battle didn't end in 1920, The

NEA Today, Nov 1994 by Faber, Mary

August 26, 1995 will mark the 75th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment. But two NEA members are working to remind their students that the fight for true universal suffrage didn't end there.

Through most of this century, African Americans in many states faced two obstacles designed to keep them from the polling booth. The poll tax, which required paying a fee to vote, survived until the 24th Amendment was ratified in 1964. And it took the 1965 Voting Rights Act to abolish the literacy test, which in some states kept more than half the eligible population from voting.

In states wanting to evade the intent of the 15th Amendment, poor, uneducated white women (and men) faced property and literary barriers--until "grandfather" laws distinguished them from Blacks. And from 1922-36, American women were stripped of their citizenship (and, therefore, their new voting rights) if they married Chinese or Japanese men who were ineligible for naturalization.

American Indians could vote only after 1924, when an act of Congress conferred U.S. citizenship on those born in the United States. And Japanese-Americans sent to World War II internment camps couldn't vote unless they had resources for getting absentee ballots from their former place of residence.

NEA members Bonnie Exner and Dorothy Battenfeld are keeping alive crucial facts such as these for their students.

Exner teaches American history and civics at Ransom Middle School in Pensacola, Florida. In her three seventh-grade history classes, students discuss early women's suffrage and political participation, women's pre-Civil demands for suffrage, and their postponement of those demands in favor of Black male suffrage. They study the suffrage movement "greats"--Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass--and prepare reports on their favorites.

A more hands-on approach enlivens Exner's three civics classes. She teaches students to write to their senators and representatives. Usually she mails or hand delivers the letters. But last year, she videotaped the best letter writers reading their letters in front of a bulletin board of U.S. presidents--and sent copies of the tape to the state capital in Tallahassee.

In California, Dorothy Battenfeld, who teaches American studies at Montgomery High School in Santa Rosa, takes a different approach. She teaches a two-hour, theme-based American studies class that, as she puts it, "includes all people's history under all topics." Her class includes honors and average kids, and kids from many ethnic and racial groups.

Weaving women's history throughout the curriculum, Battenfeld teaches about early attitudes and laws about community participation by various groups, including African, European, and North and South American Indian women. Students read diaries of women who went West, study why western states were the first to grant women suffrage and a role in politics, and discover how women later lost those rights.

When Battenfeld teaches the Civil War amendments, she asks what might have happened had women been defined as "persons" by the 14th Amendment or included in the 15th--which prohibited denying the right to vote because of color. When she teaches the 19th Amendment, she asks kids to discuss how progressive it was.

Regardless of how they teach about women suffrage, educators are certain to spark student interest in the 19th amendment.