A Very OK Podcast
Episode 22: “Votes for Women!”
February 21, 2023
Episode Transcript
(upbeat music playing)
Trait Thompson: Hello, and welcome to A Very OK Podcast. My name is Trait Thompson and I am here with Dr. Bob Blackburn, and we are glad to be broadcasting with you today. We’re going to talk about some great Oklahoma history. Bob, how you been?
Dr. Bob Blackburn: Doing good, Trait. Thank you, and hope you’ve had a good winter so far around the History Center.
Thompson: Pretty good winter. Things are going well around here. We’re getting ready to unveil a new exhibit here at the History Center on the history of aviation in Oklahoma, and so, stay tuned for that. That exhibit is opening on March 1, so we’re going to be excited for everyone to come and check it out.
Blackburn: Very good. I know we have a good collection on aviation going all the way back to Wiley Post’s family. After he died, his family kind of embraced the Oklahoma Historical Society, and we have most of the collections that were on the airplane when he and Will died in Alaska. And since then, I was with the family several times in the 1980s, when they would come back and donate more. So I know you have a good collection to build on.
Thompson: Yeah, we do. In fact, I was with our great staff at the Will Rogers Museum in Claremore, a year or so back, and they showed me, I hate to say it, but I’ve seen Will Rogers’s underwear—so, his undies that were packed. They do have his name in them, by the way.
So, and the other voice that you hear, I want to bring in, our guest today, and I’m really excited to have her with us. Dr. Sunu Kodumthara is professor of history at Southwestern Oklahoma State University in Weatherford, Oklahoma, where she has taught since 2010 and specializes in topics in political, cultural, and gender history from throughout the 20th century in the United States. So, Sunu, we are thrilled to have you. And this is not your first time to be on this podcast.
Dr. Sunu Kodumthara: That’s right.
Thompson: You were on our first live podcast that we did. And so welcome back. We’re great to have you. You’re our first two-time guest.
Kodumthara: Kodumthara: Yay! I’m so excited to be here. And I’m really excited to talk to you guys and just have a, you know, a normal friend casual conversation, as per usual.
Thompson: As one does, as one does. Just talking a little bit of Oklahoma history among friends.
Kodumthara: That’s right.
Thompson: So today, and this is one of the reasons I’m so excited to have you on, we’re going to be talking about the women’s suffrage and the anti-suffrage movements in Oklahoma, and we have so many great Oklahomans to talk about. But this is a specialty of yours, one of the things that you’ve studied quite a bit, and one thing we always like to do is to be able to talk a little bit about our topic in pop culture and talk a little bit about our movies. And, Bob, I’ve heard from people; people like it when we talk about the movies, so I guess we’ll keep doing it. But, Sunu, do you have any, you know, we don’t have to necessarily limit it to women’s suffrage, but any movies or TV shows that are favorites of yours that really delve into kind of women’s empowerment or a strong female central character?
Kodumthara: Right. So, I’ve watched two that have been about women’s suffrage, and I’ve watched Iron-Jawed Angels, which is a feature film that focuses specifically on Alice Paul, who’s known to be, and rightfully so, known to be a radical suffragist, and it’s a great film about her. She gets her training in England and comes here to the United States, and she’s arrested and goes on a hunger strike as other suffragists are with her. And it’s a great film that covers her life and the struggles of other suffragists who are arrested in Washington, DC, and what they go through, because it’s not just them going on hunger strikes and being force fed. Right? It’s also them going through all of these different abuses. And it’s an amazing story about how courageous they are, and the kind of abuses they go through. And then also, you know, to be fair, I did watch the Ken Burns documentary on suffrage. And, you know, I’m trying not to be the bitter historian who’s not interviewed for the Ken Burns documentaries, and so, I did watch, and I thought it was great and really informative, but I was also like, you know, what about women in the West? Why aren’t you talking more about women in the West? Why didn’t you call me and ask me to be the historian talking about women in the West? But you know, whatever, I...
Thompson: Bob, you’ve got Ken’s cell number, don’t you? Can you call and make a complaint?
Blackburn: I will lodge that.
Kodumthara: Thank you, Bob. I really appreciate it. See, that’s why we’re friends, Bob. This is why I keep you as a friend, Bob. I appreciate that. (laughs)
Blackburn: Thank you.
Thompson: Well, Bob, how about you? Any favorite movies, TV shows in this particular realm?
Blackburn: Well, actually, it’s very personal for me because I was raised by a single mom who was breaking through the glass ceiling in the 1950s. Had been a teacher, which had been relegated as a profession that women were supposed to go into. But Mom said, no, she’s going to go into business, became a producer, TV star, and all that. And so movies about strong women have always resonated with me because it rings so true. And two movies, same actress, that both appeal to me. One is Places in the Heart with Sally Field and Danny Glover.
Thompson: Yeah.
Blackburn: John Malkovich, where this woman is widowed all of a sudden. Her husband, who is a sheriff, is killed in this accidental death. And she has to really bail out the farm. The banks are going to take the farm if she doesn’t make a payment. She stands strong and says, no, I am not going to give up this land. Yes, my husband’s gone, but I am going to lead this family. She takes care of John Malkovich, who’s a blind man. She befriends this itinerant Black man, Danny Glover, who becomes her right-hand person. She earns his trust. He earns her trust. And together, led by a woman, they achieve it. They get in the cotton crop. They face down the local gin operator, who is discriminating both against an African American and against a woman, and she still pulls that off and holds that family together. And that’s always appealed to me.
And the second, of course, Norma Rae, in the labor movement of this woman at a time in the South, deep South, with that glass ceiling very low on workers of any kind, labor is pretty much held in low regard. And then secondly, being the woman; yet she is willing to stand up to the mill owners, to the power structure, to the elite in that community, and really leads an effort to raise people’s consciousness that something is wrong here, and we can do something about it. And she does that. And then on a more personal level, Mom was in Hollywood in 1967, covering all the new KOCO-TV and ABC shows, and I got to see it in the studio floor when Sally Fields was making The Flying Nun.
Thompson: Really?
Blackburn: I saw scenes of that as well as Bewitched. I got to see Bewitched being taped that day. A little bit of trivia from Bob Blackburn’s life.
Thompson: I think, you know, I used to watch Bewitched in reruns and, you know, as a kid, you always try to do that nose thing to see if you could conjure up anything, and I never could quite master that.
Kodumthara: Yeah, I was convinced it was because I couldn’t do the nose thing.
Thompson: Exactly. I think if we figured that out, we would have cracked it. And you could, you know, and I would use it to maybe manifest some extra money from the legislature this year. (laughter)
Thompson: Yeah, but a great movie, or it’s actually not a movie. The one that I was thinking of is a great series that came out about two years ago, and it’s on FX, and you can stream it on Hulu. It’s called Mrs. America, and it was about the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment. And Cate Blanchett stars as Phyllis Schlafly, and she’s really kind of the center of that show. Although other women’s rights players were featured in that as well, such as Gloria Steinem. But what struck me about that series is how politically ambitious and politically active Phyllis Schlafly was. And even though she was gaining a popularity and gaining a following, I remember this one scene very clearly, and she’s meeting with a congressman and his staff, and they’re in Washington, DC, and she is the one who kind of is in the position of power. And yet they tell her, hey, can you go get us coffee? Can you take notes in this meeting? And she’s the one that is driving this political machine, but yet she’s still seen in that traditional domestic role, and that really resonated with me. The entire series, it’s about ten episodes, it’s a limited series, but it really goes through the ins and outs of that. And I’m sure some things are dramatized for television, but I thought it was a really great series, and I would recommend it to anybody out there who might have the opportunity to watch it.
Kodumthara: You know, that’s the ironic thing for Phyllis Schlafly’s life is here’s this woman who is incredibly intelligent and motivated, and, you know, she has her own run at Congress, and it doesn’t work out for her. And yet, at the same time, she becomes the driving force behind the STOP ERA movement. She’s the one who, you know, establishes it basically. And she is also the organizer behind the grassroots movement, which is what successfully stops it. And yet at the same time, you know, she is also seen in this very domesticated role, like, because you’re the woman and the and the wife and the mother, can you please handle all of these little things, this sort of secretarial- mother type of role and in this domestic position? But she is a lawyer, she is a trained lawyer. So she knows the legalities of these things. And it points to the older movement of anti-suffrage. These are women who were intelligent, who were organized and who understood politics, and yet they are campaigning against something that would grant them political equality. And the question always goes back to why? Why would you be interested in doing such a thing? And that’s what I think drives historians to dig into that and investigate that more. Why would you want to be a part of of that kind of campaign?
Thompson: Sure, absolutely. Well, I think one of the best places we can start in talking about the suffrage and anti-suffrage movement, and I particularly want to get into Oklahoma, but I think we need to understand what’s going on in the national movement before we do that. And so really kind of where this gets off the ground is in 1848, a bunch of activists gather in Seneca Falls, New York, and they are invited by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, and they have the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments. And a few of those are “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal. The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman having in direct object, the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.” So, Bob, the language is not really soft in this instance, is it?
Blackburn: Right. That’s a time period, we had just come to the Great Awakening. It is a time of religious revival across the country in a sense of reform. If you go into Indian history, you see that with the reformers who say, we’ve got to do something about the way we’ve treated American Indians. You see that with the abolitionist movement about the same time coming about. It’s almost that old patriotic feeling of Sam Adams and that generation that’s thinking, you know, liberty should be part of who we are and what we will be willing to defend. And out of that sense of reform and improvement in individual liberty really comes that suffrage movement, which ironically, when we get into the 20th century a little bit. And the question I may have for Sunu is that, of course, in Oklahoma, a very strong Protestant population, very conservative, even the Catholic community at the time, very religious, but yet opposed suffrage for women based on religious reasons. You know, the Bible says it’s supposed to be the way it always has been. And in this period of the 1840s, you still get this confrontation of conservative, religious, evangelical approach to life and liberty, and governance and all. But you get this reform movement at the same time. And American history is great about looking at these reform movements. You get it in the 1890s, again through Woodrow Wilson. You get it in the 1840s. And I think we really had it in the 1760s and 1770s.
Thompson: Yeah, sure. You know, Sunu, one of the interesting things about the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments is that Frederick Douglass was one of the signers of that. And early on, the women’s suffrage movement and the anti-slavery movement were very much tied together.
Kodumthara: That’s right.
Thompson: And what’s really interesting is later, the suffrage movement would try to distance themselves from the Black Civil Rights Movement.
Kodumthara: That’s right. It’s the 15th Amendment that causes that split, right? When the 15th Amendment is ratified, and well, the 15th Amendment, of course, grants the right to vote, but it grants the right to vote specifically for Black men. And when that happens, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and others like them are furious because there’s the outrage that, okay, you’re willing to grant the right to vote to Black men, but not to white women? Why is that? Where is the equality in that? And where’s the justice in that? So there’s this anger about the willingness to grant former enslaved people the right to vote, but not to your wives, your daughters, your sisters, your mothers. And then at the same time, Frederick Douglass says, well, listen, right now the focus is going to be on granting us the right to vote. We’ll get to you all later. Equality happens in increments. Justice happens in increments. So we have to wait. It takes time, and there are some suffragists who agree with him. So the suffrage movement doesn’t happen in one cohesive way, right? So there’s a huge split in the movement where there are those who say it needs to happen all at once, where both Black men, Black women, and white women all get the voting rights at the same time. And there are those who say, no, it’s going to happen incrementally. It’s a huge split that lasts for decades, and that slows down the progress for the movement tremendously, tremendously, because nobody can agree. How are we going to get suffrage? Does it happen in one cohesive way? Does it happen state by state, and nobody can really agree on that.
Thompson: Yeah, the suffrage movement really is... They have different strategies, as you mentioned. And one of those strategies was we need a federal amendment, and that kind of fell apart. And so then they changed their strategy. And there’s these different women’s suffrage organizations that are formed by some of these leaders, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and later Carrie Chapman Catt. And then we have Alice Paul and Lucy Burns involved. But there’s two, there’s different strategies. First of all, federal amendment and then no, we’re going to go state by state and get states themselves to grant women the right to vote. And that went much slower than they thought or hoped it would go. So then we change strategy again to go, okay, we need to do this at the federal level again. And so by the time you get to the 19 teens, it’s really, you know, things had not been going well. And then of course World War I starts, and you start having momentum, and then everybody’s focus goes on to the war.
Kodumthara: Right. I mean, when we talk about the war, war changes everybody’s focus. But one of the things that I do want to emphasize here is that by the time the war happens, there are several states that have the right to vote for women. And I do want to emphasize this because this is the Western historian in me. So here we go, American West, this is your time to stand up. So Wyoming Territory, Utah Territory, which put an asterisk in that—because mumble, mumble,— Colorado, Washington, California, these places had passed suffrage and granted women the right to vote. And that was important because these states' passing the right to vote had been incredibly important for the movement. And what the national suffrage movement had realized is there were women on the ground in these states who realized, you know what? It’s pointless to wait for national leaders. It’s pointless to wait for them to figure out a strategy that works for all of us. Let’s put strategies together that works for us right here on the ground, here in Colorado, here in Wyoming. Let’s figure out what works best for us. And so when they started coming together and putting together their own strategies, that made all the difference in the world. And so Colorado will put together their own suffrage strategy in 1893, and in 1894, they’ve got the right to vote in Colorado. It doesn’t happen again until 1910 for Washington, and in 1911 in California. But because they’ve got that momentum, that’s when national suffrage leaders start paying attention and realize, oh, maybe the western states have a strategy that’s working here.
Thompson: And, Bob, I wanted to ask you, why do you, you know, it’s almost a little bit counterintuitive because the Western states, you’d be full of these, you know, big sort of burly men who are like, you know, wanting to assert their place. Why do you think the Western states were so open to women’s suffrage?
Blackburn: Well, let me put this into the context of progressive ideas versus conservative ideas. Conservative ideas are often lodged with the elite. And in the East, there was a concentration of land ownership. There was a concentration of wealth. And a lot of people tied suffrage to land ownership. That had been an issue since the US Constitution, is that are we going to allow the vote to anybody who doesn’t own land? A lot of people were against that, and that was embedded in that elite. And so you go three, four generations of people in the East where that same cultural baggage has been handed down generation to generation. Oh, we need to tie it to land. We need to be conservative. We can’t expand it. We can’t trust the mob, is the way they would have looked at it. Once you give the vote to the people, that mob mentality, they can be easily swayed because they’re not as educated as we are since we came from Harvard and Yale and Rutgers, and that attitude about the common people.
Well, out in the West, thanks to the Homestead Act, and I always like to come back to that as a pivotal point in our history but the Homestead Act, which is Abraham Lincoln was a champion of it, just as he was a champion for abolishing slavery. We need to give people the chance to own land, to get a chance to get out of that cycle of poverty, to get on that first rung of creating wealth, which was land. Today, it’s that way with housing. We still say that with housing, that getting off that of the ground floor. Well, in the West, you had a couple of generations now by the 19, by the 20th century, where you have a couple of generations of people who have the land, who are used to that more level playing field without the elites who can dictate and control and push back. And so I think that that movement starts in the West because of that leveling influence and getting away from those centers of conservatism and as much as anything, elitism, which is still an issue today with a lot of the populace around the country, they don’t trust elites. Well, you see that that’s coming out of rural America because they don’t trust the elites who have the Harvard and Yale degrees and who seem to sit in the seats of power, in committees and the banks and Wall Street. And it’s something to fear.
It’s kind of a Scots-Irish approach goes back to even that element. And the Scots-Irish approach would change American history as well, and a lot of that comes to fruition in the American West. So I think it’s no surprise that the West was leading that effort. Now, the farther south you get in the West, the less strong it is, but especially in the Midwestern states from Wisconsin and Minnesota, Dakotas, even Nebraska and Kansas. West, that was that progressive movement was coming out of those states. William Jennings Bryan, that’s his stronghold. And that was his platform that we’ve got to change. And yet you get the conservative, the Roosevelt family would be a good example of that. Yeah, he’s progressive in some things, but, you know, in terms of suffrage, not so much.
Thompson: Sunu, how much of this was in the West? It was a sense of, okay, we’re a bunch of territories out here. Will women’s suffrage draw women to territory? Will it increase our population so that we can achieve statehood?
Kodumthara: Wyoming Territory, that is their story. Wyoming Territory.
Thompson: Wyoming was 1869, so, very early.
Kodumthara: That’s right. Oh, yeah. Wyoming Territory, if they can put together a commercial, this is going to be a part of their commercial. Right? Come to Wyoming. We have women’s suffrage, right? You can vote here. That’s a part of their sales pitch, right? And what they’re hoping for is that if you can increase the number of people voting, it can increase their chances for statehood. And that’s what’s going to bring in more people. That’s what they want. So for Wyoming Territory, that’s incredibly important. And it’s the same almost for Utah. What Utah runs into, their issue is going to be the number of their Mormon population. And Congress is going to have a real problem with that. So Utah and Congress have a big clash over that. So for them, it’s their religious issues. But the territorial, the territorial status and using women’s suffrage as a means of appeal to draw more people out West is a big-time sign for please come out West. We have opportunities for women to come out and vote and have an influence over government. And for Wyoming, is it something that’s really effective? Arguably, yeah, it depends on who you ask. For Colorado? No. Colorado had already been a state, and it had worked as a result of the populist movement. So, you know, for them, it didn’t matter. So as a territory, yeah, it was, it was a selling point for them.
Blackburn: Sunu, I don’t know if you’ve done any research in this area, and this would be only an assumption on my part. But was there a difference in the attitude of rural Oklahoma? Oklahoma City area, and Tulsa? In Tulsa, just I would assume that the migration from the Mid-Atlantic states to Tulsa because of the oil boom, really, 1905 in Glenpool. Here come all of these leaders coming out of the Mid-Atlantic, where you would have had the reform movements out of Pennsylvania, especially.
Kodumthara: Right.
Blackburn: And they’re coming into Tulsa with a little bit more of a progressive attitude. Whereas in Oklahoma City, much more rural, much more agricultural based, much more southern than Tulsa that’s more Mid-Atlantic. Have you found any difference in the attitudes of the leadership, especially among women, but also among men between Oklahoma City and Tulsa?
Kodumthara: So in Oklahoma, in general, the suffrage movement is really founded on, and you see this a lot throughout the West, so there’s not a whole lot of difference here, but in Oklahoma, the early days of the suffrage movement, it’s really led by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, that conservative ideal of we need the morality of women to have their influence over government and politics. And that’s where that Mid-Atlantic, progressive influence and leadership comes in, right? The idea that that morality is what is going to bring in some sort of influence over politics and take out the immorality that men have used to corrupt politics. So if women, and again, this is, very much that progressive influence throughout the West that we, that you talked about earlier, this idea that women could be able to bring in their leadership in that way and their influence in that way. You see that in the early days of the Oklahoma suffrage movement. And when we talk about the WCTU in particular, they’re hoping that their influence can not only bring in morality in a general sense, but also take out the influence of alcohol, and especially bring in some morality because of the tremendous or the large population size of the working class people here in Oklahoma, especially throughout Oklahoma City and western Oklahoma, right? So there’s a lot of leadership concentrated in the eastern half of Oklahoma, and especially in and throughout Tulsa. Right, so that’s where you’re going to find a large concentration of the leadership right there through Tulsa. So Tulsa plays a pretty large role in the suffrage movement in terms of leadership. So yeah, that’s that’s actually pretty important.
Thompson: I think it’s also important to note that temperance and suffrage were pretty closely linked all through it. And the temperance movement was this movement to either outlaw the consumption of alcohol or to severely curb the consumption of alcohol. And this was seen as very much of a women’s issue, because men would go and get drunk, and they would abandon their wives and kids, or they would abuse them. And so this really, the march to suffrage and the march to prohibition are really closely linked together.
Kodumthara: I mean, we talk about the temperance movement. One of the things that I like to emphasize with my students is if you want to talk about temperance, you link the women and the ministers, and the women and the ministers are very closely linked. And Bob, you talked about this earlier, but the influence of, okay, so women and ministers are at the heart of the Great Awakening, and that’s what brings back the men to the church, right? It’s the same thing with the temperance movement. It’s women and ministers who are at the heart of the temperance movement. They are the ones who are leading temperance. And when we talk about these women and ministers who are pushing for temperance, it’s women who are putting together these messages and these images of women and children who are abandoned at home, who are left crying and sad because their men are out drinking after working long hours. And what are we left to do? And then this image of the woman who has long been seen as the moral leader of the home, anyway. This now becomes her responsibility to decide, okay, how do I bring him back home? Well, I have to get rid of the thing that’s taking him away from home in the first place, and that is getting rid of the drink. And a way to do that is by becoming a part of this social movement. So, that social movement is one thing, and then suffrage gives her another purpose. And suffrage gives her another purpose by saying, it’s not just the drink that’s corrupting society, politics is corrupting society, too.
Because politics is also not protecting your children. It’s not making sure that your children are drinking good milk. It’s making sure that your children have a safe place to play, making sure that your children are doing well in school, or they have safe places to work because, you know, children are working. But there’s also all of these different things that you’re not able to protect as a woman. So why not give you the opportunity through suffrage to protect those things that often go unprotected?
Thompson: And one of the things that’s really interesting in the arguments that’s made for suffrage is women would say, listen, when you insert women into this process, it’s going to result in a kinder, gentler society.
Kodumthara: That’s right.
Thompson: We’re going to bring those matronly values. We’re going to bring the things that make women great. We’re going to bring those into the political sphere. So everything’s going to get better. It wasn’t a message of of women empowerment. It wasn’t, you know, at this point, it’s not marches saying, you know, give us power. It’s like, listen, we need to make sure that our society is a kind society, is a nice society, and it’s gone off the rails, and if you let women participate in the process, we’re going to bring it back to something that more resembles the type of homes that we like to have.
Kodumthara: That’s right. And that’s what’s happening on the local level, right? That’s what’s happening if you look at campaigns in California or in Colorado or even in Oklahoma, this is what they’re saying. We want to be able to protect our homes, take care of our children, take care of our husbands, and protect our communities. That’s what they’re talking about. Now, is that what Susan B. Anthony is saying? No! Is that what Elizabeth Cady Stanton is saying? Absolutely not. They’re talking about women empowerment, and that’s not necessarily a message that the men want to hear or American society at large want to hear. So these are two very different messages that are that are being told. Would they rather hear what’s happening on the local level or what the national leaders are saying? This is the question, and that’s where you have the conflict, right? And it’s in that gap that anti-suffragists fit in, because the anti-suffragists are going to hold on to what the national leaders are saying and say, oh, do you hear what Susan B. Anthony is talking about? She’s the one who’s wanting to corrupt American society and take women away from the home and violate American families. She’s going to destroy the American home. Everything is going to go to hell in a handbasket, and there goes America. And that’s the end of that, right? That’s what they’re going to grasp on to.
Thompson: And just as an aside, Bob, I’m thinking about after hearing Sunu talk, I really want to go enroll now at Southwestern in some of her classes.
(laughter)
Kodumthara: That’s right. This whole thing is.
Blackburn: She is a great speaker. Yeah, well, I had to follow her once at a League of Women Voters Conference with the state annual banquet. I was supposed to be the keynote person. As soon as she gets up there and just, everyone has tears in their eyes, I get up, and I’m pulling out pages. I gotta get through this. She’s a good speaker.
But I wanted to add one thing about what Sunu was saying about this impulse for reform. And it is kind of ironic that some reformers who want certain things will be against women’s suffrage. Kate Barnard is a good example of that. We’ll get back to her in a minute. But an expression of this reform movement is our second governor. Not many people pay much attention to Lee Cruce. Lee Cruce was a banker from Ardmore, and he was an avowed Christian, and he really became the reform governor. Whereas our first governor, Charles Haskell, said, hey, yeah, pari-mutuel betting, that’s okay. Yeah. You know, he was a businessman. He was a railroad man, and he was okay with kind of opening society. Lee Cruce came in with almost an evangelical approach. Let’s make sure that we’re cracking down on bootleggers. Let’s crack down on pari-mutuel betting. He shut down betting at the Oklahoma City, state, or the Oklahoma State Fair in Oklahoma City. I wrote about that in a book years ago. But Lee Cruce was this reformer. And he would sit, he had his own agents in his governor’s office. There was no state police force, but he hired agents to work directly for him to go out and enforce some of these laws that were on the books that were not being enforced. You know, most of the sheriffs would have been drinking along with the boys, you know, at the Elks Club or whatever it was. But Lee Cruce was that reformer, and I don’t know what his position was on suffrage. You may know that’s Sunu, but I know that he was one of these reformers. And ironically, that same reform movement based on morality, but coming from men more so, would be the Ku Klux Klan when it emerges out of World War I as a as a vigilante group, their main focus was not controlling minorities because they were pretty much controlled by law and actions, but they were for morality. It’s no accident that their symbol was a Christian cross, the burning cross. We’ve got to take this forward and reform society. So that reform movement pops up from time to time through American and Oklahoma history. In this time period, when we have this conversation about suffrage is going on parallel with this on we’ve got to close the saloons. We’ve got to be morale. We have to enforce morality. We don’t like what we see in these movies that are coming to our towns with these New York values and Parisian attitudes, and it’s a reaction to all of that. You see that very much at the same time period. To me, it’s almost a conflicting way of looking at it, but it’s really there, Sunu.
Kodumthara: Right, right. I mean, that’s the thing, you have to sort of decide, you know, which message you want to grasp on to and which message it is that’s going to be the most effective. Right? I mean, and if you’re Susan B. Anthony, especially because she’s the one who’s actually traveling to these places. She’s the one who’s going out to, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton is the one who’s had 11 kids. She’s staying at home. Susan B. Anthony is the one who’s traveling out to these states out west, and she’s the one who’s seen, you know, what’s going on out on the ground. And what she’s realizing is these people know what works and what doesn’t work and what message is the most effective. And for her, the realization takes some time because she’s talking about women in positions of leadership and women who are empowered. And some of that works, some of it doesn’t. These women know what’s going on in their schools. These women know what’s going on in local politics and whether or not they can work as advisors or not. Yeah. Do they want to run for office? Eventually, but they know that it’s not going to happen right now. So what can happen right now? That’s the question.
Thompson: And I want to highlight Alice Paul too, because, you know, there was a group of women, you know, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Carrie Chapman Catt, and they had their strategy.
Kodumthara: Yeah.
Thompson: Alice Paul came from the rough-and-tumble suffrage movement that was happening in Britain. And she basically had the attitude that said, I’m not waiting around for men to give us our rights. I’m going to go and take our rights that we deserve. And so she was a lot more blunt in her methods, and her methods were really the women’s suffrage organizations that were led by the ones we’ve talked about before, they distanced themselves, said, no, they’re not involved with us right now. And Alice Paul starts picketing the White House, and in 1917 they start picketing the White House. They are arrested. This is during World War I, so they’re arrested on all kinds of charges of, you know, being against the war and causing disruptions and trespassing. And they’re sent to workhouses in Washington, DC. They demand to be held as political prisoners, which they are denied. And they go on hunger strikes, and then they’re force-fed. And so you’ve got these two different, you’ve got these two different strategies, which I think both strategies end up coming together eventually in order to cause success. Because by 1918, Woodrow Wilson, who is against suffrage, turns his mind.
Kodumthara: That’s right.
Thompson: Yeah, go ahead.
Kodumthara: With Woodrow Wilson, it’s fascinating because Woodrow Wilson doesn’t know which way is going to work. I mean, at first he sees this as such a distraction from what he wants to focus on, which is the war. And do we stay out of it? When do we get involved? Because he knows eventually we’ve got to get involved. And here are these women who are picketing at the White House. And then eventually when he makes his argument about the war, this cause for democracy, and here are these women who are saying, you’re talking about protecting democracy, and here are this, here’s this huge percentage of your population that you are denying participation in democracy. How does that work? And that’s his wake-up call. He is denying his support for this huge population to participate in democracy. And that’s when he realizes, okay, I have to change my tone here. And that’s the game. That’s everything.
There are these great sources that we have that show telegrams that he sends to the Oklahoma State Legislature, where he says, please vote for the ratification of of the Oklahoma state amendment to ratify, to ratify the amendment, the national amendment, and to see his support for a national amendment is incredibly powerful, because this was the same guy who said no. He was incredibly patronizing to those women who were protesting, incredibly patronizing. And now the same man is sending messages to Oklahomans, to Californians, to all of these people across the country saying, ratify this amendment. It’s important that you do so.
Thompson: Bob, I want to talk about what’s going on in Oklahoma, because Oklahoma comes into being in 1890, we become a territory. And I always talk about Oklahoma. And you mentioned this as we came in as sort of the apex of the progressive and populist movements. And so already, I think we’re already geared a little bit toward being a little bit more politically advanced. But yet, our attitudes on suffrage were not as far advanced as many of the western states that Sunu has mentioned. So can you talk a little bit about what’s going on in Oklahoma during the territorial days?
Blackburn: Well, I think that’s the southern influence. “Alfalfa Bill” Murray would probably be the ultimate example of this. You know, born in rural Texas, self-educated almost, very outspoken, articulate. But he is in some ways, you say, yeah, he’s progressive. He wants to limit big banks. He wants to limit big business. He wants a corporation commission. He wants to have school land set aside so every kid can have an education. You see that progressive or populist side of him. But then you get back to this, no way women should have a vote, no way African Americans should share in any of this prosperity. So you get that. So I think a lot of this in Oklahoma is this mingling of Midwestern, and the Cherokee Outlet has always been different in Oklahoma because it was settled by Midwesterners in 1893. Kiowa and Comanche land settled by Texans and southerners. Oklahoma Territory was kind of half and half, but it’s really that dominant southern Scots-Irish culture. And as Senator Webb wrote in his book about Scots-Irish, Scots-Irish population may be a minority, but their philosophy is so strong and appealing and almost, it almost hypnotizes the larger community. They come back. That really comes back with those southern leaders in our early history. And even though we have territorial governors coming in from a Republican administration out of Washington, DC, at the grassroots level, we have this really strong southern influence, especially in agricultural areas you still see today in the 21st century with voting patterns we see now. The rural is voting so differently than urban areas. It would have been the same then, but then the rural areas are much larger. The urban population was fairly small compared to what it is today.
Thompson: People ask me sometimes, is Oklahoma a southern state, a midwestern state, or a southwestern state? And I say, yes. (laughter) It kind of depends on where you’re standing in the state as to what the influence and what the values are.
Blackburn: Trait, before we go on to the next subject though, I wanted to add something to what you brought up with Alice Paul, and Sunu kind of expanded on a little. But throughout history, and in the same here in Oklahoma, the role of revolutionaries always has to be recognized by historians. There may be a growing idea in a society that, oh, yeah, we need to change. Well, most of us in society are saying, well, we’ll do it through the ballot box. We’ll do it incrementally, a word you used a minute ago, Sunu. And most change is incremental, but generally through history, you’ve got those revolutionaries who are willing to picket and go to jail in Oklahoma. You see that with Clara Luper. In the larger context, Martin Luther King Jr. You had it with the suffrage movement, those people who are willing to violate the law to go to jail to be those revolutionaries. Sam Adams again, going back to that Revolutionary times, you got to have, you have to have the Sam Adams at the same time you have Thomas Jefferson, much more conservative who was willing to just have this incremental. Well, Sam Adams wasn’t going to wait. Let’s get the guns, let’s get the cannon, and let’s enforce our liberties are here now. We can’t wait. Well, it’s that way now. You have people on the spectrum from the Revolutionary, that’s, no, we’ve got to have it today, and anything less is unjust. We’re not going to go for it. And then you have the vast majority say, you know, I can see change. It will come. Let’s do it through the ballot box. Let’s obey the law. And so, these revolutionaries can move society in different directions. And you see that with the Alice Pauls who were willing to go to jail, and in others who are willing to break the law just because of the force of their personality and the strength of their beliefs. They just cannot see any alternative. And it’s up to them at that moment to make that statement.
Thompson: Let’s talk about what’s going on in Oklahoma, Sunu. In 1890, the Territorial Legislature decides, they say that women can vote in school elections. And that if you are in a city of 2,500 or less, you can vote.
Kodumthara: Sure.
Thompson: But really, that’s where suffrage stops for women all the way until we get into 1918 and Oklahoma passes a state amendment to the state constitution that says that women can vote. And throughout the territorial years, which is 1890 to 1907, the different national women’s suffrage organizations, they send people down to organize. And you have, and they partner with local people. Margaret Rees out of Guthrie, who was known as “the Mother of Equal Suffrage.” And we kind of go, James Gandy, introduces House Bill 41, an act defining the rights of women in 1899. It promptly goes nowhere. And so we’re kind of just hanging out in that territorial period, and nothing much is happening. Can you talk about what’s going on in Oklahoma during that time?
Kodumthara: So there’s a lot of back and forth, right? In terms of, you know, hoping that we can, there’s these moments where, oh, we can organize, we can take advantage of what’s going on nationally, regionally. You know, the Progressive Movement is really strong. There’s a push for women’s activism anyway because of this progressive era. So women are really active in these social movements and this social time period, and here comes Kate Barnard. So Kate Barnard, and you guys spoke to Connie Cronley, a few months ago, which was, and her book. If you haven’t read it, audience, please go read her book. It’s this great, you know, birth-to-death biography of her.
But Kate Barnard is supposed to be this great activist, and she is. She’s this great progressive–era model of a woman activist. And a lot of suffragists think, that’s the one. She’s going to be our hero. She’s the one who’s in the Constitutional Convention. She’s the one who’s going to speak up on our behalf. And here comes the Constitutional Convention, and there’s not a word from Kate Barnard. And it turns out Kate Barnard is like, meh, I don’t need suffrage. Why do you need suffrage? If I can be active, then why can’t you be active? If I can make a political change from where I am, why can’t you? And that’s the problem that suffragists have with her, is that she makes the argument that I don’t find suffrage a necessity. Therefore, I’m not going to campaign for it. Why should I?
Thompson: And I think we should, you know, we should clarify too, because it’s not that she was against suffrage.
Kodumthara: That’s the key.
Thompson: She said, you know, you’ve heard the saying, “not my circus and not my clowns.”
Kodumthara: That’s right.
Thompson: You know, she said, this is somebody else’s fight.
Kodumthara: Yeah.
Thompson: And I have a quote from the great chapter that you wrote.
Kodumthara: God bless you.
Thompson: In This Land is Her Land, which is a great book that you all should get. And I know that our board member, Patti Loughlin, was involved in editing that and helping put that together, but she says, “I know that a great many women of the state think I ought to drop my work and take sides with them in the struggle for suffrage, but I do not think I am capable of assuming any more load than I am now carrying.”
Kodumthara: Yes. Listen, this woman is busy. She is very busy. She’s fighting for children. She’s fighting for working women. She’s fighting for miners. She’s fighting for prisoners up in Kansas. She’s trying to figure out how to take care of all of the many burdens and many responsibilities that she has taken on. And she is fighting the state legislature, and she is going to take on Kansas’s state legislature if she has to. And if she’s going to fight on all of those monsters, she’s not going to add on women’s suffrage on top of that. That’s for somebody else to fight. And for her, she believes very strongly that if I’ve been able to take on all of this stuff and be at the Constitutional Convention without the right to vote, surely you can too. If all of these opportunities were afforded to me as a white woman, then why can’t you do the same? So she believes that Oklahoma, in particular, has created these opportunities without the right to vote, and therefore she doesn’t necessarily see that as an immediate burden.
Thompson: And people like Charles Haskell, who you mentioned, Bob, he was he was ready to ride that train. Because he says around that time of the Constitutional Convention, he says, “Katie Barnard’s life is a lesson that every suffragist should study. And let me appeal to every mother that is in the audience to go back home to your boys and continue to rock the cradle, and through that well-known medium, continue to rule the world.” So, Charles Haskell was saying, look at look at Kate Barnard. She doesn’t need the vote, neither do you.
Blackburn: And too, to me, going back to this idea of a revolutionary, to me, Kate was revolutionary.
Thompson: Oh yeah.
Blackburn: She said let’s do it now. And shame on you for not seeing justice here, but I think like a lot of revolutionaries, they have to be laser focused. If they take on too much, it is going to blunt the message. And then too, her health was very fragile. And she would have several episodes where she would just have to disappear for a while and recover emotionally as well as physically, and I think she understood that about herself. And I think she knew she, she had to marshal her own forces and had to ration it and how she was going to use it. And she was such a powerful person. And I just love the fact that she faced down “Alfalfa Bill” Murray so many times on the stage. He would ignore her. He would avoid her, not ignore, he would avoid her because he knew he was not going to win that particular battle. He could not confront her energy and her passion and her oratorical style that spoke to people. But I think that she was going to be focused on what she thought was most important at the time, rather, and I agree with both of you. She was not against suffrage so much, although she said, my daddy was not for it. She was very respectful of her father, and so there was a personal thing there. All of us can relate to that. You know, I try to think, what would my grandmother say about me today? And I try to pay attention to it sometimes. I said, well, Granny, you wrong, but I try as much as I can to respect that. And she would have been the same way, I think.
Thompson: I want to come back around, you know, during this time of the suffrage movement in Oklahoma, there’s also an anti-suffrage movement. And I want to come around to a character, a person that I find fascinating, and that is Alice Robertson. Let’s talk about Alice Robertson a little bit, Sunu.
Kodumthara: So Alice Robertson is the reason why I got involved and got into the anti-suffragist movement in the first place. So I have to give my props to her. Alice Robertson is— or was— she’s dead; let her go. Alice Robertson is this fascinating and probably one of the most fascinating people I have ever come across. Because, first of all, she comes from a remarkable family. Her parents were missionaries, and it was her and her sister. So they were missionaries to the Cherokee Nation. And she grew up knowing that they had this responsibility of being called to a life of service, and that’s what they were raised to believe. So it was always about being in this life of service, no matter what. That was your responsibility. Right? And so she’s also raised to think and believe that she was supposed to be an ally, in her understanding of what an ally was to Native peoples. And so, growing up, as she got older, she would regularly attend what was known as the Friend of the Indian Conference, which is where she would meet future President Theodore Roosevelt. That friendship would lead to him, you know, making her the postmaster general of Muskogee. I mean, Theodore Roosevelt plays a really big role in early days of Oklahoma. And so she makes really powerful friends.
She has very powerful connections, and she is also incredibly intelligent and intuitive when it comes to politics. She knows the ins and outs of local politics. She knows the ins and outs of territorial politics. She’s also very well connected as a result. And that goes back to her again, her family connections as well, because her father is very well-connected, because he was a missionary. As she grows up and becomes the postmaster general and builds her career, she was also a teacher as well. During that time period, what ends up happening is she forms her own political identity, and her political identity is very much formed around this idea of, as a woman, her life of service is also going to be one around a domestic identity. Around motherhood and being a wife and one that’s very much a conservative identity. Except she never gets married, and she never really becomes a mother. She’s very much the single woman who lives her own life according to how she wants to live it. So it’s projection, right? So you’re going to, if you’re the wife and mother, then that’s going to be your priority.
Thompson: She’s a study in contrasts.
Kodumthara: Yes, that’s exactly right. She becomes a businesswoman. She opens her own café. She’s living her best life on her own, but she’s got values and principles that she applies to society.
Thompson: Bob, what are your thoughts on Alice Robertson? Because before this, I’d never really done a deep dive on her. And I was telling Sunu earlier, I kind of had just assumed that she sort of kind of fell into being a congresswoman, that things kind of just clicked in the right place for her and it happened. I didn’t know about all of her political activity, and I didn’t know just how ambitious she was, and she owned the most successful restaurant in Muskogee. And I just find her to be a very fascinating person.
Blackburn: A couple of things I would add to that, and the fact that she had her own photography studio too and, later— I guess I’m a little impartial here, because she donated her collections to the Oklahoma Historical Society.
Thompson: Well, we love Alice Robertson.
Kodumthara: Yeah, we’re big fans of Alice Robertson.
Blackburn: But, I think in the bigger picture too, she was part of that early Republican Party. And a lot of people think Oklahoma has always been a one-party state, whether it was then or now— really haven’t been. Republican candidates for governor were all just barely losing each time. Like today, Democrats will get 43% no matter who’s running the Democrat. They’re going to get 43%. Republicans would have had about the same. Well, she was part of that organization. And in a lot of ways, Republicans have always been better organized, better funded. And she was part of an organization of the Republican leaders of the state. And then Muskogee was the political epicenter of a not only population at one time, especially in the territorial days, but even after statehood. Look at all the governors who’ve come from Muskogee. Only one governor from west of I-35 since 1907. Muskogee has always been that epicenter, because Tulsa and Oklahoma City are going to oppose each other. Rural Oklahoma is going to go against the urbans. Muskogee has been that deciding factor. So from Muskogee, strongly embedded in the Republican Party, a woman with her own identity and ideas, intellect and abilities, and as a rejection of the Woodrow Wilson years and people tiring of this progressive movement. You know, she wins that election right after the war.
Kodumthara: What’s funny about her, and I was with you Trait, when I first came across her, I thought she was an accidental politician, but I remember reading about her. And when she was first approached about running for office, after serving as the vice president of the state anti-suffrage league.
Thompson: Yeah, the National Association Opposed to Women’s Suffrage, that she was the vice president of the Oklahoma chapter.
Kodumthara: Yes, and I thought, why would you approach her about running for office? And then her first response to them was, you know, listen, it would be impossible to win here. I know that that we’ve got the Democrat who’s, you know, William Hastings, who’s won election after election. He’s wildly popular here. And I thought, oh, she knows her politics. She understands the dynamic here. She understands polling. She understands who’s popular and who’s not. This is not a woman who is an accidental politician by any means. She knows what’s going on, how people vote. She knows the dynamics of what takes place here and how things work.
Thompson: She said, “I’ve always done a man’s work, carried a man’s burden, and have had to pay the bills. And I believe that’s why I never wanted to see suffrage for women.”
Kodumthara: Hmm. Yeah.
Thompson: You know, so she’s approached by Republican leaders. I think we also have to acknowledge there was a switch going on. So in 1920, in that period, for those two years after that, that’s the only time the Oklahoma House of Representatives goes Republican in that one time frame, other than until 2004. And then also, there’s a national backlash to Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations. So it’s set such things up perfectly for a Republican to be elected. And she was the first Republican elected to the second district in Oklahoma until Tom Coburn was the second one. And then she becomes the first woman to be elected to Congress from Oklahoma. And then when she goes to Congress, she’s the first woman to preside over a session of Congress. And I want to read this section here from the This Land is Her Land book. It says “Robertson’s election might have been an anomaly, but it was also momentous. She was Oklahoma’s first congresswoman, first congresswoman elected after the passage of the 19th Amendment, and only the second congresswoman in the history of the nation. Out of 27 million American women, 18 ran for Congress in 1920. And she, Alice Robertson, is the only one who emerged victorious.” That’s pretty incredible.
Kodumthara: Yeah, she is pretty incredible. And she has an incredible story. I mean, it’s the anti-suffragist who wins. Out of all of them, it’s the anti-suffragist who wins.
Thompson: And it’s the woman who believes in traditional values and the traditional role of a woman. And even after she was in Congress, she didn’t vote for any expansion of women’s rights. She stuck hardcore to that position, even though her whole life was in opposite of that. That’s fascinating to me, Bob.
Blackburn: Well, I think part of that, too. She still had one foot deeply embedded in her religious faith. And coming from this family that picked up and moved out to this wild frontier to serve a greater cause—that’s faith and relying on faith that God is going to take care of them. I think she was a woman of faith and still had one foot back in that 19th-century evangelical movement.
Kodumthara: She, you know, when you think about how she practices that faith, that’s really important too. So she hires a male secretary. And her justification for that is she said, I believe that men want to talk about issues with other men. And so rather than speak with congressmen directly, she had them speak to her secretary, and then he would then speak to her about it. So, for issues about things that she would be responsible for, rather than meet with congressmen directly one on one, she would have them speak to her secretary. She was offered an opportunity to serve on a committee that would deal with large weapons or increasing weapons that would, you know, talking about for war and other international issues. And she said, well, as a woman, I wouldn’t know how to handle such issues, so I am going to decline that appointment. These were issues that a lot of people questioned because, well, then why are you a congresswoman? And she said, well, I don’t think that I’m capable of, of handling those questions. And it was very much reflective of that very traditional mindset. Right? And she wanted to reflect that in how she served.
She voted against a bill that was intended to support women who were, it was called the “The Maternity Bill.” Right? The idea that women who were going to become mothers would get additional support. And she argued that this was designed to throw the responsibility of motherhood onto the government and take away the responsibility from mothers where it should be. And here’s a woman who is single and not having children of her own accusing women of trying to avoid the responsibility of motherhood. Right? She is very much that traditional woman who is who is sticking very close to her guns on what motherhood should be.
Thompson: I’d like to turn our attention and our remaining minutes to some of the women in Oklahoma who really advanced the suffrage movement, and one of the ones who caught my eye was a woman named Narcissa Owen. And Narcissa Owen was Cherokee. She married Robert Owen in 1853, and they moved to Virginia and were there for a while, and then her husband died in 1873. She comes back to Oklahoma, or I’m sorry, Indian Territory in 1879. She taught at the Female Seminary in the Cherokee Nation. By the way, her son, Robert Owen Jr., became one of Oklahoma’s first United States senators, which is pretty fascinating. But she was one who organized women’s suffrage clubs and movements in the Indian Territory, part of what we now know as Oklahoma. In 1910, she represented Oklahoma suffragists at the National American Women’s Suffrage Association convention in Washington, DC. So we have that presence out there. Also she was able to bankroll some of the women’s suffrage movement out there, which was very, very important. And then Aloysius Larch Miller.
Kodumthara: Yeah.
Thompson: I find her story to be fascinating too, because this is a woman who literally gave her life for the suffrage movement. Do you want to talk about her a little bit?
Kodumthara: No. Please do.
Thompson: Okay. Yeah.
Thompson: I’ll go ahead and do that. So she was a Democrat. She served as the secretary of the Oklahoma State Suffrage Ratification Committee. So the Seventh Legislature adjourns, and they did not call a special session to vote on the 19th Amendment. She finds out that the Attorney General S. P. Freeling, is going to be at the Pottawattamie Democratic Convention. She’s sick, but she rides over there to the convention and debates Freeling. She wins the debate— kind of wipes the floor with him. And then after that, that is what. She dies two days later. So she takes her health into her own hands. Her doctors have told her, don’t go to this debate. She does it anyway. She dies February 2, 1920.
Twenty-six days after her death, the Oklahoma Legislature met in special session and ratified the 19th Amendment. Following her death, Judge George Carl Abernathy of Shawnee made a motion that a resolution of sympathy be passed for her as “a martyr to women’s suffrage,” and then Governor Robertson ordered the state flag to be flown at half mast, and in 1982, she was posthumously inducted into the Oklahoma Women’s Hall of Fame.
Kodumthara: See, I can’t talk about her without getting emotional because her story is one of these stories that you just think about the effort that’s made. Oh, gosh, I’m going, hold on. Let me just gather myself. Hang on. It’s one of these stories when you think about the importance of— we talk about democracy so flippantly, and we talk about the vote so flippantly, and the number of people who decide on whether or not they’re going to go vote or they want to vote. And then you hear stories like this and the fact that she knows that she shouldn’t go and debate, and she does, and she just and she wipes the floor with him, and she shouldn’t even have to debate him because she’s a citizen. She shouldn’t have to debate him. It’s an easy question. And two days later, she dies. But she literally gives her life for the right to vote. And that’s what, that’s what, that’s what makes me so emotional is that there are so many other stories like this of people who are willing to give their life for the right to vote. And that’s why we just can’t take it so flippantly.
Blackburn: And Trait, I think this brings us back to one of the original conversations we had about strong women. We’ve always had strong women. You go back thousands of years in literature, and you see strong women. But women were empowered by the right to vote. But women had power before that, and they had the willingness to speak up, to sacrifice, to work together, to do all of those things. And so I think that we have a lot of thanks we need to give to that generation of women willing to speak up to be the martyrs, the revolutionaries, those who are organizing and making a change in our society that needed to be made at the time.
Thompson: You know, we talk a lot about the military and the sacrifice, you know, especially around Memorial Day and Veterans Day. We say thank you to our military, and those thanks are justified, don’t get me wrong there. But there are other people who have laid their lives on the line for the rights that we have, and I think we need to recognize them too. Aloysius Larch Miller is one of those people.
Another one of those people is Kate Stafford, and Kate Stafford was born in 1873. She was raised in Kansas. She became active, as we talked about, in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and then later joined the Oklahoma Women’s Suffrage Association in 1913. But like Alice Paul, she said, this isn’t going fast enough for me. We need to speed this up a little bit. So she joined the National Women’s Party, which was Alice Paul’s branch and what she was using to advance her goals. So she goes to Washington, DC. She’s the only Oklahoma woman who participated in the protests at the White House. She goes to Washington, DC, November 7, 1917, to represent Oklahoma at the National Women’s Conference of the National Women’s Party. And she says, “being arrested doesn’t hold any terrors for me. I’m game, and I’ll do the hunger strike too.” She’s she was a banner bearer in front of the White House. And her banner read, “Mr. President, in your message to Congress, urged the passage of the federal amendment and for enfranchising women.” She was one of 41 women arrested for allegedly obstructing traffic while picketing the White House gate. She refused to pay the $25 fine. She said to pay the fine would be an admission of guilt. Bail was refused, and she was sentenced to 30 days at the Occoquan Workhouse in Washington, DC. Conditions were terrible there, poor sanitation, bad food, dreadful facilities, people getting injured. They demanded to be treated as political prisoners, but they weren’t granted that right. The male guards dragged the suffragists into cells that were usually reserved for the most dangerous of prisoners. And she said, “I was taken by a person unknown to me, to a dark, cold, and damp cell and placed therein with four other occupants.” She engaged in the hunger strike when she wasn’t afforded status as a political prisoner. She was force-fed milk and raw eggs, and her hunger strike lasted for four days. After 14 days, she was released. And so once again, you’re talking about people like Aloysius Larch Miller. You’re talking about people who put their lives and their bodies on the line to see progress made. And she traveled to Washington, DC, knowing she was going to get arrested.
Kodumthara: Yeah.
Thompson: Knowing she was going to go to this terrible place, knowing she was probably going to have to do a hunger strike ahead of time. And she did it. I’m completely in awe of people like that because I think of myself, what would I be willing to do that for?
Kodumthara: Right.
Thompson: And I don’t know, you know.
Kodumthara: Yeah.
Thompson: And granted, I’ve got it pretty good in my life, but that’s devotion.
Blackburn: Yeah. You know, when you were telling that story, we could have replaced a couple of names on that same story: Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Jesus of Nazareth. You know, people willing to do what they think is right, knowing that they are going to suffer from it but still willing. The human spirit is amazing, male and female, and we’ve had these revolutionaries through time. And fortunately, women have been a strong force in Oklahoma politics. And we had, I don’t know if we did a podcast on that already, but we’ll have to do that again, on women in Oklahoma politics and bring you back for that, Sunu. I love your insights.
Thompson: Third-time guest.
Kodumthara: Well, listen, just let me know when, and I’ll be here.
Thompson: You know, Bob, and we’re getting to the end of our time. And so there are other women that we haven’t had a chance to talk much about. Kate Biggers, who was the president of the Oklahoma Women’s Suffrage Association for several years. And people that, like her, who have done so much for the movement. And ultimately, in 1920, the federal amendment is passed, and I do want to read the text of the federal amendment so that, we all understand what the fight was for. The 19th Amendment says this: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” A couple of sentences was a multi-decade, multi-generational fight to get those couple of sentences engraved into our Constitution and, I’m just completely in awe of the people who sacrificed for that, and it’s a wild story with a lot of interesting characters, and Oklahoma played an important part in that story.
Kodumthara: That’s right.
Thompson: Well, Sunu, what are some things that you have going on, and are there any projects you want to talk about in our closing moments?
Kodumthara: Well, I do have one coming up that I’m really very excited and quite frankly, very proud of. And that is, for Oklahoma Humanities, I have been named a state scholar for their upcoming Museum on Main Street, and the project is Voices and Votes in Democracy. We’re very excited about it. It’s still in the early stages. So we’re still working with communities to look at how we’re going to set up their projects and that sort of thing. But I’m very excited about it because we’re hoping that we’ll have honest conversations about what it means to be a democracy and what it means to be an active participant, and not just about voting, but what it means to be an active participant in a democracy. And so I’m really looking forward to it and what that means for all of us.
Thompson: Well, that sounds incredible, and we’re all going to be looking forward to that. Are there any places people can find you online if they want to look you up?
Kodumthara: Oh, that that would be a very, very dangerous, very dangerous and risky thing. But if you all want to visit me at Southwestern Oklahoma State University, feel free to come by. You can find me in Weatherford. So please come and look me up at Southwestern Oklahoma State University. It’s swosu.edu, and we would love for you to come and join us over there. The focus is you! (laughing)
Thompson: Now Bob, we have an exciting next podcast because on March 6, we are going to be celebrating Bob Wills’s birthday. And in conjunction with Bob Wills Day at the State Capitol, that evening at 6 o’clock at Ponyboy here in Oklahoma City, we are going to be doing a live podcast event. So it’ll be you and me, and we have a great lineup. Carolyn Wills, daughter of Bob Wills; Brett Bingham, who manages the new iteration of Bob Wills, and it’s Jason Roberts and the Texas Playboys now. We’ve got John Wooley, who is an incredible music scholar, and then we’ve got Jeff Moore, who is the director of the OKPOP Museum in Tulsa. And so we’re all going to be, getting together at Ponyboy, which is a great, live music establishment here in Oklahoma City. And we’re going to be talking about Bob Wills and his legacy and all he did not in Oklahoma, but on a national scale. And you can come and see us. You can all come out and do it. You can ask us questions. It’s going to be a fun event. There’s going to be food and drink and all kinds of things. So we want you to come out. You can find more information on the calendar section of the Oklahoma Historical Society’s website, okhistory.org. Come on out and hang out with us and have fun. And you know, Bob, can you do your best Ahh-ha?
Blackburn: Ahh-ha!
Thompson: Ahh-ha! There we go.
Blackburn: And Bob Wills is being inducted into the Performers Hall of Fame this year at the Cowboy and Western Heritage center.
Thompson: Yes. It’s a banner year for Bob Wills. And it’s been about a little under a decade since the last Bob Wills Day at the Capitol. And we’re working with the Arts Council to get that event going again, and we’re really excited about it. So everybody out there, we hope you have a wonderful rest of your day, and we will see you live on March 6 at Ponyboy in Oklahoma City.
Thompson: You’ve been listening to A Very OK Podcast, hosted by Trait Thompson and Dr. Bob Blackburn. The podcast is produced by the Oklahoma Historical Society. Visit us at okhistory.org, and find us on social media by searching for @okhistory. I encourage you to purchase a membership to OHS to help us continue our mission to collect, preserve, and share Oklahoma’s unique and fascinating history.
(upbeat music playing)
