More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Indigenous women of numerous Native Nations had rights, sovereignty and integrity long before European settlers arrived. This model of Native women’s rights gave suffragists the ammunition they needed, and the vision of something better.
“Laughter and contempt met my explanation of the white man’s hold upon his wife’s property.”
Can we do better than our foremothers? As we prepare to celebrate the centennial of the woman suffrage amendment, we have the opportunity to create a truth and reconciliation process, acknowledging that while the suffragists may have partially won the battle for the vote, they lost the war for injustice.
Movements don’t have a beginning and an end. They are dams historians build in the river of history to capture the flow in a particular moment, and historians regularly move the location of those dams. And history is defined less by what happened than by who tells the story. When we mark the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, it’s essential that we continue to investigate and explore the unheard and marginalized voices of the suffrage movement.
