BECOMING A WORLD POWER ★^677prohibition of alcoholic beverages (blamed for leading men to squander their
wages on drink and treat their wives abusively) to a comprehensive program
of economic and political reform, including the right to vote. Women, insisted
Frances Willard, the group’s president, must abandon the idea that “weakness”
and dependence were their nature and join assertively in movements to change
society. “A wider freedom is coming to the women of America,” she declared
in an 1895 speech to male and female strikers in a Massachusetts shoe factory.
“Too long has it been held that woman has no right to enter these movements.
So much for the movements. Politics is the place for woman.”
At the same time, the center of gravity of feminism shifted toward an out-
look more in keeping with prevailing racial and ethnic norms. The earlier “femi-
nism of equal rights,” which claimed the ballot as part of a larger transformation
of women’s status, was never fully repudiated. The movement continued to
argue for women’s equality in employment, education, and politics. But with
increasing frequency, the native- born, middle- class women who dominated the
suffrage movement claimed the vote as educated members of a “superior race.”
A new generation of suffrage leaders suggested that educational and other
voting qualifications did not conflict with the movement’s aims, so long as they
applied equally to men and women. Immigrants and former slaves had been
enfranchised with “ ill- advised haste,” declared Carrie Chapman Catt, president of
the National American Woman Suffrage Association (created in 1890 to reunite
the rival suffrage organizations formed after the Civil War). Indeed, Catt sug-
gested, extending the vote to native- born white women would help to counteract
the growing power of the “ignorant foreign vote” in the North and the dangerous
potential for a second Reconstruction in the South. Elitism within the movement
was reinforced when many advocates of suffrage blamed the “slum vote” for the
defeat of a women’s suffrage referendum in California. In 1895, the same year
that Booker T. Washington delivered his Atlanta address, the National American
Woman Suffrage Association held its annual convention in that segregated city.
Eight years later, the association met in New Orleans, where the delegates sang
“Dixie” and listened to speeches by former Confederate officers that denounced
blacks as barbarians. Like other American institutions, the organized movement
for women’s suffrage had made its peace with nativism and racism.
BECOMING A WORLD POWER
The New Imperialism
In the last years of the 1890s, the narrowed definition of nationhood was pro-
jected abroad, as the United States took its place as an imperial power on the
international stage. In world history, the last quarter of the nineteenth century
How did the United States emerge as an imperial power in the 1890s?