Conversations on Suffrage in 2008

In honor of "International Women's Month", when there's somewhat of a heightened interest in the history of women's suffrage, here's a link to a Timeline of Women's Suffrage in the United States. It took the "ladies" 50 years to get the vote. Notable are the losses before the win....

1776: Abigail Adams writes to her husband, John Adams, asking him to "remember the ladies" in the new code of laws. Adams replies the men will fight the "despotism of the petticoat."

1777: Women lose the right to vote in New York.
1780: Women lose the right to vote in Massachusetts.
1784: Women lose the right to vote in New Hampshire.
1787: US Constitutional Convention places voting qualifications in the hands of the states. Women in all states except New Jersey lose the right to vote.
1792: Mary Wollstonecraft publishes Vindication of the Rights of Women in England.
1807: Women lose the right to vote in New Jersey, the last state to revoke the right........

Report Of The Woman's Rights Convention Held At Senecca Falls, N.Y., July 19-20, 1848
The Declaration of Sentiments

What was the conflict between women's suffrage and African-American issues?

Sojourner Truth worked with Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), the most prominent leaders in the suffrage movement, but broke away from them when Stanton stated that she refused to support black suffrage unless women were guaranteed the right to vote first....

We may never truly resolve America's compromised and painful history of black slavery, or the history of betrayals between the early women suffragists and abolitionists within the context of a vicious Democratic Party divide-and-conquor political environment that still lingers today.

But we the American people have developed; we have moved on. Hats off to the women and men who fought this fight. Women now have the right to vote for a progressive, "new politics" candidate for president -- a Black man.

Unless of course we're registered independents in a closed primary state..... (What the Congress giveth, the Parties taketh away....) Today's suffrage movement is the right of independents to vote in crucial primaries that determine our choices for president. Join the movement!


For information on black independents click here or here...
And be sure to vote here for The Hankster as your favorite blogger!