Browse Items (38 total)
What Seneca Falls wasn'tWhat Seneca Falls wasn’t: It wasn’t the first time these ideas were contemplated. Stirrings of women’s equality are threaded thru the abolitionist…
Abolitionist rootsAnti-Blackness shaped the suffrage movement from very early on. Over and over, white women appealed to racism to argue for the vote: how awful it is,…
The SplitThe 19th c. suffrage movement split resulted from a painful failure. AERA fought to have “sex” included in the 15th Amendment, which barred states…
The most significant manI’m chasing down a citation, so you’ll have to wait to hear from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, one of few Black women on the record in these debates.…
You white women speak of rights...All the women are white, all the Blacks are men, but some of us are brave. The title of the landmark Black feminist anthology is the essence of…
The other side of the splitI’m spending so much time on the 1869 split because it reflects and anticipates so many activist conflicts since: over race and racism, over who gets…
We'll come back for you later...1. ElizCadyStanton & Susan B Anthony’s objections to Black male suffrage were racist. But supporters of the 15thA were not anti-racist. In fact,…
Reflections on the 1870 split1. I’m immersed in the suffrage movement’s first major rupture, and grappling with how to acknowledge ElizCadyStanton & Susan B Anthony’s racism…
Mary Ann Shadd Cary & the Centennial actionBy the 1876 US centennial, women had been demanding the vote for nearly 30 years. The light bulb was not yet invented. As the National and the…
Ida fights segregation on the railroadMemphis was rebuilding when Ida B. Wells arrived in the 1880s. After the yellow fever epidemic, the city levied a tax to build drainage systems &…