The Book of Gutsy Women

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

  A teacher, scholar, and staunch supporter of suffrage through her writing and speaking, Anna was born into slavery in North Carolina in 1858. After Emancipation, she enrolled at a school for freed slaves. Her awakening came when she realized that her male classmates were studying a harder curriculum than she and the other girls at the school. She defiantly enrolled in the same classes they were taking.

  Anna went on to graduate from Oberlin College with bachelor’s and master’s degrees. She then got involved with the black women’s club movement becoming a well-known speaker on issues of women’s rights. One of her most famous speeches was delivered at the World’s Congress of Representative Women in Chicago in May 1893. She described the plight of enslaved women, like her own mother, and then ended with this stirring call for justice: “The colored woman feels that woman’s cause is one and universal; and that not till the image of God, whether in parian [white marble] or ebony, is sacred and inviolable; not till race, color, sex, and condition are seen as the accidents, and not the substance of life; not till the universal title of humanity to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is conceded to be inalienable to all; not till then is woman’s lesson taught and woman’s cause won—not the white woman’s, nor the black woman’s, not the red woman’s, but the cause of every man and of every woman who has writhed silently under a mighty wrong.”

  Midge Wilson and Kathy Russell wrote in Divided Sisters: Bridging the Gap Between Black Women & White Women, “Among Black women who were staunch suffragists was Anna Julia Cooper, best known for her statement: ‘Only the BLACK WOMAN can say when and where I enter the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence or special patronage; then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.’ Cooper was particularly effective in emphasizing to Black women that they required the ballot to counter the belief that ‘Black men’s’ experiences and needs were the same as theirs.” Her 1892 book, A Voice from the South, is considered the first published work of a black feminist.

  Widowed by age twenty-one Anna became principal of the M Street Colored High School in Washington, D.C., the first public high school for black students in the country. Anna raised the school’s standards for students and, with her at the helm, several were accepted to Ivy League colleges.

  Anna’s approach to providing a comprehensive education for black students was not universally appreciated; she had high-profile critics, including Booker T. Washington, who favored vocational education for black Americans. When the D.C. Board of Education refused to renew her contract—possibly due to her innovative practices—she left to teach in Missouri until she was rehired at M Street five years later.

  Anna received a PhD in history from the Sorbonne in 1925, writing her dissertation on slavery and becoming the fourth black woman from the United States to earn a doctoral degree. She went on to spend more than a decade as the president of Frelinghuysen University for working-class adults. Anna believed that, for black Americans living in poverty, education was a “doctor and unfailing remedy.” She died at 105 years old in 1964, mere months before the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

  Like Anna, Mary Church Terrell also understood that the rights of women and the rights of people of color could not be separated. Born in Memphis in 1863, Mary was the daughter of Robert Reed Church, a former enslaved person and one of the first black millionaires in the South. She graduated from Oberlin College in 1884 and earned a master’s degree four years later. She taught at Wilberforce University and at the M Street Colored High School alongside fellow teacher Anna Julia Cooper. (“While most girls run away from home to marry, I ran away to teach,” she wrote later.) After she married Robert Heberton Terrell, she was forced to resign, since married women at that time were prohibited from teaching at the school.

  The following year, Mary’s childhood friend Tom Moss from Memphis—also a friend of Ida B. Wells—was lynched over his grocery store’s business competition with a white-owned store. Mary joined with Frederick Douglass to petition President Benjamin Harrison to condemn lynching; Harrison refused.

  In 1895, Mary became the first black woman appointed to the D.C. Board of Education. In 1896, she became the first president of the newly organized National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, an organization whose founders included Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, and poet and advocate Frances E. W. Harper. They adopted the motto “Lifting as we climb” in an effort to reassure “an ignorant and suspicious world that our aims and interests are identical with those of all good aspiring women.”

  In 1898, Mary delivered an impassioned speech on “The Progress of Colored Women.” In 1900, in the face of rising white supremacy within the suffrage movement, she reiterated her commitment to suffrage for all women. “As a nation we professed long ago to have abandoned the principle that might makes right,” she said. “Before the world we pose today as a government whose citizens have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And yet, in spite of these lofty professions and noble sentiments, the present policy of the government is to hold one-half of its citizens in legal subjection to the other, without being able to assign good and sufficient reasons for such a flagrant violation of the very principles upon which it was founded.”

  “With courage, born of success achieved in the past, with a keen sense of the responsibility which we shall continue to assume, we look forward to a future larger with promise and hope. Seeking no favors because of our color, nor patronage because of our needs, we knock at the bar of justice, asking an equal chance.”

  —MARY CHURCH TERRELL

  In 1940, Mary published her autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World. She declared her intent to stay active in the fight for racial and gender equality as she aged, and that’s just what she did. In 1950, at the age of eighty-seven, she was a plaintiff against a Washington, D.C., restaurant that refused to serve her and others because of their race. She helped organize pickets and business boycotts. Her efforts paid off in 1953 when the court declared segregation in our nation’s capital unconstitutional. She died the following year, right before the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education struck down the doctrine of “separate but equal.”

  Another gutsy woman whose name is too often overlooked in the history books is Alice Paul. Alice was born in New Jersey in 1885 into a Quaker family whose roots stretched back to the colonies. Her mother was a suffragist and member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) who would sometimes take Alice to suffrage meetings, introducing her at an early age to the struggle for women’s rights and social justice.

  Alice went away to Swarthmore College, then moved to New York City after graduation to pursue social work. Her letters home showed a young woman searching for a way to confront injustice. She found one after graduating in 1905, when she traveled to England and heard the suffragette Christabel Pankhurst speak. (“Suffragette” was the term there, but American activists preferred “suffragist” because it sounded less diminutive.) Christabel’s speech inspired Alice to join the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), the militant suffrage group led by Christabel and her mother, Emmeline Pankhurst.

  Alice and her cohorts were relentless and creative. On November 9, 1909, the Lord Mayor of London hosted a banquet for cabinet ministers in Guild Hall. Alice and another suffragette, Amelia Brown, disguised themselves as cleaning women to sneak into the event. They hid themselves until the prime minister stood to speak, at which point Brown threw her shoe through a window and she and Alice yelled “Votes for women!” They were arrested and sentenced to one month of hard labor after refusing to pay fines and damages.

  Alice returned to the United States in 1910, by then a celebrated suffragist with the goal of achieving recognition of women as equal citizens to men. She earned a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania; her dissertation was titled “The Legal Position of Women in Pennsylvania,” which argued that suffrage was the key goal in achieving women’s equality. She called for a campaign to ac
hieve a federal suffrage amendment—an effort that directly contradicted the then strategy of NAWSA, which argued for the more gradual strategy of passing legislation state by state.

  In 1913, the day before President Wilson’s inauguration, Alice organized a massive women’s suffrage parade. She proved to be not only an effective agitator but also a formidable organizer. Leading the parade was labor lawyer Inez Milholland, dressed in white, astride a horse, followed by bands, floats, and more than five thousand women from across the country. (It was in this parade that Ida B. Wells famously—and heroically—refused to follow Alice’s directive that black women march on their own in the back, and instead marched at the front.) At least half a million spectators showed up—a bigger crowd than at Wilson’s inauguration—and the crowd became unruly with some marchers being attacked and injured while the police stood by. The drama of the event raised the visibility of Alice’s goal.

  Alice eventually formed her own group, the National Woman’s Party (NWP). In 1917, the NWP organized the first-ever picketing of the White House. The picketing continued, controversially, after World War I started. The so-called Silent Sentinels carried banners pointing out the president’s hypocrisy in championing democracy around the world while denying women their rights in his own country. “Kaiser Wilson, have you forgotten your sympathy with the poor Germans because they were not self-governed?” demanded one banner. “20,000,000 American women are not self-governed. Take the beam out of your own eye.”

  All of this infuriated President Wilson; he had not supported suffrage in his 1912 presidential campaign against Theodore Roosevelt, who had. Wilson had no choice but to pass by the banners outside the White House that implored: “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?”

  The final sprint began on August 28, 1917, when suffragists protesting in front of the White House were arrested. As new groups of women showed up to picket, the arrests continued. On November 14, 1917, a group of thirty-three suffragists being held at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia were beaten and clubbed by guards in what became known as the “Night of Terror.”

  “There will never be a new world order until women are part of it.”

  —ALICE PAUL

  Alice herself had also been arrested. She began a hunger strike in jail, refusing to eat in protest. She was force-fed through a feeding tube inserted through her nose and down her throat, a procedure that amounted to torture. At one point, the superintendent of a local hospital interviewed Alice in an attempt to have her committed; he found her to be not only sane but “perfectly calm, yet determined.” She later described the brutal treatment the suffragists endured and reflected on the motives behind it: “It was shocking that a government of men could look with such extreme contempt on a movement that was asking nothing except such a simple little thing as the right to vote.”

  The treatment of the suffragists in jail sparked national outrage, which marked a turning point in the struggle. Under public pressure, Wilson finally agreed to support a constitutional amendment for suffrage. It passed the United States House of Representatives on May 21, 1919, and the Senate on June 4, 1919.

  After Congress passed the amendment, it had to go to the states to be ratified by the votes of legislatures in thirty-six out of the forty-eight states. That’s when Carrie Chapman Catt began to work in earnest.

  Carrie was born in 1859 and grew up in Iowa. After graduating from high school, she enrolled in college against her father’s wishes, where she excelled and became an advocate for women’s participation in everything from debate to military drills. When she graduated from Iowa State Agricultural College, she became a teacher and then the first female superintendent of the Mason City, Iowa, school district.

  She became involved in the Iowa Woman Suffrage Association, and, in 1892, Susan B. Anthony asked her to address Congress on a proposed woman’s suffrage amendment. Carrie began climbing up the ladder of the NAWSA and succeeded Anthony as president in 1900, but resigned after her first term to care for her sick husband. After becoming the organization’s president again in 1915, she unveiled a plan to obtain support for suffrage in the states; two years later, under her leadership, NAWSA led a successful campaign for suffrage in New York State. Once the United States entered World War I, although she was a committed pacifist, Carrie made the difficult decision to support the war in hopes that her show of patriotism would help the cause of suffrage.

  In her efforts to obtain suffrage state by state, Carrie sometimes appealed to the prejudices of her time—and, sadly, of our own. She denigrated Native Americans, immigrants, and black Americans, arguing that their citizenship should not be seen as equivalent to that of white women. Sally Roesch Wagner, the distinguished women’s history scholar, sums it up aptly in The Women’s Suffrage Movement: “This has been a journey of courage and cowardice; of principle and capitulation; of allies and racists. Examining our heroes and heras up close can be a painful process.”

  While Alice Paul was engaging in civil disobedience, Carrie Chapman Catt was pressuring Congress to pass the amendment and convincing states to ratify it. Thirty-five states did so. By the spring of 1920, Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt, the final architects of congressional action and state ratification, were focused on Nashville, where the deciding vote took place in the Tennessee House on August 18, 1920.

  The fight for that Tennessee victory, dramatically told in The Woman’s Hour by Elaine Weiss, came down to one young legislator, Harry Burn. On the eve of the vote, he planned to oppose women’s suffrage. But that morning, he received a letter from his mother, Phoebe Ensminger Burn: “Dear Son: Hurrah, and vote for suffrage and don’t keep them in doubt… Don’t forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt… With lots of love, Mama.” After reading the letter, Burn switched sides and cast the deciding vote.

  Six months before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, Carrie Chapman Catt founded the League of Women Voters in 1920 with the intent of educating and encouraging women to use their vote—an organization whose work continues to this day. Alice Paul drafted the Equal Rights Amendment and would spend the rest of her life advocating—as yet, unsuccessfully—for its passage. Her story is celebrated at the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument in Washington and the Alice Paul Institute at her family home in New Jersey, which provides leadership training to new generations of young women.

  Reading the words of the Nineteenth Amendment today, it’s hard not to wonder why it took so long: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” But, of course, it was a long struggle because it was about so much more than the right of women to vote. It was about race, class, and deeply held cultural and religious views about women’s subordinate roles to men in society. It was about men’s—and some women’s—insecurities and fears of the unknown. These challenges are still present today.

  The franchise—the basic right of citizenship—is still being fought over between those of us who believe every citizen should be able to vote and have that vote counted, and those who want to restrict the vote by erecting barriers against people, largely still based on race.

  Our charge today is to continue the work these heroes and so many others—sung and unsung—began. We must ask ourselves how we can do better; how we can keep expanding the circle of rights and opportunities and make that more perfect union a reality not just on paper, but in practice.

  Sophia Duleep Singh

  Chelsea

  Sophia Duleep Singh was born to a prestigious family in England, the daughter of the last maharaja of the Sikh Empire on the Indian subcontinent and the goddaughter of Queen Victoria. Her immense privilege protected her in many ways, though not in every way. Her father, deeply unhappy over being forced to abdicate his kingdom in Northern India and his subsequent exile to England by the British Raj, abandoned his family. Her mot
her suffered from alcoholism and died while taking care of an ill eleven-year-old Sophia. Still, given her wealth and position, few people would likely have guessed then that Princess Sophia would one day become a leader in the suffrage movement—probably least of all Sophia herself.

  Growing up in the late 1880s in England, Sophia immersed herself in her studies with private tutors and focused her free time on her two passions: fashion and dogs. As a young woman on one overseas voyage, Sophia insisted on traveling with her dogs close at hand, feeding them “fine cuts of meat and the occasional nip of brandy.” She posed for newspaper photographers, danced at debutante balls, and rode a bicycle in public, scandalizing the rest of the aristocracy as one of the few women to do so at the time.

  “Taxation without representation is a tyranny.… I am unable to pay money to the state as I am not allowed to exercise any control over its expenditure.”

  —SOPHIA DULEEP SINGH

  But then, as Anita Anand, author of Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary, said, something changed. In 1903, at the age of twenty-seven, Sophia traveled to India and saw for the first time the brutality of life under the British Raj. She was shocked by the racism, famine, and poverty. Though she hadn’t understood what life was like in India for the vast majority of people, her paternal grandmother, Jind Kaur—a gutsy woman in her own right—had spent her life organizing the Sikh resistance to British rule and was even imprisoned for her political activities. As for Sophia, she returned to England “with this sense of fire in her,” as Anand said, and had made up her mind “that it is not right to have equals treated as underclasses, be they brown or be they female.”

  At the time, British suffragettes were ramping up their organizing to demand votes for women, and expanding their use of more aggressive tactics: throwing rocks and bricks through windows, tossing nails under tires in the streets, interrupting speeches by political figures. In 1908, Sophia met Una Dugdale, a member of the Women’s Social and Political Union, a group founded five years earlier by suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst. Sophia signed up as a member the same day. Within a year, she had become one of the organization’s “tax resisters,” refusing to pay taxes to a government that denied women representation. (Their slogan was straight to the point: “No vote, no tax.”) As a result, some of her possessions were confiscated and sold, only to be bought back for Sophia by her fellow suffragettes.