In the twentieth century suffragists became attuned to how they could market suffrage successfully. At the same time, they came to understand what would hinder their progress. The development of eugenics at the turn of the twentieth century definitely informed the way that woman suffragists approached the issues of race and class in their appeals to the American public. Eugenics was a movement popular among the middle and upper class whites, that  argued good traits could be bred into future generations and negative traits could be eliminated by careful breeding. The concept advocated reproduction of wealthy whites, but discouraged immigrants and African Americans from having children. It further sought to eliminate traits like criminality and insanity by sterilizing those who possessed them. Eugenics promoted an already perceived inequality among the races, but was distinct because it gave white reformers a self-legitimized biological justification for holding their views. Woman suffragists often espoused a high opinion of eugenics, but even those who did not were well aware of its popularity in the American mind. In turn, woman’s suffrage required a significant distance between woman suffragists and those who were considered genetically inferior in order to appeal to the white middle-class audience who made up the bulk of their support.

            Because of pervading racist attitudes very few African American women appeared in mainstream suffragist media. In parades black women did not march with their state organizations, but instead as a collective African American delegation. When Ida B. Wells, a noted black suffragist and anti-lynching crusader, tried to walk with the Illinois delegation in the 1913 march in Washington Grace Wilbur Trout, the leader of the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association (IESA), asked Wells to march with a segregated delegation of only black women to appease white women from southern states. The Chicago Tribune reported the incident on March 4, Wells issued this ultimatum for Trout, who personally opposed the discrimination of Wells, but acted on the wishes of the national movement. Wells said, “I shall not march at all unless I can march under the Illinois banner, when I was asked to march with the other women of our state, and I intend to do so or not take part in the parade at all.”^[1] Two women from the Illinois delegation agreed to march with Wells in the black delegation, but all three women reunited with the other Illinois women during the parade. Wells marched in the parade as an Illinois woman, but the fact that she was asked not to demonstrates the very systematic way that national suffrage leaders hoped to eliminate race as a component of their campaign for woman’s suffrage.