11 Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall: Symbolism and Social Change

April 10, 2013

After the 2008 presidential election, U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-New Mexico) held a lottery for his quota of tickets to Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration, and I got lucky. So, the morning of January 20, 2009, I walked from Washington’s Union Station to my assigned gate near the House of Representatives, surrounded by thousands eager to share that momentous transfer of power to the first African American President. We passed the east entrance of the Supreme Court on 2^nd Street NE, and, across the street, the place I’d lived in 1967 when I worked as an intern in the U.S. Senate. The current tenants appeared to be anti-abortion-rights activists, judging from the enormous signs on their porch. That brief personal dissonance notwithstanding, the crowd of strangers seemed to share a sense of history—particularly people my age and older who remembered the Civil Rights Movement. One African American woman from Indiana smiled at me. “I thought this day would never come,” she said. “Me, too,” I replied. “I grew up in the segregated South and I never thought I’d see an integrated classroom.” “I was one of those kids who integrated your classrooms,” she said. The morning was full of such shorthand exchanges about histories shared—but shared differently. Standing in line at my gate, I met an African American Baptist minister from Los Angeles and his wife, who were there, they said, “Because you have to be.”

The sense of connection kept building, but everything else ground to a halt. Thousands stood immobile as the security personnel assigned to screen us proved totally inadequate for the crowd. They closed the gate before the inauguration, with thousands of disappointed ticketholders still outside. One woman managed to get Obama’s inaugural address on her cell phone, and a small group of us huddled around her to listen—so near, but still outside the fence.¹

Four years later I watched President Obama’s second inauguration from the warmth and privacy of my Calgary living room—far from Washington but closer to the event. As the President repeatedly intoned the first words of the Declaration of Independence, “We, the people,” I remembered the people who had stood with me four years earlier, and all those whose long decades of collective action brought us to that historic day. Then came the passage, paraphrasing the Declaration’s “self-evident truth” that “all men are created equal,” that evoked three social movements dedicated to the promise of that founding document: “We, the people,” the President repeated, “We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths—that all of us are created equal—is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall.”² It was the sentence of a lifetime for a historian of social change.

Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall—three places rich with connotation for the rights of American women, African Americans, and LGBTQ2S+ Americans. Yet I pondered why—alliteration aside—the President chose those particular sites for his evocative imagery. Seneca Falls, New York: site of the first U.S. women’s rights convention in 1848. Selma, Alabama: where police violence against Civil Rights activists at the Edmund Pettus Bridge moved Congress to pass the historic 1965 Voting Rights Act. And the Stonewall Inn in New York City’s Greenwich Village: where, on June 27, 1969, gay and transgender patrons resisted a routine police raid and ignited the Gay Liberation Movement.

There were obvious political reasons for the President to choose these images. He owed his re-election to women, people of color, and LGBTQ2S+ voters. He had won 55 percent of women’s votes, seven in ten Latinxs’, three-quarters of Asian American ballots, 93 percent of African Americans’. He had scored more than a three-to-one edge in exit polls among the 5 percent of voters who identified themselves as gay, lesbian, or bisexual.³ So Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall rhetorically acknowledged his base, commitments honored, and the work to come. The President continued:

It is now our generation’s task to carry on what those pioneers began. For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers, and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts. Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law—for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well. Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote.⁴

Thus, the President connected Seneca Falls to the first law he signed, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and Stonewall to his personal “evolution” to support gay marriage equality and to allow gays and lesbians to serve openly in the U.S. military. He challenged efforts to undermine the historic victory won at Selma, as many states enacted new voter ID regulations and public officials shortened polling hours to discourage African American voters; he honored those who stood for hours in long lines to resist disenfranchisement yet again.⁵

Selma and Stonewall spoke as well to issues that were before the U.S. Supreme Court, which was considering the constitutionality of key portions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, of the Defense of Marriage Act which defined marriage as between one man and one woman, and of California’s Proposition 8, which outlawed gay marriage and was found unconstitutional by a U.S. Court of Appeals.⁶ In these contexts, Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall connoted long and hard-won journeys to electoral power, inspiring hope while providing benchmarks against which to gauge new challenges and to underscore a political agenda that addressed unfulfilled promises of civic equality.

The President’s political intentions for invoking Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall fit the contexts of his re-election victory. But historians and politicians approach history differently, and his juxtaposition of three symbolic events caught my imagination. What really linked Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall and the movements they represented—what linked them historically and in 2013? Selma and Stonewall involved violent confrontations between protesters and the police; Seneca Falls was a peaceful assembly that began decades of organizing before women finally won the vote in 1920.⁷ Seneca Falls and Stonewall are popularly considered important “firsts”—the events that ignited the Women’s Rights and Gay Rights Movements. Historians quibble about the significance of such “firsts,” about what preceded and enabled them. But Selma is considered a culmination—one of the bitter final struggles in the southern Civil Rights Movement that won a signal victory, ending a century of de facto African American disenfranchisement through poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and economic and physical violence.⁸ Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall were not exactly parallel chapters in the history of U.S. social change. I was particularly intrigued by Obama’s inclusion of Stonewall, a name known to most LGBTQ2S+ activists, but not to most Americans.

I am intrigued with how particular places and events enter collective memory to connote shared identities, struggles, and aspirations. Those who came to witness President Obama’s first inauguration understood it as an historic moment, whatever individual paths led us there. We imply shared histories when we ask, “Where were you when Kennedy or King was killed?” “Where were you when the Berlin Wall fell, or the Twin Towers?” I don’t know that Stonewall or Seneca Falls or even Selma evokes similarly shared histories. In the polarized American political climate, they are likely to prompt deeply divided responses if they are known at all.

The President’s choice of images led me to revisit these three historic events—to think about their lessons for how the local, personal, and particular have inspired collective aspirations and acts, about how they enter collective consciousness and histories.

I begin with the histories of each event to get us all on the same page, starting, chronologically, with Seneca Falls. Like most historic events, the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention for women’s rights began much earlier. We could begin with the moment a participant came to oppose slavery, attended a Quaker meeting where women spoke, or witnessed spousal abuse. The story is often begun at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, which deemed women “constitutionally unfit for public and business meetings,” and relegated them to the balcony. Two of those segregated delegates, American abolitionists Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, visited the British Museum, where they first discussed the idea of a mass meeting for women’s rights. As abolitionists, they embraced human equality and extended it to full human rights for women. Stanton, a newlywed in London on her honeymoon, had refused to promise to “obey” when she married abolitionist Henry Stanton. ⁹ But she was quickly immersed in domestic duties and bearing the first of her seven children. The women’s rights convention waited eight years until Mott visited her sister in Seneca Falls, New York, where the Stantons lived. Abolitionist Jane Hunt held a tea for Mott at her home in nearby Waterloo on July 13, and invited Stanton, Martha Coffin Wright, and Mary Ann McClintock. Stanton later wrote that, unhappy with her life as a housewife, she “poured out the torrent of my long-accumulating discontent with such vehemence and indignation that I stirred myself, as well as the rest of the party.” The women revived the conference idea and the next day announced in the Seneca County Courier: “A Convention to discuss the social, civil and religious condition and rights of woman, will be held in the Wesleyan Chapel, at Seneca Falls, N.Y., on Wednesday and Thursday, the 19^th and 20^th of July.”¹⁰ They wrote eleven resolutions and a Declaration of Sentiments. Paraphrasing the Declaration of Independence, it began: “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal” and then detailed a history of “repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman.”

He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.

He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.

He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men—both natives and foreigners. . . .

He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.

He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.

The women opposed husbands’ power “to administer chastisement,” and, in the event of divorce, to get custody of children. The Declaration continued:

. . . [I]f single and the owner of property he has taxed her to support a government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it.

He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration. . . .

He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education—all colleges being closed against her. . . .

He has endeavored, in every way that he could to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.

The women demanded “immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States.”¹¹ Yet they chose not to chair the meeting but instead recruited Lucretia Mott’s husband James Mott. Only Stanton wanted to include the right to vote. “Ah, Lizzie,” Lucretia Mott told her friend, “thee will make fools of us all.” Henry Stanton left town.¹²

But more than three hundred people showed up, including forty men, among them Frederick Douglass, ex-slave, abolitionist, and newspaper owner. The first day, participants discussed and amended the Declaration of Sentiments. Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton spoke in the afternoon.¹³ Stanton tried to deflect anticipated ridicule with humor:

We do not propose to petition the legislature to make our husbands just, generous, and courteous, to seat every man at the head of a cradle, and to clothe every woman in male attire. . . .[W]e still admire the graceful folds, and consider our costume far more artistic than theirs. Many of the nobler sex seem to agree with us . . . , for the bishops, priests, judges, barristers, and lord mayors of the first nation on the globe, and the Pope of Rome, with his cardinals, too, all wear the loose flowing robes . . .¹⁴

The eleven resolutions came up for discussion and votes the second day. Ten passed unanimously, but many feared that the suffrage resolution would undermine other demands. An impassioned speech by Frederick Douglass won over a slim majority. Sixty-eight women and thirty-two men signed the Declaration of Sentiments.¹⁵

Two weeks later, on August 2, 1848, the women hosted another women’s rights convention in Rochester, New York. This time a woman, Abigail Bush, presided, the suffrage resolution passed by a wider margin, and plans began for women’s rights conventions in other states.¹⁶ Women held women’s rights conventions most years during the 1850s. Susan B. Anthony, who was not at Seneca Falls, joined the movement in 1851, beginning her lifelong collaboration with Stanton. Anthony, who was single, shared childcare at times to give Stanton time to write. Stanton once wrote her friend, “Come here and I will do what I can to help you with your address, if you will hold the baby and make the pudding.”¹⁷

Women’s rights advocates temporarily shelved their movement during the Civil War, turning their energy to working for a Union victory and an end to slavery. After the war, the movement split over support for the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, which guaranteed that no right, including the vote, could be denied because of color or previous condition of servitude. In often racist tones, Stanton and Anthony opposed the amendments because they did not include women and because they inserted the word “male” into the Constitution for the first time. The opposing sides formed two organizations: the National Women’s Suffrage Association and the American Women’s Suffrage Association. The rift was not healed until 1890, when opposing camps merged to form the National American Women’s Suffrage Association.¹⁸

Beginning with Wyoming in 1869, states and territories began to enfranchise women, but women did not win the vote nationally until 1920, with the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Of all the women who signed the Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls only Rhoda Palmer lived to cast her ballot for the first time at age 102.¹⁹ It took another sixty years—until 1980—for gender to become a recognized factor influencing votes in presidential elections, and only in recent elections have women’s issues affected election outcomes.²⁰

African American men, in theory, got the vote long before women, when the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in 1870, but that right was denied in most southern states until after Selma, when Congress passed legislation to enforce the Amendment.²¹ Selma, of course, was not the opening chapter of the African American Civil Rights Movement, which might be dated from the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that outlawed school segregation, the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, the March on Washington Movement that persuaded President Roosevelt to create the Fair Employment Practices Committee in 1941, or from the first slave ship bound for the Americas.²² Unlike Seneca Falls, Selma signified not a beginning, but a pivotal moment in the long struggle for African American voting rights. Accounts of Selma usually focus on January to March 1965, but the local voting rights movement began two years earlier when local African Americans formed the Dallas County Voters League and organizers from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) began a voter registration campaign.²³ Dallas County sheriff Jim Clark and the local White Citizens’ Council retaliated with arrests, violence, and economic intimidation. By late 1964 SNCC was exhausted, nearly broke, and fewer than 1 percent of Selma’s Black majority could vote. Shortly after the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. received the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1964, his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) joined the Selma campaign. On January 18, SNCC and the SCLC began daily marches to the Dallas County Courthouse, hoping for media attention as Sheriff Clark responded with characteristic unrestraint. Black teachers marched in protest after Clark pushed and arrested local activist Amelia Boynton. On February 18, at a night march in nearby Marion, angry Whites sprayed the television cameras with black paint and clubbed NBC reporter Richard Valeriani. An Alabama State Trooper fired point blank at Jimmie Lee Jackson as he tried to protect his mother from a similar attack; Jackson died eight days later. To channel the grief and outrage at Jackson’s murder, on Sunday, March 7 SNCC Chairman John Lewis and the SCLC’s Rev. Hosea Williams began leading some 600 protesters to the state capitol in Montgomery. They got only as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where some 150 Alabama State Troopers and Clark’s posse met them with horses, billy clubs, and tear gas. Television networks interrupted their Sunday night programming to broadcast the violence. Amelia Boynton, beaten and gassed nearly to death, appeared on the front page of newspapers around the world. John Lewis suffered a fractured skull; he and sixteen others were hospitalized.²⁴

In response to Bloody Sunday, SCLC called for people of good will to come to Selma for a second march. Despite a federal restraining order, on Tuesday, March 9 Dr. King led two thousand marchers to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, among them 450 White ministers, nuns, and rabbis. Troopers again blocked them. The marchers stopped, prayed, and turned around. King asked the clergy to stay if they could. That night a White mob followed three White ministers and clubbed Rev. James Reeb in the head. Reeb died two days later.²⁵

Protests erupted in sympathy throughout the country. On Monday night, March 15, President Johnson made a televised address to a joint session of Congress to ask for a voting rights act. His opening words established Selma’s place in U.S. history: “At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.” He continued:

The real hero of this struggle is the American Negro. His actions and protests, his courage to risk safety, and even to risk his life, have awakened the conscience of the nation. His demonstrations have been designed to call attention to injustice, designed to provoke change, designed to stir reform. . . .This cause must be our cause too. It is not just Negroes, but all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.²⁶

That night Johnson federalized the Alabama National Guard to protect marchers for the fifty-seven miles from Selma to Montgomery. The next day, Judge Frank Johnson affirmed that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteed the rights to free speech, the right to assemble, and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. Finally, on March 21, 3,200 marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Their ranks swelled to 25,000 by March 25 when they entered Montgomery, joined by celebrities like Harry Belafonte and Joan Baez, and by ordinary White supporters like Michigan housewife Viola Liuzzo. The Ku Klux Klan murdered Liuzzo that night, as she drove marchers back to Selma.²⁷

Five months later, on August 26, 1965, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, which outlawed literacy tests, poll taxes, and other obstacles to voting, and provided for federal enforcement of voting rights. The impact was dramatic. By late 1966, a majority of African Americans were registered to vote in most southern states. In 1964, 22 percent of all Blacks could vote in Alabama; by 1968, 57 percent had registered.²⁸ African American votes would elect the SCLC’s Andrew Young to Congress from Georgia’s 5^th district, the first African American to represent Georgia in Congress since Reconstruction. Then they elected him to two terms as Mayor of Atlanta. Former SNCC leader John Lewis would also represent Georgia’s 5^th Congressional District from 1987 until his death July 17, 2020.²⁹

The story could end there, a victory for democratic rights won with blood and courage. But it can also be told as the end of the fragile coalition that upheld non-violent civil disobedience. Below the surface in Selma there were rifts between the SCLC and some SNCC activists who resented moderate middle-class ministers who could attract the funds and media attention to capitalize on two years in the trenches for SNCC and the local activists. On the way to Montgomery, SNCC’s Stokely Carmichael began organizing impoverished Blacks in Lowndes County, planting the seeds of the Black Panther Party. Five days after President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, the Watts section of Los Angeles erupted in a massive race riot protesting police beating Marquette Frye.³⁰

Four years later, Stonewall, too, erupted in public resistance to a closeted underground existence, as young gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals battled police who raided the Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich Village for operating without a license. Although homosexuality was legal in New York, the State Liquor Authority refused to license gay bars, claiming they were “disorderly houses” where “unlawful practices are habitually carried on by the public.”³¹ Manhattan police conducted a routine raid the night of June 27, 1969, seizing alcohol and arresting thirteen people. But the patrons didn’t follow the script. Men refused to show their IDs; transvestites refused to go with female officers to confirm their gender. Those not arrested joined a crowd outside the bar that grew to over 2,000 people. As police tried to haul prisoners away, the crowd heaved coins, beer bottles, cobblestones, and trash cans. Shouting “Gay power,” they rammed the Stonewall’s door with an uprooted parking meter, smashed its windows, and threw a firebomb into the bar. Four police officers were injured. The rest had their hands full for six days. The Stonewall Rebellion took many forms. LGBTQS2+ protesters fought the police; got drenched with fire hoses; chanted bawdy songs; performed in-your-face Rockette-style kick lines; yelled “occupy—take over, take over,” “Fag power,” “Liberate the bar!,” and “We’re the pink panthers!”; and sang a high camp version of “We Shall Overcome.”³²

Stonewall galvanized the Gay Liberation Movement. As one activist put it, “Every movement arrives at a moment when people say, ‘Enough is enough.’ That was the Stonewall riots for the gay rights movement.”³³ Within weeks gay men and lesbians in New York formed the Gay Liberation Front; similar groups formed throughout the country, and gay pride banners appeared at anti-war demonstrations.³⁴ Stonewall signaled a collective coming out that won the support of many straight Americans as they discovered that they had LGBTQ2S+ friends and family. The first Gay Pride March was organized in Manhattan to celebrate the first anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion.³⁵ Since 1970, Stonewall has been celebrated with an annual gay pride parade down Fifth Avenue. The Stonewall Bar at 53 Christopher Street, the site of the Stonewall Inn uprising of June 27–29, was recognized on the National Register of Historic Places in June 1999 and was named a National Historic Landmark in June 2015. The Stonewall Veterans’ Association still met monthly in 2025.³⁶

Stonewall did not erupt in a vacuum. Some historians trace its roots to World War II, when gay men and lesbians met in sex-segregated military units and war industries.³⁷ In 1950 gay men founded the first homosexual rights organization, the Mattachine Society, followed five years later by the Daughters of Bilitis, a “Woman’s Organization for the purpose of Promoting the Integration of the Homosexual into Society.” Called homophiles, these activists mirrored the militant middle-class respectability of the 1950s Civil Rights Movement, contesting Cold War stereotypes and employment discrimination. Homophiles opened dialogues with Protestant clergy and the American Civil Liberties Union in the 1960s and lobbied the American Medical Association to stop classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder. New York Mattachines staged the first public protest in 1964, picketing a lower Manhattan Induction Center to protest banning gays from the military and releasing draft records to employers. Despite misgivings about the Vietnam War, in 1966 the first National Planning Conference of Homophile Organizations made military service its top priority.³⁸

But for draft-age gay men the last question on the medical surveys they had to answer at their draft physicals forced a difficult choice—how to check the last box: “Have you ever had or do you now have . . .homosexual tendencies?” If they checked “yes” they avoided the draft but risked employment discrimination. If they lied and checked “no” they risked federal prosecution, fines, and prison. As one man put it, “[I]t was the first time I had to take total responsibility for my life and accept the consequences. . . .In order to come to terms with the draft ... I had to come to terms with [being] gay.”³⁹

Even before Stonewall, the anti-war, women’s, and student movements and the new counterculture created rifts between homophile liberals and gay youth, who turned from fighting for acceptance to combating the Vietnam War, and to concerns about LGBTQ2S+ poverty, addiction, and homelessness. The LGBTQ2S+ community was no more monolithic than any other. Stonewall was a police target in part because it served patrons not welcome at many gay bars—drag queens, transgender individuals, and homeless gay youth who could buy shelter and community for the $3 cover charge.⁴⁰

It is common to divide gay history into two epochs, before and after Stonewall.⁴¹ Stonewall becomes the catalytic event that transformed homophile activism to the more radical Gay Liberation Movement, signaled in part by dropping the demand for integration into the armed forces. This linear narrative obscures more complex and contested shifts before and after Stonewall, as do stories that move sequentially from Civil Rights to Black Power, or from liberal to radical feminism. There were voter registration drives before Selma, feminist orators before Seneca Falls, marches and protests for women’s equality long before women won the vote and the Women’s Liberation Movement inherited unrealized dreams from Seneca Falls.

These were not entirely separate movements: each confronted multiple and connected inequalities. Just as the anti-war movement led some men to gay liberation, the abolitionist and Civil Rights movements broke women’s isolation and planted the egalitarian philosophies that led to Seneca Falls and Women’s Liberation. The arguments against allowing gays to serve in the military mirrored earlier ones against racially integrated units. The cases for marriage equality that were before the Supreme Court as I spoke in 2013 built from the historic 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision that legalized interracial marriage. Lesbians and transgender individuals contest their marginalization in histories of Stonewall; African American women challenge their marginalization in histories of feminist and civil rights activism.⁴² Histories of Selma that record the tensions between the male leaders of SNCC and SCLC still subordinate the importance of grass roots women leaders like Amelia Boynton and the teachers who risked their jobs to march for her. But more complex and accurate histories do not communicate or inspire as easily as dramatic events do, which brings us back to the questions of collective memory and symbolic resonance.

It is not surprising that Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall have entered collective consciousness to different extents in different ways. Events are more easily embedded in public memory if they are dramatic, if large-scale violence attracts news coverage, and if they remain politically relevant. By such measures, Selma had the edge over Seneca Falls and Stonewall. National media etched Selma indelibly for those who witnessed it on the nightly news. As NBC’s Richard Valeriani put it, “The standard answer . . .to the question of how much of a role did the camera play in shaping events is ‘There were no cameras at the Boston Tea Party.’ . . .[T]elevision helped accelerate the progress of a movement whose time had come.”⁴³ The Voting Rights Act established Selma’s place in history; dramatic images, historic sites, and annual commemorations established its symbolic resonance. Today the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute proudly claims that it is “Located in the Historic District of Selma, Alabama at the foot of the famous Edmund Pettus Bridge, the scene of ‘Bloody Sunday’,” its mission to chronicle and preserve “the historic journey for the right to vote that began when the ‘Founding Fathers’ first planted the seeds of democracy in 1776.”⁴⁴ Annual commemorative marches draw movement veterans and political allies. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both marched in 2007 as they vied for the Democratic presidential nomination. In 2012 the Rev. Al Sharpton led the annual trek to Montgomery along with Valerie Jarrett, senior advisor to President Obama, Congressman John Lewis, Ethel Kennedy, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Alabama Congresswoman Terri Sewell, and Martin Luther King, III. Media coverage, the Voting Rights Act, historical sites, and the annual commemorative march established Selma’s place in the Civil Rights Movement.

More the product of Gay Liberation than its opening shot, Stonewall came to represent Gay Pride in part through the political skill of Stonewall Veterans, who skillfully transformed the Rebellion into a potent symbol for their movement. Gays had battled police raids over a dozen times before Stonewall. There were well-documented confrontations at a 1965 San Francisco New Year’s Ball and two years later in Los Angeles, when four hundred demonstrators, including “Negroes, Mexican Americans, and Sunset Strip Youths,” protested police brutality during a raid at the Black Cat Bar. In August, 1966, patrons rioted after police raided Compton’s Cafeteria, an all-hours coffee shop in San Francisco’s Tenderloin popular with “gay hustlers, ‘hair fairies,’ queens, and street kids.”⁴⁵ Yet these events are largely forgotten. Stonewall gained mythic stature in part because New York Mattachines got the mainstream media and growing gay press to cover it. They distributed flyers on Sunday June 29, while the Rebellion still raged, that claimed Stonewall would “go down in history as the first time that thousands of Homosexual men and women went out into the streets to protest.”⁴⁶ Gay organizers insured Stonewall’s place in history as they mobilized to commemorate it. Beginning in 1965, East Coast Homophile Organizations had demonstrated each July 4 at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, an “Annual Reminder” that they were still denied “basic rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” After Stonewall, activists tired of respectable protest passed a hard-fought resolution at the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations. To “be more relevant, reach a greater number of people, and encompass the ideas and ideals of the larger struggle in which we are engaged—that of our fundamental human rights [,]” they changed the Annual Reminder to “a demonstration be held annually on the last Saturday in June in New York City to commemorate the 1969 spontaneous demonstrations on Christopher Street.” There were to be no age or dress regulations, and Homophile Groups throughout the country were asked to hold demonstrations the same day. They thus transformed a low-turnout event with an abstract message on a day already claimed for all Americans to one that mobilized gay pride and activism. New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles launched annual parades in 1970; the next year Dallas, Boston, Milwaukee, and San Jose joined them, followed in 1972 by Ann Arbor, Atlanta, Buffalo, Detroit, Washington, D.C., Miami, and Philadelphia. Ten years after Stonewall, a quarter million turned out for San Francisco’s Gay Pride celebration. Seeking to include “radical as well as conservative Gay organizations and all of those in between,” San Francisco organizers subordinated politics to a celebration for “all Gay persons to re-affirm their various lifestyles and take pride in their homosexuality.” Stonewall came to symbolize and spread a diffuse culture of gay pride that resonated far beyond the homophile and Gay Liberation communities of the 1960s.⁴⁷

Seneca Falls was at a distinct disadvantage compared to Selma and Stonewall—no violence, no cameras, its cause far from popular, even among women, and over seventy years removed from the distant suffrage victory. From the outset, women’s rights leaders understood the historic significance of their movement and sought to establish it in historical memory. Elizabeth Cady Stanton complained in 1870 that “. . . history is silent concerning the part woman performed. . . .” Angered at women’s exclusion from the historical record, she refused to donate to buy George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate and opposed a federal appropriation to build Grant’s Tomb. “If we must keep on continually building monuments to great men,” she wrote, “they should be handsome blocks of comfortable homes for the poor. . . .Surely sanitary homes and schoolhouses for the living would be more appropriate monuments . . .”⁴⁸ Believing that knowing their history would support women’s struggles for equal rights, Stanton, Anthony, and Mathilda Joslyn Gage wrote their massive History of Woman Suffrage that irritated some feminists in the American Woman Suffrage Movement by emphasizing Seneca Falls.⁴⁹ But Seneca Falls did not make it into survey texts or national consciousness until long after its centennial. The fiftieth anniversary of women’s suffrage passed in 1970 with only a single march in New York City.⁵⁰ Women’s history was not widely known nor had women yet used the ballot for feminist goals. When I assisted the first women’s history course at the University of Michigan in 1971–1972, we assigned one of the first texts to focus on Seneca Falls, Eleanor Flexner’s Century of Struggle, published in 1959.⁵¹ The Women’s Liberation Movement organized to recover women’s history, a campaign that led back to Seneca Falls, where the National Park Service established Women’s Rights National Historic Park in 1980. The Park includes a visitor center and an education and cultural center, the restored Wesleyan Chapel, where the Convention was held, the Elizabeth Cady Stanton House, and the homes of Mary Ann McClintock and Jane Hunt. ⁵² This park was won with feminist political organizing, with pressure carefully mobilized to establish the park and gain legislation and funding to buy the houses and excavate the Wesleyan Chapel.

In 1998, as part of the year-long observance of Seneca Falls’ 150^th anniversary, the Park Service and the Organization of American Historians held a conference there. First Lady Hillary Clinton gave the keynote. She began where all movements start, at the grass roots:

Imagine if you will that you are Charlotte Woodward, a nineteen-year-old glove maker working and living in Waterloo. Every day you sit for hours sewing gloves together, working for small wages you cannot even keep, with no hope of going on in school or owning property, knowing that if you marry, your children and even the clothes on your body will belong to your husband. But then one day in July, 1848, you hear about a women’s rights convention to be held in nearby Seneca Falls . . .. You run from house to house and you find other women who have heard the same news. Some are excited, others are amused or even shocked, and a few agree to come with you, for at least the first day. When that day comes, July 19, 1848, you leave early in the morning in your horse-drawn wagon. You fear that no one else will come; and at first, the road is empty, except for you and your neighbors. But suddenly, as you reach a crossroads, you see a few more wagons and carriages, then more and more all going towards Wesleyan Chapel.

Eventually you join the others to form one long procession on the road to equality. . . .⁵³

Charlotte Woodward reminds me that whatever the tensions between SNCC and Dr. King, Selma inspired Viola Liuzzo; that although the Homophiles preceded Stonewall, the Stonewall Rebellion reached lots of scared and closeted LGBTQ2S+ youth who had never heard of the Daughters of Bilitis.

Seneca Falls was for Hillary Clinton a reminder “that the rights and opportunities that we enjoy as women today were . . .fought for, agonized over, marched for, jailed for and even died for by brave and persistent women and men who came before us.” She ended with Seneca Falls’ challenge for the future: “If we are to finish the work begun here—then no American should ever again face discrimination on the basis of gender, race or sexual orientation anywhere in our country.”⁵⁴

In that sentence Clinton linked the legacies of Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall—which brings me back to President Obama’s inaugural, to the question no historian should try to answer about what these sites symbolize now and how widely they speak to deeply divided Americans. If they remain powerful symbols, it is partly because they have been written as touchstones into histories of social change, and partly because they have been effectively preserved as sites to inspire memory. Their evocative power varies for each person, depending on what they connote. For me, as for Hillary Clinton, Seneca Falls evokes Charlotte Woodward as well as Stanton and Mott, but we are likely a minority. Selma, and to a lesser extent Stonewall, had the advantage of film to etch powerful visual images, and of commemorative events to carry their messages to subsequent generations. Memory is fragile, though, and historic sites and annual commemorations alone do not insure the potency of political symbols. The ongoing conversation between the past and present urgencies reframes history; it constantly resurrects symbols, erases them, or rewrites their meanings. The President’s mention of Stonewall provoked curiosity for many people who hadn’t heard of it, and necessitated explanations from mainstream media.⁵⁵

The symbolic value of Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall rests with how they speak to enduring inequalities. When I first taught women’s history, fully employed American women earned 59 cents for every dollar a man earned; by 2013 it was 77 cents—and had risen only a penny since the Seneca Falls sesquicentennial in 1998. The Seneca Falls grievance that women “receive but a scanty remuneration” still spoke then and still speaks in 2025 as I prepare this volume. Husbands no longer “chastise” wives with legal impunity, but spousal abuse is still with us.

One grievance articulated at Seneca Falls remains a troubling touchstone—the third one, that women were denied “rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men—both natives and foreigners.” The nativism of 1848 still speaks to contemporary anti-immigrant prejudice. At the 2012 Selma to Montgomery March, Janet Murguia, president of the National Council of La Raza, urged African Americans and Latinos to push back together against voter suppression and anti-immigration laws. Representative John Lewis told an estimated 3,500 listeners: “We march today for what we did 47 years ago—for what is fair, what is right and for what is just.”⁵⁶

In 2013 more than 5,000 people followed Lewis and Vice President Joe Biden across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Biden, the first sitting vice president to take part, said that Selma “broke the back of the forces of evil,” but that voting rights remained threatened by bans on early voting and new voter ID laws. The week he spoke, the Supreme Court accepted a case from Shelby County, Alabama, seeking to overturn the section of the Voting Rights Act that required states with histories of racial discrimination to get Justice Department approval before implementing any changes in election laws.⁵⁷ On June 25, 2013, the Court ruled in Shelby County v. Holder and by a narrow 5–4 vote overturned the oversight provision, opening the door to increasing voter restrictions.

Seneca Falls and Selma may still inspire those who support gender and racial equality, yet as President Obama spoke, their movements fought defensive battles to preserve rights won decades before. Only Stonewall seemed to represent a movement making affirmative gains, as a majority of Senators and of the American public moved with surprising speed to support marriage equality—an issue, like voter suppression, then before the Supreme Court. The outcome, unlike the Shelby County v. Holder decision, was positive. On June 26, 2015, in another 5–4 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples had the right to marry throughout the United States.

Interestingly, President Obama linked Seneca Falls to pay equity, but not to reproductive choice, although that issue swung close Senate races in Arkansas and Indiana, and although reproductive rights were threatened by legislative attacks on Planned Parenthood, and by state regulations that had closed all abortion clinics in Mississippi and threatened to do so in Alabama and North Dakota. If these issues did not appear in the Seneca Falls Declaration, it was perhaps because there was no reliable birth control in 1848 and abortion was legal in most states.⁵⁸

Rather than address a divisive issue that mobilized many women voters, the President chose instead to attach his symbols to more seemingly “respectable” issues—to pay equity, the democratic right to vote, and the right to marry. Recent LGBTQ2S+ victories owe more to the goals of the Homophile movement than to the radical resistance at Stonewall. However controversial gay marriage may be for many Americans, and however important the right to serve openly in the military, the rights to marry and to serve in the armed forces fit the respectable agendas of the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis, not the rage and exuberant counterculture of Stonewall. Nor do marriage equality and military service address urgent needs for many of Stonewall’s descendants. Transgender individuals remain at high risk for violence. LGBTQ2S+ youth, according to a 2012 study, constitute 40 percent of clients served by youth service agencies, most of them homeless because their families rejected them for their sexual orientations or gender identities.⁵⁹

I don’t know what Stonewall, Selma, and Seneca Falls mean to people battling such inequalities. The President spoke powerfully to me as an historian when he invoked Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall because no President had ever linked them, and because by invoking them he moved their causes to the center of American political discourse. Their meanings may be diluted or revised and are certainly contested, but they became nonetheless symbols for the entire nation. That does not mean that everyone knows them, likes them, or embraces the movements they represent. Maybe someday they will function as symbols of national unity, but that day has not yet come. Rather, they occupy the cultural space that James Clifford defined: culture as a site of contestation, not consensus.⁶⁰

I was startled by responses I found online to a news story about the 2013 Selma March, most of which I could not repeat in a public lecture. A small sample illustrated the depth of Selma’s contested meaning. Redfish 52 wrote: “We get it . . .all white people should be ashamed now for something that happened 50 years ago . . .Bla . . .bla . . .bla . . .” Joe the Patriot wrote: “It’s 2013 and they’re still telling blacks that ‘whiteys don’t want you to vote’. . . .When are they going to give it a rest? I’m sick of the race card, I’m sick of the victim card. I’m sick of barry [Obama] dividing this country. . . .” The Big Mick was more hopeful: “Very soon now the ONLY people with DIRECT EXPERIENCE with ‘segregation’ are going to be either in the Graveyard or the Nursing Home in Diapers. So WITHOUT these ‘reenactments’ very soon they won’t be able to keep the Myth of America the Still Racist alive.” Catty wrote simply: “Celebrating history is so stupid.” But I was heartened by one brave soul, Jessenc, who answered her: “So you disagree with historical memory in principle? I suppose we should not have holidays such as Veteran’s Day or Memorial Day? I suppose Jewish people are wrong for remembering the Holocaust? Your comment is very strange. I think we should all remember our past.”

Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall may inspire controversy. But then they always did. Jim Clark and John Lewis never saw Selma the same way. Many conservative homophiles distanced themselves from Stonewall. Henry Stanton left town before the Seneca Falls convention. The contested values these events evoke, the rights hard-won and still besieged, the difficult and divisive histories they connote—that is precisely their national meaning. Equal rights remain a compass for U.S. social change, toward destinations still contested and not yet reached—and for that historical legacy Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall remain eloquent symbols.

Notes

Additional Sources: Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014) examines the construction of Seneca Falls as a symbol of the feminist movement. Following the release in 2014 of the historical drama Selma, written by Paul Webb and directed by Ava DuVernay, and the 50^th anniversary of Selma in 2015, the University Press of Florida published Joe Street and Henry Knight Lozano’s edited anthology, The Shadow of Selma (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2018), which examines how Selma entered public consciousness and the various ways it has been represented and interpreted. When I wrote this lecture, I had not yet read Melissa Harris-Perry’s article, “From Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall,” in The Nation, February 11, 2013, 10. It is not surprising that Harris-Perry, like many social scientists and historians, recognized the symbolic significance of the three events. She contended, however, that Obama’s evocation of Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall was important not because they evoked collective significance for all Americans, but for what each event signified for the people it represented. It told women, African Americans, and LGBTQ2S+ individuals that the President saw them and recognized their importance for national history. “Being seen was part of the struggle,” she wrote. “Being seen is still part of the struggle. President Obama’s inaugural address is yet another step in the long march toward fairness.”

1. 1 I described this in a blog for the University of Calgary website, Betsy Jameson, “Dispatches from Washington: Waiting for History at the Blue Gate,” January 21, 2009.

2. 2 “President Obama’s second inaugural address (Transcript),” Washington Post, January 21, 2013.

3. 3 “Election 2012, Presidential Election Polls,” New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/elections/2012/results/president/exit-polls.html, accessed May 12, 2021.

4. 4 President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address.

5. 5 The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, Public Law No: 111–12 (01/29/2009): was the first bill that President Obama signed into law, on January 29, 2009. Its long title is An Act to amend title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, and to modify the operation of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, to clarify that a discriminatory compensation decision or other practice that is unlawful under such Acts occurs each time compensation is paid pursuant to the discriminatory compensation decision or other practice, and for other purposes. For Obama’s “evolution” on gay rights and his policies as president, see Barack Obama, A Promised Land (New York: Crown, 2020), 603, 609–14; “Obama’s ‘evolution’ about gay rights,” https://gayandlove.com/obamas-evolution-about-gay-rights/, accessed May 12, 2021.

6. 6 On June 25, 2013, in a narrow 5–4 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act, which had provided for federal oversight of voting requirements in states with histories of racial discrimination. That decision opened the door for states to pass restrictive laws, limiting access to the vote by identification requirements (Texas, for instance, accepted gun permits, which have no photographs, but not student photo IDs), by restricting numbers of voting places or voting hours or restricting access to advance voting options. Those efforts continue. On June 26, 2015, in another 5–4 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples had the right to marry in the United States.

7. 7 The 19^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, certified on August 26, 1920, prohibited the United States or any state from denying the right to vote based on sex. Women first won the right to vote in Wyoming Territory in 1869 and had won the full franchise in fifteen states and Alaska Territory prior to the passage of the 19^th amendment. All but two—New York and Michigan—were west of the Mississippi River.

8. 8 Urban race riots, police violence, and attacks on voting rights would qualify the sense of victory that the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act signaled in the mid-1960s, but Selma remains a culminating event in a significant chapter of the long struggle for African American rights in the United States.

9. 9 Frederick B. Tolles, ed., Slavery and “The Woman Question”: Lucretia Mott’s Diary of Her Visit to Great Britain to Attend the World Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840, Supplement no. 23 to the Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society (Haverford, PA: Friends’ Historical Association and Friends’ Historical Society, 1952); Judith Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman’s Rights Convention (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 44, 59–64; Constance Rynder, “‘All Men and Women Are Created Equal’-Cover Page: April ’99 American History Feature,” HistoryNet, https://www.historynet.com/all-men-women-are-created-equal-cover-page-april-99-american-history-feature.htm, accessed May 20, 2021; Eleanor Flexner’s pioneering work, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1959), 71–77, esp. 71–73; Sally G. McMillen, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 72–77; and Ellen Carol Dubois, Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights (New York: New York University Press, 1998).

10. 10 Flexner, Century of Struggle, 74.

11. 11 Flexner, Century of Struggle, 74–75; Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls, 98–100. For the full text of the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments and of the Resolutions passed at Seneca Falls, see McMillen, Seneca Falls, Appendix A, 237–41.

12. 12 Flexner, Century of Struggle, 75; Jean H. Baker, “Getting Right with Women’s Suffrage,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5:1 (January 2006): 7–17; 15; Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls, 193, 195.

13. 13 Rynder, “‘All Men and Women Are Created Equal’”; Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls, 195–96; McMillen, Seneca Falls, 90.

14. 14 Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Seneca Falls Keynote Address Delivered July 19, 1848, Seneca Falls, New York, https://susanbanthonyhouse.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Elizabeth-Cady-Stanton-Seneca-Falls-1848.pdf, accessed May 13, 2021.

15. 15 Jennifer Chapin Harris, “Celebrating Women’s Herstory: The Story of Seneca Falls,” Off Our Backs 28:7 (July 1998): 9, Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20836139, accessed February 17, 2013; McMillen, Seneca Falls, 93–94.

16. 16 Harris, “Celebrating Women’s Herstory”; Flexner, Century of Struggle, 80; McMillen, Seneca Falls, 95–97.

17. 17 McMillen, Seneca Falls, 104–48; Flexner, Century of Struggle, 78–102; Reva B. Siegel, “Home As Work: The First Woman’s Rights Claims Concerning Wives’ Household Labor, 1850–1880,” The Yale Law Journal 103: 5 (March 1994): 1090–91, Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/797118, accessed February 17, 2013.

18. 18 Siegel, “Home As Work,” 1048–1050; Flexner, Century of Struggle, 148–50, 226. Stanton and Anthony led the National Women’s Suffrage Association, Lucy Stone Blackwell and Henry Blackwell, the American Women’s Suffrage Association. The two groups merged in 1890.

19. 19 Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls, 231; Judith Wellman “Rhoda Palmer,” Women’s Rights National Historic Site website, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, https://www.nps.gov/wori/learn/historyculture/rhoda-palmer.htm, accessed February 13, 2013.

20. 20 Although there had been some gender differences in votes in previous elections, the 8 percent gender gap in the 1980 presidential election brought gender differences in politics to public attention. See Jo Freeman, “Gender Gaps in Presidential Elections,” letter to the editor of P.S.: Political Science and Politics 32:2 (June 1999): 191–92.

21. 21 The Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads: “Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” Congress did not pass such “appropriate legislation” until 1965, following the events in Selma, when it passed the Voting Rights Act.

22. 22 For a discussion of periodizing the Civil Rights Movement, see for instance Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” The Journal of American History 91:4 (March 2005): 1233–63.

23. 23 Good sources for the history of the Selma civil rights campaign include Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality (1981; 24^th Anniversary Edition, New York: Hill and Wang, 2008): esp. 174–82; David J. Garrow, Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978); Clayborne Carson, ed., chap. 26 “Selma,” The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Warner Books, 1998), 270–89; John Lewis and Michael D’Orso, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998); Eyes on the Prize, Episode 6 “Bridge to Freedom (1965)” (series produced for PBS by Blackside, Inc., Henry Hampton producer) (hereinafter EOTP 6). Much of Selma’s impact was visual. Eyes on the Prize used contemporary news footage; see also Selma 1965: The Photographs of Spider Martin (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015).

24. 24 Sitkoff, Struggle for Black Equality, 174–76; R. Bruce Brassell, “From Evidentiary Presentation to Artful Re-Presentation: Media Images, Civil Rights Documentaries, and the Audiovisual Writing of History,” Journal of Film and Video 56:1 (Spring 2004): 3–16; John Lewis, “The Voting Rights Act: Ensuring Dignity and Democracy,” Human Rights 32: 2 (Spring 2005): 2–3, 7; EOTP 6.

25. 25 Sitkoff, Struggle for Black Equality, 177–79; Carson, ed., Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.,179–83; EOTP 6.

26. 26 Sitkoff, Struggle for Black Equality, 179–80; EOTP 6; President Lyndon Johnson’s Speech to Congress on Voting Rights, March 15, 1965, RG 46, Records of the United States Senate, National Archives, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, https://www.archives.gov/legislative/features/voting-rights-1965/johnson.html, accessed May 14, 2021.

27. 27 Sitkoff, Struggle for Black Equality, 179–82; EOTP 6; Carson, ed., Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., 183–89.

28. 28 Sitkoff, Struggle for Black Equality, 182; Lewis, “The Voting Rights Act.”

29. 29 Calvin Woodward and Desiree Seals, “John Lewis, Lion of Civil Rights and Congress, Dies at 80,” The Washington Post, July 17, 2020; Andrew Young, Jr., Biography, https://www.biography.com/activist/andrew-young-jr, accessed May 14, 2020.

30. 30 Vincent Harding, Robin D.G. Kelley, and Earl Lewis, “We Changed the World, 1945–1970,” in A History of African Americans, eds. Robin D.G. Kelley and Earl Lewis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 516–19; Sitkoff, Struggle for Black Equality, 185.

31. 31 “Why Did the Mafia Own the Bar?,” American Experience, PBS, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/stonewall-why-did-mafia-own-bar/, accessed February 16, 2013. Useful sources for the Stonewall riots include Martin Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Penguin, 1993); David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004); and, published after I gave my 2013 lecture, Marc Stein, The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History (New York: New York University Press, 2019).

32. 32 Garance Franke-Ruta, “An Amazing Account of the Stonewall Uprising,” The Atlantic. January 24, 2013, anecdotes based on “An Analytical Collation of Accounts and Documents Recorded in the Year 1969 Concerning the Stonewall Riots,” compiled by historian David Carter, author of Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution. See also Duberman, Stonewall, 194–292 for events of the first night;192–211 for events through July 4.

33. 33 Michael Adams, executive director of Services and Advocacy for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Elders, or SAGE, quoted in Dave Singleton, “40 Years Later: A Look Back at the Turning Point for Gay Rights,” AARP Bulletin, June 2009, https://www.aarp.org/politics-society/rights/info-06-2009/stonewall_riots_40_years_later_.html, accessed February 17, 2013.

34. 34 John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1988), 319; Simon Hall, “Protest Movements in the 1970s: The Long 1960s,” Journal of Contemporary History 43: 4 (October 2008): 657, 660, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40543228, accessed February 17, 2013; Stein, The Stonewal Riots, 238.

35. 35 S. Hall, “Protest Movements,” 660.

36. 36 William Rubenstein, “The Stonewall Anniversary: 25 Years of Gay Rights,” Human Rights 21:3 (Summer 1994): 18–23, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27879846, accessed: February 17, 2013; https://www.nycpride.org/, accessed May 15, 2021; “Stonewall Inn,” NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, https://www.nyclgbtsites.org/site/stonewall-inn-christopher-park/, accessed May 15, 2021; http://www.stonewallvets.org/, accessed May 15, 2021.

37. 37 Allan Berube, Coming Out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York: Free Press, 1990); John D’Emilio, “It Didn’t Start with Stonewall,” (Boston) Gay Community News, June 23, 1979; John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Community in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Peter Boag, “‘Does Portland Need a Homophile Society?’: Gay Culture and Activism in the Rose City between World War II and Stonewall,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 105:1 (Spring 2004): 6–39.

38. 38 Jonathan Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (New York: Crowell, 1976), 411–33; Duberman, Stonewall, 78–77, 110–17; Justin David Suran, “Coming Out Against the War: Antimilitarism and the Politicization of Homosexuality in the Era of Vietnam,” American Quarterly 53:3 (September 2001): 453, 456–61.

39. 39 Suran, “Coming Out Against the War,” 460–63.

40. 40 Suran, “Coming Out Against the War,” 460–63; D’Emilio and Friedman, Intimate Matters, 320–22; Duberman, Stonewall, 199; Duberman, “The Night They Raided Stonewall”; Franke-Ruta, “An Amazing Account of the Stonewall Uprising.”

41. 41 See for instance the structure of Duberman, Stonewall, which is divided into three sections: “Before Stonewall,” “Stonewall,” and “After Stonewall.”

42. 42 See for instance Amy C. Branner, Laura Butterbaugh and April Jackson, “There Was A Dyke March?,” Off Our Backs 24:8 (August/September 1994): 1–2, 16–17, 20, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20834872, accessed February 17, 2013 and Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press, 1982).

43. 43 Interview with Richard Valeriani, December 10, 1985, Eyes on the Prize Interviews, Henry Hampton Collection, Washington University Film and Media Archive, http://digital.wustl.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=eop;cc=eop;rgn=main;view=text;idno=val0015.0857.101, accessed February 20, 2013.

44. 44 National Voting Rights Museum and Institute website, http://nvrmi.com/, accessed February 17, 2013.

45. 45 Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Suzanna M. Crage, “Movements and Memory: The Making of the Stonewall Myth,” American Sociological Review 71: 5 (October 2006): 724–51; D’Emilio, “It Didn’t Start with Stonewall”; Brett Beemyn, “The Silence Is Broken: A History of the First Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual College Student Groups,” in “Sexuality and Politics Since 1945,” special Issue, Journal of the History of Sexuality 12:2 (April 2003): 205–23.

46. 46 Armstrong and Crage, “Movements and Memory,” 738.

47. 47 Armstrong and Crage, “Movements and Memory,” 738–43; Duberman, Stonewall, 226–29.

48. 48 Vivien Ellen Rose, “From the Editor: ‘Men Make No Mention of Her Heroism’: Natural and Cultural Resources and Women’s Past,” OAH Magazine of History 12:1, The Stuff of Women’s History: Artifacts, Landscapes, and Built Environments (Fall 1997): 3–4; 3.

49. 49 The work grew to six volumes, published between 1881 and 1922; the trio were joined by Ida Husted Harper as the project progressed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Ida Husted Harper, History of Woman Suffrage. The six volumes, available through Project Gutenberg, Google Books, and Internet Archive, as well as in research libraries, are: History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I (1848–1861), Volume II (1861–1876), Volume III (1876–1885), Volume IV (1883–1900), Volume V (1900–1920), and Volume VI (1900–1920). For resistance to this founding narrative, see Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls, esp. chap. 5.

50. 50 Ellen Carol DuBois, “Seneca Falls Goes Public, “The Public Historian 21: 2 (Spring 1999): 42.

51. 51 Flexner, Century of Struggle.

52. 52 Heather Lee Miller, Emily Greenwald, and Dawn Vogel, Women’s Rights National Historical Park: Ethnographic Overview and Assessment (Boston: Northeast Region Ethnology Program, National Park Service, 2009); Women’s Rights National Historic Park website, https://www.nps.gov/wori/index.htm, accessed February 5, 2013.

53. 53 Remarks by the First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, 150^th Anniversary of the First Women’s Rights Convention, Seneca Falls, New York, July 16, 1998, https://clintonwhitehouse4.archives.gov/textonly/WH/EOP/First_Lady/html/generalspeeches/1998/19980804-3206.html, accessed February 13, 2013.

54. 54 Remarks by H. Clinton, 150^th Anniversary of the First Women’s Rights Convention.

55. 55 See for instance Liz Halloran, “Stonewall? Explaining Obama’s Historic Gay-Rights Reference,” National Public Radio, It’s All Politics: Political News from NPR, January 22, 2013, https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2013/01/22/169984209/stonewall-explaining-obamas-historic-gay-rights-reference, accessed February 16, 2013.

56. 56 Sam Fulwood, III, “Selma to Montgomery, Then and Now,” Center for American Progress, March 6, 2012, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/news/2012/03/06/11199/race-and-beyond-selma-to-montgomery-then-and-now/, accessed May 18, 2021; Salvador Guerrero, “Latino group joins re-enactment of Selma to Montgomery March,” Scripps Howard Foundation Wire, March 7, 2012, https://www.shfwire.com/latino-group-joins-re-enactment-selma-montgomery-march/, accessed May 18, 2021; Charles J. Dean, “Selma march to Alabama capital relaunched with new spirit, purpose (slideshow),” March 5, 2012, https://www.al.com/spotnews/2012/03/selma_march_to_alabama_capital.html, accessed May 20, 2021.

57. 57 Philip Rawls, “Biden: Selma beatings shaped him, nation,” AP, March 3, 2013, https://news.yahoo.com/biden-selma-beatings-shaped-him-nation-184906535.html, accessed May 20, 2013.

58. 58 See James C. Mohr, Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

59. 59 Laura E. Durso and Gary J. Gates, “Serving Our Youth: Findings from a National Survey of Services Providers Working with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Youth Who Are Homeless or At Risk of Becoming Homeless,” The Williams Institute, UCLA, 2012, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/80x75033, accessed February 22, 2013.

60. 60 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).