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

sexuality and birth control and she was eventually deported.

Sanger, who worked to educate working class women about birth control, was sentenced to

prison in 1916 for opening a clinic in Brooklyn that distributed contraceptive devices to

poor immigrant women. The fight over birth control is important

for at least three reasons. First, it put women into the forefront of debates about

free speech in America. I mean, some of the most ardent advocates of birth control were

also associated with the IWW and the Socialist Party. Secondly, birth control is also a public

health issue and many women during the progressive era entered public life to bring about changes

related to public health, leading the crusade against tuberculosis, the so-called White

Plague, and other diseases. Thirdly, it cut across class lines. Having

or not having children is an issue for all women, regardless of whether they went to

college, and the birth control movement brought upper, middle, and lower class women together

in ways that other social movements never did.

Another group of Progressive women took up the role of addressing the problems of the

poor and spearheaded the Settlement House movement.

The key figure here was Jane Addams. My God, there are still Adamses in American history?

Oh, she spells it Addams-family-Addams, not like founding-fathers-Adams. Anyway, she started

Hull House in Chicago in 1889. Settlement houses became the incubators of

the new field of social work, a field in which women played a huge part. And Addams became

one of America’s most important spokespeople for progressive ideas.

And yet in many places, while all of this was happening, women could not technically

vote. But their increasing involvement in social

movements at the turn of the 20th century led them to electoral politics. It’s true

that women were voting before the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920. Voting is a

state issue, and in many western states, women were granted the right to vote in the late

19th century. States could also grant women the right to run for office, which explains

how the first Congresswoman, Jeannette Rankin, could vote against America’s entry into

World War I in 1917. That said, the passage and ratification of

the 19th Amendment is a big deal in American history. It’s also a recent deal. Like,

when my grandmothers were born, women could not vote in much of the United States.

The amendment says that states cannot deny people the right to vote because they are

women, which isn’t as interesting as the political organization and activity that led

to its passage. Alright, let’s go to the Thought Bubble.

The suffrage movement was extremely fragmented. There was a first wave of suffrage, exemplified

by the women at Seneca Falls, and this metamorphosed into the National American Women’s Suffrage

Association, or NAWSA. Most of the leadership of NAWSA was made up of middle to upper class

women, often involved in other progressive causes, who unfortunately sometimes represented

the darker side of the suffrage movement. Because these upper class progressives frequently

used nativist arguments to make their claims for the right to vote. They argued that if

the vote could be granted to ignorant immigrants, some of whom could barely speak English, then

it should also be granted to native born women. This isn’t to say that the elitist arguments

won the day, but they should be acknowledged. By the early 20th century a new generation

of college-educated activists had arrived on the scene. And many of these women were

more radical than early suffrage supporters. They organized the National Women’s Party

and, under the leadership of Alice Paul, pushed for the vote using aggressive tactics that

many of the early generation of women’s rights advocates found unseemly.

Paul had been studying in Britain between 1907 and 1910 where she saw the more militant

women’s rights activists at work. She adopted their tactics that included protests leading

to imprisonment and loud denunciations of the patriarchy that would make tumblr proud.

And during World War I she compared Wilson to the Kaiser and Paul and her followers chained

themselves to the White House fence. The activists then started a hunger strike during their

7-month prison sentence and had to be force-fed. Woodrow Wilson had half-heartedly endorsed

women’s suffrage in 1916, but the war split the movement further. Most suffrage organizations

believed that wartime service would help women earn respect and equal rights. But other activists,

like many Progressives, opposed the war and regarded it as a potential threat to social

reform. But, in the end, the war did sort of end up

helping the cause. Patriotic support of the war by women, especially their service working

in wartime industries, convinced many that it was just wrong to deny them the right to

vote. And the mistreatment of Alice Paul and other women in prison for their cause created

outrage that further pushed the Wilson administration to support enfranchising women.

Thanks, Thought Bubble. So, women’s long fight to gain the right to vote ended with

the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. But, in some ways, the final granting

of the franchise was a bit anti-climactic. For one thing, it was overshadowed by the

18th Amendment, Prohibition, which affected both women and men in large numbers. Also

Gatsbys. You could say a lot of bad things about Prohibition,

and I have, but the crusade against alcohol did galvanize and politicize many women, and

organizations such as the WCTU and the Anti-Saloon League introduced yet more to political activism.

But, while the passage of the 19th amendment was a huge victory, Alice Paul and the National

Women’s Party were unable to muster the same support for an Equal Rights Amendment.

Paul believed that women needed equal access to education and employment opportunities.

And here they came into contact with other women’s groups, especially the League of

Women Voters and the Women’s Trade Union League, which opposed the ERA fearing that

equal rights would mean an unraveling of hard-won benefits like mother’s pensions and laws

limiting women’s hours of labor. So, the ERA failed, and then another proposed

amendment that would have given Congress the power to limit child labor won ratification

in only 6 states. So in many ways the period between 1890 and

1920, which roughly corresponds to the Progressive Era, was the high tide of women’s rights

and political activism. It culminated in the ratification of the 19th amendment, but the

right to vote didn’t lead to significant legislation that actually improved the lives

of women, at least not for a while. Nor were there immediate changes in the roles