(upbeat music) (engine revving) (leaves rustling) - I would paraphrase the standard saying about Ohio as Ohio goes so goes the nation.

I think the same could be said about Ohio in 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 my 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 wanna look at what women's activism has looked like over the past 150 years, you can look at Ohio.

(upbeat music) - Good evening.

I'm Kitty Lensman, President and CEO of Think TV and CET.

Thank you for joining us tonight for an inside look at our most recent local documentary, 'Let Ohio Women Vote'.

You'll be able to watch the entire documentary in November, but August is the perfect time for us to get together and honor some important events around voting rights.

This month marks the one hundred and first anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which recognized that American women had the right to vote.

Also the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was enacted 56 years ago this month.

Think TV and CET are pleased to share the story of the long fight for women's suffrage in Ohio, which created unpredictable alliances as well as surprising connections and national events.

There are many organizations and individuals who were passionate about this project and supported us so we could tell you this story.

So I'd like to thank Ohio Humanities, Ohio History Connection, The John Hauck Foundation, the Susan Howarth Foundation, the Murray and Agnes Seasongood Good Government Foundation, The Robert Gould Foundation, the Steven H. Wilder Foundation and Francy and John Pepper.

Thank you for your support and thank you to our members.

Your generosity makes local programs like this possible.

So I would like to encourage you to ask questions tonight.

As with all of our virtual screenings below the viewing window, you will see the chat area.

Please feel free to ask your questions there.

We have the filmmaker, the project's lead history scholar, and a representative from the League of Women Voters.

We'll try to get to all the questions.

But if we don't, contact us and we'll follow up with you personally.

With me tonight is Melissa Currence, Board Member of the League of Women Voters of the US.

Welcome.

Dr. Kimberly Hamlin, the James and Beth Lewis Professor of the History at Miami University.

Dr. Hamlin is also a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar and the author of 'Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener'.

And Ann Rotolante, my colleague here at the station and the producer of 'Let Ohio Women Vote'.

Thank you all for being here today.

- Thank you.

- Thank you for having us.

- Great.

So tonight we started off with the opening minutes of Let Ohio Women Vote.

Melissa, you made the statement that women voting had been a fight since America began.

Why is it important a democracy for women's citizens to vote?

- You know, voting really unblocks the rights of everybody.

So it is a key to making sure that citizens can participate fully and women did not have the right to vote as we know until 1920.

Some women had the right to vote in 1920.

But if you look back in colonial America, the first woman to get the right to vote in colonial America was Lydia Chapin Taft, who was a fore mother to the Taft family who's from Ohio, such a big political family here in Cincinnati and Ohio overall.

So, you know, Ohio is really an important state to have women's voting rights.

It's a bellwether in a lot of ways.

And so the League of Women Voters wants to support voting for everybody throughout Ohio and throughout the country.

- Excellent.

Excellent.

And that leads me to a question for you Dr. Hamlin.

You mentioned "As Ohio goes, so goes the nation" very popular term that we hear across the state.

Do you think that saying it is still true about voting?

- Yes and no.

Again, Ohio is a microcosm for a lot of the trends we see nationally.

And Melissa and her colleagues in the League of Women Voters here in Ohio and nationally are really doing such great work now in terms of redistricting and trying to end gerrymandering, working towards federal legislation that secures and protects voting rights.

And so I think, you know, we have the potential to say that.

Many of the, you know, many of the national trends are happening here in Ohio in big ways that are exciting.

Whether or not they will come to fruition I think depends on what we voters decide to do, but you can see, again, all of the national trends here are percolating.

And in terms of what I was talking about in the film as Ohio goes, we can really see so many origin stories here.

Abolition is an origin story for suffrage.

The Women's Christian Temperance Union is founded in Ohio.

That's another origin story for suffrage.

So very much true with regard to the 19th Amendment.

- So much history that's just wrapped into one, one thought there.

And Ann the question I wanna ask you is how did you come up with the title 'Let Ohio Women Vote'?

- Oh, that's a great question.

So Let Ohio Women Vote there's two reasons for that.

One is very modern and one is very not modern.

So the not modern reason is there's this great postcard image which I think we showed in the roll-up to this event.

It says, Let Ohio Women Vote.

And it's got the state seal of Ohio incorporated with a woman, you know, idealized woman facing front.

And that was a postcard from like the early 1900s, 1910 era.

- [Kitty] Oh wow.

- And that's like a great powerful image that really was inspirational.

The second reason, the very modern reason is search engine optimization.

There's three words in the title related to the topic Ohio Women Vote.

So if you search Ohio Women Vote on Google, Let Ohio Women Vote will pop right up.

- [Kitty] Very smart marketing.

- Yeah.

So trying to trying to make it very easy to find the documentary down the road.

So those are the two reasons I came up with the title.

- [Kitty] Perfect.

- Yeah.

- That's a perfect answer.

So I've asked Ann to pull out a few segments of the program tonight so that we get a glimpse of what the documentary has in store.

And our first clip takes us to the beginning of the women's suffrage fight with the activism taking place in Ohio in the early 1800s.

Let's take a look.

- 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.

(upbeat music) - 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 women who are attending Seneca Falls Convention and those sole African-American who attended Frederick Douglas 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 movements, origins and 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.

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.

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 abolitionists roots of women's voting rights in Ohio it has a unique history antenna.

- The struggle over slavery and anti-slavery in the state of Ohio was quite heated.

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.

In 1834, at the Blaine Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, James Tom addressed the women of Ohio on anti-slavery and he urged them to use their powers to oppose what he saw as a moral wrong.

Tom continued to work for women and against slavery after he became a professor at Oberlin College.

If you look at Oberlin College, 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 interracial college in the country.

- We only think about 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.

- That was also interesting.

But Dr. Hamlin, I have a question for you.

In light of what we just saw in this last clip, why is it that Seneca Falls takes that center historical position?

- Kitty, that's such a great question.

The reason why we equate the suffrage movement with 1848 Seneca Falls is because that is precisely what Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage wanted us to do.

The reason we have what my historian colleague, Lisa Tetro calls 'the myth of Seneca Falls' is there was a power struggle among suffragists in the late 19th century.

There were two rival groups fighting for dominance, so to claim their priority and their leadership of the national movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony began referring, this is in the 1880s, 40 years later began referring to the Seneca Falls Convention as where the movement started.

Before then no one really had done so but to establish themselves and say, Hey, we are the rightful leaders of the movement.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was there when it started.

So for political purposes, they started talking about the 1848 Convention.

How important it was.

They held an international conference in 1888 to mark the 40th anniversary, which had never been celebrated at 10 years, 5 years, 25 years but now.

- [Kitty] Interesting.

- And then they compiled a five volume history of women's suffrage, where they told this story from their point of view and further cementing the Seneca Falls version of the story.

So this is where we really see the myth of Seneca Falls take hold because the first generations of historians to, you know, fight even for the ability to tell women's history, right, which was a hard fought battle throughout the 20th century, they looked to these five volumes.

They said, "Oh, well, here are the primary sources."

And these primary sources were in fact limited.

So more recent historians now we kind of question the five volume history of women and suffrage.

We look for new sources.

- [Kitty] How interesting.

- But for the first, you know, several years of telling the story of suffrage, this one set of books really was definitive.

So now all of the textbooks, all of the AP exams, you know, follow suit from there.

So yeah.

So if you were to have, you know, a jeopardy question or one question... - [Kitty] I like jeopardy... (Dr. Hamlin laughing) - Me too.

What is suffrage?

Where did it start?

Oh, everyone would say right.

The one person who knew would say 1848 Seneca Falls, which is... - [Kitty] Now we all know.

- Now we all know which is kind of true and kind of not true.

- Oh, that's very interesting.

Very, very interesting.

Melissa, in the lead up to the centennial of the 19th Amendment, the League of Women Voters did some research to learn more about their founding members at the local level.

- Hmm.

- What was the most interesting fact or the most interesting person that you discovered?

- Yeah, I love this question because I love telling the stories of people who aren't here to, you know, you were just saying that, Dr. Hamlin was just saying that, you know, who's kind of left can often tell the story.

So who I really admire is a woman named Agnes Hilton.

And she was a member of the Cincinnati League of Women Voters.

What is great about Agnes is that she was the second president of the Cincinnati League.

She had been a suffragist before they converted their kind of treasury to becoming a League Women Voters once 1920 happened that women were gonna get the right to vote.

She came up with the idea to have a voters guide, which is something that the community trusts that the league will provide nonpartisan voter information that is non-biased.

And so she came up with that idea in 1921.

And so the Cincinnati League has been publishing our voter guide since 1921.

- [Kitty] Wow.

- If you look at Agnes, she did have to change her name during World War One because she was German and her original last name was Hostetter.

And so she changed it to Agnes and or changed... Agnes changed it in the 1920s to Hilton.

And, but if you look at her history, she was the only woman who was, helped found the charter committee in Cincinnati who was a big reform movement in Cincinnati to kind of get rid of the boss system.

And then she went on to become president of the local league and then all the way to the state league.

So I get a lot of inspiration from Agnes in her time, you know, a hundred years ago when she was making these changes in our region.

- Yeah.

It is so interesting that a lot of this history is tied so closely to the Southern Ohio region.

So I find it very, very interesting.

Ann, I know you had to do some research to get up to speed to start working on this documentary.

Can you talk a little bit about what you had to learn or what you went through?

- Yeah.

There...

When I first had the inkling of doing this, I wanna thank Richard Nordstrom, our videographer here, we were talking about this one day, doing an art show segment.

We were covering a quilt story at the library about, and it was all about women's suffrage, the fight for women's suffrage.

And Richard's like," We should do a story about that."

Because I was just starting to just natter on about this is so cool, look at this.

So it jumped from that to then going well do... how much history do we have in Ohio?

I had no idea.

So I reached out to Catherine Dereck who's a retired Miami University professor and she has this great podcast called the Genius of Liberty and it's all about women's history, women's suffrage history stories based around Cincinnati.

And there's really some surprising history.

And I met with her and I said, "So is there enough material here to do a documentary?"

She's like," There is enough material to do a six hour mini series."

So let's do it right.

So let's just do it.

And I said, "Okay, let's just do it."

So that was where we kind of started.

And I started learning more and then I was... One of the surprising things I learned, Well, there were two really surprising things.

One was that women did have the right to vote, some women in colonial America, which I was like, really?

So we had it at one time and they took it away from us and then we had to get it back again that's so fascinating.

And the other was that some of the roots of American women activism came out of the Iroquois Federation, which I didn't realize that indigenous American women and how they conducted their culture, - [Kitty] Oh, that's interesting.

- Their political social life kind of inspired the women's activism in the 1800's.

So it comes really from here.

It's really homegrown, you know, the roots of it are here.

So those were two really fascinating things I learned.

And then I got this wonderful experience doing these interviews of these masterclasses with these historical experts just telling me everything they knew for an hour or more as we talked.

So I learned a lot, yes.

And I got to speed very quickly.

- Well, I think what's interesting is this was originally a 30- minute documentary.

And because there is so much rich content there, it's now gonna be a 60.

So we're very proud of that in your work Ann, thank you very much.

- Thank you.

- Okay.

So our next clip picks up where we left off and takes us into Ohio's early women's rights conventions in 1850, we just talked a little bit about this, and 1851.

Let's go ahead and take a look.

- [Treva] You have Oberlin alums who are moving out into the world and so Oberlin has a global footprint pretty early on in its history.

- Lucy Stone arrived from Massachusetts to attend Oberlin College.

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.

- 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 play.

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 the small liberal arts kind of enclaves.

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

- So many of the women who fought for the cause of antislavery also took up the cause of suffrage and the political strategies they learned and practice speaking in public, writing, forming alliances with men and women, Ohio serves as a training ground for suffragists.

- 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.

There are also these radicals people who were free lovers.

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 longstanding problems with traditional marriage.

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, Frances 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.

- Seneca Falls was just the stone that started the ripple.

One of the early conventions was Salem, Ohio in 1850.

And 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.

(gentle piano music) Like Seneca Falls, there was a broad platform.

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

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.

A year later, there's a Akron Convention.

And these early conventions in Salem and Akron 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.

- So Ohio really plays such an important role.

I just find this fascinating.

We're gonna go ahead and take a question from one of our viewers.

Jim from Yellow Springs wants to know, tell us about Florence Allen and her firsts.

Ann you wanna talk to that?

- I could, I can try to jump in and cover this one.

We have an expert on Florence Allen in the documentary, and she can speak much better to this than I can.

But Florence Allen was the first woman judge elected to office in Cuyahoga County.

She was the first woman judge period in the country.

And then she was the first woman judge to be, to go onto a state supreme court, the Ohio Supreme Court.

She was the first woman judge to be nominated to serve on the circuit court, which she served I believe in Cincinnati, the circuit court there.

And then she was also the first woman to be nominated for the United States Supreme Court.

And if I remember correctly, she was nominated nine times by three different presidents.

And she was really this fascinating, amazing legal mind.

And she just never quite broke that glass ceiling for whatever reason in her lifetime.

But she was a very active suffragist as a young woman in the Cleveland area.

And I think she grew up in out west and then came to the east and went to school and was very active as a suffragette or suffragist in lead up to 1920.

So she, I believe she ran for office the first time, right after 1920 and came in, she missed the, what do you call it?

When you do the runoff, she missed all of that and had to go straight in as an independent.

She wasn't with either party and she won.

- [Kitty] Wow.

You knew quite a lot about her.

- I knew a little bit.

- [Kitty] Jim from Yellow Springs is gonna be very satisfied.

- I hope so.

Watch the documentary, you'll hear more.

- Here's a question for you, Dr. Hamlin.

Can you tell us a little bit more about the rich diversity of the women's suffrage movement?

So it wasn't just straight laced church ladies, right?

- Right.

But I also wanna nuance that a little and I'm gonna paraphrase another one of my historian colleagues, Martha Jones, who has a wonderful book called Vanguard about black women's political activism.

And so I wanna emphasize when we say this suffrage movement and this is again paraphrasing Martha Jones, she has said that basically does mean middle-class white ladies.

And that is because they in various ways discriminated against cold shoulder to black women.

So the mainstream suffrage groups, like the rival groups we just talked about in the 19th century, the National Women's Suffrage Association, the American Women's Suffrage Association, these two groups merged in 1890 to form the National American Women's Suffrage Association, which was the largest.

And that is mostly middle-class white women.

So within that, there's ideological diversity for sure and political partisan diversity for sure, but not so much racial and ethnic diversity.

But within if we expand our definition of what it means to be a suffrage activist then we have tremendous diversity.

So when we ask how did African-American contribute African-American women and men contribute to the suffrage movement?

And we look to the Black church, we look to the National Association of Colored Women many of whose early leaders went through Oberlin like Mary Church Terrell, the National Association of Colored Women's first president, an Oberlin grad.

Then we see the many ways also if we look to the NAACP and the women who helped found that we see that African-American women were constantly advocating for not just the vote for women, but for civil rights more broadly for African-Americans.

So too with the Women's Labor Movement.

And especially when we look at New York and we look at the women who are organized labor activists there, who played such a vital role in this state suffrage referendum in New York, in 1917, which was successful.

And that 1917 victory in New York was really a watershed moment in the passage two years later of the 19th Amendment.

Because New York at the time had the largest congressional delegation.

So now so many more members of Congress are responding to responsible to male and female voters.

So that really helped turn the tide in terms of the 19th Amendment's chances in Congress.

So it's passed in '19 ratified in '20.

So there we see a huge role played by the labor, the working women and labor union activists in New York.

- [Kitty] So all this diversity just threaded throughout... - Through out in so many ways and so many levels.

- Wow.

Wow.

Okay, here's a question from Jeanette in Dayton, Kimberly Hamlin, your book on Helen Gardner tells how she is one of the most underrated suffragists in America for how she got the 19th Amendment passed.

Please tell the audiences why you I say that.

- Jeanette in Dayton, thank you so much for that question.

I really appreciate it.

So yes.

So Helen Hamilton Gardner is the most impactful and interesting suffragist I think that no one has ever heard of.

And she also has a really important Ohio tie.

So that part Jeanette was referencing is Gardener's penultimate chapter when she moves to DC in 1910, joins the suffrage movement and becomes the suffragist lead negotiator in Congress.

So, and to the White House.

So gardener becomes NAWSA, which is that National American Women's Suffrage Association.

She's one of their vice presidents and she's their main Washington spokesperson.

So she converts Woodrow Wilson to the cause.

She brags that she had asked him for 22 favors and he granted 21 and so he really helped her.

People tend to think that Wilson opposed the amendment, he did initially, but then she got him to sort of change course and become the amendment's most powerful supporter.

And then she helped steer the amendment through Congress by doing all sorts of things by charming all sorts of members and their wives by creating a sub-committee in the house, the Women's Suffrage Committee there, which was the vital procedural measure necessary to get the 19th amendment to the floor for a vote.

So she did a lot of behind the scenes, wrangling, negotiating, charming, and her colleagues in the suffrage movement called her the most potent factor in the passage of the 19th Amendment.

And they said without her, you know, it would not have happened when it did or in the way it did.

She was so influential that President Wilson, once Congress passed the amendment, he knew he needed to do something to signal to the nation that women, at least white women, which is another story I hope we'll talk about, at least white women were finally full citizens.

So he was getting a lot of pressure to nominate a woman to a high level post.

So of all the suffragists of all the women, he picks Helen Hamilton Gardener to nominate to the US Civil Service Commission, which made her the highest ranking woman in federal government ever to that point and a national symbol of female citizenship.

- Wow.

That is just really interesting.

Here's a question from Ericka in Cincinnati.

Do you think religion is still hindering women's rights and human rights or beneficial?

Anybody want to take a stab at that?

We all probably have an opinion.

Melissa, any thoughts?

- I think that, you know, women's rights are human rights.

So I think they're, you know, women are humans.

So I think that that is connected very much because it's just important to remember that.

But I would say in terms of, you know, religious rights, it's all rights, you know, citizens deserve to have all the rights of a country.

- [Kitty] Right.

- So that includes religious freedom and that's part of the American identity.

So I think that that religious rights are important to all American citizens.

So I wouldn't say necessarily that it's holding it back but it's people need the right to religion.

- I completely agree with you with that.

And religion is part of all of our lives.

So, you know, it is definitely a factor.

Well, how about Melissa, did the pandemic affect the League of Women Voters plans to commemorate the centennial of the 19th Amendment?

It's been a kind of a crazy year, I think, for a year and a half for all of us, but... - So, yeah, so the pandemic really did kind of throw a wrench in a lot of commemoration events here in Ohio and all throughout the country.

You know, it's not lost on many of us that the suffrage movement did, you know, they got a victory when they were having their own pandemic - [Kitty] Right.

- in 1918.

And so that pandemic ran through 1922.

So the suffrage and the 19th Amendment passing was definitely in the middle of that pandemic of the great influenza.

So it's, you know, it's kind of ironic that it would... such a large pandemic would happen again.

What's really great about the League of Women Voters and people who are celebrating women's voting is that we're a crafty bunch and so we are, you know, we shifted online.

We did a lot of virtual events.

The, I think events are still happening all throughout the country.

One thing that I'm really proud of to have seen is that the Turning Point Suffrage Memorial in Northern Virginia did open this past spring and that celebrates the women who were the silent centennials who or sentinels who protested in front of the White House, but then they had, you know, they had some definitely violence against them.

There were political prisoners in Northern Virginia.

So that Memorial opened.

It was delayed because of the pandemic, but it's open for people to go and learn more about women's history and women's suffrage.

- And even with a year delay so to speak, you know, we're still celebrating this monumental, you know, history of women and the right to vote.

Ann, how about, I can answer this for you because I work with you, but I'm gona let you answer for everybody else.

How did it affect the documentary?

How did the pandemic in your working environment affect during the pandemic?

- Yeah, it's been an interesting ride for sure.

In my head when we first conceived of this documentary I had all these great visuals plan that we would film at the Mercantile Library in Cincinnati and have this beautiful visual space to work in and talk about the history of the library with activists in women's activism.

And the pandemic said no.

So it was much more piecemeal than I would have liked.

I would have liked to have filmed everyone together like within the same few days, all the interviews and instead it was spread out over six months or more.

Very piecemeal.

And we had to wait for the vaccine till we could travel to Oberlin to film with Dr. Lasser and to Akron with Tracy Thomas and then to go to Columbus to film with Treva Lindsey, it was just like this whole is it safe to travel?

Is it safe to be in a room with people?

Or is everyone feeling comfortable?

And then when it came to editing, I normally sit shoulder to shoulder with our editor, Jason Wilson.

And we did this in two different rooms.

I was in one room and he was in another, and we talked with gaming software and I could see what he was doing on his computer and it was just the weirdest thing, but it worked out.

So it was, it's been a very interesting, and on top of that, we also had the delay of I had hoped this would be done in March of 2021 and here we are, it's August of 2021 and we're just finishing.

So it's been, yeah, it's been a whole very interesting trip to get this done.

- Well, I would just add that the real power of being able to put together a documentary like Ann has, is taking these pieces and cobbling the story together and you will be completely enthralled with it.

I promise you that.

So our next clip presents some of the important reasons why women in Ohio fought for the right to vote.

So let's take a look at our third clip.

- 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 of 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 wanna 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.

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

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.

- Ohio get 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.

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.

Municipal suffrage is passed a few places here in Ohio.

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

And 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.

- Well, we all remember Gloria Steinem that's for certain.

I do in my life.

We have a question here from Laura in Dayton.

Did women in one particular area of Ohio play a larger role in the suffrage movement over other regions?

Dr. Hamlin.

- I would, I'm not a hundred percent expert on this, but I would say no.

That women across Ohio participated though in slightly different ways.

So for example, if we think about, you know, the reach of Oberlin, so that was a real hotbed of abolitionism and women's activism.

- [Kitty] Right.

- If we think about Warren, for example, that was that Warren, Ohio housed the headquarters of the National American Women's Suffrage Association for five years in the early 20th century.

So there were different areas of Ohio that did different aspects of suffrage work, but I wouldn't say that Northern or Eastern or Southern participated a wholesale more than any other region.

I would think they contributed different aspects of the whole.

- [Kitty] Everyone had a piece.

- And another thing to keep in mind and this is an interesting thing about how suffragists organize themselves especially the suffragists in NAWSA, the National American Women's Suffrage Association, because it was federated they worked hard to have chapters, groups in every congressional district.

So when I was doing my research on Gardener, I was looking to see, you know, who wrote their congress men cause except for Jeanette Rank and they were all men, you know, how did women can contact, how did they communicate with their elected officials?

Well, they relied on these suffrage chapters.

So there were suffrage chapters in big cities, small towns, small municipalities, and these women really got the job done.

They were really highly organized from at the local level to the state level to the national level.

So women across Ohio participated in that way too by signing letters, sending letters or orchestrating petition drives, communicating with their local officials and their congressional representatives.

- [Kitty] So it was a total collaboration - Total collaboration - sounds like, yeah.

Here's a question from Mike and Huber Heights.

Is there anything in history that equates to what these women went through ERA, perhaps?

Anybody?

- I would say yes and no.

Everyone is looking at me.

(panelists laughing) So two things, the first thing that comes to my mind is Temperance.

Right?

The Volstead Act which passes in 1917, just two years before the suffrage amendment.

And by the time it passes, there was a lot of men and male leaders of the anti-saloon league.

But the people who really got the nation talking about temperance in the 19th century were women in the Women's Christian Temperance Union, which at its peak had more than 200,000 members and really functioned like a woman's political party.

So that's one corollary and one pre-history and then we could think about the ERA although then I would say which chapter of the ERA, right?

So there's the 1920s discussions over the ERA after Alice Paul first writes it in 1923.

And then there's the way we talk about it in the mid 20th century as more labor union leaders come on board.

And then there's the discussions of the ERA in the seventies and eighties when it seemed like it was for sure gonna be ratified and then it wasn't.

And then there's the 21st century ERA.

So that has, that's not as easy of a corollary because there are so many chapters but there are certainly many links in between.

And especially if we think about which states ratified the 19th Amendment and which states ratified or not the ERA, there's a one-to-one pretty much there too.

- [Kitty] See, you were the right person for that question.

- I also wanna throw out there, there is that connection of the 19th Amendment did take forever to pass.

It took a long, long time.

And then the Voting Rights Act of 1965 extended that time even further for some groups to have the right to vote and the Equal Rights Amendment I mean, when you think about it, it's been almost a hundred years, we've been waiting on that.

So it seems like something that's not that old, but it's, we've been working on it since 1923.

So it has been another long piece of legislation hanging out there that could have a huge impact so... - And it seems like they were layers, you know, it just kept growing and growing and changing.

Melissa, we just heard about activism with Gloria Steinem's grandmother in Toledo.

Did the fight for women's suffrage usually involve multiple generations of women in the same family.

- Yeah.

So I'd say absolutely.

I'd say activism is very genetic.

So it's the kind of thing that you inspire your, you know, your daughter or your granddaughter or your grandson to get involved.

Some of the, you know, women that I have learned looking back in the League of Women Voters history and the name of Gorman comes out.

So Lily Gorman was a suffragist in Cincinnati in 1910s, 1920s.

Her husband, Frank Gorman was a very well-known judge in Hamilton County.

Their daughter, Mary Gorman McMannus continued that legacy.

She was the first woman to be the director of what is now the Ohio Job and Family Services Department.

- [Kitty] Oh, okay.

And then it continues and so I got to do Sue Gorman who worked for the League of Women Voters in Cincinnati, and she was the mother or her mother-in-law was involved with the League of Women Voters and so she continued the tradition of helping voting in Cincinnati and in Hamilton County, but really getting everybody to believe in their right to vote 'cause it's so important.

- Interesting.

Dr. Hamlin, both full and partial suffrage was granted to women in the Western states like Wyoming and Colorado, but this didn't happen as much in the East.

Why was that?

- I think several factors that play into this in parts.

In some Western states, it served the powers that be to have women vote in terms of the way in which their statehood was established.

Maybe they needed more voters.

Maybe there were more women in whichever party.

So in some ways a women voting was not as radical or upending of power structures in the west whereas in the Eastern states, political parties, political power structures had been, you know, already well-established for a few generations by then.

So women voting inherently was more or conceived as more de-stabilizing.

So that's, I think one of the main reasons.

The other reason I would point to is that gender roles were slightly more fluid, more flexible in the Western states, especially in the pioneer states if you will, Colorado, Wyoming, where women, you know, there was not so much of a, you know, domestic goddess idea of femininity, right?

Women were doing a broader array of things and that the stay at home wife model was not idolized in the way that it was in women's magazines in the east for example.

So there was a slightly more capacious understanding of what women were supposed to do in the Western states.

- Oh, that's interesting.

So geography played a big role in it too.

And what were some of the things that surprised you when interviewing the scholars featured in the documentary?

- Oh gosh.

Well, I talked about a couple of them already the surprises I found.

I think what surprised me the most is is I walked into this as a woman kind of ignorant about my own history.

You know, you figure, you hear, you don't learn much in school.

Now I'm sure my mom is gonna pull up an essay I wrote about Susan B. Anthony back in fifth grade or something (Kitty laughing) but I don't remember learning.

- [Kitty] I don't think it was all tied together like we're learning through this now.

- Exactly.

And so I feel, I felt really separate from that and that we were done with it.

Like in the time period I grew up, I thought, well, we're done right.

We got the vote, we're good.

And so it was really an interesting deep dive to go into this history.

I didn't grow up in Ohio.

So that's another piece of it.

I grew up in Florida.

But I've even learned the Florida history either.

So it was very interesting just to learn everything that I now kind of have in my head about this history and how, what really struck me is the diversity that's there 'cause I always had this impression it was just a bunch of middle-class educated white women that were fighting for the vote and that they really had a particular reason and others were excluded and that wasn't the case.

I had another thing and I just totally lost it.

But yeah.

Oh, the other thing was that history is always with us.

And a lot of the things we experience today in our political climate comes from our history.

And knowing our history will help us negotiate the waters that we're in now.

So it's really important to know our own history.

- And I would just add that I think that one of the most powerful things about watching a documentary is it does teach you.

It takes you back.

Almost like you're reliving that historical time period.

And I find it very enriching to participate in those.

Okay, we're gonna go to our last clip tonight and it introduces us to some of the national suffrage leaders with roots right here in Ohio.

Let's take a look.

(upbeat music) - 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 his democratic promise.

- So I'm thinking about a woman like Mary Church Terrell she's the daughter of one of the first known Black millionaires from the South.

She's a founding member of 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.

- She was a student at Oberlin college.

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

These African-American intellectuals 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.

In one of Mary Church Terrell's favorite motto was lifting as we climb.

Anna Julia Cooper was the first African-American woman to get her PhD from the Sorbonne.

It's an understatement to say that she believed education was a means to uplift oneself.

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."

And think about the idea of intersectionality in this regard 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.

A lesser known African-American woman suffragist is Ida Gibbs Hunt.

Her husband was a US console to Liberia, France, Madagascar and Guadalupe.

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

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

They were taking an intersectional approach to suffrage activism and that training and grounding was harnessed and horned here in Ohio.

- In 1920, Ohio's one of the first few states that ratifies the 19th Amendment.

- Once the 19th amendment passed the Ohio Women's Suffrage Association reorganized as the Ohio League of Women Voters.

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

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

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

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.

- 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.

- 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.

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.

- That clip ended on a pretty strong statement.

Dr. Hamlin did Black women in Ohio experience voter discrimination and intimidation like they did in the South?

- Yes.

Black women experienced intimidation across America, but not to the same level and not to the same extent as in the South.

So I think the important thing to keep in mind is what the suffrage activists of all groups were really fighting for was the commitment that citizenship should equal voting rights, right?

That we don't have any law.

We have laws that say this, you can't discriminate based on this, or you can't discriminate based on this.

You can vote this way, but not that way.

But what we really, what suffragists really were pushing for was a strong federal law that says citizenship equals voting rights.

And in many ways that is still what we are fighting for today.

And I would say, and I'm guessing Melissa would maybe agree that that is really the fundamental battle of our day.

- Right.

Equality for all, right?

- Yes.

- And Melissa, in this last clip, you said that even anti-suffragists joined with the League of Women Voters.

Was there a lot of anti-suffragists in Ohio?

- There, we do know that there were a lot of anti-suffragist in Ohio.

In Hamilton County, for example, the anti-suffrage organization boasted a membership of over 5,000 members in the mid 1910s, which was a very large organization.

There are, we do know that some women who had come out as anti-suffrage before 1920, ended up joining the League of Women Voters to use their right to vote.

One of them is Jane Procter, who was the wife of William Cooper Procter, the chairman of Procter and Gamble at the time, very prominent family.

She had lent her name to the anti-suffrage.

Once women got the right to vote she started fundraising for the League of Women Voters.

We don't know how Jane felt exactly, but we do know that other anti-suffrage leaders said that they kind of felt that voting was thrust upon them, but because it was thrust upon them, they wanted to go ahead and kind of take up the mantle and go ahead and vote and cast their ballots.

- Hmm, very interesting.

So, you know, really the League of Women Voters is, you know, supporting all people who are interested in that citizenship and I've always found that very admirable.

- [Melissa] Yes, yes.

- Ann, I think I might've already spilled the beans, but is there any talk of part two documentary or give us on the inside spill.

- Sure.

I know we've had a lot of multi-part documentaries around here lately.

We had a Dayton Arcade part one and two, part three is to come.

And so you might think there'll be a part two to this, but there's not.

What we are doing is taking the half hour and expanding it into an hour long documentary.

So we'll have more time to tell all the important stories you wanna tell, which is terrific.

So yeah.

- [Kitty] And never say never.

- We never say never, but Dr. Hamlin has some great ideas of what we should do next.

So we're gonna work on that instead.

- Good.

Collaboration is great.

We always love to do that.

Melissa, any last thoughts before we close tonight?

- I think that I just wanna thank everyone for telling these stories and to really share how much voting is important to our communities and just thank you for all the hard work and the opportunity to be here.

- Great.

Well thank you for coming and volunteering your time and participating in the documentary.

I look forward to watching it in entirety.

How about you Dr. Hamlin, any last thoughts you would like to talk about or share with the group?

- I echo Melissa in expressing my thanks.

It has been such an honor to be a part of this process and to be here with you tonight.

And I think the best way to really honor the suffrage centennial and the suffragists is to continue to work for voting rights and to secure them.

The second thing I think that we should take from this is that the stories we tell about our past shape what we think is possible in the present and in the future.

So if you're asking or saying to yourself like "Why have I never heard of Helen Hamilton Gardener before?"

You might also think who else have I never heard of?

Right?

What other stories don't we know and how can we do more to honor all of the women who have shaped our communities and our nation.

- I completely agree.

And the whole aspect of learning from your history with our documentaries we discover but then when we have someone like you on and I'm with the Memphis Belle, we had the curator of the Memphis Belle, the historian.

In the Dayton Arcade we had a historian.

It's all the, you're like a walking library of information.

And I find it fascinating to be able to talk with somebody who opens that window up further.

And I know public television does that, but you know, it's really been a pleasure to speak with you and to get to know you.

Ann how about you?

Any other thoughts you would like to share?

- I do have one thing I want to throw out there to share, and that is some stories didn't make it into the documentary.

They just didn't quite fit for whatever reason.

And one of them features Dr. Hamlin and we went to Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati, and we filmed at the amazing, amazing grave site of Frances Fanny Wright, who was an early suffragist in Cincinnati, who has a very, very fascinating life story.

And she's buried there in Spring Grove.

So that story didn't quite fit in the documentary, but we made a side video that is gonna be on the web and we're finishing that up and hopefully that will be available for everyone to watch soon on YouTube.

But yeah, I encourage everyone to go to the website and check out the other materials that are there.

I think we have links to the Genius of Liberty podcast, to the League of Women Voters reading list.

So there's a lot of other content there they can check out.

- Ann, I'm so glad that you mentioned that because the whole digital aspect of work that we work on today is so important.

And the pieces you produced for digital only were just terrific.

They were engaging and they reached a lot of new people that we have not, you know, been able to reach maybe through our traditional broadcast.

So great thinking as far as that goes.

All right.

Well, Dr. Hamlin, Melissa and Ann, I'd like to thank you all for sharing your important stories and the history with us today with the fight for women's suffrage in Ohio.

You can watch the premiere of Let Ohio Women Vote on Monday, November 15th, write that down, at 9:00 PM on both Think TV 16 and on CET 48.

As I close tonight, I would again like to thank our Think TV and CET members and all of you for your time and support.

Your community spirit and generosity makes a huge difference in everything that we do.

Thank you everyone for joining us and have a great rest of the night.

Goodnight.