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
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08/05/2020
Renunciants
Renounce: To give up, to resign, to surrender; esp. to give up in a complete and formal manner. <br /><br />Laura Clay ran the Kentucky Woman Suffrage Assoc. from its founding in 1881 until 1912. Kate Gordon, left, ran Louisiana’s suffrage association from 1904-1913. [Renunciant 🧵] <br /><br />They were both officers of the National American Woman Suffrage Assoc. for nearly 20 years. <br /><br />Yet in 1920, as suffragists fought to win the final states needed to ratify the 19th Amendment, Clay and Gordon joined the anti-suffragists. <br /><br />They shared their deep knowledge of suffrage strategy with the opposition campaign, strategizing to block states from ratifying. <br /><br />Why on earth? In a word, racism. In two words, white supremacy. <br /><br />At the turn of the century the two women were instrumental in persuading the national suffrage movement to embrace a states’ rights approach. Unsatisfied, they later began to insist that all proposed legislation include whites-only clauses. That far NAWSA wouldn’t go. <br /><br />So in 1913 Clay and Gordon created the Southern States Woman Suffrage Conference. The Southern States Conf. was committed to white-only, state-only suffrage laws. <br /><br />Elaine Weiss recounts Clay & Gordon's dismay at the revival of the federal amendment, and the denouement: <br /><br />“On the day the US Senate finally passed the amendment in June 1919, Clay resigned from both the National Association and the Kentucky suffrage organizations, and she and Gordon turned their energies toward thwarting ratification.†<a href="https://twitter.com/efweiss5" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">@efweiss5</a> <br /><br />I struggle to understand their renunciation - really, their betrayal. <br /><br />@<a href="https://twitter.com/JonathanMetzl" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">JonathanMetzl's</a> book Dying of Whiteness has helped me grasp why racism prompts people to undermine their own interests. He profiles people whose relatives have died by gun suicide but refuse safety reforms, who are literally dying without health insurance but reject coverage that might help others. <br /><br />Kate Gordon & Laura Clay are orders of magnitude more disturbing. They devoted their lives to women’s right to vote - they were state and national leaders of the movement. <br /><br />And they turned on it. In the end, when it mattered most, they preferred that no woman vote at all than share that right with Black women. #Suffrage100Â
Daily Suffragist
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26/04/2020
To me, this story👇 is the worst of the final push in Tennessee. Laura Clay & Kate Gordon - former NAWSA board members - use what they know about the movement to lobby against it. It reflects profound racial hatred. These are women for whom white supremacy is their core.
Mary Church Terrell
The end of legal slavery didn’t make a dent in white Americans’ racism. The opposite, really: after the Civil War Northern whites patted themselves on the back for being so virtuous, then turned around and passed laws making it harder for African-Americans to vote, live, work. 🧵 <br /><br />As the century turned, Black women’s clubs were growing rapidly across the country. Meanwhile the Natl American Woman Suffrage Assoc had effectively become a whites-only organization. Still, leading African-Americans came to NAWSA conventions seeking help in fighting segregation. <br /><br />In 1898, Mary Church Terrell addressed the NAWSA convention in Washington, DC. Terrell was the president of the National Association of Colored Women, and prominent in DC Black society. Her roots went back to Holly Springs, Miss. - coincidentally, the same town as Ida B Wells. <br /><br />Terrell’s father was one of the first Black millionaires in the South. She had advantages Wells could only dream of, including a degree from @<a href="https://twitter.com/oberlincollege" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">oberlincollege</a>. Terrell supported Booker T Washington’s ingratiating approach to Black survival, which her speech to NAWSA reflected. <br /><br />Rather than demanding equality based on human rights or the Constitution, Terrell described Black women’s educational attainment and industry. She closed with her signature phrase, the motto of NACW: “lifting as we climb, onward and upward we go, struggling and striving.and hoping that the buds and blossoms of our desires will burst into glorious fruition ere long.†<br /><br />She was greeted politely, but her speech is given scant mention in the conference proceedings (which often excerpted notable speeches at length). <br /><br />(FWIW, two years later she spoke again, and her more universalist speech about the importance of the vote for all women got more attention in the NAWSA record.) Remember, Terrell lived in DC, where NAWSA conferences took place in even numbered years. In between, @ the 1899 convention in Grand Rapids, an African-American delegate named Lottie Wilson Jackson pushed NAWSA to condemn railroad segregation. After heated debate, NAWSA took the position that woman suffrage and African-American rights were completely separate causes. #Suffrage100
Daily Suffragist
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04/25/2020
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
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21/04/2020
Don't get in bed with racists
At the turn of the century, leading white suffragists deluded themselves into thinking that colluding with racists would help their cause. <br /><br />Spoiler alert: it didn’t.<br /><br />Thread. <br /><br />The new generation of suffrage leaders - with the blessing of the old guard - fantasized that they could break new ground in the south. Western state victories had petered out, and they’d suffered painful losses in NY & Calif. <br /><br />Maybe southern white men would support the cause... <br /><br />...though they never had before. Maybe women could expand local suffrage, add a state or two, and build support for a federal amdt. <br /><br />How? By appealing to white solidarity. Southern men might be willing to support votes for women IF only “educated” (read: white) women could vote. <br /><br />State leaders like Laura Clay of Kentucky and Kate Gordon of Louisiana pushed this idea. (More TK on their eye-popping legacy.) <br /><br />ElizCadyStanton and Susan B Anthony approved it. <br /><br />Stanton & Anthony’s successors, Carrie Chapman Catt & Anna Howard Shaw, thought it was a good idea.<br /><br />At the NAWSA conference in Atlanta, the one where they cheered for the President of the Confederacy, Catt said: “There is a race problem everywhere. In the North and the West, it is the problem of the illiterate immigrant; in the South it is the problem of the illiterate negro. <br /><br />"The solution of the race problem is the same everywhere, the enfranchisement of women with an educational qualification.” <br /><br />This wasn’t a brand new idea. Stanton had been sympathetic to it a long time, and she wasn’t alone. Way back in 1867, Lucy Stone’s husband Henry Blackwell addressed a broadside to the leaders of the former slave-holding states: “Your four millions of Southern white women will counterbalance your four millions of negro men and women, and thus the political supremacy of your white race will remain unchanged.” <br /><br />Yup, the same Henry Blackwell who co-founded the American Woman Suffrage Assoc, the faction that supported the 15th Amdt. For supporting voting rights for Black men, Stone & Blackwell have been awarded undeserved anti-racist cred. <br /><br />Tomorrow:Jim Crow doesn’t need help from a girl.
Daily Suffragist
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20/04/2020
NAWSA ❤️ the Confederacy
Annual conventions belong in the nation’s capital--at least as far as the National Woman Suffrage Assoc was concerned. <br /><br />But the American WSA had always rotated among states, so a few years after the merger, NAWSA began to alternate: even years in DC, odd years elsewhere. 🧵<br /><br />The first “migratory†convention was Atlanta, 1895. A day in Grant Park that year 👇 <br /><br />The crowd may not have been 100% white, but nearly.<br /><br />The following nugget has so much packed into it: “One handsome young lady, who sat on the platform a good deal of the time, was supposed to be from New England, because she wore her hair short. It turned out, however, that she was from New Orleans and was a cousin of Jefferson Davis. The announcement of this fact caused her to be received by the audience with roars of enthusiasm.†<br /><br />This story appears in volume 4 of History of Woman Suffrage without any further comment. If NAWSA’s founders - radical abolitionists, devoted to the Union through long, bloody years of the Civil War - took offense, they didn't record it for posterity.<br /><br />In fact, the sensible women of the northern & western states seem charmed - almost giddy - about white Southern women’s hospitality and performative femininity. #Suffrage100
Daily Suffragist
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14/04/2020
At the turn of the century
Doldrums: a state or period of inactivity, stagnation, or depression. Or, the women’s suffrage movement at the turn of the 20th century. Of course, it didn’t feel that way at the time. 🧵 <br /><br />By the end of the 19th century, the movement had unified into the National American Woman Suffrage Association. It was a very conservative, very white organization - but its leaders, and other suffragists who weren’t welcome in its ranks - were working hard for the vote. <br /><br />Still, as the century came to an end, the aging lions were worried. <a href="https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2014/julyaugust/feature/old-friends-elizabeth-cady-stanton-and-susan-b-anthony-made-histo" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Katy June-Friesen describes</a> ElizCadyStanton & Susan B Anthony’s fear that the young women in the movement didn’t appreciate how easily things could regress. <br /><br />Women had made strides in the professions, some Western states had full voting rights, many more had school board suffrage. But success moved women from a joke to a threat. New attempts to bar women from public and private employment began to appear. <br /><br />“The Chicago and Northwestern Railroad adopted a new policy of “promoting from within,†and, to avoid having women in management, fired many female employees.†The American Federation of Labor entertained a resolution calling on Congress to bar women from government jobs.<br /><br />It didn’t pass, but it was worrying--esp coming from a historical ally. Segregation hardened. African-American women were at double risk as always. “The old Slave Ocrats are bound to push out every man & woman of color from the enjoyment of civil rights,†Anthony wrote Stanton.<br /><br />As the 19th century came to an end, the road had been so very long. There was so much further to go. #Suffrage100 #VotesforWomen <br /><br /><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">Thank you <a href="https://twitter.com/StephenJAdams2" dir="ltr" class="css-4rbku5 css-18t94o4 css-901oao css-16my406 r-1n1174f r-1loqt21 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">@StephenJAdams2 </a></span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">for sending me the piece!</span>
Daily Suffragist
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14/04/2020
Mergers & Acquisitions, part II
Why did the American Woman Suffrage Association merge with its longtime rival, the National Woman Suffrage Association? They had distinct strategies & political philosophies. Neither had much money nor particularly large membership. So why? In a word, respectability. 🧵 <br /><br />For almost 20 years, the National (Stanton & Anthony, based in NYC, focused on federal amdt) was more progressive than the American (Lucy Stone & Julia Ward Howe, based in Boston, focused on state work). Yes, I <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YHGgrAM1S16DFCZWdCXeWSDaZDsdvFapL4g_n86aUJc/edit" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">made a chart.</a> Please add! <br /><br /><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSn7N1_HQ7Yaz1U6uDI6eSN00AnLkLQDTDIKo310k4CUvWKJuOZtlR6CKc-Al_1rNqhj6PyKQ1HRvk_/pub?embedded=true"></iframe><br /><br />Two trends converged over the post-war decades: the country got more conservative. And suffrage became more mainstream. Suffragists were succeeding: more and more people - even conservative southern women - began to see suffrage as necessary and reasonable. <br /><br />By 1890 suffrage wasn’t a fringe, radical cause anymore. Meanwhile, radicalism became identified with labor unrest and “socialism,†which suffragists wanted to avoid. Eleanor Flexner says that by the late 1880s even Susan B Anthony wouldn’t dream of doing some of what she did in the 1870s: getting arrested, interrupting the 1876 Centennial etc. That was no longer how they did business - now they regularly testified before Congress. <br /><br />Still, the National didn’t have enough friends in Congress to pass the 16th Amendment, as it was then called. The state-by-state approach that the American favored was less threatening to the status quo. (And more accommodating of white supremacy,<a href="https://dailysuffragist.omeka.net/items/show/284" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> as I explained</a> 👇) <br /><br />And that’s where the white women’s piece of the suffrage movement was headed in 1890. #Suffrage100
Daily Suffragist
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29/03/2020
A valentine to Frederick Douglass
Must be a busy day for my friends @<a href="https://twitter.com/SuffrageBdays" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">SuffrageBdays</a>! Both Frederick Douglass & Anna Howard Shaw were born #OTD. #DouglassDay celebrations this year are devoted to Anna Julia Cooper, feminist and suffragist - more on her in months ahead! <br /><br />See @<a href="https://twitter.com/CCP_org" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">CCP_org</a> meanwhile. Today is for FD. 🧵 <br /><br />Frederick Douglass was the first important man to support women’s suffrage. He was literally there from the beginning: he attended the Seneca Falls convention, and encouraged Elizabeth Cady Stanton to be bold and include voting among women’s demands. <br /><br />He published the proceedings of Seneca Falls in his weekly newspaper The North Star, spreading word of the young movement for women’s rights. The North Star’s motto: “Right is of no sex—Truth is of no color—God is the Father of us all, and we are brethren.†<br /><br />For the rest of the century Douglass was the most prominent man to give a damn. Other men who had worked closely with women in the 1850s to abolish slavery and establish equality - white men like Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison - were dismissive of women’s rights. But Douglass stayed engaged. <br /><br />In the debate over the 15th Amdt, he rebuked Stanton & Susan B Anthony for their racism - calling out his friends, and neither ceding nor abandoning the cause. In 1871 he & Mary Ann Shadd Cary led a contingent of 70+ women to vote in Washington DC. In 1894 he planned to speak at the NAWSA convention in Atlanta - until Stanton & Anthony disinvited him, lest he make their southern hosts “uncomfortable.†<br /><br />Still, he didn't walk away. On February 20, 1895, he addressed a room full of women in Washington, DC. The scene was described by S. Jay Walker, who taught African-American history at Dartmouth in the 1970s. <br /><br />"Susan B Anthony, his old friend and sometimes enemy from Rochester, and the Rev. Anna Howard Shaw escorted him to the platform. Mary Wright Sewell, presiding, invited him to speak. He declined, acknowledging the standing ovation only with a bow..." Frederick Douglass died that night at his home in Anacostia. #BlackSuffragists #DouglassDayÂ
Daily Suffragist
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14/02/2020
Mergers & Acquisitions
In suffrage summaries, the 1890 merger of the National & American Woman Suffrage Assoc. is described in neutral or positive terms. It’s an inevitability, even the healthy repair of a breach. Sentimental bonus: it was negotiated by daughters of the organizations’ founders. Thread.<br /><br />It’s hard to see the benefits, though. The merged organization was more politically and socially conservative, more hierarchical, and more racist. <br /><br />NAWSA centered the state-by-state approach the American had championed. It largely abandoned the National’s federal amendment work. <br /><br />This strategy was more accommodating of southern states that wanted to maintain white supremacy at the ballot box.<br /><br />Also, it didn’t work. <br /><br />Over the next two decades NAWSA spent a lot of money and effort to lose in New York, California, South Dakota and more. <br /><br />Of dozens and dozens of attempts, only 2 referendums succeeded: Colorado in 1893 & Idaho in 1896. <br /><br />Wyoming & Utah joined the union as suffrage states in the 1890s, but both were places where some women had already voted for a long time, though not consistently. <br /><br />Meanwhile, the power the National had built in Washington waned. The federal amendment fight fell dormant for 20+ years. <br /><br />Some longtime National leaders, like Matilda Joslyn Gage, saw the merger as a hostile takeover.
Daily Suffragist
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26/3/2020