“VOTES FOR WOMEN”?

O RACISMO COMO POLÍTICA DE EXCLUSÃO DAS MULHERES NEGRAS NA LUTA SUFRAGISTA NOS ESTADOS UNIDOS

Abstract

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the abolitionist movement conquered countless adherents, especially women who realized in the struggle for black emancipation, the need to fight for themselves. In this way, emerged the feminist movement in the country. Over time, the american women’s movement understood that suffrage was essential to the achievement of their demands. And it was in the suffragist struggle that he revealed his racism as a political strategy for maintaining white supremacy and racial segregation in force as social policy in the State. This article aims to reflect the right to vote as a political instrument and tension between women and blacks for the acquisition of greater freedom and social prestige in the United States of America. To this end, Thomas Marshall’s concept of citizenship will be taken up to seize the dispute between such groups. In the first moment, the work will elucidate the feminist movement and then it will approach the racism instituted in the movement. The hypothesis advocated here is that female suffrage reaffirmed the dominant white supremacy, marginalizing black women. At the end of the article, it identifies the causes that led black women to articulate among themselves a movement that considered their double oppression female and black with the advent of black feminism.