The Real Story
Behind
“SUFFS”
The Suffrage Movement
Betrayed Black Women
The lead character and feminist example in “SUFFS” is Alice Paul. The real story is that Alice Paul excluded Black women from her organization, the National Woman’s Party (NWP) until after 1920. That’s why Black women organized their own, separate suffrage organizations. But this racist history gets conveniently edited out of the show.
Another main character in “SUFFS,” Carrie Chapman Catt, said “white supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by women’s suffrage.” In 2020, the League of Women Voters declared it important to acknowledge the racism of Catt and other white suffragists to face the “hard truths” about the League’s founding a century earlier. But you won’t find any of these truths in “SUFFS.”
Instead, “SUFFS” tells a whitewashed version of history. The whitewashing in the show is a dangerous lie because it reinforces several ideas: that the suffrage movement wasn’t deeply racist, that white women’s stories are more worthy of taking center stage, and that white women are always aligned with progressive causes. These are comforting fictions for some white women but this sort of disinformation betrays a younger generation of would-be feminists and leads us all down a dangerous path.
In 1913, organizers of the huge suffragist parade in Washington demanded that Black women march in an assembly at the back of the parade instead of with their state delegations. Wells-Barnett famously refused. Terrell, who marched in the Black delegation as requested, believed that the white suffragists would exclude black women from the 19th Amendment if they thought they could get away with it.
Black feminist writer bell hooks, discussing the passing of the 19th Amendment, staged as the triumphant moment in “SUFFS,” called the legislation “more a victory for racist principles than for feminist principles.”
Woodrow Wilson
was
extremely racist
even for
his time
Elected in 1912, Woodrow Wilson led an effort to racially segregate multiple agencies of the federal government, which had been remarkably integrated as a result of Reconstruction decades earlier.
This also means that the kind of interracial relationship suggested by the colorblind casting in “SUFFS” (between Dudley Malone and Doris Stevens) wouldn’t have been possible at the time. Interracial relationships were often met with violence, the fear of them was the excuse for lynching, and such relationships were only officially legal in the U.S. after the Loving v. Virginia ruling in 1967.
White “SUFFS”
co-created that era’s
white supremacy
White suffragist suits were designed to emphasize femininity to counter stereotypes of them as “mannish.” The color white, a symbol of purity, also aligned with the Ku Klux Klan’s ideology of protecting the purity of the race, and more explicitly, the “purity” of white women, who were falsely depicted as at-risk of assault by Black men.
At the time that “SUFFS” characters are lobbying Woodrow Wilson, he was screening "Birth of a Nation,” a white supremacist propaganda film, at the White House. None of the white suffragists, either in the show or in history, objected to this. The film would go on to be a crucial element in the rise of the second era of the KKK.
The myth
of
the
“women’s
vote”
The dream of progressive era suffragists, like those in “SUFFS,” was that voting rights for white women would mean “cleaning up” the public sphere of social problems. But the reality is that when white women got the vote, they voted the same way the men of their class and race did. White women voted to uphold white supremacy, as they have for decades.
One consequence of the 19th Amendment was the growth of the Women of the Ku Klux Klan, an overtly racist group that mobilized white women.