19th Amendment: Part 2

Civics 101

NHPR

Education, History, Supreme Court, American History, Elections, Democracy, Society & Culture, Government, Civics, Politics, Social Studies

4.6 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 7 April 2020

⏱️ 20 minutes

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Summary

The Nineteenth Amendment was first introduced to Congress in 1878. It took over four decades of pleas, protests, petitions and speeches to finally get it ratified. We’re told that the Nineteenth granted all women the right to vote in America — but this was not the case in practice. How did the divides in the suffrage movement define the fight for women’s enfranchisement? And how did that amendment finally get passed? With a stern note from someone’s mom.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Civics 101 is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
0:09.2	This is Civics 101, the podcast about the basics of how our democracy works.
0:14.3	Hannah McCarthy here. Nick Capedice here too. We are about to dig into part two of a two-part
0:19.9	episode on the 19th Amendment. If you haven't listened to part one, I recommend you hit pause on this,
0:26.8	go back and give it a listen. There's a whole lot of context in there that will make what you're
0:31.7	about to hear actually make sense. Okay, that's all. Thanks for listening.
0:38.0	Our first episode on the 19th Amendment left us in this murky place. The 15th Amendment,
0:58.5	the amendment that granted African-American men, the ostensible ability to vote, had just been
1:04.0	passed. Victory for American democracy, right? Except, well, not so as far as Susan B. Anthony and
1:12.4	friends were concerned. Yeah, this really shocked me. It's part of the narrative that I had not been
1:16.6	familiar with. This felt like the glass shattering moment because this whole swath of the women's
1:23.0	suffrage movement breaks off to form a new organization that is in part opposed to the 15th Amendment.
1:29.5	Yeah, this is a political choice that Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton make. The argument is
1:40.5	white women should get the vote before African-American men. So Anthony and Stanton break off and they
1:46.3	form the National Women's Suffrage Association dedicated to the defeat of the 15th Amendment,
1:52.3	which feels so horrible, right? Especially when we're talking about a movement that did ultimately
1:57.8	result in the 19th Amendment, which to be fair is a good thing. I kept pushing this question
2:04.7	during my interviews like, okay, Stanton and Anthony and a lot of their cohort were the awful
2:11.4	racists, right? So here's Laura-Free History Professor at William and Hobart Smith College's
2:17.6	and author of Suffrage Reconstructed. I think we have to say yes, these suffragists were racist
2:24.3	in these moments and they were also important advocates for equality in America at certain times
2:31.0	in their lives. So I view this as a kind of yes and approach to thinking about racism in the
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