Hard Truths About Women's Suffrage

National Women’s Equality Day is celebrated on August 26th every year. The day marks the anniversary of when the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed a US citizen could not be prevented from voting on the basis of sex, was signed into law by the Secretary of State in 1920.?

2020 marked the 100 year anniversary for the passage of the 19th Amendment. As often happens during periods of historical commemoration, we were gifted with a wealth of analysis and commentary about some of the hard truths of the long struggle for women’s suffrage.?

These commentaries often argued that women’s suffrage in 1920 should come with an asterisk. Popular and national history is usually written in a way where certain truths are mythologized and certain truths are excluded.?

Though it is true that the 19th Amendment made it illegal to disenfranchise a person on the basis of sex, there were still numerous laws and policies which prevented men and women of color from voting, included the newly adopted Jim Crow laws. In fact, it wasn’t until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that all people of color - Black, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous - would get full enfranchisement.?

We also know that there was lots of inherent and systemic racism in the suffrage movement. Black women were obscured and at times pushed to the literal back of the line during some protest marches (as evidenced by the picture above). While we heroicize the white women who fought for suffrage, many of them didn’t think Black women, or other women of color, were deserving of that right because of their race.

Historical anniversaries are a great time to revisit how we tell history and who we exclude when we do. Therefore, when learning about periods of history we encourage you to look for the asterisk. We can celebrate accomplishments while still asking critical questions. As we reflect on the anniversary of women’s suffrage this year, we know we still have a long way to go to achieve full equity across the human spectrum.?

If you want to learn more about women’s suffrage, you can catch our coverage of the And Nothing Less podcast from 2020, and our discussions of the films Iron Jawed Angels and Suffragette.

We also got a wealth of fabulous publications in the anniversary year, so we highly recommend Martha Jones’ Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All and Lisa Tetrault’s The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898.