Reviews
Praise for “Winning the Vote”
This is a wonderful chronicle of the untold history of our country – the story of the brave and remarkable women who changed our nation.
Ken Burns, Filmmaker
__________
Robert Cooney's search for every bit of visual evidence of American suffragism has benefited many scholars and documentary filmmakers. Now, he has offered us his own vision of these visionary feminists. Among the many important things you will learn from this fantastic volume is just how broad and deep the American woman suffrage movement really was.
Ellen Carol DuBois, Professor of History, UCLA
__________
For more than seven decades, American women fought on the local, state, and federal level for themselves and their sisters to earn the right to vote. To celebrate the 85th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, Cooney (director, Woman Suffrage Media Project: coauthor, The Power of the People), in collaboration with the National Women's History Project, has assembled a visually rich collection of primary source materials intermingled with explanatory text that provides an approachable introduction to the women and the movements that made the victory possible. Chronologically arranged chapters make good use of primary sources such as photographs, cartoons, posters, and newspaper articles culled from archives across the nation. Bibliographic references and an index increase the value of the work. Recommended for larger public and academic libraries with an interest in women's studies, even those who already own documentary volumes made up primarily of textual sources.
Library Journal, November 1, 2005
__________
Check out the section on books about history below, but one book in this genre needs to be given special mention. It is Winning the Vote: The Triumph of the American Woman Suffrage Movement. Written by Robert P. J. Cooney, Jr., it represents 12 years of research about this nearly forgotten part of American history. The first edition is 496 pages with more than 960 photographs and illustrations, many in full color. In short, this is an impressive book just for its physical properties. Covering the critical 72-year period from 1848 to 1920, the many personalities and events that marked the movement come alive on its pages as the leaders of this movement, women and men, conducted a long struggle for legal and political recognition. Women weren’t given the vote, they fought for it! For any history buff, this book will become a prized addition to their library.
Alan Caruba, Bookviews.com, Leading “Pick of the Month
__________
School Library Journal
COONEY, Robert P. J., Jr. Winning the Vote: The Triumph of the American Woman Suffrage Movement. 479p. maps. photos. reprods. bibliog. index. American Graphic 2005. Tr $85. ISBN 0-9770095-0-5. LC 2005904560.
Gr 8 Up–Published on the 85th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, and in collaboration with the National Women’s History Project, this lavishly illustrated volume focuses on the years from 1848 to 1920. The chronological chapters move, at first, by decades, and then, when discussing the most intense activity prior to winning the vote, by year. Each chapter begins with a narrative passage giving an overview of the period covered. The pages that follow offer vignettes, brief biographies, informatively captioned archival illustrations and other primary sources (posters, documents, political cartoons), and brief descriptions of events and incidents marking the struggle. A brief epilogue describes the political activism that the suffrage movement engendered and assesses its impact on women into the 21st century. The final pages provide references for text cited in the volume, followed by an extensive bibliography, photographic credits, and a comprehensive index. The language is clear throughout, bringing to life this complex period in American history. While appropriate for students, all history buffs will appreciate this splendid volume.
Linda Greengrass, Bank Street College Library, New York City February 2006
__________
Midwest Book Review
Winning The Vote: The Triumph Of The American Woman Suffrage Movement by Robert Cooney in association with the National Women's History Project is a comprehensive, 496-page history of the struggle for American women to have the right to vote in local, state, and national political elections. Superbly and profusely illustrated with more than 960 color and b/w illustrations that include historic photographs, posters, leaflets, and campaign buttons, the informed and informative text is further enhanced for the non-specialist general reader with an extensive bibliography for further study or research. It's been 85 years since women won the right to vote in 1920, and a whole new generation of women voters has arrived who would benefit from knowing the long, hard, frustrating, long-odds struggle to provide them with an equal opportunity to participate in every facet of American political life from determining candidacies, to running and holding office, but most fundamentally--the right to cast a ballot to determine who will make, administer, and adjudicate the laws under which they and their families must live. No academic library's Women's Studies or Political Science collections can be considered either comprehensive or complete without the inclusion of Robert Cooney's Winning The Vote! COPYRIGHT 2005 Midwest Book Review
__________
Winning the Vote tells our story
by Joni Hubred-Golden
Michigan Women’s Forum, forum-online.info
If you think the women's suffrage movement began with Susan B. Anthony, add Winning the Vote: The Triumph of the American Woman Suffrage Movement to your bookshelf.
And do it today.
Women like Margaret Brent, who demanded the right to vote blazed the trail for women's rights as early as 1648, are featured in this fascinating retrospective.
Widely regarded in the Maryland colony for her courage and strength of character, a businesswoman and property owner, Brent appeared before the Maryland assembly and unsuccessfully demanded the right to vote.
Her story is one every woman should know, and it is included in the weighty 496-page volume researched and written by Robert PJ Cooney, Jr. in collaboration with the National Women's History Project. Written in a lively and dramatic style, Winning the Vote tracks the suffrage movement from its true roots, in a handful of women who spoke up for their rights, to its formal organization during the fight against slavery and the bitter, divisive battle that resulted in the 19th amendment, ratified in 1920
Cooney spent 12 years studying manuscript and photos archives from of dozens of private and public libraries and collections, uncovering a vast array of information about the suffrage movement. Interspersing photos from more than 100 sources makes the book a great coffee table addition, one that you'll pick up and read over and over again.
While bits and pieces of women's history have been scattered and forgotten over time, Winning the Vote weaves stories from around the country into a rich and exciting new tapestry. Many of the stories and photos included have never before been made available to the general public.
This valuable reference belongs in every school library and should be required reading in secondary high school classrooms, where "herstories" – our stories – have been sorely lacking.
__________
Remembering the Struggle for Suffrage
by Chris Watson, The Santa Cruz Sentinel (California)
In New Jersey, back in 1776, women voted alongside men.
And women continued to vote in New Jersey for the next three decades until, in 1807, state legislators disenfranchised them along with the rest of American women, their "inalienable" rights not withstanding.
The history of suffrage in the United States — the fight to gain the vote — is one of the most interesting chapters in American history, as well as one of the longest and most unevenly documented.
Logging a whopping 72 years until the 19th Amendment became the law of the land in 1920, women's suffrage was an issue that historians, mostly men in the early years, preferred to downplay.
But according to Robert P.J. Cooney Jr., author and designer of the attractive picture history "Winning the Vote," the history of suffrage in this country offers, in its tactics and breadth of participants, the best possible model for nonviolent social change.
Cooney, a graphic designer, spent 12 years researching in libraries, writing letters to museums and visiting private archives to find the 960 photographs and illustrations for his book, written in collaboration with the National Women's History Project of Santa Rosa.
On Thursday, he's scheduled to sign copies of his magnificent, must-have coffee-table book at the First Congregational Church in Santa Cruz.
Despite insults large and small, setbacks in state legislatures and imprisonment, the women who fought for the right to vote — who lobbied, lectured, carried banners and walked in parades — never wavered from their goal.
The fact that the 19th Amendment barely survived ratification or challenges after the fact makes their effort all the more remarkable.
Near the end of his mammoth pictorial history, Cooney tells about the ratification vote in Tennessee, just one of many astonishing stories in his book:
On August 18 1920, with 96 legislators present, Speaker of the House Seth Walker announced that 'the hour was come.' Opponents were confident that they had enough votes to block ratification and moved that the bill be tabled. But when the vote tied 48-48, a second count was called and member Banks Turner changed his vote and defeated the motion so that the resolution could be voted on by the full House.
The motion to ratify was made and a voice vote began as suffragists and anti-suffragists held their breaths. This time joining Turner in supporting woman suffrage was the youngest member of the legislature, 24-year-old Harry Burn. A well-regarded first-term Republican from a rural area, Burn had promised his mother, and suffragists, that he would vote for the amendment only if his vote was absolutely needed. When the time came, despite tremendous pressure from Walker and several of his fellow legislators, Burn held true to his promise. With his support the motion passed 49-47.
A feast for the eyes and a book to boost the pride of all Americans, "Winning the Vote" is not about how women were given the vote but about how women won the vote.
Making the world a better place
The story of suffrage has been told in bits and pieces over the years, Cooney said, but mostly from an academic or individual point of view, accompanied by few visuals and emphasizing 19th-century history.
Because of that, his book — jam-packed with full-color examples of suffrage posters, photographs, memorabilia and graphics — is a general reader's delight.
What's even more important about Cooney's history is something that can only be seen in the book's entirety: That national suffrage affected the transformation of American society without violence.
Cooney was initially attracted to the history of suffrage, he said, after discovering that the movement attracted men as well as women.
But he threw himself into the research when he saw how much the movement had to say about the history of nonviolent social change.
In the late '60s, Cooney said, "when I was at the University of Santa Clara, I became interested in nonviolent change because of the war in Vietnam."
Cooney joined the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence in Palo Alto, working to end the war and to expand on the idea of nonviolence in places like Northern Ireland and Chile.
"I wanted to make history, not study history," he said. "And I was compelled to do something to stop the war. That type of compulsion helped me understand the suffragists."
Along with the anti-war movement, the labor movement, the prison reform movement and the civil rights movement, the women's suffrage movement has helped to give the downtrodden of the world hope.
"It's positive," Cooney said, "to think of our country's long history in terms of these models that have so influenced the world."
Individual effort led to national change
During his research, Cooney encountered numerous examples that "one person can make a big difference."
"Winning the Vote" is bursting with profiles of the women and men who worked in the movement.
You'll find copious information, of course, on "Aunt Susan" B. Anthony as well as facts and stories about Lucy Stone, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jane Addams and Alice Paul.
But you'll also be introduced to relatively unknown suffragists who deserve our thanks. Suffragists like:
• Margaret Brent, who in 1648 demanded her right as a property owner to vote in Maryland's colonial assembly
• Belva Lockwood, who in 1879 became the first woman lawyer to practice before the Supreme Court
• Max Eastman, who started The Men's League for Woman Suffrage in New York City in 1910.
• Fanny Garrison Villard, daughter of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who started the Woman's Peace Party in 1915 which later became The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.
Equality being the overriding theme, Cooney also spends time discussing the personalities and tactics of the anti-suffrage movement.
The long road to change
After the Supreme Court ruled that the 14th Amendment didn't apply to women, most suffragists went to work to convince male voters in individual states to give them the vote, while others worked toward a constitutional amendment.
Californians should be particularly proud of the fact that a bill introduced by California Senator Aaron Sargent in 1878 referred to as "the 16th Amendment" was submitted to every session of Congress until it was adopted, unchanged, as the 19th Amendment 40 years later.
In 1911, California became the sixth state to allow women to vote, thereby doubling the national number of women voters.
But American business interests — especially liquor businesses that had already suffered at the hands of the Women's Temperance Union — were little interested in such reforms and worked hard to thwart suffrage.
Still, in 1917, when New York approved suffrage statewide and Prohibition undercut the liquor lobby, suffrage seemed a likely possibility.
Throughout the entire ordeal, the women did it their way — they held tea parties, called for impeachment, enlisted young college women, held hunger strikes, put on pageants, handed out leaflets at state fairs, campaigned against anti-suffragist office-holders, held nighttime rallies, wore historical costumes and performed historical tableaus, even toured the country on a chartered train called "The Prison Special" because all the women on it had served time in prison for their beliefs.
"They won the amendment by the skin of their teeth," Cooney reminds us. "And there were challenges for a long time after, too."
Nothing worth achieving is easy, however.
Alice Paul, the suffragist who fought so hard for the constitutional amendment and who wrote the text for the Equal Rights Amendment, believed that:
"Our victory cannot be a signal for rest. It is not only the symbol of the new status which women have earned, but also the tool with which they must end completely all discriminations against them in departments of life outside the political realm."
The work continues
November 26, 2005 Copyright © Santa Cruz Sentinel. All rights reserved.
__________
You want to talk about backbone?
By SUSAN SWARTZ
THE SANTA ROSA (CA) PRESS DEMOCRAT
I'd like to recommend a big book with lots of black and white pictures for George and Dick for Christmas. It's a reminder of what really makes America great.
There are no bomber pilots in it, no soldiers in Humvees in harm's way, no weapons, no secret prisons. Just a bunch of brave, determined women, and their male allies, who were able to effect lasting change without killing people. Here's evidence, too, that dissenters are not cowards and protest is patriotic.
It may help explain to Dick and George why some of the gutsiest members of Congress to stand up to them are named Barbara and Nancy and Lynn, and why the mother of a young soldier killed in a manufactured war cannot be shooed away.
The new book, "Winning the Vote," is about the women's suffrage movement. It was written by Robert Cooney, a Santa Cruz author and graphic designer. A bearish guy with a silver beard who did his protesting during Vietnam, Cooney calls the campaign to get the vote "one of the most remarkable and successful nonviolent efforts to change ingrained social attitudes and institutions in the modern era." The women, he says, "were able to do what men have rarely even tried, without firing a shot, throwing a rock or issuing a personal threat."
Plus, they did it at a time when it was considered unwomanly to march in the street even in hats and long dresses -- pants being forbidden because it says right in the Bible that women may not dress like men.
It could be that that very bloodlessness caused their siege -- 72 long years -- to be minimized by historians who tend to commemorate pivotal developments by body count and white crosses. Yet the persistent, intelligent, respectful style of this movement is maybe our only hope for co-existing today.
It's not that they didn't incite violent responses. The women were screamed at, throttled by police and hauled off and locked up as crazy women. They were derided by the media when their cause seemed futile and adored by the fickle media when they grew too loud to ignore. When they picketed outside the White House, they were chastised by the New York Times for interfering with the "vital work of the nation."
Big business hollered that they were messing with the status quo. Social conservatives said "home-loving women don't want the vote" and cried they were destroying the sanctity of marriage. And they couldn't count on the full support of their sisters because some women were perfectly content to have men tell them what to do.
Deja vu?
Author Cooney's painstaking research of the suffrage movement revealed to him "a long heritage of women involved in politics, long before they even won the vote." The women were not aligned with any one party or religious faith. They influenced elections by campaigning against candidates and getting their husbands to vote their way. They argued that the government should spend more money on social programs than war. Any man who thought the same was welcome to march with them, which large contingents did, in suits and ties and walking sticks. None dared call them girly men.
Because of these women we have a precedent for achieving democracy without violence. A winning strategy can include being patient, persistent, building your allies, setting your goals, understanding your differences. Without blowing up the other guy. It's not really a new concept. Sunday, November 27, 2005
Praise for “Winning the Vote”
This is a wonderful chronicle of the untold history of our country – the story of the brave and remarkable women who changed our nation.
Ken Burns, Filmmaker
__________
Robert Cooney's search for every bit of visual evidence of American suffragism has benefited many scholars and documentary filmmakers. Now, he has offered us his own vision of these visionary feminists. Among the many important things you will learn from this fantastic volume is just how broad and deep the American woman suffrage movement really was.
Ellen Carol DuBois, Professor of History, UCLA
__________
For more than seven decades, American women fought on the local, state, and federal level for themselves and their sisters to earn the right to vote. To celebrate the 85th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, Cooney (director, Woman Suffrage Media Project: coauthor, The Power of the People), in collaboration with the National Women's History Project, has assembled a visually rich collection of primary source materials intermingled with explanatory text that provides an approachable introduction to the women and the movements that made the victory possible. Chronologically arranged chapters make good use of primary sources such as photographs, cartoons, posters, and newspaper articles culled from archives across the nation. Bibliographic references and an index increase the value of the work. Recommended for larger public and academic libraries with an interest in women's studies, even those who already own documentary volumes made up primarily of textual sources.
Library Journal, November 1, 2005
__________
Check out the section on books about history below, but one book in this genre needs to be given special mention. It is Winning the Vote: The Triumph of the American Woman Suffrage Movement. Written by Robert P. J. Cooney, Jr., it represents 12 years of research about this nearly forgotten part of American history. The first edition is 496 pages with more than 960 photographs and illustrations, many in full color. In short, this is an impressive book just for its physical properties. Covering the critical 72-year period from 1848 to 1920, the many personalities and events that marked the movement come alive on its pages as the leaders of this movement, women and men, conducted a long struggle for legal and political recognition. Women weren’t given the vote, they fought for it! For any history buff, this book will become a prized addition to their library.
Alan Caruba, Bookviews.com, Leading “Pick of the Month
__________
School Library Journal
COONEY, Robert P. J., Jr. Winning the Vote: The Triumph of the American Woman Suffrage Movement. 479p. maps. photos. reprods. bibliog. index. American Graphic 2005. Tr $85. ISBN 0-9770095-0-5. LC 2005904560.
Gr 8 Up–Published on the 85th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, and in collaboration with the National Women’s History Project, this lavishly illustrated volume focuses on the years from 1848 to 1920. The chronological chapters move, at first, by decades, and then, when discussing the most intense activity prior to winning the vote, by year. Each chapter begins with a narrative passage giving an overview of the period covered. The pages that follow offer vignettes, brief biographies, informatively captioned archival illustrations and other primary sources (posters, documents, political cartoons), and brief descriptions of events and incidents marking the struggle. A brief epilogue describes the political activism that the suffrage movement engendered and assesses its impact on women into the 21st century. The final pages provide references for text cited in the volume, followed by an extensive bibliography, photographic credits, and a comprehensive index. The language is clear throughout, bringing to life this complex period in American history. While appropriate for students, all history buffs will appreciate this splendid volume.
Linda Greengrass, Bank Street College Library, New York City February 2006
__________
Midwest Book Review
Winning The Vote: The Triumph Of The American Woman Suffrage Movement by Robert Cooney in association with the National Women's History Project is a comprehensive, 496-page history of the struggle for American women to have the right to vote in local, state, and national political elections. Superbly and profusely illustrated with more than 960 color and b/w illustrations that include historic photographs, posters, leaflets, and campaign buttons, the informed and informative text is further enhanced for the non-specialist general reader with an extensive bibliography for further study or research. It's been 85 years since women won the right to vote in 1920, and a whole new generation of women voters has arrived who would benefit from knowing the long, hard, frustrating, long-odds struggle to provide them with an equal opportunity to participate in every facet of American political life from determining candidacies, to running and holding office, but most fundamentally--the right to cast a ballot to determine who will make, administer, and adjudicate the laws under which they and their families must live. No academic library's Women's Studies or Political Science collections can be considered either comprehensive or complete without the inclusion of Robert Cooney's Winning The Vote! COPYRIGHT 2005 Midwest Book Review
__________
Winning the Vote tells our story
by Joni Hubred-Golden
Michigan Women’s Forum, forum-online.info
If you think the women's suffrage movement began with Susan B. Anthony, add Winning the Vote: The Triumph of the American Woman Suffrage Movement to your bookshelf.
And do it today.
Women like Margaret Brent, who demanded the right to vote blazed the trail for women's rights as early as 1648, are featured in this fascinating retrospective.
Widely regarded in the Maryland colony for her courage and strength of character, a businesswoman and property owner, Brent appeared before the Maryland assembly and unsuccessfully demanded the right to vote.
Her story is one every woman should know, and it is included in the weighty 496-page volume researched and written by Robert PJ Cooney, Jr. in collaboration with the National Women's History Project. Written in a lively and dramatic style, Winning the Vote tracks the suffrage movement from its true roots, in a handful of women who spoke up for their rights, to its formal organization during the fight against slavery and the bitter, divisive battle that resulted in the 19th amendment, ratified in 1920
Cooney spent 12 years studying manuscript and photos archives from of dozens of private and public libraries and collections, uncovering a vast array of information about the suffrage movement. Interspersing photos from more than 100 sources makes the book a great coffee table addition, one that you'll pick up and read over and over again.
While bits and pieces of women's history have been scattered and forgotten over time, Winning the Vote weaves stories from around the country into a rich and exciting new tapestry. Many of the stories and photos included have never before been made available to the general public.
This valuable reference belongs in every school library and should be required reading in secondary high school classrooms, where "herstories" – our stories – have been sorely lacking.
__________
Remembering the Struggle for Suffrage
by Chris Watson, The Santa Cruz Sentinel (California)
In New Jersey, back in 1776, women voted alongside men.
And women continued to vote in New Jersey for the next three decades until, in 1807, state legislators disenfranchised them along with the rest of American women, their "inalienable" rights not withstanding.
The history of suffrage in the United States — the fight to gain the vote — is one of the most interesting chapters in American history, as well as one of the longest and most unevenly documented.
Logging a whopping 72 years until the 19th Amendment became the law of the land in 1920, women's suffrage was an issue that historians, mostly men in the early years, preferred to downplay.
But according to Robert P.J. Cooney Jr., author and designer of the attractive picture history "Winning the Vote," the history of suffrage in this country offers, in its tactics and breadth of participants, the best possible model for nonviolent social change.
Cooney, a graphic designer, spent 12 years researching in libraries, writing letters to museums and visiting private archives to find the 960 photographs and illustrations for his book, written in collaboration with the National Women's History Project of Santa Rosa.
On Thursday, he's scheduled to sign copies of his magnificent, must-have coffee-table book at the First Congregational Church in Santa Cruz.
Despite insults large and small, setbacks in state legislatures and imprisonment, the women who fought for the right to vote — who lobbied, lectured, carried banners and walked in parades — never wavered from their goal.
The fact that the 19th Amendment barely survived ratification or challenges after the fact makes their effort all the more remarkable.
Near the end of his mammoth pictorial history, Cooney tells about the ratification vote in Tennessee, just one of many astonishing stories in his book:
On August 18 1920, with 96 legislators present, Speaker of the House Seth Walker announced that 'the hour was come.' Opponents were confident that they had enough votes to block ratification and moved that the bill be tabled. But when the vote tied 48-48, a second count was called and member Banks Turner changed his vote and defeated the motion so that the resolution could be voted on by the full House.
The motion to ratify was made and a voice vote began as suffragists and anti-suffragists held their breaths. This time joining Turner in supporting woman suffrage was the youngest member of the legislature, 24-year-old Harry Burn. A well-regarded first-term Republican from a rural area, Burn had promised his mother, and suffragists, that he would vote for the amendment only if his vote was absolutely needed. When the time came, despite tremendous pressure from Walker and several of his fellow legislators, Burn held true to his promise. With his support the motion passed 49-47.
A feast for the eyes and a book to boost the pride of all Americans, "Winning the Vote" is not about how women were given the vote but about how women won the vote.
Making the world a better place
The story of suffrage has been told in bits and pieces over the years, Cooney said, but mostly from an academic or individual point of view, accompanied by few visuals and emphasizing 19th-century history.
Because of that, his book — jam-packed with full-color examples of suffrage posters, photographs, memorabilia and graphics — is a general reader's delight.
What's even more important about Cooney's history is something that can only be seen in the book's entirety: That national suffrage affected the transformation of American society without violence.
Cooney was initially attracted to the history of suffrage, he said, after discovering that the movement attracted men as well as women.
But he threw himself into the research when he saw how much the movement had to say about the history of nonviolent social change.
In the late '60s, Cooney said, "when I was at the University of Santa Clara, I became interested in nonviolent change because of the war in Vietnam."
Cooney joined the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence in Palo Alto, working to end the war and to expand on the idea of nonviolence in places like Northern Ireland and Chile.
"I wanted to make history, not study history," he said. "And I was compelled to do something to stop the war. That type of compulsion helped me understand the suffragists."
Along with the anti-war movement, the labor movement, the prison reform movement and the civil rights movement, the women's suffrage movement has helped to give the downtrodden of the world hope.
"It's positive," Cooney said, "to think of our country's long history in terms of these models that have so influenced the world."
Individual effort led to national change
During his research, Cooney encountered numerous examples that "one person can make a big difference."
"Winning the Vote" is bursting with profiles of the women and men who worked in the movement.
You'll find copious information, of course, on "Aunt Susan" B. Anthony as well as facts and stories about Lucy Stone, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jane Addams and Alice Paul.
But you'll also be introduced to relatively unknown suffragists who deserve our thanks. Suffragists like:
• Margaret Brent, who in 1648 demanded her right as a property owner to vote in Maryland's colonial assembly
• Belva Lockwood, who in 1879 became the first woman lawyer to practice before the Supreme Court
• Max Eastman, who started The Men's League for Woman Suffrage in New York City in 1910.
• Fanny Garrison Villard, daughter of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who started the Woman's Peace Party in 1915 which later became The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.
Equality being the overriding theme, Cooney also spends time discussing the personalities and tactics of the anti-suffrage movement.
The long road to change
After the Supreme Court ruled that the 14th Amendment didn't apply to women, most suffragists went to work to convince male voters in individual states to give them the vote, while others worked toward a constitutional amendment.
Californians should be particularly proud of the fact that a bill introduced by California Senator Aaron Sargent in 1878 referred to as "the 16th Amendment" was submitted to every session of Congress until it was adopted, unchanged, as the 19th Amendment 40 years later.
In 1911, California became the sixth state to allow women to vote, thereby doubling the national number of women voters.
But American business interests — especially liquor businesses that had already suffered at the hands of the Women's Temperance Union — were little interested in such reforms and worked hard to thwart suffrage.
Still, in 1917, when New York approved suffrage statewide and Prohibition undercut the liquor lobby, suffrage seemed a likely possibility.
Throughout the entire ordeal, the women did it their way — they held tea parties, called for impeachment, enlisted young college women, held hunger strikes, put on pageants, handed out leaflets at state fairs, campaigned against anti-suffragist office-holders, held nighttime rallies, wore historical costumes and performed historical tableaus, even toured the country on a chartered train called "The Prison Special" because all the women on it had served time in prison for their beliefs.
"They won the amendment by the skin of their teeth," Cooney reminds us. "And there were challenges for a long time after, too."
Nothing worth achieving is easy, however.
Alice Paul, the suffragist who fought so hard for the constitutional amendment and who wrote the text for the Equal Rights Amendment, believed that:
"Our victory cannot be a signal for rest. It is not only the symbol of the new status which women have earned, but also the tool with which they must end completely all discriminations against them in departments of life outside the political realm."
The work continues
November 26, 2005 Copyright © Santa Cruz Sentinel. All rights reserved.
__________
You want to talk about backbone?
By SUSAN SWARTZ
THE SANTA ROSA (CA) PRESS DEMOCRAT
I'd like to recommend a big book with lots of black and white pictures for George and Dick for Christmas. It's a reminder of what really makes America great.
There are no bomber pilots in it, no soldiers in Humvees in harm's way, no weapons, no secret prisons. Just a bunch of brave, determined women, and their male allies, who were able to effect lasting change without killing people. Here's evidence, too, that dissenters are not cowards and protest is patriotic.
It may help explain to Dick and George why some of the gutsiest members of Congress to stand up to them are named Barbara and Nancy and Lynn, and why the mother of a young soldier killed in a manufactured war cannot be shooed away.
The new book, "Winning the Vote," is about the women's suffrage movement. It was written by Robert Cooney, a Santa Cruz author and graphic designer. A bearish guy with a silver beard who did his protesting during Vietnam, Cooney calls the campaign to get the vote "one of the most remarkable and successful nonviolent efforts to change ingrained social attitudes and institutions in the modern era." The women, he says, "were able to do what men have rarely even tried, without firing a shot, throwing a rock or issuing a personal threat."
Plus, they did it at a time when it was considered unwomanly to march in the street even in hats and long dresses -- pants being forbidden because it says right in the Bible that women may not dress like men.
It could be that that very bloodlessness caused their siege -- 72 long years -- to be minimized by historians who tend to commemorate pivotal developments by body count and white crosses. Yet the persistent, intelligent, respectful style of this movement is maybe our only hope for co-existing today.
It's not that they didn't incite violent responses. The women were screamed at, throttled by police and hauled off and locked up as crazy women. They were derided by the media when their cause seemed futile and adored by the fickle media when they grew too loud to ignore. When they picketed outside the White House, they were chastised by the New York Times for interfering with the "vital work of the nation."
Big business hollered that they were messing with the status quo. Social conservatives said "home-loving women don't want the vote" and cried they were destroying the sanctity of marriage. And they couldn't count on the full support of their sisters because some women were perfectly content to have men tell them what to do.
Deja vu?
Author Cooney's painstaking research of the suffrage movement revealed to him "a long heritage of women involved in politics, long before they even won the vote." The women were not aligned with any one party or religious faith. They influenced elections by campaigning against candidates and getting their husbands to vote their way. They argued that the government should spend more money on social programs than war. Any man who thought the same was welcome to march with them, which large contingents did, in suits and ties and walking sticks. None dared call them girly men.
Because of these women we have a precedent for achieving democracy without violence. A winning strategy can include being patient, persistent, building your allies, setting your goals, understanding your differences. Without blowing up the other guy. It's not really a new concept. Sunday, November 27, 2005