HERO’S OF SUFFERAGE
THE NEXT
WOMEN’S MOVEMENT IS NOW Congresswomen are recognized by President Donald Trump as he delivers the State of the Union address in 2019. The white they wear is meant to honor the women’s suffrage movement that led to the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. JASPER COLT / USA TODAY
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By Allie Clouse USA TODAY Network
he relationship between women of color and women’s rights movements has always been “complicated,” said Patrick Grzanka, associate professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee. As America celebrates the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, it’s more important than ever to understand the role women of color played in the fight for suffrage, their exclusion within the movement and how the women’s rights battles of today and tomorrow can be more inclusive. “A lot of the advancements that were
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made were made at the cost of solidarity across races,” said Jana Morgan, a political science professor at the University of Tennessee. “I think a recognition that dividing ourselves up does not help to overcome systems of entrenched power is crucial right now.” In the mid-1800s, women and African American abolitionists were at the forefront of the early fight for suffrage. Together, at the Seneca Falls Convention, widely considered to be the first women’s rights meeting, they created the Declaration of Sentiments, a list of agreed-upon goals to gain equal rights for everyone. But by the 1860s, the suffrage movement divided itself into those who supported efforts to ratify the 15th Amendment, which granted Black men the right to vote but did not include women, and the suffragists
— like leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton — who chose to focus solely on the enfranchisement of women. And the passage of the 19th Amendment didn’t result in voting rights for all women. Women of color would face barriers to voting for decades to come. “The movement shifted towards what today we might call ‘single-axis politics,’ a model that really privileged the prototypical subject of voting rights, and that was the white woman,” Grzanka said. “So, when women’s issues came to the forefront, a lot of other people and issues — specifically racism and white supremacy — got pushed to the sidelines as a result.” This wasn’t the first or last time people of color and their rights would be abandoned to secure freedoms for other groups, particularly by white people.
