by ©2019 Sarah Becker Woman’s Suffrage Amendment When the enslaved rebelled against their master[s] they struggled. To struggle, as defined by The Oxford American Dictionary: (1) make forceful or violent efforts to get free of restraint. (2) try hard under difficulties. (3) contend, fight. (4) make one’s way with difficulty. (5) have difficulty gaining recognition or a living. Do men really believe that woman’s suffrage, the passage of the 1919 Woman’s Suffrage Amendment was not a struggle? “Susan B. Anthony’s self-imposed task, for almost half a century, has been to secure equal rights for her crusade women—social, civil and political,” Ida Hasted Harper penned in 1906. “When she began her crusade woman in social life was ‘cabin’d, cribb’d, confined to an extent which can scarcely be conceived. In law she was but little better than a slave; in politics a mere cipher…Is there an example in all history of either man or woman who devoted half a century of the hardest, most persistent labor for one reform?” “We little dreamed…that half a century later we would be compelled to leave the finish of the [voting rights] battle to another generation of women,” Anthony wrote in 1902. Susan B. Anthony met cohort Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1851; the same year former slave Sojourner Truth delivered her Ain’t I a Woman speech. Women earned the right to vote only 100 years ago, 24 days before the June 28, 1919, Paris Peace Conference concluded. It took a world war, not a civil war for women to achieve parity. In some World War I industries, such as aircraft, the employment of women rose from negligible proportions in 1914 to 19% in 1918. The percentage of women working in other war related industries was higher, almost double. “We have made partners of the…
The Lost Cause and Jim Crow Written by ©2018 Sarah Becker In 1888 Congress established the U.S. Department of Labor; former Union General and U.S. Senator Benjamin Harrison (R-IN) won the Presidency (1889-1893), and the National Farmers’ Alliance and Industrial Union or Southern Alliance emerged. Business gave way to industry; William Burroughs invented the first commercially successful adding and listing machine and farmers, including the one million member Colored Farmers’ Organization, advocated for greater control of railroaders, bankers and land speculators. In Alexandria, as in Jackson, Mississippi, the city approved a Confederate monument. The evangelical Alliance welcomed all who were “not obnoxious to the Constitution.” Harrison “held that a protective tariff [a tax on imports] is…wholesome and necessary.” He also dealt with election fraud and immigration. • “In many parts of our country…the colored…people…are by various devices deprived of any effective exercise of their political [and] civil rights,” Harrison continued. “The colored people did not intrude themselves upon us. They were brought here in chains….” He favored “National aid to education” and “a free and unmolested exercise of suffrage.” • “Closely connected with the subject of the tariff is that of the importation of foreign laborers under contracts of service to be performed here,” Harrison concluded. “In the earlier years of our history public agencies to promote immigration were common…Labor was scarce and fully employed….While our doors will continue open to proper immigration we do not need to issue special invitations to inhabitants of other countries.” Especially China. George Washington, America’s first President, was inaugurated in New York City on April 30, 1789. In his Address he spoke of “an indissoluble union…of duty…and the destiny of the republican model of government.” President Benjamin Harrison twice visited Mount Vernon, in 1889 and 1890. “[O]ur country now steps…into its second…