American Women's Suffrage by Susan Ware

Author:Susan Ware
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Library of America
Published: 2020-05-26T19:32:47+00:00

Statement before Joint Congressional

Session of Congress

MARCH 13, 1912

Working-­class women played active and vibrant roles in the women’s suffrage movement, especially in the last decade before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. These suffragists, who often came out of the trade union movement, were street-­smart and politically savvy. Like the intersectional vision of African American suffragists, they contributed a broader theoretical perspective by arguing that class solidarity must always be prominent alongside gender. This testimony given to a Joint Congressional Committee in 1912 by labor activist Leonora O’Reilly (1870–1927) effectively rebutted the criticisms that working women did not want the vote or that the vote was irrelevant to the problems that working-­class women faced in their lives. Born into an Irish family on New York’s Lower East Side, O’Reilly had started work not at thirteen, as she said in her statement, but at eleven. She initially became involved in the trade union movement through the Knights of Labor and later joined forces with middle-­class allies in the Women’s Trade Union League. O’Reilly was a charismatic speaker and her passionate commitment to labor and women comes through clearly in this testimony. As she argued to great applause, “We working women want the ballot, not as a privilege but as a right. . . . All the other women ought to have it, but we working women must have it.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.