Commemorating a whole story of woman suffrage

ABSTRACT

To tell the whole story of the struggle for woman suffrage, we need to begin the story well before 1848 and continue it long after 1920. For those teaching about woman suffrage, this essay offers resources that enable you to situate the 19th Amendment within a richer narrative of woman suffrage.

KEYWORDS:

• Woman suffrage
• voter suppression
• epideictic

Notes

1 Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, 1.3.4 [1358b], trans. George A. Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press), 48.

2 Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 15.

3 Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls, 15.

4 Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls, 5.

5 I am inspired here by Danielle S. Allen's discussion of how “oneness” has long dominated the way persons in the United Stated have thought of themselves as one people. As Allen notes, the United States has long been “at least two, and maybe three, four, or more, peoples, all living in the same polity but under different laws, with differential rights and powers, with different habitual practices of citizenship” and, I would add, with different stories. Allen offers wholeness as an alternative to oneness because it allows for a recognition of the multiplicity that is typical of democracies. Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 15–17.

6 “About the Haudenosaunee Confederacy,” Haudenosaunee Confederacy, accessed May 13, 2020, https://www.haudenosauneeconfederacy.com/who-we-are/.

7 Congress has officially recognized the role the Haudenosaunee played as a model for the structure of U.S. government. See Terri Hansen, “How the Iroquois Great Law of Peace Shaped U.S. Democracy,” PBS, December 13, 2018, https://www.pbs.org/native-america/blogs/native-voices/how-the-iroquois-great-law-of-peace-shaped-us-democracy/#3. See also Bruce E. Johansen, Forgotten Founders: How the American Indian Helped Shape Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard Common Press, 1982).

8 Sally Roesch Wagner, Sisters in Spirit: Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Influence on Early American Feminists (Summertown, TN: Native Voices, 2001); Sally Roesch Wagner, ed., The Women's Suffrage Movement (New York: Penguin Books, 2019).

9 Joseph Keppler, “Savagery to ‘Civilization’,” Puck 75, no. 1941 (May 16, 1914), 4, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/97505624/.

10 Given married women, as a result of coverture laws, did not technically own anything, this meant only single women could vote. And, given the enslavement of Black people was legal in New Jersey until 1804, not all Black people were “free inhabitants.” Kat Eschner, “For a Few Decades in the 18th Century, Women and African-Americans Could Vote in New Jersey: Then Some Politicians Got Angry,” Smithsonian Magazine (November 16, 2017), https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-black-people-and-women-lost-vote-new-jersey-180967186/; see also Judith Apter Klinghoffer and Lois Elkis, “‘The Petticoat Electors’: Women's Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776–1807,” Journal of the Early Republic 12, no. 2 (1992): 159–93, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3124150.

11 Glenna Matthews, The Rise of Public Woman: Woman's Power and Woman's Place in the United States, 1630–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 108–11.

12 Carolyn Eastman, “‘Who's Afraid’ of Frances Wright?” A Nation of Speechifiers (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 210.

13 Matthews, The Rise of Public Woman, 111.

14 Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Amistad, 1984), 50; see also Laura R. Sells, “Maria W. Miller Stewart,” in Women Public Speakers in the United States, 1800–1925, ed. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 339–49. For texts of Stewart's addresses, see Shirley Wilson Logan, With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995) or Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric, vol. II (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1989).

15 Matthews, The Rise of Public Woman, 98; Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls, 5.

16 Matthews, The Rise of Public Woman, 98.

17 Matthews, The Rise of Public Woman, 99.

18 Matthews, The Rise of Public Woman, 99.

19 Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls, 5. See also Suzanne M. Daughton, “The Fine Texture of Enactment: Iconicity as Empowerment in Angelina Grimké's Pennsylvania Hall Address,” Women's Studies in Communication 18, no. 1 (1995): 19–43, https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.1995.11089786; Phyllis M. Japp, “Esther or Isaiah? The Abolitionist-Feminist Rhetoric of Angelina Grimké,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 71, no. 3 (1985): 335–48, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335638509383740; Kristin S. Vonnegut, “Poison or Panacea?: Sarah Moore Grimké's Use of the Public Letter,” Communication Studies 46 (1995): 73–88, https://doi.org/10.1080/10510979509368440.

20 Jacob Katz Cogan and Lori D. Ginzberg, “1846 Petition for Woman's Suffrage, New York State Constitutional Convention,” Signs 22, no. 2 (1997): 427–39, the full text of the petition appears at 438–9, https://doi.org/10.1086/495167.

21 Carly S. Woods, Debating Women: Gender, Education, and Spaces for Argument, 1835–1945 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2018), 30.

22 Martha S. Jones, “The Politics of Black Womanhood, 1848–2008,” in Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence, ed. Kate Clarke Lemay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 29–48, 31–2.

23 First Convention Ever Called to Discuss the Civil and Political Rights of Women, Seneca Falls, New York (July 19–20, 1848), 3–4, https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbcmil.scrp4006801/?q=declaration+of+sentiments&sp=4.

24 First Convention, 6.

25 First Convention, 2–3.

26 The Proceedings of the Woman's Rights Convention, held in Worcester, MA, October 23–24, 1850 (Boston: Prentiss & Sawyer, 1851), https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbnawsa.n8286/?sp=3.

27 See Jessica Enoch's essay in this issue. See also Catherine H. Palczewski, “The 1919 Prison Special: Constituting White Women's Citizenship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 102, no. 2 (2016): 107–32, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2016.1154185.

28 Adele Logan Alexander, “Adella Hunt Logan, the Tuskegee Woman's Club, and African Americans in the Suffrage Movement,” in Votes for Women! The Woman Suffrage Movement in Tennessee, the South, and the Nation, ed. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 71–104.

29 Lemay, “Compelling Tactics, 1913–1916,” in Votes for Women, 177.

30 Belinda Stillion Southard, Militant Citizenship: Rhetorical Strategies of the National Woman's Party, 1913–1920 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2011), 84–6.

31 “Suffrage Paraders,” The Crisis (April 1913): 296, https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/workers/civil-rights/crisis/0400-crisis-v05n06-w030.pdf.

32 For testimony about Black police officers, see US Congress, Senate, Senate Subcommittee of the Committee on the District of Columbia, Suffrage Parade, 63rd Cong., Special Session, March 6–17, 1913, 68, 69, 177, 271, 336. For testimony about Black grooms, see 288, 438.

33 A highly pixilated version of a newspaper page from The Chicago Daily Tribune (March 5, 1913) can be found online (https://www.nps.gov/articles/woman-suffrage-in-the-midwest.htm) and was used by the Smithsonian in its exhibit for the anniversary of the 1913 parade.

34 E.g., “Suffrage Parade, 1913,” Bain News Service, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ggbain-11382; Inez Milholland Boissevain, George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-77359; 1913 Suffrage Procession, Palczewski Suffrage Postcard Archive, Postcard 042a, https://scholarworks.uni.edu/suffrage_images/83/.

35 Mary Church Terrell, A Colored Woman in a White World (Washington, DC: Randsell, Inc., 1940), 316.

36 E.g., 56 Cong. Rec. H773, 779 (January 10, 1918) (statement of Reps. Raker, Ferris).

37 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, “We Are All Bound up Together,” in Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory 1787–1900, ed. Philip S. Foner and Robert James Branham (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 456–60, 458.

38 Elaine Weiss, The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote(New York: Penguin Books, 2018), 327–238.

39 Freda Kirchwey, “Alice Paul Pulls the Strings,” The Nation 112, no. 2904 (March 2, 1921): 332–3, https://www.unz.com/print/Nation-1921mar02-00332.

40 Kirchwey, “Alice Paul Pulls the Strings,” 332.

41 Weiss, The Woman's Hour, 328.

42 Lemay, “The Nineteenth Amendment and Its Legacy, 1920 to Today,” in Votes for Women, 223.

43 Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin), “Americanize the First American,” in Paige Allison Conley, “Stories, Traces of Discourse, and the Tease of Presence: Gertrude Simmons Bonnin as Orator and Indigenous Activist,” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2013), 210. See also P. Jane Hafen, “‘Help Indians Help Themselves’: Gertrude Bonnin, the SAI, and the NCAI,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 25, no. 2 (2013): 199–218, https://doi.org/10.5250/studamerindilite.25.2.0199. See also Mama Bear's essay in this issue.

44 Lemay, “The Nineteenth Amendment and Its Legacy, 1920 to Today,” 223.

45 Maegan Parker Brooks, A Voice That Could Stir an Army: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Rhetoric of the Black Freedom Movement (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014).

46 Katherine Mellen Charron, Freedom's Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

47 Ari Berman, “The Lost Promise of the Voting Rights Act,” The Atlantic (August 5, 2015), https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/08/give-us-the-ballot-expanding-the-voting-rights-act/399128/. See also Carly Woods's essay in this issue.

48 Catherine H. Palczewski, “Argument Constellations in Voting Rights Debates,” in Recovering Argument, ed. Randall A. Lake (New York: Routledge, 2018), 87–92.

49 Joseph Fishkin, “Equal Citizenship and the Individual Right to Vote,” Indiana Law Journal 86 (2011): 1289–360, 1293, http://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/ilj/vol86/iss4/3.

50 Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy (New York: Bloomsbury 2018), 1.

51 Pema Levy, “After Heidi Heitkamp Won a Senate Seat, North Dakota Republicans Made It Harder for Native Americans to Vote,” Mother Jones, October 19, 2018, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/10/heidi-heitkamp-native-americans-vote-north-dakota/.

52 Lisa A. Flores, comment made at ORWAC's Citizenship at the Intersections: 100 Years Since the 19th Amendment conference, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, March 5–7, 2020.