The Concise History of Woman Suffrage

"The foundational text for the creation of the myth of Seneca Falls was written by three suffragists, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage. They are really our first women’s historians. They did a three-volume history of women’s suffrage that came out in 1881, 1882 and 1886. Three more volumes followed in 1902 and 1922. These six volumes contain more than 5,000 pages of documents, including articles, speeches and convention programs. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . They lined up all these documents to make sure that the story, albeit their story, was told. It’s hard not to go through those documents and marvel at the effort it must’ve taken to compile this material. It was a flawed but nevertheless formidable feat. Readers should remind themselves that the compilers made choices to privilege their influence on the movement. It’s a very useful source. It’s remarkable to read, but you don’t necessarily want to read 6,000 pages of it. That’s why Mari Jo Buhle and Paul Buhle put together this Concise History of Woman Suffrage . It contains highlights and gives you a sense of the whole. This treasure trove of documents together compose a social history of the movement. You can page through marriage protests from 1850 and Henry Blackwell’s lecture to an 1873 convention. “These documents show the women’s suffrage movement was really a women’s rights movement.” Reading these documents gives you a sense of how much effort went into this movement. Some of these speeches are 20 pages of tiny print. That must have been three hours. They’re lengthy, but they present well-supported views about, for instance, how the whole legal system is skewed against women, the effect of married women having so few property rights, and the lack of professional opportunities for women. These speeches are about issues much broader than the vote. They’re about women’s economic independence. The breadth of their vision comes through. These documents show the women’s suffrage movement was really a women’s rights movement. It’s very useful for people to see the words that they use. You see the racism of the movement in documents, especially during Reconstruction into the 1890s. The reason why women’s suffrage and the struggle for the rights of African Americans (especially men) were so intertwined has to do with the aftermath of the Civil War, specifically with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which guaranteed political rights, including the right to vote, to newly liberated male slaves. White women at the time hoped that as the country was enfranchising former slaves, they too would be enfranchised. Women had already been making that demand for 50 years. For activists, it became a question of priorities. Who got priority: women or African American men? It came down to a choice: Do we advocate for the Fifteenth Amendment or sit back because women are barred from voting? It’s all very tied up. In this moment, it seemed more important to solidify the legacy of the Civil War than to insist that women get the vote along with African American men. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter After the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment some suffrage leaders made pretty racist arguments. Saying, give us white women the vote, we’re more educated than immigrants, as well as African Americans. Then, when we get to 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment didn’t address the fact that African American southern women were still going to be disfranchised by poll taxes and literacy tests. You’re right, the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment made the fight for the Nineteenth amendment necessary to secure the vote for women. But we do need to remember that most voting laws are controlled by states. Most of the women who were getting the vote before the Nineteenth Amendment had been enfranchised by individual states. But in terms of the United States Constitution and national voting, as soon as that word ‘male’ went in the Fifteenth Amendment, it was going to take another amendment to make sure that females could vote. Suffragists fought 50 years for that amendment."