Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited

supremacy and a national woman suffrage campaign focused on enfranchising white women. Therefore, white suffragists from the South—radical for their culture only on gender issues—and national suffrage leaders—in rapid retreat from their role as champions of African Americans—banded together to advance their own interests by exploiting what late nineteenthcentury whites referred to as the South's “negro problem.” Seen in context, it is not surprising that northern leaders pursued so vigorously this strategy—which complemented efforts elsewhere in the nation to counter the political influence of new immigrants and other “undesirable” voters. Nor is it surprising that some southern suffragists proved to be quite reluctant to acknowledge the defeat of this “southern strategy” that gained for them strong national support and once seemed so promising as a means of prying woman suffrage out of southern legislators, unmoved by arguments based on justice and equality. Not for many more decades—and not before the development of a very different context in the wake of the civil rights movement—did the majority of American feminists seem to agree that “no women are free until all are free.” ³²

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