At the beginning of Part 1 of the videos, a Lucretia Mott made an impression on me: “Not every man is a tyrant, but the law gives every man the right of tyranny.” It was interesting way to look at the problem, and I had never looked at it this way before. However, following the theme of the past few classes, my view of the women’s rights movement completely changed. While we had been taught that abolitionism and women’s rights went hand in hand in high school, we never discussed how the women’s rights movement turned racist. Even though the thought process of the shift towards racism was completely morally wrong, one could see how the movement went down that path. Before the Civil War, the women’s rights movement and abolitionism were fighting for the same rights, so it made sense for them to team up and fight for freedom together. After the end of the war, though, black men were given the rights that both groups fought for. It seems like the shift towards racism was almost out of jealousy, and the way this racism manifested itself was upsetting, to say the least. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the most respected women in the fight for women’s suffrage, referred to African-Americans by using racial epithets, yet she is still held in high regard in history classes across America.
Women’s Suffrage
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I was incredibly shocked by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Another smear placed on my elementary school history class… Thanks 101. I honestly had never thought about the white women of the suffrage movement being racist before now. Is it wrong to think less of them because of that? Clearly, they still did good things, but idk. Might not get a T-shirt now, yknow?
I hate that the US had to CHOOSE a movement. That the abolition movement and the feminist movement couldn’t coexist. Even now, people bicker about what issue should get the headline. People argue about who has it worse.
The racist undertones that existed in the women’s movement doesn’t take away from what they accomplished, but it does raise questions about the morality behind their fight for equality. I was surprised that women, like Stanton, couldn’t see that the abolitionist movements were fighting for the same thing. The video really showed the parts of history that are often ignored in order to build up historic figures.
Something I learned about last year in my FYS was the term kairos and I think this definitely applies to your comment and the rest of these articles/videos. Kairos is known as the perfect timing for decision or action. I think it is interesting to look at kairos especially with the women’s movement. Some activists thought changing the country all at once and kairos was evident but others thought change over time was more realistic and kairos was not present. With the end of the civil war, the nation lost a lot of lives and change seemed immense, so maybe kairos was not felt then, but I think it was a missed opportunity looking back now. Of course it is easy to say now, because I did not live thought that time, but it is still an important point to make.
Yes adding on to the video and the topic about how suffragettes were prejudiced against black men, I read once that Suffragists used racial rhetoric in order to push their own agenda. They said that women needed to vote in order to cancel out the 15th amendment and overall used messages that were there to push down African American Voters.
I also was very much so intrigued by that quote at the beginning of the vote. The fact that men had the ability to act as Tyrants against women is bad in of itself. I, however, did not like the comparison in the article to women’s suffrage and slavery.