Topic > Historical events surrounding the women's suffrage movement in the United States

Although the women's suffrage movement was consolidated by a common goal, it was divided between those who believed in a parallel struggle with those who were less privileged women and those who excluded them. “From Seneca Falls to Suffrage?” by Nancy Hewitt, “Common Sense and a Little Fire” by Annelise Orleck, and the film about Ida B. Wells examine the cover stories behind the women's suffrage movement that complicate the traditional narrative of the 1920s era. As women fought to gain rights, they argued that to become fully independent they had to vote on laws that affected them. However, in reality African American, immigrant, and working-class women were excluded from political organizations that addressed the issue of the women's suffrage movement. Therefore, the most important lesson we learn from the history of women's struggle for full citizenship is that, although women's suffrage was an advance nationwide, less privileged women were increasingly marginalized. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Cady Stanton who supported anti-immigrant suffrage and lived by the idea that wealthy American women should use the vote to care for the “little” daughters of the poor” (Orleck, 94). Harriot Blatch, however, thought differently: he believed that poor women should have a say in improving their living and working conditions. Creating distance from some less privileged women officially transformed the women's suffrage movement into a bourgeois issue. For example, some immigrant groups such as Cuban and Italian immigrants and many poor whites were excluded from the polls by intentional laws that used literacy tests to discriminate against racial minorities. Such conflicts are demonstrated by the experiences of Asian and Mexican-American women who would be denied the right to vote until the United States addressed their bilingual needs by translating ballots into their native language. Likewise, the differences in why upper-class women wanted to get the vote were different from those of the marginalized group. Orleck describes how working-class women wanted to use the vote to redistribute wealth throughout the lower class, while upper-class women sought equal access to the power, money, and prestige that their male brothers or husbands had already acquired. These differences not only divided their values, but also the strength of the suffragette factions to agree. With the exclusion of blacks, immigrants and white women, different organizations would form, regressing the power of unity. What would it have meant for women to protest together while ignoring class and race? As an early African American suffragette and civil rights leader, Ida B. Wells created a new form of resistance by using the power of her pen to help African Americans overcome oppression. For example, he urged blacks to boycott the new streetcar line in Memphis and in doing so convinced hundreds of African Americans to move to the Oklahoma Territory. As a suffragist, Wells marched in several national suffrage parades and founded the first black suffrage organization known as the Alpha Suffrage Club of Chicago. Despite her success as a journalist and organizer, Ida B. Wells faced discrimination even within the suffrage movement itself, like many other African American women who held back in defending their right to vote. Orleck's piece.