Women, Race & Class

Davis highlights the life and contributions of Ida B. Wells, who founded the first Black women’s suffrage club. Wells was a friend and admirer of Susan B. Anthony, but Wells faulted Anthony’s failure to fight against racism publicly within the suffrage movement (though she appeared to do so privately). Wells believed Anthony was wrong in abandoning Black people to avoid alienating white Southern women, especially during the 1890s, when racism was rising and disenfranchisement of Black people, segregation, and lynch law and mob violence were prevailing. This era is when the NAWSA took a hard turn toward fully embracing racism and white supremacy.

Davis rejects the “expediency” argument used by Anthony and others to justify catering to Southern women given the imminent danger to Black lives. Davis notes that “the ‘neutral’ stance assumed by the leadership of NAWSA” actually encouraged the proliferation of undisguised racist ideas within the ranks of the suffrage campaign” (113). For example, Henry Blackwell suggested a literacy test as a condition to the right to vote. In 1893, with Anthony as president, NAWSA passed a resolution that reiterated Blackwell’s suggestion stating that there were more literate women than illiterate men, Black voters, or immigrant voters. Davis argues that the resolution not only “dismissed the rights of Black and immigrant women,” but also “was an attack on the working class as a whole” (116); by indicating they would use their vote to “subdue” the working class (comprising Black people, immigrants, and uneducated white people), the leaders of NAWSA aligned themselves with the capitalist class.