Her most recent book, and the books in which a program is based. Please join me in welcoming dr. Laura free. [applause] prof. Free good afternoon, thank you. I am really honored to be here. It is always a great thrill for a historian of suffrage to speak at seneca falls. I would like to acknowledge that we are on the traditional lands of the hope 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. Thank you. I would like to recognize and thank the many park rangers who do the work of on the spot history and shared the special place with so many visitors. Finally i would like to thank , the park staff who maintain and clean the facilities and whose work goes unacknowledged. 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 activists 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 adapted its text to be more gender inclusive. She 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 are not the only ones she held. Throughout her life and most vocally and dramatically in the time between 1867 and 1869, stanton and proclaimed the conviction that a persons class and race both defined and confined them. She wrote and published a statement that stereotyped africanamericans, asian americans, irishamericans and all immigrants, depicting them as inferior intellectually to white upperclass american women like herself. Let me read you just won an example. This was taken from a speech she gave in january of 1869 while congress was considering the 15th amendment to the constitution, which is says the right to vote should not be restricted by race. She said if american women find it hard to bear the oppressions of their own facts and father, the best order of manhood, what may they not be called to injure when all the lower orders of foreigners, now crowding our shores, legislate for them and their daughters . Think of those who do not know the difference between a monarchy and a republic, who cannot read 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 has has intrigued of the old world and 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 her words, numerous contemporary colleagues both black and white called her out for her racism. We have to understand that stanton made the deliberate choice 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 and powerfully exclusionary ways into the 20th century. There are many stories i could tell to illustrate this but here is one 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 washington, d. C. When africanamericans suffer just, let been working for decades 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 an damage throughout the womens suffrage endemic throughout the womens Suffrage Movement. And one of many incidents that illustrates how much the movement focused exclusively on the interest and needs of white women only. 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 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 that is a problem. I hope by the end of my talk today you will think that is a problem as well. 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. I will offer framework for helping us think about stantons racism. Then i will 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. Given her racism she poses a problem for us. Mainly because i do not think we can deny that she was a advocate for human equality. She spent half a century using her intellect and 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 reject her legacy as tainted and ignore her as a figure in early feminism. So what do we do . How do we hold on to stantons racism and her equal rights activism . I will like to this thorny problem with two ways of thinking about it. One comes from improvisational theater. The 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, and he is that you never say no to an idea that someone has raised in an improv situation. Instead you say, yes, and. Then you build on that idea. If youre improv partners as i am a bear, you dont say no you are not, 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 disagreements in the workplace. A conversation in the office might go Something Like this, person number one might say here is my idea for the company. Person number two, instead of saying yes, but and laying out the problems should stay instead, yes, and we might want to think about these other things. This validates the original idea and offers input as a supplement rather than a critique. Yes, and is even entering into our popular lexicon. This recently appeared on a bridge between my house and my Daughter School in ithaca, riffing on the ithaca local slogan is ithaca is gorgeous. 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 lee 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 significance of her racism shut people of color out of the conversation about the history of womens Voting Rights, and persistently defend stanton for what is in defendable. This is where tina fey helps us out. I think the real answer is yes, and. She says we need answer with yes, and and then we have a 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 the discussion. To help us better understand stanton, her ideas, motivation and worldview, even if and perhaps because we feel uncomfortable and find it different than our own. This is very much in keeping a mine 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. It is in 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. I would like to suggest that if we think about stantons racism through the yes, and model it helps us to contextualize her idea and enables us both to hold her accountable for her action and better understand the womans Suffrage Movement more broadly, as well as how it shaped our present moment. We have an obligation to engage. For the rest of my talk i would like to engage in share my answers to the yes, and question, by contextualizing her racism in the 1860s, showing how she deliberately wielded racist language for political purposes and by showing you how that language fit in with a broader culture of Party Politics in the civil war era. Finally, by discussing the consequences of the racist speech for the womens Rights Movement in the 1860s and beyond. Before i move on, a quick note about language and a warning about the images used in the presentation. While i will repeat some of the racist language as written to be true to the historical sources, in the interest in keeping with current antiracist practice i will not say that an word 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 the 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 is lay out what is going on for stanton in the 1860s to help us think about why is it her statements emerge in this time. In particular i want to ask, what is going on with her and with the 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 that stanton was engaged in the womens rights activism consistently from 1848 onward. During the civil war, activists agreed to set aside their equal claims in order to work for abolition. Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner credited the antislavery petitions that susan b. Anthony and lucy stone collected with tipping the political balance in congress for the 13th amendment abolishing slavery. They were working with the they were working alliance with republicans with the Republican Party to end slavery in the united states. Because of this work, stanton believed the help she provided the Republican Party would translate into support for womens equality after the war, a quid pro quo. Explaing to pause and and looked about american politics in case you are unfamiliar. At this point, the Republican Party is the more socially liberal party. The is going to flip in 1940s with the emergence of Franklin Delano roosevelt. In this time, democrats are socially conservative it keep that in mind. Stanton had an important work during the civil war, work that helped the Republican Party achieve abolition, she really believed that republicans were turnaround and support equality for women. Truthfully, the immediate postwar. Period did look hopeful because because reconstructing the nation did require citizenship. Should southern white men return to full citizenship and voting . What about formerly enslaved people . Should they be allowed to vote . These are all open questions that are being talked about and written about throughout the reconstruction period. 1866 these were being openly debated by members of congress. Republicans looking to protect both parties power and the newly emancipated people in the south saw to accomplish both by giving southern black men the ballot. In light of these political shifts, stanton reasoned this was the optimal time to also push for the enfranchisement of all women. On, oranton had reckoned underestimated, was the gender of reconstruction. Consistently throughout the postwar period republicans relied on genderbased arguments to disenfranchise africanamerican men. Claimed that black theyearned manhood should possess the ballot as did all other adult men. Persuadeork to republicans that women needed the ballot as urgently as southern black men especially through a campaign in 1866. Anthony wanted to shift congress toward Voting Rights but in 1866, they added to defineale voters. It was a crushing blow and a deliberate, and explicit, rejection of stantons claims and ideas. As the postwar years went on stanton suffered further lost her cause. Repudiatedork womens suffrage. Although stanton and anthony argue for the right to vote they rejected the argument as they declared womens enfranchisement would involve transformation so radical in social and domestic life that no new yorker would accept a. It. In 1868, legislators in the state of kansas proposed to referendums on the fall ballot. Women franchising black and one in franchising all women. Midwesterners might see the value of women and stanton and anthony went to kansas and spent a month on a statewide speaking tour trying to make their case directly. Both referendums were soundly defeated when the election took place. Discouraged, brokenhearted, feeling abandoned by former allies, and running low on funds, stanton and anthony got an offer they could not refuse. It came from an extremely unlikely source. Democrat. Om a the best way i can think of how to explain how shocking this would be in contemporary terms is if one of the president s staunchest supporters helped to undocumented immigrants apply for obamacare. That is how out of the norm this offer was. Improbable to say the least. Who was this democrat and why did he help . His name is George French is trying and he was a George Francis train and he was trying to run for the presidency. Sound familiar . [laughter] even back then millionaires and billionaires could dive into president ial candidacy. He spoke alongside stanton and anthony at events and liked what he heard. 1867, after the defeat of the referendums, he offered to fund a womens rights newspaper. They embraced the support wholeheartedly. Hard to underestimate the importance of a newspaper to the suffragist at this point. It would provide them with an independent voice, give them control over their message, and massive publicity for the movement. Dutton said it would provide the movement with a steady source of funding independent from republican or abolitionist sources. Something the movement expertly needed. Newspapers are big money at this point. Ingwould be like hand someone a startup today. Stanton and anthonys decision to accept the money was a controversial move. Train, aside from being a wealthy political semi celebrity, was also unapologetically racist. He came to kansas to argue that expanding the franchise to include africanamerican men required the inclusion of white women to create a balance in the Political Community. Gro last he and ne said. Many of stanton and anthonys longterm allies objected because of the racism and criticized them for their willingness to accept his help. Here is one example. Abolitionist leader William Lloyd garrison wrote i cannot refrain from expressing my regret and astonishment that you and ms. Stanton took leave of such good sense and departed so far from true selfrespect as to be traveling companions and associate lecturers to that crack reigned harlequin and lunatic, George Francis train. That is speak for, what are you doing . [laughter] he is a destitute principal and is gravitating toward a lunatic asylum. He may be of use in drawing an audience but so would a kangaroo, a gorilla, or hippopotamus. [laughter] hippopotamus being scarce, all stanton and anthony saw was the opportunity that train offered with their newspaper pickup. They said its purpose was to revolutionize as advocated for educated suffragist, equal pay to women for equal work, eight hours labor, abolition of standing armies and party desperate. Down the politicians and up with the people. Even then americans hated their politicians. [laughter] it is in the pages of the revolution that stanton articulated a very exclusive vision of the people. Saying some of the most blatantly racist statements in the pages. But why . Nton turned to racism when she had not done so widely or openly before . What prompted her to make this choice . The answer lies, i think, and Party Politics. Stanton carefully and deliberately appropriated the racist, partisan rhetoric of the 19th century Democratic Party. I think she did so in order to attract democrats to the cause of what womens Voting Rights. Stanton did not just pull her racist language from thin air. Point for point the arguments she made that were the most disturbing to us were taken from Democratic Party language and ideas. So, as i said earlier, the Democratic Party was the most socially conservative. Its constituents were drawn from