A Formidable Book

A Formidable Book

By Pat Reilly

Formidable: American Women and the Fight for Equality 1920-2020, by Dr. Elisabeth Griffith, is as substantial as its subjects, the Black and White women who struggled to achieve the right to vote and their female rivals.

What makes this book unique in the women’s history literary cannon is that it combines the stories of Black and White women in the early struggle, who, though they had similar goals, had different motivations and were prone to the biases of their era.

Black and White women only coalesced briefly in the early part of the last century to get the vote, but then would not form significant coalitions again until the 1970s. By integrating these histories, Griffith introduces us to a huge cast of characters, many of whom readers may be meeting for the first time. She also includes those who opposed equality, equally dedicated to their missions.

Black women in 1920, most of whom were Republicans, the party of President Lincoln, wanted all the rights enjoyed by Whites, according to Griffith. They also sought safety for their communities from discrimination and violence in the Jim Crow era. White women, split equally between the major parties, had a narrower set of needs. They wanted the same rights enjoyed by men, Griffith says.

The passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920 was not an end, but a beginning in acquiring many of the rights women now take for granted. This is the story of a century of incremental gains that, in hindsight, appear to be massive. Stilll, as Griffith points out, amortized over 100 years, they’ve been slow in coming.

Once women got the vote, they were loath to do anything with it. Though the potential electorate had doubled, general voter turnout in 1920 was at a historic low. The bookend years of this story have a lot in common. Both were election years and riven by racial strife. There is no data on male vs. female voters in 1920, except to note that Black women were barred from voting in the South, but it is safe to assume that women’s vote did not make a big difference.

Black women had to wait until 1964 to have their right to vote protected by the Voting Rights Act. In 2020, the “Black women’s vote” is credited with winning the election for Democratic President Joe Biden. What happened to shift women from the GOP to the Democrat side of the ledger? Griffith has a one-word answer: “Eleanor”.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wife urged him to give women prominent roles in his administration. She demonstrated that women could do much more than they were thought capable of. Meanwhile, World War II gave Black and White women access to well-paying jobs. “Rosie the Riveter” was well paid and, though she lost her defense job when the boys came home, women’s participation in the workforce did not flag as many think, Griffith says. Nevertheless, jobs women could get post-war lowered their paychecks significantly.

The author enumerates the many inventions and interventions that changed women’s lives, rubber nursing nipples, the sewing machine, access to education, Title IX, the Civil Rights Act, Roe v. Wade. And dominant among all of them was access to birth control. It was not until 1972, with the institution of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University that “the gender gap” in voting was discovered.

Author Elisabeth Griffith is foremost an educator. She was the celebrated longtime headmistress of Madeira, a girl’s school in McLean. She still teaches courses at Politics and Prose book store in Washington D.C. and lectures widely on women’s history. Her biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, In Her Own Right (Oxford, 1984), was named one of the “best books of the century” by the editors of The New York Times Book Review. It inspired Ken Burns’ PBS documentary Not for Ourselves Alone on which she served as a consultant.

The title of the book’s epilogue sums up women’s progress: Not Enough. The U.S. still hasn’t had a female president and very few governors are women. In state legislatures, where they do better, women are only 30 percent. Only twenty-two women are currently CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. As in 1920, the author says, it’s time to begin again.