Fired Up in the Fox Valley: Appleton, Wisconsin

When the Golden Flyer II pulled up outside the Appleton Beer Factory in freezing rain and sleet, the doors burst open and ERA activists streamed out into the cold to meet it. No one waited inside. They came out with ERA NOW signs, purple and gold Votes for Women umbrellas, and the kind of energy that makes it clear — this community has been in this fight for a long time and has no intention of stopping.

Wisconsin has that history. It runs deep.

As far back as 1846, the Wisconsin constitutional convention debated including suffrage for women and African Americans in the new state’s founding law. In 1850, the legislature passed a married women’s property act. Between 1899 and 1915, suffragists made no fewer than 21 attempts in the Wisconsin legislature to secure women’s right to vote — and lost every one. They turned their energy toward the federal amendment instead, while never letting state officials forget the cause.

That strategy paid off. On June 13, 1919, Wisconsin became the first state in the nation to ratify the 19th Amendment — submitting its official paperwork ahead of every other state. The harvest, as Wisconsin suffragists had long promised, followed the patient.

Wisconsin women carried that momentum forward into the modern women’s movement. When the National Organization for Women was founded in 1966, not one but two of its founding leaders came from Wisconsin. Dr. Katherine Clarenbach — an academic leader for women’s equality who chaired NOW’s first board — went on to help organize the National Women’s Political Caucus alongside Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, and Shirley Chisholm. Gene Boyer, a businesswoman who helped build Wisconsin’s feminist infrastructure across multiple organizations, advised women to get in by the rules and play by the rules — and then change the rules. A third Wisconsin leader, Judy Goldsmith, served as NOW National President from 1982 to 1985, having risen from the founding of a local Two Rivers/Manitowoc chapter all the way to the top of the national organization.

Appleton Area NOW is the direct descendant of that tradition — and one of the first local groups anywhere in the country to embrace the Sign4ERA campaign as Clipboard Champions, taking petitions to demonstrations, community events, and church gatherings across the Fox Valley.

Once inside, over a no-host brunch of Wisconsin staples — brats, cheese curds, burgers, pizza, and even salads — Irene Strohbeen of the NOW National Board of Directors, and our wonderful host for this stop on the Tour, presented Jeanne Clark with a two-inch-deep pile of signed Sign4ERA petitions the Appleton group had gathered on their own. It was a tangible demonstration of what consistent, local organizing produces: pages and pages of signatures, each one a commitment.

What followed was exactly the kind of gathering this Tour was designed to create: every member of the Driving the Vote team shared their story from the road, and every Appleton activist shared theirs from home. The room felt less like a program and more like a reunion of people who had been doing the same work in parallel without knowing each other.

Kathy Bonk, ERA NOW Treasure and Campaign Strategist for Driving the Vote for Equality, described the moment the whole Tour began: walking into the Seal Cove Auto Museum in Maine on Labor Day with her husband Marc Tucker, and finding a display featuring the 2016 centennial suffrage tour and the Golden Flyer. That encounter led directly to the campaign now crossing the country.

Jeryl Schriever, Author of Driving the Vote for Women and co-owner of the Golden Flyer II, recounted writing the book that became the Tour’s foundation — and then working with Kathy to build a campaign around it. The history she uncovered in Alice and Nell’s journey became the argument for making this one.

Alex Huppé , co-owner of the Golden Flyer II, husband of Jeryl and the driver of the truck pulling the Golden Flyer’s trailer across 25 states — said simply that being part of this trip was an honor. He has watched the car draw crowds, stop strangers, and open conversations that no speech or flyer could. He said he was “helping change history for the better.”

Peter Brown, the Tour’s traveling mechanic and champion of Petition gathering, has kept the Golden Flyer II running across every mile of this journey. But he also gathered signatures at every stop — and said his work spreading the Sign4ERA cause gave him “new hope for our future.”

Susan Nourse, who portrays Alice Burke on this Tour, retired as the first female police chief in Freeport, Maine, now driving the 1914 Saxon alongside Jeryl in suffragist costume — spoke about her devotion to working with young people to reach for better lives. When someone asked what kept her going, she smiled: she just loves driving old cars.

Jeanne Clark, Tour Team Member and Pittsburgh-based feminist organizer whose years of advocacy are woven through every stop on this Tour — invited everyone present to tell stories of their journeys to equality. The room took her up on it. Local activists laughed, shared experiences collecting signatures, and got into the specifics of what works and what doesn’t when you’re talking to someone who has never thought about the ERA.

Almost every photograph you have seen in these Daily Diary entries — the rainy welcome in Appleton, the Saxon gleaming in front of city halls across the country, the petition signings, the speeches, the moments of joy and urgency that have defined this Tour — was captured by one person.

Nina Zacuto, a Los Angeles-based professional photojournalist and former NBC News producer, has traveled with the Driving the Vote for Equality Tour documenting its history. She has jumped in and out of conversations while simultaneously capturing still photographs and video. She has worked in rain and heat, in town squares, boostores, breweries, festivals, at state capitols and historic train depots. She has never called attention to herself and has always made sure the story she was telling was the Tour’s story, not hers.

As the Appleton gathering wound down, there was a shared sense that this was exactly what the Tour was supposed to produce: not just signatures on a petition, but connections between people doing the same work from different places, at different scales, with the same goal. The activists of Appleton Area NOW are fired up. The tour team is fired up. And the next Congress will hear about it.

Wisconsin was first to ratify the 19th Amendment. It may yet be part of the coalition that sees the ERA recognized as the 28th.