The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, From the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement

Inez Milholland was physically stunning, but she was also “audacious” and “sure of herself.” She represented a new generation of women who rejected the “cult of domesticity” and “notions that true femininity must suffocate a woman’s independent thoughts and beliefs” (95). She was a student of law at New York University and imagined using her education to usher in a new era of equality and justice. She soon became the poster child of the women’s suffrage movement and received as much publicity as celebrities of the time.

Much of the initial advocacy for women’s suffrage “intentionally excluded” Black women. Black men had technically gained the right to vote in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, but poll taxes, literacy tests, and outright violent intimidation continued to make it difficult or impossible for most Black men to exercise that right. Many people, especially in the South, opposed extending the vote to women because “they just couldn’t abide” Black women voting (97). Bent on winning suffrage for themselves, white women saw the exclusion of Black women as a necessary and acceptable compromise. Some even went as far as to suggest that giving white women the vote would “mitigate the damage” of Black men’s votes.