Recasting the Vote

How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement

Cathleen D. Cahill

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781469659336
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

We think we know the story of women's suffrage in the United States: women met at Seneca Falls, marched in Washington, D.C., and demanded the vote until they won it with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. But the fight for women's voting rights extended far beyond these familiar scenes. From social clubs in New York's Chinatown to conferences for Native American rights, and in African American newspapers and pamphlets demanding equality for Spanish-speaking New Mexicans, a diverse cadre of extraordinary women struggled to build a movement that would truly include all women, regardless of race or national origin. In Recasting the Vote, Cathleen D. Cahill tells the powerful stories of a multiracial group of activists who propelled the national suffrage movement toward a more inclusive vision of equal rights. Cahill reveals a new cast of heroines largely ignored in earlier suffrage histories: Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša), Laura Cornelius Kellogg, Carrie Williams Clifford, Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, and Adelina "Nina" Luna Otero-Warren. With these feminists of color in the foreground, Cahill recasts the suffrage movement as an unfinished struggle that extended beyond the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. As we celebrate the centennial of a great triumph for the women's movement, Cahill's powerful history reminds us of the work that remains.

[ PART I ]

Prelude and Parades

1890–1913

[ CHAPTER 1 ]

Woman versus the Indian

Gertrude Simmons Bonnin

During the summer of 1890, fourteen-year-old Gertrude Simmons (later Bonnin), or Gertie, as she was known, was on an extended visit home to the Yankton Sioux Reservation in southeastern South Dakota. The young Yankton Dakota girl had left home for a boarding school when she was only eight years old. She had been raised by her mother in what she later described as an idyllic traditional childhood, but one which was also desperately poor. The missionaries from White’s Institute in Indiana had lured her away with promises of bright red apples.¹ Her mother had not wanted her to go, and indeed, Gertie had been miserable at school. But she was also unhappy during the visit home. It had been three years since she had been back, and everything had changed. “I seemed to hang in the heart of chaos, beyond the touch or voice of human aid,” she remembered. Her brother was too old to understand her sorrow, and her mother, who had never been “on the inside of a schoolhouse,” could not comfort her. “I was neither a wee girl nor a tall one, neither a wild Indian nor a tame one. This deplorable situation was the effect of my brief course in the East, and the unsatisfactory ‘teenth’ in a girl’s years.” Her mother mourned for her, but their relationship was strained, the result of Gertie having left at such a young age. Her sense of not belonging at home was precisely what federal policy makers hoped to achieve with the boarding school policies that they implemented in the late nineteenth century.²

Another traveler to South Dakota that summer was Susan B. Anthony, leading light of the suffrage movement, who came to canvass the state along with two young workers for the cause, Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt. They represented the National American Woman Suffrage Association, or NAWSA (pronounced Nah-saw), which suffragists had formed in 1890 by merging two earlier organizations and healing a twenty-year split in the movement. They were campaigning for the woman suffrage referendum that was on the ballot for the state’s fall elections. They recognized the vote in South Dakota as part of their broader movement to enfranchise white women on a state-by-state basis, a strategy that had been particularly successful in western states and territories, beginning with the Wyoming Territory in 1869.

A few months later, the year 1890 became an infamous one in the history of American conquest. In the deep cold of late December, U.S. cavalry troops were placed on high alert by officials alarmed by large groups of Lakota people who had gathered for the Ghost Dance. Intercepting Big Foot’s band of Lakota camped along Wounded Knee Creek, the cavalry took up positions on the high ground and readied their weapons. As they aggressively disarmed the Lakota men, a scuffle broke out and the cavalry opened fire into the camp, killing almost three hundred men, women, and children. Their bodies were thrown into a mass grave while a photographer documented the gruesome scene.

A young girl’s difficult summer back from school, a suffragists’ speaking tour, and a horrific mass killing may seem unrelated other than having occurred in the same time and place. Thinking about them together, however, reveals that people of color were always at the heart of the debates over suffrage. In large part this was because women of color were generating important ideas about women’s rights and their place in the nation. But it was also because white suffragists constantly invoked race in their speeches, writings, and activism.

After the Civil War, as the federal government consolidated its conquest of Native nations in the American West, Native children like Gertie often bore the brunt of the offensive as they were taken from their communities to be raised by strangers. Seeking to “break up the tribal relation,” policy makers argued that removing Native children from their “uncivilized” parents and placing them in federally run or missionary-run boarding schools was “a kindly cruel surgery that hurts that it may save.”³ Child removal policies were part and parcel of a larger plan to destroy Native nations and incorporate Indigenous people into the American citizenry as individuals. By 1902 the government operated twenty-five off-reservation boarding schools, dozens of on-reservation boarding schools, and hundreds of day schools. Their mission was to educate Native children in “civilized” ways, teaching the men to be farmers and the women to be housewives who would raise the next generation of Native children as American citizens.⁴

Policy makers developed a variety of other programs that supported the goal of “Americanizing the First American,” as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin would later call it. Their most important objective was to break up the political power and land bases that Native nations held in common under their treaty rights. The General Allotment Act of 1887, also known as the Dawes Act, divided communally held reservation lands and assigned parcels to individuals while selling off the “excess” to white settlers. Congress also passed a series of other laws and orders attacking Native cultures and political structures. These policies outlawed sacred dances and other religious ceremonies, dissolved tribal governments, coerced men to cut their hair, and policed marriage practices.

All of this was in service of opening up Indigenous land for white settlers. Indeed, South Dakota, the state that surrounded Gertie’s Yankton Reservation, was a new name for an old place, ironically drawn from the people whom white settlers were seeking to replace. Initially part of what the United States called the Dakota Territory, by 1889 it had been split into two, with Congress approving the petitions for the statehood of North and South Dakota. That same year, with the Sioux Agreement, the government had divided the Great Sioux Reservation, which constituted roughly a third of western South Dakota, into six smaller reservations tied to specific bands. With the Dawes Act already in place, whites assumed that as Indians received their allotments in fee simple, those reservations would disappear and their members would become U.S. citizens indistinguishable from their white neighbors—or, if Indians were unable to adjust to the new circumstances, they would die out and disappear.⁵

The first elections in the new state in 1890 reflected this vision of settlement and assimilation. That summer was the hottest and driest on record, but despite the weather, speakers feverishly canvassed the state. The white male voters of South Dakota were considering a number of questions that year, including moving the state capital and raising the state debt limit from $100,000 to $500,000 to encourage internal improvements.

The ballot included two referenda about voting: one asking voters whether to enfranchise women and the other supporting the enfranchisement of Indians who had separated from their Native nations.⁶ Both turned on the question of belonging and the mechanisms of assimilation. While race was not mentioned in the former, everyone assumed it meant white women, just as sex was not mentioned in the latter, but everyone assumed it meant Native men. The status of Native women was largely ignored in the debate over the referenda.

Americans used the right to vote to encourage the destruction of tribal communities and to measure the advancement of “civilization”: until Native people renounced their tribal connection, they were ineligible to vote. This was written into the U.S. Constitution, including in the Fourteenth Amendment, which distinguished “Indians not taxed” from those who willingly participated in the U.S. system as possessive individuals. Earlier territories that had achieved statehood, like Michigan and Wisconsin, had followed the same approach. Those state constitutions had granted suffrage rights to many people of mixed Indigenous and French descent who appeared “civilized.”⁷

In South Dakota, it seemed that individual allotment of the reservations would happen in the very near future, making the question of Native suffrage a fairly immediate one. The authors of the South Dakota referendum had used very convoluted language, however, which created great confusion at the ballot box. Voters were asked to respond in the affirmative or the negative to the statement “No Indian who sustains tribal relations, receives support in whole or in part from the government of the United States, or holds untaxable land in severalty, shall be permitted to vote at any election held under this constitution.”⁸ Newspaper editors carefully explained that those who did not want “uncivilized” Indians who were living in “tribal relations” to vote should support this statement affirmatively, while a response of “no” would sink the restrictive clause and allow all Indians to vote.⁹

Initially, white women’s suffrage seemed like a sure winner. South Dakotans had originally wanted to write it into the constitution they had sent to Congress for approval, but the territorial governor had convinced them that it would hurt their chances for statehood. So instead they agreed to hold a referendum on woman suffrage in the new state’s first election. The agriculturalists who made up the Farmers’ Alliance and the Knights of Labor had invited the venerable Susan B. Anthony to campaign in their state, promising that their party would include a suffrage plank in the platform. But politics intervened. When the Alliance and the Knights joined the new Independent Party, they left the women’s suffrage plank out of their platform, claiming it was too controversial. Nevertheless, Anthony had already made plans to campaign and had also invited Carrie Chapman Catt and Anna Howard Shaw to join her. It was to be Catt’s and Shaw’s first national campaign, and they were eager to work with their hero, Aunt Susan, who had been leading the suffrage fight for decades. And so they went. In the future, the two young women would shepherd the Nineteenth Amendment into the Constitution. But in 1890 they were fairly green apprentices just starting the work.¹⁰

Catt and Shaw found it outrageous that despite white women’s self-sufficiency and contributions to the territory’s settlement, they could not vote. Catt in particular emphasized the difficulties white women faced as they helped transform Lakota and Dakota lands into American space. “The state contains thousands of women farmers,” she reported, “young women, spinsters and widows who came here a few years ago, took up claims, improved them and are now full-fledged agriculturalists.”¹¹ Young families, after working all day, drove for miles in heavy lumber wagons just to see her talk. She was struck by the women’s youth and that most had a babe in arms.¹² On one occasion, she invited them to lay their bundles down on the floor behind her; she lectured with a dozen babies slumbering at her back. Other women impressed Catt with their ingenuity and strength, like the two who found her on the road with a broken wagon wheel and improvised a fix before accompanying her to her meeting. Or the widow with six children who pitched hay all day, cooked dinner, and milked the cows before hitching her team to drive to Catt’s lecture.

The suffragists experienced many moments of outrage during the campaign. Spurned by the Farmers’ Alliance, they attended the Republican Party’s convention. Generally, Republicans supported woman suffrage, but in South Dakota the party did not offer the women a warm welcome. The convention floor was packed with men from across the state, including several Native men—according to Shaw, they were wearing blankets and sporting feathers in their hair. And to her great indignation, the white male politicians greeted them respectfully and gave them seats near the front of the room. The white women, she remarked, received no such courtesy. Relegated to the back of the room, Catt had to stand on a chair to see above the crowd and report the convention’s proceedings to the other women.¹³

White suffragists had long contrasted white womanhood, which they saw as the highest form of civilization, with uncivilized, crude manhood as a rhetorical tactic. In South Dakota, they noted that Native men were not the only men the state’s politicians had elevated over women. There were also Russian-born men who spoke no English but wore sashes mocking Susan B. Anthony, Shaw indignantly remembered. They, too, had been enfranchised before native-born white women. Although the question of woman suffrage and suffrage for Native people had been left to referenda after statehood, South Dakota’s constitution had allowed for so-called alien suffrage, the enfranchisement of noncitizen immigrants who had declared their intent to become citizens—“first-papers” voters, they were called. By 1900 eleven states had similar laws, down from a high of twenty-two in the 1870s. While the suffragists did not mention that law specifically, the actions of the Russian immigrants (whether citizens or not) who flaunted their voting rights particularly galled them.¹⁴

When the election was held in November, white suffragists were further outraged by the results. Though voters rejected both referenda, it appeared that more men in South Dakota were willing to enfranchise Indians than women. Newspapers interpreted this as an accident due to the confusing language of the referendum. Appearing on the ballot as a negative statement (“No Indian who sustains tribal relations … shall be permitted to vote”), it required voters to cast an affirmative vote. But many South Dakotans voted no, thus casting a vote for enfranchising all Native people in the state, both “civilized” and “uncivilized.” “The voters of Pennington County labored under the same mistake in regard to the Indian franchise as did the people of this county,” lamented the Daily Deadwood Pioneer Times. “As a result, Pennington casts a majority in favor of the Indians possessing the right of suffrage.”¹⁵

Rather than seeing their struggles as similar, white suffragists read the results as an insult. Shaw told of encountering Indian men wrapped in blankets who spoke in Lakota and was furious that South Dakota’s white men seemed more willing to enfranchise them than the white women of the state. Native women seem to have been forgotten in the conversation.

But there was little love in South Dakota for Native people.

The Ghost Dance was a ceremony that promised to return the Indigenous world to the days before white settlers had come. It had spread eastward from Paiute country in Nevada to the Lakota. The dance held out hope and balm for people who had witnessed their world being torn apart and offered a way to reverse those ravages. Many bands, smaller groups within the Lakota usually bound together by kinship, moved away from the government agencies to the remote corners of the reservations. There they could dance in peace, away from federal officials’ eyes and draconian rules against religious ceremonies. Those same officials, many of them ignorant of the Native cultures they sought to destroy, were afraid that the gatherings to dance were pretexts to prepare for war. Reporters fanned the fear throughout November and December 1890 with headlines describing the Ghost Dancers as gathering for an attack.

Everyone was on edge.

Just a few days after Christmas, orders went out to the U.S. Seventh Cavalry to bring the bands back to the agency on the Standing Rock Reservation. The Seventh held a grudge against the Lakota due to the Battle of the Greasy Grass, known to white Americans as the B...