Women’s Vote Is Victory for Burns

Only a small fraction of eligible voters went to the polls in Tuesday’s off-year elections in the land of the free and home of the brave.

And stratospheric icon Michael Jordan, who is everywhere on the TV stump campaigning for MCI phone service, acknowledged back on Earth recently that he had never even registered to vote.

Talk about taking for granted rights achieved at great, aching sacrifice. It’s something to keep in mind while watching “Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony,” the latest Ken Burns documentary on PBS.

Entrancing, ever-smart and beautifully expressed through Burns’ usual graceful brush strokes, this two-parter about Stanton and Anthony strips away the arcane and superfluous before culminating with the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment giving women the vote.

That seminal moment was what both these converging thunderbolts crusaded for tenaciously throughout their lives, but didn’t live to see.

Television’s Mr. Chips of history, Burns these days never diverges from the successful formula for elegant storytelling he adopted early in his filmmaking career--one that has earned him the deepest pockets in the documentary business.

He and co-producer Paul Barnes, his longtime collaborator, forge a seamless narrative here of fascinating old photos and crisp sound bites from scholars and actors speaking as historical figures, presented with a rich background of violin music from the period.

The romantic, melodious tone is now familiar but, after all, so is the distinctive technique of Van Gogh or Modigliani or muralist Thomas Hart Benton, an earlier Burns subject whose work is instantly identifiable. And no one faults them for emulating themselves.

That notwithstanding, the shaping political, social and cultural forces of U.S. history are what drive Burns films most profoundly. Those themes include the evolving roles of women in U.S. society that he previously chronicled in his grand signature series, “The Civil War,” and the tediously less fruitful “Baseball” odyssey.

In a gender sense, these were foreplay for “Not for Ourselves Alone,” whose subjects are arguably the most important women in U.S. history. It’s hard to believe, but yes, more influential in the lives of Americans even than Princess Diana, Martha Stewart and the babes of NBC’s “Friends.”

Stanton (voiced by Julie Harris) was born in 1815, Anthony (voiced by Ronnie Gilbert) in 1820, and ahead of them were lives spent in passionate resistance to the laws men wrote regarding women as little more than property.

“Not for Ourselves Alone” accompanies these gifted, charismatic, fierce idealists as they become the soul of a fractious women’s movement battling the cultural and statutory domination of maledom. This struggle leads to that triumphant day 79 years ago when more than 8 million females voted for the first time. (Not that you can blame them alone that year for sending disastrous Warren G. Harding to the White House.)

As narrator Sally Kellerman notes, Anthony and Stanton didn’t meet until after the 1848 women’s rights convention that the latter organized with Lucretia Mott and others in Seneca Falls, N.Y. It was here that the eloquent Stanton and her female comrades, borrowing from Thomas Jefferson, drafted a pro-suffrage women’s rights declaration that began: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal. . . .” For those who need reminding, “and women” did not appear in the male-written Declaration of Independence.

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The lives of Stanton and Anthony intersected for the first time three years later at an anti-slavery lecture. Thereafter, they would be intimate friends, creating on behalf of woman suffrage a formidable, though not always harmonious, alliance--or “very affectionate sisterhood bond,” as one historian calls it--that endured more than half a century. Especially moving and illustrative of that bond are their letters to each other about the movement during good times and bad, read here by Gilbert and Harris.

Stanton, the radical feminist agitator and middle-class mother of seven whose strengths were ideas and words, and the unmarried Anthony, a firebrand and skilled, tenacious political organizer, were the complete, rounded symbiosis. In some ways, Stanton was the steam that drove Anthony’s engine, and Anthony the road warrior Stanton could not be while homebound. Each nourished the other while being as different in life as they are in photographs of them deployed throughout these four hours.

Here they are in their later years: Stanton fat, double-chinned and grandmotherly, her soft cushion of a face framed by hair as cottony white as her fashionable dress; and Anthony, hard-eyed, rigid and severe in black, the corners of her humorless mouth turned downward in a permanent scowl.

Not that either had much to smile about in the century’s middle years while being mostly ridiculed by men and doubted by women. Or later when their women’s crusade was abandoned by their fellow abolitionists--including their old ally, Frederick Douglass--whose advocacy of extending the vote initially only to African American males was codified in the 15th Amendment.

That left half the nation still disenfranchised, a wrong that wasn’t put right until four amendments and 50 years later.

Just as poll taxes and other evil devices would inhibit many African Americans from voting in the South, however, suffrage would not erase misogyny or male dominance in a nation where even today females remain strikingly under-represented in chambers of influence. And where some men make feminists and women’s advancement scapegoats for their personal failures and the problems of boys.

On the screen near the end of the Burns film are a pair of creaky women, about 100 years old, recalling the joys of voting in 1920 and knowing that women’s lives would be changed forever. “But I’m afraid,” says one, “they haven’t been changed as much as we hoped for.”

* “Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony” airs at 8 p.m. Sunday and Monday on KCET-TV and KVCR-TV.