Placing stickers on the suffragist's gravestone has become a kind of pilgrimage for voters in Rochester, N.Y. With a record number of women running, the tribute has special significance this year.
“I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman.”
“What words can express her (the white woman’s) humiliation when, at the close of this long conflict, the government which she had served so faithfully held her unworthy of a voice in its councils, while it recognized as the political superiors of all the noble women of the nation the negro men just emerged from slavery, and not only totally illiterate, but also densely ignorant of every public question.”
“The old anti-slavery school says women must stand back and wait until the negroes shall be recognized. But we say, if you will not give the whole loaf of suffrage to the entire people, give it to the most intelligent first. If intelligence, justice, and morality are to have precedence in the government, let the question of the woman be brought up first and that of the negro last.”
they do this every election lmao
They do this every election too:
White suffragists (including Anthony, Stanton, and others) routinely made arguments that if white women are allowed to vote they’ll help balance out black men’s votes. The argument was that black men (sort of nominally given the ability to vote via the 15th amendment) were animalistic, sexual predators, and unintelligent and would therefore dilute the usefulness of democracy and middle class white women being given the right to vote would solve this issue.
What does this have to do with 2018? I would argue that even today the legacy of white women consolidating white supremacist power with their vote is still very much with us. That’s the purpose they had when fighting for the right to vote and they continue to fulfill that purpose. They basically double the voice of their fathers and husbands.
