Let’s Celebrate Women’s Suffrage With Real Facts

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. It makes today a good day, once again, to reflect on how much we really know about our own American history. Looking back 100 years, perhaps we can see how it took too long to grant such an entitlement that black women were excluded and how history is repeating itself with dismay.

Remember how long it took?

It takes more than a few pages in a history book (or, hey, even a whole chapter!) To cover the 70- or 80-year journey of women to convince men that they should be able to vote. What now seems like an obvious right for women took much more time, energy, and organization than we may have known or remembered.

“The problem is that it all comes down to simplicity:“ Susan B. Anthony and some of her friends have been working for a long time, and thanks to them we have a voice, ”says Teri Finneman, professor at the University of Kansas. and an expert on the anti-suffrage movement. “It was much more difficult.”

Consider how quickly this National Geographic Kids survey of women’s suffrage silences the violence many women protestors have faced:

The women’s suffrage movement has not always been peaceful. In the early 1900s, women began using methods that they believed would bring more attention to the case, and they were often punished for expressing their opinions.

For example, during 1917, 218 women from 26 different states were arrested for picketing outside the White House in Washington, DC. One of them was the suffragette Alice Paul, who led a thousand women in a silent protest that began in January of that year. She and her fellow protesters were yelled at and beaten by people opposing the right to vote. Police arrested Paul and others for “obstructing sidewalk traffic.” In prison, they were given food contaminated with worms and slept on filthy beds, and Paul even went on a hunger strike until the doctors forced her to eat.

The same has been done with many other women fighting for equal rights. But they should have kept this movement in the minds of people.

The fourth-graders group may not need all the details of the Night of Horror , but we could better emphasize that these women faced more than rough food and dirty laundry as “punishment” for “expressing their opinions.”

We say women, but what we really mean is white women.

People of color technically gained the right to vote, granted by the 15th Amendment of 1870, but enough discriminatory methods, including literacy tests, electoral taxes, Jim Crow laws, and outright violence, were introduced to prevent many of them from actually doing it right. It was only after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed that many of these barriers were outlawed, giving people of color, including black women, by then the opportunity to go to court to begin challenging these restrictions.

But when we talk about the women’s electoral movement, it is important to understand that there were white women suffragettes and black suffragists, and their goals did not always coincide. In fact, Brent Staples wrote for the New York Times in his Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial that white suffragettes often deliberately exclude women of color from their movement:

Historians rightly warn groups involved in the commemoration of suffrage not to overestimate the significance of the 19th Amendment. It served the needs of white middle-class women fairly well. But that meant little to black women in the South, where most of them lived at the time and where election officials were well-versed in preventing blacks from accessing the ballot box. When African-American women rushed to register, southern officials simply increased the level of fraud and intimidation.

By this time, the former suffragettes of the North were celebrating the amendment and had no interest in combating discrimination against women suffering from discrimination on the basis of race rather than gender.

Therefore, we should not talk about giving women the right to vote in 1920 without acknowledging the racist reality that prevented women of color from voting with these white women suffragettes.

Here’s how Dr. Robin DiAngelo, a consultant, educator and facilitator, puts it in his book White Fragility: Why White People Find It So Difficult to Talk About Racism :

Racism – like sexism and other forms of oppression – arises when the prejudices of a racial group are reinforced by legitimate authority and institutional control. This authority and control transforms individual prejudice into a far-reaching system that no longer depends on the good intentions of individual actors; it becomes the default of society and is reproduced automatically. Racism is a system. And I would be overlooked if I didn’t recognize the intersection of race and gender in the suffrage example; white men granted women suffrage, but only full access to white women.

We can learn from anti-suffragettes

Teri Finneman studied the anti-suffrage movement in great detail by examining newspaper pages in the Library of Congress in the 1800s and 1900s that covered the struggle for women’s rights, and she sees how much of what happened then is still relevant today. especially in the way women continue to struggle for pay equity and power dynamics.

“When people think of the suffrage movement, they think men were the main problem – and don’t get me wrong, they were a huge part of the problem,” says Finneman. “But in fact, other women were also a big part of the problem … the anti-suffrage movement – their leaders were other women fighting against empowerment.”

And what phrases did these anti-suffragettes use to oppose the empowerment of women? This might sound a little familiar. Anti-suffragettes said that citizens should put America first. They called the suffragettes “socialists” who were ” enemies of the nation .”

This rhetoric, according to Finneman, took on special significance in 1917. It was then that the first woman, Jeannette Rankin, was elected to Congress, women gained the right to vote in New York State, and the United States entered World War I, which brought more women into the labor market.

“Anti-suffragettes start to panic because you feel like they’re losing momentum,” says Finneman. “So they used fear-based strategies, and you can see that some of the same fear-based strategies are being used today.”

As we approach elections this year, it will be helpful for us to return to the full history of the women’s electoral movement; the innate sexism, racism and classism that existed then in the United States and still exist; and the importance of exercising your right to vote .