Back to the Future, Part 3: Women's Edition

The Women's March--Defending Roe v. Wade (22 January 1973)

Photo from Seattle's The Stranger,
announcing the Seattle Women's March,
21 January 2017

Today is the anniversary of the landmark Roe v. Wade decision--it took the Supreme Court to ensure that American women had some measure of control over their own bodies. But today women's reproductive freedom is under threat like never before in the more than forty years since 1973.

Yesterday, unprecedent numbers of feminists--women and men, who have always supported women's rights--marched in support of women's equality and rights. There were some 600 marches in cities and towns through the U. S., and over 40 in cities around the world. The largest event, drawing hundreds of thousands of women, was in Washington, D. C. (Evidently DJT's feelings are hurt that more people attended the march in D. C. than showed up at his inauguration. Sad.)

The more things change . . .

The first notable march on Washington undertaken by women--in support of suffrage--was in 1913, one day before the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson.*

And there was the Women's Strike for Equality on 26 August 1973--the biggest turnout may have been in New York, but over a thousand women marched in Washington D. C.. This nationwide strike was scheduled on the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.

Just four years later, on 26 August 1977, there was the Alice Paul Memorial March--Alice Paul had proposed the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923, and it still hadn't been passed. This march was in support of the amendment's passage. A year later, on 9 July 1978, some 100,000 women demonstrated in Washington D. C., again in support of the Equal Rights Amendment--it was "the largest march for women’s rights in the nation’s history."

Numerous marches to support women's equality have followed, beginning in 1986. 

But, of course, the Equal Rights Amendment was never passed, and here we are. It is now 2017, and women's rights are still not guaranteed under the constitution. And reproductive rights--including those guaranteed under Roe--are threatened.

Yesterday's Women's March was held on the day after the "presidential inauguration"--and it neatly coincides with the anniversary of the Roe. v. Wade decision (decided 22 January 1973).

It's going to be a tough time for women in this period of "making America great again." Don't forget. Don't give up. Stay strong. 

For Parts 1 and 2 of Back to the Future, click here and here.

As for me--did I march yesterday??? Well, ummmm, earlier this month, I was outside pruning my wisteria and I fell off a ladder, breaking my leg and snapping my ACL I am now confined to the house, hobbling around on crutches. But when I fell, I was wearing this shirt:

*Update, 14 January 2026: In its willful destruction of history, the Trump horde of vandals has erased this page from the White House website. The link now takes you to a “404 page not found” error code, which I have left in. But the page has been preserved at the Internet Archive—click here. 

Harriet Tubman, "Moses" for African American Slaves

Harriet Tubman, born Araminty Ross (escaped slavery 17 September 1849)

Although the date of her birth is unknown (she was born in Manchester County, Maryland, probably probably between 1820 and 1822), the woman whom we know today as Harriet Tubman lived a long life, dying on 10 March 1913, almost fifty years after the end of the Civil War.

Harriet Tubman, c. 1885

I am posting about Tubman today because on 17 September 1849 she escaped from slavery. 

The daughter of enslaved parents, Ben Ross and Harriet Green, Araminta (or "Minty") Ross, as she was known then, was born as the property of Mary Patisson Brodess. At the age of eleven, Araminta began calling herself "Harriet," after her mother. After Mary Patisson Brodess's death, her slaves became the property of her son, Edward Brodess. In 1844, Harriet Ross married a free black man, John Tubman.

But after Brodess's death, and fearful that his wife Eliza would sell off the slaves, Harriet Tubman escaped.

Although she would be returned after that first escape, Harriet Tubman eventually escaped again and arrived in Philadelphia. Her glorious story from that point--as an abolitionist; as a woman who returned to slave-holding territories to help other enslaved people to freedom; as a nurse, scout, and guide (and perhaps a spy) during the Civil War; and as a suffragist after the Civil War--has become iconic.

Her gravestone is on the National Register of Historic Places, she's had a U.S. postage stamp issued in her honor, and in 2013 Barack Obama signed a proclamation creating the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument. She has an asteroid named after her, and dozens of schools, and her very own Google Doodle. She's also included in the calendar of saints in both the Episcopal Church and Evangelical Lutheran Churches of America. 

An 1849 reward notice for "Minty," about
twenty-seven years old

But rather than summarizing her life or enumerating her accomplishments, I thought I might link you here to Ethan Kytle and Carl Geissert's excellent New York Times editorial, "Myth, Reality and the Underground Railroad." 

After the Civil War, of course, everyone claimed to have been involved with helping enslaved people to freedom on the Underground Railroad. But, as Kytle and Geissert note, "Most fugitive slaves gained their freedom largely through their own efforts."

And, as Kytle and Geissert also observe, "postwar accounts--nearly all of which were produced by white Northerners--tended to portray runaways as 'passengers' [on the Underground Railroad], effectively reducing them to a supporting role in their own liberation. Some authors inflated the number of fugitive slaves that they had helped, while others neglected the work of black railroad operatives. Over all, they painted a picture of the Underground Railroad as a white-dominated enterprise in which runaways were spirited to freedom by their Northern guardians."

"Even more troubling," they conclude, "many memorialists failed to connect their stories of the Underground Railroad to the postwar struggle for black civil rights": 

Instead, they served up what the historian David Blight describes as "a mythos of accomplished glory, a history of emancipation completed." Just as Lost Cause ideologues strove to conceal the rise of Jim Crow--from segregation and disenfranchisement to an epidemic of lynching--behind a facade of Old South harmony, Northerners told "self congratulatory adventure tales" that implied that the nation had solved its racial problems decades earlier. In this way, they joined their Southern counterparts in turning nostalgia for life before the war into a refuge from the disturbing realities of the postwar racial landscape.

So today might be a good day not only to remember Harriet Tubman--the real woman, not the fictionalized, glossy image of our imaginations--but to focus on what Blight has termed "race and reunion."

Harriet Tubman, photo from 1911

There are many biographies of Tubman (at least thirty aimed at juvenile readers, by my count)--I recommend Catherine Clinton's Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom.

I also suggest David Blight's Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory.

On the larger question of the role of African-American activists in abolition and the end of slavery, Ira Berlin's The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States is essential. As New York Times reviewer Edward E. Baptist notes, "The Long Emancipation offers a useful reminder that abolition was not the charitable work of respectable white people, or not mainly that. Instead, the demise of slavery was made possible by the constant discomfort inflicted on middle-class white society by black activists."

Update (16 October 2016): As Kathryn Schulz notes in her recent New Yorker essay, "Derailed: The Troubling Allure of the Underground Railroad," there has been an "outpouring of interest" recently in the Underground Railroad--she counts two new novels, Carson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad: A Novel (an Oprah Bookclub selection!) and Ben Winters's counterfactual Underground Airlines, WGN America's television series Underground, as well as a forthcoming HBO biopic about Harriet Tubman, not to mention scholarly publications on the railroad and Tubman. But Schulz reminds us that, in many ways, the Underground Railroad remains "our favorite piece of mythic infrastructure." This is an excellent contextualizing essay--I did not know that, as Schulz clarifies, "most people who slipped the bonds of slavery did not look north." "In fact," she continues,

despite its popularity today, the Underground Railroad was perhaps the least popular way for slaves to seek their freedom. Instead, most who fled generally headed toward Spanish Florida, Mexico, the Caribbean, Native American communities in the Southeast, free-black neighborhoods in the upper South, or Maroon communities--clandestine societies of former slaves, some fifty of which existed in the South from 1672 until the end of the Civil War. Together, such runaways likely outnumbered those who, aided by Northern abolitionists, made their way to free states or to Canada.

Finally, she reminds us, most slaves did not run at all--some attempted to purchase their freedom and some sought legal judgments to end their freedom, but, "from the vast, vicious, legally permitted, fiercely defended enterprise that was American slavery, almost no one ever escaped at all."

For Schulz's essay, click here.

Jane Addams, Reformer and Activist

Jane Addams (born 6 September 1860)

It's astonishing just to list the many roles of Jane Addams: social worker, social reformer, and co-founder of Hull House; teacher and member of Chicago's Board of Education; international peace activist; women's rights and suffrage activist; philosopher; and lecturer and writer.

Jane Addams, c. 1910-1915

In 1931, the Nobel Peace Prize was jointly awarded to Jane Addams and Nicholas Murray Butler. Addams was recognized for her role as president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, an organization she founded in 1919. The Nobel committee also noted her role in helping the poor and, in particular, her efforts in relationship to child labor and for her aid to immigrants at Hull House.

One of Jane Addams's long-time partners was Ellen Gates Starr, whom she met when they both attended the Rockford Female Seminar in Rockford, Illinois. Although Jane Addams is better known as the founder of Hull House, the settlement house project was co-founded with Starr, both of them inspired by their trip to Europe and, in particular, their contact with the English settlement-house movement.

Addams's most enduring intimate relationship was with Mary Rozet Smith, with whom she had a thirty-year committed partnership. For Jennifer Brandel’s excellent article on their relationship, click here. The Jane Addams Hull-House Museum recently included a Gender and Sexuality Tour, addressing the question, "Was Jane Addams a Lesbian?"* (You may also appreciate this interview on Addams and Hull House education programs, including the LGBTQ+ tour.)

Jane Addams died on 21 May 1935, a year after Smith's death.

Some of the best information about Addams is available through the Nobel website, including a biographical essay, complete bibliography, a photo gallery, and links to useful online resources (click here).

Hull House

*Update, 6 September 2026: I hope it is not a sign of these horrible times, but I can no longer find information about the Gender and Sexuality tour at the Hull House website. The link here will take you to what has been preserved at the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. 

Battling Bella

Bella Abzug (died 31 March 1998)

A 1971 photo of Bella Abzug
in one of her trademark hats

Political activist, critical voice in the second-wave feminist movement, member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and notable hat-wearer, Bella Abzug is the woman who memorably stated, in her 1970 political campaign, "This woman's place is in the House—the House of Representatives."

Born in 1920, the same year women in the U.S. finally achieved the right to vote, Abzug dedicated her life to social and political activism. Asked about why she always wore a hat, Abzug once explained, "I began wearing hats as a young lawyer because it helped me to establish my professional identity. Before that, whenever I was at a meeting, someone would ask me to get coffee."

If you want to get a sense of Bella Abzug, check out the short video, "Bella Abzug: In Her Own Words." There are lots of great books, but you might start with this one, an oral history edited by Suzanne Braun Levine and Mary Thom: Bella Abzug: How One Tough Broad from the Bronx Fought Jim Crow and Joe McCarthy, Pissed Off Jimmy Carter, Battled for the Rights of Women and Workers, Rallied against War and for the Planet, and Shook Up Politics Along the Way.

Some Memorable, Prescient, and Important Abzug Quotations

• I've been described as a tough and noisy woman, a prize fighter, a man-hater, you name it. They call me Battling Bella, Mother Courage, and a Jewish mother with more complaints than Portnoy.
• Maybe we weren't at the Last Supper, but we're certainly going to be at the next one.
• They used to give us a day--it was called International Women's Day. In 1975 they gave us a year, the Year of the Woman. Then from 1975 to 1985 they gave us a decade, the Decade of the Woman. I said at the time, who knows, if we behave they may let us into the whole thing. Well, we didn't behave and here we are.
• The test for whether or not you can hold a job should not be the arrangement of your chromosomes.
• Women have been trained to speak softly and carry a lipstick. Those days are over.
• Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel.
• We are coming down from our pedestal and up from the laundry room. We want an equal share in government and we mean to get it.
• I am not elevating women to sainthood, nor am I suggesting that all women share the same views, or that all women are good and all men bad.
• If we get a government that reflects more of what this country is really about, we can turn the century--and the economy--around.
• Abortion doesn't belong in the political arena. It's a private right, like many other rights concerning the family.
• I prefer the word "homemaker" because "housewife" always implies that there may be a wife someplace else.
• The establishment is made up of little men, very frightened.
• All of the men on my staff can type.
• I am not being facetious when I say that the real enemies in this country are the Pentagon and its pals in big business.
• The inside operation of Congress -- the deals, the compromises, the selling out, the co-opting, the unprincipled manipulating, the self-serving career-building -- is a story of such monumental decadence that I believe if people find out about it they will demand an end to it.

From the left, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisolm (speaking),
Gracia Molina de Pick, Betty Friedan, and LaDonna Harris

Update, 17 March 2026: The PBS American Masters series premiered a new episode about Bella Abzug, "Bella! This Woman's Place Is in the House." It's an excellent profile and begins with a fascinating account from early in her career. After her first term, in which she defeated a long-time incumbent for  her district, Abzug was "redistricted" out of her seat in 1972--asked whether she was "axed" because she was  "outspoken and relentless," she replied that it was because she was a woman who refused to believe that women should be "invisible in government." As she points out, if she allowed herself to be eliminated, there would only be eleven women among the 435 members of the House of Representatives. 

Also, a wonderful cameo of Maxine Waters, who says, "I was bold because of Bella." And it's fun to see Abzug sparring with George H. W. Bush, then director of the CIA, in a Congressional hearing. Guess who's squirming?

For more information, click here. The American Masters site includes biographical information, an analysis of the importance of her career for women who came after her, and several video features, including one with Lily Tomlin, who campaigned for Abzug. 

Although, while watching this, I find myself in despair and inspired . . . 

Angelina Emily Grimké: Abolitionist and Suffragist

Angelina Emily Grimké Weld (born 20 February 1805)

Before the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and before Susan B. Anthony began working with Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the suffrage movement, the political activists Angelina Grimké and her older sister, Sarah, dedicated themselves to the pursuit of social justice.

Born to a slave-holding family in South Carolina, Angelina Grimké resisted the values of her family and her class. As a child, she noted the violence inflicted on the bodies and minds of the slaves around her and reacted strongly to their suffering.

She also demonstrated her strength in her convictions; when she was thirteen, she found that she was unable to take the pledge required for her as part of the Episcopalian confirmation, and she refused to participate.

She converted to Presbyterianism, then to Quakerism. By 1829 she had decided she could no longer live in the slave-holding South and joined Sarah in Philadelphia, where she began attending anti-slavery meetings.

William Lloyd Garrison's publication of one of Grimké's letters in The Liberator in 1835 launched her public career in the abolitionist movement. 

Grimké frequently spoke to crowds of both men and women, and in so doing, violated a sense of "appropriate" female behavior. In 1838, she addressed a state legislative committee in Massachusetts, not only speaking against slavery but in support of women's right--and obligation--to oppose injustice: “I stand before you,” she said, “on behalf of the 20,000 women of Massachusetts whose names are enrolled on petitions [which] relate to the great and solemn subject of slavery.”

Grimké was the first woman in the United States to address a legislative body. As historian Gerda Lerner notes, “It never occurred to [Grimké] that she should abide by the superior judgment of her male relatives or that anyone might consider her inferior" for being a woman. 

After she married Theodore Weld in 1838, Grimké's public visibility declined, although her personal commitment never flagged. She died in 1879.

Angelina Grimké's An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (1836) is available through Project Gutenberg by clicking here.

In 1837, Catherine Beecher replied to Grimké in An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism with Reference to the Duty of American Female, arguing against women's participation in the abolitionist movement. As "subordinate" creatures, women are "out of their place" if they attempt to take an active role--they should leave the arguments to men.

Grimké's 1838 Letters to Catharine Beecher is a series of essays addressing Beecher's objections. In Letter XI, "The Sphere of Man and Woman as Moral Beings the Same," Grimké turns her attention from a focus on abolition to equality between the sexes, an argument and analysis she continues in the twelfth essay.

In Letter XII, "Human Rights Not Founded on Sex," Grimké writes, "When human beings are regarded as moral beings, sex, instead of being enthroned upon the summit, administering upon rights and responsibilities, sinks into insignificance and nothingness. My doctrine then is, that whatever it is morally right for man to do, it is morally right for woman to do." The differences between men and women are not due to different natures or abilities, but to social expectations and norms:

man has been converted into the warrior and clothed with sternness and those other kindred qualities, which in common estimation belong to his character as a man, whilst woman has been taught to lean upon an arm of flesh, to sit as a doll arrayed in "gold, and pearls, and costly array" [1 Timothy 2:9], to be admired for her personal charms, and caressed and humored like a spoiled child, or converted into a mere drudge to suit the convenience of her lord and master. Thus have all the diversified relations of life been filled with "confusion and every evil work" [James 3:16]. This principle has given to man a charter for the exercise of tyranny and selfishness, pride and arrogance, lust and brutal violence. It has robbed woman of essential rights, the right to think and speak and act on all great moral questions, just as men think and speak and act; the right to share their responsibilities, perils and toils; the right to fulfill the great end of her being, as a moral, intellectual, and immortal creature, and of glorifying God in her body and her spirit which are his. Hitherto, instead of being a help meet to man in the highest, noblest sense of the term as a companion, a co-worker, an equal, she has been a mere appendage of his being an instrument of his convenience and pleasure, the pretty toy with which he wiled away his leisure moments, or the pet animal whom he humored into playfulness and submission. Woman, instead of being regarded as the equal of man, has uniformly been looked down upon as his inferior, a mere gift to fill up the measure of his happiness. In "the poetry of romantic gallantry" [here Grimké is quoting Beecher's Essay], it is true, she has been called "the last best gift of God to man" [Paradise Lost 6.19];  but I believe I speak forth the words of truth and soberness when I affirm, that woman never was given to man. She was created, like him, in the image of God, and crowned with glory and honor; created only a little lower than the angels—not, as is almost universally assumed, a little lower than man. . . .*

For an online biographical essay about Angelina and Sarah Grimké by historian Carol Berkin, click here. For a biography and analysis, I suggest Gerda Lerner's The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women's Rights and Abolition.

Update, 21 January 2023: Keri Greenidge's The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in America has appeared on a number of "notable books" lists for 2022. Described as a "stunning counternarrative of the legendary abolitionist Grimke sisters that finally reclaims the forgotten Black members of their family." For more, here is Michael Jeffries's New York Times Review.

Update, 14 July 2026: Serious questions have been raised about Keri Greenidge's scholarship in her book on the Grimkés. On the issues and the repercussions, see Neil Vigdor's "A Decorated Researcher Comes under Fire," just published in the New York Times (click here).

*In quoting from Grimké's letter, I have added the sources of her quotations and regularized the spelling, punctuation, and capitalization of the nineteenth-century original.

Susan B. Anthony, Founding Mother

Susan B. Anthony (born 15 February 1820)

Abolitionist, suffragist, and social reformer, Susan Brownell Anthony campaigned tirelessly for the betterment of others. Early in her life, she was involved with her family's anti-slavery and temperance activities. She began her work on behalf of women's rights after she met Elizabeth Cady in 1851. She worked for more than fifty years to secure the vote for women--when she died on 13 March 1906, there was still more than a decade ahead for the campaign for women's suffrage.

In my last year of teaching, I listened as a young woman explained why she hadn't been in class for a week, why she didn't have her assignments complete, and why she couldn't possibly finish her work when it was due. 

"I have activism fatigue," she said. Her participation in various campus "social justice activities" meant she was just so tired and run down she had to take a break and rest. She thought her excuse was good.

It was not.

When I heard it, I thought about Susan B. Anthony's lifetime dedication and lifelong service.

She never quit work to complain that she suffered from "activism fatigue."

A tribute to Anthony: Women leave
"I voted" stickers on her tombstone

Betty Friedan, the "Feminine Mystique," and the "Problem That Has No Name"

Betty Friedan (born 4 February 1921)

In 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, a book that is widely regarded as having ignited the second-wave feminist movement. She went on to help found the National Organization for Women.

Betty Friedan in 1995

In a perfect circle, Friedan was born on 4 February in 1921 and died on her eighty-fifth birthday, 4 February 2006. 

There are biographies, of course, and endless histories, assessments, and analyses. (This New York Times obituary gives a good summary of her life and work.

But there's also the book itself--it's a breathtaking read, available in paper and hardback copies, new and used, fancy fiftieth-anniversary deluxe editions and Norton Critical texts prepared for classroom use, digital download and audiobook. Get one! Read it! Enjoy! And then get angry!

Update, 4 February 2021: Noting the one-hundredth anniversary of her birth, the New York Times has published "Why We Can't Stop Talking about Betty Friedan": "A 100th birthday celebration in honor of the feminist raises the question: What was Ms. Friedan’s legacy exactly? ‘As with everything Betty, it’s complicated.’" 

 

Cover of the 1963 edition

Germaine Greer, Feminist Icon

Germaine Greer (born 29 January 1939)

Today is the birthday of irrepressible feminist powerhouse Germaine Greer. Greer's The Female Eunuch, published in 1970, contributed significantly to the Second Wave feminist movement and remains a crucial work for women today--not least for Greer's claim that women have no idea how much men hate them because women have been taught so effectively to hate themselves.

"Women have very little idea of how much men hate them," she begins in a section of the book labelled "Loathing and Disgust." She continues, "Men do not themselves know the depth of their hatred," and her analysis of street harassment, domestic violence, and sexual assault sounds as if it was written yesterday instead of more than forty years ago. It's important to note that Greer does not let women off the hook for their ignorance, self-loathing, and complicity. If you haven't read it--or if you haven't read it in a while--now is the time. 

Greer's The Obstacle Race: The Fortune of Women Painters and Their Work (1979) is a crucial treatment of the difficulties women artists have faced throughout history--it is a source I've relied on quite frequently here in my postings on women artists. And I particularly like Greer's 2007 biography of Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare's Wife. From the introduction: 

Until our own time, history focussed on man the achiever; the higher the achiever the more likely it was that the woman who slept in his bed would be judged unworthy of his company. Her husband's fans recoiled from the notion that she might have made a significant contribution towards his achievement of greatness. 

She continues, "No one has ever undertaken a systematic review" of the life of Anne Hathaway--or her potential contributions to Shakespeare's life and work--"while every opportunity to caricature and revile her has been exploited to risible lengths." (For more on Anne Hathaway, click here.)

And here is from Greer's 2013 CNN essay, "Guilt Poisons Women":

Women live lives of continual apology. They are born and raised to take the blame for other people's behavior. If they are treated without respect, they tell themselves that they have failed to earn respect. If their husbands do not fancy them, it is because they are unattractive. Dirt and disorder in the family home is their fault, though they created none of it.

For Greer and her significance, "What Germain Greer and The Female Eunuch Mean to Me," here is an assessment offered by "six influential feminists" on the occasion of her seventy-fifty birthday in 2014.

Greer in 1970,
just after the publication of The Female Eunuch

Angela Davis: Activist, Academic, Author

Angela Davis (born 26 January 1944)

Angela Davis in an iconic 1969 photo

Today is the birthday of Angela Davis, political activist, university professor, advocate for prison reform, lecturer, and cultural critic. Angela Davis has retired from her teaching position at the University of California, Santa Cruz, but she continues her efforts to reform what she has identified as the “prison industrial complex.”