Surprisingly few people are aware that women other than Nikki Haley and Hillary Clinton have run for President of the United States. Jocelyn Kuritsky SC ’04, Jonathan Goldberg and Jennifer Hall came to Scripps College’s Balch Auditorium on March 21 to set the record straight.
In the podcast “A Simple Herstory,” co-produced by Kurtisky, Goldberg and Hall, listeners are treated with not just audio, but scripted performances recounting the stories of several of the hundreds of women who have tried and failed to get their name on the ballot.
This event was hosted by Scripps Presents, a programming series showcasing different authors, celebrities, artists and activists.
Kuritsky, Goldberg and Hall played snippets of their podcast in between discussions surrounding their historical retellings and motivations.
Lizzie Aguirre, a production manager at Scripps, spoke about the significance of platforming Kuritsky as an alum.
“[It’s] always important bringing back alums, lifting them up, showcasing their work and what they’ve gone on and grown to do,” Aguirre said.
Kuritsky credits her background in theater and ability to participate in complex discussions with politically diverse friends with leading her to create the podcast.
“A Simple Herstory” bends old-time radio plays into modern theatrical accounts of female presidential candidates’ lives. Throughout the night, the audience gasped and laughed at the candidates’ sly quips and clever jabs at American culture.
“What you assume will be a linear exploration of a little-known corner of American presidential history explodes in a grotesque panoramic survey of 19th-century society, mysticism and gender inequality,” Kuritsky said.
Kuritsky also explained the importance of getting former female candidates’ stories on the radar.
“There’s a powerful feminist message of self-empowerment and speaking truth to history, but also the deeper mystery of being human, impossible choices in amoral times and [of] who controls the narrative,” she said.
Listening to snippets of the podcast, the audience sat enraptured by the voices of the entirely female-identifying cast that narrated both women’s and men’s characters.
The producers spoke on this intentional choice in a question to the audience.
Hall asked the audience to consider which voices they preferred to listen to in a podcast. After reaching a general audience consensus that female voices were more desirable, she posed another question about the podcast hosts.
“Is it their natural speaking voice or do you think they might lower their pitch to make it a little more soothing for you to make it a little more palatable?” Hall inquired. “Why should it be that a woman’s voice might need to be lowered to the register of a man’s voice in order for us to digest it better?”
Goldberg, who wrote the podcast, described the difficulties in writing about women who “did not really exist in people’s minds,” unlike the famous historical figures immortalized in textbooks. Of particular note was season one’s Victoria Woodhull, who declared her candidacy in 1872 before women could even vote.
For Goldberg, research entailed reading multiple biographies of the same person at the same time and scratching large amounts of his work, ultimately crafting one version of the story.
Goldberg described the infinite recursion one inevitably confronts when attempting to examine a single historical moment. He analogized the complexity of a historical timeline to that of a human life.
“We only have a finite lifetime to explain someone else’s finite lifetime in a long overlapping series of lifetimes,” Goldberg said. “We have to make choices. We have to use Victoria’s life to tell us something about our life, our times. Historical fiction is not biography, it’s not about the past, it’s about using the past to comment on our present.”
Kuritsky spoke on the importance of the podcast towards college students.
“I think it’s really important for women to see that you can have all different kinds of perspectives and all different ideas about what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s feminist, what’s not, what makes a good person, what doesn’t make a good person,” Kuritsky said.
Kieran Saucedo HM ’25 noted his appreciation for Kuritsky, Goldberg and Hall’s narrative style.
“[Fictional storytelling is useful] as long as you’re upfront or honest about the choices that you’re making,” Saucedo said.
Goldberg highlighted that the podcast’s stories let the complexities and gray areas of history breathe.
“A simplification of history isn’t a collection of what happened,” Goldberg said. “It’s a collection of atypical moments strung together stretching across time.”
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