What Seneca Falls wasn't
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. Thread. <br /><br />It wasn’t free of racism. The Declaration avers: “He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men-both natives and foreigners.” White women’s enduring frustration that men whom they see as lesser can vote & they can’t is present fr early on. <br /><br />It wasn’t the first time suffrage was contemplated, and it didn’t become a Watershed Event until decades later. Lisa Tetrault’s book The Myth of Seneca Falls explores in detail how and why it did: <a href="https://t.co/ZNnY152Acg?amp=1">https://t.co/ZNnY152Acg</a> <br /><br />Eleanor Flexner says we can see #SenecaFalls as the birth of the movement when we recall that a lot of growing precedes a birth. #Suffrage100 #VotesForWomen #WomensHistory #KnowYour19th
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25/09/2019
Abolitionist roots
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. <br /><br />Women’s political organizing began in the 1830s with female anti-slavery societies (see Aug 28, Sept 23&29). After Seneca Falls (Sept 19-25), a movement for women’s rights - not just voting - took shape. It grew through the 1850s, alongside the accelerating demand to end slavery. <br /><br />During the war, activists suspended the question of women’s distinct rights to focus all of their resources on ending slavery. After the war, the overlapping luminaries of abolition & women’s rights created the American Equal Rights Association. AERA focused on voting as primary. <br /><br />AERA sought the vote for all women and all Black people. Founders included Frederick Douglass, Lucretia Mott, ElizCadyStanton, Susan B Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Lucy Stone & Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. It lasted 3 years before a bitter split. Tomorrow: The Split. #Suffrage100
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17/10/2019
The Split
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.” <br />They failed.<br />Thread. <br /><br />The 15th Amdt meant suffrage for Black men only. (Though a decade later suffragists would argue that it implied that voting was an inherent right of all citizens.) Worse, the 14th Amendment specified voting by “male citizens” - adding sex to the Constitution for the first time.<br /><br />AERA had to decide whether to support half a loaf. At first there seemed to be consensus that Black male suffrage was important, and women should be patient. White abolitionist Wendell Phillips said “This hour belongs to the Negro.” (man) <br /><br />Then Stanton & Anthony rebelled. They felt betrayed. The movement for suffrage was a shared commitment. They thought everyone was in it together. And the door was closing politically - there might not be another chance.<br /><br />To them, for white women to wait in line behind men who weren’t white or educated or English-speaking felt outrageous. And they said so in blisteringly racist language. Brace yourself. <br /><br />Stanton: “Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung, who do not know the difference between a monarchy and a republic, who cannot read the Declaration of Independence or Webster’s spelling book, making law for Lucretia Mott . . . [or] Susan B. Anthony.”<br /><br />Anthony: “If you will not give the whole loaf of justice to the entire people, if you are determined to give it, piece by piece, then give it first to women, to the most intelligent & capable of the women at least.” She meant white women. <br /><br />Tomorrow: Black women respond.
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18/10/2019
The most significant man
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. <br /><br />It would not be an overstatement to say that among his many towering accomplishments, Douglass was the most significant man in the fight for women’s suffrage. From Seneca Falls to the founding of the AERA, he was a constant and devoted ally over decades.<br /><br />He spent the post-war years crusading for the vote for Black people, even if that meant only men at first. Yet he didn’t try to quash Stanton & Anthony’s demand to include women too, supporting them when other male abolitionists did not. <br /><br />He did tell them - many times, over many years - to stop being so racist. Faye Dudden quotes Douglass to ElizCadyStanton in Feb 1866: “I have about made up my mind that if you can forgive me for being a Negro, I cannot do less than to forgive you for being a woman.” #Suffrage100
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19/10/2019
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 intersectionality. It’s also a summary of the suffrage movement & the heavy load Black women shouldered in it. <br /><br />In the years after the Civil War, white abolitionists & suffragists endlessly debated Black male suffrage, white women’s suffrage, universal suffrage, “educated” suffrage -who should step aside for whom. Frances E. W. Harper was one of few Black women to speak at the conventions. <br /><br />As the American Equal Rights Association argued about who needed the vote more: Blacks or women, Harper called out white women for their racism & naivete. At their founding Convention in 1866 she said “You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs.” <br /><br />She described the humiliation of riding public transit as a woman of color. “Have women nothing to do with this?” <br /><br />Then she named the amorality of the nation as it stood in 1866 - when the war was won but citizenship still undefined. <br /><br />She's so fierce that I'll quote at length: <br /><br />“In advocating the cause of the colored man, since the Dred Scott decision I have sometimes said I thought the nation had touched bottom. But let me tell you there is a depth of infamy lower than that. <br /><br />“It is when the nation, standing upon the threshold of a great peril, reached out its hands to a feebler race & asked that race to help it, and when the peril was over said, You are good enough for soldiers, but not good enough for citizens.” <br /><br />Harper brings the speech home with the ultimate war hero: Harriet Tubman. She points out that Moses herself cannot travel unmolested in America, and then rhetorically closes the loop on the question of Black men, Black women, white women, and the ballot. <br /><br />“That woman [Tubman], whose courage and bravery won a recognition from our army and from every black man in the land, is excluded from every thoroughfare of travel. Talk of giving women the ballot-box? Go on. It is a [teaching school], and the white women of this country need it. <br /><br />“While there exists this brutal element in society which tramples upon the feeble and treads down the weak, I tell you that if there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness, it is the white women of America.” Oct 21, 2019<br /><br />Thank you for this - so glad to know about @<a href="https://twitter.com/smithcaringcirc" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">smithcaringcirc</a> and to encourage folks to join. I will! Deep appreciation and gratitude to <a href="https://twitter.com/TheBarbaraSmith" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">@TheBarbaraSmith</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/PBell_Scott">@PBell_Scott</a> & Akasha Gloria Hull for the work, and to @ProfessMoravec and <a href="https://twitter.com/BarbaraSmithBio" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">@BarbaraSmithBio</a> for making sure I cite it properly.
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21/10/2019
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr">saying it again for the folks in the back <a href="https://twitter.com/TheBarbaraSmith?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@TheBarbaraSmith</a> is a god damn national treasure. This book launched the field of black women's studies. Support the <a href="https://twitter.com/smithcaringcirc?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@smithcaringcirc</a> <a href="https://t.co/Ce3wzB1Jdh">https://t.co/Ce3wzB1Jdh</a></p>
— Michelle Moravec (@ProfessMoravec) <a href="https://twitter.com/ProfessMoravec/status/1186299484080431105?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 21, 2019</a></blockquote>
The other side of the split
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 <br /><br />We’ve seen that ElizCadyStanton & Susan B Anthony were indignant about the 15th Amendment, and that Frederick Douglass & Frances Ellen Watkins Harper were in favor despite women’s exclusion. Who else was in the room where it happened? <br /><br />Lucy Stone is best known today for being the first woman to insist on keeping her own name in marriage. As someone who would rather cut off my arm than change my name, I’ve always appreciated her. <br /><br />Julia Ward Howe is best known for writing the Battle Hymn of the Republic (“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord…”), the Union’s Civil War anthem. More tomorrow on what they said.
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23/10/2019
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, the supporters were the more conservative, cautious, and upper-class of what became two factions (both of which were almost all white). <br /><br />2. Why were 15th Amendment supporters so determined to proceed without women’s inclusion? One explanation is that while all of these folks had been abolitionists AND women’s rights advocates, they drew different conclusions from the Civil War. <br /><br />3. The women’s rights movement grew in the soil of abolitionism. Its leaders were passionate abolitionists and political ideologues. When their animating passion - the eradication of slavery - came true in a cataclysm, different people saw different lessons. <br /><br />4. Stanton & Anthony believed the world had been utterly rearranged, and women’s liberation--or at least political participation--was winnable too. Others wanted to keep their eye on the prize of Black freedom and power, and thought women’s empowerment would endanger that cause. <br /><br />5. Does this kind of tension sound familiar? It’s not unique to suffrage. In more recent history, it played out in the LGBT movement, which argued for decades about whether to include transgender people in anti-discrimination laws. <br /><br />6. Trans proponents said “later” could mean never; opponents said the mainstream wasn’t ready, and some improvement was better than none. The tensions are still present, but queers have increasingly come to see that we will all hang together in the end. #Suffrage100 #KnowYour19th
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25/10/2019
Reflections on the 1870 split
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. <br /><br />2. Faye Dudden’s book Fighting Chance offers a scorching assessment of what happened... when a movement once committed to universal suffrage broke apart. Her book is particularly valuable for its dissection of the role of philanthropists’ dollars. Then as now, progressive work depends too much on the wealthy, which warps our advocacy and limits our effectiveness. <br /><br />3. Stanton & Anthony’s choices in 1868-69 were unforgivably racist. When they saw that the door was closing, that the Reconstruction amdts would make women worse off, they stooped lower. Dudden argues that’s because they were political realists, not naifs. They gambled, and lost. <br /><br />4. Did they know it would take 50 more years to win, and that Jim Crow would have strangled Black political power by then? It all turned out worse than anyone expected. And yet I can’t ‘cancel’ Stanton & Anthony, in current parlance. They slogged on for the rest of the century. <br /><br />5. They were deeply flawed, but their achievements were massive. Would the movement have been better off without them? One way to answer that is by comparing the ideology they built after the split to that of their rival suffrage faction, which supported the 15th A. Stay tuned.
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29/10/2020
Mary Ann Shadd Cary & the Centennial action
By the 1876 US centennial, women had been demanding the vote for nearly 30 years. The light bulb was not yet invented. <br />As the National and the American Woman Suffrage Assoc's developed their separate identities in the 1870s, more African-American women joined the American. <br /><br />But Mary Ann Shadd Cary aligned herself with the National b/c they were more radical and less devoted to the Republican party. (Reconstruction was about to be undone by Republican President Rutherford B Hayes, elected in 1876.) Shadd Cary endorsed the National’s New Departure, a more daring strategy than what the American was proposing. And despite Stanton & Anthony’s racism, Shadd Cary kept pushing them to do better. She gathered the names of 94 African-American women from Washington D.C. for the National's new centennial Declaration of Rights. <br /><br />At the centennial celebration in Philadelphia, the National’s leaders - Stanton, Anthony, Gage et al - executed an amazing bit of political theatre. They took over the stage to present a new Declaration with new signatories. The Black women’s names were not included. #Suffrage100
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17/11/2019
Ida fights segregation on the railroad
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: school board seats, police hires. <br /><br />Accomplished Black women in town were resisting segregation. Jane Brown sued and won after a Memphis railroad made her change cars. Julia Hooks refused to move from her seat in a downtown theatre: she was thrown out, jailed, and fined. (Image of RR car interior c. 1880.) <br /><br />@<a href="https://twitter.com/ExploreWellcome" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">ExploreWellcome</a> Ida surely knew about these heroic women when she refused to give up the first class “ladies car” seat she had bought on a Memphis-bound train in 1883. When the conductor grabbed her to haul her off the train, she bit his hand. <br /><br />Whites stood on their seats to watch, and applauded when she was taken off the train. #IdaBWells sued for violation of the Tennessee “separate but equal” railway policy, as there was no Black 1st class ladies car. She won. She was 21 years old.
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19/11/2019