- So today, I want to talk about the intersection of age
and power in US women's rights arguments from 1870 to 1920.
I'm going to draw on archival sources that
are in the Schlesinger Library here at Radcliffe's, especially
those that look at the antislavery and women's rights
activists Susan B. Anthony and Harriet Tubman.
And then after my talk, we're going to go over,
and we're going to see some of this stuff in person.
So that's really the highlight here.
OK, first I need to explain what I
mean by the intersection of age and power in American history.
There are many ways to look at issues related to aging.
So here at the Radcliffe Institute
this year, we have scientists that
are looking at the degeneration of human cells
or how childhood trauma impacts health in later life.
We have poets and filmmakers and sociologists
that are exploring the ways in which memories get passed down
within generations and families.
And we have people looking at how individual longevity
depends upon the sustainability of our environment.
We also have-- and I'm so lucky to say--
Robin Bernstein, Tunisia Ford, and Evie Shockley
whose work on youth and childhood and race
has so deeply influenced my own.
And I'm just thrilled to be in conversation
with all these people.
That's not what I'm going to talk to you about.
I'm going to talk about old age and middle age
as political categories in US history.
So Margaret Gullette, who's also here today,
has shown that whatever happens in our bodies,
we are in her words aged by culture.
And she's asked us to think in particular
about middle and old age as key periods
where this happens in ways that are
culturally defined but highly variable and contingent.
Now this headline proclaims Harriet Tubman the oldest
ex-slave.
She's not at all.
But the fact that people thought she was and held a reception
for her as such is politically and culturally significant,
and these are the things that I want to draw your attention to.
So this souvenir from Anthony's 80th birthday celebration
juxtaposes two dated portraits of her--
one a family daguerreotype taken when
she was a 36-year-old relatively marginalized reformer
and the second an official portrait for her 80th birthday
when she had become the leader of the national movement
and arguably one of the most famous women in the world.
The souvenir draws attention to both precise birthdays 36, 80,
and the long stage of life in between, the middle years.
And these are two ways, age and stage, in which
we are aged by culture.
Now can any of you tell me why suffragists might have begun
with a portrait at age 36--
just after her 35th birthday?
President-- yes.
OK, so according to the Constitution,
you have to be at least 35 years old to run for president.
In practice, Americans have chosen men much older than men.
In 1900, a man under 45 had never held the office.
Now if I were you, I would start googling this,
so I just did it for you.
The youngest man to ever hold the office
was Roosevelt. He was not elected.
He was elevated after McKinley's assassination.
Kennedy is, in fact, the youngest at 43.
Trump is our oldest ever at 70.
Reagan was 69.
Clinton, if she'd been elected, would
have been 69 and Sanders 75.
The point I want to make here is that our young presidents--
they're not really that young.
In what other context do we talk about young people of 45.
And our old presidents aren't really that old.
It's really an office for middle-aged men,
and this was a problem for women because, in the 19th century,
single women reported that they became old maids at 30,
and married women often wrote about feeling
pushed to the background of their family circles by age 45.
So how is a woman to become president or senator or even
city councilor?
In drawing attention to Anthony's life after age 35,
suffragists challenged Americans to imagine her
not just as the President of the National American Women's
Suffrage Association, but I think
as a credible candidate for the presidency of the United
States.
So the historian Alison Lange points out
that this profile pose was new for women in the 1880s,
and that suffragists turned to that
to model their leaders after Roman states.
So this souvenir is drawing on that visual convention
to imagine a very particular passage through middle age.
So Anthony leaves the ornate but rather confined frame
of a family portrait and grows not just in age but in stature.
She looks back at her former self
but not with a longing for lost youth--
with pride in her accomplishments over time.
As these two birthday programs suggest,
suffragists modeled Anthony's celebration
on those for George Washington.
They used the birthday to insert a founding mother
into a national narrative built around founding fathers
and to suggest that even at a time
when most women could not vote for president,
there was at least one woman in the nation that
was qualified to be president.
By 1900, Anthony had become not just an old woman
but a grand old woman, and she was not the only one.
The archives of women's suffrage are filled with efforts
to elevate mature women as national leaders.
Suffragists built organizations that
put middle aged women in executive power
and gave them a public voice.
They theorize the significance of the age in their writings
and speeches, and they circulated
images of older women and described these women
as beautiful and charismatic.
Now suffrage is just one angle on age and power
in American history, and what I'm hoping with this work
is that it encourages you to think about others.
And I'm very curious in the questions where you were
thinking of age popping up.
But what I'm going to do today is
I'm going to focus very narrowly on public celebrations
for Susan B. Anthony and Harriet Tubman using both as case
studies that I think show why suffragists focused
on these connections between age and power
and also how they disagreed with each other
about what women's leadership should be
and what ends it should be used.
So I want to start right after the Civil War when supporters
of Anthony and Tubman worked to sustain them in middle life
and compared both of them to Army generals.
So Tubman was already famous as the Moses of her race
for leading enslaved people to freedom during the Civil War.
She worked as a spy and helped pilot ships
on the Combahee River where Union troops
destroyed Confederate supplies and liberated
more than 800 enslaved people.
Many Union soldiers referred to her as General Tubman.
Yet because she had not formally enlisted,
the US government did not pay her a salary,
nor did she receive a pension for her disability.
The government did pay pensions to both white and black Union
soldiers who had been injured in the line of duty,
but Tubman's injuries had occurred
before the war when she was an enslaved child
and right after when she was coming home on a train
and a white conductor violently threw her from the railroad.
These were not arenas that the US government
recognized as battlefields.
Tubman's allies, black and white,
were outraged that she return to her home
in Auburn, New York with no official recognition.
They took up a subscription to fund a biography
and organized a public fair at which the book and other items
could be sold for her benefit.
Now these were tried and true ways
for supporting formerly enslaved people.
But what I think is new here is the way
that supporters are comparing Tubman
to a male military commander, a general.
So for instance, one supporter wrote to the local paper
captains, colonels, brigadier generals
have been created during our late war who never accomplished
the shadow of the service to the country which
this noble woman has performed.
Now many male veterans were entering politics.
Comparing Tubman to these men suggested
that she, though female, illiterate,
and a manual laborer, was not only
a citizen and a veteran but a potential political leader.
Middle age and indeed chronological age
had a particular resonance for Tubman and her family
because as she explained to Bradford, her biographer,
her mother had a legal claim to be freed at age 45
along with her children--
a directive in her master's will that his heirs be
concealed from Tubman's family.
Tubman liberated herself and then her mother.
Now this kind of age fraud was quite common.
Under both private wills and gradual emancipation laws,
many black families had to sue for the freedom that
should have been theirs on the basis of chronological age.
Other fugitive slaves protested that enslavers freed old people
when they could no longer work and that this
wasn't benevolence but a form of abuse or neglect.
And as was true of many enslaved people,
both Tubman and her mother had been denied access
to any documentation of their birth dates.
So Tubman's biographer reported that quote
"she was born as near as she can remember in 1820 or 1821."
Harriet Tubman grows famously old,
but she never knows her age.
And she never has a birthday that she can celebrate.
In contrast, white women suffragists
emphasized their birthdays.
So that the first public birthday
for a middle-aged woman in the United States
was Susan B Anthony's is 50 in 1870, or so she claimed.
And I haven't proven otherwise.
So I want to make a crowdsourcing plea for anybody
who comes across mention of a public birthday for a woman
in 19th-century America, please let
me know because I'm trying to put together
this comprehensive list.
I'm a little obsessed.
So for Anthony's birthday, the New York World
claimed in the hyperbolic style of the day
Miss Anthony is again the Moses of her sex.
She has perpetrated a daring innovations in regard
to that subject, which has been with woman the most
sacred and inviolate.
No more talk of women of a certain or uncertain age.
Susan squarely owns up to 50.
Papers as far away as San Francisco
and the Hawaiian Islands noted that Anthony
was particularly transgressive to announce her age because she
was unmarried.
For years, journalists and critics
had been dismissing women's rights activists
as sour old maids who couldn't get husbands.
But in this moment, Anthony her and her supporters
reclaimed and redefine the term.
She was-- the New York Sun declared-- a brave old maid.
Matilda Joslyn Gage explained the significance
of Anthony's 50th birthday this way.
Here to for tell one's age has been looked upon as the death
knell for a woman.
Her value has been only in her youth and good looks.
Her intellect and soul have been passed aside,
and no terms of reproach have equaled that of old woman,
old maid.
And I just want to pause on this and emphasize how often I'm
seeing in the archives that this generation of women suffragists
argued that white men maintained power in part by sexualizing
young girls and then ignoring or denigrating older women.
And I just think it's worth pausing on this idea right
now in this context.
OK, this was also all about money.
So the idea for the party seems to have
originated as a fundraiser.
Many guests brought $1 for each year of Anthony's life
and other gifts, such as this gold brooch.
Anthony desperately needed the money.
The paper she published, The Revolution, was deeply in debt.
In the late 1860s, she had alienated
her former anti-slavery and Republican Party allies
when she decided to oppose black men's suffrage until women
could be enfranchised as well.
Rather than reforging ties with black leaders,
Anthony decided that she should appeal
to prominent white people who had money and had connections.
The birthday perfectly suited these
aims as it functioned to mute criticism, raise
money, and generate positive publicity.
So to be clear, the event did not cause the racial and class
divisions in the women's suffrage movement.
What it did was justify, even celebrate
Anthony's controversial decisions
as a form of brave leadership.
Said the poet Phoebe Cary wrote an ode for the occasion.
We touch our caps and place tonight
the victor's wreath upon her--
the woman who outranks us all in courage and in honor.
This is really more aspirational than true in 1870
there are arguably other women who outrank
Anthony at this moment--
not least, as I'll talk about, Harriet Tubman.
So notice how Anthony, her supporters,
and the hyperbolic journalists all took up titles widely used
to describe Tubman, Moses, general,
while failing to mention Tubman herself.
Anthony certainly knew of Tubman,
as they had many friends in common,
and people who congratulated Anthony on her birthday
also helped organize Tubman's fair.
These connections are very direct.
Further, Frances Harper, another leading black suffragist,
had directly told Anthony and her colleagues
to focus on the needs of Moses and other black women.
Instead, the birthday promoted Anthony's lone status
as a woman general.
So what we have here by 1870 and Tubman's fair and Anthony's
birthday are two efforts to elevate and sustain
the public careers of mature women.
They presented different and indeed incompatible
models of women's leadership.
Tubman's redistributive politics did not
appeal to most of the prominent liberals gathered for Anthony's
birthday, and Anthony's focus on women's suffrage
without mention of race or class seemed misguided
to those organizing Tubman's fair.
Both women would become even more prominent as they aged,
and that's the story I want to turn to now.
So in the late 19th century, public birthdays
grew in popularity, but they became rituals
to honor the achievements of old people in their 70s and 80s.
After the Civil War, all Americans,
not just women's suffrage, just paid more attention
to chronological age in general and old age as a stage of life,
in particular.
So by the 1890s, the US Pension Bureau
began using chronological age as a proxy for disability.
Private companies experimented with
the first age-based retirement programs,
and doctors specialized in what would come
to be known as gerontology.
Age also mattered for young people
as schools instituted age graded classrooms,
and states passed the first age-based child labor laws.
Historians explain these changes as part of a broader effort
to bring scientific tools of management
to bear on an industrializing democracy
and a diverse citizenry.
Printers, caterers, and merchants
also commercialized birthdays.
Prosperous Americans celebrated children's birthdays
before the Civil War inspired largely
by Queen Victoria it appears.
By the 1850s, publishers and political parties
held some birthday celebrations for prominent men.
Then in the 1880s, printers marketed the first commercially
produced birthday cards.
Most women still didn't want to announce their exact age
but congratulating each other on the day of their birth date
became more common among friends and family.
Members of the National Women's Suffrage Association
continued to innovate ways of publicly honoring
older women leaders on their birthdays.
In 1885, they not only hosted a lavish party for Elizabeth Cady
Stanton in New York City but also sent out directions
for how local suffrage clubs could hold parallel events
all over the country, and they then
documented this in the souvenir program.
This was the occasion at which Stanton read her often quoted
essay on the pleasures of age in which she
declared that 50, not 15, is the heyday of a woman's life.
Other suffragists meanwhile resisted
the idea of public birthdays.
So Lucy Stone, for example, was shocked in 1888
when people sent her gifts and telegrams congratulating her
on 70 years, as she had quote no idea the day
was known except by relatives and a few near friends.
This convention program for 1893 presents middle aged and older
white women as the public face of the National American Woman
Suffrage Association.
Lucretia Mott on the left died in 1880.
She appears here as the four mother
of Stanton, Stone, and Anthony.
The speakers listed below include younger white women
born between the 1840s and 1860s.
They have a voice, but they aren't elevated yet
into this pantheon of great leaders.
The implication is they're going to have to wait for that.
Black women do not appear at all here,
despite the fact that the women pictured were
all part of the antebellum anti-slavery movement
and all collaborated throughout their lives with black leaders.
So what I want to emphasize is that this segregation
of women's suffrage leadership by race and age
was not natural or inevitable or even really accurate,
but it was artificial, constructed,
and a misrepresentation to be sure.
One that was done for political purposes to
empower older white women.
So a more accurate image would include
younger women and white women as prominent leaders.
It would emphasize Mott's connection to black women,
including Harriet Tubman.
In the 1880s and 1890s, Tubman campaign for women's
suffrage and fundraise to establish
a home for elderly African-Americans
on her property in Auburn, New York.
She moved among suffragists, black women's
reform organizations, and the African Methodist Episcopal
Zion Church, always linking the vote
to economic justice for African-Americans.
Interestingly, evidence suggests that some white suffragists
sought to find some kind of day that
could function for Tubman the way a birthday did
for white women.
So in 1894, Edna Dowd Cheney sent funds to Tubman
describing the contributions as quote "a gift to herself,"
a birthday gift to herself.
In 1901, the woman's journal printed an appeal
asking for contributions by December,
so these could be bundled and presented
to Tubman as a Christmas gift.
So you can see them trying to present
these dates as get give now.
But the largest boost to Tubman's reputation
came from black women who invited
her to attend the founding meeting of the National
Association of Colored Women's Clubs in 1896.
The black feminist theorist Brittany Cooper
points out that this organization
sought to counter the quote "civic unknowability"
of black women.
What I want to add here is that celebrating Tubman
enabled them to emphasize black women as national leaders.
So in women's air under a reprint of Tubman's civil war
portrait, Victoria Earl Matthews wrote the fact
that we know so little that is credible and truly noble
about our own people constitutes one of the saddest
and most humiliating phases of Afro-American life.
Matthews rallied black women to come to the convention
and meet them in person.
In a grand spectacle of intergenerational solidarity,
Tubman took the stage at the convention, holding an infant--
the son of anti-lynching activist Ida B, Wells-Barnett,
as she stood there the hall overflowed with emotion--
as Matthews reported, the scene was impressive and thrilling.
It was the clasping of hands of the early 19th and 20th
centuries.
Anthony's 80th birthday in 1900 functioned in a similar way.
The highlight of the evening came
when 80 children marched across the stage,
each handing her a rose.
Now as far as I can tell from press reports on this memorial
portrait, all of the children were white,
but Anthony did invite African-American suffragists
to speak at her public birthdays.
And this I just want to underline
was really striking at a moment in American history
when almost all public celebrations,
even Lincoln's birthday celebrations,
were racially segregated.
So she is bringing black women into the movement.
At Anthony's 80th, for example, Coralee Franklin Cook spoke,
and she praised Anthony as quote "the courageous defender
of rights wherever assailed."
Anthony, in turn, made a great show of affection towards Cook,
but this did not translate into coalition building.
A year earlier, Anthony blocked a resolution
that would have condemned Jim Crow
segregation on the railroads.
So Anthony's birthday celebrations
function to include black women in the suffrage movement
while simultaneously pushing their leadership
and their political priorities to the margins.
Anthony's 80th birthday staged a grand spectacle
of generational succession in which she represented the past.
Middle-aged women took power in the present,
and white children represented the future.
This I think is a very early presentation of an idea
that we've come to know as a feminist waves.
So in the 1960s, feminist coined the term
"second wave" to both connect themselves with and distance
themselves from this historical period.
Then in the 1980s, we got younger women
saying they were a third way.
We're now on to a fourth, fifth, maybe sixth way,
depending who you talk to.
Historians and activists generally
agree that it's time to let go of this metaphor,
that it's divisive, that it's inaccurate,
but we remain very trapped inside it.
And I think it's in this moment--
surprisingly in celebrations for older women
not the rebellion of youth but in the celebrations
for old women that we see this idea taking form.
OK, so after Anthony's event in 1900,
many prominent women had 80th birthday galas,
and not all were suffragists.
So in 1982, when Elizabeth Cary Agassi, the first president
of Radcliffe, heard that supporters
wanted to hold a concert for her 80th birthday.
She wrote in her diary quote, "it is a lovely plan,
but I have sworn that I would never have
one of these public birthdays.
I must yield not without dread."
Her dread turned to delight when on the morning of her birthday,
she received a surprising gift.
Does anybody know what Agassi's birthday gift was?
Agassi house-- Elizabeth Cary Agassi on her 80th birthday
received $116,000 to build Agassi house.
That is the equivalent of almost actually more than $3 million
today--
quite a birthday present.
Her son later wrote that Agassi would
quote "like a second festival provided it could
be as lucrative as the first."
So you can see that these public birthdays are functioning
very effectively to channel resources
towards women's institutions and women's causes
to publicize the achievements of older women
and to inspire young women.
And this is all an achievement and so really effective
in a lot of ways.
The amount of money raised, of course, vary.
The same year that Agassi received $160,000 birthday
gift, Tubman's supporters struggled
mightily to raise 1,700 as a Christmas
gift that would pay off the mortgage on her old people's
home.
So in many ways, these celebrations
didn't alleviate that exacerbated
existing inequalities.
OK, what about political power?
Did women suffragists succeed in convincing Americans
outside their movement to take older women seriously
as national leaders, to view them
as potential congressmen and senators and presidents?
Boiler alert-- not so much.
So as Christian Hopkinson points out
in our study of the Spanish-American war,
expansionists label the anti-imperialist aunties
to render their leadership illegitimate and absurd.
So cartoonists targeted old white women
in particular as a threat to male potency.
Here prominent anti-imperialists are dressed as busy old women
pulling down a statue representing
the administration, the army, and the Navy.
Older African-American women had to contend with a different
stereotype--
aunt as loyal servant more dedicated
to her enslavers family than her own.
This bogus idea took off in the 1890s
when the RT Davis Mill Company began
to market Aunt Jemima pancake mix, one of the first branded
and widely advertised foodstuffs.
The publicity campaign dubbed this
invented character quote "the most famous colored woman
in the world?
And made up a biography for her--
the fake life of an older black woman.
An illustration claim to be a truthful representation of Aunt
Jemima feeding Confederates after the gunboats destroyed
the master's plantation.
Now whether consciously or not, this precisely and insidiously
erases Tubman's actual leadership
navigating gunboats during the Civil War,
and I think we have to read these images
as a direct backlash against efforts
to empower older women during this period.
Now if this was all that suffragists had to fight--
these misogynistic and racist images in popular culture--
that would have been difficult enough, but by the 1910s,
they also had to contend with women's suffrage leaders who
began to market youth.
I know, right.
It's subtle.
So white suffragists focused on appealing to white male voters,
and this is how they did it.
They prettier, conventionally attractive women out front
as the face of the movement.
This is actually my favorite.
Beauty brigade in canvas for votes for women.
So these beauty brigades are part of this massive propaganda
campaign that mobilized the techniques
of modern advertising, public spectacle and celebrity--
all of which turned on circulating
images of conventionally attractive white, often quite
wealthy women.
None of these women are over 35.
Old women remain active in the movement.
They join these massive suffrage parades,
but they were put behind the beauties,
set apart in motor cars, and treated as curiosities.
Their birthdays continued to receive attention,
but young women had become the face of the movement.
Black women adopted this strategy too.
The journalist Pauline Hopkins, editor of The Colored American
magazine here in Boston, wrote often
about the leadership of mature black women,
including this really important profile of Tubman.
But the visual culture of the magazine as a whole
centered on picturing young black women as glamorous, as
modern, as beautiful.
And I want to underline that this is really important too.
A lot of Americans felt that black women weren't beautiful
and claiming them as beautiful is political, is powerful.
Even for white suffragists who face the charge
that political activism would make them unattractive,
this was important to say that suffragists could
be beautiful and glamorous.
But what drops out of this effort entirely
is the connections between maturity and power
that women were drawing in the late 19th century.
So beauty sells.
And suffragists took up advertising,
and then advertisers appealed to suffragists.
And this marketing accomplished what Anthony and her supporters
had been unable to achieve, the ratification
of the 19th Amendment in 1920.
Now we should not describe this as the winning
of women's suffrage.
It just removed sex as a barrier.
State governments used literacy tests, poll taxes,
and identity verification to disenfranchisement many people.
And in fact, the voter ID laws that
are being passed in state after state today are a continuation
of this strategy.
So voting is not a secure right.
It's a privilege that states can regulate,
and voting is also very different than running
for office or getting elected.
So after 1920, American women did not effectively
organize to elect women to national office and progress
in this phase has remained remarkably slow,
which brings us back to the construction of Susan B,
Anthony as a great statement, equivalent to the most
beloved president.
So after 1920, members of the National woman's party
gather every year on February 15 in the crypt of the US capitol
where there was this statue of Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Susan B. Anthony.
It's the closest suffragists have to a national monument.
They gather.
They lay flowers.
They give speeches.
Black women continue to attend these events.
So that's Mary Church Terrill, the first president
of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs
in the lovely fur collar.
She talked about how Anthony was an abolitionist as well
as a suffragist just trying to keep alive these connections.
Rose Arnold Powell whose papers are at the Schlesinger
campaigned relentlessly to turn Anthony's birthday
into a national holiday.
That Anthony had been born in February
was a happy accident she used to promote the idea of three
great emancipators.
So Washington freed his country.
Lincoln freed the slaves, and Anthony freed women,
or so the story went.
Powell wrote every calendar company in the US year after
year urging them to list Anthony's birthday February,
along with Washington's and Lincoln's.
A few states, including Massachusetts,
did turn Anthony's birthday into holidays.
As far as I know, this is no longer a thing,
but it was briefly.
Massachusetts had a holiday, but we still in this country
have no national holiday that honors a woman as a leader.
And what about Tubman?
African-American women named a number of social service
organizations in her honor, including the Harriet Tubman
House here in Boston founded when Thompson was still alive,
and she was actually present at the dedication.
This clipping from the Delta Sigma Theta
papers at Schlesinger shows schoolchildren
celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Tubman home in 1959.
So even though Tubman didn't have a birthday,
these institutions named after her could have anniversaries
and rallied people around her memory.
Under President Obama, the Treasury Department
planned Tubman's face on the redesigned $20 bill.
Trump's Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin
has announced that this plan is on hold.
In 1978, Tubman did become the first black woman
to be put on a postage stamp, and Pauline Murray,
the civil rights lawyer an Episcopal priest,
read a beautiful benediction at the day
of this year's ceremony.
The point I want to make here is that we
know about Anthony and Tubman because women worked
to convince people that they were national leaders as worthy
of recognition as white men.
Now most Americans never accepted the idea
that these women were on a par with Washington or Lincoln,
but that we remember them at all is
an important legacy of black and white women's organizing.
That white women like Powell downplayed
the contributions of black women is also, of course, a legacy.
But what I want to leave you with today--
what I want to draw your attention to--
is another facet of this memorialization,
and that is how white women remembered Anthony's age.
By the 1930s, Anthony's longevity was a curiosity.
Ripley's Believe It or Not for February 15, 1938,
read Susan B. Anthony died at the age of 86.
Her mother died at the age of 86.
Her grandmother died at 86.
Never change the style of her hair dress in 70 years.
It's true.
You could look at the photos.
Soon a much younger Anthony began
to appear in popular culture.
So this Wonder Woman comic is my favorite example
of a particularly fresh-faced Anthony.
In this comic, she does grow old,
but her supporters all remain remarkably young.
In 1939, a year after the Ripley's cartoon,
Ethel Adamson of the national woman's party planted--
the word she used--
this picture in newspapers for February stories
on Anthony's birthday.
It shows Anthony at age 48.
Adamson explained to Powell quote
"we all love Susan at every age, but a little youth
does seem more attractive for a change."
Powell agreed.
She thought schoolchildren would relate more to this image,
and this is the image that stuck.
So here's Anthony on her 126th birthday looking younger
than she did when she first celebrated
her birthday in 1870, and she's still young in 1971
when the National Organization for Women
joined the birthday celebration ritual.
And again, on the coin minted in 1979.
By the 1970s, Anthony had undergone
one of the greatest anti-aging treatments in American history.
The result is that we can remember her
without engaging in the politics of age and power
that her generation was so concerned with.
So look again at this image that I started with.
Anthony at age 80--
she's posed against a black cloth that
emphasizes her white hair in harsh light showing
every wrinkle.
This image was on a calendar that suffrage just before
and hung in their homes.
As they use the calendar, they may
have planned their own time in new ways,
looking forward to growing older themselves,
certainly looking forward to the day
when Americans would recognize a woman like Anthony
as having demonstrated the political skill
and experience to be elected president of the United States.
To get to that point to elect a woman president,
we will need to innovate a new politics of women's
midlife empowerment--
one that somehow resists the tendency to divide women
by age, race, and class and instead finds
ways to build political coalitions
that work across divides for shared purposes,
and this won't be easy.
We can just hope that young women
will do this work on their own.
Middle aged and older women need to work with them and for them
in particular movements, and young women
will need to partner with their elders.
If we can understand that age itself has a history,
a history deeply connected to gender, race, class, and power,
we may be able to generate better
strategies-- at least that is my hope in talking to you today.
Thank you so much for listening.
[APPLAUSE]
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