[5] Angelina Grimké to Sarah Douglass, February 25, 1838, quoted in Annelise Orleck, Rethinking American Women’s Activism (New York: Routledge, 2016), 4; Sarah M. Grimké, “Letters on the Equality of the Sexes in Freedman (United States, 1837),” in The Essential Feminist Reader, ed. Estelle B. Freedman (New York: Modern Library, 2007), 47.
[6] Ellen Carol DuBois, “Woman Suffrage and the Left: An International Socialist-Feminist Perspective,” in Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights, ed. Ellen Carol DuBois (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 254.
[7] Nancy A. Hewitt, “From Seneca Falls to Suffrage? Reimagining a ‘Master’ Narrative in U.S. Women’s History,” in No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism, ed. Nancy A. Hewitt (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 24–25; Nancy A. Hewitt, “‘Seeking a Larger Liberty’: Remapping First Wave Feminism,” in Sklar and Stewart, Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Slavery in the Era of Emancipation, 266–278; Sally Roesch Wagner and Jeanne Shenandoah, Sisters in Spirit: Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Influence on Early American Feminists (Summertown, TN: Native Voices, 2001).
[8] Michaela Bank, Women of Two Countries: German-American Women, Women’s Rights and Nativism, 1848–1890 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), chap. 2. Her book also sheds light on the important work of German American suffragist Clara Neymann.
[9] Quote from Freedman, No Turning Back, 54. Rose was instrumental in gaining married women’s property rights in New York state. See Bonnie S. Anderson, The Rabbi’s Atheist Daughter: Ernestine Rose, International Feminist Pioneer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). She also explained on the 1853 anniversary of West Indian emancipation, “I go for the recognition of human rights, without distinction of sect, party, sex, or color.” Quote from Ellen Carol DuBois, “Ernestine Rose’s Jewish Origins and the Varieties of Euro-American Emancipation in 1848,” in Sklar and Stewart, Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Slavery in the Era of Emancipation, 280. For her entire speech, see Morris Schappes, ed., “Ernestine Rose: Her Address on the Anniversary of West Indian Emancipation,” Journal of Negro History 34, no. 3 (July 1949): 344–355.
[10] Sarah Parker Remond, “Lecture at the Lion Hotel, Warrington (1859),” in Documenting First Wave Feminisms, vol. 1, Transnational Collaborations and Crosscurrents, ed. Maureen Moynagh and Nancy Forestell (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 46.
[11] Kenneth Salzer, “Great Exhibitions: Ellen Craft on the British Abolitionist Stage,” in Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain, ed. Beth Lynne Lueck, Brigitte Bailey, and Lucinda L. Damon-Bach (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2012), 147; Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1981), 65; Sirpa Salenius, An Abolitionist Abroad: Sarah Parker Remond in Cosmopolitan Europe (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016); Elizabeth Crawford, Suffrage Centenary: A Brief History: The Diversity of the Suffrage Movement (London: Fawcett Society, 2017). On John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor see Freedman, No Turning Back, 52–54. Internationalism was also key to African American abolitionist and suffragist Mary Ann Shadd Cary, who moved to Canada after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act for fear it would endanger free Blacks like herself and enslaved people. She knit connections among her work for Black civil rights in Ontario, abolitionism, and the woman suffrage movement in the United States. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn writes that Shadd Cary was “perhaps the first African American woman suffragist to organize a suffrage organization for Black woman.” Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 39.
[12] On the importance of the telegraph in materially connecting nineteenth-century women’s rights reformers, see Margaret H. McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 1–3. On the ICW, IWSA, and WILPF, see Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). On the founding of the ICW in 1888 by Stanton and Anthony, see Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), chap. 5. These groups were preceded by Swiss leader Marie Goegg-Pouchoulin’s 1868 founding of one of the first international women’s organizations, the International Association of Women or Association internationale des femmes, whose goal was to organize women of all classes so they could enjoy the same rights as men within their own countries. Although this group included women from the United States, it was short-lived. Bob Reinalda, Routledge History of International Organizations: From 1815 to the Present Day (New York: Routledge, 2009), 150. Women from the United States also played a role in the formation of the Congrès international du droit des femmes in Paris in 1878. However, at this conference, discussion of suffrage was banned. Rupp, Worlds of Women, 14. In these years, the National Woman Suffrage Association used these groups to connect with other movements internationally, but Elizabeth Cady Stanton also worked independently of these groups to carve out important transatlantic networks. See Sandra Stanley Holton, “‘To Educate Women into Rebellion’: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Creation of a Transatlantic Network of Radical Suffragists,” American Historical Review 99, no. 4 (October 1994): 1112–1136.
[13] During the First World War, Addams and 1,150 other women from the United States and Europe gathered in The Hague to demand international peace and founded the WILPF; their declaration urged that “the exclusion of women from citizenship is contrary to the principles of civilization and human right” and as contrary to permanent peace. Jane Addams, Emily G. Balch, and Alice Hamilton, Women at The Hague: The International Congress of Women and Its Results, ed. Harriet Hyman Alonso (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 64. The original resolutions from the women at The Hague were praised by President Wilson and may have shaped his Fourteen Points in 1918. Their internationalist position was unpopular in the United States at the time, and one of the leaders, Emily Greene Balch, later winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, was fired from her position as a professor at Wellesley College in 1918. Interconnected, international goals were what the IWSA had in mind when it announced in 1909, “We have been baptized in that spirit of the twentieth century which the world calls internationalism.” Quoted in Nitza Berkovitch, From Motherhood to Citizenship: Women’s Rights and International Organizations (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 18.
[14] The ICW claimed to represent four to five million women by 1907. The IWSA attained twenty-six national affiliates by 1913. Rupp, Worlds of Women, 22, 70. They also sprang from each other. Although Stanton and Anthony founded the ICW to promote suffrage, when the organization turned away from the vote soon after its creation, German suffragists Lida Gustava Heymann and Anita Augspurg helped found the IWSA with Catt, committed to “secur[ing] the enfranchisement of the women of all nations.” Rupp, Worlds of Women, 21–22. Both the ICW and IWSA would inspire national suffrage organizing in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and other countries in the world. Katherine Marino, Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming 2019), chap. 1.
[15] DuBois, “Woman Suffrage around the World,” 256.
[16] Ian Tyrrell, Woman’s World, Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), chap. 10.
[17] Marino, Feminism for the Americas, 24. In 1920, Spanish feminist María Espinosa criticized the IWSA for proposing to have a conference in Spain but not include sessions in Spanish. Doña María Espinosa, Influencia del feminismo en la legislación contemporánea (Madrid: Editorial Reus, 1920), 35–39. Marie Sandell discusses how these organizations increasingly included representatives from countries outside of Western Europe in the 1920s through ’40s. Maire Sandell, The Rise of Women’s Transnational Activism: Identity and Sisterhood between the World Wars (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015).
[18] On imperial feminism in these groups, see Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Margot Badran, Feminism, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 108–110, 232–238; Charlotte Weber, “Unveiling Scheherazade: Feminist Orientalism in the International Alliance of Women, 1911–1950,” Feminist Studies 27, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 125–157. Imperial feminism was also pronounced at world fairs and expositions where US suffragists met with activists from other parts of the world, including the World’s Congress of Representative Women at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Hazel Carby argues that the reason that African American suffragists like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Hallie Quinn Brown, and others addressed this congress “was not the result of a practice of sisterhood or evidence of a concern to provide a black political presence but part of a discourse of exoticism that pervaded the fair.” Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 5. At the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, US suffragists juxtaposed the enfranchisement of women from what were considered “less civilized” parts of the world with US women’s lack of enfranchisement. Abigail M. Markwyn. “Encountering ‘Woman’ on the Fairgrounds of the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition,” in Gendering the Fair: Histories of Women and Gender at World’s Fairs, ed. T .J. Boisseau and Abigail M. Markwyn (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 176–177.
[19] These suffrage efforts were ultimately unsuccessful. Patricia Grimshaw, ““Settler Anxieties, Indigenous Peoples, and Women’s Suffrage in the Colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and Hawai’i, 1888–1902,” in Women’s Suffrage in Asia: Gender, Nationalism, and Democracy, ed. Louise Edwards and Mina Roces (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), 220–239. For more on suffrage in Hawai'i, and on the dynamics of white settler colonialism and women’s rights there, see Rumi Yasutake, “Re-Franchising Women of Hawai’i, 1912–1920: The Politics of Gender, Sovereignty, Race, and Rank at the Crossroads of the Pacific,” in Gendering the Trans-Pacific World, ed. Catherine Ceniza Choy and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 114–139. As Ian Tyrrell has pointed out, the WCTU’s promotion of a “benign American civilization” included the “benevolent assimilation” of Native Americans, overlooking the violence of Wounded Knee—the massacre that killed over 150 men, women, and children of the Lakota on the heels of the forced removal of thousands. Tyrrell, Woman’s World, Woman’s Empire, 181.
[20] Allison L. Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870–1929 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
[21] Rosalyn Terborg-Penn also connects US imperial feminism in Puerto Rico and St. Thomas to racism within the suffrage movement in “Enfranchising Women of Color: Woman Suffragists as Agents of Imperialism,” in Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race, ed. Ruth Roach Pierson and Nupur Chaudhuri (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 41–56.
[22] Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 86; Noaquia N. Callahan, “A Rare Colored Bird: Mary Church Terrell, Die Fortschritte der Farbigen Frauen, and the International Council of Women’s Congress in Berlin, Germany, 1904,” German Historical Institute Bulletin Supplement 13 (2017): 97; Michelle M. Rief, “Thinking Locally, Acting Globally: The International Agenda of African American Clubwomen, 1880–1940,” Journal of African American History 89, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 203–204. For more on Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, see Jones, All Bound Up Together, and the new edition of Harper’s Iola Leroy, Or, Shadows Uplifted, ed. Koritha Mitchell (Ontario: Broadview Editions, 2018).
[23] Patricia Ann Schecter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1888–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 110–111; Mia Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 185–189, 206–217. Also, as Callahan explains, Wells’s pamphlet The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Colombian Exposition (1893), which criticized the exclusion of African Americans from the Columbian Exposition, “sparked international debate about the limits of American citizenship when it came to race and gender.” Callahan, “Rare Colored Bird,” 100–102. On the work of the Alpha Suffrage Club, see Susan Ware, Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), chap. 7.
[24] Fluent in German, French, Latin, and Greek in addition to her native English, Terrell overheard German women talking about how eagerly they awaited “die Negierin” (the Negress). Later Terrell recounted, “I represented not only the colored woman in 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.” Brittney C. Cooper, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 78–80; Callahan, “Rare Colored Bird.”
[25] The term feminismé had first been used in its modern connotation by French suffragist Hubertine Auclert at the 1878 International Congress for the Rights of Women in Paris (Congrès international du droit des femmes), although that conference did not endorse woman suffrage itself. After 1882, she used the term in her newspaper La citoyenne. Sara L. Kimble, “Transatlantic Networks for Legal Feminism, 1888–1912,” German Historical Institute Bulletin Supplement 13 (2017): 56; Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 19–20; Karen Offen, “On the French Origins of the Words Feminism and Feminist,” Feminist Issues 8, no. 2 (June 1988): 45–51. For an excellent account of how the Russian Revolution infused modern suffragism, see Julia Mickenberg, “Suffragettes and Soviets: American Feminists and the Specter of Revolutionary Russia,” Journal of American History 100, no. 4 (March 2014): 1021–1051, and for the longer history of US women’s engagement with Russia, see Julia Mickenberg, American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
[26] DuBois, “Woman Suffrage around the World,” 265; Clara Zetkin cheered this accomplishment in 1907 at the International Socialist Conference, reiterating that “universal suffrage for both men and women” was an international goal. Clara Zetkin, “From ‘Women’s Right to Vote,’ 1907, A Resolution Introduced at the International Socialist Congress,” in Moynagh and Forestell, Documenting First Wave Feminisms, 1:137–143.
[27] Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), chap. 3. Women workers demanded maternity legislation, child care, protective labor laws, and equal representation in unions. DuBois, “Woman Suffrage and the Left,” 259.
[28] On collaborations with the WTUL see Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire. On the work of Stanton’s daughter Harriot Stanton Blatch’s suffrage organizing with working women in New York, see Ellen Carol DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).
[29] Vicki L. Ruiz, “Class Acts: Latina Feminist Traditions, 1900–1930,” American Historical Review 121, no. 1 (February 2016): 1–16; Nancy A. Hewitt, “In Pursuit of Power: The Political Economy of Women’s Activism in Twentieth-Century Tampa,” in Visible Women: New Essays on Women’s Activism, ed. Nancy A. Hewitt and Suzanne Lebsock (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 199–222.
[30] Vicki L. Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 99. This was the first feminist newspaper in Texas. Leonor Villegas de Magnón, The Rebel (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1994), xv. For more on Teresa Villareal and her sister Andrea, see Maylei Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 107–109; Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 67–69; Nicolás Kanellos, “Envisioning and Re-visioning the Nation: Latino Intellectual Traditions,” American Latino Theme Study, National Park Services website.
[31] Jovita Idar, a journalist and civil rights leader from Laredo, Texas, founded the League of Mexican Women, which promoted woman suffrage, educated poor children, promoted the Spanish language, and spoke out against discrimination and violence against Mexican Americans. Gabriela González, “Jovita Idar: The Ideological Origins of a Transnational Advocate for La Raza,” in Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives, ed. Elizabeth Haynes Turner, Stephanie Cole, and Rebecca Sharpless (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015), 225–248. For more on her and Villareal, see Gabriela González, Redeeming la Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 21, 24–26, 37, 41–42.
[32] DuBois, “Woman Suffrage and the Left,” 266. The working-class based suffrage movement of Lancashire textile workers in the 1890s helped inspire the militant tactics and public agitation of the middle-class women. Pankhurst’s group was founded in Manchester and moved in London in 1906. On suffrage activism in China, see Louise Edwards, Gender, Politics, and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage in China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008) and Louise Edwards, “Chinese Women’s Campaigns for Suffrage: Nationalism, Confucianism, and Political Agency,” in Edwards and Roces, Women’s Suffrage in Asia, 59–78.
[33] Some US suffragists even took on the British term “suffragette,” initially coined by the Daily Mail as an epithet, to signal their radicalism. The “American Suffragettes” in New York became the first group to “distribute literature in Yiddish to the women of the Lower East Side.” Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 94. See “suffragette” in Cheris Kramarae and Paula A. Treichler, A Feminist Dictionary (Boston: Pandora Press, 1985), 435. See also Kenneth Florey, Women’s Suffrage Memorabilia: An Illustrated Historical Study (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013), 221n32.
[34] For an excellent history of the way the war accelerated the phenomenon of the “new woman” and suffrage debate, and on connections between women’s war work and suffrage, see Lynn Dumenil, The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), especially chap. 1.
[35] Mickenberg, “Suffragettes and Soviets,” 1021.
[36] Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 59.
[37] Marino, Feminism for the Americas, 247n35; Paulina Luisi, Movimiento sufragista: Conferencia leída en el Augusteo de Buenos Aires, el 21 de febrero 1919, a pedido de la Unión Feminista Nacional Argentina (Montevideo, Urug: Imp. “El Siglo Ilustrado,” de Gregorio V. Mariño, 1919). In 1917, Uruguayans had already supported a constitution that included a mechanism for enacting woman suffrage, before a federal amendment was in the offing in the United States. As historian Francesca Miller has noted, this made Uruguay “in theory, the first of all Western Hemisphere nations to recognize female suffrage,” though suffrage did not pass there until 1934. Francesca Miller, Latin American Women and the Search for Social Justice (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1991), 98.
[38] Quoted in Mickenberg, “Suffragettes and Soviets,” 1048.
[39] In addition, as Nancy Hewitt has written, “millions of Asian and Mexican Americans in the West and American Indians across the country were denied suffrage until the 1940s, and some waited until the Voting Rights Act and its extension in 1970 addressed the bilingual needs of Spanish-speaking citizens.” Hewitt, “From Seneca Falls to Suffrage?,” 11.
[40] Rief, “Thinking Locally, Acting Globally,” and Michelle M. Rief, “‘Banded Close Together’: An Afrocentric Study of African American Women’s International Activism, 1850–1940, and the International Council of Women of the Darker Races” (PhD diss., Temple University, 2003); Keisha N. Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). For more on Black women’s internationalism, see Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Dayo Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Brandy Thomas Wells, “‘She Pieced and Stitched and Quilted, Never Wavering nor Doubting’: A Historical Tapestry of African American Women’s Internationalism, 1890s–1960s” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2015); and Lisa G. Materson, “African American Women’s Global Journeys and the Construction of Cross-Ethnic Racial Identity,” Women’s Studies International Forum 32, no. 1 (January–February 2009): 35–42.
[41] Marino, Feminism for the Americas. On US women’s dominance in Pan-American organizing in Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Uruguay, respectively, see Megan Threlkeld, Pan American Women: U.S. Internationalists and Revolutionary Mexico (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Gladys Jiménez-Muñoz, “Deconstructing Colonialist Discourses: Links between the Suffrage Movements in the United States and Puerto Rico,” Phoebe: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Feminist Scholarship, Theory, and Aesthetics 5, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 9–34; Christine Ehrick, “‘Madrinas’ and Missionaries: Uruguay and the Pan-American Women’s Movement,” Gender and History 10, no. 3 (November 1998): 406–424.
[42] For internationalist and transnational histories of US women’s activism in the late twentieth century, see Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); Jocelyn Olcott, International Women’s Year: The Greatest Consciousness-Raising Event in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power!; Ashley D. Farmer, Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Emily Hobson, Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016); Lisa Levenstein, “A Social Movement for a Global Age: U.S. Feminism and the Beijing Women’s Conference of 1995,” Journal of American History 105, no. 2 (September 2018): 336–365, among others.