11. the Rise of NAWSA and NACWC
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The right to vote was a highly contested and controversial amendment. Who should get it first? Black men or women. If women, which ones? Although female suffragist fought tooth and nail for the right other women fought just as hard against it. Ultimately black men would receive the right to vote before women did.
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Susan B. Anthony
Following the Civil War, Americans were still divided on many many socio-political topics--including universal suffrage. Women of all backgrounds played important roles on both sides of the journey to suffrage.
Post-Civil War the United States government was BUSY passing the Reconstruction Amendments. The 13th ended, or abolished, slavery in the United States. The 14th granted citizenship and the full rights of citizens to formerly enslaved people as well as women. And then the 15th gave all men in the US the right to vote.
The 15th Amendment was controversial. Many abolitionists believed everyone should get the right to vote. But when push came to shove, Congress was not ready to give Black men and all women that much power at the same time. Even previously progressive allies started to debate who should take priority. Would it be women, or Black men?
In 1866, women’s rights and anti-slavery advocates joined together to form the American Equal Rights Association. The AERA initially hoped to get women and Black people the right to vote. But male leaders in the organization feared they risked losing both battles if they kept the causes united. They decided there was less support for women’s suffrage and leaned into voting rights for Black men.
Women’s rights icon Susan B. Anthony and African-American rights icon Frederick Douglass had been friends for years, but even their relationship was tested by the 15th Amendment. Douglass made comments to the press prioritizing Black-male suffrage over women’s suffrage. Anthony responded, "I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman." Her friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton went further. In their suffrage newspaper The Revolution, Stanton described uneducated Black men who might get to vote before her racial slurs.
Post-Civil War the United States government was BUSY passing the Reconstruction Amendments. The 13th ended, or abolished, slavery in the United States. The 14th granted citizenship and the full rights of citizens to formerly enslaved people as well as women. And then the 15th gave all men in the US the right to vote.
The 15th Amendment was controversial. Many abolitionists believed everyone should get the right to vote. But when push came to shove, Congress was not ready to give Black men and all women that much power at the same time. Even previously progressive allies started to debate who should take priority. Would it be women, or Black men?
In 1866, women’s rights and anti-slavery advocates joined together to form the American Equal Rights Association. The AERA initially hoped to get women and Black people the right to vote. But male leaders in the organization feared they risked losing both battles if they kept the causes united. They decided there was less support for women’s suffrage and leaned into voting rights for Black men.
Women’s rights icon Susan B. Anthony and African-American rights icon Frederick Douglass had been friends for years, but even their relationship was tested by the 15th Amendment. Douglass made comments to the press prioritizing Black-male suffrage over women’s suffrage. Anthony responded, "I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman." Her friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton went further. In their suffrage newspaper The Revolution, Stanton described uneducated Black men who might get to vote before her racial slurs.
Lucy Stone
Everything came to a head in 1869 at the annual meeting for the AERA. Anthony and Stanton were asked to resign from the organization on the grounds that their comments were not in the spirit of “universal suffrage.” Douglass defended Stanton as a friend to Black people but also said, “I must say that I do not see how anyone can pretend that there is the same urgency and giving the ballot to woman as to the Negro… When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the cities… when they are drag from their houses and hung up on lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms, and their brains dashed out upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outraged at every turn; When they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own.”
There was great applause. An unknown voice asked, “is that not all true about black women?” Douglass replied, “yes, yes, yes; it is true of the black woman, but not because she is a woman, but because she is black.”
Susan B. Anthony was not impressed. She rebutted, “the old anti-slavery school say women must stand back and wait until the Negroes shall be recognized. But we say, if you will not give the whole loaf of suffrage to the entire people, give it to the most intelligent first. Mr. Douglass talks about the wrongs of the Negro; but with all the outrageous that he to-day suffers, he would not exchange his sex and take the place of Elizabeth Caddy Stanton.” Definitely not great that she inferred white women were smarter than Black men, but she was onto something insisting equality isn’t really equality until we’re all in it together.
Her remarks were met with great laughter. Lucy Stone of Massachusetts weighed in, “Mrs. Stanton will, of course, advocate for the presidents for her sex, and Mr. Douglass will strive for the first position for his, and both are perhaps right… We are lost if we turn away from the middle principle and argue for one class.” Translation: if we keep fighting each other, one of us won’t get the rights we wish for everyone.”
Within the year of that meeting, the 15th Amendment passed without the word “sex” making it perfectly legal to deny women the right to vote. The continuing debate about women’s suffrage certainly didn’t clarify where women of color fit within the movement--even though they had been integral to both the abolition and suffrage movements from the beginning.
There was great applause. An unknown voice asked, “is that not all true about black women?” Douglass replied, “yes, yes, yes; it is true of the black woman, but not because she is a woman, but because she is black.”
Susan B. Anthony was not impressed. She rebutted, “the old anti-slavery school say women must stand back and wait until the Negroes shall be recognized. But we say, if you will not give the whole loaf of suffrage to the entire people, give it to the most intelligent first. Mr. Douglass talks about the wrongs of the Negro; but with all the outrageous that he to-day suffers, he would not exchange his sex and take the place of Elizabeth Caddy Stanton.” Definitely not great that she inferred white women were smarter than Black men, but she was onto something insisting equality isn’t really equality until we’re all in it together.
Her remarks were met with great laughter. Lucy Stone of Massachusetts weighed in, “Mrs. Stanton will, of course, advocate for the presidents for her sex, and Mr. Douglass will strive for the first position for his, and both are perhaps right… We are lost if we turn away from the middle principle and argue for one class.” Translation: if we keep fighting each other, one of us won’t get the rights we wish for everyone.”
Within the year of that meeting, the 15th Amendment passed without the word “sex” making it perfectly legal to deny women the right to vote. The continuing debate about women’s suffrage certainly didn’t clarify where women of color fit within the movement--even though they had been integral to both the abolition and suffrage movements from the beginning.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
One notable advocate for Black women was writer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper from Pennsylvania. Drawing on personal experience, she specifically pointed out the constant plight women (of all races) were in financially. After her husband died, she was met with poverty. She warned without equal rights, any woman could be in her same situation.
Sojourner Truth, a former slave, also weighed in on the suffrage debate at a Women’s Rights Convention. She said, “There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before.”
Interestingly, newly forming western states were more open to the ideas of women’s suffrage. Wyoming became the first to grant women suffrage in 1890. The West may have been more open to women’s rights for a variety of reasons. In some areas, male politicians recognized women’s significance to settling the western frontier. In other states, granting women the right to vote could solidify conservative voting blocks. In other places, folks thought more women might be drawn into the lonely, rugged frontier territories if there were at least some rights waiting for them. Anyway, as western states considered women’s suffrage for whatever motives, the momentum was stagnant in the east.
The women’s movement split in two with Stanton and Anthony founding the National Woman Suffrage Association in New York and Douglass and Stone founding the American Woman Suffrage Association in Boston. Both groups published newspapers and advocated for women’s right to vote, but they differed in their approaches and, of course, in their support for the 15th Amendment. NWSA lobbied for a federal amendment while AWSA worked state-by-state to change voting laws.
These divided organizations forced suffragists to choose a side. South Carolina suffragists, for example, aligned themselves with AWSA. Charlotte “Lottie” Rollin and her sister Frances were free Black women born into wealth in Charleston. In 1869, Lottie made a speech on the floor of the South Carolina urging the state legislature to enfranchise women, becoming the first Black woman to do so. By the way, “enfranchise” can also mean “giving the right to vote.” In another speech, Lottie said:
Sojourner Truth, a former slave, also weighed in on the suffrage debate at a Women’s Rights Convention. She said, “There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before.”
Interestingly, newly forming western states were more open to the ideas of women’s suffrage. Wyoming became the first to grant women suffrage in 1890. The West may have been more open to women’s rights for a variety of reasons. In some areas, male politicians recognized women’s significance to settling the western frontier. In other states, granting women the right to vote could solidify conservative voting blocks. In other places, folks thought more women might be drawn into the lonely, rugged frontier territories if there were at least some rights waiting for them. Anyway, as western states considered women’s suffrage for whatever motives, the momentum was stagnant in the east.
The women’s movement split in two with Stanton and Anthony founding the National Woman Suffrage Association in New York and Douglass and Stone founding the American Woman Suffrage Association in Boston. Both groups published newspapers and advocated for women’s right to vote, but they differed in their approaches and, of course, in their support for the 15th Amendment. NWSA lobbied for a federal amendment while AWSA worked state-by-state to change voting laws.
These divided organizations forced suffragists to choose a side. South Carolina suffragists, for example, aligned themselves with AWSA. Charlotte “Lottie” Rollin and her sister Frances were free Black women born into wealth in Charleston. In 1869, Lottie made a speech on the floor of the South Carolina urging the state legislature to enfranchise women, becoming the first Black woman to do so. By the way, “enfranchise” can also mean “giving the right to vote.” In another speech, Lottie said:
Women Supporting the AWSA
“We ask suffrage not as a favor, not as a privilege, but as a right based on the grounds that we are human beings and as such entitled to all human rights.” They did not. Rollin became the sole representative from South Carolina to the AWSA, but the AWSA support did little to change the situation.
A New Hampshire husband and wife duo, Nathaniel and Armenia White, formed the States Suffrage Association and kept suffrage in the state press, successfully getting a bill through the legislature before it failed.
By the 1870’s Anthony adopted a more radical approach, shifting from a legislative focus to the courts. She registered to vote with over a dozen other women in Rochester, NY in 1872. She hoped if the government as a whole wouldn’t condemn the injustice against women, maybe a judge would. She was convicted of violating federal laws. Similarly, Missouri suffragist Virginia Minor challenged her inability to vote in court, citing language from the 14th Amendment. She lost.
In 1879, Frances Willard, head of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the largest and most powerful women's organization of the era, endorsed women’s suffrage and put the full weight of the temperance movement behind it! Willard also pushed the WCTU to support other social causes including labor and prison reform. The WCTU support eventually created challenges for the suffrage movement because the alcohol industry was a powerful opponent.
By now you can tell, the women’s suffrage movement varied in strength from region to region, city to town, and class to class. Elite, white women were among the strongest opponents to woman suffrage. They benefited from the current system in many ways and valued their gendered privileges. Why would they want to uproot it?
A New Hampshire husband and wife duo, Nathaniel and Armenia White, formed the States Suffrage Association and kept suffrage in the state press, successfully getting a bill through the legislature before it failed.
By the 1870’s Anthony adopted a more radical approach, shifting from a legislative focus to the courts. She registered to vote with over a dozen other women in Rochester, NY in 1872. She hoped if the government as a whole wouldn’t condemn the injustice against women, maybe a judge would. She was convicted of violating federal laws. Similarly, Missouri suffragist Virginia Minor challenged her inability to vote in court, citing language from the 14th Amendment. She lost.
In 1879, Frances Willard, head of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the largest and most powerful women's organization of the era, endorsed women’s suffrage and put the full weight of the temperance movement behind it! Willard also pushed the WCTU to support other social causes including labor and prison reform. The WCTU support eventually created challenges for the suffrage movement because the alcohol industry was a powerful opponent.
By now you can tell, the women’s suffrage movement varied in strength from region to region, city to town, and class to class. Elite, white women were among the strongest opponents to woman suffrage. They benefited from the current system in many ways and valued their gendered privileges. Why would they want to uproot it?
Ida Tarbell
There was also a distinct difference between northern anti-suffragists and southern anti-suffragists. While both tended to be white and wealthy, northerners were worried that the vote would corrupt and politicize women’s philanthropic and charitable work. Meanwhile southern women worried that the vote would disrupt white supremacy.
One of the most famous female opponents was a prolific writer and author of the era, Molly Elliot Seawell from Virginia. She wrote a book in opposition to suffrage titled The Woman’s Battle. In it she argued:
“It has often been pointed out that women could not, with justice, ask to legislate upon matters of war and peace, as no woman can do military duty; but this point may be extended much further. No woman can have any practical knowledge of shipping and navigation, of the work of trainmen on railways, of mining, or of many other subjects of the highest importance. Their legislation, therefore, would not probably be intelligent, and the laws they devised for the betterment of sailors, trainmen, miners, etc., might be highly objectionable to the very persons they sought to benefit… The entire execution of the law would be in the hands of men, backed up by an irresponsible electorate which could not lift a finger to apprehend or punish a criminal. And if all the dangers and difficulties of executing the law lay upon men, what right have women to make the law?” Basically, women don’t get to do a lot of stuff, so why should they have a say in all the stuff they’re not allowed to do? The logic is shaky at best, but it resonated with many women.
Some anti-suffragists argued, that the reforms proposed by suffragists would dismantle the home and erode womanhood. Political cartoons of the era depicted men doing women’s work, neglected homes, or motherless children crying because no one was there to care for them. Others depicted women selfishly pursuing their own interests at their families expense.
Ida Tarbell from Pennsylvania, the first investigative journalist who exposed the monopoly-producing policies of the Stanford Oil Company, had a pretty nuanced anti-suffragist take. She took issue with the claim that women were inferior because they could not vote. She said:
“A harmful and unsound implication in the suffrage argument has been that a woman’s position in society would improve in proportion as her activities and interests become the same as those of men. This implies of course that man’s work in society is more important… than women's. But both are essential to society.”
Tarbell herself was an accomplished woman, why should she feel oppressed just because she didn’t get to vote?
One of the most famous female opponents was a prolific writer and author of the era, Molly Elliot Seawell from Virginia. She wrote a book in opposition to suffrage titled The Woman’s Battle. In it she argued:
“It has often been pointed out that women could not, with justice, ask to legislate upon matters of war and peace, as no woman can do military duty; but this point may be extended much further. No woman can have any practical knowledge of shipping and navigation, of the work of trainmen on railways, of mining, or of many other subjects of the highest importance. Their legislation, therefore, would not probably be intelligent, and the laws they devised for the betterment of sailors, trainmen, miners, etc., might be highly objectionable to the very persons they sought to benefit… The entire execution of the law would be in the hands of men, backed up by an irresponsible electorate which could not lift a finger to apprehend or punish a criminal. And if all the dangers and difficulties of executing the law lay upon men, what right have women to make the law?” Basically, women don’t get to do a lot of stuff, so why should they have a say in all the stuff they’re not allowed to do? The logic is shaky at best, but it resonated with many women.
Some anti-suffragists argued, that the reforms proposed by suffragists would dismantle the home and erode womanhood. Political cartoons of the era depicted men doing women’s work, neglected homes, or motherless children crying because no one was there to care for them. Others depicted women selfishly pursuing their own interests at their families expense.
Ida Tarbell from Pennsylvania, the first investigative journalist who exposed the monopoly-producing policies of the Stanford Oil Company, had a pretty nuanced anti-suffragist take. She took issue with the claim that women were inferior because they could not vote. She said:
“A harmful and unsound implication in the suffrage argument has been that a woman’s position in society would improve in proportion as her activities and interests become the same as those of men. This implies of course that man’s work in society is more important… than women's. But both are essential to society.”
Tarbell herself was an accomplished woman, why should she feel oppressed just because she didn’t get to vote?
Laura Clay
Despite their opposition, NWSA and AWSA carried on. In 1887, NWSA proposed a federal amendment that actually made it to a vote! ...But 34 of the votes against women’s suffrage came from Southern States. With this humiliating defeat, both groups decided enough was enough. Anthony, Stanton, Stone, Stone’s daughter Alice Stone Blackwell, and Rachel Foster met to put the past behind them and unify their efforts. After long negotiations they decided to work solely for women’s suffrage and reorganized as the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
NAWSA was able to provide considerably more weight to state campaigns for suffrage--so state campaigns became more powerful. For example, Virginia Durant Young from South Carolina, transformed the suffrage cause in her state by publishing a weekly newspaper and quickly aligning with the merged organization. She and her allies worked tirelessly across the state bringing powerhouse speakers from within NAWSA to South Carolina to rouse support, but nonetheless, suffrage was about to hit a dry spell.
The narrow focus that NAWSA held limited their ability to view the full scope of the female experience. They did nothing to combat prominent issues like racism, lynching, alcoholism, corrupt divorce, and inheritance laws. However, because their aim was simplified, membership grew from seven thousand to two million. Yet their singular goal remained distant as southern states continued to be a massive barrier.
“If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” is not always the best strategy, but it’s the strategy NAWSA went with. Anthony and Stanton began actively recruiting prominent southern suffragists to work toward women’s suffrage. And some of these southern suffragists were pretty darn troubling. Kate Gordon of Alabama became the vice president of NAWSA and argued that white women’s suffrage would help counteract the new Black male vote. She was not alone. Laura Clay of Kentucky and Belle Kearney from Mississippi also adopted these arguments. Many southern white women were just plain uncomfortable working for suffrage alongside Black women. Meanwhile, white Southern society clung too deeply conservative gender expectations, believing that public roles for women would threaten their status as good Southern "ladies."
NAWSA was able to provide considerably more weight to state campaigns for suffrage--so state campaigns became more powerful. For example, Virginia Durant Young from South Carolina, transformed the suffrage cause in her state by publishing a weekly newspaper and quickly aligning with the merged organization. She and her allies worked tirelessly across the state bringing powerhouse speakers from within NAWSA to South Carolina to rouse support, but nonetheless, suffrage was about to hit a dry spell.
The narrow focus that NAWSA held limited their ability to view the full scope of the female experience. They did nothing to combat prominent issues like racism, lynching, alcoholism, corrupt divorce, and inheritance laws. However, because their aim was simplified, membership grew from seven thousand to two million. Yet their singular goal remained distant as southern states continued to be a massive barrier.
“If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” is not always the best strategy, but it’s the strategy NAWSA went with. Anthony and Stanton began actively recruiting prominent southern suffragists to work toward women’s suffrage. And some of these southern suffragists were pretty darn troubling. Kate Gordon of Alabama became the vice president of NAWSA and argued that white women’s suffrage would help counteract the new Black male vote. She was not alone. Laura Clay of Kentucky and Belle Kearney from Mississippi also adopted these arguments. Many southern white women were just plain uncomfortable working for suffrage alongside Black women. Meanwhile, white Southern society clung too deeply conservative gender expectations, believing that public roles for women would threaten their status as good Southern "ladies."
Colored Women's Club
In 1895, NAWSA held its annual convention in Atlanta, Georgia at the urging of Georgia’s leading suffragist, Augusta Howard. Howard believed that southern states would continue to insist southern women didn’t want suffrage until they could see more southern women rallying. Characteristically of southern suffrage, no Black women were invited to attend the event. Neither was Frederick Douglass, who used to be an annual speaker at the event. It goes without saying, this new racist NAWSA behavior was, to use the correct historical term, stupid.
Black women remained in NAWSA, but had to fight racism internally, and consistently advocated for NAWSA to support causes like anti-lynching. Thankfully, throughout the 1890s, Black women’s club’s popped up around the country to take on the issues that women’s organizations led by mostly white women wouldn’t. Ida B. Wells-Barnett from Memphis and later Chicago, rallied Black women to these clubs and boldly denounced lynching in the press. In 1896, the clubs merged to form the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs under the leadership of Mary Church Terrell from Memphis, Tennessee--one of the first Black women to earn a college degree. Their motto was “Lifting as We Climb.” Clubs often promoted the politics of respectability, encouraging Black women to be thrifty, show sexual restraint, be clean, and work hard in order to counter negative stereotypes. Terrell understood that some women simply could not solely focus on suffrage because there were too many urgent needs. She gave a passionate speech at the 1898 in DC: “Not only are coloured women with ambition and aspiration handicapped on account of their sex, but they are almost everywhere baffled and mocked because of their race.” After petitioning NAWSA for years to create a subcommittee for concerns of Black women, Terrell decided to focus her attention on the club movement.
When the first wave of women’s suffrage leaders died in the early 1900s, only four states had granted women the right to vote: Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho. Black women were increasingly battling for a place in the conversation, while indigenous and Asian women weren’t even considered citizens As herstory will prove, it would ultimately take a new generation of women from a variety of backgrounds to pass a suffrage amendment.
By the end of this era, so much remained in question. Did the split between the NWSA and AWSA cost women years of progress? Was the political maneuvering to win southern states worth it? What lasting impact would the ostracization of women of color have on the movement? Why was progress so slow to come? How many groups that refer to themselves with a mix of confusing capital letters must be formed before any political change ever happens? A billion?
Black women remained in NAWSA, but had to fight racism internally, and consistently advocated for NAWSA to support causes like anti-lynching. Thankfully, throughout the 1890s, Black women’s club’s popped up around the country to take on the issues that women’s organizations led by mostly white women wouldn’t. Ida B. Wells-Barnett from Memphis and later Chicago, rallied Black women to these clubs and boldly denounced lynching in the press. In 1896, the clubs merged to form the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs under the leadership of Mary Church Terrell from Memphis, Tennessee--one of the first Black women to earn a college degree. Their motto was “Lifting as We Climb.” Clubs often promoted the politics of respectability, encouraging Black women to be thrifty, show sexual restraint, be clean, and work hard in order to counter negative stereotypes. Terrell understood that some women simply could not solely focus on suffrage because there were too many urgent needs. She gave a passionate speech at the 1898 in DC: “Not only are coloured women with ambition and aspiration handicapped on account of their sex, but they are almost everywhere baffled and mocked because of their race.” After petitioning NAWSA for years to create a subcommittee for concerns of Black women, Terrell decided to focus her attention on the club movement.
When the first wave of women’s suffrage leaders died in the early 1900s, only four states had granted women the right to vote: Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho. Black women were increasingly battling for a place in the conversation, while indigenous and Asian women weren’t even considered citizens As herstory will prove, it would ultimately take a new generation of women from a variety of backgrounds to pass a suffrage amendment.
By the end of this era, so much remained in question. Did the split between the NWSA and AWSA cost women years of progress? Was the political maneuvering to win southern states worth it? What lasting impact would the ostracization of women of color have on the movement? Why was progress so slow to come? How many groups that refer to themselves with a mix of confusing capital letters must be formed before any political change ever happens? A billion?
Draw your own conclusions
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Learn how to teach with inquiry.
Many of these lesson plans were sponsored in part by the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Eastern Region Program, coordinated by Waynesburg University, the History and Social Studies Education Faculty at Plymouth State University, and the Patrons of the Remedial Herstory Project. |
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Library of Congress
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Did Black men need the vote more than women?
Following the 13th and 14th Amendments, conversation shifted to voting rights and the American Equal Rights Association emerged to push for Universal Suffrage, but it quickly became clear not everyone would get the vote at the same time-- and Black men would be first. 
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Library of Congress
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Were white suffragists racist?
In the last few decades increasing numbers of historians have begun to question the legacy of the women suffrage movement. What is it a women’s movement? Or a white women’s movement? In this inquiry students examine two articles written for the suffrage centennial celebration. Students will pull specific evidence from each and form their own conclusion. There is also a second inquiry using mostly primary sources and arguing the same question.
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Was Seneca Falls the start of the women's rights movement?
In this inquiry students explore the "myth of Seneca Falls," coined by Lisa Tetrault. Was this really the beginning? Should the organizers, who did not include any women of color be heroified? Let's dig in.
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Lesson Plans from Other Organizations
- The National Women's History Museum has lesson plans on women's history.
- The Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History has lesson plans on women's history.
- The NY Historical Society has articles and classroom activities for teaching women's history.
- Unladylike 2020, in partnership with PBS, has primary sources to explore with students and outstanding videos on women from the Progressive era.
- The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media has produced recommendations for teaching women's history with primary sources and provided a collection of sources for world history. Check them out!
- The Stanford History Education Group has a number of lesson plans about women in World History.
Period Specific Lesson Plans from Other Organizations
- Anti-Suffrage:
- Stanford History Education Group: The 19th Amendment was passed seventy-two years after the Seneca Falls Convention. This fact demonstrates the strong opposition that women’s suffrage faced. In this lesson, students study a speech and anti-suffrage literature to explore the reasons why so many Americans, including many women, opposed women's suffrage.
- Black Women Advocates:
- Teaching Tolerance: In this lesson of the series, “Beyond Rosa Parks: Powerful Voices for Civil Rights and Social Justice,” students will read and analyze text from “The Progress of Colored Women,” a speech made by Mary Church Terrell in 1898. Terrell was the first president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), an organization that was formed in 1896 from the merger of several smaller women’s clubs, and was active during the period of Jim Crow segregation in the South.
- National History Day: Sojourner Truth (Isabella Van Wagenen) (1797-1883) was born into slavery in New York. Truth escaped slavery in 1826 and moved to New York City until 1843 when she adopted the name “Sojourner Truth” in anticipation of her new career: traveling to preach what she saw as God’s truth about women’s status and about slavery. Although illiterate and uneducated, Truth was a skilled public speaker and best known for her impromptu speeches delivered on the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, and other social issues of the day. Resourceful and devoted to her cause, Truth supported herself through sales of her dictated 1850 biography, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, A Northern Slave, as well as portraits of herself known as cartes-de-visite, which resemble modern baseball cards. Just one year after her biography was published, Truth delivered her most well-known speech, “Ain’t I A Woman,” to a Women’s Rights Convention in Ohio, arguing against the injustice of the overlooked subordinate status of women in American life. During the Civil War, Truth collected food and supplies for U.S. Colored Troop Regiments and continued to fight for racial equality during Reconstruction when she fought for freedmen’s rights. During this time, she never stopped advocating for women’s equality.
- White Women Advocates:
- Voices of Democracy: Anthony’s speech helps students understand the Constitution as a living document. She uses a variety of techniques of legal reasoning and interpretation to challenge other, exclusionary uses of the document. She bases an argument for change on an interpretation of a founding document. Reconstruction is a challenging era for students to understand. Anthony’s speech captures the complexities of the Reconstruction Amendments and how they opened new avenues for disenfranchised groups to assert their rights. It also explores the interrelationship of the women’s suffragists with other movements. Anthony highlights the cultural, social, and political aspects of women’s struggle for equal rights. The speech does not simply assert women’s right to vote, but also more broadly addresses the subordinate position of women within the home and in other areas of public policy.
- Edcitement: Every time our society benefits from its recognition of the equality of women, thank the Foremothers of the Women's Movement, pioneers such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Stanton understood the difficulties women faced, clarifying the extent and vehemence of the opposition to equality in her Declaration of Sentiments. She detailed, in a series of grievances, the "absolute tyranny" society held over women. The "injuries and usurpations" she described were enabled, in part, by widely accepted stereotypes and beliefs about gender reflected in and perpetuated by everything from children's stories to magazine humor. Analyzing archival materials contemporaneous with the birth of the Women's Rights Movement, your students can begin to appreciate the deeply entrenched opposition the early crusaders had to overcome.
- Suffrage in Western States:
- Gilder Lehrman: Diverse women lived in the American West and participated in the making of its history. Diaries, letters, and oral histories tell us that these women—Native American, Hispanic, black, Asian, and white—experienced life on the frontier differently as they sought to use the land and its resources. Because women struggled to live on the frontier within the constraints of their own cultures, each group offers a different perspective on our study of the region. As a result, a history that includes the lives of different women in the West gives us not only a clearer understanding of the region but also gives the story of the West the depth that it deserves. We are going to look at two groups of women—Native Americans and white women—to understand the lives and experiences of these women as well as what happens when one group has power over the other. Using the classroom as an historical laboratory, students can use primary sources to research, read, evaluate, and interpret the words of Native American and white women.
- Edcitement: Why the west first? The 19th Amendment, granting suffrage to women, was ratified by Congress in 1920. It was over fifty years previously, however, that Wyoming had entered the Union as the first state to grant some women full voting rights. The next eight states to grant full suffrage to women were also Western states: Colorado (1893); Utah and Idaho (1896); Washington (1910); California (1911); and Oregon, Kansas, and Arizona (1912). Why was the West first? Focused on efforts in support of women's suffrage in Western states, this lesson can be used either as a stand-alone unit or as a more specialized sequel to the EDSITEment lesson, Voting Rights for Women: Pro- and Anti-Suffrage, which covers the suffrage movement in general. The latter lesson also contains activities and resources for learning how the movement to gain the vote for women fits into the larger struggle for women's rights in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
frederick douglass: on women's suffrage
Douglass was one of the few men and the only Black person present at the Seneca Falls Convention. He was a founding member of the Equal Rights Association and he gave this speech in 1888 reflecting on his experience.
Mrs. President, Ladies and Gentlemen:— I come to this platform with unusual diffidence. Although I have long been identified with the Woman’s Suffrage movement, and have often spoken in its favor, I am somewhat at a loss to know what to say on this really great and uncommon occasion, where so much has been said. When I look around on this assembly, and see the many able and eloquent women, full of the subject, ready to speak, and who only need the opportunity to impress this audience with their views… I do not feel like taking up more than a very small space of your time and attention, and shall not. I would not, even now, presume to speak, but for the circumstance of my early connection with the cause, and of having been called upon to do so… Men have very little business here as speakers, anyhow; and if they come here at all they should take back benches and wrap themselves in silence. For this is an International Council, not of men, but of women, and woman should have all the say in it. This is her day in court… …When I ran away form slavery, it was for myself; when I advocated emancipation, it was for my people; but when I stood up for the rights of woman, self was out of the question, and I found a little nobility in the act. …Man has been so long the king and woman the subject—man has been so long accustomed to command and woman to obey… thus has been piled up a mountain of iron against woman’s enfranchisement. The same thing confronted us in our conflicts with slavery… But neither the power of time nor the might of legislation has been able to keep life in that stupendous barbarism.
Frederick Douglass, Woman’s Journal, April 14, 1888.
Questions;
1. Why is Douglass an appropriate speaker at Seneca Falls and future Women’s Rights Conventions?
2. Why does Douglass think it is wrong that he is speaking at this event?
3. Does he think women’s rights and slavery are the same? How so?
Mrs. President, Ladies and Gentlemen:— I come to this platform with unusual diffidence. Although I have long been identified with the Woman’s Suffrage movement, and have often spoken in its favor, I am somewhat at a loss to know what to say on this really great and uncommon occasion, where so much has been said. When I look around on this assembly, and see the many able and eloquent women, full of the subject, ready to speak, and who only need the opportunity to impress this audience with their views… I do not feel like taking up more than a very small space of your time and attention, and shall not. I would not, even now, presume to speak, but for the circumstance of my early connection with the cause, and of having been called upon to do so… Men have very little business here as speakers, anyhow; and if they come here at all they should take back benches and wrap themselves in silence. For this is an International Council, not of men, but of women, and woman should have all the say in it. This is her day in court… …When I ran away form slavery, it was for myself; when I advocated emancipation, it was for my people; but when I stood up for the rights of woman, self was out of the question, and I found a little nobility in the act. …Man has been so long the king and woman the subject—man has been so long accustomed to command and woman to obey… thus has been piled up a mountain of iron against woman’s enfranchisement. The same thing confronted us in our conflicts with slavery… But neither the power of time nor the might of legislation has been able to keep life in that stupendous barbarism.
Frederick Douglass, Woman’s Journal, April 14, 1888.
Questions;
1. Why is Douglass an appropriate speaker at Seneca Falls and future Women’s Rights Conventions?
2. Why does Douglass think it is wrong that he is speaking at this event?
3. Does he think women’s rights and slavery are the same? How so?
susan b. anthony: revolution
In 1869 Anthony defended her position in favor of woman suffrage in her suffrage newspaper The Revolution.
The Revolution criticizes, ‘opposes’ the fifteenth amendment, not for what it is, but for what it is not. Not because it enfranchises black men, but because it does not enfranchise all women, black and white. It is not the little good it proposes, but the greater evil it perpetuates that we deprecate. It is not that in the abstract we do not rejoice that black men are to become equals of white men, but that we deplore the fact that two million (sic) black women, hitherto the political and social equals of the men by their side, are to become subjects, slaves of these men. Our protest is not that all men are lifted out of the degradation of disfranchisement, but that all women are left in. The Revolution and the National Women’s Suffrage Association make women’s suffrage their test of loyalty, not Negro suffrage, not Maine law or prohibition. Do you believe women should vote? Is the one and only question in our catechism.
Anthony, Susan B. The Revolution. October 7, 1869. Retrieved from Susan B. Anthony Birthplace Museum. http://www.susanbanthonybirthplace.com/racism.html.
Questions:
1. Who is Susan B. Anthony?
2. Put her argument into your own words.
3. Do you interpret Anthony’s comment to be elitist, anti-gradual enfranchisement, or racist? Why?
The Revolution criticizes, ‘opposes’ the fifteenth amendment, not for what it is, but for what it is not. Not because it enfranchises black men, but because it does not enfranchise all women, black and white. It is not the little good it proposes, but the greater evil it perpetuates that we deprecate. It is not that in the abstract we do not rejoice that black men are to become equals of white men, but that we deplore the fact that two million (sic) black women, hitherto the political and social equals of the men by their side, are to become subjects, slaves of these men. Our protest is not that all men are lifted out of the degradation of disfranchisement, but that all women are left in. The Revolution and the National Women’s Suffrage Association make women’s suffrage their test of loyalty, not Negro suffrage, not Maine law or prohibition. Do you believe women should vote? Is the one and only question in our catechism.
Anthony, Susan B. The Revolution. October 7, 1869. Retrieved from Susan B. Anthony Birthplace Museum. http://www.susanbanthonybirthplace.com/racism.html.
Questions:
1. Who is Susan B. Anthony?
2. Put her argument into your own words.
3. Do you interpret Anthony’s comment to be elitist, anti-gradual enfranchisement, or racist? Why?
sojourner truth: address to the First Annual Meeting of the American Equal Rights Association
Sojourner Truth escaped slavery and lived in Michigan. She changed her name to Sojourner Truth as a symbol of her freedom, Sojourner meaning a person who wanders. She became a powerful and outspoken voice for universal rights and suffrage. She delivered this speech at an Equal Rights Association convention in New York in 1867.
My friends, I am rejoiced that you are glad, but I don't know how you will feel when I get through. I come from another field- the country of the slave. They have got their liberty- so much good luck to have slavery partly destroyed; not entirely. I want it root and branch destroyed. Then we will all be free indeed. I feel that if I have to answer for the deeds done in my body just as much as man, I have a right to have as much as a man. There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before. So I am for keeping the thing going while things are stirring; because if we wait till it is still, it will take a great while to get it going again. White women are a great deal smarter, and know more than colored women, while colored women do not know scarcely anything. They go out washing, which is about as high as a colored woman gets, and their men go about idle, strutting up and down; and when the women come home, they ask for their money and take it all, and then scold you because there is no food. I want you to consider on that chil'n. I call you chil'n; you are somebody's chil'n, and I am old enough to be mother of all that is here. I want women to have their rights. In the courts women have no right, no voice; nobody speaks for them. I wish woman to have her voice there among the pettifoggers. If it is not a fit place for women, it us unfit for men to be there. …I used to work in the field and bind grain, keeping up with the cradler, but men doing no more, got twice as much pay... You have been having our rights so long, that you think, like a slave-holder, that you own us… There ought to be equal rights now more than ever, since colored people have got their freedom.
Questions:
1. Why would Truth be an appropriate speaker at an ERA convention and future Women’s Rights Conventions?
2. Does she think women’s rights and slavery are the same? How so?
3. How is Truth’s message different than Douglass, or are they the same?
My friends, I am rejoiced that you are glad, but I don't know how you will feel when I get through. I come from another field- the country of the slave. They have got their liberty- so much good luck to have slavery partly destroyed; not entirely. I want it root and branch destroyed. Then we will all be free indeed. I feel that if I have to answer for the deeds done in my body just as much as man, I have a right to have as much as a man. There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before. So I am for keeping the thing going while things are stirring; because if we wait till it is still, it will take a great while to get it going again. White women are a great deal smarter, and know more than colored women, while colored women do not know scarcely anything. They go out washing, which is about as high as a colored woman gets, and their men go about idle, strutting up and down; and when the women come home, they ask for their money and take it all, and then scold you because there is no food. I want you to consider on that chil'n. I call you chil'n; you are somebody's chil'n, and I am old enough to be mother of all that is here. I want women to have their rights. In the courts women have no right, no voice; nobody speaks for them. I wish woman to have her voice there among the pettifoggers. If it is not a fit place for women, it us unfit for men to be there. …I used to work in the field and bind grain, keeping up with the cradler, but men doing no more, got twice as much pay... You have been having our rights so long, that you think, like a slave-holder, that you own us… There ought to be equal rights now more than ever, since colored people have got their freedom.
- Truth, Sojourner. “Address to the First Annual Meeting of the American Equal Rights Association.” New York City, May 9, 1867. Retrieved from Society for the Study of American Women Writers. Harriet Jacobs, Ed. https://www.lehigh.edu/~dek7/SSAWW/writTruthAddress.htm.
Questions:
1. Why would Truth be an appropriate speaker at an ERA convention and future Women’s Rights Conventions?
2. Does she think women’s rights and slavery are the same? How so?
3. How is Truth’s message different than Douglass, or are they the same?
elizabeth cady-stanton: manhood suffrage
During the debates over the 15th Amendment, Stanton published these comments in the suffrage newspaper The Revolution. Some historians have argued that she was attempting to use male logic against them.
“Think of Patrick and Sambo [derogatory, meaning mixed-race] and Hans and Yung Tung who do not know the difference between a Monarchy and a Republic, who never read the Declaration of Independence or Webster’s spelling book, making laws for Lydia Maria Child, Lucretia Mott or Fanny Kemble. Think of jurors drawn from these ranks to try young girls for the crime of infanticide.”
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. “Manhood Suffrage.” The Revolution. Retrieved from Susan B. Anthony Birthplace Museum. http://www.susanbanthonybirthplace.com/racism.html.
Questions:
1. Do you interpret Stanton’s comment to be elitist, anti-gradual enfranchisement, or racist? Why?
“Think of Patrick and Sambo [derogatory, meaning mixed-race] and Hans and Yung Tung who do not know the difference between a Monarchy and a Republic, who never read the Declaration of Independence or Webster’s spelling book, making laws for Lydia Maria Child, Lucretia Mott or Fanny Kemble. Think of jurors drawn from these ranks to try young girls for the crime of infanticide.”
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. “Manhood Suffrage.” The Revolution. Retrieved from Susan B. Anthony Birthplace Museum. http://www.susanbanthonybirthplace.com/racism.html.
Questions:
1. Do you interpret Stanton’s comment to be elitist, anti-gradual enfranchisement, or racist? Why?
multiple: Minutes from the American Equal Rights Association Convention, 1869
Tensions were high in 1869 as debates over the 15th Amendment raged. Women felt abandoned in the quest for Universal Suffrage. The following are minutes from a debate in the ERA convention.
Mr. Foster: – …I admire our talented president with all my heart, and love the woman. (Great laughter.) but I believe she has publicly repudiated the principles of the society.
Mrs. Stanton: – I would like Mr. Foster to say in what way.
Mr. Foster: – what are these principles? The equality of men – universal suffrage. These ladies stand at the head of a paper which has adopted its motto educated suffrage. I put myself on this platform as an enemy of educated suffrage, as an enemy of white suffrage, as an enemy of man suffrage, as an enemy of any kind of suffrage except universal suffrage. The Revolution lately had an article headed “That Infamous 15th Amendment.“… The Massachusetts Abolitionists cannot cooperate with the society as it is now organized. If you choose to put officers here that ridicule the Negro, and pronounce the amendment infamous, why… I cannot work with you…
Henry B. Blackwell said:- In regard to the criticisms of our officers, I will agree that many unwise things have been written in The Revolution by a gentleman who furnished part of the means by which that paper has been carried on. But that gentleman has withdrawn and you, who know the real opinions of Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton on the questions of Negro Suffrage, do not believe that they mean to create antagonism between the Negro and the woman question. If they did disbelieve in Negro suffrage, it would be no reason for excluding them… But I know that Miss. Anthony and Mrs. Stanton believe in the right of the Negro to vote…
Mr. Douglass: – I came here more as a listener than to speak, and I have listened with a great deal of pleasure to the eloquent address... there is no name greater than that of Elizabeth Caddy Stanton in the matter of women’s rights and equal rights, but my sentiments are tinged a little against The Revolution. There was in the address to which I allude the employment of certain names such as “Sambo,“[derogatory, meaning mixed-race] and the gardener, and the boot black, and the daughters of Jefferson and Washington, and all the rest that I cannot coincide with. I have asked what difference there is between the daughters of Jefferson and Washington and other daughters. (Laughter.) I must say that I do not see how anyone can pretend that there is the same urgency and giving the ballot to woman as to the Negro. With us, the matter is a question of life and death, at least, and 15 states of the union. When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans; when they are drag from their houses and hung up on lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms, and their brains dashed out upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outraged at every turn; When they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own. (Great applause.)
A VOICE:-is that not all true about black women?
Mr. Douglass: – yes, yes, yes; it is true of the black woman, but not because she is a woman, but because she is black. (Applause.) Julia Ward Howe at the conclusion of her great speech delivered at the convention in Boston last year, said: “I am willing that the Negro shall get the ballot before me.“ (Applause.) Woman! Why, she has 10,000 modes of grappling with her difficulties. I believe that all the virtue of the world can take care of all the evil. I believe that all the intelligence can take care of all the ignorance. (Applause.) I am in favor of women’s suffrage in order that we shall have all the virtue and vice confronted. Let me tell you that when there were a few houses in which the black man could have put his head, this woolly head of mine found a refuge in the house of Miss Elizabeth Caddy Stanton, and if I had been blacker than 16 midnights, without a single star, it would have been the same. (Applause.)
Miss Anthony: – the old anti-slavery school says women must stand back and wait until the Negroes shall be recognized. But we say, if you will not give the whole loaf of suffrage to the entire people, give it to the most intelligent first. (Applause.) if intelligence, justice, and morality are to have precedence in the Government, let the question of woman be brought up first and that of the Negro last. (Applause.) while I was canvassing the state with petitions and had them filled with names for our cause to the legislature, a man dared to say to me that the freedom of women was all a theory and not a practical thing. (Applause.) when Mr. Douglass mentioned the black man first and the woman last, if he had noticed he would have seen that it was the men that clapped and not the women. There is not the woman born who desires to eat the bread of dependence no matter whether it be from the hand of the father, husband, or brother; for anyone who does so eat her bread places herself in the power of the person from whom she takes it. (Applause.) Mr. Douglass talks about the wrongs of the Negro; but with all the outrageous that he to-day suffers, he would not exchange his sex and take the place of Elizabeth Caddy Stanton. (Laughter and applause.)
Mr. Douglass: – I want to know if granting you the right of suffrage will change the nature of our sexes? (Great laughter.)
Miss Anthony: – it will change the pecuniary position of a woman; it will place her where she can earn her own bread. (Loud applause.) She will not then be driven to such employment only as man chooses for her.
Mrs. Norton said that Mr. Douglass’ remarks left her to defend the government from the inferred inability to grapple with the two questions at once. It legislate upon many questions at one and at the same time, it has the power to decide the woman question and the Negro question at one and the same time. (Applause.)
Mrs. Lucy Stone: – Mrs. Stanton will, of course, advocate for the presidents for her sex, and Mr. Douglass will strive for the first position for his, and both are perhaps right. If it be true that the government derives its authority from the constant of the governed, we are safe in trusting that principle to the other most. If one has a right to say that you can not read and therefore cannot vote, then it may be said that you are a woman and therefore cannot vote. We are lost if we turn away from the middle principle and argue for one class. I was once a teacher among fugitive slaves. There was one old man, and every tooth was gone, his hair was white, and his face was full of wrinkles, yet, day after day and hour after hour, he came up to the school house and tried with patients to learn to read, and byand-by, when he had spelled out the first few verses of the first chapter of the gospel of St. John, he said to me, “now, I want to learn to write.“ I tried to make him satisfied with what he had acquired, but the old man said, “Mrs. Stone, somewhere in the wide world I have A son; I have not heard from him in 20 years; if I should hear from him, I want to write to him, so to take hold of my hand and teach me.“ I did, but before he had preceded in many lessons the angels came and gathered him up and bore him to his Father. Let no man speak of an educated Suffrage. The gentleman who addressed you claimed that the Negroes had the first right to the suffrage, and drew a picture which only his great word Dash power can do. He again in Massachusetts, when it had cast a majority in favor of Grant and Negro Suffrage, stood up on the platform and said that women had better wait for the Negro; that is, that both could not be carried, and that the Negro had better be the one. But I freely for gave him because he felt as he spoke. But woman suffrage is more imperative than his own; and I want to remind the audience that when he says what the Ku Klux‘s is dead all over the south, the Ku Klux Klan is here and the north in the shape of men, take away the children from the mother, and separate them as completely as if done on the block of the auctioneer. Over in New Jersey they have a law which says that any father – he might be the most brutal man that ever existed – any father, it says, whether he be under the age or not, maybe by his last, will and testament dispose of the custody of his child, born or to be born, and that such a disposition shall be good against all persons, and that the mother may not recover her child; and that law modified inform exists over every state in the union except in Kansas. Woman has an ocean of wrongs too deep for any plummet, and the Negro, too, has an ocean of wrongs that cannot be fathomed. There are two great oceans; in the one is the black man, and the other is the woman. But I think God for that XV. Amendment, and hope that it will be adopted in every state. I will be thankful in my soul if anybody can get out of the terrible pit. But I believe that the safety of the government would be more promoted by the admission of woman as an element of restoration in harmony than the Negro. I believe that the influence of woman will save the country before every other power. (Applause.) I see the signs of the times pointing to this consummation, and I believe that in some parts of the country women will vote for the President of the United States in 1872. (Applause.)
Buhle, Mari Jo and Paul Buhle. “The Concise History of Woman Suffrage.” Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2005.
Questions:
1. Are minutes from a meeting a reliable primary source?
2. For what reason does Stephen Foster want Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to resign the American Equal Rights Association?
3. For what reason does Douglass take offense to The Revolution?
4. Why does Douglass argue Black men need the vote first?
5. Why does Anthony argue educated women need the vote first?
6. Why does Douglass believe Stanton is NOT racist?
7. Mrs. Norton and Lucy Stone make alternative arguments, describe them in your own words.
8. Look back through the document. At what did audience members laugh? Why?
9. Can laughter be a sign of a bit of tongue-in-cheek? Or do you think prejudice is on display here?
Mr. Foster: – …I admire our talented president with all my heart, and love the woman. (Great laughter.) but I believe she has publicly repudiated the principles of the society.
Mrs. Stanton: – I would like Mr. Foster to say in what way.
Mr. Foster: – what are these principles? The equality of men – universal suffrage. These ladies stand at the head of a paper which has adopted its motto educated suffrage. I put myself on this platform as an enemy of educated suffrage, as an enemy of white suffrage, as an enemy of man suffrage, as an enemy of any kind of suffrage except universal suffrage. The Revolution lately had an article headed “That Infamous 15th Amendment.“… The Massachusetts Abolitionists cannot cooperate with the society as it is now organized. If you choose to put officers here that ridicule the Negro, and pronounce the amendment infamous, why… I cannot work with you…
Henry B. Blackwell said:- In regard to the criticisms of our officers, I will agree that many unwise things have been written in The Revolution by a gentleman who furnished part of the means by which that paper has been carried on. But that gentleman has withdrawn and you, who know the real opinions of Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton on the questions of Negro Suffrage, do not believe that they mean to create antagonism between the Negro and the woman question. If they did disbelieve in Negro suffrage, it would be no reason for excluding them… But I know that Miss. Anthony and Mrs. Stanton believe in the right of the Negro to vote…
Mr. Douglass: – I came here more as a listener than to speak, and I have listened with a great deal of pleasure to the eloquent address... there is no name greater than that of Elizabeth Caddy Stanton in the matter of women’s rights and equal rights, but my sentiments are tinged a little against The Revolution. There was in the address to which I allude the employment of certain names such as “Sambo,“[derogatory, meaning mixed-race] and the gardener, and the boot black, and the daughters of Jefferson and Washington, and all the rest that I cannot coincide with. I have asked what difference there is between the daughters of Jefferson and Washington and other daughters. (Laughter.) I must say that I do not see how anyone can pretend that there is the same urgency and giving the ballot to woman as to the Negro. With us, the matter is a question of life and death, at least, and 15 states of the union. When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans; when they are drag from their houses and hung up on lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms, and their brains dashed out upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outraged at every turn; When they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own. (Great applause.)
A VOICE:-is that not all true about black women?
Mr. Douglass: – yes, yes, yes; it is true of the black woman, but not because she is a woman, but because she is black. (Applause.) Julia Ward Howe at the conclusion of her great speech delivered at the convention in Boston last year, said: “I am willing that the Negro shall get the ballot before me.“ (Applause.) Woman! Why, she has 10,000 modes of grappling with her difficulties. I believe that all the virtue of the world can take care of all the evil. I believe that all the intelligence can take care of all the ignorance. (Applause.) I am in favor of women’s suffrage in order that we shall have all the virtue and vice confronted. Let me tell you that when there were a few houses in which the black man could have put his head, this woolly head of mine found a refuge in the house of Miss Elizabeth Caddy Stanton, and if I had been blacker than 16 midnights, without a single star, it would have been the same. (Applause.)
Miss Anthony: – the old anti-slavery school says women must stand back and wait until the Negroes shall be recognized. But we say, if you will not give the whole loaf of suffrage to the entire people, give it to the most intelligent first. (Applause.) if intelligence, justice, and morality are to have precedence in the Government, let the question of woman be brought up first and that of the Negro last. (Applause.) while I was canvassing the state with petitions and had them filled with names for our cause to the legislature, a man dared to say to me that the freedom of women was all a theory and not a practical thing. (Applause.) when Mr. Douglass mentioned the black man first and the woman last, if he had noticed he would have seen that it was the men that clapped and not the women. There is not the woman born who desires to eat the bread of dependence no matter whether it be from the hand of the father, husband, or brother; for anyone who does so eat her bread places herself in the power of the person from whom she takes it. (Applause.) Mr. Douglass talks about the wrongs of the Negro; but with all the outrageous that he to-day suffers, he would not exchange his sex and take the place of Elizabeth Caddy Stanton. (Laughter and applause.)
Mr. Douglass: – I want to know if granting you the right of suffrage will change the nature of our sexes? (Great laughter.)
Miss Anthony: – it will change the pecuniary position of a woman; it will place her where she can earn her own bread. (Loud applause.) She will not then be driven to such employment only as man chooses for her.
Mrs. Norton said that Mr. Douglass’ remarks left her to defend the government from the inferred inability to grapple with the two questions at once. It legislate upon many questions at one and at the same time, it has the power to decide the woman question and the Negro question at one and the same time. (Applause.)
Mrs. Lucy Stone: – Mrs. Stanton will, of course, advocate for the presidents for her sex, and Mr. Douglass will strive for the first position for his, and both are perhaps right. If it be true that the government derives its authority from the constant of the governed, we are safe in trusting that principle to the other most. If one has a right to say that you can not read and therefore cannot vote, then it may be said that you are a woman and therefore cannot vote. We are lost if we turn away from the middle principle and argue for one class. I was once a teacher among fugitive slaves. There was one old man, and every tooth was gone, his hair was white, and his face was full of wrinkles, yet, day after day and hour after hour, he came up to the school house and tried with patients to learn to read, and byand-by, when he had spelled out the first few verses of the first chapter of the gospel of St. John, he said to me, “now, I want to learn to write.“ I tried to make him satisfied with what he had acquired, but the old man said, “Mrs. Stone, somewhere in the wide world I have A son; I have not heard from him in 20 years; if I should hear from him, I want to write to him, so to take hold of my hand and teach me.“ I did, but before he had preceded in many lessons the angels came and gathered him up and bore him to his Father. Let no man speak of an educated Suffrage. The gentleman who addressed you claimed that the Negroes had the first right to the suffrage, and drew a picture which only his great word Dash power can do. He again in Massachusetts, when it had cast a majority in favor of Grant and Negro Suffrage, stood up on the platform and said that women had better wait for the Negro; that is, that both could not be carried, and that the Negro had better be the one. But I freely for gave him because he felt as he spoke. But woman suffrage is more imperative than his own; and I want to remind the audience that when he says what the Ku Klux‘s is dead all over the south, the Ku Klux Klan is here and the north in the shape of men, take away the children from the mother, and separate them as completely as if done on the block of the auctioneer. Over in New Jersey they have a law which says that any father – he might be the most brutal man that ever existed – any father, it says, whether he be under the age or not, maybe by his last, will and testament dispose of the custody of his child, born or to be born, and that such a disposition shall be good against all persons, and that the mother may not recover her child; and that law modified inform exists over every state in the union except in Kansas. Woman has an ocean of wrongs too deep for any plummet, and the Negro, too, has an ocean of wrongs that cannot be fathomed. There are two great oceans; in the one is the black man, and the other is the woman. But I think God for that XV. Amendment, and hope that it will be adopted in every state. I will be thankful in my soul if anybody can get out of the terrible pit. But I believe that the safety of the government would be more promoted by the admission of woman as an element of restoration in harmony than the Negro. I believe that the influence of woman will save the country before every other power. (Applause.) I see the signs of the times pointing to this consummation, and I believe that in some parts of the country women will vote for the President of the United States in 1872. (Applause.)
Buhle, Mari Jo and Paul Buhle. “The Concise History of Woman Suffrage.” Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2005.
Questions:
1. Are minutes from a meeting a reliable primary source?
2. For what reason does Stephen Foster want Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to resign the American Equal Rights Association?
3. For what reason does Douglass take offense to The Revolution?
4. Why does Douglass argue Black men need the vote first?
5. Why does Anthony argue educated women need the vote first?
6. Why does Douglass believe Stanton is NOT racist?
7. Mrs. Norton and Lucy Stone make alternative arguments, describe them in your own words.
8. Look back through the document. At what did audience members laugh? Why?
9. Can laughter be a sign of a bit of tongue-in-cheek? Or do you think prejudice is on display here?
Sojourner truth: ain't i a woman?
Truth was an escaped slave and consistent women’s rights advocate. She gave voice to the feelings of many Black women that they were abandoned by both Black and women’s groups— when the issues each addressed both had adverse effects on her.
”Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that 'twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what's all this here talking about? That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman? Then they talk about this thing in the head; what's this they call it? [member of audience whispers, "intellect"] That's it, honey. What's that got to do with women's rights or negroes' rights? If my cup won't hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn't you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full? Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him. If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back , and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.
Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain't got nothing more to say Truth, Sojourner.
"Ain't I a Woman?” Women's Convention, Akron, Ohio. December, 1851. Retrieved from https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/sojtruthwoman.asp.
Questions:
”Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that 'twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what's all this here talking about? That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman? Then they talk about this thing in the head; what's this they call it? [member of audience whispers, "intellect"] That's it, honey. What's that got to do with women's rights or negroes' rights? If my cup won't hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn't you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full? Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him. If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back , and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.
Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain't got nothing more to say Truth, Sojourner.
"Ain't I a Woman?” Women's Convention, Akron, Ohio. December, 1851. Retrieved from https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/sojtruthwoman.asp.
Questions:
- Summarize what Sojourner is saying.
- What is the signficance behind her message?
susan b. anthony: the revolution
Anthony was a founding member of NWSA and of NAWSA. She was furious at the possibility that all men would get the vote and not also all women, a concept called universal suffrage. She stated she would cut off her arm before working for Negro rights before women’s rights. In 1869, Anthony defended her position in favor of woman suffrage in her suffrage newspaper The Revolution.
The Revolution criticizes, ‘opposes’ the fifteenth amendment, not for what it is, but for what it is not. Not because it enfranchises black men, but because it does not enfranchise all women, black and white. It is not the little good it proposes, but the greater evil it perpetuates that we deprecate. It is not that in the abstract we do not rejoice that black men are to become equals of white men, but that we deplore the fact that two million (sic) black women, hitherto the political and social equals of the men by their side, are to become subjects, slaves of these men. Our protest is not that all men are lifted out of the degradation of disfranchisement, but that all women are left in. The Revolution and the National Women’s Suffrage Association make women’s suffrage their test of loyalty, not Negro suffrage, not Maine law or prohibition. Do you believe women should vote? Is the one and only question in our catechism.
Anthony, Susan B. The Revolution. October 7, 1869. Retrieved from Susan B. Anthony Birthplace Museum. http://www.susanbanthonybirthplace.com/racism.html.
Questions:
The Revolution criticizes, ‘opposes’ the fifteenth amendment, not for what it is, but for what it is not. Not because it enfranchises black men, but because it does not enfranchise all women, black and white. It is not the little good it proposes, but the greater evil it perpetuates that we deprecate. It is not that in the abstract we do not rejoice that black men are to become equals of white men, but that we deplore the fact that two million (sic) black women, hitherto the political and social equals of the men by their side, are to become subjects, slaves of these men. Our protest is not that all men are lifted out of the degradation of disfranchisement, but that all women are left in. The Revolution and the National Women’s Suffrage Association make women’s suffrage their test of loyalty, not Negro suffrage, not Maine law or prohibition. Do you believe women should vote? Is the one and only question in our catechism.
Anthony, Susan B. The Revolution. October 7, 1869. Retrieved from Susan B. Anthony Birthplace Museum. http://www.susanbanthonybirthplace.com/racism.html.
Questions:
- What is her message?
- How does she write about race?
- Based on this text alone, does she support voting rights for all races?
Susan B. Anthony: leeter to Booker T. Washington
This letter was written by Anthony to Booker T. Washington, the founder of the Tuskeegee Institute, who, along with his wife, Margaret Murray, educated free men and women in industrial work, among other initiatives. Anthony was a founding member of NWSA and of NAWSA. N.Y. [City]
Jan. 23, 1900
My Dear Friend: I received yours of the 16th. Certainly whenever I go to Atlanta again, it is my intention to visit Tuskegee. I am, however, hoping that my time of going will be postponed to next Autumn, when the legislatures of several of the Southern States will be in session. I think then would be a much better time for us to be in the South, and to speak perchance before every one of the legislatures, and thus send at least a representative from every district in the state, home to his constituents with a little idea of what this woman's rights movement means. It is one of my dreams to visit Tuskegee, and to see you and Mrs. Washington and Mrs. [Adella Hunt] Logan, and all of the good men and women engaged in the splendid work of that institute. Wishing you the best of success, I am, Very sincerely yours, Susan B. Anthony
Anthony, Susan B. “Letter from Susan Brownell Anthony to Booker T. Washington.” New York City. January, 23 1900. The Booker T. Washington Papers, Library of Congress. Published in Louis R. Harlan and Raymond W. Smock, eds., The Booker T. Washington Papers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976, 5:419. Retrieved from http://www.nzdl.org
Questions:
Jan. 23, 1900
My Dear Friend: I received yours of the 16th. Certainly whenever I go to Atlanta again, it is my intention to visit Tuskegee. I am, however, hoping that my time of going will be postponed to next Autumn, when the legislatures of several of the Southern States will be in session. I think then would be a much better time for us to be in the South, and to speak perchance before every one of the legislatures, and thus send at least a representative from every district in the state, home to his constituents with a little idea of what this woman's rights movement means. It is one of my dreams to visit Tuskegee, and to see you and Mrs. Washington and Mrs. [Adella Hunt] Logan, and all of the good men and women engaged in the splendid work of that institute. Wishing you the best of success, I am, Very sincerely yours, Susan B. Anthony
Anthony, Susan B. “Letter from Susan Brownell Anthony to Booker T. Washington.” New York City. January, 23 1900. The Booker T. Washington Papers, Library of Congress. Published in Louis R. Harlan and Raymond W. Smock, eds., The Booker T. Washington Papers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976, 5:419. Retrieved from http://www.nzdl.org
Questions:
- Summarize this letter.
frances ellen watkins harper: speech
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was an active abolitionist made famous in the North for her abolition speeches and open letter to John Brown. This speech comes from the Eleventh National Women’s Rights Convention in New York City in May of 1866.
I feel I am something of a novice upon this platform. Born of a race whose inheritance has been outrage and wrong, most of my life had been spent in battling against those wrongs. But I did not feel as keenly as others, that I had these rights, in common with other women, which are now demanded. About two years ago, I stood within the shadows of my home. A great sorrow had fallen upon my life. My husband had died suddenly, leaving me a widow, with four children, one my own, and the others stepchildren. I tried to keep my children together. But my husband died in debt; and before he had been in his grave three months, the administrator had swept the very milkcrocks and wash tubs from my hands. I was a farmer’s wife and made butter for the Columbus market; but what could I do, when they had swept all away? They left me one thing-and that was a looking glass! Had I died instead of my husband, how different would have been the result! By this time he would have had another wife, it is likely; and no administrator would have gone into his house, broken up his home, and sold his bed, and taken away his means of support… I do not believe that giving the woman the ballot is immediately going to cure all the ills of life. I do not believe that white women are dew-drops just exhaled from the skies. I think that like men they may be divided into three classes, the good, the bad, and the indifferent. The good would vote according to their convictions and principles; the bad, as dictated by preju[d]ice or malice; and the indifferent will vote on the strongest side of the question, with the winning party. You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs. I, as a colored woman, have had in this country an education which has made me feel… against every man, and every man’s hand against me. Let me go to-morrow morning and take my seat in one of your street cars-I do not know that they will do it in New York, but they will in Philadelphia-and the conductor will put up his hand and stop the car rather than let me ride… Have women nothing to do with this?... Talk of giving women the ballot-box? Go on. It is a normal school, and the white women of this country need it. 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.
Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins. “We Are All Bound Up Together”. 1866. BlackPast. November 7, 2011. Retrieved from https://www.blackpast.org/africanamerican-history/speeches-african-american-history/1866-frances-ellenwatkins-harper-we-are-all-bound-together/.
Questions:
I feel I am something of a novice upon this platform. Born of a race whose inheritance has been outrage and wrong, most of my life had been spent in battling against those wrongs. But I did not feel as keenly as others, that I had these rights, in common with other women, which are now demanded. About two years ago, I stood within the shadows of my home. A great sorrow had fallen upon my life. My husband had died suddenly, leaving me a widow, with four children, one my own, and the others stepchildren. I tried to keep my children together. But my husband died in debt; and before he had been in his grave three months, the administrator had swept the very milkcrocks and wash tubs from my hands. I was a farmer’s wife and made butter for the Columbus market; but what could I do, when they had swept all away? They left me one thing-and that was a looking glass! Had I died instead of my husband, how different would have been the result! By this time he would have had another wife, it is likely; and no administrator would have gone into his house, broken up his home, and sold his bed, and taken away his means of support… I do not believe that giving the woman the ballot is immediately going to cure all the ills of life. I do not believe that white women are dew-drops just exhaled from the skies. I think that like men they may be divided into three classes, the good, the bad, and the indifferent. The good would vote according to their convictions and principles; the bad, as dictated by preju[d]ice or malice; and the indifferent will vote on the strongest side of the question, with the winning party. You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs. I, as a colored woman, have had in this country an education which has made me feel… against every man, and every man’s hand against me. Let me go to-morrow morning and take my seat in one of your street cars-I do not know that they will do it in New York, but they will in Philadelphia-and the conductor will put up his hand and stop the car rather than let me ride… Have women nothing to do with this?... Talk of giving women the ballot-box? Go on. It is a normal school, and the white women of this country need it. 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.
Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins. “We Are All Bound Up Together”. 1866. BlackPast. November 7, 2011. Retrieved from https://www.blackpast.org/africanamerican-history/speeches-african-american-history/1866-frances-ellenwatkins-harper-we-are-all-bound-together/.
Questions:
- What is the tone of this speech?
- What is the message?
- Who is the intended audience?
Kate Gordon: Letter to Roberta Wellford
Gordon was a leading member of NAWSA and head of the Southern Suffrage Association. She advocated for educated suffrage, but also white-women’s suffrage as a means for promoting white supremacy over Black men. This is a letter she wrote in 1916.
January 11, 1916. Miss Roberta Wellford, University of Va., P.O., Virginia.
My dear Miss Wellford: …if woman suffrage is kept as a state right, you will see that the negro women will not get any special national protection such as they can get, with a mandate forbidding disfranchisement on account of sex. In reality every prohibition against the negro man’s voting could be applied to the women, but in the states where their numbers make them a menace the subterfuges that are employed are really illegal, and the mass of the men who are determined to preserve white supremacy are willing, if it is necessary, to club negro men away from the polls, but you will understand a sympathy with them when they do not wish to be forced to club negro women, and the women hearing this are far more belligerent! I feel that if the franchise comes to the women of the south through the state and that we can continue the present restrictions there will be no trouble for the negro women, but if by any chance the national amendment does carry I think there will be trouble for them, and much of the good that we women want to see come from suffrage will be defeated by entangling it with this race prejudice. That is why I think out southern women endorsing a nationalamendment are making a serious mistake. I do not know much about the publication of the CRISIS. It stands for negro uplift, but so far as I can make out that negro uplift is an effort in behalf of negro equality. We take the CRISIS simply to be in touch and prepare to answer southern editors, and frequently we have written letters to editors and I believe with good results. If you would like to see some of these copies of the paper I will be glad to send them to you. This summer they had a “Votes for Women” edition with Abraham Lincoln and Sojourner Truth as the frontispiece, and it makes the prejudiced southerners not over zealous for woman suffrage at their best, foam at the mouth. We are commencing to get comments on Mrs. Patty Jacobs’ statistics in her Congressional speech. I wish to the Lord the woman suffragists would try to fight shy of the race question instead of courting it by national endorsement. Of course, her enthusiastic support is the aftermath of the Shafroth amendment activity. Just think of the fatal work that fool thing has accomplished and the opportunity and time wasted, not to mention the money spent in its advocacy. I hope that you are studying out with care the United States Elections Bill. A copy of it appears in the January issue of the NEW SOUTHERN CITIZEN. If the Democratic Party is awake to its opportunity it will pass it and spike the Republicans‘ chance for doing so, when they get in power, which very probably they will in the next administration.
Very cordially, Kate M. Gordon
Questions:
January 11, 1916. Miss Roberta Wellford, University of Va., P.O., Virginia.
My dear Miss Wellford: …if woman suffrage is kept as a state right, you will see that the negro women will not get any special national protection such as they can get, with a mandate forbidding disfranchisement on account of sex. In reality every prohibition against the negro man’s voting could be applied to the women, but in the states where their numbers make them a menace the subterfuges that are employed are really illegal, and the mass of the men who are determined to preserve white supremacy are willing, if it is necessary, to club negro men away from the polls, but you will understand a sympathy with them when they do not wish to be forced to club negro women, and the women hearing this are far more belligerent! I feel that if the franchise comes to the women of the south through the state and that we can continue the present restrictions there will be no trouble for the negro women, but if by any chance the national amendment does carry I think there will be trouble for them, and much of the good that we women want to see come from suffrage will be defeated by entangling it with this race prejudice. That is why I think out southern women endorsing a nationalamendment are making a serious mistake. I do not know much about the publication of the CRISIS. It stands for negro uplift, but so far as I can make out that negro uplift is an effort in behalf of negro equality. We take the CRISIS simply to be in touch and prepare to answer southern editors, and frequently we have written letters to editors and I believe with good results. If you would like to see some of these copies of the paper I will be glad to send them to you. This summer they had a “Votes for Women” edition with Abraham Lincoln and Sojourner Truth as the frontispiece, and it makes the prejudiced southerners not over zealous for woman suffrage at their best, foam at the mouth. We are commencing to get comments on Mrs. Patty Jacobs’ statistics in her Congressional speech. I wish to the Lord the woman suffragists would try to fight shy of the race question instead of courting it by national endorsement. Of course, her enthusiastic support is the aftermath of the Shafroth amendment activity. Just think of the fatal work that fool thing has accomplished and the opportunity and time wasted, not to mention the money spent in its advocacy. I hope that you are studying out with care the United States Elections Bill. A copy of it appears in the January issue of the NEW SOUTHERN CITIZEN. If the Democratic Party is awake to its opportunity it will pass it and spike the Republicans‘ chance for doing so, when they get in power, which very probably they will in the next administration.
Very cordially, Kate M. Gordon
Questions:
- Summarize this letter.
- Was she racist?
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Joslyn Gage: THE HISTORY OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE
This call [Document A], without signature, was issued by Lucretia Mott, Martha C. Wright, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Mary Ann McClintock. At this time Mrs. Mott was visiting her sister Mrs. Wright, at Auburn, and attending the Yearly Meeting of Friends in Western New York. Mrs. Stanton, having recently removed from Boston to Seneca Falls… met Mrs. Mott incidentally for the first time since her residence there. They at once returned to the topic they had so often discussed, walking arm in arm in the streets of London, and Boston, "the propriety of holding a woman's convention." These four ladies… decided to put their long-talked-of resolution into action, and before the twilight deepened into night, the call was written, and sent to the Seneca County Courier. On Sunday morning they met in Mrs. McClintock's parlor to write their declaration, resolutions, and to consider subjects for speeches. As the convention was to assemble in three days, the time was short for such productions; but having no experience in the modus operandi of getting up conventions, nor in that kind of literature, they were quite innocent of the herculean labors they proposed. On the first attempt to frame a resolution; to crowd a complete thought, clearly and concisely, into three lines; they felt as helpless and hopeless as if they had been suddenly asked to construct a steam engine. And the humiliating fact may as well now be recorded that before taking the initiative step, those ladies resigned themselves to a faithful perusal of various masculine productions. The reports of Peace, Temperance, and Anti-Slavery conventions were examined, but all alike seemed too tame and pacific for the inauguration of a rebellion such as the world had never before seen. They knew women had wrongs, but how to state them was the difficulty… After much delay, one of the circle took up the Declaration of 1776, and read it aloud with much spirit and emphasis, and it was at once decided to adopt the historic document, with some slight changes such as substituting "all men" for "King George." …the women felt they had enough to go before the world with a good case. The eventful day dawned at last, and crowds in carriages and on foot, wended their way to the Wesleyan church. When those having charge of the Declaration, the resolutions, and several volumes of the Statutes of New York arrived on the scene, lo! the door was locked. However, an embryo Professor of Yale College was lifted through an open window to unbar the door; that done, the church was quickly filled. It had been decided to have no men present, but as they were already on the spot, and as the women who must take the responsibility of organizing the meeting, and leading the discussions, shrank from doing either, it was decided, in a hasty council round the altar, that this was an occasion when men might make themselves preeminently useful. It was agreed they should remain, and take the laboring oar through the Convention.
Anthony, Susan et al. The History of Woman Suffrage. 1887. Rochester, N. Y.: Charles Mann.
Questions:
1. When was this document written?
2. According to this source, who were the authors of Documents A and B?
3. According to this source, how was this event unique or new?
4. Would you say the authors were humble or novice? How so?
Anthony, Susan et al. The History of Woman Suffrage. 1887. Rochester, N. Y.: Charles Mann.
Questions:
1. When was this document written?
2. According to this source, who were the authors of Documents A and B?
3. According to this source, how was this event unique or new?
4. Would you say the authors were humble or novice? How so?
elizabeth cady stanton: the declaration of sentiments
We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves, by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the women under this government, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled. The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. “Declaration of Sentiments.” July 19, 1848
Questions:
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. “Declaration of Sentiments.” July 19, 1848
Questions:
- Was Seneca Falls the start of Women's suffrage movement?
unknown: the lady's complaint
Custom, alas! doth partial prove Nor give us equal measure. A pain it is for us to love, But it is to men a pleasure. They plainly can their thoughts disclose, Whilst ours must burn within, We have got tongues and eyes in vain, And truth from us is sin. Men to new joys and conquests fly, And yet no hazard run. Poor we are left if we deny, And if we yield undone. Then equal laws let custom find, And neither sex oppress. More freedom give to womankind, Or give to mankind less.
Anonymous. “The Lady's Complaint.” Virginia Gazette. October 15-22, 1736. Retrieved from https://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/VAGuide/newspaper.html.
Questions:
Anonymous. “The Lady's Complaint.” Virginia Gazette. October 15-22, 1736. Retrieved from https://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/VAGuide/newspaper.html.
Questions:
- When was this document written?
- What does this document reveal about women in Virginia before 1848?
- Does the anonymous female author directly ask for the right to vote?
new jersey constitution 1776: excerpt
The state of New Jersey’s constitution of 1776 intentionally and liberally granted all landowners, including women and free people of color, the right to vote. In 1790 a revised voting rights law doubled down to add “he or she” pronouns, demonstrating the support of women voters. Joseph Cooper, a Quaker lawmaker was credited with this change. Quakers believed in the equality of the sexes and permitted female preachers. New Jersey women did vote in these early years of the republic, but how many is debated. Some counties report that women represented less than a quarter of voters, but newspapers often credited women voters for the success of one political party over another. Women voted, like all voters, when the vote was contentious, when ballots were anonymous, and when there were easily accessible and local polling sites. Many New Jersey polling places were located in taverns where candidates would buy drinks for their supporters and voters had to orally declare their vote. Bars were not considered appropriate or safe places for women and the evidence shows that women would go in groups to protect one another, voting in secession, one right after the other. New Jersey women lost the vote in 1807 because they were perceived to cast their votes mindlessly for candidates without knowing where the candidates stood on issues. The legislature limited the vote to “free, white, male citizens” 21 years of age disenfranchising free people of color and women in one swoop.
All Inhabitants of this Colony of full Age, who are worth Fifty Pounds proclamation Money clear Estate in the same, & have resided within the County in which they claim a Vote for twelve Months immediately preceding the Election, shall be entitled to vote for Representatives in Council & Assembly.
New Jersey Historical Society. “The Petticoat Politicians of 1776: New Jersey’s First Female Voters.” It Happened Here.https://nj.gov/state/historical/assets/pdf/it-happened-here/ihhnj-er-petticoatpoliticians.pdf.
Questions:
All Inhabitants of this Colony of full Age, who are worth Fifty Pounds proclamation Money clear Estate in the same, & have resided within the County in which they claim a Vote for twelve Months immediately preceding the Election, shall be entitled to vote for Representatives in Council & Assembly.
New Jersey Historical Society. “The Petticoat Politicians of 1776: New Jersey’s First Female Voters.” It Happened Here.https://nj.gov/state/historical/assets/pdf/it-happened-here/ihhnj-er-petticoatpoliticians.pdf.
Questions:
- When was this document written?
- What does this document reveal about women in New Jersey before 1848?
- According to this document, do women in New Jersey directly ask for the right to vote?
maria stewart: religion and the pure principals of morality
Oh, you mothers, what a responsibility rests on you! You have souls committed to your charge, and God will require a strict account of you. It is you that must create in the minds of your little girls and boys a thirst for knowledge, the love of virtue, the abhorrence of vice, and the cultivation of a pure heart… O, do not say, you cannot make anything of your children; but say, with the help and assistance of God, we will try. . . . Perhaps you will say, that you cannot send [your daughters] to high schools and academies… Our minds have too long groveled in ignorance and sin. Come, let us incline our ears to wisdom, and apply our hearts to understanding; promote her, and she shall exalt you; she shall bring you to honor when you do embrace her… I am of a strong opinion, that the day on which we unite, heart and soul, and turn our attention to knowledge and improvement, that day the hissing and reproach among the nations of the earth against us will cease… It is of no use for us to sit with our hands folded, hanging our heads like bulrushes, lamenting our wretched condition; but let us make a mighty effort, and arise; and if no one will promote or respect us, let us promote and respect ourselves… Shall it any longer be said of the daughters of Africa, they have no ambition, they have no force? By no means. Let every female heart become united and let us raise a fund ourselves; and at the end of one year and a half, we might be able to lay the corner-stone for the building of a high school, that the higher branches of knowledge might be enjoyed by us… Let each one strive to excel in good housewifery, knowing that prudence and economy are the road to wealth. Let us not say, we know this, or, we know that, and practice nothing; but let us practice what we do know. How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles? Until union, knowledge, and love begin to flow among us. . . . We have never had an opportunity of displaying our talents; therefore the world thinks we know nothing… The Americans have practiced nothing but headwork these 200 years, and we have done their drudgery. And is it not high time for us to imitate their examples, and practice headwork too, and keep what we have got, and get what we can?
Stewart, Maria. “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality: The Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build”. Speech, October, 1831. From Teaching American History. https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/religion-and-the-pure-principles-of-morality-thesure-foundation-on-which-we-must-build/.
Questions:
Stewart, Maria. “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality: The Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build”. Speech, October, 1831. From Teaching American History. https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/religion-and-the-pure-principles-of-morality-thesure-foundation-on-which-we-must-build/.
Questions:
- When was this document written?
- What does this document reveal about Black women’s focus before 1848?
- Does Stewart directly ask for the right to vote?
sarah grimké: : Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Woman
Sarah Grimké is one of the most famous white abolitionists in the Antebellum period. She was born a wealthy slave owner in South Carolina before converting to the Quaker faith and fleeing to the North. She advocated for the immediate emancipation of enslaved people, but her speeches were often contentious as women were not supposed to speak in public, especially to mixed audiences of men and women. Soon she found herself defending women’s rights so that she could advocate for enslaved people. In her Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Woman of 1838, she responded to another white woman, Catharine Beecher, who believed women should have a subordinate role in society and refrain from petitioning on behalf of the enslaved. Her words were radical for 1838 and only won limited support.
LETTER II. WOMAN SUBJECT ONLY TO GOD. Woman has been placed by John Quincy Adams, side by side with the slave, whilst he was contending for the right side of petition. I thank him for ranking us with the oppressed; for I shall not find it difficult to show, that in all ages and countries, not even excepting enlightened republican America, woman has more or less been made a means to promote the welfare of man, without due regard to her own happiness, and the glory of God as the end of her creation... LETTER X. INTELLECT OF WOMAN. It will scarcely be denied, I presume, that, as a general rule, men do not desire the improvement of women. There are few instances of men who are magnanimous enough to be entirely willing that women should know more than themselves, on any subjects except dress and cookery; and, indeed, this necessarily flows from their assumption of superiority... LETTER XII. LEGAL DISABILITIES OF WOMEN. There are few things which present greater obstacles to the improvement and elevation* of woman to her appropriate sphere of usefulness and duty, than the laws which have been enacted to destroy her independence, and crush her individuality; laws which, although they are framed for her government, she has had no voice in establishing, and which rob her of some of her essential rights. Woman has no political existence. With the single exception of presenting a petition to the legislative body, she is a cipher in the nation; or, if not actually so in representative governments, she is only counted, like the slaves of the South, to swell the number of law−makers who form decrees for her government, with little reference to her benefit, except so far as her good may promote their own... That the laws which have been generally adopted in the United States, for the government of women, have been framed almost entirely for the exclusive benefit of men, and with a design to oppress women, by depriving them of all control over their property, is too manifest* to be denied...Men frame the laws, and, with few exceptions, claim to execute them on both sexes...Although looked upon as an inferior, when considered as an intellectual being, woman is punished with the same severity as man, when she is guilty of moral offences... LETTER XIII. RELATION OF HUSBAND AND WIFE. In the wealthy classes of society, and those who are in comfortable circumstances, women are exempt from great corporeal exertion, and are protected by public opinion, and by the genial influence of Christianity, from much physical ill treatment. Still, there is a vast amount of secret suffering endured, from the forced submission of women to the opinions and whims of their husbands. Hence they are frequently driven to use deception, to compass* their ends. They are early taught that to appear to yield, is the only way to govern...If she submits, let her do it openly, honorably, not to gain her point, but as a matter of Christian duty. But let her beware how she permits her husband to be her conscience−keeper. On all moral and religious subjects, she is bound to think and act for herself. Where confidence and love exist, a wife will naturally converse with her husband as with her dearest friend, on all that interests her heart, and there will be a perfectly free interchange of sentiment; but she is no more bound to be governed by his judgement, than he is by hers. They are standing on the same platform of human rights, are equally under the government of God, and accountable to him, and him alone... Thine in the bonds of womanhood, SARAH M. GRIMKÉ
Grimke, Sarah. Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Woman. Boston: Old Sturbridge Village, 1838. Retrieved from https://www.teachushistory.org/second-great-awakening-agereform/resources/sarah-grimke-argues-womensrights#:~:text=In%20her%20Letters%20on%20the,the%20subordinate%20role%20of%20wome n.
Questions:
LETTER II. WOMAN SUBJECT ONLY TO GOD. Woman has been placed by John Quincy Adams, side by side with the slave, whilst he was contending for the right side of petition. I thank him for ranking us with the oppressed; for I shall not find it difficult to show, that in all ages and countries, not even excepting enlightened republican America, woman has more or less been made a means to promote the welfare of man, without due regard to her own happiness, and the glory of God as the end of her creation... LETTER X. INTELLECT OF WOMAN. It will scarcely be denied, I presume, that, as a general rule, men do not desire the improvement of women. There are few instances of men who are magnanimous enough to be entirely willing that women should know more than themselves, on any subjects except dress and cookery; and, indeed, this necessarily flows from their assumption of superiority... LETTER XII. LEGAL DISABILITIES OF WOMEN. There are few things which present greater obstacles to the improvement and elevation* of woman to her appropriate sphere of usefulness and duty, than the laws which have been enacted to destroy her independence, and crush her individuality; laws which, although they are framed for her government, she has had no voice in establishing, and which rob her of some of her essential rights. Woman has no political existence. With the single exception of presenting a petition to the legislative body, she is a cipher in the nation; or, if not actually so in representative governments, she is only counted, like the slaves of the South, to swell the number of law−makers who form decrees for her government, with little reference to her benefit, except so far as her good may promote their own... That the laws which have been generally adopted in the United States, for the government of women, have been framed almost entirely for the exclusive benefit of men, and with a design to oppress women, by depriving them of all control over their property, is too manifest* to be denied...Men frame the laws, and, with few exceptions, claim to execute them on both sexes...Although looked upon as an inferior, when considered as an intellectual being, woman is punished with the same severity as man, when she is guilty of moral offences... LETTER XIII. RELATION OF HUSBAND AND WIFE. In the wealthy classes of society, and those who are in comfortable circumstances, women are exempt from great corporeal exertion, and are protected by public opinion, and by the genial influence of Christianity, from much physical ill treatment. Still, there is a vast amount of secret suffering endured, from the forced submission of women to the opinions and whims of their husbands. Hence they are frequently driven to use deception, to compass* their ends. They are early taught that to appear to yield, is the only way to govern...If she submits, let her do it openly, honorably, not to gain her point, but as a matter of Christian duty. But let her beware how she permits her husband to be her conscience−keeper. On all moral and religious subjects, she is bound to think and act for herself. Where confidence and love exist, a wife will naturally converse with her husband as with her dearest friend, on all that interests her heart, and there will be a perfectly free interchange of sentiment; but she is no more bound to be governed by his judgement, than he is by hers. They are standing on the same platform of human rights, are equally under the government of God, and accountable to him, and him alone... Thine in the bonds of womanhood, SARAH M. GRIMKÉ
Grimke, Sarah. Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Woman. Boston: Old Sturbridge Village, 1838. Retrieved from https://www.teachushistory.org/second-great-awakening-agereform/resources/sarah-grimke-argues-womensrights#:~:text=In%20her%20Letters%20on%20the,the%20subordinate%20role%20of%20wome n.
Questions:
- When was this document written?
- What does this document reveal about Abolitionists women’s focus before 1848?
- Does Grimke directly ask for the right to vote?
Remedial Herstory Editors. "11. THE RISE OF NAWSA AND NACWC." The Remedial Herstory Project. November 20, 2022. www.remedialherstory.com.
Primary AUTHOR: |
Kelsie Brook Eckert
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Primary ReviewerS: |
Dr. Barbara Tischler and Dr. Alicia Guitierrez-Romine
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Consulting TeamKelsie Brook Eckert, Project Director
Coordinator of Social Studies Education at Plymouth State University Dr. Barbara Tischler, Consultant Professor of History Hunter College and Columbia University Dr. Alicia Gutierrez-Romine, Consultant Assistant Professor of History at La Sierra University Jacqui Nelson, Consultant Teaching Lecturer of Military History at Plymouth State University Dr. Deanna Beachley Professor of History and Women's Studies at College of Southern Nevada |
EditorsAlice Stanley
ReviewersColonial
Dr. Margaret Huettl Hannah Dutton Dr. John Krueckeberg 19th Century Dr. Rebecca Noel Michelle Stonis, MA Annabelle L. Blevins Pifer, MA Cony Marquez, PhD Candidate 20th Century Dr. Tanya Roth Dr. Jessica Frazier Mary Bezbatchenko, MA |
A political combat memoir like no other, suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt takes us to the front lines of the Votes for Women battlefields — in the states and in Congress — as American women fight for the franchise. With candor and flashes of wry humor, Catt offers sharp insights into the social, political, and economic forces arrayed against her cause, revealing the strategies that finally brought the suffragists' seven-decade campaign to dramatic victory.
Following a handful of remarkable women who led their respective forces into battle, along with appearances by Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, Frederick Douglass, and Eleanor Roosevelt, The Woman's Hour is an inspiring story of activists winning their own freedom in one of the last campaigns forged in the shadow of the Civil War, and the beginning of the great 20th-century battles for civil rights.
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The women’s suffrage movement, much like many other civil rights movements, has an important and often unrecognized queer history. In Public Faces, Secret Lives Wendy L. Rouse reveals that, contrary to popular belief, the suffrage movement included a variety of individuals who represented a range of genders and sexualities. However, owing to the constant pressure to present a “respectable” public image, suffrage leaders publicly conformed to gendered views of ideal womanhood in order to make women’s suffrage more palatable to the public.
In Vanguard, acclaimed historian Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women's political lives in America. She recounts how they defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons. From the earliest days of the republic to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond, Jones excavates the lives and work of Black women.
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From social clubs in New York's Chinatown to conferences for Native American rights, and in African American newspapers and pamphlets demanding equality for Spanish-speaking New Mexicans, a diverse cadre of extraordinary women struggled to build a movement that would truly include all women, regardless of race or national origin.
No Votes for Women explores the complicated history of the suffrage movement in New York State by delving into the stories of women who opposed the expansion of voting rights to women. Susan Goodier finds that conservative women who fought against suffrage encouraged women to retain their distinctive feminine identities as protectors of their homes and families, a role they felt was threatened by the imposition of masculine political responsibilities. She details the victories and defeats on both sides of the movement from its start in the 1890s to its end in the 1930s, acknowledging the powerful activism of this often overlooked and misunderstood political force in the history of women's equality.
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How to teach with Films:
Remember, teachers want the student to be the historian. What do historians do when they watch films?
- Before they watch, ask students to research the director and producers. These are the source of the information. How will their background and experience likely bias this film?
- Also, ask students to consider the context the film was created in. The film may be about history, but it was made recently. What was going on the year the film was made that could bias the film? In particular, how do you think the gains of feminism will impact the portrayal of the female characters?
- As they watch, ask students to research the historical accuracy of the film. What do online sources say about what the film gets right or wrong?
- Afterward, ask students to describe how the female characters were portrayed and what lessons they got from the film.
- Then, ask students to evaluate this film as a learning tool. Was it helpful to better understand this topic? Did the historical inaccuracies make it unhelpful? Make it clear any informed opinion is valid.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bland, Sidney R. and Cappy Yarbrough. “Women's Suffrage.” South Carolina Encyclopedia. University of South Carolina, Institute for Southern Studies. Last modified July 30, 2020. https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/women%c2%92s-suffrage/.
Collins, Gail, America's Women: Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines. New York, William Morrow, 2003.
Dionne, Evette. Lifting As We Climb: Black Women’s Battle for the Ballot Box. New York: Viking Penguin Random House, 2020.
DuBois, Ellen Carol, 1947-. Through Women's Eyes : an American History with Documents. Boston :Bedford/St. Martin's, 2005.Indians Editors. “NATIVE AMERICAN WOMEN.” Indians. N.D. http://indians.org/articles/Native-american-women.html.
Frances Willard House Museum. “Introduction." Frances Willard House Museum. Last modified N.D. https://scalar.usc.edu/works/willard-and-wells/introduction?path=index.
Mgadmi, Mahassen. “Black Women’s Identity: Stereotypes, Respectability and Passionlessness (1890-1930)”, Revue LISA/LISA e-journal [Online], Vol. VII – n°1 | 2009, Online since 23 July 2009, connection on 15 March 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/lisa/806; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/lisa.806.
National Women’s History Museum Editors. “African American Reformers: The Club Movement.” National Women’s History Museum. N.D. https://www.womenshistory.org/resources/general/african-american-reformers.
Ware, Susan. American Women’s History: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Collins, Gail, America's Women: Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines. New York, William Morrow, 2003.
Dionne, Evette. Lifting As We Climb: Black Women’s Battle for the Ballot Box. New York: Viking Penguin Random House, 2020.
DuBois, Ellen Carol, 1947-. Through Women's Eyes : an American History with Documents. Boston :Bedford/St. Martin's, 2005.Indians Editors. “NATIVE AMERICAN WOMEN.” Indians. N.D. http://indians.org/articles/Native-american-women.html.
Frances Willard House Museum. “Introduction." Frances Willard House Museum. Last modified N.D. https://scalar.usc.edu/works/willard-and-wells/introduction?path=index.
Mgadmi, Mahassen. “Black Women’s Identity: Stereotypes, Respectability and Passionlessness (1890-1930)”, Revue LISA/LISA e-journal [Online], Vol. VII – n°1 | 2009, Online since 23 July 2009, connection on 15 March 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/lisa/806; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/lisa.806.
National Women’s History Museum Editors. “African American Reformers: The Club Movement.” National Women’s History Museum. N.D. https://www.womenshistory.org/resources/general/african-american-reformers.
Ware, Susan. American Women’s History: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.