(soft music) (light instrumental music) I would paraphrase the standard saying about Ohio, as Ohio goes, so goes the nation.

I think the same could be said about Ohio and the women's suffrage movement.

New Yorkers and people from Boston may think they led the way, but we know Ohio really is a testing ground.

Ohio is a microcosm of the national women's suffrage movement.

Everything that women try in different piecemeal to try to get the vote happens here in Ohio.

It was a fight, it wasn't a gift.

It's been a fight since America's been around as a democracy.

What does it mean to be a democracy, and what does it mean to have citizens fully participate?

If you are an American citizen that has experienced any form of oppression.

If you've experienced racism, sexism.

That's the fundamental hope in voting, to return to the language of life, liberty, and happiness.

The story of suffrage activism in Ohio is a story of solidarities.

It's a story of fissures, and it's also a story of dynamism.

If you want to look at what women's activism has looked like over the past 150 years, you can look at Ohio.

(light instrumental music continues) [Narrator] In the United States, women fought for decades for the right to vote in local, state, and national elections.

It is commonly thought that the women's suffrage movement lasted for about 70 years, until the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1920.

In reality, the fight for the ballot existed for much longer.

It was a journey fraught with twists and turns, unexpected alliances and bittersweet reversals.

Taking a closer look at the women's suffrage movement in Ohio reveals the deeper story.

July 1848, Seneca Falls, New York, the first women's rights convention.

And that's the first time that the official demand for the vote is made.

The Seneca Falls Convention is always seen as this point of origin when we think about women's suffrage activism in the United States.

And that couldn't be farther from the truth.

The standard story of suffrage goes something like this: that women gathered together, women and men I should say, gathered together in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848 to demand the vote among many other reforms.

Then, a mere 75 years later in 1920, the 19th Amendment was ratified enfranchising women.

As my colleague Lisa Tetrault explains, this is a myth, the myth of Seneca Falls.

But it really pervades our understanding of the movement, from our textbooks to our national discussions about it.

And it is just that.

A myth.

[Narrator] The women who meet at Seneca Falls find inspiration in a surprising place, with roots deep in our country's past.

[Tracy] Some of the very early women suffrage leaders were inspired by the Iroquois, and the Iroquois Federation of Native American tribes was located around northwest upstate New York, which is where Seneca Falls occurred.

Their constitution itself gave women equal decision-making power.

What this alternative governance system gave was an example to the women of how we could do this differently.

The women leaders of the suffrage movement said the way we are doing it in our current society is not the only way to do it.

[Narrator] At the conclusion of the Seneca Falls Convention, 100 women and men sign a Declaration of Sentiments based on the Declaration of Independence.

It outlines the rights that American women should be entitled to as citizens, and argues that women be granted all the same rights and privileges that are granted to men.

This request is utterly radical in 1848.

But the women and men who attend Seneca Falls are already well-versed in asking for the impossible.

[Dr. Lindsey] The women who are attending Seneca Falls Convention and the sole African American who attended, Frederick Douglass, are all people who've been involved in the anti-slavery fight for over a decade.

The 1835 formation of the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society really shows the movement's origins in abolition before 1848.

Focusing on Seneca Falls misses that important part of the history and also obscures the key role that African American women played in the suffrage movement from the very beginning.

It's important to understand the women's suffrage movement and the abolition movement as two sides of the same coin.

In fact, they were very much the same people up until the Civil War.

Historically, the Ohio River is a barrier between slavery and freedom.

Once slaves crossed from Kentucky over the Ohio River into Cincinnati, they were free.

So, to talk about the abolitionist roots of women's voting rights, in Ohio it has a unique history and tenor.

So many of the women who fought for the cause of anti-slavery also took up the cause of suffrage.

And the political strategies they learned and practiced, speaking in public, writing, forming alliances with men and women who were interested in promoting equal rights for women as well as racial equality.

Ohio serves as a training ground for suffragists.

Ohio really is a testing ground for how do feminism and abolitionism work together.

The struggle over slavery and anti-slavery in the state of Ohio was quite heated and in the city of Cincinnati, there are major race riots in 1829 and again in 1836.

During those race riots, white women, as well as women of color, find themselves fighting both for their own dignity and worth as well as for racial justice.

[Narrator] The riots in Cincinnati are touched off by racial tensions.

White citizens as well as recent immigrants from Europe feel that free Black people and escaped slaves are unfairly competing for their jobs.

Cincinnati abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, who later authors the anti-slavery novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," witnesses the violence of an angry white mob during the 1836 riot.

After they destroy the printing press of an anti-slavery newspaper, she writes to her husband.

"The mayor was a silent spectator of these proceedings and was heard to say, 'Well, lads, you have done well so far, go home now before you disgrace yourselves,' but the lads spent the rest of the night and a greater part of the next day in pulling down the houses of inoffensive and respectable Blacks."

Between 1836 and 1839, throughout Ohio, at least 30 female anti-slavery societies had been formed.

And these were women who also were involved in a larger quest for equal rights.

Many of them came out of a Quaker tradition, others came out of the peace movement.

Some of them came out of church movements in which they felt called upon as women to give moral testimony to equality and found themselves blocked within the churches.

They were reformers of all kinds.

So, the movement made strange bedfellows.

The Free Love movement was a really fringe, small movement in 19th century America, but vital as a place in which women and men began to question the origins of patriarchy, about how and why things came to be the way they are, traditional marriage and monogamy.

Women also questioned marriage as a place where they lost their total identity to their husband, not just legally but also economically and sexually.

A really important aspect of Ohio in the national story, these free-loving, free-thinking women who have important ties here.

For example, Francis Fanny Wright, a radical abolitionist and also a free lover, she began speaking out about abolition and women's rights in Cincinnati in 1828, a full two decades before the Seneca Falls Convention.

The first women who organized together did so to reject the sexual double standard and also to organize for abolition.

They weren't initially demanding the vote for themselves; they were demanding much broader changes to society.

This group of reformers believed that the Constitution contained two really glaring flaws in that it allowed slavery and did not allow Black men and white and Black women to vote.

What reformers first demanded was universal suffrage, citizenship equals voting rights.

They believed that was essential to making America the democracy that it proclaimed to be.

[Narrator] Women in the anti-slavery movement are ready to step forward and help the cause.

But they're limited by social custom from organizing to express themselves on public issues.

Some bold young women attending college in Ohio begin to change that.

[Dr. Lasser] Oberlin was the first college to educate men and women together.

In 1835, it made a commitment to the education of people of color, becoming the first truly inter-racial college in the country.

[Narrator] As a home for inclusive discourse, Oberlin faculty and students are active in seeking an end to slavery, a first step towards universal justice and universal suffrage.

It is impossible to imagine the women's suffrage movement without the activism that takes place at Oberlin.

We only think about it as a college, but it has these deeply religious ties as an institution, and part of that religious conviction was a fierce, fierce anti-slavery position.

And the abolitionist cause, the cause of women's rights is something that is so important to Oberlin becoming this kind of hotbed of activism.

Lucy Stone arrived from Massachusetts to attend Oberlin College, and when she graduated in 1847 became really key to the organizing of both women and people of color.

She said, famously, "I was a woman before I was an abolitionist."

And so when she had to fight for her ability to speak as an abolitionist, she also took to speaking as a woman.

[Lucy] "In education, in marriage, in religion, in everything disappointment is the lot of women.

It shall be the business of my life to deepen that disappointment in every woman's heart until she bows down to it no longer.

I wish that women, instead of being walking show-cases, instead of begging their fathers and brothers the latest and gayest new bonnet, would ask of them their rights."

Although Oberlin becomes the kind of standout institution in many ways, I think it's important to talk about the role that historically Black colleges and universities played.

Wilberforce University, which is one of the first historically Black colleges and universities in the United States, Central State, also places like Antioch College.

There's this incredible history of these small, liberal arts kind of enclaves that really cultivate a particular kind of energy, specifically among African American women.

So, even women who weren't directly affiliated with these institutions still benefited from those kinds of conversations.

Ohio as a state has a really dynamic history as it pertains to what's happening at these institutions with regards to progressive activism.

[Narrator] Agitation for women's suffrage in Ohio is taken up by the abolitionist press.

In 1845, the Anti-Slavery Bugle newspaper in Salem, Ohio takes a firm stand for women's rights.

Five years later, women gather there to make history.

Soon after Seneca Falls, many other localities and states started having these conventions.

Seneca Falls was just the stone that started the ripple.

[Narrator] Two weeks after Seneca Falls, a follow-up convention for women's rights is held in nearby Rochester, New York.

In April 1850, Ohio becomes the first state outside of New York to hold a women's rights convention.

It was really precipitated by the Ohio State Constitutional Convention.

And the women met in Salem, Ohio to try to weigh in and have women's suffrage be in the state constitution.

Salem, Ohio had over 500 attendees and the women were in charge.

Women were the leaders, men did not have the right to vote for their proposals, although, they attended and were very much in support.

All the national leaders wrote lectures.

So, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, all of the main leaders weighed in and were part of that.

Like Seneca Falls, there was a broad platform of what issues women were demanding.

They were demanding equal rights for all regardless of sex and color.

And those included all political and all legal rights, including suffrage.

So, marital property, farms that were inherited but couldn't be owned by women, rights to child custody.

It was really those family issues that brought women to the convention and then they heard about wanting, really, full equality on all grounds.

[Narrator] Soon local women's rights conventions begin to pop up all across Ohio, in McConnellsville, Chesterhill, Mount Gilead, and in Massillon, where the Ohio Women's Rights Association is established.

Ohio also hosts national women's rights conventions in Cleveland in 1853 and in Cincinnati in 1855.

These early conventions had very tangible results.

Ohio had some early marital property statutes passed, giving women more rights in the family.

It had some early child custody statutes passed which were really ahead of the curve.

The other states get there eventually, but Ohio had some very progressive legislation giving some of those family rights that had been of concern to the women.

[Narrator] In May 1851, Ohio hosts a second statewide women's rights convention in Akron.

Sojourner Truth, a former slave and the only Black woman in attendance, takes the stage and brings a new perspective to the conversation.

It becomes one of the most famous speeches in American history.

[Sojourner] "May I say a few words?

I want to say a few words about this matter.

I am a woman's rights.

I have heard much about the sexes being equal.

I can carry as much as any man, and can eat as much too, if I can get it.

You need not be afraid to give us our rights for fear we will take too much.

Why children, if you have woman's rights, give it to her and you will feel better.

You will have your own rights, and they won't be so much trouble."

Sojourner Truth allegedly said, "Ain't I A Woman."

White suffragists depicted Sojourner Truth in this manner of being uneducated, almost mammy-like figure less intellectual, less cosmopolitan, less aware than themselves.

This shows how even when African American women were at the forefront of movements, that white women often could not see past their Blackness.

The women's suffrage movement has a long history of being in sync and allies with racial justice and racial equality, and then also being out of sync and antagonistic.

Any time African Americans were seen as a threat or a hindrance to white women getting what they wanted, that alliance broke down.

So, Sojourner Truth, newsflash, she never said, "Ain't I a Woman."

(laughs) The national myth around Sojourner Truth belies the true gravity of this historical moment about this Black woman speaking in Akron, and speaking to the truths of the day that both address anti-Black racism as well as sexism.

And what it meant for her as a Black woman to stand side-by-side white suffragists and say, "Here's what needs to happen and I need to be included in this.

And this is not just about white women's rights but about all women's rights.

And we can't have that without Black women's voices being centered."

The double burden of sexism and racism means that African American women have endured a certain type of violence against their own bodies and attacks on their humanity that are rooted in slavery, in which your body was not your own.

That's another level of oppression.

[Narrator] Tensions simmer for decades over the oppressions caused by the institution of slavery.

In 1861, the Civil War halts the women's movement as bigger challenges are faced by the nation.

It will be years after the end of hostilities before the first state or territory in the United States finally extends full suffrage to women.

The American Civil War rages for four years.

At its end, new freedoms come to the formerly enslaved.

And suffragists begin their work anew.

In 1866, the American Equal Rights Association is formed to fight for suffrage for all regardless of gender or race.

Hopes are high as new amendments to the Constitution appear to help the cause of women's suffrage as well.

After the Civil War, the nation ratified the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.

The 13th Amendment abolishes slavery, the 14th Amendment extends citizenship rights to the newly emancipated African Americans, and the 15th Amendment extends the vote to Black men.

So, suffragists begin to argue that women already are enfranchised.

That if you read the 14th and 15th Amendments together, they say, citizenship equals voting rights.

In 1871, young, beautiful Victoria Woodhull, who was born in Homer, Ohio, becomes the first women to testify before a Congressional committee about what suffragists called their new departure strategy.

[Victoria] "Men trust women in the market, in the shop, on the highway and the railroad, and in all other public places and assemblies, but when they propose to carry a slip of paper with a name upon it to the polls, they fear them.

Nevertheless, as citizens, women have the right to vote.

The American nation, in its march onward and upward, cannot publicly choke the intellectual and political activity of half its citizens."

She then uses this to jumpstart her campaign for president.

She runs for president in 1872 with pioneering abolitionist Frederick Douglass as her vice president.

Her campaign is scandalous from the start, not just because she's a woman but also because she's known to espouse free love as a principle.

And this is a really important chapter in suffrage history, a chapter in which a woman from Ohio plays the leading role.

[Narrator] Ohio's women begin to organize in earnest at the local level.

The Ohio Woman Suffrage Association is established in Cincinnati in 1869.

By the 1870s, Ohio is home to 32 different women's suffrage organizations, each focused on changing the local and state laws that prohibit women from voting.

[Tracy] The vote is considered to be a fundamental right because it's more than just ticking a box.

Voting is an expression of your individual power and agency and ability to control the world around you.

How could you get the right to protection against domestic violence?

The vote was the mechanism by which to enforce those civil rights.

Many feminists found temperance as a part of their earliest commitments.

Drink was looked at as enslaving people, and so fighting for the humanity of people of color also meant fighting against the dehumanizing factors of alcohol.

The Women's Christian Temperance Union was actually founded in Ohio in 1874.

The Women's Christian Temperance Union tends to get a bad rap as a bunch of ladies who want to shut down the party and take away your alcohol.

What motivated women to join the temperance movement was the desire to not be raped by their drunk husbands, to not have their drunk husbands come home and abuse their children, or spend all their money at the saloon.

[Narrator] The Women's Christian Temperance Union provides women with a safe and socially acceptable way to enter the public sphere to make their voices heard and enact reform.

It also campaigns for labor laws, prison reform, and other social welfare issues of concern to women.

The campaign to raise the age of sexual consent for girls was started by the Women's Christian Temperance Union in the 1880's.

The only states where they succeed in raising the age of consent all the way to 18 is the states in which women have at least partial suffrage: Kansas, Wyoming, and after 1894, Colorado.

The lesson that temperance advocates and suffragists learned from these age of consent campaigns was if we want to protect our own bodies, we need the vote.

So, raising the age of sexual consent, I think, is what helps convert Christian Temperance Union women into suffragists.

[Narrator] In the 1880s, the Women's Christian Temperance Union expands across the globe.

International temperance conventions are held in Chicago, Toronto, and Glasgow.

Its members earnestly believe in women's temperance as a means to uplift their sex and transform relations between men and women.

(soft uptempo music) Wilberforce University professor Hallie Quinn Brown is one of the more prominent speakers at the World's Women's Christian Temperance Union Convention in London in 1895.

She is well-known as one of the greatest elocutionists in Europe and the United States, renowned for performing speeches on temperance, civil rights, and women's suffrage.

She travels frequently on extensive lecture tours, but keeps up her teaching duties at Wilberforce, introducing thousands of Black women and men to the power of the spoken word.

Hallie Quinn Brown saw her future, her destiny, her commitment to her community as being linked to the progress of all African American women.

And through strength in numbers by forming these alliances with other African American women activists, she fought for the cause of African American women voting.

[Narrator] Her activism is matched by another young woman who also teaches at Wilberforce University, Mary Church Terrell.

Mary Church Terrell, she's the daughter of one of the first known Black millionaires from the South.

She's a founding member of the National Association for Colored Women.

She's a founding member of the NAACP.

She is someone who commits her life to justice and the ultimate goals of equality: anti-lynching, desegregation, access to education for everyone, but particularly for Black communities.

[Narrator] Mary Church Terrell first comes to Ohio as a child to attend elementary school in Yellow Springs.

She continues her education in the Oberlin, Ohio public schools and then transitions to Oberlin College for her bachelors and masters degrees.

[Dr. Brown] And while studying in this liberal arts program, she met other smart African American women such as Anna Julia Cooper and Ida Gibbs Hunt.

Ida was a suffragist.

She was an educator.

She was an activist.

Her husband was a US consul to Liberia, France, Madagascar and Guadeloupe.

So, her travel experiences with her husband gave her a broader perspective on international issues of social justice in the context of social justice in the United States.

[Narrator] Travel allows Ida Gibbs Hunt to promote her ideals internationally.

She connects with women suffragists in France, and gives speeches in support of peace and civil rights.

She also participates in the early Pan-African Congresses, held in Paris and London, to discuss dismantling European colonialism in Africa.

Her classmate at Oberlin, Anna Julia Cooper, also takes the opportunity to gain an international perspective.

[Dr. Brown] Anna Julia Cooper was the first African American woman to get her PhD from the Sorbonne.

She was an activist, a writer, an intellectual.

She's known for her publication, "A Voice from the South by A Black Woman of the South," which was released in 1892.

Anna Julia Cooper had the audacity to say, "My voice is important, my voice needs to be heard.

To tell the truth about racism in this country, about sexism in this country, I'm gonna speak my truth as a Black woman from the South."

[Anna] "Woman's cause is the cause of the weak and when all the weak shall have received their due consideration, then woman will have her rights and the Indian will have his rights and the Negro will have his rights, and all the strong will have learned at last to deal justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly."

[Dr. Brown] These African American intellectuals were in conversation with each other.

They were really part of a broader movement that's known as racial uplift.

They were interested in working together to improve the socioeconomic standing of African Americans.

These leaders took matters into their own hands and they built institutions: women's clubs, fraternities, sororities, church organizations.

So, it was a way of coming together and relying on each other to uplift each other.

And one of Mary Church Terrell's favorite mottoes was, "Lifting as we climb."

[Dr. Lindsey] I think it's important to think about them as activists who saw racial justice and gender justice as deeply intertwined.

And that training and grounding was harnessed and homed here in Ohio.

[Narrator] Women in Ohio continue to fight for suffrage at every level.

Starting in 1887, year after year, bills are introduced in the Ohio's legislature for full or partial women's suffrage.

And year after year, they are knocked back.

In 1890, in only a handful of territories and one state, Wyoming, are women able to vote.

Finally in April 1894, a suffrage bill passes in Ohio, allowing women to vote in school board elections as well as run for school boards beginning in 1895.

Ohio gets school board suffrage in about 1895, one of the earlier states, following Kentucky.

People could accept women voting for school board issues.

Women were teachers, women were mothers, so they had something to say about children.

[Caroline] "Have just returned from the primary election where I cast my first vote, only for a school director to be sure, but then it was a vote!

The wind blew and the snow fell, and the people went to and fro, quite unconscious of the fact that I was casting my first ballot in a public election, of great value to my self-importance, although it is but a small fraction of the full elective franchise.

The whole will come in time."

[Narrator] School board suffrage is an important step forward.

But for some time, women's roles have been growing beyond the home.

Working class and immigrant women step forward to join the fight for expanded rights, including suffrage.

So, we move beyond the conventions and the conversations among suffragists and so we see a number of these women pushing back against the notion that there's a women's sphere in which this activism should be taking place.

We're talking about tens and thousands of women, many of whose names we don't even know that challenged this notion of this middle-class, educated, polished, very affluent kind of movement.

And that has a lot of different looks, backgrounds, and I think one of the important parts of telling this story is getting the diversity of perspectives, politically, racially, ethnically, class-wise, to tell the real and nuanced story of what suffrage activism actually looked like.

Toledo had an active immigrant suffragist, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, who was a grandmother of today's Gloria Steinem.

[Narrator] German-born civic reformer Pauline Perlmutter Steinem immigrates to Toledo in the 1880s.

In 1904, she is elected to the Toledo Board of Education, becoming possibly the first Jewish woman elected to political office in the United States.

[Dr. Lasser] Pauline was active in municipal court reform, in the city club movement, in the suffrage movement, and she pioneered a commitment to women two generations before her granddaughter brought her own version of feminism to the national stage.

(soft music) In 1890, the two rival suffrage groups, the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association, merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association which is often referred to as NAWSA.

And this is what signals not only the unification of the movement but also it's cooperation with the Women's Christian Temperance Union.

So, the Women's Christian Temperance Union is by far the largest women's group of the 19th century.

It has over 200,000 members, whereas the suffragists are a teeny, tiny group compared to the Women's Christian Temperance Union.

So, it makes great strategic and logical sense for the suffragists to want to partner with the WCTU.

[Narrator] In 1903, Harriet Taylor Upton, former president of the Ohio Woman Suffrage Association, brings NAWSA's national fight for suffrage back to Ohio.

She was the secretary in the National Association of Woman Suffrage, the national organization, and she brought the archives and the organization here to the Youngstown area and Warren, where she was from.

And so the national ideas were coming out of here in Ohio.

Her main role was to keep national leadership apprised of what life was like in the states so that they could see just what it would take to get the vote passed in states like Ohio.

In 1920, Harriet Taylor Upton is elected vice-chair of the Republican National Committee.

In 1924, she runs for Congress.

She lost in the primary, but that was her vision.

She wanted a seat at the table.

[Narrator] While Harriet Taylor Upton is making sure national suffrage leaders understand what's happening in communities far from the halls of power, another Ohio woman with a growing interest in the law embarks on a legal career that will make history.

[Tracy] When Florence Allen was in law school, first in Chicago and then New York, she affiliated and worked for several suffrage organizations.

There's a proposition in Ohio for full suffrage in 1913, and Allen goes to all of the 88 counties in Ohio giving lectures about women's rights.

After the 19th Amendment is ratified, Allen runs for judicial office, supported by women of both parties, and she wins.

Florence Allen was the first woman judge of a general trial court, elected to the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court in 1920.

She serves there for a year and then she becomes the first judge in the nation who is a woman elected to a state supreme court.

Then she is the first woman appointed to the Federal Appellate Court, one of the most prestigious courts you can serve on.

And then she becomes the first woman judge ever nominated to the US Supreme Court.

She's nominated nine times by three different presidents as really this great thinker and one of our leading judicial figures.

[Florence] "To be given an opportunity to aid in administering justice is a privilege.

To be given this as a woman by the men and women of your state working together is something of a miracle.

To be placed then among fine judges in a high federal court is also wonderful.

All these privileges have been mine."

[Narrator] Not all women believe in women's suffrage.

The National Association Opposed to Women Suffrage forms in New York City in 1911.

Their membership is mostly comprised of women from wealthy families.

Some of the most strait-laced women in Ohio were against suffrage.

They thought it would undercut their traditional roles as women, that somehow women voting, taking on this public persona, would so upset gender roles that the world would be out of kilter.

[Narrator] Cincinnati in particular is known for its anti-suffrage sentiment.

In 1916, the Ohio anti-suffragists move their headquarters to Cincinnati where reportedly there are as many as 40,000 members of the Association Opposed to Women Suffrage county-wide.

It isn't just gender panic driving the anti-suffragists.

Prohibition is also a concern.

Ohio in 1910 was the third largest beer brewing state in the union, and ranked fifth in overall alcohol production.

So, not only was alcohol a cultural touchstone, it was also a very important part of the economy.

In the last phase of the suffrage movement, temperance and anti-prohibition politics played a larger role in Ohio and in defeating women's suffrage legislation for the decade before the 19th Amendment was passed.

It played a much larger role than in any other state.

[Narrator] In 1912, Amendment 23 to the Ohio Constitution is proposed to grant women the right to vote.

A special election is planned for September to put the question to voters.

As part of the campaign, the Ohio Woman Suffrage Association organizes a parade in Columbus, which is attended by 5,000 women.

A Men's League for Women's Suffrage in the State of Ohio is formed.

Hopes run high.

But the liquor interests are too powerful.

Fearful of a takeover by Christian Temperance Union women, their propaganda campaign results in Amendment 23 failing by a 15% margin, passing in only 24 of Ohio's 88 counties.

[Harriet] "Two enemies are working against us, a band of ignorant and futile women, very few in number, and the federated forces of evil.

The former makes no impression, the other is powerful and will grow more powerful as the days advance."

[Narrator] Harriet Taylor Upton is right about the forces working against them.

Two years later, despite valiant efforts on the part of suffragists, the Ohio Women's Suffrage Amendment of 1914 is defeated by more than a 20% margin.

But progress is coming.

Ohio women turn their attention to fighting for the right to vote in municipal elections, and find some success.

The city of East Cleveland gets municipal suffrage, meaning women can vote in municipal, town, city council elections.

This is 1916.

And the municipal suffrage was really quite important especially to minority women who had an ability then to have power in that local community.

[Narrator] Besides East Cleveland, women in Lakewood and Columbus are soon granted municipal suffrage.

At the national level, Alice Paul forms the National Woman's Party.

Frustrated by the slow progress of traditional lobbying and petitioning, the National Woman's Party takes public action, including Silent Sentinels who picket outside the White House daily for months in 1917.

Doris Stevens was a graduate of Oberlin College, and shortly after her graduation she was recruited to work in the National Woman's Party offices in Washington, DC where she became one of the Silent Sentinels, the pickets, at Woodrow Wilson's White House.

She was arrested and imprisoned and wrote a very famous autobiography called "Jailed for Freedom" in which she details the dehumanizing captivity in which she and other suffrage protestors were held.

[Doris] "The administration pinned its faith on jail, that institution of convenience to the oppressor, when he is strong in power and his weapons are effective.

When the oppressor miscalculates the strength of the oppressed, jail loses its convenience."

[Narrator] New York State grants full suffrage to women in 1917.

In Ohio, the Reynolds Bill, which allows women to vote in presidential elections, is signed into law by Governor James Cox.

Ohio women celebrate alongside their sisters in North Dakota, who also achieve presidential suffrage in 1917.

But liquor interests step in, and circulate fraudulent petitions for a voter referendum.

Although many are thrown out, there's enough valid signatures on the petitions to call a vote.

Presidential suffrage is defeated by Ohio voters in November 1917, and women lose the hard fought victory they thought they'd achieved.

In 1918, women's suffrage is granted in Michigan, South Dakota, and Oklahoma.

In Ohio, a new bill for women's presidential suffrage, the Reynolds-Fouts Bill is introduced and passes the legislature.

And so in 1919, Ohio becomes the sixth state to give presidential suffrage to women.

Meanwhile, another woman with roots in Ohio steps forward to take the national fight across the finish line.

Helen Hamilton Gardener was born as Alice Chenoweth.

In the 1870s, she becomes the principal of the Sandusky teacher training school.

Soon her neighbors begin to whisper, "Why is the Ohio Commissioner of Schools constantly in Sandusky?"

To visit the beautiful young principal, Alice Chenoweth.

This soon makes its way in newspapers throughout Ohio, because here is a prominent elected official having a scandalous affair.

Some papers even print her name.

She's forced to resign her hard-earned job and also, she's run out of town.

She then re-emerges in 1883 as Helen Hamilton Gardener, free-thought lecturer, and that effectively separates her from the scandalized fallen woman, Alice Chenoweth of Ohio.

She moves to Washington in 1910 and becomes the suffragist's lead negotiator, which she does very skillfully.

Her colleagues in the National American Woman Suffrage Association refer to her as the most potent factor in Congressional passage of the 19th Amendment.

Helen Hamilton Gardener's goal was never just the vote.

She said that she was working for the day in which women would be recognized as self-respecting, self-directing human units with brains and bodies that are sacredly their own.

She saw the vote as a way to end the sexual double standard and bring about female autonomy.

In 1920, President Wilson nominates Helen Hamilton Gardener to the US Civil Service Commission, and this makes her the highest-ranking woman in federal government, just below the level of cabinet secretary.

So, she becomes a national symbol of what it means for women, or at least white women, to be full citizens.

[Helen] "All our lives we have heard of the office seeking the man, but it is something quite new in the history of the world for the office to seek the woman.

When I was notified that you had nominated me for this position, my first impulse was to ask you to withdraw my name.

But, upon reflection, I realize that since women are now for the first time to enter fully into the benefits of American citizenship, they must not refuse to take up such duties as are laid upon them."

The text of the 19th Amendment says that the right to vote will not be denied or abridged on account of sex.

So, it actually doesn't even give the right to vote.

It says that you can't be disqualified from voting just because of sex, meaning gender.

Ohio is one of the first states that ratifies the 19th Amendment.

[Narrator] When the 19th Amendment is signed into law, American women finally have the vote, the most powerful tool to make their voices heard and enact change.

[Harriet] "But at last, the victory is won.

The battle is over. "

[Narrator] With their mission accomplished, NAWSA, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, holds their final convention in Cleveland.

At the meeting, NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt proposes that a League of Women Voters be organized to remove legal discriminations against women and make our democracy safe for the world.

Rather than being finished, with access to the ballot box, in 1920 the real work of women's activists is just beginning.

Women roll up their sleeves to get to work.

The League of Women Voters is the living legacy of the suffrage movement.

Once the 19th Amendment passed, the Ohio Woman Suffrage Association re-organized as the Ohio League of Women Voters.

And so, we've been working to empower voters and defend democracy ever since.

Even the anti-suffragists joined the League of Women Voters to make sure that their voices were heard.

The League of Women Voters organized to start educating women about making government work for you and the issues that you care about.

Pretty soon after the League was founded, it wasn't just that we were educating women, but we were educating citizens.

When we looked back at the records of the Cincinnati League of Women Voters, they organized themselves on a Thursday, and then by Monday they were going to Dayton and lobbying on the Sheppard-Towner Bill for women's and infant health.

[Narrator] The Sheppard-Towner Bill is proposed in response to alarmingly high rates of maternal and infant mortality.

Signed into law in November 1921, it provides federal funding for maternity education, midwife licensing, and prenatal and infant health care.

It leads to the creation of 3,000 health care centers for children and their mothers, many in rural areas.

The Sheppard-Towner Act is the first major legislation enacted after the full enfranchisement of women, and shows the political and economic power of women's issues.

As for the 1920 presidential election, all eyes are on Ohio.

[Melissa] Ohio really was the epicenter of the 1920 election.

The two political candidates for the president were from Ohio, James Cox from Dayton and Warren G. Harding.

So, that was an opportunity for Ohio women to lobby the presidential candidates, but also to be part of the political conversation of America.

[Narrator] On November 2nd, 1920, more than eight million women across the US vote in elections for the first time.

A cold, drizzling rain across most of the state does not deter hundreds of thousands of Ohio women from casting their ballot.

Many precincts report women are first in line before the polls open, including well-known society woman Mrs. Charles Baker in Zanesville and Mrs. Frank Foster, age 90, in Athens.

Anna E. Ralston, age 100, is escorted to and from the polls by representatives of the Defiance chamber of commerce.

In Martin's Ferry, Mrs. Alcinda Moore, age 102, arrives at the polls by automobile to cast her first ballot.

In East Liverpool, three generations of women vote, including Mrs. Susan Harker, age 92.

In New Philadelphia and Dover, every precinct in the city reports that women arrive in groups, numbering from 10 to 30 to vote.

Long lines are reported in Marion, where electors must wait more than an hour before casting their ballot.

And Columbus reports that every voting booth in the city is swamped by the deluge of voters.

[Hallie] "We stand at the open door of a new era.

For the first time in the history of this country, women have exercised the right of franchise.

The right for which the pioneers of our race fought, but died without the sight."

[Narrator] But there is one unfortunate side effect of the 19th Amendment.

It helps membership in the Ku Klux Klan to skyrocket.

[Dr. Lindsey] In 1920, you have a large number of African American women across the country who actually do register to vote, but then find different barriers in place that ultimately prevent them from actually exercising that right to vote.

Southern states disenfranchised Black male voters through poll taxes, literacy tests, violence so that Black men in the South effectively did not have access to the ballot after the 1880's.

White suffragists made basically a devil's compromise.

They essentially said to white male leaders in Congress, you can keep discriminating against Black women the same exact ways you've been disenfranchising Black men this whole time and we won't say a word.

And that is how the 19th Amendment is passed and ratified.

The 19th Amendment did not pass Congress because anyone thought it would enfranchise Black women in the South.

It only passed Congress because everyone knew it wouldn't.

[Mary] "The colored women of the South will be shamefully treated and will not be allowed to vote, I am sure.

I hope the Republicans will do something toward enforcing the 15th Amendment.

We are so helpless without the right of citizenship in that section of the country where we need it most."

How can African Americans achieve their full citizenship rights, from voting to everyday life, you know, being safe from harm, being safe from being attacked?

The broader goal is progress, the broader goal is challenging the United States to live up to its democratic promise.

The struggle to achieve full citizenship rights really endures through the classic civil rights movement through Freedom Summer 1964.

Freedom Summer was a project in which a number of civil rights organizations came together to register African Americans to vote in Mississippi.

[Narrator] Hundreds of student volunteers travel to Ohio for training at Western College for Women in Oxford.

The grounds of Western College are now part of the campus of Miami University.

The students who participated in Freedom Summer were predominately white, middle, upper-middle class students from the East Coast.

These young people were willing to put their theory, their ideals of freedom, justice, liberty, into practice.

These activists were 18, 19, 20, 21, and if they did not know the danger of going to Mississippi to register African Americans to vote in the face of white supremacy, they knew it by the time three students were actually murdered in that effort.

That really hit home and students began to realize this quest for equality is a life-or-death issue.

It's hard to imagine that we get to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 without what's happening at Western, without the kind of energy and the outcry that happens after those young men are killed.

This put us on the global stage of what voting rights meant and who should have them, and part of that story is Ohio.

Ohio played an important role in that conversation, and still plays a pretty important role in the conversation around voting rights.

The 19th Amendment is not really taught in law school.

It's not thought to be particularly important today.

It did its job.

I think many modern legal scholars are challenging that idea and saying, really there's a lot more to the vote that encapsulizes all of women's rights and their equal citizenship.

[Ida] "Employers with to pay them less, this must cease.

Equal pay for equal work is the growing demand.

She is taking on a new dignity with her new freedom and independence, and men are learning to respect her, and to work along beside her, forgetful of sex at the moment."

We often talk about suffrage activism in the window of 1848 to 1920.

The arc is much longer, and it's still an ongoing arc as we think about voting rights activism.

That there is this long history of women of color really mobilizing around these ideas of egalitarian society.

And so that has its roots in both Iroquois Federation policies and gender dynamics.

We seem to be constantly moving towards a more inclusive franchise.

But there's often push back at all of these different moments across history and so, suffrage and voting rights activism are really part of the US history's longer story and longer arc.

But it's important to see Ohio as this intellectual space that is cultivating this kind of activism, and it's also important to see it as representative of the debates, of the tensions, of the successes, of the victories, and also of the setbacks along this broader trajectory towards more inclusive access to the ballot.

I believe that our suffragist foremothers would be disappointed that we still have not made the strides I think many of them envisioned.

That we're talking about voter restriction as opposed to voter expansion.

We're still combating voter disenfranchisement.

We're still combating the ways that racism, classism, ethnicity, language, impact, who has access to the ballot and who does not.

I think they would be thrilled to see the energy that has emerged around women's rights activism in the 21st century.

That it has never stopped.

What we've seen continuously with the history of women in the United States is mobilization and energy around issues of equality and justice.

And so I think there would be some celebration of that, that women have persisted.

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