Women weren’t given the vote — they took it, as film reveals
For those of us who remember the “Sisterhood Is Powerful” days of the 1970s, the folks behind the new PBS documentary “The Vote” picked a doozy of an opening.
Speaking from the sidelines of a women’s march in 1970, a male television reporter wryly advises male viewers: “If you go to work tomorrow and your secretary refuses to do the filing, and you go home and your wife refuses to do the cooking, don’t blame them. Remember, 50 years ago, you gave them the right to vote.”
Now, 50 years later as we approach the centennial of women’s suffrage in August, the makers of “The Vote” declare that women were not given anything — they took it.
Their work was not only difficult but sometimes dangerous. From the vantage point of a century later, it may be hard to understand just why votes for women was so threatening. But “the right to vote has always been about power and who has it and doesn’t want to give it up,” notes a commentator in the documentary. In the end, the passage of the 19th amendment created the largest expansion of voting rights in U.S. history.
Path-breaking march
One of the turning points of the movement took place in 1913, the day before President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration (until 1933, inaugurations after Andrew Jackson’s took place March 4).
On March 3, thousands of women marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., in what’s generally considered the first large, organized march on the capital city.
Organized by suffragists Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, the march aimed to express “a spirit of protest against the present political organization of society, from which women are excluded.”
Orlando Sentinel readers learned details a few days later, in a “Washington Letter” report on March 11. “Never before had Washington ever seen such a parade,” the article declared; “a valiant army of American women” had achieved their purpose of putting “their cause so closely before the government.”
The day was marred, the report went on, when the mostly male crowd “literally mobbed the marchers. … The police in many instances stood idly by.”
The women “seized the national stage … and put their bodies on the line in what turned out to be a raucous scene,” historian Martha Jones writes on the website for “The Vote.”
The parade also revealed painful divisions in the movement. Paul and her collaborators had inherited the racism that too often ran through white suffrage associations, especially in the South, Jones notes. “When given her opportunity to remedy how white supremacy threatened to taint her parade, Paul faltered.”
It’s a complex and compelling story, told in the full two-part documentary, which premieres on WUCFTV on July 6 and 7 from 9 to 11 p.m. (folks who have PBS Passport can view it via streaming services now).
“By exploring how and why millions of Americans mobilized for — and against — votes for women,” the filmmakers say, “the film brings to life the unsung leaders of the movement, as well as the deep controversies over gender roles and race that divided Americans then — and continue to dominate political discourse today.”
To learn more
On July 1, at 6:30 p.m., a free online program combines a substantial preview from “The Vote” with commentary by two Central Florida leaders, Linda Chapin and state Rep. Geraldine Thompson. Orange County’s first elected mayor, Chapin chairs the Orange County League of Women Voters’ celebration of the suffrage centennial. Thompson is the founder of the Wells’Built Museum of African American History and Culture.
You can find clips and much addition information about “The Vote” at www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/vote/. To register for the online preview on July 1, visit thehistorycenter.org/event/the-vote/.
Joy Wallace Dickinson can be reached at jwdickinson@earthlink.net, FindingJoyinFlorida.com, or by good old-fashioned letter at the Sentinel, 633 N. Orange Ave, Orlando, FL 32801.