Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 [00:00:05] Welcome to the Colorado Magazine podcast. I'm Sam Bock, Managing Editor of the Colorado magazine, and I'm excited to bring you the third and final in our series about constitutional amendments. On this episode, History Colorado curator, Shaun Boyd, joined State Historian's Council's members, Dr. Susan Shultin and Dr. Nikki Gonzalez for a conversation about the 19th Amendment and everything that came after. I hope you enjoy listening in on their conversation as much as I did.

Speaker 2 [00:00:42] My name is Shawn Boyd, I'm the curator of archives and the curator of politics and government here at History Colorado. And I am with Dr. Nikki Gonzalez and Dr. Susan Shulten. Dr. Gonzalez is a professor of history and vice provost at Regis University. She's a native of Denver and her family has deep roots in Southern Colorado and Northern New Mexico. Dr. Shalton is a distinguished university professor of history at the University of Denver, where she has mentored students for more than 30 years. This episode is part of a series about amendments to the United States Constitution and an opportunity to think about the nature of rights and the Constitution and how it's still relevant today. So thank you guys for being here. The root of this conversation is kind of about women. And the 19th Amendment, but also the 14th Amendment and how maybe that impacts it. But I kind of want to start back in pre 1848, pre the Seneca Falls Convention, pre the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and just kind of talk about women's roles at that point in the early United States. Do you guys have any thoughts on that?

Speaker 3 [00:01:58] I'm happy to jump in here just briefly. This is Susan Schulten. I think like anything having to do with the history of women in this country, it's complicated. The revolution in some ways gives women a new role. I would say that despite the fact that women are primarily governing the domestic sphere, the revolution creates this new and young fragile country, meaning that there's a new imperative and that is to inculcate good citizens. And so women's role in that respect becomes a little bit more heightened if you think about their responsibility to rear the next generation. The other thing that I think is sort of an unintended consequence of the revolution is a widening of educational roles for women, educational opportunities. Certainly not higher education, but there is a proliferation of schools after the revolution outside the home where women can participate, young girls can participate. And that. Of course becomes really a foundational experience for girls who are beginning to be exposed to new subjects, new capacities, and that has consequences for a heightened sense of awareness of their rights later in the century.

Speaker 4 [00:03:15] I would also add, this is Nikki, and thank you, Shaun, for having us on the podcast today. I would argue that, or I would point to like the 1820s, 1830s, when women are starting to get involved in some of the kind of public sphere issues like abolition and the temperance movement. And so they're venturing into that public sphere and they're starting to take on issues that, you know, more, I guess, moral issues that affect their lives and the lives of others. And so that's, I think, the start of women really coming together and developing skills and becoming educated like Susan was saying, and kind of like the footing for a later movie.

Speaker 3 [00:03:58] Women's suffrage. That foundation of women in the public sphere that Nikki just talked about, I think is really fascinating. So listeners may have heard of the second grade awakening, which just refers to this massive outpouring of religious expression and revival after 1800. And one of the parts of that that we don't pay a lot of attention to is those revivals give women a new place in church expression. Demonstrations of faith, even leadership in some churches that are more democratic and egalitarian. And Nikki's point about the growth of reform movements out of religious revivals, chiefly abolition, and I would also say temperance and anti-alcohol movement. Those are two movements that teach women quite a lot. And in some cases even teach white women basic... Understandings of citizenship and basic questions that then lead them to ask questions, not just about slavery, but about the sexual divisions and sexual inequality.

Speaker 2 [00:05:02] And I feel like we're leading very easily into Seneca Falls in 1848, but I kind of want to pop over to the Western experience, the Western US outside of the Eastern US and you set the stage of like what were women's lives like prior to 1848 in the Spanish colonial area and then in the Mexican area.

Speaker 4 [00:05:29] So I can take that. This is Nikki again. I think we really have to look at like the history of women in Mexico in you know the the 19th century with Mexican independence which was was achieved in 1821. Mexican women didn't have the right to vote. They were excluded from voting and yet they filled these like more informal roles politically. Women of means could host political gatherings, they could have influence on politics. I often think that compared to African-American churches, so building on what Susan said, however, adapting it to the Spanish and Mexican settlements in the American Southwest, women took on, the churches became an area of political participation, political organizing, like the African-Americans churches would in the Americans South. And so you see women taking on those leadership roles, those roles of influence. You also see movements in Mexican politics and Mexican history of women becoming more educated, as Susan explained, in the American context. And so women are, you know, they're becoming more educated, they are starting to wade into those feminist waters. And we start to see that. And women who settled in what would become the American Southwest actually had more rights. I mean, they were able to own businesses. This is post 1857, was the new Constitution. In Mexico, which did grant women more rights and separated church and state, and eventually education became secular and it became free. And so there's that. And then in the American Southwest, like I was saying, you could have women owning businesses, women, in my own research, I've talked to people who talked about women who owned entire sheep herds and would manage them, the sheep herdes economically, and they could divorce their husbands, they could. You know, inherit land, which is very different from the Anglo-American experience, which, Susan, you want to take that?

Speaker 3 [00:07:32] That in the American West. Well, yeah, and actually, Nikki, you made me wonder to the extent that Mexico was a Catholic nation, did the Catholic Church have an official position or even an unofficial position? Because I know, of course, later, there's a lot of Catholic resistance in Colorado. But in that earlier period, is there a strong sense of where the Catholic church in Mexico stands on this? I think there is.

Speaker 4 [00:07:56] And again, it's a little bit more complicated than like one stance or one experience, but you have kind of the institutional church taking a more traditional approach to women's roles. However, women are exercising a lot of power within that structure, unbeknownst or unrecognized by church hierarchy. And you also have Mexican politicians who are taking strong stances against that. And with the secularization of education in Mexico. I mean, that's just, that huge because they're not within that institutional structure anymore. So that's where women really get the kind of a stronghold find those educational opportunities and sort of that feminist sort of strand comes out of that. So that secular education, but yeah, you're right. The church, Susan, I mean we will see that when, you know, after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the church will take a very traditional stance. But the church also... I mean, it's interesting. The church in the American Southwest will be present, but not in the strict way it would be in other areas. And so we have, you know, there's a little wiggle room there. And there's also influence from the indigenous tribes as well.

Speaker 2 [00:09:09] Yeah, I was going to say, do we know any stories of either in the Southwest or in the Northeast of Native women influencing how we get to the 1840s? I mean, I know the Haudenosaunee slash Iroquois Confederacy had women in leadership, and that's kind of been touted as an influence on the revolution and stuff like that.

Speaker 3 [00:09:40] Yeah, and there's, this is certainly not research that's original to me, but in my own understanding of Seneca Falls, there's a contingent of women who make their way to Seneca falls for that women's convention and they first meet with Indigenous women who have different understandings of what a political collective might be and how rights or participation or agency might be So that I've read that that's actually a pretty. Powerful inspiration to some of the positions that are taken in Seneca Falls. The other thing I think is really interesting and I'm always sensitive to ironies in American history and these sort of unexpected or unintended developments is that there is this really strange development in American political rights in the 1820s and 30s as states begin to dismantle property qualifications for voting, the white male electorate is growing. You know, the phrase that we commonly hear is Jacksonian democracy. And there is really substantive widening of the political electorate, the constituency, more men. I think by the late 1830s, every state has gotten rid of property qualifications to vote. And yet, that's exactly the time that you see. Really serious violation of rights for Indigenous people in the American southeast, culminating with the tragedy of the Trail of Tears. But also, I think that sensitizes women that there is this broadening of the electorate and broadening the voting rights at the same time that they are actively losing rights. So that I think may even contribute to Seneca Falls in this. If you read the actual Declaration of Sentiments, which I always have my students do, First, they are so blown away that it's modeled on the Declaration of Independence, like down to the language. But if you read their concerns and their beefs, it has to do with the most basic things, right? You tax us without representing us. You take all the best jobs. You make us feel bad about our lives. We have no rights within marriage. And of course, we don't have the right to vote. These are pretty basic concerns and protests. And they- They're not hard. There's no subtext, right Nikki? It's right there in the declaration.

Speaker 2 [00:12:04] Well, 1848 is like a big turning point year, right? That's when both the Declaration of Sentiments and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo happens. But there's also stuff happening all over the world in 1848. And why do you think that that was? Why do you everything kind of converged on 1848? I don't know the answer to that.

Speaker 3 [00:12:26] Do we have an answer? I think that's a great coincidence. You could, you know, organize a whole unit or a course for college students on that. Because for me, part of what is fascinating, if you think about the 19th century more broadly is the third piece of this that you just alluded to, Shaun, is the failed revolutions in Germany in 1848, which creates enormous migration to the US of a particular kind of European, very progressive, very liberal. Educated, well-resourced Germans who come to this country and bring all kinds of new ideas and are very, very opposed to slavery, by the way, and become very crucial in the fight against slavery in the 1850s and, of course, during the Civil War. But they also bring liberal ideas in terms of education, right? New ideas about what a university could be, new ideas about about kindergarten, right, new ideas about leisure, and so there's I think that's a great observation. 1848 could be our new pivotal year for the 19th century.

Speaker 2 [00:13:30] And how did the treaty and the end of the Mexican War impact what women specifically?

Speaker 4 [00:13:38] Wow, yeah. I mean, the treaty was incredibly impactful on the region, on the on the country, in fact. But one of the ways I had mentioned that women had more rights in practice than Anglo-American women. And so, you know, it was like overnight, almost in the blink of an eye, they they were subject to the laws of the American, the American state. And so was it coverture? They lost their property rights, many of them. They were subject to, you know, being property of their husbands, you know, obviously in practice, things would continue, but, you know, women who held a lot of property or who held a lot wealth in the American Southwest would, would be very vulnerable to that legal regime change. There is one really interesting story. A woman named Maria Bartello, and this is not Colorado. This is Santa Fe, New Mexico. But that border is somewhat very arbitrary. But she was known as La Tulas, and she was the owner of Santa Fe's most successful gambling establishment. And she had the means and the savviness that when she saw the writing on the wall and hired American attorneys to translate all of her documents, her property documents, into English and interpret them in terms of American law, American land law. And so she read the tea leaves, and with that political shift, she kept her power. And in fact, she expanded it and was able to increase her holdings in the New Mexico region. And so that was a very good example. But there are a lot of negative examples as well, where women lost everything as they became very vulnerable to land speculators, to the whims of their husbands. But they also came up with other strategies to maybe marry foreign born men, marry American men to kind of keep a hold on their property as well. And so, you know, they, they had strategies too, but they were certainly subject to the American law, which was more restrictive.

Speaker 3 [00:15:51] Nikki just made me think about the relationship or the separate paths of political rights and economic rights. And of course they're intertwined, right? But listening to her speak reminds us that I think sometimes when we look at the history of women in this country, we become fixated on political rights as the paramount goal, right, the vote, for instance. But there's lots of evidence that in the 19th century, economic rights were being fought for, won, exercised. Not always, as Nikki said, we shouldn't exaggerate, right? But that economic rights are a different sphere that sometimes are a little bit under the radar, but do speak to things that are happening outside the civic or political sphere that are probably important to remember.

Speaker 2 [00:16:41] Was just thinking of one of those couples that kind of crossed between a woman who was born in kind of Santa Fe, New Mexico area, and then like mountain men, right? Like you have like Kit Carson marrying a very underage woman from Taos, and he's gone for months at a time, years, and she's like running. The running the business of the family. And I'm thinking of Boggsville and all of that stuff that was happening. I know Boggsvilles a little later, but kind of that late 1840s up until 1859 in the gold rush, what was kind of happening out here in Colorado and the West.

Speaker 3 [00:17:29] One of the things my students find really interesting in studying the American Civil War is that in a lot of those Southern elite plantations or even lesser than elite plantitions, because the population is what it is, a lot those men in the South need to fight, right? And so that the staffing of plantations becomes very lean in the Confederacy and women are often sensitized to the injustices that are being visited upon them. But that doesn't necessarily lead to an assertion of rights in the way that it does in the union. That's one of the great puzzles of 19th century pathways in the regions, right, around suffrage. And that resistance to women's suffrage in the American South and the former slave states, of course, continues up until the way in which many Southern states have the 19th amendment forced upon them rather than something that they're. That they're necessarily arguing for.

Speaker 2 [00:18:27] And of course, the gold rush is bringing women to Colorado with, you know, I, you know, I'm primarily thinking of like pioneers coming from the East with covered wagons. I understand there was also like, you know, later, the railroad was making a big impact, but we're going to, I'm trying to say pre civil war and those women that came out here, did they have a specific, like during that 1859, 1865 period? Did they have a specific profile? Was there a political influence happening? Was it that 1848 liberal people migrating to the US? How did that impact Colorado's settlement?

Speaker 3 [00:19:10] I would say that they're in that first movement toward what becomes the Colorado territory in the Gold Rush. The first thing to remember is there's not a lot of women. I won't speak to Southern Colorado, what becomes Southern Colorado as Nikki said, those were generational settlements. But if we're talking about migrants across the plains, those were primarily men. There are by the mid-1860s of course all these efforts to quote-unquote civilized. This new territory. And I mean that in the double sense of it, both civilized in the sense of the feeling that this was a hostile place, given the Arapahoe and Cheyenne relations, but also the sense that it was uncivilized because it was primarily young men, gold seeking, transient, itinerant. And so part of what you see with Governor Evans, for instance, is an effort to kind of set down institutions, including educational institutions, That's right. To create exactly what Shaun is referring to, a more of a gendered balance and more of family grounding for all of this. But it takes time, right? Colorado Territory, particularly around Denver, really does struggle economically and socially because of the downturn of mining, because of The Horrific Sand Creek Massacre. I think...

Speaker 4 [00:20:27] You know there were fewer women and if you had to I mean think about how strong they must have been because you have women one of the most interesting cases of women a very small population of women coming west are women who cross-dressed right they came and they dressed as men in order to have more economic opportunity because when you think about it if they weren't attached to a well-to-do family. Some mining manager or executive or, you know, who had some economic stability in the West, then there were prostitutes. Prostitution was a profession that was open to women, or women of means might have opened brothels. And so they were very strong women who had to endure some pretty significant challenges in the west. And then, you also have Asian women who would come a little bit later, who were brought to... The U.S. For some of those same professions. So it was a tough life. And in the Southwest, what Susan referred to as the generational communities, mostly Latino or Hispanic communities, Hispano communities, they were just surviving. They were just making a living. And those are the really early years of some of the Mexican land grant communities where life was hard and also, you know. Echoing what Susan said about the resistance by the Apache, by the Ute, by the Comanche. I mean, there was a lot of violence and a lot of defensiveness that people had to deal with and a lot of engagement between those groups, which manifested in a number of ways. I mean there was intermarriage, there was Indigenous slavery, as we all know now, in those Hispano families who often took in Indigenous slaves, enslaved people. And then there was the outright violence between them. And so life was hard. There are like seedlings of coming together to defend a very unique set of land rights in those communities. And we have some of those incidents documented as early as the 1870s, but that gets into a little bit later.

Speaker 2 [00:22:42] I want to bring us back to, so the Civil War happens, I feel bad skipping over the Civil War, but I'm kind of skipping over it because I want to get to the amendments, the post Civil War amendments, particularly the 14th amendment, because I think Susan was mentioning like as through the 1820s, they're eliminating those requirements for land ownership, property ownership, and it becomes like all men over 21. And there were women that tried to vote using the 14th Amendment as the basis, Susan B. Anthony was one of them, and were denied. What influence do you think the 14 Amendment had on women's suffrage? The 14th.

Speaker 3 [00:23:24] Amendment is first and foremost, the first federal definition of citizenship. So that's the thing I think we need to keep in mind that prior to that citizenship had really been wrangled out at the state level. And each state could kind of go its own way and make its own rules. But in establishing that every person born in the US is a citizen, it raises the question, Shaun, that you were just alluding to, well, what are citizenship rights? What do they entail? And that of course generates a whole multi-decade conversation. It means that nobody can have their rights of life, liberty or property violated without due process. And it also defines voting rights for all men. And so it's really the first insertion of gender into a federal constitutional framework. And to your question, well, what does that do in terms of women's suffrage? In my mind, the 14th Amendment paired with the 15th Amendment, which bars discrimination and voting on the basis of race, that gives the suffrage movement a laser focus. In other words, women realize that the thing that's just been denied to them twice over is the thing that they most need to focus on. And so that defeat, and there are very good reasons for leaving women out of that conversation that we can talk about. They really do heighten for someone like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the sense that this thing has been actively denied to us, the vote, and it's the thing we actually have to fight for in the amendment process. In other words, the only real way to gain victory here is to have a federal amendment that protects women's right to vote.

Speaker 4 [00:25:08] And it also brings out racism, American racism, as white women activists go after the black vote. They're saying, I mean, Frederick Douglass has that famous line where he says, basically, wait. You're just going to have to wait. I can't think of the exact quote right now. But that just ignites the movement and makes it a racial issue, too. If you give us white women the right to vote, We'll negate, we'll. Kind of cancel out all of the black vote, right? The black male vote. And so it opens that as well.

Speaker 2 [00:25:43] And that becomes a repeated theme in the women's suffrage movement throughout the 19th century and early 20th century, even. And then you have somebody like Sojourner Truth, who is an intersectional figure during that period, who gives this famous speech about, ain't I a woman? I think she might've been talking more about protective rights of women, but it's all intertwined.

Speaker 3 [00:26:10] These things are really hard to disentangle. One of the most profitable things I have my students read are Elizabeth Cady Stanton's testimonies to Congress. They invite her repeatedly to come and speak about, you know, woman suffrage, and she's only willing to oblige. And to Nikki's point, she's really outraged by the 1890s that wave after wave of of foreign born men with little to no education. Only have to signal their intent to become citizens, and they can register and vote. I think it, for me, it's valuable for us to understand her deep frustration. At the same time, to Nikki's point, be aware that that frustration is also born out of shock that Black men would be protected in their right to vote with the 15th Amendment, at least on paper, of course, not in practice. Meanwhile, Wendell Phillips famously says, now is the hour of the Negro, right? That the situation in the American South was so desperate for the freedmen that he believed that the way to get this through was to prioritize those rights, the rights of black men to vote. Of course, those rights are only on paper, right, that Southern former slave states are so creative and so ingenious in getting around those with poll taxes, constitutional tests. Literacy tests, grandfather clauses, that effectively the 15th Amendment is a little bit vacant. It is a right on paper more than in practice. But back to the point that both Shaun and Nikki were making is that these rights are complicated, right? And there are ways in which educated women, educated white women in the 19th century become increasingly frustrated that others seem to have access to the ballot box before they do.

Speaker 2 [00:28:06] I mean, there was a split in the suffrage movement. Susan Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton formed the National Woman Suffrage Association and Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell, her husband, formed the American Woman Suffrages Association. And Anthony and Stanton were very laser focused, like you've been saying, Susan, on women, particularly white women getting the vote, where Lucy Stone and Henry blackwell were more Like we got to bring everybody black and white together, I think that's how those those two kind of split because they were still interested in trying to work with Frederick Douglass and trying to get universal suffrage, as they called it. And both of those parties end up influencing the 1870s in Colorado so they tried to write women's suffrage into the Colorado Constitution in 1876. It was one of those discussions. Do we want to talk about why Wyoming got to be first? First

Speaker 3 [00:29:14] I would say Wyoming is one of those examples where it really is directly tied to the desire for women to migrate to the territory, right? The governor sort of opens up this invitation that if you come here, you will have universal access to the ballot box. It's a very male dominated territory and then state. I think a lot about the American Women's Suffrage Association, like you said, really interested in taking a different path than someone like Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton. And part of what they're open to, which I find very interesting, it harkens back to something Nikki was talking about in the antebellum era, is what are women's rights in their local communities, right? So one thing that the American Women's Suffrage Association is open to. Do women have rights to vote in issues that directly affect the home? School boards, taxation, alcohol, right? That we may scoff at these, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton did think that they were sort of low-level rights, right, not really worth fighting for, but they actually tell us something about what might feel closest to home for all women, right. Regardless of race, regardless of class. And they also tell us that there are priorities that sometimes we miss when we. Focus primarily on full access to the ballot box. I'm certainly not trying to accept the idea that you would settle, but I do think that that movement tells us something really interesting. And you see it born out in Colorado, right? That Governor Rout and his wife fight for full access for women. But what actually ends up in the constitution is this provision that women can't be denied the right to vote in school board elections. And that's interesting.

Speaker 2 [00:31:01] Yeah, and Henry Bromwell and Acapito V. Hill are like really strong advocates during the Constitutional Convention in 1876, and they just can't quite get it over the border, over the line, but they did also make a provision that anyone who is not currently enfranchised can be by a vote of the people at a general election. Approved by a majority of all those cast. I'm not quoting or anything. And then that starts the 1877 campaign, like right after statehood. And then you have these national, you know, Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, they're coming to Colorado to lead that campaign. And what do we think about that?

Speaker 4 [00:31:53] That's really fascinating. And it's that article seven, section two, that makes all the difference in 1893. But I always think it's really interesting to look at the campaign and look at what communities are receptive to it. Like, there's this one incident when I think it Susan B. Anthony goes to Pueblo. And, you know, there was no announcement of her of her talk, there is no place that was reserved to hold the talk or anything. And so she has to be savvy enough to you know, to print some information out there and get a crowd and eventually it gives a lecture on women's suffrage. And then there are communities where people are very receptive to it. So it's very split and it's interesting to see what appeals to different communities. Carrie Chapman Catt also does a tour of Colorado and, you know and to see different communities kind of compare the two styles. Of the women. One is, you know, more of an argument versus more of an appeal. And so that's really interesting. And you mentioned Agapito V. Hill, who in 1876 was very supportive of women's suffrage, even though he was a Catholic. And so he challenged the archbishop at the time, Matchbaugh, who very high profile bishop. And so it's like Susan said earlier, it's complicated. Eventually it would become like this kind of confluence of events and forces in 1893 that that led to it was a referendum vote, right? Yeah, the majority vote it that eventually gave them the right to vote

Speaker 2 [00:33:33] And that 1877 campaign's a bit of a disaster, and it influences, by 1890, the two, the Stanton, Anthony, and the Stone forces have rejoined. And then the Colorado women in 1893 went to the World's Fair. I always love to talk about the World Fair in Chicago in 18 93. Like they literally saw Ferris wheel for the first time, probably had ice cream, like an ice cream cone. And went and talked to Susan B. Anthony about leading a campaign in Colorado, and her response was less than excited.

Speaker 3 [00:34:12] Was that because she had failed, Shaun?

Speaker 2 [00:34:15] Yeah, I think she really thought that Southern Colorado in particular was just gonna block everything and so she she's like I'm too old I can't do this. Here's my young associate Carrie Chapman cat You can take her but we're not gonna give you any money. You got to figure out how to pay her So it's all this hard-knuckle Political like putting down the electorate into specific

Speaker 3 [00:34:38] And where are you going to put your resources, right? And this is anticipating a little bit what happens after the momentum picks up in 1910. But there is for all the suffrage organizations, right, whether it's the National Women's Party or the National Association, that they got to figure out where they're going to spend their money. It's really interesting what you said, Shawn, that perhaps Susan B. Anthony felt like Colorado wasn't worth it, so to speak. And I do think it's a pretty tight election. In other words. 1893 successful referendum, it wasn't a blowout, right? They got it over a majority, but I don't know. I like to talk about contingency with my students that Colorado very well may have failed it a second time, right, but it didn't. And for that reason, we spend a lot of time talking about the interior West as the origin of all of this movement.

Speaker 4 [00:35:28] I also think it's important to consider the context too. So many things had changed. By 1893 you have the Silver Act which basically gutted the mining industry in Colorado and you have a national depression which really hit certain industries hard, especially mining in Colorado. The suffrage activists are really smart and going back to Susan's point about where to funnel your resources and what strategies to use, I mean they end up really responding to the suffering, especially particularly of the mining communities where there probably wasn't a whole lot of support early on for women's suffrage, but in the midst of crisis and women responding to that crisis with things as simple as food, soup, whatever, they're able to get support because the populist party is gaining in popularity at that time. And they want rights for all. Including women. And so they're able to capitalize upon economic despair and the rise of populism. The World's Fair, very consequential as well, the meeting that they had, coming together all at once. So it's this confluence of factors that comes together. And like you said, it wasn't a blowout. It was like 55 to 45%. But still, you know, that's all they needed at the time. So Colorado could not, there was a possibility that it would not have gone that way.

Speaker 2 [00:36:52] Is there a, the fact that Colorado's in the West on the national scale for, uh, women's suffrage, what do you think that that, why do you think the Western states were more open and receptive to women's suffrage than, cause they were running these campaigns all over the country?

Speaker 3 [00:37:09] Absolutely. Yeah, and by the time these four interior states, so Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, by the middle of the 1890s, by the times those four achieve, it had been defeated in a lot of other places. A lot of other initiatives had fallen flat. I think about this a lot, Shaun, because there's been a lot interest since the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, and I end up being asked to speak about this, a lot to civic groups and teachers. I don't think there's one explanation and maybe Nikki and you Shaun have a different different view. But to me, it seems like each of those four locations has a slightly different explanation for why suffrage got over that hurdle. And it's, I don't think we should attribute some kind of greater sense of enlightenment in terms of gender relations to the four interior states. I think it's more contingent than that. I think the political parties are weaker here. There's not the deep entrenchment. Of this is hard to talk about, but the deep entrenchment of the Democratic Party and its resistance to women's suffrage in the Northeast, having a very, very close relationship to alcohol and the fear that women, not unfounded fear, that the first thing they would do when they got the right to vote is pass temperance laws, right? That's actually not far-fetched. That's actually what they do. And those are slightly weaker forces here in Colorado. It's not the only reason, but I would say the weakness of political parties. The willingness, as Nikki just said, to try something new, particularly in this state motivated by the popularity of the populace in the 1890s, the downturn of silver. So it's, I don't know, Nikki, do you have a thought about that? I think it's complicated.

Speaker 4 [00:38:49] I think it's complicated, too. And something you said, Susan, made me think, I wonder what machine politics, like the machine politics that existed in the East and even in Chicago, what role did that have in the resistance to women's suffrage as well? And we don't have, I mean, there's certainly groups of influence in Western politics, but not like that, not like those kind of urban and very strong movements. And yeah, so I don't know. That's, that's, that's a question for. The ages, really. Like, what is it about the West? You wonder about the church, too. The Catholic Church is so much more powerful in the East than it is in the West at that time.

Speaker 2 [00:39:30] Yeah, so who's not included in that 1893 referendum, which then leads into the campaign for the, the 19th amendment. Although Colorado is already done by the time the 19 amendment happened.

Speaker 5 [00:39:44] Or was it?

Speaker 4 [00:39:45] Anyway. Women of color, for one. Native women, they're not citizens yet. Asian-American women, Chinese Exclusion Act has just been passed a few years earlier. Hispano women, there's a lot of forces. Language issues there. There's, you know, it was white middle-class or upper-class women who led the movement and they certainly weren't thinking about the interests of other them in marginalized groups.

Speaker 2 [00:40:12] Just to try and get us to the 19th Amendment, because that's where we were supposed to be talking this whole time. But it's all background for the 19s Amendment. So the women of Colorado become speakers and the men who were part of that campaign become national speakers. And what influence do you think Colorado had on the 19 Amendment?

Speaker 3 [00:40:32] I'm biased, but I think it has a really significant influence. So those first four states, there's a victory by the turn of the century, and then nothing, right? For 15 years, nothing succeeds. And I try to remind students of that, that there is immense failure from 1896 until there's this string of West Coast victories, right, Washington, California, then Oregon. And that creates this kind of interesting regional momentum. That the women's suffrage movement really tries to harvest. Like there is a Western momentum and that Western momentum is gonna be a juggernaut that moves East. It doesn't necessarily, back to Nikki's point, in 1915, several big deal Northeastern states put women's sufferage on their state ballots, including Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, and they all fail. They just fail miserably. And in this really interesting interview with Anna Howard Shaw in the week after, she's asked, why did you fail so miserably? And to Nikki's point, she directly points to the Democratic Party and machine politics. And the subtext, Nikki, really is immigration and these cities. So there's a whole other side to this that has to do with the rising prohibition movement as well. But they fail, they fail on the eve of World War I. Neither political party is on board officially and all that I think really begins to change with America's entry into World War One.

Speaker 2 [00:42:11] Getting the 19th Amendment ratified across the states becomes the next big campaign, right, is to get them to ratify the 19 Amendment after World War I. But again, kind of like 1893, there's an economic impact from a depression, there is mass immigration, there World War I, there's all this upheaval that happens right before 1920.

Speaker 3 [00:42:35] Yeah, and I think so about World War I, and there's this weird irony that you think about prohibition, right, which is the first federal effort that I can think of to regulate moral behavior. And so that's a particular kind of law. And yet you have the 19th Amendment, which, as Nikki said, highly circumscribed, very much led at the highest levels by white women. But But that's essentially a progressive forward-looking. Enlargement of one's rights. And yet, prohibition and women's suffrage are both passed through Congress at the height of American involvement in the war. And Wilson finally gets on board once New York passes women's Suffrage in November of 1917. He throws his support and he's actually responsible for getting those last few holdout senators to support the 19th Amendment. In 1919. He famously wrangles the final vote while negotiating the Treaty of Versailles. It's sort of extraordinary. But he five years earlier had been opposed to it with the argument that this is a state level concern. This is not a federal jurisdiction. So the war, to your point, Shaun, creates all this upheaval. It creates possibility. It create urgency that forces both prohibition and women's suffrage through in a very interesting way that maybe isn't entirely. Obvious to us in terms of an explanation.

Speaker 2 [00:44:02] And I understand we're running out of time. I'm just wondering, do we have any sources that this was like a sampler platter of women's political history in the West and the early United States? What books or resources could people reach out for to get more curiosity?

Speaker 4 [00:44:25] One that comes immediately to mind about the early period in the American Southwest is in Southern Colorado is Karen Roybal's book, but she talks about how women dealt with the treaty and the shift of power and how they resisted that.

Speaker 3 [00:44:38] There is a good published collection of essays on the uniqueness of the West in leading the rights to vote, and we can put that if there is a show note. The thing that I would send people to, because I think it's just a delight, is the Colorado Historic Newspaper database, which gives you a sense of the incredible variety of efforts that are going on around the state in the way that Nikki was talking about earlier. It has all these notes about Susan B. Anthony. Moving through the state in that failed 1877 campaign. It shows us both through cartoons and editorials, how snarky the Rocky Mountain News was about women's suffrage. My favorite is right after it passes in 1893. Essentially on the front page, both in a picture, a cartoon and in an editorial, the attitude is, well, we can see how long they survive at the polling place, right? They're gonna see how rough and tumble politics really is. They think it's so, you know, polite and fancy. Well, it's not, and I hope they are tough enough to, you know, figure it out. And it's, it kind of gives you a sense of the lingering, you know, frustrations or skepticism that continues, but also all around the state, the Pueblo Chieftain and Boulder County papers that are very excited about what this might mean for new ideas at the ballot box. Let's get those women registered. Let's, let's see where this heads. So. I would recommend the Colorado Historic Newspaper Project. I think it's really fun, super easy for students to use and free, of course. There's nothing like resources. Yeah.

Speaker 2 [00:46:14] Absolutely. Thank you, Susan and Nikki. And we'll continue this conversation throughout other History Colorado things. Thanks, everybody. Thank you. Thank You, Susan.

Speaker 1 [00:46:33] Thank you for listening to the Colorado Magazine Podcast. For more constitutional conversations or to discover more Colorado history podcasts, go to historycolorado.org slash podcasts or search History Colorado on your favorite podcatcher.