The Necessity of Other Social Movements to the Struggle for Woman Suffrage

Figure 1. Brass antislavery token dated 1838. Such tokens were sold at fundraising events organized by female antislavery activists.

Courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia, http://www.librarycompany.org.

By Robyn Muncy

American women’s struggle for the vote, a profoundly important chapter in the story of American democracy, did not unfold as an independent plot. Instead, the woman suffrage movement emerged from and was continually fed by other social movements and political causes.^[1] Between the 1830s and 1920, women’s enfranchisement was intimately connected to such crusades as the struggle for racial justice, the women’s rights movement, the campaign to regulate alcohol, and the labor movement.^[2] For some women, involvement in these social movements created the very desire for the vote; for many, it honed skills necessary to building a political movement. At various points, factions within those social movements became allies of the suffrage campaign, expanding its base of support. Many of these movements circulated ideas about human rights and democracy that prompted increasing numbers of Americans to advocate women’s enfranchisement. In all these ways, other reform movements were crucial to the victories of woman suffrage.

* * *

The antebellum period (the years before the Civil War), awash in religious fervor, economic upheaval, and debates over the meaning of the American Revolution, generated many potent reform movements. Women’s participation in these movements often nudged them beyond the domestic sphere, accepted in the early nineteenth century as women’s natural place, and sometimes eroded their acceptance of social norms that required women’s subordination to men. In the 1840s and 1850s, a women’s rights movement coalesced from a wide array of antebellum reform drives and eventually produced a sustained struggle for woman suffrage.

The antislavery movement, the most significant antebellum reform effort, proved a powerful generator of women’s rights activism. A fundamental institution of American life at the birth of the republic, slavery became ever more central to the US economy during the early nineteenth century. Organized opposition to slavery emerged first among free Blacks in the North, as well as Quakers, Unitarians, and evangelical Christians, both Black and white. Radical abolitionism publicly debuted in 1829 when African American David Walker published Walker’s Appeal, In Four Articles, a forceful critique of slavery and racial discrimination. Two years later, white New Englander William Lloyd Garrison began publishing the Liberator, and, in 1833, he joined with other opponents of slavery to form the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS). The AASS demanded the immediate abolition of slavery and full civil rights for African Americans. Its broad commitment to human rights opened the AASS to overtures by women for voice and leadership: over one hundred local women’s affiliates joined the cause.^[3] (Figure 1)

The Liberator demonstrated its openness to women in 1831 when it published an essay by Maria Stewart, a free Black woman, who condemned slavery as well as discrimination against free Blacks and women. Stewart urged free Black men, “sue for your rights and privileges,” and she asked, “How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?”^[4] When a Boston antislavery society invited Stewart to speak in 1832, she became the first American-born woman to address an audience of both women and men. By doing so, Stewart violated social conventions that forbade women from speaking before what was termed a “promiscuous” audience. Women might speak before a gathering of women in their parlors or churches, but an audience of both women and men outraged propriety. Although Stewart left Boston in 1833, disappointed that the city seemed to reject her leadership, the publication of her works by the Liberator assured that her anti-racist, abolitionist feminism reached beyond Boston, and her public addresses set a precedent for other female activists.^[5]

Figure 2. Charlotte Forten Grimké, member of a prominent African American family in Philadelphia. The women of the Forten family, including Charlotte’s mother, grandmother, and three aunts, were central to founding the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society.

Courtesy of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library.

Stewart’s ideas certainly resonated with those of the interracial Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society founded the very year that Stewart left Boston. Philadelphia was a hotbed of antislavery activism in part because of its vital Quaker community, which was inclined to egalitarian social relations by the belief that God dwelled in every person.^[6] Quaker egalitarianism even helped to convert two women born to the southern plantation elite, Angelina and Sarah Grimké, to antislavery activism. In 1836, after living in Philadelphia for several years, the sisters took up the abolitionist cause and soon scandalized many Americans by speaking before gender- and race-integrated audiences, as Maria Stewart had. Their audacity provoked violent opposition.^[7]

The belief of many women in the antislavery movement that God called them to the cause weakened their acceptance of cultural prohibitions against women’s public activism.^[8] Some antislavery activists even began to see the exclusion of women from public life as a violation of women’s own human rights. By 1838, Sarah Grimké came to the conclusion that “Men and women were CREATED EQUAL; they are both moral and accountable beings; and whatever is right for man to do, is right for woman.”^[9] Some of those who could not countenance this perfect equality of women and men nevertheless questioned limitations on women’s freedom to work publicly to benefit others. After all, dominant ideals of womanhood assumed women’s selflessness and innate moral perspicacity. If God granted women special moral insight, some asked, did it make sense to ban women from public life, which so desperately needed moral leadership? (Figure 2)

So contentious did women’s roles become among abolitionists that they split over the issue in 1840. Those accepting women’s rights as a legitimate commitment for their movement remained in the AASS, and those opposed formed the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. From that point on, women such as Lucretia Mott and Lydia Maria Child were elected officers of the AASS, and others, including Susan B. Anthony, were hired as paid organizers.^[10] In this way, the antislavery movement became a significant node in the emerging network of activists demanding greater power and scope for American women.

There were many other nodes. One was the labor movement. Textile manufacturing industrialized in the early nineteenth century and recruited young women from rural families to work in the new cloth-making mills that dotted New England. In the 1830s, those earliest of America’s industrial workers staged strikes against deteriorating working conditions, claiming a public voice and presence for working women.^[11] In that same decade, both Black and white women, working and middle class, joined a movement for moral reform. These activists decried social norms that allowed respectable men to frequent brothels while condemning prostitutes as hopeless sinners. Moral reformers wanted men held to the same chaste standard as women and to offer alternative employment opportunities to poor women. This movement critiqued the existing gender system and slid some women reformers into public life.^[12] Like moral reform, the temperance movement urged men to control their desire for pleasure, in this case by abstaining from drunkenness. Some women saw temperance as an issue on which they must take a public stand in order to protect their families from domestic violence and poverty. The antebellum temperance movement became another site for reimagining women’s proper place in society and giving some women experience in public speaking and movement organizing.^[13]

The antebellum period also witnessed independent campaigns explicitly for women’s rights. Frances Wright began lecturing about the equality of women and men soon after her immigration to the United States from Scotland in the 1820s. Her efforts produced no sustained following, probably because she rejected marriage and supported racial equality.^[14] But other, more focused drives won adherents. Calls for equal access to education and employment, for instance, drew broader support.^[15] Demands for equal pay resonated powerfully among women teachers.^[16] Agitation for married women’s property rights gained momentum when, in 1836, Ernestine Rose, a Jewish immigrant from Poland by way of England, campaigned in New York for a law aimed at securing married women’s property rights. The proposal represented change because, when women in the United States married, they generally lost control of their property and even the wages they earned. Husbands controlled all under the legal doctrine of coverture, which said that women had no independent legal identity once married. In the 1840s, emerging feminists Paulina Wright and Elizabeth Cady Stanton joined Rose in lobbying for married women’s economic rights in New York, where they achieved partial success in 1848 and a broader triumph in 1860.^[17]

Figure 3. Presentation Committee of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of Illinois, ca. 1879. Frances Willard, president of the WCTU from 1879 to1898, is in the center of this photograph, which also features one of the organization’s home protection petitions.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

At the same time, Stanton, a privileged and brilliant mother deeply dissatisfied with the restrictions on antebellum women’s lives, imagined a broader agenda. Strong ties to antislavery Quakers made it possible for Stanton to organize support for her vision of greater equality for women. Her activist friends included Lucretia Mott, whom Stanton had first met in 1840 at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, Martha Coffin Wright, Mott’s sister, Mary Ann and Elizabeth M’Clintock, and Jane Hunt. Together, these women called the first women’s rights convention in US history. It convened at Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848. Over three hundred participants, men and women, Black and white, attended that historic two-day meeting. They debated the Declaration of Sentiments, a sweeping list of demands for women’s advancement, which ranged from equal access to education and professions to married women’s property rights and access to divorce—as well as the vote. All the demands passed unanimously except the call for suffrage. Only passionate advocacy by Stanton and antislavery activist Frederick Douglass saved that item from the scrap heap. Clearly, suffrage was not, in the 1840s, a central issue even for many women’s rights advocates. Nevertheless, the vote commonly appeared on the agendas of national women’s rights conventions that began in 1850.^[18]

Suffrage became a central concern of the women’s rights movement because of the allied movement for racial justice. The US Civil War interrupted the campaign for women’s rights between 1861 and 1865, but once slavery was legally abolished and the US Congress began to debate the civil and political rights of freed people, women’s rights agitation reemerged. During a congressional push for the protection of Black men’s voting rights, some advocates of African American and women’s rights formed the American Equal Rights Association to press for the simultaneous enfranchisement of Black men and all women. (By that point, the states had generally enfranchised all white men.) When it became clear, however, that Congress would, through the Fifteenth Amendment, protect the voting rights of Black men but not those of women, some women’s rights activists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, refused to support it and formed the National Woman Suffrage Association to push for a Sixteenth Amendment enfranchising women. Activists committed to maintaining the alliance between the movements for racial justice and women’s rights, especially Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe, formed the American Woman Suffrage Association, which supported the Fifteenth Amendment and mounted state-level battles for women’s enfranchisement. Not until 1890 would the two groups reunite in the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which became the principal woman suffrage organization in the decades leading to ratification of Nineteenth Amendment.^[19] By that time, the alliance between the movements for racial justice and women’s rights was severely attenuated.

As women’s rights advocates split over their relationship to racial justice, the woman suffrage effort received a boost from another social movement, the temperance crusade. Founded in the 1870s, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) became the largest women’s organization in the late nineteenth century. Especially strong in the Midwest and South, the WCTU focused on closing saloons through nonviolent direct action and laws limiting the sale of alcohol. In 1876, one of the WCTU’s leaders, Frances Willard, concluded that women would have greater power to win temperance legislation if they had the vote. She did not claim the franchise as a right, however, but as a necessity for fulfilling women’s domestic duties. While in prayer, Willard wrote in her autobiography, she received the revelation that she should “speak for the woman’s ballot as a weapon of protection to her home.”^[20] With that framing, in 1881 Willard convinced the WCTU to endorse woman suffrage. (Figure 3) As a result, many socially conservative women began to support their own voting rights, expanding the movement’s base.^[21] Indeed, because so many women backed temperance, the Prohibition Party endorsed woman suffrage in 1872 and remained a staunch supporter of the movement for decades.

Figure 4. Rose Schneiderman, who emigrated from eastern Europe as a child, became an important labor leader in New York and a much-sought-after suffrage speaker. She helped to win full suffrage for women in New York in 1917.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The Populist Party was another third-party advocate of votes for women. A coalition of farmers, workers, and small business owners opposed to the control of the US economy by an eastern corporate elite, the Populist Party in 1892 proposed a set of policies intended to broaden American democracy and democratize the US economy. The enfranchisement of women was on that agenda. The victory of woman suffrage in Colorado in 1893 can be directly credited to the Populists, and several men in Colorado, including juvenile court judge Benjamin Lindsey, became national spokesmen for women’s enfranchisement.^[22]

Although the Populist Party disappeared into the Democratic Party in 1896, many of its commitments were absorbed by the Progressive movement that emerged in the 1890s and dominated American politics in the early twentieth century. The Progressive movement began in diffuse local initiatives aimed to diminish the egregious inequalities of wealth and power created by new national corporations. By the 1890s, these economic behemoths controlled entire sectors of the US economy and wielded substantial political power. Women were prominent among local reformers who tried to rein in corporate power through state laws to limit working hours, regulate child labor, and institute factory safety measures. Those same reformers also expanded public education, built public playgrounds, and created a juvenile justice system. They eventually created a federal income tax and public programs to reduce maternal and infant mortality. By the 1910s, many women in the Progressive movement were national political leaders, including Mary Church Terrell, first president of the National Association of Colored Women; Jane Addams, champion of working-class families; Florence Kelley, head of the National Consumers League; and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, anti-lynching crusader and cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).^[23]

As millions of American women worked passionately in the Progressive movement, many came to believe, as had so many female abolitionists and temperance advocates, that they needed the vote in order to succeed in their other reform efforts. Some also believed that women deserved the vote as a matter of right. Either way, these reformers swelled the ranks of the woman suffrage movement. Their visibility and effectiveness as reformers also meant that Progressive men increasingly supported votes for women. In fact, the Progressive Party of 1912, an enormously important third-party effort, endorsed woman suffrage, and its presidential nominee, former president Theodore Roosevelt, proclaimed that women would participate in the Progressive Party on a basis of “absolute equality” with men.^[24]

Although African American suffragists worked vigorously for the cause in the early twentieth century, the deterioration of US race relations after 1890—embodied in brutal measures to segregate the races and disfranchise African American men in the South—meant that suffragists worked mostly in racially segregated organizations between 1890 and 1920. While white suffragists, including some who expressly opposed the enfranchisement of Black women, increased the membership of NAWSA to two million, many Black women worked for the vote through multifocus organizations such as the National Association of Colored Women or the Women’s Convention of the Black Baptist Church. Ida B. Wells-Barnett founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago, which contributed mightily to the victory of woman suffrage in Illinois (1913). The NAACP, organized in 1909–10, became an important forum for suffrage activism that included both woman suffrage and the reenfranchisement of Black men in the South.^[25]

Women in the labor movement and Socialist Party also expanded support for woman suffrage in the early twentieth century. Immigrant women in New York’s garment industry, including Clara Lemlich, Rose Schneiderman, and Pauline Newman, agitated for the vote. (Figure 4) Although many male labor leaders and Socialists supported woman suffrage in principle, they did not make it a priority. Indeed, many belittled woman suffrage as a middle-class issue. But leaders among the dramatically increasing group of working women argued that wage-earning women needed the vote. Only with suffrage, they insisted, could working women hope for equal pay, safe work places, and humane hours. In 1909, working-class suffragists generated a major debate about their cause within New York’s labor community, and in 1911 they formed the Wage Earners’ League for Woman Suffrage.^[26] One of the league’s flyers asked, “Why are you paid less than a man? Why do you work in a fire trap? Why are your hours so long?” The answer: “Because you are a woman and have no vote. Votes make the law. The law controls conditions. Women who want better conditions must vote.”^[27] Woman suffrage triumphed in New York in 1917 partly because so many working-class men voted yes.^[28] Similar agitation occurred elsewhere to such an extent that throughout the 1910s, working-class men memorialized Congress to pass a woman suffrage amendment to the Constitution.^[29] Likewise in the territories, where, Puerto Rican labor activist Luisa Capetillo argued so effectively for woman suffrage that by 1908 the island’s Free Federation of Workers endorsed women’s enfranchisement, and wage-earning women and the Socialist Party were among the most ardent suffrage activists.^[30]

* * *

Relationships between the woman suffrage movement and other social movements were sometimes wrenching: witness the conflict over the Fifteenth Amendment and the racial and class segregation of most suffrage organizations in the early twentieth century. Even so, the suffrage movement owed its existence and much of its gradually increasing strength to other reform movements. A host of antebellum reform efforts drew female adherents out of the domestic sphere, challenging prevailing gender conventions and motivating many to ask questions about all the restrictions on their lives. The accumulation of those questions—and experience with writing, speaking, and organizing—produced a women’s movement that eventually put suffrage front and center. Moreover, the fervent desire to change American life—whether by increasing women’s wages or decreasing alcohol consumption—encouraged many women between the 1830s and 1920 to desire the vote as an important tool in their quest to perfect the union. Male colleagues in those reform movements increasingly perceived the value to their own political causes of enfranchising the women who worked alongside them. In sum, other reform movements were crucial to the victory of votes for women.

Robyn Muncy is professor of history at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is author of Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (Oxford, 1991) and Relentless Reformer: Josephine Roche and Progressivism in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, 2015). She is guest curator of Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote, an exhibit to commemorate the centenary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment at the National Archives in Washington, DC (March 2019–September 2020).

Notes:

[1] This essay analyzes the relationship between the campaign for woman suffrage and other reform initiatives from the early nineteenth century to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. After 1920, when millions of American women remained disfranchised by their states on bases other than sex, the push for further enfranchisement occurred fully within other social movements, including struggles for racial justice among African Americans, American Indians, and Asian immigrant groups. No independent movement for women’s enfranchisement existed in the United States after 1920 except in the territory of Puerto Rico, which the Nineteenth Amendment did not touch. There, woman suffragists had to continue their independent struggle for the vote until 1935.

[2]Another early and important but shorter-lived protest movement in which northern women participated was that against the removal of Cherokee people from their land in Georgia. Kathryn Kish Sklar, “Introduction,” How Did the Removal of the Cherokee Nation from Georgia Shape Women's Activism in the North, 1817–1838? (Binghamton: State University of New York at Binghamton, 2003), online version in Women and Social Movements, Alexander Street Press.

[3] Alison M. Parker, “The Case for Reform Antecedents for the Woman’s Rights Movement,” in Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited, ed. Jean H. Baker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 21–41, esp. 27.

[4] Maria Stewart, Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, reprinted in Maria W. Stewart, America’s First Black Woman Political Writer, ed. Marilyn Richardson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 28–42, esp. 38, 39.

[5] Stewart, Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, 28–42; Martha A. Jones, All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 7, 23–27; Dorothy Sterling, We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Norton, 1984), 154, 157–159.

[6]Judith Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman’s Rights Convention (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 92.

[7] Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels against Slavery (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), 169–250.

[8] Richardson, “Introduction,” Maria W. Stewart, 14–19; Lerner, Grimké Sisters, 192.

[9] Elizabeth Ann Bartlett et al., eds., Sarah Grimké: Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and Other Essays (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 38.

[10] Parker, “Case for Reform Antecedents,” 30; Jones, All Bound Up Together, 51–57.

[11] Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 86–131.

[12] Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Beauty, the Beast and the Militant Woman: A Case Study in Sex Roles and Social Stress in Jacksonian America,” American Quarterly 23, no. 4 (October 1971): 562–584; Margaret Washington, “Going ‘Where They Dare Not Follow’: Race, Religion, and Sojourner Truth’s Early Interracial Reform,” Journal of African American History 98, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 48–71; Ellen Carol DuBois and Lynn Dumenil, Through Women’s Eyes: An American History, 4th ed. (New York: Bedford Books, 2016), 230.

[13] Parker, “Case for Reform Antecedents,” 22; Carla Peterson, “Doers of the Word”: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830–1880) (New York: Oxford University Pres, 1995), 120, 171–173; Ruth Bordin, Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873–1900 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), 4–5; Wellman, Road to Seneca Falls, 82-86.

[14] Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (1959; New York: Atheneum Press, 1970), 27–28. For later associations between woman suffrage and free love, see Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 73–82, 96. The association between woman suffrage and some social movements—most notably, free love—might have been a greater liability than asset.

[15] Flexner, Century of Struggle, 23–40; Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845; New York: Norton, 1971).

[16] Parker, “Case for Reform Antecedents,” 26.

[17] Wellman, Road to Seneca Falls, 145–54. The 1860 law is printed in “Rights of Married Women,” New York Times, March 21, 1860, 5. The 1848 law protected only married women’s control of inherited property or gifts of property to her. The 1860 law protected wages and other property acquired through a wife’s own labor in industry, business, trade, or services. Norma Basch, In the Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage, and Property in Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 158–159, 164.

[18] Wellman, Road to Seneca Falls, 186–208; Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (1978; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 21–52; Anne M. Boylan, Women’s Rights in the United States: A History in Documents (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 91–95; John F. McClymer, ed., This High and Holy Moment: The First National Woman’s Rights Convention, Worcester, 1850 (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1999).

[19] Nell Irvin Painter, “Voices of Suffrage: Sojourner Truth, Ellen Watkins Harper, and the Struggle for Woman Suffrage,” in Baker, Votes for Women, 42–55; Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage, 53–202; Flexner, Century of Struggle, 216–225; Robert Booth Fowler and Spencer Jones, “Carrie Chapman Catt and the Last Years of the Struggle for Woman Suffrage: ‘The Winning Plan,’” in Baker, Votes for Women, 130–142.

[20] Quoted in Bordin, Woman and Temperance, 56.

[21] Bordin, Woman and Temperance, 58, 61, 119.

[22] Rebecca Edwards, “Pioneers at the Polls: Woman Suffrage in the West,” in Baker, Votes for Women, 90–101, esp. 95–98; Bordin, Woman and Temperance, 123–133.

[23] Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Robyn Muncy, Relentless Reformer: Josephine Roche and Progressivism in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 1–9; Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (New York: Norton, 1999), 21–109; Victoria Bissell Brown, “Introduction,” Twenty Years at Hull-House, by Jane Addams, ed. Victoria Bissell Brown (New York: Bedford Books, 1999), 1–38; Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); Mia Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009).

[24] Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York: Anchor Books, 1971), 47–51; Robyn Muncy, “‘Women Demand Recognition’: Women Candidates in Colorado’s Election of 1912,” in We Have Come to Stay: American Women and Political Parties, 1880–1960, ed. Melanie Gustafson, Kristie Miller, and Elisabeth Perry (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 45–54, esp. 46.

[25] Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African-American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 81–106; Wanda A. Hendricks, “Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the Alpha Suffrage Club of Chicago,” in One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement, ed. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler (Troutdale, OR: New Sage Press, 1995), 263–276; Lisa G. Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877–1932 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 87–96; Evelyn Brooks-Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 12, 226–227, 274–275; Crisis, Woman’s Suffrage Number, vol. 4, no. 5, September 1912.

[26] Woman Suffrage Endorsed (New York: NAWSA, ca. 1908), leaflet , retrieved from the Digital Public Library of America; Ellen Carol DuBois, “Woman Suffrage and the Left: An International Socialist-Feminist Perspective,” chap. 13 in Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 252–282; Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 88–96.

[27] Quoted in Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 100.

[28] Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 110; Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, rev. ed. (2000; New York: Basic Books, 2009), 173.

[29] Petition from the Moving Picture Machine Operators to George McLean, November 1918, Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers of Waterbury, CT, to George McLean, November 1918, United Plumbers’ Association of Bristol, CT, to George McLean, October 28, 1918, and Sheet Metal Workers of Stamford, CT, to George McLean, November 16, 1918 all in Petitions and Memorials, Resolutions of State Legislatures, and Related Documents which were Presented, Read, or Tabled during the 65th Congress, 1917–1919, RG 46, Records of the US Senate, Container #129, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Center for Legislative Archives, Washington, DC; Petition from the United Garment Workers Union of America, Local No. 17 from Seattle, WA, Favoring Federal Woman Suffrage Amendment, in Petitions and Memorials, Resolutions of State Legislatures, and Related Documents, which were Referred to the Select Committee on Woman Suffrage during the 65th Congress, Folder No. 17, RG 46, Records of the US Senate, NARA, Center for Legislative Archives, Washington, DC; Lansing Trades and Labor Council to Senators and Congressmen of Michigan, January 6, 1918, in Petitions and Memorials, Resolutions of State Legislatures, and Related Documents which were Presented, Read, or Tabled during the 65th Congress, 1917–1919, RG 46, Records of the US Senate, NARA, Center for Legislative Archives, Washington, DC.

[30] Vicki L. Ruiz, “Class Acts: Latina Feminist Traditions, 1900–1930,” American Historical Review 121, no. 1 (February 2016): 1–16, 3; Yamila Azize-Vargas, “The Emergence of Feminism in Puerto Rico, 1870–1930,” in Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000), 268–275.

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