Today in Labor History June 18, 1872: The Rochester, New York police arrested Susan B. Anthony for attempting to vote, in violation of laws allowing only men to vote. She was convicted, but refused to pay the fine. In 1878, she and Elizabeth Cady Stanton arranged for Congress to introduce a constitutional amendment that would extend voting rights to women. In 1920, it was ratified as the 19th amendment to the constitution.
Today in Labor History March 3, 1913: Thousands of women marched in the first Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington, D.C. Its purpose was to "march in a spirit of protest against the present political organization of society, from which women are excluded." Up to 10,000 participated. Speakers included Anna Howard Shaw and Helen Keller.
Read #QuinnNorton about #whiteness:
"The great thing about the divide-and-conquer of creating white-skin #privilege is that you don’t have to give people thusly bought off anything more, and American power structures didn’t. In places with black #slavery, the whites suffered terribly.
"There is a simple truth to American history for the majority of people who have ever been American: the worse the black experience, the worse everyone else’s experience, including whites. Driving down (or eliminating) black #wages, while always agreeable to whites, drove white pay lower than their European counterparts for most of our history."
"Far from being an absolute product of democratic development, the progress of humanity and other beautiful things of that kind, parliamentarianism is, on the contrary, a historically determined form of the class domination of the bourgeoisie and - this is only the reverse side of this domination - of its struggle against feudalism. Bourgeois parliamentarism is a living form only as long as the conflict between the bourgeoisie and feudalism lasts", Rosa Luxemburg reminded us as early as 1905.