the la follettes write to each other every day and they save every scrap of paper. so you have so much information and you can't really do him without her because he is so -- he just -- he loves her so much and all of these things that she's saying is getting a lot of criticism and he doesn't care. he never says to her once, could you tone it down. you know, the stuff about peace, and because she pushed him hard to vote against u.s. entry into world war one. and he was really struggling. la follette junior said mom, you have to come, he can't take the strain. he was very dependent upon her. once you get into him, you get into her, then you get into the chirp. because they all write to each other every five minutes too. it's a package deal. you can't just do one la follette.

>> say something about robert la follette jr. and how he -- what his career in the u.s. senate was like. i presume he was one of the so-called isolationist senators. correct me if i'm wrong. >> junior like what was la follette junior like as a senator. la follette junior did not want to be a senator. this was his obligation as a member of his family. his younger brother wanted desperately to be senator, but he was too young. so he is a dutiful senator. yes, he opposes u.s. entry into world war i. he's a solid senator. he does good work. all of these years, but he hates campaigning. at one point he's campaigning, someone brays out from the

audience, you're not as good as your paw and you never will be. and he said, no one knows that better than i, my friend, no one knows that better than i. but he does his duty and he stays in the senate for 21 years. and then he's supposed to go back to wisconsin and do some campaigning. so he doesn't and is defeated by joe mccarthy. which as you can imagine is pretty devastating for a great progressive. his health is impaired and he talks about how he let his father down and he's very upset. and he struggles for a few years. in the end, he is a suicide. yeah. so it's a very sad -- very sad story. >> i used to live in washington, d.c. supreme court which is near the alice paul house which president obama just -- i think just this week has kind of dedicated the belmont paul house there.

i just wondered if you had -- and i also used to live in wisconsin for a couple years. so i was curious, do you have any tidbits to add about the relationship between alice paul and her efforts and ms. la follette? >> well, i'm delighted to comment on any tidbits about the relationship between belle la follette and alice paul because they're fascinating. and alice paul, as many of you may know, is an american, but she sort of got her suffrage training in britain where she was shouting out at politicians and getting arrested and they were force feeding her and so forth. she really believed this was the way to go. you had to get attention, you had to get headlines. and belle la follette is so polite. that just -- she doesn't approve of this method. by then she says every day she's going to congress to sit in the gallery, the galleries listen. she walks by the silent

sentnals. i showed you that one slide of the women standing in front of the white house. she starts thinking that maybe alice paul is onto something. and she -- she admires them and her writing goes from sort of a scolding tone of this is going to put people off and don't do it to more of a perhaps we do need to be more -- more aggressive. she does come to admire paul. then after women get the vote, they have a bit of a break. because alice pale wants only equal rights amendment and nothing else. belle la follette says, well, we still need to campaign for rights for our working sisters to improve conditions, we need other things as well. alice paul says, no, it's equal right amendment and that's it. so they -- they start off, they come back together and then they separate again. yeah.

>> i was wonderibndering if the a meaningful relationship between -- [ inaudible ] -- and being a secularist whether she was -- in 1895? >> so what kind of a relationship if any did belle la follette have with elizabeth katy stanton. i cannot trace any real relationship there. i know that she got very -- she being belle la follette, got very impatient with women like elizabeth katy stanton who were basically willing to throw other races under the bus to get women's rights. she really had very little patience for that. i don't recall -- she talks in general terms about other great women leaders, but nothing about stanton in particular. >> susan b. anthony -- >> no, no. she was clearly of course aware

of them and so on. but she -- she really didn't tend to spend a lot of time focusing on the past. she was just really dedicated on, you know, getting things done today. yeah. >> i am just discovering and enjoying learning about jones. did belle la follette know or appreciate or -- i know this style is so completely -- that i -- i -- i hope she appreciated what mother jones did. >> i -- i have never read any -- i've never found anything in belle la follette's writings about mother jones which doesn't mean that it isn't there. just means that i haven't found

them. i haven't seen that. again, she -- when she gives her speeches, she rarely harkens back to the past. she -- >> -- the way mother jones did. >> she was very supportive of labor. towards the end of her papers, there's some wonderful tributes from big unions and so forth writing not to her husband, but to her. thanks her on support of organized labor and the stance that she took for them. yeah, yeah. >> you want to let me once more, on behalf of everybody, thank you for the brilliant presentation you have made. >> well, thank you all very much. [ applause ] thank you. >> now i'll tell you about the books. >> yes, let's talk about the

books. >> you will buy these or you will be shot. [ laughter ] i would hope there would be no persuasions. they are excellent books. >> well, i would just to give you incentive here, they are cheaper here than they are on amazon. if you are ever going to buy them, this would be the time to do so. and this is cheaper than the amazon discount. i'm giving you my author's price. >> a pmy mother says the unsign ones are rarer and more valuable. could you hand me that? this is "beyond nature's housekeepers." this is oxford university press. so this is -- i got very impatient with some feminist issues and i got tired of hearing about how women were more environmentally attuned

than men which i just think is not true genetically. why do men and women respond differently, why have they in american history responded differently to the environment over time, from the beginning of the precolonial period right up to the president. it's really an examination of how what we're told it means to be a man or a woman. men are naturally this way, women are naturally that way. this really is saying, how does that get constructed. where do these ideas come from. just one quick example, i have some boy scott manuals and girl scout manuals. and boys are told that the campfire represents comradery and the battle field. and girls are told that it represents hearth and home. it's a fire for crying out loud. but the best thing about this book that i want to tell you, this is my mother-in-law which she was 16 years old at ranch camp. just for the cover alone, i just absolutely adore this cover. i just think it's so fabulous.

and i was talking to the editor about what i wanted on the cover. i said, let me tell you what i want on the cover. we were talking on the phone, we both had the pictures all set out. he says, look, you may suggest, but the cover is the most important marketing tool that we have. you can suggest, but we will decide. and i said, okay, i want the cowgirl. he goes, well, that's pretty freaking good, i think we're going with that. that was how i got the cover. [ laughter ] there's a biography of bob and one of belle and then this one as well. >> well, thank you. [ inaudible ]

cspan's convention coverage begins today live at 7:20 eastern. speakers include marsha blackburn, rnc chair reince priebus, donald trump's daughter ivanka and finally donald trump himself. making america one again is the theme of the convention tonight. our preconvention show starts at 5:30 eastern. live coverage of the rnc convention begins tonight at 7:20 eastern. cspan makes it easy for you to keep up with all the latest convention developments with the cspan radio app. available as a free download from the apple app store or google play. g get audio coverage of every minute of the convention, as well as schedule information. get cspan on the go with the cspan radio app. on lectures in history, boston college professor heather cox richardson teaches a class

on the new roles women assumed in the workforce in politics during the late 19th century. she describes the gains women made in fields. she also looks at the growth of political organizations run by women that focused on issues like prohibition and women's suffrage. this class is just over an hour. >> let's go ahead and start. as you know, the theme of this course comes from the idea that the civil war dramatically changes american history because what it really does is it destroys everything everybody believed about the relationship between america and the american government. once the war is over, and this is actually a good day to talk about this. today is the anniversary of the firing on fort sumter. everybody has different ideas about what the nation is supposed to become. we've gone through a lot of that with the idea that african-american men who had fought for the union had ideas what about america should be.

white southerners had ideas about what america should be. the northerners who won the war had ideas about what america should be. the indians and the chinese out west had ideas about what america should be. and certainly the northern man who had fought and won the war had ideas about what the country should be. but the critical question as to what it was going to be was who was going to have a say in it. and we've gone through that as well. but who had a say in what that new nation was going to be was going to have a dramatic affect on what it eventually became. so, today, i want to talk about women and women's lives in the late 19th century and their role in what was the true rebuilding of the north, the south, and the west into new nation in the wake of civil war. and the story of women is way more crucial to that story than most people realize. most people when they think about women's rights and women's roles in america start here. and you probably know about this from your high school days. with the seneca falls convention of 1848 when a number of women

came together -- women and men as well -- came together in seneca falls, new york, to talk about women's rights. and the idea of rights for women came out of the abolitionist movement especially in 1840 when a number of female abolitionists went to london for the first world's anti-slavery convention. while they were there to speak about women's rights, those women weren't allowed to speak. on the way home, a number of them get talking and they say, this is not right. that if really people are supposed to be free and equal that women should have rights as well. out of that comes the organization of the seneca falls convention in 1848. this is the group of people who issued the declaration of sentiments which is based on the declaration of independence, but calls for rights of women. and tries to fight back against

what they consider the oppression of men. you all learn about this and everybody talks about this being the beginning of women's rights in america and it is. it's a very important symbolic moment. but essentially after 1848 with the declaration of sentiments and the seneca falls convention, nothing happens. this happens in new york. new york's got a lot of other things going on. they're fighting a battle over property rights in new york. there's a lot of things going on in the east, especially in the northeast in the 1840s and the 1850s. and one person looks at the seneca falls convention and says, you know, it's almost as if, you know, we're talking about martians voting and having rights. it's just not on people's radar screens at national level. not a lot changes after the declaration of sentiments. the real change for women and women's rights comes not out of the declaration of sentiments in 1848, but rather out of the american civil war. we've talked some in this class about that. women's roles changed in the civil war dramatically.

they go into the war both in the north and the south believing that they are going to be able really to maintain the roles that they had before the civil war. that breaks down almost immediately. they start with the idea that they're going to be help meets, if you will, and very quickly women have to take over a whole new set of roles during the civil war. so, first of all, they begin by supporting the troops, both in the north and the south. and especially in the north, that quickly becomes taking on very public roles. now, women in the north had had public roles before. because of the abolitionist movement. but during the civil war, the roles of women really take on new dimensions. so we have, for example, women working in the new government jobs. when i talked about the creation of american money, somebody actually physically had to take those large plates of paper and cut them into bills. those were women.

those were government girls who did the cutting. actually, if you look at these now, and sometimes you see them in museums or buy them on the internet, if you look at the edges, you can tell when the women were cutting them because by the end of the day, they got tired and the edges aren't straight. if you collect them, you want the ones with the straight edges. so women are working in the government, they're beginning to work as clerks. in the northern fields, they're taking over for the menfolk who have gone off to war. they're working in factories in both the north and the south. and they begin to do a number of things that are not usually part of women's roles. so for example, we have women getting involved in nursing which had always been a male -- considered sort of a dirty male profession. you get women involved in nursing. this is the point at which nursing becomes a female rather than a male profession. this is the beginning of the switch to that. as men go off to war, you get women involved in teaching. again, had always been a male

profession. becomes a pink collar profession because the women are the ones there to do the teaching. you have women, when they are nursing, going into spaces where they had previously been excluded. you didn't used to want your daughters to be in a hospital which is dirty and full of men in various stages of undress who are messy. they're dying or they're bleeding. and these are spaces that women begin to enter. you also have women buying bonds that i talked about. so for the first time in american history, women literally own a piece of the american government. they are buying the bonds on which the government and the military depends. and of course they're sending their sons and their husbands off to fight this war. so women have invested really, really heavily in the u.s. government. they -- they are part of that u.s. government. they have supported it with their money, they've supported it with their lives, they've

supported it with their sons, they've supported it with their efforts, and some of them quite literally put their lives on the line for the u.s. government. we have civil war spies and we have even a few women fighting as civil war soldiers. there's a great story about that. a woman discovered many years later when she applies for a pension and is able to prove that she in fact fought for the civil war. there aren't many of them, but they're a great story. so you have women in the north coming out of this war believing that they should have a say in that government. they gave everything for that government. they feel like they should have a say in what happens. certainly, more of a say than those white southerners that andrew johnson was pardoning at such an extraordinary rate during the summer of 1865.

by the fall of 1865, all but about 1,500 of the former confederates had received presidential pardons. they're like, wait a minute, how come these guys who picked up guns and tried to destroy the u.s. government have a say and we don't? and you're going to see a similar pattern incidentally after world war ii when -- it's no coincidence that you get the second wave of women's activism after world war ii out of a very set of similar circumstances. coming out of the war, women expect that they're going to be able to have a say in this new reconstructed government. and that of course is not what happens. what happens is coming out of the war, the focus is for various reasons, as we've talked about, is on african-american male suffrage and especially women's suffragists look at this and they're willing to let that happen, but they also expect that they are going to be included as well. in a moment, you're going to

hear more about julia ward howell. put it this way. she said, when we are writing that 14th amendment, women should be included. women belong in that amendment. they should have rights under that amendment. of course when congress is discussing the 14th amendment at great length, some congressmen actually do introduce the idea that women should be included in the 14th amendment and that women should be considered full citizens with a say in american society. and they're laughed out. the idea that somehow women should have rights and should be able to participate in american society is just a non-starter in 1868. this so suffragists, especially those who had worked so hard for the war, just really stung. julia ward howell said the civil war came to an end leaving the slave not only emancipated but endowed with the full dignity of citizenship. the women of the north had

greatly helped open the door which admitted him to freedom and safeguard the ballot. was this door to be shut in their face? in 1868, when that door was shut in their face, two really dramatic things happened. two suffrage associations form in america. now, most of you know from textbooks that these organizations joined together in 1890. and most people who look at the advance of women's suffrage across the country really look at that 1890 merger as being crucial. and yet, these things come out of the 14th amendment. they come out of the idea that if african-american men should be included in american citizenship, so should women. so should white women, is the people that these women primarily are concerned with. but women should have a say in american society. so what happens is, first the national women's suffrage association forms.

and these are women like elizabeth katy stanton and susan b. anthony who were very active in the abolitionist movement. they want a wide number of reforms for american women that are going to level the playing field between men and women with property ownership, divorce laws, the different economic inequalities between the sexes. and they are seen really as radicals. three months later, you get the organization of the american woman's suffrage association. and that's a much more moderate group. and it's an interesting group for my purposes today because it's formed primarily by lucy stone and julia ward howell. they demanded only the vote with the idea that once you get the vote, you have a say in your government and you can change the laws if you don't like the laws. now, this is always the part where i want to talk a little

bit about julia ward howell. julia ward howe is the same woman who wrote the battle hymn of the republic in 1862. i've talked to you about her before. she begins to take on a much more public role during the civil war, especially through her writing. she's actually a brilliant thinker. her diaries are at harvard. and she is -- she becomes involved in the american woman's suffrage association because she really wants the vote. now, she's a much more moderate character than say elizabeth katy stanton. and she wants the vote for this reason. her husband is abusive and every time she wants to leave him, he says, great, go, you'll never see your kids again. because in this era, children are the property of their fathers. and if women divorce their husbands, in fact, they can be kept from the kids.

so she stays married to him and she tries to continue to have access to the kids. and the great part of this story is, he's really awful to her. i read through her diaries a few years ago. he's really awful to her. and he keeps trying to get her to destroy the diaries. he keeps telling her she's stupid, nobody's going to listen to her, and that she doesn't matter. that he's really the shining light in the couple because he's a very famous reformer. and i always try to make a point to talk about her and this situation because i want you all to leave this room and for the rest of your lives to remember that julia ward howe is an incredibly important thinker, writer, you're going to hear more about her in a minute. and she was married to some jerk nobody remembers. that's my part for her. all right. so what happens after the organization of these two suffrage groups to try to have a push for women to have a say in

society. well, this is the era right after the civil war when legislators are trying to create a world in which equal rights really is the underpinning of the american government. so this is a period when people are talking about everybody having equal rights, everybody should have a say in american society, and they're really trying to expand that with the 14th amendment which theoretically includes everybody except indians not taxed, that's an important caveat, important exception. but out west, unlike where seneca falls took place in new york, out west in the organization of those territories that i talked about during the war, those territories that come in the west so quickly, the idea of women's suffrage takes off. in 1869 in wyoming territory, wyoming territory gives women a vote when they put together their constitution. there are very few women in wyoming territory, i promise you. but it gives women the vote with

the idea that in these new western territories, women should have the right to have a say in the construction of that society. it takes off. the next year, in 1870, utah gives women the vote. so about 1,000 women in wyoming. there's about 17,000 in utah. and they give women the vote in utah in 1870 because there is a referendum coming up on whether or not polygamy should be included in the state laws. and the expectation of the legislators who include the women is that women will vote against polygamy. that by opening up the vote, you're going to move society forward and of course women will vote against polygamy. and women go to the polls in utah, and they vote in favor of polygamy. that stops the spread of women's suffrage across the west dead for years and years and years.

the idea that somehow expanding the vote is going to create a better society hits real trouble when it hits utah and women vote in a way that most of the people who gave them the vote thought that they would not. so this is going to change the idea of women's suffrage spreading state by state, especially through the west, in the early 1870s. still, if you look at that date, women have hope because in 1870, congress is going to be debating a new constitutional amendment to protect african-american voting in the south and that's the 15th amendment. and you know about the 15th amendment. it's the one that protects voting. women lobby hard to be included in the 15th amendment. when congress passes and then the states ratify that amendment in 1870, women are not included. when they are not included,

suffragists are furious. and they do something very smart. they decide they're not going to try and lobby any longer for women's suffrage specifically. what they're going to do is they're going to argue that they are citizens under the 14th amendment because of, of course, they've either been born in america or naturalized in america. so women decide in the presidential election, the tight presidential election of 1872, women decide that they are going to test their right to vote under the 14th amendment. and across the country in 1872, suffragists try to vote. they try to register to vote. what that means is they will go up to a registrar and have their names enrolled, it's called, and be able to cast a ballot or not. in 1872 across the country, they

try and do that, and some of them succeed. others do not. there's a really important course case i want you to remember. and that is -- starts in missouri. as you remember, missouri is kind of a mess of a state because it was so evenly divided between confederates and unionists and they've got that 1865 constitution that prohibits democrats from voting, being lawyers, being doctors, being ministers, all those things. so who gets to vote and how the government is going to work in missouri is really a crucial spot in the country. in 1872, a woman named virginia miner tries to register to vote under this idea that she should be able to vote under the 14th amendment. and she goes to the registrar and the guy who is at the registrar is a guy named happerset. she goes and tries to register to vote. he refuses to let her register. she sues him. and the case miner v. happerset is going to work its way through the courts and it's going to be decided by the supreme court in

1875. and i'll tell you about that in a minute. but the one you've heard about in this year, in the year of 1872 without probably putting in context, is that susan b. anthony does register to vote. she registers to vote in new york. and she actually casts a ballot in that election. but after she casts a ballot, she is arrested for the crime of voting. that's kind of an interesting concept to get your head around, the crime of voting. and the argument about it being a crime to vote, interestingly enough, they get her under the enforcement acts that were put in place to protect african-american voting in the south. but the crime of voting, the argument behind that is that if people who should not have a right to have a say in american society vote, they're diluting the votes of those people who do have a right to vote. so, by the time she is arrested

in 1872 for voting, susan b. anthony is a very well-known figure. this is very public case and she is very public about it. after she's arrested and then let out on bail, there's a story behind that. but after that happens, she actually goes around her region of new york giving a number of speeches about the fact she's been arrested for the crime of voting. and in the trial, the trial just adds fuel to the fire. because in the trial, what happens is susan b. anthony is the only woman in the courtroom. she is not allowed to testify on her own behalf because she's a woman. and after her lawyer and the prosecuting attorney present their cases, the judge simply reads the decision he had already written before the trial.

and in a -- in a wonderful moment, her -- she watches this happen and she gets up and answers him and she won't shut up. and he says, you need to sit down now, that's enough, you need to stop. she's like, no i'm not going to and she tells him exactly what she thinks of him. but it's become such a powerful cause as she's giving these speeches about what happened that it becomes sort of a flashpoint where people look at the question of who really should have a say in american society. and one of the things that anthony says as she's speaking across new york is this. she's so mad at what happened, she says, this government is not a republic. it is an odious aristocracy. pay attention to how this is actually punctuated. the right way.

she says an olagarchy of wealth where the rich govern the poor, an olgarchy of learning where the rich govern the ignorant, or even an olagarky of race. she's okay with rich people governing the poor, educated people governing the uneducated, but this carries dissension, disco discord, and rebellion into every home of the nation. this is 1872 when many people especially in the north are turning against the idea of laborers having a say in american society. what you're seeing here is once again the switch from the idea that everybody should have a say in american society to the idea that's developing in the 1870s, talked about some in the 1880s that in fact maybe not everybody should have a say in american society.

and the question after the 1870s is where do you draw the boundaries and how do you draw the boundaries. and women's roles in this is going to be crucial to drawing going to be crucial to drawing the boundaries. all right, so what happens? in 1875, congress -- i'm sorry -- the supreme court hands down the miner v. happerset decision. when you read that for this week, read my version of it because it's a very long kind of boring decision until the very end of it. they go through everything that they can think of that women have done in american history. they say, the question at hand is are women citizens. they say they did this, they did they and they did this, and yes of course they're citizens. but then there's a kicker at the end on f it. the kicker at the end of it is they say of course women are citizens, by citizenship does

not necessarily convey the right to vote. this is a really big deal. because with this decision, the supreme court unhinges citizenship and voting. remember this is reconstruction. and this is 1875 and in 1876, you're going to have a tax on black voting across the south that returns the southern states to the control of white democrats. the idea of women voting is intimately connected to the question of who should have a say in american society. who is a good member of society and who should have a right to participate in the construction of that new nation and the government that rules that nation. meanwhile, if this is the philosophical argument about who should have a say in american society, women are not sitting home eating bon-bons waiting for this to play out. because of the loss of so many

men during the civil war and the dramatic change in the economy -- we talked about the rise of industry, women in factories, the changing agriculture, the push west, the rise of cities, women's roles changed dramatically in the 1860s. you have men dying in huge numbers as well as coming back to their homes from the war crippled, either in body or in mind. and those things open up entire new realms of opportunity for women, both in the north and the south. and african-american women and white women as well as immigrant women. i've talked to you before about edmonia lewis. she's a great example of somebody for whom the post war

years opens up a lot of doors. she shows up in the chicago ex-position of 1893. she is obviously one of our most famous american sculpters. she is african-american and indian. and she especially after the civil war became for many americans a symbol of human rights. the idea that this extraordinarily talented woman happened to come in an african-american and indian skin to many people seemed unimportant compared to her talent. not to everybody, i have to say. but because she is so visible, because she is so popular, she becomes a symbol of what women can do, what all women can do. she gets a lot of her training actually in rome because there the prejudices are not as strong as they are in america. so she gets a lot more opportunity there and a lot more training there, becomes very famous in rome.

by 1873, when i say she's a well-known sculptor, an average farmer let's say made $1 a day, ballpark. not a lot of money. a good living, $300 to $500 a year in that money. in 1873, she had two commissions. those two commissions were worth $50,000 each. uh-huh. in 1877, she was the sculptor grant chose to make his bust. he was very pleased with what she had done. and opening up the door to women in the arts. one of the things she does is she sculpts -- she puts almost a neoclassical look on americans,

especially american women, especially american women of color. so this is very famous, perhaps even more famous is this statute of 1867 called "forever free." she's doing a lot with this here. the chains are broken, but they are not off, which is interesting. for our purposes today, one of the things that is more interesting is that the man in this sculpture is unclothed, but the woman is clothed. which is a real reversal of the idea of african-american women as being somehow objects that are not -- that are not bounded. she's dressed. she is, if you will, taking part in society in a way that he, without clothes, is doing less of. it's sort of the protected woman and the idea that she can carry -- she can carry herself forward into modern american society, even though he's bigger

and more powerful and even though she's at his feet, there's a lot going on in that particular statue. you're looking at this and thinking, never heard of her, my life was complete without hearing about her. it actually wasn't. she is only one of the women in the late 19th century who dramatically change american culture after the civil war. here's a woman i would lay money none of you have ever heard of. she is a novelist after the civil war. first female american author to earn more than $100,000. she proceeds edith wharton of course. the reason i bring her up is because i've talked a lot about the north so far today. southern women are in an especially pinched spot, if you will. they're from a region of the country that has just lost the civil war and as i've talked

about is devastated. economically and psychologically as well. and the man, especially the white man returning home are often really unable to assume positions in society again. so you've got a bunch of women who are financially dependent. they've got to find some way to make money, and they know they're living through a dramatic time in america. and they're talented and they're educated. so coming out of the civil war, you have a huge number of female writers. north and south, by primarily in the south. what they write are things that now don't make it across our radar screen very often, but she is famous as a romance novelist. the southern women worked out a lot of the tensions between the north and the south through romance novels and through the explorations you could do with romance novels of boundaries, of gender, of economics, of race.

a whole lot of these things and they're really, really interesting. you can see some of the ideas of that picked up when we read the virginian. it's about the west mostly, but he is definitely tieing into the incredible popularity of post civil war romance novels. but this lady may be more familiar to you. this is louisa may alcott. her 1867 novel was the best seller in that year. sold 35,000 copies in its first year. she really pioneers the way for northern female writers. she actually didn't like writing these books, but they become enormously popular. one of the reasons they become enormously popular is because

her "little women" of 1868 explores a whole bunch of new roles for women. how many of you have read that book? if you think about it, and there's four girls in "little women." only one of them is a traditional stay-at-home precivil war girl and that's beth. beth finally dies of some unspecified illness. i'm making a little bit of fun. but beth is kind of a home body, she doesn't like to leave the house. the other sisters are all modern women, if you will. meg works for a living. doesn't like it all the time, by she works for a living. jo is a writer and wants to -- wants to go out and write the great american novel. and amy is a sculptor. all three of them are successful in those professions.

all three of them end up settling down, getting married, and having children. that's going to be important for the way women reintegrate into this new reconstructed society. so you've got southern writers, northern writers. by the way, we found out, oh probably 20 years ago now, that she also wrote real pot boiler stories which she denigrates in "little women" because they paid better and she preferred them. she wrote a short story called "mask" about women had to hide themselves that people only discovered recently. interesting stuff. people aren't just reading about women. they're watching them. this is anna dickinson. she is the first american woman to address congress, 1864. very, very well-known, very highly paid. eloquent speaker. she speaks across the country at lectures where she introduces

topics. and tells people about subjects they wouldn't otherwise know about. now women are not only taking part in the arts, showing their work, they are actually physically in public informing people. they're taking up public roles after the civil war in a way that really they didn't do before the civil war. so they're very visible. and they're also using that visibility to influence american life. here's julia ward howell again. i told you she'd come back to haunt is today. she increasingly focused on her position as a mother, which is of course what's driving her support for suffrage. her position as a mother to say that women are different than men. that women really can do society better than men have done. and what really sets her off is not only does she live through the civil war and watch the incredible carnage of the war,

remember, she's in washington in the end of '61, seeing the circling fires around washington, seeing one of her friend one of the first people killed in the war. she decided that enough was enough and that women really had to take over world society. she said, after the franco-prussian war, it seemed to me a return to barbarrism. the question forced itself upon me. why don't the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone know and bear the cost. so what she does is she issues

an appeal to womanhood throughout the world. and she writes to women. she says throughout the world, but it's women with whom she has contact in other countries. and she says, we need to stop war. and she makes this declaration that says, we will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. our husbands shall not come to us wreaking with carnage for ka rests and applause. our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. we, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. so this is the idea that women can take on even something like war and stop war if they are willing to exercise their roles as women and as women in politics.

while we're on this, this, the idea of joining women together in meetings -- cameron knows where this is going -- becomes mother's days, where mothers, plural, come together to stop war. if you google mother's day, it will tell you it started by anna jarvis in 1908. that's wrong. anna jarvis starts it because she remembers her mother going to these mothers days. this is an attempt to turn it into a day personally for her mother. but the idea of mother's day comes straight out of this post-civil war period with the idea that women as mothers could clean up world politics. isn't that cool? this is where we get mothers days then. this idea of women taking a role and taking a role because

they're different starts really to take off in the 1870s. in the 1860s right up through 1870 you get the idea that women should have rights because all humans should have rights. but during the 1870s you get the growth of this idea that women should have rights because they're different. because women have perspective that is going to be able to do things like stop war and stop the dangerous aspects of industrialization. so in 1874 we get the creation of the women's christian temperance union. they organize under annie whitenmyer. they're trying to stop excessive

drinking. and many cities have theoretically saloons are being regulated, but they're really not. and they're intimately involved in the political system. so the wctu begins to do things like pour liquor into the sewers. sewers don't really take off until the 1880s. but they're actively trying to clean up the cities by getting rid of alcohol. and the wctu becomes incredibly powerful. i'm going to talk about idaho in 1889. literally when the guys are trying to organize the constitution, within days, they're still figuring out who's supposed to sit in what seat, the first people through the door are the wctu saying out here in idaho, we can't have alcohol. they're there before anybody else shows up. that's one of the first things that goes onto that agenda

because the wctu is so very powerful and popular. women are not only taking roles in society in sort of -- in at tomized ways. because women have entered the teaching professions and because women have entered nursing and because, as i talked about, we have the rise of middle managers who now have extra money and leisure time, you have a concept coming that women need education. i want to talk about now the rise of women's colleges, because women's colleges are going to be crucial for the late 19th century. and while women have had seminaries and have had educations before this period, people really point to the organization of smith college in 1875 as a real landmark for the education of women. and radcliffe is going to organize the radcliffe annex, as it's known, is going to organize in 1879.

it borrows professors from harvard. it's known as the radcliffe annex. smith has its own professors. what these colleges are doing is they are setting up women, they're recognizing that women have brains and they're educating women. but there's a funny twist to it because they have to overcome the idea that women are weak vessels who, you know, are going to be injured by the application of their brains, that they're going to turn into, you know, sort of stoop shoulders bespectacled people who, you know, can't do a hard day's work. so at the same time that women's colleges are actually quite aggressive about teaching women, many of the same curricula that men have, women also have to take physical education classes. they have to walk, they have to learn how to have the womanly graces some colleges, not universities, have courses in setting tables. in serving tea, in knowing whether the different places for dishes go. so that women will not be educated out of their sphere.

that they'll be able to be good wives and mothers even though they can also read greek. there's a funny hybrid. if anybody is interested in this, one of the things that comes out of the rise of the college movement that i think is fascinating is there's a whole series of novels and novelists that come from the 1870s on that write novels about women's colleges. so you get that whole series called the betty whales series where it's set in a women's college. some of you may have read daddy long legs which is set in the 20th century. a famous fred astaire movie that misses the point of it being a women's college. there's a whole series of people who take on this idea, and women, girls, read them avidly. you see this in the late louisa may alcott books where jo and her husband start a women's college, and there's a wonderful scene in one of the books where the women -- it eventually becomes a coed college, the

women and men sit on a staircase and discuss the use of women's education. while women are learning these things and these tend to be middle-class women whose families had the money and time to pull their girls out of the workforce and send them to school, it's really crucial about these things is they're going to create a body of educated, intelligent, connected women. women begin to form social networks in these colleges, the same way i keep saying to you, your networks from school are going to matter in your lives. so women coming through these colleges are going to have friends. they're going to have friends they took classes with. they're going to have friends they sat up late talking about social issues with. and these networks are going to have a huge effect on the rest of american society, both in terms of what they do, but also the way they think about what they do. and one of the people who is

crucial in this is this woman here, jane addams. now, it's worth mentioning, by the way, that by 1870, so many women are getting involved in education, that by 1870, the majority of people graduating from high school in america are women. that early, women of the majority of high school graduates. only about 2% of americans going to college in that year, but women are already 21% of that group. this is not just a few people. jane addams is from illinois. her father had worked with abraham lincoln. and she was only famous, incidentally, for those eyes. which were supposed -- they were blue, and you were supposed to basically sink into those eyes. i'll show you a picture of her later in a empty. pretty much anybody who saw jane

addams commented on her eyes. but jane addams did a tour of europe when she was a young woman after going to a seminary. not to smith or radcliffe, but to a seminary, a small women's college. and was horrified by what she saw in europe because she toured the tenement districts in london and felt that the people she saw there were hardly even people. she actually likened them to animals, and she said this is not right. this is the modern world, because of course, it was the modern world to her. and there's no way in a modern world that people should live like this. but exactly what one could do about it was not clear. she eventually does what one would expect. she turns to her social networks, to a woman named ellen gates starr, and the two of them begin to talk about how women could have an effect on the terrible conditions created by

the urbanization and the industrialization of america rather than europe. because i have shown you pictures here, this is five points, again, one of these great pictures. five points is the region of new york, the area of new york that is famous in -- gangs of new york. it's famous for being sort of the most dangerous part of new york. another image of five points. so the question is, what can sort of sheltered, middle-class, usually white, not always, but usually white women do to ameliorate the sort of conditions when they can't vote, they're not involved in the economy. what can they do to stop america from going down this road that we have talked about, where there's very rich and very poor, and everything seems to be falling apart? and the answer is, women see the world differently. they see the world organically.

the idea that the way women can heal this split, if you will, is to return the idea of an organic society to america. and the way they can do it is one thing to talk about it, right? but the way they can do it is literally by living in these areas. so in 1889, starr and addams buy what becomes known as hull house. it's in a poor district of chicago, here in chicago. and they begin -- they open it up, and they live there. they don't say this is nasty and we're not going to live there. they actually live there, and they begin to open services for the immigrants. it's an immigrant community. the immigrants around them. they begin to provide baby-sitting. they begin to talk to people about why their lives are the way they are. they try to clean the debris out

of the cities, out of the trash out of the streets. and the garbage especially because they notice that the garbage is carrying flies, and the flies, the areas that have the worst garbage have the most sickness among babies. they take in unwed mothers. they try to provide social services. crucially, because of the social networks i talked about, lots of middle-class women, lots of educated middle-class women come through hull house and later on the henry street settlement started in new york. i'll talk about that in a minute. but they come through hull house, and they start to listen to the immigrants and the poor people around them. about why they're poor. about what their lives are like. and they begin to really to value those immigrants and the immigrant experiences. they start to focus on the old world traditions that are still in america. they have presentations of needleworkers, for example, from countries where the women are really famous needleworkers. they try to encourage the daughters of these immigrant

women to value their mothers' experiences and crucially, when they're trying to figure out why the cities are the way they are, these educated women go out and collect statistics. they go into factories. they find out what people are paid. they find out how many hours they work. they find out what the work is like. they ask questions, they compile charts. and this is the beginning of social work. it was not an accident that the university of chicago in the early 20th century was a place one went to study social work, because this is where the idea had come from. crucially for historians, these documents that these women collected are invaluable. and they are invaluable in the early 20th century when the supreme court starts to take into consideration conditions of life to make supreme court decisions. so for example, in the brandeis brief, brandeis, when he writes the brandeis brief, which puts together a whole bunch of

information about conditions in the country, he actually cribs the material from his sister-in-law, who was a settlement house worker. these were called settlement houses. so the settlement house workers like those at hull house and those at the henry street settlement begin to try to re-create an organic society, which they try to do it in a modern way, by gathering statistics and ideas. and crucially, lillian wald brings to the table nursing skills. she is the one -- jane addams brings political skills and social skills. lillian wald says we really need to improve health. she's the driving force behind getting nurses into schools and behind improving public health across the country in general. here, i told you i was going to show you another picture of jane addams.

this is jane speaking to a number of children, and again, trying to improve the lives of women. this is a new york picture, even though jane addams is from chicago. i like this image because this is what the settlement house workers are trying to address. women and children primarily, but you cannot improve the lives of women and children without improving society as a whole. but they don't stop here. this woman, florence kelley, is actually the daughter of a very famous industrialist congressman from pennsylvania, a guy named pig iron kelley, who is very important in the civil war. i always liked pig iron because he was not necessarily the brightest crayon in the box, but what he was really good at was listening to what everybody else said. if you wanted to know what people thought and you're in a hurry in the civil war, you can just read pig iron because he sort of synopsizes what everyone says. he's very involved in the republican party and industrialization.

then he has this daughter. and she's got issues of her own that she wants to address in american society. she had been at hull house. she had seen the terrible conditions, especially of garment workers, and she wanted to take that on. she wanted to take on industrialization. but how do women take on industrialization? see, now they take on politics, social issues. by the late 19th century, women can take on industrialization as consumers. and florence kelley and josephine shaw lowell begin to advance the idea that women can ameliorate the extraordinarily bad conditions of industrialization, the sweat shops, the terrible pay, the terrible conditions, by refusing to buy products that are made in sweat shops. and they organize eventually in 1891 the national consumers league.

and what they did is they would say we will not buy clothing or goods made under unsafe or unhealthy working conditions. and we demand as consumers, as mothers feeding our children, safe food and drink. we need to have the government guarantee these things for us. by virtue of the fact we're consumers, not virtue of the fact that every human being should have a right to these things, but because we are wives and mothers, and we deserve to have good things ourselves, but we also must protect the other mothers who are out there producing these things. well, if this is women taking on industrial society, i really only talked about the east, the north and the south here. but there's also the west.

and the west is going to play a really important role for how women's roles play out in the late 19th century. this is not a woman on a horse. this is actually that stereo typical image of the cowboy coming out of the civil war, i talked about, with the movement of the cattle up the plains from 1866 onward. what i didn't talk about when i talked about the cowboy was by the 1870s, the image of the cowboy has a certain role for women, if you think about it. this role has gotten picked up in westerns ever since. women are either good, stay-at-home solid wives or they're sort of criminals/prostitutes. in this western image. coming out of the civil war. and that has to do with, as you know, the political image of the american cowboy, but those two images of women, either very good or very bad, becomes crucial to the way women's images and women's role in american society develops after the civil war.

if that's the image of women with the cowboy, the reality of women in the west is very different. women worked very hard in the west. they work in all the ways that they do in the east. they're homesteaders, they're farmers. they work in factories. they work in -- i'm sorry, industries growing in the west. basically, the employment patterns of the west for women replicate those of the east. women work as servants when people can afford them. they do laundry, especially in mining areas. they do all the things they do in the east despite the image in the west that women are essentially nuclear wives or prostitutes. but there are, of course, i have to include this picture because it's fun. there are, of course, prostitutes in the west. and i like this picture especially because of the liquor and the striped stockings. an image taken of striped stockings and liquor signifies this is a picture of two

prostitutes. but this is not the only reality of the west. for western women. yes, there are prostitutes, yes, there are wives, but for the most part, there are women doing everything they did back east. the old saying they had to do everything the men did and still take care of the kids at the same time. so the experiences of western women have an image of being stay-at-home wives but the reality is they're doing everything. although i just said that, because of that image of the cowboy, women really do push the idea and women writers and writers about the west, push the idea very heavily in the late 19th century that good women, good american women, because the

cowboy takes on such great power as a symbol of america after the civil war, good american women are housewives. they're in the home taking care of kids. and i put up laura ingalls wilder here because she's born in 1867. she lives through this period, and she is probably our most influential western writer. you know, i say that and you're thinking, laura ingalls wilder, a western writer? her books have been in print since the 1930s. in my generation, everybody read them. what's fascinating about them, she's from a number of places, but she writes out of south dakota. what's fascinating about them is she wrote them in part because she so thoroughly hated the new deal, but she develops in these books a very specific image of a western woman. and of an american woman, and that's somebody who follows a good man, who stays at home in the home, takes care of the kids.

and is rewarded for that good behavior. what's fascinating to me about that is that's not the life she lived. that's the life she wrote. in fact, at one point, the family lives above a saloon. in fact, she worked for other people. in fact, she makes most of her own money. in fact, pa is kind of a loser, but that's not what she develops in these books. that idea of women being in the home, taking care of kids and being rewarded for that really takes off in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. the reason that i make such a big deal about this looking back to the idea of who should have a say in american society is what i'm suggesting is that by the 1880s, you get the rising idea that women are different, and they should have a say in american society, not because everybody should have equal rights, end of discussion, the way people were talking about in 1866, but rather because they're wives and mothers. and again, yesterday, i was reading the convention notes of the idaho constitutional