The thing about the two design strategies I mentioned was that the non-purist one (Worse Is Better) stated that, while it’s a “worse” approach from the purist point of view (The Right Thing), it’s actually going to achieve a better outcome than the purist strategy, sooner, even when measured by purist criteria of success.

I originally had a long response about this where I tried to go into some detail about what the two strategies suggested. Probably better, however, just to pose a question: did the passage of the 15th amendment significantly alter the fortunes, and later success, of those struggling for women’s suffrage?

I don’t know the answer to this question; but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were clear evidence that the suffrage of blacks had a positive affect on the struggle for women’s suffrage - if there seemed clear evidence that things could well have been harder, or significantly delayed, without the passage of the 15th amendment, when it was passed. (I wish I had a scholarly library near me, I would try to look into it.)

I have another comment to make, not directed at Maia. Couldn’t we look at this conflict the other way, where there were two groups, abolitionists and feminists, working together, but an opportunity arose for the abolitionists to achieve a goal for their own group right away, and they (or Douglass, not familiar with the details) took it? It might be wrong that, where human rights are concerned, one group should consider its own agenda more important than another’s; but by the same token, how can a group, for whom the time has not ripened, tell a group whose time has come, in however small a measure, that they should deny it because not everyone can join in? To me that sounds like saying that one’s agenda trumps the other’s, but in the other direction. Wouldn’t a more appropriate response be to throw all weight behind that cause, which will have a success in a short time, or seems likely to? In other words, isn’t it just as valid to expect the generosity to be exercised in the other direction? In fact, maybe it was, I don’t know the history; did the women suffragists go out and fight for the 15th amendment, or did they utterly refuse to fight for it because it held nothing for them?

It’s also not okay to feed into racism, misogyny, or homophobia to achieve supposedly practical ends. That’s not solidarity.

True solidarity is standing with your allies and making their fight your fight. It is not keeping quiet for the good of the movement; that crap is divisive. It is standing with your allies, calling each other on our shit, and remembering that sacrificing one group for expediency is just so much crap.

And if someone won’t stand with you after expecting your loyalty, it’s fine to protest that and be angry about it. It’s even fine to withdraw your support from them. It’s not okay to buy into hateful rhetoric to then try and achieve your own ends, which is what the anti-woman suffragists did, the White women in the suffrage movment did, and what some progressives do all the fucking time.

If, say, the NAACP decided to endorse anti-choice policies tomorrow, I’d be angry and I’d take them to task for it. I wouldn’t go around using racism and race paranoia as a weapon.

Here’s the irony: we’re expected to shut up and spare the fee-fee’s of Whites who act like assholes, men who act like assholes, and straights who act like assholes in order to maintain a facade of unity, so that the people in power can throw crumbs to a select few. Yet when it comes to true unity, those assholes would be taken to task, and we’d fight together for our fair share. That’s the difference.

Seems to me like a similar situation, but I’m a long way away here.

What is particularly interesting is the other major split”“the Republican party was anti-slavery, pro-Black (male) suffrage; the Democratic party was pro-immigrant, pro (White) female suffrage. The groups each party claimed to represent had more in common with each other than they’d care to admit; they also had more to gain by fighting alongside each other, demanding and working towards full civil and human rights for all. It’s sad that they spent time fighting with each other over crumbs. And let’s not forget”“the people who were elected and in power in each party (and who voted) were White men (yes, Black men got the vote before women, but it’s not as if they could actually use it, thanks to violence and intimidation). And we’re still throwing our support behind parties that don’t give two shits about us. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I thought this was worth repeating

Still, Train was known for his anti-Black suffrage views, and made these views clear during the tour, which happened after the two rival organizations were formed. Anthony herself acknowledged this. She replied to criticism of her association with the then-pro-slavery Democrats (and Train specifically), “”Why should we not accept all in favor of woman suffrage to our platform and association even though they be rabid pro-slavery Democrats?” (Because many of your sisters are Black, that’s why!) While I understand the feeling–she tore Garrison and his ilk a new one for their hypocrisy in turning their backs on women after using women’s sweat and support for universal MALE sufferage–she did exactly what they did.

Not that Stone and Blackwell were any better. Blackwell appealed to racist paranoia as a way to promote women’s suffrage: “If you are to share the future government of your states with a race you deem naturally and hopelessly inferior, avert the social chaos, which seems to you so imminent, by utilizing the intelligence and patriotism of the wives and daughters of the South.” It does mystify me how he and Stone, and their wing of the movement, was seen as pro-Black in this light.

What is particularly interesting is the other major split–the Republican party was anti-slavery, pro-Black (male) suffrage; the Democratic party was pro-immigrant, pro (White) female suffrage. The groups each party claimed to represent had more in common with each other than they’d care to admit; they also had more to gain by fighting alongside each other, demanding and working towards full civil and human rights for all. It’s sad that they spent time fighting with each other over crumbs. And let’s not forget–the people who were elected and in power in each party (and who voted) were White men (yes, Black men got the vote before women, but it’s not as if they could actually use it, thanks to violence and intimidation). And we’re still throwing our support behind parties that don’t give two shits about us. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Same as it ever was. Same as it is today.

Heart

Heart

It is commonly considered that Anthony “threw her lot behind” Train and invited him to tour Kansas with her speaking for women’s suffrage. Letters held by the Stowe-Day Foundation from Isabella Beecher Hooker have since revealed that it was Henry Blackwell, husband of Lucy Stone, who actually conspired to have Train join Anthony and when the experiment turned out to be a disaster he pinned it all on Anthony.

Henry Blackwell wrote in The Women’s Journal, “After my wife and I returned from our campaign work in Kansas, George Francis Train was invited into the State by Miss Anthony…”

However, in December 1980 Isabella Beecher Hooker had a conversation with Blackwell reported in complete confidence to her friend Susan Howard, who kept her confidentiality and the contents of the letters were only revealed after her death.

Hooker wrote, “Mr. Blackwell & Gov. Robinson & two or three others who were conducting the W.S. campaign thought it might be well for Susan to accompany Train & so get democratic votes while at the same time she could perhaps keep him straight on the negro question.”

Because for two years Isabella Beecher Hooker had heard the story spread that the association of Train with the movement was Anthony’s idea, she was stunned at Blackwell’s account. She wrote, “I could hardly believe my ears when Mr. Blackwell quietly told me this, the beginning of the story, & so I waited a while & then asked him if I understood him rightly in saying thus & so, he said I did & then went on to show me that the thing didn’t work out well, that they lost more republican votes for W. Suffrage by Train’s advocacy than they gained themselves and were disgusted with the experiment.”

Henry Blackwell and Lucy Stone publicly joined with republicans and abolishionists in blaming Anthony for the Train association. Elizabeth Cady Stanton said that she and Anthony did not “see through the game of the politicians until nearly the end of the canvas.”

Whatever version of events you choose to believe, I think this revelation is interesting and seems more congruent with Anthony’s rigid anti-slavery and pro-suffrage ethics than the Blackwell version of events.

So when I read about the National Women’s Party asking Ida B. Wells and other Black suffragists to march in the back of the 1913 protest, lest the delicate sensibilities of White southerners be offended, it turns my stomach. And when Stanton and Anthony threw their lot behind the likes of George Francis Train, it didn’t bode well for the women’s movement in general. (Train was for “educated” suffrage, which would have excluded many Blacks who had been forbidden from getting an education. Women first was his motto. He had also, during Charles’ Sumners 1862 speech in favor of slave emancipation, gotten up to the podium and voiced his disagreement.) The National Women’s Suffrage Association was quite happy to bar Black women from its Altanta convention, and allowed chapters to ban Black women if they wanted to.

Now, I suppose we could insist that Black women just stay quiet for the good of the movement, but what good would it do them? Why would this ever be in their interest? Keeping quiet and waiting your turn doesn’t do jack shit. I can’t blame suffragists for being bitter over their exclusion, but it wasn’t just White women who felt the anger over this. Instead of reaching out, many White suffragists acted like the very people who had betrayed them. Who can blame Black women when they say they don’t feel feminism speaks for them? And I say this as a pretty damn militant feminist. There’s a long history of this.

You have to understand the politics of the abolitionist movement to understand the ultimate conflict between Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Frederick Douglass was biracial, the child of a white man and a black mother. He was born into slavery. As a freed slave he, along with other freed slaves, became part of the abolitionist movement led by William Lloyd Garrison, who was white. Garrison was *way* radical. He advocated for Northern secession from the Union, characterizing the Constitution as “a covenant with death and an agreement with Hell” because it permitted slavery (go him). He once burned the Constitution publicly. He urged abolitionists and all citizens not to vote because to vote was to endorse the covenant with death (i.e., the Constitution) and he opposed the Civil War until Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Really, his politics were consistent with anarchist politics, which makes sense because he did not recognize the Constitution as a valid document so long as slavery existed anywhere in the nation.

The interesting thing was, he was also a pacifist and wholly nonviolent. He did not approve of any sort of force or violence. He believed that human beings are basically good (he was a Quaker. I love Quakers.) and that they could be won over by sound logic, persuasion, intelligent debate.

Conflicts emerged amongst black and white abolitionists, some of them having to do with differences about the role black men would play in the movement, some having to do with tactics and strategies. Freed slave abolitionists became frustrated and resentments developed because the white abolitionists often seemed to want them just to tell their personal stories in rallies and meetings rather than taking more of an active role in leadership of the movement. Freed slaves in the movement felt frustrated because they felt Garrison and others were too optimistic about human nature, were too radical, too theoretical, too doctrinaire about things (any of this sounding familiar to anybody?), whereas, they were trying to help freed slaves who had escaped to the North to keep body and soul together, to have food and shelter and work, in other words, with urgent daily needs.

The conflicts deepened and really escalated when Frederick Douglass and others in the movement, mostly freed slaves, began to openly advocate for violence, including Civil War, something Garrison and others were very much opposed to.

So the country was really getting very nervous and upset about the Abolitionists. Here you had women speaking and leading and agitating for suffrage, freed slaves advocating for violence, Garrison urging people not to vote and calling the Constitution a “covenant with death.” You had Douglass behaving scandalously at times; he had a close relationship with his white secretary for years and she lived with he and his wife. He would be seen out strolling around with his secretary on his arm getting everybody all fired up. The more visible and outrageous the Abolitionists seemed to be, the more controversial they were with the result that they were increasingly attacked, had their printing presses burned, were beaten and murdered. Internally, there were all of these divisions over what movement priorities would be and over strategies and tactics with the different factions blaming the others for the increasing hostility to the movement.

After the war, Douglass and others believed it most important to focus on black men’s voting rights, feeling as though black slaves wouldn’t really be free until black men had the vote, and that women’s suffrage was unnecessarily controversial and could be dealt with later, after black men were enfranchised. This was the final straw which split the movement wide open and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. started a woman-only suffrage organization to oppose the 15th Amendment so long as it omitted the word “sex”, — I forget the name of that organization — and Lucy Stone, Douglass and others started a suffrage organization which included men and which supported the 15th Amendment even though it did not give women, black or white, the vote, with the idea that after black men got the vote, attentions could be turned to women’s suffrage. Stanton’s and Anthony’s woman-only group was then publicly derided and excoriated for being “manhaters” and “hermaphrodites” and was viewed as the radical fringe, then, with Douglass and Stone’s group appearing to be more moderate. There’s an interesting and enlightening story about the meeting where Frederick Douglass tried one last time to convince Susan B. and Elizabeth and their group that women’s suffrage could wait, that it was the moment for black men and there’s would come after. He said something like, “When women are dragged out into the street and lynched, that’s when we’ll need the ballot for women. ” A woman yelled out, “Doesn’t that happen to black women though?” And Douglass said, “Right, but that’s not because she’s a woman, that’s because she is black.”

Anyway, the rest is history. The Fifteenth Amendment passed. Susan B. and Elizabeth S. were devastated by Douglass’s and others’ betrayal. Women would not get the vote for another 50 years, long after Susan B. and Elizabeth and most of the suffragist leaders had died. A lot has been said about what happened after the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. I will say this. The 15th Amendment passed in 1870. Elizabeth and Susan were, like I say, devasted. Nevertheless, in 1884 when Douglass caused a huge stir by marrying a white woman 2o years his junior– something for which he had no support, including from his children and family — it was Elizabeth who was in his and his new wife’s corner, publishing the announcement prominently in a publication she edited together with a photo, if I’m not mistaken (which alienated Susan B. for a while; she was always frustrated by Elizabeth’s comparative radicalism.) After that, the rift amongst the two factions began to heal.

I posted this from memory and some may not be exactly right, but in general, this is what happened.

Heart

“[..] but the whole point is that our struggles aren’t divisble. Therefore any claim that one struggle should wait till another struggle is resolved will always be insupportable.”

This seems right in theory, but is this really how things work in practice?

I make sense of these kinds of questions in terms of building software. (Guess what I do for a living.) When building software, it is all about available resources. If you want to build the perfect program, with a fully spec’ed out catologue of functionality that will take care of the needs of all potential users, that’s a fine goal; but building it is often way, way more difficult than building a small program that only makes a few people happy and then adding additional features on top of that to address others’ needs, as time goes on.

The archetypal debate over these opposing design methods was generally referred to as Worse Is Better (or Worse Is Better vs The Right Thing), in case anyone’s interested in looking that up.

A major contention of the Worse Is Better side was that designing things their way actually made it easier to reach the goal (or most of the goal) of the Right-Thing-style designers. Right-Thing design was too monolithic, too inflexible, too vulnerable.

Another claim of the Worse Is Better side was more or less along the lines that their way made it easier to recruit new users. The idea was that for a small program, the investment in design energy, and in users learning energy, was less than for a huge, monolithic, one-program-for-all type design. Granted at first the number of users (the number benefited) was small, but because the program was small and easily adjusted to new needs, it was easy to demo the working achievements of the Worse Is Better design - meanwhile, Right Thing designers were frequently stuck with promises about what their design would do, once it was finished. Usually, people like something that works, and want to have it changed in small ways to fit their needs. A snowball effect is more likely, in other words.

Ann Bartow:

“If leaders like Douglas, Beecher, Cady Stanton and Anthony could have unified behind the message that *all* adults should be able to vote, how much stonger that message would have been, and perhaps universal suffrage (or as close as we have come to it so far) would have arrived faster.”

It could have been delayed a lot longer.

My impression of Douglas deciding not to push the sex thing was that he did so out of tactics (or was it strategy). While everyone banding together to promote universal adult suffrage was/is theoretically sound, it could also have had the effect of unifying all of the enemies of suffrage for this or that group; and I think this is something that activists must consider, not just out of tactical or strategic expediency, but out of their devotion to their particular cause. Of course, it’s another thing to claim that one group’s claim on suffrage is less than another’s, all such arguments tend to sound specious, from a theoretical point of view.

In my view, more powerful still than all those groups banding together to promote universal adult suffrage, would have been all those groups banding together to promote one group’s suffrage, and then once that was achieved (acceptably achieved, there is always more one could achieve), together moving on to the next group’s suffrage. But this sounds to me almost as pie-in-the-sky as all groups banding together, agreeing harmoniously on an “adult suffrage”, and making that work, even slowly.

In 1867 Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment “freeing the slaves” and defining citizens as male. Also in 1867 Kansas campaigned for both black and woman suffrage and both lost, and there was more support for black male suffrage in states that dropped women’s suffrage.

One year later in 1868, black men were granted the right to vote by the Fifteenth Amendment and women would work another fifty years to get their voting rights back. In 1776 women could vote in the newly formed US, but by 1787 every state save for New Jersey stripped women of voting rights; NJ revoked women’s suffrage in 1807. (thank you C-SPAN)

Then as now, dropping women’s rights is generally more expedient for any group of males seeking human rights. We’re just not seen to be quite as human as men are yet.

It’s easy see parallels in some of the political issues of today. Democrats who want to sell out women on reproductive rights, or homosexuals on rights generally, because it is seen as necessary to their political success, are wrong. Divisive strategies that inhibit rather than promote social justice for a particular group of people harm everyone in the long run.

Since the early ’70s, however, I’ve always remembered with chagrin that Douglass was willing for expediency’s sake not to argue for including the word “sex” in the Fifteenth Amendment

Part of my problem in understand the whole debate, is that I don’t understand why it all had to be so either/or. I don’t understand why Frederick Douglass couldn’t have campaigned to include the word ’sex’ in the fifteenth amendment and for black suffrage. I don’t understand why the fourteenth and fifteenth amendment couldn’t have passed without breaking down those bonds.

I guess I’m used to fighting for things we’re not going to win, and always fighting for more. It doesn’t seem to me to be something to break up solidarity on.

A win is more important, and you can tell other people to bugger off, when your struggle is coherently divisible from theirs.

In a way I’m agreeing with Robert to disagree with him, but ultimately I think this is true, but the whole point is that our struggles aren’t divisble. Therefore any claim that one struggle should wait till another struggle is resolved will always be insupportable.

don’t understand your distinctions between divisible and indivisible causes. They seem more like matters of framing than any kind of absolute. If you can argue for “adult human” suffrage, why not “monogamous marriage”?

Since the early ’70s, however, I’ve always remembered with chagrin that Douglass was willing for expediency’s sake not to argue for including the word “sex” in the Fifteenth Amendment.

His argument with his friend Cady-Stanton and some other feminists was extremely public, leading to a damaging split between old allies in the abolition and suffragist movemetns, and creating a resentment that continued for quite some time, although Cady-Stanton loyally and publcly backed him in 1884 when he married his second wife, a white woman who had been his secretary, to shrieks of outrage from whites, and many blacks.

(Like many men who are public feminists, his private life left much to be desired in the equal rights realm. His first wife never learned to read and write, and he never encouraged her, as well as maintaining relations with a mistress.)

Interestingly enough, he himself had earlier split with other abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison over the very issue of suffrage, including women’s suffrage, because Garrison felt that white women’s votes would assist slavery to maintain its grasp. Garrison and some other abolitionists opposed suffrage as an abolitionist demand whatsoever.

Douglass’s bad choice in the matter of the amendents is one to be remembered these days by us all, at a time when many people - some of them people of color - argue against extending the rights of marriage to gays.

I’d like to think that he took the stance he did because he feared that neither blacks nor women would get the right to vote. But the written record offers no proof of that. But we all make errors in judgment, both political and otherwise. It’s worth remembering that Douglass’s support was one of the reasons that women’s suffrage became part of the declaration of principles in Seneca Falls in 1848. And he supported what for the time were radical measures for women’s right which went well beyond suffrage.

Moreover, after the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were passed, Douglass returned to his previous strong support of women’s suffrage - and of women’s rights in general. His last meeting before his heart failed him in 1895 was with a group dedicated to getting women the right to vote.

First cut at it:

A win is more important, and you can tell other people to bugger off, when your struggle is coherently divisible from theirs.

As you noted, black men got the vote - and a fat lot of good it did them. They ended up not being able to keep the right de facto, even as it was upheld de jure.

Suffrage would appear to be an example of a circumstance where the struggles were not divisible. What was being fought for wasn’t woman suffrage, or black suffrage, but “adult human” suffrage. That’s a binary; either every grownup who doesn’t have some legitimate individual disqualification is a member of the polity and gets a voice, or the society is effectively ruled by a narrow class. It’s really tricky to add an additional narrow class; it’s relatively simple to just change over to an everybody-votes model. (Conceptually simple, not practically easy, as the struggles of the suffrage movement shows.)

Other struggles are divisible, and thus, it’s practical to fight them one at a time. Gay people can be added to anti-discrimination laws without it breaking the model under which those laws function. Anti-discrimination laws function just fine in Mississippi, where gays aren’t included, and in San Francisco, where they are. On the other hand, I suspect that marriage is an area where divisiblity won’t hold up. Gays will have to make common cause with polyamorists and whatever other nontraditional populations seek marriage, in order to have that institution be more broadly open, because conceptually a me-but-not-thee model doesn’t fly.