While women make up 51 percent of the U.S. population, they remain underrepresented across the board when it comes to positions of leadership in politics and across the public and private sector. The visceral shot of Wicks wearing a mask and a baby carrier seemed to cut directly to the heart of the evening’s central question: “Why Don’t Women’s Votes Put More Women in Power?”

The moderator for the discussion, Marisa Lagos, KQED’s California politics and government correspondent, recalled seeing Wicks and thinking about taking her own infant to the 2016 Democratic Convention. Is the pandemic pulling back the curtain on choices like those she and Wicks had to make, “a good thing in terms of power and convincing people you need to have a seat at the table—but you might need to have a high chair next to you?” Lagos asked the panelists.

“I really think women are fed up, and we’re in a moment of an awakening,” said panelist C. Nicole Mason, president and CEO of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “We understand the issues,” she said, and the fact that systems are broken. “It’s the how: How do we get to a better place? How do we get to a workplace, a society, and an economy that values women as workers, as primary breadwinners in some cases, intellectual equals, powerful women, and leaders?”

California State Senator and author of the California Fair Pay Act Hannah-Beth Jackson, another panelist, shared that one of the reasons Wicks was on the floor that night was to vote on a bill that Jackson had put forward to expand paid family leave. The bill required a simple majority of 41 members to pass. “We got there only with three minutes literally left to spare in the legislative session,” Jackson said. More legislation, she argued, that is “reflective of the fact that women are indeed in the workforce and are valued in workforce” is needed to create a culture shift. “We have to change the laws. We have to change the mindset.” She added that it’s “having more women at the table in the room where it happens that’s going to help transform this.”

That’s a philosophy fellow panelist, Rosa “Rosie” Rios, the 43rd Treasurer of the United States, has worked hard to realize. As head of the Treasury Department during the Obama administration, Rios initiated and led efforts to place a woman on U.S. currency for the first time in more than a century.

Rios recalled her first days in the Treasury Department. “I walk in there, first female confirmed, and there’s no nursing room,” she said. “I’m started to notice women who were supposed to come back from maternity leave weren’t coming back. And I’m thinking, what century did I just walk into?” Rios ended up using her own budget to create a nursing space in the building (something that the Affordable Care Act of 2010, she pointed out, would eventually mandate for every federal facility).

The first step to making change is to recognize what’s missing, said Rios. “That was the beginning for me on this journey I continue on today in how every one of us can make a difference in how we think about facilitating a more inclusive environment,” she said.

Johns Hopkins University historian Martha S. Jones, author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, brought a longer perspective to the night. Circling back to the image of Wicks—“a woman lawmaker in the 21st century bringing her child into the chamber”—Jones said it made her “think about enslaved women who were required to leave their children in order to care for the children of others. These are complicated, interwoven stories,” she said.

Building a more equitable path forward requires taking centuries of diverse women’s experiences into account. “Early history reminds us that we have been here before, and we know how to do better,” Jones said. “I hope we take lessons from that past and the ways in which silences are often built into our stories to tell stories that are more inclusive and more reflective of who we are as a diverse community of women in the 21st century.”

As the night went on, the discussion roamed between past and present, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm—the first woman and the first African American to run for the nomination of a major party for president—and Kamala Harris’s vice presidential nomination.

“There’s a question about how to measure or weight the significance of her nomination as one measure of women’s process,” said Jones. “In my view, it would be a mistake to suggest it took 100 years for a Black woman to ‘make it’ onto the Democratic party ticket as a vice president.” Considering that it’s only been 55 years since the Voting Rights Act, she said, “Harris’s rise to power is in part a reflection about how in a short half-century-plus, Black women, despite the impediments, have built an extraordinary degree of political power, political life, political force in this country.”

The historian added that it’s also notable that Harris was one of six Black women to be vetted seriously for the ticket. “Senator Harris is the candidate, but she alone doesn’t tell the story of how Black women get from 1965 to 2020 in such an extraordinary fashion.”

During a question and answer session with the audience, the panelists spoke about the need for building a women’s base that cuts across lines of race, class, gender identity, and sexuality.

“We all know when the doors of opportunity and access swing open, many of the women who face different kinds of barriers are the last ones to come through the door. The 19th Amendment is a prime example of that,” Mason pointed out, with a nod to the 100th anniversary of its passage, which inspired the When Women Vote series.

But there’s an opportunity in this moment, she said, to build a more inclusive coalition. “I’m optimistic as we think about the pandemic and the economy and working women and all of these things—Kamala Harris, and this moment,” Mason continued, “that we are able to find some of this common ground but not [lose] sight of those differences that are also important in shaping women’s lived experiences.”

The post In the Crisis of COVID, a Moment of Awakening for Women appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“When I think about women in politics, I’m not talking about the woman who’s holding the microphone on stage,” said panelist and UCLA gender studies professor Ju Hui Judy Han, whose research tracks the demonstrations on behalf of the so-called “comfort women” that have persisted every Wednesday for 28 years now in South Korea. “I’m looking at who sets up the microphone, who builds the stage, who prints the signs, who cleans up afterward.”

The evening’s moderator, Rinku Sen, co-president of the Board of the Women’s March, agreed. When it comes to women-led protests, she said that in her experience “longevity and logistics” are “two words that should be closely tied together.”

Sen recalled once separating organizers by their gender identities for a training session. While the men were done in half the time, with demands and a press plan made, the women didn’t even finish the exercise. “They were trying to figure out where’s the child care, how are we going to turn people out, what was the phone tree system going to be,” she said. In protest, like in many other situations, she said, women often take care of “the logistics and the hospitality and inclusion: the ways that feel like people are welcome and belong at this protest or this movement or this meeting.”

That sense of inclusion and cooperation transcends borders, said panelist Valentine M. Moghadam. “There’s always been this solidarity,” explained the Northeastern University sociologist, whose research focuses on transnational feminist networks that bring together women from two or more countries around a common theme or set of objectives. “We know [transnational collaboration] took place in the International Socialist Movement, which was worldwide. The Women’s International Democratic Federation, that was also worldwide. So we’ve always done this.”

USC labor historian and panelist Francille Rusan Wilson, who is also the co-curator of the Natural History Museum’s Rise Up L.A.: A Century of Votes for Women exhibition, agreed. “One of the things we don’t really pay attention to is just how long these transnational women’s networks have operated,” she said. Famously around 1906, she pointed out, the suffragist and civil rights leader Mary Church Terrell spoke at an international women’s conference in Berlin, where she was the only American woman to give her speech in English, German, and French.

Today, Moghadam said, technological advances have only heightened and accelerated such networks. Offering a recent example, Han drew attention to how Sojourner Truth’s famous “Ain’t I a Woman” speech was used in a queer activist rally in South Korea in 2015. “We see the lessons from Black feminism in a very significant and direct way,” said Han, explaining that in this context, Truth’s words were used to challenge a women’s rights agenda that was promoting gender equality at the expense of LGBT rights. But Han also cautioned that such transnational exchanges of ideas can also cause harm, as in the case of women’s role in global evangelical Christian networks that have shaped gender politics and sexual politics in South Korea.

The significance of right-wing women’s movements, including the danger of conflating feminist movements and women’s movements and whether the gap between progressive and conservative women activists can be bridged, was also discussed, along with the importance of women in protest whose work has long been overlooked.

On the centennial of the passage of the 19th Amendment, Rusan Wilson added that there is much work to be done to address the many people whose stories have still been left out of the suffragist narrative in the U.S.

“We hear about Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Alice Paul, but we don’t hear about the Black, brown, Indigenous women, the Chinese women, the other Asian American women, who also joined the struggle to vote and did not get the right to vote in 1920,” said the historian. “This is a time for us to think about who got the right to vote and who was excluded.”

Later, during a Q&A session with audience members, the panel reflected on how the struggle continues when it comes to women’s representation in U.S. politics today.

“We have a long way to go in our own country,” said Rusan Wilson, “about why we—including women—judge women and men so differently.”

The post The Enduring Power of Women’s Protests appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That Shaw, who was president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, had come to a Midwestern state like South Dakota was not unusual; the region had a rich but contentious history with woman suffrage. The familiar narrative of women’s struggle to win the vote places national leaders like Shaw, Susan B. Anthony, and Carrie Chapman Catt on the East Coast, marching in parades in New York City or Washington, D.C. And that narrative defines their fight as a matter of women’s rights, based on calls for liberty and equality. But looking more closely at Shaw’s speech reveals the regional complexity of the movement—which was nationwide, and entangled in complicated local and regional issues that were not purely about justice. Shaw’s riveting address combined the struggle for woman suffrage with a broader debate about immigration in the region that ultimately asked difficult questions about a person’s “fitness” to vote.

Midwestern states like South Dakota had large immigrant populations, the majority from Germany, who tended to view woman suffrage with a mix of skepticism and hostility. Often living on farms in isolated ethnic enclaves, some opposed the cause because they espoused conventional gender roles and thought politics too corrupt for women. Others feared that women voters would seek to curtail cherished cultural practices like drinking, and argued that suffragists merely wanted the ballot to institute prohibition.

Indeed, many Midwestern suffragists had come to support woman suffrage through the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, or WCTU. These Midwestern suffragists were also often Yankees, either born in the Northeast or to parents from the region—and mostly white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant—who saw the ballot as necessary to protect their homes and communities from corruption caused by vices like drunkenness. But by the early 1910s, most Yankee suffragists in the Midwest had begun to distinguish their work in the WCTU from their work for suffrage. State associations elected new leaders with no formal ties to the WCTU, hoping to send a message that their desire to vote had nothing to do with Prohibition.

Still, immigrants opposed the cause, and Midwestern suffragists grew increasingly frustrated. They began to disparage their foreign-born neighbors as stubbornly and irrevocably ignorant. “They probably know little of our American ideals,” declared one Iowa suffragist.

By 1914, the suffragists’ frustration had turned to outright prejudice—and Shaw expertly tapped into those long-simmering fears. World War I had just erupted in Europe, and while the United States did not join the flight until April 1917, the conflict weighed heavily on the people in her audience. Native-born Americans were suspicious of South Dakota’s large German population, and as Germany invaded Belgium and northern France, many in the state—men and women—had begun to cast Germans as lawless aggressors. At the podium at the Congregational Church, Shaw amended her usual pro-suffrage lecture to unveil a novel argument: that citizenship was a civic responsibility, that the vote was a duty rather than just a right, and that politically-active native-born women were more deserving of the franchise than their ignorant male immigrant neighbors.

Shaw began her talk by reviewing some well-worn assumptions about gender and citizenship. During the 19th century, she said, government seemed like “some subtle thing beyond the reach of the inexperienced [woman]”—a mysterious force that citizens, and especially disenfranchised women, only felt distantly. During the early 20th century, however, women had grown close to politics and, as Shaw put it, “should be a part of the government.” Civic virtue had long been a hallmark of Midwestern political culture. Yankees were the first group to settle in large numbers in the region after the Civil War, often donating their land, money, and time to develop infrastructure and public institutions. Later generations, in turn, venerated Yankee pioneers’ activism, which demonstrated what they saw as steadfast resolve in the face of hardship and loneliness.

While conventional ideas about gender reinforced distinct roles for the men and women who settled the vast prairies, Midwestern women often transcended these boundaries, stepping in when towns lacked basic municipal services, starting garbage collection services, establishing public parks, and raising funds for public schools. Most of these women were Yankees, and many spoke of themselves as virtuous citizens who sacrificed on behalf of their communities. By 1914, Progressivism, a reform movement that promoted government action and direct democracy, was flourishing throughout the United States, and native-born women in the Midwest heeded its call. For example, in Clay County, Iowa, one group of women focused on “pure food” initiatives to promote sanitary conditions in meat processing facilities and end the sale of adulterated foods by sponsoring a film series and articles in local newspapers.

In contrast, Shaw suggested, South Dakota’s naturalized male immigrants were taking advantage of naturalization and its benefits without giving back. She alleged that foreign-born men—mainly Germans—were filing papers to become citizens, and thus gain the vote, at a remarkable rate. This may not have been true: the National Archives reports that 25 percent of all the foreign-born individuals listed in the census from 1890 to 1930 had not become naturalized or even filed their first papers. But the system was certainly haphazard and disorganized, and for generations had allowed noncitizen immigrants to assert voting rights with great ease. In 1914, a number of Midwestern states, including South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio, had allowed or still allowed male foreigners to vote before becoming citizens.

Shaw suggested that naturalization was a nightmare because it was wrongly assumed that “any person, upon arriving at the age of 21 years, if he be male, is fully capable of assuming the responsibilities of government.” Instead, Shaw suggested, many foreigners were too ignorant to be good citizens. At one citizenship hearing, she told her audience, a “foreigner appeared…and after going through the usual form, was asked the question, through an interpreter: Who is the president of the United States? He very promptly and intelligently answered, ‘Charles Murphy.’”

Shaw’s shocking story struck a nerve with her audience; one observer remarked that she left a “favorable impression” because she presented “undeniable truths.” When Shaw commented that foreigners “all over the country today on account of the war in Europe” were “very anxious to take out their first papers of citizenship,” she pandered to growing fears that Germans had plotted to take advantage of the chaotic naturalization process as a means of undermining their adopted nation.

Shaw’s speech to the Congregational Church in the fall of 1914 reflected how powerful nativism was becoming as a political force in the Midwest. She surely hoped her remarks about citizenship, including her not-so-veiled nativist anecdote, would convince voters to support woman suffrage. But her speech also rang an ominous tone that resonated well beyond the 1914 campaign.

Despite Shaw’s efforts, voters in South Dakota defeated the 1914 amendment by about 12,000 votes. Newspaper reports indicated that voters still believed either that suffragists only wanted the ballot to enact temperance legislation or that woman suffrage was far too radical. Undeterred, state suffrage leaders secured another amendment bill in 1916, but defeat again dashed their hopes. Nativist ideas percolated, and by 1916, suffrage leaders across the Midwest were commonly targeting the right of immigrants to vote.

In South Dakota and Iowa, state officials produced propaganda and issued post-election reports that accused Germans of seeking to commit electoral sabotage as part of elaborate terroristic plots. In one case, press directors in South Dakota created a map that indicated in black the counties in which residents had defeated the 1916 amendment. A note above the map read that “the ‘German’ counties are all black,” meaning that those counties that defeated suffrage in 1916 had majority German populations. The message was clear—Germans had masterminded the defeat of woman suffrage.

Nativist fear built into outright hysteria, and Midwestern suffragists began recasting decades of foreign resistance to assimilation as treason. They argued that to protect democracy, only those citizens who understood civic responsibility should vote. By 1917, when the United States entered World War I, suffragists crystallized their message. In South Dakota, propaganda warned of the untrustworthy “alien enemy” while celebrating patriotic suffragists who sacrificed “so deeply for the world struggle.” Another message deemed the “women of America…too noble and too intelligent and too devoted to be slackers” like their German counterparts.

That rhetorical maneuver finally gave woman suffrage the political leverage it needed to achieve victory. In November 1918, voters in South Dakota passed a woman suffrage amendment to the state’s constitution with an impressive 64 percent majority. Of the first 15 states to ratify the 19th Amendment, about half were in the Midwest—a startling shift for a region that had seemed permanently opposed to woman suffrage.

While Shaw’s speech was meant for an audience living in an important historical moment and place, it also resonates today. Suffragists had no qualms about using nativism to open democracy to women. They were willing to skewer immigrants in their decades-long quest for political equality. Shaw’s remarks also remind us how many assumptions Americans have made—in 1914 and today—about the rights and responsibilities that accompany citizenship.

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