Browse Items (38 total)

What Seneca Falls wasn’t: It wasn’t the first time these ideas were contemplated. Stirrings of women’s equality are threaded thru the abolitionist movement. And since 300 locals showed up on short notice, clearly it was being discussed in many homes.…

Anti-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, they said, that black men can vote and white women cannot. But it didn't start out that way. Thread.…

The 19th c. suffrage movement split resulted from a painful failure. AERA fought to have “sex” included in the 15th Amendment, which barred states from discrimination in voting on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” They…

I’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. First, a word from Frederick Douglass. Thread. It would not be an overstatement to say that among…

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 intersectionality. It’s also a summary of the suffrage movement & the heavy load Black women…

I’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 to speak for whom, who has to wait their turn. #Suffrage100 #KnowYour19th We’ve seen that…

1. ElizCadyStanton & Susan B Anthony’s objections to Black male suffrage were racist. But supporters of the 15thA were not anti-racist. In fact, the supporters were the more conservative, cautious, and upper-class of what became two factions…

1. I’m immersed in the suffrage movement’s first major rupture, and grappling with how to acknowledge ElizCadyStanton & Susan B Anthony’s racism without dismissing them. 2. Faye Dudden’s book Fighting Chance offers a scorching assessment of what…

By 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 American Woman Suffrage Assoc's developed their separate identities in the 1870s, more African-American…

Memphis was rebuilding when Ida B. Wells arrived in the 1880s. After the yellow fever epidemic, the city levied a tax to build drainage systems & fight mosquitoes. The city fathers were white, but a growing Black population garnered some power:…