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This thesis has been approved by
The Honors Tutorial College and the Department of Journalism
______
Dr. Elizabeth Hendrickson Associate Professor, Journalism Thesis Adviser
______
Dr. Bernhard Debatin Director of Studies, Journalism
______
Cary Roberts Frith Interim Dean, Honors Tutorial College
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Ohio University
“SUPERHERO WOMEN, EXTRAORDINARY IMPACT”: A HISTORICAL PODCAST
SERIES
By
Emily St. Amour
A Thesis Submitted to the Honors Tutorial College of Ohio University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Science in Journalism
May 2019
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Table of Contents
SCHOLARLY ESSAY……………………………………………………………………………2
INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………...4
LITERATURE REVIEW…………………………………………………………………5
COLLABORATION WITH ATHENS HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS…………………14
ETHICAL CHALLENGES AND CONCEPTS…………………………………………16
REFLECTIONS………………………………………………………………………….28
CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………..33
BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………..35
PROFESSIONAL PROJECT……………………………………………………………………41
EPISODE 1 SCRIPTS…………………………………………………………………...41
EPISODE 2 SCRIPTS…………………………………………………………………...67
EPISODE 3 SCRIPTS…………………………………………………………………...81
EPISODE 4 SCRIPTS………………………………………………………………….107
Streamable audio files of Superhero Women, ExtraOrdinary Impact podcast episodes and additional content associated with the series can be found at https://superherowomen.home.blog/
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Scholarly Essay
Introduction
Podcasts, when done effectively, are brilliant mediums for storytelling, and I’ve been an avid listener since my freshman year seminar when I was introduced to the Radiolab podcast. I was immediately hooked. It is understandable then, why nearly two years later, I was excited to learn that we would be using episodes of More Perfect, a Radiolab spinoff, in a course called
The Politics of Law and Sexuality. More Perfect uncovered the stories behind United States
Supreme Court cases. I was drawn in by the beautiful, rich auditory experience, and the moving stories told. Some of the blandest sounding court cases or legal decisions became undeniably, and at times heart-wrenchingly, human. I believe podcasts can convey stories about the past in a way that no other medium is quite able to replicate.
As I got closer to my senior year, I began connecting the dots of my interests and my educational experience. I love history and have a passion for education. I had been studying women in history and had made a podcast about the gender binary for my final project in my
Politics of Law and Sexuality tutorial that was based primarily on historical information. Such reflections eventually led to my decision to create a podcast about women in history. My goal was to make a podcast tailored for use in United States (US) History courses at the high school level, and my hope was that the podcast would make it easier for teachers to incorporate more information about the important contributions that women have made to the development of US history and its intellectual and cultural foundations.
I used storytelling techniques to illustrate concepts and incorporated expert interviews, primarily with scholars who research these individuals, to create this podcast. This approach
4 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;5 incorporated my journalistic training in interviewing and storytelling techniques. I also incorporated audio segments created by students at Athens High School (AHS), which I detail further in later sections of this paper.
It proved an incredibly humbling experience to contemplate the considerable breadth of notable women in US history and narrow my featured group to a select few figures. I decided to focus on the time frame from about 1850 to 1930, and then chose my individuals. I eventually settled on Jane Addams, Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, and Margaret Sanger, although I strongly considered including Jeanette Rankin, Mother Jones, and Alice Paul. I concluded that it would be more reasonable to stick with four individuals considering the time frame I had available to complete the project. Regardless, the contributions of each of these women illustrate important themes of the time period, and by telling their life stories and chronicling their impact,
I hope to add texture to listeners’ experience of US history.
Literature Review
The Promise of Podcasts
The journalistic form of a podcast, which I employed for my professional project, has grown increasingly popular over the last ten years. Today, 51 percent of the US population ages
12 and up have listened to a podcast according to the 2019 Podcast Consumer report created by
Edison Research (“The Podcast Consumer,” 2019). This compares to 33 percent in 2015 and only 11 percent in 2006. Additionally, a good deal of this growth has occurred in the age group
5 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;6 which I am targeting for my podcast, listeners between the ages of 12 and 24 (“The Podcast
Consumer,” 2019).
It has long been acknowledged that one of the strengths of podcasts is that they, unlike radio, are not bound to the constraints of time and place. Podcasts were initially conceptualized as a form of “audioblogging” (Quirk, 2015). The origin of the term “podcast” is often pinpointed to 2004 when Ben Hammersley coined the term in an article in The Guardian. However, in 2005 when Apple iTunes offered over 3,000 free podcasts, this relatively new medium became more- widely accessible (Quah, 2017). This was the first step in podcasting developing from “the nichiest, wonkiest content platforms” into a “star-studded, self-contained media ecosystem with hundreds of millions of dollars in annual advertising revenue,” (Quah, 2017, p.1).
Podcasting was appealing to content creators because it allowed them to sidestep many of the demands that limited traditional media. According to an article in The Guardian from 2004— the cusp of the first boom of podcasting— early podcasting pioneer Christopher Lydon saw the flexibility of podcasting as one of its major benefits. Lydon is the creator of one of the first and longest running podcasts, Open Source, which is described on its website as “an American conversation with global attitude.” The author states, “With no publisher to appease, no editor to report to, and an abundance of cheap tools, [Christopher Lydon] says he feels unleashed to work directly with his audience,” (Hammersley, 2004, p.1). Podcasting has been described as the
“latest in a long line of technologies developed to democratize communication” (Quah, 2017, p.3).
This observation about the democratizing nature of podcasting has been noted by scholarly sources as early as 2006. Media scholar Richard Berry notes that unlike traditional radio, “No one person owns the technology and so it is free to listen and create content, thereby
6 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;7 departing from the traditional model of ‘gate-kept’ media and production tools,” (Berry, 2006, p.146). Podcasting has less stringent barriers of entry than traditional radio, from which it derives many of its main features. The basic tools to make and release a podcast, such as sound recording and editing applications, can be accessed by anyone with a smartphone and internet connection. Because of this, Berry argues that podcasting is a disruptive technology. The barrier between producer and consumer is lowered. Podcasting is “a classic ‘horizontal’ media form: producers are consumers and consumers become producers and engage in conversations with each other,” (Berry, 2006, pg. 146).
Yet, this is not the only difference between traditional radio and podcasting. Michele
Hilmes (2013) noted three main differences “materiality,” “mobility,” and “globalism” (p. 43).
Podcasts introduced the unique development that, unlike traditional broadcast radio, their content is not ephemeral. Given that an individual has a device that can download and play audio and an internet connection, they can download a podcast, play it, pause it, rewind, and listen as many times as they please (Hilmes, 2013). In this way, a medium which has its roots in radio has been made more “material.” And, what’s more, listeners can choose practically any location they wish to listen to the content, making it more mobile. Content that is produced in one location can relatively easily be consumed in another town, state, or even nation. These changes, but especially “materiality” has opened the door for radio-like content to change and expand.
Podcasts have their roots in radio and many radio programs have deeply influenced the genre. This American Life, Studio360, and Radiolab are a few which have sparked the new
“golden age” of the radio documentary (Biewen, 2010). Podcasts mix “elements of journalism and documentary with drama and subjective reflection...constructing empathetic, character- driven accounts of realities,” (Salvati, 2015, p. 234). It therefore moves ideas from the general
7 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;8 and abstract to the individual. Podcast creators have used the medium, which tends toward a sense of intimacy, to add a human element to a wide variety of topics. Podcasts and radio share characteristics, practices, and institutions, however, as Toni Sellas (2019) notes they have gradually developed their own cultural practices as they have expanded beyond the radio industry and into such areas as education, marketing, arts, and public relations. The development of norms and practices that are unique from those found in radio means that podcasts have undergone "the progressive construction of a self-identity, (p. 67).
Most podcasts are understood to be “shows” that are released on a regular or at least semi-regular basis. Podcasts typically are delivered to listeners through RSS, which allows users to access content over the internet. RSS feeds can automatically download new content when it is available. Sterne (2008) explains that the nature of the RSS feed “creates an expectation of seriality which shapes both production and consumption practice,” (p. 2). Podcasts combine elements of different genres and mediums into a unique audio experience.
The podcast Hardcore History, which was produced by Dan Carlin, is in a similar vein to the podcast I have created. Carlin’s work represents “a significant intervention of amateur historians and hobbyists into an area dominated by professionals,” (Salvati, 2015, pg. 232). I have attempted with my podcast to intervene in the historical information traditionally available in a slightly different way. Whereas Carlin attempts to bring a different perspective, that of the everyday person, to the discussion of historical events, I aim to show what the lives of historically significant women were like. The women I discuss are typically ignored or at best skimmed over in traditional US history. Only Jane Addams is mentioned in the AP US History curriculum. This project was created with the intention to educate and inform.
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Many early podcasters, such as the creator of Love + Radio, produced content without the expectation that it would be a source of profit, at least in the economic sense. The host of Love +
Radio, Nick van der Kolk once stated that when first creating the now famous podcast his
“ambition with the show back in 2005 was to amuse [himself] and [his] 10 closest friends,”
(Quah, 2017, p. 3). At first, it was certainly a safe bet that most podcasts would not garner much advertising attention. Even in 2008 when the iPhone 3G and Android-powered G1 allowed listeners to download audio files, expanding the availability of the podcast, the medium was still in its early stages. It wasn’t until 2014 that advertisers began to take podcasts seriously. A couple of developments in the world of podcasting allowed this to happen. First, Apple released a native stand-alone podcast app with ios 8. In addition, “Smartphones, with data connections and
“podcatching” apps, greatly reduced the friction for users to subscribe and listen to podcasts,”
(Rei-Anderson, 2019, p.6). Advancement in technology has greatly added to the rise of podcasting, however, other factors have contributed as well.
When the podcast Serial premiered in 2014, its success changed the way that people interacted with and understood podcasts. Serial follows the journey of former This American Life reporter, Sarah Koenig, as she investigates the 1999 murder of high-school student Hae Min Lee and subsequent conviction of Lee’s ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed. She structures the story around the investigation in a “did-he-or-didn’t-he” style. Koenig plays off her own uncertainty to create drama and suspense. The result was a highly-popular podcast that was followed by a loyal and enthusiastic base from plot-twist to plot-twist. According to the article “How Podcasts Became a
Seductive- and Sometimes Slippery- Mode of Storytelling” in The New Yorker, it is noted that
Serial not only made it clear that podcasting could be a financially viable platform for advertisers, but influenced the tone and style of subsequent podcasts (Mead, 2018). In fact, the
9 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;10 style that Serial uses has created tropes in the podcasting world, most notably the tone of uncertainty and investigation that Koenig employs.
Since the success of Serial, podcasts have become more financially sustainable for producers, in part because they are now seen as legitimate platforms for advertisers. Daniel
Haygood (2007) anticipated such a match in 2007 writing, “One of the benefits of advertising on podcasts is that a commercial message can be placed in program content that is highly relevant or strongly connected to the product or service being advertised,” (p. 521). This allows advertisers to more precisely target the demographic they hope to reach with their message. Yet, this is not the only way that podcasters can make an income. Many podcasts operate off an “abundance model” by offering their content to listeners for free (Rei-Anderson, 2019, p. 83). Podcasters will often use crowdfunding through sites, like Patreon, to help fund their work.
Podcasts today come in countless different styles, covering everything from the history of folklore to trends in the Bitcoin market. There seems to be a podcast for every interest, no matter how niche. The top podcast genres according to an infographic from Concord University Saint
Paul are comedy, education, and news (Leadem, 2017). This is followed by sports, politics, gaming, tech, and Sci-Fi. Podcasts, like radio and TV, play host to both “hard” and “soft” content. Similar to TV channels, podcasts often brand themselves based in part on whether their focus is on “hard” or “soft” news. “Hard news” is typically considered more serious and relates to topics that are “timely” and “consequential,” (Kte'pi, 2018, p. 1). “Soft” news is less pressing and usually thought of as more trivial. Bill Kte'pi (2018) noted that “hard media here would be the major news outlets and news-driven magazines and television programs (and, increasingly, podcasts)...” (p. 1). The NPR Political Podcast, for instance, falls into the category of a podcast which has branded itself on an implicit promise to cover a subject that is usually considered
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“hard” news. The podcast that I have created is a little bit more difficult to define because although it is, for the most part, not based on current, timely content, I do not believe it can be considered trivial. History has the potential to deeply impact both the ideas and philosophies of individuals as well as public policy.
According to the Concord University infographic, education and entertainment are the two main reasons why people consume podcasts. Podcasts are particularly suited for both education and entertainment perhaps because of their ability to engage the imagination of the listener. Auditory learning has certain advantages over other ways of absorbing information, claiming a retention rate that is two times higher than reading and four times higher than attending a lecture (Leadem, 2017). Creating a podcast is unlike crafting a lecture because as
Biewen (2010) has noted, ‘‘it’s not enough to convey facts. [Podcasters] gather words and sounds and music, and assemble them, painstakingly, into an experience’’ (p. 8). It is this experience that is then transmitted and digested by the listening audience.
Podcasts are distributed through a variety of different platforms, however, Apple is responsible for supplying about 60% of podcast downloads as of 2018 (Cridland, 2018). In terms of genre, my podcast fits most closely within the umbrella of education which includes podcasts like TED Radio Hour, Freakonomics, and Radiolab. However, since podcasts can be downloaded and played on any platform and through any operating system, this content is what
Andrew Dubber calls ‘‘platform agnostic,’’ which undoubtedly contributes to the growth of the medium (2013, p. 140). Besides iTunes and Apple Podcasts, other distributors include Spotify,
Google Play Music, Stitcher, TuneIn, and Soundcloud (Winn, 2019). For the podcast I produced,
I used Soundcloud to upload my .mp3 files. I have also created a website which has links to the
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.mp3 files embedded. Podcasts are often made and distributed by individuals independent from a media conglomerate, however, this is not the only way that podcasts have been spread.
An interesting development in the distribution of podcasting is the creation of podcasting networks by pre-established media organizations. In Spain, for instance, one of the main media groups, PRISA, launched Podium Podcast in 2016 as a catalogue of native podcasts (Sellas,
2019).
As the culture around podcasting continues to develop, many have questioned what effect the increased involvement of major players will have on the medium. As noted by John Sullivan
(2019), the “podcast market is undergoing rapid transformation, spurred largely by the interest of large tech giants like Apple, Spotify, and Google” (p. 14). The process of content moving into the direction of being hosted on a centralized platform is known as “platformization,” (Nieborg and Poell, 2018). This phenomena has come to be understood through content sharing platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. As defined by Nieborg and Poell (2018), platformization “transform[s] market structures” and results in cultural industries “actively organizing production and distribution around platforms,” (p. 4287). However, it is currently yet to be known exactly what the mainstreaming process for podcasting will look like moving forward, both in terms of a podcasting platform and the development of norms around the medium. Podcasting may experience a different trajectory of “platformization” because
“podcasting’s early roots as a service built upon the open architecture of RSS would seem to blunt the forces of platformization gripping other forms of online media,” (Sullivan, 2019, p. 2).
Sellas (2019) raises the question of how the integration of podcasting into mainstream media will change the podcasting landscape:
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Nevertheless, we must not forget that beyond Podium Podcast, there are minority voices,
alternative podcast networks and hundreds of independent podcasts. We may ask
ourselves to what extent it might be a threat that podcasting may become ‘colonized by
the mainstream’ (p. 77).
The mainstreaming of podcasting could improve the quality of podcasts in the sense of production, while leading to a decrease in the diversity of content. Kris Markman (2015) notes that podcasting apps have a bias toward providing recommendations based on a “top ten” mentality which has the potential to consolidate podcast listening trends (p. 242). A question that needs further investigation is the impact of “platformization” and practices like “top ten” recommendation lists on listening trends and the diversity of content. Questions about who is producing podcasts is an important inquiry because it can help examine how democratic podcasting truly is.
The Podcast Audience
The audience for the podcast I have created is a bit different from the typical podcast listener. According to an article in Entrepreneur, most podcast listeners are young and typically well-educated (Leadem, 2017). Most podcast listeners, 57 percent, have at least a bachelor’s degree, with about 30 percent of listeners holding a graduate degree as of 2017. The demographic of my podcast aims to capture the slice of listeners, less than 15 percent, with only a partial high school education. The target age is a little lower than the demographic that tends to consume the most podcasts, people between the ages of 18 and 34. Since I am aiming to create something that will appeal to students in high school history classes, my target age range is probably somewhere between 14 and 19. That being said, teacher buy-in is an important
13 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;14 component because teachers are the group of people who will likely be most responsible for bringing the content into the classroom and introducing it to students. Fortunately, there is evidence that many educators have responded favorably to podcasting. On
TeachersPayTeachers.com, which provides resources and lesson plans to teachers, there are numerous podcast-based lesson plans and materials. Historical podcast lesson plans available for purchase cover everything from the creation of the constitution to the Louisiana Purchase. There are several podcast lessons plans based on Serial, and some, such as one entitled “Historical
Podcast Project Based Learning Students Create Mini Podcast PBL,” which give instructions on how to guide students to create their own content.
A strength of the podcast form is its flexible accessibility. The target audience can interact where and when it is convenient for them. Unlike during a traditional lecture, students can replay, pause, and rewind a podcast as much as they like. They can also revisit material through transcripts of the podcast. This is an advantage for students because it presents more opportunities to absorb the material.
Collaboration with Athens High School Students
I have learned that podcasts are often more interesting and entertaining when they are built upon well-structured, but still organic conversations. Doane (2006) noted that, “Podcasts with dramatized audio structure have been shown to yield higher listener immersion and to produce more vivid mental images than podcasts with single narrators,” (p. 120). While I aimed to avoid over-dramatization, I wanted to make sure that I included a variety of perspectives.
Rodero (2012), working from an understanding that audio has the potential to create mental imagery for the listener, found that stories that include a wider range of audio sources was the
14 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;15 most engaging. The story “based solely on dialogues was the one that least stimulated listeners’ imagination and attention levels,” (p. 472). With this in mind, I invited six students at AHS to offer listeners a wider range of perspectives. I wanted to include the voices of high school students because I believe that it is a good way of connecting with my target audience.
Podcasts, which present fewer barriers for producers, create an environment where
“Unlike traditional forms of reporting that privilege a few dominant voices, audio media can foreground the voices and perspectives of nearly all individuals in the story,” (Doane, 2006, p.
120). This has the potential to “destabilize power hierarchies by representing many different viewpoints, rather than subjugating others by telling their stories for them,” (p. 120).
I gained written permission via email from the AHS Vice Principal, Chad Springer, to include student-created content in my podcast. I then obtained consent from the parents of the participating students using a permission form in order to be able to include the students’ audio segments1. One student was over the age of 18 and did not submit a form. In three of the four episodes of the podcast there is a five to ten minute clip from two AHS students who discuss how the information covered in the podcast can be applied to contemporary problems. In the episodes about Sanger, Parsons, and Addams, students voiced their opinions on a variety of topics, including the proper role of the government in social programs, the rights of women to obtain contraception, and the politics of race. Two students decided not to participate due to time constraints so we were not able to create a student section for Goldman. By including the voices of students from AHS, I have effectively “destabilized” the traditional boundaries between producer and listener by giving control over some of the content to the “listener.” This is
1 To protect students’ privacy, parental permission forms are not included in this thesis. The parental permission forms for all minors involved are available through Ohio University Professor Elizabeth Hendrickson. Phone: 573.489.1689 Email: [email protected]
15 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;16 intended to engage the audience further using dialogue supplied by their peers. An interesting question is whether students engage differently with peer-created podcast content being used in a classroom setting.
Students were encouraged to make content about the contemporary relevance of the individuals covered in the podcasts because I found that when talking to expert sources, this was a common sentiment among those interviewed. The idea that the work, thoughts, and insights of the historical individual who was the subject of the interview are still relevant and important today came up in each interview. For example, after initially making contact with one interviewee, Candace Falk, author of “Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman” and editor of the
Emma Goldman Papers Project, she stated in an email, “I am definitely interested in bringing
Emma Goldman and her ideas at a time when we really need her.” Each person I interviewed expressed this sentiment in some way or another. I helped students decide on their general topic, although I encouraged them to take a great deal of flexibility in deciding what they would discuss, and made myself available for coaching.
Ethical Challenges and Concepts
Introducing Information into the Public Sphere
Since David White introduced the theoretical term “gatekeeper” in 1958, scholars and practitioners have understood that there are certain responsibilities that come with entering into this role. Being a gatekeeper is an unavoidable part of practicing journalism, as story and source choice are essential. According to “Communication Theories: Origins, Methods, and Uses in the
Mass Media” by Werner J. Severin and James W. Tankard Jr., a gatekeeper “determines what
16 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;17 information is passed along the chain and how faithfully it is reproduced” (p. 43). This concept is central to why I wanted to create this podcast (as it was often left out of history books), and I was mindful of it throughout my project.
Creating a podcast, especially one meant to be used in high school classroom discussions, introduces information into what is known as the “public of publics” (Dawson, 2011). This means that information is introduced as a legitimate subject of discussion in the mainstream public sphere. If this concept is extended to the classroom, it seems logical to conclude that certain individuals and subjects have traditionally not been open to consideration. In this way, they have been excluded from the classroom “public of publics.”
Kjell Andersson (2008) defined the public sphere as places where, “Citizens could influence politics by expressing their needs and interests and shape ‘public opinion’,” (p. 184).
Those who are have not historically been given full citizenship rights, such as women and
African Americans, were cut out of the public sphere almost entirely, at least in a recognizable capacity. The philosopher John Dewey was often influenced by Addams on subjects like democracy. Addams lived the ideal of pragmatism that Dewey often wrote about. However, whenever discussions of pragmatism and theories of democracy are brought up, most often
Dewey is mentioned and Addams forgotten, despite the fact that many of the ideas that are credited to Dewey originated from Addams. The digital landscape and new technologies have complicated the places that should now be considered part of the public sphere.
The idea of the “public of publics” is relevant to this podcast because podcasts are another avenue for citizens to engage with and comment upon information, current events, news, and ideas. Journalists must choose not only what to cover, but how to cover it, which
17 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;18 subsequently impacts formal public discourse. This podcast will hopefully add to public discourse in meaningful ways.
This podcast is not intended to have an ideological influence on its listeners, however, it would be impossible to deny that it is an inherently feminist piece since it attempts to highlight the work and lives of women in particular. Doane (2006) commented on the feminist implications of the work done by Koenig on the podcast Serial and stated that “...the agitative model of feminist activism is not always productive as a method for public scholarship,” (p.
119). Koenig, who was able to address controversial subjects relating to social justice without alienating her audience, is taken as an example of how public discourse should be encouraged.
While creating the podcast, I had to keep in mind that my goal is to reach as broad an audience as possible. As noted by Doane (2006), the practice of calling out bad behavior or injustice and agitating often alienates the audience that would benefit most from a discussion of the information. A solution to this would be to engage the audience in a way that invites questioning and a multiplicity of opinion (Doane, 2006, p. 120). This is not counter to the purpose of social justice, but beneficial to it, as making room for multiple perspectives has the potential to
“maximize engagement, both to reach a larger audience and to get people interested. This engagement...should spark an investment in the topics of social justice” (Doane, 2006, p. 120).
Work by Patrick Plaisance (2016) has called attention to the need to rethink the framework by which we judge media ethics, up to and possibly including a paradigm shift:
Rigorous moral psychology studies are needed to modernize our understanding of new
journalism cultures, to examine the ethical decision making among public relations
professionals, and to assess the moral maturation of the media marketing industry. This
“reorientation” will enable media ethics researchers to transcend mere description and
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construct a more compelling and holistic interpretive media ethics theory that takes into
account a host of psychology-based variables. The practical value of this proposal should
be clear: Research that documents the transformed media landscape through the lens of
moral psychology provides firmer ground on which to make claims about what media
systems and professionals should be delivering (p. 468).
This work, Plaisance (2016) suggests, would ideally resolve “the need for a truly globally relevant ethic to transcend an exclusively Western paradigm,” (p. 466). Individualism is a value often touted by those in Western culture, however, Plaisance opens up the idea that more communal virtues should be considered. There are many who question what the role of journalist should be, that of the objective observer or that of the participant. Some, such as Selwyn
Manning (2009) have argued that media professionals should acknowledge and use their unique position to have a positive influence on discourse. It is clear from this that the role of the journalist is changing. Podcasting has an important role to play in the evolution of media ethics.
It can be a powerful testing ground for understanding what ethical principles actually drive the behavior of journalists.
Hugo Aznar (2018) has expanded on the call for new frameworks for understanding journalism ethics and the role of the media. He has proposed that an ethical concept which should be used to guide communication professionals in the 21st century should be vulnerability
(p. 19). The “first generation of media ethics” was largely shaped by the introduction of the principles of truthfulness, accuracy and objectivity among other concepts which have since been integrated as norms in media ethics. These are of course still important, however, Aznar recommends that journalists consider a purpose that extends beyond merely “to inform:”
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Now we have to look at the second function that every social system has to fulfil to exist
and to win legitimacy as such: the principle of beneficence. This means that every social
system, in addition to its specific function – to provide information in the case of mass
media – also has the duty to contribute to a better society, to social justice, to the good of
the people (p. 18).
The standard of beneficence in the case of the media means including those who are most vulnerable in the public discourse. Aznar (2018) proposes making “vulnerability the crucial key of a second generation of communicative ethics. To make visible and to give a voice to those in the worst situations, in vulnerable conditions,” (p. 19). This includes victims of abuse and human trafficking, immigrants, children, and people with disabilities. Since podcasts do not follow strict boundaries between producer and consumer and do not yet follow strict rules or norms for content, they are well-situated to improve the representation of those in vulnerable populations.
I believe that this principle of “positive” beneficence can be applied to issues I have faced during the creation of this podcast. Margaret Sanger did believe in eugenics, however, that term has gathered associations that it did not have during Sanger’s time. It was important to me to provide a fair representation of Sanger and her beliefs. For the most part Sanger believed in positive eugenics and not negative eugenics. Positive eugenics is based on a belief that people, especially women, should be empowered in their decision of when (and if) to have children and how many children to have. Negative eugenics is the idea that some people should be prevented from reproducing or have their reproduction limited. The history of negative eugenics is extremely destructive. Most people are aware of the history of eugenics as it pertains to Europe,
WWII, and the Holocaust. However, what is lesser known is the history of eugenics in the US.
This history includes people being forcibly and systematically sterilized, in some cases without
20 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;21 even their knowledge, and their autonomy stripped away. People of color, those living in poverty, and those living with a developmental difference have been especially at risk for exploitation. I followed the principle of beneficence in my decision to include this controversial information in my podcast. Sanger, who mostly stuck to positive eugenics, nevertheless had some troubling beliefs about people with developmental differences, namely that they were overly promiscuous because they lacked a moral center. Knowledge of this history has the potential to raise awareness about the problems that vulnerable groups of people have faced in the US. Since “the core aim is always the protection and improvement of people in a position of vulnerability,” I believe it is imperative that this information be included (Aznar, 2018, p. 19).
This would hopefully make it less likely for the tragic history of the eugenics movement and the destruction of life and autonomy that came with it to recur.
The Emotional Impact of Podcasts
Podcasting requires a unique understanding of the effect of different audio techniques on the listener. Audio, because of its narrative structure and the imagery it produces in the mind of the listener, has the potential to “amplify the emotional transport into the storyline,” (Doane,
2006, p.120). This audio includes music employed during a podcast. Although “Journalism relies on storytelling and emotions to stimulate emotional reactions in the audience and secure their involvement,” I wanted to allow my audience to develop their own emotional responses to the information (Lindgren, Autoethnographic Journalism 186). To prevent the listener from being unduly influenced by the emotion carried by music, I decided to include this only in the intro and outro.
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Ensuring Accuracy
Questions about ethics often involve situations where one has to balance different values within the specific context of the situation at hand. One ethical dilemma I faced during the creation of this podcast required that I balance the need for accuracy with any undue influence from a source. One of the standards of the Code of Ethics for the Society of Professional
Journalists (SPJ) is to “Seek Truth and Report it” (“SPJ Code of Ethics”). The SPJ clarifies that journalists should take responsibility for the accuracy of the information before it is published.
The code notes that journalists should rely on original sources whenever possible. The ethics handbook provided by National Public Radio (NPR) emphasizes that information must be both
“correct and in context” (NPR Ethics Handbook). It is deeply important to give sufficient context when presenting historical information.
The subjects covered in this podcast, especially those rooted in historically radical politics, are not usually within the range of topics discussed in any depth in high school history classes. Relatedly, covering information in a way that allows context for the subjects and seeks to avoid distortion is an ethical dilemma of creating a podcast. Distortion can be introduced via both “systematic distortion through bias and random distortion through ignorance or carelessness” (Severin and Tankard, p. 43).
While creating this podcast I have found how tricky it can be to avoid unintentional distortion. It was particularly difficult to sort through information for one of my subjects, Lucy
Parsons, because misinformation about her is extremely prevalent. It is not difficult to find an example of this. A quick search of Lucy Parsons on Wikipedia, BlackPast.org, and even the website of the Industrial Worker if the World, unless it has been corrected by this time, will inform you that Parsons was born in 1853, when in fact she was born in 1851.
22 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;23
Misinformation about Parsons is in everything from casual blog posts to scholarly journals. There is a quote commonly attributed to the Chicago police department that Parsons was “more dangerous than a thousand rioters.” This originally appeared in Ashburgh’s “Lucy
Parsons: An American Revolutionary,” however, Jones said that she has not been able to confirm the authenticity of this quote through any solid sourcing. An article on the website for the
Communist Party USA (CPUSA) among other sources, asserts that it is widely believed that
Parsons joined the Communist Party in 1939. It is unclear, however, whether this was actually the case.
Given that misinformation about Parsons is so prevalent, I had to question my own approach to this problem. For the quote about Parsons being “more dangerous than a thousand rioters,” for instance, it made sense to mention that this quote is popularly attributed to Chicago police; however, experts, such as Jones, believe that it is only a myth. The Brookings Institution states that news organizations should “call out fake news and disinformation” (West, 2017, p.
13). While this advice was given in the context of misinformation in news reporting, it illustrates an important point which can be applied to the production of any journalistic or historical piece.
The best way to correct misinformation is to challenge it. Instead of merely ignoring the misinformation, I felt it was best for this podcast to call attention to it. By doing this, curious listeners are less likely to find and spread the misinformation at a later date. In addition, it improves the media literacy, or the ability to sort through the quality of information, of listeners.
Since misinformation about Parsons is so widespread, I decided to send Jones a rough draft of the script I was developing for Parsons prior to our interview. This was done in the interest of ensuring the information I present is as accurate as possible. I decided to do this because I did not see much risk for sharing the script with Jones only to have her then unfairly
23 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;24 shape the content. My decision might have been different if my project involved a topic that was more controversial, where two reasonable people could disagree about what was right, or if I thought my source had a personal interest in furthering or suppressing certain information. Since this was not the case, I determined that the importance of ensuring accuracy outweighed the potential for the content to be manipulated. There is also a question about whether sharing information with a source beforehand might change the way they respond during an interview.
Even sharing the most benign information creates the potential that a source could script out what they say, which could make an interview less compelling. Nevertheless, I felt that the need for accuracy was primary.
I had to then decide if I would share my script with my other interviewees prior to the interview. After considering the pros and cons of this, I decided that I would only take this approach with the Parsons script because none of the other individuals I researched were as vulnerable to misinformation. Most key information about Addams, Goldman, and Sanger is well-established and supported by multiple secondary sources. It is no less important to ensure accuracy in the coverage these individuals, however, the barriers to do so present fewer pitfalls than was the case with Parsons. As such, when weighing the demands of accuracy against other factors like avoiding distortion, it makes sense not to share the scripts for any of the other individuals featured.
Relationships with Expert Sources
Navigating appropriate relationships has long been a question that journalists of all kinds have faced. In “Getting to the Source,” there is a discussion about how journalists should balance the need to cultivate trust with sources and the need to report information with the interests of the
24 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;25 reader, not the source, in mind (Cuillier, 2007). Lusk Herald reporter Brandie Bartelt, for instance, faced a dilemma when she uncovered what could be potentially embarrassing information about the recent resignation of the local police chief (p. 16). Because Bartelt had a relationship with the mayor in which he trusted her, the mayor revealed to her that the official story that the chief was resigning for “retirement” was not the whole picture. In fact, the chief had been asked to resign because he was not fulfilling the responsibilities of the position satisfactorily. Bartelt decided not to divulge this information in the official story.
This brings up the dilemma of when should information that could be potentially damaging to an individual be reported and when should it be withheld. In line with the work that
I have been doing, how should information that might be in the interest of the source be handled in order to avoid mere “advocacy journalism.” Cuillier (2007) seems to point toward an answer in treating the interests of the reader as being the primary concern. Don Flood, editor of The
Dover Post in Dover, Delaware, said that, “Sometimes, new reporters out of college are afraid to anger sources… so they write the story the way the source wants it, not how readers want it,”
(Cuillier, 2007, p. 18). Although this article focused on the dilemma of when to report negative information, it can help provide perspective on questions about reporting information that might benefit the source as well. This is a common problem with political sources since “[Journalists] aren’t here to promote [the politicians] political agendas” (Cuillier, 2007, p. 20). The text recommends that considering the interest of the audience first helps to solve this dilemma. In most journalistic contexts, the questions include if the audience would benefit from learning the information or be harmed by not knowing the information. A journalist’s “highest and primary obligation... is to serve the public,” (“SPJ Code of Ethics”). This means carefully aligning your actions to meet the standard of acting independently.
25 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;26
In the context of a podcast being created for the purpose of education, the interests of the audience might be different than if the information is being presented merely to inform or entertain. During the creation of this project, I faced the question of whether to include information that might unfairly advance the interests of a particular source. The instance that presented a potential ethical challenge occurred when deciding what information to include from my interview with Candace Falk, author of “Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman” and lead editor of The Emma Goldman Papers. During this interview, Falk revealed to me that The Emma
Goldman Papers Project was no longer receiving funding from the University of California,
Berkeley. Because of this, Falk said the project has been struggling to raise thousands of dollars each month. During this interview, Falk discussed ways that people could support the project.
While I am personally sympathetic to the purpose of the project, I decided that it would be inappropriate to include ways to support the project in the podcast. One of the standards of the
SPJ is to avoid “favored treatment to advertisers, donors or any other special interests, and resist internal and external pressure to influence coverage,” (“SPJ Code of Ethics”). Although I believe the Emma Goldman Papers to be a worthy cause, taking my cue from the advice to consider audience interests first, I decided that including this information could potentially cross the line into advocacy. In addition, it would not fit the tone or purpose of the podcast, which is intended for education and aimed at a high school audience. Despite my desire to help the project, I came to the conclusion that it would not make sense to include this information in the podcast. If the podcast were for a different audience and had a solely-entertainment-driven focus, I might have chosen to include the information with an explanation of why. If this had been the case, I would have also included information about how to support research about Addams, Sanger, and
Parsons in their respective episodes.
26 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;27
Including the Work of Minors
Another ethical dilemma that I have faced during the creation of the podcast is the question of how to ethically use source material produced by minors. I had to make sure to strike a balance between giving the students a voice and making sure they were being represented well.
With modern technology, what is said during a podcast is likely to be public online for an indefinite amount of time. The article “Using Children as Sources” by Elizabeth Stone (1999), provides some helpful discussion which can be applied to the decision I faced. According to The
New York Times contributor, Lisa Belkin, when she was writing her book, “Show Me a Hero,” she decided to remove a statement made in an interview that one of the children featured in the book was the product of an unwanted pregnancy (Stone, 1999). This was done in an effort to reduce unnecessary pain or harm. The article mentions that one form of unintentional harm could be damage done to one’s reputation. Howard Chua-Eoan, former news director at Time magazine, said, “If we think a kid doesn’t know the implications of what he or she says, we’ll delete it entirely,” (Stone, 1999, p. 4).
In addition, the podcast is meant to be as accessible as possible. These students, since they had all studied history at the Advanced Placement level, are likely ahead of where many potential listeners could be in the discussion of these topics. I wanted to do my best to meet people where they are at in the discourse of these topics. Because of this, I felt to meet the time requirements, the conversation needed to stay focused on clear definable topics.
In my role guiding the students to create pieces which would accompany the main piece,
I had to look carefully at what my position demanded. I, of course, hoped that students would get something of educational value out of the experience. However, since I was ultimately
27 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;28 responsible for the creation of the podcast (not the students), I believe that my role can be understood as being more akin to that of an editor. I edited the student content in a way that I felt would keep their voice in place while trying to ensure that the presentation fit well into the tone and purpose of the podcast.
Reflections
While the purpose of many journalistic podcasts is to inform and entertain, I hope to extend this to education. My aim is to provide a useful resource for teachers to incorporate in the classroom.
If I were able to continue this project in the future, I would want to expand to other time periods. There are individuals that I wish I would be able to cover both before and after my time period of choice. For instance, the work of Angela and Sarah Grimké deserves inclusion in the discussion of women in history. These two individuals worked as abolitionists and were the first women to lecture in public in the US. Sarah Grimké, the more reserved of the two sisters, besides contributing to the abolition movement, wrote feminist theory which expressed ideas which would not come to popularity until nearly a hundred years later.
Not including a woman whose work was primarily in the suffrage has been the biggest area of uncertainty for me since starting this project, however, I stand by the decision I have made. The women’s suffrage movement is generally fairly well covered within the high school
US history curriculum when compared to other movements, for instance the birth control movement, led by women. I wanted to avoid the illusion that the suffrage movement represented the position or focus of all women during this time period. The history of women cannot be treated as a block which can be distilled down to one position, idea, or movement. Emma
28 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;29
Goldman, for instance, was against suffrage based on her belief that voting merely provides an illusion of control. I wanted to add to the breadth of knowledge about the diversity of the movements that women have led.
There were many hours of research that went into the production of these scripts. It was important to understand and communicate the historical context to create content that would be enriching and stimulating to an audience of high school history students.
Source Selection
I conducted four interviews over the course of this project. Most of this was accomplished through interviews conducted over the phone. For the episode about Goldman, I interviewed Candace Falk, the founding director of the Emma Goldman Papers project. Falk is also the author of one of the most acclaimed Goldman biographies, “Love, Anarchy, and Emma
Goldman.” I interviewed Esther Katz, founder and director of The Margaret Sanger Papers
Project about Sanger. For information about Parsons, I interviewed Professor Jacqueline Jones,
Chair of the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin and author of “Goddess of
Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons.” Lastly, I interviewed Cathy Hajo, who is the director of the Jane Addams Papers Project to better understand Addams’ historical impact.
Story Selection
I crafted this podcast series to work in tandem with information and concepts that are part of the more common history curriculum. The episodes are structured around figures active during the period defined as The Emergence of Modern America (1890-1930), as categorized by
The World Digital Library. Four episodes tell the stories of particular, influential women during
29 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;30 this time period, and each discussion focuses on the political, economic, and cultural change these women initiated.
It was challenging to decide not only which figures to include in the podcast, but what time period to focus on. I decided on the period which came after the Civil War and which coincided with the Industrialization coming into maturity- roughly 1890 to 1930-- because the developments that happened during this time were revolutionary. They set the stage for what has happened since in major ways. I think it is also important to remember that since this time period was marked by a technological revolution, that technology being industrial, it parallels the current time period which is being shaped by a technological revolution of its own.
Nearly every time period in US history is undercovered in terms of the contributions of women, however, I felt drawn to this time period in particular because I felt that the gap was more profound in certain ways. The generation of women more or less leading into the one I focus on contained some important figures without a doubt, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan
B. Anthony being two of the better known in the annals of US history. The contributions that these women made are indispensable, however, I felt that the women of this time period were better represented in the history curriculum than the ones that followed. When I was a student of
US history in high school I came across the names of Stanton and Anthony many times, but names like Jane Addams and Margaret Sanger seemed to appear less often if at all.
There are four episodes in the podcast. The first of which, entitled “Margaret Sanger:
Warrior for Reproductive Rights”, focuses on Margaret Sanger. Although I used several books and other resources for the creation of this episode, a good deal of the information comes from the book “The Margaret Sanger Story and the Fight for Birth Control.” I was particularly interested in resources that gave me the opportunity to interact with material that was beyond just
30 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;31 a list of facts about the individual I was studying. There were numerous stories in “The Margaret
Sanger Story” that did not make it into the final product not because they were uninteresting, but because they did not fit the purpose and focus of my project. For instance, the story behind the relationship between Sanger and the famous sexologist Havelock Ellis is engaging, humanizing, and helps paint a picture of who Sanger was. If I were creating a podcast about the secret lives of historical figures, it is without a doubt a story I would want to include. However, because I kept my focus more general and big picture, this story and many like it were not presented. I needed to include only the information and stories which helped to illustrate the individual’s most important contributions to US history.
The second episode in this series is “Emma Goldman: An American Ideal of Free
Speech,” which centers on the life and significance of Emma Goldman. If Sanger is a step outside of what students typically hear about in high school US history courses, Goldman is at least two steps outside the norm. Much of the history that forms the backdrop and, at times, the driving action behind Goldman’s experience in the US reveals actions taken by the US that many would likely rather keep hidden. Goldman’s story provides a counter-narrative to the idea that the US is a country where freedom, free speech, and personal liberty reign supreme. I relied on several biographical accounts of Goldman’s life for the content of this episode: the biography
“Emma Goldman: American Individualist” by John C. Chalbreg, “Love, Anarchy, and Emma
Goldman” by Candace Falk, and the first edition of The Emma Goldman Papers Project. I found
“Emma Goldman: American Individualist” to be particularly helpful for filling in gaps in my knowledge about the relevant historical proceedings of the time.
In the third episode, “Jane Addams: A Progressive Pioneer,” the story and impact of Jane
Addams is recounted. Of all the individuals featured, Addams is covered most in traditional high
31 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;32 school history curricula. Addams is the only of the four women I have included in this podcast who is mentioned in the AP United States History Course Framework which went into effect as of 2017. Yet, Addams is not immune to the historical minimization faced by the other women I covered. Discussion of her achievements is often limited to her contribution to the settlement house movement in the United States. It is of course natural to explain the importance of Hull
House when covering Addams, however, this should not be at the expense of overlooking her other achievements. Addams was a key figure in rallying international opposition to World War
I, becoming the first woman in the US to be awarded with the Nobel Peace Prize. I strove to include the aspects of Addams’ life that she is not typically given credit for. She was influential in the development of the field of sociology and the development of American pragmatism. Yet,
Addams is an outlier in the group of women I have chosen to focus on because she came from a well-off family and had a privileged upbringing.
The fourth and final episode in this podcast is “Lucy Parsons: A Rebel for the Working
Class” about the anarchist Lucy Parsons, who is remembered for her skills as a powerful orator and dedicated advocate of workers’ rights. Of the individuals I chose to research for this podcast,
Parsons was the most difficult to pin down. Parsons background as a former slave, her philosophy as an anarchist, and her status as a woman of color all contribute to the scarcity of accurate, quality information about her life and impact. Since many of her personal papers were seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, there is without a doubt much information about
Parsons that will likely never be recovered. Making matters more complicated, Parsons herself constructed a false identity to avoid some of the discrimination that came with being a former slave. It is at times difficult to sort through which criticisms of Parsons are valid and which are unfair. Whereas with a figure like Emma Goldman, where there is better access to her personal
32 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;33 thoughts and truth through her letters and journals, there is little to suggest what Parsons’ inner world was like. The best resource currently available about Parsons is the recently published
“Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons” by Jacqueline Jones. This book, published in 2017, clears up some misconceptions about Parsons and adds significantly to the body of knowledge about Parsons, particularly as it pertains to her early life. I used “Goddess of
Anarchy” as my main resource for information about Parsons.
Conclusion
My hope for this podcast is a final product that is both entertaining and educational.
Reframing and re-narrativizing our country’s cultural past will hopefully help create a better understanding of the impact of women on US history. History is constantly constructed through the stories that we tell. It is an active force that not only builds a narrative of the past, but influences the actions of people in the future. Telling the history of women can empower students to think differently about their roles in the world. It can help expand their imaginations and show the power of perspective, which can help them adapt to a rapidly changing world.
Podcasting, as a medium that excels in its ability to convey compelling narratives and engage the imagination of the listener, was the perfect tool for conveying this information. It will be interesting to see how the culture of podcasting continues to develop. It is clear that the ethical frameworks concerning not only podcasting, but other forms of online media, will need careful consideration in the years to follow. A major concern is the impact of podcasting on democratic communication and the proper role of podcasters in this regard. Podcasting has great potential to improve social justice, however, “platformization” could dampen this as content becomes increasingly centralized. An interesting question that this paper does not answer is whether
33 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;34 incorporating podcasting and how to make podcasts into education could make the range of ideas and perspectives found in podcasts more diverse in the long run. In this period of time characterized by rapid change, it is important to think ahead about the impact of podcasting culture and practices.
34 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;35
35 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;36
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Professional Project
Episode One Script: Margaret Sanger
Transcription Note: During the segment of the podcast created by students from Athens High School, additions from the podcast narrator, Emily St. Amour, are bolded. Elsewhere in the script, there is no special distinction for narration from me. EKatz is short for Esther Katz, who is the founder, editor, and director of The Margaret Sanger Papers Project and was interviewed for this project.
Hi! My name is Emily St. Amour, and this is “Superhero Women: Extraordinary Impact,” a podcast where we explore some of the most dynamic, influential, and at times, controversial, women in United States (US) History. The first four episodes focus on women whose major contributions take place between 1890 and 1930. This episode, we’ll be talking about the life and impact of the woman responsible for the creation of the reproductive health organization Planned Parenthood. It's Margaret Sanger!
Today, Sanger is probably best known as the founder of Planned Parenthood. However, fewer probably realize that before Sanger, the birth control movement in the US was virtually nonexistent. In fact, the term ‘birth control’ itself was coined by Sanger, who worked tirelessly to push for the right of women to choose when to have children and how many children to have.
Sanger believed that birth control rights addressed the central causes of social inequalities. Whereas many others during this time period focused on increasing wages and pushing for the eight-hour work day, she observed that very large families were
43 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;44 significantly more prone to poverty and crime than their smaller counterparts. These correlations gave Sanger pause about a woman’s agency in her family’s future.
I talked with Esther Katz, founder, editor, and director of The Margaret Sanger Papers
Project about Sanger’s life and her impact on the struggle for the right to reproductive health information.
E. Katz: Sanger recognized that you wouldn’t have a level playing field for anything unless you gave women the right to control their own bodies, control their own sexuality, and make the decisions about their own body, including when to have a child, if to have a child. So she wanted them to be much more, to have much more agency in their life decision.
Sanger went on to study nursing at White Plains Hospital around 1900. After her education as a nurse, in which she was never given information about birth control techniques, Sanger provided services to families who lived in the Lower East Side in
Manhattan. In this poverty-stricken area, Sanger regularly cared for women who were driven to the point of desperation trying to avoid another unwanted pregnancy. For many women, pregnancy could be a question of life or death. Without birth control, many women died in childbirth or from pregnancy-related complications. Other times, the arrival of another child could place an untenable strain on household resources, meaning that others in the family would have to go hungry.
In the United States, birth control information had been severely restricted since the passage of the 1873 Comstock Law, which made it illegal to share information about
44 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;45 birth control and other “obscene” topics. The law was enforced through the U.S. Postal
Service. Only the prevention of the spread of disease, taken to mean exclusively venereal disease, would permit doctors to share information. This meant that while some men could be given access to condoms, a woman who could die from another pregnancy would be given nothing.
Sanger insisted that birth control be grounded in good science. Today, there are 15 medically-recognized forms of birth control, however, during Sanger’s lifetime neither the pill, nor the patch, nor the shot was available. Women, if they had access to anything, were limited to barrier methods such as the diaphragm or suppositories that were soaked in everything from whiskey to lemon juice.
Instead of leaving women to gamble on what birth control information was safe and what was not, Sanger used research she had done overseas as the basis for the pamphlet, “Family Limitation.”
EKatz: It was controversial because it was the first manual, practical manual, on various kinds of contraception that were available at that time and it’s significant because it was very, very specific and it also was designed to appeal to poorer women because it involved using medic… materials that you could get at your local pharmacy, so the various types of douches and things like that in it and it was subsequently released in many languages, in many versions, right through the 1920’s.
However, it would not be until 1914 that this information would actually be widely published. There was a general fear about putting out birth control information. The
45 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;46 creator of the Comstock Law, Anthony Comstock, was known to bait doctors to break the law by sending them letters pretending to be a married woman requesting birth control information. In one such instance, Comstock wrote to a doctor pretending to be a woman suffering from a disease which would be exacerbated by pregnancy. The sympathetic doctor who wrote back received seven years in prison for providing information.
Prior to the release of “Family Limitation,” Sanger published a magazine called “Woman
Rebel” starting in 1914. This publication argued in fiery language for birth control.
EKatz: The “Woman Rebel” case is what led to the federal indictments and she was indicted on a lot of charges of printing not specific birth control information, but advocating birth control information in the “Woman Rebel.”
For this publication, Sanger was indicted on 9 federal charges for publishing “obscene” material. Sanger was not afraid of going to jail, but she was strategically minded. She knew that she did not want to be taken to charge for “Woman Rebel” when it contained no real information about birth control.
EKatz: Eventually they brought a series of indictments, mostly for the articles she published in I think it was the sixth issue that had been suppressed and confiscated by the post office and your know... She’s facing 20 years in prison and so she thought “I’m not sure this is worth it. I’m not sure I’m going to win this” and she finally decided after it was clear that the government was going to go forward with it that she could do more good by sort of staying out of prison. So she goes to Montreal, connects with some
46 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;47 socialist friends who help her get a fake passport under the name of Bertha Watson and then she sailed to England.
Sanger faced a dilemma when her request for an additional month to prepare her case defending the content of the “Woman Rebel” was denied. Sanger, instead of turning up to court the next day, boarded an ocean liner bound for England. After notifying the district judge and attorney, she left America to buy herself time to come up with a strategy to push birth control forward.
Three days into her journey, Sanger sent out a message, a secret one-word code, to four of her closest associates. “Family Limitation” was released into the world in a dramatic fashion as Sanger fled the United States.
EKatz: In the meantime, as she’s leaving she calls for the release of “Family Limitation” and Comstock is desperate to find out where she is so he arranges to pull a sting on her then husband William Sanger by having William Sanger sell him a copy of “Family
Limitation,” William Sanger is caught and not happily is now facing his own trial and gets a lot of support from the Socialist movement in New York and they pay for a lot of his legal expenses, but in the end they say “spend your 30 days in jail and you’re going to do an important thing for the movement,” which he reluctantly, but finally does do.
She spent time in London learning about birth control in the British Museum. Most significantly, she visited birth control clinics in the Netherlands, among the first in the world. Sanger spent two weeks studying and working at one clinic and learned how to fit
47 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;48 a woman for a pessary, a small device which prevents pregnancy by blocking the cervix.
EKatz: Sanger who is in England and is in the Netherlands and in Spain in these months, recognizes that the attention about the movement is going to her husband
William Sanger and not to her. She’s meanwhile publishing pamphlets like “English
Methods of Birth Control” and such “Methods of Birth Control for Distribution In the
United States,” but she realizes she better come back and face her trial, which she does by around September of 1915.
Sanger spent about a year in self-chosen exile before returning to the US to face trial in
1915. Despite the pressure from friends and legal advisors to compromise, plead guilty, and work for a reduced sentence, Sanger was determined to align her action not with what was legally most sensible for avoiding punishment, but with her principles. She refused to plead guilty because she did not believe anything she said in “Woman Rebel” was obscene. In a bold move that garnered her national attention and support, she decided to represent herself.
EKatz: And she is ready to stand trial when her youngest child, her five year old daughter, dies of pneumonia and she is devastated by it and she gets a lot of very sympathetic publicity also because of it…
The trial, The People of the State of New York v. Margaret H. Sanger, in 1918, attracted the support of the most powerful and fashionable women in New York City. It culminated in a packed courtroom and more press than nearly any other trial of the era.
48 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;49
EKatz: The government decides it doesn’t want to give her more publicity by convicting this bereaved mother so it decides not to go ahead with that trial and so the “Women
Rebel” issue comes to a close.
Sanger’s trial made front page news at a time when WWI was usually the only topic claiming this spot. Her trial date was pushed back multiple times and the case was eventually dropped by officials who feared public opinion. Yet despite this outward victory, no legal clarification was made about the Comstock law.
EKatz: But Sanger revised herself after the loss of her child and after the ending of the, or the stopping of the trial, and realizes that she needs to do something, she goes on a national tour, gets arrested a couple of times, gets banned a couple of times, gets more publicity, but realizes that she needs now to prove, you know, having learned from
Havelock Ellis and others, that there’s an economic and health rationale for birth control in addition to the feminist one that she had been operating under and also a rationale aimed at creating healthier children and parents.
Sanger was inspired to prove quantitatively that birth control was beneficial in part by her time in Europe. At the time, the Netherlands boasted the lowest maternal death and infant mortality rate in Europe and America. After spending some time studying population statistics, Sanger found that stillbirth, abortion, and venereal disease were all less common in areas with access to a clinic. In the Netherlands, Sanger wrote,
“Contraception was looked at as no more unusual than we in America look upon the purchase of a toothbrush.” Sanger hoped to export this attitude to the US.
49 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;50
So, after a national speaking tour during which Sanger helped others organize birth control leagues across the country, she decided to take action. Sanger notified the
Brownsville, New York attorney, and then proceeded to open the first birth control clinic in the United States in that neighborhood. Brownsville was populated largely by poor immigrants.
EKatz: And the Brownsville Clinic was interesting because it’s open in October and it’s open in Brooklin in an immigrant neighborhood and she deliberately did that because she wanted to… she put out leaflets that were printed in Yiddish and Italian and English to appeal to the immigrant women in that neighborhood to prove that Catholic women,
Jewish women, other kinds of immigrants, other religions, would want this kind of information And she opened the clinic and there’s a line around the block.
On the clinic’s opening day, it was crowded with people who traveled from miles around.
Over one hundred women and twenty men came for advice and information about birth control. Sanger took careful data about the people coming in to seek advice. At the end of the first day, a line of people had to be turned away and told to return in the morning.
EKatz: of women trying to be seen and what she gives them, each woman that came in, was a short lesson in how the reproductive system works, a lot of them didn’t understand it, they sold copies of “What Every Girl Should Know” her book on sex education and if they wanted to prescriptions for birth control douches and foams and other kinds of things that they could use. She was also promoting the diaphragm, which she learned about in Poland. The problem was that you needed to be fitted by a
50 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;51 physician or a nurse and most of these women were too poor to do that, to pay for that and so she offered kind of these suppositories and other kinds of things, again with material you could get at a local pharmacy.
However, not long after it’s opening, 10 days to be precise, the clinic was visited by a female undercover cop. The day after this visit, Oct. 26, police raided the clinic. Sanger reopened the clinic twice in November and each time it was shut down. Sanger remembered being arrested in front of a “mute” crowd. After Sanger’s last arrest for the
Brownsville clinic on November 16, police forced the landlord to evict Sanger.
By this time, Sanger was famous for her bold advocacy of birth control. People were often surprised when she did not present the brazen, harsh, and shrew-like image that many expected of her. Instead, she was the mother of two children, was well- composed, and passionate.
EKatz: And a lot of the women who went to the clinic came to testify at her trial, talking about how much she helped them. In the end of course, it just proved that she was breaking the law, but it also showed how much support she would have and this was the first time she began garnering support from very wealthy women who liked the idea of helping immigrant women control how many children they were having.
The Brownsville trial opened January 8, 1917. Sanger’s sister Ethel Byrne, who served as a nurse in Sanger’s New York clinic, was sentenced to 30 days in the workhouse at
Blackwell’s Island. In defiance, Byrne declared a hunger strike. To top off her rebellion,
51 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;52
Byrne gave a lecture about birth control to the other women prisoners in the police vehicle on the way to jail.
Sanger knew her sister well enough to know that “there was a grain of steel under
Ethel’s quiet, diffident air.” She knew she would stick to her strike. Bryne showed her willingness to lay down her life for the cause. The story caught the attention of the popular press and bulletins of her progress were posted daily.
EKatz: She decided to do what the suffragettes in England did and go on a hunger strike and was forcibly fed.Sanger was very upset because Ethel was getting sicker and sicker.
Building off the momentum created by her sister’s hunger strike, Sanger held a birth control meeting where mothers who were patients from the clinic told their stories.
Meanwhile, as Byrne’s condition worsened, she was defiant, telling the press that,
“While over 8,000 die in this state every year from illegal operations, one more death will make little difference.” The “illegal operations” that Byrne referred to were the unsafe abortions that many women felt forced to have out of financial necessity. Until abortion was legalized in 1973 by the Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade, it was not uncommon for abortions to end fatally for the mother.
In 1917, Byrne was force-fed by the prison warden after 185 hours without food or water. She was tied down and a tube was placed in her esophagus. Byrne was the first woman in United States history to be subjected to forced feeding.
52 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;53
EKatz: Because of that and so she goes to the governor of New York and pleads her sister’s case, saying she promises her sister will never do this again, just let her get out of jail, which the governor agrees to, but Ethel Byrne is furious after she is pardoned and they just didn’t really get along much after that.
Sanger herself was given the choice between a $500 fine or 30 days in jail.
EKatz: She chooses the 30 days in jail, understanding that it’s going to create publicity which is her goal. The goal is to get the discussion of the pros and cons of birth control into public debate, not something that you whisper and that's precisely what she did.
She got newspaper coverage of the arrest and the trial and eventually she is convicted, she spends her 30 days, but she appeals that conviction and by 1919, the state and the federal appeals, Crane his name is Frederick Crane, decides that birth control is illegal except when dispensed by a physician for medical reasons.
In 1918, the court expanded the rights of doctors to offer their patients birth control information, although it upheld the overall constitutionality of the Comstock Law. The scope of what counted as a situation in which a doctor could provide birth control information to “cure disease,” was enlarged by defining disease as “an alteration in the state of the body, or of some of its organs, interrupting or disturbing the performance of its vital functions, and causing or threatening pain or sickness; illness; sickness; disorder,” a definition drawn from the Webster’s International Dictionary.
53 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;54
EKatz: And that’s the loophole that she uses to open up legal clinics beginning in 1932, they’re doctor-run clinics and the birth control is dispensed by a physician and that’s a
New York State precedent, but some other states begin to take it up as well.
This success would lay the groundwork for Sanger to open the Clinical Research
Bureau in 1923, which was based in New York City and would serve as a model for a network of clinics that Sanger envisioned spreading across the country. She hoped to offer women information not just about birth control, but also about advice related to reproduction, pregnancy, and being a parent.
Sanger created the American Birth Control League (ABCL), and pushed for legislative change to strike down the Comstock Act. Although she was unsuccessful in this last pursuit, the Supreme Court in United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries in
1936 eventually granted what Sanger had hoped to accomplish through the legislature.
EKatz: At that point in the late 30s that she decides no I better go to the judicial route so she creates a test case to take to the highest court by importing, having a group, a bunch of diaphragms imported from Japan and they’re seized at customs and trials go on that eventually go up to the federal court of appeals and the US Supreme Court where the decision is handed down on federal grounds that doctors have the right to import and prescribe contraceptives for medical reasons. It allowed physicians to prescribe contraceptives, they could make up a medical reason if they were so inclined for prescribing it, something as simple as we want to prevent a venereal disease from spreading so we’re going to tell women, use condoms, have your partners use condoms and perhaps use a spermicidal douche or foam. You have a prolapsed uterus so use a
54 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;55 diaphragm, that kind of thing, you still had to create this kind of medical mask, but it allowed the clinics to offer contraception.
The court endorsed birth control when under the authority of registered physicians, however, it wasn't until much later in 1965 that the “medical mask” was removed and birth control was made more widely accessible. And even then, only married women could legally acquire birth control for non-medical reasons.
EKatz: It wasn’t until ‘72 that unmarried women could also legally use birth control, acquire birth control.
In the foreword to a biography written about Sanger in 1955, “The Margaret Sanger
Story and the Fight for Birth Control,” from which much of the information in this podcast was found, the then medical director at the Margaret Sanger Research Bureau, Dr.
Abraham Stone, wrote:
“A few rare men and women in a generation achieve true greatness. By virtue of their wisdom, their vision, their courage, the nobility of the character, they reach unusual heights and profoundly influence human destiny. To this select and unique group belongs Margaret Sanger.”
During the creation of this project, I collaborated with students at Athens High
School. I asked them to help me lead the discussion of how Sanger’s life and ideas can be used to reflect on issues prevalent in today’s world. Nora, a junior at
AHS, and Claire, who is a senior, added some important details about Sangers life to the narrative and brought up some pressing issues about Sanger’s association
55 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;56 with the eugenics movement. They ended with a discussion of the status of reproductive health care today and challenges facing Ohio in particular. I’ll interject at certain points to help add context and build off of what is being said.
I’ll also include clips from Katz to do the same. Here’s Claire and Nora with the rest…
Nora: Claire! I’m really excited!
Claire: Why are you excited?
Nora: Because we’re about to talk about a woman who changed what it means to have a uterus. She freed women from the oppressive eventuality of motherhood. She enabled women to exist in the world without the fear of falling pregnant and dying in childbirth alone and unwed or going to a home for young mothers where you were forced to work among the babies to pay off the cost…
Claire: Ok, slow down. We’re getting ahead of ourselves. Again, as Nora said, we’re going to be talking about Margaret Sanger, the woman who found a way to create the first birth control pill in America. By the way, I’m Claire Millburg, a senior at Athens High
School.
Nora: And I’m Nora Sullivan, a junior.
Claire: We’re going to talk a little bit about who Margaret Sanger was, what she did, and why she is important today.
Nora: So who was Margaret Sanger?
56 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;57
Claire: Well thanks for asking Nora. From what we could find regarding her childhood background, she was the sixth child of eleven, though her mother had been pregnant eighteen times before dying at the age of 49… foreshadowing maybe?
Nora: Wow! No wonder she fought for birth control.
Claire: And she was also an educated woman. She attended Claverack College and
Hudson River Institute and studied nursing at White Plains Hospital until she met her husband William Sanger. They then moved to Greenwich Village in New York City, marking a time when Margaret’s political gears began to turn.
Nora: Right! Because she was friends with bohemians and radicals and anarchists. It was basically “Rent,” but in 1910.
Claire: Thank you, Nora. Yes…
Nora: She goes on to break every law that should not have been a law. She takes on the government, she alienates every religious institution...
Clarie: Not a bad legacy. So she’s famous for creating birth control. How did she really do that?
Nora: She wanted an ingestible pill so she had to find a scientist who would risk his reputation and career to help her. She found this scientist in Gregory Pincus with the financial help of a very rich widow and graduate of MIT, Katharine Dexter McCormick, and a doctor named John Rock, they developed the first birth control pill.
57 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;58
Claire: But I bet it was way more complicated than that…
Nora: Oh yeah, there was all sorts of drama with finding a doctor, getting approval, doing drug trials on people and not alienating the entire Catholic Church.
Claire: And you mentioned human experimenting… here’s where we get into the more controversial aspect of Margaret Sanger’s legacy.
Nora: You’re right. Can you explain who doctor John Rock tested the new pills on to get
FDA approval?
Claire: John Rock wanted, and I quote, “A cage of ovulating females,” which he found in the newly industrialized Puerto Rico. And there were more jobs for women outside of the home so Puerto Rican women would have appreciated having fewer children, however, at the time there was no such thing as informed consent…
Nora: You mean these women were being used as the primary test subjects of a highly controversial and potentially dangerous new subject without being told what it really was?
Claire: Yes, exactly and unfortunately the pill was successful, but Puerto Rican officials complained that there [were] too many adverse side effects. Pincus and Rock, the scientist and the doctor, disagreed and went ahead with the manufacturing anyways.
58 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;59
Nora: Adverse side effects sound less surprising when you learn that the Enovid pill contained about 10,000 micrograms of progesterone and 150 micrograms of estrogen per dose.
Claire: What do modern dosages contain?
Nora: 50 to 150 [micrograms] of progesterone and 20 to 50 of estrogen. That is significantly different. These enormous doses could cause deadly strokes.
EMILY: What Nora and Claire bring up is a really good point. Throughout the history of medicine and science there have been a number of unethical decisions made when it comes to the treatment of individuals who act as the subjects of medical research. This has been especially true as it pertains to people of low socioeconomic status and especially people of color.
The Tuskegee Incident, during which black men with syphilis were told that they were receiving free medical care from the government when, in fact, researches let these men go untreated in order to observe the results, stands out as an important marker of this issue. Titled the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” this experiment lasted from 1932 until 1972. The men who participated in this study were not told that they were not being treated, did not have an accurate understanding of the duration of the study, and were not informed that they had syphilis. This is but one example of the way the black population in the United States has been exploited in medical research.
59 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;60
Clarie: In this situation Puerto Rico was not the only racial disparity involved with birth control. Margaret Sanger worked with one goal in mind… Every child should be a wanted child. However, the way she went about this was controversial. She talked about eugenics, the forced sterilization of women…
EMILY: Alright, here’s where I need to interject. While Claire is right that some aspects of eugenics advocated for forced sterilization and the Supreme Court even upheld a eugenic sterilization law in Virginia in 1927 in Supreme Court case
Buck v. Bell, it is important to bring a nuanced understanding of eugenics into the discussion.
Eugenics, coming from the Greek “good genes”, was a popular movement in the early 20th century. It comes from the faulty belief that certain human “stock” was superior to others. Charles Darwin’s work on evolution and Herbert Spencer’s theories of social Darwinism fostered the spread of eugenics under the guise of being supported by science. Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest.”
The movement was popular in part because it offered a sense of safety from and a solution to changing social condition in the United States after World War I.
More immigrants arriving from Eastern and Southern Europe changed the racial, cultural, and religious make-up of many places in the US, especially cities.
Many eugenicists were obsessed with maintaining the racial purity, health, and supremacy of the white race. The movement was outright racist against black people, Jewish people, Italians, Irish people, and many others. That being said, this is not the whole story.
60 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;61
Theodore Roosevelt, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and even
Winston Churchill were all eugenicists. It was not a radical, fringe perspective at the time. There are two different elements to eugenics: positive eugenics and negative eugenics. Positive eugenics was the idea that people should be empowered to make their own decisions about when to have children and how many children to have. Only those who subscribed to negative eugenics believed that some people should not be allowed to have children.
Katz faced much misinformation about Sanger during her work on The Margaret
Sanger Papers Project.
EKatz: We’re already practicing forms of eugenics with genetic counseling, you know, trying to make healthier people. Sanger believed that’s what eugenics was, to make a healthier civilization. Well we had to deal with a lot of this propaganda while we were doing the project and you know the issue is that we have to understand what the propaganda is about. If you paint Margaret Sanger as a eugenicist, a Nazi… and they very often will photoshop a picture of Hitler standing next to Margaret Sanger and all of that and in doing so they are of course collapse the eugenics movement with racism and they’re no necessarily the same thing all the time and it you know you undercut the validity of the birth control movement by associating it with these problematic and vicious campaigns. If you want to attack Planned Parenthood, you attack it by saying well it’s founder was a racist and her goals were racist and people forget who the real
Margaret Sanger was and what she was espousing, which is not to say she didn’t espouse some eugenic ideas that today would not be acceptable which isn’t to say that
61 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;62 she didn’t do some things that we would define as racist, but she did not advocate birth control for racist reasons. She did not want to wipe out blacks or any other racial or ethnic group, she did not want to see more whites and fewer people of color. None of that is true. She was not a fan of Nazism, she didn't support it, and she didn’t support the kind of negative eugenics, that is the idea that one group should propagate more than another group, which is a racist view. The problem with this propaganda is that it sticks.
EMILY: That being said, Sanger certainly had problematic views when it came to people with developmental differences.
EKatz: So you don’t want people to transmit genes that are inherited that will make you sick or make you mentally challenged or other things now she went further than that because she believed that mentally challenged people for example tended to be more promiscuous because they didn’t have a moral center, it’s very problematic, it’s something that we don’t agree with obviously, but for her time it was not an unpopular view. So I think we need to understand what eugenics was, what it was, what it is, that it isn’t just on thing that there were various positions within it, that some of it was good science, some of it was bad science, some of it was racist, some of it was not, yeah, I think we need to be teaching that more because there is this, I mean our president talks about Mexicans being rapists, that’s a very eugenical point of view. It’s not an action that’s related to a culture or a race.
EMILY: Now that that’s hopefully cleared up a bit, I’ll turn the discussion back over to Claire and Nora.
62 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;63
Claire: There is a horrendous history of white doctors forcibly sterilizing black women for research. Some black women felt as though this invention was another method of shrinking the black population and taking away their agency.
Nora: So she cared about women’s right to choose, but unfortunately she did support some methods that took that choice away from historically exploited populations. Like many other white feminists during her time, she ignored the importance of intersectionality in feminism and did not take the time to consider the damage done to women of color by her association with the eugenics movement.
Claire: Great point. This is why it is important to learn from the mishaps of out feminist predecessors. White women felt oppressed by their duty to bear children, but black women wanted the ability to do just that.
EMILY: Claire touches on a really good point there. The interests of women of color when it comes to reproductive rights have, for most of US history, been very different from the interests of white women. This is related to the idea that black women and their children are wrongly seen as “burdens” on society and the economy. “Killing the Black Body” by Dorothy Roberts makes very clear the role that birth control has at times played in the discrimination that many black mothers face.
The contraceptive Norplant, which is inserted into the arm, is very effective at preventing pregnancy, and can last up to five years. It is, however, dangerous for women with certain health risks, can cause life-threatening bleeding, and is
63 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;64 difficult to remove. In the 80’s legislators saw Norplant as a way of decreasing the birth rate of black children. Several legislators advocated for offering bonuses to women on welfare for getting Norplant implanted. Some even proposed making it mandatory for women on welfare. In some black communities, Norplant was distributed aggressively to teenagers. School clinics in Baltimore, for instance, offered Norplant to their female students for free and without the need for parental consent. Yet, they did not provide adequate services for students who might want to have Norplant removed. Some judges even held up Norplant implantation as a condition for reduced prison sentences or shorter paroles. In one instance, a black woman accused of forging checks was given the option of getting a milder sentence if she used Norplant, even though her crime had nothing directly to do with reproduction. Whereas white women had to fight for their right not to have children, black women have had to fight for their right to have children. Again, back to Nora and Claire.
Nora: Maybe it’s time to talk about the strides we have made since the 1960’s.
Clarie: Great idea… for one, birth control is not illegal for unmarried women…
Nora: Yes, thank you. Eisenstadt vs. Baird, also the number of maternal deaths has decline by 60% since the 60’s. The number of infant deaths has decline by 76%.
Claire: How can birth control decrease infant mortality?
64 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;65
Nora: Remember Margaret Sanger’s mother? Her body was under so much strain from those 18 pregnancies. Birth control allows women to space and plan their pregnancies so that they are physically ready for their next child.
Claire: Many opponents of birth control think that it is the same as abortion, but that is not true… Access to birth control actually lessens the rate of abortion and that’s what
Sanger’s motive was after all. Every child should be wanted.
Nora: I’m really glad we’ve made all this progress in birth control since the times of
Margaret Sanger. Our access to female health care is so much better and we are truly lucky.
Claire: There’s still a long way to go… Ohio’s governor Mike DeWine just signed
Heartbeat Bill into law, making abortion illegal after the heartbeat is detectable, about six weeks after conception.
Nora: But most women don’t even know they are pregnant by six weeks. Doesn’t Roe v.
Wade protect against this legislation?
Claire: It’s complicated… Roe v. Wade prevents states from banning abortion, but they are allowed to restrict it within reason. Other states have tried bills like this before and some have been struck down in court, but some haven’t. There will certainly be lawsuits.
Nora: Hopefully the Heartbeat Bill won’t go into effect. I wish people would understand that we restricting abortion just prevents safe abortions. Women always have and
65 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;66 always will find ways to abort, but a clean safe abortion at a hospital with a doctor is actually safer than childbirth.
Nora: And the ultimate goal is not for more abortions. The ultimate goal is actually fewer abortions which can be accomplished with better access to birth control, sex education, and other contraceptives.
Claire: And that is perfectly encapsulated by Margaret Sanger’s main goal… Every child should be a wanted child.
Nora: I’m Nora Sullivan.
Claire: And I’m Claire Moburg. Thanks for listening and taking the time to learn about some incredibly influential women who have shaped history.
Thanks so much to Nora and Claire for offering their enthusiasm and hard word to the creation of that awesome clip.
I’m Emily St. Amour and this has been the first episode of “Superhero Women:
Extraordinary Impact.” I hope you enjoyed today’s installment. I’d like to thank my advisor, Ohio University Professor Elizabeth Hendrickson for her limitless patience editing and guiding the creation of this podcast. I’d also like to thank Professor Esther
Katz, editor and director of The Margaret Sanger Papers Project, whose interview enriched the content of this episode greatly. Thank you for offering your time and expertise to the creation of this project. Lastely, I’d like to extend a deep note of thanks to Athens High Advanced Placement US History teacher, Mr. Fitz Read, for helping to
66 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;67 facilitate collaboration. Special thanks to Claire and Nora for creating such a compelling addition to this episode. I appreciate your passion and willingness to question assumptions. These truly are superpowers.
Catch me next time for an episode about a woman who members of the FBI considered
“the most dangerous woman in America.” It’s Emma Goldman! And until next time, keep your core superhero strong!
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Episode Two Script: Emma Goldman
Note: This episode does not feature a segment from students at Athens High
School, unlike the other episodes in this series, because no students were able to work on the project in the time that was available.
Transcription Note: CFalk is sort for Candace Falk, who is the founding director of the Emma Goldman Papers and was interview on Goldman for this project.
Hi! My name is Emily St. Amour, and this is “Superhero Women: Extraordinary Impact,” a podcast where we explore some of the most dynamic, influential, and at times, controversial, women in the history of the United States (US). The first four episodes focus on women whose major contributions take place between 1890 and 1930. This episode, we'll be talking about a woman who changed the way free speech is conceptualized in the United States. It's Emma Goldman!
Goldman was an activist and writer who helped establish the organization that would later become the American Civil Liberties Union, or the ACLU. Her outspokenness about freedom from government inspired legions to question authority.
Roger Baldwin, who was the co-founder of the ACLU and its executive director until
1950, was deeply influenced by Goldman. After reluctantly attending one of Goldman’s
69 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;70 lectures, Baldwin said that listening to Goldman was an “intellectual turning point” in his life. Despite their different personalities and philosophies, the two would be friends and allies.
The ACLU is an organization which today defends freedom of speech regardless of which political viewpoint is being touted. According to the ACLU’s website, the organization works in courts, legislatures, and communities to “defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties that the Constitution and the laws of the United States guarantee everyone in this country.”
CFalk: I think Emma Goldman was one of the most critical and courageous advocates of free expression in the United States and eloquent about that issue worldwide.
That’s Candace Falk. She’s the founding director of the Emma Goldman Papers project.
She is also the author of one of the most acclaimed Goldman biographies, “Love,
Anarchy, and Emma Goldman.” I had a phone conversation with Falk about Goldman’s life and contributions where she reflected on her importance to US history, and especially to the freedom of speech.
CFALK: She went to Philadelphia and everywhere she had gone, it was about 1909, and everywhere she had gone, she was not allowed to speak so she’d get up on the stage and she’d be pulled off the stage or there would be a lock on the door to a hall where she was supposed to speak and 1,000 people waiting outside trying to get in so one day when she was speaking in Philadelphia, she had this idea of getting a really, really heavy chain and lock, long chain and she tied it around herself and she tied it
70 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;71 around the podium and she was able to throw it outside the window where she had a friend, a comrade, who locked it up outside so that the police would not be able to drag her off the stage. And most people don’t know this story, but that particular time, no one came to drag her off the stage… really, really funny.
Goldman was born in Russia in 1869 and at just 16 years old moved to the US. When she first started out in the US in 1885, Goldman’s political philosophy was in its infancy.
Goldman’s first true political awakening to the principles of anarchism started after one of the most infamous events in the course of the Labor movement— the Haymarket Riot in Chicago in 1886. Although Goldman was not in Chicago during the event, she closely followed the crisis through newspapers.
We’ll touch on the Haymarket Incident more in the episode of this series about Lucy
Parsons, but just for now here’s what you need to know.
During a workers’ rally at Haymarket Square in Chicago on May 4th, a bomb went off, killing seven police officers. Social activists were then rounded up and arrested. The bombing was blamed on eight men who wrote for anarchist newspapers, only two of whom were actually at the meeting. Four of the men were eventually hanged and came to be idolized as the “Haymarket Martyrs” by sympathizers.
The Haymarket Incident caused Goldman to refine her ideology. As defined by
Goldman, anarchism is “the philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made laws, the theory that all forms of government rest on
71 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;72 violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.” But she also championed free speech, free love, and birth control.
CFalk: The right of dissent, the right to disagree with the government, the right to say your thoughts about a war that you may not feel is warranted. The way now there are places where if you have the wrong hip hop stances you could be out in jail. I think that in the end is Emma Goldman’s greatest contribution.
Goldman’s outspokenness also garnered her a few notable enemies, for example, J.
Edgar Hoover, the first director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, called Goldman the “most dangerous woman in America.”
CFalk: What the government was most worried about was her persuasive skills and the government memos that we have have the government saying to each other that, different people in the government Justice Department, saying let’s just use anarchism and the issue of violence with anarchism as the reason to underscore her danger to the
United States, but really they all agreed it was because she was so persuasive but not persuasive just to her own immigrant community, but also to a very large vector of what she calls “free-born Americans” who were attracted to her ideas.
After she moved to New York City in 1889, it was not long before this firebrand caught the attention of the nation, gaining fame for her speaking ability and anarchist philosophy by the time she was 25.
CFalk: The essence is somebody who could look straight into the fire, see the injustice, see the horror and still have a vision of hope.
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Her brilliance as a public speaker has been compared to that of Martin Luther King Jr.
Her speeches were popular and often attracted audiences of upward of two thousand people.
CFalk: Emma was always eloquent, starting in our first book which is Made for America,
1890 to 1901, the first article about her in a newspaper was an eloquent woman, and her eloquence followed her throughout her life in America because she really was a speaker and a writer of her lectures and therefore.
Yet, despite the fact that her speeches attracted large, often middle-class audiences, to whom she declared that everyone was “an anarchist at heart,” Goldman faced what
Falk refers to as “creeping” repression.
CFalk: Creepingness, I don't know if that's a word, of repression. You know how it started you couldn’t have birth control and you couldn’t do that, speak out against conscription and then all the sudden you couldn’t speak out against war and you couldn’t print something that even hinted at that.
Speaking was Goldman’s forte, however, she also published an influential magazine called “Mother Earth.” This magazine, with its unique mixture of politics and art, was like a child to Goldman. But this too was under scrutiny from authority and was eventually shut down for an article it published in 1917.
CFalk: You couldn’t publish Mother Earth magazine, her magazine, that she had since
1906, and in 1917 when there was an article not only critical of what was happening in
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Europe and in the war, but also because it covered the issue of lynching in the South and also riots in Chicago, race riots and that too was starting to be suppressed and probably was suppressed for a long time.
Advocating for anarchism and other such controversial social causes was more than enough to mark someone as a dangerous woman. However, it is perhaps her opposition to World War I and the draft which most angered authorities. During wartime, dissent has rarely been valued in the United States, and unquestioning patriotism is often the order of the day.
In Goldman’s time, President Woodrow Wilson had secured reelection in 1916, campaigning on the phrase “He Kept Us Out of War.” Many on the left, including many socialists, were convinced by the president’s platform. Not Goldman.
CFalk: And so there was a very, very intense propaganda machine really to convince
Americans that what they would be going to war for was to make the world safe for democracy, which it’s a very noble idea and yet Emma Goldman felt like the underlying motivation, not completely, but a lot of the motivation for the war had been economic and took advantage of poor people.
And, as it turns out, her suspicion that President Wilson’s promises of peace were hollow was correct. On April 2, 1917, President Wilson would ask Congress to declare war on Germany.
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CFalk: And so it was a time when Wilson, President Wilson, was under obligation to bring more troops from the United States into the war in Europe because so many people had died there already.
After the war began, groups that had opposed the war, such as the American Union
Against Militarism (AUAM), were expected to— and in fact did— drop their anti-war activities. The President believed that there was no place for dissent after Congress voted.
Soon after the US entered World War I, the Selective Service Act of 1917 was passed, marking the first draft act of its kind since the Civil War.
To counter the Selective Service Act, Goldman and Alexander Berkman formed…
CFalk: The No-Conscription League and she tried very hard not to say to people, don’t register for the draft, she tried to say use your own conscience and follow it and if it puts you in a situation that is against what the government wants, take responsibility for it rather than go and be killed or be a foot soldier in an army and a war that you don’t agree with.
The League never advised people to resist the draft, but it vowed to support those who came to that decision of their own volition.
Goldman ceased to give speeches for the No-Conscription League when she discovered that undercover agents who infiltrated her audience were using the event to entrap those who had not registered for the draft. At one of her speeches arguing
75 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;76 against the draft, every man present at the event who could not produce a draft card was arrested.
Wanting to protect non-registrants, Goldman decided to confine her outreach methods to the written form. This, however, would prove to be an unnecessary step.
CFalk: She was arrested because she spoke out against the draft.
All of Goldman’s activities came to a stop when she was arrested on June 15, 1917 and charged with conspiring to “induce people not to register.” This would be the third and final time that Goldman was arrested in the US.
CFalk: The last arrest in the United States I think was the most important action that
Emma Goldman took that I think, you know, will go down in history, but a lot of people don’t know that.
Goldman was given five days to prepare her defense. The jury took less than 40 minutes to convict.
CFalk: So she and also her closest comrade Alexander Berkman went to jail for almost two years, 18 months, for what they said against conscription, but what they did in the process was in a country that didn’t allow people to speak out against conscription or against the war, she was limited in what she could publish, what she could say from the platform, open air meetings, what she could say in big lecture halls so when she had her trial, she decided that rather than having a lawyer fight her case, she would have, take the platform herself and so would Alexander Berkman. And so if you look at the
76 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;77 transcript of her trial, what you see is the most eloquent statements not only about anarchism, but about a vision of justice, about poverty, it’s really remarkable,
Goldman and her partner Alexander Berkman were doomed by the judge’s loose definition of conspiracy. He recommended deportation after a two year jail sentence.
The pair served 18 months in jail starting in December of 1917.
CFalk: After she was in jail, for 18 months, the war had already heated up, heated up, heated up, and many of the people who were colleagues of her’s of comrades of hers like Eugene Debs ended up in prison and ended up with long sentences in prison because by that time, the Sedition Act, the Espionage and Sedition Act had been passed and you could get much longer jail sentence.
Goldman was vulnerable to deportation because she had gained her citizenship through a short-lived marriage when she was still under 20 years old.
CFalk: And so they worked very hard to take Emma Goldman’s citizenship away from her in order to make it legal for them to deport her and also Alexander Berkman.
Authorities were successful in disqualifying Goldman's citizenship through a technical loophole and in 1919, Goldman and Berkman, along with 247 others marked out as politically undesirable, were deported in the first “Red Scare.”
After 34 years of life in the United States, Goldman was sent back to Russia, which was now under the command of Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
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Goldman, at first excited to be a part of post-revolutionary Russia, soon became disillusioned with the Bolsheviks. She was alarmed to hear free speech dismissed as a
“bourgeois superstition” and outraged when she learned that Bolshevik leader Maxim
Gorky, who she had once admired, was calling for prison terms for “morally defective” children.
CFalk: She didn’t really like Russia when she went there she was very horrified that it was so autocratic and punitive. You know I think it was so painful for her because that was her great hope, that even though she was being deported, she could serve the
Revolution and she started to wonder whether it was all worth it and when she got out of
Russia she spoke about what was happening there and the lack of free expression and all the things that she fought against in America.
Disappointed, she left Russia for Sweden in January of 1922, where she was determined to speak out against what she saw in Russia. Goldman was not afraid to rally against popular thought, even when it was the thought of her friends and allies.
Most people on the political left at the time drew a distinction between the good guys in
Lenin’s Russia and the bad guys under Hitler and Stalin. Yet, Goldman saw these forces to be two sides of the same coin.
CFalk: When she observed the kind of authoritarian policies when she was in Russia she wrote about them and it ended up being in the New York World and so she thought she was doing a good thing by alerting the world to what was happening there, but a lot of people thought she was, you know, a lot of people on the left thought that that was self-serving because you know it was not in solidarity with the movement there.
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At the time there was an international push for unity between socialists, progressives, anarchists, communists and all others on the political left in the face of fascism. Called,
The Popular Front, this movement declared “No Enemies on the Left.”
Because of her unpopular views, Goldman had trouble finding a home in Europe. The
“No Enemies on the Left” mentality extended far and wide. The Socialist Prime Minister of Sweden, who wanted to maintain an alliance with the Soviets, made it known that
Goldman was no longer welcome. Goldman remained active in speaking out against the rise of fascism in Europe and defiantly warned about the dangers of Adolf Hitler two years before he ever became chancellor of Germany.
Goldman would live in Germany, England, Canada, and France, but was never able to find what she had in the United States. Despite spending much of her later life abroad, the United States would always be the place Goldman considered home.
CFalk: I do think she really, really wanted to come to America and I think that she thought her autobiography called “Living My Life,” which is two volumes, very passionate about ideas and very passionate about her love of her comrades, lovers, she thought that that was a way to fill out the historical record and also maybe to be a reentry into the United States and in fact Eleanor Roosevelt read the book and loved it and one of the people who worked with Eleanor Roosevelt helped Emma come back to the US, but only for 90 days.
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Goldman's brief return to the US proved dissatisfying. Her greatest wish as she grew older was to return home for good, yet she refused to compromise or sell out her principles even for this.
And because she fought for free expression, she was a wonderful lecturer, she wrote about free expression in every aspect of life so that would include sexual expression, that would include education, that would include labor. And those, that trust in the kind of freedom that is often limited.
It is rumored that in the 1930’s Goldman was going to be offered permanent return to the US if she would speak out against the communists and work with congressional committees investigating them. But Goldman made it clear that she would do no such thing.
Prominent journalist William Reedy once wrote about Goldman in an article entitled
“The Daughter of a Dream” stating:
“She lives freely and is willing to pay the price of misrepresentation, abuse, poverty, persecution. And amid it all she is serene. She is as one sure that she is sane in a mad world… invincibly inspired with an ideal that the world cannot yet behold with her eyes.
There is nothing wrong with Miss Goldman’s gospel that I can see, except that she is about eight thousand years ahead of her age. Her vision is [that] of every truly great man or woman who has ever lived.”
Emma died in 1940 at the age of 70 and was buried in Forest Park, Illinois... finally returning to the country that was home to her life’s work.
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I’m Emily St. Amour and this has been the second episode of “Superhero Women:
Extraordinary Impact.” I hope you enjoyed today’s installment. I’d like to thank my advisor, Ohio University Professor Elizabeth Hendrickson for her limitless patience editing and guiding the creation of this podcast. I’d also like to thank Professor Candace
Falk, founding editor of the Emma Goldman Papers, whose interview provided vital information for this episode. Thank you for offering your time and expertise to the creation of this project.
Catch me next time for an episode about the woman who is said to have influenced
“Almost every item of social or economic reform from 1895 to 1930...” Up next, it's Jane
Addams.
And until next time, keep your core superhero strong!
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Episode Three Script: Jane Addams
Transcription Note: During the segment of the podcast created by students from Athens High School, additions from the podcast narrator, Emily St. Amour, are bolded. Elsewhere in the script, there is no special distinction for narration from me. CHajo is short for Cathy Hajo, who is the Director of the Jane Addams Papers Project and was interviewed for this project.
Hi! My name is Emily St. Amour, and this is “Superhero Women: Extraordinary Impact,” a podcast where we explore some of the most dynamic, influential, and at times, controversial, women in the history of the United States (US). The first four episodes focus on women whose major contributions take place between 1890 and 1930. This episode, we'll be talking about the woman who founded the Hull House and was a key figure in the international peace movement. It's Jane Addams!
Jane Addams is probably best known for her social reform work in founding the Hull-
House in Chicago. However, Addams also was the first American woman to win the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 for the significant contributions she made to the international peace movement.
CHajo: Well I think that one of the reasons that Addams became a leader of the peace movement is that she was already a very prominent woman leader so she had already built over 20 years of being a public intellectual and being involved in so many movements. She had this status and public personality that people listened to what she said.
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That’s Cathy Hajo, Director of the Jane Addams Papers Project. I spoke with Hajo over the phone about Addams’ influence on the peace movement and social reform in the
US.
CHajo: I think that what she want to see is a society that progresses. She’s like the quintessential progressive to me, but one of her quotes is that “change is only good if it raises everyone, not just some.” So there’s this idea that we need to make it better in society for everyone, not just some people.
Addams was an influential social activist and theorist who founded the Hull-House in
Chicago in 1889. Her work jump-started the settlement house movement in the United
States. Settlement houses were established to act something like a community center.
Educated young people would take up residency in these houses and work with the community to provide resources and classes.
By 1892, Addams’ settlement offered 35 evening college-extension classes each week.
Hull-House was a hub of social and political thought and action. Labor meetings were hosted there and some of the most influential thinkers, politicians, and leaders would cross paths under its roof.
Addams was not only a powerful force for immediate, on-the-ground social change, she was an important philosopher on many subjects including the nature of democracy and peace. Addams put her philosophy into practice through the Hull-House. She believed that democracy could not be actualized without social involvement.
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CHajo: She was a person who believed that people could get along and compromise.
And so that she came into it being from a neutral country at the beginning of the war.
She came in with the kind of stand that she wanted to talk to people from all the difference countries, that she thought they could get along. She had this kind of personality that I don't think we have too much of today, but she really was about getting people together forming a community, trying to figure out what the basic goals everyone had were and trying to get everyone to work together and she had this, you know, the ability to have a meeting with President Wilson or talk to other world leaders.
We’ll touch more on Hull-House later, but I think that it is worth breaking a chronological structure to highlight the important influence that Addams had on the international peace movement.
Addams was the first president of the Woman’s Peace Party, or the WPP, which reached a membership of 40,000 in 1916. She would also serve as the first president for the International Congress of Women for Permanent Peace, which would become the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom or the WILPF. When she stepped down from this organization in 1929 for health reasons, she was recognized as honorary president for life.
It was in these roles that Addams helped lay the foundations for some very practical measures toward peace and reform, much of which would eventually be co-opted into official US domestic and foreign policy.
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Addams’ desire for peace started on the local, community level, but she applied the same approach in her role as a leading figure in the international peace movement.
After the war began, but before the US entered the conflict, “preparedness” was a popular policy.
CHajo: At the beginning of the war, most Americans were for peace and they did not want the United States in the war and they did not think that the war was a good idea, but gradually over time, as the US starts to get pulled in and it's allies start to try to get more involved, there becomes like these different movements in America that are starting to push for joining the war and they start out being about preparedness, saying that we should build up our armies and navies because we might have to fight. And
Addams and the peace movement are arguing no, you know, if you start building up your navies and your armies, you’re much more likely to fight. So it starts out with there being different kind of threats within American politics. Theodore Roosevelt, the former president, used to be an ally of Jane Addams and during the move into the war, they being arguing in the press, he’s arguing for preparedness and that we should get into the fight and she’s arguing that they shouldn’t, but there is a whole debate going on even before we get into the war.
But Addams did not confine her peace activism merely to the borders of the United
States. When the International Congress of Women met at The Hague in 1915, Addams served as the organization’s president. In attendance at this conference, were 1,136 delegates representing 12 countries. Many faced intense resistance from their home
86 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;87 countries to attend. Of the 180 British women who accepted invitations, only two were able to make it on time. No delegates were able to come from Russia or France.
CHajo: One of the things I think the Women’s International did was that it talked about the kinds of things that we’re still talking about sadly, but that if women have rights in all these countries and they are able to participate in democracy, that’s it’s far more likely that they won’t be pushing for war. That by bringing in the voices of all different kinds of people that you end up having a different conversation. And I think that’s sort of what they were getting at. I can’t say they were as successful as we would have liked them to have been, but I still think that what they were saying is still needed and is still valuable.
The idea that the more people that are able to participate in your democracy or in your government, gives you more voices and a better sharing of things, instead of it being the needs of one small community or the wealthy discussions of what the munition people want or what the politicians are trying to do.
Under Addams’ direction, the WPP developed a platform of “immediate neutral mediation to end the current conflict, … arms limitation, democratic control of foreign policy, [the] creation of international laws, … an international police force instead of national armies; and specific programs of aid and regulation to eliminate the causes of this and future wars.” This all was laid out by the WPP nearly five years before the creation of the League of Nations, the first worldwide intergovernmental organization with a mission of world peace, in 1920.
CHajo: She was a person who believed that people could get along and could compromise. And so that she came into it being from a neutral country at the beginning
87 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;88 of the war. She came in with the kind of stand that she wanted to talk to people from all the difference countries, that she thought they could get along.
Addams led the conference and pushed for a continuous mediation plan. The idea was that neutral countries would form a sitting council to negotiate an end to the war. Envoys from the Hague Conference were sent to 14 countries, where in 35 meetings with national political, spiritual, and other leaders, they urged a sitting council of neutral nations. This council was to be composed of professionals in a variety of fields, such as economics, sociology, and politics. These experts would then work together to resolve disputes nonviolently. Some of the figures that delegates met with included the Pope, numerous prime ministers, foreign ministers, the King of Norway, and the president of
Switzerland. And Addams herself met with President Wilson several times.
CHajo: You know in the early days of the war… what they were finding is that if you start asking a belligerent nation to start talking about peace that if they say yes, that means that they think they're not winning so there was this kind of feeling that you can't talk about peace if you're not overwhelming winning the war because then it makes it look like your weak and you're starting from a position where you're not going to be getting a good settlement.
Privately, officials praised the proposals brought forward from the women of the
International Congress. One unnamed prime minister commented that “Yours is the sanest proposal that has been brought to this office in the last six months.”
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CHajo: So they thought that if the neutral countries could start negotiating then they might be able to figure out what peace might look like and then try to have them then bring in the belligerent nations, then that would help to kind of take the onus off of talking about peace because you're saying it's the United States, the Scandinavian
Countries and Holland, all come and say hey this is what we think might be a way out of this, would you be willing to come talk about it.
Leaders, including President Wilson, did not want to negotiate from a position that might be perceived as “weak.” President Wilson, although he agreed with much of what
Addams proposed, was unwilling to publicly support her calls for mediation.
Yet, Addams’ efforts were not in vain as many of her ideas were later adopted after the war. During the peace negotiations which led to the creation of the Treaty of Versailles,
President Wilson stood behind his famous Fourteen Points. These points, which pushed for a peace treaty that extended easy terms to the defeated Central Powers, essentially echoed ideas that Addams had advocated for during the war. According to the current
WILPF website, nine of President Wilson’s Fourteen Points derive from ideas touted by
Addams and other women during WILPF conferences.
On another note, one of Addams’ ideas, the concept of “moral substitutes” for war, proposed that the energy and ideals that motivated warfare could instead be directed toward constructive efforts. This idea would be born out as the Civilian Conservation
Corps during the New Deal era and later on as the Peace Corps.
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CHajo: She talked a lot about the kind of militarization of things like what’s heroic and what’s courageous and part of it comes out of some of the things that she talks about for women’s suffrage where she is saying what it is supposed to be patriotic or what it is to be a hero is basically has been defined in kind of very military, masculine ways and that the idea that someone who is a soldier is more heroic than and more American than someone who might be a labor leader who is doing great things to protect the workers. She’s saying that those things are seen differently and that that kind of work should be just as valorized as military victories so I think she’s trying to bring that in to a lot of different ways, you know, saying why do we glorify this one aspect that mostly women can’t participate in and make that something that is so signified as what is
American as what is what makes somebody brave as opposed to the kind of things that would help different kinds of people and that are, that would help the country in other ways, you know, building, doing the public works projects would be just as good, could be seen as just as heroic if the culture did it, you know, building some great thing together that everyone can use is a good thing, but it's not seen as heroic and it's not seen as brave or courageous.
Addams was among the few bold enough to stand up against intense criticism for principles of peace during the war .
CHajo: What happens right after we join the war is that it’s expected that as an
American once we’re in you’re gonna stop talking about that we shouldn’t be in, or that we should get out, or that we should negotiate a peace because then you’re I wouldn’t say treasonous, but you’re working against the interests of the country…
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Opposition to the war was considered solidly unacceptable once the US entered combat. The Espionage Act made disloyalty, refusal to serve in the armed forces, interfering with the enlistment of soldiers, or aiding the enemy in “any way” punishable by a 10,000 dollar fine and 20 years jail time. In addition, the Threats Against the
President Act, passed in 1917, made it treason to criticize Wilson with just as loose a definition of what that entailed. There were over 4,000 imprisoned as “wartime offenders,” including “absolute” conscientious objectors, labor activists, and anyone seen as making statements that might interfere with the draft. After the war, Addams led the campaign to grant amnesty to all political prisoners, but the mood of the day was not in her favor.
CHajo: Even through Wilson for most of his term was saying I don’t want to get into the war, I don’t want to get into the war, as soon as he declares war, I think everyone was expected to drop the peace movement, do an about face and support the country and
Addams decided not to do that because she thought that it was still important to try to now that she’s in one of the belligerent countries, it’s just as important for her to try to get peace talks started and to try to make a peace once the war ends that can be something that will last. So she is called a German sympathizer, and she’s called a traitor, and she’s called a communist, and a Red and all these things. And I think it surprises her because she was so popular before this.
Addams had, before she came out in opposition to the Great War, been idolized and cast as a saint. During the war, she received not only negative press, but was subject to much governmental suspicion. A lawyer with the Military Intelligence Division of the War
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Department assigned to investigate radicals, Archibald Stevenson, published a list of 62 people he considered to be “dangerous, destructive, and anarchistic.” Addams was on the top of this list, which was soon dismissed and discredited, with one official noting that being on any list that included Addams put one in good company.
In May of 1919 after the war had ended, Addams presided over an international conference of the WILPF. Sessions at this conference approached social, economic, and educational programs with Addams’ trademark style of careful analysis and specific proposals for change. They called for international labor regulations, free and compulsory education, investigation into international war profiteering, and efforts to alleviate the food crisis in Europe.
The WILPF published a critique of the Treaty of Versailles, which it viewed as dangerously punitive toward Germany. Addams even sent a personal telegram to
President Wilson urging him to oppose the blockade on Germany. Despite the war being over, many of the allied forces wanted to keep the blockade in place to force
Germany to accept the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Without access to food and other basic necessities, Germany would be more likely to accept unfavorable terms in order to have the blockade removed as quickly as possible. Addams was opposed to this political tactic, which only served to worsen the desperate position of the German people. Due to malnutrition, infant and child mortality was already shockingly high during this time, with a mortality rate of 50 percent among infants born in Berlin.
CHajo: They had come up with these kind of ways to prevent war and part of the things they were talking about is not having these kind of, you know, treaties, a peace treaty
92 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;93 that basically punishes one side so heavily that it’s not going to… I think they saw very clearly that it’s not going to, that it wasn’t going to work if you make things untenable for a country that’s defeated to survive that you’re going to have another war...
Addams’ resistance to the war movement put her in the same camp as radicals like
Emma Goldman, who is covered in another episode of this series. While Addams’ commitment to peace merely hurt her reputation, Goldman’s opposition to the war eventually led to her deportation from the United States.
To gain a full understanding of Addams, one must look at her early years as well. She first began her career in public service long before the outbreak of World War I and, in fact, she is usually better known for her earlier work than her work in the peace movement. Despite her tremendous influence, like many women in her generation,
Addams spent much of her young adulthood feeling directionless and unsure.
CHajo: This first generation of college women that she is a part of, they think they got a lot in college about the fabulous things that they could do and the ways they could change society and then they came out and those ways, those things weren’t open to them. There’s many instances of women who go to law school and they fight their whole way through law school, they’re the one or two women in the class, they’re constantly defending themselves that yes, they have the right to do this and then they get out and there are no jobs for women lawyers in established practices and people don’t want to hire a woman lawyer so they have a hard time finding work. So there was that kind of difference in what was available once you got out and what you were kind of told as you were being college educated and I think things like Hull-House where these kind of
93 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;94 women that had gotten these educations trying to make a space for themselves, make a place where they could do things, be involved. Some of them, like Grace Abbott, she ends up head of the United States Children’s Bureau. I think her sister Edith ends up being a professor of social work as they start to professionalize that. They start to get real positions in society, not married, not planning on getting married and they have this safe space to do that at Hull-House and I think Addams is integral in creating that place where they keep learning and they keep trying to figure out how they can impact society
Hull-House’s alumni were testament to its unique atmosphere. Julia Lathrop, Florence
Kelley, and Ellen Gates Starr were among the women who made their home in the rich intellectual and social community at Hull-House. Among other accomplishments,
Lathrop would go on to be the first woman to head a federal bureau in the United
States, leading the charge for the creation of the Children’s Bureau. Kelley’s work as the first female Chief Factory Inspector for the state of Illinois was key in eventually ending child labor and improving working conditions for all.
Hull-House grew out of Addams’ desire to be of service, however, she would balk at idea that the settlement would ever be considered a charity.
CHajo: They didn’t hand out money, but they did do things like have kitchens that would serve really cheap food and they had these educational classes and things like that, but it was a different kind of thought. What I love about her writing is she always calls the people her neighbors, she doesn’t call them like the charity cases or like the people… it’s not like they’re an object, they’re her neighbors and she talks to them like a neighbor and obviously she wasn’t the same to them as any other neighbor, but she tried really
94 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;95 hard to not think that’s she’s better than them or not think that she has all the answers and I think that’s the most things that you saw differently about some of the other charity groups at the time and I think that changes over time, it becomes the social work profession
She was a firm believer in democracy, which she took a step father than many.
CH: Well she didn’t see it just as a system of government the way that we do, but she saw it more as a way of living and interacting in society with a kind of morality and it’s… the underlying part of it is the idea that everyone is equal and that everyone has the same rights and their voices should be heard at the same volume and I think that what she wanted is that people could work together as individuals and try to understand the different points of view that people had so they could work for the mutual benefit.
The Hull-House was located in a diverse neighborhood with a high population of immigrants and factory workers. Hull-House operated as a social gathering place and
Addams prided herself on breaking from strict class mores. Hull-House consisted of thirteen buildings which housed everything from a kindergarten and day care facility, an employment bureau, an art gallery, libraries, and a theatre. The facility offered a wide variety of classes such as: English, citizenship, music and art.
Hull-House held social events celebrating the cultures of the immigrant populations in the area, yet, her work for immigrants extended beyond merely providing a welcoming social gathering place.
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CHajo: What I think really separates her from a lot of the other settlement leaders is that she really I think she started out kind of young and naive and thought I’m going to move in there and we’re going to have art classes for the immigrants and laborers and we’re going to see what we can do to help them and then it turns into really talking and listening to the people in the neighborhood and finding out what it is they need, you know, they need child care so that the mothers can go to work in factories and they need somebody to advocate for them because they don’t actually know how to advocate for things like when their tenamanets are falling apart, they don’t really know, I think she said in one of her speeches… these people come here and they’re told that
America is great. They come from Italy or Greece or somewhere and they get put in these horrible tenement building and everyone else is living like this and they don’t know that this is not acceptable because they don’t have any experience in America except for just coming straight over so they don’t know how to advocate for themselves, they don’t know how to say this is a horrible place to live and why does the government allow this, but somebody who can kind of negotiate between them and American society is kind of the role Hull-House puts in there.
Addams helped to propel forward the idea that poverty was not the fault of those trapped in its vicious cycle, but in fact the result of certain factors that were often out of the control of those struggling with unsafe and unsanitary conditions. In the neighborhood where Hull-House was situated, plumbing, sewer services, food sanitation, and garbage collection were rudimentary at best. In the summer of 1892
Hull-House residents, who viewed themselves as envoys of the community, filed 1,037 complaints with the City Health Department.
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CHajo: I think there was kind of a real sweet spot that developed there with people that were really engaged and energized and helping and a neighborhood that was finding that these people were different and they weren’t just coming into their homes and telling them your house is dirty, you know, your clearly immoral and don’t deserve money so instead Addams is like why is your house so dirty, oh look the streets are filthy, what’s going on with the garbage inspection in town and then she runs for garbage inspector to clean up the streets so that people actually can have clean homes.Part of what she is arguing is that you can’t expect a person in a house to not be affected by what goes on in their neighborhood so that’s part of what they were saying of why women should vote, it’s like women have needs to be meet that you can’t just keep your house clean by sweeping it all day long if there’s stuff in the air, if things are being tracked in and there’s no sanitation.
Progressivism, the idea that improvements could be made through gradual reform of the system, was highly popular during Addams’ time. This contrasts with the position taken by others, such as anarchists, that the entire system needs to be rebuilt or done away with completely. Addams took a pragmatic approach to her efforts. Addams believed that...
CHajo: You need to be able to petition your government and make changes so it was that kind of like looking at very practical problems that people are having and trying to help negotiate through the system and it’s great because a lot of the things that they started end up being taken over by the government and I think that’s part of the whole progressive thing where they had things like child labor that they were arguing trying to
97 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;98 get child labor regulated and stopped and eventually they are able to get those made into laws, but the things that they are arguing for now become legal, but there are also they started up a juvenile court to try to treat children differently than adults and that eventually becomes part of the judicial system in Chicago so a lot of what they started people end up saying yeah that is something that the government should be doing and then it does get taken over.
Addams was in a position to devote all of her time, energy, and administrative skill to
Hull-House and other social ventures. Her work brought her recognition during her lifetime and adoration after her death in 1935. The ideas that Addams set forth still resonate deeply to this day.
Addams’ obituary was published in the New York Times and included this statement:
“Miss Addams has been called "the greatest woman in the world," the "mother of social service," "the greatest woman internationalist" and the "first citizen of Chicago…” Miss
Addams's influence was world-wide. She was, perhaps, the world's best-known and best-loved woman.”
During the creation of this project, I collaborated with students at Athens High School. I asked them to help me lead the discussion of how Addams’ work and ideas can be used to reflect on issues prevalent in today’s world. Mieke and Emma, both juniors, used this as an opportunity to exercise their voices on the subject of what the government’s role in providing social programs should be and how government spending should be allocated. They discussed what it means to be a responsible citizen
98 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;99 and helped outline the contours of where the government's responsibility should begin.
I’ll interject at certain points to help add context and build off of what is being said. I’ll also include clips from Hajo to do the same. Here’s Emma and Mieke…
Mieke: So my name is Mieke Riddlebarger and I am in my junior year of high school.
Emma: And my name is Emma Dabelko. I am seventeen and I am also a junior in high school.
Mieke: So we chose to present on Jane Addams, everything that she accomplished and how it kind of relates to nowadays, which is something Emma and I are both very interested in [yeah]. We talk about politics a lot. I mean how can you really not talk about politics…
Emma: ...in this day and age honestly.
Mieke: And while I was learning about her, I also learned that she was a queer woman. So that’s something that’s not super well known about her because queer people are pretty much erased from history.
EMILY: Let’s back up here for a second… What Mieke said about Addams likely being queer is correct. Most Addams scholars would agree with her here. That being said, Addams burned the majority of her most personal letters, so it is impossible to say for sure.
CHajo: She has two long-term, exclusive relationships with women. I personally believe that she was a lesbian, but I don’t think she would have identified that way. They had
99 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;100 that whole idea of the Boston Marriage which was companionship, two women who would be companions for life and Mary Rozet Smith was definitely the wife of the relationship. She would take care of Addams, she also funded a lot of Hull-House work.
She was definitely a person who was nurturing and behaved that way, but do I know what they did in the bedroom? No. And that’s something that I will never know.
Emily: And also that seems like something that Addams wouldn't have been… I mean, you know, she was a very private person so…
CHajo: Right, there's no proof, but there are so many, and there are a few letters left, but some of the letter that are left there's like love poems and it's clear that they were incredibly close, but I don't think what thought they were would be the same as what you would say as being an out lesbian is right now.
EMILY: Queerness as an identity is a fairly modern concept. For much of human history, homosexuality has been understood not as an identity, but as a behavior.
But back to Emma and Mieke on why they felt inspired to talk about Jane
Addams.
Mieke: Yeah, what about you Emma?
Emma: So within that, although, I’m looking at sort of the global perspective of it, I’m really interested in social development and trying to better society so I’d really like to be one of those people that spurs conversations and finds solutions to all these problems that we have.
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EMILY: During a trip to Europe that Addams made in her young adulthood, the period of time when Addams was grappling with finding purpose, she came across what would serve as her model for the Hull-House, Toynbee Hall. Social settlements in London began in the 1880s as a way to mitigate the negative side effects of urbanization, industrialization, and immigration. Here’s Mieke with more:
Mieke: So she kind of changed it up a bit because she noticed how Toynbee Hall that she was so inspired by was only for men so she was trying to make it more inclusive so she made this for women instead and also immigrants. So this was in order to help them and teach them basic skills and how to get back into the work-force and how to be able to function in society.
EMILY: Addams was progressive in her acceptance of immigrants even by today's standards. Recent immigrants were often demonized in the US at this time. Hajo commented on the connection between the way immigrants were treated 100 years ago and they way they are treated today.
CHajo: There’s a lot about anti-immigrant feeling in the country and she’s so clearly on the side of the immigrants and trying to get people to value what they do and these quotes just come up and it’s like we need to tweet this right now because we need this stuff right now. I mean they’re different immigrants and I find that actually interesting because the people that they are criticizing in her day are the Eastern Europeans and
Italians and now, but they’re criticizing them for the same reasons that people are criticizing everyone now.
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EMILY: Addams was focused on providing people with practical measures to improve their lives. Hull-House offered opportunities tailored to the needs of the community.
Emma: Yeah, it taught women skills similar to what we now learn in school, but also life skills like how to help your children, how to get in the workforce, etc. And it also helped a lot of children growing up in the area to have a stable environment to properly grow up in, so in that aspect, it’s more of like a community center like a YMCA. So it had like activities for children. It had like art classes…
Mieke: Yeah, sometimes it would host concerts for people to come and…
Emma: Things that low-income families generally did not have the opportunity to get.
EMILY: In addition to what Emma and Mieke just mentioned, Hull-House was home to the first public playground, the first public gym, first community theatre, and the first public baths in the United States.In the spirit typical of progressivism, many of the programs that started at Hull-House were later taken up by the government. Mieke and Emma used this as an opportunity to reflect on the status of government-provided public programs today.
Mieke: So, Emma, what do we currently have that is available?
Emma: Well there [are] food stamps…
Mieke: Yeah, this is a big thing that we are going to talk about…
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Emma: Yeah, so food stamps, they help… so in 2016 food were supplying for 44.2 million people, which can I just say that’s a lot of people. [That is so many people.] And so also think about the fact that’s it’s not just 44.2 million people, it’s those people and their children so that’s even more people because a lot of the people on food stamps do have children.
Mieke: Yeah, exactly, and so in 2018, the government, we found this quite interesting, the government gave 70 billion dollars for food stamps, which that’s a lot [it is a lot of money] and then we also saw that they gave, the budget for the military in 2018 was
700 billion, which is…
Emma: 700 billion, don’t get me wrong, the military is important, but think about other first world countries though. So the United States has a really, really huge military budget and just to compare this to other first world countries, China has the second largest military budget in expenditure and it 215 billion so that’s a pretty big difference
[that’s still a lot], it’s still a lot, but the difference is, it’s literally three times the size of
China. Can we talk about how China’s population is literally the largest population in the world…
Mieke: And still their military expenditure is like three times lower…
Emma: I mean I understand that our country is very interventionist and so we have a lot of things going on, but if we look at it 700 billion compared to the 70 billion that are provided for people to literally to survive. [Literally eat food]. Yes… That’s, in my opinion I see something wrong there…
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Mieke: Yeah, I do too. And this is not me talking down about the military. I do have a pacifist attitude, So does Jane Addams, but literally people need to eat. So when I see people talking about we don’t need handouts, like, don’t give people handouts, like let them pull themselves up from their boot straps, like it’s literally food and we’re spending
700 billion on the military, I think we can spend 70 billion on letting people eat.
Emma: I understand people feeling that it's unfair because they worked so hard and they got to a certain spot, but at some point…
Mieke: And we’re not even just talking about food stamps at this point, any social welfare programs-- food stamps, community intervention, any help from the government. I mean, housing... This applies to all of it. Pulling yourself up from your boot straps does not work if you don’t have boot straps. And also I did not come up with that, that definitely was stolen from the internet.
Emma: But it’s just kind of disappointing because I see a lack of empathy in the people around me and I understand that it’s hard for people to see from a different person’s perspective because they’re not in their shoes.
Mieke: So I’m going to read one of her quotes and I think it solidifies who she was…
“The good that we procure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.” So this is just that perspective that we can’t have a good country without having everyone be happy and everyone be able to get a job, have a house, have money, be able to provide for their kids.
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EMILY: Hull-House differed from many social organizations at the time in that it was not focused on providing “charity.” One of Addams most foundational principles was that the various social classes are interdependent, and she believed that those with more privilege had a great deal to learn from those who did not receive the same opportunities in life.
Emma: A lot of the time if people see for example, homeless people, on the streets in big cities or just in general, they tend to look the other way and it’s heartbreaking because I understand it’s difficult to face that and a lot of the time you really can’t just help out, but it’s something we should stop turning away from.
Mieke: Individual people also, it is up to the government as much as it is up to individual citizens, but individual citizens... like yeah when I visit big cities I find it horrible to seeing homeless people, but I can’t give my money to every homeless person I see. So it is the job of bigger corporations, it is the job of the wealthy, it is the job of the government to be able to help with social welfare.
CHajo: She’s in an economic time again which is very much like our own where there is this concentration of wealth and people that have money are able to make decisions for everyone else and I think she’s arguing for something, she’s saying that’s kind of like immoral that everyone needs to be a part of this decision and it sounds almost communist, but this idea that the whole is more important than any one person. She didn’t see it as a kind of antagonism between classes, but a kind of collaboration.
Sometimes she feels to me so inspiring and other times she feels so naive. You say that
“Oh everybody needs to get along” and “everybody should,” but then I’m like, but people
105 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;106 are people and they’re craven and they’re greedy and so sometimes I find that it’s difficult, I mean the ideals are great, but getting from the ideal from something that actually works that people accept is the hard part. I think that she really believed that separating people, whether by class or by race or by ethnicity is immoral and it’s not democratic because what it does is that it leads to conflict between groups and people starting to fight for their group over other groups. I think that she wants to see is a society that progresses.
Emma: The fact that there is so much privilege in this country and Mieke and I we are both white females… We are both white and we both have a lot of privilege.
Mieke: We both have pretty wealthy families, I mean like middle class families…Yeah, we’re middle class.. We’re privileged, we have AP classes, we go to a high school.
We’re privileged enough to be talking about this on our computers with our iPhones.
Emma: And so I normally say that you should never use your privilege, but the way that you should use your privilege, that’s the whole factor in it. So you see people who people who are celebrities and who use their privilege to make things better aka
Ashton Kutcher who [yes, icon!]
Mieke: Straight, white man, but is using all of that privilege…And also his position of income, like he is very rich, but he is using his position to help with sex trafficking which is just, it’s a huge issue and it’s becoming more of an issue within the US as well…
Emma: Yeah, but it’s also extremely ignored…
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Mieke: Also, it generally feeds on low income women of color. [We have come full circle]. We have come full circle back to this issue, which is we need more help for social problems.
Mieke: If you do care about this, learn from people like Jane Addams, learn from people
200 years ago who were already fighting for things we are still fighting for. And social welfare needs to change and we need to look back at women like Jane Addams to help form ideas for the future and solutions for the future and we need to speak out.
Thanks so much to Emma and Mieke for that thoughtful and well-rounded discussion on how the issues that Addams faced are relevant in contemporary times.
I’m Emily St. Amour and this has been the third episode of “Superhero Women:
Extraordinary Impact.” I hope you enjoyed today’s installment. I’d like to thank my advisor, Ohio University Professor Elizabeth Hendrickson for her limitless patience editing and guiding the creation of this podcast. I’d also like to thank Professor Cathy
Hajo, editor of The Jane Addams Papers for providing me with perspective about the life of this complex woman. Thank you for offering your time and expertise to the creation of this project. I’d like to extend a deep note of thanks to Athens High Advanced
Placement US History teacher, Mr. Fitz Read, for helping to facilitate collaboration.
Lastly, thank you to AHS Vice Principal Chad Springer for granting permission to include audio segments from students. Special thanks to Mieke and Emma for creating an awesome addition to this episode. I appreciate your leadership and the genuine sense of compassion and empathy you both possess. These truly are superpowers.
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Catch me next time for an episode about the woman who was a founder of the Industrial
Workers of the World and was the only woman to speak at its founding. Up next, it's
Lucy Parsons. And, until next time, keep your core superhero strong!
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Episode Four Script: Lucy Parsons
Transcription Note: During the segment of the podcast created by students from Athens High School, additions from the podcast narrator, Emily St. Amour, are bolded. Elsewhere in the script, there is no special distinction for narration from me. JJones is short for Jacqueline Jones, Chair of the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin and author of “Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons., who is the founder, editor, and director of The Margaret Sanger Papers Project. Jones was interviewed for this project.
Hi! My name is Emily St. Amour, and this is “Superhero Women: Extraordinary Impact,” a podcast where we explore some of the most dynamic, influential, and at times, controversial, women in the history of the United States (US). The first four episodes focus on women whose major contributions take place between 1890 and 1930. This episode, we'll be talking about a woman who helped found the Industrial Workers of the
World and would shape the course of the labor movement. It's Lucy Parsons!
If there is one word to describe Lucy Parson, it would be enigmatic. Parsons, who sometimes went by the alias Gonzales, was a powerhouse speaker who spent her life fighting for the rights of workers. Parsons lived a life filled with social defiance.
J Jones: Her life is full of wonderful stories.
That’s Professor Jacqueline Jones, Chair of the History Department at the University of
Texas at Austin and author of “Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy
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Parsons.” Professor Jones spoke with me over the phone from her office about
Parsons’ legacy.
J Jones: I will think of a 1913 effort in the Northwest when she was in I think it was
Portland Oregon and there was a strike of cannery workers at the time, she was there selling the books and tracks that allowed her to make a living for herself. The Industrial
Workers of the World were there trying to organize and she at one point in downtown
Portland mounted the soapbox in the middle of the street or maybe it was a chair and the police charged her and she jumped down and ran around the block and started speaking again from a street corner and that to me seems to epitomize her.
Parsons was in fact a force to be reckoned with. Born into slavery in 1851, at the age of
19, Parsons fell in love with and married a white, former Confederate soldier named
Albert Parsons. Popular legend asserts that Chicago police called Parsons, “More dangerous than a thousand rioters.” She took something akin to enjoyment knowing that her passionate speeches were often attended by undercover police intent on her arrest.
JJones: She was a fearless presence publicly, she defied the police, she was happy I think when she was trying to dodge them and continue her speaking and it shows that she was certainly a formidable presence, one who was very difficult to silence.
In addition to championing free speech, Parsons was a founder of the Industrial
Workers of the World, also known as the IWW or the Wobblies. The IWW was meant to be “one big union,” a union open to all workers regardless of class, race, gender, or creed. She was the only woman to speak at the founding convention of the IWW. In this
111 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;112 speech, she laid out the structural and organizational power that the IWW was up against: money, legislative tools, armories, and finally the gallows. She was active in shaping the labor movement, using her powerful speaking abilities to propel her forward. Yet despite her influence she lies largely outside of mainstream history.
J Jones: First of all she was an enigma, she was mysterious. She never really acknowledged her past, the fact that she was born to an enslaved woman in Virginia in
1851. She concocted a new identity for herself around 1886 or so. She claimed that no one cared who she was or where she came from, that was not true, but it added to an aura of mystery around her. During her lifetime, she was very well-known. The newspapers followed her obsessively. She was certainly a well-known orator, a very provocative speaker. People commented on her, she was very fashionable, very beautiful so she didn’t seem to fit into standard categories.
“Goddess of Anarchy”, published in 2017, represents perhaps the most comprehensive and in-depth look at the life of Lucy Parsons ever created. It brought to light significant new facts about Parsons and corrected some long-standing errors.
J Jones: For a long time Carolyn Ashbaugh’s biography of 1976 stood as the standard text on Lucy Parson’s life. People if there are errors in that I think she does use that quote about “more dangerous than 1000 rioters,” but she doesn’t footnote it and I’ve never been able to find the source, however, subsequent writers begin to duplicate what they find in the Ashbaugh book and if there are errors they get replicated over and over again.
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The Haymarket Incident can perhaps be singled out as the one event that changed
Parsons’ life the most profoundly. Although Parsons was already involved with politics before this event, it would propel her onto the main stage.
Historian and co-founder of the Illinois Labor History Society, William J. Adelman once stated that "No single event has influenced the history of labor in Illinois, the United
States, and even the world, more than the Chicago Haymarket Affair. It began with a rally on May 4, 1886, but the consequences are still being felt today. Although the rally is included in American history textbooks, very few present the event accurately or point out its significance."
On that particular May 4th, workers were protesting the killing of several workers the day before by police officers. During this rally, seven police officers and four demonstrators were killed when someone threw a bomb at police lines. Police started firing into the crowd. As many as 70 people were injured.
Also on this day, the Parsons were, as was common for the pair, attending a political meeting. Prior to the bombing, Albert spoke to the crowd at the Haymarket meeting.
Albert was arrested along with eight other men in connection to the bombing, but many believe this to have been a misexecution of justice.
J Jones: Well I think historically she has been overshadowed by Albert Parsons, one of the famous Haymarket martyrs, the Haymarket bombing, he and three of his comrades
113 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;114 were executed in November of 1887, They did not toss the bomb in Haymarket Square on May 4th, 1886, but they were very well known anarchists, they were speakers, they were editors and the Chicago police literally rounded up the usual suspects after the bombing even though they had no proof who has thrown the bomb that killed seven policemen and some civilians we don’t know how many wounded how many more and to this day we don’t know who threw the bomb.
All of the men arrested in the aftermath of the bombing were members of the radical press. In Albert’s case, it was argued that his writing in The Alarm, an anarchist newspaper, had incited the perpetrator of the bombing to violence.
Albert and six others were sentenced to death. Two of these individuals yielded and were given lesser sentences.
J Jones: At the same time Lucy Parsons’ career after the bombing has been less well known. She began her public speaking tour right after Albert and his comrades were convicted.In 1886 she wanted to raise money for the defense and that’s why she went on this public speaking tour that took her through the Midwest and into the Northeast and then she realized she was a great speaker, that she could command a crowd, that she could garner a lot of attention so she continued to speak after his death, but yes people often think of her simply as Albert Parsons’ wife and then widow.
On November 11, 1887 Albert and three of his companions were hung. Of the four individuals who were hung, only two had actually been present at the demonstration.
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Parsons and her two children were blocked from visiting Albert on the day of his execution.
JJones: We get kind of second hand accounts of their relationship which apparently was very affectionate, very loving, very deep. She visited him with the children often in jail and she wrote very movingly about him after his death so I think they were a very devoted couple. They were very different in the sense that he was very gregarious and he was a good mimic and a good conversationalist, he had a good sense of humor and she was much more taciturn and there’s not much evidence that she had much of a sense of humor, I think she carried a lot of burdens actually considering her youth as an enslaved person so they were very different.
Parsons was not one to wallow in grief. She and Albert were both prepared to die for the principles they believed in.
Parsons wrote and spoke about the Haymarket incident extensively. She would write
“Life of Albert R. Parsons, With a Brief History of the Labor Movement in America.”
Much of her life was devoted to honoring her late husband. An article in The New York
Times from 1942 called Parsons a martyr for her dedication to Albert and his ideas.
JJones: She had a tumultuous career after his death and some of her anarchist friends began to criticize her first because her rhetoric seemed so extreme that it seemed to be counterproductive especially to her socialist friends. They said you know you’re doing more harm than good by bringing all this unwanted police attention to us, you should
115 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;116 moderate your rhetoric, you should honor the life of your dead husband, but you shouldn’t engage in this kind of extreme rhetoric which we don’t approve of.
Albert and Lucy had met in the post-Civil War South under unlikely circumstances.
JJones: They met there in the 1860’s the late 1860’s in Waco apparently they carried on a very passionate affair, there is evidence that Lucy Parsons had been involved with a former slave around this time and Albert stole her heart away at least that’s what was claimed later so they did marry, they married in 1872, they fled to Chicago because they realized they were not going to find a hospitable home in Texas for any length of time going forward and they seemed very devoted to each other.
Albert was a key figure in Parsons’ life and his access to the world of politics through the Republican Party and involvement in the labor movement created an opening for
Parsons’ entrance into this world herself.
Parsons found success as an editor and writer. She wrote for the anarchist paper, The
Alarm, which Albert helped to run. Her writing is characterized by her dramatic portrayals of the wrongs against the poor and the working class. In Chicago, Parsons practiced her skill as a public speaker and labor organizer.
The Great Railroad Strike of 1977, the first national strike in the history of the US, impacted the Parsons couple’s politics, however, it wasn’t until after the Haymarket
Incident that Parsons took on her role as a dynamic and influential speaker. While her
116 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;117 later life was characterized by her bold speech and at times controversial rhetoric, it should be noted that her early life was spectacular in its own right because Lucy
Parsons’ path to becoming a labor agitator was certainly unique.
JJones: She was a teenager when her owner moved her and her mother and brothers out of Virginia and into McLennan County Texas. We have no written documents that would suggest her views at this point, certainly she did not talk about this period of her life later on because she denied that it even happened.
Parsons was born into slavery in Virginia in 1851. She lived through the civil war, although her thoughts about this experience are, as with many things about Parsons, unknown. But there are some things we do know.
When the Civil War ended with the surrender of the last major Confederate army by
Robert E. Lee on April 9, 1865, Parsons was in her early teenage years. After the war, violence against black people and especially against former slaves was shockingly common. The abuses in rural areas were especially pronounced. Many former slaves were forced to work under conditions that were slavery in everything but name. Many rural workers were routinely denied their wages.
But the offenses were by no means only economic in nature, gangs of former slave owners and other white people disgruntled by emancipation terrorized the country sides.
Terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Families of the South, and the
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Knights of the Rising Sun would whip, shoot, and hang freedmen under the false pretense that these individuals were thieves or criminals.
One group, known as the Gathings Gang was active in McLennan County. The gang attracted the attention of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedman, and Abandoned Lands, an organization formed as part of Reconstruction to try to ease the transition from slavery to emancipation. In addition to murder, the bureau was aware of the Gathings gang’s abuse against black people, including pervasive castrations, burnt limbs, and gouged eyes.
It was in this extreme environment of racial tension and violence where Parsons came of age. She moved with her mother and siblings from the more rural McLennan County to Waco, a larger town which could offer them more protection.
JJones: The first she really surfaces is in the 1870 census for Waco in McLennan
County, Texas and there we find her with her mother who is living with Lucy’s two brothers, Lucy is living in a separate apartment in the same dwelling with her baby,
Champ, and we learn later that Lucy did attend a school for former slaves in Waco sometime around 1867 or 1868, but her own views really don’t come into sharp focus until she begins writing
Originally Lucia Carter, Parsons changed her name to Lucy after moving to Chicago with Albert.
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JJones: A lot of people assumed that she was born to Native American and Mexican parents and that’s because there was very little research into her early years so people took her at her word when began to claim this was her identity. Looking into her past we find this wasn’t the case, that this was a fiction that she fabricated, Albert supported.
Parsons wanted to obfuscate her history as a former slave, a designation that would undoubtedly mark her out for discrimination. Parsons appearance was racially ambiguous and the subject of much speculation during her lifetime. She herself claimed different identities at different times, sometimes going by the last name of Gonzales and claiming Mexican or Native American heritage on official forms.
In addition, Parsons largely distanced herself from the issues faced by black workers.
Jones, when responding to what she would ask Parsons if she had the chance, responded:
JJones: I guess I would ask her why she and her husband Albert Parsons were not more attentive to the plight of African Americans in Chicago and the rest of the country.
It’s not that because she was born to an enslaved woman she must be a freedom fighter for black people, but I think she was a professed radical, she did profess to care about working people, exploited people so not on the basis of her background, but on the basis of her politics, I would ask her why she did not take up the cause of African
American workers during this period.
It is a controversial fact to this day that Parsons took steps to obscure her true identity.
For many, it raises questions about how Parsons’ legacy should be perceived, and
119 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;120 critics have cited her as taking a colorblind approach on the rare instances when she did address issues pertaining to African Americans.
JJones: Certainly she did have a Marxist critique of labor relations and the definition of the working class so for instance she did write very briefly, I think there was one newspaper article, about black people in the South and the argument seemed to be that they should take care of themselves, they should defend themselves, that they should arm themselves, that their vulnerabilities came from their poverty and their powerlessness and not from the color of their skin so in that way she was very much a
Marxist in her thinking that black people constituted a part of the laboring classes, but not a unique part of that group, they weren’t deserving of special attention or a special critique so in that sense she did just consider black people part of the working class. I must say that her efforts and those of her husband were directed toward white, urban working people, especially working men. So in that sense because the vast majority of
African American workers in this period are in the South and working in fields, they were for that reason perhaps going to escape her notice.
Yet despite this gap in Parsons’ activism for workers, she was bold in her efforts to push for the interests of labor. In 1914 Parsons traveled to San Francisco on behalf of the
IWW. Here she dominated the city’s Unemployment Convention and pushed for a public works programs for the unemployed. She led a protest march of 10,000 to demand recognition of the Unemployment Committee.
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In January of 1915, Parsons organized a Hunger Demonstration in Chicago that was joined by Jane Addams' Hull House, the American Federation of Labor, and the
Socialist Party.
JJones: In January of 1915 she led what was called a hunger march among unemployed workers. It started at Jane Addams’ Hull House and then went out into the streets of Chicago and commentators focused on her ability even in her advanced age then, she must have been 65 or so, to dodge the police and she as I said was never so happy as when she was out in public making a fuss. And she hoped making the headlines the next day. I think she was one of these people who thought that all publicity was good publicity, that as long as she could stay in the public eye, as long as police and newspaper reporters were afraid of her or skeptical of her, she was doing what she was supposed to be doing which was bring attention to the exploitation of the laboring classes.
Parsons believed in anarchism as the only true form of “self-government.” She, like many anarchists at this time, believed that people should be free to form voluntary associations with one another. To her, the individual was the only legitimate source of control. Governments were, in her estimation, always destined to descend into rule through coercion and force.
Parsons, in contrast to some anarchists of her day, believed in more traditional gender roles. She often characterized herself as a wife and a mother. She believed that class struggles were more important than sexual freedom, which she saw as having no
121 SUPERHERO WOMEN ;;;;;122 relationship to liberation. Parsons once stated that “Variety in sex relations and economic freedom have nothing in common."
JJones: She loved to feud with other radicals, she did not like Emma Goldman at all, the broke over this notion of sexual liberation, Goldman thinking of anarchism kind of as a liberation of the senses so people should feel no constraints in their artistic or sexual impulses. Lucy Parsons always maintained this image of kind of this prim, Victorian woman and although her own private life was hardly conventional, she criticized
Goldman and others there in the 1890’s who were saying that monogamy was a sham and if one really wanted to be free, one would throw off the shackles of marriage and so forth. Goldman accused her of being a huge hypocrite of course for that reason because of course she was living her life according to her own impulses and her own sexual feelings and not according to Victorian convention, but in any case Lucy Parsons loved a good feud.
Despite going blind in her later years, Parsons continued to speak and agitate for the rights of workers. When she died in 1942, Chicago police seized most of Parsons’ personal papers, her writing, letters, and journals, and more than three thousand volumes of literature and writings on “sex, socialism, and anarchy” were handed over to the FBI. The loss of this material creates a marked silence in her life story. Some of
Parsons’ more personal thoughts and experiences will likely never be uncovered, consigning her to the permanent status of an enigma. Her enigmatic nature adds not only mystery and the allure that comes with that, but also some deep uncertainty about
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Parsons’ character. There are certain issues in Parsons’ life that are hard to sort out, even for someone who has studied Parsons as intensely as Jones has…
JJones: I can give you a story that I don’t like about her because we didn’t mention her children. She had a son, Albert Jr. born in 1879 and a daughter Lulu born in 1881. Lulu died from a fever in 1888, but Albert Jr. went on to high school and I think he became a clerk and seemed like a very interesting young man. Lucy wanted him to follow in his father’s footsteps and become and anarchist and he apparently had no interest in that and actually I think turned to spiritualism, which his mother would have disdained. In
1899 when she was denouncing the US involvement in the Philippines, Cuba, he decided that he was going to join the army which horrified her and she marched him before a judge in Chicago’s insane court and the judge, on the mother’s urging, sent
Albert to an insane asylum where he died twenty years later and there’s no evidence that she went to visit him. He was, as you can imagine, quite miserable there. He died of tuberculosis in 1919 so that is a really disturbing incident in her life and it’s hard to understand how she could be so cruel to her own son, but I think that she just did not want him to humiliate her in public. She worried that he would join the army and that would be a great sign of disrespect to her and she just couldn’t even stand the possibility of it. A really ugly part of her life I think and one I can’t fully understand.
However, despite this dark occurrence, Parsons fought tirelessly for the rights of the exploited classes. It can be hard to reconcile all the facts of Parsons’ life into a cohesive picture. However, it is doubtless that her influence on the workers’ movement in the
United States was significant.
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Parsons’ friend and colleague Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, labor leader and activist who played an import role in leading the IWW, would write these words in an article in the
Daily Worker eulogizing Parsons:
“Lucy Parsons spoke in a beautiful melodious voice, with eloquence and passion. She had her roots in the people, which gave her strength… She did not live in the past. She lived for the future. She will live in the future, in the hearts of the workers.”
During the creation of this project, I collaborated with students at Athens High School. I asked them to help me lead the discussion of how Parsons’ work and ideas can be used to reflect on issues prevalent in today’s world. Dela and Maya, both juniors, discussed Parsons politics and how the issues that she spoke out against are still impacting workers, both in the US and globally. I’ll interject at certain points to help add context and build off of what is being said. I’ll also include a couple of clips from Jones to do the same. Here’s Dela and Maya.
Maya: Hello, we are Maya and Dela and we are both juniors at Athens High School.
Dela: We will be talking about the “Goddess of Anarchy,” Lucy Parsons. She was an
American political, minority activist. She was one of the most original and radical thinkers of her time and she was involved in many political organizations, including the
Socialist Labor Party and the International Working People’s Association.
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Maya: She was a strong supporter of dismantling the government and ending capitalism.
Dela: This idea is still relevant today and very controversial, especially with candidates like Bernie Sanders who are pushing Socialist agendas like free college and universal healthcare.
JJones: She was, her rhetoric and her point of view makes sense to us today because she was addressing condition that are still with us. For instance, she said that the two party system was never going to address the real needs of the laboring classes because the two parties would always be centrist, there would not want to defy the corporate heads that helped fund them.
Maya: Lucy Parsons also had a very interesting personal life. She was born into slavery in Virginia and moved to Texas.
Dela: Later in life when questioned about her ethnic background, Parsons denied having African ancestry.
Maya: She claimed that she was Native American and Mexican, but that was later disproved.
Dela: Many claim that Parsons invented her Mexican and Native American ancestry as a way of avoiding certain obstacles and to appear more relatable to the different groups she was representing.
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Maya: She married Albert Parsons, a white former Confederate soldier turned anarchist newspaper editor and labor activist. The couple was forced out of Texas and moved to
Chicago in 1873 due to intolerance over their interracial union. In Chicago, Albert and
Lucy became involved with the political party The Social Democratic Party of the United
States and eventually the anarchist movement. In 1887, Albert Parsons was executed by hanging for his alleged involvement in the Haymarket massacre, which claimed the lives of seven policemen and four civilians.
Dela: She wasn’t widely embraced by mainstream feminism because of her radical views. She was also more concerned with larger issues. Mainstream feminism of the time was concerned with gaining voting rights for women and dismantling barriers in education and employment.
Maya: While these suffragettes were demanding the right to vote, she called elections a
“capitalistic fraud.” She said “We the women of this country have no ballot, even if we wish to use it, but we have our labor. Wherever wages are to be reduced, the capitalist class uses women to reduce them."
Dela: She argued against extending the franchise to women on the grounds that the state should be smashed, not accommodated. She also openly challenged racism, which was not common during that time. One of her most notable achievements was helping the Scottsboro Boys, a group of nine black teenagers who were falsely accused of raping two white women aboard a train near Scottsboro, Alabama in 1931. Parsons and the International Labor Defense, the legal wing of the American Communist Party, spearheaded a national campaign that eventually helped the boys gain freedom.
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EMILY: Parsons did indeed help the Scottsboro boys. She met with the mother of one of the accused men. She saw this as a way of moving past merely talking and into taking action.
Maya: Parsons also called for armed overthrow of the American ruling class. She believed that the origin of racist violence was not in racism, instead Parsons viewed all forms of oppression, including racism and gender inequality as a necessary byproduct of capitalism. This is a really interesting thought, what do you think?
Dela: Parsons idea makes sense especially because she was a former slave, she understood that slavery as a capitalistic venture required free labor. To keep slavery and capitalism going, the wealthy, white elite needed to keep racial minorities oppressed.
Maya: The way she said it is controversial, but I mean it makes sense if oppression is a necessary byproduct of capitalism, capitalism is the root cause so it must therefore be destroyed.
JJones: She was a critic of the state, arguing that it inevitably was going to side with people who had money and for all these reasons then we can understand her because she’s speaking a language that we find familiar today about wealthy people funneling money into political parties, about the vulnerability of laboring people, about the pernicious effects of technology on jobs, about the growing problem of unemployment and underemployment. So in that sense, even though she was speaking in the 1880, she speaks to us today as well.
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Dela: I feel like this is also still happening in America today. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer because we employ cheap foreign labor from China and even hire undocumented migrant workers who we pay very low wages.
Maya: In undeveloped societies where the US gets most of its products from, a lot of the workers are mistreated and oppressed. Many work more than 100 hours a week making only 1 cent per hour while their employers make millions. These workers are often in conditions with poor air quality and extreme heat. This sadly goes hand in hand with
Parsons idea of getting workers rights.
Dela: According to Lucy Parsons ideology, in order for us to have a truly equitable society, the systems of oppression, including capitalism, racism, and sexism must be dismantled.
Maya: Thanks for listening to our podcast episode about our superhero woman Lucy
Parsons. Pew Pew…
EMILY: Thanks so much to Maya and Dela for the social awareness and clarity that you brought to the discussion about Parsons.
I’m Emily St. Amour and this has been the fourth episode of “Superhero Women:
Extraordinary Impact.” I hope you enjoyed today’s installment. I’d like to thank my advisor, Ohio University Professor Elizabeth Hendrickson for her limitless patience editing and guiding the creation of this podcast. I’d also like to thank Professor
Jacqueline Jones, author of “Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy
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Parsons” for helping to shed light on the life of this powerful and influential woman. Thank you for offering your time and expertise to the creation of this project.
I’d like to extend a deep note of thanks to Athens High Advanced Placement US History teacher, Mr. Fitz Read, for helping to facilitate collaboration. Lastly, thank you to AHS
Vice Principal Chad Springer for granting permission to include audio segments from students. Special thanks to Dela and Maya for creating an awesome addition to this episode. I appreciate your thoughtfulness and sense of global awareness. These truly are superpowers.
And, until next time, keep your core superhero strong!
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