Start Date
12-6-2011 9:30 AM
End Date
12-6-2011 12:00 PM
Subject Areas
North America, activism, class, feminist, politics, race
Abstract
Race, Region and Rights challenges the standard narrative of women’s suffrage in the United States by placing race at the center of analysis. Drawing on new research and the rich corpus of recent studies, it examines the ways that race shaped suffrage battles in various regions of the country and the ways that women of color shaped the suffrage movement from the 1860s to the 1940s. The paper also suggests the importance of suffrage battles in local as well as state and federal arenas and briefly notes the influence of suffrage campaigns elsewhere in the world on the U.S. movement. This framing of the U.S. suffrage movement makes clear that the traditional tale that traces the campaign for voting rights from the Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention of 1848 to the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920 fails to capture the breadth, depth and contentious character of battles for the ballot. Most importantly, that traditional framing obscures the critical roles that women of color and working-class women played in a century-long struggle to claim equal political rights.
Keywords
suffrage, race
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
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Race, Region and Rights: Recasting the U.S. Women's Suffrage Movement
Race, Region and Rights challenges the standard narrative of women’s suffrage in the United States by placing race at the center of analysis. Drawing on new research and the rich corpus of recent studies, it examines the ways that race shaped suffrage battles in various regions of the country and the ways that women of color shaped the suffrage movement from the 1860s to the 1940s. The paper also suggests the importance of suffrage battles in local as well as state and federal arenas and briefly notes the influence of suffrage campaigns elsewhere in the world on the U.S. movement. This framing of the U.S. suffrage movement makes clear that the traditional tale that traces the campaign for voting rights from the Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention of 1848 to the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920 fails to capture the breadth, depth and contentious character of battles for the ballot. Most importantly, that traditional framing obscures the critical roles that women of color and working-class women played in a century-long struggle to claim equal political rights.