I’ve been working on a new book for women trying to kick ass in a male-centric world and I’m in the developmental editing stages right now. I just got through my final chapter and I love it so, darn much:
Chapter #12: Stick Together
How To Stop Undermining Other Women & Get Things Done Together
It starts with this section, which I want to share below. After this, I discuss what a more equitable world looks like based on real situations from all over the world (governing bodies with more equity, whole countries with equal pay laws, etc), and finally, I have put together an extensive list of how we can help each other get to wherever it is we want to go. It all starts with women sticking together. Historically, our failure to do so has cost us decades of progress. Here’s just one example.
Stick Together: An Excerpt From My New Book
Last year, I was doing a bit of research for another book about how women won the rights we already have. These are rights like the right to vote, having our own financial lives, and the right to hold office. I was curious whether there were any learnings we could apply to today, a time where I fear a lot of those rights are being eroded and new ones seem out of reach. After researching the right to vote, my conclusion is already, heeeeeell yes, there are some key learnings that we really need to pay attention to.
As far as women’s suffrage goes, the short version of how we won the right to vote is that women attacked the issue on all fronts. We had women of all types trying everything they could: public protests, signature collection, lawsuits (oh so many lawsuits), lobbying, suffrage parades, publications, multiple organizations, cookbooks, traveling stump speeches, and a suffrage-themed pageant outside of the Treasury building, just to name a few. This took us 40 years of concerted effort. FORTY YEARS to get the 19th Amendment passed. But this was without social media and any representation whatsoever in governing bodies.
I will say, there was one, very distinct reason that stood out above all others that was likely the reason it took so very long to gain the right to vote. We didn’t stick together. The suffrage movement was fractured heavily from the start.
There were two large organizations, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), who couldn’t agree on exactly how to go about gaining suffrage. NAWSA focused on gaining suffrage at the federal level primarily via an amendment to the constitution. They were considered the more “radical” group that was also in favor of women’s divorce rights, equal pay, and property rights (can you imagine??!). ASWA was focused on a state-by-state approach and solely on the right to vote. Instead of working together, they worked side-by-side and sometimes against each other.
Neither organization was very supportive of black women voting. Once black men won the right to vote with the 15th Amendment in 1870, it should have been a no-brainer to be pushing for everyone else to get the vote. And yet, most suffrage events didn’t include black women and some actively excluded them. So black women had to strike out on their own, dealing with headwinds from both the recent abolition of slavery and the idea that they might somehow be less worthy of the vote than white women. Even though all groups wanted the same thing, they were fighting for it separately. Many early wins were only applied to white women. Or, when they applied to black women who, for example, gained the right to vote in the state of Utah in 1870 along with white women, were far more likely to face discrimination at the polls.
All of these organizations very publicly threw shade at the others and very rarely did they work together or show up at the same events. NAWSA and AWSA eventually did merge in 1890. Then, in 1916, The National Women’s Party (NWP) emerged, using more militant practices such as white house picketing and hunger strikes to get what they wanted.
It took some very strong women to keep pushing for their rights in this kind of environment. I have a lot of respect for women like Sojourner Truth, a former slave, who, in the state of New York showed up to vote in 1872 and was turned away. She pioneered the use of brand new technology, the photographic trading card (carte de visite), and used her image to become quite famous in the suffrage movement. She helped push the use of the new technology to women like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, proving how valuable it could be, despite always making her points from the outside of their organizations looking in.
And then we had Ida Wells-Barnett, who raised money to march in the March 3, 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington, DC, only to be told she couldn’t march at the front of the parade because she was black. She left in tears, joined the crowd, and when her Illinois contingent walked by, she calmly joined them at the front of their section and finished the parade anyway. Now, that is one badass woman!
We need so many more badasses right now to continue to fight for our rights. Women don’t have the luxury of saying that some badass women can’t fight or join or make progress simply because of some attribute or another. We need every single person we can to continue to fight for things like equal pay and equal representation in governing bodies.
Hindsight is entirely 20-20 of course, but it is very clear to me that if you want to achieve a goal, you should be as inclusive as possible. The more voices you have on your side, the faster you’ll get what you want. And I believe our fractured support of one another as women has set us back decades on various fronts.
Why Sticking Together Matters Today
The reason this chapter feels so urgent to me right now is that we are living through a moment that would have been unthinkable to many of us even ten years ago. Reproductive rights are worse. Equal pay got worse, especially during the pandemic. Women’s representation in governing bodies is still nowhere near parity.
And yet, in too many spaces, we are still doing what the suffragists did. We’re fracturing along lines of ideology, identity, and approach instead of locking arms around the things we agree on. The women who finally got the 19th Amendment passed didn’t agree on everything. They agreed on enough. We don’t have to be identical to be allies. We don’t have to agree on every issue to show up for each other on the ones that matter most. The urgency of this moment is real. So is our collective power but only if we use it together.
When Is The New Book Coming Out?
Great question! Likely the beginning of 2027. If you’re interested in continuing to hear updates, please subscribe to my blog, Medium feed, or request the free chapter of my first book on the home page, which is a non-technical book about the people side of software development (and how the best software products are built).
This is just one section of the new book, which I’m writing for every woman figuring out how to navigate a world that wasn’t built for her. Ida Wells-Barnett finishing that parade is the energy I want all of us to bring right now.
More soon. In the meantime, let’s stick together.
