Transcription
[NARRATOR:] The first state in what came to be known as "the suffrage column" was Wyoming, which joined the Union in 1890 with its women already fully enfranchised. It was followed over the next six years by three more western states. Then, the forward march stalled.
[KEYSSAR:] By the late 19th century, in white, middle-class and upper-class American society, there was a shrinking faith in democracy. In the North, a lot of people are saying, well, you know, democracy’s not an unalloyed blessing. We have all of these immigrants coming in. They don’t speak English. They’re not very smart. I don’t think we should let them vote. In the South, of course, the politicians were busy disenfranchising African Americans who had been enfranchised during Reconstruction.
DUBOIS: The 15th Amendment didn’t say people have the right to vote, regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. It said states can’t deny people the right to vote. And southern states realized, well, they wouldn’t deny the right to vote by race. They’d deny it if your grandfather was a slave. That’s not specified in the 15th Amendment.
[KEYSSAR:] So the dominant movement is to take voting rights away from people. And that is something which the women’s suffrage movement runs up against at the end of the century.
[NARRATOR:] As states across the South moved to bar black men from voting ––by means of grandfather clauses, literacy tests, poll taxes and brute force –– the National Association, with Susan B. Anthony's assent, adapted to the prevailing mood. African American women who had been prominent in the movement were sidelined, and Southern chapters permitted to refuse black members. In 1894, Anthony even went so far as to ask Frederick Douglass to keep away from a suffrage convention in Atlanta, for fear of alienating potential supporters.
[GIDDINGS:] Frederick Douglass is the one who stands up and says to women who are ambivalent about calling for the vote, "well, you must work for suffrage." So to say to him that he’s not welcome in the South, in Atlanta, is a terrible thing. And Anthony probably actually believed that, as she said, when we get the vote, when white women get the vote, we’ll make everything okay for everybody. But it certainly encouraged the continuing segregation and discrimination.
[JONES:] African American women are going to continue to work toward women’s rights. They’re interested in the vote. But they are also using those ideas to transform and control their institutions–– in churches, in fraternal orders, in benevolent societies. They’re going to build, by the 1890s, an African American women’s club movement. And within that, they are also going to be claiming women’s rights in their own terms.
[CHATELAIN:] These are sisters who are divided because of racism and because of white supremacy and they’re asking each other to concede on the issue of rights and it will impact every single attempt to bring women broadly together in action for a better society.