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In the history of fairness and equality in the United States, there’s no denying that women of color have often come up short. From 19th- and 20th-century feminist movements to modern-day fights for egalitarianism, black, Asian, Native, and Latinx women have often rallied for the same rights as white women without the same results.
Take the 19th Amendment, for example. Passed by Congress in June 1919 and ratified over a year later on August 18, 1920, the 100-year-old bill was meant to guarantee all women the right to vote. The amendment stated that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”
While that sounds ideal in theory, in practice many women of color found themselves unable to exercise their legal right to cast a ballot, depriving them of a voice in local and federal elections. As the New York Times noted in an editorial in their evaluation of the 19th Amendment's centennial, “millions of other women — particularly African-Americans in the Jim Crow South — remained shut out of the polls for decades” after the amendment’s ratification. That includes many Native American and Asian American women who were not granted citizenship.
Men of color across the U.S. were, of course, also still disenfranchised after the passage of the 15th Amendment in 1870, which was supposed to prohibit the government from denying anyone the right to vote based on their "race, color, or previous condition of servitude." Washington Post contributor and National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Kimberly A. Hamlin argued that senators were against the 19th amendment because it would compel the government to enforce the 15th. Yet even with the passage of the 19th amendment, states and municipalities continued to ignore their enforcement, disenfranchising people of color across the nation.
As Harvard University’s Susan Ware, a historian who specializes in women's suffrage, discussed in her book Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote, it was mainly white women who won the right to vote in 1919.
“The primary beneficiaries of the 19th Amendment at first were white women and the small minority of African American women who lived in northern and western states, where there were no racial restrictions on voting,” Ware told Teen Vogue. “The vast majority of African Americans still lived in the South, where men and women were kept from voting by Jim Crow laws put in place in the late 19th century.”
Some states took it upon themselves to pass laws making it harder for minorities to vote with the creation of literacy tests and poll taxes. Violence was also used to deter people of color from exercising their legal right to vote. Even today, certain practices like gerrymandering and voter ID laws disenfranchise people of color by making it harder for them to vote or diluting the effect of their votes.
Though they rallied alongside white suffragettes, many women of color remained disenfranchised by racist policies until the mid to late 20th century. It wasn’t until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that black women in the South were able to exercise this right without the aforementioned restrictions. Some Latinx, Native, and Asian American women had to wait even longer. In 1975, the federal government passed voting rights amendments that prohibited discrimination against “language minority” citizens.
While women of color were forced to wait nearly 50 extra years after the passage of the 19th Amendment to gain proper access to the ballot box, their contributions to the protests and demonstrations were critical to the amendment’s passage. White women earned the right to vote, in part, due to women of color, and these contributions have since been largely erased from history.
“African American clubwomen were central to the struggle for the vote. Having seen their men lose the vote despite the guarantees of the 14th and 15th amendments, they realized its practical and symbolic importance,” Ware explained to Teen Vogue. “African American suffragists always saw the vote as part of a much broader range of social, economic, and political issues surrounding their communities. Theirs was an intersectional vision which linked race, class, and gender, in contrast to white suffragists, who often approached the issue from the lens of gender only.”
Yet for decades, white women have often been enshrined as the sole leaders of the suffragette movement. Museums, textbooks, and historians alike honor the likes of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony for challenging gender norms and pushing for a women’s right to vote. However, these same women were found to have supported racist ideals, fighting for white women's right to vote and ignoring the acute discrimination faced by women of color. Women of color were often forced to march separately from their white counterparts and were excluded from suffragette conventions.
While there are few, if any, memorials honoring the women of color that fought for the right to vote for all women, it’s important that, on the anniversary of the 19th amendment, we remember their names: Mary Church Terrell. Sojourner Truth. Jovita Idár. Ida B. Wells. Wilhelmina Kekelaokalaninui Widemann Dowsett.
Unfortunately, for many American women, the equal rights that these women fought for have still not yet been realized a century later.
Women of color in the U.S. and its territories still face serious barriers to voting. In territories like Puerto Rico, residents are American citizens but unable to vote in federal presidential elections. Meanwhile, nearly 50% of the U.S. prison system is made up of women of color, who are prohibited from voting while incarcerated or on parole in many states, or for life for those with certain convictions in others. And in August 2019, a Brennan Center analysis found that nearly 17 million voters were purged between 2016 and 2018, with higher purging rates in counties with a history of voter discrimination.
So the fight continues.
As Ware put it: “Feminism and women’s rights are an ongoing struggle with no clear endpoint in sight and the women’s suffrage movement is a vital part of that story. There is a direct line from the suffrage parades of the 1910s to the sea of pink pussy hats worn at the Women’s Marches held in January 2017 to protest the inauguration of Donald Trump.”
Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: Black Wall Street and the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, Explained
