How impact litigation works
1. Like all good civil disobedience actions, Susan B Anthony’s was well-planned. Century of Struggle describes the whole effort: she recruited more than a dozen women to vote together, “assured herself of first-rate legal advice, and promised the election inspectors... <br /><br />2. (whom she had convinced by the force of her arguments that they should register her group) that she would cover all costs if legal steps were taken against them!” In the months before her trial she spoke so widely in the county that the prosecution demanded a change of venue. <br /><br />3. Susan B’s goal was to get her case to the Supreme Court, which President Grant was determined to prevent. Although she was convicted, she was only fined $100 - the law provided for up to $500 - and when she refused to pay, Judge Hunt didn’t jail her, thwarting her on purpose. <br /><br />4. She wanted to go to jail so she could file a writ of habeas corpus to the Supreme Court. The election inspectors who let Susan B and the other Rochester women vote were convicted in the same trial, and then pardoned by President Grant. <br /><br />5. Politicized appointment of unfit Supreme Court justices is not a modern invention. Justice Ward Hunt was appointed by Ulysses S Grant at the request of NY Senator and Republican Party boss Roscoe Conkling. Fin. <a href="https://www.oyez.org/">oyez.org</a> says: “To say that Hunt accomplished little on the Court would be an overstatement. He was given little to do and did just about that.” #Suffrage100
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1192121885087195136" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original Thread</a>.
06/11/2019
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
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1196275446884839424" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread. </a>
17/11/2019
The Ken Burns treatment
20 years ago, @<a href="https://twitter.com/KenBurns" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">KenBurns</a> made a film about ElizCadyStanton & Susan B Anthony. I think they're the only women he's ever covered. 😉 It's on Amazon Prime + <a href="https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/not-for-ourselves-alone/video" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">bits below</a> - seeing the film clips is a thrill. <br /><br />On the PBS site don't miss "Convo w/Paul Barnes" for the filmmakers' response to why their lens was so limited. I'd love to hear from the historians interviewed in it - inc. @<a href="https://twitter.com/EllenDubois10" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">EllenDuBois10</a> @<a href="https://twitter.com/lynnsher" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">LynnSher</a> @<a href="https://twitter.com/AnnDGordon" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">AnnDGordon</a> @<a href="https://twitter.com/Swagner711" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">SWagner711</a> about the process and the final product.Â
Daily Suffragist
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10/12/2019
A Black man, a white woman, and suffrage in 1850s Albany
In New York it is said that activists come to Albany, not from it. True or not, in the 1850s and today Albany has produced some truly marvelous people. <br /><br />Among them: Lucretia Mott’s cousin by marriage Lydia Mott, and an African-American businessman named William Topp. Thread. <br /><br />New York runs 400 miles from west to east. In the 1830’s and 1840’s, activists for abolition, women’s property rights, temperance and more criss-crossed the state via the Erie Canal. From its completion in 1825, the canal carried goods and people in both directions. <br /><br />Radical newspapers, books, and lecturers spread ideas throughout the state and to points west and south. Activists from towns like Seneca Falls and bigger cities like Rochester & Syracuse could reach the state capitol in about a week - faster and more comfortably than by wagon. <br /><br />The state convention I described yesterday - Albany, 1854, February, freezing - was co-led by local leaders Lydia Mott and William Topp, and attended by activists from around the state. <br /><br />Lydia Mott was a backbone of suffrage in NY for more than 30 years.<br /><blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr"><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WomensDay?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#WomensDay</a> LYDIA MOTT (1806 -1875) – most important woman from <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Albany?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Albany</a> you never heard of. Quaker, teacher, shop owner, best friend Susan B. Anthony ( Mott was glue that held together woman’s suffrage movement in the mid-1800s),Underground RR conductor, FORCE OF NATURE! <a href="https://t.co/Oi7qZrPRmO">pic.twitter.com/Oi7qZrPRmO</a></p>
— AlbanyMuskrat (@albanymuskrat) <a href="https://twitter.com/albanymuskrat/status/971823514239078402?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 8, 2018</a></blockquote>
<br />Lydia organized state and national conventions, collected funds, coordinated lobbying, and housed visiting activists. Susan B Anthony was a close friend and always stayed at Mott's home when she was in town. The house still stands, on Columbia Street in downtown Albany. <br /><br />So central was Lydia Mott to the movement that in 1855 the New York Evening News lamented that the women’s rights movement needed some new recruits, beside the same-old, same-old: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Lydia Mott. <br /><br />Lydia was closely connected to William Topp, an African-American man who was born free in Albany in 1813. (Remember, slavery persisted in NY until 1817.) <br /><br />By his late 20s Topp was a prominent community leader, active in the Underground RR & the American Anti-Slavery Society. <br /><br />He was a merchant tailor with an upscale shop - when most clothing was made-to-measure - and became the wealthiest African-American in Albany. Lydia Mott owned a gentleman's shop near his - they probably met through a combination of business and abolitionist interests. <br /><br />Lydia and her sister Abigail were very close to Frederick Douglass. They were governesses to his <a href="http://historicwomensouthcoast.org/rosetta-douglass/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">daughter Rosetta</a>, who lived with them in Albany from age 6-11. <br /><br />Topp was active in state & national Colored Conventions, as well as Women’s Rights Conventions. @<a href="https://twitter.com/CCP_org" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">CCP_org</a> <br /><br />Besides Douglass, we don’t know of many Black men who were deeply committed to women’s rights in this early period, so William Topp’s name matters a lot. <br /><br />After her sister died, Lydia grew even closer to William. When Af-Am abolitionist William Cooper Nell visited Albany in 1852, he stopped in to see Topp. Finding him not at home, he went to Lydia Mott’s - “and there to my agreeable surprise found Mr. Topp and his whole family.”<br /><br />Tragically, Wm Topp died of tuberculosis at 44. He willed $100 to the abolitionist newspaper <em>The Liberator.</em> The same disease claimed Lydia Mott many years later. Susan B Anthony cancelled her speeches to spend a month nursing Lydia to her death in 1875. <br /><br />Upon Lydia’s death, Susan B said, “There has passed out of my life today, the one, next to my own family, who has been the nearest and dearest friend to me for over thirty years.” <br /><br />The relationship among these giants is contained in an amazing artifact at the Library of Congress.<br /><br />Wm Topp gave Lydia Mott an inscribed copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 20 years later, Lydia gave it to Susan B. When Susan gave her papers to LOC, she annotated the book with a long note about Wm Topp - it’s hard to make out, but she begins by calling him “a splendid man.” <br /><br />Thank you Albany for giving the movements these great activists, and @<a href="https://twitter.com/albanymuskrat" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">AlbanyMuskrat</a> Julie O’Connor and Friends of Albany History for preserving their stories. #Suffrage100
Daily Suffragist
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26/12/2019
<a href="http://historicwomensouthcoast.org/rosetta-douglass/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Rosetta Douglas biography</a>
#CiteBlackWomen
A generation before the great #IdaBWells, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper spoke for Black women in a fierce debate that included Frederick Douglass, ElizCadyStanton & Susan B Anthony. #CiteBlackWomen #Kwanzaa
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr">It’s the 2nd Day of <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Kwanzaa?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Kwanzaa</a>! Today we honor Black women who represent <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Kujichagulia?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Kujichagulia</a>—Self Determination—like Ida B. Wells. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, Wells’s anti-lynching campaign fiercely defended Black people and rights. Who do you honor? <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/CiteBlackWomen?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#CiteBlackWomen</a> <a href="https://t.co/5r8heM8AT9">pic.twitter.com/5r8heM8AT9</a></p>
— Cite Black Women. (@citeblackwomen) <a href="https://twitter.com/citeblackwomen/status/1210572953630466049?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 27, 2019</a></blockquote>
@citeblackwomen 1866: “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.†ðŸ™@marthasjones_Â
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1210575628283662336" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
27/12/2019
History of Woman Suffrage
I got some questions about what the heck these books are, which I’ll take as an invitation. <br /><br />The History of Woman Suffrage was originally intended as one volume, to be edited in the centennial summer of ‘76. <br /><br />It ended up 3,000 pages published throughout the 1880s (& more later). <br /><br />It’s the story of the movement from the POV of ElizCadyStanton, Susan B Anthony & Matilda Joslyn Gage - in other words, the National Woman Suffrage Association and its tactics and strategies. <br /><br />It omits most of what Lucy Stone and the American Assoc. were doing, and the History scarcely mentions African-American suffragists - about whose work they didn’t know or didn’t bother to include. Probably some of both. <br /><br />What it does include is awesomely detailed: Proceedings of conventions - with a strong emphasis on Seneca Falls as The Beginning. <br /><br />Important correspondence, details of state campaigns. An essay about women of the Revolutionary period, like Phillis Wheatly & Anne Hutchinson. Stanton’s 25-page eulogy for Lucretia Mott, and her reminiscence of the day she first met Susan B. <br /><br />Each volume has its own epigraph: <br /><br />Volume I: "Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed." <br /><br />Volume II: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States. <br /><br />Volume III: “Women are citizens of the United States, entitled to all the rights, privileges and immunities guaranteed to citizens by the national Constitution." <br /><br />Lisa Tetrault describes the History as a “valentine to the movement” - a record of the past & a prod for the future. <br /><br />Stanton & Anthony were in their 60s when it was published. The 3d volume begins: “our earthly endeavors must end in the near future...Into younger hands we must soon resign our work.” <br /><br />I imagine they woke each day believing they would live to see victory-- knowing they might not.
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1211472922184966144" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
30/12/2020
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
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1220722462918348803" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
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 Mother of Us All, part I
Susan B Anthony was a lesbian. There’s solid evidence of her romantic relationships with women, and contrary evidence doesn’t exist. You didn’t know? Me neither. ðŸ™Patriarchy is very, very powerful. But in 1946 another dyke came along and brought Susan B. out of the closet.🧵<br /><br />Gertrude Stein - also a lesbian! (That you knew.) Right after WWII, composer Virgil Thomson and Gertrude got a commission for a new opera, their 2d collaboration. He suggested they write something about 19th century American politics. Gertrude immediately thought about Susan B. <br /><br />Stein & Thomson wrote The Mother of Us All. It's still widely performed. It opens with Susan B at home, discussing patriarchy with another woman, “Anne.†Most productions play it gay, referencing Susan’s relationships w. women including Anna Dickinson. <br /><br />Some play it straight and insist that Anne is Anna Howard Shaw, Susan B’s successor in the movement - and the life partner of her niece Lucy Anthony. I'll be at @<a href="https://twitter.com/metmuseum" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">MetMuseum</a> tonight to see @<a href="https://twitter.com/JuilliardSchool" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">JuilliardSchool</a> <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/events/programs/met-live-arts/fy20-the-mother-of-us-all" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">production</a> - will report back.Â
Daily Suffragist
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1227346188145504258" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
02/11/2020
Failure is impossible
When Susan B Anthony was born in 1820, life expectancy for men was 41 yrs. Life expectancy for women was zero. Nothing beyond domestic or menial labor was expected of us. We were to have no public life at all. No serious education, no skilled profession, no politics, no property. <br /><br />Activist @<a href="https://twitter.com/deray" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">deray</a> Mckesson says the challenge for progressives is that we must imagine a world we've never seen. Conservatives just say retrench, turn back to the way things were. Dreaming a different world, convincing others it is attainable is orders of magnitude more difficult. <br /><br />Susan Brownell Anthony dreamed that world and insisted it could happen. Insisted, despite repeated failures, that failure was impossible. Her flaws are ours to reckon with, but her impact is indelible. Happy birthday, Susan B. #Suffrage100
Daily Suffragist
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15/02/2020
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
<a href="https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1243641043028979716" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Original thread.</a>
27/03/2020