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 was universal suffrage possible during Reconstruction? If women, which ones? Could women work together across race and class to achieve suffrage? And, although female suffragists 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 and women entered the doldrums period, divided.
How to cite this source?
Remedial Herstory Project Editors. "11. THE RISE OF NAWSA AND NACWC." The Remedial Herstory Project. November 1, 2025. www.remedialherstory.com.
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.
After the Civil War the United States government was busy rebuilding the nation by passing the Reconstruction Amendments. The 13th ended, or abolished, slavery in the United States. The 14th rejected the ruling from Dred Scott and granted citizenship 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?
Suffrage (Noun.), the right to vote in political elections.
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The American Equal Rights Association
In May 1866, just after the close of the Civil War, women’s rights and anti-slavery advocates joined together in Washington, DC for the annual meeting of the American Equal Rights Association. The government was rapidly working to “reconstruct” the Union after the way and quickly passing legislation to ban slavery and consider the status of formerly enslaved people. Wrapped up in this was the status of women of all races. The AERA initially hoped to get women and Black people the right to vote at the same time. The goal? Disband Lockean conceptualization of the family unit and instead move to a system of individuals within a collective society. A system where adults of all colors and genders could represent themselves, not by proxy through a patriarch. This was called “universal suffrage.” 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. Failing to give Black men power to represent their homes threatened the legitimacy of the overall structure.
Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass had been friends for years, but even their relationship was tested by the strategic split in the AERA. 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 used racial slurs to describe uneducated Black men who might get to vote before her.
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 outrages that he today suffers, he would not exchange his sex and take the place of Elizabeth Caddy Stanton.”
Her remarks were met with great laughter. Lucy Stone of Massachusetts weighed in, “Mrs. Stanton will, of course, advocate for the precedence 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.” On the one hand, Stanton argued for “educated suffrage” perhaps a euphemism for racism. On the other, the writing was on the wall: men and women who had once shared in her cause were abandoning her. What was evident is that the former abolitionists were fighting over scraps instead of uniting to get the whole loaf. Stone advocated for taking what they could get.
By July 1866, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution passed Congress and was on its way to be ratified. The Amendment gave everyone born in the United States citizenship, effectively granting rights to formerly enslaved people, but it also accomplished something the Constitution had failed to do: it made women’s subjugation explicit. Section 2 explicitly used the word “male” where the constitution had only ever used the term “persons.” Then in February of 1869, the 15th Amendment passed, the last of the Reconstruction amendments. It read:
“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
The list failed to include the word “sex” making it perfectly legal to deny women the right to vote. For the first time, women’s exclusion from government wasn’t just “self-evident,” it was law. The 15th Amendment accomplished something the Constitution had not: it made women’s oppression overt.
One notable advocate for Black women was writer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper from Pennsylvania. One of the first black women to be published in the United States, Harper was famous in her own time. Drawing on personal experience, she specifically pointed out the constant plight women (of all races) were in financially. After her husband died, she faced 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.”
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Public Domain
Western Liberty
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.
Arguments over whether to support the 15th Amendment, split the women’s movement 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:
“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.
The Awakening, Public Domain
Shifting Approaches
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.
Indigenous Women and Suffrage
The question of how race influenced and impacted conversations regarding the suffrage movement extended to Indigenous women as well. After all, in addition to the inspiration suffragists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Matilda Gage, and Lucretia Mott drew from Indigenous matricultures, Indigenous women themselves had been a part of debates surrounding women’s rights since the eighteenth century.
Indeed, women from Indigenous communities such as the Onondaga, Cherokee, and others oftentimes critiqued Euro-American society for their treatment of women. For instance, in reflecting upon the past and present, Jeanne Shenandoah of the Onondaga noted that “we Haudenosaunee live within the traditional structure that we’ve always had, the structure of equality among all members of our community… and so, when we met these white women so long ago, I am sure that our women were probably shocked at the lack of human equality that these other women had to live under.”
Suffragists, as evidenced by a publication history spanning from the 1870s to the 1890s, engaged with similar critiques by Indigenous women. For example, during the first meeting of the International Council of Women’s that had been organized by Stanton and Anthony in 1888, one Ms. Alice Fletcher—an ethnographer who lived and worked with numerous Indigenous communities over her career—presented a paper on the legal conditions of Indian women. Fletcher began noting the prevailing and persistent myth that Indigenous women were effectively “slaves, possessing neither place, property, nor respect in the tribe.” In reality, however, she recounted her experiences among Indigenous women, particularly their reactions when she explained white women’s legal status. More specifically she recalled that when “I have tried to explain our statutes to Indian women, I have met with but one response. They have said: ‘As an Indian woman I was free. I owned my home, my person, the work of my own hands, and my children could never forget me. I was better as an Indian woman than under white law.’”
Women’s Opposition to Suffrage
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?
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?” In other words, since women had limited knowledge of any of the things they would legislate on, it made no sense to provide them with the right to vote.
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?
NAWSA Merger
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 to deeply conservative gender expectations, believing that public roles for women would threaten their status as good Southern "ladies."
Amendment (Noun.), Amending the Constitution is a two step process. First an amendment must be passed by a 2/3rds vote in both the House and the Senate. Next the amendment must be ratified by 3/4ths of all the states.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Public Domain
Black Women’s Resistance
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 for the NAWSA annual event.
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 clubs 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 in her 1898 NAWSA address 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.
Conclusion
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 immigrant 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?
