Craft: An American History

by Glenn Adamson

As African American voting rights in the South were eradicated through a combination of violence and Jim Crow laws, white suffragists worried that welding themselves to another civil rights movement would impede their own progress. Black women were typically excluded from suffragist pageants. On one occasion, the pioneering African American campaigner Ida B. Wells had to refuse point-blank a request to march at the rear of a women’s rights parade, as if she were boarding the back of a bus. This racial divide was typical of women’s organizations at the time. The Daughters of the American Revolution is one example. It had strong connections to the suffrage movement—Susan B. Anthony and Alice Paul were both members—and followed the Hull-House model by opening an immigrants’ craft shop in Chicago, in the hope of “making a bond between new Americans and the old, old stock.”67 Yet the DAR did not allow Black women to join its ranks. In keeping with the general tendency of the Colonial Revival, it painted a picture of the nation’s founding in just one color.