KAMALA HARRIS AND HISTORY PART I: SHE WHO WOULD BE VICE PRESIDENT

Former Vice President Joe Biden’s selection of

California Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate prompts a serious review of the historical dimensions of his choice. Her selection during the 100-year anniversary of the constitutional amendment

giving women the right to vote made even more significant the possibility Harris could very well stand on the U.S. capitol steps on January 20, 2021, raise her right hand, and take the oath as the nation’s first female vice president.

                  

Harris wouldn’t reach that place alone. She’d

    

follow in the footsteps of Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, Fannie Lou Hamer, Barbara Jordan, Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, Carol Mosley Braun, and many

others who led the way in getting women, including women of color, voting rights and meaningful participation in American political life. The long road to potentially having a woman one heartbeat from the presidency deserves an examination we’ll present in this post and our next one.

 

Women and Voting

Political movements aimed at gaining women the right to vote sprang up in the first half of the  nineteenth century, culminating in an 1848 convention at Seneca Falls, New York that called for full political equality for women. Congress took up a women’s suffrage constitutional amendment in 1878, but defeated it nine years later. The all-male U.S. Supreme Court rejected theories that the equal protection and anti-slavery amendments guaranteed women the vote.

America’s entry into World War I opened a new argument for suffragists. With women joining the labor force and serving in the military, the idea women should have a greater say in the nation’s political life gained traction. President Woodrow Wilson, facing protests that included women going on hunger strikes after  being arrested for demon-

strating in favor of suffrage, supported a constitutional amend- ment. The measure passed the House on May 21, 1919, the Senate on June 4, 1919, and went to the states for ratification. On August 18, 1920, Tennessee became the necessary 36^th state to ratify the 19^th amendment.

 

The Racial Divide

Middle class white women ran the women’s suffrage movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The 19^th amendment didn’t mention race. It prohibited denying the vote on the basis of sex, but it didn’t uniformly benefit black women. African American women in northern and border states could and did register to vote after the amendment passed. Indeed, when it was challenged as violating Maryland’s state constitution which limited voting to men, one of the women involved was Mary D. Randolph, “a colored female citizen” of Baltimore who had registered along with a white woman, Cecilia Waters. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld their registration.

Things were different in the South, where local officials resisted voting by African Americans of either sex. Literacy tests, poll taxes (outlawed in the 1960s by the twenty-fourth amendment), and other barriers kept many black women from voting. Even before passage of the 19^th amendment, black women

banded together in  suffrage organizations. Ida B. Wells, for example, helped found the Alpha Suffrage Club in 1913, likely the first African American women’s suffrage organization in the United States.

Only the 1965 Voting Rights Act finally addressed the problem by eliminating the barriers southern states used in keeping all blacks from voting. Though the statute didn’t mention sex, within a year of passage, it allowed registration of half a million African American voters in the South and ten million by 1980, many of them women.

 

Office Holding

The first woman elected to Congress reached

that body before enactment of the 19^th amendment. Montana gave women the vote in 1914, six years before ratification of the federal suffrage amendment. Jeanette Rankin won a House of Representatives seat from Montana in 1916.  

Harris would go to the vice presidency from the U.S. Senate, where no woman sat until November 21, 1922, when 87-year old Rebecca Felton of Georgia was sworn in to serve one day in filling a vacancy. The first woman elected to the Senate was Hattie Caraway Arkansas’s in 1932. In 1978, Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas became the first woman elected to a full senate term whose husband hadn’t been in Congress before her.

Carol Mosley Braun won a U.S. Senate seat

from  Illinois in 1992, ousting Alan Dixon largely over his vote in favor of confirming Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court. In doing so, she became the first black woman in the senate.  Kamala Harris became the second with her 2016 election from California. Before that, she’d won two statewide races for California Attorney General, and served as San Francisco’s district attorney.     

Harris has often acknowledged how the career of Chisholm, a New York Democrat, influenced her. Chisholm became the first black woman elected to the House when she won her seat in 1968 and in 1972 became the first woman and the first black person to seek the presidential nomination of a major party.

Chisholm, in advocating the importance of women in public office, once famously said, “Our representative democracy is not working because the Congress that is supposed to represent the voters does not respond to their needs. I believe the chief reason for this is that it is ruled by a small group of old men.”  In line with Chisholm’s view, we see the change the Harris candidacy represents as long overdue. What do you think?

In Part II we’ll look at the nation’s response to female vice presidential candidates and more deeply at Harris herself.