Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick

RECOMMENDED

This excellent history also serves as a text book on women’s movements from 1800 to 1920. Various women appear depending upon their achievements and strides in given fields: education, professions, doing social work and efforts in politics.

Women knew of their time, society and opponents. In many ways in the early Twentieth Century suffrage became a white woman’s movement because joining with African American women would distract from immediate goals. Readers should infer that race was always boiling, and misdirected efforts for a long time were employed to keep a lid on that issue. Yet, efforts and activities of African-American women were duly noted through out the text. One drawback there was little or no women’s movement in the ante-bellum south. Indeed, African American women were usually the persons making any effort.

At the beginning of the Twentieth Century a woman in middle age returned to America and found leadership of the women’s movement stale. Idioms, concepts and imagination came from days of yore, using the older language. She joined the leadership and things changed. Yet, a women in her later fifties a decade later did not want to be the lead in specifics surrounding suffrage. Youth was necessary to use its energy and do the work. [A sudden shift: Many delegates going most of the work of the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, like Madison, were in their thirties and early forties. Older men were respected and considered elders.] Century of Struggle makes that notation in passing. It’s a youth movement. Most of the country wanted suffrage – expect opposing interests: liquor, bars, manufacturing and Americans whose principles of democracy were rotten to the core.

It should be observed in the 1960s and early 1970s African American women had to choose between Civil Rights and the then current Women’s Movement. On the Left women had to chose between supporting male leftists in their communities and their own interests as women and as human beings. Part of that divergence of their stories is reflected in literature of African-American women of the 1970s.