Women's Equality In The 1920s Essay

Words: 2220
Pages: 9

During the 1920s women are given the right to voteafter many years of disenfranchisement, changing women’s politics. Post-suffrage, one method in which women became involved in politics was through the participation in progressive reform movements. Another method in which women became involved in politics was by joining right-wing, and traditionalist political movements. “The battle for women’s suffrage emphasized political fairness. A small minority of these women believed that this political fairness should only be applied to men and women who fell within the dominant racial groups, in this case, whites”.1 “Women who interpreted the struggle for women's votes through the prism of racial, ethnic, and class privilege thus experienced an apparently easy transition from women's suffrage to the plethora of white supremacist, nativist, and racist political movements of the early twentieth century”.2 These women …show more content…
In actuality, women were, and remain, an essential part in communicating the message of race-related hegemony. Author Kathleen remarks that “through subversive actions within an all-female community, women involved in the Ku Klux Klan planned and executed their own activities with the purpose of maintaining white supremacy, not only in the South, but throughout the United States”.4 Moreover, I argue that women used their organizing force to create one of the most influential organizations, the WKKK, to find answers to problems they regarded as important in their lives, or in society as a whole. Their movement is considered progressive and so successful in its recruitment of other women because the Klanswomen supported a reactionary, extremist right-wing agenda, which embodied racism and white supremacy, and also related the rights of white, Protestant American women in the public realm, to the protection of their families in an attempt to make