[ Music ] >> Hi. I'm Rebecca Boggs Roberts, and I'm sitting in my living room here in Washington D.C with a portrait of my grandmother, one of my inspirations, looking over my shoulder. >> Hi. My name is Lucinda Robb, and I am coming at you from my basement in Arlington, Virginia. I tried to make sure that everything is going to be quiet, but if you hear a dog in the background, I apologize in advance. We're very excited to be here today to talk a little bit about our book, "The Suffragist's Playbook, Your Guide to Changing the World." We first got the idea for this book several years ago as we were preparing for the hundredth anniversary of the 19th amendment that gave women the right to vote. I was talking to a friend of mine, and she was saying that she didn't know a lot of the history behind the suffrage movement. Usually it gets maybe a couple of paragraphs in a history book. Maybe you've heard one of the names. But usually most people don't have an idea of how this happened, one of the greatest expansions of the vote in United States history. And Rebecca and I both come from a background where we have very strong mothers and grandmothers, and we know about the important role that women played in politics, and we wanted to really shine a light on their accomplishments, especially because one of the great things about studying the suffrage movement is that they had a lot of smart tactics that activists today can use for almost any way that you want to make the world a better place. They're very applicable, and make a lot of sense. And one of the best things about modeling the suffrage movement is unlike when you have wars, they don't tend to be sort of violent upheaval. They're a way to make permanent change in a way that really makes a difference, but doesn't totally throw off the old structure beforehand. >> A few years ago I read a book about the suffrage movement here in Washington D.C, and Lucinda came to me and said, "You know, I really think we need a young reader's version of suffrage history. There needs to be some way for people to get access to these stories earlier." And we talked about maybe writing a graphic novel, but neither of us can draw in any way, and we sort of went back and forth on different ways to make this history relevant for a younger audience. And we realized that the things the suffragists pioneered, the tactics that they used to make sure that women were enfranchised when they were, are things any activist can use at any time. And, in fact, they were things the suffragists invented in order to get their cause through. And so whether you're fighting for something enormous like climate change or something really small like, you know, changing the traffic patterns on your block, you could do a lot worse than to learn from the suffragists and the way they succeeded. So tactics like making sure everything looks exactly right, and gets picked up virally because of the imagery. We think of that as an artifact of the Instagram of age and it's super not. You know, 100 years ago the suffragists were really smart about making sure things looked fantastic in pictures so that newspapers would pick them up all over the country. They made messages go viral in 1917 by sewing words on to a banner and standing in front of the White House which seems crazy now, but just think what those women would have done with social media. I mean those banners the suffragists held were tweets. They cultivated allies which is so vital to any social movement. They, by definition, could not introduce legislation. They could not vote for it. They could not affect the change they needed to make because they weren't men. And so they needed male allies from the very beginning. And there are just so many lessons reverberating throughout the 20th and 21st century with almost any social cause you can think of that the suffragists did first and best. So that lovely portrait over my shoulder is my grandmother Lindy Bogg. She's one of the reasons that Lucinda and I wanted to write this book along with Lucinda's grandmother, Ladybird Johnson. My grandmother was born in 1916. So before women had the right nationwide to vote. And yet she went on to be a powerful member of Congress, an ambassador. She was a pioneering feminist in so many ways in her own very lovely gentile southern way. And she lived almost 100 years. So she was able to witness massive, massive changes in American history in her own lifetime. And affect many of those changes herself. So there is no way to study suffrage history without the Library of Congress. It is just an extraordinary resource. And one of the amazing things about being able to study 20th century history, and my focus of the suffrage movement is more 20th century, and Lucinda covered the 19th century. That's sort of how we divided things up. But in the 20th century of course there's amazing photographs, and they are striking, and beautiful, and there's tons of them. And the Library of Congress has them all available for free to download at any resolution you want. And the fact that you can almost participate in this movement from the comfort of your own bedroom on your laptop is such an extraordinary resource. But then the Library of Congress also has the National Woman's Party papers. And I think they've even discovered more things that they didn't know they had when the library put on the exhibit for the centennial last year. They discovered all kinds of artifacts that really tell the story of this movement. And so the Library of Congress is unique and extraordinary and local to me. I'm so lucky to live in the town where I can just sort of [inaudible] on down there and use the resources. But so many of the resources are digital that almost anybody does have access to them. >> And I have to say the place that I probably did the most of my initial research starts off at the [inaudible] the national archives. And the national archives of course has the actual 19th amendment. What really surprised me when I started working there was that they had tens of thousands of petitions from women that they'd written on just about all of the social movements of our history starting with these enormous petitions from women writing in trying to abolish slavery. And they would be so big that literally they'd be signed by 30, 40, 50,000 women. And they would have paper, and they would sew them together, and they would roll them in this big giant roll. And they sent them in to Congress, and it was so enormous that instead of unrolling it, they actually just weighed it. But these were women who were trying to participate and to have an active say in what was happening in our democracy before they actually had a vote. And what really surprised me is I never heard of a lot of these women. I'd never known anything about this engagement and all of the lobbying and the politicking and the ways that they were trying to influence things behind the scenes before they actually had the right to vote themselves. So a number of the women who would write in, one of my favorite petitions was from Susan B Anthony who was arrested for trying to vote in 1872. And in fact she knew about publicity as well, and she was very good at marketing and how things were going to be picked up by the press. And at first they said, "Well, you know, you can come in. We're going to arrest you, but we'll just let you come in to the office." And she said, "No. No. No." She held -- She made the bailiff come and get her, and she held her hands out and said, "You must arrest me." And she was desperately trying to get him to put the handcuffs on her because she knew how it would look, and how it would play. And there's a big trial that winds up being held, and when she's finally given the chance to speak for herself, the judge winds up interrupting her six times, and finally in the end he shuts her down. But Susan B Anthony was not one to easily be shunted aside. But finding all these petitions from well known women, but also women who were just everyday ordinary people, and we might say nothing special about them except for the fact that they cared about their country and they wanted to write in and say, "This is how we need to make a difference." And it's this sort of groundswell of activism, and gradually you see them becoming much more sophisticated over time. They really wound up making a huge impression on me. >> I think the ingenuity of the suffragettes shows up again and again. And, you know, we're having this conversation in the summer of 2020 when there are protests all over the country. And every time I see a picture of a protest, I think, "Yeah. Suffragists invented that. Yep. They did that first." And it's extraordinary to me to watch how relevant their messages are still 100 years later, and how contemporary activists, completely unconsciously most of the time, are echoing these tactics that they invented. And just the very idea of American democracy is already ingenious. And so demanding a part in it is, you know, a completely American thing to do. But to have to achieve that part in democracy without any power, to start from a position of absolutely no power, and get to a point where all American women were enfranchised. And I hate saying they were given the vote because they fought really hard for the vote, and I would also argue that they always had the right to vote as American citizens. It was just finally that the men in power recognized they had that vote. But the tactics and the strategies of course were ingenious, but even just the whole idea of wanting a voice in your government of a government of, by, and for the people. And that includes me. And that is important. Just gets to that core idea of American ingenuity. >> I think I would agree entirely with Becca what she says about how the suffragists were always coming up with interesting and different ways to get attention to their cause. And just even in the very beginning we normally start the suffrage movement from 1848 at the Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls. That was the very first time that they had a women's convention to talk about women's issues. Sure. It had been sort of a buzzy issue in small progressive circles. Mostly people are abolitionist and Quakers. But then they decided, "We're going to go ahead and send out a couple of flyers, see if we can interest a few people." And what happened is 300 plus people showed up at a church one July, men as well as women, wanting to talk about this issue. It's something that had never been done before on a wider scale, but once they did it, they got a lot of publicity. They modeled their document after the Declaration of Independence, and they came up with their own resolutions, and their own ways that they talked about how society had been unfair to them, talking about how they were legally dead under the law, how they weren't allowed to have their own wages where they weren't allowed to go in many cases to higher education. They did something to really sort of capture imagination, and I think that's what made a lot of the movement so successful. Because they had sometimes limited tools, they were able to think of how can we do this in a clever way. How can we bring attention? How can we make people think? And that's something that again and again keeps coming back at you when you study the suffrage movement. How clever they were. How they were able to come up with sort of some kind of strategy that would get people to pay attention. All of these things that they did, it wasn't easy, and they managed to find a way to get that attention. >> And it still works. I think that's the big point of our book, that they got those -- that attention in ways that any contemporary activist could still use. So when you see people planning a march for the -- to coincide with the presidential inauguration. When you see people all wearing the same color at a protest to stand out. When you see a mural painted on 16th street in front of the White House to get a message directly in the president's face. Those are all suffragist tactics, and none of them had been done before the suffragists did them. >> I think another thing that winds up being interesting to me when we talk about parallels today is that you had both a sort of moderate track of the suffrage movement, and what you might call a more radical track. And sometimes you'll find that when people look at them they try to say, "Well, this is the group that made the difference." Or, "That is the group that really made the difference." And the truth is they worked very well together. You had the more radical, and I say radical aspect of the suffrage movement that was getting a lot of attention and headlines, and what they were doing was moving the goal posts. But you had a much wider, larger, sort of group that had places -- had women engaging all over the country that was involved in suffrage. And they had the local contacts. They had been lobbying for a long time. They were able to take that momentum that the more radical suffragists created and make it really work to keep things going and get that ball to that final goal of a constitutional amendment. And it is unbelievably difficult to pass a constitutional amendment. It takes a long time. It's a lot of work. But they managed to accomplish it. >> In any social movement, the radical and moderate branches ultimately work together to serve the goal. And they don't necessarily literally work together. They often actually undermine each other. And that was absolutely the case in the suffrage movement. The National Woman's Party and [inaudible] Association often tore each other down and store each other's [inaudible] and all kinds of things that were at cross purposes. But ultimately the fact that they both existed and were moving towards suffrage served the goal well, and better than if either had been doing it without the other. So the more radical arm could push the envelope, try these tactics, go out on a limb because the more moderate group was there doing the long slow steady organizing grassroots work. And the more moderate group could have cover to meet with members of Congress who might be hesitant by saying, you know, "Oh, we're not those crazy National Woman's Party people. We're very reasonable and credible. Come meet with us." And so the two ultimately could not have succeeded without each other. >> I think if I was trying to say something to many of the activist movements today that is particularly useful in looking at the suffrage movement, I would say to never give up. I know that there are times now that we think, you know, we've been trying at this for so long, and still no change. And it's easy to get frustrated. And the suffragists definitely felt that way themselves. And when we talk about the suffrage movement, we're talking about three generations. And, in fact, most of the first wave of suffragists lived very long lives. Some of the most well known leaders. And all of them died before they actually had the opportunity to vote. It was a 72 year struggle. But at the same time they would look back and say, "It's not always easy to see how many things have changed, but in this process, so much happened for women's political activism." When they first started speaking out, it was literally controversial for women to speak in public period. In fact, women weren't even supposed to applaud in public. You weren't supposed to make any noise. So you'll often read in sort of 19th century accounts they talk about women waving their handkerchiefs because that's how you were supposed to applaud. And when Lucy Stone and Susan B Anthony got to the end of their lives, they did -- They said it's -- "We're not there. We haven't gotten it yet. But so much has changed." The fact that women had the right to their own property. The fact that women could speak in pubic because it became more common for women to go on to higher education. In fact, even enter the professions. And women were doctors and lawyers and journalists. All of the activity that they've gotten involved in really made a difference. So looking at something only from the sort of has everything changed movement, sometimes it's helpful to step back and see you may not have gotten all of your goals, but you probably have changed landscape a lot in that time. I do think social change happens a great deal more faster -- more quickly than it did back in the time of the suffragists. But making legislative change is still hard, and it will still take time. But a way to think of it in my mind is a lot of times what you're doing is you're planting the seeds. And for a long time you don't actually see the results. You -- Nothing appears to be above ground. But at some point it'd been watered enough that you do start to see they take root. They grow. You start making massive changes in public opinion. And that's why I always like to point out that as tough as it was to get the 19th amendment passed, now today you can't imagine finding anyone who would be against the idea that women should have the right to vote. It became so much a part of our understanding of what American democracy is all about. When I look at the 19th amendment, I'm proud of it, and I'm so glad to be celebrating the 100th anniversary. But at the same time it's really more like a rung on the ladder of democracy that we never stop climbing in search of a more perfect union. I think one of the things we hope this book will accomplish is that young people today will be able to use some of these tools for their activism. We hardly need to tell them to get active because they're amazingly involved. But they'll be able to find successful tools so they can continue to make this a more perfect union, a better democracy. The suffragists were amazing, but they were also flawed. They had a lot of mistakes. They did a lot of things wrong. And the truth is the same is true for activists today. It will not be perfect. But we often find that that actually makes us feel better. If you think that your historical figures are perfect, then you don't think you can ever emulate them because we mostly know our own flaws. But once you realize that they had feet of clay and that somehow, despite the fact that they weren't, you know, Wonder Woman, they still managed to make a difference, we find it empowering. And I hope that the people who read this book will be able to take some of these lessons and go forward and keep making our country a better place. >> I can't help but think of what the suffragists would make of you, of all of us, of the people who are activists today. I think they'd be so impressed. Not only are today's activists so confident in their ability to make a difference and creative in their ways to get attention and you have so many tools at your disposal and you're so persistent, but I think they'd mainly be impressed that you feel like you have power. That even if you're too young to vote, even if you're fighting for a cause that feels like it's a real long shot right now, everyone in all of our flaws and all of our weirdness, and all of the mistakes we all make, can change the world for the better. We really can. And Susan B Anthony said failure is impossible. We absolutely agree. And we can't wait to see what you all do next. [ Music ]