Votes For Women?!: The 1913 U.S. Senate Testimony

Young people today might find it hard to believe that it took a long time for women in America to gain the right to vote, but as we all know men have been voting for over 200 years, while women have just reached their 70th anniversary as voters. Producer/director Jocelyn Riley's latest entry in her multimedia Her Own Words series presents back-to-back speeches for and against women's suffrage by Belle Case La Follette, Progressive speaker and magazine columnist; and Kate Douglas Wiggin (author of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm). While voice-over narration provides the texts of the speeches, the visuals offer a fascinating array of memorabilia from the era, including political buttons, cartoons and banners. Wiggin's speech against women having the right to vote, while containing some elements of the Suzie Homemaker mindset, primarily focuses on the dirtiness of politics. She does not "question woman's ability to vote intelligently," arguing instead that women "do not need the ballot" in order to be effective, and shouldn't be involved in what is more or less a base and seedy enterprise (i.e. politics). La Follette, on the other hand, makes her case by arguing that while women have traditionally been seen as housekeepers, government is essentially "public housekeeping," and is therefore very much in woman's domain. An interesting dramatization of one of the key issues in our nation's development. Recommended. (Available from: Jocelyn Riley, P.O. Box 5264, Madison, WI 53705.)