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- This is One-On-One.

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(upbeat music) - Hi, I'm Jacqui Tricarico.

Steve Adubato and I are here to set up this show all about women's rights, the women's suffrage movement.

Steve, you had a chance to speak with Rachael within, she's the Executive Director of the Alice Paul Institute.

I had a chance to speak with a historian, who has dedicated her research and her life to this specific topic, Dr. Ann Gordon over with Rutgers University.

Steve, let's first talk about your interview about Alice Paul.

Alice Paul was the one who really pushed that 19th amendment to be ratified in 1920, right?

- That's right, women's right to vote.

You know what's so interesting to me, as we were talking to Rachael on this, and you'll see the interview with Rachael, is she kept talking about Alice Paul and her tenacity, her grit.

I mean, she fought.

She's the first, 1913, don't you, it's amazing, Jacqui, we read these things, and we act like we know everything.

I just read it.

In 1913, the first protest in front of the White House on behalf of women's right, or the battle, the fight, the suffragette movement for women to have the right to vote.

Seven years, Jacqui.

Alice Paul was a key leader in that effort.

She kept fighting and fighting.

She was jailed, if I'm not mistaken, she was mistreated while she was in jail.

It never stopped her.

She had a level of tenacity, grit, and a commitment to change, that really changed the course of history in our country.

- Yeah, 1913 to 1920, but even way before that, there were decades long of suffragists, 70, at least we know, like with the records and everything, 70 New Jersey women fighting the good fight, getting out there, spreading the word, traveling throughout the United States to get the word out there and get other women behind this and fighting.

Some of those names that I talked to briefly with Dr. Ann Gordon.

- Who did you talk to Professor Gordon about?

Go ahead.

- So Lucy Stone, she was really important in this.

She, at one point, she lived in New Jersey.

She refused to pay taxes in New Jersey, state taxes, because she.

- Well, she wouldn't be alone right now.

- Right, why am I gonna pay taxes, if you're not giving me the right to vote?

I mean.

- That's right.

- That was very brave.

- Taxation without representation.

- Exactly, so brave of her at that time.

I mean, there were repercussions to that, but still, she stood up.

Elizabeth Caddy Stanton, her.

- Is that who that is?

- Yes, she was also one of the well-known ones.

She did so much early on to really push this movement forward.

She ended up getting it in other people's hands, and they took the baton and led it to where it ended up in 1920, but she was another one.

Worked closely with Susan B. Anthony as well, her and Susan B. Anthony, very close friends during that time.

And Portia Gage, just someone else, who in New Jersey made such an impact.

She led 172 women to the polls at one point, demanding that they cast their ballots.

They weren't allowed, so what they did is they made their own ballot box out of a fruit crate and said, "You know what?

"We're gonna create our own."

Obviously, weren't accepted, and the ballots weren't accepted, but you know what, they made their stance right there, and said, "We don't care.

"We're gonna do what we're gonna do anyway."

And finally, 1920 happened, like you said, and women's right to vote was established.

- Jacqui, I'm sorry, which one's up first?

- So up first, we're gonna see Dr. Ann Gordon, my interview with her.

Like I said, history professor, she's retired now, but her whole life's research was dedicated to this specific topic.

And then, we'll see your interview with Rachael, the Executive Director of the Alice Paul Institute.

- There it is, the Women's Rights Movement in New Jersey and the nation.

Remember Them.

- Hi, I'm Jacqui Tricarico.

Joining me now is Dr. Ann Gordon, Research Professor Emerita in the History Department at Rutgers University.

Dr. Gordon, thank you so much for joining us.

- Thank you for having me.

- It's so great to have you.

I know there's so much here that we can discuss about the Women's Rights Movement, but let's bring it back, first.

When we're talking about the women's suffrage movement, more specifically here in New Jersey, more than a century, right?

A century before the 19th Amendment, women in New Jersey were voting.

Can you explain that to us?

- Yes, it's a fun fact that somehow got buried conveniently in the histories of the American Revolution.

New Jersey wrote a constitution to be independent of England.

They finished it on July 2nd, 1776.

They knew the Declaration of Independence was coming.

They had, I suppose, runners going back and forth from Philadelphia to Burlington County.

And what they wrote, that one of the things that they had to write into a constitution was who had the right to vote for officers.

And I guess mainly it's officers, and legislators and county and town officers.

And what they wrote in is a remarkable document.

And if you'll forgive my angles here, I'll read you exactly what it said.

It said "All inhabitants of this colony of full age," that was already understood to mean 21 years old, "full age, who are worth 50 pounds proclamation money."

And that's a form of money that they're talking about.

But it does, it's important to think that it does not say 50 pounds worth of property.

So it's not requiring that you be a landholder in order to vote, which is often thought to be and sometimes is the rule.

Okay, so "worth 50 pounds proclamation money, clear estate in the same, and have resided within the county in which they claim a vote for 12 months immediately preceding the election can vote."

- So I'm not hearing any gender roles in there.

- You're not hearing gender and you're not hearing race.

- Yep.

- And we didn't have a concept of citizenship.

Citizenship is also missing, and that gets added in wars later, battles later.

But that's because they weren't citizens yet.

They didn't have a government yet, really.

So they're not thinking.

But yes, so race and gender are gone from that.

And inhabitants is a curious choice of words.

But it's a very wide open word.

It was a kind of.

- But women did vote, right?

Women were voting.

They took this opportunity.

- We were getting to that.

And our knowledge of it is growing in clarity in recent years.

We now know for certain that women were voting.

There've always been stories like family stories.

My grandmother voted.

My next door neighbor's mother voted.

You know, there were things in the historical record to tell us that people knew about it and were voting.

But now, during this recent centennial of the Federal amendment for women's suffrage, the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia put some serious effort and money into tracking down if there was anything left in the state, in our state to illustrate this.

They were doing, you know, their mission is the history of the American Revolution.

And they found fantastic things.

By laws of the 1790s that were meant to kind of make new New Jersey elections a little more orderly, shall we say, it had been, the legislature had dictated that they keep a record book with the names of people who came to vote.

And so you get the order because they're just written down as they come in and say, I'm here and blah, blah.

- So they're able to pull out some of those women's names from that.

- There are women's names.

I mean, crystal clear women's names, Mary, Betsy, you know, nothing, no mysterious is this a man or a woman.

There also is evidence, and I'm not as clear as to how you know for sure, but they know they can identify some African-American voters also in that period.

And those lists, one of the fun things about those lists is they also, at least in some of them, show that women, the women's names tend to come together as though they came as a group.

- Right.

- Which is a wonderful thing to think about.

You know, we don't very often get visual images of our predecessors on this planet.

And there you have the possibility that women in the neighborhood gather.

And they're not women of the same last name.

So I'm not talking about, you know, the grandmother and the mother-in-law, and, you know, a team from one household.

These people have different last names.

So it looks like they have made it a social occasion and come together.

- Fast forward a little bit for us, Dr. Gordon, in terms of the fact that women then realized this did happen when they started putting their own groups together to fight this fight and say, you know what?

We deserve the right to vote, here in New Jersey, here across the nation, so many specific people here in New Jersey that we'll name in a few minutes.

But when did things really start picking up here in the state, and the women coming together to push the envelope and demand the right to vote again?

'Cause they're actually asking for their right to be returned at that point, when we know the history.

- And they use that language.

It's, I think, the only example in the country of a state organization or state activists using that language of we want it, we're reclaiming a right, or we want you to restore our right.

And that language shows up in petitions to the legislature to give women the right to vote.

It shows up in people's just expressive political language about, you know, it was they're using verbs like it was a despotic act to take it from us.

It shapes all the ways that suffragists in this state throughout the whole 19th century and into the 20th talked about this right.

Because they knew, and it became a key part of the way they thought about politics for themselves in New Jersey.

And I say, let me say one further thing here.

When I say "and into the 20th century," women in New Jersey did not get the vote back until that federal amendment went through.

And none of their efforts from, well, we haven't set a deadline for how long that.

The legislature took away the right of Black people and women of any color to vote in 1807.

And they wrote a law, and then they put that same language into a constitution in 1844 saying it's white male citizens.

So you, you know, you've narrowed the base for government in New Jersey.

And that, go.

- Oh, sorry.

I was gonna say, there's a couple of women that I do wanna just shed a light on and have you just tell us a little bit about them because they were just so incredibly brave and strong, and their names stand out, I mean, over 70 suffragists here in the state of New Jersey alone that we could talk about.

But one of them, Lucy Stone, she's known for that famous phrase, "No taxation without representation."

What's that in reference to?

- It happens a lot in the whole suffrage movement.

It's going back to the language of those pre-revolutionary years in the 18th century when colonists in Boston, there's a tea party.

Remember, that's over taxes.

- Right, mm hm.

- So, you know, you're not letting us have any role in the government of the colonies 'cause you got the government over there in London, but you're taxing us, and so that term no taxation without representation.

Today you can still hear that phrase be used.

It's such a part of American political life.

The residents of the District of Columbia (chuckles) are taxed without representation.

And they use that phrase that's just got so many decades of use in American history.

- And that's what Lucy Stone said in reference to not paying her taxes here in New Jersey because she wasn't given the right to vote.

I know that that is where she wanted to say that phrase.

That's where that phrase came from, and specifically with Lucy Stone.

What about Elizabeth Cady Stanton?

I know she's one of the most prominent suffragists, and somebody you spent so much time researching throughout your career.

What do we need to know about her?

- Well, she actually, in a wonderful twist, she actually was already very well known by the time she moved to New Jersey.

You know, her career, if we may, you know, use the mother, housewives, that role in that term, her career starts in upstate New York.

The Seneca Falls is in the Finger Lakes area, and she was very well known in that part.

But she's a mother of seven children, and she's of childbearing age as the woman's rights movement starts.

So she's not exactly out on the road with these babies and these pregnancies.

But she's a terrific writer right from the get go.

And she is writing things for early women's papers.

She's writing, helping people write speeches.

She's loaning out speeches of her own.

She's a voice to be heard, shall we say, in the earliest women's rights movement.

But then after the Civil War, she moves into New Jersey, and by the time she's doing that, the Women's Rights Movement in New York State has gotten some serious changes to laws about rights that you could, there were ways in which women, married women in particular could own property if it came to them in the right way in New York state.

You could, there were all kinds of little, little things.

Custody of children after your husband dies, that would've been cleared up.

And she notices, she has a national newspaper at the point that she's moving from New York City to Tenafly, New Jersey, and she notices and writes in a really nice, funny little squib for her paper about how, hmm, I just seem to be moving away from the very rights I earned in New York.

New Jersey's way backwards in this.

She knows what's happening in New Jersey and she knows she's moving backwards in terms of the progress of women's rights.

Once she's here, she's not terribly active in the local movement, partly because, well, there's still those children, but also she becomes such an important figure nationally.

And once her children can be pawned off to a boarding school or whatever, she has the opportunity to travel the entire country.

So by 1871, for example, she takes that brand new Continental Railroad (chuckles), Transcontinental Railroad and goes all the way to the West coast.

She's lecturing.

That earns her money.

- Spreads the word, spreads the word.

- And spreads the word.

- And she and Susan B. Anthony are both on the road a lot.

One of my favorite stories that I've published somewhere is that Anthony, who has a diary, so we get daily details from Anthony, she gets on a train someplace in the upper Midwest and finds Stanton asleep in the car, you know, (laughs) so just falling asleep in the seat.

So she sits down with her.

And then Stanton wakes up and they can chat.

But it's that kind of, they are so mobile.

- Yeah, yeah, just making the rounds, spreading that word, her, so many others, so many names we could get into but don't have time for unfortunately, that all led to 1920, having the 19th Amendment ratified under President Woodrow Wilson at the time.

Such an important history lesson from you, Dr. Gordon.

Thank you so much for your insight into this critical time and all the research that you've done.

I know there's so much more we could dive into here and maybe we can do it next time with you.

We've come a long way, right, but still much work to be done, I'm sure.

- Indeed, indeed.

(Ann and Jacqui laughing) - Thank you so much, Dr. Gordon.

We'll be right back after this.

- [Narrator] To watch more One on One with Steve Adubato find us online and follow us on Social media.

- We are thrilled to be joined for the first time, won't be the last time by Rachael Glashan Rupisan who is Executive Director of the Alice Paul Institute.

Good to see you, Rachael.

- Hi, Steve, how are you?

- I'm great.

Now, that's "Alice Paul," a book about Alice Paul behind me.

99% of the folks watching right now, plus, are Alice Paul?

But a huge figure in American history, particularly around the 19th Amendment women's right, the women's right to vote in this country, which did not happen overnight and it was a hard fight.

Tell everyone who Alice Paul was and why she matters and why we should still remember her.

- That's so true.

So Alice is really a hero, probably the least known public historical figure.

And she should be known because she really helped to enfranchise half of the country back in 1920.

She was really part of the suffrage movement that really got the 19th pushed to be ratified and she was such a radical mover and shaker in the movement and her strategies are really what pushed it over the edge.

- Radical, define that word a little bit 'cause it means different things to different people, Rachael.

- She was radical.

So to me she went above and beyond what she was supposed to be doing at the time.

In 1920, women were not expected to be in the public sphere.

There were really both those private and public spheres still existed at that point and Alice really kind of broke the mold.

She was doing things that even people at the time weren't doing in terms of protesting.

She was described as militant a lot of the time in her tactics and strategies, which just wasn't happening.

Alice also organized the National Women's Party in 1913 with the sole focus to be really pushing the 19th Amendment forward and their tactic.

- Hold on a sec.

I'm sorry for interrupting.

Was that the first protest in Washington, D.C. in 1913?

- Yes.

- Connected to the women's right to vote?

So it it was all those years, '13 to '20?

- Correct.

It was before.

- If not before.

- What was that protest like?

- So that first protest was organized by the Silent Sentinels and they went in front of the White House and they picketed, which had never happened in American history before that.

So it's interesting because now when you think about protesting, that is the first thing you think about, people standing with signs and marching down a street to voice their concerns.

Alice was the first person in American history to organize that type of protest.

- Tell us a little bit more about Alice Paul as a person.

Meaning what kind of, one of my favorite words is grit.

What kind of grit did she have to have?

Tenacity, stick to it-ness, if you will, to stay with this fight for women and this country.

Not just for women, for the country to be better, for women simply to have the right to vote, please.

- Sure, we call it keeping the long view.

How do you keep the long view, right?

So Alice just knew that this was the right thing to do.

This was the way forward for our country to become more civilized and she had to endure quite a bit.

You know, while she was even-- - Like what?

- While she was really protesting and doing a lot of her work in the teens through the '20s when the amendment was ratified, she was jailed, she was force fed while she was in jail, which was really, it's now considered torture and it's illegal.

- [Steve] Force fed.

- She was force fed with a tube and she had to endure a lot of that with a lot of her other contemporaries to really be able to prove that this was the way forward for this country.

- Again, I thought I understood the fights in connection with the Equal Rights Amendment.

So you can look at March 22nd, 1972, Congress passes the Equal Rights Amendment with more than 2/3 vote required.

Virginia becomes the last state necessary to ratify it in 2020 as the 38th state.

Where are we now with this and what did Alice Paul have to do with it?

- So right, now it's super complicated.

So Alice, she co-authored the ERA.

So back in 19-- - What did it do?

I'm sorry again for, what did the ERA do?

- So the Equal Rights Amendment is the suggested 28th Amendment to the Constitution.

- What would it have done?

Go ahead, I'm sorry.

- It would have or will do when it is passed 'cause I believe it will be passed one day, it will put women in the Constitution and will put full protections for people of all genders in the Constitution, which currently does not exist.

So after the 19th was passed, Alice knew that the fight wasn't over.

She knew-- - 19th Amendment.

- The 19th Amendment, right.

So that gave women the right to vote.

She knew that for women to gain full equality in this country, we had to be included in the Constitution.

So her and Crystal Eastman co-authored the ERA and they introduced it in 1923, so 100 years ago.

We just celebrated the ERA centennial just a few weeks ago.

But they introduced it as the Lucretia Mott Amendment at Seneca Falls.

And then it was later introduced to Congress that year as the Equal Rights Amendment.

So now 100 years later, we're still fighting for it.

There's been a lot of traction for the ERA over the past few years, particularly with the rollbacks on women's rights.

So there are two resolutions that have been put forth to Congress and those you can find out more about at equalrightsamendment.org.

- Equalrightsamendment.org.

We'll put up the website.

Go ahead.

- And the two congresswoman who are pushing that forward right now are Ayanna Pressley and Cori Bush.

And I highly recommend just taking a look at what they're trying to do.

It's really about equality for all people and people of all genders.

- Before I let you go, Rachael, your passion, your commitment to not just understanding Alice Paul but the work of Alice Paul and why women, not just having the right to vote in 1920, but the Equal Rights Amendment and everything connected to women's rights, why is that such an incredibly important cause for you professionally and personally?

- I mean, equality is everything, right?

And I think one of the reasons I'm so passionate about people like Alice Paul is because their legacies are complicated and that teaches us something, right?

So some flaws of the past is that it wasn't a very intersectional approach to movement building.

And we know now that "none of us are free until we're all free."

I'm stealing that quote from Fannie Lou Hamer.

But it's true.

We can't continue to push progressive notions forward while we still leave specific groups behind.

So we need to work together and collaboratively to make sure that all people are treated fairly in this country.

- Rachael, before I let you go, is this a message from Alice Paul or you, quote, "You can be a flawed human being and still impact the world with positive change."

Is that from you?

- That is what I usually say when I describe Alice's legacy.

(both chuckling) - Hey, who among us is the first to say they are not flawed?

Rachael, do not let this be the last time you join us.

I'll make sure our producers follow up with you.

There's so many other topics to talk to you about but we appreciate you joining us on Remember Them and One-on-One to talk about Alice Paul.

Thank you so much, Rachael.

- Thank you so much, Steve - You got it.

For my colleague Jacqui Tricarico and the team at "Remember Them," I wanna thank you so much for watching.

I'm Steve Adubato, we'll see you next time.

- [Narrator] One on One with Steve Adubato has been a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Funding has been provided by PSEG Foundation.

NJM Insurance Group.

RWJBarnabas Health.

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey.

Prudential Financial.

New Jersey Sharing Network.

And by The Russell Berrie Foundation.

Promotional support provided by The New Jersey Business & Industry Association.

And by BestofNJ.com.

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As part of the Garden State, we help companies keep their vehicles on the road, employees on the job and projects on track, working to protect employees from illness and injury, to keep goods and services moving across the state.

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