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PR for the Founding Mothers(Vol. III, No. 2/3 -- Fall/Winter 1999/2000)Jay Benjamin writes: "Unbelievable! How could he never have heard of her?" This was my reaction when Ken Burns revealed, "I'm a film maker, but I'm also pretty well-versed in American history, and I had never heard of Elizabeth Cady Stanton." He said this in the background video shown after part one of his recent PBS documentary Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Surely a graduate of Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and an acclaimed maker of films about the Civil War, Lewis and Clark, the Shakers, Thomas Jefferson, Frank Lloyd Wright, and other Americana, must have heard of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Even I, retired male software engineer, knew as a teenager that Stanton was a nineteenth century activist for women's rights, particularly the right to vote. Why, she was on a United States postage stamp, along with Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony, wasn't she? I dug out the stamp album from my youth, and found the remembered 1948 "Progress of Women" stamp with images of three women: Stanton, Mott, and Carrie C. Catt. Carrie C. Catt? Who the heck is that? And where was Susan B. Anthony? Turns out Anthony had her own stamp in 1936, a three-cent "Suffrage for Women" issue. What I knew and when I knew it were muddier. Maybe growing up in the Finger Lakes region of New York State and taking a state social studies class in junior high gave me a leg up on Ken Burns. Seneca Falls, site of the first women's rights convention in this country in 1848, is between the northern ends of the two longest Finger Lakes, Seneca and Cayuga, and not far from my southern tier stomping grounds. Rochester, home of Susan B. Anthony, is also nearby. But none of our family outings included Seneca Falls or Rochester. While I was growing up, there was no Women's Rights National Historic Park and no National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls. The Susan B. Anthony house in Rochester was not open to the public. Any mention of the nineteenth century women's rights movement in history class in the late 1950s was but "scant mention." Maybe high school American history in the early sixties taught me about Stanton and Anthony, and their roles in eventual passage of the nineteenth amendment in 1920 after their deaths. But it didn't teach me how broad the women's rights movement was after the Seneca Falls convention, fighting not only for women's right to vote, but for their rights to property and wages, to attend colleges, to enter professions, to become ministers, to be equal partners in marriage, to be granted guardianship of children after divorce, and, more generally, to be granted "the equal station to which they are entitled." These last words are from the Declaration of Sentiments, patterned after the Declaration of Independence, written largely by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and adopted at the 1848 convention. Even after graduating from college in 1967, I had never seen the Declaration of Sentiments. Nor had I learned about the decades-long symbiosis of Stanton, the philosopher and strategist, and Susan B. Anthony, the crusader and tactician; the intertwining of their efforts with the abolition and temperance movements; and their angry reaction when the fifteenth amendment gave the vote to black men, but not also to women. Not for Ourselves Alone revealed this and more, and left me wanting to know even more. Whether Ken Burns really never heard of Elizabeth Cady Stanton before Paul Barnes, editor of his Civil War series, told him about her, no longer matters. Realizing he knew next to nothing about, in his words, "the most important woman in American history," Ken Burns did something about it. Not for Ourselves Alone deepens our understanding of the struggle to fulfill the promise of American ideals, and entices us to dig deeper. We need to be enticed. According to a 1999 poll commissioned by General Motors, corporate underwriter for Ken Burns' film projects, ninety-three percent of Americans could not identify Elizabeth Cady Stanton as a women's rights activist, and ninety-three percent could not identify the decade the women's rights movement began. Publicity provided via the Burns film will help remedy this widespread ignorance, and easy access to related information via the World Wide Web should help, too. But arousing curiosity and making it easy
to satisfy that curiosity
are not enough, I fear. Something else must
be overcome -- the attitude
that influenced the editor of the TIME magazine
television section (November
8, 1999 article) to devote two full pages and part of a third
to buxom
female action stars, with color photos emphasizing
the "buxom" aspect,
but only two-thirds of a page
to
Not
for Ourselves Alone and another PBS documentary on New York City
by
Ken Burns' brother. This same attitude was
at work on the CNN Larry
King Live segment (June 1, 1999) when two of the panelists
discussing
Hillary Clinton's imminent run for Senator
from New York offered negative
comments on her anatomy, which won them a
P.U.-litzer
prize from Norman Solomon for one of the stinkiest
media performances
of 1999. The seven Rochester women who fought
for their right
to go shirtless and the Australian women's Olympic soccer
team members
who shed their clothes for a calendar intended
to bring more attention
to women's soccer in that country were manipulated
by this attitude. Maybe
the "Founding Mothers" will be as well known
as the "Founding Fathers"
once attitudes have changed enough that we
no longer encounter such examples.
For the Curious
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