The first sorority to demand equal rights

[nittanyalum]

Originally Posted by DSTCHAOS

I won't even get into the history behind the women's suffrage movement. Suffice it to say that the women's suffrage movement (and the women's liberation movement) far more impacted white middle class women than it did poor white women and racial and ethnic minority women. So how is that possible if a substantial percentage of college enrolled and college educated women who were also in sororities were not actually in the struggle on a macro level besides going to school? History lesson, anyone?

I will! I think more and more, it's too easy for young women (and heck, old women) to forget how long and how hard women had to fight. March being Women's History Month, this discussion is particularly apropos.

The women's rights movement did cross efforts with the civil rights movment, but as DSTCHAOS mentioned in a later post, how much parity came out of it for caucasian vs. african american women is up for debate. Clearly, African American women face additional discriminations based solely on their skin color.

To the NPC/NPHC debate (LOL at Senusret he's just determined to have a full-on "race war" somewhere on this forum!), I think what you'll find in the history of NPCs are individual members who may have been active in the women's movement (ala my girl H.E. Butterfield), but working on behalf of the movement was not on the agenda of the NPC orgs themselves. Our founders, though, without a doubt, were pioneers on their campuses and did their own thing to promote women in their time and place.

NPHC orgs seem to have a much higher level involvement as a whole with the rights movements, so while I don't think it's necessarily an apples to oranges thing, I do think there are much different national directives about the role the national org should take in these larger national "causes".

Some interesting reads that provide info. on most of the above:
A Short History of the Women's Movement: http://www.legacy98.org/move-hist.html -- about halfway down, under "The Movement Expands", notable activists are named, among them are Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell , the only 2 black women to sign the petition that led to the formation of the NAACP, and just overall kick-a$$ ladies. And here's an article from a 2002 edition of Black Issues in Higher Education entitled Did black folks gain from the women's movement?