Lifting as We Climb: Black Women’s Battle for the Ballot Box (2020) by Evette Dionne

Description

Susan B. Anthony…Elizabeth Cady Stanton…Alice Paul…The Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls…The 1913 Women’s March in Washington, D.C…When the story of the suffrage movement in the United States is told, the most familiar leaders, speakers, and participants written about or pictured are generally White.

That is NOT the real story.

Women of color, especially African American women, were fighting for their right to vote and to be treated as full, equal citizens of the United States. Their battlefront wasn’t just about gender. African American women had to deal with White abolitionist-suffragists who drew the line at sharing power with their Black sisters. They had to overcome deep, exclusionary racial prejudices that were rife in the American suffrage movement. And they had to maintain their dignity-and safety-in a society that tried to keep them in its bottom ranks.

Lifting as We Climb is the empowering story of African American women who refused to accept this. Women in Black church groups, Black female sororities, Black women’s improvement societies and social clubs. Women who formed their own Black suffrage associations when White-dominated national suffrage groups rejected them. Women like Mary Church Terrell, a founder of the National Association of Colored Women and of the NAACP; or educator-activist Anna Julia Cooper who championed women getting the vote and a college education; or the crusading journalist Ida B. Wells, a leader in both the suffrage and anti-lynching movements.

Author Evette Dionne, a feminist culture writer and the editor-in-chief of Bitch Media, has uncovered an extraordinary and underrepresented history of Black women. In her powerful book, she draws an important historical line from abolition to suffrage to civil rights to contemporary young activists-filling in the blanks of the American suffrage story.

About the Author

Evette Dionne is a journalist, pop culture critic, and magazine editor.

She writes extensively about the intersections of race, gender, and size, for a number of print and digital publications, including HBO, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Time, The New York Times, Zora, The Guardian, Teen Vogue, Refinery29, Bustle, Romper, SELF, The Toast, Harper’s Bazaar, Mic, The Toast, and Ravishly. She’s also written book chapters in The Problematic Tyler Perry (Peter Lang, 2016); The Beyoncé Effect: Essays on Sexuality, Race, and Feminism (McFarland, 2016); Can We All Be Feminists?: New Writing From Brit Bennett, Nicole Dennis-Benn, and 15 Others On Intersectionality, Identity, and the Way Forward for Feminism (Penguin, 2018); The (Other) F-Word: Celebrating the Fat and the Fierce (Abrams Books, 2019); and Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger (Seal Press, 2019).

She’s also delivered speeches at the Schomburg Center for Black Research and Culture, Brown University, the University of Chicago, the University of Southern California, and Stanford University.

Evette received her bachelor’s degree in journalism from Bennett College, an incredible HBCU for Black women, in 2012. In 2014, she received a Master of Science in media management and women, gender, and sexuality studies from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Evette is based in Denver.