Look On! Suffragists

(Look On! takes occasional note of noteworthy films.)

Just finished watching Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony. The several-years-old documentary is available on Netflix as well as in DVD.

It's worth watching, though best watched in several segments. By filmmaker Ken Burns, it 1st aired as a documentary series on PBS, which maintains an informational website. As is common in works of the kind, the repetition of static photos (necessary given how little motion picture footage there was back in the day), coupled with folksy-Americana music, can make one a bit drowsy at times.

But stick with it. The story's a good one -- one of which this 'Grrl knew precious little.

Told well are the life journeys of 2 very different persons, at one in their passion for changing the role of women in the United States:

► Elizabeth Cady Stanton (near right), a mother, wife, and writer, loved good food and took care to keep her hair curled.

► Susan B. Anthony (far right) was an austere, cerebral woman who never married.

They met in 1851 in Seneca Falls, New York, where 3 years earlier Stanton had convened the 1st-ever women's rights convention. From then on, the 2 (both IntLawGrrls foremothers) worked tirelessly together for women's rights -- especially, for the enfranchisement of women.

Particularly interesting in Not for Ourselves are the moments when that last, singular goal conflicted with others. The conflict saw the women, who'd been staunch activists on behalf of abolition, oppose post-Civil War Reconstruction Amendments because they kept from women what they granted to former slaves. And as the goal of women's suffrage grew nearer, they distanced themselves from African American women in an effort to shore up support in the South. Conflict also arose between the 2 women themselves. The 1890s publication, by an ever-more-radical Stanton, of The Woman's Bible drew censure from the movement she'd started -- a movement that Anthony chose to continue to lead notwithstanding its ouster of her longtime friend and ally. As a result Anthony, alone, appears on the 1st U.S. coin depicting a woman.

Both women would pass away more than a decade before their work took form in the 19th Amendment. This film serves as a reminder of their legacy.

On August 13

On this day in ...
... 1818, Lucy Stone was born, the 8th of 9 children, into a poor farm family in Brookline, Massachusetts. She began teaching school at age 16, and did so in between college-level studies, becoming the 1st Massachusetts woman to earn a college degree when she was graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio at age 29. By this time Stone was an activist for women's rights and against slavery; her work aided passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, as well as suffrage laws in many states. She was a close ally of foremothers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Before her death in Boston at age 75, Stone would campaign for temperance, for less restrictive women's clothing (welcoming the advent of bloomers, above left (credit)), and for reform in social mores and family law (keeping her own name after marriage).

(Prior August 13 posts are here, here, and here.)

On August 12

On this day in ...
… 1833, Lillie Devereux Blake (left) was born in Raleigh, North Carolina. In 1857, she began writing short stories for Harper's Weekly and the Knickerbocker. After her husband’s death, she supported herself and her 2 children with her writing, working as a war correspondent during the Civil War as well as writing novels and short articles. In 1869 she joined IntLawGrrls' foremothers Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to fight for women’s suffrage. She was president of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association from 1879 to 1890 and of the New York City Woman Suffrage League from 1886 to 1900. Blake died in 1913. (image credit)
… 1825, Simón Bolívar (below right), known as "The Liberator," became the 1st president of the Republic of Bolivia. (image credit) A descendant of rich Spanish aristocrats, Bolívar was one of the major architects of South American independence from Spain. He consolidated the independence of several South American countries through multiple military campaigns over the course of the early 1820s. In 1821, Gran Colombia (a federation covering much of modern Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador) was created, and Bolívar became its president. Then followed the presidenc of Bolivia on this day.

(Prior August 12 posts are here and here.)

Guest Blogger: Tracy A. Thomas

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure today to welcome Tracy A. Thomas (left) as a guest blogger.

Professor of Law and Director of Faculty Research and Development at the University of Akron School of Law in Ohio, Tracy teaches Remedies, Women’s Legal History, and Family Law.
She was graduated Order of the Coif with her J.D. from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, where she was also Production Editor of the Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review (then called Journal). She also holds a a B.A., cum laude, from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and an M.P.A. from California State University-Long Beach.
Prior to joining the Akron Law faculty in 1998, she clerked for Judge Ferdinand F. Fernandez on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and was an attorney for Covington & Burling and Neighborhood Legal Services in Washington, D.C.
Tracy's publications include numerous articles and essays on equitable remedies, and she is newly a co-editor of Remedies: Public and Private (West, forthcoming 5th ed.). Much of her scholarship forms a part of the nascent field of women's legal history, about which she guest-posts below. Among Tracy's current research projects is a book, under contract with New York University Press, entitled Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Feminist Foundations of Family Law. Not surprisingly, she chooses to dedicate her guest-post below to her research subject. Stanton (prior IntLawGrrls posts) is depicted below in 1856 as she holds 1 of her daughters, Harriot. (credit)

Tracy writes that

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a formidable intellect, whose holistic concepts of gender equity enabled her to envision individual, collective, and systemic change. She was able to articulate legal philosophies that are much of the basis of our work today. She did all of this while mothering (single-handedly) seven children. Her radical ideas led to her historical ostracization even though it was she at the time, rather than her colleague, Susan B. Anthony, who was the familiar national figure.

Today Stanton joins other honorees (albeit, we note, not yet Anthony) on the list of IntLawGrrls' transnational foremothers just below our "visiting from ..." map at right.

Heartfelt welcome!

On September 3

On this day in ...
... 1838 (170 years ago today), a man who'd become an internationally renowned advocate of slavery abolition and universal suffrage, for women as well as men, Frederick Douglass, escaped from slavery. Douglass, who was about 21 at the time, left Maryland and traveled by train to New York. He wore the clothes and carried the ID papers of a freed sailor of African ancestry. (credit for photo montage of Douglass and colleague Elizabeth Cady Stanton)
... 301, Marinus, a stonemason-turned-Saint believed to have been born in what is now Croatia, founded San Marino, among the world's oldest republics. Today the mountainous country (flag at right), which is about the size of Washington, D.C., and is fully surrounded by Italy, has a population of about 31,000.

On July 19, ...

... 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton (pictured at left with 1 of her daughters, Harriot) read aloud a Declaration of Sentiments at a Seneca Falls, N.Y., women's rights convention. The following day delegates unanimously adopted the 1848 Declaration -- the text of which parallels the 1776 American Declaration of Independence, and so includes phrasing such as, "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal ..."
... 1980, the XXII Olympic Games opened in Moscow with a record-low number of countries participating, as scores of countries joined a boycott called by U.S. President Jimmy Carter to protest the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

On May 15, ...

...1937 (70 years ago today), Madeleine K. Albright (left), the United States' 1st woman Secretary of State (1991-97), was born in Prague, in what was then Czechoslovakia.
...1869, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton co-founded the National Woman Suffrage Association, an organization dedicated to securing an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would extend the franchise to women.
...1252 (755 years ago today), Ad exstirpanda, a bull issued by Pope Innocent IV, authorized the use of torture to extract confessions from presumed heretics. Succeeding popes reaffirmed the proclamation, and torture became widespread in Catholic Europe.