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Just as Frederick Douglass inspired Sojourner Truth to sell her portrait, Truth inspired Susan B. Anthony to sell portraits of herself and other suffragists. However, in an attempt to gain the support of Southern politicians and white women, Anthony and many other white reformers refused to allow Black women to represent the face of the voting rights movement. Anthony never promoted Truth's portrait in her newspaper and excluded portraits of women of color from the History of Woman Suffrage series, a set of influential books that continue to shape our understanding of the movement today.

The poet and novelist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was born free in Maryland in 1825. By the 1830s, activists petitioned, wrote pamphlets, and hosted meetings to oppose slavery and win the vote for all citizens. Harper soon joined in. They advocated for equal pay, the right to own property, and access to education for every person. Harper soon joined these efforts.

After slavery was abolished, voting rights advocates founded the American Equal Rights Association in 1866 to secure the ballot for all, "irrespective of race, color, or sex." Harper gave a moving speech at the group's first meeting, urging them to confront prejudice based on race and gender.

However, this collaborative effort did not last. In 1869, the association split: Most members supported the 15th Amendment allowing Black men to vote, but some racist white women insisted that Black men should not be able to vote before they could.

As Black women, Sojourner Truth and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper were not allowed to hold leadership positions in the two national women's voting rights groups that emerged after the collapse of the American Equal Rights Association. They urged these groups to advocate for racial equality, but the leading organizations refused to address Black women's concerns beyond the vote.

As a result, Black women started to create their own groups to push for equality. In 1896, Harriet Tubman, former leader of the Underground Railroad, helped found the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) to fight against racism and sexism. The NACW sought to end racial violence, improve communities, and win the vote for women.

In 1890, the two voting rights groups led by white women merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). The association allowed local clubs to exclude and discriminate against Black women and women of color. In 1904, Susan B. Anthony, a NAWSA official, wrote: "I think it is a shame and disgrace...to class women with felons, idiots, etc.," who could not vote. The "etc." subtly refers to Black men in the South, where racist laws and violent intimidation prevented them from voting.

Anthony shaped the voting rights movement's public image. While popular cartoons mocked female activists as masculine and unruly, she distributed portraits that represented them as dignified leaders. In 1900, she sat for this photograph, in which she was surrounded by portraits of other white activists. By showcasing portraits like these, she aimed to attract supporters to her cause. Thanks to Anthony, we have access to these pictures in museums. However, her choice not to distribute Black women's portraits means fewer of them made it into historical archives.

In 1890, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin created The Woman's Era, a newspaper that connected Black women activists across the country.

Ruffin worked with groups led by white suffragists, but, because she faced discrimination from them, she also founded the Woman's Era Club in Boston to advocate against racism and sexism. Her work contributed to the founding of the National Association of Colored Women, which pressed for the voting rights of Black men and women.

After decades of signing petitions and holding meetings, women's voting rights advocates tried new tactics to bring attention to their cause.

Harriot Stanton Blatch, the daughter of voting rights leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton, organized the first women’s voting rights parades in New York City starting in 1910. Marchers wore costumes and sewed banners to turn their protests into eye-catching events. These protests made news and helped win supporters.

Some women of color joined these marches, including Black suffragist Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Chinese suffragist Mabel Ping-Hua Lee. Nina Otero-Warren organized fellow women of Spanish descent to march in New Mexico. However, women of color faced a greater risk of violence from volatile crowds.

Despite the risks to their safety, some Black women organized public protests and marched in parades.

In this photograph, Nannie Helen Burroughs stands on the left with her elegant banner, perhaps after marching in a parade. The banner is for the Women's Convention, which Burroughs founded in 1900 as part of the National Baptist Convention. These Black Baptist women performed charity and missionary work to support their communities.

Burroughs also participated in the National Association of Colored Women. Many of its members sought to defy stereotypes that depicted Black women as "unruly." Yet, to appear "respectable" required conforming to popular white ideals of femininity.

Many suffragists were middle and upper-class women, but Harriot Stanton Blatch recruited working women into the movement and organized the first parades based on labor protests and British suffrage processions.

Leading organizations selected white women like lawyer Inez Milholland to represent them in press photographs. She was featured in several parades, including Washington, D.C.'s first one in 1913. The Washington Post called her the "most beautiful suffragist." Activists sought to counter stereotypes of political women as masculine. (As part of that, they emphasized heteronormativity, hiding the queer relationships of many of the movement's leaders).

Behind the scenes of the 1913 parade, Milholland helped to convince the parade's leaders to allow women of color to march.

Black women including Ida B. Wells-Barnett marched in the 1913 suffrage parade in Washington, D.C. Wells-Barnett joined the delegation of women from her home state of Illinois. Black women from Howard University marched with other college students in integrated sections too. Alice Paul, the parade's organizer, had wanted to segregate the parade, but Black activists refused to march separately.

Wells-Barnett, a journalist, was famous for calling attention to the lynchings of Black people. In 1913, she founded the Alpha Suffrage Club to organize Black women and elect Black officials in Chicago. Throughout her career as an activist, she urged white women to join her in fighting for Black women's rights.

Whether they were picketing, attending meetings, or lobbying officials, suffragists wore pins to support their cause. They also sold them to raise money for their work. Some pins feature portraits of women's voting rights leaders, while others have colorful designs and slogans.

This pin likely came from a campaign to secure the ballot for women at the state level. By 1915, women could vote in all elections in 11 states, mostly Western ones. Activists hoped that if more states allowed women to vote, they would be able to pass a constitutional amendment. The rising sun on this pin represents optimism for a more equal future.

In 1917, Mary Church Terrell participated in the first ever pickets of the White House with her daughter. One of the first Black women to earn a bachelor's degree, she was also elected the first president of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896.

After the 19th Amendment's passage, Terrell encouraged leading suffrage organizations to help challenge the various poll taxes and other laws passed by Southern states that blocked Black voters, male and female. They refused, arguing that gender equality, not civil rights, was their mission.

In 1914, women's voting rights activists marched in Boston, Massachusetts. This photograph of their parade features a Black woman marching in the bottom left. Most likely, many more women of color participated that day.

This is one of the few photographs of a Black woman in a suffrage parade. Suffrage groups led by white women had press committees to select photographs to send to newspapers. These groups did not want women of color to represent their cause because they believed they would lose support.

For most of U.S. history, the majority of Americans opposed allowing women to vote. They argued that a woman’s husband represented her in the public sphere and that women should focus on housekeeping.

Anti-suffragists dominated government positions and the press. Their position was so widespread at first that they did not need formal organizations. It wasn't until the 1890s, when the women's voting rights movement gained momentum, that male and female opponents of suffrage decided to organize.

Alice Stone Blackwell, a second-generation suffragist, knew the arguments that her opponents made. In 1915, she wrote this pamphlet, "Objections Answered," to help fellow supporters make their case for women's right to vote.

To counter anti-suffragists' arguments, Alice Stone Blackwell listed the most popular objections to women's voting rights. For example, anti-suffrage women argued that men represented them in politics. They believed it was a privilege to be able to focus on their families and homes and did not want to participate in the male political world. Read more about arguments made against women's voting rights in this excerpt from "Objections Answered."

Some of the arguments that Alice Stone Blackwell wrote about in 1915 remain part of today's debates about women's rights.

In January 1917, the National Woman's Party started picketing the White House. Some suffragists called these protests unpatriotic, especially since the United States entered World War I that month. In June, some picketers were arrested and sent to a workhouse. To draw attention to the cause of suffrage, Alice Paul ensured that professional photographers took pictures of the white picketers and sent them to the press. Although Mary Church Terrell, former president of the National Association of Colored Women, joined the pickets, she wasn't included in the photographs.

Nina Allender, the artist for the National Woman’s Party, called attention to the arrests too. In her illustration, the jailed women look longingly at the viewers and ask the president to support their cause.

The National Association of Colored Women discouraged members from picketing the White House. The organization embraced marching but rejected picketing as too militant. Instead, the group aimed to educate its members about the vote and to live up to its motto: "Lifting As We Climb."

The group's newsletter in January 1917 noted: "We hope that America is not to have the Militant Suffragettes. Let us get what we want in another way." They did not want to be depicted as unruly protesters in the press and likely feared that, as Black women, its members might face racially motivated violence.

In 1919, Congress finally approved the 19th Amendment and sent it to the states for ratification. On August 26, 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state and final state needed to ratify the amendment. That November, millions of women registered and voted in the presidential election for the first time.

While the 19th Amendment was a milestone, it did not guarantee all women the vote. Although it prohibits voter discrimination based on sex, some states found other ways to limit access to the ballot. For example, in the 1890s, Southern states started requiring voters to take unreasonable literacy tests and pay poll taxes to keep Black people from participating in elections. Violent intimidation by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan also kept Black people from the polls.

Black women in the South, as well as Chinese, Japanese, Native American, and Puerto Rican women, kept fighting for the vote.

In 1923, the National Woman's Party proposed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to win gender equality. Mary Church Terrell testified before congressional committees in favor of the ERA. Almost 50 years later, a new generation of advocates, including Shirley Chisholm, renewed the push for the ERA.

In 1968, Chisholm became the first Black woman in Congress. In 1972, she became the first Black woman to seek the presidential nomination from a major political party.

That same year, Congress approved the ERA and sent it to the states for ratification. A movement of conservative women-fearing that it threatened their privileges as wives and mothers-lobbied against it. They won.

Congress required states to ratify the ERA by 1982, but some argue the time limit was unconstitutional. In 2020, Virginia ratified the ERA, giving the amendment the support required to become part of the Constitution. The House of Representatives voted to extend the deadline, but the Senate has yet to do so.