With this year’s 100th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, we’ve been adding to and updating section on women’s suffrage. In selecting and editing new entries, I was surprised to learn that there was such an active suffrage movement in Virginia. After all, Virginia was the first colony to specifically restrict women from voting, which it did by statute in 1699. And the General Assembly, in 1920, voted not to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guaranteed women the right to vote, only ratifying it in 1952.
My particular interest in building this section was understanding the role that Black women played in the movement because the white suffragists of Virginia were not inclusive in their quest for women’s right to vote. Rather than working in coalition with Black women, they cowed to antisuffragist fear-mongering that giving women the right to vote would encourage Black women to vote and endanger white domination at the ballot box. At the expense of nonwhite women, the president of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia Lila Meade Valentine openly declared support for white supremacy in order to win support for women’s suffrage. While the 19th Amendment guaranteed that the right to vote could not be denied on the basis of sex, in practice this applied only to white women. But in spite of being shunted out of the movement and protections of the 19th amendment, Black women continued to advocate for their rights. Millie Lawson Bethell Paxton organized Roanoke’s first Colored Women’s Voting Club and registered hundreds of Black women to vote in the 1920 presidential election. Paxton and other Black women suffragists like Rosa L. Dixon Boswer, saw suffrage as just one element of their activism. They were organizing for social welfare initiatives, juvenile justice reform, and access to quality education and healthcare. Theirs was less an individual rights’ project and more one of collective community liberation.
In addition to the above entries, I edited new biographies on these women in the movement:
Anna Whitehead Bodeker attempted to vote in the 1870s, citing the 14th and 15th amendments at the ballot box.
Mary Elizabeth Pidgeon dedicated herself to educating the electorate, especially new women voters.
Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis carried the Virginia banner at the 1913 national suffrage march in Washington, D.C.
Economist Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis Otey abandoned the Equal Suffrage League’s work for a state suffrage amendment in 1915 to join the National Woman’s Party, which was engaging in “unladylike militancy” like protesting and marching.