Category: change
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A disease of the white people
In her book Caste, Isabel Wilkerson tells how Albert Einstein was dismayed at the treatment of black people when he arrived in the United States from Germany in 1932. After he settled in Princeton, he found that Black residents were consigned to the worst parts of town, to segregated movie houses and to servant positions.…
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Keep working
“When you put your hand to the plow, you can’t put it down until you get to the end of the row,” Alice Paul, the suffragist, once said.
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Ordinary equality
“I never doubted that equal rights was the right direction,” Alice Paul, the suffragist, once said. “Most reforms, most problems are complicated. But to me there is nothing complicated about ordinary equality.”
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No spectator sport
“Life is not a spectator sport,” Jackie Robinson once said. “If you’re going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you’re wasting your life.”
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Use your anger
“If you’re not angry, you’re either a stone, or you’re too sick to be angry,” Maya Angelou once said. “You should be angry. “You must not be bitter. Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. It doesn’t do anything to the object of its displeasure. So, use that anger. “Yes. You write it.…
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Was the battle over on August 26, 1920?
In 1921, Alice Paul answered: “It is incredible to me that anyone should think that the fight for women’s equality has been won.” And, as we all know, the larger battle for diversity and equality in this country is still ongoing.
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Celebrate on August 26!
The Tennessee Senate passed the 19th Amendment, and then the Tennessee House of Representatives passed it on August 18. However, Tennessee Governor Roberts didn’t sign the Certification of Ratification until August 24. After that, the Certification of Ratification traveled by train to Washington, and Secretary of State Colby signed it on August 26. The 19th…
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A long social reform movement
“Women staged one of the longest social reform movements in the history of the United States,” says historian Kate Clarke Lemay in the July 10, 2020, issue of The New York Times. “This is not a boring history of nagging spinsters; it is a badass history of revolution staged by political geniuses.” Kate Clarke Lemay…
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Who couldn’t vote in 1891?
The Illinois state constitution stated: “Idiots, lunatics, paupers, felons and women shall not be entitled to vote.” That law, we think, provides an indication of the status of women in the United States—and of the need for women’s suffrage.
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The first women to vote
Who were the first women to vote in the United States? Almost a thousand years ago, women in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy helped select the chiefs who governed their council, says scholar Sally Roesch Wagner. These were women in the Mohawk, Oneida and other tribes that lived around the Great Lakes, and they helped decide matters…