An Equal Rights Amendment rally took place on the steps of the Virginia Capitol on opening day of the Virginia General Assembly, Jan. 8, 2020, as shown in this still image from "These Things Can Be Done." (Image courtesy Laura McCann)
This month marks the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment, which gave women in the United States the right to vote. A new documentary, “These Things Can Be Done,” looks at the Virginia suffragists who fought for this right, though Virginia was not one of the states that ratified the amendment.
The documentary airs at 9 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 13, on VPM PBS and is the product of producer and writer Laura McCann, director Jeff Boedeker and their production team.
If you don’t catch the film in its first run, it will be available online during the next two weeks, and there will be a virtual panel discussion with the historians featured in the film via the Virginia Museum of History & Culture on Friday, Aug. 14, at noon.
In our interview, McCann talks about the challenges of producing a film during a pandemic and about her personal connections to the subject.
Richmond magazine: How did this story find you?
Laura McCann: We knew we wanted to produce something with VPM and had some ideas. When we started researching, we realized that nobody has done a documentary about [Virginia] suffragists — because despite all the work by these women, Virginia didn’t ratify the 19th Amendment. The centennial was coming up, and we viewed that as a perfect opportunity. We’ve been fortunate with our partners, the Virginia Museum of History & Culture, the Library of Virginia, the Women’s Suffrage Centennial, and VPM.
RM: Whose stories are threaded through the framework of the film?
McCann: A big component is Lila Meade Valentine, who founded the Virginia Equal Suffrage League, and [artist and activist] Adèle Clark, Sophie Meredith — who broke away from them [to campaign for the national Equal Rights Amendment] — [Jackson Ward business leader and activist] Maggie Walker and [Jackson Ward educator and reformer] Ora Brown Stokes, and Pauline Adams from Norfolk, who like Sophie split off. She was pretty radical, got arrested and did time at [the Occoquan Workhouse]. And there’s Jane M. Rutherford, the founder and president of Virginia Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage. Part of their argument was that women shouldn’t dirty themselves with politics, that they shouldn’t organize or speak out — but Rutherford and her followers were doing just that, speaking out and organizing against speaking out and organizing.
RM: The suffrage movement in Virginia, and elsewhere in the South, was split along lines of class and race.
McCann: Absolutely. Part of the reason the 19th Amendment didn’t pass in Virginia was because the effort came at the height of Jim Crow when the legislature — who are the white men — did not want to open up the question of voting rights at all. Their concern was that it would give Black people in Virginia more power. Even though the federal law gave the right for women to vote, it locally didn’t end the literacy tests or the poll tax, and that impacted Black folks and poor white folks as well, until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Part of this story is how the [Virginia Equal Suffrage League] operated in that system. Lila Meade Valentine tries to argue that giving the vote to women helped maintain white power. We can now better understand how the power structure influences those who organize the fight for change.
RM: Do you have any suffragists in your family?
McCann: Turns out that that’s the case. My dad’s part of the family is from Lynchburg, and I’m not sure of the precise connection, but we are related to Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis — she gets a quote in the film. She was an activist and founder of the Lynchburg Equal Suffrage League. Her daughter Elizabeth Otey ran as a Socialist candidate and was a big supporter of [five-time Socialist Party presidential candidate] Eugene V. Debs.
RM: What was your time frame in making the film, and did you run into pandemic-related production challenges?
McCann: We greenlighted it in October of last year, officially delivered it this past weekend. Less than a year. We’d planned on doing reenactments with some of the key women. We started casting calls, engaged someone to do costuming, and we were talking to sites around the state. Then, really just before we were to hold the auditions in our office, that Monday, during that weekend in mid-March, everything stopped. That made us reimagine our original concept. Luckily our editor, Mike Rafferty, was able to utilize graphics animation, and we used a lot of the imagery and we dug into archival research for that.
RM: Your challenge was to make these women of a century ago come to life and be relevant to our present time. What was one way you were able to accomplish this?
McCann: VHMC, as part of their "Agents of Change" exhibition, reenacted that well-known photo of the Virginia ESL posing in that car at the base of the [George] Washington statue in Capitol Square. This was in January, and they brought together modern Virginia women. We filmed the day they did that and used that story of the modern woman involved in politics meshed with the historic photograph. This demonstrates the kind of energy and commitment of those women from a century ago, and today.
