Category Archives: Women Win the Vote Book

From anonymity to NBC

Fifteen years ago, I interviewed Rev. Robert Hartwell for my book of weight loss success stories, “How We Did It.” In it, I share the stories of about three dozen people who lost weight using different plans and programs. This past weekend, I caught up with Pastor Hartwell over lunch.

We were having such a great conversation that I totally forgot to take a picture to mark the occasion! So, instead, I’m reprinting his story below. His was a NutriSystem journey, although today Pastor Hartwell says he follows a mostly keto diet. Like him, I found that what worked when you were younger doesn’t always work fifteen years later! But if you want to maintain control of your weight and health, you can find something that works. I’d love to know how you did it!

An astonishing phone call

Most people make their weight loss resolution only after the annual holiday binge. But it was on New Year’s Eve 2007 that the Rev. Robert Hartwell’s weight-loss odyssey came to a dramatic close.

That morning, he stepped on a scale on NBC’s Today Show in front of 10 million people. 

Just how the pastor of Village Lutheran Church in Bronxville, New York, got to this point began around Thanksgiving the previous year. Robert’s church had started a campaign to pay down an $8 million mortgage it had assumed for a building project.

One day, Robert got a baffling call. A former parishioner, someone who kept close ties with the church, offered to make a substantial donation. But there was a catch.

“This donor asked me how committed I was to the project, and I started to tell him what I planned to give,” he says. “The donor brushed that off and said that, instead, he wanted me to commit to losing 70 pounds, and if I did so, he would donate $5,000 for each pound lost.”

Will he accept the challenge?

It was both an intriguing and a heartbreaking offer.

“I was crushed—mortified—that someone had discovered that I was overweight, although of course everyone saw it when I stepped into the pulpit each week,” Robert says. “But this donor said he wanted to know that I was as committed to the project as he was.”

Given the unusual nature of the pledge, Robert talked with church leaders to make sure that accepting the offer wouldn’t cheapen the image or mission of the church. Although the other pastors and deacons found the offer “wacky,” they saw no reason to reject it. So was born “The Skinny on Sacrifice” campaign. 

Although up to this point Robert hadn’t acknowledged his weight problem, he certainly understood how it had happened.

“My life is so hectic. I was always eating on the run. I’d grab a muffin between hospital visits, get home from council meetings at 10:30 at night, exhausted and ravenous, and grab a couple of sandwiches and chips,” he says. “And I was a volume eater—I could eat a half a pizza by myself or eight White Castle burgers at a time.”

By the time the sly donor came into the picture, the six-foot-tall pastor weighed about 270 pounds. After consulting with his parish nurse, Robert took up the challenge. Robert chose NutriSystem, and he followed it to the letter.

How he did it

On a food plan of about 1,500 calories a day, Robert lost 10 pounds almost immediately, and continued to lose two to three pounds a week. He and his wife, Sue, had always walked for pleasure, and Robert made sure he got in his two to three miles a day.

After six months, Robert ramped up his exercise routine in the gym at next-door Concordia College, where he is an adjunct professor [NOTE: Concordia closed its doors in 2021]. A congregant who is a personal trainer showed him how to use the machines for both cardio workouts and strength training. The college atmosphere was stimulating.

“I was there with the 19- and 20-year old baseball players, and they motivated me to keep going,” he says. He began going to the gym five days a week, on top of his family walks.

Let’s go national!

Meanwhile, an employee at the church’s school who happened to be a lighting director for the Today Show brought the pastor’s challenge to the attention of a producer. Wanting a religious-themed holiday feature, the producer asked whether Robert would be willing to weigh in on the show the morning of December 31, 2007.

“I had already told the donor that I wouldn’t weigh in during a church service, and here I was agreeing to do it in front of a live audience on national television,” he laughs. “Barring Jesus projecting it in the sky over the earth, it couldn’t get any bigger than that!”

Robert agreed to do the show, but he had a few conditions: He wanted to be fully clothed, but he didn’t want to wear shoes, and he wanted to bring his own scale. So far, so good. But just before he stepped out onto the stage, someone clipped a microphone to the back of his shirt. “This thing must weigh five pounds!” he protested.

No matter. Robert made the donor’s 70-pound limit, with 8 pounds to spare. Keeping his end of the bargain, the donor wrote a check for $390,000, which church members augmented with their own funds for an even $400,000.

Can I get an Amen?

Since then, Robert’s goal has changed—while he originally targeted 200 as his goal weight, he is maintaining his weight at 180 pounds and is working on strength training and toning. “Age is no friend to loose skin,” he says. He still uses NutriSystem—he finds himself ordering a box now and then because he really enjoys the food and finds it helpful in maintaining his weight. But he has also made his diet rich in omega 3s, healthy grains and low-glycemic carbs and protein.

And, the newly-svelte pastor made a deal of his own. On Ash Wednesday of 2008, “when everyone is thinking of mortality, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” Robert asked parishioners to join in a challenge cooked up with NutriSystem to see how many pounds the church community could lose in a year’s time. The congregation lost thousands of pounds, and many more community members picked up lifelong healthy lifestyles.

Ultimately, a change in lifestyle is what Robert believes makes a difference. “We have even changed the way we plan our fellowship events. In addition to the high sugar foods that people love and often bring, we try to make sure there are healthy options,” he says.

Robert has become an avid runner. He and four others ran the New York City Marathon in November 2011 to raise funds for the church’s Christian school.

“Running is such a great way to stay healthy and to find balance and harmony in the middle of a hectic life,” he says. “I often find myself praying or praising God in my morning runs and thank God that my new healthy lifestyle allows this righteous pleasure.”

Life lessons from the journey

With new insight, Robert says he now believes that weight loss is not only an individual pursuit yielding personal satisfaction, but a goal with wide-ranging possibilities for strengthening family and community ties.

“Food is a short cut. We use food to show love, to reward our children for their accomplishments. It’s ridiculous,” he says. “Food is really a substitute for spending time with each other. We’ve decided we’re not going to do that anymore.”

Influences

Anonymous donor to Village Lutheran Church

His wife, Sue: “She never made me feel guilty about not eating her food.”

Parish nurse Joy Elwell and parishioner Rich Foster, a congregant and personal trainer

God’s grace and motivation to reach new goals

Tips

For our church coffee hours, I’ve encouraged everyone to bring in fruits and vegetables. It costs more, but we feel good about it. I don’t go to donut shops, and I’m not buying that stuff for my kids any more.

Talking suffrage in Princeton, NJ

“The time has come to conquer or submit. For us there is but one choice. We have made it.”

Yes, President Woodrow Wilson said these words in regard to winning World War I. But in 1917, another towering historical figure adopted this battle cry as her own. Suffrage leader (and outspoken Jersey Girl!) Alice Paul put those words on a banner that she paraded in front of Wilson’s home — the White House — on a picket line peopled by women who were tired of waiting for men to grant them the right to vote. They’d decided it was time to conquer.

Off to a bad start

From the start of our country in 1776, women had been shut out from participation in public life. And they protested their second-class status even while the battles of the Revolutionary War raged.

“Remember the ladies,” Abigail Adams admonished her husband, John, who was at the Continental Congress. “If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”

Sadly, the organized fight for the woman’s vote was a long way off, but finally in 1848 five women met for tea at a house in Seneca Falls, New York, and they decided it was time to act. They organized a two-day women’s rights convention at the Seneca Falls Wesleyan Methodist Chapel and formalized their complaints and demands in a document they called The Declaration Of Sentiments and Resolutions. The fight was on!

New Jersey’s spotty history

In my book Women Win the Vote! 19 for the 19th Amendment, I profile nineteen women who devoted their lives to this epic civil rights battle. The nineteen women are both those who were prominent in the fight and those who have been overlooked due to racism and class prejudice. At my upcoming talk for Stone Hill Church of Princeton (NJ) you’ll meet some of them in my illustrated talk, “Choosing to Conquer: The Women Who Won the Vote.” Some were women of faith, some were atheists — but all worked toward the single goal of winning the full rights of citizenship for themselves and their American sisters.

Often forgotten is the fact that the suffrage fight went on at not just the national level, but at the state and local level as well. And New Jersey is an exciting state in suffrage history! Remember I said that from the beginning of our country American women couldn’t vote? That’s not entirely true! In 1776, the New Jersey constitution granted women, African American men and immigrants the right to vote. And yet just a few decades later, a new constitution restricted the elective franchise to free, white males. What happened there?

Zeroing in on Princeton

Because Stone Hill Church is in Princeton, I rummaged around in old newspapers and found ample evidence of suffrage activity in town. Who was for suffrage? Who was against it? Where did the opposing camps meet? And what did Princeton University and seminary students think about women voting? The streets you walk and houses you see today will take on a new layer of meaning when you follow in the footsteps of the suffragists.

I love talking about the three generations of passionate women — and men! — who devoted their lives to righting this glaring civil injustice. Through a trove of vivid historical photos and the actual words the suffragists spoke, you’ll gain an appreciation of the courage and commitment it took for women to carry out their mission — the mission to conquer. Please join me on Monday, October 7 at 6:30 p.m. in Harris Hall at Stone Hill Church of Princeton for more on this exciting topic!

For more information about the event, contact me at nancybkennedyauthor@gmail.com or the church at info@stonehillprinceton.org. Or call the church at 609-924-3816.

Love in the time of suffrage hikes

In 1912, suffragists working for the woman’s vote started a new form of protest: the long hike.

In December that year, General Rosalie Jones — a military title conferred on the woman who led many of these hikes — walked with 200 women from New York City to Albany to present a suffrage petition. The 170-mile, 13-day hike is considered to be the first such hike undertaken for a cause.

A year later, in February 1913, the General again led a hike, this time a 230-mile jaunt from New York City to Washington, D.C. A few dozen women, and scores of hangers-on, completed the hike, which ended with the women joining their fellow suffragists — 8,000 in all! — on a historic march down Pennsylvania Avenue.

It’s all very lofty to present these hikes in all their dogged and determined glory, but the women who hiked were very human, and a lot of human drama attended their walk. I wrote about one such drama, a love story (maybe) that arose when the women walked into Princeton, New Jersey, on the night of February 13, 1913.

That night, a Princeton University freshman spotted a hiker who instantly captivated him. In my story, you’ll read what happened when “Wee Willie” Cator decided to hike along with the young suffragist, Phoebe Hawn, nicknamed “The Baby Suffragette” by the national papers and “The Brooklyn Baby” by her hometown paper, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

Love or something else?

I’ve since come to wonder whether these stories of suffrage romances were more akin to the modern-day concept of stalking. On this same hike, a Brooklyn teen by the name of Roy B. Trolsen attached himself to another hiker, Helen Bergmark, when the women stopped for the night in Bordentown, NJ.

“We’re going to be married just as soon as the hike is over and we’ll settle down in Philadelphia and I’ll get a job with some civil engineering firm,” he told the press.**

Problem was that Helen didn’t agree to this vision of her future. “No, I am not going to get married. I do not know Roy Trolsen,” she said emphatically. “Whoever started such a report was cruel. It is a hoax.”***

Trolsen’s father chimed in, declaring to the press that his son was not 21-years-old, as Roy claimed, but a 17-year-old boy who was skipping school. He vowed to go retrieve his errant son. “I will stop this foolishness at once!” he said.****

It’s suffrage, stupid

This story read to me more like a case of stalking, if it indeed happened and was not a story dreamed up by the press. The press tended to romanticize the hikers, claiming the real goal of the hike was to attract husbands. They also put words into the General’s mouth, claiming the women had all vowed not to fall victim to Cupid’s arrow for the length of the hike.

As for Roy, he led a life that suggested he was a miscreant from an early age. At age 15, he stole a necklace of his mother’s and was arrested trying to pawn it. In his 20s, his wife divorced him, citing his refusal to work. In his 30s and 40s, he passed bad checks and spent time in a mental institution. In his 50s, he was involved as a truck driver in a scheme dreamed up by a pharmacist to get cut-rate drugs for his shop.

All this to say, poor Helen — and perhaps Phoebe? — was more a victim than a willing partner in these escapades on the hike. And I imagine even more women were targeted, although I suspect they put on a brave face for the public and the newspapers. They were hiking for suffrage and suffrage only, a fact that people couldn’t accept at face value.

Notes

Oh, those myth-making suffragists!

The suffragists were heroes, right? They were saints, don’t you think? Well, maybe they were heroes, but they weren’t saints. Researching my books, I’ve found that the suffragists were stellar myth-makers. They weren’t above burnishing their reputations and their actions through exaggeration and outright lies.

Take, for example, the famous March 3, 1913 suffrage parade in Washington, D.C. Eight thousand women (and men!) marched down Pennsylvania Avenue from the U.S. Capitol Building to the Treasury Building, a distance of about two and a half miles.

People poured in from all over the country to participate in, or to watch, the parade. Railroad companies added hundreds of extra trains to accommodate the crowds. The parade organizers planned the parade for just this exact day, because not only were people coming for the suffrage parade, they were in D.C. for President-elect Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration the next day. These suffragists were savvy!

The only problem was that the inaugural crowd had been swarming into the city for a week. The mobs of mostly men spent their time frequenting the saloons and public houses, and they were drunk and rowdy. They’d thrown off the restraints of polite society, and when the parade began, they harassed and attacked the women. Three hundred women were injured, one hundred of them taken to local hospitals.

Seize the moment!

Because of the failure of the police to protect the women, a congressional hearing was called after the disastrous parade to investigate. This was a tremendous opportunity for the women to enshrine the parade in myth!

In accounts written by the suffragists after the parade, they love to relate one scene in particular. In the telling, Woodrow Wilson arrives at Union Station only to find that the station is deserted. There are no cheering crowds to greet him..

“One of the incoming president’s staff asked, ‘Where are all the people?’

“‘Watching the suffrage parade,’ the police told him.” *

Very inspirational! But, alas, very untrue. Yes, mobs of people were watching the parade, but mobs of people also showed up at Union Station to greet and cheer Wilson as he made his way from a train chartered by Princeton University students (his alma mater) to the Presidential Suite at the station. The moment was fully covered in the newspapers.

The Washington Herald was there

I know you can’t believe everything you read in the paper, but this is a very detailed, almost moment by moment account of Wilson’s arrival. I suppose it could have been dreamed up by the writer. It’s been known to happen, especially in the newspaper environment of the early 1900s. Even the Library of Congress includes the supposed ghost scene in its account of the parade.

But I tend to believe this newspaper article contains the truth of the moment. Generally, people of this era did not speak in sound bites, so I become suspicious when I see a pithy statement like this. People ascribe all sorts of sayings to Susan B. Anthony — “Independence is Happiness!” —but you have question these neat, repeatable clips. (Beware BrainyQuote!)

Nothing but the truth

In fact, here is a photo taken at Union Station on March 3, 1913. I think President Wilson got quite a hearty welcome!

In my next post, we’ll poke into what really happened when the militant suffragists picketed the White House. Did they really chain themselves to the fence? Did they set fires on the White House lawn? You decide.

  • * Both suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt (Woman Suffrage and Politics) and suffrage historian Doris Stevens (Jailed for Freedom) repeat this scene in their books. They go so far as to say that President Woodrow Wilson himself asked, quite forlornly, where everyone was!

The Title IX 100

Last year at this time, I made a New Year’s resolution. I vowed to write about Title IX this entire year, the 50th anniversary of the gender equality law. And I kept my resolution! Here it is, one year and one hundred blog posts later. Yay me!

            You can browse through the posts here at my website. In total, the 100 posts add up to around 70,000 words — about the length of a book!

            I started last January simply, with the wording of Title IX.  “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

            Before I knew it, I was drawn into the drama of this law that I once knew nothing about. It has its humorous moments and its heartbreaking moments. It changed a centuries-old male-centric world while remaining relevant to the current day. In short, it was groundbreaking.

Words become deeds

            Until you have the time to read my fractured 100-chapter book, today I’ll share with you in brief bullet points what I learned about the landmark 1972 law this year.

            So, hold onto your seats. Here we go!

* It took the eagle eye of one woman — Bernice Sandler — to spot how an existing law could be turned into a gender equality law.

* We needed Title IX! The two authors of the law, Rep. Edith Green and Rep. Patsy Mink, had both been excluded from the education and jobs they wanted.  

* Title IX was part of sweeping changes in the way Americans thought about women, their place in society and what they could accomplish.

* But a lot was happening in 1972, so the law passed with a whisper instead of a bang.

* At first, no one recognized the bill’s potential to revolutionize the sports world.

* But the athletic fields needed a revolution! Women were excluded there just as in educational programs.

* Once people did make the Title IX sports connection, men didn’t like it. They tried to take the teeth out of the law.

* Women got creative (and sometimes naked) to force entities to comply with the law.

* Title IX’s enemies weren’t always men. And its defenders weren’t always women.

* Most often, progress came — and still comes — through lawsuits.

* Almost all lawsuits are settled out of court. But one high-profile lawsuit might finally go the distance.

* Title IX claims some astonishing victories. Equal pay in some professional women’s sports is one of them.

* Title IX paved the way to the Olympics for women. In 1976, the first women’s basketball team went to the Olympics, and when women dominated team sports in the 1996 Olympics, it became known as the Title IX Olympics.

* It opened a path for athletic careers off the playing field, too. Coaching , broadcasting and sports management, to name just a few.

* Women found success in whatever field they chose because of their athletic experience.

* Title IX’s reach is constantly expanding. It addresses athletic scholarships, sexual harassment, age discrimination, gender issues, COVID-19, school lunches, fraternity hazing, even hair.

* The success stories stemming from Title IX are thrilling! The stories of women “firsts” are inspiring.

* But there’s still more work to be done. Title IX gets a failing grade in many realms. It’ll take a lot more work on our part to reach Title IX’s goal of parity.

It got personal

            For me, personally, writing about Title IX taught me a lot about women’s history. I knew vaguely that women had always been discriminated against — I’d written a book about the woman suffrage movement — but I had no idea of the extent of society’s damning of women.

            But to be more specific, I learned about my own ignorance of the pervasive societal view of women. So often, when I interviewed women for the blog, they shared instances of blatant discrimination. Privately, I was thinking that in my own life, I hadn’t suffered from similar dismissals of women’s personhood. But I had!

            I grew up in a church ruled by men who silence women from public worship, tell them what to wear and box them in to child care and meal preparation. I chose the career of journalism, which was opening up to women in the newsroom but still excluding them from management positions. I specialized in financial journalism and felt the scorn of men who thought women were barely intelligent enough to balance a checkbook.

            Even today, I hear men joking that women are airheads, bad drivers and shopaholics. I bank where the branch manager calls his employees “the girls.” I attend family gatherings where the women cook and clean up while the men watch TV and snore away on the sofa. My husband and I coach our son on how to negotiate his salary and benefits in the job market, which makes me realize that women rarely get this kind of mentorship.

            It takes a village, they say. In reality, it takes a nation. And so the fight for gender equality will go on. Title IX is just a starting point.

Stemming the bias

Title IX’s most visible impact has been in athletics, but the law dramatically changed the academic universe for women, too. Evelynn Hammonds was in the first wave of women to break through the barriers women interested in science had faced.

            Born in 1953 in Atlanta, Evelynn was intrigued with science and the physical world from the very beginning.

            “As a young child, I was always very interested in science,” she said. “I had all these different kinds of science kits — I had a chemistry set, I had a microscope, I had all kinds of building kits, and it just spurred in me an interest in wanting to understand how the world worked.”*

            In high school, Evelynn’s interest in physics emerged. A National Merit Scholar, Hammonds attended Spelman College, where she entered a joint engineering program with Georgia Institute of Technology. She also took physics courses at Morehouse College. She graduated in 1976 with degrees in physics and electrical engineering.   

            Evelynn got her first chance to work in a physics lab in Bell Labs’ Summer Research Program for Women and Minorities. After graduation, she began a PhD program at MIT, but instead of finishing, went to work as a software engineer for five years. She completed her PhD at Harvard in the history of science.

Making inroads

              Today, she is Professor of the History of Science and of African and African-American Studies at Harvard. She was a dean at Harvard for five years, but returned to teaching in 2021.

            Women like Evelynn are paving the way for women in the sciences. Many of the degrees women seek today are in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields. In 1970, two years before Title IX was passed, women comprised just 8 percent of STEM workers. Today, that number is 27 percent.

            But men still dominate: men make up half of all U.S. workers, but 73 percent of the STEM workforce. Engineering and computer science — two of the most lucrative STEM fields — remain heavily male. Only 21 percent of college engineering majors and 19 percent of computer science majors are women.

It’s the culture, stupid

            Part of the problem is a culture that is unwelcoming, and even hostile, to women. Evelynn found that to be true as early as her college years.

            “You’re in a culture where, on any given day, somebody might think you were a secretary, or a janitor, or anything but a graduate student in physics,” she said. “It was made very clear to us by some people that we didn’t fit, that we didn’t belong, that we were only there because of affirmative action, that we could never be successful. We were constantly finding those attitudes.”**

            Because of that, Evelynn authored her first published paper as E.M. Hammond, so people couldn’t tell she was a woman or African American. She was following in a long line of female scientists who have had to fight for recognition. Women in earlier generations had always been victims of the culture.

            “I still remember asking my high school guidance teacher to take a second year of algebra instead of a fifth year of Latin,” said Nancy Grace Roman, the first female executive at NASA. “She looked down her nose at me and sneered, ‘What lady would take mathematics instead of Latin?’”***

What’s to be done

            Evelynn and others are working to erase the hurdles that still exist for women in STEM fields. Some possible fixes: universities should diversify their faculty and courses should teach social issues, journals should reject research that doesn’t consider gender and sex, and Title IX should be used as a lever to force institutions to comply.

            “We’ve fought our fight as my generation, but we’re going to have to keep fighting for a while,” she said.† “We have a lot of work to do. The attitudes and the culture haven’t changed as much as they absolutely have to.”

                                      _____________________

* Jennifer Berglund, “Challenges and Change for Women of Color in Science – A Conversation with Evelyn Hammonds, Chair and Professor of the History of Science,” Harvard Museum of Sciences and Culture (August 20, 2020).

** Caitlin McDermott-Murphy, “Women in STEM need more than a law,” Harvard Gazette (June 20, 2022).

*** Report: “The STEM Gap: Women and Girls in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics,” American Association of University Women. Nancy Grace Roman (1925-2018) is known as the “Mother of the Hubble Telescope” for her role in planning the telescope.

† “Challenges and Change” and “Women in STEM.”

It’s Women’s Equality Day!

Time out! Today we celebrate Women’s Equality Day. On August 26, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote was signed into law.

            If you think Title IX has been a battle, you need to read up on the suffrage fight!* Women fought for 72 years just to have the word “men” deleted from the Constitution’s wording on voting rights. It took more work — and more years — to ensure all women could vote regardless of color or heritage, but we were on our way. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally outlawed discrimination of any kind at the polls.

            Today I want to introduce you to just one of the millions of suffragists who devoted their lives to the suffrage cause.

Mother doesn’t vote

            Carrie Chapman Catt had a political awakening when she was just 11 years old. In 1872, as her father and brothers hitched up the family wagon to go into their Iowa town to vote in the presidential election (Greeley vs. Grant), she saw that her mother wasn’t getting ready to go.

             “Why, Mother, aren’t you going to vote for Greeley?” she asked. She was interested in national affairs, and had accompanied her father to political rallies, but she didn’t realize until that day that women couldn’t vote.**

            Carrie took the office of president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1900 and again in 1915. While a few states granted women the vote during her tenure — most notably New York State — she realized that a federal amendment was the real way ahead. In 1916, at an emergency meeting of NAWSA, she urged women to press on.

            “Nothing less than this nation-wide, vigilant, unceasing campaigning will win the ratification,” she told them. “The Woman’s Hour has struck! Women arise: Demand the vote!”***

Victory ahead

            The suffragists’ unceasing campaign finally paid off. The amendment passed Congress in June 1919 and went out to the states for ratification. One by one, states voted to ratify, until Carrie saw victory ahead.

            At a suffrage convention held on February 13, 1920, Carrie addressed the crowd of thousands of women. Although victory was still six months away, she was convinced the battle was won.

            Here, I’ve reprinted excerpts from her victory speech that day. It was a rousing message that drew thunderous applause. And it speaks to us today, as women continue to fight in many realms for true equality.  

Be Joyful Today

            There is no earthly power that can do more than delay by a trifle the final enfranchisement of women.

            The enemies of progress and liberty never surrender and never die. Ever since the days of cave men, they have stood ready with their sledge hammers to strike any liberal idea on the head whenever it appeared.

            Suffragists were never dismayed when they were a tiny group and all the world against them. What care they now when all the world is with them? March on, suffragists—the victory is yours!

            The trail has been long and winding; the struggle has been tedious and wearying. You made sacrifices and received many hard knocks. Be joyful today! Our final victory is due, is inevitable, is almost here.

            Some day the history of these past few months will be written and, if the writer catches the real spirit of it all, it will be a thrilling story. Ours has been a movement with a soul, a dauntless, unconquerable soul ever leading on.

            Women be glad today! Let your voices ring out the gladness in your hearts. There will never come another day like this. Let the joy be unconfined and let it speak so clearly that its echo will be heard around the world and find its way into the soul of every woman of any and every race and nationality who is yearning for opportunity and liberty still denied her sex.

                                                            ___________________

* You can start with my book! Women Win the Vote! 19 for the 19th Amendment (Norton Young Readers, 2020). I profile nineteen women whose work led to victory in the suffrage fight.

** Mary Gray Peck, Carrie Chapman Catt: A Biography (New York: H.W. Wilson, 1944), p. 28.

* Carrie Chapman Catt, “The Crisis,” Atlantic City, NJ (September 7, 1916). My excerpts come from the version printed in the Woman’s Journal and Suffrage News (September 16, 1916), p.1.

PHOTO: That’s Carrie holding the massive victory bouquet. When victory finally came, she was honored with a ticker tape parade and a banquet in New York City.

Guest post: Author Kathleen Stone

A time out for Mary Church Terrell

Recently,  I invited Kathleen Stone, author of  They Called Us Girls:Stories of Female Ambition from Suffrage to Mad Men (Cynren Press, 2022), to talk about anything that was on her mind. Kathleen’s book chronicles the lives of seven unconventional women of the 1900s who broke out of society’s expected roles for women. Just the right topic for this blog! 

Kathleen’s eye fell on Mary Church Terrell, a woman who I also encountered while writing my book on the  woman suffrage movement, Women Win the Vote! 19 for the 19th Amendment. I’ll let Kathleen take it from here. Enjoy this guest post that touches on women’s rights from suffrage to civil rights, to, yes, even Title IX. 

Mary Church Terrell

 

            When my alma mater, Oberlin College, renamed its central library for Mary Church Terrell, I didn’t know much about her, other than that she was an alumna. Since then, I have come to understand that she was pivotal in two movements that share a complicated history — the movement for civil rights for Black Americans and the movement for women’s rights. 

            Mary Church was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1863, the year Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, to parents who had been enslaved. Her mother owned a hair salon and her father was a successful businessman. Education was one of her family’s goals, an opportunity often denied to Black Americans, and Mary headed to Oberlin College in Ohio.

            Oberlin was the first college in the country to admit both men and women as well as students of color, but its embrace of equality went only so far. To women, the college offered a two-year program, and to men a four-year program, including Latin and Greek. Mary’s friends urged her to take the two-year program — if she were too educated, they warned, she would intimidate men and never find a husband. She ignored their advice and completed the four-year course, earning her bachelor’s degree in 1884 before going on to get a master’s. She taught at Wilberforce University, the first private, historically Black college in the country, and later moved to Washington, DC where she taught in the district’s segregated system.

            Despite warnings that she would scare off men, Mary did marry. Her husband, Robert H. Terrell, was her intellectual match; he was a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College and a teacher, lawyer, justice of the peace and municipal court judge. 

A dual role in activism

            Mary stood at the intersection of the movements for women’s rights and civil rights for Black Americans. She was the founding president of the National Association of Colored Women, charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and a member of the Women’s Committee for Equal Justice, the Civil Rights Congress, and the Women’s Republican League of Washington, D.C. She was the first African American woman to serve on the D.C. Board of Education.*

            On March 3, 1913, the day before President Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated, Mary marched down Pennsylvania Avenue with thousands of women, demanding the right to vote. When Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party staged picket lines at the White House in support of suffrage, she joined in, sometimes with her teenage daughter, even though violence and arrest were real possibilities.**

A dual disadvantage

            After the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, it must have been galling that some of her sisters-in-suffrage refused to involve themselves in the civil rights struggle. Mary tried to awaken them to her reality:

            “A white woman has only one handicap to overcome — that of sex. I have two — both sex and race. I belong to the only group in this country which has two such huge obstacles to overcome. Colored men have only one — that of race.”***

Her rhetoric was not only informative but also pragmatic. When she urged the National Woman’s Party to address the difficulties Black women experienced when trying to vote, she said:

“Colored women need the ballot to protect themselves because their men cannot protect them since the 14th and 15th Amendments are null and void. They are lynched and are victims of the Jim Crow Car Laws, the Convict Lease System, and other evils.”****

Despite her compelling logic, the party’s white leadership failed to take up her challenge.

That did not stop Mary. She continued her advocacy into the 1950s. At age 86, she joined a protest, ordering food at a restaurant in Washington, D.C., knowing that the segregated establishment would refuse to serve her. The subsequent lawsuit got to the U.S. Supreme Court where — a year before its landmark decision of Brown v. Board of Education —  it held that the restaurant had violated anti-discrimination laws.

A living legacy

Mary died in 1954, ten years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination on the basis of both race and sex. It would be another eight years before Congress passed legislation, including Title IX, that outlawed discrimination in education. That, too, would have spoken to her passion. 

Not many of us will have as far reaching an impact as Mary Church Terrell did. That’s certainly true for me, but she nonetheless inspires me. She reinforces my belief that education is crucial, opening opportunities for work and ways to contribute.  

Mary also demonstrates the importance of speaking up for others. When she advocated for Black women in the South who were unable to vote and whose husbands were in prison, she was not speaking for herself, the wife of a judge appointed by the president. She was reaching beyond herself to speak for those without access to the venues where she found herself.

From Mary, I take inspiration that I can do something similar in my life, even if my actions are smaller and my words less consequential than hers. She would agree, I believe, that we all can work to make life better for others.

                                                __________________________

* Biographical information drawn from articles by Mary Church Terrell’s biographer, Alison M. Parker, and from Lisa Gulasy, “Learning from Activist Mary Church Terrell,” Oberlin College & Conservatory (February 13, 2016). For a deeper dive, see Alison Parker’s biography, Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

** Alison M. Parker, “Mary Church Terrell, the Forgotten ‘Face of African American Women’s Suffrage Activism,’” Ms. (February 13, 2021).

*** Mary Church Terrell, A Colored Woman in a White World (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), p. 29.

**** Alison M. Parker, “Mary Church Terrell: Black Suffragist and Civil Rights Activist,” National Park Service.

Aquasprites anyone?

Recently, I talked with veteran journalist, Medill lecturer and former ESPN sportscaster Melissa Isaacson about her athletic experiences on and off the field.

Melissa’s life is interesting because it straddled Title IX. She began to see changes while she was still young.

“By junior high school, we suddenly saw girls teams starting up,” she says. “We were peripherally aware of Title IX. We followed Billie Jean King’s career and knew she was part of a national dialog. We realized we were the first generation of girls to get to compete.”*

But old ideas die hard. In 1907, the state of Illinois (where Melissa grew up) had banned girls’ interscholastic competition. Overall, the only approved sports for girls at the time were those considered ladylike.

“Girls could play the genteel sports like tennis, badminton and golf,” she says. “Anything that wasn’t bumping boys out of the gym.”

Melissa and her friends hung out at the Little League fields, peering through the chain link fences, wanting desperately to be on those fields, but knowing that they couldn’t be.

Even after Title IX passed, team sports like basketball — Melissa’s favorite sport — were still considered unladylike. For girls just a few grades ahead of Melissa, only one sport available to them, a synchronized swimming sport called Aquasprites. The team had no trouble attracting members.

“Girls were desperate for the opportunity to play any sport at all,” Melissa says.

Competition, that dirty word

Melissa remembers “play days,” organized one-off events in which girls from different schools were brought together and randomly assigned to teams. The emphasis wasn’t competition — the girls were just supposed to play for fun. By not being allowed to play consistently with the same team members, the element of competition was muted.**

She also remembers after-school “postal tournaments.” In these events, sponsored by the U.S. Postal Service, schools gave girls an occasional chance after school to compete in sports like swimming, bowling and “basket-shooting.”

But still, competition wasn’t really the point. After the event concluded, girls’ individual times were written on postcards and mailed to the Illinois High School Association (IHSA), the governing body for state sports.

“If the participants were lucky, they’d find out the results, or who ‘won,’ a month or two later,” Melissa says. “It really cut down on the drama of competition.”

Still, Melissa persevered. She had an inner drive to compete that was all consuming.

“I would endure anything, any pain, to play. I was always thinking, ‘What more can I do? Where can I find more opportunity?’” she says. “I could have played all day, all night. I would have gone to the gym in my pajamas at midnight to practice if I had to.”

Finally… basketball!

By the time she got to high school in 1975, change was in the air. Despite Title IX, her high school, Niles West in suburban Chicago, had been resisting adding girls sports. The principal had repeatedly petitioned the state to allow girls sports like swimming, volleyball and softball. Basketball was out of the question — there was no way girls would be allowed to take up boys’ valuable gym space.

“I can’t reason with those crew cuts,” he complained about the IHSA.

But in the winter of 1974, his efforts paid off. Melissa’s school was allowed to add a girls basketball team, and a PE teacher, Arlene Mulder, stepped up to coach girls sports.

Once basketball became the focus of her world, Melissa found ways to take advantage of any opening. She and some of her teammates, along with members of the boys team, would head for the gym at 4 a.m. to practice together, but she had to keep that to herself.

“It was all a big secret. I was considered weird, too much like a boy. I felt like I was walking a tightrope all the time,” she recalls. “My mother wasn’t against it, and the boys kept the secret, but society was still against it.”

To Melissa, Arlene Mulder became more than a coach; she was a mentor. She and the girls on Melissa’s basketball team became the subject of her book, State: A Team, A Triumph, A Transformation. It’s the story of the team’s 1979 state championship title. We’ll pick up Melissa’s story next time.

                                         ________________________________

* Quotes in the present tense (says) are from my telephone interview with Melissa Isaacson on April 19, 2022. Quotes in the past tense (said) are from her book, State: A Team, A Triumph, A Transformation (Chicago: Agate Midway, 2019). https://amzn.to/3yBR0cf

** In my March 26 blog post, Debbie Millbern Powers also talks about play days. She chafed against the regulated play that kept girls from developing their skills and teamwork in the way boys could. https://www.nancybkennedy.com/cookies-and-punch-with-the-enemy/