#of the like. upper middle class married people (and how that impacts the non married person)

[morallygreyparents]

Daily Life in Fairy World

So I'm going to try and do better about making sure Canon is incorporated into my AU, so apologies if stuff isn't accurate or if there are things I haven't considered. I'm still relatively new to world building and I haven't actually sat down and watched the show in who knows how long. I've still have yet to actually watch the reboot lol. I only know about it through Tumblr

Daily Life General:

-Fairy World is vastly populated and defined as a floating island just about Earth (removing Giant Bucket of Acid world just bc I feel like Jorgen wouldn't be stupid enough to put Fairy World above it. I feel like that was just made for the sake of a cheesy joke)

-Made out of light and Fairy Dust, fairies are the only ones capable of physically walking on the rainbow bridge. Any visitors either need magic to assist them or have to fly over the bridge.

-Generally cannot be seen by the naked eye due to privacy reasons. Adults cannot see Fairy World at all, and only godchildren can see it as long as they're cases are still active (meaning they still have their memories and god parents)

-Architecture is mostly metropolitan. Think of booming cities and business, kind of like NYC, but with a fantasy twist to it. Colors are generally pastel pinks, purples, and cyans, and the average, middle class citizen lives in a small, modernized cottage.

-Divided into several sub-sections such as Fairywood, where the majority of upper-class/wealthy fairies live, The Fairy Academy, and the courtyard for Fairy Council (the few people that are above Jorgen in terms of power)

The Big Wand:

-Basically one of the two core sources of magic Fairies need to produce magic, alongside their own, bodily pools of magic.

-Powered by godchildren's belief that Fairies exist.

-Alongside magic, powers basic electricity in businesses and homes.

-Is Also the reason Fairy World hasn't crashed into the center of Earth, since flight is technically considered magic in the Fairy realm.

-One of the side effects however is high amounts of magic pollution that spreads through the area. Pollution is very weak so it doesn't have much of an impact unless it's in large amounts. It does make the air less clean however and can have disastrous effects if inhaled (especially by a godchild or non-fairy entity) or left uncleaned.

Demographics and Men/Women:

-Adult and Middle aged fairies make up the majority of the population, with a good portion of teenagers and young children and a small population of those considered elderly.

-Females fairies tend to live longer than Male fairies due to being able to endure magic and magical injuries better than males. Also, because females aren't affected by pregnancy so their magic doesn't get weaker from that.

-Child Birth is the leading cause of death for males, while old age is the leading cause for females (the second being magical warfare/deadly injurers)

-In pretty much every career aside from more male focused careers (child care, nursing, etc), the women are paid about 50% more than their male counterparts. That's because some of the people in the Fairy Council still believes that a male is meant to be in the home, cooking and cleaning, while raising and giving birth to new children. Luckily, this isn't an unanimous opinion.

-Historically, men used to have to ask for permission from their wives before getting a job or spending money. This isn't the case however, but a lot of jobs and companies prefer female employees.

-If married couples are godparents, they funds go into a joint account that is under the wife's name.

-All women 26,000 or older (until they get to be about 60,000) are required to stay enlisted for the Fairy Service, which drafts those randomly and enlists them for testing for the general army if selected.

-There has been some debate on whether or not the same should apply to males, but as of now, it's not a law.

Government and Social Hierarchy:

-Technically an Oligarchy. The Fairy Council are the ultimate rulers of Fairy World, deciding everything from laws, economic decisions, politics, and anything else regarding Fairy World and anything associated. Jorgen Von Strangle is just below them, carrying out their orders and making sure Fairy World doesn't descend into total chaos (though he doesn't always do a very good job).

-The Fairy Council are a small group of men and women that were some of the first fairies to live when Fairy World was first discovered. Some of them are directly related to Fairy World's most noble, historical troops, as well as some of the founders.

-The Von Strangle family is directly below them, with Nana Boom Boom the head of Fairy World, up until her retirement and passing her position of power onto Jorgen (since she doesn't have any daughters or nieces)

-In the event a position of power opens up, a female fairy is highly preferred but not necessarily required. It generally starts with the oldest daughter, followed by any younger daughters, and nieces/grandchildren as the third. A male would only be entitled to the position of power if they had no female siblings/cousins/etc. or if the rules of passage were ignored due to any circumstances.

-Power of Social Hierarchy is as follows:

Fairy Council

Jorgen Von Strangle (previously Nana Boom Boom before stepping down)

Von Strangle Family

Tooth Fairy/Cupid/Holiday Fairies (women first)

Wealthy Female Fairies

Wealthy Male Fairies

Middle Class Female Fairies

Middle Class Male Fairies

Lower Class Female Fairies

Lower Class Male Fairies

Anti-Fairies/Pixies/Immigrants

Unfortunately, a lot of the laws that are currently still in place are gender-biased.

-Women are required by law to enlist in the Secret Fairy Service, regardless of personal choice/beliefs. It's not likely that they will be drafted, but you are required to serve under the circumstance that you are. Males are not required at the present time, but several members of Fairy Council, as well as Jorgen himself, are fighting to have that law changed. (Males will be subject to screening if the law passes, as the fairy military does not to enlist any pregnant fairies)

-Women are subject to physical tests, trials, and health screenings prior to drafting to make sure they are fit for war. If they do not pass, the drafting process is halted without penalty, though you are not entitled to any benefits.

-Death Row is much more likely for women than men due to the general attitude that women are more magically competent and aggressive. The few males that are violent enough to land in prison (not including Anti-Fairies or foreign enemies) usually get life in prison.

-Prisons are co-ed due to the lack of resources and funds to create male-only prisons.

Economy and Careers:

-Not all fairies are required to be godparents but it is one of the highest paying jobs since it's the most valued and requires the most training. (I'll make a seperate post on training later)

-I don't really have a name for Fairy World currency just yet, so for the sake of keeping things simple, I'll just say they use gold and silver coins to pay for things. Gold is the same thing as a US dollar and a silver is more for like your quarters and dimes.

-Gold and Silver coins are manufactured at the Fairy World Mints, where they are covered with an invisible dust to ensure that the coins are official and not counterfeit.

-Fairies cannot produce legitimate coins on their own. Any money that the produce with their wands are considered counterfeit.

-Fairy World is generally capitalist; meaning that businesses and companies are owned and ran privately. The Fairy Council has no right to tell business owners what to sell, how to sell, and how to run their business. They only have authority in making sure laws are being followed and the employees that work for these companies have their rights protected.

-Fun Fact: Cupid is the wealthiest Fairy in the world due to being able to produce more than just romantic love magic. Fairies need love to be able to fuel their wills to live in order to survive.

-Taxes are used to pay for public transportation and architecture and the amount owed is dependent on the income a household brings. All adult fairies are considered when deciding how much they owe in taxes, so married couples and wealthier families often have to pay the most, compared to single parents or those in lower classes.

-I'm not sure who yet but Fairy World also gets some of it's good and services through trade from other magical realms. They have embargo'd Anti-Fairy World and had gotten an embargo from Pixies Inc, so neither world have good ties with Fairy World at the moment.

Culture/General Attitudes:

-Seeing as Earth is a major business partner and the main reason that Fairy World is able to function at all, Fairy World is pretty similar in terms of fashion/food.

-Fairies (especially godparents or godparents in training) are encouraged to learn as many languages as possible so that they are prepared to be sent to any part of the human world.

-Godparents are required to learn and test for at least 5 different languages (ASL counts as one but their native language does not count. For instance, if a fairy has been raised learning English their entire lives, English does not count as a language that can be tested).

-Alcohol is very expensive and is often considered a luxury.

-Some alcoholic drinks (namely cocktails in the club) have temporary effects on the fairy. Will make another post of that later.

-Despite becoming more modern over time, social etiquette is still incredible important and applies to all economic classes. Ladies holding doors for their male partners when going out on dates, being the ones expected to pay for their meals (thought it really depends on the people and the circumstance. Most fairies are ok with splitting the bill 50/50.) Males shouldn't be sitting anywhere without keeping their legs closed or crossed, and it's frowned upon to not give up your seat to a pregnant man if using public transportation.

-Women generally are the ones that propose. However, much like everything else, it mostly depends on individual taste.

-Women propose on one knee. Men propose on both. Also, (though frowned upon unless the couple is super close), males can technically propose with ultrasound photos of their babies .

-Men also have higher standards and expectations in regards to raising their children. Often times, people will see a child out with their mother and praise them for "babysitting" and "being so involved' even with doing the bare minimum for the child.

Transportation:

-Most Fairies generally fly from one place to another, or teleport when they get a certain age. However, Fairy World does have some drivable roads for fairies that drive or for those that take the public bus.

-If your wings are in good condition and trained properly (kind of like how a parent teaches their children to walk), anyone can fly. However, teleportation and driving both require a license. Bus and Taxi Cab drivers are also required to have a commercial driver's license on top of their regular ones.

-Taxis are really only used for godparents that are still on Earth and need to be brought back home, either to receive a new case or because they had quit their jobs.

-Buses are mostly used for pregnant or disabled fairies to get from one place to another, in addition to those who don't have any licenses. While not necessarily required, it's generally in bad taste not to give up your seat for a pregnant fairy or one who is elderly/disabled unless you are one of the above yourself.

-Pregnant fairies are also discouraged from teleportation.

[soulvomit]

The female face of technological job loss. Nobody fucking cares!

NOBODY talks about how so much national productivity loss is specifically female productivity, how much social mobility loss is specifically female, and nobody talks about how the living wage jobs left to women require college education. (Just as we only barely talk about the racial and cultural politics and cissexist politics of industrial and trades work.) Just as we don’t talk about the fact that we also refuse to provide the conditions that would grow a labor force of trained STEM workers, which I suspect would take about 25 years because it would require growing them from the ground up! We would have to have massive overhauls to our social support system to produce the STEM labor force that other countries produce.  EVEN FEMINISTS ARE NOT TALKING ABOUT THIS. I’m not even sure *intersectional feminists* talk about it. I suspect that we just don’t care and that it’s another area where American culture hates a particular group of people so much that it’s willing to fuck over everyone else just to keep that one group from ever having anything. Our system didn’t just turn working class white men against everyone else, it also turned them against women. I suspect that white American culture hates women and POC and immigrants so much that we’re willing to completely yank away our educational system just to keep these people out of the workforce. Pressuring women to go into traditionally male jobs (which are the only non-professional-class jobs left that pay a living wage) seems logical and practical, but to limit the analysis to that, misses the point. The whole system is broken. Even nursing, which has long been seen as the female parallel of skilled trade, suffers this given that you have to go to college. You don’t apprentice your way into being an RN. The requirements for entering the field have gotten higher and higher and the competition more and more fierce for entering those schools. So basically, what most women are actually left with, in the end, is service and domestic work. Which has a role in keeping us dependent on traditionalist men. Probably by design, when you consider that the same culture doesn’t want to provide child care. The culture wants to keep a handful of “ideal breeding stock” women barefoot and pregnant, and to starve the rest of us out. Part of the propaganda that a greater majority of white middle class people seem to swallow, is that middle class women didn’t work before the 1970s, and working class women and WOC just weren’t even worth talking about, I suppose. Working class white men are prioritized in these analyses, as if the only jobs and activities that are worthwhile are ones that are traditionally held by either upper middle class white men or working class white men. The reality is that in creating a feeding frenzy for trade and STEM jobs, we’re being pushed into the last economically viable jobs left, to compete with men, and eventually those sectors will die out, too. And women in general, and POC, will be blamed for killing those professions. Oh and for that matter, disabled people are losing a lot of workforce access too. All of this focus on jobs that only able bodied, neurotypical people can do, is really short sighted. My polio survivor, wheelchair using grandmother worked in office and clerk jobs for most of her adult life. It wasn’t easy, and she was an activist on behalf of what became the ADA. But in today’s job market, could she have competed with able-bodied, much more formally educated people *AT ALL* for the few paid office jobs left?  When I say “few,” you’re going to point out that you know xyz person who is an administrative worker. But I want to point out that it was a whole sector, in the 1980s and before. When was the last time that you actually saw a typing pool?  I’m not saying that women shouldn’t go into trade and STEM fields. They should - if they want to. And get equal pay. AND you should also be able to support yourself doing other things! Nobody ever got rich being a teacher or secretary, but in the 1980s most teachers *could* at least afford their own apartment, and administrative jobs were actually much more common and much lower competition than they are now.   But let’s talk about history. We can’t imagine what life was like before the industrial age labor force, before the job market.  We talk about the male jobs lost to the invention of mass production and the computer. (And the many jobs gained, as well - for middle and upper class men.) But we don’t talk about the independent businesswomen put out of business by the factory, whose work was replaced with sweatshop labor. We don’t talk about the female involvement in agriculture (and you will see this if you’re in a region that actually has family or independent farms) - being a farm wife, didn’t just mean that you had married a farmer. We don’t talk about the office jobs that were lost to computer and software innovations. When was the last time that you saw a typing pool? I bet you’ve never seen one. I bet you know very few professional clerical workers.  We don’t talk about how the health industry is being impacted by the loss of virtually every traditionally female profession, since it’s really the one thing left for so many of us and now there is intense competition and there are increasing levels of privilege required to enter what were formerly “working class” status jobs. And looking back even deeper into time, we don’t talk about the lost productivity of women craftspeople and healers and midwives or how massive religious institutions and centralized imperial governments were the original disruptors, the original big box stores. We don’t talk about traditional female crafts no longer even being economically sustainable. “Kids moving to the city to get jobs, away from the traditional business” is always framed as a lifestyle choice and not an economic necessity. Of course I feel like women should be able to do trades and STEM work, and get equal pay for it. But we should be do practically anything else, too, and society needs all of those other professions to exist.  Every technological and social disruption that impacted men, impacted women first. And we never talk about it. I’m not saying we should go back to the Stone Age, ffs. This is not a luddite analysis. I direct a lot of this specifically at the Anglophone world, let alone the US. But we really need to talk about this, going forward. We have been among the canaries in this coal mine the entire time. The same things that happen to us, eventually happen to male dominated industries as well. We only talk about these things when they happen to white men, so there has been a lot of talk about the jobs that are being lost to white men. All of this has been happening to women, throughout history. Nobody paid attention. Nobody fucking cared. 

[earlyandoftenpodcast]

(Benjamin Franklin calling down lightning from the sky. Not that relevant to the episode, but I feel obliged to use it anyway.)

The Quaker faction in Pennsylvania fights a rearguard effort to hold on to political power despite their dwindling population, at one point literally beating back riotous sailors with clubs.

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Transcript and Sources:

Hello, and welcome to Early and Often: The History of Elections in America. Episode 39: The Long Death of Quaker Rule.

Over the last two episodes, we’ve discussed the history of Pennsylvania from the 1680s to the 1730s. Politically, the main struggle was over local autonomy. Pennsylvania was a proprietary colony ruled by one man, William Penn, and then later by his heirs. Thanks to various legal troubles, Penn had to spend most of his time in England instead of in America. In his absence the Assembly slowly but surely accumulated power until they were the dominant force within the colony. In fact, in 1701, the Assembly forced Penn to accept a new constitution, which made Pennsylvania unicameral. The Assembly became the sole legislative body, while the council was reduced to a mere group of advisors.

But just as important as these political changes were the demographic changes reshaping Pennsylvania across the 18th century. Pennsylvania had been founded as a refuge for persecuted Quakers, and in the beginning Quakers and other similar denominations did in fact dominate the colony. But there weren't actually that many Quakers in the world, and so the initial wave of Quaker migration soon dried up. However, that didn't mean that immigration stopped. Pennsylvania was a prosperous, tolerant place, and so many non-Quakers started coming. By the early 1700s the Quakers were already a minority in their own colony.

Some of these immigrants were Scots-Irish, fleeing the poverty of Scotland and Northern Ireland. The Scots-Irish in particular had almost nothing in common with the Quakers. They were rowdy, violent, and poor. I'll talk much more about them next time. And I've already discussed the Anglicans living in Philadelphia, plus other cosmopolitan men like Ben Franklin.

The other big group came from Germany. Germany was still recovering from the devastation of the Thirty Years' War several decades ago, and therefore migration was an enticing prospect. And once they started coming, they didn’t stop. By 1717 there were some 15-20,000 Germans in Pennsylvania. By the Revolution, there were 110,000.

When it came to politics, these Germans tended to support the Quakers, for a few reasons. Firstly, many of the Germans also came from pacifist religious denominations. Even those Germans who weren't pacifists wanted to avoid war. Secondly, the Germans, being foreigners, were unlikely to run for office themselves, so it made sense to pick a group of native English candidates to support. And the Quakers, for their part, advocated giving the Germans citizenship as soon as possible, so that they could vote for Quaker candidates.

In order to maintain their power, the Quakers also made sure that the settlements on the western frontier, which were typically filled with non-Quakers, were systematically underrepresented in the Assembly. For example, in 1760, the eastern counties of Philadelphia, Bucks, and Chester had a combined 26 delegates out of 36 total, while the 5 western counties together had only the remaining ten representatives, despite the fact that both regions had similar populations.

So thanks to these sorts of tactics, the Quakers managed to stay in power much longer than you might expect, considering their small numbers. For example, in 1739, 22 out of 36 seats in the Assembly were held by Quakers. But it would've been clear to everyone that things were changing. In order to keep that power, the Quakers had to stick together. So no more middling vs. elite Quakers. From now on, there would just be a single Quaker faction.

And when I say “Quaker faction”, I mean Quaker faction. They may have gotten support from other groups, but it was very much controlled by the Quakers themselves. By the 1750s they were literally choosing their candidates during Quaker meetings. You might recall that Quakers governed themselves through a system of meetings, local meetings, regional meetings, meetings for men, meetings for women, and so on. Well it was at some of these meetings that the Quakers chose their candidates. It's a bit like if today Republican party candidates were being chosen explicitly by meetings of Evangelical Christian leaders.

Their opponents found this outrageous, and they issued calls for nominees to be chosen in public, rather than in private, but the Quakers ignored them.

Who were these opponents? Well, the Quakers had continued to attack proprietary authority, and so their opponents wound up becoming supporters of the proprietorship. So once again the factions were simultaneously split along lines of religion and politics. Quakerism overlapped with anti-proprietary beliefs, while non-Quakerism overlapped with pro-proprietary beliefs, by default.

However, the proprietary faction was generally on the losing side of things. The Quakers had assembled a powerful coalition, their policies were popular, and frankly the Penn family wasn’t much of a help.

William Penn had died in 1718, but it took a long time for his estate to be settled. The legal proceedings dragged on for most of a decade. I’ll spare you all the details, but basically in the end Pennsylvania went to his children by his second wife, Hannah, who herself died just after the court case was settled.

It took a few years longer to decide who was going to actually govern the colony, but in practice it was her son Thomas who wound up running things. Thomas spent some time in Pennsylvania, but mostly he lived in England.

He was a very different man than his father. In fact, he wasn’t even a Quaker. He didn’t see Pennsylvania as a Quaker refuge or as some divine experiment. He had no grand visions for what life in Pennsylvania could or should be. To him, it was just an investment to be properly managed. In his words, “I never desire to have views so noble, extensive, and benevolent as my father, unless he had left a much larger fortune; because these views, though good in themselves, yet by possessing him too much, led him into inconveniences which I hope to avoid.” No point in sticking to your beliefs so strongly you wind up in a debtor’s prison.

And the officials he appointed were generally non-Quakers as well.

So those are the dividing lines within Pennsylvania. Anti-proprietary Quakers, supported in particular by the Germans, vs. the non-Quaker proprietary faction. It's remarkable how the government of Pennsylvania had now become anti-Quaker. This in the colony founded by William Penn, one of the most prominent Quakers in history. Just goes to show the weird twists history can take.

By the way, this was also the time of the Great Awakening. The Great Awakening had a moderate impact in Pennsylvania, less than in New England but more than in New York. The Quakers and Germans proved mostly immune to the Awakening's charms, but other groups such as the Anglicans were more receptive. Therefore, members of the Quaker faction tended to oppose the Awakening, while members of the proprietary faction tended to support it, but I don't think that it actually proved to be a major source of division like in New England. Pennsylvania just wasn't theocratic in the same way that Massachusetts was.

But, moving along.

The 1730s were a time of transition. Many of the old politicians who had led Pennsylvania for the last half century -- David Lloyd, James Logan -- were either dead or nearing retirement. And a new generation of politicians was rising to take their place. Benjamin Franklin for one, although he was kind of an outlier. He was from Boston and he was a self-made man.

Most leaders came from the new Quaker upper class which I mentioned last time. Take for example William Allen, a leader of the proprietary faction. Allen had a somewhat successful merchant father and Allen himself become one of the richest men in Pennsylvania. He married the daughter of a prominent politician, and in the 1760s one of his daughters married into the Penn family. He became a member of the council at age 23, and was elected to the Assembly at age 27, then as mayor of Philadelphia at age 31. The same sort of career path as Thomas Hutchinson in Massachusetts. Men from prominent merchant families going into politics at a young age and marrying women from other such families.

So all in all, that's the pattern Pennsylvania had settled into by the mid-1730s. But in the late 1730s, King George’s War broke out, and once again, Pennsylvania was called upon to contribute to the war effort.

The governor asked the Assembly to raise funds, and at first the Assembly, which was controlled by the Quaker faction, was open to the idea. During the previous wars, the Quakers had come up with a compromise. They’d raise money without explicitly specifying what it was for, even though they in fact knew it would be spent on fighting. That had been enough for the Quakers. They felt that their hands were clean.

Initially, it seemed like that compromise would still hold. However, things were swiftly derailed. The governor began raising a volunteer militia. But when this militia took in a number of indentured servants without the permission of their masters, there was a general uproar in the colony. People thought that the militia, by taking in these servants, was stealing property from the masters. They soon turned both against the militia and against war in general. Realistically, it may have just been an excuse to oppose the war effort, but either way the damage was done. The Quaker faction now opposed the war.

There is one other factor to consider in understanding why this happened. The Quakers themselves were becoming more pacifist. You may recall that in New England, there had been a gradual transformation of Puritanism as time went on, as the initial enthusiasm wore off. Something similar had happened within Quakerism. After 50 years in Pennsylvania Quakerism had become less spiritual, less aggressive. And all you had to do to be a Quaker was conform to Quaker practices, rather than accept the Inner Light. Quakerism was becoming normal.

And just like in New England, this gradual loosening eventually provoked a backlash by people who wanted to recapture the old fervor, and to maintain the Quaker identity against all the other immigrants in Pennsylvania. That meant taking their beliefs more seriously, including pacifism. And so, many Quakers now found it harder to support war than in the past. They now wanted to be real pacifists, not just nominal pacifists. Of course, not all Quakers supported this change, but at the moment, it was the hardline pacifists who had the upper hand.

Whatever the reason, the Quaker faction was now at odds with the proprietorship.

During the 1740 election, the proprietary faction argued that unless Pennsylvania agreed to help fund the war, some sort of catastrophe might overtake them. The Quakers, on the other hand, argued that war meant conscription, tyranny, and higher taxes. The people found that message more believable, and the Quakers won the election and kept control of the Assembly.

The proprietary faction was in a difficult position. They really had very little chance of winning the Assembly, and without the Assembly, they couldn’t hope to contribute to the war effort, which would undermine the Penn family in Britain. Remember, it was still possible that Parliament might make Pennsylvania into a royal province. That concern hadn’t gone away. So, if they couldn’t win legitimately, the proprietary faction decided to use underhanded tactics instead.

In the runup to the 1741 election, they tried to get the Board of Trade to ban Quakers from holding elective office during times of war. Needless to say, such a drastic action would have wiped out the Quakers as a political force, at least temporarily. However, the Board of Trade declined to go along with the plan, which was probably sensible of them. Banning Quakers altogether sounds a bit harebrained to me.

Although, I should point out that it wasn't only the proprietary faction using underhanded tactics. For example, for several years the Quakers had been physically interfering with the election process in Philadelphia. As it happened, voters in the capital had to go up a flight of stairs in order to hand in their ballots. The Quakers had recently begun using this quirk to their advantage. They would all crowd along the stairwell and only allow voters who supported them to come up to vote. Everyone else they tried to block.

Anyway, during that next election, in 1741, things got a bit heated. When some reverend was accused of casting two ballots someone punched him. And when an official moved in to break up the fighting, he got punched too.

The Quakers won yet again, but that little scuffle was nothing compared to what happened in the next election in 1742. Having failed to oust the Quakers through legitimate or semi-legitimate means, the proprietary faction began considering more drastic actions.

First, I need to explain a bit more about how elections in Philadelphia worked at this time. There were actually two elections on election day. The second election was for the delegates to the Assembly, but the first election was for the inspectors. The inspectors were the people who oversaw the election. They were empowered to look at people’s ballots, to decide what was and wasn’t legal, to disqualify people from voting, and so on. So controlling the inspectors meant that you could control the election process. It was a lot like the sheriffs in New York I talked about a few episodes ago. If you wanted to manipulate the elections, the inspectors were the way to go. Or, if you feared that your opponents were going to manipulate the elections, you wanted to make sure that they didn’t control the inspectors.

How were the inspectors chosen? By election, of course. But since there would be no inspectors to oversee their own election, this had to be done through a different process, overseen by the sheriffs. Instead of using ballots, voters would simply line up behind their preferred candidate to be counted. I suppose the idea was to make the election as public as possible, so that there could be no trickery. And then, after the inspectors were chosen the real election would be held.

However, this system may have had some flaws. For one thing, the elections in Philadelphia were held near the docks, an area filled with taverns and drunken sailors. It was an unstable environment. There were no orderly procedures, just big crowds of people milling around. It was an even more volatile area than that stairwell, even more vulnerable to disruptions.

And before the election, there were rumors swirling throughout the city. Firstly, that the Quakers would bring in German immigrants to vote illegally. And secondly that the proprietary faction had hired sailors to act as muscle, to intimidate the Quakers out of voting. Everyone was on edge, everyone was expecting trouble.

On the morning of October 1, everyone gathered to vote. Tensions were indeed high. There were an unusual number of sailors on the streets, already getting drunk and making threats to “knock down the broad Brims”. That is, attack the Quakers. The Quakers wanted the sailors to be removed from the area, but since they hadn’t actually done anything yet, the officials overseeing the election refused. And even before the election began already a few punches had been thrown.

At 10 AM the polls opened and the voters began lining up to choose the inspectors. It soon became clear that the Quakers were set to win. Then suddenly 50 plus sailors appeared a block away, marching towards the voters. They began beating the voters with clubs, attempting to drive them away from the polling site. The voters were pushed back at first, but the sheriffs handed out clubs to any of the voters who were willing to fight back. Even a number of Quakers entered the fray.

Thus, there was a violent back and forth, and there were a few serious injuries. At one point the Quakers were pushed into the courthouse, and the sailors besieged the building. Windows were broken in and so on. But eventually, the sailors were driven back and the rest of the election could be held in peace. 54 of the sailors were thrown in jail. It took pacifist Quakers arming themselves, but in the end they prevailed.

Needless to say, the Quaker faction won big time, both in the elections for inspector and in the elections for the Assembly. And it wasn't just a one-time victory. The attack cost the proprietary faction dearly. The voters now associated them with violence and disorder, and with unfair elections.

Although, to be fair, the accusations against the proprietary faction were never actually proven. The Assembly led an investigation into the incident, but the investigation was biased and partisan. They were aiming to make the proprietors look bad, not figure out what happened. It's possible that what happened was that the Quakers, fearing an attack, had tried to kick the sailors out of the area, which upset the sailors and led them to attack on their own initiative. Possible, at least, though I think not likely. I would wager that the proprietary faction, or at least someone within the proprietary faction, was responsible. After all, we've seen these tactics before, in 1690s New York, when Governor Fletcher had brought in sailors to intimidate voters. Although in that instance, the sailors didn't actually attack anyone.

But in any case, now the Quakers were even more firmly in control of the Assembly than before. For a while, they controlled practically every seat. And the proprietary faction now had no hope of taking over themselves. They hardly even bothered to run candidates. So the governor now had to negotiate with the anti-proprietary faction from a position of weakness. The proprietary faction capitulated on a number of issues, but the Quaker faction gave in on military appropriations as well. They agreed to go back to the old compromise of granting money without explicitly stating what it was to be spent on.

However, although the Assembly was willing to send money to other colonies to help them fight, they were much less interested in creating any sort of army or militia to defend Pennsylvania. In fact, the colony was nearly defenseless, as was shown when a French warship sailed up the Delaware and harassed some English vessels before sailing away. Rumors spread that an even bigger invasion was planned. But still the Assembly refused to create a militia.

That gave an opening to Benjamin Franklin. He was always eager to form new institutions, and so he decided to create a volunteer militia himself. He wrote and published a pamphlet to that effect and it was immediately successful. Thanks to Franklin’s efforts many men across the colony organized themselves into regiments and began drilling.

Like many American militias at this time, the officers were elected. Specifically, the volunteers elected their officers, and then those officers elected colonels. Franklin could've been elected to lead the Philadelphia militia, but he declined the offer, instead serving as a common soldier, though all he ever did was keep watch. And in any case the war ended that next year.

Still, Franklin’s efforts further increased his standing, at least among most Pennsylvanians. The more extreme Quakers weren’t fans of the militia, but the moderates were happy enough to see someone else take up the burden. According to Franklin, “Indeed I had some cause to believe that the defense of the country was not disagreeable to any of them, provided they were not requir’d to assist in it.”

On the other hand, if many Quakers proved unexpectedly grateful, the proprietary faction was rather lukewarm. They weren't too happy that Franklin had succeeded where they had failed. It was partly due to jealousy, and to concerns over how ambitious Franklin was. Thomas Penn, the proprietor, was particularly wary of Franklin. He saw him as an agitator. “He is a dangerous Man and I should be very Glad he inhabited any other Country, as I believe him of a very uneasy Spirit. However, as he is a Sort of Tribune of the People, he must be treated with regard.”

So, strangely enough, by creating a militia, Franklin endeared himself more to the faction that opposed a militia than to the one that supported it. Although, Franklin did remain friendly with both sides, it wasn't like he had firmly sided with one camp or the other. And his efforts were popular with the people as a whole.

It was around this time that Franklin retired as a printer. He’d amassed enough money that he could now just pursue his personal interests, whether politics or science or inventions or founding new institutions. And though he was a dilettante, he did make genuine contributions. He helped advance the study of electricity, plus he invented the lightning rod, bifocal lenses, and a new type of stove. I have to say, his reputation was earned, it wasn’t merely inflated later on because of his role in the American Revolution. He was an impressive guy.

Politically, he became an alderman in Philadelphia, and then he was elected to the Assembly, where he served from 1751 to 1764. Although according to him, he didn't seek office on his own, though he was happy to accept it. “I would not, however, insinuate that my ambition was not flatter’d by all these promotions; it certainly was; for, considering my low beginning, they were great things to me; and they were still more pleasing, as being so many spontaneous testimonies of the public good opinion, and by me entirely unsolicited.”

In his first years in office, Franklin didn't join with the Quakers or with the proprietary faction. He remained non-partisan, and he was able to work with men from both sides. He spent his time on various useful projects, getting a hospital built, getting the streets paved, and so on.

Perhaps less admirably, he also worked to reduce the influence of the Germans within Pennsylvania. Like many English-speaking Pennsylvanians at the time, Franklin harbored serious anti-German prejudice. He was concerned that the Germans might never assimilate to English ways of life. They could remain forever German, a foreign element in the body politic. Their pacifism worried him as well. In one essay he asked, “why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements and, by herding together, establish their Language and Manners, to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them...?”

And the Germans did indeed purposefully separate themselves from their English-speaking neighbors. They lived in ethnic enclaves and kept on speaking German rather than learning English. And they were politically passive. Franklin thought they were too ignorant of liberty to properly participate in government. They rarely voted, and when they did they just supported the Quakers en masse.

And so Franklin proposed measures to remedy the situation, to weaken the Germans politically and to encourage assimilation. According to the historian Theodore Thayer, he “proposed in 1752 that all non-English speaking people should be barred from holding civil or military office. In addition, he held that a prohibition should be placed on the importation of German books, and that all German publications should be obliged to carry an English translation on each page, while deeds, bonds, and other legal documents should be in English only. Intermarriage, he thought, should be encouraged to break down the clannishness of the Germans, and a limitation or quota should be placed on German immigration. Furthermore, he recommended that English schools be established among the Germans to Anglicize the younger generation.”

However, none of those plans really went anywhere. There were a few schools opened, but they folded within a few years, since they were correctly seen as being politically motivated. And the proprietary faction kept trying to ban Germans from voting along with the Quakers, but that didn't happen either. The Germans did begin to assimilate around the time of the Revolution, but it was of their own accord, not because the government forced them to.

Moving along, the main dispute after the end of King George's War was over paper money. The Assembly wanted to print more paper money, while the proprietor wanted the opposite. A very standard dispute.

Thomas Penn sent governors to Pennsylvania with secret instructions to not approve any more money being printed. But the Assembly kept passing bills to that effect, which the governors had to veto over and over again, leading to a stalemate that lasted into the 1750s. The Assembly was aggrieved, not just that they couldn't get more money printed, but that Penn's instructions to his governors were kept private, meaning that they didn't know what they were negotiating with.

One governor got so fed up that he resigned. His replacement was a man named Robert Hunter Morris, who was actually the son of Lewis Morris, one of the big landowners in New York, the guy who’d been removed from the supreme court by Governor Cosby. He's not that important historically, but I bring him up because Benjamin Franklin, in his autobiography, relates an amusing anecdote about him which I'd like to share, which tells you something about how politics worked at the time.

“In my journey to Boston this year, I met at New York with our new governor, Mr. Morris, just arriv’d there from England, with whom I had been before intimately acquainted. He brought a commission to supersede Mr. Hamilton, who, tir’d with the disputes his proprietary instructions subjected him to, had resign’d. Mr. Morris ask’d me if I thought he must expect as uncomfortable an administration. I said, “No; you may, on the contrary, have a very comfortable one, if you will only take care not to enter into any dispute with the Assembly.” “My dear friend,” says he, pleasantly, “how can you advise my avoiding disputes? You know I love disputing; it is one of my greatest pleasures; however, to show the regard I have for your counsel, I promise you I will, if possible, avoid them.” He had some reason for loving to dispute, being eloquent, an acute sophister, and, therefore, generally successful in argumentative conversation. He had been brought up to it from a boy, his father, as I have heard, accustoming his children to dispute with one another for his diversion, while sitting at table after dinner; but I think the practice was not wise; for, in the course of my observation, these disputing, contradicting, and confuting people are generally unfortunate in their affairs. They get victory sometimes, but they never get good will, which would be of more use to them. We parted, he going to Philadelphia, and I to Boston.

In returning, I met at New York with the votes of the Assembly, by which it appear’d that, notwithstanding his promise to me, he and the House were already in high contention; and it was a continual battle between them as long as he retain’d the government. I had my share of it; for, as soon as I got back to my seat in the Assembly, I was put on every committee for answering his speeches and messages, and by the committees always desired to make the drafts. Our answers, as well as his messages, were often tart, and sometimes indecently abusive; and, as he knew I wrote for the Assembly, one might have imagined that, when we met, we could hardly avoid cutting throats; but he was so good-natur’d a man that no personal difference between him and me was occasion’d by the contest, and we often din’d together.”

So, politics could get heated, but it didn't always get personal. It depended on the men involved.

Anyway, as it happened, Morris was governor for the first two years of the French and Indian War, which is our next big topic of discussion.

The previous wars with Quebec had generally been fought in the north, on the borders of New York and New England. But now, a new theater was opening up: the Ohio Valley, which is the area surrounding the Ohio River. The Ohio runs west from Western Pennsylvania into the Mississippi. So basically the area we’re talking about is part of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky. This territory was disputed between France and Britain. It was still mostly populated by Native Americans, with a few British traders. But now, the French were starting to move in. Who would control this region? Well, by 1754 it became apparent that the only way to settle this was through war.

War was coming to Pennsylvania for real this time, or at least to the outskirts of Pennsylvania. But the Quaker faction and the governor remained at each other's throats over the money supply, and for that reason it was hard to raise funds for the war. The Assembly was trying to use their leverage to increase their power, increase the money supply and force the governor to make his instructions public.

Into this dispute stepped Ben Franklin. He came up with a workaround solution which involved the Assembly issuing loans to raise funds, rather than printing money directly. He also proved extremely helpful in gathering supplies for the army of General Braddock, which was setting off to fight along the frontier. However, these were only temporary bandaids. Braddock's force was soon utterly defeated, and Braddock himself killed, which left Pennsylvania even more dangerously exposed to attack than before.

The Assembly voted to raise a further 50,000 pounds, but once again relations with the governor caused problems. This time the issue was property taxes. The Assembly had decided to raise the money by raising property taxes, but the bill they passed taxed land owned by the proprietor, along with everyone else's land. Governor Morris had instructions to prevent the Penn family lands from ever being taxed, and so he vetoed the bill, declaring that, “All Governors, whether hereditary or otherwise, are, from the Nature of their office, exempt from the Payment of Taxes; on the Contrary, Revenues are generally given to them to support the Honour and Dignity of Government, and to enable them to do the Duties of their Station.”

Obviously to the average Pennsylvanian, the idea that they had to pay taxes while their leaders didn’t, was seen as flagrantly unjust, especially during a time of war. With opponents like that, it’s no wonder the Quakers held on to power.

Well, that was only one reason they held on to power. The Quaker faction was also changing internally. Changing so much in fact, that within a few years it would hardly be a Quaker faction at all. You'll notice that the issue being fought over is not whether or not to fund these military expeditions, but over how that money was to be raised. The pacifist Quakers were slowly losing their grip on the Quaker faction. Their demands were more and more seen as impractical in a time of war, and they themselves were growing weary of politics, which meant that non-pacifists and indeed non-Quakers were now able to put themselves in positions of power.

Most notably, after spending his first few years in the Assembly as a non-partisan figure, Ben Franklin had moved into the Quaker faction. In fact, he swiftly became the leader of the Quaker faction, despite being neither a Quaker nor a pacifist.

He kept some of the old policies in place, in particular the attacks on proprietary authority. He still tried to get Governor Morris to accept that proprietary lands would have to be taxed, the same as everyone else. But he was also much more open to the use of force. He proposed a bill to create a voluntary militia, based on the one he'd created during the last war, and it was passed with only a few dissenting Quaker votes.

Indeed, Franklin himself was made an officer. He went out to the frontier and raised a force of 560 men. There he had several forts built, but he soon returned to Philadelphia to continue his work in the Assembly without ever seeing any action.

But the point is that Franklin was moderating the more extreme Quaker demands for total pacifism, to create a more moderate, broadly acceptable faction. It was such a big change that I'm going to start calling it the popular faction instead of the Quaker faction. It was a continuation of the old Quaker faction, but it no longer had much Quakerism in its DNA.

Franklin's new faction was opposed to proprietary authority, and it was still pretty anti-war, but it was also willing to raise a militia and so on. That was the sort of compromise position which appealed to most Pennsylvanians. They didn't want to pay for big armies or risk conscription, but neither did they want to be defenseless. Hence, a volunteer militia made perfect sense. It was a platform designed to get support from a supermajority of Pennsylvanians.

And at the same time Franklin was taking over the Quaker faction, the remaining Quakers were voluntarily removing themselves from power.

The proprietary faction was still continuing its quest to bar Quakers and Germans from serving in the Assembly or voting. In 1755 they sent a petition to London asking the Board of Trade to keep these groups out of government. The Board of Trade heard the petition and issued a recommendation to Parliament that they pass an act requiring officeholders in Pennsylvania to swear oaths, which of course Quakers were forbidden from doing. It was an indirect way to ban Quakers from office.

In response to this, the Quakers in England mobilized to help their brethren in America. They worked on two fronts: firstly, to keep officials in London from taking any drastic actions. And indeed, Parliament wound up not banning Quakers from office, although it was probably due to the fact that Pennsylvania was being more proactive in the war thanks to Ben Franklin. But either way the Quakers were saved for the time being.

The other thing that the English Quakers did was to discourage Pennsylvania Quakers from holding office during wartime. Maybe that seems contradictory. They were working both to make sure that Quakers could hold office and to make sure that Quakers didn't hold office. But I think it made sense. This way, the Quakers wouldn't have to compromise their principles, and they wouldn't take the blame for any problems that came up. It was better to voluntarily give up power for a little while, rather than risk being permanently forced out.

The Pennsylvania Quakers apparently agreed with this logic. Six of the hardline pacifists resigned from the Assembly, and they were replaced by Anglican supporters of Franklin. And after the next election, another four Quakers resigned. By 1756, a majority of the Assembly was now non-Quaker, a tremendously rapid fall.

But as it turned out, that was it for the Quakers. They never again regained control of Pennsylvania. Their numbers were too few and their total pacifism was too unacceptable. That they'd held on so long was a miracle itself, but realistically it couldn't last. As soon as they were dislodged, there was never any going back.

And so, the transformation of Pennsylvania was complete. The proprietorship had ceased to be Quaker with the death of William Penn, and now even the Quaker faction had ceased to be Quaker. 70 years was all they'd had.

The Quaker experiment had failed, just like every other planned attempt to build a society in America. In New England, the Puritans, in the end, had abandoned their Puritanism in favor of creating a normal society. The Quakers, however, made the opposite choice. They held on to their beliefs even when it meant losing power.

As society drifted away from the Quakers, the Quakers drifted away from society. Many Quakers were becoming increasingly apolitical. Well, not exactly apolitical – they still wanted to make the world a better place, but the compromises politicians had to make were unacceptable. And so the true believer Quakers became increasingly withdrawn from political life. Any of the Quakers who didn't support this turn drifted away from Quakerism in general, which reduced the Quakers to a small but devoted rump of true believers.

Instead of politics, the remaining Quakers devoted themselves more and more to charity and to advocacy, which is one of the big reasons why Quakers turned to abolitionism before almost anyone else in America. They redirected their energy into causes like that. And so the few remaining Quakers continued to have an outsized impact on America for generations to come.

There’s a saying, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.” I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s what Quakerism aspires to. Pennsylvania was no longer Quaker, but Quakerism imprinted itself on America’s identity far more than you’d think.

Next episode, we'll finish off the history of colonial Pennsylvania with a comprehensive look at the one group of colonists I haven't yet talked about: the Scots-Irish, the fighting Scots-Irish. So join me next time on Early and Often: The History of Elections in America.

The podcast is on twitter, at earlyoftenpod, or go to the blog at earlyandoftenpodcast.wordpress.com for transcripts of every single episode. And if you like the podcast, give it a good review on iTunes. That helps. Thanks for listening.

Sources:

The Colonial Period of American History Volume III by Charles M. Andrews

The Philadelphia Election Riot of 1742 by Norman S. Cohen

Voting in Provincial America: A Study of Elections in the Thirteen Colonies, 1689-1776 by Robert J. Dinkin

The World of William Penn by Richard S. Dunn and Mary Maples Dunn

Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fischer

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin

Colonial Pennsylvania: A History by Joseph E. Illick

The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century, Volume II by Herbert L. Osgood

Pennsylvania Politics and the Growth of Democracy, 1740 - 1776 by Theodore Thayer

Benjamin Franklin and the Pennsylvania Germans by Glenn Weaver

American Nations by Colin Woodard

Benjamin Franklin and the Quaker Party, 1755-1756 by John J. Zimmerman

[cedarmoons]

do you have tips for creating memorable oc's? yours are always great

this ask is perfectly timed because I’ve recently played the mobile game Stellamore by @willowishstudios (available now on iOS and Android!) and I’ve FALLEN IN LOVE. Cipactli babe… call me… (jk i’ll call u 😏😘)

So! Let’s go overboard in answering this ask and create a brand new OC for Stellamore, step-by-step! Under the cut for length. :)

My method of creating OCs is like a toddler fiddling with building blocks. I start with a base and build from there, adding rooms, removing towers, etc., as I see fit, until I have a basic structure that passes as a castle. It should be mentioned that @vide0-nasties has been instrumental in helping me develop my MCs in various ways, and I love her to pieces!

First Step: Inspiration

So before I decide anything about my OC, personality, name, etc, I look at inspirations: what is in the game, and what can I build off of it? The devs have helpfully provided some inspirations for the Stellamore world, so that’s what I’m going to use as a launching pad. Initially, I looked at Halle, who has clear Scandinavian influences, and I was like “nice… viking girl…” but I did further lore delving and I don’t think Halle is human lmfao so THAT was out! Back to the drawing board.

Ooh, okay, so there’s Roman influences, clearly seen in the character Seneca, who is human… okay. Great. Let’s make this MC fantasy Roman! That gives me my foundation of building blocks.

Second Step: Name

So the Oracle, Stellamore’s MC, receives visions from the stars. Knowing this, I was like, “Dope… let’s look at some mythology names, because Roman influence, and try to narrow those down to celestial/sky deity names.”

So I went to good ol’ Wikipedia’s list of names, and here were some of my initial impressions:

Aditi’s a pretty name, but that’s the name of a Hindu goddess, and MC’s fantasy Roman. Questionable decision. Out.

Urania’s the muse of astronomy, so it fits thematically, but there are unfortunate implications within the name. I can name her Ourania to get rid of the unfortunate “ur anus” implications, but that’s a bit of a mouthful? Hmm. No. Next.

Asteria is an old Greek goddess of the stars… nice… wait, I already have like 3 OCs with A names. Let’s diversify. Out.

Phoebe is a Greek Titaness of prophecy and related to Titaness Theia (!!), mother of Asteria. Good placeholder name, but a little too modern for my tastes. We’ll see.

Eventually I settled on Maris, which means “of the sea” and has nothing to do with the stars or astronomy &etc. I don’t know how I jumped to Maris from sky deity names, but it’s pretty and it’s Latin, so Maris is her name! 

Third Step: Faceclaim/Appearance

I always try to find faceclaims for my OCs as a springboard. Back when I was thinking “hhh Viking Gorl” as my baseline, I found pictures of María Valverde as Lucrezia Borgia and I was like “oh,,,, nice,,,” and looked up María outside of that role. María is still not a lock in for Maris, but she’s influenced her looks! Outside of that, I wanted to make some tweaks.

One thing I wanted for sure: black hair and brown eyes (romanticize brown eyes!! every one of my OCs has brown eyes except Ziah and I will regret not giving her brown eyes to my dying day)

Second thing I wanted: thanks to Ms. Valverde, I wanted Maris to have a big beautiful nose and oval face!

Third thing I have just as of right now decided about her appearance, suddenly and without warning: she’s gonna have moles on her face. no freckles, just moles. (bonus: Cipactli counts them and LOVES THEM ALL. My babe…… I’ll call u….)

Rags (@vide0-nasties) was kind enough to let me pick the height for her Oracle, Petra, so she picked Maris’s height, which is now 5′8″.

Fourth Step: Personality and/or Backstory

This is the least fleshed out because I decided to make Maris yesterday (11/12) after replaying Stellamore and trawling through the blog’s Cipactli tag for that sweet sweet lore about my newest love. But here were my initial goals for Maris:

Theia make an OC who’s not an ice queen (at the start) challenge

Theia make an OC who’s not depressed and/or anxious challenge

Theia make an OC who’s not an introvert challenge

Theia make an OC who’s not afraid of her emotions challenge

So that’s fine. Again, I need a springboard for Maris. I’ve decided since she’s an Oracle, and Oracles have connections to the stars for unknown but undoubtedly cool reasons, she will be an Air sign (completing the cycle of Ziah’s Earth, Ariala’s Fire, and Adelaide’s Water) – which limits me to Libra, Aquarius, and Gemini. Okay, well, let’s google some “basic traits” of all of these signs. I want Maris to have sun or star symbolism, because Ziah and Adelaide are my Moon Girls and Ariala’s my Sun Girl, so I can either balance it (making her a Sun symbol) or complete the triad (making her a Star symbol). 

Here was my thought process researching this:

“Libras can be emotionally cold” oof… no… that would fail my non-ice queen challenge, let’s move on to Aquarius (who can also be cold I have discovered through another search with Google Images)

Oh, Aquarius seems extroverted! I like these basic traits, and it makes sense since Mukondi is Maris’s friend and an extrovert. Both succeeds my “non ice queen” and “non introvert” challenges. Depression and/or anxiety… I’m coming for u bitches…

Oh hey what’s Cipactli’s sign

OH HE’S A LIBRA

OH AQUARIUS AND LIBRA ARE COMPATIBLE JACKPOT

I put a lot of stock in astrology even though I know I shouldn’t

Okay I’ve decided to give her Sun iconography to balance it, I can make Star ocs later. This means she will wear a lot of gold/summer tones.

Also hey Cipactli’s religion focuses a lot on the sun

U know what this means………….. religious iconography during sex…… symbolism……..

anyway Cipactli my love i’m so sorry idk if ur religious or not and if u are I apologize for the blasphemy

But if ur not….. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Ms. Valverde’s smile in many pictures is kinda smirk-y, so maybe that’s something to incorporate about Maris: she doesn’t smile, she smirks. What kind of sense of humor would that give her? A wry one? A dry one (which isn’t the same thing necessarily)? What does this phrase – that she doesn’t smile, she smirks – imply about her character? Is she smug? Self-assured? Sarcastic? Detached from others? (NO! She can’t be detached because then I will fail my “don’t make an ice queen” challenge!)

Her personality will still need fleshing out – I will need more to work with than “oh she’s extroverted!” and “oh she’s friendly/sunny!” She will need flaws that are more complex. Since I chose the “bold” option when approaching Cipactli, maybe… HMM… okay, let’s make Maris bold. This makes her unafraid of conflict, but can also make her brash and/or arrogant and/or potentially hot-tempered! She can also be insufferably smug when she’s right, which is often, because of her Oracle abilities (idk!)

Another springboard I’ll use is looking up MBTI types, but those usually come after I’ve made my OC and just need more development.

As for her backstory, here were some things I decided upon, fiddling with my growing castle made out of wooden building blocks:

Okay she’s fantasy Roman… what if… she grew up on a vineyard & winery

And her dad was the vineyard’s owner

A mom? No. Single dad. Who knows where the Mom went. No, that could give her mom issues, let’s not do that. Mom died in childbirth or illness?

So now Maris is the daughter of a vineyard owner, which means she would probably know a fair amount about wine, which means she has excellent (and/or: snobby) taste in wine.

She also loves nature because she grew up in it, which means she would LOVE Huatzintepec. Oh hey, Cipactli’s room is full of plants, another reason for Maris (and me) to love him

I’ve just decided she has an older brother

No, younger

No, she has two brothers, one older and one younger. She’s the middle child. This means Mom died in childbirth to the younger brother and made Dad a Single Roman Dad.

Dad funded her education because if she was educated she could a) help her brothers operate the winery/vineyard after his death; b) make a career in politics and further the family name (haven’t decided a surname yet, let’s google Roman surnames, ooh here’s a list of ancient Roman surnames on Wikipedia – OKAY, I have it, Maris Viridius of the Gens Viridia); c) marry a well-off fantasy Roman businessman??

Instead Maris became a diplomat, which is how she met Mukondi, and since they’re both friendly extroverts they became fast friends

Since she’s a diplomat and educated she probably speaks a bunch of languages,,, oh look here’s a list of how many languages the cast speaks [clicks tongue] noice,,, okay so she would speak at least 3 (three) languages: Latin, Common, Greek, and know some basic Nahuatl

How does her backstory influence her personality, because pasts always have a vast impact on characters’ (and our own) personalities? Well, maybe she’s a little bit elitist because of her upper class upbringing. Maybe her work as a diplomat has allowed her to visit every one of the human kingdoms, and has made her down to earth. Maybe she was so cooped up in her studies that she became sheltered, or a bookworm, or both – which would give her another point of commonality with Cipactli.

All of these are reasonable possibilities, and all of these are little building blocks I can assemble together to shape my OC and develop her further!

So now I have Maris Viridius, of Gens Viridia, who:

has black hair, black eyes, lots of moles, a big beautiful nose and an oval face (thus, rounded features)

is an Aquarius

is unafraid to be bold, even if it comes across as arrogance; is unafraid to challenge authority; is also aware, as a diplomat, when to hold her tongue or when to be polite (her job might also make her a good liar? things to ponder for the future!) 

is an optimist and an extrovert; thrives off of meeting new people and making new friends; has a good, albeit sarcastic, sense of humor

is gonna cash in Cipactli’s v-card, but tenderly, because soft otps are my jam

I have to do more development with Maris, but here is her skeleton, built out of blocks! I might just write some stuff for her and Cipactli in the future because I have seen two (2) Stellamore fics, one on Tumblr and one on Ao3, which is a tragedy.

Anyway, I know I went overboard, but I hope this helps and gives insight into my process as to how I write my OCs! :)

[weareinstrangetimes]

This Day In History - Jan 20, 2021 |  a work in progress...

Immediately after the inauguration of Joseph R Biden as the 46th President of The United States of America, the Republican Party, along with the right wing disinformation network and their allies abroad and whatever nook and cranny they can be found in will attempt to re-write history. They will point the finger of blame for everything they are responsible for including their complicity in the corruption, deceit, atrocities, breaking of all norms, denigrating the Constitution, insurrection and attempted sedition based on the lies and conspiracy theories by their nice leader and traitor-in-chief.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A post from October with a lot of research, graphs, and links, topped with a video from Meidas Touch

The Trump Depression: The Economy Does Better Under the Democrats

One of the rare occasions when DJT has told the truth.

https://weareinstrangetimes.tumblr.com/post/633392690647711746/the-trump-depression-the-economy-does-better

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The National Debt.

Trump’s most enduring legacy could be the historic rise in the national debt

COVID-19

One Year, 400,000 Coronavirus Deaths: How the U.S. Guaranteed Its Own Failure

Cremation Limits Lifted In LA Due To 'Backlog' As COVID-19 Deaths Skyrocket

~~~~~~~~~~~~     ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I continuously see posts in FB, and shared from one person to another, in many edited forms, that are to be their “reminder” of where we are currently, for posterity. Most of them will have some personal points of fact in them such as the current price of gasoline in their area. Most of them contain the usual false or misleading talking points used by the GOP and the right wing disinformation circles. They aren’t outrageously nonsensical enough to have come from the duck pond people, so they mostly are just the usual disinformation from the Republicans. Case in point: Facebook post I am making this post so it will show back up as a future memory on my timeline:Today is Biden's Inauguration ...Gasoline is currently $2.17 per gallon in Checotah OK. Interest rates are 2.25% for a 30 year mortgage. The stock market closed at 31,188.38 +257.86 (0.83%) today even though we have been fighting COVID for 11 months. Our GDP growth for the 3rd Qtr was 33.1 percent. We had the best economy ever until COVID and it is recovering well. We have not had any new wars or conflicts in the last 4 years. North Korea has been under control and has not been testing any missiles. ISIS has not been heard from for over 3 years. The housing market is the strongest it has been in years. Homes have appreciated at an unbelievable rate and sell well. Wood prices are high with 2x2x8' going around $5.66/stud at Home Depot... And let’s not forget that peace deals in the Middle East were signed by 4 countries—unprecedented! Unemployment sits at 6.7% in spite of COVID.

Point - Counter Point

My reply: The 33% gain in GDP is true. That is still 10% below the Q1 level after the 31.4% drop in Q2. And even farther below the Q4 2019 level. The reason for the 33% gain from a 31.4% loss is due to the stimulus pumped into the economy from the Cares Act that Nancy Pelosi worked so hard on getting. https://www.brookings.edu/.../dont-let-flashy-3rd.../ 

Below is a running tracking of the GDP from 1947 to the latest data. There are two major drops in the GDP. One starting in Q3 2008, and another dramatic one beginning Q1 2020.

   Reply to me: plus adding manufacturing that was outsourced to offshore manufacturing, lowering tax rates on business, and a multitude of other things. If you think this new stimulus bill they passed will benefit us we'll see since they seem more interested in sending money to other countries including enemies.

My Response:

Which manufacturing jobs were those? I know there has always been a lot of "talk" about it. Many corporations took advantage of their tax windfall to buy back their own stocks. Some who did upgrades added automation which resulted in loss of jobs for human workers, that robots could do. Some of those high profile corporations that were on display at the White House who gave out $1000 bonuses (to high ranking employees) laid workers off and scaled back which more than made up for it. Many CEOs and upper management received raises and very little went to the working class employees. There were a few companies that actually did increase wages and benefits to their employees, and Kudos to them. But I think they were in the minority.

The money going to foreign countries is not anything new and it was also included in the previous years budgets. It was part of the annual budget, in the defense portion, and was not part of the stimulus bill. They combined voting on them to try to get them both passed. The House voted on them separately and the Senate was to vote on the combined bill. The talking points are merely political, knowing full well that the majority of the population were not going to do any research.

N Korea? While exchanging love letters they were continuing their nuclear war head development under the cloud of a love affair. They had already perfected and tested their long range missiles within the last 4 years. Missiles that could reach the Western United States.

Peace treaties between non-warring countries? A nice political ploy. Bebe was returning the favor for the previous administration's help with his re-election. The two peoples still at odds are Israel and the Palestinians. The Palestinians were left out. The Palestinians want the same thing that Israel has always wanted and rightly so. Their own homeland/country and recognition on the world stage. The conflicts in that region, aside from with Iran, were with Qatar, (where we have a strategically shared air base and thousands of troops, and the other strategic partners in the region. Why? Because Jared Kushner got turned down when he was asking Qatar to bail out his failing 666 5th Ave property. It was revenge. So, that's like throwing gas on a pile of wood, lighting it, and then offering water to put the fire out. Those "peace treaties" were nothing more than normalization and cooperation agreements with some promised "deals" thrown in.

Point - Counter Point Another post being passed around in FB.

I've heard everyone else's hatred, rhetoric and blatant lies for the past four years, so now I'm expressing my opinion. If you don't like it, you know where the delete button is. Let me be clear, I'm not a Biden fan. I think he's corrupt, a liar, a racist fanatic, he's in bed with China and probably suffers dementia. He has done nothing to improve anything in his 47 year political career. But what has Trump done in the past 4 years?The ′′ arrogant ′′ in the White House negotiated four Middle East Peace Accords, something that 71 years of endless political intervention and war failed to produce.The White House ′′ buffoon ′′ is the first president to not involve us in an outside war since Eisenhower.The ′′ racist ′′ in the White House has had the biggest impact on the economy, bringing jobs and reducing unemployment among the black and Latina population of ANY other president. Never. Ever.The ′′ liar ′′ in the White House has exposed profound, widespread and long-standing corruption in the FBI, CIA, NSA, and Republican and Democratic parties.The White House ′′ White Supremacist ′′ turned NATO around and made them start paying their debts.The White House's ′′ dumb ′′ neutralized North Koreans and prevented them from sending missiles to Japan and threatening the Western US.The ′′ xenophobic ′′ in the White House changed our relationship with the Chinese, brought hundreds of businesses back to the US and revived the economy.This same ′′ clown ′′ reduced taxes, increased the standard deduction in his IRS statement from $ 12,500 to $ 24,400 for married couples and prompted the stock market to rise to record levels, positively impacting retirement accounts of tens of millions of citizens.The ′′ idiot ′′ in the White House accelerated the development of multiple COVID vaccines that are now available or will be soon. And yet we still don't have a vaccine for SARS, bird flu, ebola, or a number of diseases that emerged during previous administrations.The ′′ orange man ′′ in the White House rebuilt our military, which the Obama administration paralyzed and fired 214 key generals and admirals in their first year of term.Got it you don't like it. Many of you hate and despise him completely. How special of you. He is serving you and the WHOLE American people. What are you doing besides insulting him and laughing that he got the China virus Some of you even expected COVID to be the cause of her disappearance. (Ah, the left. The party of ′′ tolerance ′′Please re-educate me on what Biden has accomplished for America in his 47 years in office, as well as enriching the entire Biden family. BTW where's Hunter?I'll take the ′′ clown ′′ any day versus a corrupt, hypocritical, racist, fork-tongue liar. I want a strong leader who isn't afraid to kick butts when necessary. I don't need a father figure. I don't need a liar. That's what Hollywood, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS and The New York Times are for.Call me dumb, racist, super diffuser or part of the basket of deplorables. I don't care!God bless Donald Trump, the best and least appreciated president in US history.

Reply:

Counterpoint part 1: I realize you are not the author of that post. I have seen this post re-posted many times in various forms here in FB including by friends and I didn't respond. But since this is my post I will. I have also seen it at a site where gamers, musicians, music enthusiasts and creative folks hang out. It did not originate from there. The origin I believe is in part anyway from the same conspiracy theorist group that also makes up wild and crazy claims of former heads of state and officials being arrested, that never are. And people dying, who are still alive. And a dead person secretly being alive and running a crusade, who is still dead. And pizza joints having basements with trafficking rings, that have no basements. And miracle cures for COVID that are not proven and can cause more damage if not used for what they were intended for, even if you have a really cool pillow and a clean aquarium. And, and, and ... 5G, windmills, George Soros, Bill Gates, Forest Gump, Mr. Magoo, and voodoo doctors doing it with little green men in their dreams. 

Do they ever question why everything they believe is bunk? Do they ever get angry for being deceived? Do they ever feel foolish for looking foolish for posting such foolish nonsense? No. They just pass it off and wait for the next wild tale to spread and swear by. 

There are those who praise so-called Peace Treaties between nations that are not at war, leaving out the 1 culture that is affected and wants their own sovereignty and homeland, in every one of those so called "peace treaties". They suggest he should get a Nobel Peace Prize, and some even think he has been awarded it because he puts a fake facsimile of the medal in some of his posts. Those "peace treaties" I don't think were any more than cooperation and normalization agreements, and in some cases containing agreements to make financial transactions. 

The guy they tout as not having involved us in any wars has brought us very close to nuclear conflicts with his loud mouth and nasty tweets. The one guy who was the most imminent danger learned quickly that he could dupe the the mad Tweeter by giving him praise. In turn, he received what his father and grand father, also dictators before him, could never get from a U.S. President. What they got, with very little in return, was their most coveted prize, an audience with the Tweeter which gave them credibility and legitimacy in the eyes of their own subservient population. And they got an end to our annual readiness maneuvers with their Southern neighbor and our other strategic allies which was their second most coveted prize. Then while exchanging love letters with the mad Tweeter, they were able to secretly continue with their nuclear warhead development. And since they already have long range missile capability to reach the United States (tested during the mad Tweeter's reign) they are not only a major threat to our allies in the South Pacific, they are an imminent threat to the mainland U.S. 

The "buffoon" (referenced in the list of fables) in question also abandoned our allies that were instrumental in fighting ISIL (who is not completely eliminated) leaving them to be threatened with genocide (our betrayed allies) by another despot whose country hosts real estate developments the mad Tweeter has his name on (Trump Towers), and another crazed dictator who has been guilty of genocide and using chemical weapons in his own country on his own citizens. Those allies were also guarding the prisons that the ISIL prisoners were housed in, and they were allowed to escape. In fact his claims of completely eliminating ISIL himself 100% can be debunked by his own State Department. https://www.factcheck.org/.../trumps-isis-claim-goes-to.../ That was in 2017 and 2018. So, if ISIL (ISIS) was 100% defeated by 2018, why were we still fighting them in late 2019? Trump walks back claim of defeating ‘100% of the ISIS caliphate’ https://www.rollcall.com/.../trump-walks-back-claim-of.../ The claims by the right wing propagandists and Trump regarding unemployment for Blacks, and Latinos can be corrected by simply doing some research. AP FACT CHECK: Trump on unemployment for blacks, Latinos https://apnews.com/article/e1afa3f19a054540a7c34ca193bdd9ae Quote from the fable: "The White House ′′ White Supremacist ′′ turned NATO around and made them start paying their debts." What he did was weaken our alliances, playing right in the hands of one of our most dangerous adversaries, the guy who helped him to get into office. Something he has done throughout his term. And, his alt-facts and those of the right wing deceivers are easily fact checked. FactChecking Trump’s NATO Remarks https://www.factcheck.org/.../factchecking-trumps-nato.../ Trump made many claims about bringing jobs back to the U.S. and creating new jobs. Many of those things he was taking credit for early on were things that were already in the works long before he was helped into the White House. 2017: https://www.factcheck.org/.../trump-jobs-returning.../ 2020: We can reshore manufacturing jobs, but Trump hasn’t done it https://www.epi.org/publica.../reshoring-manufacturing-jobs/

There are a lot of claims around the GOP tax cuts. Sure, the standard deduction was increased. So has the cost of living due to illegal trade wars and prices sky rocketing. And many deductions for those who itemized were eliminated. Many are still waiting for their "post cards" so they can file their taxes. Those who really benefitted were those who are not in a month to month struggle to make ends meet. The corporate tax cuts that the Trump and GOP promoters said would trickle down and benefit the working class family wage earners was not realized. Corporations used their GOP granted socialism to buy back their own stocks. And many of those who touted handing big bonuses out in turn laid other workers off or eliminated jobs which more than made up for it. 

The stock market has been used by Trump and his mouthpieces as an economic indicator. While some people do benefit with returns on their retirement plans and stock portfolios, it is not a barometer of how working families are getting along, many who have to work multiple jobs just to pay rent and eat. And not everybody dabbles in the stock market. There have been ups and downs in the market. There was one period in March of 2020, where all gains in the market were wiped out back to February 2017. What happens in that type of situation? Those companies that can wrangle it buy back their own shares at lower prices which artificially gives the market another instant boost.

Counterpoint part 2:>>> Let's talk about infrastructure week. Still waiting on that one since February or March of 2017. We'll have to wait until real President-elect Joe Biden takes office. 

How about Operation Warp Speed and vaccine development. Accelerated vaccine development is a good thing, and because there were decades of research behind it and technological advances it was possible to accomplish. Joe Biden even acknowledged Trump, or at least Operation Warp Speed as a positive move. We can at least give him credit for that, since he botched the response with delays, denial, disinformation, and creating a herd mentality to push back on safety and mitigation in order to recklessly reach herd immunity through infection and death.> It should be noted that the first vaccine that was approved was from Pfizer, and they did not participate in Operation Warp Speed where the others received funding. They funded themselves although Trump deceitfully takes credit. And those 20,000,000 vaccine doses that Trump, Pence and the Trump administration were promising by the end of December 2020? As of January 8th, 6.6 million initial doses have been administered according to NBC News MAP Covid-19 vaccination tracker across the U.S. https://www.nbcnews.com/.../map-covid-19-vaccination...

After Trump "wanted to play it down" the U.S. as of Friday, January 8 2021, has surpassed 22 million COVID-19 cases, with a record 269,420 new cases, and over 372,000 deaths (Jan 9). https://www.nbcnews.com/.../u-s-covid-19-cases-hit-22...

Trump and his enablers and apologists often talk about how he rebuilt the "depleted military" that he inherited from President Obama. As with most Trump claims, it is Mostly False. Quote from the fable: "The ′′ orange man ′′ in the White House rebuilt our military, which the Obama administration paralyzed and fired 214 key generals and admirals in their first year of term. "Regarding the firing of the Generals, I saw another figure, 197, that was posted in a publication for retired folks in The Villages in Florida. Others have said it first appeared in the alt-right fake news Breitbart site. As with most things that roll around like a marble in an empty box in the right wing disinformation arena things are just made up, or facts spun and twisted like a taffy pretzel. In 2010, President Obama did replace his top Afghanistan war commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal due to in-bickering in his national security team. He replaced McChrystal with his boss and mentor, Gen. David H. Petraeus. https://www.nytimes.com/.../24/us/politics/24mcchrystal.html There have been other firings, replacements, and retirements. Most absences are for good reason and there is no wholesale purging as the right wing conspiracy theorists would lead you to believe. https://skeptoid.com/.../24/president-obama-purge-military/ Quoted from Snopes: "The U.S. national defense budget was slightly reduced during Obama's second term, in large part due to efforts by Congress to limit government spending and the withdrawal of troops from the Middle East. "Who controlled both the House and Senate? The Republican Party. https://www.snopes.com/.../trump-inherit-depleted-military/ AP FACT CHECK: Trump's Overblown Boasts About Military, Vets https://www.usnews.com/.../ap-fact-check-trumps-overblown... General Michael Flynn was also fired in 2014 from his position as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency under Obama. Too many connections with RU it seems. And something I didn't previously know, was after he was fired he became a contributor to RT (government funded, Russia Today). https://themoscowproject.org/collusion/flynn-fired-dia/ I had always thought he was fired due to his overt Islamophobia which didn't sit well with some of our allies. He was advising Trump in 2016 on foreign policy and national security and subsequently during his campaign transition. Then he was appointed National Security Adviser in the administration (despite warnings not to), and he brought much of his baggage with him. It was discovered that he had previous contacts with the Russian Ambassador to the U.S. and was accused of trying to undermine U.S. policy. He was also accused of being a lobbyist for the same country where Trump's name is licensed on the Trump Towers Istanbul (that's 2 of them). All this while receiving classified briefings. He was fired or asked to resign just 3 weeks into Trump's term. https://apnews.com/article/ce90066b4e20483da79adf21910da0c7

Another quote from the fable list: "The buffoon in the White House has exposed the deep, widespread, and long-standing corruption in the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and the Republican and Democratic parties." While there have been some procedural errors and some ethical issues, most of them are small compared with the real issues at hand. Now, the "buffoon" has not exposed anything. All the noise is to cover up and deflect from the corruption and high crimes and misdemeanors of said buffoon and his accomplices, enablers and apologists. That is the way the GOP does things.

"47 years" seems to be one of the fall backs when they run out of any other fables, or simply can't think of anything else to say. That would bring us back to 1973 making him 31 years old at that time. Joe Biden was a U.S. Senator representing Delaware from 1973 to 2009, re-elected several times. He was Vice President in the Obama Administration from 2009 to 2017, two full terms. He ran for president in 1988 and 2008.He has been on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In his early years he worked on consumer protection, environmental issues, and greater government accountability, arms control. He has worked as a public servant most of his adult life. He has probably done a lot more in his 47 years since being elected U.S. Senator than most people asking what he has done. While some of his views and policies in the past were controversial at the time, like most people, he has evolved and adapted to the changes in culture and public opinion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Biden...

The person who wrote the fable list states he will take the ′′ clown ′′ any day versus a corrupt, hypocritical, racist, fork-tongue liar. The Impeached "clown" in fact is all of the above and has been identified as a pathological liar and probably the most documented liar in history. The "clown" is also labeled as racist, corrupt, a con-artist, a xenophobe and a bigot among other things too numerous to list. Many people have said that. Also, unindicted co-conspirator, Individual 1, in crimes another person is serving prison time for. Individual 1 was only ‘not indicted’ due to Justice Department policies on not indicting a sitting president for crimes committed.

to be continued....

[itsfinancethings]

New story in Politics from Time: 5 Myths About the 19th Amendment and Women’s Suffrage, Debunked

Even a century after Tennessee became the last state to ratify the 19th Amendment on Aug. 18, 1920, there are still a lot of misunderstandings about what that 39-word addition to the Constitution did and didn’t do.

So much of the history that led up to that moment—and so much history was made after—has only been written in recent years and is still being written, especially as scholarship have spotlighted the diversity of the suffrage activists who weren’t mentioned in earlier histories of women’s suffrage.

TIME turned to historians of the women’s rights movement and experts on the suffragists and voting rights activists to debunk some of the top myths and misconceptions about the significance of the 19th Amendment, from the oft-cited birthplace of the suffrage movement to the stories of history’s most famous suffragists.

The Myth: The 19th Amendment guaranteed all American women the right to vote

The reality: After the Amendment was ratified, states passed other laws that disenfranchised women

Many people are surprised to learn that the right to vote—for any American—is not part of the original 18th-century text of the U.S. Constitution. Later Amendments established this right in reverse, by clarifying ways in which it is forbidden to limit the vote. “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex,” the 19th Amendment clarified.

“The text of the original Constitution does not speak about voting,” says Lauren MacIvor Thompson, a historian of early-20th century law, at Georgia State University. “Yes, there is the 15th Amendment and the 19th Amendment, but they are discussing what the states can’t do to restrict voting based on race/sex [respectively].”

As a result, states tried to get around the Constitutional addition—and the 15th Amendment, which banned restriction of the vote “on account of race”—by passing laws requiring voters to pay a poll tax or take a literacy test, or stripping the vote from women who married an immigrant.

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution“Zitkala-sa” by Joseph T. Keiley, 1898 (printed 1901).

Tests and poll taxes didn’t mention “race” or “sex” but were used to target certain voters, especially African Americans. Violence and intimidation, especially lynchings, also kept people away from the polls. Some registrars even flat-out refused to process the papers, or handed Black women a blank sheet of paper. The same methods of disenfranchisement also held back Latinas from voting in the South. At the same time, laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the immigration acts of 1917 and 1924 blocked Asian immigrants from citizenship, and therefore, from voting. And even though Native American voting rights activist Gertrude Simmons Bonnin— also known as Zitkala-Sa—lobbied for the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, which allowed more Native Americans to vote, some Western states didn’t grant Native Americans the right to vote until 1948 (Arizona and New Mexico) and 1957 (Utah).

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 would eliminate many of the obstacles women of color faced voting, but the Supreme Court in 2013 invalidated part of the law’s federal oversight of state obstacles to voting rights. Voting rights activists and policymakers continue to call for updates to strengthen it.

“[The 19th Amendment] is not beginning or the end of a story,” says Lisa Tetrault, associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University and author of the upcoming book A Celebrated But Misunderstood Amendment, “but the middle of an ongoing story. It didn’t start women’s voting and did not complete women’s voting.”

The Myth: Women couldn’t vote before the 19th Amendment

The reality: Whether a woman could vote before 1920 depended on where she lived, her race and her citizenship status

In about half of U.S. states—18, such as New York and California—some American women, including Black women, were able to vote in local, state and federal elections, prior to the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, according to the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Twenty-two states, like Illinois, had partial suffrage, meaning women could vote in certain elections, and only eight states had no suffrage. At least 3,586 women ran for office in the 50 years before 1920, a fact that helped show political strategists that women were a bloc they couldn’t ignore. Those victories were mostly in the new territories in the West, which used suffrage as a lure to attract new residents; more than 750 women were elected to various offices in Kansas before 1912.

Women were also voting before the United States even existed. Women voted in the colonies before they lost the right to vote during the American Revolution, and indigenous women in North America were voting before the European settlers arrived.

“Indigenous women have had a political voice in their nations on this land for over 1,000 years,” Sally Roesch Wagner, historian and editor of the 2019 anthology The Women’s Suffrage Movement, points out. “Women’s rights is not a new concept on this land; it’s a very, very old one. And the clan mothers of the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Haudenosaunee women, have had political voice for 1,000 years.”

Several important suffragists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Matilda Joslyn Gage and Lucretia Mott, had contacts with Haudenosaunee women and saw them as an example. “I think [seeing the power of indigenous women] made it possible for them to imagine a different way of being and it was so far beyond the vote,” Wagner says.

The Myth: All women wanted the right to vote

The reality: Some women opposed the 19th Amendment

Florey Suffrage Collection/Gado—Getty ImagesA circa 1918 anti-suffrage poster or broadside, issued by the Oklahoma Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage.

Just as women today don’t represent a single united voting bloc—and don’t always vote for female candidates—some women in the late 1800s and early 1900s opposed extending suffrage.

Some believed voting would distract women from their far more important roles as mothers and wives and “ruin happiness in the home,” says Sally G. McMillen, historian and author of Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement. In addition, amid period of a great wave of immigration back then, McMillen says, some feared the political impact of extending the vote to immigrant women. Many anti-suffragists were upper-class female philanthropists who feared more women voting would threaten their influence.

“Many of them thought that gaining the right to vote would be a loss to them in terms of their power in the family, and their role as the arbiters of moral and social purity,” says Lauren MacIvor Thompson.

Associations taking that side of the argument sprouted up nationwide. In a 1909 publication titled “The Remonstrance,” Boston women argued that the woman of the day was “already overburdened with duties which she cannot escape and from which no one proposes to relieve her.” The New Jersey Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage argued that suffrage logically involves the holding of public office, which is “inconsistent with the duties of most women.”

Others simply thought that suffrage wasn’t the most pressing issue, says Tetrault. Advocates for temperance and birth control thought such matters protecting women’s “bodily freedom” were more important.

The Myth: The most important suffragists were white

George Grantham Bain Collection—Library of CongressA 1923 photo of New Mexico suffragist Nina Otero-Warren, who lobbied her state’s legislators to ratify the 19th Amendment.

The reality: Women of color played a key role in suffrage movement—but got left out of the retelling of it

One of the clearest examples of the impact of non-white women on the American suffrage movement is Adelina “Nina” Otero-Warren, who lobbied New Mexico legislators to pass the 19th Amendment. According to Cathleen D. Cahill, associate professor of history at The Penn State University and author of the upcoming Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement, “At the last minute, New Mexico ratification is looking a little bit like it might not go through. Without her, New Mexico wouldn’t have ratified [the 19th Amendment] and without New Mexico, the amendment might not have been ratified because every one of those states was essential.”

Library of CongressChinese suffragist Mabel Lee was profiled in the April 13, 1912, edition of the New-York Tribune.

Another example can be seen in Mabel Lee, a 16-year-old incoming Barnard College student and future economist, who was front and center at a 1912 suffragist parade in New York City. At that event, suffragists tried to shame American politicians by arguing that China was going to give women the right to vote before the U.S., following the 1911 revolution that overthrew the empire and established a republic. (In fact, China wasn’t as far ahead as the suffragists thought.)

In recent years, as papers and articles by voting-rights activists have been digitized, the work of previously undersung suffragists is getting a new wave of attention. As historian Martha S. Jones told TIME recently, Black suffragists and other women of color were not always at—or even invited to—white suffragists’ events—so finding their stories requires researching the events they held instead; many of them were not even catalogued as relating to the suffrage movement.

Many suffragists of color were left out of what’s long been considered the definitive history of the 19th century movement, the six-volume series called History of Woman Suffrage. Published between 1881 and 1922, and spanning more than 5700 pages, it features profiles of women who paid for their portraits to be in the book. “Susan B. Anthony herself recognized that this was possibly a problem [and] that by requiring the people whose portraits were in the book to actually pay for those portraits to be in a book would limit the vision, and yet she did it anyway,” says Allison K. Lange, associate professor of history at the Wentworth Institute of Technology. “The women whose portraits became part of that book really are the women that we most often remember today and they’re the women whose portraits are in most archival collections.” (Lange co-curated Truth Be Told, a new site aggregating documents and artifacts about suffragists of color.)

The Myth: American Feminism began at Seneca Falls

The reality: Seneca Falls started to be seen as a turning point only decades later

Ken Florey Suffrage Collection/Gado—Getty ImagesA circa 1859 Harper’s Weekly caricature satirizing the 1848 women’s rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, captioned “Ye May Session of Ye Woman’s Rights Convention – ye orator of ye day denouncing ye lords of creation, ” suggesting that suffrage is contrary to religious and natural law.

The July 19-20, 1848, women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, N.Y., is sometimes called “the beginning of feminism.” Scholars today say it’s important to remember when Seneca Falls started being described as the origin of the movement, and why it started being described that way.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized the women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls in just a few days, so attendance was mostly local, though 200-300 people did attend. Black women, however, were not present at the event—even though a group of Black women fighting to be licensed preachers had the prior spring made many of the same demands that would show up in the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments.

At Seneca Falls, each of the demands passed unanimously; the right to vote was the only one in danger of failing, until Frederick Douglass backed it in an impassioned persuasive speech. Ironically, two decades later, in 1869, Stanton turned on Douglass by opposing the passage of the 15th Amendment. Some suffragists supported it and some, like Susan B. Anthony and Stanton, thought that Black men shouldn’t get the vote before white women. Douglass countered that Black men needed the vote more “urgently” because of the daily vigilante violence they faced.

Bettmann Archive—Getty ImagesA circa 1881 photograph of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, founders of The National Woman Suffrage Association, seated together at small table.

A few months after Congress passed the 15th Amendment, Anthony and Stanton distanced themselves from the amendment’s supporters by starting The National Woman Suffrage Association to advocate for an amendment enshrining women’s suffrage. Their wing of the movement also set out to ensure that their views prevailed in memory of the women’s suffrage movement, coinciding with “a period of intense memory building in the U.S. after the Civil War,” as Tetrault explained on the Professor Buzzkill History podcast earlier this year.

When Victoria Woodhull was jailed for obscenity amid her short-lived 1872 presidential campaign, the two started telling the story of the 1848 Seneca Falls convention to mitigate the “PR disaster” for the suffrage movement. In 1873, they organized a meeting to mark the 25th anniversary of the convention—and in doing so began reshaping both the “official” history of American feminism and the reputation of Seneca Falls, which up until that point had not been seen as a major turning point. Anthony did not even attend the 1848 convention, though she talked about it so much that she’s often mistakenly reported as being there.

Emphasizing Seneca Falls as the birthplace of the suffrage movement also allowed them to exclude from the story a rival who didn’t attend the convention, Lucy Stone—a champion of both a woman’s right to vote and to keep her maiden name—who supported the 15th Amendment and advocated for a state-level approach to suffrage. When The History of Woman Suffrage was written, they further preserved their place at the center of the story.

“A variety of divisions inside the movement put Stanton and Anthony at a defensive position,” Tetrault explained. “We think of them as acclaimed, beloved leaders for the duration of the campaign, but that’s the end of the story read back onto the beginning.”

—With reporting by Suyin Haynes

from Blogger https://ift.tt/3g64256 via IFTTT

[mixedfeelingsproject]

Arslan

Where are you from? United States of America

How would you describe your race/ethnicity? Native Turkmenadian (Kalinago/Arawack, Turkmen, Scottish, Irish, African)

Do you identify with one particular aspect of your ethnicity more than another? Have you ever felt pressure to choose between parts of your identity? Yes, and somewhat. I mainly identify with Turkish, which is pressured when I am unable to speak Turkish myself. Black Americans have wanted me to identify with black, but that would deny me my heritage. My friend's girlfriend once told me over the phone "I need culture".... Turks have been around for over a millennia, whether they were Mongols/Huns, Mughals, Seljuk, or Ottoman. I have history. Lots of it. I recently got to identifying more with my Grenadian side, eating their foods, but Turkish is predominantly how I identify, even if people don't see it haha. Latino Americans, similarly, have walked up to me speaking Spanish, and being disappointed when I couldn't. As I have found out, people think I look Brazilian or Dominican. However, that is their perception, so I don't feel pressure because I can't compare it at all.

Did your parents encounter any difficulties from being in an interracial relationship? Yes. When my they were dating, my father worked at UPS. His boss once told him he was "in the wrong kind of interracial relationship". When he introduced my mother to his mother, they got into a screaming match for a solid 20 minutes before letting my mother in. Polite, but probably seething. When I did visit Turkey when Babaanne (paternal grandmother) was still alive, I never knew more than half the family. When she died, I met cousins who were about my age. It was amazing, and sad to hear and think about.

How has your mixed background impacted your sense of identity and belonging? Very much so. I don't belong anywhere, yet I belong everywhere. I can make friends easily, but since we don't have a cultural connection, there is always a barrier. Recently, one of my close friends is Peruvian, and maybe because I look Latino, to some, we hit it off. But no, I do feel as though I don't quite belong, especially because I am upper-middle class, going to a middle to lower class college. I can feel the cultural gap. Black Americans, Latino Americans, and South Asians all call me "my n****", and I don't respond. Not my culture(s). I get along every well with Indians, Pakistani, and other MENA people more than black Americans or Latino Americans. So, it's easy to see where I belong, because my identity is stronger there. But would they let me marry their daughters? No.

Have you been asked questions like "What are you?" or "Where are you from?" by strangers? If so, how do you typically respond? Very, very seldom actually. I get this question from black Americans and Latino Americans most. However, when dealing with Eastern Europeans, or anyone from the MENA region, they are pleasantly surprised by my name. These MENA people accept me more so than non-MENA people (except Eastern Europeans). I usually get snooty, like "well, what do you think? You'll never get it right". Maybe when they ask, I'll give them my middle name, much to the shock of my friends, who think I am lying. It's quite funny, and hides my identify. Or at least one of them.

Have you experienced people making comments about you based on your appearance? Kind of? They mostly love my hair. They think it's a perm. Also, black people, followed by Latino people, are the most attracted to me. But no girlfriend, so...

Have you ever been mistaken for another ethnicity? All the time. Black, Latino, Indian! My mother and sister get Indian the most, but now me too!

Have you ever felt the need to change your behavior due to how you believe others will perceive you? In what way? No, because I am too much of a personality by myself to try to fake being anybody else. I really can't fake being anyone who I am not, even when I give a "false name".

What positive benefits have you experienced by being mixed? I am more comfortable around white people, because I realize that not every white person is European. After all, people from the MENA region are recognized as white by the U.S. census (may change in 2020). When I run into these people, we are on good terms, especially once they see my name. Being mixed has also allowed me to see the world. Thus, I believe I have a better understanding of the world and see how race is not everything, it really is an American thing. The world is broad, giving me a bigger perspective than most. For example, interracial couples are common in Paris, France; London, England; Lisbon, Portugal, and of course Sao Paulo, Brazil. It's just America it is still taboo. Living under my father's white privilege has allowed me to see the better side of the world. For example, we have a sailboat, something most minorities don't even think about, and I get to go on adventures, sailing through the Florida Keys, the Hudson River, and New York Harbor. Again, my world is broader, and I am thankful for that.

Have you changed the way you identify yourself over the years? Yes. When I was young, I was black, at least I thought I was because my mother taught me that. However, my father saw me as Turk (according to Turkish citizenship requirements, that's true). Neither did my friends. Mixed was not a word or identity that existed then. Sometimes, on the infamous race/ethnicity fill-in-the-box, I would fill in black, Asian, and native American. After all, Turkey is in Asia, not Europe (unlike what tour guides say). 

Are you proud to be mixed? Yes

Do you have any other stories you would like to share from your own experiences? One time, the family was at a restaurant and the waiter asked if my dad and mom were married. Literally, the only time the validity of the family was questioned. Being mixed has given me privilege into the white mind. When I was at college, the first one, an acquaintance said "Hey, since you're not really black, can I say racist things about black people?" I said yes to learn more. A friend of his would say "I hate rap, except for Eminem, 'cus he's white". Recently, people have said I look Indian. Maybe it's the beard? I forgot the first time I got that was my second year of college. I have gotten it a lot in the last 2 months. In Portugal, a man in the first 4 hours of my arrival, asked me a question. I had no idea what he was saying. Again the next day with a woman. I have never felt so normal outside the U.S.

[loislaneinvestigatesauthors]

An early woman bishop? Diane Cummings and John Rigoli’s The Mystery of Julia Episcopa

How much of the story of Julia Episcopa is based on real history? How did you research this?

John: Based on archeological discoveries and the works of historical scholars, it is widely accepted that women held leadership positions in the early Church. We have evidence of female ordination throughout the Roman Empire from tombstones, frescoes, mosaics, and manuscripts.

Reference: Women Officeholders in Early Christianity by Ute Eisen and Dorothy Irvin.

In the letters of Paul dated to the middle of the first century CE: He greets Prisca, Junia, Julia, and Nereus' sister, who worked and traveled as missionaries in pairs with their husbands or brothers. He tells us that Prisca and her husband risked their lives to save his. He praises Junia as a prominent apostle, clear evidence of women apostles active in spreading the Christian message. Paul's letters refer to house churches where women led the meetings, teaching Jesus’s message.

Reference: Karen L. King Professor of New Testament Studies and the History of Ancient Christianity at Harvard University in the Divinity School.

Though the subject is still controversial, many scholars believe that Paul’s contradictory instructions that women ‘are to remain silent’ was a much later addition to 1st Corinthians, an addition added by a scribe in the 4th century.

 I traveled to Italy and Israel several times, have researched the stories of the Roman Empire and early Christian history over 30 years. They call me an archaeology sleuth.

Diane: Julia is a fictional character based loosely on the biblical character Junia. That Paul considered Junia an apostle is where the similarity to Julia begins and ends, though Junia’s life might have played out exactly as we constructed Julia’s. We placed our protagonist in historically accurate settings and gave her life as it was lived then. We sent our publicist, who lives in Florence, Italy, to Herculaneum so that we could accurately construct her life there.

 A previous title more explicitly stated the women's history and struggle aspect of this book. Why did you decide to change it to the more enigmatic title it has now? 

John: We did not want to confuse readers from ordering the earlier version and felt that the word mystery might rouse readers’ curiosity.

Diane: “A Woman’s Struggle…”didn’t gain much interest when we published it. John and I realized that we could add to the story and improve it. We changed it so much that “Struggle…” diminished in comparison to “Mystery…” We tried to retire the first book so as not to confuse readers with two books of the same name, but as you know, once online, it’s there forever. Therefore, we changed the title.

 What was a woman's life, and a woman's role, like in Roman Empire times? How (or did) Christianity affect society's view of women? 

John: Women were considered full citizens under Roman law, though they could not vote or stand for office and had no formal role in public life outside of certain religious offices, such as the Vestals. However, many wives, widows, or close relatives of prominent men often wielded great political influence behind the scenes. In public, women were expected to play their traditional role in the household. They were responsible for making clothes, running the household. They were expected to be the dignified wife and good mother and not break from this tradition. 

Diane: We’re speaking of the upper classes now. Children were adored in Roman households, especially the girls. They were educated and many could speak several languages by the time they were of marriageable age, at around 14-16. As they reached the age to marry, they could depend on their fathers to find them a suitable husband. Adoring fathers wanted their daughters happily settled in marriage, but at the same time, the match must be financially advantageous to both families. Daughters never decided whom they would marry. Love did not enter into it.

When a girl married, her relationship to her father remained unchanged, and she was legally still a member of her father’s family, with equal inheritance rights to her brothers. This led to a relative level of independence under Roman law, in comparison to other cultures of this age. She will have been trained by her mother in all aspects of running a household. Supervising slaves/servants, organizing and hosting lavish parties, maintaining her family’s status would be done with ease. If she were savvy enough, politically astute, she could speak her mind to her husband, guiding and advancing his career.

 In the earliest days of Yeshua’s preaching, the Romans largely paid little attention to the religious lives of their Israeli lands provided Rome received the taxes they were due. The diaspora Jewish communities throughout the Roman Empire were allowed to practice their religion relatively freely.

 Rome viewed the earliest Christian communities as simply another Jewish cult, and did not differentiate them legally from any other group of Jewish settlers. Though there were some persecutions under Emperor Nero, there was little legal difference under Roman law until the Jewish Rebellion in the latter half of the first century, at which point, the Christian movement sought to distance themselves from the Jewish communities.

 While we do not know precisely when the role of women in the early church started to be curtailed, we do know that women were a dominant force in the early church. We also know that when the fledgling movement was moved to distance itself from Jewish communities in the Empire, the Jews began to be less separatist and conform more closely to mores of the larger Roman society. They wished to blend in in order to avoid the persecution that they were subjected to after the rebellion in Jerusalem and the fall of the Temple in 70 CE.

  How did Julia's social standing impact her life as a woman? How would the story have been different if she had not been noble, if she'd been, say, a farmer's daughter? 

John: Because of her formal education and family status and wealth, Julia was able to sponsor and provide early Christian meetings at her home and recruit other wealthy and high-ranking Romans.

Diane: As a Roman noblewoman, Julia had the best of everything: a fine education, a beautiful home, all the clothes and jewelry one could imagine and a husband who, even if he did not love her, respected and honored her. Julia organized the household, raised children, and mixed with other women of her station, for her a tedious pursuit. Her husband ruled, and what she wanted was subject to his approval. She came to know that what she lacked in her life was personal freedom.

 It would have been difficult for Julia to imagine the life of a farmer’s daughter. Class differences were an unquestioned fact. However, she had the opportunity to travel, to mix with people of many different stations. Her eyes opened, and she developed empathy for the many who suffered. During her lifetime, though, she never quite shed the image of herself as the sophisticated noblewoman, which made her the force she was.  

  What reactions has this book gotten from religious people? Nonreligious people? 

John: Based on the majority of Amazon reviews, most readers have embraced this book - both religious and non-religious. We have presented a plausible story that challenges the status quo, and so far, most people have really loved it.  

 Diane: We were worried, of course. A couple of readers have accused us of “heresy,” but I have to say, our Facebook page is full of lively discussion. Men seem more troubled by the notion of a woman bishop than women do.

 What was your process like working with a coauthor? How did you two collaborate?  

John: We communicate by email and phone as I live in San Francisco and Diane lives in Atlanta. The process works for us because of our different contributions to the writing. My historical research and Diane’s writing expertise.

Diane: Once we decided to work together, our division of labor was obvious. John would be responsible for research and putting into context what he found, and mine would be writing the book. We did no outline. We had a general idea about where to start and no idea where it would end. We made it up as we went along by spending hours on the phone creating scenes and characters. One of John’s creations was Giuseppe. He wanted to add a character with slight limitations—and this idea came well into writing the first draft. I really liked this character after we rounded him out, but we had no idea what to do with him. We talked and talked creating scene after scene, and just when we thought to scrap him, one of us said, “Got it.” And Giuseppe became our caretaker.   

The Mystery of Julia Episcopa is available here. 

[ourimpavidheroine]

1/2: I started reading your Wuko story (The abdication of Hou-Ting LVI) a week or so ago. It's fucking awesome. Seeing Qi making a conscious effort to correct Qi's speech to make it more proper? Tears every where. I'm an English major that grew up in poverty and my speech very much reflects that. I'm more than capable of speaking "proper" English but for years I didn't because that's how I talk. But people thought I was dumb and crude because of how I spoke.

2/2: It made me cry to see that some one else gets it. I've tried to explain that people treat me differently because of how I talk but no one seems to get it. Seeing it put into such a beautifully crafted story and centered around a non-cis character that I could relate to as agender? It made me feel like I wasn't just over reacting for the first time in my life. Does your understanding of how speech effects the perception of the person come from experience? Personal or otherwise?

First of all, thank you so much for taking the time to not only let me know you are enjoying the stories but also for sharing such a very personal connection to them. Your words were very beautiful and very very moving. It meant a lot to me to read them.

To answer your question...yes. My understanding of how speech influences perception is 100% personal.

As a small girl, I had a stutter. I was already a strange, awkward child - it was only in my 40′s that I was diagnosed with Asperger - and the stammer made it so much worse. I was in speech therapy for two years getting rid of it. The bonus of this was that I learned to mimic my speech therapist’s voice perfectly.

I also grew up in and around poverty. When I was 10 my parents moved us from the San Francisco Bay Area to a tiny town located in Northern California, a town that relied on the timber trade to survive. My parents were blue collar people who hovered on the brink of poverty my entire life. I was the first person to go to university in my family. And when we moved to this small town? I got beat up more than once for emulating my old speech therapist’s accent. Because I sounded stuck-up, don’t you know.

I got the fuck out of Dodge when I left for University (never to return) and I studied theater, where I specialized in acting, and especially voice work. I spent a lot of time perfecting my accent when I was there, losing the rough sounds of my background. I knew first hand how different I sounded. I knew first hand how differently people treated me when I didn’t sound like who they expected.

Fast forward many years. I met and married a Finnish woman and moved to Finland. Now being an immigrant is part of my identity, and the fact that I cannot speak fluent Finnish continues to impact me every day. Finns make a lot of assumptions about me because of my accent: I’m stupid, I’m uneducated, I’m not funny (humor in a second language is difficult), etc. People get impatient, angry, dismissive and are often very rude to me because of it. And I’m the “right” kind of immigrant, a white cis woman (who isn’t Russian). It’s so much worse for my fellow immigrants here who are not white. My life is full of constant small humiliations because of the way I speak: the man in the shop, brusque and impatient, the receptionist feeling completely free to yell and humiliate me because I misunderstood the time of my appointment over the phone, the looks on people’s faces when I mispronounce a word.

Because of the Asperger there are also times when I struggle with communication, where my spoken words jumble up and either come out tangled or refuse to come out at all. Do I get judged for this? Of course. People don’t know what is going on, and they assume the worst.

I teach English for a living. I’ve taught myself to speak what I call Teacher English: I speak clearly with excellent diction, slowly, I avoid slang and idioms, use phrasal verbs very sparingly, etc. It is an extremely conscious way of speaking, done in order to help my students understand me and gain the confidence to speak aloud (a problem that many Finns have). I am 100% aware of what I am doing. It is very deliberate. Because I know how it works, I know how speech has such an impact on how we live our day to day lives. (In fact, just this week I did a voice meme here on Tumblr; you can listen if you want to hear me speak!)

So yes, Anon. Yes. When I am writing about Qi trying to improve their accent, when I write about Wu trying to fit in, when I write about Mako’s struggle to make sure that he and Bolin keep their lower middle class accent, when I write about Nuo’s treatment at the hands of her schoolmates for her Lower Ring accent and then her treatment at the hands of her family when she finally comes home with an upper Middle Ring one, when I write about Huan’s struggle to make himself understood - his use of formal rote language when he is unsure or doesn’t know someone, his word salad when he’s starting to melt down and/or shut down - all of these things come from my long years of very personal experience. I get it, I really do. I know exactly what you are saying to me; let me assure you that I hear you, and I know. And I want to hug you, because I also know the kind of emotional toll it takes from you, trying to make those changes. It’s slow and frustrating and yeah, it hurts. It’s frustrating that most people, like you said, have no idea of the assumptions they are making about someone based on their speech. Classism is a real thing, and it is revolves around how we talk. (And hooo-boy, there is so much to unpack about it with regards to racism, too, because race and speech? Holy shit. But that’s another post.) So let me say right here and now, Anon, that I’m acknowledging all of your hard work and I don’t have to know you to tell you how brave you are. I salute you, one poor kid to another.

[qualkoesuce-blog]

Online dating sites racist

Racism and online dating: my experience The overwhelming majority of roles offered to Asian men in media is one that ignores their humanity, their experience, and sexuality.  Does online dating reveal that we're racist? African-American women said yes about 30 percent less often to Hispanic men; about 45 percent less often to white men; about 65 percent less often to Asian men.  They dropped out of High School, or they took standard English or Special Education English in High School, and they did poorly in every math course in High School, but they get to vote on the legality of new bills and Amendments at the State, Local, and Federal government level.  Seeing that all the time affects your self-esteem.  Non-white women also exist that will only date black or Asian men.  I wrote a Take some time ago about how crappy dating sites are and completely forgot to mention the racial situations on them, which I probably will do in a follow-up Take I'm planning on.

That dating site for white people? It's racist, no matter how it's justified You don't understand that I have a certain mindset embedded in my mind that I can't just change if I want to.  Never saw a black girl with a white guy.  And then, these same women rarely if ever mention anything they bring to the table.  However, when it comes to interracial dating, all is not fair and equal.  To examine how racial prejudice affects our romantic decisions, Kevin Lewis, a sociologist at the University of California at San Diego, analyzed messages sent by more than 126,000 OkCupid users over a two-and-a-half month period.  Online dating is meant for those who are ready to step out of their comfort zone and not those who are waiting for someone to come and sweep them off their feet.  Black women tend to be the group least likely to go outside.

The casual racism of our most popular dating apps I don't think it would change and have me go for only white people.  Today, the African population is lagging behind the other three mitochondrial lineages by about 100 to 150 years worth of intellectual evolution, and this is in spite of the western world doing everything humanly possible to help educate and advance these people.  And I can't wrap my head around it.  Just curious as to what other Asian actresses are deemed hot by Asian fetishists? Yes, being mixed race, I have felt like one or two doors closed on me. .  But when you already are that race but don't date others it can have different reasons.  It found that racial bias has increased.

Online Dating: Racist or Revolutionary Furthermore, race was shown not to be a factor in perception.  Their behavior turned on a dime.  And of course, anytime we talk about appearance, race will eventually come into play.  This actually happened about a semester ago.  A new study of racism in OkCupid messaging finds a little bit of hope in a sea of largely same-race interactions.  So why do such a significant portion of gay men feel comfortable writing it on their profiles? Then again, the demographics of my clients are probably a bit skewed towards upper-middle class white people.  Its like food, what some people love others hate.

Inside the Sad World of Racist Online Dating I just thought that it was pretty amazing that someone who lived such a short life had such a big impact on yours …….  But it never was because of any of these.  Sinakhone Keodara, the founder of a Los Angeles-based Asian television streaming service once came across the profile of an elderly gay white man online.  Whatever it is though, I think it's weird.  You have all masterfully painted the picture of a few sane, healthy people drowning in an ocean of socially unskilled hypocrites: Women who would deign to accept a five foot four Asian M.

Racism and online dating: my experience And this has little to nothing to do with peoples reasons for going on a dating site at all.  I mean if a white guy only dates black girls is he racist? It doesn't apply to me personally.  Aren't there plenty of others who would want them in real life? Any man that gets to know you can appreciate you… race is unimportant.  In most of Asia, I find that the parents are only worried about two things.  Maybe the fact is, just like in every race, there are men that are not appealing to women.

Online Dating: Racist or Revolutionary You can choose to not respond to them.  Almost all polymaths in history have been western European, with a few Asians, and then one or two Arabic individuals in the past 1300 years.  You get to decide what is right for you, but also get to decide who we are allowed to date? Blacks are generally the same size flacid or erect, whites will typically grow a substantial amount from flacid to erect.  I suspect, however, if the question had been would you marry someone of a different race, the differences between men and women would have been less pronounced….  If your teachers are that incompetent, then get off your lazy ass and go read a library book.  It really boils down to this; there are many more white men than Asian men in this country.

Online dating racism row: 'I only date hot white girls': does racial bias in relationships make us racist? And you will be the one selecting, not the other way round.  I once knew an Asian guy like this that did have one very nice girl interested in him.  While he said white people were the most likely to consider relationships with people from other ethnic backgrounds, he said the biggest 'reversals' in preference, are observed among groups that display the greatest tendency towards in-group bias.  It has given even the socially awkward people the opportunity to meet someone special.  Check out this article about dispelling the Asian male.  The website looked at research from five years ago - which showed most people prefer to date within their own race - and compared it to current data.  I find your responses thoughtful and helpful as well.

[erinmorganmcki1]

Gentrification

Have you ever heard of the lost village in New York City? Many people walk all over and around the village every day. This lost village, Seneca village, was thought to be the first community functioned by African Americans. Andrew Williams, an African American, purchased the first three lots that would become Seneca Village for one hundred twenty-five dollars. Williams helped build the village from his house to his (where he would marry his wife in the backyard) to the first church (All Angel’s Church). He and Sara would raise their three children in this up and coming neighborhood they called home, where the Irish and Blacks would eventually get along even though both ethnic groups faced mental and physical discrimination. Andrew Williams had open arms for the Scott O’Neal family the day they wanted to come into town and helped build their houses after they were forced to move out of Yorkville. O’Neal’s bakery was torn down to construct the Croton Distributing Reservoir. Williams consoled O’Neal in his time of grief, reassuring him that it was safe in Seneca as long as they stayed united. Then one day all the families received a thirty-day notice (and two hundred dollars) to leave their homes for the bettering of the city. Central Park was born. What is the word that makes the middle and lower class residents cringe, have economists on the fence, and politicians happy? Gentrification. Gentrification is used to displace low-income residents, and it increases crime rates on surrounding neighborhoods/counties by renewing and rebuilding, which has more negative impacts than positive, socioeconomically and politically.          The history of renewal is best understood through close examination of multiple cases. According to the person who coined the word, “One by one, many of the working class quarters have been invaded by the middle upper and lower…once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the working class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district changed” (Ruth Glass). Looking down the history of Gentrification in the United States no much good has come from the advances. Shortly after the Vietnam War, the city of Boston wanted to make some breakthroughs. They created new factories for jobs and built new apartments, without acknowledging the lower income neighborhoods who could not afford these higher taxes on rent. As a result, the combat zone formed, full of high crime, mostly drugs, and prostitutes. A Harvard football star ended up on the wrong side of town that night and was murdered. The city did not pay attention to the high crime, and so they lacked police force in that area. Thanks to Brown vs. The Board of Education segregation in public schools is non-existent. Brown was a little black girl who was not able to go to a school because of discrimination even though it was closer to home. Her and twelve other families filed a case against the board of education and were granted access to this school. Now there is a more natural way to deal with wanting your child into a better school, gentrification. As gentrification rises school rezoning increases shown in cases like Shawn v. Reno and Shelba County v. Holder. There are plenty of claims about how these adverse effects are not intentional and that the end goal is to improve the area. Whether or not these effects are intended or not they happen and have continued to occur in the U.S.          As gentrification continues to displace low-income residents, this affects the socioeconomic status and interactions with others. Georgia State is a university but also a major company. The school has bought almost every building surrounding Woodruff Park, like the Sun Trust building. The school makes Atlanta more of a campus instead of a city. The only affordable housing downtown for the lower and middle class are provided to college students. The same thing has happened to midtown Atlanta. For example, I lived in Atlanta for three years. When it was time for my mother and me to move because of a pest issue, we couldn’t. My mother was a teacher and are considered higher middle class, but we could not find any reasonably priced apartments for her income that would allow me to go to Grady High school. So instead I attended Tucker High. When I lived in Candler Park that would let me stay at Grady the neighborhood salary average was $76,354.The average income is now $143,918 (point2homes). Due to the home improvements some made, others were forced or preferred to move. I have witnessed five new homes built, and two remodels on my old street alone since 2012. The neighborhood has become more luxurious over the years, and it used to be cozy with a lived-in kind of feeling. The split between white collar and blue collar jobs in this neighborhood had been close to a 55:45 ratio. Now it is closer to a 70:30 split expecting to be even closer to an 80:20 in five years. It is not hidden that a lot of blue collar jobs tend to have more minorities employed, that is just history. There has always been a social divide in major cities, and the neighborhoods that are being transformed are historically black or surrounded by traditionally black communities: Kirkwood, Edgewood, and Reynoldstown border Candler Park, Inman Park, and Decatur. Simply economics will show that if ten new houses built in each one of these "white collar" neighborhoods that the average home price for old houses will go up at least $15,000. The more demand for larger homes, in safe communities, in a high school district the more family size homes and upgrades that will be built. After this, the average home price may have increased at least4.5% up to 12.3%. Since parts of Edgewood is in the same zip code as Candler Park the tax dollars for those homes will increase, causing families that cannot afford those taxes to move.          Although there were probably two apartments that were affordable, it wasn’t worth it because when you pay for a place to live, you are also paying for the neighborhood. The two homes me and my mother had to choose from were in higher crime areas than we were accustomed to. If this could happen to my family, imagine how many other families continue to go through the same things. No person should have to sacrifice safety to be able to go to the same school. (Plan to place facts/research done on the politics, inflation, and how school systems are affected). In the end, we moved to Tucker, Georgia, a pleasant little suburbia on the outskirts of Decatur. We soon saw with the increases in nice expensive neighborhoods in Atlanta; the more crime spread to cities near us like Clarkston and Lawrenceville.          Gentrification is used to displace low-income residents, and it increases crime rates on surrounding neighborhoods/counties by renewing and rebuilding. Does this process help cities grow? Yes. Does this process lower unemployment? Yes. Has this process divided major cities into white collar blue collar? Has this process diminished the diversity of races as well as income? Has this process got rid of suburbia? Has this system made it harder for the low-class citizens of major cities to receive a better education as well as other opportunities? Yes.

[bestnewsmag-blog]

New Post has been published on Bestnewsmag

New Post has been published on https://bestnewsmag.com/top-10-uk-guided-walks-and-tours-for-families/

Top 10 UK guided walks and tours for families

If you’re searching out “gently spooky” families as opposed to “deliver the youngster’s nightmares tours for weeks”, then that is the UK   ghost tour for you. Comply with “Victorian undertaker” Invoice Spectre as he leads you thru the returned

streets and courtyards of Oxford. This twilight excursion is peppered with ghost memories, that are illustrated with props, pyrotechnics, and illusions. Lots of jokes and audience participation ensure it by no means goes to the dark face and is suitable for children of every age. • Friday and Saturday night at 6.30pm from the gift shop of Oxford Fortress Unlocked, 1¾ hours, no need to an e-book. Adults £9, youngsters £5-£7. Ghosttrail.Org

Robin Hood, Nottingham Ezekial Bone’s Robin Hood tour. Fb Twitter Pinterest The legend of Nottinghamshire’s well-known outlaw is delivered to live on this entertaining tour. In feathered cap and leather jerkin, Ezekial Bone (aka Ade Andrews) appears the element, leading traffic across the key sights in Nottingham, along with the Castle, Lace Market, and Vintage County Gaol. A foray into underground caves and St Mary’s churchyard add a fun frisson for youngsters. Bone additionally runs tours of Sherwood Wooded area with an emphasis on the natural environment. • tours run most Saturdays from March-October and on different dates at some stage in the yr. Endorsed for kids over 10, 2½ hours. Adults £12, underneath-14s, £7. Ezekialbone.Com

Blackbeard to Banksy, Bristol Workplace block wall in Bristol providing a Banksy mural of a caricature canine. Fb Twitter Pinterest Banksy mural on a Workplace wall Discover Old pirate haunts and current avenue artwork on Duncan McKellar’s taking walks excursion. An artist and historian, McKellar humorously weave the specific strands of Bristol’s records on a two-hour walk, taking in Lengthy John Silver’s model, Robinson Crusoe’s first port of name, Bristol Fort and some of the metropolis’s avenue art, such as pieces by using Banksy and JPS. • tours run on Thurs-Solar, departing from the cathedral at eleven.30am. Adults £7, children £3, a circle of relatives £18. Blackbeard2banksy.Blogspot.Co.uk

Supercalifragilistic, London Amber Raney-Kincade’s Mary Poppins excursion. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: Niki Gorick Dressed as Mary Poppins, Amber Raney-Kincade takes households on walking excursions of the city of London, inspired by means of the lifestyles and works of Poppins novelist PL Travers. Amber prefers to maintain the precise details of the itinerary a wonder, but count on a jaunt to a London park, feeding the pigeons on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral, a view over the London rooftops or even the occasional burst of the track. Film fans can find out about the making of Mary Poppins (which wasn’t truly shot in London) and there are masses of thrilling records sprinkled in approximate suffragettes, chimney sweeps, and the city. The total distance walked is much less than a mile, so it’s best for little legs and on hand for prams and wheelchairs. • Runs maximum Saturdays, 2 hours. Adults £15, under-12s £10. Americantourguideinlondon.Com

Fossil looking, Isle of Wight Compton bay, Isle of Wight. Caption Fossil looking, on the dinosaur island “ isle of wight” Fb Twitter Pinterest Photo: Samuel J Ford/Picfair Martin Simpson recognized locally as “the Fossil Man”, runs the fossil and gem save at Godshill on the Isle of Wight. He’s written several kids’ books on fossils and Stocks his understanding on fossil-looking journeys on beaches in the southwest of the island. They normally include the chance to spot dinosaur foot casts and, if the tide is ways out sufficient, the remnants of a fossilized Wooded area. families are shown wherein to look for fossils and might preserve any they locate. The 2-hour journeys are appropriate for every age and no equipment are required. • Some journeys are led by Martin and A few through head guide Felicity, 2 hours. Adults £4, children £3, circle of relatives £12/£14, personal journeys from £40, island-gems.Co.uk

Seaside safaris, Gower peninsula Organization of traffic to a Seaside safari, Gower peninsula, Wales. Fb Twitter Pinterest Picture: Judith Oakley Marine biologist Judith Oakley is in no way happier than while poking around rock pools in south Wales. On summer weekends, households can join her on one among her free Beach safaris to learn about the area’s hidden storefront and marine wildlife, and how to help appearance after it. kids discover ways to discover exceptional forms of seaweed and anemones and are shown the high-quality locations to look for sea urchins, starfish, and crabs. Places for the safaris vary but consist of Mumbles, Rhossili Bay, Bracelet Bay and Port Eynon. • Safaris open to all ages from 3 upwards and are loose. Reserving essential – dates and details could be available on the Oakley Intertidal Facebook web page

Roam with Romans, Northumberland A tour guide and a colleague, wearing Roman soldier gown, stand on Hadrian’s Wall. UK Fb Twitter Pinterest Not anything pops up a history lesson pretty like an area experience – particularly if it’s guided via your very own Roman auxiliary. Kev Robson started out Wild canine Outside 4 years in the past and his two-hour Roam with the Romans taking walks excursion of Hadrian’s Wall offers families an insight into existence in Celtic/Roman Britain, the cultural beliefs of the time, battle procedures and the constructing of the wall itself. The tours start at Cawfields, near Haltwhistle, wherein there is a properly-preserved stretch of wall, the remains of a Milecastle and stunning views throughout the moors. The interactive tours are led by way of a costumed guide – regularly Kevin, however occasionally every other member of the team – and children can attempt on a Roman helmet and Observe a self-guided story map. Kevin also can organise family bushcraft workshops and c498ca6ac814ba2a0e6fddbf2ba4d831 excursions of the area. • Adults £20, 5- to fifteen-12 months-olds £three, under-5s loose. Wilddogoutdoors.Co.uk

wildlife safaris, Scottish Highlands natural world Safaris, Scottish Highlands with wild west.Scot Facebook Twitter Pinterest Spot pink deer, Highland cattle, seals, otters, osprey and eagles on a flora and fauna safari with the guide and photographer Ian MacLeod. Ranging from four hours to a full day, the Wild West minibus excursions out of Fortress William discover the wildlife of Lochaber and the Ardnamurchan peninsula. Ian’s Huge 5 safari consists of a ship trip on Loch Shiel to search for otters and harbor seals, followed by using a street excursion in search of purple deer, purple squirrels, and golden eagles. In October, Ian runs safaris to look pink deer rutting, and he additionally gives searchlight trips to identify nocturnal animals which include bats, badgers and pine marten. • 1/2-day safaris: adults £35, underneath-16s £21. full day Big 5 safari with boat ride: adults £eighty, beneath-16s £48. Wildwest.Scot

Viking walk, York visitors, and publications on the Unique Viking stroll, York Facebook Twitter Pinterest learn about the deeds of Ivar the Boneless, Eirik Bloodaxe and Harald Hardrada on a walk via York with Sigwulf (real call, Neil Tattersall). With flowing locks and dressed in complete Viking apparel, Neil immerses himself in the component and – with a background in overall performance, martial arts and level combat – is aware of a thing or two approximately how to weave a story and wield an axe, which should hold maximum kids enthralled in this 75-minute tour around the historical capital of the north. • excursions run every Saturday and on demand; most are led through Neil but by way of different guides once in a while. Adults £6, below-16s £three. Northernforge.Co.uk

Thames archaeology, London Thames Direction, London Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Tames Path in critical London. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Mum or dad Dr. Fiona Haughey is one of the international’s leading experts at the records of the river Thames. Her “Secret Thames – the Archaeology” tour is a taking walks records lesson, covering the entirety from the Roman career to London’s Secret rivers. “Beachcombing” tours are no longer approved on the foreshore without a license, so most of the tour now takes place on the Thames Course. But, Fiona brings alongside Masses of her very own captivating unearths for human beings to deal with – everything from a flint all to a medieval clay pipe – and on the end of the tour, individuals are free to go down onto the foreshore to look what they can locate. • Scheduled dates from April-October from Mansion Residence tube station, 2 hours.

Family Life in the 18th Century

Marriage, children, economic circumstances and social status were closely linked during the 1700s. The majority of families were what the famed English author Daniel Defoe termed “the middling class” or the middle class, a status of the family that was non-existent before the 18th century. During the 1600s people were either wealthy and privileged or utterly poor and there was no in-between whatsoever. The rise of the middle class began during the 18th century and its impact upon family was enormous.

Women and men of the upper classes did not marry for love. Instead, they married strictly for financial and social reasons. Women who wished to continue living in a wealthy household simply did not marry a man of the middle or lower class. A self-respecting gentleman didn’t even consider marrying a woman from a poor family. It was unlikely she would possess the social graces and dowry required to marry into such a society. Moreover, rumors would abound as to why a wealthy young man would wed a girl of such poor means. Perhaps he had gotten her “in the family way” and was inclined to do right by her? Such humiliation could never be visited upon his family.

The middle class, on the other hand, could marry whomever they liked. It wasn’t sensible for middle-class

women to marry a poor man since her children would be raised in poverty, yet if her happiness depended upon it, her family was unlikely to intervene. There was no need to marry for social status or wealth since the middle class did not possess either.

Yet the concept of the middle class was still one of privilege. Up until the 18th-century childhood, like the middle class did not exist. The lower class worked hard to eke out a living and their children were expected to work alongside them. The school was a privilege that only the upper class could afford. And well into the 18th-century childhood still did not exist for the lower class.

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Even a century after Tennessee became the last state to ratify the 19th Amendment on Aug. 18, 1920, there are still a lot of misunderstandings about what that 39-word addition to the Constitution did and didn’t do.

So much of the history that led up to that moment—and so much history was made after—has only been written in recent years and is still being written, especially as scholarship have spotlighted the diversity of the suffrage activists who weren’t mentioned in earlier histories of women’s suffrage.

TIME turned to historians of the women’s rights movement and experts on the suffragists and voting rights activists to debunk some of the top myths and misconceptions about the significance of the 19th Amendment, from the oft-cited birthplace of the suffrage movement to the stories of history’s most famous suffragists.

The Myth: The 19th Amendment guaranteed all American women the right to vote

The reality: After the Amendment was ratified, states passed other laws that disenfranchised women

Many people are surprised to learn that the right to vote—for any American—is not part of the original 18th-century text of the U.S. Constitution. Later Amendments established this right in reverse, by clarifying ways in which it is forbidden to limit the vote. “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex,” the 19th Amendment clarified.

“The text of the original Constitution does not speak about voting,” says Lauren MacIvor Thompson, a historian of early-20th century law, at Georgia State University. “Yes, there is the 15th Amendment and the 19th Amendment, but they are discussing what the states can’t do to restrict voting based on race/sex [respectively].”

As a result, states tried to get around the Constitutional addition—and the 15th Amendment, which banned restriction of the vote “on account of race”—by passing laws requiring voters to pay a poll tax or take a literacy test, or stripping the vote from women who married an immigrant.

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution“Zitkala-sa” by Joseph T. Keiley, 1898 (printed 1901).

Tests and poll taxes didn’t mention “race” or “sex” but were used to target certain voters, especially African Americans. Violence and intimidation, especially lynchings, also kept people away from the polls. Some registrars even flat-out refused to process the papers, or handed Black women a blank sheet of paper. The same methods of disenfranchisement also held back Latinas from voting in the South. At the same time, laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the immigration acts of 1917 and 1924 blocked Asian immigrants from citizenship, and therefore, from voting. And even though Native American voting rights activist Gertrude Simmons Bonnin— also known as Zitkala-Sa—lobbied for the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, which allowed more Native Americans to vote, some Western states didn’t grant Native Americans the right to vote until 1948 (Arizona and New Mexico) and 1957 (Utah).

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 would eliminate many of the obstacles women of color faced voting, but the Supreme Court in 2013 invalidated part of the law’s federal oversight of state obstacles to voting rights. Voting rights activists and policymakers continue to call for updates to strengthen it.

“[The 19th Amendment] is not beginning or the end of a story,” says Lisa Tetrault, associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University and author of the upcoming book A Celebrated But Misunderstood Amendment, “but the middle of an ongoing story. It didn’t start women’s voting and did not complete women’s voting.”

The Myth: Women couldn’t vote before the 19th Amendment

The reality: Whether a woman could vote before 1920 depended on where she lived, her race and her citizenship status

In about half of U.S. states—18, such as New York and California—some American women, including Black women, were able to vote in local, state and federal elections, prior to the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, according to the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Twenty-two states, like Illinois, had partial suffrage, meaning women could vote in certain elections, and only eight states had no suffrage. At least 3,586 women ran for office in the 50 years before 1920, a fact that helped show political strategists that women were a bloc they couldn’t ignore. Those victories were mostly in the new territories in the West, which used suffrage as a lure to attract new residents; more than 750 women were elected to various offices in Kansas before 1912.

Women were also voting before the United States even existed. Women voted in the colonies before they lost the right to vote during the American Revolution, and indigenous women in North America were voting before the European settlers arrived.

“Indigenous women have had a political voice in their nations on this land for over 1,000 years,” Sally Roesch Wagner, historian and editor of the 2019 anthology The Women’s Suffrage Movement, points out. “Women’s rights is not a new concept on this land; it’s a very, very old one. And the clan mothers of the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Haudenosaunee women, have had political voice for 1,000 years.”

Several important suffragists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Matilda Joslyn Gage and Lucretia Mott, had contacts with Haudenosaunee women and saw them as an example. “I think [seeing the power of indigenous women] made it possible for them to imagine a different way of being and it was so far beyond the vote,” Wagner says.

The Myth: All women wanted the right to vote

The reality: Some women opposed the 19th Amendment

Florey Suffrage Collection/Gado—Getty ImagesA circa 1918 anti-suffrage poster or broadside, issued by the Oklahoma Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage.

Just as women today don’t represent a single united voting bloc—and don’t always vote for female candidates—some women in the late 1800s and early 1900s opposed extending suffrage.

Some believed voting would distract women from their far more important roles as mothers and wives and “ruin happiness in the home,” says Sally G. McMillen, historian and author of Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement. In addition, amid period of a great wave of immigration back then, McMillen says, some feared the political impact of extending the vote to immigrant women. Many anti-suffragists were upper-class female philanthropists who feared more women voting would threaten their influence.

“Many of them thought that gaining the right to vote would be a loss to them in terms of their power in the family, and their role as the arbiters of moral and social purity,” says Lauren MacIvor Thompson.

Associations taking that side of the argument sprouted up nationwide. In a 1909 publication titled “The Remonstrance,” Boston women argued that the woman of the day was “already overburdened with duties which she cannot escape and from which no one proposes to relieve her.” The New Jersey Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage argued that suffrage logically involves the holding of public office, which is “inconsistent with the duties of most women.”

Others simply thought that suffrage wasn’t the most pressing issue, says Tetrault. Advocates for temperance and birth control thought such matters protecting women’s “bodily freedom” were more important.

The Myth: The most important suffragists were white

George Grantham Bain Collection—Library of CongressA 1923 photo of New Mexico suffragist Nina Otero-Warren, who lobbied her state’s legislators to ratify the 19th Amendment.

The reality: Women of color played a key role in suffrage movement—but got left out of the retelling of it

One of the clearest examples of the impact of non-white women on the American suffrage movement is Adelina “Nina” Otero-Warren, who lobbied New Mexico legislators to pass the 19th Amendment. According to Cathleen D. Cahill, associate professor of history at The Penn State University and author of the upcoming Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement, “At the last minute, New Mexico ratification is looking a little bit like it might not go through. Without her, New Mexico wouldn’t have ratified [the 19th Amendment] and without New Mexico, the amendment might not have been ratified because every one of those states was essential.”

Library of CongressChinese suffragist Mabel Lee was profiled in the April 13, 1912, edition of the New-York Tribune.

Another example can be seen in Mabel Lee, a 16-year-old incoming Barnard College student and future economist, who was front and center at a 1912 suffragist parade in New York City. At that event, suffragists tried to shame American politicians by arguing that China was going to give women the right to vote before the U.S., following the 1911 revolution that overthrew the empire and established a republic. (In fact, China wasn’t as far ahead as the suffragists thought.)

In recent years, as papers and articles by voting-rights activists have been digitized, the work of previously undersung suffragists is getting a new wave of attention. As historian Martha S. Jones told TIME recently, Black suffragists and other women of color were not always at—or even invited to—white suffragists’ events—so finding their stories requires researching the events they held instead; many of them were not even catalogued as relating to the suffrage movement.

Many suffragists of color were left out of what’s long been considered the definitive history of the 19th century movement, the six-volume series called History of Woman Suffrage. Published between 1881 and 1922, and spanning more than 5700 pages, it features profiles of women who paid for their portraits to be in the book. “Susan B. Anthony herself recognized that this was possibly a problem [and] that by requiring the people whose portraits were in the book to actually pay for those portraits to be in a book would limit the vision, and yet she did it anyway,” says Allison K. Lange, associate professor of history at the Wentworth Institute of Technology. “The women whose portraits became part of that book really are the women that we most often remember today and they’re the women whose portraits are in most archival collections.” (Lange co-curated Truth Be Told, a new site aggregating documents and artifacts about suffragists of color.)

The Myth: American Feminism began at Seneca Falls

The reality: Seneca Falls started to be seen as a turning point only decades later

Ken Florey Suffrage Collection/Gado—Getty ImagesA circa 1859 Harper’s Weekly caricature satirizing the 1848 women’s rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, captioned “Ye May Session of Ye Woman’s Rights Convention – ye orator of ye day denouncing ye lords of creation, ” suggesting that suffrage is contrary to religious and natural law.

The July 19-20, 1848, women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, N.Y., is sometimes called “the beginning of feminism.” Scholars today say it’s important to remember when Seneca Falls started being described as the origin of the movement, and why it started being described that way.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized the women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls in just a few days, so attendance was mostly local, though 200-300 people did attend. Black women, however, were not present at the event—even though a group of Black women fighting to be licensed preachers had the prior spring made many of the same demands that would show up in the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments.

At Seneca Falls, each of the demands passed unanimously; the right to vote was the only one in danger of failing, until Frederick Douglass backed it in an impassioned persuasive speech. Ironically, two decades later, in 1869, Stanton turned on Douglass by opposing the passage of the 15th Amendment. Some suffragists supported it and some, like Susan B. Anthony and Stanton, thought that Black men shouldn’t get the vote before white women. Douglass countered that Black men needed the vote more “urgently” because of the daily vigilante violence they faced.

Bettmann Archive—Getty ImagesA circa 1881 photograph of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, founders of The National Woman Suffrage Association, seated together at small table.

A few months after Congress passed the 15th Amendment, Anthony and Stanton distanced themselves from the amendment’s supporters by starting The National Woman Suffrage Association to advocate for an amendment enshrining women’s suffrage. Their wing of the movement also set out to ensure that their views prevailed in memory of the women’s suffrage movement, coinciding with “a period of intense memory building in the U.S. after the Civil War,” as Tetrault explained on the Professor Buzzkill History podcast earlier this year.

When Victoria Woodhull was jailed for obscenity amid her short-lived 1872 presidential campaign, the two started telling the story of the 1848 Seneca Falls convention to mitigate the “PR disaster” for the suffrage movement. In 1873, they organized a meeting to mark the 25th anniversary of the convention—and in doing so began reshaping both the “official” history of American feminism and the reputation of Seneca Falls, which up until that point had not been seen as a major turning point. Anthony did not even attend the 1848 convention, though she talked about it so much that she’s often mistakenly reported as being there.

Emphasizing Seneca Falls as the birthplace of the suffrage movement also allowed them to exclude from the story a rival who didn’t attend the convention, Lucy Stone—a champion of both a woman’s right to vote and to keep her maiden name—who supported the 15th Amendment and advocated for a state-level approach to suffrage. When The History of Woman Suffrage was written, they further preserved their place at the center of the story.

“A variety of divisions inside the movement put Stanton and Anthony at a defensive position,” Tetrault explained. “We think of them as acclaimed, beloved leaders for the duration of the campaign, but that’s the end of the story read back onto the beginning.”

—With reporting by Suyin Haynes