When historians note the limits of Reconstruction, they invariably point to failure of abolitionists and radical Republicans to secure women’s suffrage. The Fifteenth Amendment (1870), the last major Reconstruction amendment, prohibited states from barring citizens from voting based on race but infamously allowed prohibitions on gender to continue. Yet that compromise, Sinha contends, had little to do with the desires of antislavery radicals—many of them women, Black and white, who favored women’s suffrage—but instead with conservative reactionaries who were dead set on the “overthrow of Reconstruction.”
To make this argument, Sinha focuses on what she calls the “abolitionist feminism” of Black women like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who, she contends, fused Black rights with women’s rights. Their vision is positioned against the “feminism ‘pure and simple’” approach—focusing on women’s suffrage at the expense of Black rights—that came to define the more popular suffrage movement led by the white activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. While acknowledging Stanton’s and Anthony’s role in the antebellum abolitionist movement, Sinha underscores their fickle commitment to it.
After congressional Republicans struck out language from the Fifteenth Amendment that would have allowed women to vote, Stanton and Anthony actively campaigned against it. Worse, they allied with Democrats and began to couch their critiques in nakedly elitist, nativist, and racist language. Stanton argued that white women should not stomach “Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung”—referencing Irish, Black, German, and Chinese men—having access to the vote before educated white women like herself did.
By contrast, Harper and other Black suffragists insisted that women should support the Fifteenth Amendment, however compromised, then immediately fight for a new amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote. The racist strategy Stanton and Anthony pioneered reemerged when the next generation of suffragists took up their cause at the turn of the twentieth century. But Sinha argues that Harper and her Black suffragist successors, like Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell, better capture the “intersectional” abolitionist feminism pioneered in the early days of Reconstruction.