Ida vs. Frances Willard
The belief that “women†would vote as a block about alcohol animated support and opposition re: suffrage. (It wasn’t ever really true.) The liquor industry lobbied against women’s votes at many junctures, though historians debate how much influence they had. 🧵 <br /><br />The Women’s Christian Temperance Union had massive influence among women, especially very conservative women who were skeptical about suffrage. Frances Willard, leader of WCTU, was one of the most powerful women in the country.<br /><br />She persuaded her 200,000 members (equiv. to 1.2 million today) that they needed the vote to influence domestic issues. She called it a “Home Protection†ballot. WCTU was a very white, very Christian organization. They did organize Black women, often in segregated chapters.<br /><br />Leading activists like Frances Watkins Harper & Sarah Woodson Early played national roles, and urged WCTU’s white women to recognize their privilege. Ida B Wells wasn’t a change-from-the-inside kind of activist. She was frustrated at WCTU’s silence about lynching. <br /><br />WCTU had huge clout among white Southern women, and had they spoken out, it would have been powerful. But they didn’t. <br /><br />Ida, never hesitating to criticize the powerful when they were being cowardly, publicized racist statements by Frances Willard. Willard responded by patronizing Ida [“If Miss Wells is not careful she will kill her cause…â€], and insisting on her own abolitionist bona fides. As you can imagine, the feud went on a long time. <br /><br />The @<a href="https://twitter.com/FrancesWillard" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">FrancesWillard</a> House Museum in Evanston, Ill. & the WCTU Archives @<a href="https://twitter.com/ArchivesWillard" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">ArchivesWillard</a> collaborated on a really spectacular exhibit & website on the conflict, <a href="https://scalar.usc.edu/works/willard-and-wells/index" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Truth-Telling: Frances Willard & Ida B. Wells.</a><br />It’s got a detailed timeline, short pieces on the era and context, thoughtful personal essays inc. by @MLDWrites, and it’s handsome and easy to navigate. Most importantly, it delivers on its promise. <br /><br />It’s a model of how to tell the truth about racism and conflict in movements. In refusing to lie for their namesake, @FrancesWillard & @ArchivesWillard make her story more relevant. #Suffrage100 <br /><br /><blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr">were there any brazen female wine-drinkers who thought respectable women should be able to drink in public (and vote)?</p>
— Dr. Mary Dockray-Miller (@MDockrayMiller) <a href="https://twitter.com/MDockrayMiller/status/1242423075783802881?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 24, 2020</a></blockquote>
<br /><br />@MDockrayMiller Ooh, good question! Apparently one of the reasons Ida B didn't embrace temperance as a cause is that she enjoyed a social drink - and Ida wd never do anything hypocritical. But I bet @<a href="https://twitter.com/LOsborne615" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">LOsborne615</a> would know more.
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1242295620037156864" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
23/03/2020
Women's Christian Temperance Union/Frances Willard
Building mass appeal almost always means making your ideas less threatening. Once persuaded, new adherents may want the cause to reflect their own more conservative interests. For the vanguard, this instrumental tradeoff rarely feels good. <br /><br />To take one recent example... <br /><br />A domesticated, strictly monogamous, painfully chaste version of LGBT life made marriage equality palatable to the masses. <br /><br />Was it worth it? Absolutely. Is it limiting? Sure is. <br /><br />In the 1880s, Frances Willard recast suffrage as “home protection,” a brilliant stroke. <br /><br />0Willard's approach attracted a wider base of support than the radical idea that women were independent individuals. <br /><br />But the influence of so many conservative women pushed the suffrage movement in a more conservative direction. Over the months ahead we’ll see how that played out. <br /><br />Before moving on, @<a href="https://twitter.com/EllenDubois10" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">EllenDubois10</a> new history of the movement captures perfectly why I resist spending much time on Frances Willard. <br /><br />“It takes a real leap of historical imagination to appreciate what Frances Willard accomplished in the WCTU. So much of her approach—her religious framework, her appeal to sentimentalism and moralism, even her flowery language—is foreign to us today. <br /><br />Unlike Eliz. Cady Stanton, who believed relentlessly in individual privacy as well as rights, Willard was an advocate of social control and government policing of behavior and morality. She believed in legal prohibition, if necessary by constitutional action. <br /><br />"That said, Frances Willard placed herself squarely in the center of the women’s rights tradition, and did so in a way that spoke to women far less radical in their inclinations than the pioneers of the suffrage movement. As Willard’s leadership grew stronger and more confident, her essential belief in the equality of the sexes became ever clearer." <br /><br />Willard died in 1898, only 59. We don’t know how her views might have evolved further. #Suffrage100
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1244655349199712256" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
30/3/2020
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
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1303878094537793536" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread</a>
Sept 10, 2020