Telling Unheard Stories of Women’s Suffrage, with Ronny Frishman ’72
About this Episode
Episode 152: Published on Mar 6, 2024
Frishman, an author and former journalist discusses her recent book, Nina Allender: Suffrage Cartoonist, illuminates the life and work of an underappreciated hero in the women's suffrage movement.
[MUSIC PLAYING] MAX: Welcome back to Northwestern Intersections, a Northwestern Alumni Association podcast. We'll be speaking to guests about their career trajectories and the lessons they've learned along the way.
Our guest today is Ronny Frishman, author and former news reporter and editor. She has experience writing human interest and medical health articles, and recently shifted to writing children's books. Her recent book Nina Allender-- Suffrage Cartoonist illuminates the life and work of an underappreciated hero in the suffrage movement. We will dive into all these topics and more in this edition of Northwestern Intersections. Ronny, thank you so much for being here.
RONNY FRISHMAN: Well, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.
MAX: Absolutely. And I've got a lot of questions for you, especially during Women's History Month. I really want to know a lot about your book. But before we jump into the Nina Allender story, I want to think back to your time on campus. What brought you to Evanston, and what did you study?
RONNY FRISHMAN: Well, when I went-- and back in the day, when I was looking at schools, it's very different from today. With my children, we went and we looked at a million schools. I didn't. I applied to a bunch of schools. My guidance counselor helped me pick out. My parents helped me pick out. I went and looked at maybe two schools.
I got into a bunch, and Northwestern-- I wanted to go away. Northwestern had a really great liberal arts program. I wanted to be near a city because I grew up outside New York City, and Chicago fit the bill. So I chose Northwestern. At the time, I was going to be a French major.
And I have to say that I literally did not see the school until the day I got there in September. And my parents did not take me. They put me on an airplane. I shipped my trunk. Some students met me at the airport. I got on a bus, and there I was. But I was not disappointed. I saw ivy-covered buildings, and I loved it from the minute I got there.
I was going to study French and changed my mind after a while, even though I loved one of my French teachers, Tilde Sankovitch, who was one of the best teachers I ever had there. But I started to think, maybe I want to do something else. Then I switched to political science. Then I was thinking of art history. I'm a very curious person, and I have a lot of interests.
So-- I also like to write. So I thought, well, maybe I should switch to journalism. In those days, it was perfect because, in journalism, you took a range of everything. You had to have a good background. You had to have a social science major and then something-- an arts major, minor, to back it up. It was a really good cross-section. So that's how I ended up in journalism. And I was actually a radio/TV major, but I never did that. I got spooked by the camera. I couldn't do that. [CHUCKLES]
MAX: It sounds like you had a lot of interests, both in school and in the working world. You've held a lot of different positions. How did you manage to change careers and maintain an interest in a lot of different areas?
RONNY FRISHMAN: Well, to be honest, when I graduated, I really wanted to go to New York City and start my career. I wanted to go into newspapers or magazines. But I met a guy at Northwestern. We got married. He was a graduate student in econ. And he got a Fulbright scholarship to go study for his PhD-- do his PhD research in Nigeria.
So we went to Nigeria for two and a half years, and I taught English there. I did a little bit of writing when I was there. I had a few freelance gigs. But, basically, I taught while he did research, and he taught also.
When we came back, we did go to New York. I got a job at a magazine, but it wasn't a great job. It was like an editorial assistant. But whenever you say you came from Northwestern, that was a great calling card because people in the media business and communications know the reputation of the school.
And you don't even realize-- when you're there, you don't realize it. You're a kid. You're a student. You think you're getting a good education. I was a serious student, but not the best student because-- but I thought all the other students were really smart. I have to-- I remember when I first got there, I was thinking, did they make a mistake? Do I belong here? Because the kids were really, really sharp.
But I got that job with a magazine. And then, when my husband went on the job market for an academic job, we ended up in upstate New York at a small school. He was-- got a job at Hobart and William Smith colleges. And we went to this small town-- Geneva, New York. I grew up-- we both came from New York City. I had never lived in a small town. I hated it.
But I got a job at the newspaper there. And it was a small-town newspaper, and it was probably the best thing I could have done. They hired me pretty much right away. It covered-- I think it had a circulation of 17,000, but it was a great place to learn. I did everything. A celebrity came to town-- you got to interview that person. There was a meltdown at the nuclear plant-- you covered it.
So it was a great learning ground. And I stayed there for a while, and then I moved to the Rochester newspapers. I outgrew that. I was an editor. I went from reporter to editor. And then I went to the Rochester newspapers, which were-- there were two newspapers. The Times Union was the afternoon, and the Democrat and Chronicle was in the morning. And at one time, these were Gannett's flagship newspapers.
They actually-- Gannett used to be headquartered in Rochester originally. A lot of people don't know that. And I thought I had died and gone to heaven. That was my dream job. In my heart, I'm always a reporter because I like to go out, get the story, talk to people. I love the pressure of a deadline.
Yeah, so I stayed there for a while. And then the newspapers merged. They got rid of my newspaper. It was the beginning-- I was in newspapers when newspapers were still really viable, really vibrant. And thank God for that because it was a wonderful place to work.
But already, the handwriting was on the wall. They were getting rid of afternoon papers, and our papers merged. I still had a job, but it was different. And believe it or not, it wasn't as crazy about being a supervisor as I was about writing myself. So I stayed for a while, and then I decided to go off on my own.
And I left-- wasn't fired. I just left. There were some management issues I didn't like. And I thought I'd get another job, but it was hard to find. There were no other newspapers around. So I hung up my freelance shingle, and I had a lot of contacts, and I started freelance writing.
In those days, there were a lot of magazines. Magazines are-- so many of them are defunct. I wrote a lot for Ladies' Home Journal, McCall's-- Harvard Health Letters still exists. And once you get an inroad with one, they know you and they stick with you, and so I had a lot of work.
But it's not-- you can't really support yourself as a writer. People think it's great to be a writer, and they're going to get all this work. But it's low paying, and, unless you're Stephen King or James Patterson, you don't-- it's just, you don't make a lot of money. Journalism is not a really moneymaking career, unless you're in maybe TV. So I got this other gig on the side being the managing editor of a health policy journal. I worked remotely before people were working remotely. I always say that. I was the first person to do that. [CHUCKLES]
So I edited this journal. I thought, oh, I'll do it for five years until something else turns around-- comes around. And I did it for 20 years. And then I did the journal-- editing the journal-- at the same time that I could do freelance writing. So I traveled. I wrote a lot of magazine pieces, and-- that was the fun part, and then I came back in the nitty-gritty of the journal.
It was a scholarly journal, so it was a little tough. It wasn't journalism writing. But surprisingly, health care had become, really, a hot issue. And this was around the time that the Affordable Care Act was being debated and passed. So all of a sudden, health care-- health care policy was hot news. Yeah. So I mixed and matched all this stuff.
And when I first started doing freelancing, I still-- the internet hadn't really-- hadn't blossomed yet. So you'd have to go to the library a lot to do a lot of research-- took a lot of time. And then they sold-- the health care journal, they sold to another publishing company, and they really didn't need me. They had their own staff. So they retired me, and I still did some freelancing.
And then I was also interested-- in the back of my mind was always writing for children. This was going to be my fun thing. I wouldn't say it's a career. I'm pretty much semi-retired because, if I had to live on this, I would totally starve because I've only gotten this one book published.
But I'm still writing. I'm active. I took some courses. I did a lot of reading. I went to conferences because just because you can write doesn't mean you can always change from one genre to another, so-- But it's a lot of fun. And I like to think that all the skills I got from Northwestern were really helpful, I think.
MAX: I want to ask you a little bit about the children's book that you wrote, because I think it's a perfect tie-in to Women's History Month. It's called Nina Allender-- Suffrage Cartoonist. Tell me a little bit about this story and what motivated you to write it.
RONNY FRISHMAN: So I'd never heard of Nina Allender. But being in upstate New York, Susan B. Anthony-- I'm in Rochester, New York, and Susan B. Anthony was from Rochester, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. From this whole area is really where they say the women's rights movement started. In 1848, they had a women's rights conference in Seneca Falls, which is in the area.
So I knew about this because I had covered all of this stuff when I was in the newspaper business. All the women's rights-- a lot of the history and the personalities I knew about. We were in Washington, D.C. For a few months. I was with my husband. He was actually taking a bunch of students on a semester there.
And we were living on Capitol Hill. And every day, we would walk past this beautiful old building on our way to the metro. And we kept thinking, that building-- it looks important. So one day, we decided to go check it out. And, in fact, it was a small museum that was called the-- I have to get the right name-- the Sewall-Belmont House and Museum.
And it was actually the home of the-- the former home of the National Woman's Party. And We went in, and there was an exhibit there. And they had an exhibit of these cartoons done by this woman, Nina Allender. Never heard of her.
And it was just fascinating. I really liked her stuff. And I was looking for things to write about. And, having a background as a journalist, even though I try to write picture books that are imaginative, I think my strength really lies in nonfiction because I know how to do the research. I like to do research. I really loved to dig and find things that people haven't heard about before.
So they had just found-- in fact, a lot of people didn't know about Nina Allender. They found a whole-- like a stash of all her stuff in a closet when they were cleaning out that place. So I asked the-- I started doing some research. I couldn't find anything on her. I found one book. It's an academic book that somebody had done called Cartooning for Suffrage by Alice Sheppard.
But there was nothing else-- very little about her. And I asked the curator at the museum what she thought about a kid's book, and she thought it was a great idea. Plus, I knew that the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment was coming up.
So I knew that this was a good angle-- that, if I could get this book done in time, maybe I could sell it. So that was the story, and that's how I found out about her. And mostly, the way I found information was-- they had all her cartoons. And the Library of Congress had a lot of stuff. There was a lot of photographs.
She was the official cartoonist of The Suffragist, which was a broadsheet newspaper that the National Woman's Party put out. So all the copies of that were preserved. But I went and I used old newspaper articles. People have heard about her now, but she was pretty well known at the time. She did cartooning from I'd say about 1913 to 1920, and she did over 300 cartoons. So people knew about her, but she got lost in history, like so many people do, so--
MAX: And I want to ask you this because March is Women's History Month. And obviously, you've done your part. You're doing your part to help share some important stories. What message do you want people to take away from the Nina Allender story?
RONNY FRISHMAN: Well, I think, first of all, Nina-- I go, and I talk to a lot of kids about this. Nina-- she was a trailblazer on two fronts. First, she was a suffragist, and she had been divorced. She had to work. She did not come from a wealthy family. She had to support herself.
And I guess she saw early on that it was-- she didn't like the inequities that she saw. And her parents were educated people. Her mother was one of the first people to work for the Department of the Interior. So I think she saw strong women. So she was working. She went out there and she started to fight for the federal amendment for the right to vote on her own.
When she met Alice Paul, who was really the dynamo-- the powerhouse behind getting the federal amendment-- she became even more involved, and that's how she started cartooning. But she was an artist. She studied to be an artist. Because women at that time-- they had very limited professions for them that were acceptable.
She was an artist. She actually went to Europe. She had a studio. I found some illustrations she did for a book. She took herself very seriously, and she even had a studio. But artists-- we know-- even artists today-- it's very hard to make a living. She wanted to be an artist. She was a painter-- saw herself as a painter.
But-- so she became a trailblazer by starting to be a cartoonist. Up until then-- cartooning had been around for a long time. In fact, it's been around since colonial times. I think Benjamin Franklin is considered-- he made the first cartoon-- political cartoon. People couldn't read. So how did you get your message across to people through pictures?
So there have always been cartoonists-- political cartoonists-- but they were not women. Women were considered too refined. They were not supposed to be involved in politics. They were kept out of government. Their place was seen as at home, taking care of the house and the family.
But Nina clearly was not like that. So she became a cartoonist, so she was breaking the mold in that respect, and she was breaking the mold by going out and demonstrating and fighting for women's rights and for a federal amendment which was not very popular at the time. So I see her-- the message is, she decided she could be what she wanted, and I think she's a great role model for young people.
MAX: If you could sit down with Nina Allender if she were alive today, what would you ask her, and how happy do you think she'd be? What would you tell her about society today?
RONNY FRISHMAN: Well, it's funny because I thought about this a lot. And, of course, I would want to say to her, where did you get your ideas? Because she-- I've read some of her quotes, and she said it would take her a long time to find an idea. But once she got it, she went with it. It was easy. And I understand that because, usually, when I get an idea to write something, getting the idea and nailing it down is the hard part.
But what I would like to ask her-- I would love for her to be here now because I'd like to say to her, well, what do you think? Have we come very far? I think she would be somewhat disappointed because, yes, we have women on the Supreme Court. We have women on heading corporations. Women can vote. At the time, they-- women thought that, if women got the vote, that they would get rid of wars and poverty and all the problems. Well, we know that's not the case.
But I think she would also be horrified to see that we still don't have an Equal Rights Amendment. Because, after they got the vote in 1920, the National Woman's Party-- Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party-- they did not pack up their bags and leave Washington. They started on the Equal Rights Amendment. And they started a new publication called Equal Rights, and Nina did cartoons for that publication, and she did that till 1927, I think.
So they first introduced the Equal Rights Amendment to Congress in 1923. Here it is. It's over 100 years later. We still don't have it. It was ratified in I think, what? '72? Not ratified-- it was passed by Congress in '72, but it's never been ratified by all of the states. I think they would be horrified to see that, quite frankly, because I'm horrified myself. [CHUCKLES]
MAX: That's fair. Oh, that's fair. And before we close, I want to ask you a couple other questions, given that it is Women's History Month. I always ask guests, are there any Northwestern shout-outs that they'd like to give? I'll ask you that question as well. But I'd also like to ask you, are there any Women's History shout-outs that you'd like to give-- people, places ideas that are important or influential to you?
RONNY FRISHMAN: I think that one thing, then, that upset me, and I actually mentioned in my book, and-- we always celebrate these suffragists. And the ones who we saw and we know about tended to be white, upper middle class women.
This was not a diverse group of women. They usually had money, they had influence, and they knew how to use it. But there were really a lot of people, as we're finding now-- people of color, women of color-- who were involved in this movement. And there were immigrants who were involved in this movement.
So there are more and more stories coming out about these women, and I think we should look hard to remember and to read these stories. Even Harriet Tubman was a suffragist, and there was a whole bunch of other-- I can't think of the names right now, but who we're finding out really did play a role and just haven't gotten the popularity or the attention that the others have.
So I think we have to remember and look that these movements-- they were not monolithic in any way. Oh, and shout-out to Northwestern? In what way? Professors? Things that I loved there?
RONNY FRISHMAN: Favorite memories-- well, we used to hang out at the Grill a lot, but I don't think the Grill exists anymore. There was no-- you know what, did you ever hear about the Grill? [CHUCKLES] The Grill was in Scott Hall in the basement.
We didn't have a student union in those days, so people used to gather at-- the Grill had some food there, and people would play bridge and whatnot and hang out there. And then they built-- or the library. Then they built the library on the-- we called it the new library, but it's not-- Deering was the first one, and then there's the other library-- the white one right that's stacked up-- the library.
And then that became a big social place because we still-- we didn't have any kind of student union. It didn't stop people from socializing. The Meadow was really popular. I remember lots of-- on a spring day, hanging out on the Meadow. I was in a sorority, so the quads-- I loved the quads, but-- yeah.
And the faculty of the J School-- I really-- I didn't know that I really knew what to do when I got to a newspaper. It's like they did a great job. It must have been drilled into my head. And my first day, I knew exactly what to do and-- all those hours in the basement of Fisk Hall were pretty dismal in those days. [CHUCKLES]
MAX: Ronny Frishman, thank you so much for joining us.
RONNY FRISHMAN: Thank you for having me. It was a lot of fun.
