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Alice Paul, seated second from left, sews the 36th star on a banner, celebrating the ratification of the women’s suffrage amendment in August 1920.
Alice Paul, seated second from left, sews the 36th star on a banner, celebrating the ratification of the women’s suffrage amendment in August 1920. Photograph: Anonymous/AP
Alice Paul, seated second from left, sews the 36th star on a banner, celebrating the ratification of the women’s suffrage amendment in August 1920. Photograph: Anonymous/AP

The 19th amendment is a reminder that the right to vote is unfinished business

This article is more than 3 years old
Moira Donegan

The centennial raises discomfort among feminists in part because of a long overdue examination of the partial, fragmented and compromised nature of the amendment

One uncomfortable reality of history is how much even seismic events are shaped by the personalities of their principal actors. The vanities, prejudices, nostalgias, misguided affections and petty rivalries of historical figures can at times play a greater role in the unfolding of events than we would like to admit, and there are moments when reckoning with the human failings of long-dead individuals can cast a pall on even their most noble achievements. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the ongoing, palpable discomfort of feminists over how to how to mark the centennial of the 19th amendment, the constitutional triumph that removed sex-based restrictions on voting rights.

The discomfort arises in part because of a long overdue popular examination of the partial, fragmented and compromised nature of the amendment. Thanks to the efforts of Black historians and public intellectuals, there is a growing acknowledgement that the 19th amendment did not, per se, grant women the right to vote, so much as it removed the remaining laws that said women could not vote because they were women. But like the 15th amendment, which granted Black men the franchise in theory but often not in practice, the 19th amendment left intact restrictions on women’s enfranchisement that used other pretexts to keep women from voting: women’s race, their literacy, their ancestors’ enfranchisement or lack thereof, and their wealth were left intact as reasons why racists, sexists and others hostile to women’s political participation could justify prohibiting them from voting.

There is also the uncomfortable reality that many of the historical figures who most famously fought for women’s suffrage held values, blind spots and hatreds that are morally repugnant. Though many of the prominent white women who were most vocal in their support of women’s suffrage began their political careers as abolitionists, their recognition of the evils of slavery rarely translated into an understanding of Black people as their own moral and intellectual equals.

Take, for instance, the women’s suffrage movement’s most famous leader, Susan B Anthony. Born into a left-leaning Quaker family, Anthony spent her life at the forefront of the abolition, women’s suffrage and temperance movements. She at times wrote movingly anti-racist sentiments, such as when she addressed the worries of pro-slavery whites that Black people would not be equipped to live free. “What arrogance” she wrote, “to put the question, what shall we do with a race of men and women who have fed, clothed and supported both themselves and their oppressors for centuries”. Sentiments like this made her a close friend of Frederick Douglass, the self-emancipated abolition pioneer. She was capable of understanding Black people as capable, intelligent, morally complete individuals – rather a low bar, but one that many white people still fail to meet.

On the other hand, Anthony could be short sighted, single-minded and selfish. She drifted towards conservatism in her later years; she wounded Black women suffragists who considered her a friend by being willing to work with openly racist white women on the suffrage campaign. In the aftermath of the civil war, her friendship soured with Douglass over his support of the 15th amendment, which Anthony and other suffragists had hoped would ban gender as well as race as means of denying the vote to Americans. When Douglass felt that an amendment giving the vote only to Black men was the only feasible one that could pass, Anthony was angered, and in her anger, she told Douglass the line that has tainted her reputation and her work ever since: “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman.”

The most generous interpreters of Anthony see this exchange as her anger not at Douglass’s prioritization of anti-racism over feminism, but at his lowering of his hopes. They argue that in this instance, Anthony was actually being more radical than Douglass, wanting an amendment that would expand the franchise along both racial and gender lines. But even if you concede this generous interpretation, context makes it harder to ignore the hurtfulness of Anthony’s words, and the worldview that lay behind them: When Douglass decided that he would accept an amendment that granted only Black men the right to vote, Anthony saw this as a betrayal of her and other white women, not of the Black women who were also being left behind.

One aspect of the uncomfortable reality that history is shaped by imperfect people is that these people often did not succeed in living up to the values that they preached.

This, I think, is what modern feminists find so uncomfortable about celebrating the 19th amendment’s centennial: it marks the greatest achievement of a movement that was blinkered in its vision, and whose leaders could be thoughtless or cruel in their pursuit of it.

Perhaps because of the massive and diverse constituency that it represents, feminism is a uniquely contentious and self-reflective movement, one prone to revisions, revisitations, inner conflict and self-criticism. Among other things, it is a movement that can sometimes become alienated from its heroes, when we discover they were not who we had been led to believe they were, or when we learn about their compromises, bad ideas and betrayals. You can see this as a weakness of the movement, but I choose to see it as a strength: thinking more deeply and with greater nuance about figures like Anthony forces feminists to value principles over personalities. Hopefully, the movement’s hard-earned and growing skill for honest self appraisal and interior change will allow feminists of the next century to avoid the mistakes of the last.

It would be unfair and inaccurate to depict the women’s suffrage movement as entirely white, just as it would be unfair and inaccurate to depict Anthony as entirely good, and recent work has done much to revive the legacies of Black suffragettes like Sarah Parker Remond and Mary Church Terrell, as well as casting light on the suffrage efforts of Black woman luminaries of the era like Ida B Wells and Sojourner Truth. And reflecting on the ways that the 19th amendment was an incomplete and partial victory has also allowed many of us to become more aware of the work that remains to be done. In a development that likely would have surprised her, perhaps the most visible modern heir to the suffrage work of Anthony is Stacey Abrams, a Black woman from Georgia. Abrams has taken on a national fight against the forces of voter suppression that has used inventive, nefarious and cruel tactics to thwart elections in her home state and now threaten to undermine access to the franchise nationwide. A century later, all American women still need to be fighting alongside her.

  • Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

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