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HISTORY This Week

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August 18, 1920. In the third row of the legislative chamber in Nashville, Tennessee, 24 year-old Harry Burn sits with a red rose pinned to his lapel. He's there to vote on the 19th Amendment, which will determine if women nationwide will be able to vote. Burn's shocking, unexpected vote, "yes," will turn the tides of history. But women had already been voting for decades before 1920, and many women still won't be able to vote for decades after 1920. So, what did the 19th Amendment actually do for women in America? And what, on this 100th anniversary, does it show us about our own right to vote today?

Thank you to our guest, Professor Lisa Tetrault, author of The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898 (University of North Carolina Press, 2014) https://bit.ly/33pmYZR

To our listeners, thank you for subscribing to History This Week. We want to hear your feedback: https://bit.ly/3a4FGqJ

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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‎HISTORY This Week: Suffrage isn't Simple on Apple Podcasts

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‎August 18, 1920. In the third row of the legislative chamber in Nashville, Tennessee, 24 year-old Harry Burn sits with a red rose pinned to his lapel. He's there to vote on the 19th Amendment, which will determine if women nationwide will be able to vote. Burn's shocking, unexpected vote, "yes," wil...

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Stuff You Missed in History Class

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This 2018 episode connects to a lot of others in our archive. Ida B. Wells-Barnett fought against lynching for decades, at a time when it wasn't common at all for a woman, especially a woman of color, to become such a prominent journalist and a speaker.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

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‎Stuff You Missed in History Class: SYMHC Classics: Ida B. Wells-Barnett on Apple Podcasts

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‎This 2018 episode connects to a lot of others in our archive. Ida B. Wells-Barnett fought against lynching for decades, at a time when it wasn't common at all for a woman, especially a woman of color, to become such a prominent journalist and a speaker. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://n...

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Stuff You Missed in History Class

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Nina Otero-Warren was from a prominent New Mexico family, and worked in education, politics, and the suffrage movement, focusing largely on Spanish speakers.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

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‎Stuff You Missed in History Class: Nina Otero-Warren on Apple Podcasts

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‎Nina Otero-Warren was from a prominent New Mexico family, and worked in education, politics, and the suffrage movement, focusing largely on Spanish speakers. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

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HISTORY This Week

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June 21, 1964. James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, three civil rights activists in their early twenties, are reported missing in Mississippi. They are part of the first wave of Freedom Summer, a massive voter registration campaign in the racist heart of the South, Mississippi. The first interracial movement of its kind, the project was led by black southern organizers and staffed by both black and white volunteers. The movement's leader, Bob Moses, joins this episode to explain how the disappearance of those three men brought the Civil Rights movement into the homes of white Americans - and what Freedom Summer can teach us about moving the wheels of progress today.

To our listeners, thank you for subscribing to History This Week. We want to hear your feedback: https://bit.ly/3a4FGqJ

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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‎HISTORY This Week: Freedom Summer, 1964 on Apple Podcasts

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‎June 21, 1964. James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, three civil rights activists in their early twenties, are reported missing in Mississippi. They are part of the first wave of Freedom Summer, a massive voter registration campaign in the racist heart of the South, Mississippi. The fi...

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Lesson of the Day: ‘The Complex History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement’

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Lesson of the Day: ‘The Complex History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement’

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By Natalie Proulx

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Lesson of the Day: 'The Complex History of the Women's Suffrage Movement'

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This year, we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment. In this lesson, you'll learn about the lesser-known history of the fight for the right to vote. Find all our Lessons of the Day here.

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How Queer Women Powered the Suffrage Movement

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How Queer Women Powered the Suffrage Movement

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By Maya Salam

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For many suffragists, scholars have found, the freedom to choose whom and how they loved was tied deeply to the idea of voting rights.

Molly Dewson, left, with Polly Porter in 1925. Their relationship is one of many that have surfaced as scholars seek to broaden history's narrative of the suffrage movement. Credit... Castine Historical Society

In 1920, the suffragist Molly Dewson sat down to write a letter of congratulations to Maud Wood Park, who had just been chosen as the first president of the League of Women Voters, formed in anticipation of the passage of the 19th Amendment to help millions of women carry out their newfound right as voters.

"Partner and I have been bursting with pride and satisfaction," she wrote. Dewson didn't need to specify who "partner" was. Park already knew that Dewson was in a committed relationship with Polly Porter, whom she had met a decade earlier. The couple then settled down at a farm in Massachusetts (where they named their bulls after men they disliked).

Dewson "made every political decision, career decision based on how it would affect her relationship with Polly Porter," Susan Ware, a historian and the author of "Partner and I" and " Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote," said in a phone interview.

Dewson was far from the only suffragist who had romantic relationships with women. Many of the women who fought for representation were rebels living nonnormative, queer lives.

"These kinds of non-heteronormative relationships were just part and parcel of the suffrage movement," Ware said. "It's not like we are having to dig and turn up like two or three women. They're everywhere." Including among the highest echelons of the movement.

In her diary, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, an African-American writer and a suffrage field organizer, described "a thriving lesbian and bisexual subculture among Black suffragists and clubwomen," Wendy Rouse, a historian and associate professor at San Jose State University, wrote in an article published on the website of the Women's Suffrage Centennial Commission. In those entries, Dunbar-Nelson wrote about the romantic and sexual experiences she had with men and women both while she was single and while she was married.

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A portrait of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, who described in her diary "a thriving lesbian and bisexual subculture among Black suffragists and clubwomen." Credit... Alice Dunbar-Nelson Papers, University of Delaware

Carrie Chapman Catt, a president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), settled down with Mary Garrett Hay, a prominent suffragist in New York, after the death of Catt's second husband. Catt asked that she be buried alongside Hay (instead of either of her husbands), which she was, at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

And Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, another NAWSA president, had a decades-long relationship with Lucy Anthony, the niece of Susan B. Anthony. Though the elder Anthony was concerned about her niece's long-term well-being, given more than a decade difference in their ages, she understood the kind of relationship she was in, said Lillian Faderman, a scholar of L.G.B.T.Q. history, who wrote the book "To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America - A History." Shaw "assured Susan that she would take care of Lucy forever," Faderman said in a phone interview, "and she did indeed do that."

Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, right, and Lucy Anthony in Shaw's home in Florida in 1917. Credit... Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University

Susan B. Anthony herself had relationships with women, Faderman said. Anthony wrote romantic letters to the suffragist Anna Elizabeth Dickinson and had a long relationship with Emily Gross. Faderman found letters - one to a relative, another to a close friend - in which Anthony refers to Gross as her lover. Lover was a term used for an admirer, but not in Anthony's vocabulary, Faderman said.

Today, we have many terms for romantic relationships between women: lesbian, bisexual, same-sex and queer, among others. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, they were sometimes called "romantic friendships" or Boston marriages, which Faderman described as "long-term domestic relationships between two women who were financially independent thinkers."

When the history of the 19th Amendment is taught in classrooms, suffragists are often depicted as boring, chaste and dowdy, and their campaign is rarely framed as a major social and political movement. But as greater attention is starting to be paid to suffrage history, and to the roles of Black and brown women, the narrative that is emerging is much more varied. This broader, more accurate picture is also increasing our understanding of queerness in the movement. Rouse, who is among scholars working to "queer the suffrage movement" - which she described as "deconstructing the dominant narrative that has focused on the stories of elite, white, upper-class suffragists" - uses "queer" as an umbrella term to describe suffragists who challenged gender and sexual norms in their everyday lives.

They did this by choosing not to marry, for example, or by living a life outside the rigid expectations placed on women in other ways. The suffragist Gail Laughlin demanded that pockets be sewn into her dresses, a radical request at the time.

Belle Squire, a suffragist from Illinois, "not only wanted the vote, she wanted to smash what we now call 'the patriarchy,'" Rouse wrote in her article. In 1910, inspired by Squire and her No Vote, No Tax League, thousands of women refused to pay their taxes until women were granted the right to vote. Squire also publicly declared her refusal to marry, "a bold statement against the oppression of women," Rouse wrote. And, demanding the same respect as married women, she insisted on being called Mrs. Squire, not Miss Squire.

An article about women's suffrage in The Chicago Tribune in 1913. Credit... Michigan State University Libraries

Of course, the reality of living as an outlier wasn't exactly rosy, especially for women in the working class or women with a more masculine presentation. In her research, Faderman found several instances in which a sex toy was found in the possession of women, a discovery that she said was "certainly frowned upon." Those women, especially if they were of a lower social status, "were sentenced to jail" or "sentenced to be publicly whipped."

The societal expectation that middle- and upper-class white women would marry men created a smoke screen of sorts. "I think that the world outside didn't speculate about the possibilities of a sexual relationship between" women, Faderman said, adding that parents were probably relieved to learn that their daughter had an intense relationship with a female friend, and not a man, before marriage.

In a way, this smoke screen extended to detractors of the movement, known as anti-suffragists. Anti-suffragists already viewed suffragists as abnormal for wanting equal rights, and they pointed to gender-nonconforming suffragists as evidence that the movement was deviant. They argued that these women would reject marriage, family and the home, and they feared women would adopt men's clothes and assume male privileges, Rouse said in an email. But somehow they didn't latch onto the fact that many of these women were having romantic relationships with each other.

This oversight was in part because same-sex relationships didn't start to be pathologized until the early 20th century, and because, as Ware put it, "Women are kind of invisible, period." But maybe most of all, it was because the suffrage movement itself downplayed the queerness within it, Rouse said, a defensive strategy that contributed to the erasure of queer suffragists.

Leaders of the movement (including Shaw and Catt) opted instead to present a version "palatable to the mainstream," Rouse said, by emphasizing normalcy. So suffragists who were seemingly happily married wives and mothers - or young, beautiful and affluent, a.k.a. marriage material - became the faces of the movement.

Despite this internal friction and these fraught side effects, it ultimately made practical sense that queer women would be at the forefront of the movement. Married women of the day often had children, and mothers didn't have time to lead a movement, Faderman said. "But the women who didn't have kids, they did have time to lead."

For these queer women, the freedom to choose whom and how they loved was tied deeply to the idea of voting rights.

"They knew they would have no man to represent them," Faderman said, echoing a common refrain among married women who were not suffragists: "My husband votes for me. He votes for the family." But unmarried or gay women knew that would not be the case for them, she said, and so, "they needed to get the vote for themselves."

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How Queer Women Powered the Suffrage Movement

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For many suffragists, scholars have found, the freedom to choose whom and how they loved was tied deeply to the idea of voting rights.

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In 1920, Native Women Sought the Vote. Here’s What’s Next.

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In 1920, Native Women Sought the Vote. Here’s What’s Next.

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By Cathleen D. Cahill and Sarah Deer

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In 1920, Native Women Sought the Vote. Here’s What’s Next. (Published 2020)

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The 19th Amendment did not bring the right to vote to all Native women, but two experts in a conversation said it did usher in the possibility of change.

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Help your community and sign up to Power the Polls!

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America is facing a record shortage of poll workers this year due to the coronavirus. Our democracy depends on ordinary people who make sure elections run smoothly and everyone's vote is counted. You can make sure we have a safe, fair, efficient election for all.

Power the Polls requires Javascript enabled in your browser in order to sign-up. If you are having issues, general inquiries can be submitted by emailing info@powerthepolls.org. Although we can't guarantee a response to every email due to volume, we will try our best to reply.

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America is facing a record shortage of poll workers this year due to the coronavirus. Our democracy depends on ordinary people who make sure elections run smoothly and everyone's vote is counted. You can make sure we have a safe, fair, efficient election for all.

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First hour: “And Nothing Less: The Untold Stories of Women's Fight for the Vote” Second hour:  NPR Story Corps Special: “One Small Step”

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First hour: “And Nothing Less: The Untold Stories of Women's Fight for the Vote” Second hour:  NPR Story Corps Special: “One Small Step”

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First hour: "And Nothing Less: The Untold Stories of Women's Fight for the Vote"

Second hour: NPR Story Corps Special: "One Small Step"

We bring you special programming this Labor Day.

In our first hour, it's "And Nothing Less: The Untold Stories of Women's Fight for the Vote." "Men their rights and nothing more; women their rights and nothing less." Written by suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, women's rights activists used this rallying cry to demand voting equality. But the suffrage movement included far more voices and perspectives than these two well-known names: throughout the fight for women's right to vote, generations of diverse activists demanded full access to the ballot box. Hosts Rosario Dawson and Retta guide us through this seven-part series, bringing us the stories we didn't learn in our history books. "And Nothing Less" is a production of the Women's Suffrage Centennial Commission, the National Park Service, and PRX. It is the official podcast commemorating 100 years of the 19th Amendment and women's constitutional right to vote.

Then in our second hour, it's "One Small Step: Courageous Conversations Across A Growing Divide," a special hour from NPR and StoryCorps. At one of the most divided times in American history, StoryCorps and NPR Member stations around the country are inviting people to take One Small Step to better understand those with whom they disagree. One Small Step pairs people of differing political views to have conversations with one another out of respect and recognition of their shared humanity. This hour-long radio special from NPR and StoryCorps, along with member station WBHM, tells the story of a nation divided and one effort to create space for conversation. Host Elise Hu guides us through conversations with StoryCorps founder Dave Isay, expert guests, and the highlights of a live stage presentation in Birmingham, Alabama, one of first cities to undertake the One Small Step project.

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Coming up on Connections: Monday, September 7

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First hour: "And Nothing Less: The Untold Stories of Women's Fight for the Vote" Second hour: NPR Story Corps Special: "One Small Step" We bring you special programming this Labor Day. In our first hour, it's "And Nothing Less: The Untold Stories of Women's Fight for the Vote."

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Article: Celebrate Women's Suffrage, but Don't Whitewash the Movement's Racism

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Article: Celebrate Women's Suffrage, but Don't Whitewash the Movement's Racism

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By Tammy L. Brown, Associate Professor of Black World Studies, History, and Global and Intercultural Studies, Miami University

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My 94-year-old great-aunt, Paralee Wilmer - we call her Aunty Lee - voted for the first time after moving to Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1944. Born to no-nonsense, small farmers in Millers Ferry, Alabama, and the youngest daughter of 12 children, Aunty Lee was one among many African Americans who moved from the South to the North in search of better job opportunities and greater freedoms during the The Great Migration. These freedoms included the right to vote without intimidation or any other hindrance.

Aunty Lee's memory is a bit cloudy regarding whether the first time she cast her ballot was in an election for local politicians or a presidential race, but one thing she knows for sure is her pastor at the time inspired her to exercise her constitutional rights and fulfill her civic duties. He said, "When it's time to vote, make sure you vote. When it's time to do grand jury, make sure you go."

At age 20, Aunty Lee understood the magnitude of her pastor's advice, given the disenfranchisement of Black folks that she witnessed growing up in Millers Ferry - including poll taxes, literacy tests, and outright violence and intimidation that prevented Black people from voting. To be a Black citizen in America but denied full citizenship rights epitomizes the hypocrisy of American democracy. This is a sad truth that I repeat like a blues refrain to my students.

This summer - as the nation celebrates the 170th anniversary of the first major convention for women's rights at Seneca Falls and the 98th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which granted women the right to vote - how do we reconcile widespread narratives of a triumphant, steady march towards women's enfranchisement with the more complicated and painful reality of my great-aunt's lived experience as a young, Black woman in Jim Crow America?

One word: intersectionality.

Legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw argues that racism and sexism intersect in a manner that compounds Black women's oppression. Although the above historical events occurred long before Crenshaw articulated intersectionality, this insightful theory should be applied to all historical narratives that do not fully engage with the lived experiences of African-American women.

What do we notice when we take an intersectional view of the events that transpired at Seneca Falls? How does our understanding of the history of all women's political empowerment in the United States change?

When suffragists gathered in Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848, they advocated for the right of white women to vote. The participants were middle and upper-class white women, a cadre of white men supporters and one African-American male - Frederick Douglass. The esteemed abolitionist had forged a strong working relationship with fellow abolitionists and white women suffragists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. No Black women attended the convention. None were invited.

Although women of color were profoundly absent at Seneca Falls, a greater degree of cultural inclusion was on the horizon. In May 1851, African-American abolitionist Sojourner Truth spoke at a women's rights convention in Akron, Ohio. During her famous speech on the abolition of slavery and the promotion of women's rights, Truth allegedly bared her breast and proclaimed, "Ain't I a w oman?"

It was a melodramatic act and statement, but as historian Nell Painter argues, it never happened. Instead, it was a quaint fiction crafted by convention organizer Frances Dana Gage and other white feminists who depicted Truth to white audiences as a genuine albeit primitive ally in the fight for women's rights. Thus, the 1851 convention marked a modicum of progress, but this progress is tainted by white suffragists' attempts to control Truth's voice.

By the turn of the 20th century, Black suffragists such as Mary Church Terrell represented intersectional feminism at its best. Born to former slaves in Memphis, Tennessee, Terrell earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from Oberlin College and served as president of the National Association of Colored Women. In February 1898, Terrell spoke at the National American Woman Suffrage Association convention in Washington, D.C.

Her speech forced powerful white women attendees to reflect on the compounding oppressions and systemic violence that Black women endured during slavery. She ended on a more optimistic note - praising the sheer grit and intellect of freed women. Terrell's rhetorical style echoed the American ethos of self-made men and women, but she oversimplified the historical reality that the paths to racial and gender equality are long, jagged, and still unwinding.

The history of women's suffrage in America is not nice or neat, because the impact of white supremacy is broad and human nature is messy. Furthermore, a nation built on stolen land from Native Americans and stolen labor from African slaves is flawed from the start. We must constantly acknowledge this truth and engage in an intersectional celebration of women's rights activists and landmark events.

In addition to celebrating the passage of the 19th Amendment, let's celebrate the upcoming birthday of African-American suffragist Mary Church Terrell, who would be 155 on September 23. Let's celebrate the lives and legacies of the true Sojourner Truth, abolitionist and suffragist Harriet Tubman, and Shirley Chisholm - the first Black woman elected to Congress and to seriously run for president.

Let us celebrate and support current-day Black Lives Matter founders and organizers Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, three queer Black women committed to "placing those at the margins closer to the center" of political leadership. Last but not least, let's celebrate the lives of everyday people like my Aunty Lee - a Black woman born and raised in Jim Crow Alabama who sought out a better life in Ohio and has religiously exercised her right to vote for the past 74 years. Let us celebrate these Black women while recognizing that the struggle to vote without obstacles continues.

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Celebrate Women's Suffrage, but Don't Whitewash the Movement's Racism

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My 94-year-old great-aunt, Paralee Wilmer - we call her Aunty Lee - voted for the first time after moving to Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1944.

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Article: African American Women and the Nineteenth Amendment

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Article: African American Women and the Nineteenth Amendment

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By Sharon Harley

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Figure 3. Ida B. Wells, c. 1891. Illustration from I. Garland Penn, The Afro-American Press and Its Editors (Springfield, MA: Willey & Co., 1891). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Despite all this important work by Black suffragists, the mainstream suffrage movement continued its racially discriminatory practices and even condoned white supremacist ideologies in order to garner southern support for white women's voting rights. Consequently, African American women and men became increasingly marginalized and discriminated against at woman suffrage meetings, campaigns, and marches. Even after the NWSA and the AWSA reconciled to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1890, Anthony and other white suffragists in the South and the North continued to choose expediency over loyalty and justice when it came to Black suffragists. In 1895, Anthony asked her "friend" and veteran woman suffrage supporter Frederick Douglass not to attend the upcoming NAWSA convention in Atlanta. As she later explained to , Douglass's presence on the stage with the honored guests would have offended the southern hosts. Wells-Barnett and other suffragists reprimanded Anthony and other white women activists for giving in to racial prejudice. During the 1903 NAWSA meeting in New Orleans, the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Times Democrat denounced the organization's anti-Black states' rights strategy for its negative impact on Black women's quest for suffrage.

There were exceptions to the discriminatory traditions among suffragists. In New England, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin claimed she had been warmly welcomed by Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and others. Some African American women, such as internationally prominent women's rights activists and speaker , belonged to and participated in NAWSA meetings and activities, even as the new organization discriminated against them to woo southern and white male support for woman suffrage. (Figure 2) Mary Church Terrell

In the closing decades of the nineteenth century more Black women formed their own local and regional woman suffrage clubs and, in 1896, the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). The NACW, which elected Terrell as it first national president, provided Black women a national platform to advocate for woman suffrage and women's rights causes. From the organization's inception and throughout the twentieth century, Terrell, Ruffin, Barrier Williams, Wells-Barnett, and numerous NACW members and leaders fought for woman suffrage, sharing their pro-suffrage sentiments and activities at regional and national NACW conventions and in the white and Black press.

Despite the discrimination Black women experienced, including the rejection of Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin's effort to represent the NACW in the General Federation of Women's Clubs, Black women cautiously joined interracial efforts to secure the ballot for women and to expand women's engagement in electoral politics as canvassers, organizers, and voters. Prominent anti-lynching activist, NACW member, and suffragist Ida B. Wells-Barnett organized, in 1913, the first Black woman suffrage club in Illinois, the Chicago-based Alpha Suffrage Club. (Figure 3) She and other midwestern women participated in nonpartisan NACW, NAWSA, and Alpha Club campaigns and political rallies; most Black women, however, also supported Republican Party platforms and candidates.

As the suffrage movement moved into its final phase in the early decades of the twentieth century, local and national white woman suffrage organizations claimed racial inclusivity and did have African American women as active members, but the actions and policy statements of their leaders reflected a very different racial reality-one that worsened over time. When Alice Paul, founder of the National Woman's Party, organized a woman suffrage parade in 1913, scheduled a day before the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson, the first US president from the South, her accommodating acquiescence to white racism typified the worsening racial climate within the suffrage movement. Prior to the parade, Wells-Barnett, representing the Alpha Suffrage Club, was asked to march at the rear of the parade rather than with the white Chicago delegation. In keeping with her resistant and radical personality, Wells-Barnett refused to join her fellow Black suffragists at the rear. Instead, as the all-white Chicago delegation passed, Wells-Barnett emerged from the crowd and entered the line between two white Chicago women and marched and with them, as she knew to be just.

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African American Women and the Nineteenth Amendment (U.S. National Park Service)

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Despite all this important work by Black suffragists, the mainstream suffrage movement continued its racially discriminatory practices and even condoned white supremacist ideologies in order to garner southern support for white women's voting rights. Consequently, African American women and men became increasingly marginalized and discriminated against at woman suffrage meetings, campaigns, and marches.

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Book: Women in the Dark: Female Photographers in the US, 1850–1900

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Book: Women in the Dark: Female Photographers in the US, 1850–1900

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by Katherine Manthorne

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Katherine Manthorne writes about landscape art across the Americas and the contribution of women to 19th century art and culture. Currently an art history professor at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, she has been a visiting professor in Venice, Copenhagen, and Berlin. Her publications include Home on the Hudson: Women and Men Painting Landscape, 1825-1875 (Boscobel, 2009) and Restless Enterprise: The Art & Life of Eliza Pratt Greatorex (University of California Press, 2021).

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women in the dark: female photographers in the us

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1850–1900 schiffer ltd art & antiques catalog arts & crafts catalog general catalog military catalog uncategorized

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Women in the Dark: Female Photographers in the US, 1850-1900

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Schiffer Publishing Women in the Dark: Female Photographers in the US, 1850-1900 - Recover the stories of long-overlooked American women who, at a time when women rarely worked outside the home, became commercial photographers and shaped the new, challenging medium.

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Article/Radio clip: Yes, Women Could Vote After The 19th Amendment — But Not All Women. Or Men

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Article/Radio clip: Yes, Women Could Vote After The 19th Amendment — But Not All Women. Or Men

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By Melissa Block

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On Aug. 26, 1920, the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution officially took effect when Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby signed a proclamation certifying its ratification.

The amendment promised women that their right to vote would "not be denied" on account of sex.

Yet, even after that milestone, millions of people - women and men alike - were still excluded from the vote, as many barriers to suffrage remained.

The fight over the amendment was not just about sex; it was also deeply entwined with race.

While the women's suffrage movement had its roots in the anti-slavery movement, early suffragist leaders including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony would later split off from their alliance with abolitionists. They were outraged that, under the 15th amendment, Black men would get the vote while white women were still denied.

Decades later, when the 19th amendment was up for debate, Southern politicians especially seethed over the prospect of enfranchising millions of African American women, just as the 15th amendment had enfranchised Black men - by law if not by practice.

"The debates are explicit!" says Martha S. Jones, professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and author of the forthcoming book Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All.

"Racism runs through the debates over women's suffrage oftentimes through and through," Jones says. "Racism is a language that is shared by suffragists and anti-suffragists alike."

Case in point: In 1919, just before the U.S. Senate voted on the 19th amendment, South Carolina Sen. Ellison Smith fulminated against what he called the "alien and unfit [Negro] race."

He proclaimed it "a crime against white civilization" that Black men were granted the vote with the 15th amendment.

Extending the vote to "the other half of the Negro race," Smith thundered, would unleash new "evils."

In the face of racist opposition, white suffragists betrayed the Black women who had also long fought for the right to vote, says Elaine Weiss, author of The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote.

"We have to acknowledge," Weiss says, "that [white suffragists] used as one of their politically expedient arguments, 'You know, there are more white women who will be voting than Black women. So don't worry. White supremacy is not going to be endangered.'"

In 1918, leading suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt framed the argument this way in a letter to North Carolina Congressman Edwin Webb, trying to persuade him to vote yes on the 19th amendment:

[The] present condition in the South makes sovereigns of some negro men, while all white women are their subjects. These are sad but solemn truths. If you want white supremacy, why not have it constitutionally, honorably? The Federal Amendment offers the way.

Of course, as historian Martha Jones points out, whites in the Jim Crow South knew all too well how to keep African Americans from voting: Poll taxes. Literacy tests. Grandfather clauses. Violence and lynching.

"It is a bargain in 1919 and 1920," Jones explains. "Support for women's suffrage in exchange for giving individual states license to continue to keep Black Americans from the polls. They've long kept Black men from the polls, and now they're going to keep Black women from the polls as well."

Indeed, just two months after the 19th amendment was ratified, the prominent African American suffragist and activist Mary Church Terrell wrote a letter to NAACP president Moorfield Storey that was filled with foreboding:

The colored women of the South will be shamefully treated, and will not be alowed [sic] to vote, I am sure. I hope the Republicans will do something toward enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment. We are so helpless without the right of citizenship in that section of the country where we need it most.

Along with African Americans, other groups who continued to be excluded from the vote included Asian American immigrants, who were long ineligible for naturalized citizenship on account of race, and only won the vote starting in 1943.

Among those advocating for both women's suffrage and immigrant rights was a young woman named Mabel Ping-Hua Lee. She was about 5 when her family managed to immigrate to the U.S. from Canton (now Guangzhou), China, in 1900 through a narrow exemption in the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Starting as a teenager, Lee became a powerful voice in the suffrage movement, says Cathleen Cahill, associate professor of history at Pennsylvania State University, and author of the forthcoming book, Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement.

"She has a real presence," Cahill says. "People talk about her speeches, and about how the audience is 'Mabelized' by her ability. White suffragists think she's phenomenal."

So much so that they ask the 16-year-old Lee to march on horseback at the front of a major suffrage parade in New York City in 1912.

It would take more than 20 years after the 19th amendment's ratification for Lee and other Chinese-American immigrants to become eligible for citizenship, and thus win the right to vote.

Also excluded from the franchise: Native Americans, many of whom were not made U.S. citizens until 1924.

Even after that, Native Americans in some states were considered "wards of the state" and weren't guaranteed the right to vote until passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Voting rights activist Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Sa) of the Yankton Sioux Nation was prominent in the women's suffrage community.

"She and other nationally known native suffragists don't necessarily want to only have U.S. citizenship," Cahill says. "They also want recognition of their citizenship in tribal nations and their treaty rights, particularly to land. They want to use suffrage and U.S. citizenship to save their land and their communities."

After the 19th amendment is ratified, Cahill says, Bonnin "spends the next several years going to white women and saying, 'Now you have the vote, please fight for my people.' She says, 'Don't forget your Indian sisters.'"
"It's never a done deal"
"A victory for some was not a victory for all, and fights continue today," says Marcia Chatelain, professor of history and African-American Studies at Georgetown University.

"I think what this year provides us an opportunity to do, as people celebrate 100 years of suffrage," she says, "is to ask the critical question: suffrage for whom and at what cost?"

In answer to that question, Chatelain points to the current struggles over voting rights.

"No one should celebrate anything as long as we live in a country that has such strategically created voter suppression," she says. "We really can't claim that the United States had an incredible victory in 1920, when in 2020 there are still far too many barriers for people to vote."

For historian Martha Jones, the ratification of the 19th amendment "marks for African American women a start, not a finish."

"It fuels a new chapter in the struggle for voting rights in the United States," she says, "a movement that Black women will lead all the way to 1965 and passage of the Voting Rights Act."

"One of the lessons that we learn when we compare 1920 and 2020," she continues, "is that voting rights is never a given. It's never a guarantee. It's not a done deal in the United States."

In her office, Jones can look up at a visual reminder of that long history.

Hanging on the wall is a portrait of her great-great-grandmother, Susan Davis, who was born enslaved in Kentucky.

Jones likes to imagine her then-80-year-old ancestor on election day 1920, hitching up her horse and buggy, riding into town, "and getting into that line - a segregated line, but a line nonetheless - that would permit her and her daughter Lillian both to cast their first ballots."

"I can't say for sure that Susan and Lillian voted on that day," Jones says. "I sure hope they did."

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Yes, Women Could Vote After The 19th Amendment - But Not All Women. Or Men

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On Aug. 26, 1920, the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution officially took effect when Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby signed a proclamation certifying its ratification. The amendment promised women that their right to vote would "not be denied" on account of sex.

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What the Right to Vote Means to Me: A Crowd-Sourced Poetry Project 

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What the Right to Vote Means to Me: A Crowd-Sourced Poetry Project 

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As part of this month-long community celebration, NBMAA and Stanley Black & Decker invite you to contribute to a crowd-sourced poem facilitated by celebrated Connecticut poet Ginny Lowe Connors.

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By Nancy A. Hewitt

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In the years between the Seneca Falls Convention and the Civil War, powerful links existed between antislavery and women's rights advocates. Virtually all women's rights advocates supported abolition. Not all abolitionists supported women's rights, however; since some believed that it was inappropriate for women to be engaged in public, political action. Still, these differences among abolitionists did little to deter the common work of those who embraced emancipation for both slaves and women.

From 1848 through the Civil War, those who argued for wider roles for women generally called themselves women's rights advocates rather than suffragists. The right to vote was included among their goals, but their agenda was much broader than any single issue. In addition, most women's rights supporters had been introduced to reform efforts through the antislavery movement and specifically through the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) led by William Lloyd Garrison. Members of the AASS argued that abolition could only be achieved by persuading Americans-slaveholders and non-slaveholders alike-that human bondage was against God's law. Many Garrisonians, including a large number of Quakers, refused to participate in electoral politics due to the government's support of slavery and the U.S. war against Mexico. Garrisonian women did not necessarily oppose woman suffrage, but they emphasized instead the right of women to gain equal access to education and employment; equality within marriage, the family, and religion; and a married woman's right to property, wages, control over her own body, and custody of her children. They advocated similar rights for African Americans and focused particularly on the sexual abuse of slave women as one of the strongest arguments for eradicating slavery.

The AASS provided women with opportunities to speak, organize, and write on behalf of slaves; and to hold office, raise funds, and edit newspapers for the cause. Lucretia Mott, co-organizer of the Seneca Falls Woman's Rights Convention, was a Garrisonian abolitionist and a charter member of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society founded in 1833, which included both African-American and white women in its ranks. Many Garrisonian societies were interracial and mixed-sex organizations, and all argued on principle for both racial equality and a woman's right to a public role. Other antislavery groups, such as the Liberty and Free Soil parties, focused on political action as the best means of achieving abolition. However, they attracted fewer women to their ranks and relegated them to secondary roles, such as raising funds to support men's activities and agendas.

It was only in the aftermath of the Civil War, when Republican politicians introduced the 14th and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution extending citizenship and suffrage to former slave men, that suffrage gained the central place in the battle for women's rights. Then former abolitionist allies, including those who had long advocated women's rights, divided over the movement's priorities. Many abolitionists initially advocated universal suffrage, for both African Americans and women. When that was made impossible by the insertion of the word male in the 14th and 15th amendments, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, with support from African Americans like Sojourner Truth, campaigned against any amendment that would deny voting rights to women. Among their opponents were former allies like Lucy Stone, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Wendell Phillips, and Frederick Douglass, who argued that it was "the Negro's hour" and that women's suffrage would have to wait.

As a result of this division, Stanton and Anthony founded the National Woman Suffrage Association, a women-only organization, in 1869 to promote a federal amendment guaranteeing woman suffrage. Stone and Blackwell formed a rival organization-the American Woman Suffrage Association-that included men as well as women and advocated a state-by-state campaign for female enfranchisement. Not until 1890 would the divisions created by the battle over black men's enfranchisement heal, allowing suffragists and former abolitionist allies to work together again in the National American Women's Suffrage Association. Nonetheless, even though the abolitionist-women's rights alliance fractured in the late 1860s, suffragists owed a substantial debt to the antislavery movement, which had served as the most important training ground for its leaders and the most important repository for ideas of sexual as well as racial emancipation in the decades before the Civil War.

About the Author: Nancy A. Hewitt is Professor of History at Rutgers University. She received her Ph.D. at University of Pennsylvania in 1981 and taught at University of South Florida and Duke University before moving to Rutgers in 1998. She is the author of "Women's Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822-1872" (Cornell University Press, 1984) and "Forging Activist Identities: Latin, African American and Anglo Women in Tampa, Florida, 1870s-1920s" (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming). She has also edited a collection of articles, "Women, Families and Communities: Readings in American History," aimed at helping teachers integrate stories of women into American History courses. And she has facilitated curriculum integration workshops on gender and race for middle school, high school, and college teachers in Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Illinois, and New Jersey.

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In the years between the Seneca Falls Convention and the Civil War, powerful links existed between antislavery and women's rights advocates. Virtually all women's rights advocates supported abolition. Not all abolitionists supported women's rights, however; since some believed that it was inappropriate for women to be engaged in public, political action.

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Article: How the Suffrage Movement Betrayed Black Women

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Article: How the Suffrage Movement Betrayed Black Women

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By Brent Staples

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Susan B. Anthony during a portrait session circa 1891. Credit... Library of Congress

Susan B. Anthony during a portrait session circa 1891. Credit... Library of Congress

The suffragist heroes Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony seized control of the feminist narrative of the 19th century. Their influential history of the movement still governs popular understanding of the struggle for women's rights and will no doubt serve as a touchstone for commemorations that will unfold across the United States around the centennial of the 19th Amendment in 2020.

That narrative, in the six-volume "History of Women's Suffrage," betrays more than a hint of vanity when it credits the Stanton-Anthony cohort with starting a movement that actually had diverse origins and many mothers. Its worst offenses may be that it rendered nearly invisible the black women who labored in the suffragist vineyard and that it looked away from the racism that tightened its grip on the fight for the women's vote in the years after the Civil War.

Historians who are not inclined to hero worship - including Elsa Barkley Brown, Lori Ginzberg and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn - have recently provided an unsparing portrait of this once-neglected period. Stripped of her halo, Stanton, the campaign's principal philosopher, is exposed as a classic liberal racist who embraced fairness in the abstract while publicly enunciating bigoted views of African-American men, whom she characterized as "Sambos" and incipient rapists in the period just after the war. The suffrage struggle itself took on a similar flavor, acquiescing to white supremacy - and selling out the interests of African-American women - when it became politically expedient to do so. This betrayal of trust opened a rift between black and white feminists that persists to this day.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton Credit... Universal History Archive, via Getty Images

This toxic legacy looms especially large as cities, including New York, prepare monuments and educational programs to celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment, ratified in 1920, which barred the states from denying voting rights based on gender. Black feminists in particular are eager to see if these remembrances own up to the real history of the fight for the vote - and whether black suffragists appear in them.

The famous suffrage convention convened in Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1848 featured Stanton and her partner-in-arms, Lucretia Mott, in addition to the towering figure of Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and dyed-in-the-wool supporter of women's rights who was on his way to becoming one of the most famous speakers of the century. Were it not for Douglass's oratory, the historian Lisa Tetrault tells us in "The Myth of Seneca Falls," the "controversial" resolution demanding the vote for women might actually have failed.

It became clear after the Civil War that black and white women had different views of why the right to vote was essential. White women were seeking the vote as a symbol of parity with their husbands and brothers. Black women, most of whom lived in the South, were seeking the ballot for themselves and their men, as a means of empowering black communities besieged by the reign of racial terror that erupted after Emancipation.

The tension escalated in the run-up to the 15th Amendment, a provision that ostensibly barred the states from denying Negro men the right to vote. Reasonable people could, of course, disagree on the merits of who should first be given the vote - women or black men. Stanton, instead, embarked on a Klan-like tirade against the amendment. She warned that white woman would be degraded if Negro men preceded them into the franchise. Admiring historians have dismissed this as an unfortunate interlude in an exemplary life. By contrast, the historian Lori Ginzberg argues persuasively that racism and elitism were enduring features of the great suffragist's makeup and philosophy.

Similarly, the historian Faye Dudden wrote that Stanton "dipped her pen into a tincture of white racism and sketched a reference to a nightmarish figure, the black rapist," and lashed out from the pages of the suffragist paper that she and Anthony published. Her message - that passage of the 15th Amendment would mean only degradation for women at the hands of Negro men - must have cheered the Ku Klux Klan as it terrorized the black South.

Frederick Douglass Credit... Library of Congress

Douglass was clearly wounded by what he described as the "employment of certain names, such as 'Sambo,' and the gardener, and the bootblack ... and all the rest," but gracefully declined to answer insult with insult. Instead, he summarized in dramatic fashion the differences between the interests of black and white suffragists - and the case for federal protection of black voters.

"When women, because they are women," he said, "are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans; when they are dragged from their houses and hung upon lampposts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed out upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own."

Douglass cut to the central fallacy of the white suffragist push - that African-American women could magically separate their blackness from their femaleness.

The 15th Amendment was, of course, ratified. Women would wait another 50 years for the 19th. Racism intensified among suffragists as they neared their goals. African-American luminaries like the noted anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells and the civil rights leader Mary Church Terrell became more deeply and publicly engaged.

As in other instances, suffragists outside the South used the racism in the Jim Crow states as an excuse for their discriminatory treatment of their black suffragist sisters. Black women's suffrage clubs that sought formal affiliation with the national white suffrage movement were discouraged from doing so on the grounds that admitting them might anger white Southerners. It has since become clear that this was a ruse Northern whites used to obscure their own discriminatory policies.

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A suffragist parade in New York in 1913. Credit... Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

The most blatant example of accommodationism came in 1913 when organizers of a huge suffragist parade in Washington demanded that black participants march in an all-black assembly at the back of the parade instead of with their state delegations. Wells famously refused. Terrell, who marched in a colored delegation as requested, believed at the time that white suffragists would exclude black women from the 19th Amendment - nicknamed the Anthony Amendment - if they thought they could get away with it. These episodes fueled within the African-American community a lasting suspicion of white suffragists and of the very idea of political cooperation across racial lines.

Historians are rightly warning groups involved in suffrage commemorations not to overstate the significance of the 19th Amendment. It covered the needs of middle-class white women quite nicely. But it meant very little to black women in the South, where most lived at the time and where election officials were well practiced in the art of obstructing black access to the ballot box. As African-American women streamed in to register, Southern officials merely stepped up the level of fraud and intimidation.

By this time, the former suffragists of the North were celebrating the amendment and were uninterested in fighting discrimination against women who were suffering racial, as opposed to gender, discrimination. As the historian Rosalyn Terborg-Penn writes: "Within a few years, white supremacy was victorious throughout the South. Unlike Black men, who had been disenfranchised within 20 years after the ratification of the 15th Amendment, Black women had lost the vote in less than a decade." It would take another half-century - and a new suffrage campaign, with black women in a leading role - before that black community was fully enfranchised, through the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The recent uproar over the monuments to white supremacy that dominate public spaces in the South has put civic groups on notice that memorials often convey pernicious messages and perpetuate historical wrongs. Organizers need to keep that in mind as they commemorate a movement in which racism clearly played a central role.
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Opinion | How the Suffrage Movement Betrayed Black Women (Published 2018)

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Susan B. Anthony during a portrait session circa 1891. Credit... Library of Congress The suffragist heroes Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony seized control of the feminist narrative of the 19th century.

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NBMAA and Stanley Black & Decker invite you to create a work of art inspired by the 2020/20+ Women @ NBMAA initiative.

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The New Britain Museum of American Art and Stanley Black & Decker welcome you to join us for a month-long community celebration of the centennial of women's suffrage in America. Throughout the month of August, the NBMAA, in partnership with presenting sponsor Stanley Black & Decker, will offer a dynamic series of virtual programs honoring this historic milestone and all those who have fought for opportunity and change. Learn more.

As part of this month-long community celebration, NBMAA and Stanley Black & Decker invite you to create a work of art inspired by the 2020/20+ Women @ NBMAA initiative.

Please use these hashtags when posting your work:
#ForThoseWhoMakeTheWorld #NBMAA #2020ArtForAChange
Jenny Holzer Inspired Lesson

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The New Britain Museum of American Art and Stanley Black & Decker welcome you to join us for a month-long community celebration of the centennial of women's suffrage in America. Throughout the month of August, the NBMAA, in partnership with presenting sponsor Stanley Black & Decker, will offer a dynamic series of virtual programs honoring this historic milestone and all those who have fought for opportunity and change.

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From their onsets, suffragists and abolitionists shared many of the same values, so what caused the movements to split apart?
By Ta-Nehisi Coates

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Susan B. Anthony (Wikimedia Commons)

The reformer mind was accustomed to dealing in abstractions, not specifics. -- Christine Stansell, The Feminist Promise

In those circles where radicals and progressives debate the history of their various struggles, the late 19th-century split between the nascent feminist and early civil rights movement is much mourned. Briefly, abolition was the primary cause of Northern reformers in the years leading up to the Civil War. The women's rights advocates who would push for suffrage, from Seneca Valley on, generally started out as abolitionists and temperance activists. It is not to say that Woman's Rights -- as was the phrase of the day -- was not on the table. But the abomination of slavery, especially in the wake of the Civil War, tended to blot out all other causes.

After the War, with abolition achieved, the movement turned to broadening the franchise. It was generally agreed. among the reformers, that universal emancipation -- for black men and all women -- was the ideal. But the old abolitionists split on the matter of timetables. On one side you had activists like Julia Ward Howe, Antoinette Brown, Lucy Stone and ultimately Frederick Douglass, who favored the enfranchisement of black men as a first step. On the other side stood Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who argued that the incrementalism was bankrupt and that the franchise should be expanded to include black men as well as black and white women.

The subsequent fight destroyed the old antebellum alliance and eventually sent both movements into a (short) dark age. Anthony and Stanton, the leaders of the revolution, would eventually make common cause with Southern racists. Meanwhile, the reformers would soon find that, in the Deep South, the constitutional assurance for black men meant nothing in the face of white terror. Black leaders like Booker T. Washington would eventually go so far as to effectively surrender all claim to the franchise. (At least temporarily.)

The Great Schism has echoed down through the ages, and it haunts any talk of gender and race on the left. Not to put my commenters on blast, but here is a typical rendering:

It's one of the great embarrassments of first-wave American feminism that so many supporters of women's suffrage turned against the 15th amendment, using the grossest racial politics, too. I've never felt the same way about Susan B Anthony since I learned of her opposition to black suffrage.

That's basically the rendition I was treated to in college debates under the flag pole, or on the steps of Douglass where nascent leftists, like yours truly, deployed arcane formulas to determine who had the most privilege, who could pile up the most layers of jeopardy. The sense was that if one could be born a half-Native American, half-African-American lesbian, who'd done a bid on the reservation, or in the projects, some mystical ascension awaited.

As it happens, our great creation myth did not match the history. From Stansell's The Feminist Promise:

The break has long been described as between a group committed to the freedpeople's cause and a racist, all-white Stanton-Anthony faction, but the judgment is facile and ignores the facts.

For sure, Stansell has a critique. She does not shirk from outlining the racism which plagued the movement from the postbellum years on.The pattern begins in the years right after the War with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony campaiging for women's suffrage with the scandalous George Train, under the slogan "Woman first and negro last." Stanton dubbed Train, "the most wonderful man of the century," and frustrated by the stonewalling of women's suffrage began a a long pattern of justifying women's rights through bigotry:

Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung who do not know the difference between a monarchy and a republic, who never read the Declaration of Independence, or Webster's spelling book, making laws for Lydia Marie Child, Lucretia Mott or Fanny Kemble.

It got worse. By the dawn of of the 20th century, Anthony and Stanton were openly courting avowed white supremacists like Belle Kearney. 1903 found the old stalwart abolitionist, Anthony, in New Orleans at the National Association of Women's Suffrage Association's convention, enduring a rousing rendition of Dixie, and tolerating Kearney's "semi-barbaric denunciations of blacks."

By that point, some of the most ardent suffrage activists were outright racists like Rebecca Felton, who fervently supported lynching, and Kate Gordon who eventually abandoned the suffrage movement because a national amendment would threaten white supremacy. "State sovereignty and white supremacy are inextricably linked," said Gordon. Kearney argued that "the enfranchisement of women would insure immediate and durable white supremacy."

By 1915 (after Anthony's death) NAWSA, founded by an abolitionist, friends of Frederick Douglass had thoroughly absorbed the rhetoric of white supremacists:

In Germany, German men governed German women; in France, French men did the same, "but in this country, American women are governed by every kind of man under the light of the sun," complained Anna Howard Shaw, successor to Anthony as NAWSA president.

How did a movement once rooted in the principles of abolition come to be associated with white nationalists?

I think one way of looking at this -- among many others -- is to not look at the movement post-1865, but post-1835, when abolitionist women, like Anthony and Stanton, were subject to unbridled sexism among their allies and enemies alike. In antebellum America, for a woman to speak before a promiscuous audience--that is to say an audience of mixed-gender--was to invite charges of prostitution. To travel, unescorted, as some reformers did was to increase the risk of accusation. To take these actions in opposition to the Southern Slave Society--an ostensibly divine institution deeply entwined with theories of family--and "Woman's Rights" was nigh blasphemous. And the penalties for doing such were not theoretical:

...the spread of women's rights thought fueled anti-abolitionist fires. Sexual imagery conflated the two causes: It was "old maids" and "nigger-lovers" who made up the female societies. Rhetorical violence in newspapers and pamphlets fed mob violence....Women were not exempt. In 1835 in Boston, a crowd of several thousand threatened members of the BFASS [Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society] who were thought to be hiding a visiting British abolitionist in there meeting rooms...

Afterward, Maria Weston Chapman, a leading member....could not walk in the streets of her own city without passerby and shop clerks hurling abuse at her. The Boston women noted acidly the double standard that divided acceptable female behavior from activity that as reviled. They were all involved in several reform causes...."No one said then, 'women had better stay home.'" Doing the same thing on behalf of the slaves, though, was another matter bringing threats bordering on lethal.

Stansell doesn't say this, but I have to believe that the prospect of rape often hung in the background.

Nor were threats of sexism strictly the province of the foes of women abolitionists. Sarah Grimke -- who credited abolition with helping awaken her to the persistent oppression of women -- was denounced by her abolitionist allies for daring to publicly raise the cause of women's rights alongside abolition. After thugs in Philadelphia broke up a meeting of one of the Anti-Slavery Societies, The Colored American (a black newspaper) took the opportunity to warn black women in the abolitionist movement away from the Grimkes, and toward the work of hearth and home:

Colored females from education, are more especially deficient in fulfilling their appropriate duties, and in redeeming the character and carrying forward the interests of their oppressed and injured people. As wives, as mothers and as daughters, they are too inert not sufficiently self-sacrificing.

In 1840, the World Anti-Slavery Convention -- the first of its kind -- refused to seat the eight American women delegates. Evidently this humiliation was insufficient. The conveners then made the women observe the deliberations from behind a curtain. Elizabeth Cady Stanton--barely 25--was there, and as was her wont, fuming righteously:

When we consider that Lady Byron, Anna Jameson, Mary Howitt, Mrs. Hugo Reid, Elizabeth Fry, Amelia Opie, Ann Green Phillips, Lucretia Mott, and many remarkable women, speakers and leaders in the Society of Friends, were all compelled to listen in silence to the masculine platitudes on woman's sphere, one may form some idea of the indignation of unprejudiced friends...

Judging from my own feelings, the women on both sides of the Atlantic must have been humiliated and chagrined, except as these feelings were outweighed by contempt for the shallow reasoning of their opponents, and their comical pose and gestures in some of the intensely earnest flights of their imagination.

What do we make of all of this? Stansell argues that the two tragically misread the politics of the day:

Why did the suffragists lose women's suffrage? The question has dominated scholarship about the postwar years? But one can also ask, really, why did they ever think they could win. From any angle the prospect was faint.

Whereas black male suffrage had actual political support, women's suffrage did not.From the Republican Party view, black male suffrage was a singular boon--a weapon which advantaged the loyalist, and hurt the defeated Confederates. The math of women's suffrage--which would double the black vote and the Southern white vote--was decidedly different.

And yet, I find myself in sympathy both Stanton and Anthony. They were not latter day Geraldine Ferraros, or white supremacists like Kearney or Felton. On the contrary, the two spent much of their early careers very much devoted to the cause of black people, and took their share of abuse for it. When the goal -- abolition -- was achieved, they hoped for some reciprocity. It did not come. "When I think of all the wrongs that have been heaped upon womankind, " wrote Stanton. "I am ashamed that I am not forever in a condition of chronic wrath."

Frankly, given the sort of gender bigotry that women abolitionist faced, I'm a little surprised that more didn't take the absolutist path. I also don't think too much should be made of associations. They offer context, but they aren't the story. There's also the model of Frederick Douglass, who after splitting bitterly with Stanton and Anthony reconciled with them both, singling out Stanton, in particular, for making him a "Woman's Rights Man." The day Douglass died, he attended a suffrage conference where he was saluted by Anthony and her compatriots.

And finally there is my own personal bias. The other day I was reading over Robert E. Lee's famous quote about slavery...

In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence.

...and I found myself filled with rage and contempt. It is moral cowardice, a willingness to not merely abide by a great evil -- but to actually profit from it -- that really grates.

I think of Lee utterly quitting on the great moral question of his day, and still enjoying a place of honor in this country, and I am baffled. Then I think of Stanton and Anthony, misstepping, but always pushing, always agitating, always expanding, and I feel a strong kinship. I don't need my personal pantheon to be clean. But I need it to be filled with warriors.

As always, I invite the professionals to fill in the gaps here -- both in terms of actual facts and context.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. He is the author of The Beautiful Struggle, Between the World and Me, and We Were Eight Years in Power.

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Susan B. Anthony (Wikimedia Commons) The reformer mind was accustomed to dealing in abstractions, not specifics. -- Christine Stansell, The Feminist Promise In those circles where radicals and progressives debate the history of their various struggles, the late 19th-century split between the nascent feminist and early civil rights movement is much mourned.

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Women of Color and the Right to Vote

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Biographies | Resources | Upcoming Programs | Community Input Form
Colored Women's Liberty Loan Committee, October 21, 1917, RG012, State Archives, Connecticut State Library | From left to right, Elizabeth R. Morris, Mary A. Johnson, and Rosa J. Fisher

Inspired by the words of notable African American reformer and political activist, Mary Townsend Seymour, "The work must be done," the Connecticut Historical Society presents exciting new research about the women of color who worked for women's suffrage. As the nation, and Connecticut, celebrate the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment which legalized women's right to vote, attention is growing about the critical need to identify and raise up the stories of the women of color who participated in the fight for suffrage and those who, like their white counterparts, were against the enfranchisement of women. Historically, research about the fight to win the right to vote has focused on the white women who were both for and against this act. Due to the internalized racism of many of the national and state-wide suffrage organizations, women of color, and particularly African American women, were denied agency within these activist organizations. This does not mean that women of color were not involved in the fight for and against suffrage. They absolutely were. Women of color were active leaders who developed their own associations, both nationwide and state-based, to achieve social and political reforms, including working for woman suffrage.

Listen to this podcast episode of "Grating the Nutmeg," in which our own Natalie Belanger talks to historians Brittney Yancy and Karen Li Miller about their ongoing research on women of color and their role in the suffrage movement.

Biographies

Community Input Form
Click to access the Community Input Form
Resources

Public Presentations

August 26, 2020 @ 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm: Online program for the New Haven Museum. THIS PROGRAM IS SOLD OUT!

September 30, 2020 @ 7:00 pm: Online programs for the Otis Library

September 23, 2020 @ noon: Connecticut Historical Society, sponsored by the Aurora Women and Girls Foundation. Register Here.

Book an in-person or digital presentation

For information, please contact our Education Assistant at (860) 236-5621 x232 or education_assistant@chs.org.

Funders

Funding for this project is made possible by the State of Connecticut and the National Endowment for the Humanities, both of which provide significant support to Connecticut Humanities.

Researchers

Karen Miller CHS

Brittney Yancy Goodwin University

Partner Organizations

Prudence Crandall House

Otis Library

Lockwood Mathews Mansion Museum

Stonington Historical Society

Litchfield Historical Society

New Haven Museum

Connecticut Historical Society

One Elizabeth Street, Hartford
CT, 06105 | 860.236.5621

Tuesday-Friday: 12:00-5:00 pm

Saturday: 9:00 am-5:00 pm

Library & Waterman Research Center:

Re-opening September 8: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday: 12:00-2:00 pm and 2:30-4:30 pm, by appointment only

Waterman Research Center will be closed for cleaning each open day at 2:00 pm

One-day admission prices:

FREE for CHS members and children 5 and under
$12 Adults
$10 Seniors (65 and over)
$8 Students (with valid college ID) and Youth (6-17)

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The Work Must Be Done - Connecticut Historical Society

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Biographies | Resources | Upcoming Programs | Community Input Form Colored Women's Liberty Loan Committee, October 21, 1917, RG012, State Archives, Connecticut State Library | From left to right, Elizabeth R. Morris, Mary A. Johnson, and Rosa J. Fisher Inspired by the words of notable African American reformer and political activist, Mary Townsend Seymour, "The work...

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Book: Restless Enterprise: The Art and Life of Eliza Pratt Greatorex

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Book: Restless Enterprise: The Art and Life of Eliza Pratt Greatorex

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by Katherine Manthorne

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Eliza Pratt Greatorex (1819-1897) was America's most famous woman artist in the mid-nineteenth century, but today she is all but forgotten. Beginning with her Irish roots, this biography brings her art and life back into focus. Breaking conventions for female artists at that time, Greatorex specialized in landscapes and streetscapes, traveling from the Hudson River to the Colorado Rockies and across Europe and North Africa. Her crowning achievement, a monumental tome of drawings and narratives titled Old New York, awakened the public to the destruction of the city's architectural heritage during the post-Civil War era. Exploring Greatorex's fierce ambition and creative path, Katherine Manthorne reveals how her success at forging an independent career in a male-dominated world shaped American gender politics, visual culture, and urban consciousness.

Katherine Manthorne is Professor of Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. An award-winning art historian, she is the author of monographs on Martha Mitchell, Frederic Church, Louis Mignot, and James Suydam.

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Eliza Pratt Greatorex (1819-1897) was America's most famous woman artist in the mid-nineteenth century, but today she is all but forgotten. Beginning with her Irish roots, this biography brings her art and life back into focus.