Reflections on the 1870 split
Title
Reflections on the 1870 split
Description
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Creator
Daily Suffragist
Source
Date
29/10/2020
Files
Collection
Citation
Daily Suffragist, “Reflections on the 1870 split,” Daily Suffragist, accessed April 16, 2024, https://dailysuffragist.omeka.net/items/show/140.