Suffrage Movement Splits Over 15th Amendment as Stanton and Anthony Deploy Racist Rhetoric

On May 15, 1869, the women’s rights movement fractured when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) after breaking with the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) over support for the 15th Amendment. The proposed amendment would prohibit voter discrimination based on race but not sex, granting voting rights to Black men while continuing to exclude all women. This split occurred against the backdrop of Reconstruction, when the insertion of the word “male” into the 14th Amendment in 1868 had already signaled that constitutional recognition of voting rights might prioritize formerly enslaved men over women of any race. Stanton and Anthony argued that any constitutional amendment failing to grant women’s suffrage was unacceptable and deployed increasingly racist rhetoric to make their case, revealing how white supremacy could corrupt even progressive movements for democratic expansion.

Stanton’s racist arguments against the 15th Amendment exposed deep fissures within the democratic reform coalition. She argued that “educated” white women deserved the vote before African Americans, whom she characterized as ignorant of American political customs. In her most notorious statement, Stanton questioned whether reformers should “stand aside and see ‘Sambo’ walk into the kingdom [of civil rights] first.” Anthony and Stanton partnered with racist Democrats who sought to overthrow Reconstruction, prioritizing their gender-based grievances over racial justice and betraying their former alliance with abolitionists. This stance disgusted Frederick Douglass, an early supporter of women’s suffrage who had spoken passionately for the Seneca Falls Convention’s voting rights resolution in 1848. At the May 1869 AERA convention, Douglass spoke against Stanton’s position, leading to the final rupture in their alliance.

The split created two rival organizations with fundamentally different strategies and principles. The NWSA, led by Stanton and Anthony, opposed the 15th Amendment and pursued a federal constitutional amendment for women’s suffrage while supporting broader reforms for women’s equality. In contrast, Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, and Julia Ward Howe formed the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) later in 1869, which supported the 15th Amendment alongside women’s suffrage and focused on state-by-state campaigns. African American women like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper criticized both sides for ignoring Black women’s unique position, declaring at an 1866 convention: “You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs.” This schism, which lasted 21 years until the 1890 merger creating NAWSA, demonstrated how institutional power structures exploited divisions within reform movements. Corporate and political interests opposing democratic expansion benefited when potential allies fragmented along racial lines, a pattern that would repeatedly undermine efforts to challenge concentrated power. The NWSA’s racist turn revealed that even movements claiming universal principles could reproduce systems of exclusion and hierarchy when their specific interests were threatened.