Lessons For Real Patriots From the Sufferin’ Suffragettes

Lessons For Real Patriots From the Sufferin’ Suffragettes

One hundred years ago today was the watershed 1913 women’s suffrage march in Washington, D.C. Plus, Friday is International Women’s Day. It’s therefore the perfect moment to reflect on the strategies and tactics of several generations of amazing women.

We all know that the suffragettes won in the end by securing the vote for U.S. women in 1920. But to stop with that fact is to miss the phenomenal, inspirational, often nail-biting and groundbreaking campaign that preceded their win, as well as the lessons they have for activists today.

Before telephones, before TV, before the web, these women mobilized masses of people in a widespread and colorful campaign. Their successful tactics continue to shape campaigns today, even if many organizers have no idea where those tactics originated. But no, this couldn’t possibly be because of the suffragettes’ gender and the utter lack of historical study on women’s issues until just a few decades ago… hmmm.

First of all, it was huge

Modern history often gives the impression that suffrage was given to women by men under pressure from some small group of marginalized female activists. Of course, there was a committed core organizing crew, but that account is far from what really went down.

In the late 1800s, moderate activists, such as those in the National American Woman Suffrage Association, chose to frame voting rights as a natural extension of what was then considered appropriate for women so as not to alienate potential supporters. Rather than diminishing men’s role, they argued that women needed the vote to fulfill their role as nurturers, holders of morality, keepers of culture, the heart of the household. As mothers and guardians who were considered to be more in touch with morality than men, women were positioned to call out corruption and hold the all-male politicians accountable. “Politics is housekeeping on a grand scale,” Jane Addams said at the time.

The mainstream nature of the wider movement is displayed in lines from a banner carried in the parade before the 1916 Republican National Convention: “For the safety of the Nation / To the Women Give the Vote / For the hand that Rocks the Cradle / Will Never Rock the Boat!” Do you think they really meant that, or was it just brilliant PR outreach? Either way, before SignOn.org, Twitter or Facebook, these women collected more than a million signatures in pen and ink, all through hand-to-hand contact, and displayed them as they marched down Fifth Avenue in New York with 20,000 supporters and an estimated half-million people in the crowd in 1917. That’s quite a petition-delivery!

....To push the vote in New York state in 1912, there was a 12-day, 170 mile “Hike to Albany”; the next year, the suffragist “Army of the Hudson” completed a 225-mile walk from New Jersey to Washington, D.C. These physical stunts were part of the ”new womanhood” that showcased active, fit women in the public sphere to undermine any thoughts of women’s inferiority, physically or politically. At the time, astute writers commented that this kind of public work generated millions of dollars in free publicity for the movement, as well as immense outreach opportunities.

The militant National Women’s Party took this another step further with the first-ever picket of the White House. The “Silent Sentinels” and their banners were present every day from Jan. 10, 1917, to June of 1919 — except on Sundays. More than a thousand women participated over this period. Many were arrested, were refused bail and served time in horrendous conditions of solitary confinement, where they experienced beatings and force-feeding when they went on hunger strikes. Outrage at the treatment of women activists in prison built sympathy for the suffragette cause. Also, the first arrests at the White House were eventually found illegal, which helped ensure the right to protest there to this day.

In the 19th century, political parades and pageants were common in U.S. communities — for local celebrations, temperance marches or presidential campaigns passing through town. Suffragists held parades as early as 1906, beginning in California. This practice reached its peak exactly a century ago with what The New York Times called “one of the most impressively beautiful spectacles ever staged in this country.” This 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession was reported to include nine bands, four mounted brigades, three heralds, about 24 floats and more than 5,000 marchers.

The march concluded at the Department of the Treasury steps with 100 women and children staging a vision of a shining future along with Justice, Liberty, Charity, Peace and Hope personified by women in flowing classical dresses and trumpets blaring. The now-famous image from this march is of a young beautiful woman in white robes on horseback, in a not-so-closeted, militant nod to Joan of Arc. Wow.

Lawyer Inez Boissevain, wearing white cape, seated on white horse at the National American Woman Suffrage Association parade on March 3, 1913, in Washington, D.C. (Wikipedia/George Grantham Bain Collection)Their spectrum of tactics included hotter actions, too. At one point in 1919, President Wilson was burnt in effigy in front of the White House, pitting the petticoats against the bluecoats. Wildly spewing fire extinguishers were unable to prevent the burning of the four-foot-tall cardboard Wilson. (There were about 50 arrests that day.) The suffragettes used flames again when they set “watchfires” outside the New York City opera house while Wilson was speaking there. Activists transcribed his words as he spoke them and then publicly burned the paper in public fires outside — thus condemning the hypocrisy of his words about international freedom while women were denied suffrage at home. These protests kindled more support for the women, who were steadfast, innovative and organized. They left the police looking disorganized and foolish, along with anti-suffrage minions.

Many of the media stunts were timed just right — famously, President-elect Wilson arrived in Washington the day before he was to be inaugurated to empty streets, as the masses in town all were drawn to the Woman Suffrage Procession. Of course, that meant that there were many hostile observers who had come just for the next day’s inauguration — about 100 marchers landed in the hospital — but the riotous swarm and the resulting publicity led to more momentum for the campaign.

It worked on many levels

Generations of American suffragettes were brave, tenacious, dedicated and incredibly talented nonviolent warriors and leaders — from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Alice Paul. Their tactics and strategies have become such an integral part of our nation’s repertoire of civil resistance that we often take them for granted.

Not only were the events innovative, courageous and spectacular, but they were intentionally executed to get attention in the media of the day — newspaper and radio, as well as early motion pictures. Some participants in the 1917 New York march recorded one-minute speeches on early Kinetophone cylinder recordings that were then played to audiences in Vaudeville houses — an ancestor of YouTube, perhaps? Ubiquitous media coverage, whether positive or negative, succeeded in helping educate and convert the public into supporters of women’s suffrage.

This list of suffragette activities and accomplishments could go on and on. For instance, they were not afraid to lobby (which they did for decades, alongside more militant actions), and they didn’t shy from political campaigns, either. They were not only the first to picket the White House, but they were also the first to hold a funeral as both a political event and a memorial in the Capitol building — to Inez Millholland (famous for her role in leading the 1913 parade on the white horse). And, finally, they were well aware that effective activism meant making the personal political; the straw that finally broke the camel’s back and enabled the passage of the 19th Amendment, granting suffrage to America’s women, was the vote cast by a young lawmaker swayed by his mother’s note: “Hurray and vote for suffrage… don’t forget to be a good boy!”

Progress doesn't just happen because you write a blog or even have your own radio program or a propaganda channel dedicated to conservatism like Fox News and CNN. Progress can be frustratingly slow. Never give up, even if you only make a tiny step forward in a year. That is a fight won for the next American and a step further down the road to America living up to it's ideals and not down to the base malevolence of conservatism.

Liberal Media? You Must Be joking. Wall Street Journal More Interested in Caviar and Foie Gras Than Employee-owned Firms

Liberal Media? You Must Be joking. Wall Street Journal More Interested in Caviar and Foie Gras Than Employee-owned Firms

Social pain, anger at ecological degradation and the inability of traditional politics to address deep economic failings has fueled an extraordinary amount of practical on-the-ground institutional experimentation and innovation by activists, economists and socially minded business leaders in communities around the country.

A vast democratized “new economy” is slowly emerging throughout the United States. The general public, however, knows almost nothing about it because the American press simply does not cover the developing institutions and strategies.

For instance, a sample assessment of coverage between January and November of 2012 by the most widely circulated newspaper in the United States , the Wall Street Journal, found ten times more references to caviar than to employee-owned firms, a growing sector of the economy that involves more than $800 billion in assets and 10 million employee-owners — around three million more individuals than are members of unions in the private sector.

Worker ownership — the most common form of which involves ESOPs, or Employee Stock Ownership Plans — was mentioned in a mere five articles. By contrast, over 60 articles referred to equestrian activities like horse racing, and golf clubs appeared in 132 pieces over the same period.

Although 2012 was designated by the United Nations as the International Year of the Cooperative — an institution that now has more than one billion members worldwide — the Journal‘s coverage was similarly thin. More than 120 million Americans are members of co-operatives and cooperative credit unions, 30 million more people than are owners of mutual funds. The Journal, however, devoted some 700 articles to mutual funds between January and October and only 183 to cooperatives. Of these the majority were concerned with high-end New York real estate, with headlines like “Pricey Co-ops Find Buyers.”

The vast number of cooperative businesses on Main Streets across the country were discussed in just 70 articles and a mere 14 gave co-op businesses more than passing mention. Together, the articles only narrowly outnumbered the 13 Journal pieces that mentioned the Dom Pérignon brand of champagne over the same time frame, and were eclipsed by the 40 Journal entries that refer to the French delicacy foie gras.

Another democratized economic institution is the not-for-profit Community Development Corporation (CDC), roughly 4,500 of which operate in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Such neighborhood corporations create tens of thousands of units of affordable housing and millions of square feet of commercial and industrial space a year. The Journal ran no articles mentioning CDCs in 2012 and only 43 over the past 28 years — less than two a year. Meanwhile, the word château appeared in 30 times as many articles, and luxury apartments received 300 times as much coverage over the same period.

Not surprisingly, the growing “new economy movement” championing democratization of the economy has itself received even less coverage, despite growing citizen involvement on many levels. Over the past year, major national, state and other conferences focusing on worker-owned companies, cooperatives, public banking, nonprofit and public land trusts, and neighborhood corporations were oversubscribed, reflecting the growing interest in these forms. The Journal, however, gave scant coverage to the movement.

Thousands of other creative projects — from green businesses to new forms of combined community-worker efforts — are also underway across the country but receive little coverage. A number are self-consciously understood as attempts to develop working prototypes in state and local “laboratories of democracy” that may be applied at regional and national scale when the right political moment occurs. In Cleveland, Ohio, for instance, a complex of sophisticated worker-owned firms has been developing in desperately poor, predominantly black neighborhoods. The model is partially structured along lines of the Mondragón Corporation, a vibrant network of worker-owned cooperatives in northern Spain with more than 80,000 members and billions of dollars in annual revenue.

Since 2010 legislation to set up public banks along the lines of the long-established Bank of North Dakota has been proposed in 20 states. Several cities — including Los Angeles and Kansas City — have passed “responsible banking” ordinances that require banks to reveal their impact on the community and/or require city officials to do business only with banks that are responsive to community needs. But municipally led responsible banking initiatives appear to have received no attention in the Journal, whereas the newspaper published seven articles this year discussing President Obama’s birth certificate.

The limited nature of the coverage can also be seen in particular cases. Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI) is a highly successful consumer co-op with $1.8 billion in sales for 2011, allowing it to share $165 million of its profits with its 4.7 million active members and 11,000 employees. Organic Valley, a Wisconsin-based cooperative dairy, generated more than $700 million in revenue for nearly 1,700 farmer-owners. From January through October 2012, the Journal referred (briefly) to REI in just three articles; Organic Valley rated just one mention. In combination, REI and Organic Valley appear in the Journal only as often as the Cavalier King Charles spaniel, a breed of dog that turned up in four entries in the Journal‘s pages this year.

Further perspective on the coverage is offered in the way in which “hot topics” are presented, and others of greater economic significance played down. Co-ops in the U.S. generate over $500 billion in annual revenues. The global market for smartphones is estimated by Bloomberg Industries at $219 billion — less than half as large. Furthermore, there are 20 million more co-op members than smartphone users in the United States. The Journal, however, published over 1,000 print articles that included the terms “smartphone” or “smartphones” from January through October this year — more than five articles for each piece mentioning co-ops (many of which, as noted, were about upscale Manhattan apartments.)

The print coverage of the Journal was analyzed by the Democracy Collaborative of the University of Maryland through the online database ProQuest. Although the assessment focused on the Journal, the nation’s preeminent source of news for economic and business affairs, a preliminary review suggests that other national media outlets devote a similarly miniscule proportion of space to the exploding “new economy” sector. This highlights the need for greater media exposure regarding important developments toward a more democratic, sustainable and community-based economy.

By Gar Alperovitz and Keane Bhatt.

Gar Alperovitz is the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland and co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative.

The reason the Wall Street Journal or any other major media outlet does not cover co-operative type businesses is because they do not want the average American workers to get any crazy ideas about empowerment. About having more control over their lives. They also do not want the people to start pondering the idea that employee owned businesses generally make better products and provide better services because some bean counting elite CEO is not the one deciding what is good or bad.