The right to vote is guaranteed only by our resolve to fight for it
Reflections on the centennial of the 19th Amendment
In 1912, at only 16 years old, Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, a Chinese-born immigrant, led a suffrage parade of thousands on horseback through the streets of New York City. In the years that followed, she became a member of the New York Women’s Political Equality League, speaking fiercely on behalf of women’s education and urging New York to grant women the vote.
In 1917, Mary Church Terrell picketed outside the White House, calling national attention to women’s fight for the vote. The daughter of former slaves, Terrell had become a leading spokesperson for the National American Women’s Suffrage Association, urging enfranchisement and equality for all women, even as prominent members sought to exclude black women from movement.
In 1919, the Hawaiian House of Representatives stalled legislation on the floor that would have enfranchised women in the then-territory. Wilhelmine Kekelaokalaninui Widemann Dowsett, a native Hawaiian suffragist, organized nearly five hundred women to storm the floor of the House, demanding the right to vote for all Hawaiian women.
100 years ago today, the United States adopted the 19th Amendment, prohibiting any state and the federal government from denying the right to vote based on sex. This was extraordinary: the largest enfranchisement in our nation’s history, for which generations of suffragists had shouted, starved, and stumped. The efforts of Lee, Terrell, Dowsett, and thousands like them had worked.
Mostly. This year, as the Smithsonian celebrates this transformative moment, we also recognize that the story of suffrage has never been clear cut. Even within the movement, debates raged around who merited the right to vote, with many prominent leaders insisting it should be reserved for white women. And after the passage, many women still lacked the right to vote.
While Hawaiian women like Dowsett were enfranchised by the 19th Amendment, many Native American women across the country were not considered full citizens and thus not entitled to the vote. And Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, who moved to the U.S. at age four, was prevented by Chinese Exclusion laws from enjoying the rights of the 19th Amendment for which she had so staunchly advocated. Despite the efforts of Mary Church Terrell and others, discriminatory voting laws would keep many black women disenfranchised until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Our responsibility, as a historical and cultural institution, is to make sure that we represent the long struggle for the vote in all its fullness. It’s why I’m so proud of efforts by the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative to reflect the deep complexity of the suffrage movement: the diverse voices and opinions that drove our country toward the 19th Amendment, and the women who remained disenfranchised long after its passage.
This month, we’ve taken on a range of activities to meet this goal. AWHI has partnered with the Library of Congress and the National Archives to launch the #19SuffrageStories social media campaign to countdown to the centennial. Posting a new story of an extraordinary suffragist or group each day, the campaign has seen over 100,000 engagements and an outpouring of positive comments. The initiative has produced eight videos profiling lesser-known suffragists, focusing particularly on women of color. And we’ve hosted a Wikipedia edit-a-thon, asking users to improve suffrage-related content on the internet’s most visited encyclopedia.
Even as a lifelong historian, I have been surprised and awed by what I’ve learned from these suffrage stories. The persistence, the grit, the ingenuity of women like Dowsett, Terrell, and Lee remind us all what the best of American democracy looks like at a time when such reminders are sorely needed. Their fight asks us never to take for granted our most sacred duty as citizens.
As we head to the polls this November, in the centennial year of such a remarkable historical moment, I think of the obligations that we still have: to stand up and speak up for the discarded, the dispossessed, the disenfranchised. And I remember the lessons of the suffrage movement. That the right to vote, the cornerstone of our democracy, is guaranteed only by our resolve to fight for it and our readiness to exercise it.
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Posted: 26 August 2020
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