Existing comment:
Votes for All Women?
Not all women felt welcome in the suffrage movement led by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Carrie Chapman Catt.
Stanton and Anthony were active abolitionists but opposed the Fifteenth Amendment if it would enfranchise only African American men and not women. After its ratification in 1870, they were committed to obtaining a woman suffrage amendment. This determination led them and their successors to focus their organizations on voting rights instead of more expansive women's rights. It also led them to collaborate with people who did not believe that voting rights should extend to men and women of all races. Their speeches and writing of this time invoked race, class, education, and nativism as arguments for woman suffrage. |