As the suffrage battle continued state by state, white supremacy was an important
factor in the strategy of the suffragists, who needed to develop southern support for a
female suffrage amendment.
White supremacy was not only a southern white-man’s prejudice:
- In 1915 a women’s suffrage amendment to the state constitution was lost in New York when ‘white voters were heard to have said that they changed their minds about supporting the amendment when they saw so many black women campaigning for it’
The glaring political fact of life in the US was not a gender division, but a racial one.
The black male franchise had already been clawed back in the southern states under the Jim Crow laws.