Women’s History Month: From Suffrage to the SAVE Act
By Kate Caldwell
In American history, the fight for voting rights has never been only about who has the right to vote, but about who must prove they deserve it.
Women’s History Month invites us to reflect on the long struggle for political inclusion in the United States. The suffrage movement is often remembered as a triumph: women organizing, marching, and demanding recognition as full political subjects. That history matters. But an honest accounting requires more than celebration. It requires naming who was included, who was excluded, and how the fight for the vote has always been shaped by power.
This year, Women’s History Month arrives as Congress considers the SAVE Act (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act), a proposal that would require documentary proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. Supporters frame the bill as a measure to protect election integrity. Civil rights, disability rights, and voting rights advocates warn that it would create new barriers to the ballot.
This moment exposes a familiar pattern in U.S. history wherein expansions of voting rights are often followed by new mechanisms of exclusion; a dynamic documented by historians and voting rights scholars examining the contested history of American democracy.
Limits of Suffrage
The U.S. suffrage movement was not a single, unified project. While it helped secure the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, many of its most visible leaders were willing to compromise social justice in order to gain political legitimacy with white lawmakers.
Black women had been challenging these exclusions long before suffrage became a national political victory. In 1851, Sojourner Truth, a formerly enslaved abolitionist and women’s rights advocate, delivered her now-famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech, confronting the racial hierarchies embedded within both the women’s rights movement and broader American society.
Later generations of Black suffragists continued this work. Black women were frequently excluded from white-led suffrage organizations and public demonstrations. When Ida B. Wells attempted to march with white suffragists in the 1913 Washington, D.C. suffrage parade, she was told to move to the back. She refused, joining the march with her state delegation instead. Wells and other Black suffragists, including Mary Church Terrell and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, organized their own political networks that linked suffrage to racial justice and civil rights.
The history of suffrage also intersects with disability in ways that are often overlooked. Some suffrage leaders embraced Progressive Era eugenics and “fitness” politics, a dynamic sometimes described by historians as “eugenic feminism,” which linked women’s political rights to ideas about racial and biological fitness to social improvement. Within this framework, disabled people were frequently portrayed as unfit for citizenship, reproduction, and political participation. While suffragists argued for women’s political capacity, they often imagined that capacity through ableist ideals about who counted as a legitimate citizen.
At the same time, disabled women were participating in democratic struggles in ways that have largely been erased from mainstream histories. Harriet Tubman, who lived with lifelong neurological disabilities after suffering a traumatic head injury while enslaved, later became active in the women’s suffrage movement alongside leaders such as Susan B. Anthony. Helen Keller, who was deafblind, publicly advocated for women’s suffrage, labor rights, and broader democratic participation, challenging the idea that disabled people lacked political capacity.
Even after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, voting access remained deeply unequal. The right to vote on paper did not translate into access in practice.
- Black women in the South faced poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation, and violence.
- Native women were not universally recognized as U.S. citizens until 1924, and many were barred from voting by state laws for decades after.
- Disabled women in institutions were often legally or practically prevented from voting.
- Poor women faced financial and logistical barriers to registration and participation.
The suffrage victory was real, but incomplete. The struggle for voting access did not end in 1920. It simply shifted terrain.
Poll Taxes: Paying to Participate in Democracy
Poll taxes were one of the most explicit tools of voter suppression in U.S. history. They required people to pay a fee in order to vote and were used primarily to disenfranchise Black voters and poor people, particularly in the Jim Crow South. Poll taxes were not accidental bureaucratic hurdles. They were designed barriers.
Women organizers played key roles in fighting poll taxes, recognizing that “paying to vote” fundamentally undermined democratic participation. Poll taxes were ultimately prohibited in federal elections by the Twenty-Fourth Amendment in 1964 and ruled unconstitutional in state elections by the Supreme Court two years later (Harper v. Virginia Bd. of Elections, 383 U.S. 663 (1966)).
Women played key roles in organizing to challenge these systems of exclusion. During the Civil Rights Movement, Black women organizers helped dismantle the structures that had prevented generations of women from voting. One of the most powerful voices in that struggle was Fannie Lou Hamer, a Mississippi voting rights organizer who helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and led voter registration efforts in the Jim Crow South.
Hamer’s activism came at enormous personal cost. She lived with lifelong disabilities and chronic health conditions after being brutally beaten by police in 1963 while jailed for attempting to register Black voters. Her experience illustrates the risks faced by Black women who challenged voter suppression and the intersection of racial violence, disability, and political resistance.
While poll taxes were ultimately prohibited, the lesson is not simply that charging money to vote is wrong. The deeper lesson is that voting barriers are often framed as neutral administrative requirements while functioning as targeted exclusion.
Building Democratic Access: Women Who Organized the Vote
The fight for voting access was never limited to constitutional amendments. It depended on grassroots organizing and civic education.
Civil rights leader Septima Poinsette Clark played a central role in this work. Through the Citizenship Schools program at the Highlander Folk School, Clark helped thousands of Black citizens learn the literacy and civic skills needed to register to vote in the Jim Crow South, effectively undermining literacy tests used to disenfranchise Black voters. Clark’s work demonstrates an essential truth about voting rights: access to democracy is not just about legal recognition. It also requires the removal of structural barriers and the creation of pathways for participation.
Other women expanded democratic participation through leadership within government institutions themselves. Barbara Jordan, the first Black woman elected to the Texas Senate since Reconstruction and later a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, became one of the most powerful voices defending constitutional democracy during the Watergate hearings. Later in life, Jordan used a wheelchair due to multiple sclerosis while continuing to teach and advocate for democratic governance.
History reminds us that disabled people are not merely subjects of policy. They have long been architects of movements that expand democratic participation and challenge structural barriers.
The SAVE Act
Today, debates over voting access continue in new forms.
The SAVE Act would require people to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship (such as a passport or birth certificate) to register to vote in federal elections. Non-citizen voting in federal elections is already illegal and extremely rare. The practical effect of the bill would not be to solve widespread fraud but to change who bears the burden of proving their right to participate in democracy.
The SAVE Act does not impose a literal fee to vote. But it does impose real costs:
- Paying to obtain or replace documents
- Traveling to government offices
- Taking time off work
- Navigating complex bureaucratic processes
These costs function as modern barriers to the ballot, especially for people who already face structural inequities in access to documentation, transportation, and time.
For this reason, many voting rights advocates describe the SAVE Act as a modern echo of poll taxes: not because it charges a fee to vote, but because it shifts the cost of democratic participation onto individuals least able to absorb it.
Disproportionate Harm Is Not Accidental
Like poll taxes and literacy tests before them, the SAVE Act’s burdens would not fall evenly.
Women are more likely to experience documentation mismatches due to name changes after marriage or divorce. A birth certificate that does not match a current legal name can create new hurdles to voter registration.
Disabled people face disproportionate barriers and gaps when voting requirements emphasize in-person documentation, travel to government offices, and inaccessible bureaucratic processes. Transportation, office accessibility, and the cost of document replacement are not neutral obstacles.
People of color are less likely, on average, to possess passports or easily accessible citizenship documents due to structural inequities tied to poverty, housing instability, and historical exclusion from formal systems of recordkeeping. Naturalized citizens who are fully eligible to vote may also face additional burdens because the documents used to prove citizenship, such as naturalization certificates, can be difficult and costly to replace.
Documentation requirements can also create barriers for people attempting to re-register after incarceration in states where voting rights have been restored, adding another layer of administrative hurdles for eligible voters in civic participation.
Historically, voting restrictions are rarely framed as targeting specific groups. They are framed as neutral safeguards. Their impacts tell a different story.
What Women’s History Month Asks of Us
Women’s History Month is often framed as a celebration of access. But history tells a more complicated story. Suffrage expanded the vote, but it also left intact many systems of exclusion. Poll taxes were defeated, but new barriers emerged in their place. Each generation inherits both victories and unfinished work.
The question is not whether the SAVE Act resembles past restrictions symbolically. The question is whether we recognize the pattern:
- When access expands, new administrative barriers follow.
- When participation grows, new “neutral” rules appear.
- When democracy becomes more inclusive, new lines are drawn around who must prove they belong.
Women’s history teaches us that voting rights are not self-executing. They require constant defense and careful attention to who bears the cost of participation. And they require rejecting policies that quietly reintroduce exclusion under the language of “integrity.”
Defending Access Is Honoring History
To honor Women’s History Month is not simply to celebrate suffrage. It is to refuse the repetition of the same structural harms in new forms.
Voting access is gender justice.
Voting access is disability justice.
Voting access is racial justice.
The work of expanding democracy did not end in 1920. It did not end in 1965. And it does not end now.
The Center for Racial and Disability Justice (CRDJ), based at UCLA School of Law, is a first-of-its-kind center dedicated to promoting justice for people of color, people with disabilities, and individuals at the intersection of race and disability.
Learn more about CRDJ by visiting the Center for Racial and Disability Justice webpage.
