Did you see the flap about Target announcing that they were going to desegregate children’s toys? No more shelves labeled “boys” and “girls,” but just a mixture acknowledging that kids can choose what they like, whether that is a bulldozer for a girl or a baby doll for a boy. That’s good preparation for parenthood – presumably the most important thing we ever do -- as well as for careers.
So I’m sorry to say that too many internet users blasted Target. I’m even more sorry to say that most were young mothers. I suspect that they have too much time on their hands, time that could be spent with those developing minds instead of writing hateful stuff on Facebook. Or I could be wrong. Maybe kids are better off without more exposure to such idiocy as came from one: She was so angry that she said she would not even drive on Target’s parking lot to get to other stores. I’m sure the executives wept big salty tears.
The thing that struck me, though, is that many of these messages condemned the store’s innovation as “politically correct.” That was their sole argument, as if repetition of the phrase were the answer to all questions. Saying that something is “politically correct,” in fact, has become a too-pat putdown, a true knee-jerk response. But just what is wrong with being correct, politically or otherwise? Back in grade school, getting 100% correct on a worksheet was a terrific thing. We strive to be correct in medicine, engineering, and other life-affecting fields. Being correct is important. Would they prefer “politically wrong?”
* * *
Target’s timing probably wasn’t connected to August 26, but that date is increasingly recognized as Women’s Equality Day. Not with a day off, of course, but maybe someday… Next week, on Wednesday, August 26, we will celebrate the 95th anniversary of the right of American women to vote in every state and in every election. The Nineteenth Amendment, which was added to the US Constitution on August 26, 1920, proclaimed that no state had the right to deprive a citizen of this right simply because she was born female.
Voting was a very mixed bag at the time, with women in most western states eligible in all elections, and women in most southern states eligible in none. The Wyoming Territory led the way, granting full rights in 1869 and never repealing that, although some congressmen tried to force a repeal when Wyoming became a state in 1890. Congress did do that with Utah: Women there had voted for seventeen years when Utah moved to statehood, and Congress successfully insisted that this right be dropped. By 1920, however, every western state except New Mexico had fully enfranchised its women. And New Mexico redeemed itself in the next election, choosing two women for statewide office. One was Hispanic, as Soledad Chavez Chacon became New Mexico’s secretary of state in 1922.
But things were very different back East. Not until 1917 – just three years prior to the Nineteenth Amendment – did any eastern state grant full voting rights. That was New York, but many of the states that we now think of as liberal were firmly opposed to female voters. Connecticut and Vermont were especially obtuse. Carrie Chapman Catt, the first president of the League of Women Voters, eventually had to give up on New England and go to West Virginia and Tennessee for the last crucial ratifications. Both were exciting stories, full of scandal and betrayal. Someone could make a movie.
In many states, especially in the Northeast and Midwest, women could vote in certain races, but not in others. Elections for school boards were by far most common. Men in Massachusetts, Illinois, and other Midwestern states also elected women to school governance positions long before women there could vote for themselves. The first woman elected to a statewide office, in fact, was North Dakota’s superintendent of schools in 1892. Colorado elected a woman to this position in 1894, and when its feminists sent in their final report to national office of what became the League of Women Voters in 1920, they were pleased to say that no man had been elected as state school superintendent during the last quarter-century.
Most women most wanted the vote in municipal elections, as decisions by city fathers affected them most directly – and because they could see most clearly with their property tax bills that the American slogan of “no taxation without representation” did not apply to them. Occasionally officials manipulated women to achieve a goal: New Orleans, for example, enfranchised them when the city desperately needed a sewer system. City fathers correctly believed that sanitation-minded women would vote for the bond issue – but as soon as that referendum was over, women again lost their limited vote.
No Florida woman had the right to vote in any election until 1915, and then it happened unintentionally. The era was prosperous, and because of new railroads, many new towns developed, especially on the lower east coast. The Indian River County town of Fellsmere was among them, and although you’ve probably never heard of it, its 1915 population was eight times that of Palm Beach. Women helped establish Fellsmere, and when the founders sent their incorporation paperwork to the legislature, they included women as voters. Legislators, even lazier then than now, did not notice and thus unintentionally granted the vote. The very first Florida woman to cast a ballot was Fellsmere’s Mrs. Zena Drier.
Other municipalities followed, and the Glades County town of Moore Haven elected Marian Horowitz O’Brien as mayor in 1917. By the time that the Nineteenth Amendment enfranchised all American women in 1920, women were voting in twenty-three Florida municipalities. The counties in which women had this limited right (for city elections only) were: Brevard, Broward, Dade, DeSoto, Glades, Indian River, Orange, Palm Beach, Pinellas, Polk, St. Lucie, and Volusia. Some of these counties had been part of our Hillsborough until fairly recently, and almost all of the towns within them were newly planned development. In contrast, Florida’s oldest and largest towns – from St. Augustine and Jacksonville to Pensacola, Gainesville, Tallahassee, Tampa, and Key West – did not revise their charters to include women.
Nor did Florida ratify the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, although women ran sophisticated lobbying campaigns in every legislative session between 1913 and 1919. They came close to winning several times, and many promises were made and broken. We Florida women owe our rights largely to Yankees -- but at least we finally are acknowledging that and celebrating feminism’s victories on August 26. I’ll be signing my newest book, They Dared to Dream: Florida Women Who Shaped History, at the Manatee-Sarasota annual event. It’s politically correct to attend.
* * *
On a similar note, I chaired the Florida Women’s Hall of Fame under Governor Lawton Chiles, when we enacted it into law. That was 1991, and we were among the first states to do this. Arkansas, my home state, now has followed, and my sister so wanted me to attend its inauguration that she booked a hotel room and sent a plane ticket. I’m especially glad that Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson has played a strong role in this and that the non-partisan committee made good choices – including famous Democrat Hillary Clinton.
The others you may know include philanthropist and arts patron Alice Walton of Wal-Mart, as well as Betty Bumpers, wife of longtime US Senator Dale Bumpers, who took on the Washington establishment by opposing nuclear weapons. Her 1970s campaign to vaccinate every child by age two also became a national model. You probably don’t know Hattie Wyatt Caraway, but Arkansas voters made her the first female US senator in a special election in 1931. To the surprise of pundits, she won reelection in 1932, defeating six male opponents that included a former governor and the national head of the American Legion.
Nor are you likely to recall Daisy Bates, but as president of the Arkansas NAACP, she was the heart and soul of the nation’s first school integration attempt in 1957. Her Little Rock home was bombed, and the newspaper that she and her husband built was bankrupted when advertisers withdrew. She and the nine students she mentored eventually succeeded, though, and her book, The Long Shadow of Little Rock, still is a good read.
The committee also made an innovative move by including an organization among its honorees. I’ve advocated that with my colleagues who choose the historical figures commemorated on Tampa’s Riverwalk. I think that this is important because women are much more likely than men to do things cooperatively – and that is the way that most of the nation’s libraries, orphanages, and similar institutions began. You may recall that I wrote recently about Tampa’s first hospital, founded by a group of women in response to the 1887 yellow fever epidemic. It’s hard to pull out just one woman who merits more credit than others, and trying to do so also encourages historical dishonesty. So I’m glad for Arkansas’ precedent of recognizing organizations, as well as for the choice: The Women’s Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools.
Governor Orval Faubus so objected to the US Supreme Court’s 1954 decision that neighborhood schools should be open to students regardless of race that he closed them rather than allow African Americans to enroll. The Arkansas National Guard enforced his order, and President Dwight Eisenhower sent federal troops to overrule those of the state. It was a profound constitutional crisis, and when male leadership defaulted, women organized to reopen the schools in September 1958. There’s a sidebar on this in my History of Women in the United States: A State-by-State Reference.
There’s so much to be known, so much to be publicized and heralded and taught. Please make a vow to learn something and to do something on August 26 that recognizes the importance of women. Remember, without us, history ends in a generation.
doris@dweatherford.com
Doris Weatherford writes a weekly column for La Gaceta, the nation's only trilingual newspaper. With pages in Spanish, Italian, and English, it has been published in Tampa since 1922.
So I’m sorry to say that too many internet users blasted Target. I’m even more sorry to say that most were young mothers. I suspect that they have too much time on their hands, time that could be spent with those developing minds instead of writing hateful stuff on Facebook. Or I could be wrong. Maybe kids are better off without more exposure to such idiocy as came from one: She was so angry that she said she would not even drive on Target’s parking lot to get to other stores. I’m sure the executives wept big salty tears.
The thing that struck me, though, is that many of these messages condemned the store’s innovation as “politically correct.” That was their sole argument, as if repetition of the phrase were the answer to all questions. Saying that something is “politically correct,” in fact, has become a too-pat putdown, a true knee-jerk response. But just what is wrong with being correct, politically or otherwise? Back in grade school, getting 100% correct on a worksheet was a terrific thing. We strive to be correct in medicine, engineering, and other life-affecting fields. Being correct is important. Would they prefer “politically wrong?”
* * *
Target’s timing probably wasn’t connected to August 26, but that date is increasingly recognized as Women’s Equality Day. Not with a day off, of course, but maybe someday… Next week, on Wednesday, August 26, we will celebrate the 95th anniversary of the right of American women to vote in every state and in every election. The Nineteenth Amendment, which was added to the US Constitution on August 26, 1920, proclaimed that no state had the right to deprive a citizen of this right simply because she was born female.
Voting was a very mixed bag at the time, with women in most western states eligible in all elections, and women in most southern states eligible in none. The Wyoming Territory led the way, granting full rights in 1869 and never repealing that, although some congressmen tried to force a repeal when Wyoming became a state in 1890. Congress did do that with Utah: Women there had voted for seventeen years when Utah moved to statehood, and Congress successfully insisted that this right be dropped. By 1920, however, every western state except New Mexico had fully enfranchised its women. And New Mexico redeemed itself in the next election, choosing two women for statewide office. One was Hispanic, as Soledad Chavez Chacon became New Mexico’s secretary of state in 1922.
But things were very different back East. Not until 1917 – just three years prior to the Nineteenth Amendment – did any eastern state grant full voting rights. That was New York, but many of the states that we now think of as liberal were firmly opposed to female voters. Connecticut and Vermont were especially obtuse. Carrie Chapman Catt, the first president of the League of Women Voters, eventually had to give up on New England and go to West Virginia and Tennessee for the last crucial ratifications. Both were exciting stories, full of scandal and betrayal. Someone could make a movie.
In many states, especially in the Northeast and Midwest, women could vote in certain races, but not in others. Elections for school boards were by far most common. Men in Massachusetts, Illinois, and other Midwestern states also elected women to school governance positions long before women there could vote for themselves. The first woman elected to a statewide office, in fact, was North Dakota’s superintendent of schools in 1892. Colorado elected a woman to this position in 1894, and when its feminists sent in their final report to national office of what became the League of Women Voters in 1920, they were pleased to say that no man had been elected as state school superintendent during the last quarter-century.
Most women most wanted the vote in municipal elections, as decisions by city fathers affected them most directly – and because they could see most clearly with their property tax bills that the American slogan of “no taxation without representation” did not apply to them. Occasionally officials manipulated women to achieve a goal: New Orleans, for example, enfranchised them when the city desperately needed a sewer system. City fathers correctly believed that sanitation-minded women would vote for the bond issue – but as soon as that referendum was over, women again lost their limited vote.
No Florida woman had the right to vote in any election until 1915, and then it happened unintentionally. The era was prosperous, and because of new railroads, many new towns developed, especially on the lower east coast. The Indian River County town of Fellsmere was among them, and although you’ve probably never heard of it, its 1915 population was eight times that of Palm Beach. Women helped establish Fellsmere, and when the founders sent their incorporation paperwork to the legislature, they included women as voters. Legislators, even lazier then than now, did not notice and thus unintentionally granted the vote. The very first Florida woman to cast a ballot was Fellsmere’s Mrs. Zena Drier.
Other municipalities followed, and the Glades County town of Moore Haven elected Marian Horowitz O’Brien as mayor in 1917. By the time that the Nineteenth Amendment enfranchised all American women in 1920, women were voting in twenty-three Florida municipalities. The counties in which women had this limited right (for city elections only) were: Brevard, Broward, Dade, DeSoto, Glades, Indian River, Orange, Palm Beach, Pinellas, Polk, St. Lucie, and Volusia. Some of these counties had been part of our Hillsborough until fairly recently, and almost all of the towns within them were newly planned development. In contrast, Florida’s oldest and largest towns – from St. Augustine and Jacksonville to Pensacola, Gainesville, Tallahassee, Tampa, and Key West – did not revise their charters to include women.
Nor did Florida ratify the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, although women ran sophisticated lobbying campaigns in every legislative session between 1913 and 1919. They came close to winning several times, and many promises were made and broken. We Florida women owe our rights largely to Yankees -- but at least we finally are acknowledging that and celebrating feminism’s victories on August 26. I’ll be signing my newest book, They Dared to Dream: Florida Women Who Shaped History, at the Manatee-Sarasota annual event. It’s politically correct to attend.
* * *
On a similar note, I chaired the Florida Women’s Hall of Fame under Governor Lawton Chiles, when we enacted it into law. That was 1991, and we were among the first states to do this. Arkansas, my home state, now has followed, and my sister so wanted me to attend its inauguration that she booked a hotel room and sent a plane ticket. I’m especially glad that Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson has played a strong role in this and that the non-partisan committee made good choices – including famous Democrat Hillary Clinton.
The others you may know include philanthropist and arts patron Alice Walton of Wal-Mart, as well as Betty Bumpers, wife of longtime US Senator Dale Bumpers, who took on the Washington establishment by opposing nuclear weapons. Her 1970s campaign to vaccinate every child by age two also became a national model. You probably don’t know Hattie Wyatt Caraway, but Arkansas voters made her the first female US senator in a special election in 1931. To the surprise of pundits, she won reelection in 1932, defeating six male opponents that included a former governor and the national head of the American Legion.
Nor are you likely to recall Daisy Bates, but as president of the Arkansas NAACP, she was the heart and soul of the nation’s first school integration attempt in 1957. Her Little Rock home was bombed, and the newspaper that she and her husband built was bankrupted when advertisers withdrew. She and the nine students she mentored eventually succeeded, though, and her book, The Long Shadow of Little Rock, still is a good read.
The committee also made an innovative move by including an organization among its honorees. I’ve advocated that with my colleagues who choose the historical figures commemorated on Tampa’s Riverwalk. I think that this is important because women are much more likely than men to do things cooperatively – and that is the way that most of the nation’s libraries, orphanages, and similar institutions began. You may recall that I wrote recently about Tampa’s first hospital, founded by a group of women in response to the 1887 yellow fever epidemic. It’s hard to pull out just one woman who merits more credit than others, and trying to do so also encourages historical dishonesty. So I’m glad for Arkansas’ precedent of recognizing organizations, as well as for the choice: The Women’s Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools.
Governor Orval Faubus so objected to the US Supreme Court’s 1954 decision that neighborhood schools should be open to students regardless of race that he closed them rather than allow African Americans to enroll. The Arkansas National Guard enforced his order, and President Dwight Eisenhower sent federal troops to overrule those of the state. It was a profound constitutional crisis, and when male leadership defaulted, women organized to reopen the schools in September 1958. There’s a sidebar on this in my History of Women in the United States: A State-by-State Reference.
There’s so much to be known, so much to be publicized and heralded and taught. Please make a vow to learn something and to do something on August 26 that recognizes the importance of women. Remember, without us, history ends in a generation.
doris@dweatherford.com
Doris Weatherford writes a weekly column for La Gaceta, the nation's only trilingual newspaper. With pages in Spanish, Italian, and English, it has been published in Tampa since 1922.