Hello, Dolly!

ED: So today on the show, we’re going to look at the twists and turns of women in politics. We’ll visit a raucous parade for suffrage down Washington D.C.’s main avenue in 1913. We’ll also explore why millions of women still couldn’t vote after the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920. And we’ll look at how the first African-American woman to run for president paved the way for the next generation.

PETER: But first, let’s travel back to America’s founding, long before women could run for office or vote. Even so, the wives of elite politicians played a crucial role in politics. Here’s why. The fellows who founded the United States strongly believed they had to embody what they called republican virtue. That basically meant putting the interests of the Republic above self-interest. So no favors for friends or political supporters, no behind the scenes lobbying.

This was a radical idea in the 1770s. The way the founders saw it, if they didn’t act the part of proper republicans, their new form of government would fail. Historian Catherine Allgor says there was just one problem. The founding fathers had no role models.

CATHERINE ALLGOR: They had only been new Americans for about 15 minutes. They had been British colonist before that. And the only ways they could really understand the world were British. And the only vocabulary of power they have is aristocracy.

PETER: Yet they couldn’t be seen as doing anything even remotely aristocratic, which Allgor says often meant that they couldn’t do their jobs.

CATHERINE ALLGOR: And what ended up happening in Washington is that, as the official men of the government struggled to retain their pure republican virtue, the women of their families took over all of those dirty tasks of politicking that were borrowed from the monarchy.

PETER: But women are virtuous, I’ve been taught. Weren’t they virtuous in your period as well? Is there a difference between female virtue and this republican virtue you’re talking about?

CATHERINE ALLGOR: Yes, republican virtue is definitely about public ruling. And women, for their part, their virtue was in supporting men’s work. And I think that’s something important, too, to say about this period. That when we’re talking about women, quote, “being political” or “being politically active,” they’re not working for suffrage. They’re not working for equal rights. They are working for their husband’s politics, their family’s politics.

So here’s an example. The most hated monarchical practice is patronage. So remember, there is no job application process in the royal court. It was really who you knew and who could help you. And you can see why the founding fathers, at least in theory, thought this was just the worst, most representative practice of the old world and one that needed to be taken out root and branch. Unfortunately, as it turns out, patronage is something that budding democracies and baby republics need.

And a great example of that is John Adams, who in his quest to be the perfect republican, kept all of his predecessor’s cabinet. And they all turned against him like dogs.

PETER: Yeah, stupid.

CATHERINE ALLGOR: So we need patronage in the early republic. We need to make those connections to develop a ruling class, to connect the capital city to the hinterlands, to create political careers. And yes, the dirty work of patronage fell to women.

PETER: Now can we think of a nicer way to put that, Catherine? That is, women would be associated with a nurturing role, with affection, with warmth. Could they play the family card? Then that would seem like the natural thing for a good woman to do.

CATHERINE ALLGOR: Yes, so let’s characterize patronage not as dirty, but necessary for nation building, as it turned out to be. And the women of the early republic, they develop a language, a vernacular, of femininity in which to basically influence peddle. And if you’re not a careful reader of the sources, you might find a correspondence between two women, and they seem to be talking about health, love, family, illness, all of those personal things. But with a good read, you realize that somebody is asking for a job. And somebody is getting a job using this language of femininity.

PETER: So you broke the code, Catherine?

CATHERINE ALLGOR: I am the Alan Turing of women’s history, yes.

PETER: [LAUGHS]

CATHERINE ALLGOR: And nobody embodies that more than my favorite first lady, and I hope yours, Peter, Dolley Madison.

PETER: I wouldn’t argue about that. Give us an example of how this actually works, how Dolley played this game.

CATHERINE ALLGOR: Dolley is always a great example of the patronage machine, how it worked. She had a close friend from her Philadelphia days named Anthony Morris. And she was not only close to him, but close to his daughter Phoebe. And at some point, Anthony Morris, who is stuck out in Bolton, Pennsylvania, wants a government position. So he writes President Madison, who he knows through Dolley, a rather formal letter talking about wanting to take a position.

But then he writes Dolley. And he talks to Dolley about needing a change of scene. Why? Because his children need to get out of Bolton. And he talks about concerns for their health and also that they’re not meeting the right kind of people that they might marry. And she’s a mother and an old friend. And surely she understands that.

And this is a great letter, Peter, because it shows that, like many other men, Anthony Morris has learned the language. And Dolley replies. And she too talks about darling Phoebe and her desire to get Phoebe out into the world. And then a few months later, we find out that Anthony Morris has been appointed a special embassy to Spain. And so he’s suddenly with Phoebe on a boat going to Spain.

PETER: So it’s bringing those two worlds together, the domestic and the political, that’s really critical to the functioning of this politics.

CATHERINE ALLGOR: It’s politics of the heart. It’s important to note though, Dolley was without question a powerful political force in Washington. But she would have been horrified to be accused of being what they called petticoat politicians.

It’s a funny thing about the work of political women of this time. It only exists under cover. If you asked Dolley why Anthony Morris got this job, she would say, well he was very qualified. But didn’t he write to you? Oh, yes, but we’re just friends. I’m just concerned about his health.

So the politicking of women operated in a kind of culture of denial. And the women themselves denied it, even as they were quite obvious about what they were doing. But you have to understand that the power of women’s world lies in its unconsidered nature.

PETER: So, Catherine, you’ve brilliantly reconstructed this world of women’s political activity and influence. When and why did it go away?

CATHERINE ALLGOR: Women’s history is full of paradox. And it shows us that American history is not progressive. So the sort of heyday of this kind of parlor politicking, especially in Washington D.C., comes to an end in the late 1820s.

So around the time of Andrew Jackson’s presidency, that era, we call it the Rise of the Common Man, and it’s celebrated as a watershed of democracy. This is when more and more white men are given the chance to vote. And that’s seen in our minds as Americans as a very good thing.

But what that meant was that women would become increasingly excluded from the political process. So think about it. When the majority of people, men and women, couldn’t vote, there are lots of ways to be politically influential.

You could boycott. You could mob. You could petition. But as men then suddenly were getting the vote, all of these other ways are not nearly as effective. So if I’m a politically powerful woman in the 1790s, my correlate in the 1840s isn’t. And so pretty soon, women figured out that they would also need the vote in order to be politically active Americans.

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PETER: Catherine Allgor is the Director of Education at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. She’s the author of Parlor Politics, In Which the Ladies of Washington Helped Build a City and a Government. Earlier we heard from Sherry Smith, a historian at Southern Methodist University.

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So guys, Catherine Allgor’s parlor politicians were elite women, who had access to elite men. That wasn’t an opportunity open to most women. And particularly when the doors close of those parlors, where do they go and what do women do? How do they affect politics?

ED: Yeah, Peter, but not everybody had a parlor.

PETER: (LAUGHING) Yeah, right.

ED: And those women who didn’t, as well as some of those who did, decided to participate in politics in ways that didn’t go through their husbands at all. They started organizing, reform organizations, joining abolitionist societies, and so forth. So what’s amazing to me is how quickly we pivoted from this deferential kind of hierarchical model that Catherine talks about to that more participatory model.

PETER: Right, and that’s–

ED: How would you explain that?

PETER: –a pretty narrow sense of what politics entails. These are women who associate together to take the high ground and make changes in the world at large, from slavery, to temperance, to world peace.

ED: Yeah, they’re building, a lot of times, on the missionary impulses in their churches, which kind of validates women’s efforts to make that world better.

BRIAN: And that pattern continues throughout the late 19th century and the 20th century. In the early 20th century, it’s women providing social services because the state isn’t supposed to do that.

And by the 1960s, it’s women being the foot soldiers in large social movements like the civil rights movement, where, especially in the South, we have Jim Crow segregation. The state isn’t going to intervene, but these women do. And they do it in the tens of thousands.

PETER: So, Brian, would you say that organizing women are anticipating future legislation. This is deep politics, you might say, to set a new agenda, a more capacious agenda.

BRIAN: Absolutely. I think they’re saying politics, the formal political system, that doesn’t begin to deal with all of the issues that are really about power.

PETER: So women are excluded from politics early on, before women’s suffrage is finally recognized. But they’re also drawing attention to the things that are excluded from politics.

BRIAN: They’re also anticipating equal protection of the law as actually being carried out across the nation.

ED: And precisely because women are advancing the vision of what the state could be and what we might do for each other in this way, they run into opposition at every step of the way of the story.

PETER: And that opposition suggests that you need direct political power. You need to be in politics. So these things come together, the vision and the practice, making a new politics.

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