Intersectionality in the 19th Century: How the 15th Amendment Exposed the Limits of Coalition Politics

The 1870 voting rights amendment revealed how single-issue campaigns can fracture when different groups' interests collide.

By Garret Merkley · Explainer · Jun 7, 2026

Branched from The 15th Amendment and Its Impact on the Women's Suffrage Movement

Quick take

The 15th Amendment granted voting rights based on race but explicitly excluded sex, splitting the abolitionist-suffragist coalition.
Black women and white women faced different barriers to voting, yet the movement treated 'woman' as a universal category.
Strategic disagreements over which right to prioritize first exposed how coalition politics can marginalize members with overlapping identities.

Intersectionality in the 19th century wasn't called that yet, but it was lived acutely. The 15th Amendment (ratified in 1870) guaranteed that voting rights could not be denied based on 'race, color, or previous condition of servitude'—but said nothing about sex. This omission fractured the reform coalition that had fought slavery and demanded voting rights together. Black women and white women wanted the vote, but they wanted it for different reasons, faced different obstacles, and disagreed on strategy. The amendment exposed how a single-issue campaign, even one fighting for something as fundamental as voting rights, could leave some people behind entirely.

The Coalition That Split Over One Word

Before the Civil War, abolitionists and women's rights activists overlapped significantly. Both movements drew on ideals of human equality and fought oppression. Many suffragists believed that after slavery ended, the logical next step was universal adult voting rights—regardless of race or sex. But when Reconstruction began and Congress drafted the 15th Amendment, it became clear that Republican leaders wanted to secure Black male voting rights without committing to women's suffrage. This wasn't accidental. It was a deliberate choice to pass what seemed achievable, leaving sex-based restrictions untouched.

The response split the movement. Some white suffragists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, opposed the 15th Amendment publicly, arguing that women should not be excluded from a voting rights amendment. They reasoned: if the amendment passed without mentioning sex, it would entrench male voting as a constitutional right and make women's suffrage even harder to achieve later. Other activists, particularly those with stronger ties to the abolitionist movement, supported the 15th Amendment anyway, believing that securing Black male voting rights was the more urgent priority and that women's suffrage could follow. Black women, whose voices were often marginalized in both movements, had to navigate this rift while facing unique pressures: supporting Black male suffrage meant accepting their own continued disenfranchisement; opposing the amendment risked being seen as disloyal to their own communities.

Why 'Woman' Was Never a Neutral Category

The suffrage movement often spoke of 'woman' as if all women shared the same interests and faced the same barriers. But the 15th Amendment exposed this fiction. A white woman's path to the vote was blocked by sex alone. A Black woman faced both sex-based and race-based disenfranchisement. These were not the same problem, and they could not be solved by the same strategy. Yet the movement's leadership—predominantly white and middle-class—often treated women's suffrage as a single, unified cause.

Black women understood this intuitively. They could not separate their identity as women from their identity as Black people. When Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a Black abolitionist and poet, spoke at suffrage conventions, she pushed back against the idea that women's rights should come before or instead of Black rights. She argued for a vision of justice that honored both, but she also recognized that the white-dominated suffrage movement was unlikely to prioritize Black women's needs. This was the real cost of the 15th Amendment's silence on sex: it forced Black women to choose between movements that each claimed to represent their interests but served them incompletely.

The Strategic Trap: Which Right First?

The 15th Amendment created a strategic dilemma that no amount of coalition-building could resolve. Republican leaders argued that securing Black male voting rights first was pragmatic—it had enough political support to pass. Women's suffrage, they said, could come later. But 'later' never arrived on its own. By the time the 19th Amendment passed in 1920, fifty years had elapsed. During those decades, the suffrage movement had to choose whether to ally with white Southern Democrats who opposed Black rights in order to gain their support for women's suffrage, or to maintain solidarity with Black voters and risk losing white Southern votes. Many chose the former, further marginalizing Black women and deepening the fracture in the coalition.

This was not a failure of individual activists' commitment to justice. It was a structural problem: a political system that forces movements to negotiate for rights one at a time, and a coalition structure that assumes members can deprioritize parts of their own identities for the sake of unity. Black women could not deprioritize their Blackness to fight for women's suffrage, nor could they deprioritize their womanhood to fight for Black rights. Yet the movement's logic demanded exactly that.

Why This Moment Matters

The 15th Amendment and the suffrage movement's response to it laid bare a truth about coalition politics: shared enemies do not guarantee shared interests, and a single shared goal does not mean all members will benefit equally from achieving it. The amendment granted Black men the vote while leaving Black women and all women disenfranchised. It was a partial victory that looked complete only if you were a Black man. This experience—of being asked to celebrate a victory that does not include you—became foundational to how Black women, and later other marginalized groups, understood the limits of single-issue activism. It showed that movements built around one demand can inadvertently reinforce other forms of oppression, and that the people most affected by overlapping systems of exclusion often have the least power to shape the movement's priorities.

The Timeline of Exclusion

1865: 13th Amendment abolishes slavery; no mention of voting rights
1868: 14th Amendment grants citizenship; introduces the word 'male' into the Constitution for the first time, implying voting rights are male
1870: 15th Amendment prohibits race-based voting restrictions but allows sex-based ones
1920: 19th Amendment grants women the vote—but only formally; Black women in the South face additional barriers for decades

Did Black women actively oppose the 15th Amendment?

Not uniformly. Some Black women supported it as a necessary step for their communities, even as they recognized its incompleteness. Others, like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, criticized the movement for treating women's rights and Black rights as separate issues. Many Black women's voices were simply not recorded or centered in the historical record. What's clear is that they faced an impossible choice: support the amendment and accept their own continued disenfranchisement, or oppose it and risk being seen as disloyal to Black liberation.

Why didn't Congress just include both race and sex in the 15th Amendment?

Political calculation. Republican leaders believed they had enough votes to pass a race-based amendment but doubted they could pass one that included sex. Including sex would have alienated moderate Republicans and Southern Democrats whose votes might be needed. This reflects a broader political reality: rights are often won piecemeal, and those with power to grant them make strategic choices about which groups to include.

How did this split affect the women's suffrage movement later?

Significantly. The rift between white suffragists who opposed the 15th Amendment and those who supported it never fully healed. More importantly, the movement's leadership became increasingly willing to exclude or marginalize Black women in order to appeal to white Southern voters. By the early 1900s, some suffrage organizations actively discouraged Black women from participating, believing it would hurt their chances of winning white support. This betrayal had lasting effects on how Black women approached political organizing.

Is this what modern scholars mean by 'intersectionality'?

It's a precursor to modern intersectionality theory. The term 'intersectionality' wasn't coined until Kimberlé Crenshaw developed it in 1989 to describe how race, gender, class, and other identities overlap and create distinct forms of oppression. But the 19th-century experience of Black women navigating movements that treated their race and gender as separate issues is exactly the kind of problem intersectionality theory addresses. Modern scholars use the 15th Amendment era as a historical example of why intersectional analysis matters.

Did Black women eventually get the vote in 1920?

Technically yes, but practically no—not for decades. The 19th Amendment granted women the vote in 1920, but Black women in the South faced the same barriers Black men did: poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and intimidation. It wasn't until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that these barriers were effectively challenged. So while the 19th Amendment is celebrated as a women's suffrage victory, it was a hollow one for Black women in much of the country.

Sources

Kimberlé Crenshaw, 'Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color' (1991) — foundational intersectionality theory with historical context
Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, 'African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920' (1998) — detailed account of Black women's role in suffrage movements
Ellen Carol DuBois, 'Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869' (1978) — analysis of the split over the 15th Amendment