The Suffrage Cat (Episode 1)

(RD & R: Banter back and forth about cats ---)

R: How many cats is too many cats?

RD: ….one cat is too many. (Or maybe she says three?)

R: [Agrees or disagrees] BUT, love em or hate em, cats have always been part of suffrage history.

RD: If you look at postcards and cartoons from the suffrage era -- and there are great exhibits of some of these right now, we’ll link to them on our show notes -- the cat was everywhere!

R: Anti-suffrage groups used cats in their propaganda against the women’s rights movement, comparing suffragists to cats. This happened both here and in England. Basically the idea was that a woman voting was as absurd as a house cat voting.

The cat also was used to symbolize something feminine. So some cartoons would show the potential risks of women in power. I’m talking - men at home, with a cat, doing the laundry and taking care of babies. He’s looking at the viewer like, what a sucker I’ve become, domesticated like this house cat.

RD: And so, if they were going to win back the public’s favor, and cat lovers, the suffs had to take the symbol of the cat and rebrand it.

Two suffragists named Nell Richardson and Alice Burke began to reclaim the cat during a cross-country road trip in 1916. They invited the press to send them off in New York City before hitting the road. Nell and Alice, in a tiny, yellow, two-seater called a Golden Flier, depart for Ohio, Texas and other states before ending in Washington and California. And along for the ride was a mascot -- a little black kitten called Saxon, named for the company that made the Golden Flyer.

Wonder Woman: Episode 2

[wonder woman theme]

Retta: Aww yeah that was my jam

Rosario Dawson: Well you know I’m the voice of Wonder Woman

R: What?! Amazing!

[RD Wonder Woman clip]

R: And you know Wonder Woman was all about voting. I mean I don’t know if the Amazons were democratic, but she would’ve been a suffragist.

RD: But seriously why are we talking about Wonder Woman during this suffrage centennial year? The man who created Wonder Woman, William Moulton Marston, was actually a major supporter of women’s equality. He crossed paths with suffragists and feminists like Emmeline Pankhurst, Margaret Sanger and a woman named Inez Milholland.

R: Inez Milholland was a passionate advocate for women’s rights and pacifism. But, as we all know, sex sells, and it did, even then. Millholland was voted the Most Beautiful Suffragist and is perhaps best known for the stylish way she led the famous 1913 suffrage parade in the Capital. Dressed in a flowing white cloak and star-shaped crown, she rode a horse named Grey Dawn while leading the marchers.

RD: It’s easy to see how this image would stick in the mind of Marston as he was creating a female superhero. Wonder Woman was unveiled for the world in 1942.

"The only hope for civilization is the greater freedom, development and equality of women in all fields of human activity,” he said in the press release. Wonder Woman’s goal was to combat the idea that quote “women are inferior to men, and to inspire girls to self-confidence and achievement in athletics, occupations and professions monopolized by men."

R: Whether or not she was the Justice League’s secretary, there was no doubt Wonder Woman was a suffragist.

Rosario Dawson: We all know Sojourner Truth as an abolitionist and a women’s rights activist. But, did you know she was also something of a media mogul?

If you know her story --- she was born into slavery in the 1790s, beaten, and sold several times --- that doesn’t really track. But lemme explain.

By the middle of the 19th century, Sojourner Truth was already captivating audiences with her life story. She would tell them about her life in slavery and her escape to freedom. She also talked about the need for justice and reform.

Retta: And around this time, photos had become relatively cheap and easy to circulate. And Americans were hungry for images. Here’s our resident expert on all things visual, historian Allison Lange

allison lange: For those of us who remember photography before our iPhones, negatives were able to kind of exist in a way that you could create as many prints from that negative as possible. But in the 19th century they made them from glass plates. So once they did that, you could purchase photographs of any kind of famous person. And most Americans by the mid 19th century had these photograph albums in their parlors. And in addition to having photographs of their family and friends that they would exchange, they also had photographs of the famous political leaders of the day and actresses, writers, because otherwise, unlike today where we can just Google what these people look like people had no idea what these important figures looked like. RD: So, Sojourner Truth saw this market as an opportunity, not only to earn a living, but to control her own identity. And for a person who had been owned as property, you can only imagine the power in this.

allison lange: So in the 1860s, she decides to start sitting for carte de visite portraits. They're kind of like baseball cards. They're very cheap. You trade them with your friends. You want to just collect them of all your kind of most interesting figures of the time period. And she really chooses a particular version of herself to represent the public. You can see here from her story that she is not the traditional idealized woman of this time period, but in her portraits, she's often seated regularly next to it, kind of like a domestic home setting, like a parlor with a vase of flowers next to her...a book, knitting, all of these things that really suggest femininity, domesticity, which absolutely was not something that she spent as much time on as perhaps other people would have in that period. And so she chose the way that she wanted to represent herself to the public in a meaningful way.

R: She not only chose the way she wanted to appear, she made sure she owned her own copyright, which was very rare. She put her own slogan on every card, so people knew she was the owner. “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance.”

You see, back in the 19th century, people called photos “a shadow,” since they were literally made using sunlight on glass plates. So Truth was selling her own image to support herself, to support her speaking tours and to support her reforms.

That’s a business model we all can learn from.

allison lange: She had been an enslaved woman. She's now a free woman. And she wants to fully control what part of herself is available to the public to purchase.

RD: “It has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.” Susan B. Anthony said that. What do you think she was talking about?

R: Voting, of course

RD: Nope

R: Ok, probably something about property rights. Or the right to control their own earnings.

RD: Retta, she was talking about bicycles.

R: Ok. I mean I like my bike (or if you hate your bike!). But I never thought about it emancipating me.

RD: Well here’s what else Anthony said. “It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel.” She went on saying that it’s quote “the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.”

R: Wow

RD: Right? So different incarnations of bicycles had existed throughout the 1800s. But they weren’t really conducive to everyday riding. They were more like impressive gags. Then in 1885 John Kemp Starley released his invention -- the Rover Safety Bicycle. And that looked pretty much like our bikes today. And people went nuts.

Economists actually called this period in the 1890s the “bike boom”. According to the League of American Wheelmen at the time, in 1896 for example, there were probably two and a half million bike riders in the U.S. People even threw bike parties.

And all of this came at the perfect time for women who were seeking independence. The bicycle allowed them to move freely, in a much bigger way, without their husbands or fathers.

R: I would imagine the bike also affected what they wore, too? I mean a corset and big skirt is not conducive to riding a bike.

RD: Absolutely. The more popular cycling became, the more women began to shed their corset and instead wear bloomers. Those, incidentally, were named for a suffragist - Amelia Bloomer.

R: I bet some men were not too happy about this...

RD: There were people who were threatened, especially when women were changing their behaviors and dress. And you would even have doctors who tried to make the case that a bicycle could lead to nerves, insomnia or get this -- something called “Bicycle Face.”

R: Not Bicycle Face!

RD: Yes, that’s described as a woman who cycled too much, and got both flushed AND pale. Which would seem hard to be at the same time

R: Yeah I imagine women were not too afraid of bicycle face.

RD: No, the bike was there to stay. It gave women mobility and autonomy...something they would need while on the road to suffrage.

R: Hey Rosario have you done the first pitch at a baseball game?

(Riff on this)

R: Well everybody knows Take Me Out to the Ballgame.

[Harry Caray audio]

Those of us old enough can remember Harray Caray doing it before the Cubs games. But it was actually written in 1908. And so you probably know what I’m going to tell you…

RD: It was written by a suffragist.

R: Close! It was inspired by a suffragist. This is a bit of history that was dug up by a man named George Boziwick who was the chief of the music division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

The song was written by Jack Norworth. And this historian says that Jack Norworth wrote it as an ode to his girlfriend, Trixie Friganza. She was a vaudeville actress, and yes, a suffragist.

[Trixie clip ]

Friganza was very involved in the women’s rights movement. She attended demonstrations and marches, donated money and gave speeches of her own. At one rally in New York City in 1908 she said, “I do not believe any man – at least no man I know – is better fitted to form a political opinion than I am.”

Friganza met Jack Norworth, also a well-known vaudeville performer, and they hit it off. Problem was - Jack was married - to another actress.

RD: Oh boy

R: Yes I know. And this made the press. But they were in love. And love makes you write songs. And one day while riding the subway, the story goes that Norworth saw a sign that read “Baseball Today - Polo Grounds.” And the muse hit, and he wrote some lyrics on the back of an envelope. You can see them at the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

RD: So that’s when he wrote the song we all know? What did that have to do with Trixie Friganza?

R: Well sort of. The chorus is basically the same. “Take me out to the ball game Take me out with the crowd; And so on...with the bit about the peanuts and cracker jacks.

But there are other verses most people have never heard or seen. It goes like this

Katie Casey saw all the games, Knew the players by their first names. Told the umpire he was wrong, All along, Good and strong. When the score was just two to two, Katie Casey knew what to do, Just to cheer up the boys she knew, She made the gang sing this song:

Historians like George Boziwick believe Kate Casey was Trixie Friganza. This is a message of inclusion, with women part of the rooting crowd, with women being good and strong. This is Trixie, people think.

RD: Wow. So what ever happened to their illicit affair?

R: Well, the same year that he wrote “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”, Jack Norworth did divorce his wife. And he got married the following week. But NOT to Trixie Friganza.

RD: What!?

R: I know. He married his Ziegfeld Follies co-star. But Trixie went on to star in over 20 films and marry. And I like to think that if enough of us think about her and her fight for equality when we sing this song, she will truly have the last laugh.

Retta: We’re looking back on this history while in the middle of a pandemic. And I don’t know about you, but when I’m putting my mask on just to try to get my cat food, this all feels really far away.

Rosario Dawson: Yeah, a lot has changed in a hundred years. But I’m sure the suffragists couldn’t have imagined a world without hugging, right?

R: Well, you know actually, we probably should not be forgetting that just two years before women secure the right to vote, the world was facing another pandemic.

RD: That was the 1918 Spanish flu, which infected one third of the world’s population. The impact was devastating -- more than 50 million people died worldwide, and over six hundred thousand died here in the United States.

But that led to unexpected social changes, especially for women.

Allison Lange: the 1918 flu crisis, which is very much similar to our own this global crisis really shaped the way that the 19th Amendment was passed.

R: Allison Lange is a professor at the Wentworth Institute of Technology and is a consulting historian for the Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission.

Lange: it first came to the united states in a major wave in the fall of 1918. It's September 30th, 1918, when Woodrow Wilson addresses the Senate, asking them to endorse suffrage. And it's the week later that the speaker of the House falls ill.

In response, the nation’s capital shuts down. You can imagine it, having experienced something similar today.

And obviously this wouldn’t mean quick progress for any legislation, but women were mobilized in response to the flu crisis, which had a disproportionate impact on young men.

To put it in perspective, look at World War One. That ended just as the flu was at its worst in November of 1918. The war killed around 17 million. That’s only a third of the flu deaths. More American soldiers died from the flu than in battle.

Lange: Women were nurses on a large scale and a lot of them had been nurses and were one and came back to the United States and continue to do so. They were caregivers for their family, but also many of them were enlisted to work more professionally. Another component is that during World War One, the American Red Cross did not deploy women of color to be nurses overseas. But because of the crisis in 1918, they did call up women of color to be nurses, which, you know, by by breaking that barrier, they were allowed to be included in future American Red Cross initiatives. So that was a really important shift in that in the nursing profession for women of color.

By 1920 women made up 21 percent of the workforce. While this gender boost is often credited to World War I alone, women’s increased presence in the workforce would have been far less pronounced without the 1918 flu pandemic. And that was something the public and politicians couldn’t ignore, says writer Elaine Weiss.

Weiss: it makes the old arguments about women's frailty and women's lack of citizenship and patriotism moot. And that's why it really propels things forward. And women have a better sense of themselves. It convinces a lot of women who did not support suffrage before. Now suddenly they've taken on a job, they've taken on public service in many different ways. And they realize that they do want a say in how their nation is governed.

RD: You know we’re having a lot of conversations about this as women’s history. But, I can’t get over the fact that ultimately it was men who had much of the power to control the 19th Amendment’s destiny.

Women campaigned and organized, and some even exercised the right to vote depending on where they lived. But men were mostly in charge at the state and federal level, and would have the final say-so on the amendment.

R: But there was one exception. We need to talk about Jeanette Rankin. She was the one and only woman to ever cast a ballot as a legislator in support of the 19th Amendment.

RD: That’s right. In 1917 she was a Congresswoman representing Montana in the House. And listen to what she said, “If I am remembered for no other act, I want to be remembered as the only woman who ever voted to give women the right to vote.” What a badass.

But she should be remembered for more.

R: Jeanette Rankin was born in Montana before it became a state and initially thought she’d study biology. But while traveling east, she saw how women and children were living in urban slums. And her life’s mission changed.

RD: She ended up studying at what would later become Columbia University’s School of Social Work. And she traveled even further west, to Washington state, to work at an orphanage. But Rankin was frustrated by working on one case at a time. She wanted bigger change.

R: The suffrage movement offered her answers. Votes for women meant social reform. It meant laws to improve the lives of children and families. And while Rankin was living in Washington, it became the fifth state in which women won the right to vote.

RD: Rankin returned to Montana inspired and ready to work. And pretty soon a group called the Equal Franchise Society asked her to address the Montana legislature. Now -- this was a big deal -- a woman in the State Capitol!! So they needed to get their act together.

R: Like put their adult magazines away, or what?

RD: You’re not far off. The legislators were told that day they couldn’t use foul language. Smoking was banned, and spittoons were removed from the room. Rankin was welcomed with a bouquet of violets.

R: I don’t actually hate that part.

RD: But despite being so accommodating to Rankin, and despite her passionate speech, Montana women didn’t win the right to vote for another 3 years.

[music]

But, that paved the way for Rankin’s successful run for Congress. And while she was in office she not only got to vote for the 19th Amendment. She stood behind her pacifist beliefs and voted against World War One. She did this again over twenty years later when she was back in Congress and voted against World War Two. She was the only representative to cast a “nay” vote against both World War One and World War Two.

As she later told a friend, “I have nothing left except my integrity.”