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
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21/04/2020
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
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04/25/2020
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.
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.
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08/05/2020
Seneca Falls at 60
Seneca Falls wasn’t really a thing until 25 years after it happened. <br /><br />The suffrage movement had split, and Susan B Anthony & ElizCadyStanton sought to establish authority for their faction by crafting an origin story at Seneca Falls. (New followers: scroll back for more!) 🧵 <br /><br />The two factions eventually merged after years of ideological and tactical conflict - but the merged organization, NAWSA, was ambivalent about venerating Seneca Falls. <br /><br />Harriot Stanton Blatch wasn’t. <br /><br />Blatch was the daughter of ElizCadyStanton, and a pivotal suffragist in her own right. At the beginning of the century she returned from decades of living in England. <br /><br />Compared to the radicalism taking hold among UK suffragists, the US movement was dull. <br /><br />Not just dull. NAWSA in the early 1900s was a conservative, very Christian, and almost entirely white organization. <br /><br />Blatch acidly remarked that “It bored its adherents and repelled its opponents.†<br /><br />Blatch created a new group, the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women. It was a sister org to the Women’s Trade Union League, and it sought to put working women - both professionals and factory workers - front and center in the suffrage movement. <br /><br />Blatch wanted a ceremony in Seneca Falls to honor the 60th anniversary. The mainstream NY & national groups weren't interested, so the Equality League organized its own events. These included a program for local students & a gathering of the survivors of the original convention.<br /><br />They installed a bronze plaque near the site of the Wesleyan Church where the original meeting took place. The plaque cites ElizCadyStanton & Frederick Douglass’ commitment to voting rights. That was fitting for 1908, tho it ignored the convention’s many other equality demands.<br /><br />The roster of speakers at the 60th celebration included Mary Church Terrell, founding president of the National Association of Colored Women, who gave a keynote. Blatch surely knew that it had been years since Terrell was invited to speak to NAWSA. <br /><br />Other speakers included Rev. Annis Ford Eastman, mother of Max & Crystal, who would later play a major role in the movement; and Maud Nathan, a prominent Jewish suffragist whose sister was an equally famous anti-suffragist. <br /><br />Luminaries from nearby Cornell University also spoke: Prof. Nathaniel Schmidt and graduating senior Elizabeth Ellsworth Cook. Elizabeth was a star debater, already an officer of the Equality League, and later a successful businesswoman. #Suffrage100 #CenturyofStruggle
Daily Suffragist
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17/06/2020
<a href="https://dailysuffragist.omeka.net/items/show/347" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Nathan Sisters</a><br /><br /><a href="https://dailysuffragist.omeka.net/items/show/361" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Mary Church Terrell</a>
Mrs. Pankhurst at Carnegie Hall
While Alice Paul was in London’s Holloway Prison with a feeding tube forced down her nose, Emmeline Pankhurst traveled to the US to raise funds and promote the cause. <br /><br />American women were fascinated to see the British radical up close. 🧵 <br /><br />On Monday, October 25, 1909, all 3,000 seats of Carnegie Hall were filled, almost all by women. The line stretched around the corner; 1,000 people were turned away. <br /><br />Vassar and Barnard students wearing Votes for Women sashes served as ushers - we’ll meet some of them tomorrow! <br /><br />Harriot Stanton Blatch’s Equality League for Self-Supporting Women sponsored the evening. 400 working, wage-earning women were seated onstage behind Mrs. Pankhurst: teachers, doctors, dentists, nurses, social workers, lawyers, civil service workers & trade unionists. <br /><br />Blatch presided; Anna Howard Shaw from NAWSA & Margaret Dreier Robins from Women’s Trade Union League gave welcoming remarks. <br /><br />However, 4 days later a different group of women met at Carnegie Hall to create a more conservative local suffrage group. There’s a photo of that night. <br /><br />Back to Mrs. Pankhurst...<br /><br />In her memoirs, Harriot Stanton Blatch says the crowd expected someone more fearsome than the elegant Englishwoman. (Meryl Streep played Emmeline Pankhurst in the movie "Suffragette." The movie was eh but the casting seemed right.) <br /><br />“I know you have not all come here tonight because you are interested in suffrage. You have come to see what a militant suffragette looks like & to see what a Hooligan woman is like… <br /><br />I am not going to tell you why we need the vote but how we are going to get it.†<br /><br />She spoke for two hours, explaining that polite demonstrations simply weren’t enough. <br /><br />“It is by going to prison, rather than by any arguments we have employed that we have won the support of the English working man.†<br /><br />As for rock-throwing, it was a British political tradition--and a necessity. <br /><br />“Around every one of these [stones] was wrapped a piece of paper with a question on it. We only threw them because we were not admitted to Liberal meetings and had no chance to ask our questions any other way.†<br /><br />Later in her visit Pankhurst urged the US government to intervene on behalf of Alice Paul. She noted diplomatic interventions on behalf of other Americans jailed abroad, and asked why President Taft was doing nothing for Miss Paul. #Suffrage100 #CenturyofStruggle
Daily Suffragist
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10/07/2020
Why Alice & Lucy threatened NAWSA
Alice Paul & Lucy Burns didn’t rebel against the mainstream suffrage organization. It kicked them out. Natl Am. Woman Suffrage Assoc was an organization of white moderates. Religiously conservative, politically mainstream, proudly respectable. Alice&Lucy threatened all that.🧵 <br /><br />Their accomplishments, media savvy, youth, self-confidence; their single-minded focus on a federal amendment, their fundraising - all of it threatened NAWSA leaders Anna Howard Shaw & Carrie Chapman Catt. But most concerning was their allegiance to the Pankhursts. <br /><br />Alice spent 2 years apprenticed to the radical wing of the British suffrage movement - itself born of frustration with the dull probity of the UK’s mainstream org. Brooklyn's Lucy Burns was already in the UK when Alice arrived; she stayed 2 years more organizing in Edinburgh. <br /><br />Reunited in the US, Alice & Lucy spent 1913 in a frenzy of activity - the year began with the pre-Inauguration march, and continued with constant presidential and Congressional lobbying. They stayed in touch with their UK mentors. <br /><br />That October, Emmeline Pankhurst was barred from entering the US due to convictions of “crimes involving moral turpitude.†(This is STILL a category in our immigration law.) Alice Paul & Alva Belmont hired a lawyer who got her in, and Alice & Lucy hosted her in Washington. <br /><br />This photo from that trip looks like it may be in front of Union Station, DC. Mrs Pankhurst is the one in fur. Lucy Burns is on the left, eyes closed. <br /><br />This was all too much for NAWSA. When Lucy Burns was arrested chalking a meeting notice on a Washington DC sidewalk, Anna Howard Shaw rebuked her: “You may think we are all a set of old fogies, and perhaps we are….[but] We will not be like England.†<br /><br />NAWSA began working to eject Alice & Lucy at the end of 1913. Motivations inc jealousy, intrgenerational conflict, genuine strategic differences. But the core was their certainty that Alice & Lucy were radicals who would demolish the respectability NAWSA had worked hard to build. <br /><br />Alice & Lucy believed violence would be unnecessary in the US. But if you are willing to starve in jail with a tube shoved down your nose for the cause, you aren’t likely to repudiate your comrades because Anna Shaw & Carrie Catt disapprove. #suffrage100 #19thAmendment
Daily Suffragist
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20/07/2020
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
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28/07/2020
Suffrage colors explained
In writing about what it means to “look like a mom,†@<a href="https://twitter.com/VVFriedman" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">VVFriedman</a> reported that the yellow t-shirts Portland moms wear are intended to evoke sunshine, joy, warmth. The protesters even carry sunflowers to reinforce - which connects them directly to suffrage's color palette.🎨🧵 <br /><br />Sunflower yellow was the only good thing to come out of the 1867 referendum in Kansas. Local suffragists made cloth ribbons in the color of the state flower >> yellow caught on as “the distinguishing badge of the woman suffrage army.†It eventually became NAWSA’s official color. <br /><br />In the UK, the Pankhursts’ WSPU sought to distinguish themselves from other suffrage groups. Purple represented “the royal blood that flows in the veins of every suffragette, the instinct of freedom and dignity;†white for purity; green for hope & “the emblem of spring.†<br /><br />Harriot Stanton Blatch honored the Pankhursts by using their colors for her Women’s Political Union. In New York suffrage marches 1910-1917, women wore sashes in a variety of colors reflecting different groups, usually over a white dress -- for effect, and virginal femininity. <br /><br />Alice Paul & Lucy Burns formally adopted purple/yellow/white as their group’s colors shortly after the 1913 Washington march. They were still a NAWSA committee then, not yet the National Woman’s Party - and their colors merge NAWSA’s yellow with the Pankhursts’ white & purple. <br /><br />Or do they? They explain their choice in one of the first issues of the Suffragist newspaper. White for purity, purple for loyalty and steadfastness (not royalty), and “gold, the color of light and life, is as the torch that guides our purpose, pure and unswerving.†<br /><br />No reference to sunflower yellow or honoring their connection to NAWSA. But they do invoke the life-giving sunshine that inspired suffragists all the way back in Kansas in 1867 - and<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/style/wall-of-moms-image.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> inspires the white moms in Portland today</a>. #Suffrage100 #19thAmendment
Daily Suffragist
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30/07/2020
Suffrage for white women
By the 1916 election, it was clear the Nat'l Woman’s Party strategy was working: a federal constitutional amendment had become a live political issue. NAWSA couldn’t beat NWP, so they were going to have to join them. But neither group was willing to confront its own racism.🧵 <br /><br />For years NAWSA had supported a federal amendment strategy only tepidly, in deference to their southern members. These white women insisted on a “states rights†approach - meaning, no votes for Black women and no new federal oversight of voting. <br /><br />0But NAWSA’s state by state strategy wasn’t delivering. The painful 1915 losses in NY, NJ, MA & PA were followed by more losses in 1916. By then Carrie Chapman Catt had replaced Anna Howard Shaw as head of NAWSA. Catt was a stronger leader and a more skillful strategist. <br /><br />Catt saw that if NAWSA refused to engage on a federal strategy they would tempt political irrelevance. Though Catt would never have said so publicly, Alice Paul had made a federal amendment a possibility - and forced NAWSA into supporting it. <br /><br />NAWSA’s embrace of a federal amendment did not represent an epiphany about the evil of white supremacy. Nor did Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party expect one. On the contrary: both white women’s suffrage organizations continued to accommodate a racist ideology. <br /><br />While rejecting explicit “whites only†voting laws, they encouraged the argument that votes for southern women would STRENGTHEN white supremacy. Meaning, southern states could expect white women wd vote and Black women & men could not. (This IS what happened for the next 45 yrs.) <br /><br />White suffragists believed that in order to win, they had to reassure southern politicians they could enfranchise women while keeping Jim Crow. They understood that southern Black women wouldn’t be included in the victory - but they weren’t the ones suffragists were fighting for. <br /><br />Alice Paul (and Susan B. Anthony before her) knew race discrimination was wrong, but insisted it was a separate issue, unrelated to women’s right to vote. Carrie Catt (like Elizabeth Cady Stanton earlier) didn’t care if Black women were excluded.<br /><br />Mary Church Terrell, Hallie Q. Brown, W.E.B. DuBois & other Black activists were working for voting rights. White suffragists could have collaborated w/them to demand that every citizen get the ballot. But racism - their own, the nation’s - kept them from making common cause.
Daily Suffragist
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09/08/2020