Voices on the Bridges to Universal Suffrage and Equality

Poster by III Corps, Ft. Hood

Presentation by Diane Howard, Ph.D.
for III Corps, Ft. Hood, TX
Women's Equality Day
Copyright © 2011

It is a privilege to be with you as you celebrate women’s equality and the anniversary of the right to vote for American women. It is truly a joy to be with you, as the U.S. Army has always been near to my heart and life experiences. I have been involved with and served the U.S. Army all my life in various capacities. My husband, Dr. David Howard, retired LTC Chaplain who directs the Marriage and Family Counseling Program at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, has trained military chaplains at our university and at Ft. Hood in marriage and family therapy. Dave, 20 year veteran, was the Family Life Chaplain here at Ft. Hood and has worked with chaplains and commanders here for many years.

My father, Col. H.S. Lowe, was a 30 year veteran who served General Patton in WWII; Chiang Kia-Shek, as a liaison from the U.S. Army; General McArthur in Korea; and General Westmoreland in Viet Nam. For most of my life I have been involved with the U.S. Army as a military wife, military family member, or as a university professor of military personnel. I am deeply grateful for the contributions of the U.S. military in providing freedom and extending equal rights for people around the world. It is an honor to remember with you today those who have built bridges towards equal rights and to consider with you how we can continue to march forward toward advancing the rights and productivity of half the people of the globe- that is the women.

The American Women's Rights Movement began in 1848. It has continued to the present in its long, complex, hard struggle. Today I am giving you an overview of some of this history and performing paraphrases of the original words of leaders in this conflict.

In 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton laid out the case to female colleagues related to the limitations of women in the United States. The women planned a specific, large-scaled strategy to increase the freedom of women in order that the country might benefit from active, female, civil involvement. The plan included the initial women's rights convention at Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848.

To prepare for the meeting Stanton drafted a "Declaration of Sentiments," using the Declaration of Independence to connect women's rights directly to the most powerful American symbol of freedom. Familiar words from the Declaration of Independence were included. The new document stated..."We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." As grievances had been listed by America's revolutionary forefathers in the Declaration of Independence, Stanton laid out unjust treatments of American women in the "Declaration of Sentiments." These included the following:

The Seneca Falls Convention described what was normative for American women in 1848- that is for Caucasian Women. It did not set forth the much worse conditions for enslaved, African-American women. At this meeting 12 resolutions received unanimous endorsement. The only resolution that did not pass unanimously was the appeal for women's right to vote. Ironically, it was not until Frederick Douglass, the great Black, abolitionist, orator, spoke that the resolution passed. He stated, "Suffrage is the power to choose rulers and make laws, and the right by which all other (rights) are secured." It would take 72 years, however, for women to win the right to vote, setting the stage for gaining other rights.

           Women's Rights Conventions were held regularly until the beginning of the start of 
the Civil War. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Sojourner Truth traveled, 
lectured, and organized for many years.  Stanton and Anthony promoted equal rights for

women, Caucasian women- that is for Caucasian women ; but Sojourner Truth made the 
case for rights for women of color, as well.

A Women's Rights Convention was held in Akron, Ohio in 1851. The second day of the convention was contentious, as male clergy railed against the rights of women. They cited the superior intellect of the male, the manhood of Christ, and the sinful nature of Eve. Few women spoke. Sojourner Truth's involvement that day caused quite a stir. She rose slowly from her seat in the corner. She had scarcely lifted her head before then. Don't let her speak! insisted some. Sojourner moved slowly, solemnly to the front, laid her old bonnet at the president's feet, and turned her great eyes to the presiding officer. There were sounds of disapproval, but Sojourner Truth was introduced and gave her legendary Ain't I A Woman speech in which she argued the cause of black women. She said to a clergyman, Where’d your God come from? I said where'd your God come from? He came from God and Woman. Ain’t no man had anything do with Him. The president, Frances Dana Gage, asked for the ballot and for equality before the law for all adult citizens of sound mind, without regard to sex or color.

Harriet Tubman was a second-generation slave called "the Moses of Her People." Her call "Let my people go!" was her life’s cry to slaveholders. She escaped from slavery, herself, yet returned to the South nineteen times to free over three hundred slaves. She had a constant faith in God and believed slavery was an evil that man created. In 1850, when Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act making it illegal to assist a runaway slave, Harriet joined the Underground Railroad. She led her charges to Canada for safety. Tubman never lost a slave or failed on her missions. In the 1860s, Harriet began to appear at anti-slavery meetings and to speak on women's rights. She was a scout and a spy for the Union Army during the Civil War of 1861-1865. She was responsible for the destruction of great amounts of Confederate resources. After the war, she continued to battle for social reforms and justice for her people. She felt that achieving freedom and equality for African-Americans was closely linked to women's rights. Therefore, Harriet was involved in the early histories of the civil rights and women's suffrage movements in the United States.

Ida B. Wells was born 1862, during the second year of the Civil War. She has been described as a crusader for justice, and as a defender of democracy. She has also been characterized as a militant and uncompromising leader for her efforts to abolish lynching and to establish racial equality. Ida Wells challenged segregation decades before Rosa Parks. During Reconstruction she laid hold to previously unheard-of freedoms and civil rights. She became educated and helped to institute schools for African-Americans. She ran for Congress and attended suffrage meetings with Susan B. Anthony and others.

When Ida B. Wells died, she left behind a legacy of activism, dedication and hope. Her accomplishments were truly extraordinary given the time and social context in which she lived. She traveled throughout the United States and Europe with her anti-lynching message. She wrote extensively throughout her life on the injustices faced by blacks and engaged in a never-ending effort to organize women and African-Americans. Toward the end of her life she became an ardent community activist, determined to change the path of poverty and crime. Wells worked as a social researcher, activist, and organizer. She was one of this country's most dynamic and remarkable women.

She said If my work can contribute in any way toward arousing the conscience of the American people to demand for justice for every citizen and punishment by law for the lawless, I shall feel I have done my race a service. No nation, savage or civilized, except the United States of America, has failed to protect its women- except by hanging, shooting, and burning alleged offenders.

Civil Rights leaders from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement one hundred years later, spoke of Southerners' resistance and resentment towards giving the African-Americans freedom, the right to vote, and civil rights laws and protections. Madame C. J. Walker was born in 1867 to sharecroppers. She brought up as Sarah Breedlove in a life of poverty and with little education because she never went to school. She said I got my start because I gave myself a start. She gave herself the name Madame C. J. Walker and began her own cosmetic company. It became highly successful and profitable. Before the 1920’s Madame Walker was a charitable millionaire.

In June, 1873, Susan B. Anthony was jailed for voting. She cast her ballot almost 50 years before the Nineteenth Amendment was enacted, giving women the right to vote in 1920. When the Fourteenth Amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution in July 1868, women's rights leaders, who had actively campaigned for decades for women's rights to vote, were angered by the wording of Section 2, which encouraged states to give the vote to black males but placed in doubt the citizenship of females.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony urged women to vote in defiance of any state law that prohibited them from voting. Women in at least ten states followed their stand and a few, including Anthony in 1872, were able to cast ballots when they threatened voting registrars with a lawsuit if turned away. Anthony and 14 other women registered and voted in the 1872 presidential election. Susan B. Anthony, the other women, and the registrars were arrested. Bail was set at $500, and all but Anthony chose to pay, rather than go to jail. Anthony's bail was reset at $1,000, but she again refused to pay. It was paid by a Judge Selden from whom she had sought legal advice.

Before her trial, Anthony traveled throughout the county stating her case. She asserted, Friends and fellow-citizens, I stand before you under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted illegally. The Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the constitutions of the several states propose to protect the people in the exercise of their God-given rights. One half of the people of this Nation today are utterly powerless to blot from the statute books an unjust law, or to write a new and just one. This form of government enforces taxation without representation and compels women to obey laws to which they have never given their consent. It imprisons and hangs them without a trial by a jury of their peers, robs them, and leaves half of the people wholly at the mercy of the other half.

In 1873, Anthony's trial opened. It was stated that Miss Susan B. Anthony upon the 5th day of November, 1872, voted. At that time she was a woman. When Selden, who represented Anthony, called her to the stand, there was an objection, because she was a woman. Because she was a woman she was not considered competent to witness on her own behalf. Selden took the stand in her place. He testified that he had agreed with Anthony as to the Fourteenth Amendment's protection of women's rights and had advised her to vote.

He stated If the same act had been done by her brother under the same circumstances, the act would have been not only innocent, but honorable and laudable; but having been done by a woman it is said to be a crime. The crime, therefore, consists not in the act done, but in the simple fact that the person doing it was a woman and not a man.

The presiding judge directed the jury, I have decided as a question of law that under the Fourteenth Amendment, which Miss Anthony claims protects her, she was not protected in a right to vote. I therefore direct you to find a verdict of guilty.

Susan B. Anthony never paid her fine or saw women given the right to vote. She spent much of her life promoting women's suffrage, that is for Caucasian women and not necessarily for women of color. Many of the early women rights proponents were limited in their thinking, just as their male counterparts had been. Even when women were given the right to vote in 1920, women of color were discouraged from voting in subtle and aggressive ways.

Women had key roles in Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s. Fannie Lou Hamer, born of a Mississippi sharecropper, was beaten and jailed in 1962 for trying to register to vote. She co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and gave a fiery speech at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

She told of being arrested and beaten when she tried to register to vote, 40 years after women were given that right. She said,

I had attended a voter registration workshop and was returning back to Mississippi. I was arrested and kicked. I was carried to the county jail placed in a cell. I began to hear the sound of kicks and horrible screams, and I could hear horrible names. They beat a woman and after a while she began to pray and asked God to have mercy on those people.

And it wasn’t too long before three white men came to my cell. I was carried out of that cell into another cell where they had two Negro prisoners. The State Highway Patrolmen ordered the first Negro to take the blackjack. The first Negro prisoner ordered me, by orders from the State Highway Patrolman for me, to lay down on a bunk bed on my face, and I laid on my face. The first Negro began to beat, and I was beat by the first Negro until he was exhausted, and I was holding my hands behind me at that time on my left side because I suffered from polio when I was six years old. I was in jail when Medgar Evers was murdered. All of this is on account of wanting to register, to become a first-class citizen and to live as a decent human being, in America.

Since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's, progress has been made in challenging gender discrimination and in securing equal rights for all women, including women of color. But sometimes there have been steps forward and then back again concerning equal professional opportunities in public life for women. There have been laws, treaties, charters, and conventions established around the world affirming the equal and inalienable rights of human beings, irrespective of gender. Gender-specific protections have advanced the inherent dignity of women and have equalized their standing with men before the law. As women have been protected and freed to enter public life, societies have been enriched by their contributions and productivity.

The U. S. Army has fought valiantly and sacrificially throughout the world to advance freedom for subjugated, intimated, and terrorized people, including women. Thanks to your efforts, women are now being educated in Afghanistan and are participating in the political process. This is a big step forward in the political progress of women in that country. Afghan women have become role models for other suppressed women throughout the world. They have demonstrated the importance and value of their being educated and allowed to participate in public life. The U. S. Army has advanced the march toward freedom and equal rights throughout the world in the past century and in the present one.

We have heard today some of the voices on the bridges toward women’s suffrage and equality. We should thank God for the perseverance of such great women, who have sacrificially contributed to the greater good of us all. I have often written and spoken on women's issues and performed stories of leading and pioneering women. This history is rich with the contributions of women whose service has benefited people throughout the world for posterity. I think this celebration today gives us an opportunity to remind ourselves and the general public of the great social contributions of women that have served societies at large. Let us continue to advance equal rights and opportunities for all people. As Fredrick Douglass said, "Right is of no sex - Truth is of no color - God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren."

Equal rights amendment. Retrieved March 17, 2005 from http://www.apa.org/pi/wpores.html

Faculty salaries rise, but still trail inflation. Retrieved April 19 from http://www.timesargus.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050419/NEWS/504190351/1002/NEWS01

King, M & Mason, A., Engendering development through gender equality. World Bank. Retrieved April 13, 2005 from http://www1.worldbank.org/devoutreach/spring01/article.asp?id=109

Living the Legacy: The Women's Rights Movement 1848 - 1998, Retrieved Aug. 14, 2005, http://www.legacy98.org/move-hist.html

Madame C. J. Walker. Retrieved Aug. 18, 2010.
http://www.hyperhistory.net/apwh/bios/b4walkercj.htm

Notable Speeches and Letters from African-Americans. Retrieved Aug. 21, 2011. http://www.infoplease.com/spot/bhmspeeches.html

Religio-Political Insights of 19th Century Women, Retrieved Aug. 18, 2010 http://www.janushead.org/JHSumm99/moody.cfmUnited States v. Susan B. Anthony: 1873 http://www.gale.com/free_resources/whm/trials/anthony.htm

Tubman, Harriet. Retrieved Aug. 21, 2011.
http://learningtogive.org/papers/papers131.html

Voices of Freedom. Retrieved Aug. 21, 2011.
http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/programs/pauleyg/voices/fhamer.htm