REVISING WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE
A Q&A with Villanova historian Shannen Dee Williams, scholar of African-American history
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Lepage Center planned to host a roundtable conversation marking the 100-year anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment. Titled, “Revising Women’s Suffrage” the conversation was to have examined the ways in which our understandings of the women’s suffrage movement have been revised over time, and how that history is more complex than we may believe.
The Lepage Center’s History Communication Fellows, Keeley Tulio and James Lyons, sat down with Villanova historian Shannen Dee Williams — one of the invited speakers for the “Revising Women’s Suffrage” event — to discuss how contemporary historians are making the history of women’s suffrage more inclusive by integrating the perspectives of black women into the narrative. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Fellows: The history of the women’s suffrage movement often gets reduced to the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and women earning the right to vote in 1920, erasing black women from the movement. Why is this so?
Williams: As historian Lisa Tetrault has demonstrated, the roots of this erasure can be traced to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Gage, and Ida Huster Harper and their multi-volume History of Woman Suffrage. These books, which intentionally placed Stanton and Anthony at the center of the story and at best presented black women as marginal figures, became the “definitive” narratives of the movement and shaped popular and scholarly conversations around women’s suffrage for decades. Enslaved and free black women had always struggled against racism and sexism. In 1832, free black women in Salem, Massachusetts not only established the nation’s first all-female abolition society, but also explicitly argued for the equal citizenship of African Americans. That same year, Maria Stewart, a free black woman in Boston who argued for abolition and women’s rights, became the first American woman of any color to deliver a public address before a mixed audience of women and men, black and white. Yet, Stanton and Anthony’s decision to mark a local and fairly inconsequential 1848 meeting of white women activists and Frederick Douglass in Seneca Falls, New York as the beginning of the women’s rights movement in the United States erased black women’s foundational and leading presence in the fight for women’s liberation.
The simplification of the narrative is also due to the failure of early historians of women’s suffrage to take black women’s lives and activism seriously. Before the emergence of the first generation of professionally-trained black women historians hired to teach at the nation’s historically white colleges and universities, few scholars viewed black women as independent actors in their own history or understood that black women possessed political histories and traditions separate from black men and white women.
Many early historians of white women suffragists were also unwilling to examine the ways that the icons of the movement, like Stanton and Anthony, were not truly inclusive in their vision of freedom and women’s suffrage. That is the danger of iconography and hagiography. Many white women suffragists readily embraced white supremacy to get their own vote. Stanton and Anthony, for example, lobbied against the ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which granted citizenship and suffrage to African-American and immigrant men. Many white women activists also publicly argued that their attainment of suffrage would help suppress the black vote. Indeed, the fight for women’s suffrage did not technically end in 1920 with the ratification of the 19th Amendment, but in 1965 with the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Continued assaults on the voting rights of African Americans and other marginalized groups in the United States (as seen in Shelby v. Holder and in wake of COVID-19) mean that the fight for women’s suffrage remains an ongoing battle.
Fellows: How can examining the lives of specific black women help make conversations about women’s suffrage more inclusive?
Williams: The story of the Rollin Sisters of South Carolina is an illustrative example. Born black, Catholic, and free in Charleston, Frances Anne, Charlotte “Lottie,” Kate, Louisa, and Florence were among the earliest and the most influential women suffragists to labor in the former slave state in the 19th century. In 1870, the sisters organized the first “women’s rights convention” held in South Carolina, and it was an interracial gathering. However, the activism of the Rollin sisters was not restricted to the fight for women’s suffrage. In 1867, Frances Rollin (later Whipper) successfully sued against the emerging practice of Jim Crow segregation in South Carolina after a white steamboat captain refused her first-class accommodations on the basis of her race. After racist violence forced the sisters and their families to flee to the North, the Rollin daughters and their descendants continued to struggle for racial and educational justice.
Telling the stories of black women’s suffragists such as these forces us to broaden our definition of “women’s issues” and rethink what constitutes politics. While black women struggled for the vote, it was not the only — or even the most pressing — issue around which they organized and fought. When we center black women’s intellectual voices and political struggles, their fights — for access to a quality education, against rape during and after slavery, to have one’s marriage and parental rights recognized after slavery, against lynching, against Jim Crow, against racism — all become visible as women’s issues.
Fellows: The New York Times appears to be an institution re-examining the lives of black women. For example, On June 6, 2018, the New York Times published an obituary for Mary Ann Shadd Carey, 100 years after her death. Why did the New York Times publish that obituary?
Williams: In 2018 the Times established the Overlooked series, in which Carey’s obituary appears, to highlight the lives and labors of extraordinary men and women whose deaths the paper previously ignored. By the Times’s own admission, white men dominated its obituaries since 1851. While Carey was a revolutionary figure in 19th-century America, her blackness and her womanness, along with her status as an abolitionist, a suffragist, and a pioneering attorney, placed her outside the realm of respectability, at least in the minds of those committed to white (male) domination. This series presents an opportunity for us to reclaim and celebrate those who were always a part of the American experience but who were overlooked because of racism, sexism, and exclusion in the publishing world. The New York Times is one of several American institutions searching for ways to confront and atone for their discriminatory pasts as it relates to people of color and white women.
Fellows: Why is this kind of project important?
Williams: In the face of persistent white supremacy, racial inequities, and racist misrepresentations of facts in contemporary society, historical truth-telling is one of the most important weapons that we have. Historians of the black experience have long recognized that white supremacy seeks to erase the history of its violence and its victims. So, when confronted with intentional erasure, one of the most radical things that a person can do is to tell the story that was never meant to be told. It is important to see powerful institutions like the New York Times grappling with this ugly history and taking critical steps to institutionalize these truths of itself and American society.
Fellows: The inclusion of these stories depends on the politics of the moment, right?
Williams: Absolutely. The decision to exclude black people, especially women, from any narrative of American history is always political. However, it is not because the lives and labors of black women do not matter. The exclusion underscores that black women’s stories fundamentally do matter. Black women’s stories radically revise American history. It is always a difficult task to tackle the mythology of the nation and certainly the mythology or moral limitations of some of the nation’s best-known freedom fighters. There has been a desire to excuse the documented racism and/or sexism of iconic figures by saying that they were simply people of their time. However, we are less likely to do so when we also acknowledge that these individuals had peers who were far more inclusive in their visions and understandings of freedom.
Fellows: Any final thoughts?
Williams: The past often reveals ugly truths that we may not wish to encounter or reckon with in the contemporary era. However, for those of us invested in building a more just and inclusive society, confronting and learning from the past is a necessity. Telling black women’s stories radically revises almost every aspect of American history. Recovering and institutionalizing black women’s stories must be understood then as an essential component to any campaign of human and social justice.
Shannen Dee Williams is the Albert Lepage Assistant Professor of History at Villanova University. She is completing her first book, “Subversive Habits: Black Nuns in the Long African-American Freedom Struggle,” under contract with Duke University Press.
Keeley Tulio (M.A. ’20) and James Lyons (B.A. ’20) are the 2019–2020 History Communication Fellows at the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest at Villanova University.
