Hello, Fred. Welcome. So excited you're with me today. I'm sharing a conversation with Dr. Elizabeth Griffith,

who has written an incredible work called formidable, and it is about American women and the fight for equality.

If we want to move forward in history with open eyes, we have to learn from the past.

So let's start. I'm Sharon McMahon and welcome to the Sharon says so podcast.

I am so excited to be chatting today with Dr. Elizabeth Griffith. Thank you so much for being here.

It's a pleasure and how nice to be returning to the Midwest even if only on audio.

So I read with such interest your book called formidable and the subtitle is American women and the fight for equality.

And I think we have this idea that equality happened for American women when women gained the right to vote.

I think that's sort of the impression that many people have that, you know, like, hey, we can vote. Everybody's equal now.

And that was obviously not the case. And I would love to hear more about why you chose this topic.

It's an important topic. And because of all the hoopla about the 19th Amendment and it enfranchised 26 million white and black American women,

but it did not cover everybody. It did not protect those black women.

It was a federal rule that said that women could not be discriminated against on account of sex, but that did not mean that state laws could not discriminate and whether they were able to vote what barriers were put up before them.

A journalist said 10 years after suffrage passed that the 19th Amendment promised almost everything and delivered almost nothing.

There was such excitement over the possibility that women were going to vote. It's one of the reasons I chose the title because formidable is a word with many meetings.

It means something dramatic and possibly dreadful. And that's how the people who opposed women's suffrage felt about it.

That if suffrage passed, it would be a disaster.

And it also means a very hard task and getting suffrage, winning suffrage was an almost 100 year campaign and it barely won, even as it closed in on victory.

So it was a formidable fight. And the women who conducted it were brave and gutsy.

But then it's over. And what happens next? That was my question. Once they got the vote, what did women do? What causes did they support? Did they run for office? Did they vote?

How did they change America? Did they achieve equality? The answers to most of those might be no.

Peggy 18

...