VOTING RIGHTS, VOTING WRONGS 4

We cross the virtual finish line to the 19th Amendment...but, in an ending that will surprise no one by this point, the women we all learned about in history class got to the end of this race by tripping their fellow runners and erasing the contributions of those who paved the way for this eventual, partial victory. We learn you can't trust anniversaries or parades organized by white women (we're looking at you, Susan B. Anthony and Alice Paul), and that it's about damn time to rewrite history. Special shout outs in this episode to Lisa Tetrault's The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898, Evette Dionne's Women's Suffrage Leaders Left Out Black Women in Teen Vogue, and PBS' The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. 

If you buy any books about women's suffrage (and you should!), please invest in  groundbreaking Black women historians and writers like Rosayln Terborg-Penn (African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920), Evette Dionne (Lifting As We Climb: Black Women's Battle for the Ballot Box), and Martha Jones (Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All)... they have been and are rewriting history in all the best ways, and we owe them a huge debt of gratitude.

​Last, but not least we dive into the ongoing debates around how best to remember the woman Susan B. Anthony groomed to carry on her autocratic, strategically racist legacy: Carrie Chapman Catt, the namesake for the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics and Catt Hall at Iowa State University. In letters to the editor in the summer of 2020, activists at ISU in the 1990s (and current badasses) Meron Wondwosen and Celia Naylor expertly lay out how Catt was a white supremacist (25 years after Wondwosen did so as an undergrad) and name white women's current defense of Catt as part of this tradition. Stay tuned next week as we interview activists from the September 29th Movement leading the campaign to change the name of Catt Hall. 

Oh, and Woodrow Wilson and Henry Burn of Tennessee? We see you supporting white women to stick it to Black people. Nope.​