11. the Rise of NAWSA and NACWC

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. 

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. 

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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.

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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.” 
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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:

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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? 

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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? 

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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."

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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. 
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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. 

[Setting up the Inquiry] 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?

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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.

Primary AUTHOR:

Kelsie Brook Eckert

Primary Reviewer:

Dr. Alicia Guitierrez-Romine

Consulting Team

Editors

Kelsie 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 Guitierrez-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

Alice Stanley

Reviewers

18th Century
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