-In the first episode of "The Fight,"
we talked about the beginnings of the women's
rights movement in the United States.
The early advocates for suffrage were also abolitionists
fighting for the end of slavery.
What happened next, though,
changed the shape of the suffrage movement
for decades to come.
In 1861, with the outbreak of the American Civil War,
the movement for women's suffrage
decided to put its work on hold.
White suffragists, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
believed that once the Union won the war,
and enslaved people in the South were granted the right to vote,
women would also be rewarded
for their war efforts with full suffrage.
After the war, however, the Republican Party saw
that if they granted women the right to vote,
it might mean White women in the South,
who were nearly all Democrats,
might outweigh the new political power of freed
Black male voters there,
who would mostly vote Republican,
the party of Lincoln.
So it was a calculated decision not to include women
in the text of the 15th Amendment, which read,
"The right of citizens of the United States to vote
shall not be denied or abridged by the United States
or by any State on account of race, color,
or previous condition of servitude.
The reaction of White suffragists,
like Stanton and Anthony, was severe and outwardly racist.
They thought it was an outrage that newly freed,
uneducated Black men should be able to vote
before middle-class educated White women, such as themselves.
For Black suffragists, though, the choice was clear.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper said,
"When it was a question of race,
I let the lesser question of sex go.
But the White women all go for sex,
letting race occupy a minor position."
For Frederick Douglass, a member of the women's rights movement
since its beginning, at the Seneca Falls
convention, it was inconceivable that
Black men should be denied the right to vote
until White women could have it, too.
Susan B Anthony said to Douglass,
"If you will not give the whole loaf of justice
to the entire people,
it should be given to the most intelligent
and capable portion of women first."
She meant educated White women, such as herself.
She also referred to Black men using a racial slur
to viciously drive home her point.
This was a heartbreaking split in the women's movement.
Black women suffragists and Douglass,
who had once enjoyed the friendship and camaraderie
of White suffragists, like Stanton and Anthony,
felt utterly betrayed
when they opposed the passage of the 15th Amendment.
By the 1870s, Black men in the South
began to vote and hold office --
rights that would soon be stripped away by new laws.
The divide in the suffrage movement was complete.
Stanton, Anthony, and others formed the National Woman
Suffrage Association in 1869,
shortly after the 15th Amendment passed Congress.
Their goal was to pass another Constitutional amendment --
one that would enfranchise women across the whole country.
But Frances Ellen Watkins Harper,
Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth,
and the abolitionist Lucy Stone formed
the American Woman Suffrage Association.
Their plan was to win women
the right to vote, state by state,
since the Constitution grants states the power
to control voting rights.
And so the different factions worked without much progress
for the next two decades.
A few Western states granted women the right to vote,
hoping to attract more women to their sparse states
and to increase their national importance
by increasing their number of voters.
But in the East and the South, there was still a lot more work
to be done to change attitudes and politics.
Most people at the time still thought the idea of women
voting was completely crazy.
In 1890, the divided women's movement
finally decided to converge into the National American Woman
Suffrage Association, or NAWSA.
It was an organization mostly dominated by middle-
and upper-class White women who were not interested
in fighting to defend the rights of the newly enfranchised
Black men of the South.
By the end of the 19th century, though, many
Black women suffragists
were forming their own clubs and organizations.
Nannie Helen Burroughs and Mary Church Terrell
cofounded the National Association
of Colored Women in 1896.
National and local groups of Black women
saw the importance of suffrage
to protecting the entire Black community.
Though not a lot of progress had been made toward a national
Constitutional amendment extending the right
to vote to women, groups like these laid
the groundwork for the victories to come.
In the next episode, we'll see
how a new generation of radical suffragists
took the fight for the vote to the next level.