 | | Nannie Helen Burroughs (left, holding banner, circa 1910) was a leader of the Woman’s National Baptist Convention and an advocate for women’s suffrage. The contributions of Black women like her to the movement have long been largely overlooked.Library of Congress |
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“This is not a boring history of nagging spinsters; it is a badass history of revolution staged by political geniuses.” |
— Kate Clarke Lemay, historian and curator at the National Portrait Gallery |
As the story is often told, the path to women’s suffrage began in Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, which granted all women in America the right to vote. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were the leaders of the movement. |
And yet we are learning, slowly, that that telling of the story is wildly incomplete. It was not only Stanton and Anthony who led the movement for voting rights in this country; women of color, working-class and immigrant women also paved the way. |
The movement did not emerge out of nowhere in 1848; it had roots in the movement to abolish slavery. Many early suffragists were active in that fight. |
And the 19th Amendment was not an end but a beginning: After its ratification, it would take four more years for many Native Americans even to be considered citizens with voting rights in this country, and it would take even longer for some Asian-Americans. Many Black women, while possessing suffrage on paper, could not freely exercise that right until 1965, when the Voting Rights Act banned racially discriminatory voting practices, such as literacy tests. Disenfranchisement at the polls, of course, still continues today. |
As America nears the centennial of the 19th Amendment next month, The New York Times gathered seven scholars, authors and thinkers for a discussion about misconceptions, the women left out of the history books and just how much of what suffragists were fighting for is still relevant today. |
Let’s start by overturning some of the common misconceptions about suffrage. Where should we begin? |
Susan Ware, historian: Can I raise an issue from the outset? It’s about terms. “Suffragette” is a fraught term. American suffragists never used it, only their detractors. |
Elaine Weiss, journalist and author: The term was made up by a journalist in The Daily Mail in London. It was 1906, and he was making fun of the more militant suffragists in the U.K. — and so he used the diminutive “-ette” to belittle them. But then they turned around, as often happens in a movement, and they decided to own it. They said, “OK, you’re going to call us suffragettes? We’re going to call ourselves suffragettes.” But that was in Britain. The American press began using it too, just because it was cute, and expressed the disdain most American newspapers held for the movement. It’s easier to say, I have to admit it. |
Kate Clarke Lemay, historian and curator: I find it maddening that only two women’s names — Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton — are consistently taught in core history classes. Suffrage was a movement of thousands of women — including African-American women, who are often left completely out of the record. |
Sally Roesch Wagner, historian: A lot of my work centers on the influence of Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, women on the movement. These are Indigenous women who, for a thousand years, had political voice in their sovereign nations — and continue to. The early suffragists knew Indigenous women had authority over their lives in their nations that U.S. women didn’t: rights to their bodies, their possessions and their children, safety and political voice. Having this model showed some suffragists that equality was possible. |
Adele Logan Alexander, historian: Can I add something about time? Clearly this year’s centennial is a significant landmark, but it’s not the only date we should be thinking of. The federal Voting Rights Act, which became law in 1965, was incredibly important too, because the passage of that legislation supposedly guaranteed the franchise to African-American women. |
Lemay: I think the way we talk about suffrage needs attention. It is so often described in a way that makes it seem kind of dowdy and dour — whereas, in fact, it is exciting and radical. Women staged one of the longest social reform movements in the history of the United States. This is not a boring history of nagging spinsters; it is a badass history of revolution staged by political geniuses. I think that because they were women, people have hesitated to credit them as such. |
Those who learned anything about the suffrage movement in school probably learned about a handful of white, middle-class women from the Northeast. Who are some other leaders we should know? |
Erica Armstrong Dunbar, historian: I think of women like Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Maria Stewart, Harriet Forten Purvis and Ida B. Wells-Barnett — African-American suffragists and abolitionists who advocated for the right to vote even when spurned by their white counterparts. These women were as committed to suffrage as their white counterparts, and yet their voices were often marginalized or silenced. |
Alexander: I would say it is not one person nor one event, but the scarcely recorded efforts of anonymous women of all races, educational and economic levels who, for decades, talked with neighbors, held meetings, challenged their fathers, sons, husbands and employers — often putting themselves in physical and economic jeopardy to do so. They are the unknown heroes of the movement. |
Ware: I really hope we will get a lot more books and articles on what I call “queering the suffrage movement.” I think that as we diversify our understanding of the movement, making a place for queer people is really important. |
Tina Cassidy, author: It’s interesting, one of the first questions I always get about Alice Paul is, “Was she married?” Because people want to know, how did she have the time to dedicate her entire life to this? Was she gay? And I think that the truth is we don’t actually know the answer to that. |
Weiss: She didn’t have a personal life! |
Cassidy: Right, the fight for equality was her entire life. Also, she may have been asexual. I think there’s so much more contemporary language now to describe this. |
Lemay: Also, being single was empowering for many of these women. A lot of them chose to be single. |
Weiss: Legally, it was a better thing to do. |
Lemay: For a long time, once a woman got married, she suddenly lost her rights. She lost her right to sign a contract, to own property, to sue — and in the rare case of divorce, she didn’t have rights to her own children. Which is mind-boggling to us today! |
Cassidy: Yes, though I also think the assumption that all the women in the movement were lesbians is an annoying stereotype. It assumes that women had men to take care of all of their needs and why should they want the vote, too? |
Wagner: As a lesbian, I want to out every damn one of ’em! What I find helpful is thinking about Adrienne Rich’s “lesbian continuum.” We tend to see the male sexualization of relationships as the model, and that’s not the way that lesbian relationships necessarily develop. Often, the emotional may have more importance. So then you look at, well, were these women doing it in bed? Well, does that even matter? What matters is that many of these women had lifelong emotional relationships that sustained them in their movement work. |
 | | “I have a visceral memory of the first time I went into a voting booth,” said Adele Logan Alexander, who is named for her grandmother, the suffragist Adella Hunt Logan.Sharon Attia/The New York Times |
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Adele, your grandmother, the suffragist Adella Hunt Logan, was once denied the opportunity to speak about the plight of Black women at a conference honoring Susan B. Anthony because Anthony feared her presence might offend some white politicians. How should we think about the flawed, complicated — and sometimes flatly racist — figures like Anthony who were also critical parts of a movement? |
Alexander: There is sort of a simplistic assumption that we must avoid, which is that progress moves forward in straight lines. And boy, does it ever not go in straight lines. It twists back, it doubles over itself. And it crosses many categories, such as economics, gender and race. That’s something that we may forget, and perhaps it goes against Dr. Martin Luther King’s precept that the arc of justice always bends forward. |
Wagner: I think as a culture, we are really grappling with what I call the “both, and” of our historic figures. How do we both hold accountability and celebrate? The suffragists both did this passionate, incredibly important creation of democracy — which we didn’t have before — and they also need to be held accountable for furthering racist laws. |
How do you see the parallels of what these women were fighting for and what is happening today? |
Weiss: We’re still fighting over voting rights, over citizenship rights and, yes, over women’s rights. We’re still grappling with inequality and racism — we’re in the streets marching for justice. |
Cassidy: When Black Lives Matter protesters were recently in Lafayette Park, I couldn’t help but think of the suffragists, led by Alice Paul, who burned President Wilson’s own words — from speeches he gave about democracy — in that same location more than a century ago. They were arrested for it. |
Alexander: I often think of the women, my grandmother among them, who wore white dresses to protest the denial of their political empowerment. There were echoes of that symbolic garb during the campaigns of Shirley Chisholm, and in the glorious display of white pantsuits worn by the record number of multiracial, multicultural women who went to Congress as result of the 2018 election. I smiled when I saw them! |
Lemay: Suffragists were the predecessors to the contemporary feminist activists who we esteem and admire today for speaking truth to power. |
Here are three articles from The Times you may have missed. |
 | | Ziwe FumudohChase Hall for The New York Times |
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- “How many Black people do you know?” Ziwe Fumudoh, a comedian, performs a kind of racial high wire act on her Instagram Live show, but she really just wants to heal. [Read the story]
- “I couldn’t do anything.” Despite their often hero status, health care workers experience pressure that can be paralyzing. Here is one doctor’s story. [Read the story]
- “I feel incredibly vulnerable.” Rebecca Trimble grew up thinking she was American. When she realized that she wasn’t, her quest to fix the problem put her at risk of deportation. [Read the story]
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This edition of In Her Words is written by Jessica Bennett and Veronica Chambers. Our art director is Catherine Gilmore-Barnes, and our photo editor is Sandra Stevenson. |
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