Each week, The Extraordinary Times catches up with friends from the historical and cultural scene. This week, we catch up with Miami University historian Kimberly Hamlin, author of Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener (2020). While writing her book, she received support from a National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) Public Scholar Award and the Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics. An Organization of American Historians (OAH) Distinguished Lecturer, Dr. Hamlin speaks about the history of women, gender, and sex across the United States, and publishes in a wide array of scholarly journals and public media. August 18, 2020, marks the centenary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment which guaranteed women’s voting rights, so we asked Dr. Hamlin to share her perspectives:
* What have you been up to this summer? Like so many of our colleagues, I have been working on transitioning my courses to online and hybrid models, learning new technologies, and working on my syllabi. And since my new book Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener (W.W. Norton) came out at the start of the pandemic, I have also transitioned my book tour to online. Each week, I have been participating in various suffrage centennial events and book talks online. Though the cancellation of in-person events was disappointing, it has been great to connect with readers, other scholars, and those interested in women’s history and the history of voting rights in this new way. In some cases, the transition to virtual events has created new opportunities that would not have been possible (because of the limitations of time and money for travel) in The Before Times. * Who was Helen Hamilton Gardener, and what inspired you to write about her life? HHG, as she often signed her letters to friends, was the “fallen woman” who changed her name, reinvented herself, negotiated Congressional passage of the 19th Amendment, and then became the highest-ranking woman in federal government and a national symbol of what it meant, finally, for women to be full citizens. I was drawn to her story because it is so unusual – she created an autonomous life for herself (besides picking her own name, she supported herself and her lover financially, traveled throughout the country and the world, defied expectations for female behavior and modeled new possibilities for women) with few role models and little support. She was a truly self-made woman and she lived many lives in one. I sometimes joke that she was like the Forrest Gump of the women’s rights movement that culminated in the 19th Amendment. From the 1880s till her death in 1925, she was at all the major women’s rights events, she knew three generations of suffrage leaders, and through her life readers can glimpse a more nuanced history of the suffrage movement, one that centers both sex and race. * Tell readers about your involvement with the 19th Amendment centennial! In addition to giving lots of talks about HHG and Free Thinker, I have been working with various groups, including high school teachers and community organizations, to enhance our understanding of the suffrage movement and its relationship to American history. For example, I led a workshop for Texas high school teachers on suffrage and am doing several similar events this fall for high school and college instructors. And I am teaching a three-part Master Class on Women’s Suffrage and Women’s Rights for the Chautauqua Institution. I filmed a short video on the National American Woman Suffrage Associations’ (NAWSA) Congressional Committee for the Schlesinger Library/Radcliffe Institute at Harvard. Locally, I am on the suffrage centennial advisory committee for the Cincinnati Museum Center and am the historical consultant on a new documentary in the works, by CET and Think-TV, called “Let Ohio Women Vote.” I have also been writing a lot about the centennial, its legacy, and the history of women in politics. I have essays coming out this month in NEH Humanities, BBC History, and Smithsonian magazines, and another op-ed in the Washington Post. * Why is it important to remember the 19th Amendment this month? August 2020 marks 100 years since the ratification of the 19th Amendment, as well as the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the 15th Amendment. In 2020, we are witnessing record numbers of women running for office as well as unprecedented, in my lifetime, attacks on voting rights and voting access especially targeting people of color. So I think the suffrage centennial is vital to understanding both of these trends, one positive and the other negative. I hope that learning about the suffrage movement – its leaders, their names and stories, as well as their limitations and failures – will inspire more women to run for office and more support for the women already running. And I hope that the suffrage centennial will spark many more conversations about voting rights and inspire us to continue the work toward universal voting rights and voting access. * What might HHG have made of our own extraordinary times? One thing that I love about HHG was how modern and ahead of her times she was, so I think in many ways she would fit right in. She would have to learn about the internet and social media, but she was a natural whiz at publicity and media, so I think she would figure that out. But one thing that I think would really surprise her is the huge gulf that now exists between citizens and our elected officials. In her day, she would meet with members of Congress, and even the President, on a regular basis. She would send a letter and expect an immediate response. And it was quite normal for suffragists on the whole, beyond HHG, to request to meet with Congressmen (they were all men, with the exception of Jeannette Rankin from 1916-1918) and receive prompt, positive replies. Now, because of the huge increase in campaign spending and the role of outside, special interest money in nearly every election, Members of Congress are no longer so beholden to their actual constituents (unless you happen to be a millionaire donor or head of a large PAC). I think this is a major issue facing every modern reform movement, and I think HHG would be shocked to see how little access to Congress citizens and citizen groups now have. To my mind, campaign finance reform is the mother of all other reforms, and I think HHG – who used her personal connections to members of Congress so skillfully – would agree. * Any new projects on the go? Yes, I am in the very early stages of my third book which will be a new history of the temperance movement, centering sex, sexual assault, and sexually transmitted disease. Like the suffragists, I think that temperance advocates often get short shrift, dismissed as nagging women who wanted to shut down the party. But, in reality, I think the temperance advocates were brilliant politicians who wanted to secure bodily autonomy for women and that it might be more accurate to think of them as the #MeToo movement of the 19th century.
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AuthorMatthew Smith, PhD (History). Public Programs at Miami University Regionals. Historian of Appalachia, the Ohio Valley, & the early American republic. Archives
February 2024
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