Celebrating 100th Anniversary of the 19th Amendment

i know the pacifica radio this is k pr prisons i'm kate mcintyre this week marks one hundred years since the nineteenth amendment was ratified giving women across the united states the right to vote kansas women have been voting for decades voting in municipal elections since eighteen eighty seven and a nineteen twelve kansas became the eighth state to grant full suffrage to women but it wasn't until congress passed the nineteenth amendment in may nineteen nineteen and it was ratified by thirty six states on august eighteenth nineteen twenty the women across the entire country could vote today okay pierre presents a long road to women's suffrage i'm joined by dr terry phantom and she teaches journalism at the

university of kansas and is the author of prosper trails of women politicians portions of today's keep your prisons were originally broadcast on june sixteenth two thousand nineteen dr friedman thanks for joining us today it's rhyming guess was one of the first states to ratify the nineteenth amendment on june sixteenth nineteen nineteen that followed right on the heels of the us senate passing the nineteenth amendment that i'd like to start our conversation back in the eighteen hundreds us back to eighteen forty eight than the women's rights convention in seneca falls new york well or actually didn't go back eight years earlier and eighteen forty elizabeth cady stanton lucretia mott attended the world anti slavery convention in london people who were anti women's rights were also heavily involved with the anti slavery movement during this time and so you have these two women going over to london not wanting to participate in this and they were denied being able to participate due to their

gender and so that this was kind of the early seeds are putting together that they're also needed to be a women's rights movement and so eight years later you have eighteen forty eight and the seneca falls convention i were people gathered and they put together a declaration of sentiments declaring that men and women were both equal and this day in particular is considered to be the official launch of the women's rights movement where did it go from there well i mean obviously we had in the civil war starts high not too long after i'm which captured our nation's attention for that solid block of time after the war and so i and eight in sixty nine i you see two different suffrage groups former won was the national woman's suffrage association that susan b anthony and elizabeth cady stanton i were affiliated with and then you also had a competing american woman suffrage association

forming the same year so it really shows you that complicated to have history of the women's rights movement a lot of people know the name susan b anthony i they think that's really all there is to know but really the women's rights movement is a very complicated mixture of the feminism and sexism racism and religion and fear that makes it very difficult to summon up in just a few sentences but these women's organizations formed because between eighty sixty eight in eating seventy one of congress' discussing the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments i am well they were doing as women were arguing that they should be included in them that they should also be given the right to vote however congress did not agree to this it only included black men within these amendments and so this is where you see the women's rights movement to really taking off and forming these national organizations i had to try to push some of

them wanted congress at the national level to approve a women's voting rights amendment and then you had other women who decided to focus on a state by state strategy instead why do you think that at the time it seemed more palatable to white men to get african american men the right to vote rather than their wives and their daughters was a good question you know i think that's gender norms were stretched no matter what race you were there were strict gender norms for women of what their expectations were i'm there is a feeling at the time among some people that this was either our for black men that women needed to wait their turn the eye you had women disagreeing with that and quite frankly i had this is where you see some of that really vicious racism start to come out in this woman's rights movement where women are saying some really negative things about black men getting these rates before white women got them in this

kind of racism continued throughout this movement and so there is some tension surrounding his hundredth anniversary of women having the right to vote and some people considered a spear consider it to be simply a low white women's celebration because they're very aware that women of color and were purposely trying to be left out in these are incorporated and suffragist strategies and an anti suffrage strategies people using racist rhetoric saying bad you know we need to give women the right to vote but don't worry about black women are immigrant women because there's more than enough white women to count or how they would vote and of course it and i suffer just saying we can give women the right to vote because that'll give black women immigrant women the right to vote you do have this very racist problematic rhetoric that is going on during this time and that continued all the way to the end and frankly continues to bare you mentioned that the seeds of this were planted not in the right to vote itself but in

the whole slavery argument about bad and also how old the fight for prohibition and women's involvement in the temperance movement played into the fight for suffrage well anti slavery movement and the prohibition movement so it really helped women gain political savvy is so to speak they weren't allowed to participate in the public sphere the men's fear of quote unquote actual politics on the women of course during this time were very much seen as being the morality of a family that set like the religious and morals are to center their family around lists of their participation in these kinds of causes was considered to be ok because they fell under that umbrella and so by participating in these movements you have women learning how to organize learning how to public speak learning the basic fundamentals of social movements and how to be fact event in them and so they gave women a lot of training that they could not otherwise get but yes the

prohibition movement was another reason there isn't just one reason why it took seventy two years for women to get the right to vote and nationally from nineteen forty eight to nineteen twenty again this is a very very complicated topic of a prohibition certainly one of them there is a widespread belief that this time and women that's all involved because there were concerns about the impact that alcohol had and family life are with domestic abuse with amending the only one who could really work based on norms of the time and concerns about men spending all their money down at the bar and then leaving their families helpless without money for the rest of the month and see you do see a lot of women get involved in this movement but then of course the recruit concerns about what would happen if we gave women the right to vote and you have a lobbyist for the alcohol industry and other major lobbyists having great concerns about wanting women to have this kind of power so there's all these different dynamics going on

again we're marking the one hundred anniversary of the nineteenth amendment and the thing with dr terry phenomena of the university of kansas long before the nineteenth amendment gave women across the united states the right to vote women in kansas and many western states were already voting wife's women's suffrage more readily accepted in the newer parts of the us so the very first place to give women the right to vote was actually wyoming territory in high and then you see other western states like utah and colorado get on the stand waiting as well and there are number of reasons for that one of them was that the western states at this time we're very proud of how progressive they were and they wanted to show themselves as being this model of progressive community is that we're kind of in this land of utopia so to speak it in the united states as people we're going west young man and setting up new communities and that

because of how difficult it is to start from scratch you needed women to be much more involved in helping with communities build them from the ground up and then you add happening in the east which had a very established protocols and very strict gender norms at this time in as you are setting up new governments new city council's new school boards i knew were state constitutions it's a lot easier to to include these kinds of things that we're building from the ground up then to challenge the status quo and to changing so these are some of the reasons why it was a lot easier in the west to get this done you mentioned before of a split between i'm susan b anthony and elizabeth cady stanton one camp and people like lucy stone and harry blackwell in another canyon bigelow deeper into that what exactly was that split in and how did they ultimately come to resolve that well have you had these women have different priorities again you have the one group that's really

focused on getting this national amendments and then you had the other group thinking that a state by state strategy you was the better way to go and so there are different philosophies on the best way to get this done you also had some women who were convinced that though only thing they should focus on was that women getting the right to vote where as you let other women think you know we need to broaden this platform to be more so about women's rights in general and and on other things is i have these different philosophies and this played out in the eating hundreds were you also see it play out in the nineteen hundreds where you how have these generational differences develop among the primary leaders of the suffrage movement and the more liberal wing of the movement where you have carrie chapman catt for example wanting very much moderate type of strategy but then you have people like alice paul who are much more liberal who wanted to

incorporate more of that i'm british type of militant tactics that involved taking in hunger strikes and getting arrested and it was a much more public does les of militancy and demanding rights as opposed to more moderate approach and so throughout the entire suffrage movement you have these women having these very different strategies on how to get things done and then the tensions that built because of that do you think that tension and bad times like i live with in the movement slow things down or did that just make the conversation more robust both i think that the different camps all had their legitimate points of you buy it it's an issue that we continue to see with women today quite frankly where it's difficult to rallying around any particular cause to be able to make a change more quickly which was closed down our momentum i'm and then you also have the

anti suffrage movement at this time which is a very pretty aggressive and then for a while i did very well so it was an intel dating eighties in eighty nine these that you start to see anti suffrage organizations form because intel then they don't really care what was going on in the west they thought they were just a bunch of hillbillies and what they did out there really didn't matter to the people in the east bay it as these ideas and started anew adding more to the eastern part of the country where you see states like massachusetts and new york become more alarmed and you said that they need to form an actual organizations to counter this movement and what's interesting is i think a lot of people tend to think of white men and being the problem with holding women back really is or primarily white women who are running these organisations in arguing against their own right to vote in soho you not only have dissension within the suffrage movement

itself but the opposition was coming from we would therefore it made it more difficult for men in political positions didn't know which one to listen to when you're one group of women saying they want these riots in another women saying they don't want these raids i did a study on the anti suffrage movement and the different press strategies that they used and they use a wide variety of strategies to argue why women should get the vote on religion of course was one of them in a time when religion was so dominant and this was an easy argument for them to make that people would buy into are basically saying that god created man in women for very different purposes i that men weren't designed to be in the public sphere and women very specifically were designed to be in the private sphere either also arguments that women simply were not smart enough to be able to vote or humans that women didn't have time to educate themselves to vote because they were too busy taking care of her husband and their

children so when would they ever have time to educate themselves on the issues you also have some really ridiculous arguments being made i one of which was that there was not enough horses possibly up to possibly take both men and women to the polls won't really do you have to have the men are right in the horse and going and you have to read the horseback in an hours would have to go again and how did that even happen i mean it was it was really ridiculous and then you know we think the lake misinformation and facebook means are new but let me tell your facebook has been around since before facebook and so back in the day was using pamphlets and they would take quotes from notable people like thomas jefferson and plunk them on an anti suffrage pamphlet and as the new non reasoned arguments for why women aren't good enough to vote and so they're also a multi prong strategy is that at play here on the other ridiculous or it's where well possibly

go vote because what happens if the baby is sick or there's an invalid in the family or you know i mean they come up with all these doomsday scenarios another one argued about urban versus rural women and how women in the city would have an advantage because it would be easier for them to go vote and women who lived on a farm and would have to travel further to get to a polling location so they use all these different arguments and met with sharing them now that you know seems a little silly but at the time people thought that those are really good arguments to make so just to be clear these are arguments that women were making or that we're making that we were making against their own right to vote yes there were dozens of anti suffrage organize asians by nineteen sixteen there were three hundred and fifty thousand people across the country involved in this anti suffrage movement and these were primarily women we're the women that were involved in the pros suffrage movement where they are a minority among

women or do you think that there was some exceptions they get this is probably a good thing even if i don't want to go out and take of the courthouse or our idol wannabe particularly involved well i mean of course that changed over time i mean back in the nineteen forties they of course were a very small minority of of people who wanted to sit on a minute i'm seventy two years before you could convince enough people that this was a legitimate cause i just was introduced into congress it took forty one years after the bill was introduced in congress before congress both the chambers of congress agreed to pass that so this was a very very slow going i it's interesting though people tend to think that the marsh on march on washington against donald trump a few years ago was the first women's march on washington and really wasn't the first one took place in nineteen thirteen and that women were marching monday inauguration weekend of woodrow wilson

protesting that this president was coming into office you head very wishy washy stances on suffrage he'd intended to very good answers when he was asked about it while he was campaigning it kind of blew it off as you know states' rights i wonder like that and so you have five to seven thousand maybe even up to ten thousand people descend on washington and march and protest during his inauguration weekend and so that was one of the really key turning points in the suffrage movement but really world war one not enough can be sad about how critical world war one was to the women's rights movement in nineteen seventeen and that's the year in particular that i studied when i looked at the desperate measures that the anti suffer just for going to fight to try to cling onto their stance as the suffrage movement was gaining more and more momentum and of course again that moment because when you have american men going over worked overseas to fight it you have all these women

at home or having to go out into the workforce to help support the country and keep it running end and help during wartime and so that really did a number on anti suffragists arguments that it women aren't smart enough that women had no business in the public sphere i when you see women out there and doing the job in ghana done and being perfectly competent sam is a world where one was just as major turning point we've touched on the role of susan b anthony and elizabeth cady stanton which are games that might be familiar to our listeners begged for some of the people that were involved in the suffrage movement that we may not be so familiar with well of course i mean there needs to be much more focused on women of color who are very involved in the suffrage movement as well as as being involved in different racial issues in trying to create more opportunities and rights for people of color and so you're people like ida b wells the end to amiri church to a royal

who did a lot of work for the suffrage movement you're in kansas we had a couple of notable women as well were very active i'm i'm amy dillard it is is a name of a kansas woman as where as well as i carry he was clark who was the mother of langston hughes and she wrote for a newspaper and she encouraged african american women to seek education and be politically active and so in addition to that though i mean what's really interesting is as susan b anthony and elizabeth cady stanton get all of their attention but i mean there were thousands in thousands of local women across the country who were involved in grass roots efforts so even though those two names are the most popular by far did not do this themselves it took millions of women across the country over seventy two years to chip away at this all of these unnamed women and one of the women that i focus on is jeannette rankin who is

included in my book and she was the first woman elected to congress in nineteen sixteen which is another reason it could really put the genie back in the bottle at that point because you had a woman serving in congress at this point i'm engineering can was very very active in the suffrage movement are going across the country and new york and washington state and california and montana i mean this was full time work for these women to advocate for this bomb and so one of the things that i've been doing is talking out some newspaper conventions and encouraging people to dig into the local history and find out about these women in the state who worked so hard to give women the rights that they now have today whatever's women here in kansas is susanna salter who was elected the first female mayor anywhere in the country in the little town of argo me a kansas yeah it's interesting so she moved to kansas with her husband an early eighteen at ease and she was nominated for mayor in eighteen eighty seven on the prohibition party ticket

but she was nominated as a joke by local men and then she actually ended up and so it's since really great a kansas is able to have a very notable moment even if it was initially set up for not nice reasons but that chlorine and nickels i like a lot of fire the kansas women who were involved in the suffrage movement here she was a journalist and involved in journalism in using newspapers at this time as advocacy too walls are men and so initiate she sell their lawrence in nineteen fifty four and she gave a lot of lectures about equality and she was associate editor and i am paying the anti slavery a newspaper as well i mean she really fight for women's property rights and voting in school options and some of this information that i'm talking about amazon bookmarks that we will have available in

kansas throughout the next year where we feature six or seven different cans a suffragist and how some of these fun facts about them so we're hoping he'll come up to some of our events in the coming year you get some of your bookmarks i want to go back to your own research interests you frightened prosper trails of women politicians and that's your specialty within journalism in general how did the press portrayed the suffrage movement and particularly the women involved in it well i have particularly focused on the latter sections of the suffrage movement and so i'm more familiar with the nineteen tens leading up to the nineteen twenties and that was interesting when i was taking the ged press coverage of the anti suffrage movement how much dave focused on syria rational statements that the anti suffrage is reusing that weren't necessarily based on any kinds of facts so for example

obey put it than to suffer just talking like that anybody will who is for suffrage was also pro german and a socialist and they've made accusations that that's the only way that new york had passed women's suffrage is because just the socialists all voted that again is that there is a lot of fear mongering that was used at this time i had to do it dig into people's core raw emotions of fear and try to make them very afraid of change in giving women more rights and so it's interesting because you don't really have much for fact checking going one eyed journalist back in this time of war there was a very quick one cents saying that this isn't true because when you look at the votes and in your collection the socialist candidate got fewer votes than the woman's suffrage image the dead but you don't see is kind of fact checking going on and you have these anti suffrage is really

attacking women for the vote referring to them as being very very selfish and we have this war going on right now and how dear you be wanting your own rights when we need to be focusing on what's going on abroad and so it's interesting to see the strategies whereas the press when they're covering the suffragettes in this particular instance they used the arena reasoned arguments is interesting because they also quoted local and regional where manor where's the suffragist movement they quoted national women that may not seem that interesting to people but think about it when you hear a national politician talk to somebody who you don't really know you have that distance for them whereas when somebody local originally attended put a little more credibility to what they're saying that's really interesting to think about what sources journalists were using at that time but then when you take a look at the nineteen thirteen march on washington which is the other major movement that i've

studied it was really interesting at that time how positive the press coverage was of these women mostly i think because this was so no novel that something like this had not happened before and it was almost a circus proper artsy type of environment and because you had women marching new york to washington dc to set up like a spectacle for this lake months in advance as they were marching through the winter tom insel this was this huge event that the press found fascinating too so looking to come and so there was much more positive coverage that however one thing that is very notable in press coverage is how little attention was given to race and class and it certainly would have been very well known to the people of the era that these racist arguments were being made about why women should not be allowed to vote

because it would give black women writes and you really didn't see him that play out in the press coverage that i saw there was really no your credibility or defense of these women even the suffragettes with this with this parade there is little mention that i the white women were trying to make black women either not participate in the parade or at least be in the very back of the parade and so there's something there we need to really keep in mind more so today is how inclusive were being in our coverage in making sure that all women in all voices are included because they didn't get that but diffin and you just alluded to not just race but class was this seen as an upper class movement that these were way man of a certain social status that were there worked for train this or was this more widespread throughout various social classes well one of the ways that class comes into play is that you have these upper society where many were

very involved in anti suffrage movement actually be cut as they did not want women of lower classes to have any kind of a quality so for example use more upper class women had access to powerful man whether that was their own husbands or whether that was the high class party use that they went to where the wood mingle with people in positions of power and other politicians and so's through of soft power so to speak to just the conversations that they would have with access to these powerful people you know very well that they had some kind of power as women in this regard and that by having the rating will be more democratic process this would open up government to people who worked at he's a fancy dinner invitation only parties and so some of these women did not want to give up the political power they already have in sharing that was used to serving in itself so even

though the political power did not extend to be about reagan and they still had political more of a soft kind of political power they you know there are a number of women who believe that you know there has been has represented the family in what their choice was that's all you need for free and what she brought that out because i know one of the arguments against giving women the vote was that women would just vote the way their husbands told them to or the way their fathers told them to if they were unmarried how did that play into the arguments either for or against giving women vote well i know i was one of the hundreds you could say of reasons why it took so long for women to get the right to vote is you did have political parties who thought that women were a bunch of robots have thought the same way and so he gave women the right to vote you're going to give the one advantage to a particular political party and men story would be over for the other party because women were just all look the same and then we'd have one party rule for the end of days his book is another argument about why women shouldn't be able to

vote so yeah i mean you do see that like you even still out that happening today i mean as recently as time the last few presidential elections i mean in particular one that i pointed out during my book is you had one of the campaigns in the republican party who believe that by putting sarah palin on the ticket you would automatically gain all of the hillary clinton supporters because there was a woman and two seconds to think that out i mean people who support hillary clinton or sarah palin are not going to just flip flop involved for the other american whaling different people with different political philosophy is but that kind of thinking doesnt seem to always come out into play and you know i can't make jokes and so to speak that they think that women are all just like one block of cheese that you can just focus on her own and it's just really not true it's interesting that you say that though because just with in the

past month i've seen a facebook named it was something to the effect of it's all women were to vote in the next election they could change the outcome which may or may not be true but that's making the assumption that women vote as a big monolithic block in more recent years the ads my years seeing women they have a bit more of a liberal slant than a conservative slant but there i mean as we saw in the last election there were all locked in and who voted for donald trump and not for hillary clinton and so it just didn't make any bad assumptions talk to me about the differences between this year and the first wave of feminism and how that came to influence there the second wave of feminism and perhaps the third wave of feminism the church's first and secondly

famine feminism a now third and some even say there's a fourth wave of feminism or interesting that only and make useful terms in the fact that they help situate people in history and certainly each wave had its own kind the distinct message that it was going for but one of the things that we are you my study is that they're also kind of problematic terms to use because of a tempest that women up against each other so for example the argument is that the third wave formed because they saw that the second wave did not doing nearly enough for women of color are for women of different sexuality is right and so it set up as this conflict between these two waves critiquing each other thinking the other one isn't good enough the second wave critiquing the third wave forward there are ways of doing things in it and by having this kind of language it

becomes really problematic because it does kind of set up this cat fight type of framing among women when really when you study these movements more closely each wave that played a role in helping the next wave of help for me it's a giant dam and it move on and by having more of a cohesive approach to feminism i think it would mean conversations go much easier for this topic rather than always coming at it from a point of tension and setting women of different generations up against each other that generational difference though i think it does play out in terms of people even of my generation totally dismissing how hard these women worked to get the right to vote and penthouse socking it is that we take that for granted yeah we do enemy are part of that time and i put in my typical big year

has to do with who writes history books so think about the textbook that you read in k twelve how much of women's history do you remember from a textbook how much do you think is included in those textbooks today we tend to hear the same stories over and over again and we don't tend to hearing these kinds of stories i mean i'm sure susan b anthony wright i mean she's included of course you hear kind of the five cent version of history and you don't get these nuances and the complications and more doubt on these issues which is why this anniversary of song portland maine yes it's a long anniversary of the fourteen month anniversary of farmland that congress approved it approve the nineteenth amendment on june fourth say intel tennessee became a file states or ratify in august nineteen twenty but we really got to me this time to get the message out to educate people about women's history and

how important it is because we don't have to get that otherwise professor carey finn amend teaches journalism at the university of kansas and j mcintyre and today on cape your present role long road to women's suffrage i'm joined by jack ely top of the league of women voters of kansas she's the co chair of the league's centennial committee jacki it is great to see you again thank you glad to be here this year doesn't just marked the one hundred anniversary of the nineteenth amendment it's also the one hundred anniversary of the league of women voters itself talking about the connection between the two share as you mentioned we were we were one of the early ratifies of the nineteenth amendment that was in nineteen nineteen and then surely there after we had the kansas we find the right name of that a lot of these women's groups are very similar names the national american woman suffrage association grew out of are the suffrage movement and so in march of nineteen ninety nineteen carrie chapman catt

decided to form that grew into a league of women voters and the purpose was stiff quote finish the fight that yes we're going to be getting the vote here soon if it passes it it and it took a while you know took me to tell the states that we also need to educate women and an end then too but no what is it and what is this write about and how can we be educated voters so they started with a group of wichita jane brox is from wichita she was always identified as the wife of a prominent wichita attorney that she must've been quite a force in her own right because she was chosen to be president of the kansas equal suffrage association and then that group became the league of women voters of wichita will sedgwick county but then the wichita and then that group formed the league of women voters of

kansas so here in kansas we have the very first we believe league of women voters chapter and we're very proud of her roots and proud of that but they work really was that once women got the vote was about educating and yesterday getting educating women but then it grew into all butter issues women care about that are not being talked about much so what are some of those and what can we do to make our voices heard so it was a real civic education process and the league was there from the very beginning helping hand groups do studies and learn how to research how to find information and it sounds a little nowadays cycle where they have to have somebody help them do that but if one came from a background where their voice was not heard and it didn't matter what we start an elder said no i can vote that there's a real need for that education and for women to feel part of the process so that's what the league helped happen and i'm guessing for women

who weren't necessarily part of the women's suffrage movement there were an active in helping women get the vote a lot of them just didn't have the skills to be common sensibly engaged and for that it's true it's very true that they're walking there was all a lack of knowledge about how about how the process worked even in ohio it's a good sound simple melodies that had to register to vote how do you what you need you need an id and then some women hadn't gone to college so women have gone high school so how do we bring everybody up to speed on what these issues are that effect as one of this quotes was made by having this is carrie chapman catt is that she said women do not need to be told whom to vote for they need to know the facts backs the citizenship school will go a long way to get so the citizenship school was one of the things the league helped promote again just basic how you how are you a good citizen and it

was necessary for freedom because go back to the basics what did that look like in terms of meetings or pamphlets you know the kansas state historical society has ever really did material on some of this every year we have the convention and oftentimes at the convention as steady as adapted and so a steady might've been a policeman early issues where about milk safety which seems simple but again when your mother and you're feeding your kids milk and your family you wanna learn how all how do we make our food safer so some of those early issues the name came out of just practical things one of the first things that the league actually helped happening back in nineteen nineteen was trying to get court visiting committees to monitor cases that affected women and children there were cases that have women children are involved with and there was nobody watching to see it was being done correctly did those women and children have the resources that they need so about to be ongoing it was just about

helping women be watched out for and protected her and her children so you know the mangoes and education so on that as colleges started in any place that they saw that women could to learn more to make an impact there's a big connection between the early temperance movement and women who then became suffer just speak as the bayside alcohol as destroying our family system and women were there to protect that so a lot of these women started more with the women's christian temperance union and they grew into the suffrage movement but they kept that and that idea of i'm here for my it's about protecting families is so many of the issues where it grew out of that desire to take care of families and do what is best for their families and kids jj what do you see as those issues haven't changed over the past one hundred years our well that's interesting because we'd like to think that we maybe

have moved beyond it that need but obviously there is still a need for women's voices and inform the public formed to help make sure that our needs are not forgotten and i don't know exactly it where we lost that to tell you the truth i one would think well we should have learned better back then a hundred years ago but i think that we'd maybe didn't get as totally at even though the women who got the right to vote were quite progressive obviously their way was to live in a society that's our women as second class citizens and you know the history of the nineteenth amendment is not entirely wholesome they know that data phenom and probably will talk about that but there were similar motives to get white women to vote to drown out the black was of the black women that is that's not going to help anybody you know we all need to work together for everybody's ways is to be heard so we were perfect in those early days as much as we did do well at a ged so yes our voices are still needed there are still issues

affecting women we still hear women are still only making about seventy five eighty cents for every dollar that a man makes for the same work that has not changed in fifty years or so there's a lot to be done and then women in the league and women and other groups that we work with our work and i think i should also say i think it was this out but that in kansas we actually have the right to vote in nineteen twelve women dead so we were in the nation to to grant women full voting rights and that's i think that's pretty cool some people like to think they can this is backwards and maybe not as forward thinking back when it came to women voting we were one of the first and that women could vote in school elections back in eighteen sixty one and we had the first major you know and their first female mayor in the whole country or growing encampment are going canada so it's it's really air a really wonderful history that we have an i think we should celebrate that because it

spits kansas has been at the forefront of this and we really need to the point that people jacki like cap is co chair of the league of women voters the centennial committee celebrating the one hundred anniversary of the nineteenth amendment and with it the creation of the league itself coming up it's the last installment of my fellow kansans from the kansas news service i'm kay mcintyre k pr prisons is a production of kansas public radio at the university of kansas yesterday days thank you