Amelia Bloomer

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode, and please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too. Amelia Jenks was born on May 27, 1818, in Homer, New York, one of six children born to Ananias and Lucy. Lucy valued education, and Amelia attended the Village Common School through eighth grade, where she learned to read and write with, "a little grammar and less arithmetic." When she was 17, Amelia taught for a term in the village of Clyde. Afterward, moving in with her older sister, Elvira, in Waterloo, New York. In 1837, when she was 19 years old, she was hired as a governess and tutor for three of Orrin and Mary Chamberlain's daughters. It was around this time that Amelia met Orrin's nephew, Dexter Bloomer, a new attorney in Seneca Falls, who was also co-owner and co-editor of the Seneca County Courier, a Whig newspaper. On April 15, 1840, Amelia and Dexter married in Elvira's home in Waterloo. By the time of their wedding, Amelia already supported the temperance movement, refusing to even drink a glass of wine with her husband at their wedding reception. The following January, two of the founders of the Washington Temperance Formation visited Central New York, and Amelia and Dexter attended a public meeting and stood in line with 1300 of their friends and neighbors to sign a pledge of total abstinence. Temperance was catching on. Dexter, who knew Amelia's skill at writing from the letters she'd sent him when they were courting, encouraged her to write for the local temperance newspaper, which she did, at first under a pseudonym. In 1848, Amelia and her friends formed The LadiesTotal Abstinence Benevolent Society of Seneca Falls, and they decided to launch a temperance newspaper for women, which the president of the society named "The Lily," for a biblical symbol of feminine purity and worth. Amelia didn't like the name, but she was outvoted. Despite their lack of experience and despite being scammed by a con man, Amelia was determined to see The Lily succeed. The first issue was published on New Year's Day, 1849, with the subhead that read, "A Monthly Journal Devoted to Temperance and Literature Published by a Committee of Ladies, Terms, 50 Cents a Year in Advance." Within a few months, Amelia's co-editor, Anna Madison, moved away, leaving Amelia on her own. Around the same time, Dexter was sworn in as Postmaster of Seneca Falls as a reward for his support of the Whig presidential campaign, and Amelia convinced him to hire her as Deputy Postmaster. It was in the post office that Amelia met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had become a regular contributor to The Lily by later in 1849. At the end of the first year of publication, Amelia decided to press ahead for another year, as she would do time and time again. In early 1851, Elizabeth Smith Miller, cousin of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, came to Seneca Falls wearing what was often referred to as Turkish dress, a knee length dress and trousers. There was already a lot of discussion of dress reform, especially in upstate and central New York, including at the nearby Oneida community. Miller herself credited her outfit creation as having been born of the frustration of gardening in a long dress. Stanton soon began to wear the short dress and trousers, as did Bloomer, and they were soon followed by other women in Seneca Falls. Bloomer and Stanton discussed their new dress style in The Lily, and the story was soon picked up by other publications. Word quickly spread, with journalists, for some reason, settling on the term "bloomerism," for the dress trend. Amelia received hundreds of letters at the post office in Seneca Falls, both from people aghast at her choices and from women asking for dress patterns. Even with extra print runs, The Lily quickly sold out each month. In April, 1852, invited by Susan B. Anthony, Amelia Bloomer spoke on stage to several 100 women at the founding meeting of theNew Women's State Temperance Society. She apologized for her inexperience, but a journalist who was there reported that she was,  "distinctly heard and highly applauded throughout." After that, Bloomer would begin to receive offers for paid speaking engagements. By the following year, The Lily also had at least 2000 subscribers, half the number of Frederick Douglass's very popular North Star. All of this work, though, took a toll on Amelia's health, and she often had to visit health resorts to recover. In 1853, Dexter and Amelia moved to Mount Vernon, Ohio, a much less progressive place than Seneca Falls, New York. Dexter was editor and co-owner of the Western Home VisitorNewspaper, and Amelia continued to publish The Lily. They didn't stay there long, though. After a year, they moved further west to Council Bluffs, Iowa. There they were so far removed, that it would be impossible for Amelia to continue publishing The Lily or to go on speaking tours. Her doctors had repeatedly recommended that she slow down, but this would still be difficult for Amelia. She sold The Lily to Mary Birdsall. In 1857, the Bloomers adopted a four year old boy, and a couple of years later, they adopted his older sister as well. Although Amelia was no longer editing a newspaper, she contributed to various publications, kept up a steady correspondence with far flung friends and relatives, and was elected president of the Soldiers Aid Society. In 1870, Amelia Bloomer and Annie Savery fought for women's suffrage in Iowa. A bill passed both the Senate and the House in the Iowa legislature that year, but when they voted again in 1872, the measure was defeated. At their request, Bloomer contributed a chapter on Iowa to Stanton and Anthony's History of Women's Suffrage, and she sent copies of The Lily to be displayed at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Amelia Bloomer died at home, in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on December 30, 1894, at the age of 76. I'm joined in this episode by writer Sara Catterall, author of, "Amelia Bloomer: Journalist, Suffragist, Anti-Fashion Icon." 

Kelly Therese Pollock  10:45  
Hi, Sarah, thanks so much for joining me today.

Sara Catterall  10:46  
Hi, thanks for having me. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  10:48  
This was such a fun book to read, and I was really happy to learn about Amelia Bloomer. So I want to hear a little bit about what got you interested in writing this book.

Sara Catterall  11:00  
I was working on my previous book, which featured some information on how women's dress, alternative dress, started in the 18th century with some feminist writers and activists, starting with Lady Wortley Montagu, who went to the Ottoman Empire and brought back Turkish women's clothing, along with the realization that Ottoman women had a lot of legal rights that European women did not. I was intrigued with this, so I started following up on that. And in the same book, there was a piece, an image of Amelia Bloomer, who was wearing that outfit, but she was, it was in a German newspaper, and I started to get interested in her, and why this outfit went so viral, and why it spread so far, and it's just sort of went from there. And then I realized she was born about 40 minutes from my house, so, yeah, I got even more intrigued after that.

Kelly Therese Pollock  12:01  
So there's an incredible amount of detail in this book. What are, what are the sources that you're able to tap into to write this story?

Sara Catterall  12:11  
At first, I didn't think I would, I didn't think I would have as much material as I ended up having. I ended up having enough material for a 700 page book, and nobody, I don't think, really wants to read a 700 page book on Amelia Bloomer. But at first, there was just sort of the same information over and over again. So I had to start digging into primary sources and letters and newspaper articles and start researching around her, researching her friends, what they had to say about her as well. And the more I dug into the materials from her time, the more I realized what there was out there. But there was, yeah, a lot of digging through old newspapers scanned into databases. I'm very good at reading cursive at this point and reading very old print. Yeah, and I had to do some travel as well. I went out to Council Bluffs and Des Moines and looked at archives there. I even stopped in at a presidential archive in Ohio that had had a newspaper that was the first publication of her with her name on it, her actual name, because she wrote under a lot of pseudonyms when she first started out.

Kelly Therese Pollock  13:16  
All right, so let's talk about kind of the the elephant in the room, so to speak. So Amelia Bloomer has this really incredible life. She's a journalist, she's a postmaster, she does these really amazing things. She's dedicated to temperance and suffrage. She doesn't want to be remembered for bloomers, for this costume. So why is it that that is her legacy today?

Sara Catterall  13:42  
I, that's a question that I don't think I've completely resolved for myself yet. I mean, why not forget that, along with everything else, why is that image still so powerful? I think, sadly, I think in some ways, I think it's been so powerful because it's been an effective way to put down those early feminists. It was true at the time, and it's still true now. It came up again a lot in the 1940s, when there was also a lot of gender anxiety about women leaving the home and wearing the trousers and all of that sort of thing. And the way it was portrayed at that time was a sort of outdated, naive, failed attempt to change the world, which is really inaccurate, but, yeah, I think there's something about it that that I think feminists as well have used some progressives as well to just say this was a naive, failed attempt to change the world in the early, you know, part of the century. And look how, you know, we did it better later, and that's when we won, rather than seeing it as somebody that was built upon later that she did important work that was important to the founding of the movement. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  14:51  
So I mentioned temperance. This is another movement that she cares deeply about, another thing that's sort of discredited at this point. Right, but it's, it's really deeply important to her. So I wonder if you could talk some about why it's so important to her. And you know, it's not just some sort of moral cause to her, but it's something much deeper than that.

Sara Catterall  15:15  
Yes, I think studying her, I finally started to realize that temperance, at least began as, it was a movement that started because drinking at that time was as bad, really, as our opioid epidemic now. It was a really severe social and health public health problem, and temperance was promoted through the churches because that was a good organized, institutional place to go to get the word out to people. And then, of course, it became tied in with morality and religion as well. And I think that became more visible later on, but early on, I think it was most tied to health and public health and domestic violence. So the idea was that, and with this, you know, they didn't know any better at the time, but they really thought that if you could stop everyone drinking, then men would stop beating their wives, they would stop abusing their children, they would support their families and be good husbands as they were supposed to be. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  16:16  
And she's so persuasive in this that she convinces her own husband, then to stop drinking.

Sara Catterall  16:24  
Yes, I don't think he was drinking very much to begin with. Temperance started out as just drinking wine and beer and hard cider, and then it became total abstinence. And yeah, he became a convert to that. But most of Seneca Falls did. It was kind of amazing. There was a meeting very early on there, where it was almost like two thirds of the town ended up signing the temperance pledge. So it was a real local craze, and he became a leader and a speaker in it, as did many of their friends. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  16:51  
Yeah, so let's talk about Dexter then, because this marriage is just, it's really wonderful. It's, you know, he seems like such a great partner to Amelia, in so many ways, really seems to be caring, especially for the time, to care about being an equal partner and allowing her to be an equal partner. So can you talk about their their relationship? You know, it's not perfect. No relationship is but, but how, how they both view this marriage?

Sara Catterall  17:25  
Dexter was raised Quaker. I mean, the Quakers, especially some of the more radical Quakers in this area, believe that women's women were equal with men, spiritually and as human beings. So he had that going for him early on, and it took them a little while to decide to get married. They met in the home of his uncle, and it was two or three years, I think, before they decided to get married, and when they did, it seems that the minister actually left the word obey out of the marriage service. I don't think it was either of their ideas. He just did it. So it wasn't, it was in the water at that time, I think. But they were both very pleased about that, and they went on like that. They had a mutual, respectful marriage. They didn't always agree on everything. They did have to persuade each other things at times, but the rule more or less, was that nobody was the ruler of anything in the household, that it was always a question of discussion. And you know, if you were going to do something that would affect the other person, asking them and getting permission and discussing it first. And yeah, I think they held to that pretty much throughout. And he really admired her, and I think nothing shows that more than the fact that, when she died, he spent the year afterwards going through her desk and writing to all her friends for their letters and writing a biography of her, which is the only one that's been written so far.

Kelly Therese Pollock  18:45  
Yeah, that's, that's really incredible. And so when, when he becomes the the postmaster, she convinces him that he's going to need an assistant, and that not just any assistant, but that it's going to need to be her. So first of all, we should talk about how people get the job of postmaster, because this is a political spoils system that, in theory wouldn't exist anymore, but, of course, still does. But then also, how how unique and terrific it is that she gets to be in this role.

Sara Catterall  19:18  
Yeah. So at the time Andrew Jackson had put together, I guess that it sort of existed before, just as it sort of exists everywhere, I think. But he had made it official that every time there was a new party took over the presidency, all the government positions turned over with him. So postmaster was a lucrative position, but it was also an influential position. And yeah, so it was often given to people who, editors of newspapers who had supported the political party that had just won, and that was Dexter, in this case. He was the Whig in Seneca Falls, and his newspaper had supported Harrison. So yes, he took, he took the job over. He got the appointment. He also had friends in high places who made sure that it was him in particular. Yeah, and then yes, the job came with a deputy position, and she thought that it would be a good example to have a woman in that position. And he really wasn't sure. He thought it was like, "Oh, what do people say?" You know, I don't mind. But, and she talked him into it.

Kelly Therese Pollock  20:17  
And then she's able to use that job, then, not just, you know, to have a job, but to actually, like, makes like a salon, like a reading room out of the post office.

Sara Catterall  20:28  
Yes, the job came with a little office right off the lobby. So women were coming in. She had started The Lily at that point. I imagine that, you know, people would, they would have things to say to her about articles. And, you know, because there was a woman in the post office, more women felt comfortable coming in to get their mail every day. So she, yeah, saw the opportunity and set up her office as a little reading group. And being in the post office and having all these subscriptions coming there, they could lay them out on the tables, and people could come in and read them who couldn't afford the subscriptions themselves. Women specifically, yeah.

Kelly Therese Pollock  20:59  
Yeah, so you just mentioned The Lily. So let's talk about The Lily. What, what's the origin of this paper, which runs for a really long time and is incredibly influential in its time, even if it's largely forgotten now?

Sara Catterall  21:13  
Yeah, so it started with temperance. Bloomer and her friends and mostly people that she knew from church actually, put together a temperance committee that was sort of an auxiliary to the men's, and they met regularly and did charity work, mostly; but then they had the idea of having a little newspaper. And Amelia Bloomer had been writing for a little while now, with the encouragement of her husband for temperance papers, so she had some knowledge of that scene, but she didn't have any editing experience, and she didn't have any publishing experience, and none of them did. I mean, all of these women probably had eighth grade educations at best, and her husband thought it was a terrible idea, that they would go into debt, etc, but the committee pushed ahead with it. But then they got hit by a scam artist part way in, right before they were about to publish the first issue, and they all backed out, except for Amelia Bloomer, who thought that that was terrible, and they had subscription money, and they'd sent out the press releases and everything that it wouldn't just make them look bad personally and just women in general. So she forged ahead with one other woman, who then dropped out about a month later, and then it was just her, and she committed for a year to publish this little temperance paper. And it took off. And she kept re-upping it one year after another. And then it got to be so popular that it just became not a question anymore. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  21:19  
And she had some some contributors whose names we would certainly recognize still today. 

Sara Catterall  22:45  
Yes, a few months in, that summer, actually, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was relatively new in town and was tied up at home with little kids, came into the post office and said, "I'd like to write for you." And Amelia Bloomer said, "Happy to have you," because she was well known in town. She had a very influential abolitionist husband. Yeah, she was quite happy to have her from the first time she showed up, although she didn't actually write anything for the paper until, I think, November. I think, yeah, she really had a lot on her hands in those days. So The Lily was an excellent opportunity for her. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  23:16  
And then Amelia Bloomer, of course, is the one who introduces Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony to each other.

Sara Catterall  23:23  
Yes, Stanton was mostly writing about temperance and was a temperance supporter. And then Bloomer had met Susan B. Anthony in temperance meetings, probably in Rochester and in the area. So yes, they Anthony came down to Seneca Falls, following some speakers that she wanted to see again, and Stanton was hosting them. So Anthony and Bloomer hung out on the street corner until Stanton appeared, and Bloomer made the introduction, and then she said, the next morning, they went back over to Stanton's house and started making plans for other things they could do.

Kelly Therese Pollock  23:56  
One of the things I love so much about Amelia Bloomer in the in the story that you tell, is that over and over again throughout the rest of her life, then you know, people sort of misremember or miss tell her story and the story of The Lily, and ascribe it, you know, or various things that she did instead, to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, or to Susan B. Anthony, and every time she stands up for herself, as she writes back and says,"No, no, I did this. The Lily was mine." This is how things go.

Sara Catterall  24:31  
Yeah, no. And there's the one incident where it's particularly frustrating because people are sending her this reprint from Seneca Falls and papers in Seneca Falls by somebody in Seneca Falls who is a teenager when all these things are happening, and she gets it so wrong, and people still quote her all the time. But she writes an outrage, raged reply back to the original paper, but she also writes to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who writes back to her and says, "Really. There's no point in fighting people. People are going to say the wrong things. They're going to get it wrong. And you know, if you correct them, they just get annoyed." And yeah, and it turns out, in fact, she's right, unfortunately.

Kelly Therese Pollock  24:35  
Well, and even then, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony themselves, as they're writing their big history and ask Amelia Bloomer to write a chapter, don't do the best job at respecting her wishes. 

Sara Catterall  25:27  
Yeah, that's so frustrating for her. I She ends up sort of excusing them later on, because, of course, you can't fit everything in, and they are trying to fit everything in. But yes, they tell the story they want to tell, which centers themselves and centers their friends and leaves out people they disagreed with, and minimizes people who were, you know, friends, but who weren't the closest friends. So this is often how history gets written, I think. It's definitely very frustrating for Bloomer at the time, however.

Kelly Therese Pollock  25:56  
So another big thing I think we should maybe talk about is Amelia Bloomer's health, because this is something that is is really frustrating for her throughout her life. She probably could have had a much different kind of career, maybe something closer to what Anthony and Stanton had, if her health had allowed her to. So what, what what is going on there? What, what is happening that that causes her to have so many problems with her health?

Sara Catterall  26:26  
As far as I can tell, I think there's a bout of malaria that happens right after she gets married that sets off a lot of it. I had to do a little research on this, because she's not completely explicit about it, but there's one point when she talks about her drug ruined constitution. And at that time, the most standard treatment for pretty much anything that you would suffer from was basically a version of mercury, and they would give it to you until you start to show signs of mercury poisoning, which meant drooling. Your teeth would loosen. You could have cognitive problems, gastrointestinal problems, nervous system damage, and a lot of this could be permanent, ongoing. So it seems like a lot of that is where that started. But it also seems as if her family wasn't the most healthy. She wasn't the only one of her sisters to be infertile. There's a lot that could have been going on there, but the what it comes down to is that she had gastrointestinal and severe like daily headaches pretty much all her life, and it seems that stress and exhaustion made it worse, but she also tended to drive herself very hard. She said a lot of her friends didn't even know that she was sick, only her near and dear did. And I remember when she got very old, her husband commented that she finally got, after, I think, she'd had a stroke or something, she finally slowed down enough that her husband could keep up with her on their walks. And she was about five one, and he was about six one. So she was a very driven person. She was very determined to try to do everything she could despite being sick. But of course, it did catch up with her. At times she had to take long breaks. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  28:03  
Then they move west, first to Ohio and then to Iowa. And it seems like maybe the the one time in their lives that Dexter sort of maybe doesn't totally consult her and does what he thinks is best for her is when he decides that they're going to move to Council Bluffs. You know, Iowa does not feel like the west at this point, perhaps, but at that point, Iowa is like the frontier, right? So what, what would this move have been like for them? 

Sara Catterall  28:32  
Oh, yeah. I mean, I think the agreement to move west initially, I think she did agree on that, the move to a to Ohio, because she could still keep her paper going in that situation. But I think it probably became pretty clear that it wasn't far enough a move. She kept, she kept going with her lecture tours. It continued to be a big problem for her on terms of her health. So he and he'd, I think it was also just his fantasy. Yes, see, I mean, he'd always wanted to move further west. He was very attracted to that. So he goes out on a trip to scout out the far frontier. And he goes out as far as the Nebraska territory, which wasn't a state at that point, and loops back around and Council Bluffs is the last town on the edge of the United States, you know, the states themselves at that point, and he buys a house there and writes home that he's bought a house. And, yeah, I imagine that was a bit of a surprise, and especially when she gets there and it turns out to be a two room house with no kitchen. I'm sure that was not thrilling. And it's also out beyond the railroad a long way. It's it the railroad doesn't reach them for another 10 years. So she is on an enforced break for that long, and she has to give up her paper at that point because there's plenty of printing presses in Council Bluffs, but no, no way to distribute regularly. And Council Bluffs is the most wild west town at that point. It is full of saloons. It is full of gambling. houses, it is, yeah, it was probably be a bit of a nightmare for her. She would be starting over absolutely from scratch, with temperance and with everything else. The contrast with, you know, progressive, bright thinking, temperate Seneca Falls, couldn't be any greater, I think.

Kelly Therese Pollock  29:50  
But in true Amelia Bloomer fashion, she she makes it work.

Sara Catterall  30:21  
Yes, she just starts over. I mean, she she is a housewife for a while, and she contents herself with that. And she adopts a pair of children whose parents have disappeared, and works on raising them. And she was raising children back at Seneca Falls too, including her niece. But yeah, once you know the railroad comes around, she's back at it. But before that, yeah, she does. She starts over. She it, she starts over with charity. And that's sort of where she started. She starts over with temperance and charity as much as she can, and tries to fit in with her new environment and find friends and build a new network from scratch.

Kelly Therese Pollock  30:55  
And so the the temperance movement sort of leads into then the women's movement and suffrage, and of course, there's a that's what Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony are more known for. But there's a lot going on in that movement that you know nationally, there's a big split going on, but it seems like Amelia Bloomer is very much on the sort of, let's think about how to do this in Iowa. This is where I am. Let's think about Iowa. We can go to the state house, you know, it doesn't. They don't get all the way there, but, but she's instrumental in almost getting there and almost getting suffrage going in the 19th century.

Sara Catterall  31:39  
Yes, there's a lot of western states that are pushing very hard for women's suffrage at the time. And some of that, I think, is due to the fact there's a lot of men and not enough women out there, and they think that maybe if they give women's suffrage, it'll attract more women. But, you know, I think there's, there's also just a lot of very progressive people going out there and thinking, you know, maybe they can push these ideas out there, men and women. Obviously, men have to be on board, because that's who has to vote it in. But it is, yeah, it's tricky, especially since in both Nebraska and Iowa, you had to get the legislature to pass it once and then again another year. So it was a matter of convincing everyone two years in a row and fighting about back against the opposition two years in a row. It's difficult. It was a difficult thing to pass, and they did come very close. But yes, if it wasn't for, it wasn't for the big national sex scandal out east, it probably would have happened. Being associated with free love definitely brought a lot of that down. And yeah, I think made that was part of what made the women's movement more conservative going forward and trying to dissociate itself from things that it had been associated with in the past, including, you know, racial equity and, yeah, other radical causes.

Kelly Therese Pollock  32:52  
Yeah, yeah, you talk some at the very end of your book about the importance of thinking about a woman like Amelia Bloomer, about studying her life. So I was struck by what you were saying about the need to not wait for other people to sort of save us, right? That that Amelia Bloomer said, "Okay, here's a problem. What can I do? Like, what, what steps can I take?" So could you expand on that a little, you know what, what are, what are the reasons to study Amelia Bloomer's story in general, but then also, what are the lessons for today, for people who are listening to this podcast, people who are going to read your book?

Sara Catterall  33:41  
Yes, I think that a lot of the time when we look at history, we look at people who won, the people who were successful, but often those people have decades and sometimes generations of thinkers and activists behind them who are driving toward this final success. And often we ourselves, find ourselves in the position of being at a point when either things are just starting or things are at a low point, and it doesn't look like we're ever going to win. And Bloomer's, approach to all of this was always this is what's right. This is what I believe is right, what needs to be done? What's the next step? So she started with temperance, and then she realized that temperance also was involved with a lot of other women's issues in terms of, you know, getting jobs, having custody of their children, being able to be independent. And then, yeah, so she would ask around, and she would say, "Okay, how do you do this?" You know, you know, ask a man. Ask, you know, whoever happened to know that she had access to and figure it out and go forward. And some of those meetings are very messy. They were not ideal. People said things that, you know, maybe people would wish they hadn't said. Yeah, and she went to meetings where she and Susan B. Anthony were completely shouted down, and they couldn't say a word, and they were sitting there with the people, the men in the room, shouting over their heads about the subject that they were experts on. And she, you know, with The Lily people, she had a lot of pushback, and she repeatedly would say, "I am not an expert. I am not the best writer. I'm just doing the best I can," but I think that that she's a wonderful role model for diving in and figuring it out. I think a lot of the time, people think that politics, or even local politics, is something that's something for experts, that you have to already have degrees and have experience and, no, actually, you don't. You can just figure it out. It can take a rhinoceros hide, obviously. But a lot of these women didn't have that either. You know, they had their eighth grade educations, and they had been brought up from smallest children to believe that they should never be seen or heard in public. So they had a lot to get past internally, not just external. They had to to believe themselves that a good woman could get out in public and speak her mind, and that it's just the right thing to do. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  36:08  
Well, it's a fantastic book, so please tell listeners how they can get a copy.

Sara Catterall  36:14  
Oh, you can get a copy anywhere that you ordinarily buy books, your local bookstore, online. I always recommend bookshop to people to try to find a good place to support to buy your books. And you can buy it directly from the publisher too. They are online also at Belt Publishing. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  36:31  
Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talk about?

Sara Catterall  36:35  
Oh so much that surprised me going into this book. I think I was never that interested in women's history myself, because so much of it is it just seems sentimental to me, and it's kind of idolizing, putting these women on pedestals, and they weren't that interesting, and I now feel like I was brainwashed, because they're all so interesting and so funny and have such incredible flaws. As soon as you start to get acquainted with them at all, you it's they're not. They're really not so far in the distant past as you might think. And it's remarkable how much the arguments they were making at the time are still so relevant now you can pretty much use the same words they did. They were using the same words people use now, and so were their opponents. So I highly, I highly recommend studying them in general, just because I think it's key to us not going in circles endlessly. Because it's unbelievable how long we've been having some of these conversations in this country, like it would be nice to make a little more movement forward.

Kelly Therese Pollock  37:36  
Yes, agreed. Well, Sarah, thank you so much for speaking with me. 

Sara Catterall  37:40  
Thank you for having me.

Teddy  38:09  
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