Women to the Polls Q&A

hello everyone my name is paul malcolm i'm a programmer at ucla film and television archive welcome to the latest event in our virtual screening room initiative uh we are not coming to you from our year-round home at the billy wilder theater but we still want to acknowledge that we are present on the traditional ancestral and unseated territory of the gabrielino tonvar peoples we are humbled to do work in this community our program today is presented in partnership with league women voters uh it's a continuation of the series we had to suspend in march women to the polls of suffrage film festival which celebrated the ratification of the 19th amendment and examined through film and dialogue the ongoing fight for universal suffrage in the united states we're thrilled to return to these themes this week albeit in a different environment with the screening of the rediscovered 1917 silent film mothers of men followed by a panel discussion featuring leading scholars and public policy advocates i want to thank the san francisco silent film festival for allowing us to include its restoration of mothers of men in our program i also want to give a huge thank you to legal women voters of los angeles and professor virginia wexman who has been the driving force behind this entire initiative we're grateful to all the distinguished guests joining us here today to introduce the film and for our post-screen conversation please do stick around for that and now i will turn it over to virginia wexman thank you paul i want to add my welcome to paul's on behalf of the league of women voters of los angeles which is co-sponsoring today's event please stay with us after the screening to hear a discussion about the film and its relation to the issues of today with our panel of experts to provide us with some background on the film we're about to see i would now like to introduce shelley stamp professor of film and digital media at the university of california at santa cruz and the author of movie struck girls women and motion picture culture after the nickelodeon thanks virginia it's a real honor to get to introduce the film to you today uh let me start by saying that i think that everyone involved in the making of mothers of man in 1917 would have been shocked that a woman was nominated to run for president um on the party of a major major political party uh in 2016. they would have been shocked not because a woman was the democratic nominee for president but because it took 100 years um mothers of men um was released at a time when the nation was really gripped with the question of equal voting rights for women and many films were made on the topic many films about the quest for women's suffrage mothers of men attacks this question a little differently rather than make an overt plea for equal voting rights mothers of men jumps into the near future and imagines a world when women already have the vote and already has political equality and already occupied a positions of civic leadership attorneys judges even state governor and where the women's party is an influential body in politics and the film uses a melodramatic plot um to embroider its heroine claire madison in a series of sort of hail hair-raising incidents that challenge her resolve so political corruption misogynist critics italian anarchists and ultimately a death penalty case um involving someone very near and dear to her and so in doing so i think most of men poses a series of questions that really still dog female politicians and female civic leaders can women provide effective political leadership without their heartstrings getting in the way um will women bring a stronger moral compass to civic leadership um can female leadership curtail political corruption where do women's allegiances lie with their families with other women with the public good are these things mutually exclusive um and so by posing all of these problems around the heroin um claire madison um in such melodramatic terms medicine men insists that women however powerful in this new future um remain bound by familial ties and by emotional attachments that the film kind of sees as at odds with civic life right or public leadership and it builds a case for the moral superiority of white middle class femininity by contrasting it with a violent racialized otherness as you'll see in the film um and then in imagining this future of political equality the film ponders another set of questions that i think we still face today um how will the popular press treat women in elected office or running for elected office how will female leaders handle misogynist attacks that they're going to face um when the film was first released reviewers suggested that its timely theme would interest millions of women not just ardent suffragists right reviewers were very um keen to suggest that it was going to be of interest to many many women not just art and suffragists even still the film's producer hal reed was eager to court the favor of suffrage activists um so he screened the print of the film four suffrage leaders on the east coast uh and incorporated some of the suggestions they made um having shot the film in california where women already had the vote i think he was really eager to make sure that its message would play to a broad national constituency including many women who did not already have the vote right um so it was initially released in 1917 and then it was re-released in 1921 just a few months after the passage of the 19th amendment um and for its re-release it was re-titled every woman's problem um and it this re-release print included new forward uh declaring that women had been newly released from the fetters of inequality by the vote and so the far-flung future that was imagined in the 1917 release was now a much more tangible reality in 1921 um but every woman's problem the battle between the heart and the head um still threatened to compromise women's engagement in civic life right um and so so you know i feel like how much of the rhetoric surrounding women in politics and women in public life has actually changed over the past 100 years these are still questions that were grappling with now both versions of the film the 1917 version and the re-release in 1921 were long presumed to be lost um but they were rediscovered by film archivist extraordinaire james mccoskey in 1997 and he recently restored the film uh in partnership with the british film institute and the san francisco silent film festival and so i'd like to invite james to us tell us a little bit more about um the restoration of the filming that we discover at the print thank you very much shelly i appreciate the kind words but i'll be honest it was shelley who uh made this all happen and i wouldn't be here this film wouldn't have been discovered without her help uh back in uh i was a student uh at ucla excuse me ucsc and she was my advisor and i had studied with shelly uh in her silent film class and she inspired me uh to learn about silent film and i had learned about the local film studios that santa cruz had to offer at that time uh in that research and at that time i had discovered mothers of men was a film that had been made in santa cruz and i went uh through uh researching trying to find if any prince existed it just so happened that the film the only known existing copy of it was at the british film institute how could this be that uh one of our suffrage film that was made here in the us wound up across the seas at the british film institutes and it's so unfortunate that the british film institute took uh their time and energy to preserve our history and i appreciate that my big thanks should go out to the british film institute for preserving this film uh so after ucsc it took me about 16 years to come back to find my way back to mothers and men i worked at ucla uh in the preservation department and then back uh to san francisco to work at american zojo francis ford copeland's company and in that time i said you know i wanna i feel that we had started something in santa fe uh with shelley that i wanted to go back and find a way to preserve this and it seemed that 2016 2015 2016 when when we had this discussion it seemed that the time was right uh so i had approached the san francisco silent film festival who's starting to work on preservation themselves and stacy wisnia and rob byrne a big shout out goes to them because i couldn't have done that without their help rob took the great care and energy to preserve uh to do the restoration and i helped uh with a lot of the stabilization but rob really did the nuts and bolts of cleaning up the film and so i i think that the work that uh the san francisco asylum film festival should be recognized they do an amazing job and we're here again because of shelley we're here because of the san francisco silent film festival and in 2016 when we debuted uh we found the original score but a group called the mont alto orchestra in colorado uh came about and and helped put sound back to the film now these we say that these are silent films but they're not really silent they were never meant to be they were meant to have sort of improvisational during school people theaters had had musicians that they hired to play along with the film so it needed to have a voice uh so mont alto you'll hear tonight uh uh orchestrated uh wrote the score for for tonight's film and i thank them for for doing that for us uh also the part of the restoration is you know we think of silent films we think of uh they're black and white and scratchy and dirty and all the people have sort of this connotation but they're not you know uh back back then the great love and care was done for the presentation of the film and a lot of these films were colored uh tints and tones uh but unfortunately that aspect of film preservation was lost over the time it was easier and cheaper to do black and white transfers and so when people think of black and white is because of uh that that work uh was done to preserve uh transfers to black and white but lost the color so modern technology has been able to look at what was done for the region uh original presentation and create recreate these beautiful tints beautiful tones and when rob and i went to the british film institute we discovered that the the print that they had had beautiful tips they were gorgeous blues pinks oranges what was done in 1917 and this is the first time that we were able to present the film as it was originally intended to an audience in 1917 1921 now uh what is it also interesting that i think is fitting that we're here today was it was great we're in a great period and i think this is a good time to commemorate uh the fight for suffrage uh the ratification the the bringing the 19th amendment it's such a great time to come back to see what they had done a hundred years ago with the films it's unfortunate that there's not many foam suffrage films that survived mothers of men is one of the only films that really discuss uh the suffrage movement there's others but uh there's not many of that survive uh so it is great that a hundred years that mother's men still lends a voice it still can move the discussion and i'm glad we're here tonight uh it is very fitting that the league of women voters is here tonight because you know in 1921 they just just recently at that time had the start of their organization and there's great articles that when the ratification uh the nineteen men 19th amendment happened uh it was a good moment to re-release mothers and men under the new title that chilean mentioned everyone was prompted and they released it uh in new jersey and the legal woman voters at that time starting on the east coast had participated in in this re-release they were right there right at the very beginning using mothers and men as part of bringing the cause of women uh the rights for women to vote uh out there so it the connection i see it's very fitting that we have them here tonight a hundred years later to join the discussion again and i thank ucla i thank uh paul for for inviting me here tonight and without further ado i think we should need to get back into the film and see this what we're going to see tonight so i appreciate having this discussion and i look forward to tonight's discussion with virginia and everyone so thank you very much and turn this back over to virginia now mothers of men i'll be back with our panel discussion after the film hello again i hope everyone enjoyed the film let me begin our discussion by introducing the participants shelly stamp you've already met but we also have ellen du bois professor emeritus of history at ucla and the author of the just published suffrage women's long battle for the vote then we have belinda robnett professor of sociology at the university of california at irvine who had just moved to the university of california santa barbara she is the author of how long african-american women in the struggle for civil rights finally virginia kayes executive director of the league of women voters of the united states and virginia is in washington dc so i'm going to start by um you've already heard from shelley stamp we'll have a little brief statements from the other participants beginning with ellen hi this is really interesting movie i've seen a few others of the pro suffrage pre-1920 movies but never this one 1917. so uh although the 19th amendment have been ratified women are voting in uh um actually now including new york uh probably something like 6 million maybe 20 of women in the united states are already voting what's interesting is that the book does not address questions of whether women could vote it obscures that what else addressed is women running for office which is not something that the suffrage movement did it it really didn't do that it didn't uh its purpose was not not even the league of women voters the purpose was not to get women to hold office in part to conceive from this movie uh because women were seen to be both sort of too vulnerable uh to uh the corruption uh of elections and that if they did get into politics they'd lose the kind of moral superiority that they were that was hoping they'd do uh politics so this is a very very interesting leap in going in that direction there's one other thing that it raises which is also very unusual this is that she's married and i have to tell you i don't know about the actress but to me she looks like she was getting pregnant while the thing was being uh filmed she looks like she's getting a little thick there um but the uh notion that uh women get married and she's going to have a baby and there's no indication that that she's going to stop being governor when she has the baby so the idea of women both holding jobs and being married was really too modern for the feminist movement in this period and certainly for women in politics that makes this film very unusual linda what would you like to say for the outset oh okay i'll raise the other thing later no you can go ahead finish yeah if they talk about the women's party the women's party that they have in the movie is not the woman's party that we have of in the suffrage movement which focused not on promoting people for office but in uh pressuring uh the male-dominated parties to get women to vote so that's not the national woman's party elena are you done yes i am sorry about that belinda okay uh so in viewing this film um i really took uh a lens of of looking at it um in the context of uh how the suffrage movement how for example the women's movement uh have often uh had a particular narrative uh and um if the suffrage movement over time has had a narrative that this thumb really uh exhibits and that is that uh there's a concentration of uh viewing the suffrage movement is associated with middle class of white women so really the theme for example of women having moral superiority is very much wedded to whiteness um it's also wedded to whiteness in the sense that the idea that women could who would have to stop working because they're married or because they have children was not something that in 1917 women of color enjoyed by and large or even women who were from work the working classes so i think that uh it really does strongly have a narrative about the the kind of uh framing of women's uh uh as white uh and what that meant uh their frailties or their moral superiority uh or uh perhaps uh their inability to uh as in the film she's torn between family and her husband and her job and so she's ultimately sticking with what is kind of the moral uh decision uh of her job rather than the heart uh which is also associated with uh really the freedom to be able to exercise that i mean the whole idea that a woman of color in that era would even imagine being a judge was just i mean it's just not something that you would even think about uh so i think in that regard it's very much race um and so uh i can talk more about some of this later uh but i do want to say that there is plenty of research and work out there that really talks about the role of women of color uh during that period and the roles in the suffrage movement uh rosalind herborg penn's book she studied at the hours of african-american women in the suffrage movement uh and um uh really uh talked very much about just the number of black women for example uh just to name a few uh who really rallied in in march uh for women's suffrage uh francis harper juno pierce uh josephine st pierre ruffin um and uh the list goes goes on and on native american women who weren't even didn't even get the vote uh uh with the passage of the 19th amendment also marched uh as did latinas um and so um i think uh it's really uh important to think about it in that context uh they often were relegated to the back of the the march um denied the right to speak at these uh suffrage uh uh conferences uh some women uh who were very fair-skinned but african-american would sneak in uh and so there's a lot of wrong uh history of kind of the absence of inclusivity in this and part of it is because when women joined the suffrage movement many of them were already involved in their racial ethnic movements to begin with uh and so the idea that those movements were separate uh was not really the framework in which they joined the suffrage movement it was extension of their participation in those former movements uh those race ethnicity movements uh and that pattern replicates itself uh largely uh later in the 19th early 1970s uh women's movement uh so i would leave it at that uh because some of the questions that i know are coming up i can uh add more to to this information at that time thank you thanks belinda virginia k store so i will say i watched this movie and there is a lot to unpack from a modern day perspective um i will say there was a lot it was you know it struck me as being wildly progressive for the time but yet completely anti-immigrant and xenophobic and you know so many other things and the complexity and and how um rare it was i think not just among white women but as for women as a whole the idea that a woman would not only ascend to uh leadership but that a man would step back so that she would be able to have that position and then beyond that that she would then further move on to become governor all while juggling being married and having a child and the complexity that exists today for many women right but but it was just very very interesting to me i think even with uh it being a silent film and seeing the writing um there and not it was interesting that they the way they chose to write the words you knew exactly who was speaking because they tried to do it in such a um i mean it was it was just very anti-immigrant right like anti-italian the language in the way that it was written on screen which sat with you because you could almost hear in your mind the words being spoken even though they were written and so again for me there was a lot of complexity i know we'll talk a lot about the 19th amendment and and women um and also this imaginary town out an imaginary state out west somewhere it just said out west um but the west actually i think wyoming was the first state to uh allow women to or grant women the right to vote and so it makes sense that it would be in this state that was out west um it was just a very very i'm looking forward to this discussion because i think there's just like i said so much to unpack so much of it is wildly unrealistic but yet at the same time realistic in a modern day context so this should be an interesting discussion for me thanks virginia i i note we have a question already from one of our listeners about immigrants and the the stereotype of italians and we we still have the issue of immigrants today not italians but but others does anybody want to say at this point before we uh as long as this has been brought up about the issue of of immigrants and um the voting rights issue yes to put its context um so uh we're here talking about european immigrants european immigrants form a crucial part of the suffrage movement in the 1910s were it not for them the movement could not have been a mass movement so when we look at the giant parades especially in new york in the ninth starting in about 1912 um it is uh labor movements that it is women and labor movements women in the garment and [Music] textile industries who fill the ranks of the suffrage movement um there are a fair number of irish and uh eastern european are irish and um jewish women eastern european jewish women who surface in leadership roles i'm not aware of any italian women um it is said what a couple of things one is um whereas um uh jews brought in a socialist tradition italians brought in an anarchist tradition therefore making them not all been interested in political participation and uh the other thing is that it's interesting it's not in the movie but um um the italians had a reputation for being very patriarchal uh and that's that's not in the movie there are actually no immigrant women it's all men but i think it's interesting when you make the comparisons and belinda um given the fact that you know you really do focusing on issues of different disability and inclusion or really your area but i think it's interesting when you think about the parallels today and um how that anti-immigrant sentiment still exists and it really impacts voting rights today and what we're seeing in our country and the othering of people it's just a new form you know what's old is new and that it never really went away and we see how um the the latinx community is being marginalized we see even we saw a naturalization ceremony performed during the republican national convention and the idea that many of those individuals had already come to the country and been doing the work and would not qualify as immigrants today to be able to even make it into the united states based on the new rules that have put in place and so i think you know again looking at a modern context and who is considered worthy of voting or who is worthy of american citizenship is really really an interesting way to look at that piece of the movie taking out the part about you know women as a whole um and then as you know so i'd just be interested to hear what your thoughts are no i think i mean one of the things that has consistently happened again and this gets back to kind of the framing of white womanhood and uh so you know we have these these immigrants who really seem to have no moral compass uh in the film uh and uh there is a woman in there she you might have missed her she's italian she's the wife of one of you yes uh yeah the bootlegger and she's terrified of him uh you get the impression he hits her there is a movement that he makes in in the in the silent thing uh she knows what's happened uh she's terrified to speak yes so so the idea then is that if if we value our white women and we know historically that when when african-american men the idea was that they were going to get the ability to vote first over african-american women and there was this notion that well how can you have black men vote when your own white women can't vote uh and so there was always this tension in uh the place of white women right next to that of white men uh and again this is very class-based so i'm not just sweeping it all all together but it does become a piece of that narrative that uh you know we're civilized and our white women are civilized but yet these italian men presumably if they become citizens would have votes over our decent moral wonderful motherly she's pregnant white women uh and so we get that it's everything is built in in that regard so um but yes and that goes on today right uh we don't value that kind of the the immigrant uh uh woman the the culture is is always seen as backwards somehow uh that latinx women don't have a vote or um different kinds of things that have happened around our politics as well uh and uh that somehow uh we we pigeonhole people in particular ways that serve to bolster and protect the superiority of middle class and upper class white men and women uh and so uh i i see it as just really a continuum over time uh really uh in that regard um but you know what else oh yeah i'm sorry as well which i thought was really interesting you know it's on display as though this token the worst thing that had happened to this family was that this poor sister was flying and you know and then the fact that somehow she was just you know completely disregarded as this liability within the family um but yet protected anyway more to unpack there's just so much there so yeah blind i tried to think about that and then i thought well what else is supposed to be blind in the movie justice is mine i just would uh born against reading the movie entirely on the grounds of discrimination and exclusion if it first of all um it it sort of obscures the hundred years that goes on between then and now uh and um not to say that what's going on then or what's going on now is good it's just i don't think helps us to understand the movie in as long as we're on the subject of people of color and who is excluded do you want to say anything more about the role of african-american women in the suffrage movement now i think melinda is right with what she said on the one hand um you know look the suffrage movement starts at the abolitionist period and then peaks in the jim crow period that's a lot of difference uh and um so those last 20 or 30 years that's um that's in some ways the worst period in american history for race outside of this outsideman's sleep so there's this the suffrage movement happens at that moment and i do not mean in any way to forgive those leaders who collaborated in marginalizing women of color it wasn't all true there were white women who were part of the naacp in those years um but it is true that this is the jim crow years the national government is controlled by southern democrats and the national movement is taking place in a southern white dominated city so uh these are people who are not just looking at their um potentials for the his for the future they are trying to figure out as political pragmatists what they are going to do uh so that's one thing then the other thing which belinda talks about which is absolutely right is that black women are involved in the suffrage movement from the beginning by the turn of the 19th century just a generation out of slavery they're educated they've formed their own organizations and they're probably more aware of what the vote might mean than any other group of women in the united states so i think those two points the um the historical context of the racism and the white suffrage movement and the presence of black women in their own suffrage movement are the two sides of this story very important and am i right that the 19th amendment gave all women the right to vote and and the suppression of votes of african-american women was in the south especially was and other minorities was due to voter suppression tactics of those states that is the 19th amendment doesn't give anybody the vote it just prohibits the states from disfranchising anybody by virtue of their sex and what is the case then and what is the case now is that the states control the right to vote and that is the problem so when we talk about black women having lacking the right to vote after 1920 we're talking about the majority of black women who live in southern state and as black women begin to move north into cities like chicago and new york there they begin to have a political role right and let's return to the issue of the movie and its time and go back to shelley and ask um what what if how many movies of this sort were made what were the variety of them and how does this movie fit into an historical context of many other films of this sort i mean i think the first really important thing to say is that the suffrage activists were incredibly savvy about visual media um they staged marches and parades and pageants that they knew would be photographed and filmed and you know as linda was saying they were often a sort of display of white middle class femininity as particularly respectable they dressed in white the white women were um prominent so there was but they were very very savvy about using that kind of digital media they also um spoke in um nickelodeon movie theaters they had slideshows and and talk to audiences to recruit them for the cause so they were very engaged with media suffrage activists were some of the first to record their speeches on sound film very very early sound films um and then sort of at the height of the movement the two national suffrage organizations um fund and make feature films to promote their cause so um the women's political union uh makes 80 million women want blank in 1913 and it opens with direct addresses uh of by harriet stanton blanche and uh the british activist emily pankers speaking to the camera now these are silent films but the image of these women addressing movie audiences was i think i thought he's so profound and important so that's 1913 that 1914 the national american women's selfish association um makes your rule in mind another feature film they hire the screenwriter who has just written one of the most popular um female-centric action-adventure serials of the time and they they ask him to write this movie and it features a young white heroine who's gets wrapped up in the cause for suffrage and dr anaheim shaw is in the film that dr anaheim shaw kind of takes the hand of the fictional heroine and shows her their way um so the soviet groups really understood the power of film up to and including making films there were also tons of comic shorts that engaged with the women's suffrage movement because it was it was a huge topic of the day right and so some of these early short comic shorts were pro suffrage many many many were also uh anti-suffrage and then cleaned the activists so as her frequent trope would be to have um to suggest that the activists would vanish and have male actors in drag playing the suffrage activist so charlie chaplin plays the suffrage activist in one film um and the other sort of favorite trope of these um lampooning comedies was to to play with kind of a future when women are granted the vote and where they imagined they would be complete gender inversion like a horrific spectacle of gender aversion so women on the police force and men taking care of babies as this kind of horrific uh future of not equality but gender inversion right just an inversion of the hierarchy and so what's interesting about mothers of men is so it comes into this this debate relatively late in 1917 there's already been a lot of of films about suffrage but it takes this strategy of the comic shorts which is to imagine this future this horrific future and it turns it on its head and said okay let's think about the future let's think about a future when women not only can vote but hold elected office and serve as judges and state governors and what would that be like and um so i think it's a really interesting um entry into this into the whole debate so like i said it comes fairly late in the slew of suffrage films of this era of the 1910s but it it does something a little differently it doesn't actually advocate directly for the vote it it jumps and imagines the future in a very interesting way okay we have another question from jinping um about the issue of journalists in the film there's a kind of a sense that the journalists are the corrupt journalist editor is uh in league with the corrupt politicians and uh not going to be fair to uh the woman who is uh running for office and having to make a judgment on her husband um do we still see journalism in a political position today or how is the role of journalism playing into the politics of women's voting anybody hillary clinton and her friendliness and her emails and things like that um well yeah i i mean i'm just looking at what's going on with uh kamala harris right now um and yeah i mean to be fair not all of it is a product of the media uh per se uh in journalism i mean such as it is um it's very uh divided partisanship so uh but the framing of her is is very stereotypical uh in many ways um and with at least from the particularly from the more republican side of things you know that she's very angry the most angry woman that he's ever seen and whether we know as a stereotype of african-american women as they're very angry um and uh if people think back um i was thinking about when michelle obama first came on the scene um she's cultivated a demeanor in a particular way um but initially that was the framing for her as well very early on and so um and so and as far as hillary clinton well i mean the whole idea that she didn't bake cookies was just seen as outrageous uh that really stuck with people that sounds really trivial uh but it wasn't um and um uh i mean it came up again and again and again that she didn't bake cookies that was a statement she had made when she was first lady um so uh women have a hard time winning in the political arena because when you're really um comparably assertive we know that gets seen as like overly aggressive and angry and you know and then when you don't really stand up then you're seen as too weak that you're never going to be able to make it and what kind of a leader would you make you're going to cry so it's very hard to navigate that even today i feel so you have anything to add to that the role of journalism and the portrayal of women in politics and in the film about the the rhetoric is that that is too weak and too attached to domestic issues to be an effective leader in the public sphere do you think that attitude still exists today and and that the media i mean we do have right-wing media today and we have a lot of different um kind of a fragmented media uh landscape as opposed to the kind of mainstream media that we had in the past you know i think we had mainstream media in the past i think that's not true i think in this period most newspapers are either republican or democrat they're openly and clearly partisan and even the new york times was a republican newspaper it couldn't be count on to give a decent portrayal of democratic uh uh candidates so you know this idea uh that we have a distinguished uh a past of distinguished newspaper coverage that somehow has been lost i don't think it's true um there are other um issues that come up in the film that are considered women's issues um that they are tethered to concerns about about home and family and that to turn that on its head um there was an article by gail uh collins in the new york times a terrible article about the fact that women getting the vote should have led to more attention to women's issues like health care education and that sort of thing do you think that that is still a relevant issue that that women have not women who got the vote did not pay attention to women's issues the way that they thought that it was thought that they would at that time i mean i think one of the things that's difficult when you look contextually at the time um is that again just because women women fought hard for the right to vote it's not like it was granted it wasn't given it was this hard-bought battle that lasted over 72 years and so i think who was able to vote and how decisions were made it was still very much white middle-class and upper-class women who were more suited to be able to address those issues why because they weren't they were homemakers many of them were domestic um domestic capacity and so think about who was able to vote when women could vote if you're working 14 hours a day in a factory you're not the one who has those very very real issues um you're the one who's going to be least likely to be able to have access to the ballot um as opposed to women who maybe um are in a different uh socioeconomic position i think is is but i think today what you see and it's it's not as though those issues didn't exist then they very much did is who was making the decisions about how to focus on policy um and what policies needed to be put forward i think today though when you think about what's happening um once again women and women's issues are should be at the center and we are failing as a country when you look at covid and you look at the crisis child care schooling how many women are going to end up being left behind as a result having to stop careers or they're putting less hours towards their work just because they simply have to make those choices and nobody is thinking from a policy level or focusing on what is happening to women right now in this moment um from both the mental health health care um you know education standpoint your ability to move forward in your job and to be able to progress in your career all of these things um are very interesting i think the other thing that's interesting about this film just talking about all those issues this is one year before the pandemic of 1918 hit as well so um again what's what's old is still new it's kind of like we're on this hamster wheel and i think it's interesting too that the um the film presents women's issues as a kind of opposing force right that that clara the heroine is kind of torn between the the harpies of the women's party who are just trying to push her forward into the governors who were not presented in any way sympathetic um and the pull of her family and her marriage there's even a composition where she's trying to decide whether to run for governor and the women's party women are on one side and her father and mother and blind sister on the other side and there's a sense that she's if she's poor like there's no sense that women's issues are part of women's issues are part of the fabric of which larger issues this virginia case just saying right that that that they're seeing the film really presents them as an opposite and i think that's a problem with with what it's doing and some of these women's issues i think we can look at other countries and see that there have been more um different advances in terms of health care child care [Music] and i wonder why america has has shown a different pattern there other thoughts about that i mean in new york yes uh go ahead there was a famous uh article written in the late 19th century called why is there no socialism in the united states um it is a very different country first of all there is a tradition of individualism which is extremely strong in this country to this day second of all there is a structure to our politics called federalism we have uh it seems odd to say this in the age of trump but we have a relatively weak federal government and uh how and political power is divided between the states and the federal government so when the prime minister of the netherlands wants something done he does it but that cannot happen in the united states uh just to repeat something i i think i said before control i just called uh one of the uh heads of electorate of the electoral commission in wisconsin and wanted to ask her about certain constraints on voting those constraints vary by uh by um county by county uh so there's nothing like that certainly in europe um i think places like canada and uh latin american countries are a little bit more like us but the structure of our politics is different than countries which by the way are smaller and less scattered right well i would also say there's a history you know i mean that the feminist movement there was internal struggles quite a bit over which way to go um and um you know there were liberal feminists socialist feminists radical feminists all sorts of different viewpoints about the claims making um and uh ultimately uh the liberal feminists won out in the sense that there was this idea that we were going to be equal uh to men uh that uh we could meet again we could be the same as men uh and so that kind of um approach really uh for better for worse because there's you know multiple sides to this uh but really led to this idea that women were going to fit into the existing structure particularly of work um and uh and if you look at patterns in some other countries i take norway because my cousin is from norway uh they they took an idea that we were going to take a more um human perspective of which women were a part of that and so we're going to um uh really focus on issues of family the collective good um and in fact it ended up pretty much legislating that because women would take family leave and not men uh that men had to take family leave so uh there were there were steps um you know they they have a quota system for like their boards uh for their uh companies uh where they have to have so many women and then over time they don't need it anymore because it has kind of broken the barriers uh we're much less proud to do that and so um some of that choice and and kind of i don't want to say ignoring physical difference because not everybody has kids or whatever but but the really kind of playing up that it's the same became more that women were going to have to fit into to the man's world uh rather than really in some ways um then having to address the the you know other kinds of responsibilities and um kind of the society as a whole and so uh that has kind of reinforced uh i think some of the the problems that we're still seeing with regard to the glass ceiling um as as virginia talked about uh another virginia earlier about uh the fact that um uh you know we're seeing uh covet 19 just the the pandemic is just i know lots of articles there are some studies out there now uh showing this is decimating women uh in terms of of their careers and the idea that somehow um they're going to be able to get back on track is really um up in the air uh at this point so so we're coming to the end of our time and i wonder if before we sign off we would like anyone would like to make a final statement um ellen question for shelley um did you call this uh it's sort of a two-part question a pro-suffrage film and a suffrage propaganda film do you think it was meant to it's 1917. you think it's meant to change opinions i think it is i think it's less direct than some of the other explicitly pro suffrage films um i i do know i mentioned in my introduction that the producer hal reed was really interested to get the opinion of suffrage leaders in the east and he took he screened the print for them he wanted their input he wanted the message to be um applicable across the country um so i think it's a it's a much less direct for women's suffrage than some of the other films which are explicitly asking for the vote um it's more or less kind of freaking sophisticated absolutely absolutely and i think the fact that the league of women voters took it up immediately after ratification in 1921 and um and retitled it and showed it and went around that i mean shows that they understood at the very beginning of that organization that this is a an important film for their message and it's important message going forward right now that we've won the vote how are we going to go forward so absolutely well i i want to conclude by thanking all of you uh a panelist and thanks to all of you who joined us and listening to the panel now let's all go out and persuade all of our friends and neighbors to exercise their right to vote in november no women women currently vote at higher rates than men so let's remember that let's keep it up yep okay bye everyone great bye thank you all bye