Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
By: Coline Jenkins, legislator, author, television producer and great-great-granddaughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Dr. Erica Ryan, associate professor of history and director of the gender and sexuality studies program at Rider University
The struggle to secure the right to vote for women engaged the energy and dedication of three generations of American women and spanned some 75 years. The first women’s rights convention, organized at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and a handful of colleagues, is widely seen as the starting point of the modern women’s rights movement. As two of the movement’s early leaders, Stanton and Susan B. Anthony worked together to spread their message. With seven children, Stanton juggled her responsibilities in order to do the work that was so important to her. She wrote speeches that Anthony would go out and deliver, while Anthony helped her at home. As Stanton’s husband said, “Susan stirred the puddings, Elizabeth stirred up Susan, and Susan stirs up the world!”
Many suffrage activists joined them in the fight over the next few decades, including notable leaders like Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Lucy Stone and Ida B. Wells, as they spoke out, wrote petitions, lobbied Congress and raised funds — sometimes by selling suffrage cookbooks!
Rider University’s earliest iteration — Trenton Business College — opened its doors in 1865 during the early years of the women’s rights movement and graduated its first female student, Marion Ashton, in 1867. Women, the school’s owners claimed, were entitled to the same education as men, as women could “comprehend the full bearing of a business transaction…quite as readily as men.” This, at a time when women could not yet vote, or, if married, own their wages, was frank language asserting women’s right to equality in education and to the power of the purse. Women graduating from business colleges like the Trenton Business College, filled a growing female clerical work force as bookkeepers, stenographers and accountants. Catalog copy from the College in 1887 argued, “The prejudice that once existed against women in business is largely, if not entirely, disappeared,” declaring that the College would place women “on an equal footing with young men.” This mattered, for, as Stanton said, “women will always be dependent until she owns a purse of her own.”
Despite some advances like these, by 1892, in a diary entry, Elizabeth Cady Stanton found herself coming to terms with the fact that she and her fellow first-generation suffrage activists were “sowing wheat…which other hands than ours will reap and enjoy.” Susan B. Anthony reinforced this in a letter to Stanton some years later, a mere few days before Stanton’s death, saying “these strong young women will take our place and complete our work. There is an army of them, where we were but a handful.” This army helped grow the suffrage fight into a mass movement at the start of the 20th century, as a new generation of leaders like Alice Paul sent protestors to the White House carrying signs announcing, “The Young Are At The Gates.”
An astonishing array of women, from different regions and backgrounds, organized campaigns to overcome the once widespread resistance to a national amendment granting women the right to vote. And when the 19th Amendment became law in August of 1920, it served as the largest single expansion of democratic voting rights in American history, which one suffragist called “the greatest bloodless revolution ever known.”
However, due to racism embedded in existing state and federal voting laws, many American women and men still were denied their constitutional right to vote, including Black women, Native American women, and Asian American women. Black suffragist Mary Church Terrell put it plainly when she said at a suffrage convention in 1890, “A white woman has only one handicap to overcome — that of sex. I have two — both sex and race.” Terrell and other Black women were alienated — if not excluded outright — from many mainstream suffrage groups in the Jim Crow era, and so they formed organizations of their own, where they fought tirelessly for both gender and racial equality. It would take until 1965, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act, for their right to vote to be fully secured.
Many women persisted in their activism after 1920, accomplishing a wide array of reforms aimed at expanding citizenship rights, social justice and equality. The fight for an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) began in 1923, then passed to the second wave of feminists in the 1960s and 1970s, and continues today. Proposed as the 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the ERA mirrors the 19th Amendment: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” Many are still engaged in the effort to pass the amendment, in addition to struggles for equal pay, reproductive rights and equality in political representation.
In 2020, we stand on the shoulders of all of these pioneers for women’s rights as we celebrate their achievements and strive to fulfill their dreams. As we join forces to create The Rider University Women’s Suffrage Centennial Cookbook to support scholarships for female students, we thank you for your commitment and we ask: What kind of platform are you providing for the next generation of strong young women? How will future women’s rights activists, teachers, business leaders and politicians reach higher because they stood on your shoulders? One clear tool we have at our disposal is that right Stanton insisted on back in 1848 — the right to vote. Use it.
Coline is co-founder and president of the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Trust, a collection of 3,000 objects of women’s suffrage memorabilia that has been lent to museum exhibits, book publishers, documentary film producers, presidential libraries, popular magazines, television programs and Congressional testimony. The Trust’s lending practice fulfills its mission: to preserve the history of the women’s rights movement; to educate the public on this history; and to promote the advancement of women’s rights.
Coline lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, where for 30 years, she has served as a municipal legislator. She co-authored 33 Things Every Girl Should Know about Women’s History and produced the television documentary, An American Revolution: Women Take Their Place. Her 2009 testimony before the United States Senate contributed to the passage of federal legislation creating a national trail of historic sites, coordinated by Women’s Rights National Historical Park, known as The National Votes for Women Trail.
For six years, Coline has served as vice president of MonumentalWomen.org, a nonprofit organization dedicated to breaking the bronze ceiling over New York City’s Central Park by erecting the first statue of real women — Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth — in recognition of the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Coline comes from a long line of women activists. In addition to her great-great-grandmother Elizabeth Cady Stanton, her great-grandmother Harriot Stanton Blatch worked as a major organizer of the women’s suffrage movement in New York State during the militant period of 1913–1915. Coline’s mother was born one month prior to the passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution in 1920. Coline grew up in an atmosphere of women’s rights and suffrage campaigning. She firmly believes that equality is attainable.
Dr. Erica Ryan is an associate professor of history and director of the gender and sexuality studies program at Rider University. Erica teaches courses in modern American history, including courses on politics, culture, women, gender and sexuality. Her research focuses on the intersections among gender, sexuality, and political culture in the modern United States. She has written about the significance of the family as a social and political construction,
the development of modern conservatism in America and the long history of our present-day culture wars. Erica received her PhD from Brown University.
Erica’s newest book, When the World Broke in Two: the Roaring Twenties and the Dawn of America’s Culture Wars, published in 2018, presents the decade’s most compelling controversies as precursors to today’s culture wars. Erica published her first book titled Red War on the Family: Sex, Gender, and Americanism in the First Red Scare in 2014. She also has published essays in Encyclopedia of the Jazz Age: 1918–1929, Notches: Remarks on the History of Sexuality, and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, and has written book reviews for American Historical Review, History: Review of New Books, Archives of Sexual Behavior, New Jersey Studies, H-Net Reviews and the scholarly website Women and Social Movements in the United States.
Erica is currently working on centennial celebrations for the 19th Amendment with the Alice Paul Institute and researching a new project that explores masculinity and the fatherhood movement of the 1990s.
