Say Something Real
Celebrating Women’s History Month
By Michelle Bryant
Michelle Bryant
It’s time to vote. This civic responsibility has been etched in my DNA, from family members who hail from Birmingham, Alabama. Anyone who understands the regional history of this country, knows that mentioning either that city or state comes with a huge amount of baggage. Black Codes, Jim Crow, lynching, segregation and separate and unequal policies immediately come to my mind. For every advancement made in these areas, we know that they came at great personal expense for many of our ancestors. It is that knowledge that drives my engagement, both politically and civically. Every time, I complete a ballot, I proudly acknowledge that I am showing up for them!
The thing I have been forced to reckon with, is that my “them” was biased. As an African-American, I can rattle off key names in the civil rights movement. I can talk with ease, about leaders in the black community, who led the charge for voting equity. And yes, many of these champions were women. Given that fact, I still wasn’t making a critical connection. The ancestors that marched, protested and demanded the right for me to vote, also included women of every race. I am guilty of undervaluing and underestimating the scope of the work that was done, by those who share my gender, to secure my basic rights.
While I own my share of responsibility for this oversight, I also fault educational systems that have sugarcoated or romanticized women’s fight for voting and civil rights. I’ve seen the textbook photos of women marching in their finest white suits. The historic procession, held on March 3, 1913, was hosted by the National American Woman Suffrage Association. The goal of this gathering was to highlight the exclusion of women from the democratic process. Demonstrators wanted the passage of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment to the U.S. constitution, which read “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”
It would take more tutelage to fully understand, that when women’s groups began to assemble in the mid 1800’s, they were addressing a litany of grievances. Property ownership, guardianship of their own children, the ability to keep the money that they earned, and even an end to slavery, to some extent, were a part of their early priorities. I would be “good and grown” before I understood that countless women were beaten brutally and even jailed, for advocating for these issues. Women were force-fed food with maggots, in response to hunger strikes, while incarcerated. It was the revelation of this treatment that shifted the national conscience about equitable treatment for women. Though, not all females benefited from this new found benevolence.
Ultimately, a version of the Anthony amendment was passed in 1919 and ratified in 1920. It was the 19th time the U.S. Constitution was amended and focused narrowly on a person’s right to vote, regardless of sex. What Black women and every other racial group of women, aside from white women, found is that their right to vote was not explicitly protected. Voting rights for other women would come, roughly, 45 years later. It’s a difficult and storied history, but one that deserves to be told, acknowledged and revered.