The Film
In 2024, the documentary film Discovering Catharine was released and shown at private screenings and festivals. After receiving feedback from those showings, the project is now being expanded into a 90-minute feature length film.
The documentary features interviews, animations, and actors performing her work. The objective is to bring to life examples of her speeches and writing that demonstrate her courage to enter critical discussions of the rights of women. She had a lovely but strong voice, and used wit and tenacity to convert her audiences. We want to show this to an audience unfamiliar with her extensive writings. Several of the women we interview will discuss how Catharine inspired their lives, and you can see this in action. Other women we interview will highlight her leadership in complex legal research of issues that extend beyond women’s rights and inform the basis of civil rights and human rights.
Catharine’s approach was to promote incremental change, that is, step-by-step legal victories that had a big impact and would lead to further change. Understanding her accomplishments provides an example of a successful feminist leader using techniques that contrast with the current commonplace acrimonious protesting by women, demanding attention and setting themselves against men. We hope that her examples will inspire and support young leaders in their efforts, regardless of their political affiliations.
Were she alive today, we imagine that she would promote public discussion of difficult and complex issues facing our country, and would push for movement away from single-issue and identity politics. She could be a Republican or a Democrat, she would speak and act the same because she had her own ideas. We imagine Catharine would be deeply immersed in trying to move us forward. Her strategy would be both radical and moderate; actionable and inclusive. What better formula woud enable all to embrace reforms? The film will highlight the key ingredients of her strategy and approach - offering a guide to a constructive resolution of goals. We have been asking each other: where would Catharine be involved today; how would she have forged consensus; how would she have maintained her zeal, communicated her message; and what behind the scenes strategy would she have employed? We hope that when you watch the documentary, we will have roused you expand her noble goals!
Trailer for Discovering Catharine, the first version of the Catharine Waugh McCulloch documentary.
Shall Men Vote?
The 90-minute feature length documentary will now be titled Shall Men Vote? which references Catharine Waugh McCulloch's speech from 1911.
“Shall Men Vote?” became one of McCulloch’s most repeated speeches in the last few years leading up to Illinois passing women’s suffrage in 1913. Starting in 1911, McCulloch began giving the speech at primarily male dinner clubs. The speech was also titled “Shall Men Have the Ballot?” and was published as a pamphlet.
Around this time, national women’s suffrage organizations underwent changes in leadership and started using new techniques to revitalize the movement. At the state-level, Illinois women were frustrated that legislators had repeatedly stalled their legislation. McCulloch had authored the Illinois Suffrage Amendment in 1893 and brought it to the Illinois Assembly every session since then. After nearly twenty years, McCulloch knew she needed a larger percentage of the public sympathetic to the effort, therefore she needed to rally men who could vote to make the change.
She introduced “Shall Men Vote?” as an intellectual exercise where she had the men in the room imagine that only women had the vote and they were advocating for their suffrage. McCulloch went on to explain “women’s” rationales for excluding men from the vote using the justifications men had been using for decades opposing women suffrage. McCulloch concluded that “identity and equality are not the same thing.” She believed that withholding the right to vote due to supposed gender differences was not a valid argument. Turning the tables on men demonstrated that their claims of gender superiority were weak.
In the final years before Illinois women’s suffrage, McCulloch tried out multiple rhetorical and speaking styles to persuade her audiences, especially men, to come around to women voting. She went on auto tours around the state, wrote fictionalized plays arguing women’s cause, and gave these provocative speeches at events. McCulloch was tactful in her fight for women’s rights issues, and “Shall Men Vote?” particularly highlighted her compelling and singular style for persuading people to her side.
Sources:
Waugh McCulloch, Catharine, “Shall Men Have the Ballot?”, Forty Club, Pamphlet, (Date Unknown), Evanston History Center Subject Files.
Waugh McCulloch, Catharine, “Shall Men Vote?” 1911, Speech, Evanston History Center Subject Files.
Waugh McCulloch, Catharine, “Illinois Suffrage Struggle Succeeds After 58 Years: Fairness to Prevail: Mrs. Catharine Waugh McCulloch Tells of Success After Years of Failure.” June 16, 1913. The Evanston Daily News, Evanston History Center Subject Files.
MEET THE TEAM
INTERVIEWEES
JULIA WILSON
Executive Director of the John Paul Stevens Fellowship Foundation
Julia Wilson was a student at Stanford Law School and in 1997 participated in the WLH Biography Project (Women’s Legal History Project - https://wlh.law.stanford.edu/barbara-babcock/). Julia was born in Illinois and she chose Catharine Waugh McCulloch's history for her assignment. Julia was able to access CWM’s memoirs, speeches, and other key documents that were available at Stanford, through Harvard’s collection of materials at the Schlesinger Library, Mary Earnhart Dillon Collection. Julia’s paper was available online through the WLH Biography Project and that is how we met Julia and came to learn of the impact this project had on Julia’s ambitions.
In April 2020, Julia will serve as the Executive Director of the John Paul Stevens Fellowship Foundation[1] (http://www.jpstevensfoundation.org/). In February, Julia is combining her trip to Chicago for the CWM Project interviews with meetings at Chicago-based law schools. We are pleased to have now two connections to Northwestern Law School, and to learn about Justice Stevens’ connection to Chicago and public justice.
For [22 years], Julia has led an important non-profit called OneJustice (https://onejustice.org/). OneJustice created a statewide network in California of 100+ nonprofit legal organizations, law firms, law schools, and businesses that together provide life-changing legal assistance to over 270,000 low-income Californians each year. Julia also traveled around California providing training and consulting support to the executives and boards of the legal nonprofit organizations in OneJustice’s network. Her areas of expertise include analysis of civil justice delivery systems, designing pro bono programs, legal aid innovation practices, and best practices in nonprofit management for organizations with law at the heart of their mission.
She started her legal career in 1998 as an Equal Justice Works (then NAPIL) Fellow at the Legal Aid Society of San Mateo County, providing free legal assistance to low-income residents with a focus on serving very young children with disabilities. She became Directing Attorney and then Legal Aid Society of San Mateo County’s first-ever Pro Bono Coordinator, developing and launching Legal Aid’s pro bono programs, which still continue to this day.
From 2005 to early 2013, she served as the shared executive director of both OneJustice and its sister organization, the Legal Aid Association of California (LAAC). In this capacity, she led statewide advocacy efforts on behalf of the legal services delivery system, undertook multiple statewide strategic planning initiatives, and served as the legal services community’s liaison to key access to justice partners. She serves on the Board of Directors of BoardSource and Equal Justice Works. She also serve on the Leadership Committee of Ready California, working with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center to support immigrant-serving organizations while continuing to build the statewide infrastructure to prepare for and respond to emerging threats and opportunities.
“CIVIL JUSTICE: THE PROMISE OF AMERICA” | Julia Wilson | TEDx MountainViewHighSchool was filmed in 2/2018
[1] John Paul Stevens served as a US Supreme Court justice from 1975 to 2010. He was born in Chicago in 1920, attended University of Chicago, and after serving in the Navy during World War II he attended Northwestern Law School. The Foundation provides Public Interest Fellowship grants to participating law school students who work in unpaid public interest summer internships.
VIRGINIA DRACHMAN
Arthur Stern, Jr., Professor of American History at Tufts University
Virginia is a distinguished professor at Tufts University and is the Arthur Stern, Jr., Professor of American History. Her teaching interests focus on nineteenth and twentieth century American history, specifically the history of women, the professions, medicine and society, and the rise of modern American culture. Her scholarship mirrors her teaching and focuses on women in modern America society. She is interested in the overall theme of women in male-dominated professions, particularly medicine, law, and business.
Her books include: Enterprising Women: 250 Years of American Business (University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Sisters in Law: Women Lawyers in Modern American History (Harvard University Press, 1998); Women Lawyers and the Origins of Professional Identity in America: The Letters of the Equity Club, 1887 to 1890 (University of Michigan Press, 1993); and Hospital with a Heart: Women Doctors and the Paradox of Separatism at the New England Hospital,1862-1969 (Cornell University Press, 1984).
DR. GWEN HOERR JORDAN
Chair of the Justice and Legal Studies Department, Bay Path University
In July 2019, Dr. Gwen Hoerr Jordan relocated from Illinois to Western Massachusetts, where she is the Chair of the Justice and Legal Studies Department at Bay Path University in Longmeadow MA. It is an all-women’s undergraduate college for primarily first generation college students.
Gwen was Chair of the Legal Department and faculty at the University of Illinois at Springfield (UIS) from 2010 to 2019 after two years as a visiting assistant professor at Northern Illinois University and three years as the Legal History Fellow at the Institute for Legal Studies, University of Wisconsin Law School. Gwen also had a part-time staff attorney appointment with the Illinois Innocence Project (IIP) at UIS. Her position with the IIP involved representing individuals who were wrongfully convicted, leading the policy reform initiative to reduce wrongful convictions, training police cadets on the causes of wrongful convictions at the University of Illinois Police Training Institute, and working with UIS undergraduate and graduate students and law school students externs from other Illinois universities participating with the Project.
Jordan’s scholarship focuses on the history of women lawyers and their local, national and international social justice activism; issues of gender, race, and law, and critical race theory. Her current work is on the transnational coalitions of women lawyers of color in shaping the new world order during the mid-twentieth century. She is additionally analyzing issues of race identity, African-American women lawyers’ civil rights activism throughout the twentieth century, and the strategies women lawyers of color developed to overcome the intersection of race and gender discrimination in the legal system.
Dr. Jordan earned her M.A. in Criminal Justice and her Ph.D. in History from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She earned her J.D. from the University of Denver College of Law. She was awarded the UIC Dean’s Scholar Award and received an American Association of University Women Educational Foundation American Dissertation Fellowship. She also won a National Award Certificate of Commendation as curator of the exhibition Bar None: 125 Years of Women Lawyers in Illinois, and was previously Co-Chair of the Chicago Bar Association Alliance for Women and served on its advisory board. In addition to her academic experience, she spent years as a Deputy District Attorney in Colorado.
Gwen published a great article in 2009 in the Nevada Law Journal entitled “Agents of (Incremental) Change: From Myra Bradwell to Hillary Clinton” and this is consistent with the nature of CWM’s dedicated, comprehensive, strategic but incremental efforts to advance legal reform, and this is a central point that we are trying to describe in illustrate – how could she consistently be energetic, feisty, witty, and engaged on so many levels while at the same time raising a family and working at the law firm with her husband.
RACHEL BOLMAN
Subject Specialist for American History, American Studies, and Journalism, University of Notre Dame
Rachel Bohlmann is the subject specialist for American history, American Studies, and journalism at University of Notre Dame. She has an undergraduate degree from Valparaiso University; an MTS in religion from Harvard Divinity School; an MS in library and information science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and PhD in American history from the University of Iowa.
JILL NORGREN
Professor emerita, biographer, book reviewer, and author most recently of Stories from Trailblazing Women: Lives in Law, Forgotten Stories of America’s First Women Lawyers
Jill taught government, law and society, and women’s studies for nearly thirty years at John Jay College and the University Graduate Center, The City University of New York. Her research has focused on various aspects of cultural pluralism and law. In two early books, Partial Justice (with P.T. Shattuck), and The Cherokee Cases, she took up questions of federal Indian law. In the textbook, Cultural Pluralism and Law (now in the 3rd ed.), anthropologist Serena Nanda and Jill explore the continual negotiation that has occurred between culturally different groups and American society through the mechanism of law. In her three most recent books, Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would be President; Belva Lockwood: Equal Rights Pioneer (for young adults); and Rebels at the Bar she has turned to biography, recovering the lives and careers of America’s first (nineteenth century) women lawyers. Her current project, a group biography of trailblazing women attorneys born in the twentieth century, brings this biographical exploration into the present moment.
Jill is a co-founder of, and researcher/writer for www.herhatwasinthering.org. This site focuses upon women in the United States who ran for political office before 1920 when the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified. Through mini-biographies and short historical essays, this unique site challenges the longstanding belief that women did not involve themselves in electoral politics. Currently, the names and short biographies of more than 3,500 women appear on this important web site.
As a book reviewer for the online cultural site, SeniorWomen.com, Jill specializes in essays on memoir, biography, and U.S. politics. She has recently reviewed Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor’s memoir My Beloved World; David Nasaw’s The Patriarch; Carla Peterson’s Black Gotham; and Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
Source: http://www.seniorwomen.com/news/index.php/author/jill-norgren/