July 4, 1876
One of the myths of the suffrage story is that nothing radical or confrontational happened before 1913. Not so. <br /><br />On July 4, 1876, at the national Centennial celebration in Philadelphia, suffragists stormed the stage. <br /><br />Thread. <br /><br />They had asked for a place on the official program for the dispossessed half of the citizenry. The chairman refused: the event program was set, he said, and besides, “We propose to celebrate what we have done in the past hundred years, not what we have failed to do.†<br /><br />They asked for seats for the National Woman’s Suffrage Assoc. and were refused because “only government officials were invited.†<br /><br />DC suffragist Sara Spencer replied: “We are aware that your programme is published, your speakers engaged, your entire arrangements decided upon, without consulting with the women of the United States; for that very reason we desire to enter our protest.†<br /><br />Susan B Anthony wrangled press credentials via her brother’s newspaper. Matilda Joslyn Gage, Lillie Devereaux Blake, Phoebe Couzins & Sara Spencer also found tickets. <br /><br />They had been planning for the Centennial for months, from an office on Chestnut Street that Anthony had leased -- as an unmarried woman she was the only one in the group who could sign the contract. <br /><br />From that office Matilda Joslyn Gage drafted a Declaration of Rights. <br /><br />Not a Declaration of Sentiments, as the 1848 Seneca Falls manifesto was called, but Rights. Plus Articles of Impeachment of the all-male government. <br /><br />Sara Spencer calligraphed a grand version for presentation to the government, signed by the National's leadership.<br /><br />They printed thousands of copies of the text for distribution. 👇(from <a href="https://twitter.com/smithsoniannpg" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">@smithsoniannpg</a> via Ann Lewis Collection) <br /><br />On July 4, 1876, the official program commenced in Philadelphia. It was unbearably hot. <br /><br />The women hadn’t identified the precise cue for their action, but as Richard Henry Lee of Virginia read the 1776 Declaration of Independence, Susan B Anthony knew the moment had arrived. <br /><br />Lee, a Confederate veteran, was a direct descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. A traitor to his country was welcome and honored at the Centennial, but not women who had campaigned ceaselessly for the Union. <br /><br />“Now is our time,†Anthony announced. <br /><br />They walked boldly down the center aisle, ascended the stage, and handed a 3-foot scroll wrapped in ribbons to Vice President Thomas Ferry. <br /><br />“I present to you a Declaration of Rights from the women citizens of the United States," said Anthony. He bowed and accepted the scroll. <br /><br />The women turned, descended the rostrum, and as they made their way through the crowd they handed out printed copies of the Declaration of Rights. Men stood on their chairs to grasp for them. <br /><br />The emcee cried “Order! Order!†and begged the conductor to strike up the band. <br /><br />A crowd gathered outside the main event as Susan B stood in the shadow of a statue of George Washington and read the entire document aloud. Then the suffragists made their way to a nearby church, where the pews were packed and the speeches continued for five hours. <br /><br />The day before, the women had asked one last time for a place on the program. In refusing again, the chairman of the Centennial presciently noted that if the women spoke, “It would be the event of the day--the topic of discussion to the exclusion of all else.†<br /><br />The New York Tribune called their stunt "A very discourteous interruption; it prefigures new forms of violence and disregard of order which may accompany the participation of women in active partisan politics.†🔥🔥🔥 <br /><br />The St. Louis Dispatch of July 13, 1876 was more sympathetic: “If perseverance is to be awarded, the agitators of the woman question will yet carry off the prize they seek. Death alone can silence such women as Susan B. Anthony and Cady Stanton... <br /><br />"...their teachings will live after them and unite others of their sex into strong bands of sisterhood in a common cause. <br /><br />"It is safe to say, if events march on in the same direction they have since the calling of the first National Woman’s Convention, another centennial will see woman in the halls of legislation throughout the land, and so far as we are concerned we have no objection, so long as she behaves herself.â€
Daily Suffragist
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04/07/2020
Lesbian Erasure from the Centennial
We gotta talk about lesbians. Specifically, about lesbian erasure. Queer is cool, right? It’s 2020! ðŸ³ï¸â€ðŸŒˆðŸ³ï¸â€âš§ï¸etc., etc. <br /><br />So why is the lesbian reality of the suffrage movement barely part of the #19thAmendment centennial conversation? A thread. <br /><br />The movement for women’s liberation was run largely by unmarried women - some never married, some widowed. Why? Because marriage was a prison for women, legally and socially. Unmarried women were exponentially freer to do the work of organizing and building a national movement. <br /><br />Long-married leaders who raised multiple children - ElizCadyStanton, IdaBWells - are outliers in the suffrage pantheon. Most of the women who led the movement didn’t marry, didn’t have children, or were widowed early. Does that mean they were lesbians? Well, yes - many of them. <br /><br />First, the context: enlightened men were vanishingly rare - remember, in the 19th & early 20th centuries women were widely believed to be inferior and incapable. So a woman who wanted independence would rather not marry if she could afford it. <br /><br />Also, sex. @lillianfaderman makes the point that for women, penalties for heterosexual sex outside of marriage were extreme. So an unmarried woman who wanted an erotic life with someone besides herself was much safer finding it with women. <br /><br />These women wouldn’t have used the word lesbian. Nor would they likely have identified as “invertsâ€--the clinical forerunner to “homosexual.†But many lived in romantic partnerships with other women--relationships far more intimate than what we’d call “friends.†Some receipts… <br /><br />Susan B Anthony’s correspondence w/Anna Dickinson is flirty & direct. “Well, Anna Darling--I do wish I could take you in these strong arms of mine this very minute†& “I cannot bear to go off without another precious look into your face--my Soul.†There's a lot more. <br /><br />It didn't last. Years later, Susan said how much she envied the committed, devoted relationship her niece Lucy had w/Anna Howard Shaw - a relationship Susan knew was an intimate one. <br /><br />Only in her 70s did Susan come close to finding it, w/a married Chicago woman named Emily Gross. Susan wrote to friends of her “new lover†in Chicago--not a word she used for colleagues or admirers. Anna Shaw wrote in her diary: “I am so thankful for the new friend for Aunt Susan. How nice it is!†They were together for Susan’s last decade; Gross grieved her death deeply. <br /><br />Frances Willard preferred “Frank†w/intimates; like the others in this thread she hated "female" chores & rejected rigid gender roles as ridiculous. Ironically, her great accomplishment for suffrage was convincing conservative women that the vote would aid, not “unsex†them. She was so bluntly revealing about her love for the women she lived with - first Kate Jackson, then Anna Gordon - that some scholars say the relationships must have been chaste: if they were erotic she wouldn’t have revealed so much. I’m not convinced. <br /><br />Anna Howard Shaw & Lucy Anthony had a pretty conventional butch/femme home: Lucy did the dishes, Anna mowed the lawn and fixed things. Anna had affairs with other women in her travels, but their partnership lasted 30 yrs. <a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1252779160692498437" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Lucy worked to memorialize her 👇</a><br /><br />Unlike the women above, Carrie Chapman Catt was married twice: her 1st husband died soon after they married, her second agreed to a prenup that promised her at least â…“ of the year away from him, working for suffrage. After he died, Catt & Mollie Hay lived together 23 years. Catt presented a very intentional public narrative about her double widowhood, but in the movement Mollie was recognized as her spouse. When Mollie died, Catt was widowed a 3rd time. She had a heart attack. She survived and lived years more. They are buried under a shared stone.<br /><br />There were Black lesbian suffragists always, like Alice Dunbar-Nelson & Angelina Weld Grimké. Notably, many leading Black women were married briefly or not at all, like Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Nannie Helen Burroughs & Mary McLeod Bethune. <br /><br />Why such a deep closet? The new PBS documentary didn’t give a whiff of queerness. There was one @NYTimes piece by @Maya_Salam + one @WomensVote100 post by @WendyLRouse - both good ones! - but in a year of commemoration I can’t name much else. <br /><br />We know A LOT about the private lives of Famous Suffragists. And given how much we know, the absence of centennial acknowledgment that these women lived queer lives is … gaping. <br /><br />Thx @lillianfaderman for finding the evidence. #suffrage100
Daily Suffragist
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Sept 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
Racist Propaganda
What's a Rochester suffragist from Susan B Anthony's day doing on a racist anti-suffrage leaflet in Virginia circa 1920? Read on . . . <br /><br />Julie O’Connor <a href="https://twitter.com/albanymuskrat" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">@AlbanyMuskrat</a> recently called my attention to Hester Jeffrey, a prominent African American suffragist and clubwoman in western NY. Originally from Boston, Hester moved to Rochester in 1891 and quickly expanded political life for women in her new city. <br /><br />She held leadership positions in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union & the Needlework Guild of America. After Frederick Douglass died she was appointed to his Monument Committee. She sponsored scholarships for Black women at what’s now Rochester Inst. of Technology. <a href="https://twitter.com/RITtigers" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">@RITtigers</a> <br /><br />Rosalyn Terborg-Penn describes Hester as active across networks of Black club women and white suffragists. She was president of the New York Federation of Colored Women, and she represented the Federation at the New York Woman Suffrage Association convention in 1905.<br /><br />In 1902, when New York women could vote in school board elections but nothing else, Hester Jeffrey founded the Susan B Anthony Club. The group organized Black women for charity work and suffrage. SusanB, of course, was the most famous woman in Rochester, and Hester knew her well. <br /><br />When Susan B died in 1906, Hester Jeffrey gave a eulogy alongside local politicians and suffrage leaders Anna Howard Shaw & Carrie Chapman Catt. <br /><br />Speaking on behalf of “the colored people of Rochester...the colored churches in this city, the National and State Federations of Colored Women, the federated clubs of the association†she expressed sorrow at the loss of a “friend for many years†and pledged that the members of the Club would “devote our time and energies to the work thou has left us to do.†<br /><br />Hester Jeffrey led the creation of the first memorial to Susan B, a stained glass window at Rochester’s Memorial A.M.E. Zion church, installed in 1907. (When the church moved in the 1970s, I believe they took the window to their new home - along with one of Harriet Tubman.) <br /><br />I’d been thinking about Hester for a few days when I opened Terborg-Penn’s book to look for more. I was startled to see the familiar face of Hester Jeffrey hijacked onto anti-suffragist propaganda. 👆The flyer is unhinged; it seems to argue that suffrage leads to race-mixing. <br /><br />Its author was James Callaway, a columnist for the Macon (GA) Daily Telegraph. In 1918 he wrote a screed against the “Susan B Anthony Amendment†that accused Anthony, along with Carrie Chapman Catt and Anna Howard Shaw of, well, having Black friends. Exhibit A was Hester Jeffrey. <br /><br />Callaway also named Frederick Douglass, Robert Purvis, and Booker T. Washington as friends of Susan B's - and by association, the living suffrage leaders. <br /><br />Of course, this is weird and more than a little ironic. <br /><br />Susan B and those men were long dead; Catt and Shaw were hardly integrationists. (They were lesbians, though - could that be what Callaway was insinuating by “immediate women friendsâ€?) <br /><br />But racism doesn’t make sense. <br /><br />Terborg-Penn explains that the closer a federal suffrage bill came to passing, the harder white supremacists worked to sabotage it. Anti-suffragists took Callaway’s article & turned it into a leaflet they used against Carrie Catt when she campaigned for ratification in Virginia. <br /><br />And that’s how Hester Jeffrey, suffragist and clubwoman of Rochester - and by 1920 a full voter in New York state - ended up on a flyer in Virginia. #BlackSuffragists #CenturyofStruggle #19thAmendment <br /><br />Correction and more! Susan Goodier's essay says that after Hester was widowed in 1914, she moved back to Boston to live with her sister. She died in 1934.Â
Daily Suffragist
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14/07/2020
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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.
Daily Suffragist
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29/10/2020
South Dakota
South Dakota became a state in 1899. Its motto: “Under God the People Rule.” National suffrage leaders converged on the state immediately to campaign for a doomed suffrage amendment. Its motto: “Women Are People.” A #StateOfTheWeek thread <br /><br />White women in the Dakotas had sought the vote since at least 1883, but the territorial legislature worried it might hurt their chance for statehood. When North & South Dakota were admitted to the union, neither Native men nor any woman could vote. <br /><br />Eleanor Flexner summarizes: ]“The South Dakota campaign in 1890 was one of the most rigorous that suffrage workers ever endured -- blazing hot all summer, while the 75-yo Susan B Anthony and the veteran Henry Blackwell (a mere 65) toured the state, and freezing cold during Mrs. Catt’s tour in the fall. <br /><br />“In addition, living conditions were ‘primitive,’ and all the speakers had to cover immense distances. The decision for the newly united suffrage association to enter the campaign had hinged on pledges of support from farm and labor organizations." <br /><br />But... “when the campaign was already under way, the Knights of Labor and the Farmers Alliance launched a 3rd party, which refused to encumber itself with the controversial issue of votes for women. <br /><br />"The outcome was a defeat of almost 2-to-1, after a murderous campaign: “Mrs. Catt came down with typhoid fever immediately afterward and very nearly died, and when Miss Anthony returned to her home in Rochester, her sister Mary commented that for the first time she realized that Susan was growing old.” <br /><br />A referendum the same day to enfranchise Native men failed too. The massacre at Wounded Knee took place two months later. #StateOfTheWeek #CenturyofStruggle
Daily Suffragist
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27/03/2020
Susan B on trial
Susan B Anthony voted 147 years ago today. For this she was arrested, and tried in federal court in Canandaigua NY the following June. She was represented by Henry Selden, a retired judge who laid out her case for why the 14th Amdt provided her the right to vote as a citizen.
Judge Ward Hunt was a recently-appointed Supreme Court justice riding circuit in the Northern District of NY. He refused to allow Anthony to testify in her own defense, and directed the jury to find her guilty. To Hunt’s regret, he then asked if she had anything to say.
Miss Anthony—I have many things to say; for in your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government... Judge—The Court cannot listen to a rehearsal of arguments the prisoner's counsel has already consumed 3 hours in presenting.
Miss Anthony— May it please your honor, I am not arguing the question, but simply stating the reasons why sentence cannot, in justice, be pronounced against me. - Your denial of my citizen's right to vote is the denial of my right of consent as one of the governed...
- the denial of my right of representation as one of the taxed, - the denial of my right to a trial by a jury of my peers as an offender against law, - therefore, the denial of my sacred rights to life, liberty, property and— Judge— The Court cannot allow the prisoner to go on.
Miss Anthony— But your honor will not deny me this one and only poor privilege of protest against this high-handed outrage upon my citizen's rights. May it please the Court to remember that since the day of my arrest last November, this is the first time that either myself or...
...any person of my disfranchised class has been allowed a word of defense before judge or jury— Judge Hunt— The prisoner must sit down—the Court cannot allow it. This goes on for a while. Anthony published the trial proceedings: read them https://t.co/5AqREGb213 #Suffrage100
Daily Suffragist
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05/11/2019
<a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/97187514/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">An account of the proceedings on the trial of Susan B. Anthony on the charge of illegal voting at the Presidential election in Nov., 1872, and on the trial of Beverly W. Jones, Edwin T. Marsh and William B. Hall, the inspectors of elections by whom her vote was received.</a>
The Emma Goldman Institute for Capitalism
Today’s “March for Life†takes the 19th Amdt as its theme. The anti-abortion movement regularly invokes Susan B Anthony, ElizCadyStanton & Alice Paul. Suffragists indeed inspire people of varied opinions - but anti-abortion groups are lying about what they stood for. 🧵 <br /><br />The idea that Anthony or Stanton or Paul wanted the government to decide whether you get pregnant and stay pregnant is absurd. So what do anti-abortion groups cite as evidence of their claims? Is it true? @<a href="https://twitter.com/AnnDGordon" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">AnnDGordon</a> & @<a href="https://twitter.com/LynnSherr" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">LynnSherr</a> have <a href="https://time.com/4106547/susan-b-anthony-elizabeth-cady-stanton-abortion/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">the receipts</a> 👇and Constitutional Law giant Reva Siegel <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/01/22/what-antiabortion-advocates-get-wrong-about-women-who-secured-right-vote/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reups it all this week</a> w/Stacie Taranto 👉<br /><br />TL;DR? The “anti-abortion†claims rest on 3 scraps, all falsehoods. <br /><br />First, an article published in Stanton & Anthony’s newspaper The Revolution, falsely attributed to Anthony herself. The 1869 article denounced “child murder†and labeled abortion “a most monstrous crime.†Anthony edited but didn’t write it - rather, the opposite, repeatedly. <br /><br />2) Anti-abortionists claim ElizCadyStanton wrote Julia Ward Howe that it was “degrading to women†to think of children as “property to be disposed of as we see fit.†They can’t cite a source for the letter, allegedly written on a day Stanton & Howe were together at a conference. <br /><br />Last, Alice Paul’s references to the harm of back alley abortions are twisted to suggest she opposed it. Paul so fiercely believed â™€ï¸ should make their own choices that she opposed paternalistic protective labor laws--women’s most significant political achievement of the 1910s. <br /><br />That’s it - that’s the “evidence†of suffragists’ opposition to abortion. In 70+ years of speeches & letters - a corpus so massive the edited highlights run 7,000 pages - they claim 3 threadbare references to alleged anti-abortion feeling. And they’re fake.<br /><br />That’s pathetic - but what’s really gross is that their story relies on misappropriation and willful misunderstanding of the entire century of struggle. The movement began in the 1830s, when a tiny number of deeply radical women began to voice objections to American society. Objection to the fact that women who were enslaved were property. That women who were not enslaved were legally erased when they married. That everything women owned or made or did - including their children - was their husband’s property. That rape by a husband was not a crime. <br /><br />Bodily autonomy was the essence of what became abolitionism & suffrage. The political & intellectual leaders of the movement: Stanton, Anthony, Lucy Stone - said repeatedly that the rt to control your own body, to decide if & when to get pregnant, was at the center of their work. The notion that a fetus had rights equivalent to an adult woman would be ludicrous to them. <br /><br />So how did suffragists become posthumous spokespeople for the opposite of their lives’ work? See eg, Stanton International; Susan B Anthony List; Alice Paul Group. You can look them up. Or #PurpleSashRevolution, or watch a cringe-worthy spoken word: <br /><br /><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/9a4mEoX-bUs" frameborder="0"></iframe><br /><br />Like Martin Luther King, the achievements of suffragists are being sanitized & co-opted to serve agendas they would revile. First by neutering suffragists of the actual political content of what they stood for. Then worse: perverting their message to stand for its utter opposite.<br /><br />Naming anti-abortion anti-sex anti-birth control groups for people whose entire lives were devoted to the political and personal liberation of women is a posthumous assassination. It’s the Emma Goldman Institute for Capitalism or the Rosa Parks Center for White Pride.
Daily Suffragist
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24/01/2020
Don't want to link to them, but "Susan B. Anthony List" is just one of the anti-abortion groups named for a suffragist.
The Food
One of the hardships of suffragists’ life on the road? Lousy food. This @<a href="https://twitter.com/NPRFood" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">NPRFood</a> piece <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/03/08/591633331/on-the-road-to-womens-rights-susan-b-anthony-stomached-plenty-of-bad-food" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">focused on Susan B,</a> though it would apply to any of the 100s of women who traveled 1000s of miles, year after year, to talk to men about why we were citizens.
Daily Suffragist
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28/03/2020
The Freeman
Mary Ann Shadd Cary edited The Freeman in Canada. She moved there in 1850s to protest Fugitive Slave Act. Post-Civil War she returned & entered Howard Law School at age 46, the only woman in her class. More ahead on her work w/Frederick Douglass, Susan B.
Daily Suffragist
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05/09/2019
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/06/obituaries/mary-ann-shadd-cary-abolitionist-overlooked.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cary obituary</a>