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Not without flaws, Women’s Suffrage movement prevailed

19th Amendment sees 100 years of progress, some struggles remain

By EMILY VASSAR - The Sunday Telegraph Staff | Aug 15, 2020

Most heroes aren’t saints. No movement was ever free of errors. Of course, it also depends on who or what you stand behind when you look back at the finer details of history. Mother Teresa was known as the Saint of Calcutta because she went to great lengths to help the poor of third world countries, especially those who were sick or dying. However, she once claimed in an interview, “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as central to the fight for civil rights as anyone could be, insisting on and practicing peaceful protest every day, was also an adulterer. We know now that he had numerous affairs. His wife Coretta, knowing full well his weakness for other women, put the sanctity of the movement before her own happiness as a spouse. An inspiring organizer and activist herself, it is said that she not only chose to preserve the integrity of the movement by not speaking out and divorcing him, but actually insisted that all within their closest circle stay mute on the topic. That must have been a gut-wrenching decision to make, regardless of how necessary for the cause it was.

There are many revered figures in our history whose imperfections have come to light over the decades, changing our once-shared narration of who they were and what they stood for: Benjamin Franklin, Mahatma Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt; the list goes on. We understand and recognize that even with the best intentions, at least on the surface, no one is free of flaws, and no progress is made without mistakes woven into the fabric of action.

This August 18, we will celebrate the one hundred year anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment. You don’t even need to be a feminist to appreciate the power and determination spun from the hearts of the women who fought for our right to vote. But they weren’t all fighting for every woman.

Provoking change on a grand scale, the Women’s Suffrage movement represented decades of struggle and grief, both personal and shared, that many of us can relate to today. In our current political and socio-economic environment, it’s more imperative than ever that we recognize and confront the flaws of our past, especially when those flaws sit nestled away in the details that our school history books often left out.

Although thousands of African American Women were actively resolute in the movement, they were not necessarily welcomed by their white peers. Advocating for Black Women’s voting rights in an effort parallel with the calls for abolition in the mid 1800’s, prominent Black activists like Sojourner Truth, Mary Church Terrell, Harriet Tubman and Ida B. Wells-Barnett fought for every woman’s right to vote- but especially their own. After all, their votes and their lives were the ones most vehemently denied their integrity, and in fact, their very existence.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a suffragist, investigative journalist, educator, and co-founder of the NAACP.

Many white Suffragists wanted voting rights for all, regardless of race, but were frustrated by the perceived “this but not that” details of the eventual 15th Amendment, which would secure the voting rights of Black Men in America. “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ask for the ballot for the Negro and not for the woman,” said an ardent Susan B. Anthony in 1866. She eventually resolved that no person, regardless of race or social class, should be excluded from submitting their vote on a local or national level.

Many white “Suffs”, as they were referred to back then, opposed the progress undeniably made with the 15th in even more racially explosive terms. “You have put the ballot in the hands of your black men, thus making them political superiors of white women. Never before in the history of the world have men made former slaves the political masters of their former mistresses!” was the sentiment of Anna Howard Shaw, who was a Methodist minister and president of the National Women’s Suffrage Association at the time. She could have phrased it a little differently, but the point is that she chose not to. Not terribly humane, but quite human, as it were.

Protest parades were often the most methodized street tactic used during the Women’s Suffrage movement. We call them simply, “marches” in our modern environment. However, in contrast to our gathering on behalf of Black Lives today, white Suffrage organizers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries forced Black participants to march in the very back- if they were allowed to participate at all.

Looking back on the struggles- the literal blood, sweat and tears- that cemented so many of the rights we take for granted today, perhaps we are not so far removed from our history and its champions. Even our most revered figures of justice and reform, of every race, of every background, were one thing before anything else: Human. To recognize their faults is not to deny any of the good that they did. In fact, if we take in the bigger picture, the whole picture, we allow ourselves the opportunity to learn even more, and to improve our chances of gaining grounds in our own battles for equality and human rights. So on this coming Tuesday, August 18, let us commemorate- but let us also reflect and learn. And on November 3, be loud, be clear, and vote. We owe it to all of the women who fought for our right to do so.

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