The feminist civics lesson of 19: The Musical

ABSTRACT

This essay examines 19: The Musical—a memorial project that marks the suffrage centennial. The author employs an intersectional lens to examine the arguments this memorialization makes about a suffrage past as well as a feminist present and future. This intersectional emphasis is especially important given the prevalent present-day assumption of the suffrage movement as an entirely white women's endeavor—one that especially forgets the racism and exclusivity that riddled the suffrage movement.

KEYWORDS:

• Suffrage
• public memory
• intersectionality
• feminist rhetoric

Notes

1 John Stoltenberg, “In ‘19: The Musical,’ Women Sing and Dance Their Way to Suffrage,” D.C. Metro Theater Arts, November 29, 2019, https://dcmetrotheaterarts.com/2019/11/29/in-19-the-musical-women-sing-and-dance-their-way-to-suffrage/.

2 “About,” 19: The Musical, accessed May 1, 2020, https://www.19themusical.com.

3 Selected songs from 19: The Musical are available on Vimeo and Spotify. A recording from a workshop of the musical performed at the National Archives was streamed live on September 18, 2019 and is archived on YouTube. Quotations from the musical within this essay are culled from the YouTube recording: “19: The Musical,” US National Archives, September 18, 2019, YouTube Video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3sdAzf02O8.

4 Stoltenberg, “In ‘19: The Musical,’ Women Sing and Dance Their Way to Suffrage.”

5 Mikaela Lefrak, “New Musical About Suffrage Aims to be the ‘Hamilton’ of Women's History,” National Public Radio, November 21, 2019, https://www.npr.org/local/305/2019/11/21/781621478/new-musical-about-suffrage-aims-to-be-hamilton-of-women-s-history.

6 Due to the social distancing required by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, many centennial memorializations have been postponed; others have remediated their exhibits to virtual formats such as the National Portrait Gallery's “Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence,” the Library of Congress's “We Shall Not Be Denied: Women's Fight for the Vote,” and the Alice Paul Institute's “For Democracy: Celebrating 100 Years of the 19th Amendment.” Other cultural institutions already offered memorializations in digital formats such as “On the Road to Ratification: California and the Struggle for Women's Suffrage” (California State Library, June 5, 2020, https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/on-the-road-to-ratification-california-state-archives/dgIy74lMkNykIA?hl=en), and “Taking Center Stage: Women's Suffrage in Grand Rapids and Michigan” (Greater Grand Rapids Michigan Women's Council, June 5, 2020, https://www.ggrwhc.org/suffrage-grand-rapids/).

7 Shachar Peled, “Where Are the Women? New Efforts to Give Them Just Due on Monuments, Street Names,” CNN, March 8, 2017, https://www.cnn.com/2017/03/08/us/womens-monument-project-trnd/index.html.

8 Tasha Dubriwny and Kristan Poirot, “Gender and Public Memory,” Southern Communication Journal 82, no. 4 (2018): 199, https://doi.org/10.1080/1041794X.2017.1332448.

9 Dubriwny and Poirot, “Gender and Public Memory,” 200.

10 See Ann D. Gordon, “How to Celebrate a Complicated Win for Women,” New York Times, August 28, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/27/opinion/how-to-celebrate-a-complicated-win-for-women.html; Brent Staples, “A Whitewashed Monument to Women's Suffrage,” New York Times, May 14, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/opinion/central-park-suffrage-monument-racism.html.

11 See Elaine Godfrey and Russell Berman, “The Real Turning Point for Women's Political Power,” The Atlantic, July 2, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/07/how-women-remade-american-government-after-suffrage/591940/; Adrienne LaFrance, “The ‘Undesirable Militants’ Behind the Nineteenth Amendment,” The Atlantic, June 4, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/06/most-dangerous-women-american-politics/590959/.

12 See Susan Ware, “It's Time to Return Black Women to the Center of the History of Women's Suffrage,” Washington Post, April 23, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/04/23/its-time-return-black-women-center-history-womens-suffrage/; Martha S. Jones, “How New York's New Monument Whitewashes the Women's Rights Movement,” Washington Post, March 22, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/03/22/how-new-yorks-new-monument-whitewashes-womens-rights-movement/.

13 See Marilyn La Jeunesse, “The 19th Amendment Only Really Helped White Women,” Teen Vogue, August 16, 2019, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/19th-amendment-anniversary-benefited-white-women.

14 For information on the Turning Point Suffragist Memorial, see https://suffragistmemorial.org; for information on the Women's Rights Pioneers monument, see https://monumentalwomen.org.

15 The float was sponsored by the non-profit organization Pasadena Celebrates 2020. See Donna Balancia, “Pasadena Commemorates Anniversary of Women's Rights to Vote and the Girls Who Helped,” Pasadena Now, January 2, 2020, https://www.pasadenanow.com/main/pasadena-2020-commemorates-the-anniversary-of-the-womens-right-to-vote-and-the-girls-who-helped/.

16 See, for example, the debate over the Women's Rights Pioneers monument in Central Park, New York: Gordon, “How to Celebrate;” Jones, “How New York's New Monument”; Staples, “A Whitewashed Monument to Women's Suffrage.”

17 Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson, and Brian Ott, “Introduction: Rhetoric/Memory/Place,” in Places of Public Memory, ed. Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson, and Brian Ott (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010): 6.

18 Cindy Griffin and Karma Chávez, “Introduction: Standing at the Intersections of Feminisms, Intersectionality, and Communication Studies,” in Standing at the Intersections of Feminisms, Intersectionality, and Communication Studies, ed. Karma Chávez and Cindy Griffin (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012): 12, 2.

19 Griffin and Chávez, “Introduction,” 8.

20 Aimee Carillo Rowe, "Be Longing: Toward a Feminist Politics of Relation," NWSA Journal 17, no. 1 (2005): 27, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4317124.

21 Carillo Rowe, “Be Longing,” 28.

22 Dubriwny and Poirot, “Gender and Public Memory,” 200.

23 This concern is evident in the controversy over the statue to commemorate the suffrage centennial in Central Park. Initially, the plans were for the monument to feature only Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Public figures such as New York Times columnist Brent Staples were outraged, arguing that the statue not only “ignores the important contributions of black women,” but also ignores the fact that Stanton and Anthony “represented a classist and often racist faction of the movement that declined to accept African Americans as equals.” Given Staples and many others’ responses to the statue, the figure of Sojourner Truth was added to the monument, which is now titled the “Women's Rights Pioneers Monument.”

24 Quoted in Virginia Kase and Chris Carson, “Facing Hard Truths about the League's Origin,” League of Women Voters Blog, August 8, 2018, https://www.lwv.org/blog/facing-hard-truths-about-leagues-origin.

25 For scholarship and public commentary that engages the racism of the suffrage movement, see Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage, 1983); Catherine H. Palczewski, “The 1919 Prison Special: Constituting White Women's Citizenship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 102, no. 2 (2016): 107–32, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00335630.2016.1154185; Staples, “A Whitewashed Monument to Women's Suffrage”; Leslie J. Harris, "Rhetorical Mobilities and the City: The White Slavery Controversy and Racialized Protection of Women in the US," Quarterly Journal of Speech 104, no. 1 (2018): 22–46, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00335630.2017.1401221.

26 19: The Musical, 21:09.

27 19: The Musical, 21:16.

28 19: The Musical, 21:36.

29 19: The Musical, 22:48.

30 19: The Musical, 24:20.

31 Urszula Maria Pruchniewska, “‘A Crash Course in Herstory’: Remembering the Women's Movement in MAKERS: Women who Make America,” Southern Communication Journal 82, no. 4 (2017): 230, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1041794X.2017.1332089.

32 Actors do change their shirts in the second act. Their costumes follow same minimalist idea, but now the t-shirts offer messages like “Reclaiming My Time,” “She Who Dares,” and “Feminist”; suffragist dancers and singers wear tunics with images of newspaper articles from the suffrage movement on them.

33 19: The Musical, 23:37.

34 19: The Musical, 23:58.

35 Lefrak, “New Musical About Suffrage.”

36 Quoted in Lyra D. Monteiro, “Race-Conscious Casting and the Erasure of the Black Past in Hamilton,” in Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America's Past, ed. Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018), 61.

37 Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter, “Introduction: History is Happening in Manhattan,” in Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America's Past, ed. Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018), 11.

38 Monteiro, “Race-Conscious Casting,” 62.

39 Quoted in Rheta Childe Dorr, Susan B. Anthony: The Woman Who Changed the Mind of a Nation (New York: F.A. Stokes, 1928), 183.

40 For an analysis of Iron Jawed Angels, see Kristy Maddux, “Winning the Right to Vote in 2004: Iron Jawed Angels and the Retrospective Framing of Feminism,” Feminist Media Studies 9, no. 1 (2009): 73–94, https://doi.org/10.1080/14680770802619516.

41 19: The Musical, 33:20.

42 19: The Musical, 33:47.

43 19: The Musical, 34:38.

44 Carillo Rowe, “Be Longing,” 19.

45 Carillo Rowe, “Be Longing,” 23.

46 19: The Musical, 35:53.

47 19: The Musical, 37:44.

48 19: The Musical, 37:58.

49 19: The Musical, 38:10.

50 19: The Musical, 38:20.

51 “Suffragette’s Racial Remark Haunts College,” New York Times, May 6, 1996, https://www.nytimes.com/1996/05/05/us/suffragette-s-racial-remark-haunts-college.html.

52 See Kevin Amidon, “Carrie Chapman Catt and the Evolutionary Politics of Sex and Race, 1885–1940,” Journal of the History of Ideas 68, no. 2 (2007): 305–28, https://www.jstor.org/stable/30136020; “Suffragette's Racial Remark Haunts College,” New York Times, May 5, 1996, 30, Proquest, https://search.proquest.com/docview/109533895?accountid=14696; Robbie Sequeira, “Catt Center Continues Efforts to Clear Namesake of Racism Allegations,” Ames Tribune, July 27, 2019, https://www.amestrib.com/news/20190727/catt-center-continues-efforts-to-clear-namesake-of-racism-allegation; Heather Wiese, “Controversy Surrounds Building's Name,” Iowa State Daily, May 6, 1996, https://www.iowastatedaily.com/gsb/controversy-surrounds-buildings-name/article_51b19593-b663-50f6-a7a3-bc4ecfd83d07.html.

53 19: The Musical, 41:02.

54 19: The Musical, 41:17.

55 19: The Musical, 41:18.

56 19: The Musical, 40:39.

57 19: The Musical, 42:52.

58 Adrienne Rich, "Notes Towards a Politics of Location," in Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills (Routledge, 2003), 213.

59 Staples, “A Whitewashed Monument to Women's Suffrage.”

60 Carillo Rowe, “Be Longing,” 26.