Nancy Woloch's Chapter 14 "Feminism and Suffrage"

¶ … Nancy Woloch's Chapter 14 "Feminism and Suffrage" (1994, 2nd ed, pp. 326-363) from the general to the specific and back again. Remarkable to me was how three generations (357) of women reacted to a complex and evolving institutional and social environment to adapt and specialize toward the primary goal of woman suffrage.

They achieved this core objective by targeting the strongest leverage, from the woman on the street to their male 'representatives' in the state house, "deliberately and collectively" (Woloch 359), and I add 'persistently,' over five decades (355) through changing leadership and constituent characteristics and preferences. Woloch asks what this achievement contributed toward "the overhaul of attitudes demanded in 1848" (359).

The result was a model for accomplishing massive structural social change that led directly from Seneca Falls through the labor movement, the Great Society era Civil Rights Movement, to Stonewall and Section 503 of the Civil Rights Act that became the Americans With Disabilities Act the better part of a century later. While white / male groups still dominate all others in earnings and social power today, none of these accomplishments would have been possible without the difficult work these pioneering women sacrificed many lives to accomplish together.

That being said, some of those choices were difficult, and look mercenary, if not hypocritical from the modern viewpoint they laid the foundations for. While selling out the black woman vote (343) probably was harder for some than others, as evidenced by the difference between Susan B.

Anthony's attempts at integration (343) all the way through the opposite extreme of NAWSA taking "advantage of racist arguments when they were useful" (343), if we judge them today, it is from the viewpoint they left us, which we may not have without this difficult tactical decision. We can only pay back those generations of black woman now, by recognizing her sacrifice then, and make up for it with unity today.

Likewise an "impressive women's peace movement" widely supported among the rank and file (351) had to fall by the wayside when the NAWSA (successfully) "attempted to profit from war" (353). Chopping off these important threads of long-standing prior struggle may have been like choosing which children to feed when dinner ran short but the result was a stronger foundation from which many of those objectives were later achieved.

Some of the rowdier daughters excused themselves from the table by pushing too hard too fast, like Victoria Woodhull (332), or Alice Paul even though she helped bring a new generation of suffragists into the wider movement (352). The result was a stronger, more focused and tactical objective that the last generation (of that wave) was able to carry through to ultimate success.

Woloch does not tell us what Charlotte Woodward's opinion of the final result was (355), so we can only wonder if the 1850 Seneca signers would find the result worth the sacrifices. They might given the viewpoint of modern Feminists, but then they very well may not. This all being said, the sacrifices were difficult for some, maybe not for others; the painful decisions seem to have been tactical rather than rejections in principle, and.