ORCID
0000-0001-7843-4712
Document Type
Conference Document
Date
Fall 2020
Keywords
Suffrage, Voting, 15th Amendment, 19th Amendment, Miscegenation, interracial marriage, abolition, women's rights movement
Language
English
Acknowledgements
Andrew Wender Cohen
Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai
Massachusetts Historical Society
Disciplines
History | Political History | United States History | Women's History
Description/Abstract
This paper explores the intersection of debates over voting rights and interracial marriage from the 15th to the 19thAmendments. In the Civil War era, the specter of interracial marriage rose with the possibility of emancipation.The 15th Amendment became known as the miscegenation amendment, and critics used this nickname to attack Black men, Black women, and all women’s rights activists. While the 19th amendment did not engender the same heated discourse, Catt and other white suffrage leaders viewed interracial marriage as dangerous to their cause in part because some of their allies retained a principled commitment to racial equality. Although much of the public outcry predictably focused on Black men’s political and sexual power, the potential rights of women—Black and white—to marry a man of their choice emerged as a central theme in the debates over the impact of the 15th and 19th Amendments.
Recommended Citation
Carol Faulkner, "Suffrage and the Specter of Interracial Marriage," "Shall Not Be Denied: The 15th and 19th Amendments at the Sesquicentennial and the Centennial of their Ratifications," Conrad E. Wright Conference, Massachusetts Historical Society, 2020.
Source
submission
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Additional Information
Paper presented at “’Shall Not Be Denied’: The 15th and 19th Amendments at the Sesquicentennial and Centennial of their Ratifications” Conrad E. Wright Conference at the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2020.