Thread by @jessicabennett

Today is the centennial of the #19thAmendment’s ratification — which promised suffrage to American women.

Like most people, I learned about this history in school.

The story went like this:

The fight for women’s voting rights in this country began in 1848 in Seneca Falls, NY, and ended in 1920. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were leaders. Suffrage gave all women in America the vote. The end.

And yet that story is wildly incomplete.

That’s no huge surprise; women’s stories are said to make up just 0.5% of recorded history. The stories of women of color are often absent entirely from the public record.

And so, here are a few things I have learned since then.

🚨The vote was WON not given. It involved decades of protest, violence and hunger strikes. It was a FIGHT not a favor.

google.com/amp/s/www.nyti…

🚨Suffrage did not “begin” in 1848 nor “end” in 1920. Native people didn’t even receive citizenship with voting rights until 1924; Black women, while having suffrage on paper, could not freely exercise it until the passage of Voting Rights Act in 1965.

google.com/amp/s/www.nyti…

🚨It was not Stanton and Anthony alone who led the movement — it was women of color, working-class and immigrant women, queer women.

nytimes.com/2020/08/12/art…

Women like Mary McLeod Bethune, who starting a school for Black girls in segregated Daytona, Florida, with $1.50 in her pocket, and spearheaded voter registration efforts by riding her bicycle door-to-door.

And Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, who rode a white horse to lead members of her Chinese-American community in New York in one of the biggest suffrage parades in U.S. history.

Or Gail Laughlin, the first woman from Maine to practice law, who demanded that pockets be sewn into her dresses (YES gurl YES) — and was one of many queer leaders of the movement.

(🙏 @Maya__Salam)

nytimes.com/2020/08/14/us/…

🚨I learned that many newspapers like @nytimes opposed suffrage. As @katiekings writes, NYT did not believe voting would “increase either the happiness or the prosperity of women” and that “Without the counsel and guidance of men, no woman ever ruled a state wisely and well.”

🤯

They also called the suffragists “Amazons” and “female pests” and there was that one cool time in 1908 when they gathered “leading men” to discuss women’s suffrage, natch.

(Her is @katiekings’ piece , which does not stoop to such names!

google.com/amp/s/www.nyti…)

Here are a few fave headlines.

When lovely woman stoops to politics

The female pests (great band name!)

Her whims as voter

Leading men on woman’s right to vote

🚨 These women, it bears repeating, were suffragISTS not “suffragettes.” Suffragette was a diminutive term used to belittle the U.S. suffragists (though it was used in Britain)

🚨 The fight continues — with 78 days to the election.

google.com/amp/s/www.nyti…

Read more in our special section, edited by @vvchambers, with contributions from @mayasalam @jennyschuessler @marthasjones_ @kate_c_lemay @efweiss5 @CathleenDCahill and many more — and in our Opinion pages.

nytimes.com/spotlight/wome…

And please: In the words of Michelle Obama’s necklace at the #DNC2020 last night — and in honor of that hard-wom fight — exercise your
V-O-T-E. 🗳🗳🗳