WASHINGTON — Emma Gonzalez, meet Alice Paul and Lucretia Mott. Peaceful protest was their watchword.
The haunting silence Gonzalez observed here in her speech at the March for Our Lives was a Quaker thing to do. Mott and Paul were the greatest Quaker women of their generations: major figures in American history — not just American women's history for the month of March. I told tales of them at Swarthmore College in Philadelphia yesterday. Mott was a founder, Paul a graduate.
The national swath of young people galvanized against gun violence is taking a trail these two pioneered, in nonviolent resistance. Mott was famed for her voice in the public square against slavery and for women's rights. Paul was the spirited leader in the last phase of the woman suffrage movement, with skin in the game. Her ranks were ready to be jailed and force-fed.
This was a blueprint and harbinger of Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights marches 50 years later, winning the day with peaceful public persuasion. Authority can be conquered that way. Democracy can expand.
So these Quaker women were not sweet, meek and mild, trust me. They were forces to be reckoned with, who confronted the mightiest powers of their time. First, Mott spoke out against Southern slaveholders. Later, Paul challenged the president of the United States. The National Rifle Association, the gun lobby, is almost as rigid and rich as the "slave power" back in the day.
They are Gonzalez's mentors and ours, in revolution. The suffrage movement 100 years ago, led by Paul, practically invented marching on Washington to win the vote in 1920. Woodrow Wilson was the president they set their sights on, demonstrating day after day on Pennsylvania Avenue, outside his gates for seven years. How he hated that street theater, Wilson, who meant to make the world safe for democracy by entering World War I.
Who did these modern young ladies think they were? Go home, don't you have mending to do? (I'm paraphrasing.)
Paul had a brilliant insight: Going public puts the president in his proper place, on the defensive. Wilson, the political science professor, learned that lesson the hard way. Paul prevailed at last with the 19th Amendment for woman suffrage. She created the paradigm for the Women's March on Jan. 21, 2017, which signaled the start of something big.
With record-breaking marches rising in the Donald J. Trump presidency, I see history's circle closing, in kind of a rhyme. By knowing where we came from, the way open is clearer, going forward.
The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture is a splendid new resident of the National Mall, a bronze triumph.
It's time. Shouldn't women have a Smithsonian history house of our own? Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., is working on it. She says if it comes to a House floor vote, it will become reality. That's the rub: "if." It will not happen on Republican watch.
"How can we empower women if we do not recognize them?" Maloney said.
The government is making progress on other fronts. The Library of Congress just announced the public has free digital access to the Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton collections. These suffrage leaders were great friends and took the baton from the aging Mott, who inspired them.
The digitized documents, a lively trove of speeches and letters, plot the movement's points from Mott to Paul. "Individuals can access these digital versions anywhere or anytime they have Internet access," Janice E. Ruth, assistant chief of the manuscript division, noted. In their lifework, Stanton was the pen, Anthony the organizer.
Stanton and Anthony never lived to see the day women voted.
Sonya Michel, a noted historian, says, "American women need a museum of their own so that the full arc of their history can be laid out in detail."
We were there, from the earliest days, but somehow our stories got lost in the narrative. Not by accident. Emma and her friends need to know Lucretia and Alice on a first-name basis. To conquer the future, we must claim the unknown frontier of the past.
To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit Creators.com.
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