Women, Race & Class

Davis expands on a key shortcoming of the growing suffrage movement: racism and its powerful hold on even the movement’s most progressive leaders. Davis identifies this rising influence of racism during and immediately after the Civil War period. She cites a letter written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton from December 1865 expressing several racist ideas and arguments; in particular, it illuminates her concern that Black men will progress further than white women and her corresponding unwillingness to support Black men’s enfranchisement if women could not get the same. Stanton and others (like Susan B. Anthony) opposed Black suffrage based on the belief that emancipation had made Black men equal to white women and that suffrage for Black men would therefore put them a step above white women. As Davis writes, this assumption “ignored the utter precariousness of Black people’s newly won ‘freedom’ during the post-Civil war era” because in reality (77), Black people had to deal with violent mobs and continuing economic oppression.

Stanton and others saw the Republican Party’s failure to extend women suffrage as choosing to uphold male supremacy and extend it to Black men. Davis argues that Stanton and her supporters misunderstood the underlying intentions of the Republican Party from the outset and were consequently vulnerable to falling into the trap of racism.