Sharon McMahon
speaker
324 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 25 Feb
Sharon McMahon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Well, you know, I've been teaching for a while. I teach on the internet now and I used to teach in a classroom, obviously. And it's very apparent to me that people in this moment, they feel really hopeless. They feel like nothing they do matters. They feel like nothing they will ever do matters. They don't have billions of dollars. They don't have a weirdly shaped rocket ship.
To blast off into space with. Yeah. They don't have millions of followers. They're not in movies. They don't have any kind of capital on which they can access the levers of power. They know those levers exist, but they feel like there's nothing they can ever do to be able to move them themselves. And they feel like I've written letters, I've voted, nothing has changed.
And it feels really hopeless to people. And I hear that, you know, I get more than 10,000 DMs every day.
And a huge amount of them are people who are like, I just feel like nothing will ever change for the better. And so I know from experience how meaningful it is to hear about people who have changed things without having access to the levers of power that we traditionally think you need to be able to make a difference.
And history is actually full of people who did such consequential things, not because they woke up in the morning and felt hope, but who chose to have hope. And I think that's a distinction that we really, really need today, that hope is a choice that we can make. It is not a feeling that we wait to feel.
Our ancestors who did incredible things in this country, who built schools for children who had no access to them, who reformed prisons, people who wrote incredibly consequential words, people who were incredible philanthropists.
people who changed the course of history without access to the levers of power did not wake up in the morning and feel hope because the totality of their life circumstances in many cases were such that none of us would ever want to trade places with them. We would never be like, yes, let me get her life instead.
People who were falsely arrested or incarcerated, people who were fired from their jobs, who grew up in the segregated South, people whose parents were enslaved, people whose children died, people People whose husbands were liars, who had second lives or married to another woman or had kids with those people.
We would never look at the totality of their life circumstances and say, I would love your life.
Right. No, we would never say that.
Inez was a suffrage worker whose story is really remarkable. But one of the things that I find really amusing about her is that she used what she had and what she had was her beauty. And she also was very smart. She went to law school at a time when women did not go to law school.
19 teens. 19 teens. Have you seen Seth's? I have not, but I want to. The producer reached out to me and was like, please come see it. We'll get you tickets. I'm going to. Yes. Yes.
Inez is a character in the Broadway show. Mill Holland, yes. She's very beautiful and also very smart. And she is somebody who really changed what suffrage meant in this country. Suddenly, suffrage grew up with temperance movements.
Yes, to enfranchise women. And the temperance movement was the movement that led towards the fact that we made it illegal to sell alcohol in the United States for a period of time. And we quickly also amended the Constitution to get rid of that amendment. These are two branches of the same vine, temperance and suffrage. It was women who were working on this for decades, 30, 40 years.
And so by the time we get to the 19-teens, many of these women are in their 40s and 50s. And here comes Inez, who newspaper reporters said things like, her white satin dress clings to her with the tenacity with which she clings to the suffrage cause. Oh, wow. Oh, very flowery. Suddenly, suddenly suffrage became sexy.
Yeah, she was a very, very attractive woman who was willing to be at the front of every parade, who was willing to carry all the banners. She had a car and the idea that like women could drive. That is noteworthy. She had Inez in her car. She was willing to use what she had.
And I know that there are a lot of feminists, myself included, who feel like women shouldn't have to trade on their looks in an effort to make change in society. But let's also be real. That is one of the levers of power that women have always had access to, right?
Is their ability to make themselves attractive in conventional sense. But Inez ultimately is a martyr for the cause of suffrage, right? And I won't give away how she goes about becoming a martyr for the cause of suffrage, but her efforts are a precursor to the passage of the 19th Amendment.
And I think one of the things that's worth remembering about Inez, of course, she martyrs herself and so her sacrifice is noteworthy, but ultimately she dies before the 19th Amendment is passed. And one of the things that people say about her after she's gone is that no work for liberty can be lost the nation.
And I think that's really worth remembering that even if we don't see the ball make it into the end zone, whatever we're working for, even if we don't see the ultimate like, and the bill was passed and they all lived happily ever after, ultimately the fabric of the country is changed because of your efforts. We are made incrementally better because of your efforts.
Showing 261–280 of 324 · page 14 of 17
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