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chapter 9 Reconstruction: The Making and Unmaking of a Revolution
white women all go for sex, letting race occupy livelihood in their midst. (Applause.) If the
a minor position. She liked the idea of work- nation could only handle one question, she
women, but she would like to know if it was would not have the black woman put a single
broad enough to take colored women.
straw in the way, if only the men of the race could
Project Yes, yes. obtain what they wanted. (Great applause.)
MISS ANTHONY and several others:
MRS. HARPER said that when she was at
Boston there were sixty women who left work
Source: Philip S. Foner, ed., Frederick Douglass on Women’s
because one colored woman went to gain a
Document Rights (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), 86–89.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary | Woman’s Right to Vote, Early 1870s

MARY ANN SHADD CARY (1823–1893) was an educa- two hundred years, they shared equally with
tor, a journalist, and a reformer who was deeply fathers, brothers, denied the right to vote. This
committed to both black and women’s rights. In fact of their investiture with the privileges of
the 1850s, she was also a proponent of emigration free women of the same time and by the same
to Canada. Following the split of the AERA, she amendments which disentralled their kinsmen
sided with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan and conferred upon the latter the right of fran-
B. Anthony in founding the National Woman chise, without so endowing themselves is one
Suffrage Association. At the time she gave this of the anomalies of a measure of legislation oth-
speech, Cary was teaching in Washington, D.C. erwise grand in conception and consequences
The speech captures the substance of remarks beyond comparison. The colored women of this
she made before the Judiciary Committee of the country though heretofore silent, in great mea-
House of Representatives in support of a petition sure upon this question of the right to vote by
on behalf of enfranchising women in Washington, the women of the [copy missing], so long and
D.C. In 1883, Cary received a law degree from ardently the cry of the noblest of the land, have
Howard University. neither been indifferent to their own just claims
under the amendments, in common with col-
By the provisions of the 14th & 15th amend ments ored men, nor to the demand for political rec-
to the Constitution of the United States, — a log- ognition so justly made every where within its
ical sequence of which is the representation by borders throughout the land.
colored men of time- honored commonwealths The strength and glory of a free nation, is not
in both houses of Congress, — millions of col- so much in the size and equipments of its armies,
ored women, to-day, share with colored men the as in the loyal hearts and willing hands of its men
responsibilities of freedom from chattel slav- and women; And this fact has been illustrated
ery. From the introduction of freedom° African in an eminent degree by well-known events in
slavery to its extinction, a period of more than the history of the United States. To the white
women of the nation conjointly with the men,
it is indebted for arduous and dangerous per-
° The strikethroughs throughout are part of the original
document. sonal service, and generous expenditure of time,

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