A Dyke on Horseback
A Dyke on Horseback <br /><br />~ One more story from the 1912 New York City suffrage marches~ <br /><br />ðŸ´thread courtesy of @<a href="https://twitter.com/WendyLRouse" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">WendyLRouse</a> <br /><br />Annie Rensselaer Tinker grew up swimming, sailing, and riding on her father’s Long Island estate. <br /><br />She rode astride, not side-saddle, which was still notable when she was a young woman at the turn of the century. [That means she wore riding pants and could put one leg on either side of the horse, rather than perching on the side of the horse wearing a long skirt. #Equestwitterstorians can explain whether riding astride was scandalous because it involved wearing pants or having a crotch or both.] <br /><br />Annie put her skill to work in service of the cause. Jun <br /><br />She joined the Women’s Political Union and created a suffrage cavalry. Before the May 1912 march, newspaper articles breathlessly anticipated “a squadron of mounted suffragists†-- 40 women, riding astride, led by Annie and 2 teenage girls. (One may have been Mabel Ping-Hua Lee.) <br /><br />Alas, Annie was struck by appendicitis and missed the march! May Bookstaver rode the lead in her stead. <br /><br />When the war began, Annie joined the British Red Cross. (The US had not yet entered the war.) Annie was running a hospital in Belgium when the Germans invaded. <br /><br />In 1921 France awarded her a medal for her service. During the war, Annie fell in love with Kate Darling Nelson. Nothing was simple, as Kate later married a hotel baron, but they stayed together. With the war raging, Annie wrote out her will by hand, leaving everything to Kate. <br /><br />Annie died of tonsillitis, before antibiotics, at just 39. Her family contested the will, bickering for a decade. Kate ultimately got $350,000, and gave â…“ of it, as Annie requested, to “women who work for a living.†The money was distributed to needy women for nearly 100 years. <br /><br />Annie Tinker was not a terribly important suffragist, and her legacy is preserved because she happened to be born very wealthy. We have this portrait of her, painted when she was 15 or 16. She chose the clothes, surely. Still, it's worth knowing a queer ancestor. #Suffrage100Â
Daily Suffragist and Wendy Rouse
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1270553441513897984" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
09/06/2020
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
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1252779160692498437" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
21/04/2020
Belva Lockwood & Dr. Walker
Belva Lockwood and Dr. Mary Edwards Walker
circa 1912
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1361530795895230470" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread</a>
February 15, 2021
Carrie Chapman Catt
Carrie Chapman Catt liked to be in charge, and she was good at it. She ran the National American Woman Suffrage Association twice, first in 1900 when Susan B Anthony stepped down, and then from 1915 until the ratification of the 19th Amendment. ðŸ±ðŸ§µ <br /><br />(In between Catt's terms was Rev. Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, a great orator but a lousy leader.) <br /><br />NAWSA was most effective under Catt’s leadership. Catt was politically centrist and always decorous. She played the inside game to Alice Paul’s radical outsider - for example, building a relationship with Pres. Wilson in the Oval Office while Alice picketed outside. Not so many years before, though, Catt was in Alice Paul’s shoes: the young upstart whom the old guard feared. <br /><br />JD Zahniser @<a href="https://twitter.com/jdzah" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">jdzah</a> tells the fascinating story of Catt creating a new Organization Committee within NAWSA in 1895. Frustrated at the org’s weak structure, she wanted a clean slate. With Susan B’s backing, Catt got her own committee and a generous budget.<br /><br />She succeeded in deploying new old, creating new local branches & reinvigorating moribund ones. For her efforts the board elected her President -- and disbanded her committee. “Catt later wrote that she ‘cried for three hours’ after that meeting and considered resigning.†<br /><br />She stayed, and though the old guard fought her at every turn, she slowly professionalized the place. Catt stepped down in 1904, publicly because her husband was ill; privately she was frustrated with resistance to her efforts. She returned a decade later after Shaw mucked it up. <br /><br />Eleanor Flexner describes Catt’s approach as: “careful planning, tireless and painstaking care for detail; an imaginative flair and a constant search for new methods; insistence on efficient administrative procedures at the state and local level.†<br /><br />More ahead about Catt in the last years of the federal amendment fight! Though she lived the last half of her life in New York, Carrie Chapman Catt was a midwesterner in her bones. She grew up in Wisconsin and spent her early adulthood in Iowa. <br /><br />She worked her way through @<a href="https://twitter.com/IowaStateU" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">IowaStateU</a> washing dishes and working in the library. She was so active in the Iowa Woman Suffrage Assoc. that when she married her 2d husband (her 1st died a year into their marriage), their prenup promised her 4 months each year for suffrage work. <br /><br />Carrie and Mr. Catt had no children, and his death left her financially independent. As DailySuff has previously mentioned, Catt’s third spouse was Mary Garrett Hay. They are buried under a shared tombstone. #Suffrage100 #19thAmendment #WomensEqualityDay
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1288294790900088837" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
28/07/2020
Dr. Walker part II
PART II. In 1865 Pres. Andrew Johnson awarded Dr. Mary Walker the Medal of Honor. Dr. Walker wore the medal pinned to her suit coat every day for the rest of her life. In 1917, her medal was rescinded along w/those of 911 men, for want of direct combat. <br /><br />She wrote a letter of protest, and simply continued to wear the medal until her death in 1919. Pres. Jimmy Carter reinstated the honor in 1977, thanks to feminist protest. <br /><br />Dr. Walker is still the only woman ever to receive it. <br /><br />Dr. Walker lived a long life, in Washington, Oswego & Albany. <br /><br />She continued to practice medicine and activism. She campaigned for pensions for Civil War nurses and other women who had served, and never stopped urging women to give up corsets & petticoats. <br /><br />She was close to Belva Lockwood, landmark lawyer and presidential candidate; they worked for suffrage thru the 1870s. Walker’s contributions to the movement were all but erased from the record by Stanton & Anthony, who were threatened by her & uncomfortable w/her gender-bending. <br /><br />Was Dr. Walker trans? Genderqueer? A butch? Or just a sensible woman trying to do her job in appropriate clothing? There needn't be only one answer. Gender expression isn't static across one's life. I’ve used the pronoun “she” in these posts b/c Walker did - but with discomfort. <br /><br />In early years she doesn’t try to pass, doesn’t call herself M. Edwards Walker or M.E. In lectures and in writing she regularly describes herself as a woman - a woman willing to challenge convention, and frustrated at how lonely that was. <br /><br />She was arrested repeatedly for her clothing, in New York City & Baltimore. <br /><br />Charged w/disorderly conduct & disturbing the peace, in 1866 she points out to the court that she’s been received by President Lincoln & Justice Salmon P. Chase wearing these clothes. <br /><br />But that’s in 1866, when she was still wearing long hair and women’s collars. <br /><br />Look at what Dr. Walker is wearing <a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/omeka-net/53651/archive/files/eecb0518a277a1631beb2ed0c41fcd64.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAI3ATG3OSQLO5HGKA&Expires=1596067200&Signature=h4WBF5Lj3wog1SLoOlbIecPladE%3D" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">here</a>. THIS is the kind of outfit that led to arrests. This is how little women could reject gender norms. <br /><br />By the 1870s, Walker cut her hair short and wore unambiguously male clothing for the rest of her life. She sat for photos and had portraits painted in those years - in top hat & dinner jacket, Dr. Walker wanted to be seen clearly for who she was. <br /><br />For queer people, Walker’s portraits offer a jolt of recognition. While she had flirty correspondences with men and women, her biographer says there’s no evidence of any relationship after her brief marriage. But she made an indp & defiantly gender-bending life in the 19th cent. <br /><br />Walker proudly wore pants, ties, and short hair - and wasn’t afraid to say you should too. She wasn’t trying to blend in or disappear - though she could have; plenty of transmen did, and I admire that too. Instead, she stood out and spoke out. <br /><br />That’s what makes her so admirable and so unique to me. She modeled professional excellence in everything she did, and demanded that other women interrogate the prison of convention they lived in. <br /><br />There are at least two children’s books about Dr. Walker: Mary Walker Wears the Pants and Mary Wears What She Wants. <br /><br />But the most fitting tribute hides in plain sight: @<a href="https://twitter.com/whitmanwalker" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">WhitmanWalker</a>, which has been serving the health and well-being of LGBTQ Washington for 42 years. <br /><br />I’m grateful to @<a href="https://twitter.com/UConn" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">uconn</a> prof Sharon Harris’ terrific biography, Dr. Mary Walker: An American Radical, 1832-1919, which is available digitally; to Charlotte @<a href="https://twitter.com/cmclymer" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">cmclymer</a> for getting the word out; to @<a href="https://twitter.com/albanymuskrat" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">AlbanyMuskrat</a> & to @<a href="https://twitter.com/VesuviaAdelia" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">VesuviaAdelia</a> for the perfect ending. #Suffrage100
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1217151182294192133" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread</a>
01/14/2020
<a href="https://dailysuffragist.omeka.net/items/show/5" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Dr. Walker part I</a><br /><br /><a href="https://friendsofalbanyhistory.wordpress.com/2019/01/26/dr-mary-walker-recipient-of-the-congressional-medal-of-honor-and-her-time-in-albany/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Dr. Mary Walker, Recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor and her time in Albany I came across this picture, taken on State St. in 1911. It’s photo of Dr. Mary E. Walker. I had one of those lightbulb moments. My Gram used to tell me about a nice old lady in Albany..." [Friends of Albany History]</a><br /><blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr">Today is <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/TransDayOfVisibility?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#TransDayOfVisibility</a> <br /><br />Honor our transgender ancestors - read the 2-part story of Civil War hero & suffragist Dr. Mary Edwards Walker and please share!<br /><br />Part II 👇and Part I in the next tweet. Happy <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/TDOV2020?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#TDOV2020</a> ! <a href="https://t.co/9eSnOIuzlS">https://t.co/9eSnOIuzlS</a></p>
— Daily Suffragist (@DailySuffragist) <a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1244977635823955968?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 31, 2020</a></blockquote>
Dr. Walker, part I
The only woman ever awarded the Medal of Honor - the US military’s highest decoration - was a genderqueer Civil War surgeon named Dr. Mary Edwards Walker.<br /><br />Walker was a suffragist, a veteran and POW, and a talented doctor who challenged convention in every way.<br /><br />She campaigned for dress reform for decades, before & after the war and as an officer of the Dress Reform Assoc. She was deeply disappointed in Lucy Stone, ElizCadyStanton & others who agreed with the cause but gave up on it.<br /><br />She was briefly married to a man, a fellow doctor.<br /><br />They omitted “obey” from their 1855 vows. She kept her name - they hung out a shingle as Drs. Walker & Miller.<br /><br />It took them twice as many years to get divorced as they spent married. Walker fought for divorce reform for the rest of her life.<br /><br />Turned down in her attempts to join the Union army, Walker volunteered at first. She finally got a contract, and proved able and unflappable - but still couldn’t get a formal commission.<br /><br />So she appealed to President Lincoln directly. Referring to herself, she asks:<br /><br />“[T]hat she may render aid in the field hospitals, where her energy, enthusiasm, professional abilities and patriotism will be of the greatest service in inspiring the true soldier never to yield to traitors, and in attending the wounded brave.<br /><br />“She will not shrink from duties under shot and shells, believing that her life is of no value in the country’s greatest peril if by its loss the interests of future generations shall be promoted. - Mary E. Walker, M.D.”<br /><br />Lincoln demurs, but she finds a way. Photo in uniform.<br /><br />The @AmerMedicalAssn tried hard to block her - both b/c of sexism and resistance to “eclectic” or what today we’d call alternative & homeopathic medicine.<br /><br />Recall: traditional medical schools wouldn’t admit women then, so the line between credentialing & sexism is a thin one.<br /><br />Walker challenged the status quo always. Early in her military days she questioned unnecessary amputations, quietly counseling soldiers to refuse if she thought the limb could be saved.<br /><br />She took a 2d degree to study hygiene, which the medical establishment dismissed as fluff.<br /><br />After the war she wanted to be a doctor for the Freedmen’s Bureau, but they weren’t hiring outspoken women.<br /><br />Dr. Walker was famous, which biographer Sharon Harris says is what she wanted - and got, thanks to her "accomplishments, her unique personality, and her appearance."<br /><br />Dr. Walker was a committed suffragist who used her public profile to advance the cause. Like Anna Dickinson in the same period, she was only lightly affiliated with the 2 big movement groups. Walker was wary of both factions, though cooperated w/both Lucy Stone & Stanton/Anthony.<br /><br />Dr. Walker is the first woman known to try and vote in New York, in her hometown of Oswego. It was 1867, early in what becomes known as the New Departure, a strategy of voting as civil disobedience.<br /><br />Tomorrow: So, was Walker queer? Trans?
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1216854671928840197" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread</a>
13/01/2020
<a href="https://dailysuffragist.omeka.net/items/show/6" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Dr. Walker part II</a>
How we know and why it matters
Anna Dickinson was a lesbian, as Matt Gallman demonstrates in his 2006 biography. He quotes Dickinson’s steamy correspondence with a variety of women, including Susan B Anthony(!), and acknowledges her female partner of 30 years, but hesitates to “label” Dickinson.
How do I know Anna Dickinson was a lesbian? How did I know even before her biographer offered the receipts? I’m going to try and explain as best I can, from the vast record of lesbian accomplishment and my own experience as a queer woman. Family, please chime in.
For Anna Dickinson to develop a deep political analysis beginning as a teenager in the 1850s, and to demand to be heard and taken seriously on matters of state, required not caring what men thought of her.
A girl who is hardwired not to care if boys are intimidated by her is freer than other girls. As we grow, not caring much if men find us attractive or marriageable is a kind of superpower. Not caring leaves us free to take up the space necessary to accomplish something.
Lesbianism isn’t a surefire recipe for success, and plenty of straight women led the suffrage movement. But it is one source of Anna Dickinson’s unusual power and drive to achieve, to be recognized, to be heard.
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1202975157821804545" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread</a>
06/12/2019
It's National Coming Out Day!
It’s #NationalComingOutDay Let’s fling open the suffrage closet, shall we? We could start almost anywhere. How ‘bout the biggest suffrage org, NAWSA. In its 30 year existence it had four presidents. Three were what we’d now call LGBTQ. ðŸ³ï¸â€ðŸŒˆðŸ§ºðŸ§µ<br /><br /><a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1303880036588679168" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Susan B Anthony</a> <br /><br /><a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1252779160692498437" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Anna Howard Shaw</a><br /><br /><a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1303883167628173313" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Carrie Chapman Catt</a><br /><br />Carrie might call herself bisexual if she were alive today. So might <a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1248664985540182019" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Maud Nathan</a>, leader of the Consumers Union. Maud had two long, happy relationships in her life: her husband Frederick, who shared her devotion to suffrage, and Corinne Johnson. #bipride <br /><br />Alice Stone Blackwell, editor of the biggest suffrage newspaper, was madly in love with her adopted cousin Kitty Barry. They lived together for 15 years; before that they were separated by an ocean, and their multi-year correspondence includes hot role play.🔥 <br /><br />It’s no accident that so many leading suffragists fashioned lives - by choice or by circumstance - that didn’t depend on men. Belle Squire, a fierce tax resister from Chicago, <a href="https://twitter.com/WendyLRouse/status/1215504212768854016" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">was asked a dumb question and gave a clear answer</a>: <br /><br />And don’t forget <a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1299476091569143813" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Dr. Mabel Seagrave</a>, who served in World War I in NAWSA’s all-suffragist medical unit. <br /><br />There are so, so many more. Follow @WendyLRouse @anya_jabour, and <a href="https://dailysuffragist.omeka.net/exhibits/show/lgbtq/lgbt" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">visit DailySuffragist's LGBTQ web exhibit</a> 👉 <br /><br />#suffrage100 #19thAmendment #NationalComingOutDayÂ
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1315448390449352704" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread</a>
Oct 11, 2020
Law School by Tweet: 14th Amendment
The hashtag #HATM stands for historians at the movies; is there an opera equivalent?! <br /><br />Saw “The Mother of Us All†last night. Happy to report that the all-â™€ï¸ artistic team: @<a href="https://twitter.com/dcandillari" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">dcandillari</a> & Louise Proske + @<a href="https://twitter.com/FeliciaLMoore" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">FeliciaLMoore</a> in the title role gave a great (and gay!) performance. 🧵 <br /><br />Gertrude Stein has Susan B Anthony argue that “male†was inserted in the Constitution for the first time b/c men are afraid of us. <br /><br />It’s an intriguing argument! And probably true. <br /><br />I was tempted to stand at the exit w/a sign saying “Ask me about the 14th Amdt.†So here goes... <br /><br />First, the basics: in the Constitution, every state gets 2 Senators. <br /><br />House members are awarded based on state population. <br /><br />Electoral College votes are the # of Senators + # of House members. <br /><br />So, more House members = more power. <br /><br />From the beginning, states wanted to count every inhabitant so they’d get more House seats, but without letting women or Black men vote. (Then and now, if African-Americans and white women voted as a block, we’d outvote white men in southern states.) <br /><br />This is why enslaved people were counted as â…— of a human being - so enslavers would get more seats. <br /><br />At the end of the Civil War, the 14th Amendment was drafted to define citizenship in Section 1 and repeal the â…— clause in Section 2. <br /><br />But its drafters--abolitionists like Wendell Phillips & Charles Sumner--tussled over who would count and who would vote. <br /><br />How could they separate voting from counting-for-proportional-representation?<br /><br />If being counted wasn’t tied to voting, southern states would end up w/even MORE power than they had before the war. They’d bar African-Americans from voting but count them as whole people, not â…—. (This is what soon happened anyway.) <br /><br />If being counted WAS tied to voting, how could states count all their women without letting them vote? <br /><br />@<a href="https://twitter.com/EllenDubois10" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">EllenDubois10</a> explains: “the Republican authors of the 14th Amdt had to decide between enfranchising women or specifying male citizens as the basis of representation.†<br /><br />So that’s why Section 2 of the 14th Amendment says male. <br /><br />It does not say that only men can vote or that only men count. It says that if states don’t let “male inhabitants†vote (for any reason other than criminal punishment*), they’ll lose House seats.<br /><br />*Hence states in both the south and the north quickly expanded criminal codes to put more Black men in jail so they couldn’t vote. That & the exception in the 13th Amdt are why criminal disenfranchisement persists today. But that’s another thread. <br /><br />Was Gertrude Stein right to have Susan B Anthony sing that “As the result of my work, for the first time the word ‘male’ has been written into the constitution of the United States concerning suffrageâ€? <br /><br />Yes. <br /><br />“Two decades of women’s rights agitation had destroyed the centuries-old assumption that political rights applied only to men.†-@EllenDubois10 <br /><br />It never needed saying before. But by the end of the Civil War, women were a political force. To exclude us, you had to say so.<br /><br />Historian Laura Free offered an important addendum on FB. She's not on Twitter, so I'm sharing for her: "The original drafts of the Amendment did not specify a voter's gender. It wasn't until Congress had been receiving petitions (From Susan B. Anthony, among others)......that the word "male" enters into the language of the Amendment. Prior to this they simply assumed that all voters were men by default. Once women asked, Congressmen in power knew they had to specify or risk inadvertently enfranchising women with the 14th Amendment! "They were not caught off guard - Stanton wrote a letter in late 1865 warning that the word male was a possibility in the Amendment so they initiated a whole petition campaign to try to stop it. (One of them is on display at the National Archives)." "I was dissatisfied with previous accounts of the gendered language in the Amendment. So I tracked the day by day discussion of the Amendment's language and then the path of the suffrage petitions in committee. The Joint Committee of Fifteen had many versions of the Amendment......before the petitions started coming in. Then after they received a number of the petitions, Roscoe Conkling of New York proposed that the word "male" be added to the Amendment."
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1227710672957583360" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
12/02/2020, 17/02/2020
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