National Coming Out Day
Happy #ComingOutDay to Anna Howard Shaw & Lucy Anthony! Shaw led the movement from 1904-1915. She wasn't our greatest leader, TBH. But she was a minister, a doctor - the 1st woman Rev. & Dr. - and for 30 years partner of Susan B's niece Lucy. <a href="https://www.autostraddle.com/rebel-girls-meet-some-of-the-gal-pals-of-the-suffrage-movement-287808/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Them & more</a>:
Daily Suffragist
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11/10/2019
Anna Howard Shaw: Reverend, Doctor, NAWSA Leader
When Anna Howard Shaw was a young woman, she wore pants and short hair. She gave it up eventually because she got too many comments, but she couldn’t hide her ambition, and her certainty she could do better than a man. <br /><br />Turn-of-the-century thread. <br /><br />She came from iconoclasts: her mother’s British family were Unitarians in a world where everyone was an Anglican. “Anna’s grandmother stood by each year while some of her furniture was taken to be sold for the Church of England tithes which she refused to pay.” (Flexner) <br /><br />If religious nonconformity is inherited, maybe Anna got it from her grandmother. Anna heard Rev. Marianna Thompson preach in rural Michigan, and by 1871 she was licensed to preach in the Methodist church. Her family was angry she left Unitarianism (which didn't ordain women yet). <br /><br />They offered to pay her way to the University of Michigan if she’d give up the ministry. She declined. <br /><br />Anna struggled, hungry, through 2 years of divinity school at @<a href="https://twitter.com/BUTheology" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">BUTheology</a> - she was denied the financial aid men got. She applied for full ordination in the Methodist Episcopal Church; when she appealed that rejection they revoked her preacher’s license. She was ordained, grudgingly, in the Methodist Protestant Church. <br /><br />She quit the ministry after 7 years. It was too hard “to fight the church in addition to the devil.” <br /><br />Also, she was intellectually restless and wanted a new challenge. In 1883 she went back to Boston University @<a href="https://twitter.com/BU_Tweets" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">BU_Tweets</a> this time to @<a href="https://twitter.com/BUmedical" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">BUMedical</a>. <br /><br />She got her MD in 1886 and was known as Rev. Dr. Anna Howard Shaw for the rest of her life. <br /><br />She was a protege of Susan B Anthony’s, who recruited her for her preaching skill. The movement needed orators. <br /><br />Susan B sent Anna Shaw to California to lead the heartbreaking 1896 referendum fight. With a train pass provided by the widow of the Southern Pacific Railroad she traveled the state, lecturing daily. Her letters to her lover Lucy Anthony, Susan B’s niece, describe the travails of that and so many other state campaigns. <br /><br />Shaw vied with Carrie Chapman Catt to succeed Susan B as head of NAWSA. Eventually Shaw got the job - and was a disaster. <br /><br />The movement needed leadership, not just great speeches, to fill the void left by Stanton & Anthony. In Eleanor Flexner’s words: “Dr. Shaw’s devotion was complete and her gifts were many, but administrative ability was not among them.” <br /><br />Under Shaw’s leadership, NAWSA descended into ever-more explicitly racist policies. In 1903, Black women were barred from attending the annual convention in New Orleans. (Adella Hunt Logan snuck in and reported back.) <br /><br />NAWSA had sunk to endorsing a states’ rights approach to voting, Jim Crow and all. In New Orleans, Rev. Shaw said, “Never before in the history of the world have men made former slaves the political masters of their former mistresses.” <br /><br />She kept company with women who shared her views. <br /><br />Eleanor Flexner was graciously vague about the lesbian sisterhood to which she belonged. “In 1903 Anna Shaw built a home at Moylan, Pa., which she and Lucy Anthony shared until her death. Other friends included many of the leading women reformers of her day. President M. Carey Thomas of Bryn Mawr College was a close associate in later years.” <br /><br />Carey Thomas was a big ol’ dyke, and also a racist and an anti-Semite. These things aren’t mutually exclusive. <br /><br />Ironically, the United Methodist Church announced this year that it is divorcing itself - splitting in half as the only way to resolve longstanding conflict over LGBTQ clergy. Yet we have always been present, since 1880 at least. <br /><br />After Anna’s death, Lucy Anthony commissioned a stained glass window in her honor for the Methodist Protestant Church in Tarrytown, NY. <br /><br />The image is of the Annunciation, and the inscription reads: “Commemorating the brave, strong stand of this church in ordaining Anna Howard Shaw, whom other churches persistently refused to ordain.” <br /><br />The window now resides in the stairwell at BU Theology School where Anna once collapsed from hunger on her way to class. Nearby is the Anna Howard Shaw Center for women in ministry. #Suffrage100
Daily Suffragist
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21/04/2020
Dr. DuBois v. Dr. Shaw
Supporting women’s suffrage wasn’t an obvious political choice for African-American men in the 1910s. To convince readers of The Crisis to support the cause, W.E.B.DuBois had to first confront the racism of mainstream suffragists. Thread.
The mainstream movement - NAWSA, led by Rev. Dr. Anna Howard Shaw - was composed of Southern white women who used white supremacy to advocate women’s enfranchisement, and Northern white women who insisted that women’s suffrage and Jim Crow had nothing to do with each other.
And that was just the present day. The shadows of the past loomed large for African-Americans: suffragists’ rejection of the 15th Amendment because it didn’t include women, and the racism that ElizCadyStanton & Susan B Anthony spewed at the time were both well-known stories.
In the Journal of Black Studies in 2000 Garth Pauley described DuBois’ rhetorical strategy for persuading African-American men to give suffrage a chance. First, he attacked the racism of white suffragists while expressing support for their cause.
That opened the door for him to then make both principled and pragmatic arguments for the merits of women’s suffrage. But the first step was the most necessary. DuBois used humor and gentle sarcasm to call out the white women on their racism.
Anna Howard Shaw had said that “all Negroes are opposed to woman suffrage,” which DuBois called a “barefaced falsehood.” But instead of dismissing the cause itself, he challenged the inadequacy of suffragists’ response. “They do not ask such silly questions of white folks:
"They go and see why they do not join. They teach, agitate, and proselyte; while among Negro Americans they have scarcely a single worker and are afraid to encourage such workers.” The magazine printed Dr. Shaw’s pathetic reply, written as if she intended to prove his point:
“There is not in the National Association any discrimination against colored people. If they do not belong to us it is merely because they have not organized and have not made application for membership.”
DuBois added an editorial wink: “The woman suffragists are wincing a bit under the plain speaking of Crisis.” But he didn’t demean the rightness of the cause. #Suffrage100 #CenturyofStruggle #BlackSuffragists
Daily Suffragist
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15/05/2020
Lesbian Erasure from the Centennial
We gotta talk about lesbians. Specifically, about lesbian erasure. Queer is cool, right? It’s 2020! ðŸ³ï¸â€ðŸŒˆðŸ³ï¸â€âš§ï¸etc., etc. <br /><br />So why is the lesbian reality of the suffrage movement barely part of the #19thAmendment centennial conversation? A thread. <br /><br />The movement for women’s liberation was run largely by unmarried women - some never married, some widowed. Why? Because marriage was a prison for women, legally and socially. Unmarried women were exponentially freer to do the work of organizing and building a national movement. <br /><br />Long-married leaders who raised multiple children - ElizCadyStanton, IdaBWells - are outliers in the suffrage pantheon. Most of the women who led the movement didn’t marry, didn’t have children, or were widowed early. Does that mean they were lesbians? Well, yes - many of them. <br /><br />First, the context: enlightened men were vanishingly rare - remember, in the 19th & early 20th centuries women were widely believed to be inferior and incapable. So a woman who wanted independence would rather not marry if she could afford it. <br /><br />Also, sex. @lillianfaderman makes the point that for women, penalties for heterosexual sex outside of marriage were extreme. So an unmarried woman who wanted an erotic life with someone besides herself was much safer finding it with women. <br /><br />These women wouldn’t have used the word lesbian. Nor would they likely have identified as “invertsâ€--the clinical forerunner to “homosexual.†But many lived in romantic partnerships with other women--relationships far more intimate than what we’d call “friends.†Some receipts… <br /><br />Susan B Anthony’s correspondence w/Anna Dickinson is flirty & direct. “Well, Anna Darling--I do wish I could take you in these strong arms of mine this very minute†& “I cannot bear to go off without another precious look into your face--my Soul.†There's a lot more. <br /><br />It didn't last. Years later, Susan said how much she envied the committed, devoted relationship her niece Lucy had w/Anna Howard Shaw - a relationship Susan knew was an intimate one. <br /><br />Only in her 70s did Susan come close to finding it, w/a married Chicago woman named Emily Gross. Susan wrote to friends of her “new lover†in Chicago--not a word she used for colleagues or admirers. Anna Shaw wrote in her diary: “I am so thankful for the new friend for Aunt Susan. How nice it is!†They were together for Susan’s last decade; Gross grieved her death deeply. <br /><br />Frances Willard preferred “Frank†w/intimates; like the others in this thread she hated "female" chores & rejected rigid gender roles as ridiculous. Ironically, her great accomplishment for suffrage was convincing conservative women that the vote would aid, not “unsex†them. She was so bluntly revealing about her love for the women she lived with - first Kate Jackson, then Anna Gordon - that some scholars say the relationships must have been chaste: if they were erotic she wouldn’t have revealed so much. I’m not convinced. <br /><br />Anna Howard Shaw & Lucy Anthony had a pretty conventional butch/femme home: Lucy did the dishes, Anna mowed the lawn and fixed things. Anna had affairs with other women in her travels, but their partnership lasted 30 yrs. <a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1252779160692498437" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Lucy worked to memorialize her 👇</a><br /><br />Unlike the women above, Carrie Chapman Catt was married twice: her 1st husband died soon after they married, her second agreed to a prenup that promised her at least â…“ of the year away from him, working for suffrage. After he died, Catt & Mollie Hay lived together 23 years. Catt presented a very intentional public narrative about her double widowhood, but in the movement Mollie was recognized as her spouse. When Mollie died, Catt was widowed a 3rd time. She had a heart attack. She survived and lived years more. They are buried under a shared stone.<br /><br />There were Black lesbian suffragists always, like Alice Dunbar-Nelson & Angelina Weld Grimké. Notably, many leading Black women were married briefly or not at all, like Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Nannie Helen Burroughs & Mary McLeod Bethune. <br /><br />Why such a deep closet? The new PBS documentary didn’t give a whiff of queerness. There was one @NYTimes piece by @Maya_Salam + one @WomensVote100 post by @WendyLRouse - both good ones! - but in a year of commemoration I can’t name much else. <br /><br />We know A LOT about the private lives of Famous Suffragists. And given how much we know, the absence of centennial acknowledgment that these women lived queer lives is … gaping. <br /><br />Thx @lillianfaderman for finding the evidence. #suffrage100
Daily Suffragist
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Sept 10, 2020