With 2020 being the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which permitted women to vote, I’m seeing a pattern of racial erasure in our narrative of suffragette history in that the 19th Amendment only gave white women the right to vote. In fact, many suffragettes were against Black suffrage, and even allied themselves with eugenicists, whose beliefs were highly racist. Black women were not given the right to vote until 1965. Because of this, I have mixed feelings about glorifying white suffragette heroes like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Is it really doing us any favors to ignore the side of suffragette history that we don’t want to see?
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