Meme Busters

ED: We’re going to turn now to a question from one of our listeners. It was prompted by meme he saw online. Neil, welcome to the show.

NEAL: Hi, thanks for having me on.

ED: OK, tell us a little bit about this meme.

NEAL: So I received a meme across my Facebook page. And it begins with a CNN Tweet that states that 96 years after women won the right to vote, a woman could win the White House.

The Tweet is embedded in another Tweet that states, Native American women couldn’t vote until 1924. Asian women couldn’t vote until 1952. And black women couldn’t vote until 1964. And I was wondering, what is the truth of that?

ED: So we have a CNN Tweet that refers to the 19th Amendment, the amendment that granted women the right to vote in 1920. Then another Tweet rebuts the CNN Tweet, listing later years that different minority women got the vote, Native American women in 1924, Asian-American women in 1952, and African-American women in 1964.

Well, Neal, I have someone on the line here who can help us untangle all of this. Let me introduce you to Robyn Muncy, a historian from the University of Maryland. Robyn, welcome to the show.

ROBYN MUNCY: Thank you so much. Delighted to be here.

ED: So, let’s start with the first part of this meme, the CNN Tweet. Quote, “96 years after women won the right to vote, a woman could win the White House.” Now, if we were going to tweet back an answer to this, what would be the short version? I know we’re going to unpack each clause of it, this being BackStory and fully understanding things. But what would be the quick answer to that meme?

ROBYN MUNCY: I love this meme, not because it gets everything right, but because it does point to a profound truth about the history of women’s suffrage, which is that, even after the passage of the 19th Amendment, millions of American women still were barred from the polls.

ED: So, Neal, you were right to be confused by this. And it’s an even larger scale than we would have thought. So now we’re going to ask Robyn to unpack each one of these clauses and help us understand really what’s going on.

Part two of the meme, Native American women couldn’t vote until 1924. Is that true, Robyn?

ROBYN MUNCY: In part. In 1924, Congress passed the Snyder Act. And that act made all Native Americans citizens. But being a citizen did not guarantee you voting rights. Still, the states had it in their power to exclude people from the polls on a lot of different bases.

So what was very common in places like, oh gosh, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Maine, Minnesota, in many states, Native Americans were still barred from the polls, both men and women, by arguments that said, for instance, that because they lived on reservations, they weren’t really residents of the state. And those laws remained on the books in some states into the ’40s and even into the 1950s. So it was still decades after 1924 that many Native Americans were still fighting for the right to vote in their states.

ED: So, Neil, what I hear here is that this clause of the meme has even greater weight than we thought.

NEAL: Oh absolutely. This is stuff my history teacher never taught me.

ED: But I believe that there’s still other parts of this meme we still have to explain. Right, Neal?

NEAL: Yes, the second part of the meme was that Asian women couldn’t vote until 1952.

ED: So what do you think, Robyn? Is this true?

ROBYN MUNCY: It’s partly true. Asian descended women who were born in the US could vote. But Asian immigrant women were largely excluded from the polls because they were excluded from citizenship until 1952, when the McCarren-Walter Act dropped the bar so that Asian immigrants could naturalize. They could become citizens, and thereby gain access to the polls.

ED: So this is true, but it also applies to men of the same immigrant background as well.

ROBYN MUNCY: Absolutely.

ED: So we’ll give that a largely true ranking. But, Neal, there’s even more after this, right? What’s the next, and the last, part of the meme?

NEAL: So the last part of the meme states that black women couldn’t vote until 1964.

ED: Is it true?

ROBYN MUNCY: No, not quite. African-American women in the North and the West were able to vote in their states at the same time that the majority of women in those states were admitted to the franchise. So in 1911, when women in California are given the vote, black women voted in California.

It’s African-American women in the South who were excluded in the early 20th century and through much of the 20th century by the same means that African-American men were excluded by. Those include things like the poll tax, unfairly administered literacy tests, brute violence, and economic reprisals from employers. And that kept African-American women in the South from the polls, in large part, until 1964 or 1965– in 1964, the ratification of an amendment to the Constitution that banned the poll tax, and then in 1965, of course, the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which made literacy tests illegal and also extended all kinds of protections to language minority groups, which helped Asian immigrant women and men as well.

ED: So that’s very helpful. If you were giving this meme a grade, what would you assign it Robyn?

ROBYN MUNCY: For spirit, an A-plus.

ED: [LAUGHS] OK.

ROBYN MUNCY: For facts, I’m afraid it would have to be a C-plus or B-minus.

ED: You like the spirit of this, an A-plus. What’s the spirit behind this that you like so much about this?

ROBYN MUNCY: I think it is really important to recognize that women are discriminated against on many bases other than sex. And if we really care about the well being, and empowerment, and freedom of women, then we have to be worried about all the bases on which women are excluded from something like the vote.

ED: You know, I think that sounds like a meme in and of itself.

ROBYN MUNCY: [LAUGHS]

ED: Thanks so much to both of you, Neal, for initiating this conversation and, Robyn, for actually answering these very hard questions.

NEAL: Thank you very much.

ROBYN MUNCY: Thank you so much.

ED: Robyn Muncy is a historian at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the author of Relentless Reformer, Josephine Roche and Progressivism in 20th Century America.

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