Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth and Ida B Wells: Mothers of the Movement for Women’s Equality
By Maura Reilly
Many associate the early women’s suffrage movement with suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Stanton gained prominence with her commitment to abolition and the passing of the 13th Amendment, and quickly recognized the need for a women’s equality movement when barred from many abolition conventions and meetings on the basis of her sex. Partnering with Lucretia Mott, Susan B Anthony, and other progressive women, Stanton organized the first Women’s Rights Convention in 1848, the famed convention would later become known as the Seneca Falls Convention. For the Convention, Stanton wrote the Declaration of Sentiments, modelled after the Declaration of Indepence calling out the inadequacies of the later and its failure to grant the true equality it hinted at. Although an early advocate for abolition, Stanton grew increasingly isolationist in her views on suffrage and equality, actively opposing the 15th Amendment for explicitly excluding women from the right to vote.
As the women’s suffrage movement became increasingly divided over the cross-section of race and gender, Sojourner Truth came to the front, calling for universal equal rights and suffrage. In 1851, at a Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, Truth delivered one of her most famous speeches, “Ain’t I a Woman?” Truth called attention to the double-burden women of color face in both gaining civil rights and women’s equality. Although Truth initially worked alongside both Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass, she distanced herself as Stanton vocally opposed the 15th Amendment and Douglass urged women to wait their turn.
Ida B. Wells carried on Sojourner Truth’s mantle, becoming an avid intersectional activist both for civil rights and women’s equality. While working as a journalist, Wells investigated the systemic lynching of African American men in the south and published several newspaper columns and pamphlets on the pandemic of racial violence. Following death threats for her work, which earned her a posthumous Pulitzer Prize this year, Wells moved from Tennessee to Chicago where she became active in the women’s suffrage movement.
Wells helped establish several women’s rights organizations including the Alpha Suffrage Club, the National Equal Rights League and the National Association of Colored Women’s Club. In 1913, Ida B. Wells joined in the Women’s Suffrage March held in DC. After being told to march at the back rather than with the Illinois state delegation, Wells said “either I go with you or not at all. I am not taking this stand because I personally wish for recognition. I am doing it for the future benefit of my whole race.” Wells went on to march with her state delegation ignoring calls for segregation.
Well’s Pulitzer recognition comes at a time when all women but women of color in particular are underrepresented in our annals of history not because they failed to be active participants or effect real change, but because of their gender and the color of their skin. As we fight for a more equal system and a more representative democracy we must recognize and address the double burden women of color face. And we must be sure to tell and retell the story of these mothers of the movement for women’s equality.
