February 14, 2020 • 14 mins
Tracy and Holly discuss the nuances of the Equal Rights Amendment's history, and the whaling industry that we discussed in the biography of Quaker Paul Cuffe.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios, How Stuff Works. Hello, and Happy Friday.
I'm Tracy d Wilson. Yeah, it's the end of the week,
which probably means I'm on a plane. That seems to
(00:23):
be works lately. Oh, I'm it's today's Friday. I don't
think I'm on a plane. I have been on a
plane recently, but uh not today. So say flight Holly,
if that's where you are right now? Who yeah, you
never know. Um. We kicked off our week on the
show this week talking about the Equal Rights Amendment. We
(00:44):
sure did so. I first learned some about the Equal
Rights Amendment way back in college and so at this point,
this was in like four or five or something like that.
I think this class that was called a Volution, Revolution
and Social Change, and it was a class that was
about social movements through specifically the women's rights movement, civil
(01:08):
rights movement, and gay rights movements in the United States.
And so one of the things that we talked about
was the anti Equal Rights Amendment backlash. And our professor
told us about women from Stop E r A going
to the state legislatures and the places where they lived
with these baskets of like homemade bread and saying from
(01:29):
the bread maker to the bread winner, and I'm still
mad about that was thirty years ago almost. Yeah, I
mean when we were talking about it in the context
of the show, I stopped afterwards from my a side,
which is a little ranty, but like, um, yeah, I
(01:49):
make bread and I'm also the bread winners. Yeah yeah, um.
As I was working on this, we had just recorded
the episode on George sand Uh and I was like,
I was thinking about when we were talking about her
whole having a very supportive male partner, who was the
(02:10):
person that just like made sure that she had everything
she needed. I was like, what if we had t
shirts that said from the bread maker to the breadwinner?
But they depicted that scenario, and then I was like,
nobody's gonna visually know what that is, and they're gonna
think that anybody that wears that shirt, like, they're not
going to get the joke right. It's it's a little
tricky to convey visually. Yeah. It was sort of also
(02:33):
an interesting um thing in my head as we were
discussing this long drag out of the Eagle Rights Amendment.
It's a good reminder having just come off the George
Son episode that you know. France also, for example, had
their weird law on the books that women couldn't wear
pants until less than a decade ago. So like, we
(02:55):
are not the only country who has struggled with this
legislation around sex and the quality. Yeah. As I was
doing the research for this, I was trying to figure
out exactly what happened in because everything says the same
thing that it was introduced in Congress in UM and
(03:18):
then it just sort of stops, like there's there's no
further conversation, like what happened next. So what I was
trying to do was like through old newspaper reporting to
see if I could get a sense of like what
what we're people talking about after this was introduced in Congress.
And one of the results I got was a New
York Times article that was about a very similar amendment
(03:40):
that had been introduced in France at about the same
time and had a similar discussion about UM people wanting
to add in exemptions related to women being drafted for
the military or laws to protect women that are already
on the books and things like that, And I was like, Oh,
this is so interesting. Maybe I will have some time
to like dig into and I did not have time,
(04:03):
did not have time to look further further into that um.
One of the arguments about like, there are arguments that
I did not get into you in the episode because
it did not seem totally relevant. There are various arguments
that people make that are like, do we even need
this now because we have other legislation, um that is
supposed to guarantee some kind of equality. Whether that legislation
(04:26):
is respected as a whole other question, but like people
have said, there's all these little laws on the books now.
One of the points that was made was that a
lot of people think that that the Constitution already says
that we have equal rights regardless of sex, and like,
don't realize that that's not actually part of the constitutions.
There was sort of a question of do we even
(04:47):
need this when there are all these other laws and
people think that it's already the law, um. And the
counter argument was, like a lot of other nations that
we compare ourselves to on the world stage have a
constitutional or some other foundational guarantee of equal rights regardless
of sex, and the United States doesn't, and that sets
(05:08):
sets us apart because there's like a whole, huge conversational
thread about all of that. I had certainly known that
this had been going on for a century, but it
wasn't until I got your outline that I had seen
the statistic that this amendment has been ten percent of
the introduced amendments. And I told you while we were
(05:30):
in a break in recording, like to me, to my
like sort of checklist oriented mind, I would just want
to get that thing handled so you can move on
the other stuff, Like it seems like such a huge
time suck when they're certainly other things also to be discussed, right,
But I understand that there have been passionate voices creating
(05:52):
that debate. So it's a it's a little bit hard
to wrap my head around because it seems so obvious
to me. Yeah, but I know that's not everyone's position. Yes,
surely I learned this in that class that I was
talking about, but I have forgotten, uh, just how overwhelming
(06:13):
the votes were in Congress in favor of the amendment,
and just how quickly the ratification process was going. And
then like it got to that point of five states
needed or three states needed left to go, I had
a whole Monty Python moment of three verses five just then,
but it like got to this moment of three states
left to go and just stopped. It didn't stop by itself, obviously,
(06:35):
there was the whole backlash that we talked about that
was responsible for the stopping. But anyway, I also thought
it was important to note that like Philish lastly didn't
do it all by herself. There were other people in
organizations campaigning also, but she was definitely the most visible
part of it. Uh, that part is, Uh, it's hard
(06:56):
for me because I get really angry. I told you
as we were recording, I felt like Mr Potato Head
and my wife had packed my angry eyes. Yeah, it's
it's tricky because as again, to me, it seems so
obvious what the right thing to do is there, and
I understand that people will have different points of view,
(07:18):
but like it is so obvious to me that that's
anything to do based on my life experience that it
is infuriating. Yeah, yeah, yeah, anchor. So our second episode
this week was about Paul Cuffey, which was actually researched
and written before the Equal Rights Amendment one, but we
(07:42):
shuffled the order around since the Equal Rights Amendment seemed
particularly timely, UM, and that made it it's just sort
of strange, little time work. When I was actually recording
them in the studio somehow, I was like, when did
we talk about this? I don't remember. That happens to
me all the time, because sometimes we're working a couple
(08:06):
of three weeks ahead if we're in a good place. UM.
And then also because we do so many episodes. I mean,
if you consider each of us, on average, we're each
researching and writing an episode a week, yep fifty two
weeks a year. If you asked me four weeks from
now what we talked about that I researched, I will
(08:26):
have probably only vague outlines in shape, ready and available
for me to converse upon. Yeah, we've also been in
a place recently where we normally episode We normally record
two episodes a week in the studio. UM. For various reasons,
we have had sort of a rolling third episode that
like we haven't had time to get to the third
(08:47):
episode in our studio session, so that one gets bumped
to the next week. So like Paul Cuffey was simultaneously
one of the like third episodes that got bumped to
the next week and then got swapped with the Equal
Rights Amendment. UM, So this morning I had to really
refresh my memory. One of the things that we did
not get into in that episode that I did learn
about when I was researching it and found really interesting, UM,
(09:09):
is that because of the indigenous involvement in the whaling
industry in the centuries that we were talking about, especially
the like Wanpanog involvement in whaling, there are indigenous people
in indigenous communities around the world who can trace their
ancestry back to tribes and nations living in New England,
(09:31):
including New Zealand in particular as one place where either
whalers got there and said, you know, I'm done whaling.
I think I will live here now, or maybe the
captain of their ship was like, you're done whaling and
this is where you live now. Either way, there are
threads of people on the internet who were kind of
tracing their ancestry back and discovering that they have roots
(09:53):
in the Wampanog community or another tribe from the northeastern
United States, which I just found to be interesting that
in a in a less well, I just more horrifying. Note. Um,
there are also indigenous communities in the Caribbean who trace
their ancestry back to uh, New England that are more
(10:15):
related to the thing that we talked about or mentioned
very briefly in passing, which was people being enslaved after
King Philip's War. Um, And I'm working on a King
Philip's War episode because I felt like that was a
lot to drop in there without much explanation. Yeah, it's
it is fascinating because here's where it's really fascinating to me.
(10:35):
I think from the perspective of someone who lives in
the US, not in New England, we tend to think
of New England as a little enclave, like it's got
its own unique personality, and it doesn't seem like a
thing that would have tendrils all over the world. So
it's kind of a cool thing to realize, Like it
is not always cool how those people landed in various
(10:57):
other places, but it does make very clear really in
some ways how tiny the globe is. Yeah. Yeah, I
will say, having lived in the South and New England, um,
that New England does feel more insular to me in
some ways, like the States are all a lot smaller.
(11:19):
When I was living in North Carolina or Georgia. I
did not typically just go drive to another state for
some reason, because that that was going to take dead
least two hours from the most of the places that
I lived. UM. Not so much the case in a
lot of New England. UM. And often when I am
looking at the biography of somebody who lived in New
(11:40):
England during like the colonial period, uh, it feels like
everyone was related to everyone else because it is like
such a smaller geographical area and so many more interconnections
among people. So yeah, I uh I am at all
(12:00):
And I guess surprise isn't isn't quite the right word. Um.
But having learned about more about Paul Coffee and and
about how much he did in his life and how
influential he was in this part of New England, and
it uh I wish he were better known than he
his his story is when I didn't know at all, neither,
(12:21):
I love it. Yeah. I know that whaling is a
very contentious issue front, especially involving commercial whaling and animal
rights and all of that. Um. If you have been
like if you live in the New England area and
you have been thinking about going to someplace like the
(12:42):
New Bedford Whaling Museum. I didn't really know what to
expect when I went to that museum because I was
very sidled about paw coffee UM. And there is a
lot about like whaling as a practice at that museum,
but there's also a lot about, at least in terms
of the exhibits that were there when I was there.
There's a lot about the indigenous people's who have whaling
(13:03):
as part of their indigenous history and culture and what
that has meant for those cultures. There's a lot about
whale conservation UM and a lot about whales in general.
So if you were kind of imagining a place that
you're going to show up and it's going to be
um big walls of harpoons. While there are a couple
of walls of harpoons, there's like a lot of other
(13:24):
stuff that's more about UM culture and history and UH
conservation and not about this is how people uh killed
whales right well, and it's it's I have not been
to that museum, but it sounds like it contextualizes that
information about how people killed whales and how it was
(13:45):
more than just going out on a little hunting trip.
UM the place where where Paul Cuffy lived is also
not far from New Bedford. But um, we were we
were tired after our museum and so we returned home
to north of Boston. So thanks for stopping by for
(14:07):
our casual Friday Uh. If you want to write to
us through history podcasts that I heart radio dot com
thanks again. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a
production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. For more
podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios, How Stuff Works. Hello, and Happy Friday.
I'm Tracy d Wilson. Yeah, it's the end of the week,
which probably means I'm on a plane. That seems to
(00:23):
be works lately. Oh, I'm it's today's Friday. I don't
think I'm on a plane. I have been on a
plane recently, but uh not today. So say flight Holly,
if that's where you are right now? Who yeah, you
never know. Um. We kicked off our week on the
show this week talking about the Equal Rights Amendment. We
(00:44):
sure did so. I first learned some about the Equal
Rights Amendment way back in college and so at this point,
this was in like four or five or something like that.
I think this class that was called a Volution, Revolution
and Social Change, and it was a class that was
about social movements through specifically the women's rights movement, civil
(01:08):
rights movement, and gay rights movements in the United States.
And so one of the things that we talked about
was the anti Equal Rights Amendment backlash. And our professor
told us about women from Stop E r A going
to the state legislatures and the places where they lived
with these baskets of like homemade bread and saying from
(01:29):
the bread maker to the bread winner, and I'm still
mad about that was thirty years ago almost. Yeah, I
mean when we were talking about it in the context
of the show, I stopped afterwards from my a side,
which is a little ranty, but like, um, yeah, I
(01:49):
make bread and I'm also the bread winners. Yeah yeah, um.
As I was working on this, we had just recorded
the episode on George sand Uh and I was like,
I was thinking about when we were talking about her
whole having a very supportive male partner, who was the
(02:10):
person that just like made sure that she had everything
she needed. I was like, what if we had t
shirts that said from the bread maker to the breadwinner?
But they depicted that scenario, and then I was like,
nobody's gonna visually know what that is, and they're gonna
think that anybody that wears that shirt, like, they're not
going to get the joke right. It's it's a little
tricky to convey visually. Yeah. It was sort of also
(02:33):
an interesting um thing in my head as we were
discussing this long drag out of the Eagle Rights Amendment.
It's a good reminder having just come off the George
Son episode that you know. France also, for example, had
their weird law on the books that women couldn't wear
pants until less than a decade ago. So like, we
(02:55):
are not the only country who has struggled with this
legislation around sex and the quality. Yeah. As I was
doing the research for this, I was trying to figure
out exactly what happened in because everything says the same
thing that it was introduced in Congress in UM and
(03:18):
then it just sort of stops, like there's there's no
further conversation, like what happened next. So what I was
trying to do was like through old newspaper reporting to
see if I could get a sense of like what
what we're people talking about after this was introduced in Congress.
And one of the results I got was a New
York Times article that was about a very similar amendment
(03:40):
that had been introduced in France at about the same
time and had a similar discussion about UM people wanting
to add in exemptions related to women being drafted for
the military or laws to protect women that are already
on the books and things like that, And I was like, Oh,
this is so interesting. Maybe I will have some time
to like dig into and I did not have time,
(04:03):
did not have time to look further further into that um.
One of the arguments about like, there are arguments that
I did not get into you in the episode because
it did not seem totally relevant. There are various arguments
that people make that are like, do we even need
this now because we have other legislation, um that is
supposed to guarantee some kind of equality. Whether that legislation
(04:26):
is respected as a whole other question, but like people
have said, there's all these little laws on the books now.
One of the points that was made was that a
lot of people think that that the Constitution already says
that we have equal rights regardless of sex, and like,
don't realize that that's not actually part of the constitutions.
There was sort of a question of do we even
(04:47):
need this when there are all these other laws and
people think that it's already the law, um. And the
counter argument was, like a lot of other nations that
we compare ourselves to on the world stage have a
constitutional or some other foundational guarantee of equal rights regardless
of sex, and the United States doesn't, and that sets
(05:08):
sets us apart because there's like a whole, huge conversational
thread about all of that. I had certainly known that
this had been going on for a century, but it
wasn't until I got your outline that I had seen
the statistic that this amendment has been ten percent of
the introduced amendments. And I told you while we were
(05:30):
in a break in recording, like to me, to my
like sort of checklist oriented mind, I would just want
to get that thing handled so you can move on
the other stuff, Like it seems like such a huge
time suck when they're certainly other things also to be discussed, right,
But I understand that there have been passionate voices creating
(05:52):
that debate. So it's a it's a little bit hard
to wrap my head around because it seems so obvious
to me. Yeah, but I know that's not everyone's position. Yes,
surely I learned this in that class that I was
talking about, but I have forgotten, uh, just how overwhelming
(06:13):
the votes were in Congress in favor of the amendment,
and just how quickly the ratification process was going. And
then like it got to that point of five states
needed or three states needed left to go, I had
a whole Monty Python moment of three verses five just then,
but it like got to this moment of three states
left to go and just stopped. It didn't stop by itself, obviously,
(06:35):
there was the whole backlash that we talked about that
was responsible for the stopping. But anyway, I also thought
it was important to note that like Philish lastly didn't
do it all by herself. There were other people in
organizations campaigning also, but she was definitely the most visible
part of it. Uh, that part is, Uh, it's hard
(06:56):
for me because I get really angry. I told you
as we were recording, I felt like Mr Potato Head
and my wife had packed my angry eyes. Yeah, it's
it's tricky because as again, to me, it seems so
obvious what the right thing to do is there, and
I understand that people will have different points of view,
(07:18):
but like it is so obvious to me that that's
anything to do based on my life experience that it
is infuriating. Yeah, yeah, yeah, anchor. So our second episode
this week was about Paul Cuffey, which was actually researched
and written before the Equal Rights Amendment one, but we
(07:42):
shuffled the order around since the Equal Rights Amendment seemed
particularly timely, UM, and that made it it's just sort
of strange, little time work. When I was actually recording
them in the studio somehow, I was like, when did
we talk about this? I don't remember. That happens to
me all the time, because sometimes we're working a couple
(08:06):
of three weeks ahead if we're in a good place. UM.
And then also because we do so many episodes. I mean,
if you consider each of us, on average, we're each
researching and writing an episode a week, yep fifty two
weeks a year. If you asked me four weeks from
now what we talked about that I researched, I will
(08:26):
have probably only vague outlines in shape, ready and available
for me to converse upon. Yeah, we've also been in
a place recently where we normally episode We normally record
two episodes a week in the studio. UM. For various reasons,
we have had sort of a rolling third episode that
like we haven't had time to get to the third
(08:47):
episode in our studio session, so that one gets bumped
to the next week. So like Paul Cuffey was simultaneously
one of the like third episodes that got bumped to
the next week and then got swapped with the Equal
Rights Amendment. UM, So this morning I had to really
refresh my memory. One of the things that we did
not get into in that episode that I did learn
about when I was researching it and found really interesting, UM,
(09:09):
is that because of the indigenous involvement in the whaling
industry in the centuries that we were talking about, especially
the like Wanpanog involvement in whaling, there are indigenous people
in indigenous communities around the world who can trace their
ancestry back to tribes and nations living in New England,
(09:31):
including New Zealand in particular as one place where either
whalers got there and said, you know, I'm done whaling.
I think I will live here now, or maybe the
captain of their ship was like, you're done whaling and
this is where you live now. Either way, there are
threads of people on the internet who were kind of
tracing their ancestry back and discovering that they have roots
(09:53):
in the Wampanog community or another tribe from the northeastern
United States, which I just found to be interesting that
in a in a less well, I just more horrifying. Note. Um,
there are also indigenous communities in the Caribbean who trace
their ancestry back to uh, New England that are more
(10:15):
related to the thing that we talked about or mentioned
very briefly in passing, which was people being enslaved after
King Philip's War. Um, And I'm working on a King
Philip's War episode because I felt like that was a
lot to drop in there without much explanation. Yeah, it's
it is fascinating because here's where it's really fascinating to me.
(10:35):
I think from the perspective of someone who lives in
the US, not in New England, we tend to think
of New England as a little enclave, like it's got
its own unique personality, and it doesn't seem like a
thing that would have tendrils all over the world. So
it's kind of a cool thing to realize, Like it
is not always cool how those people landed in various
(10:57):
other places, but it does make very clear really in
some ways how tiny the globe is. Yeah. Yeah, I
will say, having lived in the South and New England, um,
that New England does feel more insular to me in
some ways, like the States are all a lot smaller.
(11:19):
When I was living in North Carolina or Georgia. I
did not typically just go drive to another state for
some reason, because that that was going to take dead
least two hours from the most of the places that
I lived. UM. Not so much the case in a
lot of New England. UM. And often when I am
looking at the biography of somebody who lived in New
(11:40):
England during like the colonial period, uh, it feels like
everyone was related to everyone else because it is like
such a smaller geographical area and so many more interconnections
among people. So yeah, I uh I am at all
(12:00):
And I guess surprise isn't isn't quite the right word. Um.
But having learned about more about Paul Coffee and and
about how much he did in his life and how
influential he was in this part of New England, and
it uh I wish he were better known than he
his his story is when I didn't know at all, neither,
(12:21):
I love it. Yeah. I know that whaling is a
very contentious issue front, especially involving commercial whaling and animal
rights and all of that. Um. If you have been
like if you live in the New England area and
you have been thinking about going to someplace like the
(12:42):
New Bedford Whaling Museum. I didn't really know what to
expect when I went to that museum because I was
very sidled about paw coffee UM. And there is a
lot about like whaling as a practice at that museum,
but there's also a lot about, at least in terms
of the exhibits that were there when I was there.
There's a lot about the indigenous people's who have whaling
(13:03):
as part of their indigenous history and culture and what
that has meant for those cultures. There's a lot about
whale conservation UM and a lot about whales in general.
So if you were kind of imagining a place that
you're going to show up and it's going to be
um big walls of harpoons. While there are a couple
of walls of harpoons, there's like a lot of other
(13:24):
stuff that's more about UM culture and history and UH
conservation and not about this is how people uh killed
whales right well, and it's it's I have not been
to that museum, but it sounds like it contextualizes that
information about how people killed whales and how it was
(13:45):
more than just going out on a little hunting trip.
UM the place where where Paul Cuffy lived is also
not far from New Bedford. But um, we were we
were tired after our museum and so we returned home
to north of Boston. So thanks for stopping by for
(14:07):
our casual Friday Uh. If you want to write to
us through history podcasts that I heart radio dot com
thanks again. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a
production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. For more
podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
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Holly Frey
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