Color me surprised! (Not)

Erasing, and changing, history at every level.

Lynda

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By Jane Hampton Cook
August 24, 2025

The Smithsonian Institution’s museums have been in the news lately because President Trump has ordered a review of their programming and exhibits. I understand why.

In 2019, I was a consultant for the committee celebrating the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment that granted all women in all states the right to vote in 1920. Asked to write an article for the Smithsonian, I featured Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in my 1,000-word article.

When the article came back from the Smithsonian’s editors, I was shocked. They insisted that I include a chapter in Susan B. Anthony’s life that suggested she was a racist and that it would be wrong to omit it.

I looked into what they were talking about and could not with integrity describe her that way. In fairness, I know a lot more about her now than I did then, but my opinion has only gotten stronger over the years since.

In the decade before the Civil War, there was momentum for women winning the right to vote through Congressional legislation. Suffragists supporting women’s voting rights were also abolitionists who opposed slavery. These women leaned into their abolitionists’ views during the Civil War from 1861 to 1865.

Susan B. Anthony, a New York teacher, led a petition campaign where she gathered signatures from thousands of Americans calling for President Abraham Lincoln and Congress to abolish slavery. These petitions gave Lincoln the mandate he was looking for to issue his Emancipation Proclamation.

After the Civil War, the suffragists expected members of Congress to pass legislation for women’s voting rights as they had promised. But instead these congressmen went back on their word. Essentially the political will was only strong enough to grant black men the right to vote through constitutional amendments, not women regardless of skin color. The word male was put into the Constitution for the first time when the 14th Amendment described voters as the “male inhabitants of such State ... twenty-one-years of age” and “citizens of the United States.” Even one of Anthony’s staunchest allies from the beginning of the suffrage movement, Frederick Douglass, abandoned the women. Needless to say, the suffragists were devastated.

So what did Susan B. Anthony do? She and Elizabeth Cady Stanton realized that they were going to have to lobby for change at the local and state level, going state-by-state to change state laws. This meant that they would have to do something shocking at the time: reach across the political and regional aisle and work with and convince Southern Democrats.

It was at this point that they took money from some Southern Democrats who partially supported their position on women’s voting rights. Anthony and Stanton wanted voting rights for all men and all women regardless of color. Some of these Democrats supported literacy tests for voters. This meant that they were comfortable giving their educated wives and daughters the right to vote, but not their former female slaves. This is obviously a racist view but I did not see evidence that Anthony approved of this viewpoint. I found the opposite.

In looking at a 40,000-ft view of Anthony’s life, I could not characterize Susan B. Anthony the way the Smithsonian wanted me to characterize her. To do so was to smear her and imply that she was a racist. Her views on abolition were too strong. I withdrew my name and my article.