“THE SEEDS OF THE 19TH AMENDMENT….”
In the spring of 2009, Caroline and I went to visit our daughter Susan, who was living in Westfield, NY, while she did a theatrical internship at an internationally known puppet theater known as Das Puppenspiel. Westfield was located directly on Lake Erie, but it was best known as the home of Welch’s grape juice. When we had first arrived there in the late summer of 2008, I saw acres and acres of green plants that looked from afar like they were the cotton plants with which I had grown up. I knew that cotton wouldn’t make it in this geography, so as I was wondering what they were, it dawned on me – grape arbors, aligned almost exactly like the rows of cotton plants that I knew so well from the Mississippi River delta.
On this spring trip of 2009 we went to Seneca Falls, where the first convention for women’s rights was held in the United States in July, 1848. Housed in the Women’s Rights National Historical Park is a powerful history of the women’s rights movement, especially in the 1800’s. Nearby was the hull of the original building where the convention was held in Wesleyan Methodist Chapel – three brick walls were left.
On this coolish New York day, you could almost see and hear the voices of the debate over whether to adopt the “Declaration of Sentiments,” which had been drafted a few days earlier by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott (who would later accompany Mary Brown to Harper’s Ferry in 1859 to pick up the body of Brown’s husband John, who had been executed by the federal government because of his raid on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry). Stanton and Mott first met in London, 1840, while they were attending the World Anti-Slavery Convention with their husbands. That convention excluded women delegates, and this denial helped strengthen their resolve to work for women’s rights and to hold a convention for that purpose.
The gathering at Seneca Falls built on the pioneering work of many women who spoke and worked for equal rights for women: Sojourner Truth, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, Abby Kelley, Margaret Fuller, Victoria Woodhull, and others. Its goal was to begin the work of developing legal and political rights for women in the United States and around the world. It was a regional gathering and a white one – Frederick Douglass was the only African-American in attendance there. Sojourner Truth was not there, Harriet Tubman was not there, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was not there. This blindness and tension over the intersectionality of race and gender would plague and hurt the women’s rights movement for many decades.
This gathering at Seneca Falls is now seen as the official beginning of the women’s rights movement, a beginning that led to the passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, whose 100th anniversary will be celebrated later on this month. Over the next couple of weeks, I will take a brief look at this history, noting the difficult fights, the internal struggles over the intersection of gender and race, the great successes, and the passage of the three steps in bringing voting rights to Black men in the 16th Amendment, to white women in the 19th Amendment, and then to Black women in the passage of Voting Rights Act of 1965. Last week was the 55th Anniversary of that Act, which ended neo-slavery in the country, but especially in the South.
The Seneca Falls Convention adapted a phrase from the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident – that all men and women are created equal.” They passed 10 resolutions unanimously in support of women’s rights, and the one contentious one was a resolution that affirmed voting rights for women. It barely passed, aided by a fiery speech in support of it by Frederick Douglass. But, its controversy at Seneca Falls would point to the difficulty of its passage. It would be 72 years before white women (and some Black women) secured the right to vote in the 19th Amendment. Only one attendee at the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention was alive at the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920: Charlotte Woodward Pierce.
Its passage was a milestone, but for all the hard work that went into it, there was much work yet to be done. It would be 45 more years before Black women were guaranteed the right to vote, and indeed that work continues. In 2013, the US Supreme Court used the case of Shelby (Alabama) v. Holder to strike down key provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and we are still working to restore them. If you think that voting is not much, just think of all the resistance that has been seen and continues to be seen – as John Lewis once put it, it is the only viable, non-violent weapon in a democracy. We are seeing its importance in this year’s decisive November election. In honor of Seneca Falls and all the women and men who have worked and fought and died for the vote, make sure that you are registered to vote for the November election – and commit to find 10 others who are not and to get them to register and to vote!
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