But were they really doldrums?
How long did “the doldrums†last? The doldrums: the period at the end of the 19th c./beg. of the 20th in which the suffrage movement seemed to make no progress: no statewide victories, death of the old guard, uninspiring new leaders, embrace of explicitly racist policies. 🧵 <br /><br />Popular narratives skip over this period - one minute we’re winning Colorado & Utah in the 1890s, then Stanton & Anthony die, and boom Alice Paul & Lucy Burns come back from England and are picketing the White House. If only. <br /><br />When did the doldrums end, and what ended them? There’s consensus that the gloom lifts by 1910, when the women of Washington state push a successful referendum. That same year Ida B Wells founds a suffrage club in Chicago, and the 1st suffrage parade marches down 5th Ave, NYC. <br /><br />But sweeping suffrage histories - old ones like Eleanor Flexner’s Century of Struggle, new ones like @<a href="https://twitter.com/EllenDubois10" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">EllenDubois10</a>’s Suffrage and @<a href="https://twitter.com/kate_c_lemay" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">kate_c_lemay's</a> @<a href="https://twitter.com/smithsoniannpg" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">smithsoniannpg</a> catalog - pin the shift to points both earlier and later: 1906, 1907, 1912. Thoughts on when? And on why it matters?Â
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1256047555395362822" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
30/04/2020
Serving two Gods
Rose Schneiderman and Leonora O’Reilly were featured speakers at NAWSA conventions as early as 1907. The leaders of the suffrage mainstream warmed to working class women when they saw how these fiery activists could ignite a crowd. [New thread!] <br /><br />But the middle-class suffragists grew uneasy when the speeches got too Socialist. Even the more daring suffrage groups, like Harriot Stanton Blatch’s Equality League and a group called the American Suffragettes (more on them later!) told Schneiderman and O’Reilly to tone it down. <br /><br />For a while they complied - they wanted to be part of the suffrage movement, and its leaders provided funds they needed to organize working women. But eventually they grew tired of watching their words. Frustratingly, they had nowhere else to go. <br /><br />Suffrage was almost as unwelcome in Socialist settings as Socialism was among suffragists. The men of the labor movement thought suffrage was a bourgeois distraction from the real work of revolution. Publicly the Socialist Party and the AFL supported woman suffrage, but privately they disparaged it as a waste of time. @<a href="https://twitter.com/AnneliseOrleck1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">AnneliseOrleck1</a> quotes a letter to Rose Schneiderman from a man who chastised her for squandering her talent: <br /><br />“You cannot possibly serve two Gods--you cannot fill efficiently two places in two movements...<br /><br />"You either work for Socialism and as a result for equality of the sexes or you work for woman suffrage only and neglect Socialism.” <br /><br />Schneiderman and O’Reilly, along with Pauline Newman and Theresa Malkiel and a handful of others, persisted in trying to balance both causes. <br /><br />Newman - whose friends all called her Paul - pointed out that it was easy for Socialist men to dismiss the importance of the vote; they had one. In the early years of the century we can see working class suffragists continually reorganizing. <br /><br />The same cadre of women form and reform, seeking a place to be fully committed to both women and labor. They keep trying to make a way to fund their work & set the agenda without being captive to wealthy women or disdainful Socialist men. How’d that work out? Stay tuned.
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1258735604780740611" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
08/05/2020
Fannie Barrier Williams
Fannie Barrier Williams was so significant a thinker that though almost no Black women were invited to lecture at the Chicago World’s Fair, she spoke twice. She addressed the World Congress of Representative Women in May, and the World Parliament of Religions in September. 🧵<br /><br />Her first address, “The Intellectual Progress of Colored Women,†was a particular standout. @<a href="https://twitter.com/ProfessorCrunk" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">ProfessorCrunk</a> Brittney Cooper describes it as “the most intellectually sophisticated and compelling narrative about race women’s progress and racial aspirations.†<br /><br />Fannie Barrier Williams was born and raised in Brockport, NY, a town on the Erie Canal. By her description her childhood was “sweet and delightful†- she did not experience racism until she graduated from what’s now SUNY @<a href="https://twitter.com/Brockport" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Brockport</a> and moved away. <br /><br />She married atty S. Laing Willliams and moved to Chicago. There she was well-positioned to pressure white society women to include African-Americans in the 1893 World’s Fair, a fight they all but lost. Fannie took the lone clerical job they offered, though it was beneath her. <br /><br />She became nationally known after her speeches at the World’s Fair, and was proposed for membership in the all-white Chicago Woman’s Club. After a year of dispute, she was admitted. Soon after, she was instrumental in creating the National Association of Colored Women. <br /><br />In 1907, NAWSA’s annual suffrage convention came to Chicago. Susan B Anthony had just died, and Fannie was asked to represent “the colored people†at the memorial. She generously hearkened back to Susan B’s abolitionist days. <br /><br />Williams emphasized Susan B's “unremitting struggle for liberty, more liberty, and complete liberty for negro men and women in chains,†plus, in a gentle tweak: “and for white women in their helpless subjection to man’s laws.†<br /><br />Fannie Barrier Williams was the first woman AND the first African-American to join the board of the Chicago Public Library @<a href="https://twitter.com/chipublib" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">chipublib</a> -- in 1924. 😣 She relentlessly critiqued the double burden of racism and sexism that Black women faced. <br /><br />For more on her intellectual work, including her critique of W.E.B.DuBois’ gender politics, read @ProfessorCrunk's book <a href="https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/68emc6tz9780252040993.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>Beyond Respectability</em></a>. After her husband died and her term on the Library Board ended, she returned to Brockport, where she died in 1944. #BlackSuffragistsÂ
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1264023748279242754" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
22/05/2020
Alice Paul's first arrest
Alice Paul was first arrested in London. On June 29, 1907 she joined the Pankhursts storming the House of Commons, frustrated the Prime Minister ignored their demand for action. In the slammer she met Lucy Burns, whose red hair and American flag pin were hard to miss. Thread. <br /><br />On July 30, Alice and 11 other women forced their way into a speech by David Lloyd George. She was sentenced to two weeks in jail, where she refused to eat or wear prison clothes. <br /><br />On September 12, Alice & Lucy broke windows in a hall where Winston Churchill was speaking. <br /><br />Women across the UK were being arrested for disruptive suffrage protests - they spat at police officers, broke windows, shouted down politicians. In jail they refused to eat and were force-fed thru nasal tubes. @<a href="https://twitter.com/tinacassidy2" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">TinaCassidy2</a> describes this vividly in her book.👇Annie Kenney, 1905 <br /><br />In November the radical WSPU escalated its campaign against Churchill, an up-and-coming politician opposed to women’s suffrage. Lucy Burns infiltrated a fancy party, where she accosted him, asking: “How can you dine here while women are starving in prison?†<br /><br />Alice Paul snuck into the party disguised as cleaning staff. When the crowd quieted for a toast, Alice & Amelia Brown smashed a stained glass window and were dragged out shouting “Votes for Women!†Alice spent nearly a month in jail, violently force fed twice a day. #Suffrage100
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1266918802148790273" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
30/05/2020
Teaching Americans to be bolder
When US suffragists began street demonstrations in 1910, the women in the UK had already become more brazen. They were holding huge demonstrations, intentionally provoking arrest, and more. <br /><br />One of their leaders came to the US in 1907 to encourage us to be bolder. Thread. <br /><br />Anne Cobden-Sanderson was first arrested in 1906 along with nine other members of the Women’s Social and Political Union, demonstrating at the House of Commons. <br /><br />They were charged with using “threatening and abusive words and behaviour" and put on trial. <br /><br />They chose two months in Holloway Prison rather than a £10 fine and six months good behavior. <br /><br />The public was shocked that upper-class women would go to prison, but Anne said: “We have talked so much for the Cause now let us suffer for it.” <br /><br />In 1909 Cobden-Sanderson was arrested for picketing 10 Downing Street with a petition to the Prime Minister. There’s a photo! <br /><br />Harriot Stanton Blatch & Sarah Smith Garnet invited Cobden-Sanderson to the US in 1907. <br /><br />Her visit was a coup for both Blatch’s Equality League and Garnet’s Brooklyn Equal Suffrage League. In the packed hall of the Cooper Union, Cobden-Sanderson emphasized how much the British movement owed to its working-class instigators. <br /><br />@<a href="https://twitter.com/EllenDubois10" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">EllenDubois10</a> recounts: “After women factory workers were arrested for trying to see the prime minister, Cobden-Sanderson and other privileged women, who felt they ‘had not so much to lose as [the workers] had,’ decided to join them and get arrested.”'<br /><br />She toured the US; her lecture at Bryn Mawr college was called “Why I Went to Prison.” <br /><br />New York suffragists didn’t instantly become more radical, but Cobden-Sanderson and her stories of WSPU’s long prison terms had an impact. #Suffrage100 #CenturyofStruggle
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1270871832179150849" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
10/06/2020
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/opinion/new-york-city-protests.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">2020 NYC Protests</a>
Racist Propaganda
What's a Rochester suffragist from Susan B Anthony's day doing on a racist anti-suffrage leaflet in Virginia circa 1920? Read on . . . <br /><br />Julie O’Connor <a href="https://twitter.com/albanymuskrat" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">@AlbanyMuskrat</a> recently called my attention to Hester Jeffrey, a prominent African American suffragist and clubwoman in western NY. Originally from Boston, Hester moved to Rochester in 1891 and quickly expanded political life for women in her new city. <br /><br />She held leadership positions in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union & the Needlework Guild of America. After Frederick Douglass died she was appointed to his Monument Committee. She sponsored scholarships for Black women at what’s now Rochester Inst. of Technology. <a href="https://twitter.com/RITtigers" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">@RITtigers</a> <br /><br />Rosalyn Terborg-Penn describes Hester as active across networks of Black club women and white suffragists. She was president of the New York Federation of Colored Women, and she represented the Federation at the New York Woman Suffrage Association convention in 1905.<br /><br />In 1902, when New York women could vote in school board elections but nothing else, Hester Jeffrey founded the Susan B Anthony Club. The group organized Black women for charity work and suffrage. SusanB, of course, was the most famous woman in Rochester, and Hester knew her well. <br /><br />When Susan B died in 1906, Hester Jeffrey gave a eulogy alongside local politicians and suffrage leaders Anna Howard Shaw & Carrie Chapman Catt. <br /><br />Speaking on behalf of “the colored people of Rochester...the colored churches in this city, the National and State Federations of Colored Women, the federated clubs of the association†she expressed sorrow at the loss of a “friend for many years†and pledged that the members of the Club would “devote our time and energies to the work thou has left us to do.†<br /><br />Hester Jeffrey led the creation of the first memorial to Susan B, a stained glass window at Rochester’s Memorial A.M.E. Zion church, installed in 1907. (When the church moved in the 1970s, I believe they took the window to their new home - along with one of Harriet Tubman.) <br /><br />I’d been thinking about Hester for a few days when I opened Terborg-Penn’s book to look for more. I was startled to see the familiar face of Hester Jeffrey hijacked onto anti-suffragist propaganda. 👆The flyer is unhinged; it seems to argue that suffrage leads to race-mixing. <br /><br />Its author was James Callaway, a columnist for the Macon (GA) Daily Telegraph. In 1918 he wrote a screed against the “Susan B Anthony Amendment†that accused Anthony, along with Carrie Chapman Catt and Anna Howard Shaw of, well, having Black friends. Exhibit A was Hester Jeffrey. <br /><br />Callaway also named Frederick Douglass, Robert Purvis, and Booker T. Washington as friends of Susan B's - and by association, the living suffrage leaders. <br /><br />Of course, this is weird and more than a little ironic. <br /><br />Susan B and those men were long dead; Catt and Shaw were hardly integrationists. (They were lesbians, though - could that be what Callaway was insinuating by “immediate women friendsâ€?) <br /><br />But racism doesn’t make sense. <br /><br />Terborg-Penn explains that the closer a federal suffrage bill came to passing, the harder white supremacists worked to sabotage it. Anti-suffragists took Callaway’s article & turned it into a leaflet they used against Carrie Catt when she campaigned for ratification in Virginia. <br /><br />And that’s how Hester Jeffrey, suffragist and clubwoman of Rochester - and by 1920 a full voter in New York state - ended up on a flyer in Virginia. #BlackSuffragists #CenturyofStruggle #19thAmendment <br /><br />Correction and more! Susan Goodier's essay says that after Hester was widowed in 1914, she moved back to Boston to live with her sister. She died in 1934.Â
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1281069215496187905" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
14/07/2020
<iframe width="600" height="600" frameborder="0"></iframe>