Votes for Hawaiians

Sidedoor

Smithsonian Institution

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4.6 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 5 August 2020

⏱️ 34 minutes

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Summary

100 years ago this month, the 19th Amendment was ratified into the American Constitution. It’s widely remembered as the moment American women gained the right to vote, but history tells a more complex story. For millions of Indigenous Americans living in far-flung territories, the 19th Amendment afforded some rights – but fell well short of what was promised. So this time: how women’s suffrage came to Hawaiʻi – and what was taken from Hawaiians to get there.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Side Door, a podcast from the Smithsonian with support from PRX.
0:13.3	I'm Lizzy Peabody. In August 1920, the question of whether women should be allowed to vote in the United States
0:29.3	was a hot topic.
0:31.6	And Harry T. Byrne, a 24-year-old from a little town called Mouse Creek, Tennessee,
0:36.8	must have been sweating more than most. Not just because he spent that month sitting in
0:41.0	a wool suit in Tennessee's stuffy capital building, but because
0:44.9	he was a new member of a divided State House, whose vote could settle the fate of the 19th Amendment. And as the vote loomed,
0:54.0	Harry wrestled with the question at hand.
0:56.0	Do we really need women voting?
0:59.0	Today that question seems pretty uncontroversial,
1:02.0	but in 1920, many people thought that women Today that question seems pretty uncontroversial.
1:02.6	But in 1920, many people thought that women voting
1:05.5	was a ridiculous idea.
1:07.4	Here's Kate Clark LeMay, historian and curator
1:10.2	at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, who is an expert on women's suffrage.
1:14.8	So a lot of people thought that women just had soup for brains.
1:22.4	They thought women already had a job and it sure wasn't in the
1:25.6	ballot box. Their first and foremost responsibility and we're talking 17th
1:31.6	18th, 19th centuries was to bear children and raise the children.
1:38.6	One prominent biologist thought that the stress of voting could make women infertile.
1:45.2	He said it would set society back 1,000 years.
1:50.0	Others thought,
	...

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