Authors Philip McFarland and Debby Applegate trace the lives of the Beechers, a family which included the siblings Henry Ward Beecher, a famous preacher, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Audio and video options are available.
Author Anne Sebba follows the life of American-born Jennie Jerome, wife of Randolph Churchill and father of Winston Churchill. Sebba examines Jennie's early life, the romantic affairs that assisted her husband's career, her relationship with her son, her social reform work, and other aspects of her very active life. The presentation includes slides.
Audio and video options are available.
This archive provides more than 81,000 images and 1,000 texts on the history and culture of California. Images may be searched by keyword or browsed according to six categories: history, nature, people, places, society, and technology. Topics include exploration, Native Americans, gold rushes, and California events.
Three collections of texts are also available. Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive furnishes 309 documents and 67 oral histories. Free Speech Movement: Student Protest, U.C. Berkeley, 19641965 provides 541 documents, including books, letters, press releases, oral histories, photographs, and trial transcripts.
UC Berkeley Regional Oral History Office offers full-text transcripts of 139 interviews organized into 14 topics including agriculture, arts, California government, society and family life, wine industry, disability rights, Earl Warren, Jewish community leaders, medicine (including AIDS), suffragists, and UC Black alumni.
Today, when it seems that everyone is getting a make-over, so are the suffragists. Iron Jawed Angels, a recent film by HBO, dramatizes the final years of the American woman suffrage movement, from 1912 to the winning of the vote in 1920. Historians familiar with the classic documentary One Woman, One Vote (1996) will be amused by how the suffragists have been updated and recast to mirror our own contemporary sensibilities. This film portrays these women as you have never seen them before: shopping for fashionable hats, smoking and lounging in their undergarments, and marching to a soundtrack of hip-hop rhythms. They are more than “new women”; they are 21st-century women in their casual manner, informal speech, and attitudes toward men and sexuality. With this approach, the film modernizes our political foremothers in an attempt to win new audiences in a postfeminist age.
Tensions between veteran activists and “new suffragists” are at the heart of the story. Hilary Swank stars as the outspoken and determined Alice Paul, and Frances O'Connor plays her faithful comrade, Lucy Burns. The dynamic duo represents the more youthful, radical wing of the movement, which confronts the more conservative Carrie Chapman Catt (Anjelica Huston) and Anna Howard Shaw (Lois Smith), president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Allied with the Democratic party and the new president, Woodrow Wilson, Catt continues to support a gradual state-by-state campaign. She is portrayed as traditional, stuffy, and arrogant compared to the playful, optimistic, and impatient Paul who launches public demonstrations, supports a federal suffrage amendment, demands immediate results, and condemns the Democrats and Wilson, even in the midst of war. Paul and her allies eventually split with NAWSA to form a separate organization, the National Woman's Party. While historians have focused on the militant tactics of the new suffragists, the film fixates on their colorful personalities to separate them further from the old guard.
Although the filmmakers try to reinvent the image of the suffragists, the storyline is based on the real troubles and triumphs of the campaign's final years. For an audience new to women's history, it conveys the very serious barriers to women's political participation and social justice. When the activists are physically attacked as they protest peacefully, the true hostility toward woman suffrage comes alive. The movie also contains a chilling portrayal of Paul's jail experience, showing her psychoanalyzed in the mental ward and violently force-fed after initiating a hunger strike. The film even acknowledges the racial tensions between white suffragists and African American activists, highlighting Paul's conflict with Ida B. Wells before the Washington, DC, parade in 1913. The film does take many liberties, however. For example, it overstates the influence of the radicals in winning the vote, downplaying the concerted effort of the entire suffrage spectrum and the impact of women's work and volunteerism during World War I. While historians have described Alice Paul as intellectually vigorous, personally conservative, and politically militant, the film transforms her into a spunky rebel who knows how to have fun but is still fully committed to her cause.
Is this what it takes to attract new audiences to women's history? In an age when many young women resist the feminist label, the film invites them to connect with feminists who are single, young, independent, sexually vibrant, and, of course, physically attractive. But this emphasis on beauty and charisma would surely disturb the suffragists, who would find these characters very foreign. This approach will also irritate historians of gender who have worked hard to define the suffragists as serious political actors and to integrate them into the American historical narrative. Viewed with a critical eye, Iron Jawed Angels could be useful for instructing students about history and popular culture, Hollywood and historical interpretation. It also forces us to grapple with more than feminism and its discontents. It can generate needed reflection on the ways historians can also be guilty of constructing historical personalities as they want to see them, by ignoring issues of race or dismissing the personal failures of our subjects. The challenge, then, remains to promote interest in women's history and still teach about who we think the suffragists were, rather than who we want them to be.
This review was first published in the Journal of American History, 91:3 (2004): 11311132. Reprinted with permission from the Organization of American Historians (OAH).
Charting changes in women's rhetoric in the public realm from 1848 to the present is possible through this archive of more than 400 speeches by influential, contemporary women. These include prominent female politicians and scientists, as well as popular culture figures. There is an emphasis on the United States (particularly after 1900), including speeches from women as diverse as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Mary Church Terrell, Marie Curie, Helen Keller, Emma Goldman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Betty Friedan, and Ayn Rand. A nearly complete list of Nobel lectures by women laureates provides access to acceptance speeches.
The search function is particularly useful for pulling speeches from a diverse collection into common subject groups. It also allows for the study of the language of women's public debate by following changes in the use of particular metaphors or idioms, such as the concept "motherhood."
Do you have any primary source documents from John Bingham that show why he chose to include only males in the 14th Amendment, any copies of speeches he made on the topic, etc.? Also do you have any source documents from Susan B. Anthony that take the opposite view of why women should be included? My daughter is completing a National History Day project and these two are critical to her performance.
I’m not sure how to answer this. I wouldn’t want to take anything away from your daughter’s project by doing her research for her. But the subject is complicated and I think I can say a few things that might help with her research.
The issues around the passage of the 14th Amendment, as they appeared to women’s rights activists, are well covered, with transcripts of Congressional debates, and details of the petitions and organizing activities of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and others, in the History of Woman Suffrage, Volume 2, Chapter 17, pages 90-151, which your daughter can read at the link. In addition, if your public library, or a nearby academic library, has online access to the ProQuest historical newspapers collection, she might find it useful to take a look at The New York Times reporting on the announcement of—and speeches given at—the 11th National Woman’s Rights Convention, held in New York City, as detailed in the articles, “Woman’s Rights. The Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention” (April 2, 1866) and “The May Anniversaries” (May 11, 1866).
In order to supplement these sources and to more fully understand the Congressional debates over the language of the 14th Amendment, I think it is important to note that the essential purpose of the amendment was not to define the principle on which the right of suffrage was based, but rather to craft a means by which the country could be “reconstructed,” which is to say that the joint House and Senate “Committee of Fifteen” (which included Representative John A. Bingham of Ohio) that put together the language of the amendment and brought it to the Congress as a whole for a vote was recommending a way for the southern states that had seceded to be re-admitted to the Union, a very urgent issue at the time.
When they were re-admitted, these states’ representatives would have to be seated in Congress. But there was a problem with doing that: According to the Constitution, the number of slaves in the southern states had figured into the counting of the states’ population for the purpose of deciding the number of Congressional representatives from those states (the “three-fifths clause”). But with the end of the war and the passage of the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery, there were no longer any slaves to count.
If, then, the sheer number of persons living in the southern states were now to be used to determine the number of representatives these states could send to Congress, these states would gain a very considerable advantage over what they had before the war because the ex-slaves would then be counted as “full” persons, even though, in these states, they were not allowed to vote. The result would be an actual increase in the legislative power of these states, whose strengthened congressional delegations would still be drawn from the same class of white landowners whose “retrograde” views had played a decisive role in the events leading to the war. This would have been plainly unacceptable, as it would have seemed that the South had actually been rewarded as a result of the war.
To solve this problem, the Committee of Fifteen created a condition for these states re-admittance to the Union, which is described in section 2 of the constitutional amendment it proposed:
Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.
In other words, the committee was saying, “Okay, maybe we can’t force you southern states to give Blacks the vote, but if you don’t, we’ll just deduct the Black population from your total population when counting how many congressional representatives you get, so you don’t get any advantage over us; in fact, you’ll be disadvantaged, because now you won’t be able to count your Black population at all whereas before you could count three-fifths of it (more or less) in figuring out how many congressional representatives you could have.” This seemed like a fair, if somewhat convoluted, compromise to the committee. The committee thought it would stand a good chance of being passed.
In fact, essentially the same sort of scheme had already passed Congress as part of a civil rights law, but Congressman Bingham, who was both a lawyer and a judge, was convinced that that law would be found by the courts to be unconstitutional for a number of reasons (including the fact that it infringed on the rights of states to determine which of its citizens could vote), so he had actually opposed its passage in Congress and argued that it needed to be passed as a constitutional amendment instead. That is why it was deliberated on by the Committee of Fifteen—actually called the Committee on Reconstruction—of which he was an influential member, and was proposed by it. It was part of the committee’s plan for how the southern states could be brought back into the fold: If these states’ legislatures reaffirmed their allegiance to the United States and voted to accept the conditions in the proposed amendment, then they would be re-admitted.
I cannot find a source that gives Bingham himself the responsibility for inserting the word “male” in the language of the amendment. Perhaps you have found such a source. The material in the History of Woman Suffrage appear to me to suggest otherwise, that it was simply the result of the committee’s long hours in trying to craft precise language that would do no more than what the committee intended the amendment to do, without inadvertently opening the door to a storm of objections surrounding the much larger principles of suffrage, whether it was a universal “human right” or not, that would most probably have derailed the amendment’s chance of passage.
Garrett Epps, Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post-Civil War America. New York: Macmillan, 2007.
William E. Nelson, The Fourteenth Amendment: From Political Principle to Judicial Doctrine. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds. History of Woman Suffrage. Volume 2, 1861-1876. Rochester: Susan B. Anthony, 1881.
The Harriet Beecher Stowe House is operated as an historical and cultural site, focusing on Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. The site also includes a look into the family, friends, and colleagues of the Beecher-Stowe family; Lane Seminary; and the abolitionist, women's rights, and Underground Railroad movements in which these historical figures participated in the 1830s to 1860s, as well as African-American history related to these movements. The house was home to Harriet Beecher Stowe prior to her marriage and to her father, Rev. Lyman Beecher, and his large family, a prolific group of religious leaders, educators, writers, and antislavery and women's rights advocates. The Beecher family includes Harriet's sister, Catherine Beecher, an early female educator and writer who helped found numerous high schools and colleges for women; brother Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, a leader of the women's suffrage movement and considered by some to be the most eloquent minister of his time; General James Beecher, a Civil War general who commanded the first African-American troops in the Union Army recruited from the South; and sister Isabella Beecher Hooker, a women's rights advocate. The Beechers lived in Cincinnati for nearly 20 years, from 1832 to the early 1850s, before returning East.
The house offers exhibits, tours, and occasional recreational and educational programs and events.
The Federal Judicial Center is the education and research agency for the federal courts. History of the Federal Judiciary includes background information about the court system, judicial legislation, federal courthouses, and oral histories. A biographical directory of judges since 1789 includes all federal courts.
Teaching Judicial History: Federal Trials and Great Debates in United States History provides in-depth instructional units with narrative and supporting documentation from The Sedition Act Trials to Bush v. Orleans Parish School Board and the Desegregation of New Orleans Schools.
Julie Novkov, Associate Professor of Political Science and Women's Studies at the University of Albany, SUNY, provides an overview of 230 years of struggles for equality, focusing on the role of the Constitution and the courts in movements for African American and women's rights.
Audio and video options are available.
Gerald Prokopowicz of the Lincoln Museum looks at Abraham Lincoln's remarks on women in politics, and considers the increasing presence of women in politics throughout the 19th century.
To view to this clip, scroll to "Abraham Lincoln, Women, and Politics" under "Abraham Lincoln's Biography Video."