar to the saturday evening club or comparable things like that because she did grow up in the city poor family went to girls high school but she ultimately was able through luck and hard work to end up at boston university and be useful of law and while she was there she started a boston university's temperature association when she graduated she became a leader in the suffrage movement and she did outreach to many people with a particular focus for not exclusive on the jewish community she was also joined you know the jewish community by louis brandeis who of course was a prominent lawyer in boston and would ultimately become when he was appointed by were wilson the first jewish united states supreme court justice of the time and louis brandeis actually gave several wonderful speeches in support of woman suffrage the same time as all this is going on in eastern states like massachusetts and similar stories a little bit different but comparable going on in states all over the east and the mid atlantic meanwhile progress after a hiatus picked up again in the western part of the state i told you earlier that the first states to adopt  a woman were in the west and then once again the west led the way states like washington california oregon and so forth and act and suffered they were always way in advance i mean what's interesting if you think about it is the ideas of the suff movement came from the east came from people like the woman's journal but they were first implemented successfully in the west and then the west had to kind of drive the movement back east so this brings us to basically nine hundred ten thousand nine hundred eleven lots of outreach lots of new tactics and then we have the development of even newer tactics when alice hall comes on the scene as some of you may be familiar with she is the founder of what becomes known in one nine hundred sixteen is the national women's party but at this point she actually works with him and she slid off from the national american woman suffrage association at this point she hasn't yet slid off and she heads up what they called a congressional union because she had persuaded the kerry chapman other leaders that enough progress had been made in different states that it was time again to make a new push in washington to also work not just on behalf of the states and suffrage in the states but also for a new federal amendment so new a president they held the first massive suffrage parade and parades would very quickly become a major focus of the suffrage movement major attention gathering lots of people would come and walk they would get lots of publicity and so forth and this was the votes to a doctor and amend the massachusetts state constitution that would grant woman full and total suffrage that would be an amendment to our massachusetts state constitution at almost the exact same time similar legislation succeeded in several other relatively comparable states york new jersey and pennsylvania but as you probably all know from your life as a voter when a referendum kasich amendment is a is approved by the legislature it has to come before the voters and the voters have to approve it they have to ratify it so in one thousand nine hundred fifteen ratification campaigns took place in four large important influential eastern states massachusetts new york new jersey pennsylvania and these blue birds like this were apparently posted throughout massachusetts that was one of the symbols in karachi people to come out and vote for a woman no this time unlike eight hundred ninety five when women were allowed to vote suffrage if they were able to vote for school committee women couldn't vote at all this was a referendum ratification by the male electorate because they were the only ones who were empowered to vote in it so it was going to be a vote in these four significant eastern states by all men there were major campaigns for these nine hundred fifteen amendments all of which three of which took place including the massachusetts one on the same day in november one thousand fifteen in new jersey proceeded  by a few weeks in october this was that one of the posters that was used this demonstrated to many of the east not just that they should support it because it's the right thing to do because they were advantages but because right now the west has figured it out the west is leading the country all those states in the west have woman suffrage and we need to bring that to the list as well this is just an example of one poster twelve reasons why women should vote the reason why i wanted to include and i'm not going to read it all to you is because it emphasizes you know as i said these women have learned to try to reach to each constituency arguments that would appeal to them and so they argue from because those obey the laws should help to choose them down to laws affecting children laws affecting the home the public spirited mothers make public spirited sons that eight million women are wage workers in the conditions under which they work are controlled by law to work here to appeal to your viewers who are part of labor unions i mean they really tried to run a very very broad based campaign however the antis had not gone away and they came all the full force in the months leading up to this referendum in one nine hundred fifteen it's a little hard to see this image but what this shows here is down at the bottom with the flowers and the beautiful children of courses love marriage children ambition but then this poor woman who my wife has joined the suffrage movement and i've suffered ever since i love this life because it talks about the massachusetts woman suffrage victory parade but i will tell you that this was a pretty big parade this was the of crafts and industries and towns and colleges and school and it got tremendous coverage i've gone back and looked at newspapers like the boston globe which of course was published then and they have big articles about it lots of pictures i mean it was a lot of support for wom jersey pennsylvania and new york as well as massachusetts but a loss by the largest margin in massachusetts which is really sad and that's probably because of the incredible strength of the anti suffrage movement here as well as the great strength of the catholic community which really opposed to dissuade so who opposed social conservatives looker interests into labor interests who are afraid of big business who are terrified that if women got the vote they might do things like require workers to stop work after eight hours or have a child labor and catholics so it was rejected at this point there was a meeting among the leaders of the national american woman suffrage association so including madhur park and carrie chapman cat and this is still they've split with alice paul but the final total split hasn't yet quite happened and they decide that it's now time to embrace a federal strategy as the only strategy that suffrage we have sniffed there were so many representatives in congress both just representatives in the house of representatives and senators in the united states senate who were from states where women can vote and in many other states even if women didn't have full suffrage they had mystical suffered  school committee suffrage that there were enough people who were sympathetic that at this point finally after all these years it was the time to abandon more expensive state campaigns although some still were still had new york tried  succeeded actually in one nine hundred seventy but in general the movement for state campaigns was abandoned and all focus was now turned in washington and the focus came both from the so called more moderate national american y and alice hall and the national women's party which established itself as a radical movement modeling itself after the militant strategies that have now been by this time been used in england so they didn't use bombs but in terms of they picketed outside the white house was their primary strategy legit they being arrests they then asked as english suffered suffragettes had asked to be treated as political prisoners when that was denied they went on hunger strikes and so forth where basically you claim you're saving the world for democracy you're keeping the world safe for democracy and you're denying it to citizens here at home and other signs like that mr president how long must woman wait for liberty mr president what will you do for a woman suffrage and there were many arrests in massachusetts never had that many people who were involved in the national woman's party with alice paul i think the reason is because the woman's journal was here because alice blackwell was here because we were such a center of what had been the american woman suffrage association the college equal suffrage league and so forth the national women's party did have a branch here though it is was a large and two of the women who were involved with it who wanted to pull credit too were a mother daughter team agnes and catherine moore a and they were both arrested in massachusetts and also in new york they were arrested in massachusetts when president wilson came to massachusetts to speak and there was a protest in boston common at the same time as you have the picketing going on by the national woman's party the lobbying going on by the national american woman suffrage association it's also world war one and just like in the civil war during war time women made new and different contributions so women worked in factories had all these new jobs and they used the a war service also as an argument for suffrage just about at the end and they love this poster it says on the left as a war measure the country is asking of woman this long list of things from army cooks to ambulance drivers farmers mechanics nurses doctors and so forth and all that women are asking of the country is the  chance to go into this today is that the southern states were very opposed to woman suffrage and wilson did not want to lose the support of the southern states and the seven states meanwhile of course had been busy denying suffrage to black men who'd been granted into the fifteenth amendment and the last thing they wanted was to give it to a new class of people which would include black woman and call more attention to disenfranchisement of black men but ultimately as a result of the these three factors i mean each there are books written saying one deserves all the credit the national woman's party disserves all the credit the national american woman social associations herb's all the credit and the truth of the matter as you would probably imagine is that they all deserve partial credit  combination of factors that ultimately led woodrow wilson to come around ultimately lead the united states congress this is a parade after wilson supported suffrage and ultimately led congress in stone had started back in eight hundred sixty nine the state campaigns because even if there had been a federal amendment earlier it might not have been ratified by three quarters of the states it was the state campaigns the state workers who  in place to lobby their state legislatures to ratify this amendment ultimately tennessee you may know the dramatic story of how tennessee became the critical state the push to ratification over the edge when a young man whose name i'm blanking on had pledged to oppose ratification but received a letter from his elderly mother saying that this is something you must do and change his vote so  this august one thousand twenty which is why the date of gratification is celebrated as august twenty sixth the one nine hundred twenty this is a copy of the joint resolution this is the front page of the woman's journal that is an overview of some of what i have learned so far it's easier to be a talk then to write into a book but that is my goal but i would love to do is not only try to answer questions but because this is very much a work in progress i really would love to hear your thoughts ideas picketing and then they gave them one militant action like breaking windows and even using bombs and so forth they were brought to prison they were sentenced they asked to be treated as political prisoners they view themselves as political prisoners and instead they were treated as common criminals and they went many of them on hunger strikes and they worked for sped and it was absolutely horribly dreadful and horrific it also i will say did bring even more publicity and attention to the separate cause so there was a sort of a silver lining the exact same thing happened here and as i said the woman here were not breaking windows and throwing bombs but they were picketing in part of the white house they picketed like they did in boston common when president wilson came here many of them were arrested and similarly they demanded to be treated as political prisoners and they were not they to want to hunger strikes and they too were force fed and they didn't have been as extensively here as it did in england  ma good park became the first national president of the league of women voters the kerry chapman that florist luckow they all became very active in the league of women voters and even before the nineteenth amendment was ratified they were running the national merican woman's suffrage association even before it changed its name was running civic education classes teaching women about the importance of vote how to be a good citizen how to vote absolutely alice paul of course went as some of you may know in the national women's party went directly from supporting the nineteenth amendment to supporting an equal rights amendment and they started in the early one nine hundred twenty s so they really didn't really unite with the league of women voters which they viewed as again a more mainstream organization just like the national merican woman suffrage association and they turned their attention to an equal rights amendment and i don't know what any of your first memory is of alice paul's people who are of sort of like my age in here but you know long before i knew the importance of alice paul and who she was and what all she had done i remember kind of vaguely hearing you know stories about once a year alice paul and tennis shoes would show up at congress and once again introduce an equal rights amendment almost as like a joke you know when it was reported i mean and then you know you learn i mean who this woman was but she was absolutely adamant that voting was a first accomplished but maybe you have an argument that the time that i've run out of that there is an argument and you know and you know it's interesting because the fiftieth anniversary of woman but like ma good park who believed in the obligation of opportunity you know what does it mean what's our role what's our job what's our obligation to do for our daughters and granddaughters and so forth who come after us so   to some extent eight years ago the campaign in the democratic party when barack obama was running against hillary clinton so the nomination because that certainly was played up a tremendous amount in that election during that nomination campaign and don't we all wish we were back thinking about issues like that but that's a private cut that out of my belmont i don't want television reporting any other questions comments really