Forgotten Women and Men’s Spontaneous Enlightenment

My new book, We the Men, explores how America’s dominant stories about itself forget about women. This post draws on that book to highlight one mode of forgetting—simply ignoring women and their struggles for equality.

 

Some examples are concrete (literally). A 2021 survey of federal courthouses found more than 165 named for a man and just four named for a woman. Only three women made a 2021 list of the fifty most frequently commemorated people in America’s public monuments, compared to forty-four white men, many of them slaveholders.

Struggles over commemorating women have drawn much less mainstream attention than commemoration conflicts framed as centrally about race, even though many struggles over commemorating women are simultaneously intertwined with race. Perhaps our male-dominated commemorative landscape is such a perennial fact of life that it sometimes fades into the background as we enter yet another government building with a man’s name over the door or walk through yet another public square featuring a man immortalized on horseback.

But commemorations are not just decorative flourishes or scenery. They shape the vision of America that we carry around with us, which is why generations of women have fought to reconstruct the commemorative landscape and why they have faced such persistent resistance.

For example, women in and out of Congress have been fighting since the 1990s for construction of an American Women’s History Museum. That battle has lasted so long because of sustained opposition from conservative lawmakers and anti-feminist activists. As of this writing, Congress has not passed the statute required to build on the National Mall, and the museum remains years away from opening.

Women’s erasure also runs through the stories that powerful Americans tell with torrents of words rather than blocks of concrete and stone. Politicians delivering odes to America on significant anniversaries commonly celebrate the Founders for establishing government by the consent of the governed. That account depends on excluding almost everyone who was not a white male property owner.

Supreme Court opinions regularly ignore women when remembering the Court’s key decisions. They skip over both rulings that offered crucial support to women striving for equality and the many cases where the Court blocked or undid women’s progress. Law professors making lists of the Court’s most important or most terrible constitutional judgments routinely omit decisions about women’s rights.

Indeed, I was surprised to discover how frequently legal authorities and popular writers marginalize women even within discussions of women’s status. When judicial opinions mention women, judges on and off the Supreme Court often write as if men decided on their own to expand women’s rights and opportunities. I call these tales “spontaneous enlightenment stories,” and they feature in generations of popular press and political debates as well. These stories attribute progress to consensus and men’s wisdom while erasing the conflict and female agency that forward momentum required, with women needing to demand change and fight for reform against determined opponents.

For example, it remains all too common for judges, politicians, and textbook writers to describe the Nineteenth Amendment as a gift from men that “gave” all women the vote. That account is doubly misleading.

First, framing the Nineteenth Amendment as conclusively establishing women’s access to the polls misdescribes reality and implicitly centers white women. While the amendment prohibits sex-based denials of the franchise, it guarantees no one the right to vote. Laws on the books or tactics on the ground have denied many women the vote since 1920, especially women of color. Battles over voting and voter suppression rage to this day.

Second, the Nineteenth Amendment was not a gift. It was a multigenerational battle that required suffragists to overcome furious, sometimes violent, opposition. Suffragists were shot at, assaulted, knocked from picket lines, dragged on the ground, arrested while their assailants went free, brutalized in prison, and force fed.

American newsmen were apparently unable or unwilling to provide detailed photographs of anti-suffragist violence, which helped shield the violence from scrutiny. A suffragist artist refused to let the violence go undepicted. Nina Allender’s cartoons for the National Woman’s Party attracted widespread attention. Her cover art for a September 1917 edition of the Suffragist newspaper shows a male mob surrounding suffragists to wrest their banners from their hands and destroy them. One delighted hooligan has ripped the word “democracy” from a woman’s banner and claimed it for himself. The drawing was captioned: “Training for the Draft.” It illustrated how women battling for suffrage faced their own ferocious combatants, at a time when the nation was drafting young men to fight World War I.

— Jill Hasday