Last week, historians Martha Jones and Lisa Tetrault joined National Constitution Center President and CEO Jeffrey Rosen for a conversation exploring the history and legacy of the 19th Amendment. The discussion highlighted the untold stories of women from all backgrounds who fought for women's suffrage and equality for all—as well as the work still left to do after the amendment's ratification was won. Martha Jones is author of the new book Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All. Lisa Tetrault is author of The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898.
This conversation originally aired on our companion podcast, Live at the National Constitution Center. Listen and subscribe here.
This program was presented as part of the 19th Amendment: Past, Present, and Future symposium presented in partnership with All in Together, the George & Barbara Bush Foundation, the LBJ Presidential Library, the National Archives, The 19th, and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. It’s part of the National Constitution Center's Women and the Constitution initiative—a yearlong celebration of the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment.
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PARTICIPANTS
Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University. She is a legal and cultural historian whose work examines how black Americans have shaped the story of American democracy. Professor Jones is the author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All and Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America, winner of the Organization of American Historians Liberty Legacy Award for the best book in civil rights history, the American Historical Association Littleton-Griswold Prize for the best book in American legal history, and the American Society for Legal History John Phillip Reid book award for the best book in Anglo-American legal history.
Lisa Tetrault is Associate Professor in the Department of History in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. She specializes in the history of U.S. women and gender. A historian of the nineteenth century, she focuses on social movements (particularly feminism), American democracy, and the politics of memory. She is the author of The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898, which won the Organization of American Historians' inaugural Mary Jurich Nickliss women's history book prize, and her second is Enter Woman Suffrage: A New History of Reconstruction, 1865-1878. Professor Tetrault is an adviser for the National Constitution Center's exhibit The 19th Amendment: How Women Won the Vote.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
- The National Constitution Center’s new exhibit The 19th Amendment: How Women Won the Vote
This episode was engineered by Greg Scheckler and produced by Jackie McDermott and Tanaya Tauber. Research was provided by Lana Ulrich, Nicholas Mosvick, and Jake La Fronz.
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TRANSCRIPT:
This transcript may not be in its final form, accuracy may vary, and it may be updated or revised in the future.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:00:35] Lisa Tetrault I have to thank you for your great advice with the National Constitution Center's new exhibit on the 19th Amendment how women won the vote is in that beautiful building, which is on the on the backdrop behind me, we're going to open on August 26th, which is the actual hundredth anniversary of women's suffrage. Today, of course, we're talking to our friends on August 6th, the hundredth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 or rather the day of the anniversary. You in your great book about Seneca Falls, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, argue that Seneca Falls was not the beginning of the women's suffrage movement which in fact began far earlier. Tell us about the origin story of the fight for women's suffrage.
Lisa Tetrault: [00:01:26] I think the first point there Jeffrey is that there is no single fight. It is many, many, many fights. So it depends which strand of the story you pick up and then where you trace it back to. And we have contained a story from 1848 to 1920, but that was really a product of white suffragist themselves who are trying to elevate their particular fight and their particular agenda, particularly Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and it had a lot to do with fights inside the movement where they were trying to exile and sideline other suffragists who didn't share their particular vision of suffrage activism. So even within a kind of white women's suffrage fight there were many, many strands and many parts of the story. And so in some ways, when we tell the story of Seneca Falls, we're really reading the end of the story back onto the beginning and missing a lot of the complexity. And as we unravel 1920 on this anniversary, we are simultaneously and hopefully increasingly unraveling stories of beginnings.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:02:22] Martha Jones, in your forthcoming book, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, you argue that the movement didn't have an end point in 1920 and in fact we would do better to think of it as a struggle from the early 19th century all the way up through the 1965. Tell us about that argument and also about the heroic African-American women who you highlight and whose stories you tell.
Martha Jones: [00:02:54] When we take the vantage point of African-American women it turns out that the start point and the end point, if indeed there is one, these are very different. So Vanguard begins in the first decades of the 19th century with truly pathbreaking African-American women who first and foremost develop a political critique; that is one that decries both the influence of racism, as well as the influence and of sexism on American politics. And this becomes, if you will, the signature defining feature of African-American women's politics going forward. Yes, 1920 is a landmark moment for some African-American women in states like New York, Illinois, California, Black women will be voting even before ratification of the 19th amendment. But for too many African-American women the 19th amendment, while a landmark, is not the gateway to voting rights at all. And state laws, Jim Crow laws like poll taxes and literacy tests, will keep far too many black women from the polls until in 1965, as you suggest, the passage of the voting rights act gives a kind of teeth to both the 15th amendment from 1870 and the 19th amendment from 1920 and opens up a new chapter in voting rights for Black Americans. One in which now there will be federal oversight that looks to guarantee the right to vote for the very first time.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:04:39] Well, let's take the story up chronologically so we understand the relationship of the movement for women's suffrage from Seneca Falls leaders and from African-American women. So Lisa, tell us about Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the women at the heart of the Seneca Falls movement. What was the Seneca Falls convention arguing for when it invoked the Declaration of Independence to argue that all men and women are created equal? And how did what began as a movement in the early 19th century for women's civil rights, more generally, focus in particular on the right of women to vote?
Lisa Tetrault: [00:05:15] Well, that's a big story. I would start off with saying that I think really this begins at the founding more appropriately, and there were women at the founding, probably many, many, many more than we know of because many voices were not preserved, already saying if man is capable of self-government, why am not I? And we know quite famously that Abigail Adams would say, "Remember the ladies," but she was certainly not alone. And the founding framers of the Constitution and others spoke repeatedly of the up-swelling of desires for self-governance and voting and of many other rights at the time of the founding. And I think we don't really have a clear picture in many ways of just how robust that sentiment was among women, partly because those records haven't been kept. But by the time we start to see some stirring for voting it is a very different kind of American democracy. We can't really tell this story without telling the sort of evolution of American democracy itself, because gender is not an isolated variable in this story. And as voting starts to change and become something that is more central to people's lives by the 1820s and the 1830s, many people start to incorporate that into their overall calls for rights, but not in a way that they center it as the most important of their rights. And for many people what was necessary for the strength of American democracy, but something else entirely. And for example, the abolition of slavery. But the Seneca Falls convention is, as we know it, the first women's rights convention in the United States. It is not the first call for the vote, which is often said about it. That's part of the mythology that I traced in my book. Susan B. Anthony was not in fact there, although she has routinely played there in her obituaries. It will say she began the fight at Seneca Falls which is also part of the mythology, which I tell in my book. And it was a local impromptu convention that no one at the time would have thought was sparking a movement or that began the movement. And nobody would say that really, that this convention, which took that founding document and turned it into this cry for women's rights saying for example, and you know, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men and then they add and women are created equal, and this is the famous declaration of sentiments; their manifesto that they issue. And in that they, instead of listing grievances against the King, they list grievances against man and then the series of demands, which include everything from voting, to equal pay, to equal education, to access to the professions, to an end of the sexual double standard, to property holdings. And again, many of these are concerns that address a certain type of woman's life, but aren't necessarily addressing the concerns of other women. So it's, it's a kind of women's rights agenda that puts the vote in it, but it doesn't center the vote. That doesn't happen until quite a bit later and that'll happen after the American Civil War. And we can talk more about that, but that sense that this began the movement, Seneca Falls, is something that gets created after the American Civil War and then read back onto the beginning in a way that is about politics after the American Civil War and adjudicating those politics. But Seneca Falls is routinely used as the beginning and Susan B. Anthony is routinely and erroneously placed there in a way that really hurts our understanding of the movement and of voting rights generally, and of the evolution of American democracy.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:08:34] Well, Martha Jones help us understand how after the Civil War, the movement began and your previous book all bound up together, you tell the amazing story of how African-American activist women who are often marginalized in public life in the 1830s, became community leaders by the 1890s. Introduce if you will, the complicated and important relationship between the Women's Suffrage Movement and the Abolitionist Movement. We have Frederick Douglass standing with women's suffrage advocates, arguing for votes for African-Americans and for women, but the movements splinter after the Civil War. It's a complicated story. Help us understand it.
Martha Jones: [00:09:14] Thanks. You're bringing us to the 1860s to an extraordinary, some would say revolutionary, moment in the history of American law and politics. This opportunity to rethink the fundamental terms of the US Constitution: the 13th Amendment that abolishes slavery, the 14th Amendment that establishes birthright, citizenship and equality before the law and finally, the 15th Amendment that will prohibit the States from using race as a criteria when kneading out voting rights. There indeed is an old coalition of folks who have radical activists, women's rights activists, abolitionists who have known each other, some of them for a very long time, who reconvene in the 1860s. And the question before them is what is their relationship going to be to this constitutional revolution that is being wrought in many ways, not in their meetings, but in Congress. And you have the coming together figures like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglas s, the great abolitionists Wendell Phillips, and it is true that this coalition really struggles over whether to endorse and whether to support ratification of the 14th, and most importantly, the 15th Amendment, which will again, speak to race, but not speak to gender when it comes to voting rights. Oftentimes, this is a story that's told as a face-off between Frederick Douglass, an African-American man and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a white woman. And this is a troubling myth to borrow Lisa Tetrault's framing. It's a troubling myth because of course there are also African-American women in these meetings: Sojourner truth, the very well-known by this period anti-slavery and women's rights orator and Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, who is somewhat of a newcomer, but has established herself as a poet and a public speaker. I want to focus on Harper because she, when we focus on her as an African-American woman, we learned something about what is troubling this meeting. Watkins Harper comes in and she's deeply skeptical of just about everybody in the room. She is quite sure that no one quite appreciates the circumstances that African-American women face in this new, extraordinary moment as they look to law and politics to address both racism and sexism simultaneously. It isn't possible in Watkins Harper's view to take a position that speaks to anti-Black racism and doesn't also speak to gender. Her often quoted line is, "We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity." And this becomes the signature contribution that African-American women will make to this ongoing debate over voting rights that will continue, I'd say even until our own time. This view that it is not possible to parse out access to the polls, access to office holding, to jury service, and more along man-made differences as she would put it like race and gender that she asks this coalition, including Stanton, including Douglass, to really lift their sights to the interests of all humanity as she would put it. And this is the position that black women will put on the table. They will not carry the day in the 1860s, but they will press this position coming all the way through the 19th Amendment and beyond. And I guess I'll leave it to another panel to decide whether we've actually arrived at that ideal. But it's Francis Ellen Watkins Harper who puts that on the table as early as the 1860s.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:12:59] In your new book, Vanguard, you tell the story, not only of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, but also other heroic black women, Maria Stewart, Fannie Lou Hamer, and more. Tell us about their activism during this crucial period between the passage of the 15th and 19th Amendment. Some activists were arguing for change at the state level. Others were arguing for courts to recognize women's suffrage. What was the position of these African-American women you write about and how successful were African-American women, in particular, in getting the right to vote in the States during this crucial transition period?
Martha Jones: [00:13:38] One of the important facets of this story, in my research, was to recognize that while we have been able to recover small and important numbers of African-American women who are part of the Women's Suffrage Associations that take us, if you will, from the Civil War to the 19th Amendment, it is a small number of African-American women. So part of my work was to ask where, where did, where were Black women, if they weren't a part of the suffrage associations. One of the myths about them is that they hadn't been interested in politics. They hadn't been interested in voting rights. So I wind up following them, if you will, to the places where they do gather. And it turns out that African-American women are gathered in important numbers by the thousands in the tens of thousands. First in their churches, Black Methodist Baptist churches where in the same period they are engaged in pitched debates over their political power within religious denominations. Will they have preaching licenses? Will they have offices within their denominations? Will they be ordained to the ministry? And when they engage in these debates, they are speaking precisely the sorts of language that, and making the sorts of arguments, that are animating suffrage debates at this very same moment. Now by the 1890s by 1895 and 1896 African-American women are indeed prepared to gather in a national organization, but it will not again, be a suffrage association. It will be the National Association of Colored Women. It will be a club movement that gathers together hundreds and thousands of local Black women's clubs across the country and activates them for a whole range of political work. Even before suffrage, these clubs are organizing against lynching and advocating for federal anti-lynching legislation led in to an important degree by the great suffragist, Black suffragist, Ida B Wells. So the founding of Black women's politics, as a companion to the suffrage movement, is through an organization that yes, comes to adopt women's suffrage as part of its agenda and to work hard to that end, but at the same time is active and committed to what we'd say in 21st century parlance was anti-racist work, right? In particular, the move for federal anti-lynching legislation. Black women do not find a comfortable home in suffrage associations. The important degree to which racism has informed that movement, for some women individually, but more importantly, I think strategically and instrumentally it means that African-American women never find a comfortable home here. But at the same time they are, as Lisa Tetrault has suggested, already part of the political machines in cities like New York and Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles, even before the 19th Amendment. So they are beginning to work their political power to influence the agenda, particularly of the Republican party of that era. And at the same time, black women are organizing with one another: citizenship schools and suffrage schools, because what they know, and it is no secret, in the years leading up to the ratification of the 19th Amendment that they will face an additional set of hurdles in too many States: poll taxes, literacy tests in addition to intimidation and violence. And so suffrage and citizenship schools become the way that Black women prepare one another. And it turns out they also prepare Black men who have been away from the polls for a very long time for a new wave of registration, new attempts to cast ballots in the fall of 1920. As we know, too much of that will not succeed and require Black women to mount yet another movement for women's suffrage, if you will, one that begins in August of 1920.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:17:53] Lisa Tetrault, take us up from 1913 to the passage of the amendment, we are commemorating its hundredth anniversary this year. In March 1913, the two women's movements, as Martha Jones describes them, as African-American women marchers and white woman converged on the eve of a presidential inauguration and set in motion a series of events that led to a dramatic last minute shifts of a vote by a Tennessee Senator, who got a letter from his mother, and then the amendment was opposed and passed. Tell us about that story. Why did it pass when it did?
Lisa Tetrault: [00:18:27] It's a cinematic finish. The ratification, both the, the fight for the actual voting, you know our Congress approves the amendment, and then it goes to the States for three fours for ratification. Beginning, often people say with this parade in 1913, which was a massive peaceful protest in Washington, DC done on the Eve of Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, precisely in order to upstage him for his opposition to women's suffrage. Hundreds of thousands of people turn out in the streets. Tens of thousands of women are marching and violence erupts. This is the kind of violence that many women of color experience on a daily basis, but it's shocking for Americans, white Americans, to see this happen to sort of good upstanding white women. It makes front page press. There is of course, you know, the usual racial tensions and concessions to white supremacy with inside white suffragist activism. They ask that Ida B Wells, who is, you know, one of the nation's premier civil rights activist, Mary Church Terrell, a black sorority and others to March at the rear of the parade. And this is emblematic in many ways of the ways in which white suffragists made concessions to and accommodations to white supremacy in order to further the cause of eradicating the word male, but not fighting more generally for the right to vote of all peoples. And that parade leaves Alice Paul, who directs it and who becomes kind of the center of the theatrical of the campaign, to go on and do a more and more theatrics, including picketing the white house, underscoring as we enter World War I, the ways in which the United States is defending much democracy abroad, but not protecting it at home. And then it would lead up to Congress finally passing this for many, many, many reasons, including I would argue the fact that the Southern States have now officially disenfranchised African-Americans with Jim Crow laws. I think that's part of why the amendment passes. We rarely talk about that because we talk about gender as an isolated variable. And they know that women of color, you know, will have difficulty voting. And then it goes to ratification is flies through ratification until it stops, sits with one state short for months and months and months. Tennessee takes it up. It looks like it's not going to pass. The youngest member, Harry T. Burn gets a letter from his mother Fab who tells him to quote, "Be a good boy and help Mrs. Cap with a rat ratification." With that he changes his vote dramatically. It goes over by one. And you know, the hundreds of thousands of votes and fights and letters have finally pushed the amendment over to ratification. It is truly a cinematic finish, but it is not the end of the right to vote or the creation of a right to vote. It is the eradication of the word "male." Which is significant, but insufficient.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:20:58] Martha Jones, it was an insufficient achievements to pass the 19th Amendment. Tell us what happened next. African-American men, of course in 1920, had already been severely disenfranchised by literacy tests, poll taxes, and other ruses that subverted the promise of the 15th amendment. How did the African-American women fair and goading between 1920 and 1965? Were they disenfranchised at an even greater rate than African-American men and with different elicit means? Tell us about their story and how they contributed ultimately to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Martha Jones: [00:21:34] Sure. There's no question, but that African-American women in a strong sense become equal to their male counterparts in 1920. But that means also equally disenfranchised, subject to the same Jim Crow laws, the adaptation of Jim Crow laws. In Georgia the poll tax requirements applied only to men have to be amended now to include women as a bar to voting or an impediment to voting for black women in the state of Georgia. But African-American women again, in the National Association of Colored Women now headed by an Ohioan, Holly Quinn Brown call on Alice Paul in 1921 on the Eve of the last, which turns out to be the last meeting of the National Women's Party. And they implore Alice Paul to stay in the fight for voting rights even with the victory of the 19th Amendment behind them because Black women know that the 19th Amendment is not going to be enough to get all of them to the polls. They are disappointed by Alice Paul who will move on to laudable concerns like the Equal Rights Amendment, but African-American women now will, to an important degree, link arms with African-American men in a civil rights agenda that looks to topple many of the pillars of Jim Crow, including grandfather clauses and poll taxes and other state level impediments to the vote. This is a story that takes us through to the modern Civil Rights Era and the 1965 ratification of the, of the, Oh, excuse me, of passage of the Voting Rights Act. But what I want to point out in this interim 45 years is that African-American women though disfranchised do not sit on the sidelines and wait until that moment when they'll be welcomed to the polls. I write about a figure like Mary Church Terrell, a Floridian a staunch voting rights activist in Florida in 1919 and 1920, an educator, the founder of Bethune Cookman university. Well, when Bethune can't make good on voting rights for Black women in Florida, she comes to Washington and introduces herself to Franklin Roosevelt and will help Roosevelt by the thirties establish what is often referred to as his Black cabinet. Bethune understands that power in Washington certainly comes by way of the election of representatives, but in the wake of the depression and the advent of the new deal state, if one can commandeer the resources of federal agencies, which are charged with digging the nation out of the depression, one can actually do a great deal for Black communities across the country. And Bethune will use that kind of influence, a deep friendship with Mrs. Roosevelt as well, to bring Black Americans literally to Washington, to work in those agencies, but most importantly to redirect the resources of those agencies toward Black Americans. All of this long before we get to the Voting Rights Act. So this is why Black women can never be single issue political agents. They have to be nimble. They have to be inventive. They have to be ready to seize opportunities where they exist and Bethune is a wonderful example of a consummate politician who, when she's ordered at the polls figures out now, how to get close to power in Washington and do something with it.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:25:17] Thank you so much, Martha Jones and Lisa Tetrault for illuminating and rich discussion of the complicated and important history of the 19th Amendment. We'll look forward to the next panels about the present and future of the fight for the right to vote. Friends, we'll look forward to seeing all of you in person at the National Constitution Center and online at constitutioncenter.org to celebrate, commemorate, and learn about this crucial Constitutional anniversary. Lisa Tetrault, Martha Jones. Thank you so much for joining us.
Jackie McDermott: [00:26:03] This episode was engineered by Greg Scheckler and produced by me, Jackie McDermott, and Tanaya Tauber. This program was presented as part of the 19th amendment past present and future symposium presented in partnership with All In Together, the George and Barbara Bush foundation, the LBJ Presidential Library, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, the National Archives and the 19th. It's part of the National Constitution Center's Women in the Constitution initiative, a year long celebration of the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment. Please rate, review, and subscribe to live at the National Constitution Center on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. Join us back here next week. On behalf of the National Constitution Center, I'm Jackie McDermott.
