by Elaine Weiss
But not exactly all persons. For the very first time, in Section 2 of the proposed amendment (the part dealing with representation in Congress and penalties for infringing upon voting rights), the phrase “male citizen” appeared, where no such gender designation had ever before been made in the U.S. Constitution. The right of “male citizens” to vote. Elizabeth Stanton, Susan Anthony, and Lucy Stone screamed loudly, in furious pronouncements to the press, in protest petitions to Congress, in biting letters to their abolitionist brothers whom they felt, after so many years of toiling together, had betrayed them.
And their allies did abandon them, for a combination of practical and political reasons. For the abolitionists, this was the historic moment consecrated in the blood of war for transforming slaves into citizens once and for all. Yes, Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips agreed, women should also get the vote, but the nation could not swallow two immense reforms at once, and the black man’s very life depended upon his ability to protect himself with the vote. The terrible War Between the States had not, after all, been waged for women’s right to vote. This was “the Negro’s Hour”; “the Woman’s Hour” would come, eventually, Douglass promised, but its time had not arrived.
While Stanton and Anthony protested, Lucy Stone slowly acknowledged the political reality: if the wording could not be changed, better to adopt a flawed amendment to protect endangered black men’s civil rights than nothing at all. But Stanton could not accept such a compromise: “If that word male be inserted it will take us at least a century to get it out,” she moaned.
“I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work for or demand the ballot for the Negro and not for the woman,” Susan Anthony declared.
The old abolitionist coalition tried to hold together under the banner of the American Equal Rights Association, dedicated to securing suffrage and political rights for all Americans “irrespective of race, color or sex.” Frederick Douglass signed on as a vice president, and Garrison, Phillips, Stanton, Anthony, Mott, and Stone were all on the organization’s masthead, but the alliance was a troubled one, riven by the question of whether “manhood suffrage” must take precedence over “universal suffrage.” To Stanton and Anthony it was a false choice and a tragic lost opportunity: this was the nation’s hour and a chance to perfect democracy. She urged women to “press in through that constitutional door the moment it is opened for the admission of Sambo.” The Negro male must not “march to liberty over woman’s prostrate form,” Stanton and Anthony insisted.
“It is with us a matter of life and death,” Frederick Douglass shot back, “and therefore can not be postponed.” Women were not despised by society as black people were, said Douglass, framing the disparity in stark, heartbreaking terms:
When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans; when they are dragged from their houses and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms, and their brains dashed out upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads, when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own.
Douglass was asked if this awful predicament was not also true for black women. “Yes, yes, yes; it is true of the black woman,” he replied, “but not because she is a woman, but because she is black.”
The feminist-abolitionist alliance continued to weaken as the Fourteenth Amendment wended its way toward ratification in the states and disintegrated completely when the Fifteenth Amendment was introduced in order to clarify and strengthen the voting rights provisions of the previous amendment: The right of citizens to vote cannot be denied or abridged on account of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
Why not include one more word, Stanton asked, why not just add the word “sex” to the protected status, and with those three letters enfranchise all citizens? No, that was impossible, she was told. We should all walk through the door to the Kingdom together, insisted Stanton and Anthony, and if women were not allowed to walk through that enchanted door to the franchise, they were prepared to block entry for the black man as well. They would fight against ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment with a vengeance.
Stanton and Anthony descended into depths of vile racist rhetoric, going so far as to warn against the “horrible outrages” against white women that were sure to follow the black man’s enfranchisement and elevation in society. In a cynical ploy to appeal to southern states—which otherwise had little sympathy for woman suffrage—they argued that white women’s enfranchisement would provide an electoral bulwark against “Negro rule” in the South. In other states they broadened their attack, vilifying the increasing number of immigrant men who were entitled to vote: “Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung,” Stanton snarled, “who do not know the difference between a monarchy and a republic, never read the Declaration of Independence or Webster’s spelling book,” making decisions for educated and cultured white women.
Lucy Stone was horrified by the pair’s unhinged diatribes, and Wendell Phillips cut off financial support from abolition funds, isolating Stanton and Anthony from the movement and making them susceptible to a brief alliance with George Francis Train, an eccentric, flamboyant businessman with an appetite for unpopular causes and an unsavory reputation for unbridled racist sentiments. Lucy Stone called Train a “raving lunatic” and denounced her longtime colleagues. Stanton brushed off the criticism: “If the Devil steps forward ready to help, I shall say good fellow come on,” she insisted. In the end, the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, while the abolition and women’s rights coalition Elizabeth and Susan had nurtured for the past twenty years was torn asunder.
Stanton, Anthony, and their supporters formed the National Woman Suffrage Association, with the goal of advocating for a Sixteenth Amendment providing the franchise to women, but also agitating for equal pay, an eight-hour workday, more equitable divorce laws, and other social reforms. Lucy Stone, together with her husband, Henry Blackwell, Julia Ward Howe, and other more moderate feminists, formed the American Woman Suffrage Association, based in Boston, focusing on getting individual states to grant the vote to women (as states have authority over their own election laws, provided those laws agree with federal law) but steering clear of more radical issues. There was bad blood, both political and personal, between the two groups, and the split would not be healed for another quarter century.
Meanwhile, the rift between Frederick Douglass and the woman suffragists, even Stanton and Anthony, was overcome more quickly. By 1873 the leaders of the suffrage movement began to make peace overtures to Douglass, and by 1876 he was once again an honored guest at their suffrage conventions. Stanton and Anthony welcomed him, realizing they needed Douglass’s star power in their continuing campaign. Douglass was still a true believer in woman suffrage, and his magnanimous spirit allowed him to forgive, if not quite forget, the slurs suffragists had hurled at black men. He was still “willing to be part of the bridge over which women should march to the full enjoyment of their rights.” And Douglass was still proud of standing with Elizabeth Stanton in her demand for suffrage at Seneca Falls:
“There are few facts in my humble history to which I look back with more satisfaction than . . . that I was sufficiently enlightened at that early day, when only a few years from slavery, to support your resolution for woman suffrage,” he told a women’s convention in 1888. “When I ran away from slavery, it was for myself; when I advocated emancipation, it was for my people; but when I stood up for the rights of women, self was out of the question, and I found a little nobility in the act.”
The suffragists tended to be less noble. When NAWSA held its first convention in a southern city, Atlanta, in 1895, Anthony personally asked Douglass to stay away, fearing his presence would antagonize white s
outhern suffragists whom the movement needed to attract and appease. “I did not want to subject him to humiliation,” Anthony explained to a young black colleague, the civil rights activist Ida B. Wells, “and I did not want anything to get in the way of bringing the Southern white women into our suffrage association now that their interest had been awakened.” Douglass realized his old friend was making a naked political calculation; she was protecting her cause at the expense of his. This type of accounting would be repeated many times in the future.
Despite the difficulties the Suffs faced in their quest for equality—upending centuries of law and millennia of cultural tradition—all these paled in comparison with the challenges black citizens faced in securing their basic rights. It would always be safer and easier for the women to lay their claim, precisely because they were the close kin of the men in power: they were not “other” or alien, they were the wives and mothers, sisters and daughters, of the men of the white ruling class. They might not have the vote, but they had familial ties, social standing, and elite educations and connections. Most important, unlike the black man and woman petitioning for fundamental dignity and rights, the Suffs were not despised for their skin color or dismissed as lesser beings; they did not bear the perpetual scars of slavery.
Nevertheless, Frederick Douglass remained a steadfast “Woman’s Rights Man” until the day he died in February 1895, just two weeks after that Atlanta convention and just hours after participating in another women’s rights convention in Washington, D.C. When Susan Anthony received the news of his death, she rushed from the convention to Douglass’s home in Anacostia, across the Potomac River from Washington, to console Douglass’s widow. She sat grieving with Helen Douglass for the next days, helping to arrange the funeral services, staying in the guest bedroom the Douglasses reserved for her visits; her framed portrait hung above the hearth. In Douglass’s own study, a large oil portrait of Elizabeth Stanton had pride of place on the wall, adjacent to a painting of Abraham Lincoln.
Anthony eulogized her friend at the Washington ceremonies, with senators, congressmen, and Supreme Court judges in the pews of Metropolitan AME Church, while thousands of mourners thronged the surrounding streets. The son of Douglass’s last slave master sent a floral tribute. Reverend Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, who along with Carrie Catt was one of Aunt Susan’s girls, used her preaching gifts to offer a stirring benediction. And Anthony read a tribute from Elizabeth Stanton, too infirm to attend, expressing her grief at Douglass’s passing and her appreciation of his sustaining moral power:
Frederick Douglass is not dead! His grand character will long be an object lesson in our national history; his lofty sentiments of liberty, justice, and equality, echoed on every platform over our broad land, must influence and inspire many coming generations.
Carrie Catt was in that next generation, and when she read the press accounts of Douglass’s funeral, the accolades offered by Anthony, Stanton, and Shaw—she was dismayed: “The relation of our leaders to the colored question at the Douglass funeral has completely taken the wind out of our sails,” Catt complained to a fellow Suff. “You should see some of the clippings I have from the Southern press and some of the letters. They were a little suspicious of us all along, but now they know we are abolitionists in disguise, with no other thought than to set the negro in dominance over them.” Carrie Catt had already become a suffrage politician.
Over the following decades, as Catt became the movement’s preeminent politician, she was forced to grapple with the race issue again and again. Voting rights and race were inexorably bound together, as they would be for the rest of the twentieth century, as they continue to be now. It seemed to come down to a cruel, damnable choice, as if one group of citizens needed to win and another must lose, at each step of progress. There was no entering into the gates of the Kingdom together. When forced to choose between truly equal rights and women’s rights, between insisting on justice for all or accepting injustice to protect their own cause, the Suffs almost invariably chose the easier, less noble, path.
In 1903, when racist southern suffragists steered NAWSA toward a “southern strategy” allowing each state association to handle the suffrage issue in harmony with its local customs—which, in the South, meant winning the vote for white women but not black and ignoring the federal amendment—Catt, in her first term as president, acquiesced. She also tolerated the use of a jaundiced rationale: to assuage the fears of southern legislators in Congress and in statehouses, suffragists often made the argument that giving the vote to women would not threaten “white supremacy” but actually amplify it. It was a matter of simple mathematics: there were more white women in the southern states than black women and men combined (even if blacks were actually allowed to vote) and more native-born women than immigrants in the northern cities. She allowed census statistics to be brandished as proof in hearing testimony, even in the pages of The Woman Citizen: white hegemony was safe.
Alice Paul made similar cynical calculations. When Ida B. Wells, the fearless black journalist and activist who chronicled the epidemic of lynchings of black men (and was forced to flee Memphis when her office was firebombed and her life threatened), wanted to join Alice Paul’s suffrage march in Washington in March 1913, she hit the wall of convenient suffrage racism. Wells understood how essential it was for black women to gain the ballot to protect their families, and she founded Chicago’s Alpha Suffrage Club, the city’s first club for black women devoted to suffrage. But Paul refused to allow her to march with the delegation of Illinois suffragists, as an integrated contingent might upset white southern participants. Wells was told to march at the back of the parade with the black Suffs; she would not be intimidated and refused to march at the rear. As the Illinois contingent passed by, Wells stepped from the sidewalk into the procession, defiantly marching shoulder to shoulder with her white comrades.
Both Paul and Catt recognized that the federal amendment needed the support of white, southern, conservative women if suffrage ever hoped to make inroads in the region, and needed the votes of similarly inclined southern men if it was to ever succeed in Congress and in the statehouses for ratification. They tried to avoid antagonizing southerners with talk of full equal rights, black and white.
“Negro men cannot vote in South Carolina and therefore negro women could not if women were to vote in the nation,” Alice Paul told a reporter in early 1919, to ease the federal amendment fears of southerners. “We are organizing white women in the South.” When the NAACP asked Paul’s Woman’s Party to repudiate such statements, it refused.
Black suffragists such as Wells, NAACP cofounder Mary Church Terrell (who considered Catt a personal friend and insisted she was completely free of race prejudice), and W. E. B. Du Bois of the NAACP had every reason to be skeptical of—and at times dismayed by—the equivocations of white suffragists who spoke of justice but, more often, acted in their own self-interest. Dr. Du Bois was a steadfast universal suffragist, in the mold of Douglass, and while he spoke at many suffrage conventions and dedicated many pages in the NAACP’s journal, The Crisis, to the topic of woman suffrage—for all women—he did not flinch from calling out Anna Shaw and Carrie Catt and Alice Paul for their lapses into hypocrisy.
Catt deliberately put on blinders as needed. Though she was an unabashed “dry,” she distanced herself—and NAWSA—from any official ties to the temperance movement and its apotheosis, Prohibition, as the historically close links between the two movements had created too many enemies for suffrage. Catt refused to endorse Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control League, though Sanger frequently and ardently asked for her support. Catt appreciated how important women’s control of their bodies could be in achieving full social and economic freedom, but alliance with what was still an illegal enterprise—distributing contraceptives and providing abortions—was just too dangerous for the National Association. (She was also enough of a Victorian to find the public discussion of sexual matters distasteful.)
When it came to war and peace, she made, what was for her, the most painful compromise, aligning herself and NAWSA behind the war machine for political advantage.
Personally, Catt was offended by Jim Crow segregation and appalled by lynchings, but even after the war, after black men had proven themselves in the military and black women distinguished themselves on the home front, Catt resisted the request of a consortium of black women’s clubs to become cooperative members of NAWSA, knowing that the group intended to force the National Association to take a stand on African American women’s voting rights. This was in the winter of 1919, when the U.S. Senate was still stalling on the federal amendment, several southern senators still digging in their heels. Catt feared the repercussions if NAWSA welcomed the black suffrage clubs. She asked them to withdraw their application for membership until the federal amendment was law, until suffrage for white women was safe.
So it was in keeping with Catt’s willingness to make morally suspect compromise and capitulation that she determined Mrs. Pinckard’s public accusations could not be allowed to go unanswered. Not in Nashville, not at this critical juncture. She called in her stenographer. “You ask if I will amplify my meaning when I wrote: ‘Suffrage democracy knows no bias of race, color, creed, or sex,’” she dictated as the stenographer penciled curly symbols on a pad of paper. “I do not know that I ever wrote it or in what context it stood if I did.”