WOMEN,THE VOTE AND THE PIE
Welcome to the Kelly Lewis Podcast where we ponder women’s place in Art, Literature and Culture. You can call me Kelly and today we are going to take a break from our series “History of Women Stitching”, to talk about “Women, the vote and the pie”because I am a mother and have daughters and this year I’ve gotten politcal.
If you’re interested in my first two podcasts, we go all the way back to prehistoric times, talk about the division of labor agreed upon between men and women outside the hut, the origins of linen, wool, cotton and silk and contemplate just how long women have been spinning and weaving.
But for this podcast let me explain the pie I am talking about and actually alluded to in episode 2. It’s the proverbial Pie of prosperity illustrated by Stephen Covey in his popular book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
The visual teaching aid of people trying to get the slice of pie they think they are entitled to and how big that piece is before someone else get that slice might be realizely new, but the idea that there is not enough to go around is universal and timeless, called the Scarcity Mindset. How much there is or there is not of a pie in a particular society has been discussed in about every discipline from theology, to sociology, to economics.
Rick Steves the PBS tour guide of Europe, talks about the Pie, HERE. Basically he concludes when resources were abundant, when crops and trade was good and when well people had opportunities in their futures, no one worries about the pie. When there is scarcity , crops are bad, when opportunities and jobs are limited, there are too many people then we start worrying about the pie.
This one idea needs to stay in the back of your head while you consider Women’s voting history. White women got the right to vote by the 19th Amendment in 1920. My grandmother was alive in 1920. She was a little girl but that meant that my great grandmother who I met, did not have the right to vote until she was in her 30’s. Black men got the right to vote by the the 15th Amendment at the end of the Civil War in 1870. 50 years before any woman had federal protection for our right to vote. Think about that.
You might be saying I thought we were talking about a pie. We are. Do you know what is the route word for words like civilization? It come from the Latin words- civilis, so does citizen, civilian and "city". We started to think about the pie, to worry if there would be enough to go around about the time we moved into the cities, built great civilations. When we were more of an agricultural society, which I talk about a lot in “History of Women Stitching” there was a practical division of labor between men and women. I’m better at tending to children and cooking over a fire then my husband and I would be wholly useless bring down a wooly mammoth. I’d be too pregnant most of the time to be a warrior and defend us or travel great distances to trade. But that all changed when we moved into cities and and some of us have been denied a slice of the pie or even the right to have an opinion about the care of that pie…
Except for…
There is another condition that happens that effect the pie and that is a quick drastic change of not enough workers, not enough to take care of the things that allow the pie to be there and that usually happens when as I talked about in my second episode of “The History of Women Stitching” terrible things happen like in the middle ages, after the black plague the population decreased by 33% and all of a sudden the other 2 Estates had to pay attention to the pheasants.
World Wars will do it too. That’s how we got Rosie the Riveter in the war time of the mid 1940’s. Women had to come out of our home and rivet and build bombers and then fly them over the ocean to deliver them in England and Europe to our husbands fighting over there. But when the end of the war was on the horizon, the end was in sight both in Europe and The Pacific we started to thinking of all the jobs filled on the home front by women and all the soldiers that were coming home and everyone was worried about that pie. How society got Rosie back in the kitchen so that her husband and his fellow soldiers had jobs, is a whole series, but did you know there is a pamphlet issued by the US Government about it…
You can peruse and download that government issued pamphlet sent out to soldiers as part of US forces exit from the war. titled “Do You Want Your Wife To Work After The War?” discussing the pros and cons of “the proper place for women”. I think the pamphlet , for the time is pretty balanced, but we will discuss the result of Midcentury integration of men back into the workforce and women back in the kitchen another time.
But such is the case worrying about that pie. Those in power find ways to exclude those groups with less power. And often it is society that first does the exclusion even if by law other groups should have rights…
Harper's Weekly April 13 1867 cartoon We Accept the Situation
After the Civil War, and the slaves were freed, many of the Black men were highly skilled in such jobs as carpentry, ship building and other skilled labor jobs and for awhile because of the loss of life in the war and the protection of the new rights they had in the 14th Amendment Blacks experienced some advancements in equality, only to be shaved away a few decade later in the Jim Crow era fueled by the the belief there weren’t enough slices of pie to go around.
Don’t even get me started on how long it was before Native Americans were even considered citizians of this country let alone had the right to vote. That will probably be its own podcast/blog before the election.
But even if Black men fought for their right to vote they were then subjected to clauses of needing to own land, have a grandfather that could vote and the ability to read- but needless to say they still had that right almost for a half a century before women, well women who did not reside in the West, where the protection of the pie, still needed all hands on deck, all able body souls to build new communities in the wild frontier, in a land that had been habited for thousands of years by other people, but like I said we will get into that in another podcast/blog
Women got the right to vote in the Wyoming Territory in 1869, less than 5 years after Black men got the right to vote in the 14th Amendment. That history is covered very well in an article from wyohistory.org HERE
But lets just say in a nutshell. Wyoming needed more people to be considered for statehood and had somewhat of a negativity to the Native Americans, plus the Blacks and Chinese that were coming along with the railroads being built. Most agree that the decision of letting women have the vote, something that had been tried in many states throughout the 1800’s could be describe as the “lesser evil” choice.
This idea of a “lesser evil” was just brought up by the Pope in which way he recommended his parishioners to vote in the 2024 Presidential election. An idea that did not work so well for us women when it was brought up in the 2016 election when I heard that term refer to the Evangelical Christian endorsement of a said candidate that went on to be president and be tried and convicted in a hush money skeam with a adult film star. His poor desrepectiful treatment of women, multiple women was bad but he was a “lesser evil” then the more evil agenda of what the other party was offering. Which was actually a devote catholic and the first female running for vice president who was previously the Attorney General for California. Don’t tell me women’s rights are not at the bottom of the bucket.
Nuff said, but this idea of a lesser evil is often used in politics and was used in Wyoming because the assumption that white women would vote like their husbands is a creditable one and as long as women vote like their husbands that protects the pie.
It is important to remember that in the mid 1800s, Republicains were Democracts and Democrats were Republicans. In other words the Dempocrats were the ones trying to keep the status quo and fought all the new fangle ideas of equality of Blacks and Women let alone being concerned about the Asian population or Native Americans. Lincoln’s Republicans were pushing to have more equality spread to everyone in the country by laws and elected officials. Where do you stop such crazy notions? That would be by limiting who not only has the right to vote but also can cast that vote and those are two different things.
Of course people across the country really were up in arms when women in the Utah Territory got the right to vote in 1870, more HERE So close in their time lines both Wyoming and Utah try to claim being the first, whether that is giving the right - Wyoming or actually casting the first ballot- Utah.
But eyebrows were raised across the country because of the salacious practice of polygamy in Utah. Opinions differed on if that would give more votes to their husbands or empower the women to abolish the patriarchal practice, which did not happen and leading up to statehood and pretty much a condition for it, the vote was taken away from women in Utah and laws were created forbidding polygamy, though the practice continued after 1887.
When Utah gained statehood in 1896 the vote was given back to them and women could hold office and so continued the snickering of the rest of the country in newspaper articles debating how many votes did Utah men actually get. Do go to kellylewispodcast.com to see all the great political cartoons I found debating for and against women suffrage.
In some parts of Colorado women had already been voting in local elections such as school boards and had been holding local leadership positions as early as 1877, all because there was not enough worker in those mining and frontier towns to maintain the pie of prosperity. But in 1893 , info HERE Colorado gave all women in the state the right to vote, the first through a state wide referendum.
After Colorado came more western states- here are some- Idaho in 1896,Washington in 1910, California in 1911, Oregon and Arizona in 1912, Montana in 1914 , North Dakota, New York, and then Rhode Island: 1917, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Michigan in 1918.
Of course the Spanish Flu epidemic 1918-1920 and our involvement in World War 1, April 1917 to November 1918 put a kink in the progress in the momentum of other states following but reversely women’s effort during the war and the great male loss of life plus all the loss from the epidemic evened out that prosperity pie for a while and in 1920 women recieved the right to vote across the country by the 19th Amendment. Sound familair, great social unrest like the plague- wars- temporaily give opportunities to the minorities in a society?
It is important to remember that women have never 100% agreed as women on if we should have the right to vote or how to go about to get it. The great Susan B Anthony was so disgusted with the lack of zeal for the vote from the more conservative women in the southern counties in Colorado, where I might add I live, that she swore to never come back and campaign in the state after an earlier attempt to get the women’s vote was cast down. Did I mention that is where I live?
How demure we should be might be a running joke on Tic Tok right now, but there as always been a judgement on how demure women should be. And once the war, plague, western expansion and frontier danger has passed the expectation in this country at least is for us to pull inward and well stop using our brains and abilities. To move aside for the men.
It makes my skin crawl as a women and as mother of daughters how in the last few weeks I have heard that idea come from one of the candidates for president with the phrase “I’ll be your protector”, and then his buddy, a billionaire offer to “put a baby” in Taylor Swift after she endorsed the other candidate for president and what is it with football players telling us to “step aside, take a rest because they got this”
But they don’t got this!
That is why women were voting and holding offices in Colorado before any women in America should have been. The men folk were all down at the creeks panning for gold. We had to build the towns, hold the offices, be concerned with the running of the mining town schools because the men rushing to Colorado certainly were not going to doing it.
But what did women vote for when we could or what were we inspired to fight for or against when we could not vote.
This is the big one- Probation…
and we did that before half the women in the country could even vote. It was the 18th Amendment passed by congress on December 18, 1917, one and a half years before the 19th Amendment gave at least all white women the right to have a voice at the polls and How we pulled that off is a podcast in itself which I will do, but needless to say women were persistent and well they had had enough. From the PBS Ken Burns documentary which you can view HERE , I quote-
By 1830, the average American over 15 years old consumed nearly seven gallons of pure alcohol a year – three times as much as we drink today – and alcohol abuse (primarily by men) was wreaking havoc on the lives of many, particularly in an age when women had few legal rights and were utterly dependent on their husbands for sustenance and support.
Another hot issue for women in the 1920’s?
Their own morality rates in child birth and their children’s high mortality rates were of great concern for women and for good reason. According to Wikipedia HERE in around 1915…
At that time almost 100 infants per 1000 died born to white mothers and almost 200 infants born to Black mothers died. Today the infant mortality rate is 6…. 6 out of 1000 births. I know such a radical leftist idea bringing health care to expectant mothers. The 1920 campaign made big promises if “the right party was elected” but improving women’s health never really came to fruition. Sound familiar?
Another hot issue for women was the marriage age. The marriage age of their daughters, again in an era they had no say in when their husbands could give their daughters to a man of his choosing. When we became a great country around 1776 that age for girls was 12 years old, with the consent of the parents, or actually the consent of the fathers, girls were given over in marriage and their mothers had no say, no power, no avenue to stop it. What women in her right mind would want to go back to that time?
Find the wikipedia article on the Kellylewispodcast website HERE but here are the high notes or the low notes, for example, I quote…
In California, early statutes forbade sexual intercourse with females under the age of 10,[16] following the English statute of 1576. In 1889, the California statute was amended to raise the age to 14 years[17] and the age was raised to 16 in 1897.[18][12]
In the late-19th century, a "social purity movement" composed of Christian feminist reform groups began advocating a raise in the age of consent to 16, with the goal of raising it ultimately to 18. By 1920, 26 states had an age of consent of 16, 21 states had an age of consent of 18, and one state (Georgia) had an age of consent of 14.[19]
Yup, saving our homes from drunk male providers, saving ourselves and our children from death in childbirth and our daughter from being…what demure word should I use… being given over at such young ages to serve husband we had little authority in choosing, those are the uneducated, emotional issue women were concerned with when just over 100 years ago we got the right to vote…
Of course there is a whole lot more, literally plastered on campaign t shirts sold in the Tic Tok store- when we could have a bank account in our own name, when our husbands did not make our medical decisions for us, when we could get a mortgage on our own, own a business, have a right to a divorce, not be thrown into the looney bin if we were difficult, the list goes on.
And most of what I just listed off happened after 1970, after I ,as a middle aged women was born. And just a few years after my own mom divorced my dad. I didn’t know how new of rights she had to raise us on her own and start her own business. I did not know my mom was one of the first to even be able to own her own house or have to fight for her right to a divorce.
Now we get to the sticky part. I am a devote Christian, a follower of Christ and have tried to be obedient to what I think God wishes according to my understanding of the bible and I don’t think God is happy about divorces, but women not having the ability to pursue them legally is a whole different thing. Which leads to the most sticky campaign issue in this election. Abortion, something else that I firmly believe makes God and frankly me very sad to think of those sweet little ones who wont have a chance at life.
But…. before anyone comes at me, well from either side- cause when you are politically moderate- oddly everyone can hate you.
I Am voting for Kamala Harris. This election. For many reasons… but let’s us clear up the aboration confusion I might have caused.
According to survey reported in the National Library of Medicine HERE, while 33% of women were confident in their decision to end their pregnancy, more were not and I quote…
Sixty percent reported they would have preferred to give birth if they had received more support from others or had more financial security.
Kamala might be way too liberal in her general ideology for me, but she sees that improving cost of living, the housing crisis, education, jobs for the middle class will improve the lives of most of us and it will vastly improve the lives of women and children. Think about it. Husband and families that are a support for women raising these babies, lessening the financial burden for mothers, those idea, fit right in line with the desires and wishes of the crazy women who fought for their homes and families a hundred years ago.
I love that we are chipping away at abortion rates that were 1.6 million/ year in the 1990’s and have fallen to just under 1 million per year in 2020. Probably due to the availablity of birth control and the ultrasound making an early connection between parents and child and the greater involvement of fathers. I’ll take it! If Kamala Harris is able to accomplish what she wants and relieves some of the burden on young families, I assume those rates will go down even more.
But denying medical care with miscarriages, non vibual fetuses or health of the mother by state law and hunting those women down is just hateful, I better stop before I type something I will regret.
Which proves who is not going to have these concerns in the forefront of their minds for this election, even if they don’t hate women… men. I love ‘em, I’ll keep ‘em, Mine keeps me warm at night, is a great provider, a great father, my best friend. Do I want to step aside and have faith he can look out for my legal rights… no.
Do I think that is what God wants, for a man to look out for my legal rights…no.
My faith governs my choices but there is no where in the Bible that God, Jesus or any writer argues that change, real change should come from the government in religious matters. “Give Cesear what is ceser’s” Jesus said. In other words pay your taxes and turn towards God for real change. Of course be active in government, fight the good fight, if you are led. Be a good citizen but put your hope in what “will not rust or tranish or fall away”.
Now the next sticky issue with women and politcs… being humble.
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, thinks Kamala Harris is not humble because though being a step mother to two, she did not have biological children of her own. I don’t agree with Governor Sanders. I think motherhood made me…what is the opposite of humble? Proud, noble and well, overbearing. I like prefer the word brave. That is why I’m writing this, putting it up as a podcast. Because I am the mother of daughters! Daughters that might have less rights then me as their mother and possibly their grandmother in 2024.
I think Governor Sanders like a lot of good Christian church going ladies consider Proverbs 31 to be the handbook of the humble mother with phrases like “ her children will rise up and call her blessed,” the assumption is they called her blessed for her humble and quiet manor. As churching going ladies we don’t seem to read the rest of the chapter or we forget it all too easily.
The Proverbs 31 women was anything but humble, mananging the entire household, having a side hustle of making cloth that made money, go to my first two podcasts on the “History of Women Stitching” to understand what that included. She was being manager of her family as well, allowing her husband to “…sit at the gates”. That is Old Testament talk for he was probably an official of their town or city and he could do that, because she took care of everything else. Her children rose up and called her blessed not because she was demure or humble but because she was a “bad ass” and well they probably had clean underwear and socks or the equilvalent in Bible Times.
Ladies, no matter how conservative or liberal you are, we have our history blocked from us and out and out changed too much. Call it social norms or pressures, gaslighting, wanting to fit in, being churched or what you like but women are opressed in this country. The goal is to limit who has a say in exactly how that pie, remember the pie is going to doled out.
We are a nation of, well as Colin Woodward thinks in his book, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America , a whole lot of ethnic groups that after over two hundred years of history have more to do with how we live and vote then our party affiliations. Read it and you will never look at the Electoral College the same way again.
But what I do find odd and unfair is that the Women’s right to vote and our issues has always been attached to Liberal movements. Let me say that another way. Our rights has almost always been attached to ideologies and laws that are considered far left. And as a nation, when we rein in those crazy left liberal idea, “part and parcel” we seem to take rights away from literally half the population. Actually according to Google right now that would be 50.4% of the population is women. In other words the rights of women are gained and lost depending on how liberal or conservative the party in power is and this is not a new thing, or unique to the United States. Many countries, like Sweden and Hawaii when it was a sovereign nation have given limited voting rights to women and then striped them of those rights. Wikipedia article HERE and HERE
a coup d'état overthrew her ( Queen Lili'uokalani) rule in 1893 and installed a provisional government in Hawaii.[1] (Then) Women were barred from voting by the provisional government.
Sweden: Female taxpaying members of city guilds (were) allowed to vote in local city elections then (rescinded in 1758) and national elections (rescinded in 1772).[4]
Okay, I have given you all I have as a fellow woman, maybe talking more to my friends who are conservative, hate abortion and are faithful followers of Jesus to consider this election. Like I said this election I am going to vote for a candidate that is much more liberal than I like. I would like nothing better next election if the country leans even more liberal to bring it back to the middle by voting for a moderate Republican. Heck, Democrat, Republican doesn’t matter to me, middle is what I am looking for, leaders that can come to the table and compromise, care about our young people, kids and babies in and out of the womb and the moms and dads that are taking care of them. In those concerns I think I would be joining in with my fellow suffragates a hundred years ago, feeling like “enough is enough” with the crisis to my family, to my children, not that much different then this election. Today, You do not have to vote the way your husband votes. You do not have to try and sway him or explain your decision. Vote for you, for your daughters and for your granddaughters, as well as your sons, you can vote the way you chose, because you are an intelligent, brave soul and that is actually what motherhood teaches us, to be brave.
Post script: What is it about including cats when trying to insult women? Apparently the oppostion was doing that in the 1920’s arguing that women could not handle leadership roles because we might liked cats?
In a National Park Service article linked on my website, check out the political cartoons making the connection between cats, women and the threat of domesticating, maculating husbands., So, apparently cats have always been connected to women for boths tendency to be home bodies and liking coziness while men were more active and out and about the town so connected to dogs? I think a house cat has the same brain as a mountain lion, just a smaller body, so I hold to my proclamation that we as women, wives and mothers are brave when we need to be. We might like homey and soft things, and just like cats, we might keep our claws in most of the time, but don’t think we don’t have them.
Not sure what will be coming next on the Kelly Lewis Podcast. But will probably be coming sooner than later. Until then have a blessed day and enjoy the ones you love~!
