Alan Price: I'm delighted to welcome all of you who are watching today's special conference online. Thank you for joining us.
I would like to acknowledge the generous support of the underwriters of the Kennedy Library Forums: lead sponsors Bank of America and the Lowell Institute, and media sponsors, the Boston Globe and WBUR. This program is also funded in part by Mass Humanities, which receives support from the Mass Cultural Council and is an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
I would like to thank Ellen Fitzpatrick, professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, for serving as an advisor in the development of this conference. Thank you also to our Kennedy Library Forum producer Liz Murphy and Director of Education and Public Programs Nancy McCoy for all their work in putting this conference together.
We look forward to a robust question-and-answer period today. You'll see full instructions on screen for submitting your questions via email or comments on our YouTube page during the program.
I am now honored to welcome Archivist of the United States David Ferriero. He has been integral to the National Archives' exploration of the suffrage centennial this year. And we are so pleased he is able to introduce this morning's conference session.
Finally, one change to our schedule of speakers. You'll notice that the Archivist introduces Brenda Wineapple. Unfortunately she is unable to join us this morning and we hope to welcome her to the Library at another time.
Please enjoy the conference.
David Ferrierio: Good morning. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States. Welcome to this special conference, Expanding Democracy: The 19th Amendment and Voting Rights Today. The National Archives is the home of the 19th Amendment, and we're honored that you're joining our virtual commemoration of the centennial of this landmark document. This year, with online programs for all ages, including the Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote exhibit, we have explored the complex story of the struggle for women's suffrage leading up to and beyond the ratification of the 19th Amendment on August 26, 1920.
The campaign for women's suffrage was long, difficult and sometimes dramatic, yet the 19th Amendment did not ensure full enfranchisement. Many women remained unable to vote long into the 20th century because of discriminatory laws. You can find records that help tell this story, including petitions, legislation, court cases, and more in the National Archives. We believe it is crucial to continue to examine such issues today, and discussions like those you will hear today play a critical role in deepening our understanding.
Now to examine some of the key issues of the earlier years of the suffrage movement in more detail, I'm delighted to introduce the participants in this morning's panel:
We are pleased to welcome Ellen DuBois, professor emeritus of history at the University of California-Los Angeles, and the author most recently of Suffrage: Women's Long Battle for the Vote. We're also honored to welcome Martha S. Jones, professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University, and author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote and Insisted on Equality for All; Manisha Sinha, professor of history at the University of Connecticut and author of The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition; and Brenda Wineapple, professor in the MFA program at Columbia University, and author most recently of The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation.
It's also a pleasure to welcome Lisa Tetrault, professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University and author of The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898, to moderate this morning's conversation.
Please join me in welcoming our panel for this morning's important conversation. And now thank you, Professor DuBois for providing an overview of the origins of the suffrage movement to set the stage for our discussion.
Ellen DuBois: Now, right? Hello, everybody, this is very exciting. I'm just thrilled to begin this conversation. I was asked to give a 20-minute introduction, and instead of trying to overview 75 years, I thought I'd give a start to this movement. And I'm not going to start in the normal place of Seneca Falls, because the campaign for women's suffrage really began almost two decades later. And what really began, it was the campaign for black suffrage, initiated during the early years of Reconstruction. At this point, issues of enfranchisement, instead of being left as they traditionally were to the states, began to be moved up to the federal government into the Constitution and to Congress to enforce. This fundamentally and permanently changed the women's suffrage movement.
Moreover, in examining this first decade, the Reconstruction years, of national suffrage activism, I want to concentrate on something that I think is underappreciated – suffragists campaigned using various tactics to secure women's right to vote by securing the right of all national citizens to vote. We call this either universal suffrage or citizen suffrage.
In 1866, Stanton, Anthony and Lucy Stone, joined by male allies – notably, Frederick Douglass – formed the American Equal Rights Association to pursue universal suffrage: first at the state level in Kansas and New York and New Jersey, and then nationally. The key text here was the 14th Amendment, not the second section with its introduction of the word "male" as the basis – as part of the basis of representation, but the much more important first section, which, for the first time, established national citizenship, and then linked national citizenship to rights and privileges for all citizens under the equal protection of the laws.
When the 14th Amendment did not succeed in getting southern states to enfranchise former slaves, radical Republicans began to discuss a 15th Amendment, which would address national suffrage rights more directly. As everyone knows, the final version of that Amendment left control of voting to the states, only forbidding them to disfranchise on the grounds of race, color, and previous condition.
But there was another proposal made by Indiana Congressman George Julian early in 1869 while the 15th Amendment was being discussed. It read, or he said, "The right of suffrage in the United States shall be based on citizenship and shall be regulated by Congress and all citizens of the United States, whether native or naturalized, shall enjoy this right equally without any distinction or discrimination whatever founded on sex." Of this announcement, Elizabeth Stanton wrote, "The date will be held memorable in all coming time."
The language which we know as the 15th Amendment was quickly instead introduced and ratified, but it was unsatisfactory to many champions of black suffrage as a weak and vulnerable protection of voting rights. As many of us know, from the women's suffrage side, it produced furious resentment by Stanton who drew on overtly racist rhetoric and tropes in denouncing it, and by Anthony who argued with Frederick Douglass at the May 1869 Equal Rights Association about the priority of black suffrage, or about choosing priority between black and women's suffrage. This famous conflict destroyed the American Equal Rights Association, split the suffrage movement, and inaugurated the National Women's Suffrage Association. But it did not end suffragists’ commitments to universal suffrage and their search for a way to put this approach forward.
Soon after the formation of the National Women's Suffrage Association, St. Louis husband-and-wife suffragists Francis and Virginia Minor began to argue for an approach to universal suffrage that would not require the daunting effort to pass another constitutional amendment. They argued that the Constitution as it stood, and especially the 14th Amendment, already laid the basis for national enfranchisement, including that of women. This approach became known as the suffragists' "New Departure." The argument was constitutionally complex, but in its essence rested on the 14th Amendment's establishment of national citizenship. The crucial addition that they made was to contend that among the privileges and immunities of citizenship – of national citizens must be the right to vote.
Even before the Minors laid out in great complexity their constitutional case, women in numerous cities and towns were beginning to try, even to succeed at times, to register and vote. By November in 1868, before even the 15th Amendment was fully designed, more than 100 women in New Jersey, most of them in Vineland, but also Lucy Stone and her sister-in-law in Roseville, tried to vote. Numbers and locales increased in 1869, including black women in Washington, DC and South Carolina. In 1870, Angelina and Sarah Grimké, now aging, voted in Massachusetts, and black women voted again in South Carolina. Quote: The managers of the election – and they must have been black – were arrested.
In 1871, the largest group of women to attempt to register and vote was in DC, where actually residents could still vote, as well as Matilda Gage in Fayetteville, New York; Woodhull and Claflin in New York City; and 200 black women in North Carolina dressed in men's clothing. And they succeeded in registering and voting. Legal scholar Allan Winkler has called this "popular constitutionalism" and considers it one of the high points in the Reconstruction years.
Finally, in 1872, a presidential year, among the hundreds of women from around the country who attempted to cast their ballots was the nation's most famous suffragist, Susan B. Anthony, who, along with female family members and friends went to the Rochester polls and successfully registered and were permitted to cast their ballots. Two weeks later, as is well known, the Rochester women were arrested, but only Anthony was tried in January 1873 in an episode famous in suffrage history. She was arrested for a federal crime, that of criminal voting [inaudible] came from the Enforcement Act of 1870. And she was tried before a federal jury. The presiding judge was a sitting member of the US Supreme Court, and he dismissed the jury after himself directing a verdict of guilty, saying the only points at issue were whether Anthony was a woman and whether she voted, and these were incontrovertible. Anthony was not allowed to appeal or, as she wished, to be jailed. This is the crime for which President Trump, surely against any wishes the deceased might have had, pardoned her for, a crime of which he had no doubt had no understanding.
Meanwhile, a second New Departure strategy was pursued by the notorious VCW – that's Victoria Woodhull. With the help of her advisor, perhaps lover, Representative – Massachusetts – Massachusetts Representative Benjamin Butler, she spoke before the House Judiciary Committee, laying out the constitutional grounds for her argument and requesting a Congressional declaratory act which would endorse the New Departure interpretation of the 14th Amendment and therefore establish the right to vote for all citizens, women included therein. The Judiciary Committee issued a majority report ruling against her, and a minority report ruling for her.
The New Departure finally came before the US Supreme Court in the very famous case of Virginia Minor – Happersett was the man who refused her ballot – in 1874. This was the second major women's rights case ever brought before the Supreme Court. The Court ruled, almost peremptorily, that although Minor was a person and a national citizen, nothing in the Constitution guaranteed the right to vote to national citizens and it remained to the states which could grant the privilege – the Court's words – of voting to those it deemed worthy.
In response to this decision, Susan B. Anthony noted that what had been defeated was not just women's suffrage, but the right to vote of all citizens, and that the decision would be followed by all sorts of – I think her phrase was "petty cunnings and freaks" – to deny the vote to others. Of course, she was correct. And the Court soon followed by permitting former Confederate states various surrogate devices to get around the ban against discrimination by race, color, or previous condition.
The story does not quite end here, so if you'll give me another minute.
In 1878, three years after the Court decision, Anthony's partner, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, came before the Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections and read a brilliant speech, entitled, "National Protection for National Citizens" that reproduced much of Francis and Virginia Minor's constitutional argument and restated the Julian Amendment for Suffrage to All National Citizens, quote, "without any discrimination and disfranchisement by sex."
At the same time as she made this statement, the National Women's Suffrage Association was collecting petitions for a differently worded constitutional amendment modeled closely on the 15th Amendment, and this is the language that would become the 19th Amendment, exactly the same as the 15th Amendment except for the substitution of "sex" for the phrase "race, condition, and previous servitude." And Stanton herself was simultaneously making her case for educated suffrage – the right to vote available to all citizens without regard to race, sex, religion, et cetera, but requiring English language literacy, a limitation that was intended to be directed against recent immigrants, many of whom could vote quite quickly – male immigrants.
This chaos of women's suffrage proposals should not obscure the importance of the universal suffrage national citizenship approach of the late Reconstruction years. Suffragists had the merest, quote, "fighting chance" – to use the words of the late and very recently deceased and lamented Faye Dudden – of securing it. Fighting chance. But never again, to my knowledge, was there a serious effort to shift suffrage to the federal level. And I don't mean in the women's suffrage movement; I mean in general – and asserted affirmatively for all citizens. And Martha, as legal scholar here, you might know [inaudible] I don't.
I'm just going to finish by saying this: Where might we be today, six days ahead of our election, if that suffrage version, the one granting – establishing the right to vote at the federal level and granting Congress the right to control it, if that vision been successful?
Thank you.
And it looks to me like Lisa – ah, there you are now. Lisa, I’m done.
Lisa Tetrault: So do we then begin the panel? Okay. Hi. So, everyone, it's so good to be with you again here as we close in on the close of the centennial season and the arrival of the digesting of the election season, part of which we'll try to merge and blend together here. So, I wanted to start, Ellen, by thanking you for your long history of keeping this topic alive in the profession, and congratulate you on your new work, congratulate Martha on her new work, and Manisha on her forthcoming work about Reconstruction and voting in the Civil War era, all of which was such important contributions to this ongoing shift in this history. And I think part of what you're presenting us with, Ellen, is a story that many people don't know, which is about the kind of constitutional governance of these questions. And of course, this is a vast and sprawling history, and one of the things that the centennial and this kind of era of history-writing has reminded us is that this history is so much bigger than what we previously find it to be; and so much more complicated.
So I wondered if, from the vantage points where you are working, both Professor Sinha and also Professor Jones, if you wanted to say how you might add to that, of course necessarily truncated story because it was limited to 20 minutes, and what you might bring to that narrative to help us continue to flesh it out and expand it and reposition it.
Manisha Sinha: Thank you, Lisa, and thank you, Ellen, for your wonderful talk. I think that's a great question. I would reiterate something that Ellen made clear in her talk, which is to look at the story of progressive constitutionalism during Reconstruction. Often this era is seen as a moment in which you have this division amongst abolitionists and suffragists over the 15th Amendment. What we forget is that there is a real attempt to broaden that progressive moment and we forget the Julian Amendment, you know, the attempt at that very point to expand voting rights.
I would add that this kind of Reconstruction is kind of taking place, not just at the national level, among prominent suffragists, prominent leaders, but also the grassroots in the South. We have yet to recover the story of African American women; and Ellen mentioned quite well the women in South Carolina, but there is a lot more. We have yet to recover the stories of African American women at this moment who did not give up on the notion of impartial suffrage, or what Ellen called universal suffrage. That they continued to contest this in ways that I think historians have not paid sufficient attention to.
So I would broaden that story at the grassroots, at the local level, you know, besides the very well-known and important instances of black women, like Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and Susan B. Anthony and others, who tried to span the purview of the 14th Amendment in contesting for the right to vote and, more broadly, for equal citizenship in this country.
Lisa Tetrault: Martha?
Martha Jones: Thank you so much, Professor Tetrault, and thank you so much to the Kennedy Library for bringing us together this morning. It's an honor to be here with my colleagues, Ellen DuBois and Manisha Sinha. And I thank Ellen very much for starting us off with a very important, but, I think, still fraught question of where to begin with this story. And of course, Lisa, your important work on the myth of Seneca Falls really challenged so many of us on this point.
So, I'm going to take my lead from the two of you to get us started and to say, by the time we get to the important moment of the 1860s that Ellen has so carefully sketched out for us, black Americans have been for many decades already deeply engaged, not only with the on-the-ground question of voting rights, but have been deeply engaged with the ways in which guiding documents like constitutions might be a place to which they can resort for thinking through and aiming to transform where they stand with respect to voting rights.
African American men in places like New York and Pennsylvania have already enjoyed a season of voting rights, only to be disenfranchised in the 1820s and 30s. And so, when they arrive at these meetings, like those of the American Equal Rights Association, they are tremendously seasoned advocates who are thinking through, now in a new context, some clearly thorny questions.
For African American women, they, too, have been four decades at work on the sorts of ideas that necessarily undergird a push now for women's votes in the 1860s. Black women, since the 1820s, have been crafting a political philosophy, a point of view, a critique of American politics that decries both racism and sexism. And we see how those ideas longstanding now get traction, but also cause trouble and are very much a part of the season of the 1860s.
I would be remiss if I didn't invoke one figure who I think did not get mentioned, or at least mentioned by name, and that is Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who was also a part of these meetings. And I do think it's one of the unfortunate legacies of some of the early histories of women's suffrage that we don't always recognize that African American women, too, were part of these meetings. But more important than their physical presence, their ideas are on the table. And I think no one more so than Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, the anti-slavery lecturer, the educator, but also the poet brings to the floor in those meetings her great refrain – we are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity – raises the bar extraordinarily high for everyone in this important coalition in the critical years of early Reconstruction. It is the bar set by black American women, is the bar they would hold up for the suffrage movement, for civil rights organizations, and more, going forward.
Just one last note, if I could, and I don't want to get too far ahead of us, but I think, for me, it's also important for us to acknowledge that there is too little in these remarkable scenes in this revolution around voting rights that is being brought in the 1860s. There is too little here in the discussion that speaks to what is already anticipated to be the ongoing, for example, disenfranchisement of Chinese immigrants to the United States, the impossibility of their naturalization and, hence, their ineligibility for voting rights going forward. And I think our conversations must account for that.
And here, drawing on the important work of legal scholar Maggie Blackhawk, recognizing that the consolidation of federal power that is being constructed during Reconstruction is the same federal power that will be used in the coming decades to not only undermine, but to destroy Native sovereignty in the United States.
So while we oftentimes tell these stories as black-and-white stories, they, of course, are not. And nothing reminds us about that more than our 21st century reality, but even in the 1860s these are live and important questions that are companions to the debates that we will focus on today.
Lisa Tetrault: Great, thank you so much. So, I’m hearing a bunch of audio feedback, so I’m just going to disrupt here for the sake of listenability. Ellen, your mic– is it possible for you to mute yourself for just a second if– That seems to eradicate it, yes? So, somehow– Yeah, I know. It’s somehow there’s a bunch of feedback– feedback-sounding stuff coming from your particular thing. So I think, Ellen, why don’t you just stay muted, and then when you plan to speak, you can just unmute yourself. And then it should be fine. That will just kind of cut down on the overall background static.
Yeah, so thank you for both of you for reminding us that this is not just a single story of women; it is a story of many different kinds of legalities governing very different kinds of lives, everything from Chinese immigrants, to Mexican Americans, to African Americans, to immigrants in New York City, and all of this legality will ensnare women differently in different kinds of legal obligations and different kinds of legal obstacles.
And so, in many ways the story of the 19th Amendment is not the story of many other women when it comes to questions around voting. And so, I appreciate all of you for underlining the ways in which this is a much bigger story now than that question.
And I wonder if we could build off of that and think about how this new scholarship that is bringing in the stories of other kinds of governance and legality and other kinds of state structures and other kinds of racial structures that's reminding us that the 1848 to 1920 narrative, or, if we undo 1848, as Martha and other people have so eloquently done, even how do we then kind of reposition 1920. Because it strikes me that much of the work that's being done positions 1920 really in the middle of a very contradictory story in some ways of expansion and contraction, you know, democratic access and democratic restriction.
And so, how might we also think about how to periodize 1920? To periodize the 19th Amendment, I should say? Not 1920. How might you situate that, not as the end of a story, but as really the middle of an ongoing story? And I'm curious; Martha's already given us one possibility of a different kind of beginning, which would be not in, kind of, white women's rights movements but in African American activism, black convention movement, inside the churches in the 1820s and before, and how might you then, kind of, move forward? As you said, Martha, we have to bring in stories of citizenship laws; how might we periodize that? That was a longwinded question because I was trying to give Ellen a chance to deal with the– hi, Ellen, welcome back.
Ellen DuBois: Thank you.
Manisha Sinha: That's a great question, I think the idea that we should be talking about the suffrage movement the way we talk about the civil rights movement or even the abolition movement in much broader ways. You know, we have the long civil rights movement. I liked the way you talked about 1920 as, Martha, an ongoing story. It's not the end point; it's a continual conversation for not just voting rights but equal citizenship in this country.
So in my own work, as you know, I went right back to the early connections between abolition and women's rights, starting in the 18th century, with people like Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges taking note of and trying to form some form of connections with the anti-slavery movement.
So in my own book, I espouse that the abolitionist feminist story had been really overlooked, especially because African American women played such an important and primary role in that story. So going back, again, to Phillis Wheatley; you could go right back to the 18th century and black women who sue for their freedom.
And in terms of 1920, I think it is important to realize how this amendment, modeled on the 15th Amendment, shows us– when you look at the Reconstruction era and then you look at 1920 separately, but in fact the forces of the [inaudible] continue. And we need to be able to talk about some of those connections. And beyond 1920, of course, because most African Americans [inaudible] are disfranchised.
So I would not go so far as to say that the 19th Amendment was a non-event; it certainly wasn't. It certainly wasn't for black women in the North who mobilized and managed to elect African American Congressmen after Reconstruction [inaudible] We have really good work on this by Lisa Materson and others.
So I think that we need to continue to tell that contested story, but without looking at 1920 as sort of an end point, but also not as a non-event.
[pause for technical difficulties]
Ellen DuBois: This is a good question. I think whenever you begin and end a historical story, it's artificial. So I understand that there are many places to begin besides 1848. It's a convention, but one I relied on because it's a convention that the popular understanding subscribes to.
About 1920, I have two comments to make about that. One is that, of course, the battle for voting rights runs through American history and nobody needs to tell anybody in 2020 that. I appreciate something I learned from Martha, which is that the term "suffrage," especially because it's so antiquated, is not a very good term because it sort of terminates this struggle at this date. So, I would add— am I still okay to be heard?
Lisa Tetrault: Yep, we hear you fine Ellen.
Ellen DuBois: Ok. The Congressionally authorized centennial didn't help us in this way. It fetishized 1920, of course, I would say, in order to protect the 19th Amendment celebration from any connection to contemporary issues.
And finally, I would say that in line with Lisa's point about continuing contestation, and actually 1920's the kind of midpoint where things are closing down as well as opening up, this gives us an understanding of why suffrage leaders were so eager to get this thing done in 1920. I think they anticipated a post-war reaction, and I think that it's entirely likely that if we hadn't gotten a women’s suffrage, if we hadn’t gotten constitutional amendment of the 19th Amendment in 1920, it might have been a very long time; as long as it was for the French, into the post-World War II progressive period. So there was really a kind of narrow movement.
So now, I'm going to mute myself and wonder why I can't see.
Lisa Tetrault: So, let me just say one thing. I appreciate the shift in language there, Ellen, and I do think that's something that many scholars are now trying to encourage, is that we don't talk about 1920 and the 19th Amendment as the winning of women's suffrage – we talk about it as the winning of the 19th Amendment – because those two things are very different things. And I think that this history of contestation and continued disenfranchisement and others continues to remind us that the winning of the 19th Amendment was not the winning of women's suffrage. And so, after we've heard from Martha about periodization, maybe we can take up exactly that question of the 19th Amendment, because I do think there's an important distinction for us to make sure that we're careful about, because it ill equips us to understand what our democratic rights are in the present. And we can come to that at the end of our conversation.
So we've had two thoughts about the periodization, Martha, but they've left us pretty much still in the 19th century, kind of into the beginning of the 20th. And you've had something to say about the early 19th. Would you take us into the 20th century, after 1920?
Martha Jones: I'd be delighted to, thank you. And my confession here is that when I take on the task of trying to write a history of African American women and voting rights, I am writing about 200 years because in fact the fallacies of periodization are sort of rampant in this story. But there's no moment in US history when there isn't a contest, when there isn't a debate, when there isn't a struggle over who votes and by what terms. And the struggles for the 19th Amendment sit at one place along that much more elaborate timeline.
What we know about 1920 is that the expansion of voting rights goes hand in hand with the expansion of voter suppression; which is to say that a new federal amendment does indeed many American women to the polls for the very first time, and it also true that now African American women are going to be subject to both the laws and the violence that have kept their husbands and fathers and sons from the polls, some of them since the 1890s.
So how to go forward is the question for African American women, and how to go forward when many likely allies are moving on to new politics and new issues. And it is a moment for the building of a new voting rights movement, now one in which African American women will join with African American men. It will have three prongs. Black women will continue to play the ground game of politics, as Professor Sinha alluded to, nowhere better exemplifying this than the city of Chicago and Lisa Materson's work on the ways in which black women in Chicago not only get to the polls, but become Republican Party operatives and, indeed, do send Oscar De Priest to Congress in 1928, the first black man since 1901 to be elected to Congress.
But this is a campaign that also requires a legal strategy, much of it led by the NAACP, the defeat by lobbying and litigation of the poll tax, of grandfather clauses, of whites-only primaries, chipping away at the voter suppression edifice that was Jim Crow. And then finally, of course, by the 1940s, we have the advent of the remarkable, courageous, grassroots civil rights, modern civil rights movements in which African American women will now put their bodies, their families, their communities, their livelihoods on the line. Not dozens of them, not hundreds of them, but thousands and tens of thousands of black Americans, including black women, who will ultimately force the hand of Congress, force the hand of Lyndon Johnson to give us, in 1965, the Voting Rights Act, another milestone in this story. Hardly the end, but another milestone, a 45-year struggle that begins out of the ashes, if you will, of 1920 and arrives in 1965 with the Voting Rights Act.
Lisa Tetrault: Yeah, it would be useful, I think, too, if we spent a little time talking about the Voting Rights Act. But to take us to the 19th Amendment so that we can link it to the Voting Rights Act, maybe, Martha, could you explain, again, why it is that the 19th Amendment does not equal women's suffrage? Let's talk about the language of the 19th Amendment. Because one of the things I think that's happened is that there's become such an easy conflation between women's suffrage and the 19th Amendment that we think they're synonymous, when in fact they're not. And part of what you're telling us is that there are so many women left out of the 19th Amendment. But I think that becomes confusing to folks about how they could have been left out of the 19th Amendment because we attend to the text of the 19th Amendment itself in the way that Ellen was encouraging us to do in the beginning, which I think is incredibly useful.
So Martha, would you comment on that? And then we can ask the other panelists if they have anything they'd like to add.
Martha Jones: Here, of course, there is a powerful myth–
Lisa Tetrault: Ellen, do you want to mute yourself one more time? Thank you.
Martha Jones: You are the moderator extraordinaire, and we thank you.
There's a powerful myth that surrounds and is often with the 19th Amendment often repeated – American women win the right to vote. You might even hear people say, American women are guaranteed the vote by the 19th Amendment. No one is guaranteed the vote by the 19th Amendment. Importantly, the amendment prohibits states, and the federal government now, from arbitrating or denying voting rights based upon sex. Laws that had used terms like male and men are no longer enforceable. This is significant, but there's no guarantee.
And American women continue to be disenfranchised by age requirements, citizenship and residency requirements, by mental competence requirements. In 1920, it's still true that American women, when they marry non-citizens, can lose their citizenship, be naturalized, and hence denied the right to vote. When we wed that story to the story of Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests and more, and then include the dynamics of intimidation and violence, including lynching, we understand that when black American women look out across the national landscape after the fall 1920 election cycle, what they see is a patchwork, where some women vote, some women do not. Particularly in the American South, too many African American women who are going to be denied access to the polls. This is the dilemma that the 19th Amendment sets up for American women generally.
Lisa Tetrault: Let me say one thing about that, Ellen, and I was just going to say the misnomer, I think, often, is that Americans assume that voting rights are federally granted and federally conferred and federally protected. And in fact, that is not true; it's all state restrictions. And what the 19th Amendment does, as Martha was saying, is strike down one restriction but leave up many other restrictions at the state level that will ensnare so many women.
Ellen DuBois: Yeah, what I tried to do in my presentation, I think this battle is lost, not with the 19th Amendment, but with the 15th Amendment. We have to remember that the 19th Amendment is absolutely predicated on the 15th Amendment after more than a decade of trying to get past it. And I do think I'm correct that the many advocates of black suffrage objected to the wording of the 15th Amendment for precisely this reason.
And I would like to ask Martha if she's aware about any efforts [inaudible] control of voting from the federal, from the state [inaudible] if Martha is aware of any efforts to shift control of voting from the states to the federal government once the women suffrage effort [inaudible] votes for national citizenship is ended. Are there any other efforts?
Martha Jones: Sure. This is the agenda as defined going forward by the National Association of Colored Women. Hallie Quinn Brown leads that association in 1920, and their agenda is now to win federal legislation that will give teeth to the 15th and 19th Amendments and override and nullify state laws that continue to keep black Americans from the polls. That is the agenda as black women in the NACW see it. And in fact, that is precisely, to an important degree, what the Voting Rights Act is in 1965, is finally, again, giving teeth to the 15th Amendment, such that no longer can these offensive state laws be imposed.
And at the same time, black women within the NACW, and in other organizations, have been working throughout this entire period to win federal anti-lynching legislation because what black women know is that even with a federal amendment, if intimidation and violence continues, especially in the American South, that amendment will have no force in their political lives.
And so, black women have all throughout this period been arguing for the necessity of federal legislation that would protect voting rights by suppressing intimidation and violence, and now they add to their agenda what becomes the Voting Rights Act, federal legislation that would nullify the state laws that keep them from the polls.
Manisha Sinha: And if I can add to that, Lisa, I do think there was actually an attempt made, very consciously, during the Reconstruction era in the debates over the laws and amendments to actually establish national standards, federal standards of citizenship and rights. [simultaneous conversation] And of course, states managed to get around these amendments with these state and local restrictions, especially in the South. But if you look at the debates, they're talking about this in the broadest way possible. They're talking about the Pacific, they're talking about Chinese immigrants, they're talking about Native Americans, distinguishing between Native Americans within US jurisdiction versus those in the Plains, the Plains Indians.
So the debate is ongoing, even then, that this is a moment of enfranchisement that will impact the larger project of American democracy so that even going ahead to recent restrictions– and I know you wanted to talk about this, we're sort of segueing there a little bit – if you look at the opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, they invoke states' rights. So this constant attempt to invoke states' rights as a pushback against national federal standards, which by the abolitionists and African Americans had fought for long before the Reconstruction moment, that is a way to critique that expansion of rights, to leave it to the will and the whims of local and state officials.
So I think it is really important to look at how the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of the 20th century, how much it goes back to that idea of the federal government as a guarantee for citizenship and rights which will include voting, but include actually a whole host of other rights, too. If you look at the expansion of the 14th Amendment to protect the right to privacy, gay marriage, against discrimination on the basis of sex, and if you look at even Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent in Shelby v. Holder, she invokes that national standard.
So it is an ongoing contestation and the fact that that majority opinion invoked states' rights to undo preclearance for elections, federal preclearance for national elections, precisely in those states that had actually pioneered in voter suppression by using seemingly non-racial [simultaneous conversation].
So I think it is an ongoing contestation, but–
Lisa Tetrault: I want to bring it up to the present, Manisha.
Ellen DuBois: I do want to add something here, Lisa. I want to go back to the great "national protection for national citizens" speech that Stanton gives in 1878 because what she does here is she – excuse the metaphor – she marries individual rights and national power and isolates states' rights. So as a feminist, she's very interested in questions of the kinds of things that Manisha's bringing up, what we would call reproductive rights.
So she argues that the individual's rights are best protected by the high standard, the overarching standard of a national protection, and states' rights are a violation of the individual's rights. Which is very different than the original Founders approach in which federal control is a violation of individual rights.
In this way, I think we could say that [inaudible] fits the pioneering approach to individual rights that's fundamentally feminist and not masculinist in the way that, let us say, the Andrew Jackson tradition is.
Lisa Tetrault: Yeah, so I want to summarize for the audience, who may not be exactly– this is all phenomenal content here and I just want to frame it for the audience so that we can then move to the Voting Rights Act, and then exactly what Manisha talking about, Shelby County v. Holder, and tie it back to the narrative that Ellen began us with and is reminding us of again here and one that Martha also reminded us of, sort of going back to the 1820s, that voting in the United States is something that states govern, which is something I think a lot of Americans, when we talk about voting rights, we assume it's kind of federally governed. This is a state-governed issue. And what social movements have done is try to leverage the power of the federal government to enforce their voting access or voting rights against the states in some ways.
And so, part of what Ellen's pointing to and Martha and Manisha are all pointing to is this idea inside these social movements for expanding voting, there has been a debate about the governmental location from which they should demand their rights. And inside the kind of mainstream white women suffrage movement that we think of, if we're going to bound that by the campaign for the 19th Amendment, there was a whole host of people who thought we ought to be working at the state level and not at the federal level. So this was a split even inside white suffrage activism, prior to 1920, and would then be picked up, the mantle, as you're saying, as Martha was saying, and others, by black women to kind of carry forward, by Indigenous women, by Chinese American women and others, arguing that there ought to be a national standard for this. And as Manisha says, that is still very much in contest.
And so, let's come to the Voting Rights Act. And as Martha said, the Voting Rights Act is the product of an ongoing civil rights activism, ongoing activism among black women and men together, for the expansion of voting rights and for the enforcement of the 15th Amendment, which the states have gotten around by propping up poll taxes, literacy tests and other things. And the fact that the Voting Rights Act will help more than just citizens in the South, but kind of all over the nation.
So let's talk about, and Manisha, you also raised preclearance. I'm trying to figure out a spine for the audience to put all this together. So there are these states that have ongoing histories of discrimination because they just come up with new ways to restrict the vote; they just avoid the ones that the Constitution is now barring them from doing, like race and sex. But they have poll taxes, literacy tests, citizenship laws, things like that; age requirements, residency requirements.
So what is it exactly that the Voting Rights Act then will do? So as Martha said, it will go back to the discriminatory states and say, You must not do this. And how will it balance out federal and state power, this ongoing dynamism, over American history?
Anyone can answer. I don't know, Manisha, if you want to take it, or Martha, or Ellen.
Manisha Sinha: Sorry, Lisa, could you rephrase your question? I missed that.
Lisa Tetrault: I just wanted to go to, how is it that the Voting Rights Act tries to structure this ongoing question of federal versus state power, over regulating voting rights and voting access? Because I think that's important for understanding (a) where we've come from from the beginning of this conversation, and also, how do we get to where we are today, which is where we're going to take this conversation from here.
Manisha Sinha: I think the Voting Rights Act of 1965 does, is it establishes a national standard, particularly geared towards Southern states that had disfranchised African Americans for the many years after the 15th Amendment. Disfranchised black men and certainly black women after the 1920s, though that did not prevent black women from trying to vote after the 19th Amendment.
And in trying to do that, in trying to establish that federal standard, I think it puts more teeth into the Reconstruction laws and amendments because it actually established a judicial mechanism by which to implement it. And in that sense, it reminds me a lot of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 – not 1964 but of 1866. Because we actually do not need to simply proclaim these rights as I think Martha put it quite well. You could have all these amendments and laws and still have people flouting it flagrantly, and with impunity.
So what you needed was a federal mechanism, a judicial mechanism, because we can't send in Union army troops to the South anymore after Reconstruction is overthrown. But you needed a judicial mechanism. And that's what the Voting Rights Act does with this question of federal preclearance. If you pass any state level electoral law, that affects voting in any manner, you need to be precleared by the federal government, by the Department of Justice to see that it is not aimed at suppressing votes. And in fact, it worked really well. It worked well in the South in preventing those kinds of mechanisms.
Lisa Tetrault: Does anyone else want to comment on the Voting Rights Act?
Martha Jones: I think just to put a fine point on your question, it reasserts federal authority, federal review, preclearance, over the individual states which had largely operated unchecked when it came out to meeting voting rights. So there is this renegotiation, perhaps this restoration of an old role that had been imagined for the federal government during Reconstruction, is now set in place. States are no longer at liberty to impose discriminatory laws, practices, rituals, policies and more that would suppress voters, particularly in states that had a history of discrimination.
Ellen DuBois: I wanted to, there's another term here with federalism. The American system is not unique, but is characterized by this dual sovereignty. I know everyone listening to this understands that, but what this means for activists is that they constantly move, both proponents and opponents of social change move back and forth through the federal to the state level and back again, depending on who's in control.
And I think it's interesting that when we contrasted these two moments, the 1860s and the 1960s, the assumption here is of a certain kind of federal government, a certain kind of national government which is committed to the protection of rights, or at least is not in the pocket of regional discriminations. Of course, we're not in that position anymore, so that we cannot rely on the federal government. And the battle has shifted to the states because– it hasn't entirely shifted, but the battle has to be fought at the state level, as well as at the federal level.
Lisa Tetrault: So yeah, to go back to the really complex and vexing nature of this history to review, the 15th Amendment was in many ways a compromise that left power with the states to disenfranchise. It didn't create a national standard. The 19th Amendment, although Anthony and others, as Ellen points out, may have been advocating for a national standard, and as African Americans were advocating for a national standard, they would not win that in the 15th Amendment, nor would the 19th Amendment reflect that national standard.
And that work being carried forward is going to be finally, as you say, brought out in the Voting Rights Act, which allows the federal government to strike down state laws for being racially discriminatory. And then Manisha, we got to– this was called preclearance. And then we get to Shelby County v. Holder, as you said.
Manisha Sinha: If I can just add [simultaneous conversation] a little bit. Actually, the 15th Amendment does establish a national standard when it comes to race, color, and previous condition of servitude. Right? What it doesn't do, it doesn't anticipate the mechanisms that Southern states would put into place, like the grandfather clause or– if your grandfather didn't work, then, you know, majority of enslaved people, their grandfather did not work. Or literacy clauses. Or poll taxes. And all those other things. And in the North, also, of course, there were literacy requirements and there were other requirements being put into place for the rise of nativism.
So what it didn't do was it didn't establish a national standard in any other respect.
Lisa Tetrault: Yes, I misspoke. It created a very narrow national standard. [simultaneous conversation]
Manisha Sinha: And so, 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments in many ways do establish certain basic national guidelines. The problem has been how states have managed to manipulate or bypass the intent.
Now clearly, all these clauses were used to disfranchise African Americans, right? But they were supposedly race-neutral, but they weren't. We know they were actually intended to target African Americans.
Martha wanted to say something.
Martha Jones: I think for me, that read really lets the proponents of the 19th Amendment off the hook far too easily. Proponents of the 19th Amendment not only know the record of the 15th Amendment and how an amendment that merely puts a bar on the states can be easily overridden by state law. That is, it is the premise of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, that nothing in the amendment will interfere with the ongoing capacity of the states to use their laws to now keep African American women from the polls. It is a half century between the 15th and the 19th Amendments, and what the 19th Amendment does not reflect are the lessons of the 15th Amendment. It might have been an amendment that aimed directly at those laws and, hence, enfranchised black American women, but it did not.
Manisha Sinha: I should clarify, I was talking about the 15th and not the 19th Amendment. But I take Martha's point to heart, that clearly the lessons should have been learned by then in terms of a disfranchisement of African Americans. Though, of course, this did not prevent Southern white politicians from still fearing the 19th Amendment and, for most of them, actually an overwhelming majority, to oppose it, to see any expansion of rights as somehow an entering wedge into allowing– and then they used the specter of, in their eyes, the specter of black women voting to oppose the 19th Amendment.
But I take Martha's point to heart because clearly by that time certainly most people were aware of the Jim Crow South and the ways in which black people had been disfranchised. And it seems to me that the suffrage movement had already, from the 1890s onwards, compromised so much with Southern racism, and to no avail, because in the end they didn't even get their votes.
Ellen DuBois: Let me also add to this discussion that when the women's suffrage amendment was being debated, I believe especially maybe in the House but especially the long 15 months of debate, 18 months of debate in the Senate, there were various efforts to add a constricting clause limiting it to white women. And we should realize that those were defeated.
And so, it is interesting, both the 15th and the 19th Amendment have enforcement clauses. Now, there have been efforts, important efforts to enforce the 15th Amendment. I don't believe that there's ever been any use of the enforcement clause of the 19th Amendment. Perhaps because – and here's, I guess, something we must talk about – where voter suppression against women, per se, rather than women as a vulnerable category of other disfranchised groups. I don't believe there's been any effort at surrogates for sex that [inaudible] So there's not been, one way or another, there's not been a lot of enforcement effort of the 19th Amendment. And of course, Martha speaks about the most important failure, which is 1921, when black women seek to use the enforcement clause to get Congress to protect them against voter suppression in the South.
Lisa Tetrault: So Shelby County v. Holder sort of takes us to where we are now and the world that we're currently living in, which is a kind of shift away from this idea of federal enforcement, back to states' ability to run roughshod over the kinds of voting rights that social activists have long demanded. And we are in an era of pretty massive voter suppression right now.
So Manisha, you had talked about Shelby County v. Holder, but I wasn't sure for the audience, who might not be initiated in it exactly, if they understood what, in 2013, the Supreme Court decided. So do you want to say, again, what they do here is they say that federal power to strike down discriminatory state laws, racially discriminatory state laws, is a violation of states' rights, and racial discrimination happens no longer, so therefore this is a prerogative that ought to be returned to the states, and we ought to get rid of a national standard. Which is where we are now. So you see throughout this entire history this push and pull between a federal standard and a kind of states' rights issue, and voters being caught in the middle of that dilemma, often losing what we would call voting rights in the process. Which is where we are now. So do you want to talk about Shelby County v Holder again, the 2013 Supreme Court decision? I just summarized it, but anyone here can now comment on, this is all part, really, of this ongoing history of the 15th and 19th and the ongoing long claim for expansion of voting rights. [simultaneous conversation]
Manisha Sinha: Chief Justice Roberts, in his majority opinion, in Shelby County v. Holder, did not just use the term states' rights; he actually used the term state sovereignty. [inaudible] And to me, that was just galling, that he would use that term. His decision, that somehow the conditions for discrimination no longer prevailed in the South and therefore there was no need to subject these states to federal preclearance sounded like Democrats and border state slaveholders, their speeches against the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment, and all the laws of Reconstruction.
And it's quite horrifying when they try to go back. It's called originalism, as you know, quite in fashion now, this idea of going back to notions of federalism based not just on having distinct spheres of political authority, which is how it was originally visualized, but having this notion of state sovereignty over all these different matters, including electoral law, is something that is out of date after Reconstruction.
And I think it is quite shocking that in fact we haven't triggered the 14th Amendment. All Southern states indulging in voter suppression should suffer loss of representation in Congress. That's the 14th Amendment. We still haven't triggered that. We could use the enforcement mechanisms in the 13th, 15th, and 19th Amendment to actually go right down into the local level, at state levels and intervene. The federal government hasn't used that because we are so much in– we are held hostage by judicial conservatism, and it's sort of reliance on states' rights and an unprecedented notion of state sovereignty, even though it means violating the individual rights, the Bill of Rights of individual citizens. That's what the 14th Amendment did, right? It nationalized the Bill of Rights and said that the federal government would be a guarantor for those rights versus state intervention.
And so, Roberts's opinion, to me, was actually shocking. And if you read the dissent by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, you can see that she takes apart all those things. Because she relies so much on the 14th Amendment for her own jurisprudence and her whole history of litigation that she was able to take apart Roberts's majority decision extremely well.
And in fact, what has been the fallout, Lisa? The fallout has been that all these states – Texas, Georgia – they've gone right back to classic voter suppression tactics, including recently having one ballot box for millions of voters compared to another– I mean, they're so brazen and it's so overt that I think – maybe not with this Supreme Court, but maybe with another – that we need to probably revisit that decision. This is rather brazen of me to say this, I'm just an ordinary historian, but I think Roberts's opinion is unconstitutional, in my opinion. Unconstitutional if you seriously take the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment, the Reconstruction amendments, and you don't have an idea of originalism, which will get us back to the three-fifths clause.
Lisa Tetrault: Anyone else want to comment on Shelby County v. Holder and the ways in which it has again restructured this question of states' versus federal oversight of voting?
Martha Jones: I'll put in a little more anecdotally, to say I recently, not so long ago, moved from the state of Michigan to the state of Maryland. And this is not uncommon, we do that. But what we discover when we do that are the consequences of Shelby v. Holder, which is to say, moving from one state to another will subject Americans to new regimes, new strictures, new barriers. And that is the afterlife of Shelby v. Holder, that we don't live in one United States when it comes to voting rights. We live in atomized, individual states. My husband happens not to be an American and he's flabbergasted that the way we vote in the state of Maryland is not the way in which our neighbors in the state of Pennsylvania vote, or our neighbors to the south in the District of Columbia or Virginia. And while that has always been true to some degree, with the abdication of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby, or the evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County, we now live in a regime where we only need to turn on our televisions to appreciate how differently Americans vote and how compromised in many ways our access to the polls are.
Ellen DuBois: I'm not a legal scholar, believe me. And certainly in Shelby v. Holder, we have to look at the makeup of the Court. But it does seem to me that, as I listen to you all, as important as the Voting Rights Act is and as horrible as its dismantling has been, because it works within the framework established by the 15th and 19th Amendments, it was still vulnerable. Because by arguing that the states no longer– that you had to prove that the states would be overridden by the federal government. And if you argue that wasn't the case, then you defaulted to state control.
I guess I would like to ask us in a pragmatic way, given the world that we live in and given that only one of us is a legal scholar, what is left to us? We can't usher Chief Justice Roberts out the back door. We can't – at least maybe we can, maybe can't – change the quality of– what do we do now in the face of these restrictions? What do the American people do now? I know all you there on television, "go out and vote, go out and vote," but clearly there has to be something else, some other strategy that perhaps we as historians with a Reconstruction background can contribute.
Lisa Tetrault: This might be a good time– I think we can call answer that and then it might be a nice time to transition to Q&A, to think more about how we can bring this past to the present and have the present talk to the past. So maybe we can all speak to what we might want to say there and then maybe open it up to Q&A – we have quite a bit in the queue here – and ask the audience themselves how they might answer that question.
Martha Jones: I'll jump and just say that I think we're doing that work, Ellen, which is to say there are many, many courageous and longstanding and newfound organizations that are doing the in-the-trenches work of challenging each and every effort at voter suppression as it emerges, as it is imposed. And so, I look to one of the legal historians I admire the most, and that's Sherrilyn Ifill, who heads the NAACP legal defense fund, who is doing that work.
And so, I don't have a sense of sort of this, like what to do, though I think the question is always there for us, of what role history in particular and the sort of history that we write, what role that history plays in this scene, but I think that work is ongoing and vital.
I gave a talk not so long ago, in the pre-COVID times, to the Maryland state legislature. I live in a state that prides itself on not having indulged, if you will, in the possibility of voter suppression in the wake of Shelby County. But still, in the state of Maryland, nothing in our constitution guarantees us the right to vote. So I challenged my state legislature to amend our constitution and to raise the bar high in this moment, and to contrast our regime to those in other states that are indulging in this post-Shelby moment. Our individual states, California could amend its constitution to guarantee to every Californian of age, right, the right to vote. Period. But we don't live in that kind of regime.
And so, there are many places for us to go, even in this post-Shelby moment, but I think we can play a role in sort of reminding folks of where the high bar really is. And it is back to that principle, that voting rights should be universal.
Manisha Sinha: I would agree. I would say we are ready for a third reconstruction of American democracy, long overdue. After the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been gutted, we have a clear path forward. We, of course, need to win the presidency and the Senate back first. And after that is done, we should act like the 39th Congress of Reconstruction. There should be federal laws and enforcement. Since the Supreme Court has chosen to gut the Voting Rights Act of 1965, we do need, as President Obama clearly laid out, a John Lewis new voting rights act that would make it a federal national standard and not allow any state or local interference in an individual citizen's right to vote.
Besides that, we could go further with amendments. I can think of gutting the electoral college, one of the most undemocratic institutions in this country. We certainly do not need to suppress democracy, which is exactly how the electoral college has worked in the recent past. We can think of so many ways in which we can refine the American democratic structure. That would be an amendment that I think many states have already moved on in sort of making– they have dome piecemeal reform with the electoral system for the presidential elections.
But what we need, again, is that national standard. And we need that national enforcement. We cannot allow local rogue regimes to continue the way, let's say, Georgia did, in a clearly stolen election from Stacey Abrams, where the man who is conducting the elections is a candidate. I mean, talk about conflict of interest. Where we have three sitting judges in the Supreme Court who argued in Bush v. Gore for Bush. Conservatives tried to think that they really lowered the independence of the Judiciary, but this is a clear violation of the independence of the Judiciary and stems people's faith in these institutions.
So I do think we are ready for that third reconstruction, but first we have to win back the White House and the Senate, and we have to have people truly committed to the democratic process. And this would affect also recent immigrants and the fact that immigrants, whose rights to vote have been challenged or who have not been counted in the US Census, as is declared, by the way, in the Constitution – I think people are originalists only when it suits them – where all persons and not just citizens are needed to be counted in the US Census. And that has happened since 1790.
So these are all the kinds of reforms that I think are possible if we win the Democratic majority.
Lisa Tetrault: To go to Q&A, we have a question from the audience that I think bears exactly upon this question, and it may be on the minds of many audience members where they're confused that, if voting rights are derived from citizenship and therefore federal, why is there this federal/states back-and-forth thing? I think a lot of people assume that the most basic right of citizenship is the right to vote. So could you all speak to that? Because I think that's tripping up some members of understanding why this isn't federal. This is a question that came in on the Q&A. So Martha, Ellen– Martha, do you want to start with that?
Martha Jones: While citizenship may be a prerequisite to voting rights – that is to say, you must be a citizen in order to vote – of course, there are jurisdictions, particularly in local elections where even non-citizens vote, even today, just to make that clear – school board elections, things like this – but generally speaking, citizenship is a prerequisite, but it is not a guarantee. And there remain many barriers that we're familiar with. But in my lifetime, the age barrier was renegotiated and became the subject of a constitutional amendment in the Vietnam era, and so now states cannot prohibit folks by virtue of age, if you are 18 or older, from voting. But if you are 17-and a half, and a taxpayer, and deeply engaged, you cannot vote. And so forth.
There are many barriers to voting rights – residency requirements, citizenship requirements, mental health competence requirements, and of course, my interpretation of many of the aftereffects of Shelby County versus Holder, be it voter ID requirements or exact match requirements, the shuttering of polling places, the purging of voter rolls – these are legal efforts that prevent Americans from voting, despite their being citizens of the United States.
Lisa Tetrault: And on that, I'll just answer one of the questions here as well, that people should understand that citizenship does not confer voting rights to you. This is exactly what Martha is saying. You have to clear the state requirements in order to be able to vote.
And so, someone's writing in, how are Shelby or other things affecting women's right to vote? And again, the question is really– there is no women's vote here, right? Sex as a criteria is no longer allowed to be used, but women are targeted in all kinds of ways, other than sex. So that, for example, if we go to the example of purging voting rolls, many Tribal Nations right now, the postal service does not deliver to your home address; you go to a post office box. And this is one example of how Shelby County might be affecting a woman's right to vote, but it wouldn't be on the grounds of being a woman. But it would nonetheless, you would be affected as a woman, and as a man.
But when you register to vote, you have to put down your mailing address. So in some Tribal Nations, when you register to vote, you put down your post office box. And this has now become, among white registrars in county offices and things who have incredible power to manipulate voting rules, they will then say, "Well, this is an obscure address. And it strikes me as a kind of not-legitimate voter application, so we're going to purge that, we're going to remove your voter application and take you off the voter rolls as a legitimate voter."
So there's one example of this kind of idea of purging voter rolls. And the idea behind this is one that has absolutely no evidence to back it up, but it is said enough that it has become, it seems true, which is that there's fraud going on, so we need to clean up these rolls because they're fraudulent. We have people with post office boxes, dead people. And that is not true to the extent. And what it's being used to do, this myth of fraud and needing to clean up the records to secure democracy, is one example is, people are using it really to purge. And it's estimated now that some tens of millions of voters have been purged off the rolls.
I just want to put a number on this so the audience have a sense of the massive scale of this right now and the really nefarious ways in which it's happening under seeming guises of reasonable actions, like keeping clean voter rolls.
Ellen DuBois: I want to address the question of men and voter suppression. We haven't said the obvious point, which is, voter suppression is intended to suppress the Democratic vote, that's the point. Vote in favor of Democratic candidates and Presidents.
Lisa Tetrault: So, I want to interject there just for a minute, Ellen. If you're talking about voter suppression in this particular election, yes. But I would say that sort of historically it's been around questions of race in particular. It's about a purely partisan issue.
Ellen DuBois: Let me answer so I can make my point. I'm thinking of the last 40 years. And the point I want to make here is that, to the degree that voter suppression in our lifetime, and especially in this moment, are directed against Democratic voters. It is also the case that this coincides with the fact that women have, since 1980 and the so-called gender gap, have been increasingly, increasingly, increasingly Democratic, until the point is over 20%. As someone said the other day, it's not a gender gap; it's a white male problem.
Lisa Tetrault: Well, actually, though, but if you divide women's voting right now–
Ellen DuBois: Please let me finish.
Lisa Tetrault: Okay, I thought you were finished, Ellen, please, go ahead.
Ellen DuBois: No, I'm not finished. And that this emergence of a women's bloc in the 1980s is in some way a delayed realization of the threat or promise of the 19th Amendment. And it coincides– to my mind, the arrival of the gender gap coincides with the revival of feminism, which has moved women into the liberal, progressive, left and Democratic regimes.
So it's an extended connection between voter suppression and questions of gender.
Okay, now I'm done.
Lisa Tetrault: Thanks, Ellen. Sorry, it's hard to tell sometimes when I can't see you. I also want to say one thing about that, Ellen, which is that when you divide that women's vote supposedly by race, it is not overwhelmingly Democratic. White women right now vote a majority for Republican. And it is women of color who strongly represent the Republican [sic] Party, African American women being at the kind of pinnacle of that backbone of the party. So the women's vote divides very differently along racial lines.
Ellen DuBois: And also, Lisa, it's not just white versus black; it's white and non-college-educated women that were on that side, not white college-educated.
Lisa Tetrault: [simultaneous conversation] A slight majority of white women are voting for Trump, they broke for Trump in this election, and continue to.
Manisha Sinha: Lisa, if I can add to that. [simultaneous conversation] that did happen, but now we are seeing since 2018, the midterm elections, and this one in particular, it seems there's a slight majority going Democratic.
But not to belabor that point, I think you're right to draw attention to the racial aspect of these exclusionary laws. Clearly the one that you mentioned about the polls is targeting Native American populations in the Midwest, where a lot of Republican tactics have targeted Native Americans, whether it comes to voter suppression, gerrymandering, they've done that everywhere.
I think to me also what is really bothering and worrisome is the reemergence of criminalization that had occurred during Jim Crow with the rise of mass incarceration. So you have a place, as in Florida, where the voters overwhelmingly voted to give voting rights back to people who had done their time and who were now back out into the world, and now again the court system there has made it difficult for them to vote. In order for them to pay their fees, their fines, unless they are done with all that, they still don't have the right to vote.
So this is constantly being contested. But you can see us going back to really archaic ways of disfranchising people, which is criminalizing freedom, criminalizing, and then having people come out and then losing all citizenship rights.
Another reform that I think we really need is a national holiday. This actually discriminates, not just against people of color and women, but working class people. Very few working class people have the time and the luxury to give up on their hourly paying jobs when they're barely making ends meet to go and vote, to perform their citizen duty. And everyone then talks about how these people are recreant to their duties of citizenship. But in the United States we have made it particularly difficult.
Many other countries, not only is voting required, but you also have a national holiday. These are the kinds of voting reforms that we need in a third reconstruction of American democracy.
Lisa Tetrault: Did anyone else want to comment, or I'll go to a new question. Some of the audience members are perplexed as to why voting rights should not be a federal issue. I think we can easily say that the panel shares your confusion on that point. And my own sense is that we as a democratic, supposedly democratic nation, have had a much longer love affair in this nation with disenfranchisement than with enfranchisement. And that is partly why we retain this kind of state governance, because it allows an ongoing history of disenfranchisement. But that's my own two cents. I don't know if other people have their own sense of that. But yes, that question about why this is not a federal issue remains a perplexing one. And should be.
There are questions from the audience about– I'm trying to decide where to go in terms of sequence here. People want to know, are the federal offices that we vote for governed by a national right to vote? And I think we can all answer that with a shake of our heads.
[simultaneous conversation]
Manisha Sinha: It's in the Constitution. It's in the US Constitution how we vote for federal office.
Lisa Tetrault: Right, but people are asking whether citizens are guaranteed a right to vote in those kinds of elections as opposed to state elections. I think people are still struggling with the federal/state balance here. And so, yes, how we vote for state office, exactly. But our citizens, our people, because they're federal offices, are they then federally protected to vote in those offices?
Ellen DuBois: I'll answer that. As perhaps many of you don't know, many, many women were enfranchised before 1920 by amendments to their state constitutions, including my state. And when they were enfranchised – this is a point I really want to make – when they were enfranchised by amendment of the state constitution, they could vote for federal office.
So the women of Colorado voted for President, from 1896 all the way up to 1920. Not sure how it factors into our current discussion, but once again undermined the complexity of dual sovereignty and federalism when we look at this material.
Lisa Tetrault: So there are some questions now about back to the winning of the 19th Amendment and the fight that led up to the 19th Amendment and whether people could talk about the divisions within activism around the activism undergirding of the 19th Amendment and the many ways that people wanted to secure that amendment. So could people speak to the complexity of the organizing and of the visions that wracked social movements in that moment around that issue? Martha?
Martha Jones: Sure, thank you. I'm going to offer the perspective of African American women, which is to say that only small numbers of African American participate in and work through the auspices of the major suffrage associations, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the National Women's Party. When we look for black suffragists, we have to look in organizations like the National Association of Colored Women, which I've mentioned; 300,000-plus black women organized under the auspices of that organization on the eve of ratification of the 19th Amendment.
We have to look to black women's organizations within their church communities; in particular, black Baptists and Methodist women who are organized by the millions to do suffrage work. African American women are, by 1920, part of the relatively new, but increasingly important civil rights organizations, including the NAACP.
So black suffragists are not only working through distinct organizations; they are working through distinct philosophies. And most importantly, this approach to the work of women's votes permits African American women to work simultaneously and in compatible ways to win, for example, federal anti-lynching legislation, which, for black women, is deemed as critical as winning a federal amendment that would extend to women voting rights.
Ellen DuBois: I guess I want to give, I'm going to call it the more conventional answer about the distinction within the white-dominated mainstream movement. As Martha made clear, there are two white-dominated organizations – the National American Woman Suffrage Association and the National Women's Party. And the National Women's Party is the one that we've most been drawn to. To go back to Martha's point, they are equally unwelcoming of women of color.
The National Women's Party is the one that does civil disobedience, first group ever to picket the White House, and they get arrested, force-feeding, all of that, which draws out– they're heroic in a way that we recognize today.
The larger group, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which – and this is sort of conventional – were primarily the lobbying group. And when I did this book, I found myself really taken with their work. And I think in some ways– well, both sides of this divide have lessons for us, but the lobbyists for the 19th Amendment worked so well. And this was also a federally organized campaign. They had to be organized at the federal, at the national level, but they had to be organized at the state level, which they had been since the formation of the organization, and which, we should point out, was crucial to the ratification. There were suffragists organized and working in every state. And I think it's to them we should give the credit of the narrowly secured 36-state ratification.
Lisa Tetrault: Manisha, did you want to speak at all to that?
Manisha Sinha: I think it's important to note that despite the tradition of federalism, which actually exists in many other republics, too, beside the United States, this unprecedented notion of states' rights and state sovereignty is rather unique to the US and we should really be clear what political tradition that signifies.
It first was raised in a way to protect local democracies against arbitrary acts by the federal government. I'm thinking of the Alien and Sedition Acts. But if you go down and look through the 19th century and later, it's clearly raised, mostly raised in defense of slavery and of Jim Crow. So the idea that we are somehow bound to that understanding is something that first the Federalists and then the Whigs and then the Republicans during Reconstruction have always contested. And certainly, abolitionists and African Americans who were trying to establish national standards for human rights, for civil rights, for political rights have always contested.
And I think we need to grab that tradition more vigorously because for too long, I think, people within the garb of originalism, et cetera, have used this as a stumbling block. The point is to attack it forthrightly, both politically and constitutionally. And we actually have precedent to do that. Whether it is to activate long, put in place mechanisms that have not been activated or to pass new laws, to fortify voting rights, and in fact establish the national standards which the Voting Rights Act, which the 14th Amendment tried to do, I think that's where we should be going next.
Lisa Tetrault: We're almost at time, so I'm getting nudges to kind of wrap us up. And I hope that what you've taken away today is the utter complexity of this question of who gets to vote. And it is on multivalences, it is governed at multi-levels, and a simple constitutional amendment, which was very narrowly construed in the case of the 19th Amendment, as Martha very rightly points out, and quite likely quite deliberately so, has not been enough to secure or guarantee anyone's voting access or voting rights.
And we are, then, in an era, right now, in the present, where the realities of that, I don't know if we want to call it a failure, but of a failure of those moments has meant that we are in the midst of a massive wave of voter suppression, which is affecting disproportionally folks of color, poor folks, young folks and elderly folks, and, among those, millions and millions of women.
And so, with that, I think we can close and turn it back over to the Kennedy Library. I hope this has given you a spine to think about the evolution of voting rights in the United States and the role of the 19th Amendment in that. So thank you so much, both to the Kennedy Center[sic] and to my esteemed colleagues. It's been a joy to be with you once again.
Manisha Sinha: Thank you, Lisa.
Martha Jones: Thank you.
Ellen DuBois: Thank you.
Lisa Tetrault: Alan Price is joining us, but as you can see, the tech of this particular event has been just a little uncertain. So we have Alan Price, but we actually have Liz Murphy.
There was a question in the Q&A that I'll just answer. And it was, were there spots in the United States that didn't have a suffrage movement? And I think the answer to that in some ways depends on what we define the suffrage movement as, right? And much of what we've been talking about today is that we need to broadly expand our view not to think about just white women's organizing for the 19th Amendment. In that sense, when we bring in women of color, and all parts of the United States have always had suffrage movements, but of various types, and ones that we're just learning to see and recognize.
I would recommend all this recent scholarship, both Ellen's book, Martha's book. Martha's book, Vanguard, Ellen's book, Suffrage. Also some recent other work by Cathleen Cahill looking at women who are Indigenous American, Chinese American, Latina, also striving for their stories of voting rights. And people asked, are there writings on Indigenous rights to vote? Yes, extensive ones. And there's a book called, Native Vote, by Daniel McCool and Jennifer Robinson, and plenty of others if you just Google that. There are plenty of organizations out there also fighting for the securing and the protecting and the safeguarding of Indigenous voting rights. Do we have Alan with us? I think not.
Ellen DuBois: I just want to say in answer to the last question, I think if we look especially at the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the answer is, no, there was certainly no state in the United States where there wasn't organized suffragism by the 1910s. Certainly there were cities and towns.
Hi, Alan. Okay, bye!
Lisa Tetrault: Hi, welcome. Thank you so much for hosting. We'd like to turn it over to you to close us out.
Alan Price: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for engaging in this fascinating discussion and for joining us to commemorate the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment. In the words of President Kennedy, "In a free society, those with the power to govern are necessarily responsive to those with the right to vote."
I'm grateful to our panelists for helping us come to a deeper–
[technical difficulties]
Ellen DuBois: Google is not the answer to everything.
Lisa Tetrault: Thank you so much. Everyone was extraordinary. And it, I think, also reminds us that this has been a long, ongoing struggle to protect voting rights and requires people on the ground to fight for and defend and get involved in that kind of activism.
So to keep democracy alive, I hope all of you will participate in whatever ways speak to your politics, but protect voting rights.
And thank you so much to the Kennedy Center[sic], and thank you so much to everyone else. We'll close out here. Thank you so much, bye, bye.
END