Celebrating Women’s History Month: Trailblazers Who Paved the Way for the Women of Today

Episode Notes

Transcript

Mary Sarah Bilder:

I think these women like Eliza Harriet, like Charlotte Rawlins, like so many other women, continue to exist today every time women stand up and they say something, they make sure other people hear them. They think strategically, how can I get someone like George Washington to show up? So 140 newspapers will actually cover this happening. And I think in some ways it’s young women where we see this increasingly important.

Announcer:

Welcome to the award-winning podcast, Lawyer 2 Lawyer with J. Craig Williams, bringing you the latest legal news and observations with the leading experts in the legal profession. You’re listening to Legal Talk Network.

J. Craig Williams:

Welcome to Lawyer 2 Lawyer on the Legal Talk Network. I’m Craig Williams coming to you from sunny Southern California. March is Women’s History Month where we pay tribute to all the women who have made a difference and shaped our political landscape. Some of them include Eliza Harriet, Susan B. Anthony, So Journer Truth, Beva Lockwood, Alice Paul, and obviously Ruth Bader Ginsburg. They’ve made a big difference and continue to inspire the women of today. Well, today on Lawyer 2 Lawyer, we will celebrate Women’s History Month by discussing trailblazing women throughout history who paved the way, the barriers they faced, and what women across the nation can do to fight for their rights today. Without further ado, we’re joined by Mary Sarah Bilder. She’s historian and the founder’s professor of Law at Boston College Law School. Mary’s most recent book is The Female Genius, Eliza Harriet and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution.

She’s currently working on a constitutional biography of English historian Cathryn Nakale. Welcome to the show, Mary.

Mary Sarah Bilder:

Thanks so much for having me, Craig.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, Mary, tell us about Eliza Harriet. Who is she?

Mary Sarah Bilder:

Oh, she’s such a wonderful person and I was delighted to learn about her. She was the first female public lecturer in the United States, and she gave a lecture series in the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia when the delegates were writing the US Constitution, and George Washington attended her lectures. So she’s a pretty incredible person. She was also a school teacher and very influential.

J. Craig Williams:

What put her into the position of being such a prominent lecturer in that time?

Mary Sarah Bilder:

Yeah, she’s amazing. I came across her when I wrote a book on James Madison’s notes of the convention, and I was reading various notes and diaries from people in the summer of 1787. And George Washington kept a diary. And unlike other delegates who kept diaries of what happened inside Independence Hall, George Washington kept a diary of what he did that summer, who he saw, who he hung out with, what shows he went to. He spent a lot of time having tea, dinner with women. And one of the things that he wrote in that diary was that he went to hear a lady lecture, and he thought she was tolerable. When I ran into that, I thought, “What’s he doing hearing a lady lecture? Is that an unusual thing? Did other women lecture? I didn’t know very much about it. ” And I recall that tolerable was what Mr. Darcy says to Eliza Bennett in pride and prejudice.

And when I looked it up, it turned out that it was a not bad thing to call somebody, tolerable, like acceptable. So I started trying to figure out who she was and learned a lot about her. And she was a British woman originally and eventually comes to the United States.

J. Craig Williams:

So Eliza Harriet is a prominent individual who George Washington listened to. What was it that caused George Washington to want to go and listen to her in the first place?

Mary Sarah Bilder:

One of the things that I found very interesting about George Washington is that he was modern in some respects. He was interested in attending things with women. He loved going to the theater. He loved going to hear music. He was interested in various agricultural inventions. And he decided to go with Robert Morris’s wife who he was staying with and some other ladies to go listen to this prominent lady lecture, this woman. And Eliza Harriet was the first woman to give a public lecture in the United States. She gave the lecture in a large lecture hall in Philadelphia where all the famous male lecturers had given her lecture. She advertised extensively in the newspaper. She wanted George Washington to come. And in the newspaper, she actually delayed her lecture one day probably to make sure that he would be in attendance. So she knows in some ways that when he arrives at her lecture, he will bring the kind of publicity that surrounded Washington as the most famous American.

J. Craig Williams:

So what was it that she communicated to Washington in her lecture?

Mary Sarah Bilder:

Yeah. So one of the things that Eliza Harriet stood for is the concept of female genius. Eliza Harriet had been born in 1749 in Lisbon, and she was the daughter of a person who actually worked in the American colonies. Her uncles had been governors of New York and New Jersey, and she grew up in England in a moment when many upper class British women were interested in rethinking about the role that women had in political participation. And she marries a young Irish Catholic law student who’s studying in London. And they embody a kind of liberal intellectual political excitement that existed in the 1760s and 1770s on both sides of the Atlantic. What they all were part of was a world that was beginning to think about whether monarchy made sense and what it would look like if more people could participate in government. Eliza Harriet and John seemed to be part of this political culture, and it’s a political culture that in some ways gives rise to the American Revolution and to a lot of other interesting kind of thought.

And the piece that Eliza Harriet seems to find particularly interesting is the part of that political culture that began to think about what should be the role of women. Should women be able to be educated? Should they be able to participate in politics? And this political culture in the 1760s, 1770s, and into the 1780s is really quite extraordinary. I think we look back in time and we think we must be the only people who ever thought women could participate or women were smart or something like that. But in the 1760s, 1770s and 1780s, across the Atlantic, groups of people are beginning to think about maybe a larger group of people should be able to participate in government. In England, very few people participated in government and most people weren’t allowed to elect people. And that was true also in the American colonies. Most of the American colonies had property requirements in order to vote.

So everybody didn’t participate. And in this period, people began to think it would be better if more people participated in government. They begin to move towards ideas about democracy.

J. Craig Williams:

What was it about women that made that springboard from the property owners and the culture that they were trying to change into this enlightenment era?

Mary Sarah Bilder:

Yeah. I think for women, one of the things that becomes very frustrating in this space, and Eliza Harriet’s one of a group of women thinking about this, is that legally women’s position is one of dependents. As daughters, they’re dependent on fathers because there’s very little opportunities to make money. Now, lots of women are working as laborers or on farms, but if you were of the social class where you watched men go out and have a job or participate in politics, your life was very constrained and there wasn’t a lot of opportunities to make money. Women actually try. There’s lots of women printers in this period. Women begin to write books because that’s the profits from the book. The copyright is something that they can keep themselves. But when women married, they lost all their legal rights. And so women were covered by a set of doctrines called coveture.

And that meant that as a married woman, you lost your legal identity. You couldn’t sue anyone in your name, you couldn’t vote, you couldn’t own real property, you couldn’t control your property. In fact, you couldn’t even refuse to have sex with your husband. And this was a world that did not understand that you could be raped by your husband. It basically understood that when you were married, you lost your identity. You were completely subordinate. And so for a lot of women of this, particularly this sort of intellectual social class, the ideas that people like the revolutionaries in Ireland, constitutional reformers in England, Americans who are beginning to get unhappy with monarchy, the way that they’re thinking about dependence is bad. People ought to have liberty, people ought to have equality. That feels to them like in some ways it describes their own experience as married women.

Why don’t they have equality? Why don’t they own property? Why can’t they participate in government? And so in this period, what we begin to see is women taking small steps in different ways to challenge that. One important thing they begin to challenge is the idea that women were incapable of education, that there was no point in educating them. And that’s this term female genius, which is a term used at the time period. They begin to say women have genius. And what they mean by genius isn’t particularly special. Genius in this period means capacity. And so they’re really arguing that women have capacity. They have the capacity to be educated like men. They have the capacity to participate like men. One of the most amazing things I found in doing my research is that in the 1770s and 1780s, there were women debating societies in London.

There were actually a number of them. And they were places where lots and lots of women get together. There’s actually pictures of them in the newspaper with hundreds of women, and they debate all sorts of topics. And some of the topics they debate include whether women should be able to have political representation to vote and to serve in political offices. So in the same moment that people are beginning to think, why should we be subjects of a monarch? Why shouldn’t we as Americans begin to get a vote in the United States, the future United States? Within England and in Ireland and in other places, women are beginning to think, well, why shouldn’t we also be able to be educated? Why shouldn’t we be able to participate in politics? Why shouldn’t we be able to serve in elected office? And it’s really that movement that Eliza Harriet O’Connor represents when she first comes to the United States.

J. Craig Williams:

What is it that Eliza influenced in the Constitution?

Mary Sarah Bilder:

Well, one of the things that she did in the summer of 1787 was she gave these lectures and she gave lectures where she talked about Shakespeare and Milton, and she talked about great poets and political writers of philosophy. And she gave Damosthonies Oration on the Crown as a speech, which was a thing that male political young men looking for politics often gave to practice. And she represented this idea that women could have the capacity to participate in the political state. After her lectures, which George Washington attended, Eliza Harriet writes her own copy for the newspaper, and she basically argues that her example shows that women will desert the Toilet and Solan. Those were the two places where women tended to be private, quasi-private homes for the college and the forum. So she predicts by speaking in public, by showing that women have capacity, by showing that they can give political speeches and talk the way men can.

They will be able to participate in college in higher education and in the forum, the political forum, participate in politics. One of the things that I think her example makes clear is that this is a moment where it wasn’t yet clear that women should be excluded from constitutional politics, from voting, from elections. They hadn’t been explicitly excluded prior to the late 18th century. Of course, women had been queens. There was no sense that they couldn’t participate in politics. And during the 1770s and 1780s, some women begin to think they might be able to participate in politics. And what’s interesting about the 1787 Constitution is that in the drafting, there were some gestures at gendered language. And so for example, the draft of the fugitive slave clause, the clause that will enforce the right of enslavers to bring escaped people back into slavery, that language as drafted originally used both he and she pronouns.

And you can imagine how the person who proposed that language, who was an enslaver, who enslaved a large number of people, imagined in his own mind, women, enslaved women escaping from him. And it’s the only she in all the hundreds of drafting pages that we have where we see actually a woman being imagined, but imagined in the role of an escaped slave. Congress was originally referred to as two bodies of men. And so in some ways there was gendered language in the drafting. In the state constitutions, most state constitutions early on didn’t describe who could participate in voting. They just used the neutral generic term he, which was understood to apply to both men and women. And what’s interesting is in the drafting of the Constitution in that summer, although it was possible to have imagined writing a Constitution that would have excluded women, the text of the Constitution doesn’t end up excluding women.

The text in 1787 of the Constitution describes everybody who can participate in politics as a person, and it uses the generic pronoun he. And we know this because the clauses of the Constitution that govern the ability to bring somebody back who commits a crime that apply to women today, use that same language person and he. So the president is a person, the representatives are person, the senators are person. And what that means is that the Constitution was written open to the possibility that women could participate in politics. The Federal Constitution didn’t describe itself as a constitution of exclusion. That will happen. Constitutional documents will become exclusionary, but it didn’t happen in the summer of 1787. And that’s interesting and Eliza Harriet and her role in being an example of a woman who was giving a public speech, who was political, who George Washington thought was tolerable, who was hanging out and communicating with Benjamin Franklin’s daughter, that kind of image of a woman with capacity may have been a reason why the delegates did not explicitly exclude women from constitutional politics.

J. Craig Williams:

At this time, let’s take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsors. We’ll be right back. And welcome back to Lawyer 2 Lawyer. I’m joined by Mary Sarah Bilter. She’s historian and the founder’s professor of Law at Boston College Law School. This is not the first time in history that women have taken on such roles. And you see this kind of repeating over and over again in parts of history. Why is it that this is so special and why has it failed so many times?

Mary Sarah Bilder:

Yeah. I mean, I think one thing that’s really interesting and important, and there’s been a lot of great work done on this. The Museum of the American Revolution did a wonderful exhibit for the centennial of the 19th Amendment, constitutionalizing women’s vote, and they called it when women lost the vote, because we tend to think of the history of this country as one where women never had the vote and then they gained it. But we actually know in this early period, it wasn’t clear that women shouldn’t get the vote. So very importantly, in New Jersey, women voted between 1776 in theory and into the early 19th century to 1811. And we have voting roles, some people of color voted, women were allowed to participate in town meetings in Massachusetts, women voted from 1759 to 1811. So there’s this period of time where it’s just not clear that you should exclude women from the political state and what constitutions, written constitutions turn out to be very good at is beginning to exclude people.

And so women become excluded, people of color become excluded in the early 19th century, in part as voting expands to allow men without property to vote. And so as constitutions begin to allow all white men to vote, they begin to be written in ways that exclude women and people of color. And many years later after the Civil War and the 19th Amendment, that reverses again, and we begin to go back to a world where constitutions again permit a larger group of people to participate.

J. Craig Williams:

What lessons should women today take from Eliza?

Mary Sarah Bilder:

For me, I don’t really like talking aloud and I get nervous about it. And reading about her really made me understand how important it is to be an example. One of the things that she writes in the newspaper in explaining how important women’s education is, in explaining how important giving her lecture is, is she says that the exertions of a female are basically the efforts of a woman should be considered or understood as presenting an example to be imitated and improved on by others. And she sees herself, not as a perfect example, but as a sense of if she stands up there and does this, if she gives a lecture, if George Washington and the other delegates come, if she starts a school that looks just like a male school, that’s teaching all the same subjects that has the same kinds of exams, she might not be perfect, but she will inspire some other young woman to come along and do the same thing.

And we see that very much in the history of women’s activism in enormous number of early women, both white and black women in the 19th century into the 20th century were teachers and lawyers. And they took professions where you were an example and where you got used to speaking in public and they participated in those. And they were many of the activists for the vote and for other kinds of rights, women’s rights to own their own property, women’s rights to participate in politics come from people who have these kinds of roles as educators and lawyers. And so for me, I think one of the things that it really has emphasized is the enormous importance of being willing as a woman to stand up and say something, to go out and advocate for legal rights, to serve as a lawyer, to serve as a teacher.

J. Craig Williams:

If you were to bring Eliza to present day, what would she see as the major differences between now and her time in terms of what she was advocating for? I

Mary Sarah Bilder:

Think she would be so happy that there are women in public offices. I think she’d be enormously excited by seeing women in governor roles, in local offices. I think she would be devastated at the fact that we still haven’t had a woman president. I think she’d be sad that there are people today who think that women shouldn’t have the right to vote as married women, that we should return to that world. I think she’d be sad that being a woman is somehow part of a conversation about whether you should be an acceptable candidate. She really believed that women had equal capacity. She thought of herself as an example of that. And I think she’d be disappointed that we’re still debating that question, whether just because someone’s a woman, whether or not that relates to their capacity to do a political office.

J. Craig Williams:

There are a lot of arguments today being made that women have gone back in time in terms of their rights. Where do you think Elisa and her salon would come out and say, “Here’s how we push that forward again,” if in fact we’ve gone backwards.

Mary Sarah Bilder:

Yeah, great question. I mean, I think she would think there’d been amazing improvements and she didn’t get all women to think the way she did. So she’d understand there was an enormous diversity of sentiments. She herself went to the South and was most successful in places where most of the labor was enslaved labor. And we don’t know how she felt about the critical question of slavery. She ended up being very successful in South Carolina as a white woman. And that’s a piece that we have to sort of not turn her into a great hero about. She represents one person in a very complicated world, but I do think that she and others would be happy to see the great success that women had with respect to education. I think they would be disappointed that there weren’t more women in public spaces, in political spaces, and that more women in particularly prestigious offices weren’t able to just be treated like people who had good opinions, but were faced being treated certain ways because they were women.

J. Craig Williams:

Who are the Eliza Harriets of today?

Mary Sarah Bilder:

Honestly, one of the things that I think about when I think about her is she had her young female students give public examinations, which sounds super scary and I wouldn’t want to do it, but the idea was that women would stand up in public. Her young students would stand up in public and they would speak. And this is a very important activity that young men do because it allows you to be a minister, a politician, a lawyer speaking in public is very important. And so in an interesting way, every time I see young women speak, get up and give speeches, talk at rallies, present something at their schools, I think in some ways that’s what Eliza Harriet would care the most about. I end the book with a woman named Charlotte Rawling who was in South Carolina after the Civil War. And she was a black woman who had been educated much like Eliza Harriet in a kind of liberal arts education.

And in 1869, the South Carolina legislature thinks about giving women the vote. This is a post-Civil War legislature with a number of Black representatives. And they ask if anyone will come and give a speech arguing for women to vote. And Charlotte Rawlins shows up in 1869. She’s the only person who does, and she gives a speech arguing for why women, black women, white women should be given the right to vote. And then she makes sure that speech gets published and it exists today in a few copies, her four-page speech. And the New York Times even noticed her speaking. The New York Times wrote about it, but mocked her speech and her argument that women should have a vote. But I think these women like Eliza Harriet, like Charlotte Rawlins, like so many other women, continue to exist today every time women stand up and they say something, they make sure other people hear them, they think strategically, “How can I get someone like George Washington to show up?” So 140 newspapers will actually cover this happening.

And I think in some ways it’s young women where we see this increasingly important.

J. Craig Williams:

Let’s take another quick break to hear a word from our sponsors. We will be right back. And welcome back to Lawyer 2 Lawyer. I’m back with Mary Sarah Builder, historian and the founder’s professor at Boston College Law School. Many men today are seemingly stuck in the 1700s and still of the mindset that they should have control over women like you expressed earlier. Drawing on what Eliza and her compadres would say at the time, what are the women of today and the leaders that you’ve just identified? What’s the response to that? How do you deal with that kind of a man?

Mary Sarah Bilder:

Oh, such an interesting question. I think one of the things that Eliza Harriet did, and this isn’t the only choice, lots of people have different choices, but she really tried to show an example. She really put herself out there as, “I’m going to do this job. I’m going to stand up and give a speech.” She didn’t give a speech just in Philadelphia. She gave lectures elsewhere. She made sure lots of people heard about her speeches. She worked really hard to provide a positive model of that and to educate other people to create a future generation. I think that providing a positive example is incredibly important. I’m not sure you can always argue people into changing their minds, but you can sometimes persuade people. And so Washington is a great example. Washington was not super liberal. He was not a person who was a proto feminist or anything like that.

But after he hears Eliza Harriet, he calls her tolerable. He becomes very good friends with a woman named Eliza Powell. It’s Eliza Powell who’s a woman in Philadelphia who will persuade Washington not to step down in 1792. We believe that Eliza Powell is very important to Washington in that regard. It’s Eliza Powell who will ask Benjamin Franklin at the end of the convention, “What kind of a government have you given us?” And it’s to her that Franklin says, “A Republic, if you can keep it, ” and her name’s usually forgotten in that regard. All of these women worked hard to be examples. And Washington, when he goes back to Mount Vernon, he ran a small school there, sort of oversaw it, and he agrees to let women into the school. Now, not equal basis. He says, one woman for every four young boys, one girl for every boy, for boy, so one to four.

But nonetheless, he changes his mind a little bit by seeing Eliza Harriet speech. And I think that’s a small thing to have hope about.

J. Craig Williams:

As we wrap up, I want to acknowledge you as an example in that vein. And tell us about your experience with Amistad.

Mary Sarah Bilder:

Oh, with Amistad. I was a very young professor and I got to be a consultant for Steven Spielberg on the movie Amistad. Most of what I did was read the script and memos, write memos on various legal matters. And one of the things that was very interesting about that was what Steven Spielberg wanted to imagine courtrooms were like. So Steven Spielberg, for example, the set originally said women should be in the jury box and there are no women in the jury box in the 19th century. And so I sadly had to say, “You can’t have women in the jury.” He said, “Oh, that’s supposed to be who’s in the scene.” I said, “Well, they can’t be in the jury because women don’t serve in the jury.” In fact, women in Massachusetts don’t serve on juries until the 1950s. He wanted to have the judges wear wigs.

And so I sadly had to say, “American judges don’t wear wigs. That looks like a monarchy and American judges can’t have that. ” And then Steven Spielberg said, “Well, how about a big mace? Maybe they can have a mace.” And I said, “No, they can’t have a mace either.” And he said, I said, “Well, they’re not going to look very important up there without a wig and a mace.” And I sort of was like, “That’s not my problem. That’s how judges are. ” But it was a great experience and I came away very impressed with his commitment to visual accuracy, even if the script itself took some liberties, shall we say.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, all scripts take some liberties, I think. It’s well

Mary Sarah Bilder:

Booked

J. Craig Williams:

Too. So there. Well, let’s wrap up and get your final thoughts as well as tell us about your new book about Kathryn McCauley.

Mary Sarah Bilder:

Yeah. I’m working on a new project on Kathryn McCauley. Most people have never heard of her, but if you Google her, she was incredibly famous in the time and there’s enormous numbers of pictures and statues about her. She was influential on the American Revolutionaries and she wrote the first defense of the regiside, the moment in the English Revolution where they executed Charles the first, that her defense of the regicide influences people like Thomas Jefferson. And in fact, the Declaration of Independence reads a lot like the last part of her constitutional history on the Regicide. And in some ways, she becomes influential on Americans by explaining how you could have a Regicide, how you can get rid of the king without the inconvenience and danger of having to execute him. And so she’s just enormously influential on the Americans. When she comes to the United States in the 1780s, she spends over a week with George Washington.

But she becomes largely completely forgotten by us today, even though she was a household name in the time period. In fact, people in Boston named their kids after her.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, Mary, if folks would like to listen or learn more about you and reach out to you, how can they get ahold of you?

Mary Sarah Bilder:

Well, they can reach me at Boston College, at Boston College Law School, at my email through my professional site. And there’s a wonderful woman who read Female Genius online through audiobooks. And so if you don’t like to read about her in a book form, you can listen to a wonderful reader read the book.

J. Craig Williams:

Wonderful. Great. Thank you so much for being on the show today. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

Mary Sarah Bilder:

Thanks so much, Craig, for having me.

J. Craig Williams:

Here are a few of my thoughts about today’s topic. I had the unfortunate or fortunate, depending on the way you look at it, experience of talking to several women this weekend in a group, much in the same way that George Washington listened to Eliza Harriet. But this was more intimate. The women shared with me that every single one of them had been molested in their youth, and that one woman, in fact, had gone to a meeting of other women. And after several meetings realized that all of the women were there to discuss the fact that they also, every single one of them had been molested. Despite the Eliza Harriets and the names of the influential women that I rattled off at the beginning of the show, there’s much more to be done and much more of that work to deal with women and protect women needs to be done by men.

Think about that. Well, that’s it for my rant on today’s topic. Let me know what you think. If you’d like what you heard today, please rate us on Apple Podcast, your favorite podcasting app. You can also visit us at legaltalknetwork.com where you can sign up for our newsletter. Don’t forget that I’ve got three books out titled How to Get Sued: The Sled and My Newest Book, How Would Decide 10 Famous Trials that Changed History? You can find all three on Amazon. In addition, our new podcast miniseries, In Dispute, 10 Famous Trials that Changed History is currently featured here on the Legal Talk Network and on your favorite podcasting app. Please listen and subscribe. I’m Craig Williams. Thanks for listening. Please join us next time for another great legal topic. Remember, when you want legal, think Lawyer 2 Lawyer.

Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Lawyer 2 Lawyer produced by the broadcast professionals at LegalTalk Network. Subscribe to the RSS feed on legaltalknetwork.com or an iTunes. The views expressed by the participants of this program are their own and do not represent the views of, nor are they endorsed by Legal Talk Network, it’s officers, directors, employees, agents, representatives, shareholders, and subsidiaries. None of the content should be considered legal advice. As always, consult a lawyer.

Continue Reading