by Angel Garza, CSP-Corcoran
Carrie Chapman Catt devoted most of her life to the expansion of women’s rights nationwide and around the world and is recognized as one of the key leaders of the American women’s suffrage movement. Her political strategies and organizational skills contributed to the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution on August 18, 1920.
The suffrage movement lost momentum during the civil war, as men and women turned their attention to the conflict between the states. After the war, female suffrage endured another setback when the women’s rights movement became divided over the proposed 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
It would give black men the right to vote, but failed to extend the same privilege to American women of any skin color. Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, these whole first generation, the four mothers (as they are sometimes called) of women’s rights in America, all are abolition workers before they are suffragists.
And so, the idea of women’s rights and women’s suffrage comes out of the abolition movement. It actually is a daughter of the abolition movement and they became kinda like siblings. The same people often work in both causes, so these women are truly committed to freeing the slaves. They believed and they were encouraged in that belief by their abolitionist co-workers, that at the end of the Civil War, when slavery was abolished, that universal suffrage would reign, that Black men, Black women, White women, all those who have not had the vote, would get the vote.
So they were very deeply offended and disappointed and felt betrayed when the 14th and 15th Amendments passed, and they were told, “no, the nation can’t take two big reforms at once.” It was a tough pill for the women to swallow and they didn’t. Now, Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe and a whole other bunch of suffragists said, “Well, wait a minute. It’s not a good situation. We don’t think that women should be cut out, but we have to still support the 14th and 15th Amendments.”
So that was the first split in the movement: Stanton and Anthony formed the National Association; Stone and Howe, the American Women’s Suffrage Association. They remained apart for a whole generation, until 1890.
On August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment was signed into law. Women had finally won the long-sought right to vote. The same year, on November 2, more than 8 million women voted in the U.S. elections for the first time.
To all my “incarcerated sisters” of all races, including transgender women, across the United States prisons and in California: In solidarity, hope, unity, and strength together you all possess a strong coalition of political strategies against prisons and against correctional officers abuse, you all together can unite peacefully with all your organizational skills to build a powerful incarcerated women’s rights movement to fulfill and manifest #closure of women’s prisons with #freedoms! Your freedoms! I believe in all of you, and you must believe in yourselves. I’m only one man, a brother, to all of you in solidarity, struggles, and in strength towards abolitionist horizons to dismantle the Prison-Industrial-Slave Complex.
But yet, we are many!
The story and history of the 19th Amendment had its struggles for women’s rights to vote, and it took a few women to step up, organize, and make history happen for all women worldwide. You might ask each other, how did they do it? It took unity, political strategies, and organizational skills. Yes, they had setbacks, divisions, and conflicts throughout a whole generation.
In prison, we men and women have had our own setbacks, divisions and conflicts among our populations throughout whole generations, slaughtering each other. Just what the Prison-Industrial Complex wants.
We now have the opportunity to put aside all conflicts, biases, prejudices, divisions, segregations, set trippin, prison politics, paperwork checks, and bullying, as this only causes our movements to set back for other generations.
The time is now, sisters, you all can develop a strong coalition unbreakable and unshakable in unity, just as the women in 1920 achieved the long sought right to vote.
The evidence of a strong movement of women’s rights is recorded, 8 million women voted for the first time in the U.S. elections.
Hope is our commitment to a future where #ClosureIsPossible and #YourFreedomsAreNecessary. Peace be with you all! ✦
Leave a Reply