| | | Illustration by Hanna Barczyk |
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A century ago this month, women won the right to vote in America—on paper, at least. The landmark passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which secured female suffrage, was in truth a work in progress; like most modern American crusades for social reform, it was hobbled by deep and unresolved tensions grounded in racial and class segmentation. And women’s suffrage was in large part designed to exploit these divisions as a political calculation so that recalcitrant state legislatures, charged with endorsing the amendment, could rest assured that a certain kind of woman—white, well-to-do, and law-abiding—would make the most of the right to vote.
That history continues to haunt the effort to secure the franchise for the American populations at the greatest risk of losing its voting rights in the twenty-first century: nonwhite, poor, and formerly incarcerated women. So while we justly celebrate the long overdue accession of American women to the franchise, The New Republic staff writer Melissa Gira Grant says there’s still a great deal of work to be done in order to extend the substantive protections of the Nineteenth Amendment to all American women:
One hundred years on from “woman suffrage,” and women in the United States are still denied the right to vote, whether through outright disenfranchisement for past involvement with the criminal legal system, voter intimidation, bogus claims of “voter fraud,” or the realization—perhaps logical—that there isn’t much worth voting for in a political system that has so often failed and excluded them.... The women who remain locked out of the franchise are the fractured legacy of a fractured movement. |
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For suffrage pioneers Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, this state of fracture was achieved by design, Grant notes; after the Civil War, both activist leaders campaigned for the preeminence of voting rights for women over extending the franchise to former slaves and their descendants. Their joint appeal for an “educated suffrage” helped bolster the eventual adoption of literacy tests and other facially race-neutral bars to voting that would lay at the foundation of Jim Crow oppression in the former Confederacy over the next century. And you don’t have to look far on today’s grimly policed battery of new Jim Crow-style barriers to voting in Black, poor, and one-time incarcerated populations to see that same legacy playing out. Indeed, on August 18—the very day we observe the centenary of women’s suffrage—a federal appeals court is slated to hear a voting-rights case brought by two formerly incarcerated Black Florida women Rosemary McCoy and Shelia Singleton, who are arguing the state of Florida’s recent law mandating that erstwhile felons must make full financial restitution of all legal and administrative costs relating to their cases before they’re allowed to vote. McCoy and Singleton allege that the law functions as an unconstitutional poll tax—and abridges their Nineteenth Amendment right to vote.
They’re far from alone. While gender breakdowns of people who fall under felony disenfranchisement are hard to come by—the most recent count is two decades old—it seems clear, as Grant writes, that women who’ve been convicted of felonies could well be “the fastest growing group of United States citizens to be denied the right to vote” since the last four decades have seen the overall number of women incarcerated in federal and state prisons or local jails skyrocket “by 750 percent—from 26,378 in 1980 to 225,060 in 2017. If you add women on parole or under probation, that number goes up to 1.3 million.”
McCoy and Singleton are represented by Nancy Abudu, deputy legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center. In an interview with Grant, she explains that she didn’t start out pressing a Nineteenth Amendment claim in the case partly because case law stemming from the amendment is comparatively thin, at least in contrast to the vast body of race-based voting rights litigation. “It was such a matter of first impressions for the courts, meaning it was the first time they were even really considering that amendment in a contemporary time,” Abudu says. Still, the gender logic of the case seemed all too plain, so Abudu found herself rethinking her approach.
After preparing a talk for a law school conference marking the anniversary of women’s suffrage, “looking at that history … If not now, then really, when?” And tying it as she does in the suit to the rights of low-income Black women, she said, “That was motivated from the history and the fact that that is, in some ways, the unfinished business of the Nineteenth Amendment.”
Over a pending election cycle that’s already seen historic efforts from the right to suppress the vote—from the president’s nonstop, and unfounded, rhetorical assaults on voting by mail to the operational kneecapping of the U.S. Postal Service—that unfinished business is nothing short of urgent. With any luck, its brutal legacies won’t extend into the middle of the present American century.
—Chris Lehmann, editor |
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| | | Illustration by Hanna Barczyk |
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