21.3 New Voices for Women and African Americans

LEADERS EMERGE IN THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT

Women like Jane Addams and Florence Kelley were instrumental in the early Progressive settlement house movement, and female leaders dominated organizations such as the WCTU and the Anti-Saloon League. From these earlier efforts came new leaders who, in their turn, focused their efforts on the key goal of the Progressive Era as it pertained to women: the right to vote.

Women had first formulated their demand for the right to vote in the Declaration of Sentiments at a convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, and saw their first opportunity of securing suffrage during Reconstruction when legislators—driven by racial animosity—sought to enfranchise women to counter the votes of Black men following the 1870 ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment.

The movement moved forward with legal action and activism. Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Florence Woodhull, and others testified before the House Judiciary Committee. They argued that the 14th Amendment, which guaranteed equal protection under the law, indicated that women should have the right to vote. Cary, a publisher and the first Black woman to attend law school (the second to graduate) recalled the principles of the nation's founding when she said, "The strength and glory of a free nation, is not so much in the size and equipment of its armies, as in the loyal hearts and willing hands of its men and women....Taxed and governed in other respects without their consent, [women] respectfully demand that the principles of the founders of the government may not be disregarded in their case..." The committee issued a negative ruling on their testimony. Susan B. Anthony, a veteran of the suffrage movement, registered and voted under the principle that the 14th amendment gave her the right. She was arrested and ruled guilty without being allowed to testify. On July 4, 1876, during the Centennial celebration in Philadelphia, suffragists delivered the "Declaration of the Rights of Women of the United States," written largely by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. When the disconcerted presider, Vice President Ferry, refused to allow the document, Anthony began reading it aloud from outside Independence Hall.

By 1900, the western frontier states of Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming had already responded to women’s movements with the right to vote in state and local elections, regardless of gender. They conceded to the suffragists’ demands, partly in order to attract more women to these male-dominated regions. But women’s lives in the West also rarely fit with the nineteenth-century ideology of “separate spheres” that had legitimized the exclusion of women from the rough-and-tumble party competitions of public politics. In 1890, the National American Women’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA) organized several hundred state and local chapters to urge the passage of a federal amendment to guarantee a woman’s right to vote. Its leaders, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, had formulated the first demand for the right to vote at Seneca Falls in 1848 (Figure 21.11). Under the subsequent leadership of Carrie Chapman Catt, beginning in 1900, the group decided to make suffrage its first priority. Soon, its membership began to grow. Using modern marketing efforts like celebrity endorsements to attract a younger audience, the NAWSA became a significant political pressure group for the passage of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Figure 21.11 Women suffragists in Ohio sought to educate and convince men that they should support a woman’s rights to vote. As the feature below on the backlash against suffragists illustrates, it was a far from simple task.

The 1912 election placed the issue of women’s suffrage at the forefront of politics, as six states in the West allowed women to vote for the president. In order to build on this momentum, Alice Paul joined NAWSA, and was given leadership over the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, a committee tasked with passing a national suffrage amendment. Paul adopted new strategies, including placing women on the streets to speak about suffrage, handing out pamphlets, arranging speaking tours, lobbying legislative representatives, and organizing public parades.

The first suffrage parade in 1913 became a flashpoint for several issues in the fight for women’s right to vote. Envisioned as a powerful way to win support, the parade was led by Inez Milholland sitting astride a white horse, followed by women marching in groups defined by their professions or state suffrage delegations, and with many wearing their academic regalia. The format of the procession caused tension when some states arrived with an interracial contingent. African American suffragists, who had been active in the movement for decades, faced discrimination from their White counterparts. Some White leaders justified this treatment based on the concern that promoting Black women would erode public support. For example, leaders of the NAWSA convention 1911 disallowed an amendment adding race as an element of the organization's platform based on the idea that White men would oppose the entire movement. But overt racism played a significant role, as well.

During the parade, Black members were told to march at the rear of the line. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, a prominent voice for equality, asked her local delegation to oppose this segregation, but they were unsuccessful in changing the decision. On the day of the parade, as the Illinois delegation began marching down the street, Wells-Barnett emerged from the sidelines and joined the White women from her state, integrating the procession. As the parade continued, spectators in the crowd not only heckled the women but became violent. The police did little to protect the suffragists as they were attacked. Over 100 women were hospitalized for injuries sustained during the parade. This violence was greeted by outrage and reinvigorated the suffrage movement.

In December 1913, Alice Paul’s aggressive approaches led NAWSA to sever ties with the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, which would become the National Woman’s Party. Over the following years, Paul continued her public crusade for women’s right to vote, most notably during World War I, when suffrage protesters began picketing President Woodrow Wilson in front of the White House to pressure him into supporting their cause. This was particularly relevant as women volunteered as army nurses, worked in vital defense industries, and supported Wilson’s campaign to “make the world safe for democracy.” Known as the Silent Sentinels (Figure 21.12), Paul and her group picketed for nearly two years, starting in 1917. In the latter stages of their protests, many women, including Paul, were arrested and thrown in jail, where they staged a hunger strike as self-proclaimed political prisoners. Prison guards ultimately force-fed Paul to keep her alive. Once this treatment became public, President Wilson changed his position in support of a woman’s constitutional right to vote.

Figure 21.12 Alice Paul and her Silent Sentinels picketed outside the White House for almost two years, and, when arrested, went on hunger strike until they were force-fed in order to save their lives.

While Catt and Paul used different strategies, their combined efforts brought enough pressure to bear for Congress to pass the Nineteenth Amendment, which prohibited voter discrimination on the basis of sex, during a special session in the summer of 1919. Subsequently, the required thirty-six states approved its adoption, with Tennessee doing so in August of 1920, in time for that year’s presidential election.

Although the federal suffrage amendment was a great step forward, women still struggled for equality under the law. Many Black women remained unable to vote due to state laws that disenfranchised them, particularly in the South. Native women were not considered citizens in 1920, and were also excluded from voting under the amendment. The fight was not over, and Alice Paul continued to focus on political change, seeking to pass an Equal Rights Amendment to ensure that in all areas of the law, no one could be denied any protection or right based on sex.

Defining American

The Anti-Suffragist Movement

The early suffragists may have believed that the right to vote was a universal one, but they faced waves of discrimination and ridicule from both men and women. The image below (Figure 21.13) shows one of the organizations pushing back against the suffragist movement, but much of the anti-suffrage campaign was carried out through ridiculing postcards and signs that showed suffragists as sexually wanton, grasping, irresponsible, or impossibly ugly. Men in anti-suffragist posters were depicted as henpecked, crouching to clean the floor, while their suffragist wives marched out the door to campaign for the vote. They also showed cartoons of women gambling, drinking, and smoking cigars, that is, taking on men’s vices, once they gained voting rights.

Figure 21.13 The anti-suffrage group used ridicule and embarrassment to try and sway the public away from supporting a woman’s right to vote.

Other anti-suffragists believed that women could better influence the country from outside the realm of party politics, through their clubs, petitions, and churches. Many women also opposed women’s suffrage because they thought the dirty world of politics was a morass to which ladies should not be exposed. The National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage formed in 1911; around the country, state representatives used the organization’s speakers, funds, and literature to promote the anti-suffragist cause. As the link below illustrates, the suffragists endured much prejudice and backlash in their push for equal rights.

LEADERS EMERGE IN THE EARLY CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Racial mob violence against African Americans permeated much of the “New South”—and, to a lesser extent, the West, where Mexican Americans and other immigrant groups also suffered severe discrimination and violence—by the late nineteenth century. The Ku Klux Klan and a system of Jim Crow laws governed much of the South (discussed in a previous chapter). White middle-class reformers were appalled at the violence of race relations in the nation but typically shared the belief in racial characteristics and the superiority of Anglo-Saxon White people over African Americans, Asians, “ethnic” Europeans, Native Americans, and Latin American populations. Southern reformers considered segregation a Progressive solution to racial violence; across the nation, educated middle-class Americans enthusiastically followed the work of eugenicists who identified virtually all human behavior as inheritable traits and issued awards at county fairs to families and individuals for their “racial fitness.” It was against this tide that African American leaders developed their own voice in the Progressive Era, working along diverse paths to improve the lives and conditions of African Americans throughout the country.

Born into slavery in Virginia in 1856, Booker T. Washington became an influential African American leader at the outset of the Progressive Era. In 1881, he became the first principal for the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama, a position he held until he died in 1915. Tuskegee was an all-Black “normal school”—an old term for a teachers’ college—teaching African Americans a curriculum geared towards practical skills such as cooking, farming, and housekeeping. Graduates would often then travel through the South, teaching new farming and industrial techniques to rural communities. Washington extolled the school’s graduates to focus on the Black community’s self-improvement and prove that they were productive members of society even in freedom—something White Americans throughout the nation had always doubted.

In a speech delivered at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta in 1895, which was meant to promote the economy of a “New South,” Washington proposed what came to be known as the Atlanta Compromise (Figure 21.14). Speaking to a racially mixed audience, Washington called upon African Americans to work diligently for their own uplift and prosperity rather than preoccupy themselves with political and civil rights. Their success and hard work, he implied, would eventually convince southern White people to grant these rights. Not surprisingly, most White people liked Washington’s model of race relations, since it placed the burden of change on Black people and required nothing of them. Wealthy industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller provided funding for many of Washington’s self-help programs, as did Sears, Roebuck & Co. co-founder Julius Rosenwald, and Washington was the first African American invited to the White House by President Roosevelt in 1901. At the same time, his message also appealed to many in the Black community, and some attribute this widespread popularity to his consistent message that social and economic growth, even within a segregated society, would do more for African Americans than an all-out agitation for equal rights on all fronts.

Figure 21.14 In Booker T. Washington’s speech at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, he urged his audience to “cast down your bucket where you are” and make friends with the people around them.

Yet, many African Americans disagreed with Washington’s approach. Much in the same manner that Alice Paul felt the pace of the struggle for women’s rights was moving too slowly under the NAWSA, some within the African American community felt that immediate agitation for the rights guaranteed under the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, established during the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, was necessary. In 1905, a group of prominent civil rights leaders, led by W. E. B. Du Bois, met in a small hotel on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls—where segregation laws did not bar them from hotel accommodations—to discuss what immediate steps were needed for equal rights (Figure 21.15). Du Bois, a professor at the all-Black Atlanta University and the first African American with a doctorate from Harvard, emerged as the prominent spokesperson for what would later be dubbed the Niagara Movement. By 1905, he had grown wary of Booker T. Washington’s calls for African Americans to accommodate White racism and focus solely on self-improvement. Du Bois, and others alongside him, wished to carve a more direct path towards equality that drew on the political leadership and litigation skills of the Black, educated elite, which he termed the “talented tenth.”

Figure 21.15 This photo of the Niagara Movement shows W. E. B. Du Bois seated in the second row, center, in the white hat. The proud and self-confident postures of this group stood in marked contrast to the humility that Booker T. Washington urged of Black people.

At the meeting, Du Bois led the others in drafting the “Declaration of Principles,” which called for immediate political, economic, and social equality for African Americans. These rights included universal suffrage, compulsory education, and the elimination of the convict lease system in which tens of thousands of Black people had endured slavery-like conditions in southern road construction, mines, prisons, and penal farms since the end of Reconstruction. Within a year, Niagara chapters had sprung up in twenty-one states across the country. In 1908, racial tensions erupted in a violent riot in Springfield, Illinois. Shortly after the event, a newspaper announcement called for the creation of a national organization focused on racial progress and eradicating racial violence. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Mary Church Terrell were among the sixty respondents who went on to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in 1909. The group created a bureau for investigating lynching deaths as well as a dedicated task force focused on federal legislation. The NAACP also developed its own publication, The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races, to spread news about the organization’s work. Du Bois served as the influential director of publications for the NAACP until 1933. As the editor of The Crisis, Du Bois had a platform to express his views on a variety of issues facing African Americans in the later Progressive Era, as well as during World War I and its aftermath. In both Washington and Du Bois, African Americans found leaders to push forward the fight for their place in the new century, each with a very different strategy.