Ignis Fatuus

2020 ◽  
pp. 175-194
Author(s):  
Melanie Beals Goan
Keyword(s):  
American Woman ◽  
Woman Suffrage ◽  
Opening Scene ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
Southern States

Returning to the opening scene of the book, this chapter explains the factors that led Laura Clay to resign from KERA and to oppose ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. By 1916, the National American Woman Suffrage Association had endorsed Carrie Chapman Catt's “Winning Plan,” pledging to pursue a federal amendment as its key goal and demanding that states shelve their own plans in favor of national goals. Clay lined up with many southern “states' rights suffragists” such as Kate Gordon and continued to advocate for a state route to the ballot.

REFLECTIONS ON AILEEN KRADITOR'S LEGACY: FIFTY YEARS OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE HISTORIOGRAPHY, 1965–2014

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 290-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise M. Newman
Keyword(s):  
American Woman ◽  
Woman Suffrage ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
Western Imperialism ◽  
Fundamental Insight ◽  
Key Aspects ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Regional Histories

AbstractThis article assesses the impact that Aileen Kraditor's classic monograph, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement (1965) has had on fifty years of suffrage historiography. Kraditor is best known among scholars for offering the terms “justice” and “expediency” to distinguish between two strains of suffragist argumentation, the former of which she associated with the nineteenth century and the latter with the Progressive Era. Although specialists no longer believe in a firm divide between the two periods, many continue to differentiate between principled (egalitarian) arguments that called for suffrage as a universal right of citizenship and instrumental (expedient) claims that often contained racist assumptions about white women's superiority. The majority of scholars now accept Kraditor's fundamental insight that a political movement devoted to the extension of democracy contained within it antidemocratic and racist elements, but they have challenged other key aspects of Kraditor's work, including her characterization of white southern women's advocacy of suffrage and her Turnerian assumptions about why statewide suffrage referenda succeeded first (and primarily) in the West. In addition, scholars have expanded the terrain of women's political activism to include analyses of black women's suffrage activities and understandings of citizenship; in so doing they have connected the regional histories of the South and the Midwest, displacing Kraditor's national narrative. Collectively the field has moved far beyond Kraditor's focus on the National American Woman Suffrage Association to emphasize the enormous range of suffrage activities that took place before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, demonstrating how woman suffrage encompassed new understandings of citizenship that were inseparable from the histories of Reconstruction, U.S. expansion, and western imperialism.

The Politics of Commemorating the Woman Suffrage Movement in New York City: On the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument

2020 ◽  
pp. 009614422094412
Author(s):  
Sierra Rooney
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
American Woman ◽  
Woman Suffrage ◽  
Contentious Politics ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Central Park ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
Suffrage Movement ◽  
Woman Suffrage Movement

This article traces the commission, design, and public reception for New York City’s Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument as a case study for the contentious politics of monument-building. The Central Park statue—as of this writing, not yet realized—has followed a protracted, frequently contested path since its conception in 2015. It was originally designed to depict women’s rights activists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton for the centennial anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment. What began as an initially well-received initiative to correct the gender imbalance in the city’s public art became mired in controversy amid the politically charged atmosphere of the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency. I argue that, while the polarity of contemporary politics amplified the statue’s controversy, the tensions at play are the product of more than 170 years of conflicts inherent in the progressive activism of the American woman suffrage movement and commemorations of it.

Ratification

2020 ◽  
pp. 11-20
Author(s):  
Paula A. Monopoli
Keyword(s):  
American Woman ◽  
Woman Suffrage ◽  
Constitutional Development ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
National Woman's Party ◽  
Alice Paul

Chapter 1 describes two national suffrage organizations’ efforts, in the final years prior to ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. It highlights the split between members of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), over whether a state-by-state approach to suffrage, or a federal suffrage amendment, was the best strategy to achieve the vote for women. That split caused Alice Paul to form a separate organization, the National Woman’s Party (NWP). The chapter foreshadows how that deep division had an impact on the constitutional development of the federal suffrage amendment, after its eventual ratification in 1920.

Validity

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-42
Author(s):  
Paula A. Monopoli
Keyword(s):  
American Woman ◽  
Woman Suffrage ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
National Woman's Party ◽  
Constitutional Meaning

Chapter 2 surfaces the history around the decision, by both the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and the National Woman’s Party (NWP), to immediately pivot to other goals after ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. While each monitored the litigation around the validity of the Nineteenth Amendment, NAWSA and the NWP both had conventions that resulted in adoption of a new mission. The chapter looks closely at the debates among each group’s members as to what its new mission should be. It concludes that the immediate pivot of each group played a role in the Nineteenth Amendment’s less-than-robust constitutional meaning.

Persuading the “Male Preserve”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Goodier ◽  
Karen Pastorello
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
New York State ◽  
American Woman ◽  
White Men ◽  
Woman Suffrage ◽  
York State ◽  
Unique Aspect ◽  
Anna Howard Shaw ◽  
Urban Immigrants

This chapter focuses on men, the only empowered contingent of the suffrage movement. While some men had always voiced support for woman suffrage, no sustained men's organization existed in the state until 1908. That year, Anna Howard Shaw, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, encouraged the founding of the Men's League for Woman Suffrage, which then served as an affiliate of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association. These elite white men, often raised or living in suffrage households, risked embarrassment and censure by publicly displaying their support for woman suffrage. As their participation became routine, the novelty of it wore off. These privileged male champions of woman suffrage inspired men of other classes—including urban immigrants and rural, upstate men—to reconsider their suffrage stance. This unique aspect of the suffrage coalition thereby played a lesser but crucial role in winning the vote for women.

Afterword

2020 ◽  
pp. 229-240
Author(s):  
Kathy Roberts Forde
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
New South ◽  
Electoral Politics ◽  
Voter Registration ◽  
New Era ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
Southern States ◽  
Racial Democracy

Racial divisions shaped the women’s suffrage movement and inflected much of the journalism that helped suffragists collectively imagine women as political beings, persuade others that women should be directly involved in electoral politics, and secure the vote through ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. These racial divisions proved tragic. If the Nineteenth Amendment ever promised a new era of racial democracy in America, that promise was lost when white suffragists abandoned the citizenship aspirations of black women (and men) in the South to the forces of white supremacy. Henry Grady’s New South ideology veiled coordinated efforts across the Southern states to thwart black political power and institute the “solid South” of white supremacy. In 1920, Mary McLeod Bethune helped lead black Floridians in a voter registration drive—a bold effort to claim black civil rights promised in both the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments. The result was violent voter intimidation across the state and a massacre of black citizens in Ocoee.

scholarly journals THE SEQUEL: THE FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT, THE NINETEENTH AMENDMENT, AND SOUTHERN BLACK WOMEN'S STRUGGLE TO VOTE

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 433-449 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liette Gidlow
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Woman Suffrage ◽  
The South ◽  
American Women ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
Fifteenth Amendment

This essay reframes both the woman suffrage narrative and narratives of African American voting rights struggles by focusing on the experiences of southern African American women between the 1870s and the 1920s. It argues that the Fifteenth Amendment remained central to their suffrage strategy long after the failure of the “New Departure” to win court sanction caused white suffragists to abandon it. As white supremacists in the South worked at the turn of the century to disfranchise black men, leading African American suffragists such as Mary Church Terrell, Gertrude Bustill Mossell, and Adella Hunt Logan called for the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments as well as the enfranchisement of black women. After the federal woman suffrage amendment was ratified in 1920, many southern African American women encountered the same barriers to voting—obstructionist tactics, threats, and violence—that black men had faced a generation earlier. In short, for aspiring African American voters in the South, the failure of the Nineteenth Amendment to secure voting rights for black women constituted a sad sequel to the failure of the Fifteenth Amendment to secure voting rights for black men.This interpretation offers three significant interventions. It pairs the Reconstruction-era Amendments with the Nineteenth Amendment, recognizing their shared focus on voting rights. It connects the voting rights struggles of southern African Americans across genders and generations. Finally, it finds that, for some women, the canonical “century of struggle” for voting rights continued long after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified.

Anna Howard Shaw

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trisha Franzen
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
American Woman ◽  
Woman Suffrage ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Poor Family ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles ◽  
Suffrage Movement ◽  
Economic Reality ◽  
Gender Boundaries ◽  
Anna Howard Shaw

This first scholarly biography of Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919) sheds new light on an important woman suffrage leader who has too often been overlooked and misunderstood. An immigrant from a poor family, Shaw grew up in an economic reality that encouraged the adoption of non-traditional gender roles. Challenging traditional gender boundaries throughout her life, she put herself through college, worked as an ordained minister and a doctor, and built a tightly knit family with her secretary and longtime companion Lucy E. Anthony. Drawing on unprecedented research, the book shows how these circumstances and choices both impacted Shaw's role in the woman suffrage movement and set her apart from her native-born, middle- and upper-class colleagues. The book also rehabilitates Shaw's years as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), arguing that Shaw's much-belittled tenure actually marked a renaissance of both NAWSA and the suffrage movement as a whole.

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