This video is sponsored in part by Keeps
Mr. Beat: Do you think that women should be allowed to vote?
Mrs. Beat: Mr. Beat: I’ll take that as a yes
I’m Mr. Beat Many of you already know this, but I am a man.
Here are actual quotes from men arguing why women should not be allowed
"I daresay that the idealism of the feminine mind and its deadly logic which we have all experienced in private life are qualities superior to those of men, but I do say that in governing a great country and in considering the problems which we have to consider every day in this House such qualities are not valuable, but destructive."
"Women are likely to be affected by gusts and waves of sentiment.Their emotional temperament makes them so liable to it. But those are not the people best fitted in this practical world either to sit in this House... or to be entrusted with the immense power which this bill gives them."
Oh no! A gusted wave of sentiment! It got me! (falls off chair)
Today we are going to be reading from one of my favorites
"Things Old White Men Said"
And today we are going to be hearing from
Mr. John Henderson, MP for Aberdeenshire Western
"This is a commercial and industrial country. But it could hardly be hoped that women could govern and manage our commerce and industry. If we were to have women in this House they would be legislating for these commercial industries of the management of which they know nothing."
"I have read their writings, and in one paper... a moderate publication, I saw that the Prime Minister was violently described as an old fossil. What can you say of people who exhibit such a want of judgment, and such a lack of perception of actual facts?"
"Women are tremendously accessible, extraordinarily impressionable, noted for the adoption of any new thing, and for the easy acceptance of other people's views."
Goodness gracious.
Oh, and here’s a quote from a dude who didn’t want women to serve in the Parliament of the
United Kingdom:
"There are obvious disadvantages about having women in Parliament. I do not know what is going to be done about their hats. How is a poor little man to get on with a couple of women wearing enormous hats in front of him?"
This month marks the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment.
That’s the Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that finally gave women the right to vote,
In other words, after it passed every adult in the United States could vote.
Hey Ellie, could you pull that up so that we can take a look at it?
Yeah, I want to show for the folks.
That’s my cat, Ellie.
I’m trying to train her to help me with these videos.
Yeah, no. Over there. Just click that button right there.
There we go.
Thanks!
"The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by
the United States or by any State on account of sex.
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."
It’s simple enough, right?
But it still blows my mind that it took so freaking long
for that amendment to pass.
It’s crazy.
In this video, we're briefly gonna look at that long and difficult struggle to get women the right to vote
but also the pushback against women's suffrage, particularly here in the United States.
It all started with the Iroquois in modern-day upstate New York.
Also known as the Six Nations (or Five Nations)- they referred to themselves as the Haudenosaunee.
The Iroquois Confederacy formed in 1142, and when they did they didn’t say only men could vote.
They let all adults vote on all major decisions.
It wasn’t just voting.
The Iroquois generally treated men and women equally.
After democracy made a comeback during The Enlightenment, you did see random circumstances
where women were able to vote.
For example, there was Lydia Taft, the first woman known to legally vote in colonial America,
but it really was on behalf of her dead husband.
Back then, being able to vote was almost always tied to owning property, and who owned the
property?
Men.
After the United States became a country and gained a reputation around the world for being
all about democracy, this tradition continued.
Men, who owned property, could vote.
And women mostly went along with it.
But then, an English author named Mary Wollstonecraft shook things up when she wrote the book A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792.
In it, she wrote that women were NOT naturally inferior to men, and that men and women should
both be treated as rational beings.
She called for equality, dangit!
And others followed.
In 1838, Sarah Grimke’s book Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women was
a hit.
That same year, the United Kingdom controlled Pitcairn Islands gave women the vote.
Ok, so only like 100 people lived there, but still.
Soon after, the writings of Margaret Fuller further promoted women’s suffrage.
In 1840, the Hawaiian Kingdom gave women the right to vote.
In 1848, Italy’s Tuscany gave women the right to vote.
And then, an entire Feminist Movement.
I have a video that already goes into it, but feminism, which is the belief that men
and women should have equal rights and equal opportunities, really took off in the 1840s,
mostly in both the United Kingdom and the United States.
Still, even at the Seneca Falls Convention, which took place in Seneca Falls, New York,
on July 19-20, 1848, folks there argued about whether or not women should be allowed to vote.
Props to Frederick Douglass, the only African American at the convention, for convincing
folks there to add the fact that women could not vote to the Declaration of Sentiments.
The Seneca Falls Convention was officially the first women’s rights convention.
In the following decades, as the women’s rights movement grew and more and more women
fought for women’s suffrage, a countermovement rose up to fight back.
For starters, many people back then actually thought women had inferior brains, and they
backed it up with the crappy science of the time.
The thinking was, that if women got involved with politics, they would push their already
inferior brains too much and thus hurt their entire body, which obviously might hurt their
reproduction system so they couldn’t make babies!
Ok, so earlier you heard some actual quotes from men justifying why women shouldn’t
be able to vote.
Here’s another quote from a supposedly smart person.
William T. Sedgwick, a well respected professor at MIT, said “We must not forget pregnancy
and lactation, both of which are a great strain on a mother’s vitality.
Any further strain, like the responsibilities of suffrage, is bound to be harmful to both
mother and child.”
Almroth Wright, the well respected immunologist known for creating a typhoid vaccine, said
women couldn’t vote because of both menstruation and menopause.
Seriously.
He thought that women couldn’t psychologically handle the responsibilities of voting due
to having periods and because of their periods...um...later stopping.
Mobs of opponents to women’s suffrage, mostly men, routinely disrupted women’s rights
conventions, bringing one convention to a close in 1853 after things almost got violent.
Still, the suffragist movement only grew, with pockets of the world adopting women’s
suffrage at the local level.
A big influence on the worldwide movement was the powerhouse trio of the American activists
Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
In 1869, Stone and her husband, Henry Browne Blackwell, started the American Woman Suffrage
Association.
That same year, Anthony and Stanton broke away from Stone and Blackwell and started
the National Woman Suffrage Association over disagreements about how to move the movement forward.
Ok, that’s confusing.
Also that same year, in an effort to attract settlers, Wyoming Territory became the first
area of the United States to allow women to vote.
In 1870, Lucy Stone began publishing a newspaper to promote women’s suffrage called Woman’s Journal.
The next year, the Anti-Suffrage Society was formed to resist women’s suffrage, and many
of its members were women.
In 1872, Victoria Woodhull became the first woman to run for President of the United States,
although many historians argue her campaign was never serious about her actually getting
elected.
I mean, she was younger than 35 and the vast majority of women in the country at the time
couldn’t actually vote for her, but ya know.
Susan B. Anthony tried to vote in that election, by the way, but she was arrested for doing
so and fined $100.
The next year she got a trial, but the judge, Ward Hunt, who was also a member of the Supreme
Court, wouldn’t allow the jury to talk the case over and instead told them to just find
Anthony guilty.
Anthony never paid the fine, but got a lot of publicity out of the trial, and it actually
helped the women's suffrage movement grow even more quickly.
They tried different strategies.
Some fought in the courts, like Anthony did.
Some focused on getting state laws passed, eventually getting women the vote in nine
states by 1912.
Around the world, the movement was also catching on.
Under the banner “Votes for Women,” suffragists, or suffragettes, as they were called by critics,
began implementing more public strategies to spread the word.
Huge parades, hunger strikes, silent vigils.
Suffragists were often heckled and received death threats.
They were sometimes jailed and violently attacked and even sexually assaulted.
Thanks to the efforts of women like Kate Sheppard, New Zealand became the first country in the
world to let women vote on September 19, 1893.
Finland followed in 1906, although taxpaying women there were able to vote way back in
the 1700s.
Over the next few years, suffragists got a little more aggressive in protests mostly
since the anti-suffragists, you know...the one’s against women voting...were more aggressively resisting.
The group that led the women’s suffrage movement the most during this time was the
Women’s Social and Political Union, or WSPU, founded by the Pankhurst sisters Emmeline
and Christabel in the United Kingdom.
The WSPU was certainly hard to ignore.
They chained themselves to railings, heckled politicians, trespassed on government buildings,
smashed windows, set fire to mailboxes and empty buildings, and even set off bombs.
The media portrayed them as thugs.
When in prison, they were force fed after going on hunger strikes.
Meanwhile, back in the United States, folks like Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, among others,
organized the Woman Suffrage Procession, the first big organized march on Washington for
political purposes.
As many as 10,000 women’s suffrage advocates marched down Pennsylvania Avenue on
March 3, 1913, the day before President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration.
From this point forward, it seemed to be about amending the Constitution to finally get women
the vote across the entire United States.
Around the time of World War One, the tide began to turn.
Still, President Wilson resisted supporting women’s suffrage.
So Alice Paul organized a protest to convince him to publicly support an amendment to the
Constitution that guaranteed a woman’s right to vote.
Beginning on January 10, 1917, protesters gathered in front of the White House holding
up signs that said things like "Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?"
And they just stood there, all day, six days a week, not saying a word.
Because of the not saying a word part, they became known as the Silent Sentinels.
On November 14, 1917, local law enforcement harassed, arrested, and even tortured some
of these women in what became known as the Night of Terror.
Still, they persisted, later pushed back to Lafayette Square for “obstructing traffic.”
And they did this until finally President Wilson was like “ok fine!
You can vote!”
Yep, he changed his mind, announcing his support for a women’s suffrage amendment on January 9, 1918.
The next day, the House of Representatives barely passed it, but the Senate then refused
to even debate it.
So the Silent Sentinels kept protesting, targeting Senators who were against them.
Well it worked.
After the 1918 midterm elections, most of Congress was pro women’s suffrage.
This was around the time World War One had ended, and all of sudden countries around the world
were finally allowing women to vote.
The United Kingdom and Germany were too big ones that year that passed women’s suffrage.
In the spring of 1919, Congress passed the 19th Amendment, but remember, it still had
to go to 3/4 of the states to approve of it.
Well, this story has a dramatic ending.
By the summer of 1920, 35 of the 36 states needed had ratified the amendment.
Then all eyes were on Tennessee, a state very divided on the issue.
After other southern states were rejecting the 19th Amendment, Tennessee seemed to be
the suffragists’ last hope.
After the state senate voted for the amendment, next it was up to the Tennessee House of Representatives.
There it had been deadlocked evenly between suffragists and anti-suffragists.
It didn’t seem like it was going to pass.
But then, almost out of nowhere, a supposed anti-suffragist, the 24-year old Harry Burn,
shocked the world.
To fill you in, I’ve teamed up with Florida’s legendary social studies teacher Mr. Wade
from the channel Virtualhistory360. He drove up to Nashville last summer to that actual location where Harry Burn made his dramatic vote that got the 19th Amendment
to be added to the U.S. Constitution. Mr. Wade, you want to fill them in?
Mr. Wade: Thank you Mr. Beat. Like he said, I'm Mr. Wade. I'm from Virtualhistory360, and I'm very happy that I can include some bit of trivia into his story of the suffrage movement.
Now, as you can see, I'm here in Nashville, Tennessee.
Right me behind me, that is the Tennessee State Capitol Building where it all went down.
Now as he said it passed the Senate quickly
but it came down to the House of Representatives here in the state.
And they thought it was gonna be tied.
You see, they thought they were gonna put it on the table
and just forget about it.
They voted 48-48.
So they said, "you know what?"
"Let's vote for ratification."
Now, the suffragists in the gallery thought
that it was going to come down to another tie and nothing was going to happen.
But there was one man
Harry T. Burn. Now, Harry T. Burn
received a letter from his mother that morning
I've been following and some of this has been bitter
but I don't know how you are
so do me a favor
and vote yes.
Now why is this a big deal?
Because Harry Burn, Harry T. Burn was wearing that red rose
because he was on the anti-suffragist side
and everyone on his side thought he was gonna vote with the nos.
But when they called his name he goes "Aye."
He said it so quietly and so fast that they
they had to wait a minute to let it sink in
that he voted for it, and that then caused
Tennessee to be the 36th state
all because this young boy, the youngest of the Tennessee House of Representatives
listened to his mother, and voted "yes."
So, what do you think, Mr. Beat?
What do I think?
I think you should always listen to your mother.
By the way, Mr. Wade has his own video on his channel where he's at the hotel across the street, known as the
Hermitage, where the suffragists and anti-suffragists in the Tennessee House of Representatives
debated the amendment.
Check it out after you’re done watching this video, and be sure to wear your 360 goggles
while watching it to get the full effect.
So that’s it.
That’s how the 19th Amendment finally passed around 100 years ago.
Over the next few decades, women’s suffrage slowly spread around the rest of the world.
Brazil in 1932, France in 1944, Mexico in 1953, Switzerland in 1971
Wait it took Switzerland until 1971 to finally give women the right to vote?
Goodness.
Iraq 1980, Saudi Arabia, as recently as 2015
And today, women can vote in every country in the world.
Except Vatican City.
What the heck Vatican City?
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Thanks to Keeps for sponsoring this video.
Also, thanks to Alex, Sheryl, Molly, Virginia, and Nancy for reading those cringeworthy quotes at the beginning of this video.
Actual quotes from men justifying why women shouldn't vote. At least they had some fun with it.
Be sure to check out all of their channels.
I’ve put the links in the description of this video.
Also thank you to my wife, Mrs. Beat, for helping me out with this video. She's always terrific.
Do you think that women should be able to vote? Mrs.Beat yes. (laughing) It's like look at me like I'm an idiot. Mrs. Beat: oh! That's not the reaction I thought you were gonna do.
Thanks to my cat, Ellie, for making her producing debut.
And finally, thanks to Mr. Wade for collaborating with me. It took a long time for us to finally collaborate.
Be sure to subscribe to his channel, Virtualhistory360, and check out his video at the Hermitage
in Nashville where the drama went down for the ratification of the 19th Amendment.
Thanks for watching!