Good and Mad_The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger by Rebecca Traister

Author:Rebecca Traister [Traister, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: feminism, Politics
Amazon: B07CL2HHZZ
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2018-10-02T04:00:00+00:00

EPITAPH

On the day that Frederick Douglass died in 1895, he had spent the morning with Susan B. Anthony at a meeting of suffragists. In fact, he’d had such a good time that he had been in the midst of telling his wife about the meeting when he’d fallen to his knees, hands clasped, and his wife had simply believed that his pose was one of narrative enthusiasm, not realizing that he was in fact dying.

“It is a singular fact,” the New York Times reported in Douglass’s obituary, “that the very last hours of his life were given in attention to one of the principles to which he has devoted his energies since his escape from slavery. . . . Mr. Douglass was a regularly enrolled member of the National Woman Suffrage Association, and had always attended its conventions.” The obituary noted that his companion at the suffrage meeting that day was “Miss Anthony, his lifelong friend,” and that when “Miss Susan B. Anthony heard of Mr. Douglass’s death, at the evening session of the council, she was very much affected. Miss Anthony has a wonderful control over her feelings, but tonight, she could not conceal her emotion.”91

The racism that had riven the women’s movement had by no means abated, nor would it anytime soon; twenty years later, one of the next generation’s white suffrage leaders, Alice Paul, would try unsuccessfully to force her elder, the black suffragist and anti-lynching leader Ida B. Wells, not to walk with her state’s delegation in the enormous 1913 suffrage march on Washington, DC, but instead to march with the rest of the black women suffragists where they’d been told to position themselves: behind all the white women. And the year that he died Anthony had asked Douglass not to appear at a suffrage convention in the South, because she was trying to strategically win white women to the cause. But neither did women of any race have the vote, nearly six decades after the first meetings of the black and white women joining to push for abolition, more than forty years after Douglass had joined Stanton at Seneca Falls.

Frederick Douglass was seventy-eight at his death; Susan B. Anthony would die eleven years later at eighty-six. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had turned to such baldly racist rhetoric in her anger at the inclusion of black men in the franchise before she herself had won the vote, was seventy-nine at the time of Douglass’s death and would live another seven years. Near the end of his life, Douglass would observe of their linked battles, “We should all see the folly and madness of attempting to accomplish with a part what could only be done with the united strength of the whole.”92

None of the three, of course, would live to see the passage and ratification of the Ninteenth Amendment, much less conceive of the Voting Rights Act. In fact, only one woman who attended the Seneca Falls convention would survive long enough to cast a ballot after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.

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