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And by the way, it s̓ “suffragist” not “suffragette.”

Nannie Helen Burroughs (left, holding banner, circa 1910) was an advocate for women’s suffrage. Library of

Congress

By Jessica Bennett and Veronica Chambers

Published July 10, 2020 Updated Aug. 19, 2020

Suffrage Isn̓ t ʻBoring History.̓ It s̓ a Story of Political Geniuses.

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As the story is often told, the path to women’s suffrage began in

Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the

19th Amendment in 1920. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady

Stanton were the leaders of the movement. It granted all women in

America the right to vote.

And yet we are learning, slowly, that telling is wildly incomplete. It

was not simply Stanton and Anthony who led the movement for

voting rights in this country ; women of color, working-class and

immigrant women also paved the way.

The movement did not emerge out of nowhere in 1848; it had roots

in the movement to abolish slavery. Many early suffragists were

active in that fight.

And the 19th Amendment was not an end but a beginning: After its

ratification, it would take four more years for many Native

Americans even to be considered citizens with voting rights in this

country, and for some Asian-Americans it would take even longer.

Many Black women, while possessing suffrage on paper, could not

freely exercise that right until 1965, when the Voting Rights Act

barred racially discriminatory voting practices, such as literacy

tests. Disenfranchisement at the polls, of course, continues today.

Meet the Brave but Overlooked Women of Color Who Fought for the Vote July 24, 2020

As America nears the centennial of the 19th Amendment next

month, The Times gathered seven scholars, authors and thinkers

for a discussion about misconceptions, the women who were left

out of the history books and just how much of what suffragists

were fighting for is still relevant.

These are excerpts from that conversation (along with a few

follow-ups).

Revisiting the story of suffrage: Clockwise from far left, Elaine Weiss; Susan Ware; Tina Cassidy; Erica Armstrong Dunbar; Adele Logan Alexander; Sally Roesch Wagner; Jessica Bennett of The Times; and Kate Clarke Lemay. Sharon Attia/The New York

Times

One of the things The Times is aiming to do in its coverage of the

centennial — and in an upcoming book — is overturn some of the

misconceptions about the path to voting rights in this country, and

present readers with a more complete story. Where would you

begin?

Susan Ware, historian: Can I raise an issue from the outset? It’s

about terms. “Suffragette” is a fraught term. American suffragists

never used it, only their detractors. One thing I hope might come

out of this conversation is that when The New York Times

publishes stories about suffrage you would not use the word

“suffragette” — unless it were in quotes.

Elaine Weiss, journalist and author: The term was made up by a

journalist in The Daily Mail in London. It was 1906, and he was

making fun of the more militant suffragists in the U.K. — and so he

used the diminutive “-ette” to belittle them. But then they turned

around, as often happens in a movement, and they decided to own

it. They said, “OK, you’re going to call us suffragettes? We’re going

to call ourselves suffragettes.” But that was in Britain. The

American press began using it too, just because it was cute, and

expressed the disdain most American newspapers held for the

movement. It’s easier to say, I have to admit it.

Ware: I tried to write to Hillary Clinton a few years back to tell her

that she was using it incorrectly. I wrote this nice, long letter and I

said, “I’m a Wellesley graduate,” and so on. I never heard anything

back. That was really infuriating to me, because she has brought a

lot of attention to the suffrage movement. And yet she calls them

“suffragettes.”

Kate Clarke Lemay, historian and curator: I find it maddening that

only two women’s names, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady

Stanton, are consistently taught in core history classes. Suffrage

was a movement of thousands of women — including African-

American women, who are often left completely out of the record.

In fact, Anthony wasn’t even at the Seneca Falls convention in 1848,

which so many still think of as the starting point of the movement.

(The reason people think this, by the way, is because Stanton and

Anthony called it as much when they later started writing a six-

volume history of the suffrage movement. Because there was so

little recorded history from that time, it was taken as fact.)

Sally Roesch Wagner, historian: A lot of my work centers on the

influence of Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, women on the movement.

These are Indigenous women who, for a thousand years, had

political voice in their sovereign nations — and continue to. The

Haudenosaunee clan mothers decide the chiefs to represent their

clan. They advise them and have the responsibility to remove them

if they don’t live up to their responsibilities. One absolute rule is

that a chief can’t have abused a woman or child. That sounds pretty

good as a test of suitability for office, doesn’t it? The early

suffragists knew Indigenous women had authority over their lives

in their nations that U.S. women didn’t: rights to their bodies, their

possessions and their children, safety and political voice. Having

this model showed some suffragists that equality was possible.

Adele Logan Alexander, historian: Can I add something about

time? Clearly this year’s centennial is a significant landmark, but

it’s not the only date we should be thinking of. The federal Voting

Rights Act, which became law in 1965, was incredibly important

too, because the passage of that legislation supposedly guaranteed

the franchise to African-American women — since even after

ratification of the 19th Amendment, stifling Jim Crow regulations

throughout the South had kept the vote from women, as much as

they did for Black men.

Lemay: I think the way we talk about suffrage needs attention. It is

so often described in a way that makes it seem kind of dowdy and

dour — whereas in fact it is exciting and radical. Women staged

one of the longest social reform movements in the history of the

United States. This is not a boring history of nagging spinsters; it is

a badass history of revolution staged by political geniuses. I think

that because they were women, people have hesitated to credit

them as such.

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Erica Armstrong Dunbar, left, focuses on African-American history. Her latest book is about Harriet Tubman. Sharon Attia/The New York Times

Sally Roesch Wagner, right, is a longtime teacher of women’s studies. Her new book is an anthology on suffrage. Sharon Attia/The New York Times

There is a misconception that drives us nuts, which is that women

were “given” the right to vote — not that they fought for and won

it. How do you describe what drove these women?

Tina Cassidy, author: A lot of what drove these women were

practical ideas around their daily existence. We are talking about a

time when women couldn’t own property; once they were married

it belonged to their husbands. Women had no economic power.

Getting divorced meant losing your kids. Even until the 1970s,

many women could not get a credit card without a man signing for

it.

Alexander: To me, there is an emotional connection to it. I have a

visceral memory of the first time I went into a voting booth with

my mother. I couldn’t have been more than 3, because the muscle

memory says I was reaching up for her hand. We went down into

the bowels of the Washington Heights Library, in Upper

Manhattan, and there was the voting booth with its old-fashioned

pull curtain. This was long before anybody ever said the word

“suffrage” to me. But nearly 50 years later, when I started studying

this stuff seriously in graduate school, I thought, “Yes, that’s what I

remember.” Both of my grandmothers were Black Southern

suffragists in the early 1900s, and their beliefs and activities

remained important family legacies through several generations.

“I have a visceral memory of the first time I went into a voting booth,” said Adele Logan Alexander, who is named for her grandmother, the suffragist Adella Hunt Logan. Sharon Attia/The New York Times

Those who learned anything about the suffrage movement in

school probably learned about a handful of white, middle-class

women from the Northeast: Stanton, Anthony, maybe Alice Paul.

Who are some of the characters we may not know but should?

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Erica Armstrong Dunbar, historian: I think of women like Harriet

Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Maria Stewart, Harriet Forten Purvis

and Ida B. Wells-Barnett — African-American suffragists and

abolitionists who advocated for the right to vote even when

spurned by their white counterparts. These women were as

committed to suffrage as their white counterparts, and yet their

voices were often marginalized or silenced. Although the

responsibilities of wage-earning work and domestic duties created

a difficult balancing act, Black women found the time to advocate

on multiple fronts: to end slavery, offer citizenship to African-

Americans and to give Black men and women the right to vote.

Alexander: I would say it is not one person nor one event, but the

scarcely recorded efforts of anonymous women of all races,

educational and economic levels who, for decades, talked with

1 hour ago

neighbors, held meetings, challenged their fathers, sons, husbands

and employers — often putting themselves in physical and

economic jeopardy to do so. They are the unknown heroes of the

movement.

Ware: I really hope we will get a lot more books and articles on

what I call “queering the suffrage movement.” I think that as we

diversify our understanding of the movement, making a place for

queer people is really important.

Cassidy: It’s interesting, one of the first questions I always get

about Alice Paul is, “Was she married?” Because people want to

know, how did she have the time to dedicate her entire life to this?

Was she gay? And I think that the truth is we don’t actually know

the answer to that.

Weiss: She didn’t have a personal life!

Cassidy: Right, the fight for equality was her entire life. Also, she

may have been asexual. I think there’s so much more

contemporary language now to describe this.

Lemay: Also, being single was empowering for many of these

women. A lot of them chose to be single.

Weiss: Legally, it was a better thing to do.

Lemay: For a long time, once a woman got married, she suddenly

lost her rights. She lost her right to sign a contract, to own

property, to sue — and in the rare case of divorce, she didn’t have

rights to her own children. Which is mind-boggling to us today!

Cassidy: Yes, though I also think the assumption that all the

women in the movement were lesbians is an annoying stereotype.

It assumes that women had men to take care of all of their needs

and why should they want the vote, too?

Wagner: As a lesbian, I want to out every damn one of ’em! What I

find helpful is thinking about Adrienne Rich’s “lesbian continuum.”

We tend to see the male sexualization of relationships as the model,

and that’s not the way that lesbian relationships necessarily

develop. Often, the emotional may have more importance. So then

you look at, well, were these women doing it in bed? Well, does that

even matter? What matters is that many of these women had

lifelong emotional relationships that sustained them in their

movement work.

Alice Dunbar-Nelson, a suffrage field organizer and the first Black

woman to serve on Delaware’s Republican Committee, had several

women lovers. Carrie Chapman Catt, a one-time president of the

National American Woman Suffrage Association, and Mary Garrett

Hay were an item; so were Dr. M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn

Mawr College, and Mary E. Garrett, who were major suffrage

funders. There were dozens of these “Boston marriages” of

economically privileged lesbian power couples in the movement.

Adele, your grandmother, the suffragist Adella Hunt Logan, was

once denied the opportunity to speak about the plight of Black

women at a conference honoring Susan B. Anthony — because

Anthony feared her presence might offend some white politicians.

How should we think about the flawed, complicated — and

sometimes flatly racist — figures like Anthony who were also

critical parts of a movement?

Alexander: One of the things that you see in many movements is

that there is sort of a simplistic assumption that we must avoid,

which is that progress moves forward in straight lines. And boy,

does it ever not go in straight lines. It twists back, it doubles over

itself. And it crosses many categories, such as economics, gender

and race. That’s something that we may forget, and perhaps it goes

against Dr. Martin Luther King’s precept that the arc of justice

always bends forward.

Wagner: I think as a culture, we are really grappling with what I

call the “both, and” of our historic figures. How do we both hold

accountability and celebrate? The suffragists both did this

passionate, incredibly important creation of democracy — which

we didn’t have before — and they also need to be held accountable

for furthering racist laws. How many African-American men’s lives

would have been saved if they worked with Ida B. Wells-Barnett

against lynching? What if they had worked against voter

suppression laws, would people of color have had to wait until 1965

— and for some groups longer — to have a political voice? Where

would we be today if our country had enjoyed the leadership and

political voices of women of color for the last 100 years?

So much of this history feels so utterly relevant. How do you see

the parallels of what these women were fighting for and what is

happening today?

Weiss: One of the things that I try to emphasize is how many of

these themes are in our headlines right now. We’re still fighting

over voting rights, over citizenship rights and, yes, over women’s

rights. We’re still grappling with inequality and racism — we’re in

the streets — marching for justice.

Cassidy: When Black Lives Matter protesters were recently in

Lafayette Park, I couldn’t help but think of the suffragists, led by

Alice Paul, who burned President Wilson’s own words — from

speeches he gave about democracy — in that same location more

than a century ago. They were arrested for it.

Alexander: I often think of the women, my grandmother among

them, who wore white dresses to protest the denial of their political

empowerment. There were echoes of that symbolic garb during the

campaigns of Shirley Chisholm, and in the glorious display of white

pantsuits worn by the record number of multiracial, multicultural

women who went to Congress as result of the 2018 election. I

smiled when I saw them!

Lemay: Suffragists were the predecessors to the contemporary

feminist activists who we esteem and admire today for speaking

truth to power.

Tina Cassidy sees close parallels between the suffragists’ protests and contemporary ones by Black activists. Sharon Attia/The New York Times

Elaine Weiss wears a replica of the “Jailed for Freedom” pins sported by suffragists who were arrested while protesting. Sharon Attia/The New York Times

Many of you have talked about how the visual artifacts of suffrage

— pins, posters, tea sets — have become a way of keeping the

movement alive. Which artifacts are most meaningful to you?

Alexander: My suffragist grandmother feels close to me today

because her portrait still hangs in my apartment. The poster from

the first “Afro-American Women and the Vote” conference also

hangs on my wall, a testament to Adella and others like her.

Dunbar: I have an original copy of Life from October 1920. The

cover depicts what appears to be Lady Liberty offering a ballot to

an American woman. Both women are white. What attracted me to

this issue was what wasn’t depicted: the many nonwhite women

who also fought for suffrage. Perhaps a more accurate

representation is the March 5, 1913, edition of The Chicago Daily

Tribune, which features Ida Wells-Barnett marching on

Washington alongside white suffragists. When told that she and

other Black women would have to march in the back of the parade,

Wells-Barnett refused. She marched alongside her fellow

suffragists from Illinois.

Ware: One of the artifacts in my book is a plaque from the

suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt’s “suffrage forest.” This was an

actual forest she had on her farm in New York, where she named 14

trees after movement leaders, each one with a bronze plaque.

When my book came out, I decided that I would create my own

suffrage forest at my home in New Hampshire. I had 19 bronze

plaques made, one for each of the women in my chapters. So you

walk from one tree to the next, and you just have this feeling of the

women talking to each other. And for me, it’s such a powerful

image of the diversity of the movement. How there can be all of

these separate trees that are part of the forest. We don’t need to

have a pedestal with two white women on it. It’s the sense of

inclusion, of being part of something larger.

Adele Logan Alexander is a historian and author of “Princess of the Hither Isles: A Black Suffragist s̓ Story from the Jim Crow South ,” about her grandmother Adella Hunt Logan.

Tina Cassidy is the author of “Mr. President, How Long Must We Wait: Alice Paul, Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the Right to Vote.”

Erica Armstrong Dunbar is a professor of African-American history at Rutgers University and the author of “She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman.”

Kate Clarke Lemay is a historian and curator at the National Portrait Gallery. She is a co- author of “Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence.”

Sally Roesch Wagner is a historian at Syracuse University and editor of “The Women s̓ Suffrage Movement.”

Susan Ware is a historian and the author of “Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote.”

Elaine Weiss is a journalist and the author of “The Woman s̓ Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote.”

Jessica Bennett is a Times editor at large covering women and culture. She writes about personalities, politics, social trends and the workplace — through a gender lens. She is the author of “Feminist Fight Club” and “This Is 18.”

Veronica Chambers is the editor of Past Tense, an archival storytelling initiative devoted to publishing articles based on photographs recently rediscovered as The Times digitizes millions of images from its archives.

A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 16, 2020, Section TW, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Radical, Exciting And Relevant, Especially Now. Order Reprints | Today s̓ Paper | Subscribe

See more on: U.S. Politics, League of Women Voters, Susan B. Anthony, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman

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