CHAPTER TWELVE
Suffragists Abroad
STARTING IN THE 1830S AND 1840S, American and British abolitionists forged connections that influenced the early history of the suffrage movement. In the decades following the 1840 antislavery conference in London, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott first met, women activists exhibited a remarkable propensity for traveling around the globe to attend conventions. Susan B. Anthony, Frances Willard, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Anna Howard Shaw were all intrepid world travelers.
Women’s international networks were especially vibrant in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1880s, the World Woman’s Christian Temperance Union took the lead, promoting political equality for women in places such as New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. In 1888, the International Council of Women was founded to bring together existing women’s groups, primarily from North America and western Europe, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony as its prime instigators. Its offshoot, the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), founded in 1904 in Berlin “to secure the enfranchisement of the women of all nations,” fed the growth of the woman suffrage movement worldwide.1
Anna So’os Koranyi’s block print poster of Atlas and an equally strong woman holding the world was created for the IWSA’s seventh annual conference (Internationaler Frauenstimmrechts-Kongress), held in Budapest, Hungary June 15–20, 1913. Undeterred by the distance, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Jane Addams both made the trip. So did the IWSA president, Carrie Chapman Catt, who traveled by way of meetings in London, Berlin, Dresden, Prague, and Vienna, doing her final leg by boat on the Danube River.
With local arrangements in the highly capable hands of Rosika Schwimmer, the IWSA welcomed its largest gathering to date, attended by representatives from twenty-five countries, including China. “For the first time in the woman movement,” Catt boasted, “it is expected that Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, Mohammedan, Jewish and Christian women will sit together in a Congress uniting their voices in a common plea for the liberation of their sex from those artificial discriminations which every political and religious system has directed against them.” Despite this inclusive statement, behind Catt’s sentiments lay not an expansive commitment to multiculturalism but a deeply engrained belief in the superiority of Western civilization. The world’s women might come together, but the expectation was that women from western Europe and North America would lead.2
Flush with success in 1913, the IWSA confidently looked forward to its next biennial meeting in Berlin, but the outbreak of World War I meant it never took place. As a result, many suffragists later looked back on the Budapest congress with special fondness, a halcyon time before the world they knew was forever altered. When women won the vote in a range of countries after the war, many suffragists seamlessly transferred their energies to the promotion of peace and the elimination of war.
IN APRIL 1904, Mary Church Terrell, a respected leader in Washington, DC’s vibrant African American community, received an invitation to deliver an address to the International Council of Women in Berlin. Deeply honored, she nevertheless struggled to see how she could attend a conference so far away in less than two months. Where would the money come from to pay her way? How could she leave her young daughter? How would she book passage on such short notice? She had moments of self-doubt even after she surmounted those obstacles, but her larger purpose carried the day: “Whenever my courage seemed to be oozing away and the horror of leaving my family seemed greater than I could endure, I would think of the opportunity which had been miraculously afforded me of presenting the facts creditable to colored women of the United States, and my spirit would immediately revive.” At this world congress, Mary Church Terrell proudly represented not just the American suffrage movement but the experiences of African American women as well.3
When she arrived in Berlin, there was much speculation about die Negerin (the Negress) from the United States. Terrell was one of the few American delegates who spoke fluent German, and delegates and the press repeatedly asked her about this unusual honored guest, not realizing that she, who was very light-skinned and often mistaken for white, was the very same person. Finally she revealed her identity to one persistent reporter, whose reaction was a combination of joy at scoring the first interview with the mystery guest and disbelief at the distance between her expectation of what an American Negro might look like—which Terrell parodied as “rings in her nose” and “cake-walking” in the streets—and the well-dressed woman standing in front of her. As she had been doing all her life, Mary Church Terrell confronted racial stereotypes head-on by presenting an eminently respectable public persona.4
Once the preconference activities started, Terrell began to hear complaints from the German hosts that the American and British delegates planned to address the congress only in English. (The “poor monolingual Americans” was a frequent complaint at international conferences in those days.) Terrell had painstakingly prepared her address in English, but she decided on the spot to give it in German. Even though she feared she wouldn’t have time to adequately adapt the speech to conversational spoken language, she received encouragement from several Americans, including the newspaperwoman Ida Husted Harper, who was covering the conference for the Washington Post. “Well, Mary Church Terrell,” another delegate weighed in, “if you can deliver an address before this Congress in German and don’t do it, I think you are a fool in 57 varieties of languages.”5
Terrell’s main motivation was not showing off her fluency in languages (she also spoke French and Italian), although she was well aware of the symbolism of someone just one generation removed from slavery addressing a major international conference in a foreign language. In the days before simultaneous translation, she wanted German women to hear firsthand what she had to say about the position of African American women in the United States. Then, she hoped, delegates would continue that conversation over the rest of the conference. The stakes were high, she realized: “I represented, not only the colored women of my own country but, since I was the only woman taking part in the International Congress who had a drop of African blood in her veins, I represented the whole continent of Africa as well.”6
Two days and several sleepless nights later, she stood before the assembled gathering with her new speech. Since many delegates still did not realize that she was “die Negerin,” she decided to open her talk with a frank admission: “In all this great world gathering of women, I believe I am unique in two respects. In the first place, I am the only woman participating in these exercises who represents a race which has been free so short a time as forty years. In the second place, I am the only woman speaking from this platform whose parents were actually held as chattels and who but for the kindly intervention of a beneficent Providence would have been a slave herself. As you fasten your eyes upon me, you are truly beholding a rare bird.” This last phrase brought amused chuckles from the audience, because “rare bird” translates into German as ein weisser Rabe: literally, “a white robin.” “And so,” she continued, “as I stand here tonight, my happiness is two-fold, rejoicing as I do, not only in the emancipation of my race, but in the almost universal elevation of my sex.”7
Having set the stage so well, Terrell proceeded to give the audience a short tutorial in African American women’s history. Hardly glancing down at her prepared text, she contrasted the days of “oppression and despair” under slavery with the “true miracle” of the progress since then, singling out accomplishments in the fields of education, literature, business, and civic improvement. While most of the initiatives came from within the African American community, she noted that black women had also been encouraged “by their more fortunate sisters of the dominant race,” singling out Susan B. Anthony, “the veritable Abraham Lincoln of women’s emancipation,” who was seated in the audience. Her thirty-minute talk was greeted with “tumultuous” applause. Later at the conference, Terrell delivered another well-received speech in French.8
Mary Church Terrell was not the only American suffragist who made the long journey to Berlin. Anna Howard Shaw, May Wright Sewall, Hanna G. Solomon, and Mary Wood Swift also attended, as did the eighty-four-year-old Anthony who, when delegates presented her with a bouquet of roses, charmed them by saying, “When I was young men threw stones at me in the street—now that I am old they shower roses upon me.” Anthony personally conducted the proceedings at the Berlin congress that led to the formation of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, a separate transnational organization specifically devoted to suffrage, although she declined to assume its presidency. Carrie Chapman Catt, who was also in attendance, agreed to serve; she held the post for the next twenty years.9
The presence of such an impressive American contingent is symptomatic of the strong international ties which linked activists across national borders and promoted a rich circulation of ideas and strategies. As with American suffragism, the international suffrage movement was dominated by a relatively homogeneous group of white, Christian, bourgeois women that mainly operated with often unacknowledged assumptions about western European / North American superiority—“offering a hand to their more oppressed sisters” summed up their stance towards women in the non-Western world. In addition, their mindset contained deep strains of racism, also unacknowledged. That is the world Mary Church Terrell was trying to navigate with her speech in Berlin in 1904, but it is also an apt summary of her experience throughout her long career within the wider suffrage and civil rights movements.10
Mary Church was born in 1863 in Memphis, Tennessee, the child of former slaves. Her parents divorced when she was young. Her mother later operated a successful beauty salon, and her father, whose own father was a white slaveholder, invested in Memphis real estate and is often referred to as the South’s first black millionaire. Sent north for schooling, Mary graduated from Oberlin College in 1884, where she was one of only a few black women in her class. Unwilling to take up the leisured life that her privileged class background could have afforded, she taught for a year at Wilberforce University in Ohio and then at the esteemed (but segregated) M Street “Colored” High School in Washington, DC.11
Still not quite sure of her future direction, she gratefully accepted an offer from her father to send her to Europe. The experience, which spanned the years 1888 and 1889, was eye-opening. As the “cake-walking” quote from 1904 would later confirm, Europe was not free from prejudice, but it was much more fluid than the United States in its racial hierarchies. She found its social freedoms especially exhilarating: “I could take advantage of any opportunity I desired without wondering whether a colored girl would be allowed to enjoy it or not.” This relative absence of prejudice was so appealing that she briefly considered settling in Europe permanently. Ultimately, she decided that returning to her country to promote the welfare of her race was her duty.12
Traveling in Europe was also attractive because it meant she could temporarily put off the insistent courtship of Robert H. Terrell, an 1884 Harvard graduate who served as the principal of the M Street High School. Although they had tried to be circumspect about their budding relationship, their students had quickly spotted the romantic attraction, quipping, “Mr. Terrell is certainly getting good. He used to go to dances and now he goes to Church,” a play on her surname. When she returned from abroad to resume her old job, she finally accepted his proposal, and the couple married in 1891.13
The early years of their marriage were challenging: she suffered a serious illness and, in five years, lost three babies shortly after birth. Their daughter Phyllis was born in 1898, and in 1905, the couple adopted her brother’s daughter. Making their home in the deeply segregated (and voteless) capital of the nation, the Terrells were, thanks to her leadership roles in civic and educational activities and his position as a municipal court judge, what would now be called a power couple in Washington’s African American community.14
Mary Church Terrell proudly asserted that she had always been a suffragist. Having seen the vote taken away from black men because of their race, how could she not support such an important citizenship right for women? “Even if I believed that women should be denied the right of suffrage,” she wrote in The Crisis in 1915, “wild horses could not drag such an admission from my pen or lips, for this reason: precisely the same arguments used to prove the ballot be withheld from women are advanced to prove that colored men should not be allowed to vote.”15
Terrell came to the attention of the white suffrage movement in part because of her leadership in the black club movement, especially her role as a founder and first president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896. Under the motto “Lifting as We Climb,” the NACW pursued a broad agenda that foregrounded women’s role in confronting the “race problem.” It quickly became the pre-eminent national organization offering black women leadership roles and public prominence. Even though the group did not officially endorse woman suffrage until 1916, it had an active suffrage department from the beginning.16
During the 1890s, Terrell attended meetings of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, giving her first address to the group in 1898 on the topic of “The Problems and Progress of Colored Women.” She also spoke on “The Justice of Woman Suffrage” at the 1900 NAWSA convention, pleased that she had been tapped to talk about suffrage in general, not just the perspectives of African American women. She counted Susan B. Anthony as a friend—she had been entertained by Anthony and her sister in Rochester—and had warm relations with many prominent white suffragists; in 1908 she was one of the few African Americans invited to Seneca Falls, New York, for the celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the women’s rights convention. Even so, those close associations had not keep her from admonishing “my sisters of the dominant race” at a NAWSA convention four years earlier to “stand up not only for the oppressed sex, but also for the oppressed race.” Unfortunately, that call was rarely heeded.17
Mary Church Terrell’s suffrage philosophy was built around an intersectional vision that embraced race as well as gender, an implicit challenge to white suffragists who tended to focus only on the subordination created by their sex. “A white woman has only one handicap to overcome—that of sex,” she argued. “I have two—both sex and race. I belong to the only group in the country which has two such huge obstacles to surmount. Colored men have only one—that of race.” Echoing both Sojourner Truth and Ida Wells-Barnett, she always said forthrightly, “However much the white women of the country need suffrage … colored women need it more.” Yet the white woman suffrage movement consistently refused to make the enfranchisement of black women a priority.18
Much of Terrell’s vision was shaped by her daily lived experience as a black woman—or as she pointedly titled her 1940 autobiography, “A Colored Woman in a White World.” “I assure you that nowhere in the United States have my feelings been so lacerated, my spirit so crushed, my heart so wounded, nowhere have I been so humiliated and handicapped on account of my sex as I have been on account of my race.” She always wondered how her life might have been different if she had lived in a country that had not handicapped her by race but instead “had allowed me to reach any height I was able to attain,” but she never allowed herself to become bitter.19
The challenges of travel, especially in the Jim Crow South, brought this point home. While she never attempted to pass as white, a stance that would have been anathema to her race consciousness and self-respect, her light skin often allowed her to evade the dreaded customs that relegated blacks to separate and distinctly inferior accommodations. This was especially an issue when Terrell began to receive lecture invitations that involved an overnight train ride, where sleeping berths were only available for whites. Rather than sitting up all night in the “colored” car, Terrell purchased first-class accommodations that allowed her to arrive fresh and rested at her destination. But like any person in the South with “one-drop of black blood,” she knew an unpleasant confrontation awaited her if a single white person chose to challenge her carefully planned subterfuge.
Terrell’s activism and interests cast a wide net. In addition to her key leadership role with the National Association of Colored Women, she was the first black woman appointed to the Board of Education in the District of Columbia and a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909. And despite the suffrage movement’s unwillingness to incorporate race into its agenda, she remained loyal to the cause. When Alice Paul staged the 1913 parade down Pennsylvania Avenue the day before President Wilson’s inauguration, Terrell marched with the Delta Sigma Theta contingent from Howard University, relegated with the other black marchers to a separate section so as not to offend the sensibilities of white southerners. In contrast, Ida Wells-Barnett had defied suffrage leaders’ instructions to march at the back and jumped into the Illinois delegation after the procession began. Each woman made her point in her own way, because both knew how important it was to demonstrate that African American women wanted—and deserved—the vote just as much as white women.
In 1917, Mary Church Terrell and her daughter Phyllis took a turn on the National Woman’s Party picket lines outside the White House, possibly the only two African Americans to participate in these demonstrations. Maintaining respectability was a mantra for middle-class African American women—a way to counter whites’ negative stereotypes—and such militant action posed a grave risk to their carefully guarded public reputations. (Young African American women who joined the civil rights sit-ins of the 1960s faced similar constraints.) Even though the Terrells avoided arrest, they were later awarded the special prison pin created for those who had been jailed as a result of these public protests. Still, Terrell confided a nagging suspicion to Walter White of the NAACP that if Alice Paul could have gotten the Nineteenth Amendment passed without enfranchising African American women, that would have been fine with her.20
As her eagerness to journey to Berlin in 1904 demonstrated, much of Mary Church Terrell’s vision for suffrage and race relations was grounded in an international framework that placed the domestic situation in the United States in dialogue with customs in the rest of the world. When she spoke abroad, she used that platform to educate foreign audiences about conditions for African Americans, about which they were often totally ignorant. When she returned home, she deployed the relative freedom from prejudice found in many European countries as a foil to challenge the rigidity of American racial mores. Thirty years before Hitler’s rise to power, she developed an especially acute comparison of the anti-Semitic treatment of Jews in German society with how African Americans were treated in the United States.
Mary Church Terrell often was the only woman of color at major international conferences. In this group portrait of the Second Annual Conference of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in Zurich, in 1919, Terrell stands in the middle of the back row to the left of the woman with the large black hat. Courtesy of Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
As the suffrage movement closed in on victory, Terrell maintained her international connections by joining the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), which was founded at the 1915 International Congress of Women held at The Hague. In 1919, she journeyed to Zurich as a member of the American delegation to WILPF’s second annual convention, timed to coincide with the Paris Peace Conference. Once again she was the only woman of color, belying the organizers’ statements that women from all over the world were present. “On sober, second thought it is more truthful to say that women from all over the white world were present,” she gently chided the organizers. Remembering her experience at the 1904 conference, she explicitly made the link: “For the second time in my life it was a privilege to represent, not only the colored women of the United States, but the whole continent of Africa as well.… In fact, since I was the only delegate who gave any color to the occasion at all, it finally dawned on me that I was representing the women of all the non-white countries in the world.” On the fourth day of the congress, Jane Addams, the lead American delegate, asked Terrell to represent the United States in an address to the delegates. Just as she had in 1904, she delivered her speech in German.21
Mary Church Terrell’s international experiences underscore the rewards and challenges of suffrage activism that crossed national borders. Like many of her white allies, she journeyed to Europe for conferences and reveled in the friendships and connections she made abroad. But she always had an additional item on her agenda—an urgent plea that the concerns of African Americans, especially African American women, not be forgotten. “You may talk about permanent peace until doomsday,” she told the delegates assembled in Zurich in 1919, “but the world will never have it until the dark races are given a square deal.”22 And that had to include women, a point too often lost on the white suffrage movement, no matter in what language Mary Church Terrell was speaking.