(upbeat music begins) - Coming up on Inspire, we'll learn about the women's march of 1921 and the fight for a social justice in the cold fields of Crawford County, Kansas, stay with us.

(intro music) - [Announcer] Inspire is sponsored by Kansas Furniture Mart, using furniture to inspire conversation.

And by the Blanche Bryden Foundation.

(upbeat music) - December of 2021 marked the 100th anniversary of the women's march, also known as the Amazon Women's March.

Here to tell us all about it is Linda O'Nelio Knoll of Pittsburg, Kansas.

Linda is an Educator, Local Historian and Playwright.

She is the author of the play "An Army of Amazons."

Also joining us today from Pittsburg is Kris Lawson.

Dr. Kris Lawson, Associate Professor of History at Pittsburg State University.

We are so pleased to have you wonderful educators here with us and Linda, if I could please start with you.

Usually, we hear about women marching for women, but this was women marching for men, their husbands and fathers, and so forth.

- Yes, that's right.

In a cold December Sunday about 500 women decided to meet together at the Franklin Union Hall.

And when they left, they issued a statement on behalf of the wives of the loyal union men of Kansas.

And they wanted to stand shoulder to shoulder with their men in this struggle.

And it was basically against the Industrial Court Act that was recently passed by the Kansas legislature, which outlawed all strikes.

- So tell us about the miners, who were they?

- Well, they came from so many different nationalities and ethnicities.

In the late 1800s, when coal was discovered in Southeast Kansas, they needed cheap labor.

So one entrepreneur, Franklin Playter decided to come up with these posters, these broadsides that said, "Paradise on earth, come to Kansas and mine coal," and these broad sides were placed all over villages in Europe.

And with that hoards of people came to Southeast Kansas to mine coal.

They didn't find the paradise on earth however that they were hoping for.

- I have a question for Dr. Lawson, if you could set the stage for us for what was actually happening.

So we have these coal miners who are down in Southeast Kansas, they were getting unfair treatment, things were happening, they weren't allowed to strike, the women got involved, could you set that stage for us?

How did all that come about?

- Well, there was more than just the unfair labor practices going on.

There were all kinds of national events that were affecting the way that these women were thinking about their place in American society.

So we had just come off of this conflict in Europe, World War I, in which if you were ethnic, if you were not native born American, your loyalty to the United States was questioned.

And they felt this desire to become truly accepted as Americans.

So they participated in Americanization movements and they embraced the flag and they called themselves Americans.

And at the same time that they were struggling with their identity as Americans, women's suffrage had just passed within the past year.

And these women who were wives of miners were becoming naturalized American citizens along with their husbands.

So they were becoming political.

They were gonna be able to vote in the upcoming elections in upcoming years.

And I think there was a lot of excitement about being part of a new political process.

- I find myself disappointed oftentimes when we look back at history on how we treated people, how we as Americans treated others.

And here were these immigrants coming in, hoping to make a better life, hoping to, as you see, have the paradise and the working conditions we understand were miserable.

They lived in horrible houses, and yet these women, often many with were pregnant.

They were carrying their small children with them.

They just knew that they had the need to help.

And I just admire them so much.

And shame on us for not embracing them more.

- And there are all kinds of ways to think about this community.

We can think about them as being separated by language and by ethnicity.

But when you look at the way the community operated, they had so many things that connected them.

And the biggest thing that connected them was this labor in the mines.

And while the women didn't labor in the mines, they were very much part of the mine culture.

They took care of their husbands and their sons and their uncles and their fathers.

When the miners came home, they drew their baths, they fed them, their entire existence revolved around the mines.

And it brought this community together.

It brought these women together into a unified kind of community that we might not imagine would have been so unified.

- Linda, I'd love to hear from you talk about the courage that it took for these women to actually buck the system as it was, and go and strike on behalf of their husbands.

- Well first of all as Kris was saying, the major struggle for workers rights actually did occur to a good part in Southeast Kansas during the early 1900s because of the dangerous working conditions that the miners had to go through.

The coal seams themselves were only two to three feet thick.

So the miners had to work on their sides or on their knees to extract the coal.

Daily there were injuries and accidents.

And in fact, when the women were marching in 1921, there were 10 fatal accidents and 704 non-fatal accidents.

The year before there were 1000 non-fatal accidents and 22 deaths.

The wages were minimal.

Children worked at second turns with their fathers in the mines.

There was no workman's compensation, no disability, if someone was killed then the next oldest child, son, of course would, as soon as they were old enough would go to work in the mines.

If there were no one to do that, the women had to kind of fend for themselves, open boarding houses, find work that way.

So there were all these tensions that had to do with social issues.

So these women were called names, of course, (laughs) alien, foreign born, that was some of the nicer names.

But I'll say that when they did go out to protest for three days, the newspapers were not kind to them.

Most of the established newspapers would call them terrorists, anti-American rebels, which by the way, a good many of these women now, married women with children were also American citizens.

A good many of them in including my grandmother who was born here, but they took on that mantel of immigrants and aliens.

And they were sort of called that a lot.

They were also given military terminology, the word Amazons, Amazon Army.

There's a picture of a young girl.

She's 14 on a car with a flag, one of the marchers.

And she was identified in the New York Times as General Annie Stovitz.

- [Panelist] Wow.

- Yeah, the leader of an Arma band that even bayonetes can't stop these women.

- [Panelist] Wow.

- Either men or women.

So there was a lot of misrepresentation if you will.

And they were attributed also to a lot of things that were just spectacular, never happened.

Some of the newspaper headlines would say that they dynamited mine camps, which they didn't, or that they shot at the houses of some of these scab miners, which they didn't.

(upbeat music) - There is so much more to learn about this.

We're gonna continue our discussion.

So please don't go anywhere, stay with us.

(upbeat music) - Today we're gonna talk about safety considerations that people need to think about before they go hiking.

- So when you're planning to go on a hike, whether it's the summer or the winter, some of the same things apply.

You need to make sure that you let somebody know where you're going and your expected length of time to be gone.

You should take your phone with you.

To save battery, you might put it on airplane mode so that when you need it, it will still have a charge.

In the summer, you need bug spray.

It's always good to go with a partner so that you have somebody with you in case something happens.

- You need water.

- Always.

- You always need water.

So generally people will have a small pack.

- So I have water and a first aid kit, just minimum stuff.

This is a bigger pack, but you can put fewer things in the pack.

You could also take that trail map.

Sometimes we don't take a map, but we know where our car is generally.

And while we're hiking, we continuously think about the direction that we would need to go if we needed to go back to our vehicle.

- And you definitely wanna pay attention to trail markers, every trail has some markers specific to it.

So before you leave on your hike, you need to know what the markers are for that trail and be familiar with what the different colors of markers might mean.

- And then of course, it's important to check the weather.

In Kansas, you never know what the weather might bring.

So it's good to know ahead of time if it's gonna start pouring rain in an hour, you need to time your hike just right.

Or if it will be windy or super hot, you're more likely to be dehydrated.

So knowing the weather conditions help you be prepared for a good outdoor outing.

(upbeat music) So it is important to know your own limits when you're going on a hike or on any outdoor adventure and to not overstress yourself the first few times, you need to test your limits perhaps sometimes.

So the conditions will make a difference.

Hiking on a cool rainy day is easier.

Hiking on a hot summer day, makes it a little bit harder.

So knowing your limits and always having a plan is an important aspect of safety on the trail.

- Another thing to think about regarding safety in hiking is knowing the terrain that you're going to be on.

Although people think that Kansas is pretty flat.

Many of the trails are located in areas that have lots of rocks and lots of trees.

So rocks can sometimes be a little slippery and there can be very steep inclines here in Kansas.

So be prepared for that.

This is Jennifer and Denise with Dirty Girl Adventures.

- [Denise] We hope we've inspired you to get out and get dirty.

(upbeat music) - And we're back with Linda O'Nelio Knoll and Professor Kris Lawson from Pittsburg, Kansas.

Ladies, on our last segment we talked about some of the social conditions and the labor situations that led up to the women organizing and assembling and deciding to take matters into their own hands.

We understand that they gathered together I think just to talk about what they should do.

And one thing led to another suddenly they were marching.

I mean, it's called the Amazon Army, but march implies movement and activity.

So tell us about that.

- They wanted to prove a principle and they definitely believed that there was an injustice that resided in this law, the Industrial Court Act.

So they decided to go to every single mine, if they could, in Crawford County, and they had these huge 15 foot long, 6 foot wide flags, and that they would go mine to mine and talk to the scab workers and convince them to join with their men in the strike.

Well, the first day out they also included the sheriff.

They asked the county sheriff to come and be a part of this because they felt like he was there to protect all the citizens of Crawford County.

The sheriff came to the Union Hall and noticed that, he's counting them, he's just shocked.

He goes, oh my gosh, there must be like 3000 women here.

Again, they asked him to be a part of this and they told him what they were gonna do.

They just wanted to talk to the men, but it soon became apparent that the law enforcement was not going to be helping the women at all.

They were pretty much protecting the company men.

The first day, water hoses were actually being threatened to be thrown upon them at the first mine.

Another incident was a superintendent who had an automobile would've ran over and hurt many women, had they not scattered out of the way because when they came to a mine entrance, they would put the flags down as a barrier for men not to go to work.

And of good many of the men would see the flag and would turn around and go back.

Some men were upset at them but for the most part, they seemed to have a good first day.

- I love the part about it saying, Amazon women, how you're talking about the mythology and how the women were wires from back in Troy and all that kind of stuff against the Greeks.

I just think these women realizing their power and then they really made it known later when they had the vote.

- Oh yeah, that's so true.

Because the three day march, every single day, more and more people would show up.

By the third day, Mary Skubitz's Journal reported that thousands had showed up between 3,500 or to 6,000.

And they were approached by an anonymous man in the road on that third day, telling them that the governor was sending out the state militia, the women were adamant.

We wanna continue.

We don't care if the militia's coming.

Well, Mary and other leaders they were thinking, if these women who are enraged, get in front of these horses with the cavalry, certainly somebody could get hurt.

So they themselves decided to call this march off, saying that they had made an impression.

- Wow.

Well I want to circle back to the ladies getting aggressive with the pepper flakes.

So can you talk to us about that?

Because it wasn't just like they were on the defense the whole time, they were trying to stop the scabs.

Talk about that.

- Yes.

Throwing the pepper, I think was an innovative kind of way of making their point.

One of the things that I've run across recently in reviewing the news about this event, this three day event, which was news nationwide.

So it was in the New York Times and it was in the California papers and it was everywhere.

Everybody heard about this, what was going on in Southeast Kansas.

One of the things that I ran across was what they did while they were marching and they were singing songs and they were having a good time.

And one of the reports that I was reading said they were singing patriotic songs and they were singing modern jazz tunes too, which I think is just a wonderful way to think about these women maintaining their community and maintaining their ties and having a good time doing it and keeping a positive attitude.

And then saying, okay, now here's the law.

You are not going in these mines.

You're gonna step back.

And you're gonna think about our community and you're gonna support us and support our children by not breaking the strike line.

- Are there lessons from the women's march that we can actually take from 100 years ago?

- I think the biggest lesson is community and how important it is to make these community connections in order to affect our lives.

- Linda, would you please weigh in on that?

- The same issues, diversity, immigration, women's rights, child welfare, those issues are still with us today, still playing out.

And if you look back at what those women did at the time that they did it.

I mean, this is a time when they had no running water in their homes, no electricity, everything was a struggle.

And yet within that struggle, they stood for principles.

And they stood for American democracy.

They were very proud to be Americans.

And so I think that legacy is still with us today.

That ability to stand up for things you believe in, even when it's in the law, there were injustices in the law that they found they needed to fight for.

And I know my grandmother who was in the march, I feel that kind of legacy from her and those people that came before me, especially education.

They were so adamant to get their children out of those situations into a better environment.

And most of the ancestors now that I have interviewed over the years of these women are almost all doing well.

I mean, they're all believers in education, they're community minded as Dr. Lawson said.

And so that legacy I think lives on in those ways.

And also right after the strike, it initially looked like it hadn't worked, because Howat called his miners back to work, and they lost their votes and voice in the union.

But looking a little deeper into that history, the mine inspector's report of that year, very quietly put the stats out.

The march actually was very successful because it took 3000 scab minors that were working initially and brought it down to 700 or a little less than 700.

(upbeat music) - Linda and Dr. Kris, we thank you so much for being here today.

And we've all learned so much and thank you for being with us on Inspire.

Coming up, we continue our inspiring discussion of the women's march of 1921.

Stay with us.

(upbeat music begins) - Today we're gonna talk about safety considerations that people need to think about before they go hiking.

- Important facts about being on any trail, especially in Kansas in the summer is to stay on the trail and to not wander off into the greenery on the sides.

You can see anything from poison ivy to stinging nettles, and we have ticks and mosquitoes, and sometimes snakes.

Thinking about snakes in Kansas, the first thing I would say is remember to stay on the trail.

And when you see interesting things on the side of the trail, don't pick them up, right?

Don't flip over a cool big rock or a log, just stay on the trail and keep going.

A lot of times the snakes are underneath those things.

Should you see a snake on the trail, sometimes they like to come out and sun themselves to get a little warm, you are going to give it a wide birth.

We have poisonous snakes in Kansas, and should you be bitten by a snake, that's the worst case scenario.

We just finished for aid certification and you should sit down and be still and dial 911 immediately.

The more you move, the more your body circulates your blood and thus passes the venom throughout your body.

So were you to get bitten by a snake, you should sit still dial 911 and.

- [Jennifer] Wait for help.

- Wait for help.

So one of the thanks to watch out for on the trail, even if you're on the trail along the edges, often there's poison ivy.

Poison ivy is leaves of three, leave them be.

Each leaf has a mitten shape, and there are usually three on a stem.

The leaves can be plain green, but they also have some redness sometimes in them.

And in the stem, you can also notice that sometimes poison ivy climbs up the tree.

So it can be in a vine over your head or attached to a tree.

It can change and look different ways.

So really trying not to brush up against that foliage.

Once you do, or even if you're not sure the tip to avoid poison ivy is to avoid getting the Urushiol oil from the poison ivy plant onto your clothing or your skin.

So after a hike, your best practice would be to undress directly into your washing machine and go take a shower with Dawn dish soap.

It breaks the oil skin bond.

If it's good enough to get the oil off of birds in the ocean, then it can work for the Urushiol from poison ivy.

That that way, when you put your dirty clothes in the dirty clothes hamper, and then pick it up to put it in the washer, you don't start all over again with the Urushiol.

- And think about your furry friend.

If you've got your dog with you on the trail, your dog may very well be brushing up against poison ivy, even if you've got your dog on a leash as recommended.

So be sure and just wipe your dog down or give your furry friend a bath when you get home.

This is Jennifer and Denise with Dirty Girl Adventures.

- [Denise] We hope we've inspired you to get out and get dirty.

(upbeat music) - Ladies, we all know that women are strong and that women are tough, but the women who participated in the women's march back in 1921, they were not to be messed with.

- Definitely not.

- What do you think about today's history lesson?

- Well, I gotta say, first of all, hearing Amazon women, I'm thinking that to me brings up a huge woman.

- [Danielle] Exactly.

- But they were big in what their goals were and their ideals were.

So I love that.

- What came most to light to me is the fact that how little has changed in 100 years, she talked about how the newspapers called them terrorists and the unpatriotic, and they weren't American citizens.

And they had dynamite, fake news, and that they were fighting for workers' rights.

They were trying to help people who don't have a voice.

Have we really gotten any better in 100 years?

- No.

- A little.

- Part of me has to wonder, I know, certainly we have.

And it's also I love the fact that when they got together, they weren't thinking what's gonna happen in three to five days or years or twenty, it's just like right now, we need to help our guys right now without understanding what the impact is gonna be.

And that's how all social movements really take hold.

- Exactly.

And the idea of community.

- [Amy] Yeah.

- I really wish that we had that community feeling.

We've had it like in bits and pieces here and there, but not enough to just get in there and say, you know what?

We're gonna stand up to injustice.

We don't care if they put pepper spray on us, as we're trying to do it, we're gonna stand for what's right.

And I thought was just a beautiful story that the women got together to do it.

- And then reading also about how the men would join in, but they would follow the women, so that they were letting them, their voices be heard.

And I love the fact that it's still known in Crawford County still taught at Pittsburg State University, that's amazing.

- Well, and the cool thing is, is that the women just got the right to vote.

So right after that, they made us huge impact in what the elections were.

And a lot of people were out.

- Exactly, bounced out.

Yes.

- Yeah.

It's like, yeah, it matters.

Does your voice count?

Yes.

- It does matter.

Okay.

So we do need to remember that today.

- Absolutely.

Well, and the fact that we're sharing this with our viewers, because I didn't know anything about it upon coming here to do this episode.

- Right.

- And now I'm like, I'm gonna tell everybody about this, 'cause I'd be like, look what we do in Kansas.

We make history.

I'm sure there's many things that we don't even know about, but definitely this is a piece of our history that we can be proud of, that not only did these women stand up to the union people, but they were like, we're changing laws.

We're bouncing people out who aren't doing any good for us.

- Well, I'm also shocked that we had coal mining in Crawford County in Kansas.

- And 60 mines.

I didn't know that.

(upbeat music) - Yeah.

- Its fascinating.

Well, I am sorry to say that, that's all the time we have for today.

And if you wanna be inspired all over again, just go to watch.ktwu.org to watch this show and all Inspire shows anytime you like.

- And if you are inspired to learn more about our inspiring guests and find out what's coming up on future shows, be sure to visit our website, www.ktwu.org/inspire.

- Inspiring women, inspiring you, on KTWU.

Thank you all for watching.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Inspire is sponsored by Kansas Furniture Mart, using furniture to inspire conversation and by the Blanche Bryden Foundation.