First Ignored, Then Mocked, in 2020 the Suffrage Movement Is Getting Serious Treatment From Media

For most of its history, the suffrage movement was ignored by the mainstream media, namely newspapers in major cities. By the 20th century, women organizing for their rights were ridiculed in the press, their quest for a presence in the (male) political arena considered dangerous to sex roles in the family — who would cook dinner if women could vote? As the movement grew and took to the streets, with massive parades and soapbox speechifying, coverage was unavoidable, and reporters got busy asking who was “the most beautiful suffragette” or describing the dress a matron wore to a meeting.

As the centennial of victory for woman suffrage comes upon us and many media outlets repackage the same old tips of the hat to it, overt sneering is not much in fashion. A commentator may still speak of “suffragettes,” a derisive term originating in the British press. We hear that we are celebrating women being “given the vote,” a paternalistic locution, making the end of a long fight sound like an act of charity.

One hundred years after the 19th Amendment became part of the Constitution, the COVID-19 pandemic is wreaking havoc on longstanding plans for the occasion. No parades, mass meetings, live concerts, day-long conferences, or large gatherings at sites specifically created for this moment. Instead, we are driven to our screens and our earphones, where we replace the sense of community and contagious enthusiasm of live events with … hopefully, a national education, for the centennial has been taken as an opportunity in some quarters to review the history of the fight for the vote, interrogate some of its myths and memes, and revise our understanding of what actually happened.

The 2020 versions of suffrage history confront the weight of a white, middle-class tradition centering Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and the so-called “first” women’s convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, a tradition created by Stanton and Anthony themselves in their six-volume History of Woman Suffrage. Most school syllabi, if they touch the subject at all, still repeat the litany: Stanton, Anthony, Seneca Falls. Sometimes activist and abolitionist Sojourner Truth, who escaped from slavery, is added, as she was to the statue in New York’s Central Park that was created for the centennial when opposition to depicting two white women, Stanton and Anthony, as representative of the movement forced the change. Dating the origins of suffrage activism to a small New York State town — upon which a whole tourism industry has been built — is also now, with new scholarship emerging, a “fact” open to contention.

In 2020, Black — and other nonwhite — lives matter in telling the story, not as add-ons, but as carriers of a narrative entirely different from the white women’s, a narrative that revolves around dealing with racism in general and white suffragists’ racism in particular, organizing against lynching, and building a movement for “uplift of the race” that includes the right to vote but does not focus exclusively on it. The New York Times has recently helped bring these historical truths to the attention of a mass audience. Last weekend, the Times published a bold, tabloid-looking special section — “How American Women Won the Right to Vote” — in which some of those previously on “the margins” take center stage: African Americans, Native Americans, queer women.

Online, “Finish the Fight” is a dramatic piece made especially for digital space. Actors portraying two black women, Frances Ellen Harper and Mary McLeod Bethune; a Chinese woman, Mabel Ping-Hua Lee; a Mexican woman, Jovita Idar; and Zitkála-Šá, a Native American woman, become more than “names,” their need for the right to vote overlapping and yet entirely distinct from one another.

Reinvigorated activism in the streets has also changed the telling of the suffrage story. Stanton and Anthony no longer dominate the narrative. Now capturing the imagination is Alice Paul, whose militant civil disobedience, imprisonment, and forced feeding, and genius for attracting attention to The Cause feel in tune with the times. In spite of a college major and graduate degree in American history, producer and writer Michelle Ferrari, like many, knew little about the movement when she began preparing the television documentary The Vote, for American Experience at PBS. The Vote opens with Paul, an American Quaker, striding across a London street. The documentary is suffused by an intelligence that takes its subject seriously, discarding old memes and actually analyzing events. Naming racism as the reason votes for women took so long to secure, the documentary — and supporting interactive material online — tells the story in all its complexity, including the synergy between Paul’s tactics of disruption and Carrie Chapman Catt’s “inside the walls” campaigning, a difference usually seen as a conflict. The Vote embraces conflict and imperfection around a subject often smoothed out and sanctified.

Singer/songwriter Shaina Taub also “discovered” Alice Paul and underexplored conflicts both generational and racial, as she developed Suffragist, a musical scheduled to open at the Public Theater in New York in time for the centennial. The pandemic prevented that, but Taub’s team has taken snippets online, including a powerful musical response by Ida B. Wells, played by Nikki M. James, to Alice Paul’s insistence that she join the mammoth 1913 Washington, D.C., march with other black women at the back of the line. “Wait My Turn” is a song of indignation and fury, worthy of the real Ida B. Wells, who actually did not wait her turn at the march or anywhere else.

In an online conversation with the audience, Taub expressed worry about whether people will still be interested in the subject beyond the centennial date. One can only hope so because, for all the revelations prompted by the suffrage centennial, much remains to be aired in the public square: issues of class, radicalism, socialism, and the context of World War I for starters. A huge swath of American history is yet to take its place in the national consciousness and to be treated with what the suffragists and all of us insist on — what Aretha Franklin called R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

Note: Some of the events commemorating the 19th Amendment centennial can be found here:

https://suffragistmemorial.org/

https://nationalwomenshistoryalliance.org/

https://www.womensvote100.org/

https://www.2020centennial.org/

http://monumentalwomen.org