VOTING RIGHTS, VOTING WRONGS PART 3

We take our discussion of suffrage to the end of the 19th century! Huzzah! It might take us as long to discuss this topic as it took to actually get the 19th amendment passed.  Main takeaway from this episode: whyte (yes, whyte) women really don't get intersectionality. But basically, we took our one-issue concern—getting the vote—and said a big "sorry, maybe later" to basically every other concern out there, but especially to the topic of racism. Before anyone gets apologetic about "well, that's the way it was back then..." Stop. Stop right there. As you will learn, women like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton knew what they were doing. They had a choice to make and they made the wrong one. It's a choice we are still dealing with, over 120 years later.

In this episode, we take down Jane Grey Swisshelm, and shout out the Zinn Education Project's Teach Reconstruction Campaign as well as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. In particular, check out her Truth-with-a-capital-T speech, "We Are All Bound Up Together" (1866). 

"I do not believe that white women are dew-drops just exhaled from the skies. I think that like men they may be divided into three classes, the good, the bad, and the indifferent. The good would vote according to their convictions and principles; the bad, as dictated by prejudice or malice; and the indifferent will vote on the strongest side of the question, with the winning party. You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs."
—Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1866)