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| Suffragists | |||
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| With the ratification of the 19th amendment in August, 1920, woman's suffrage was granted to most women in the United States. This marked the culmination of a long organized struggle that began at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. For the next seventy two years, women participated in a host of organizations and engaged in a range of activities to gain the right to vote. Some, like the General Federation of Women's Clubs with its three million members, were highly respectable mass organizations comprised mainly of older, married women. Others, like the Women's Political Union, which was modeled after its British counterpart, were more militant and smaller, and its members were generally younger. Although most of the suffrage organizations were composed mainly of White women, African American women also participated in the suffrage struggle, mainly in their own clubs and organizations. The suffrage series was initiated in 1972 as a project of the newly formed Feminist History Research Project. The eight narrators interviewed by Sherna Berger Gluck were active in the suffrage movement in the early part of the 20th century. Their activities, which took place outside California, ranged from organizing or participating in college suffrage groups, to marching in parades, speaking atop soap boxes on street corners, and picketing the White House. Some were also involved in the drive to ratify the 19th amendment. Many of them remained active in social issues after their move to California. Several of the women interviewed for the project gained public attention as a result of their participation in the 50th anniversary celebration of the ratification of the woman's suffrage amendment in Los Angeles in 1970. Full life histories were recorded for 4 of the women. [Note: highly edited transcripts with five of the women are available from the Oral History Program at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, and an edited narrative version of the interviews with the same five women was published under the title "From Parlor to Prison: Five American Suffragists Talk About Their Lives," edited by Sherna Berger Gluck , originally published in 1976 by Vintage, and reprinted by Monthly Review Press in 1985]. |
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| Jesse Haver Butler | |||
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Jesse Haver Butler served as a lobbyist for the National Consumers League in Washington, D.C. during which time she came into contact with activists in the National Woman's Party. In 1919-1920, she toured the western states with Carrie Chapman Catt during the ratification drive for the woman's suffrage amendment. Raised on a ranch in Colorado, Butler was determined to attend Smith College. She graduated from there in 1918 and went to work for first for the Massachusetts Minimum Wage and then moved to Washington D.C. to serve as a lobbyist for the National Consumers League. In Washington, she ate lunch regularly at the National Women's Party headquarters, and came into contact with many of the women involved with the picketing of the White House. After she toured the western states with Carrie Chapman Catt during the ratification drive for the woman's suffrage amendment, she married and went with her husband to England. On her return to the US, she began a new career, teaching public speaking to women. A full life history of approximately 12 hours was recorded with Butler, between November 1972 and the spring of 1973, when she was 88 years old, in her apartment in a retirement community in LaVerne, California. She had come to public attention as a result of her participation in the 1970 celebration of women's suffrage. A woman of commanding presence, with a vigorous voice and persona, Butler was highly committed to the goals of the Feminist History Research Project and to the women's liberation movement. In the course of the several years following the interview, she regularly spoke on college campuses and to women's groups and remained very involved working on child care issues with the local chapter of NOW. |
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| Katherine Tolls Chamberlain | |||
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Katherine Tolls Chamberlain, the daughter of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, was exposed early in her life both to the ideas of feminism and to key leaders in the 1910s women's movement. Her own active involvement, however, was limited largely to her participation in early suffrage parades. After this brief foray, she focused mainly on her own work as an artist. Chamberlain was recommended as a potential narrator for the Feminist History Research Project's suffragist series by Barbara (Una) Stannard, a San Francisco-based feminist author. She was a reluctant narrator, at best, and only one relatively short interview was conducted with her. Nevertheless, her interview provides interesting insights into the intellectual/social circles in which her mother traveled, and her own ideas about women's rights. |
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| May Goldman | |||
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| May Goldman, an ardent feminist, was involved in a suffrage group while she was at student at Barnard College. Her participation was quite limited, however, except for joining the Barnard contingent in the 1915 suffrage parade. Goldman was referred to the Feminist History Research Project by women in Women FOR Legislative Action, a group with which she was involved. Only one interview was conducted with her because of her very limited involvement in the suffrage movement. However, despite her limited participation, the interview is interesting for the insights it provides into the thinking of ardent feminist of the period. For instance, she did not believe in marriage. Nevertheless, she married during her sophomore year at Barnard so that her husband could be exempt from the World War I draft. She had a child for the same reason. |
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| Ernestine Hara Kettler | |||
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Ernestine Kettler was one of the suffragists who was arrested for picketing the White House with the National Woman's Party. She served time at the Occoquan Work House, where she participated in the strikes launched by the suffragist prisoners to be recognized as political prisoners. Shortly after this, Kettler went west, where she worked initially with the I.W.W. (Industrial Workers of the World) and later for various trade unions in both San Francisco and Los Angeles. She remained an ardent feminist her entire life and had a long history of labor and socialist activism. Her involvement with the suffrage struggle, though short-lived, was an outgrowth of both her feminist beliefs and her ties to political and bohemian circles in New York that began in her teen years. Kettler was among the former suffragists who spoke at the Jubilee celebration of woman's suffrage in Los Angeles, and she was referred to the Feminist History Research Project by leaders of Los Angeles NOW. Approximately 7 hours were recorded with her in January and February, 1973, when she was 78 years old. The interviews were conducted mainly in her room at a residential hotel overlooking MacArthur Park in Los Angeles. A petite woman, who was still very intellectually inquiring and physically vigorous, she nevertheless seemed rather depressed. Her health failed over the next two years, and she moved into an assisted living facility, where a final, brief interview was conducted in 1975. She lived there until her death in 1978. |
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| Laura Ellsworth Seiler | |||
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Laura Ellsworth Seiler was active first in a suffrage club, when she attended Cornell University, and then after graduation in Harriet Stanton Blatch's group, the Women's Political Union. She stumped for suffrage in a variety of venues, including from the back seat of a chauffeured car in upstate New York, atop a horse in New York City, and from a boat on the Hudson River. After this period of heightened activity, Seiler was not involved in the suffrage movement until the final push, when she spoke on behalf of ratification. Following these years of involvement in the suffrage movement, she mainly focused on her career, and eventually became an executive in the advertising industry. Seiler's name was given to Sherna Berger Gluck by Jesse Haver Butler, another suffragist narrator. Two interviews were conducted with Laura Seiler in October 1973, when she was 82 years old and living in a suite in a retirement community in Claremont. She was very active, alert, articulate, and well spoken. She prepared herself for the interviews and thought of various stories she wanted to relate. |
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| Sylvie Thygeson | |||
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Sylvie Thygeson was involved in both the illegal birth control and suffrage movements in St. Paul Minnesota in the mid-1910s. She remained involved in progressive causes after she moved with her family to Palo Alto. Thygeson was 104 years old at the time of the interview, which was conducted in the lounge of the convalescent hospital where she was confined. She was referred by women involved in Women FOR, in Los Angeles, a longtime radical group with whom Thygeson had been involved when she lived in Los Angeles. They referred to her as "Mother T," and initially could not remember her name. The interview was arranged by her 70 year old daughter, Mary Shepardson, who also participated in the interview. Despite Thygeson's very advanced age and frail condition, she was alert, incredibly articulate and determined. The single, one hour interview with her provides insight into the respectable suffrage activity among the elite women of the city, on the one hand, and the involvement of some of these same women, along with Thygeson, in running an illegal birth control clinic. The illegality of this latter activity resonated deeply, even sixty years. At the age of 106, Thygeson decided to end her life and stopped eating. |
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| Eva Marshall Totah | |||
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Eva Marshall Totah was active in a suffrage club at a Quaker college in Iowa. After graduation, she attended a drama school in Chicago and considered pursuing a career in acting, but then became involved in religious teaching instead. This took her to Palestine where she taught at the Friends school in Ramallah and married the Palestinian Quaker who was principal of the school. She stayed in Palestine for 18 years. Upon her return to the United States, Totah was involved in volunteer and reform groups, such as the League of Women Voters. In addition to discussing her Quaker beliefs and their relationship to feminism and suffrage, she talks about her disappointment following the passage of the suffrage amendment. She had hoped that women would provide a new moral force to society. Her own activities with regards to women's rights following her return from Palestine in 1948 were limited to involvement in the League of Women Voters. Totah, who was 77 at the time of the interview, had been listed with the National Organization for Women as a participant in the 50th Jubilee of the League of Women Voters. A one hour interview was conducted with her in 1973, when she was 81 years old. In addition to shedding light on college suffrage groups, her interview provides some interesting glimpses into the views of an outsider in pre-1948 Palestine. |
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| Miriam Allen deFord | |||
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Miriam Allen deFord, a well-known writer in San Francisco, began her suffrage involvement at the age of 14 in Philadelphia, where she was raised. In 1912-1915, she soap-boxed for suffrage in Boston. Following this period of her life, she moved to California with her first husband. Her activities centered around radical politics and her writing, although it wasn't until many years later that she was able to earn a sufficient living from her writing. In addition to writing for the Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Books with her second husband, deFord covered the labor scene in San Francisco. Approximately 7 hours were recorded with Miriam Allen deFord in 1973, two years before she died at age 90. A slight woman with thick glasses, she apparently had a difficult time with cataracts and had a hearing problem. Despite these disabilities, she was a very vigorous, lively, and intellectually curious 84-year-old woman at the time of the first two interviews with her. deFord was always cooperative and interested in providing whatever information we would find helpful. She spoke very rapidly and often laughed nervously. All the interviews took place in her suite at the Ambassador Hotel in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. The hotel, which she claimed was a good second class hotel at one time, was rather dilapidated. Despite the run down condition of the hotel, her own rooms, were in good condition; she apparently made all of the repairs to the suite and furniture at her own expense. Her suite included a small room that she used as her study; it was quite cluttered with books and photographs and was obviously a place where a woman is quite busy at work. Indeed, at the time of the interviews, deFord was still very busy at her writing career and at the end of first interview proudly displayed an honorable mention she had recently received for some of her poetry. |
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