The Women's March by Jennifer Chiaverini

Author:Jennifer Chiaverini [Chiaverini, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: William Morrow
Published: 2021-07-27T00:00:00+00:00

17

Ida

January 1913

Chicago, Illinois

On the evening of January 30, Ida stood in the foyer of the Negro Fellowship League welcoming women of color from throughout the Chicago area to the first meeting of a new suffrage club dedicated entirely to them and their unique concerns. The response to her announcements had been overwhelming and gratifying, and the consensus was that it was high time Black women had an organization of their own. Too often they had been excluded from white women’s suffrage clubs, in practice even if segregation was not written into the bylaws.

Ida knew what far too many white suffragists did not: that women of color had been involved in the suffrage movement from its inception, and that their participation had been omitted from the historical narrative told about the struggle. Sometimes they had been deliberately excised, such as when a sketch alongside a magazine article depicted only white faces in the crowd at a rally, or when a newspaper photographer carefully cropped out the dark-skinned woman on the end of a row of marchers. Sometimes indifference or the habitual underestimation of Black women’s contributions left their stories untold. This sort of neglect, Ida believed, was what accounted for their exclusion from the celebrated four-volume history of the suffrage movement Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton had published, although to be fair, numerous white suffragists from rival organizations had also failed to make the editorial cut.

Sometimes women of color had been left out of the historical account of a significant suffrage event because they had been quite deliberately excluded from it. No Black women were mentioned in the stories of the momentous suffrage meeting of 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, because none had been invited. Frederick Douglass had been, but not Sojourner Truth. Mrs. Stanton had often insisted that she fought for the right to vote for every woman, but her speeches and writings suggested that her foremost concern was to gain enfranchisement for women like herself—white, middle-class or higher, educated, propertied, Protestant.

But although women of color barely merited a footnote in white women’s suffrage history books, that did not mean they had been idly sitting by, waiting for someone else to win the ballot for them, or that they had been too consumed by other important causes to make suffrage a priority. Ida knew well—and made it her business to educate others—that Black women had been engaged in the struggle for equal suffrage all along. Excluded from most venues available to their white counterparts, they had instead worked through channels that pumped lifeblood through the Black community: antislavery societies, churches, newspapers, women’s clubs, and civic groups. “Votes for Women” meant votes for Black women, and equal suffrage promised greater influence over the civic institutions that determined the quality of their lives and their children’s futures.

With so much at stake, many women of color, including Ida herself, still endeavored to work with white women’s suffrage groups in hopes that their combined strength would benefit all women. Sometimes their overtures met with rejection, but not always.

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