On the anniversary of Seneca Falls
Women's rights and the struggle against racism
As women prepare to meet in Seneca Falls, N.Y., to
commemorate the 150th anniversary of the birth of the women's
rights movement, we print below an adaptation from an article
in the Sept. 7, 1995, Workers World by Monica Moorehead. It
deals with the inseparable relation between the struggles for
women's rights and against racism.
The U.S. women's movement was born in 1848 at
the historic Seneca Falls convention in upstate New York. Its
goal was to organize women and their male supporters in the
fight for women's equality, especially the right to vote.
That same year in Europe, as bourgeois revolutions shook
feudal rule, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels inspired those
fighting for social change with their "Communist Manifesto." It
called for the emancipation of women as an indispensable part
of the struggle to overthrow capitalism.
The suffragist movement received an addi tional impetus from
the already estab lished abolitionist campaign fighting the
enslavement of African peo ple in the South. Many leaders of
the suffragist movement or their relatives were
abolitionists.
While women of all class back grounds were eager to join the
suffrag ist movement, the leadership was mainly petty bourgeois
and over whelmingly white. The best-known included Lu cretia
Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
Frederick Douglass, an ex-slave, an abolitionist and a
friend of the women's movement, was the only man allowed to
make a formal presentation at the Seneca Falls conference.
Besides voting rights, the Seneca Falls conference took up
women's need for more educational opportunities, the right to
own property without their husband's consent, the right to
divorce, and the right to civil and re ligious freedoms.
While a number of women suffragists-Lucy Stone, for
example-took an individual stand against slavery, they were
unequipped to strug gle within the suffragist movement to
elevate the anti-slavery fight. Many Black women suffragists
felt betrayed by the mainstream suffragist movement-and
justifiably so. This manifested itself after the Civil War in
the struggle over the 14th and 15th amendments, which focus on
political equality between white and Black men.
Black women suffragists felt the pas sage of these
amendments would help put Black women on a more equal political
footing with their white coun terparts.
Black women suf fragists such as Sojourner Truth and Mary
Church Terrell tried to convince the white suffragist leaders
to organize solidarity with the struggle against racism,
especially in the South. This, they said, would build and
strengthen alliances with Black people in the North and
South.
They felt white suf fragists were insensitive to their
special needs and oppressions. At a women's convention in 1851,
Sojourner Truth had to fight her way to the podium. There she
made her famous "Ain't I a Woman" speech.
But many Northern white suffragists wanted to avoid
alienating the white racist Southern suffragists. Black
suffragist leader Ida Wells-Barnett was even asked not to join
a Chicago march because its organizers were afraid of
antagonizing an all-white Southern contingent.
The suffragist movement also asked that only "educated"
women get the right to vote.
This set the struggle for women's rights back a half century
and strengthened the polit ical and economic rule of the
capitalist class.
Expanding capitalist development in the U.S. from 1900 to
the beginning of World War I brought a growing working class
inside the U.S., including more and more women workers eager to
join organized labor.
As they organized for better wages and tolerable working
conditions, they also became more con scious of their lack of
political rights. The impact of women workers gave the
once-fragmented suffragist move ment-at a low ebb at the end of
the 19th century-an infusion of new vi tality that lasted until
the passage of the 19th Amendment.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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