Name: 婦女參政權。美國曆史速成班#31 (Women's Suffrage: Crash Course US History #31)
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Duration: 13 min 31 s
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Hi, I’m John Green, this is Crash Course U.S. history and today we’re going to talk

about women in the progressive era. My God, that is a fantastic hat. Wait, votes

for women?? So between Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson,

and all those doughboys headed off to war, women in this period have sort of been footnoted

shockingly.. Mr. Green, Mr. Green. I’d NEVER make a woman

a footnote. She’d be the center of my world, my raison d’etre, my joie de vivre.

Oh, Me from the Past. I’m reminded of why you got a C+ in French 3.

Let me submit to you, Me from the Past, that your weird worship of women is a kind of misogyny

because you’re imagining women as these beautiful, fragile things that you can possess.

It turns out that women are not things. They are people in precisely the same way that

you are a person and in the progressive era, they demanded to be seen as full citizens

of the United States. In short, women don’t exist to be your joie

de vivre. They get to have their own joie de vivre.

intro So, it’s tempting to limit ourselves to

discussion of women getting the right to vote with the passage of the 19th amendment, but

if we focus too much on the constitutional history, we’re gonna miss a lot.

Some historians refer to the thirty years between 1890 and 1920 as the “women’s

era” because it was in that time that women started to have greater economic and political

opportunities. Women were also aided by legal changes, like getting the right to own property,

control their wages and make contracts and wills.

By 1900 almost 5 million women worked for wages, mainly in domestic service or light

manufacturing, like the garment industry. Women in America were always vital contributors

to the economy as producers and consumers and they always worked, whether for wages

or taking care of children and the home. And as someone who has recently returned from

paternity leave, let me tell you, that ain’t no joke.

And American women were also active as reformers since, like, America became a thing.

And those reform movements brought women into state and national politics before the dawn

of the progressive era. Unfortunately, their greatest achievement,

Prohibition, was also our greatest national shame. Oh, yeah, alright, okay. It’s actually

not in our top 5 national shames. But, probably women’s greatest influence

indeed came through membership AND leadership in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.

The WCTU was founded in 1874 and by 1890 it had 150,000 members, making it the largest

female organization in the United States. Under the leadership of Frances Willard, the

WCTU embraced a broad reform agenda. Like it included pushing for the right for women

to vote. The feeling was that the best way to stop

people from drinking was to pass local laws that made it harder to drink, and to do that

it would be very helpful if women could vote. Because American men were a bunch of alcoholic

scoundrels who darn well weren’t going to vote to get rid of beer hoses.

In 1895 Willard boldly declared, “A wider freedom is coming to the women of America.

Too long has it been held that woman has no right to enter these movements (…) Politics

is the place for woman.” But the role of women in politics did greatly

expand during the Progressive era. As in prior decades, many reformers were middle and upper

class women, but the growing economy and the expansion of what might be called the upper-middle

class meant that there were more educational opportunities and this growing group of college-educated

women leaned in and became the leaders of new movements.

Sorry, there was no way I was gonna get through this without one “lean in.” I love that

book. So as we’ve talked about before, the 1890s

saw the dawning of the American mass consumer society and many of the new products made

in the second wave of industrialization were aimed at women, especially “labor-saving”

devices like washing machines. If you’ve ever had an infant, you might

notice that they poop and barf on everything all the time. Like, I recently called the

pediatrician and I was like, “My 14-day-old daughter poops fifteen times a day.” And

he was like, “If anything, that seems low.” So the washing machine is a real game-changer.

And many women realized that being the primary consumers who did the shopping for the home

gave them powerful leverage to bring about change.

Chief among these was Florence Kelley, a college-educated woman who after participating in a number

of progressive reform causes came to head the National Consumers League.

The League sponsored boycotts and shaped consumption patterns encouraging consumers to buy products

that were made without child or what we now would call sweatshop labor.

Which at the time was often just known as “labor.”

And there was also a subtle shift in gender roles as more and more women worked outside

the home. African American women continued to work primarily as domestic servants or

in agriculture, and immigrant women mostly did low-paying factory labor, but for native-born

white women there were new opportunities, especially in office work.

And this points to how technology created opportunities for women. Like, almost all

the telephone operators in the U.S. were women. By 1920 office workers and telephone operators

made up 25% of the female workforce, while domestic servants were only 15%.

A union leader named Abraham Bisno remarked that working gave immigrant women a sense

of independence: “They acquired the right to personality, something alien to the highly

patriarchal family structures of the old country.” Of course this also meant that young women

were often in conflict with their parents, as a job brought more freedom, money, and

perhaps, if they were lucky, a room of one’s own.

Oh, it’s time for the Mystery Document? Please let it be Virginia Woolf, please let

it be Virginia Woolf. The rules here are simple. I guess the author of the Mystery Document.

I’m either right or I get shocked. Alright, let’s see what we’ve got.

“The spirit of personal independence in the women of today is sure proof that a change

has come … the radical change in the economic position of women is advancing upon us…

The growing individualization of democratic life brings inevitable changes to our daughters

as well as to our sons … One of its most noticeable features is the demand in women

not only for their own money, but for their own work for the sake of personal expression.

Few girls today fail to manifest some signs of the desire for individual expression …”

Well, that’s not Virginia Woolf. Stan, I’m going to be honest, I do not know

the answer to this one. However, it has been Woodrow Wilson for the last two weeks. You

wouldn’t do that again to me, or would you? I’m gonna guess Woodrow Wilson. Final answer.

DANG IT. Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the book Women

and Economics? What? Aaaaaah! The idea that having a job is valuable just

for the independence that it brings and as a form of “individual expression” was

pretty radical, as most women, and especially most men, were not comfortable with the idea

that being a housewife was similar to being a servant to one’s husband and children.

But of course that changes when staying at home becomes one of many choices rather than

your only available option. And then came birth control. Huzzah!

Women who needed to work wanted a way to limit the number of pregnancies. Being pregnant

and having a baby can make it difficult to hold down a job and also babies are diaper-using,

stuff-breaking, consumptive machines. They basically eat money. And we love them.

But birth control advocates like Margaret Sanger and Emma Goldman also argued that women

should be able to enjoy sex without having children. To which men said, “Women can

enjoy sex?” Believe it or not, that was seen as a pretty

radical idea and it lead to changes in sexual behavior including more overall skoodilypooping.

Goldman was arrested more than 40 times for sharing these dangerous ideas about female

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婦女參政權。美國曆史速成班#31 (Women's Suffrage: Crash Course US History #31)

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