Day 5: Voting and the women’s suffrage movement

The fight for women’s suffrage was not as straightforward as you might think. Today we will examine the intersections of race and gender and how this played out during the fight for the 19th Amendment. Black women were marginalized in the movement and their contributions sidelined by history. Today, we will look back at these pioneering leaders and how they laid the groundwork for universal suffrage and the civil rights movement.

CHALLENGES

OPTION 1: Read this article about the African American suffragists who fought for the right to vote, while fighting racist backlash from the movements white leadership, many of whom did not believe that any black person should have the right to vote before white women.

OPTION 2: Watch this video that re-frames the way we look at the suffrage movement and encourages us to do more to honor and remember the black women who bravely fought for universal suffrage.

OPTION 3: Read about five amazing women of color who bravely fought for the abolition of slavery, the rights of women, and civil rights in the United States. They pioneered the idea of intersectionality more than a century before the term would be officially coined in 1989.