Wednesday, August 19, 2020

Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Women's Right to Vote

Utah women of color were part of fight for equal suffrage, historians say

Photos courtesy of Better Days Utah 2020. L to R: Elizabeth Taylor; Alice Kasai; Zitkála-Šá (Dakota); and Hannah Kaaepa (Hawai'ian) with her mother and sister. All fought for women's rights. Source: https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/08/16/utah-women-color-were/

“Indigenous women have had a political voice in their nations on this land for over 1,000 years,” Sally Roesch Wagner, historian and editor of the 2019 anthology The Women’s Suffrage Movement, points out. “Women’s rights is not a new concept on this land; it’s a very, very old one. And the clan mothers of the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Haudenosaunee women, have had political voice for 1,000 years.”

The passage above is from a new Time magazine article, August 18th, 2020: "5 Myths About the 19th Amendment and Women's Suffrage, Debunked": https://time.com/5879346/19th-amendment-facts-myths/

On August 19, 2020 there will be a special discussion about the leadership and strategies of Black women during the long fight for suffrage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAkgz7oYPV8

Description of the webinar/discussion:
In the standard story, the suffrage crusade began in Seneca Falls in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But this overwhelmingly white women’s movement did not win the vote for most Black women. Securing their rights required a movement of their own. In “Vanguard,” historian Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women’s political lives in America. She recounts how they defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons. From the earliest days of the republic to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond, Jones excavates the lives and work of Black women — Maria Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Lou Hamer, and more — who were the vanguard of women’s rights, calling on America to realize its best ideals.

The book the conversation emerges from is Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (September 8, 2020), by Martha S. Jones. Link: http://marthasjones.com/vanguard/

Additional new scholarship in 2020 reveals which women and women's organisations took leadership and had influence en route to this tremendous accomplishment a century ago. This sites lists several other new books honoring the Suffrage Centennial:
http://suffrageandthemedia.org/source/books-new-in-2020-for-the-suffrage-centennial/