Was Elizabeth Cady Stanton racist

Answer 1

The short answer, in my opinion is yes. My sources of information come fromwikipedia.com. The reason being is that after the civil war ended, members of the Woman's Suffrage Movement were against the 14th and 15th Amendment and strongly lobbied against it because it didn't guarantee women the right to vote. It angered members of the Women's Suffrage Movement and made them not want to support the Abolitionists any longer. Well, my first point about this is, our country just got through a civil war. Just as in the Revolutionary War, during the Civil war, Black soldiers proved their worth in society at the cost of camaraderie and bloodshed. This can be found in James Loewen's book "Lies My Teacher Told Me". You would have to imagine the number of people dead during this time, the families broken, both sides really lose because they were all U.S. citizens. Stanton held an "all or nothing" position" against supporting the passage of the 15th amendment (Source: wikipedia). I think it was a selfish position to hold personally because we just came out of a war that was fought over slavery. Women's rights couldn't have been the most important issue at the time. Could she not at least wait for a better time? Even when the 19th Amendment was passed, it said that everyone regardless of gender could vote, but was this really effective? It didn't really happen until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because before then, the colored vote really was not really guaranteed. Although the 19th Amendment couldn't be any clearer, the Woman's Suffrage Movement has failed to actually give colored women a secure vote, even 17 years after Elizabeth Stanton's death. I think that Elizabeth Stanton showed her true colors after the passage right before and after passage of the 15th Amendment. Her anger created divergence and she resorted to ethnic slurs, she made it sound like the woman's vote was more important than the vote for the colored men. -MysteryManoLove, YouTube.com

Answer 2

The answer is NO.

My information comes mainly from primary sources, including writings about Elizabeth Cady Stanton and by her in THE HISTORY OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE and her newspaper, THE REVOLUTION.

Stanton, an abolitionist, stood up for the right to vote for white and African American women from the very beginning. She says so many times in THE REVOLUTION.

Her opposition to the 15th Amendment granting voting rights to African American men and not to African American and white women was based on political pragmatism, not racism. Her concern about the 15th Amendment was not that African American men got the vote, but that African American and white women didn’t. Rightly or wrongly, she had been warned by African American leaders, including Robert Purvis and Sojourner Truth – that if African American men only got the vote it would be much more difficult to extend it to ALL women. Purvis predicted that "the great mass of black men would give their influence like a dead weight against the equality of women." In spite of those concerns, Stanton did not call for the repeal of the 15th Amendment once it was enacted.

Stanton was angry at the terrible injustice done to women by the abolitionists who only fought for the right of African American men to vote even after Stanton and other leading Suffragists had sidelined their issue to go all out for ending slavery and winning the Civil War.

Stanton was so committed to African American women getting the vote that she made sure to include them and document their involvement in the first three volumes of THE HISTORY OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE. In those volumes, which she co-edited, African American women suffragists are referenced at least 84 times and some are quoted extensively and described in glowing terms.

Frederick Douglass’s lifetime friendship with and admiration for Stanton, in spite of their tactical disagreements over the 15th Amendment, is a powerful testament. He understood, from his own experiences, that people working for political change must sometimes make difficult pragmatic decisions which are not always i with their core beliefs. A frequent house guest of Stanton’s, he had portraits of Stanton and Susan B. Anthony displayed prominently in his home.