August 18, 2020 was the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the vote after a fierce seven-decade battle for suffrage. To mark the occasion, we asked writers and scholars to tell us what, in their…
19th Amendment Centennial
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Culture 50 years a feminist, and I’m still learning what suffrage means
I cast my first vote in 1945, when I was five. My mother led me behind the curtain, picked me up so I could reach the levers, pointed to the name William O’Dwyer on the voting machine, and let me do the honors. But first, she told me why “we” wanted O’Dwyer to be the…
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Culture The suffrage movement was racist. Where did Jewish women fit in?
Hilary Danailova’s recent cheerfully titled article “Jewish Suffragists, White Dresses and Yellow Roses” in Hadassah Magazine is intriguing. Jewish suffragists? As a woman who is Jewish and Black, whose mother was a refugee from Nazi Austria and father was from Jamaica, I have always known that the overwhelmingly white Protestant leadership and their followers in…
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Culture Suffrage comes with obligations. Voting is only the first.
Women have had the right to vote in the United States for 100 years. We should celebrate that, but our understanding of what exactly this right entails remains superficial. Many think that the right to vote is in itself sufficient: If they have in fact voted, they think, they have exercised this right and fulfilled…
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Culture Why I won’t celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment
Mention to me that you’re celebrating the centennial of the 19th Amendment, and you might notice a slight cringe. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve just finished a book about the history of Black women and the vote, so I am as interested as anyone in this anniversary and its significance to the nation’s past. But…
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Culture The Eastern European Jewish immigrant who saved suffrage
On August 8, 1920, a freshman legislator from Tennessee, Joseph Hanover, was summoned to the elegant Hermitage Hotel in Nashville by Carrie Chapman Catt, head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. A friend and longtime ally of Susan B. Anthony, Catt had been pushing for women’s suffrage since the 1880s, and had assumed leadership…
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Culture Why have Jewish suffragists been left out of history?
This year, leading up to the centenary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, newspapers, podcasts, documentaries and museum exhibitions — indeed, three in the nation’s capital alone — have been filled with stories of the brave women who, for three-quarters of a century, fought for the vote. But Jewish women rarely appear in these…
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