Professor free cites numerous examples of Elizabeth Cady stanton using racist rhetoric in her newspaper writings of the period, arguing that she used racism in an effort to attract allies in a fight to gain Voting Rights for white women only. The Womens Rights National Historical Park in seneca falls, new york is the host of this event. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is andrea. Superintendents of Womens Rights National Historical Park and Harriet TubmanNational Historical park over in auburn. On behalf of the National Parks service it is my pleasure to welcome all of you here to your part. Before we start, i want to ask that everybody please silence of their cell phones so that our camera crew does not get disrupted. It is my delight to introduce you to our speaker dr. Laura free. Professor associate of history at hobart and William Smith colleges. Her work focuses on the interconnections of gender, race and politics in 19thcentury united states. Her most recent book, and the books on which this program is based is titled suffrage reconstructed race and civil rights. Please join me in welcoming dr. Laura free. [applause] prof. Free good afternoon, thank you. I am really honor to be here today. It is always a great thrill for a historian and of suffrage to speak at seneca falls. I would like to acknowledge that we are on the traditional lands of the hopi nations people and pay my respect to the elders, past and present. I would like to thank you for inviting me and setting up my visit. I would like to recognize and thank the many park rangers who do the work of on the spot history and share this special place with so many visitors. I would like to thank the park staff who maintain and clean the physical facilities of theirs and all other National Parks, whose work too often goes acknowledged. I am guessing that if you are here today you know who this is. This is Elizabeth Cady stanton. You see her with her longterm partner in activist work susan , b. Anthony. You probably already know a bit about her. You are probably aware she said controversial things over the course of her long activist career. She said that married women should be able to own their own property. A radical idea. She argued that women should not have to wear constricting corsets, a metal cage and 20 something pounds of long heavy , skirts if they did not wish to. She believed that the christian bible was problematic for women, and she reenvisioned its language and abducted its text to be more gender inclusive. This was incredibly radical. Even for today. She argued that the activities and minds of all people should not be defined, nor confined by their gender identity. And yet, these controversial ideas arent the only ones stanton held. Throughout her life and most vocally and dramatically in the period between 18671869, stanton repeatedly proclaimed that a conviction persons class and race both defined and confined them. She wrote and published a statement that stereotyped africanamericans, asian americans, irishamericans, poor americans and all immigrants depicting them as , inferior intellectually to white upperclass american women like herself. Let me read you just one example. This was taken from a speech she gave in january of 1869 while congress was considering the 15th amendment to the constitution, which says the right to vote should not be restricted by race. She says, if american women find it hard to bear the oppressions of their own facts and fathers, the best order of manhood, what may they not be called to endure when all the lower orders of foreigners, now crowding our shores, legislate for them and their daughters . Sick of patrick and sambo, and not know the difference between a monarchy and a republic, who cannot read a sentence in the declaration of independence or websters spelling book, making laws for Lucretia Mott or an ae dickinson. It is an open, deliberate insult to american womanhood to be cast down under the iron heeled andantry of the old world of the slaves of the new. This is truthfully among some of the more mildly racist things she said. I will get to the darker stuff shortly. This is not simply an artifact of her moment, a common reflection of the background racism that permeated and still permeates American Culture as some people have suggested. In fact, when stanton was at her worst, numerous contemporary colleagues both black and white called her out for her races up and her elitism. We have to understand that stanton made the deliberate choice again and again and again, to write and publish explicitly racist statements and ideas. In so doing, she threw away decades of intersectional alliances and friendships all in order to advocate for the votes of white women and white women only. Statements like this one, as well as many other place racist speech and racist ideas at the heart of the womens Suffrage Movement. This practice carried through in powerfully exclusionary ways into the 20th century. There are many stories i could tell to illustrate this but here is just one brief example of how racism in the Suffrage Movement operated well beyond stantons time. In 1915, the Suffrage Movement was organizing a massive parade, think of the womens march and in washington, d. C. But when africanamerican suffragists in the Alpha Suffrage Club in chicago, who had been working for decades for suffrage, and included antilynching advocate ida wells, when the club was asked to participate in the parade, they were told that they were only welcome at the end, at the back of the parade. This was the movements equivalent of the bus. This is only one of many incidents and ideas and moments that make it abundantly clear that racism was endemic throughout the womens Suffrage Movement. It is one of many incidents that illustrates how much the movement focused exclusively on the interest and needs of white women only. So all of this may or may not be news to you. It certainly is not news to historians of womens suffrage and all of the parks staff who are here today. Nor is it news to people of color, who have been for decades, calling out the legacy of racism in feminist movements. That said, openly and explicitly and widely acknowledging the racism of the feminist foremothers has not been a consistent part of our popular narrative about the Suffrage Movement. I think thats a problem. I hope by the end of my talk today you will think that is a. Roblem,too i would like to walk you through some of the ways that i have been thinking about this issue lately, and hopefully offer you some tools, some from historians like me and some from unlikely sources, the tools for helping us to grapple with our complicated, always messy and often ugly past. My talk is divided into three sections. First, i am going to offer some intraoperative framework for helping us think about stantons racism. Then i want to lay out why i think she turned to racism as a political tool. Then i want to share some ideas about ways to talk about and think about racism within the context of the 19th amendment centennial. So, given her racism, stanton poses a problem for us. Mainly because i do not think we can deny that she was a advocate a passionate advocate for human equality. She spent half a century using her profound intellect and her back power with words working to transform the ways that americans thought about and acted upon gender in law, ideology, religion, politics and culture. We cannot simply reject her legacy as tainted and ignore her as a figure in early feminism. So what do we do . How do we hold onto both stantons racism and her equal rights activism . I would like to begin by offering my answer to this admittedly thorny problem with two ways of thinking about it. One comes from improvisational theater via feminist committee and tina fey, feminist comedian, tina fey, and the other from my discipline of history. These two things are pretty far from each other so bear with me. First improv, in tina feys memoir, a title that i think could be great for a stanton biography, she says that one of the most important rules of improvisational comedy is that you never say no to an idea that someone has raised in an improv situation. Instead you say, yes, and. Then you begin to build on that idea. So if youre improv partner ,ays, i am a bear, you do say no. You say, yes, and lets go eat those hikers, they look delicious. Some Business Leadership seminars had taken up the ideas of yes, and, and used it as a critical tool for guiding Difficult Conversations and disagreements in the workplace. A conversation in the office might go Something Like this a person number 1 might say here , is my idea for the company. Person number two, instead of saying yes, but and laying out the problems the idea might have should say instead yes, and we , might want to think about these other things. This both validates of the original idea and offers input as a supplement, rather than a critique. Yes, and is even entering into our popular lexicon. This graffiti is a judge. This recently appeared on a bridge between my house and my Daughter School in ithaca, ripping on the ithaca local slogan of ithaca is gorgeous. Instead it says ivanka is ithaca is yesanding. Apparently it is getting around. How is this relevant for stanton . If we asked the question is stanton a racist, two very common responses that i have heard personally are no, or mike yes, but. But i dont think either of these work as a for filling answer to the question. Those who answer no, willfully and harmfully ignore the evidence. Those who say yes, but and then proceed to explain away what she said and did and why the belie the significance of her racism, shot people of color out of the conversation about the history of womens Voting Rights, and persistently defend stanton for what is ultimately indefensible. I think the real answer is yes, and. Y says that if you answer something with yes, and you then have some responsibility to contribute, to add something to the conversation. Here is where my historical training kicks in. I dont think it is enough for us to say stanton is a racist and dismiss her work and ideas. Thats not useful. I think instead, we have an obligation to contribute to the discussion. To help us better understand stanton, her ideas, motivation s and her worldview, even if and perhaps because we feel uncomfortable with it and find. T different than our own this is very much in keeping in line with the purpose of history. Historians seek to understand the people in the past where they were. We try to understand why they made the choices that they did and what cultural, political and social influences may have shaped those choices. For it is in assessing those choices that we figure out who we are in relationship to the past and we better refine and define our own values and ideas. So i would like to suggest, that if we think about stantons racism through the yes, and model it helps us to contextualize her ideas and enables us both to hold her accountable for her action and better understand the womans Suffrage Movement more broadly, as well as how that movement shaped our present moment. It is not enough merely to dismiss her, we have an obligation to engage. For the rest of my talk i would share my answers to the yes, and like to engage and share my answers to the yes, and question. In particular, by contextualizing stantons racism in the 1860s, showing how she deliberately wielded racist language for partisan and political purposes, and by showing you how the language fit in with a broader culture of Party Politics in the civil war era. And finally, by discussing some of the consequences of that race speech for the womens Rights Movement in the 1860s and beyond. Before i move on, a quick note about language and a warning about some of the images used in the presentation. While i will repeat some of the racist language as written to be , quoting directly here to be true to historical sources, in the interest in keeping with current antiracist practice i nwordt say that a out loud, merely replacing it with that term. There are two sides in the presentation that use very racist imagery from the documents. There is a brief description in the talk of a Sexual Assault and murder. I encourage you all to practice good selfcare if these things are triggering for you. The first thing i want to do in the rest of the talk is laid out what is going on for stanton in the 1860s to help us think about why it is for most troubling racist statements emerge in this period. In particular i want to ask, was on earth is going on with her and with her political world around her that made her think that racist ideas and racist speech might be a good idea at this point in time. We know, of course, that stanton had been engaged in womens rights activism consistently from 1848 onward. But during the civil war, northern womens rights activists agreed to set aside their equality claims in order to work for abolition. Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner even credited the antislavery petition that stanton susan b. Anthony , and lucy stone collected with tipping the political balance in congress for the 13th amendment abolishing slavery. They were working in alliance with republicans, with the Republican Party in congress to get rid of slavery in the united states. Because of this work, stanton believed that the work she provided the party in that period would translate to womens equality after the war, it kind of political rate per quote, standard political quid pro quo, standard in american politics then and now. Im going to posit explain a little bit about american Party Politics in case youre unfamiliar with it. At this point in time the Republican Party is the more socially liberal party and the Democratic Party is the more socially conservative. That will flip in the 1940s with the emergence of Franklin Delano roosevelts new deal. ,ut in this time period republicans are more socially liberal, and democrats are more socially conservative. Just keep that in mind when i talk about republicans and democrats going forward. Had done somenton important work during the civil war, or veteran helped the Republican Party achieve their goal of abolition, she really believed that republicans would turn around and support equality for all women. And truthfully, the immediate postcivil war period did look particularly hopeful for womens rights. It required a wideranging assessment of political citizenship. Should southern white men who had just made more of the nation return to full citizenship and voting . What about formerly enslaved people . These are all open questions that are being talked about and written about throughout the reconstruction period. Between 1865 in 1866, questions were openly debated by members in congress. In particular, republicans, looking to protect the power and the newly emancipated people in the south, sought to accomplish both by giving southern black men a ballot. In light of these political shifts, she reasons that this was the optimal time to push for the enfranchisement of all women. But what stanton had not reckoned on or what she wildly underestimated, was the power that gender wielded in the politics of reconstruction. Consistently, throughout the immediate postwar period, republicans relied heavily on genderbased arguments in franchising southern africanamerican men. In particular, republicans echoing arguments made by male activists themselves, cleaned that black men had earned their manhood on the field of battle in the civil war. As men africanamerican men should possess a ballot as do all other adult men in america. Stanton worked to persuade republicans that women need the needed the ballot as urgently as southern black men. Especially through a Petition Campaign in 1866 that was similar to the one she spearheaded during the war. Stanton hoped to shift republicans towards womens Voting Rights. The Republicanled Congress to thehe word male second section of the 14th amendment to define voters. This added gender specific language to the constitution for the first time. It was a crushing blow and a deliberate and explicit rejection of stantons claim and ideas. As the postwar years went on, stanton suffered further losses to her cause. First, new york, her home state repudiated woman suffrage in , the 1867 constitutional convention. Although stanton had personally appeared before the convention Suffrage Committee to argue for womens right to vote, the committee rejected the argument by saying that womens franchise meant would involve , transformations so radical in social and domestic life, but no new yorker would accept it. The last straw for stanton happened in kansas. In 1868, legislators in kansas had proposed a referendum on the fall ballot. One enfranchising black men and one emfranchising all women. Excited by the possibility that midwesterners might see the value of women as voters, stanton and anthony both went to kansas and spent a month on a statewide speaking tour on trying to make their case directly to the kansan voter. Were soundlyrenda defeated when the election took place. Discouraged, brokenhearted, and feeling abandoned by allies in the east and west, and running low on funds, stanton and anthony then got an offer they couldnt refuse. It came from an extremely unlikely source, from a democrat. So here again, remember, in the 19th century republicans are , socially liberal and democrats are conservative. The best way i can think of to explain how shocking this offer would be in contemporary terms, would be if the president s staunchest supporters helped to undocumented immigrants