High Time for The Untold Story
by Louise S. Robbins
Carolyn Jefferson-Jenkins tells the story of one of the premier women’s political action groups—the League of Women Voters—from the vantage point of her position as the first woman of color to be elected president of the League. Her book, The Untold Story of Women of Color in the League of Women Voters, recounts the League’s origin in the abolitionist movement and its uncomfortable break from that movement as it worked to gain voting rights for women. Some of the League’s towering heroines are revealed to have deep strains of bigotry.
Resentful that Black men acquired the franchise through the 15th Amendment, while women were omitted, League members actively discouraged full participation by women of color and, in fact, used fear of Black voting power as a way to enlist help in securing the right to vote for White women, especially in the South. League chapters used meeting traditions, subtle and explicit comments, and contrived rules to limit Black women’s ability to participate. Even after suffrage was gained, the League was generally unwelcoming.
Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin, circa 1911, in a personnel photo for the Office of Indian Affairs. A member of the Metis Turtle Mountain band of the Chippewa, she marched in the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade in Washington.
Credit: National Archives at St. Louis, Records of the U.S. Civil Service Commission
The poet and activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in 1895. She challenged Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton at an 1866 women’s rights meeting.
Credit: Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, & Rare Book Library, Emory University
Educator Mary McLeod Bethune in an image from 1910 or 1911. She led voter registration drives after women gained the vote in 1920.
Credit: State Archives of Florida
While a few state and city Leagues included women of color, League leadership—using official plans and procedures—evaded opportunities to include Black women or to take a stance on integration, especially of schools, even while other women’s groups, such as the YWCA, were actively working toward improved race relations. Jefferson-Jenkins’s book rehearses these issues and the League’s responses, drawing attention to the varying degrees of leadership played by the national board and officers.
Jefferson-Jenkins focuses on her own election and somewhat turbulent term as the first woman of color to lead the League. She draws extensively throughout the book on primary sources—for which we owe her a debt of gratitude—while acknowledging that much more needs to be done at the level of state and local Leagues to fill out the picture.
Those interested in how an august, 100-year-old organization can work to overcome a legacy of bigotry and attempt to develop a culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion as the League began to do under Jefferson-Jenkins’s leadership will be interested in this book. It will also be of interest to students of women’s history and historians of American civic life.
Louise S. Robbins is a member of the League of Women Voters of Dane County. She is former director of the UW–Madison School of Library and Information Studies. She recently published similar versions of her review of The Untold Story of Women of Color in the League of Women Voters in ABC Clio and Amazon.
Dr. Carolyn Jefferson-Jenkins will be the featured speaker at our virtual Lively Issues Conversation: Centennial Challenges, coming up on Saturday, January 16, at 1 p.m. See a short description of the event and register now. The event will not be recorded.
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