Most powerful weapons

The year 1917 was highly consequential for the suffrage movement. Having lost the chance to defeat the reelection of President Woodrow Wilson, who had initially been lukewarm toward suffrage, activists set their sights on securing voting rights for women by the 1920 presidential election.

One wing of activists began a daily picket of the White House, the first in American history. Another organized a lobbying campaign to win Congressional votes. Then, in April of that year, the United States entered World War I, and whatever political will that had been building for women’s enfranchisement evaporated.

Still, suffragists were not deterred. One of the most powerful weapons they had was the four million women already empowered to vote by their state constitutions. These women could cast ballots in all elections, up to the federal level, including for congressional representatives and for president. All of these “suffrage states” were still west of the Mississippi, but in November, suffragists won the richest state suffrage prize, New York.

New York was the wealthiest, most politically powerful state in the union. Now its 46-person delegation, the largest in Congress, was answerable to female as well as male voters. Just two months later, the lone Congresswoman, Jeannette Rankin of Montana (a state where women could vote) presented the bill authorizing a constitutional amendment to the House of Representatives. Amendment legislation requires the support of two-thirds of each house, and the bill passed without a vote to spare.

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Now it was on to the Senate. Historically the more supportive of the two chambers, suffragists expected a quick victory there. Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, even bought a new dress for the occasion. Even a new and deadly opponent, the 1918 flu pandemic, did not keep suffragists from pressing forward. Despite the momentum, Southern Democrats and conservative Republican senators managed to stop the bill.

Election results were what finally shifted the political ground. Once the war was over, the nation was in the mood for a change and the November 1918 midterms turned over control of Congress to the Republican Party. At the last minute, a southern Democratic Senator tried to amend the bill to limit the vote to white women, but this failed. Finally, in June 1919, in one of its first legislative acts, the new Congress passed the bill and the suffrage amendment went out for ratification. Catt called Congressional passage an “electric touch that sets a vast and complicated machinery in motion.”

Ratification is the final and steepest obstacle to amend the constitution. A majority of legislatures in three quarters of the states must vote in favor. At least six constitutional amendments—most notably the Equal Rights Amendment—have passed through Congress but failed ratification. The woman suffrage amendment had the advantage of well-organized, dedicated suffrage supporters in every state, but the anti-suffrage movement was equally energized.

Ratifications began quickly—within four months, 17 states had acted—but then slowly ground to a halt. States like Colorado, Wyoming and South Dakota, where women had been voting for decades, saw no rush to enfranchise women in the rest of the country. In Washington State, where women had been full voters since 1911, the governor resisted calling a special session of the legislature to consider the suffrage bill, but finally, in March, nine months after Senate passage, he relented, and Washington became the 35th state.

Where would the 36th state ratification come from? In Connecticut and Vermont, conservative Republican governors refused to call their legislatures into session. All eyes turned to the South, where most states were controlled by white supremacist Democrats. By July, four months after the ratification in Washington State, prospects for ratification from a 36 state were gloomy, and suffragists were becoming desperate.

Finally, Tennessee, a rare southern state with two parties, came through with the tie-breaking vote. A young Republican legislator cast the deciding ballot. Eight days later the U.S. Secretary of State announced that the 19th Amendment had officially become part of the Constitution.

Suffragists had nine weeks to get women registered to vote. While there is no way to know exact numbers, it is generally accepted that one-third of eligible women voted in the 1920 election (versus two-thirds of men).

The era of woman suffrage was over. The era of women working their way up and through the political process had begun. As one suffragist put it, it was “the dawn of woman’s political power in America.”

Almost 700 years ago, the overwhelmed physicians and health officials fighting a devastating outbreak of bubonic plague in medieval Italy had no notion of viruses or bacteria, but they understood enough about the Black Death to implement some of the world’s first anti-contagion measures.

Starting in 1348, soon after the plague arrived in cities like Venice and Milan, city officials put emergency public health measures in place that foreshadowed today’s best practices of social distancing and disinfecting surfaces.

“They knew that you had to be very careful with goods that are being traded, because the disease could be spread on objects and surfaces, and that you tried your best to limit person-to-person contact,” says Jane Stevens Crawshaw, a senior lecturer in early modern European history at Oxford Brookes University.

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The Adriatic port city of Ragusa (modern-day Dubrovnik) was the first to pass legislation requiring the mandatory quarantine of all incoming ships and trade caravans in order to screen for infection.

The order, which miraculously survived in the Dubrovnik archives, reads that on July 27, 1377, the city’s Major Council passed a law “which stipulates that those who come from plague-infested areas shall not enter [Ragusa] or its district unless they spend a month on the islet of Mrkan or in the town of Cavtat, for the purpose of disinfection.”

Mrkan was an uninhabited rocky island south of the city and Cavtat was situated at the end of the caravan road used by overland traders en route to Ragusa, writes Zlata Blazina Tomic in Expelling the Plague: The Health Office and the Implementation of Quarantine in Dubrovnik, 1377-1533.

Tomic says that some medical historians consider Ragusa’s quarantine edict one of the highest achievements of medieval medicine. By ordering the isolation of healthy sailors and traders for 30 days, Ragusan officials showed a remarkable understanding of incubation periods. New arrivals might not have exhibited symptoms of the plague, but they would be held long enough to determine if they were in fact disease-free.

The 30-day period stipulated in the 1377 quarantine order was known in Italian as a trentino, but Stevens Crawshaw says that doctors and officials also had the authority to impose shorter or longer stays. The English word “quarantine” is a direct descendent of quarantino, the Italian word for a 40-day period.

Why 40 days? Health officials may have prescribed a 40-day quarantine because the number had great symbolic and religious significance to medieval Christians. When God flooded the Earth, it rained for 40 days and 40 nights, and Jesus fasted in the wilderness for 40 days.

Stevens Crawshaw says that even before the arrival of the plague, the biblical notion of a 40-day period of purification had crossed over into health practices. After childbirth, for example, a new mother was expected to rest for 40 days.

Even with the new quarantine law, Ragusa continued to be hit hard by aftershock outbreaks of the plague in 1391 and 1397. As a maritime city that survived on trade, it would have been impossible to completely wall off Ragusa to disease without gutting the economy.

But even if the quarantine measures didn’t fully protect Ragusans from disease, Stevens Crawshaw believes that the laws may have served another purpose—restoring a sense of order.

“There are risks with any sort of epidemic of social breakdown, widespread panic, or complacency, which can be just as dangerous,” says Stevens Crawshaw. “There are a lot of emotions that need to be acknowledged and preempted and that was part of public health policy 600 years ago as much as it is now.”

Quarantine wasn’t the only tool in Europe’s ongoing battle with the plague, which would periodically ravage the continent well into the 17th century. Ragusa was also the first city to set up a temporary plague hospital on another island called Mljet. This new type of state-funded treatment facility would soon become known throughout Europe as a lazaretto.

Stevens Crawshaw, who wrote a book about plague hospitals, says that the name lazaretto is a corruption of the word Nazaretto, the nickname for the lagoon island upon which Venice built its first permanent plague hospital, Santa Maria di Nazareth.

The lazaretto served two functions, as a medical treatment center and a quarantine facility. It was a way to compassionately care for both new arrivals and local citizens who fell sick with the plague while keeping them isolated from the healthy. At a lazaretto, plague-infected patients would receive fresh food, clean bedding and other health-promoting treatments, all paid for by the state.

“They’re quite a remarkable early public health structure into which the government has to invest huge sums of money,” says Stevens Crawshaw. “Regardless of whether there’s a plague in Venice, these hospitals are permanently manned, ready and waiting for incoming ships that may be suspected of carrying an infectious disease.”

In 1665 and 1666, one city experienced two enormous tragedies: the Great Plague of London and the Great Fire of London. The plague killed roughly 15 to 20 percent of the city’s population, while the fire burned about a quarter of London’s metropolis, making around 100,000 people homeless. And though the city only officially recorded a small number of deaths from the fire, the real death toll was likely quite high.

Humans often want to find a silver lining amid disaster, and one myth that sprung up around these twin tragedies is that the Great Fire ended the Great Plague by driving out the rats who were spreading the disease.

The Great Plague was London’s last major outbreak of the plague, a bacterial infection caused by Yersinia pestis. The outbreak began in the late winter or early spring of 1665. By the time King Charles II fled the city in July, the plague was killing about a thousand people a week. The death rate peaked in September when 7,165 people died in one week.

Officially, the city recorded 68,596 deaths from the Great Plague, and the true death toll may have exceeded 100,000. Most of these deaths were from bubonic plague, a form of plague spread through fleas on small mammals. In London, the major carriers were rats. (In the United States, where plague has likely existed since a 1900 outbreak in San Francisco, squirrels and prairie dogs can and do transmit plague to humans.)

After peaking in September 1665, the city’s plague deaths began to taper off that winter. In February 1666, King Charles II returned to London, signaling a belief that the city had become “reasonably safe,” says Christoph Heyl, the chair of British literature and culture at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, who has written about the Great Fire.

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So although London continued to report plague victims until 1679, the major outbreak was mostly over by September 2, 1666, the night a baker named Thomas Farriner unwittingly started the Great Fire of London.

“In a world lit only by fire, people were always setting fire to their houses,” Tinniswood says of England in the mid-1600s. What was more unusual was for someone to start a fire in his house that set over 13,000 other houses on fire—which is what Farriner accidentally did.

The Great Fire destroyed most of the official city of London (which was geographically smaller than modern-day London), but it didn’t reach many of the outer metropolitan areas like Whitechapel, Clerkenwell and Southwark that were also affected by the plague. This means that even if the fire did drive out rats in the 436 acres it burned, it didn’t spread far enough to drive out all of the plague-spreading rats in greater London.

In fact, data suggests the fire didn’t have any effect on the plague. Plague deaths in London were already declining by the time the fire started, and people also continued to die of the plague after the fire. It’s not clear when exactly people began to say that the fire ended the plague, since people didn’t seem to believe this at the time.

If you look at the discourse of the time, there was never any connection between the end of plague and Great Fire,” Heyl says. As an example, he points to a piece of royalist propaganda that tried to spin the Great Fire as a kind of political success for King Charles II. “Even in a text like this, there’s no trace of a connection whatsoever between fire and the end of the plague.”

The uncomfortable fact is historians don’t really know why the Great Plague ended. After the fire, London strengthened old building codes that favored brick over timber because it’s less flammable. Brick is also harder for rats to burrow into, but as Museum of London curator Meriel Jeater notes, there were no concurrent hygienic or sanitary improvements with this brick use that might have explained an eradication of plague.

Even in the 21st century, the plague remains a serious disease. Between August and November 2017, a plague outbreak in Madagascar led to 2,417 infections and 209 deaths. Antibiotic treatment is extremely effective against the plague. But when the disease isn’t diagnosed or antibiotics aren’t available, it can still be very fatal, just as it was back in 1665 and 1666.