4. A Pioneering Reformer’s Awful Racism
Elizabeth Cady Stanton left little doubt about her racial views. As she put it in a speech opposed to the 15th Amendment’s enfranchisement of black men and immigrants: “Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung, who do not know the difference between a monarchy and a republic, who cannot read the Declaration of Independence or Webster’s spelling book, making laws for… Susan B. Anthony … [The amendment] creates an antagonism everywhere between educated, refined women and the lower orders of men, especially in the South“.
Stanton played up awful anti-black racist themes with regularity, especially in the South. There, she argued to Southerners that female voters would maintain the social order because they would balance out black voters, whom she painted as ignorant, backward, and eager to assault white women. Not that there was much need to counter the black vote in the South: within a few years of the 15th Amendment’s passage, Southern states had effectively disenfranchised blacks. Voter suppression means ranging from removing blacks from voter rolls to lynching blacks who dared assert their voting rights, reduced the Southern black vote to insignificance for generations.
