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Race And Feminism: Women's March Recalls The Touchy History by Karen Grigsby Bates 

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Race And Feminism: Women's March Recalls The Touchy History by Karen Grigsby Bates 

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The streets of Washington looked vastly different the day after Donald J. Trump's inauguration than they did the day-of. Instead of the largely white crowds that lined Pennsylvania Avenue on Inauguration Day, people of all colors, classes and ages filled the streets for what's being called the most diverse march for women's rights ever.

The Women's March On Washington drew tens of thousands to the nation's capital to press for protection of women's rights, including reproductive health care, LGBT issues and equal pay. "Sister marches" held concurrently in every state across the nation, (and in several cities abroad) added to the numbers and the diversity.

But all that diversity came with a cost: racial tension - not just around the march itself, but around the feminist movement, who leads it and why. Some bemoaned the discord as a distraction from the march, saying on this occasion, "we should all be women first."

Grace Hong is not surprised. A professor of Asian American and Gender Studies at UCLA, Hong says for decades, white women didn't have to consider any interests beyond their own because "historically, the category 'woman' has, implicitly, meant white women." The call to put womanhood above all else, Hong says, is based on the idea that "critique and dissent undermine a unity that's based on the lowest common denominator: Find the one thing everyone has in common."

The fact that the feminist movement was so white for so long, says Ashley Farmer, is the reason so many women of color steered clear of it. Farmer is a historian at Boston University, and concentrates on African-American women's history. She says women of color noticed when their interests and needs didn't get a full hearing.

"When we actually get down to representation or creating a list of demands or mobilizing around a set of ideas," Farmer says, "it tends to be that white middle-class or upper-class women's priorities get put above the rest."

It was that way in the 1850s, when some feminists split over whether to champion abolition or women's rights. (That's when Sojourner Truth gave her famous "Ain't I A Woman?" speech at a women's rights conference in Ohio.)

It was that way in the late '60s and early '70s, when "Sisterhood is Powerful" became a rallying cry - but with very few exceptions (Flo Kennedy, Shirley Chisholm, Eleanor Holmes Norton) brown and black sisters were very much on the sidelines. It's why some African-American women, like writers Alice Walker and bell hooks, chose to refer to themselves as "womanist," not feminist. They refused to divorce their race from their gender. (They were intersectional before intersectionality as a term came into existence, created by black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw.)

Today, "womanist" also resonates with a younger generation of feminists, not all of them black. Dolores Arredondo, a marketing executive with Wells Fargo, in Los Angeles, has been calling herself a womanist for years, in direct response to what she saw as white feminists' exclusion. "I just remember this history of the feminist movement," Arredondo shrugs. "I can see the history, and none of them looked like me." Arredondo attended the Los Angeles march with her 13-year-old daughter Sophie.

Brenda Gonzales-Richards says she's not hung up on labels. The director of the California regional office for the National Council of La Raza, a Latino civil rights group, Gonzales-Richards says she'll answer to most anything - feminist, womanist, whatever - but she has another term she prefers: chingona.

"It means badass!" she says, gleefully. "A chingona is someone who is not afraid to stand up for what they believe in, somebody that's happy to shake things up when needed." Chingonas, she says, get things done. And they come in all races and genders.

The Women's March on Washington started out pretty white, but quickly added young women of color in positions of leadership. They're three of the four main organizers, and a lot of attention has been paid to how diverse this march has been in contrast to earlier ones. But even as the march's diversity was being celebrated, it was also causing tension.

When ShiShi Rose, a young black Brooklyn blogger, wrote an Instagram post advising white women allies that "now is the time for you to be listening more, talking less." She suggested they become more conversant in culture beyond the mainstream standard. Some white women were so offended that they cancelled plans to attend the march.

Margo Jefferson doesn't have much patience with that. A Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic for The New York Times for years, (and part of the Artist Table of creatives and celebrities who participated in the New York sister march) Jefferson remembers being one the few early black feminists who called themselves that. ("Of course I was lonely back then," she admits. "It was harder for black women to make a feminist movement in the 1970s.")

Jefferson advises white women who were offended by Rose's post to "Sit back. You're associated with a history that has to do with being bossy and self-absorbed and bigoted in some ways. I can see how that would rattle, and even anger you," she says gently. "But I do not consider it reason enough to cancel an attendance at a march like this. Get over it."

Julie Wittes Schlack is a Boston writer and corporate executive who was neither rattled nor offended by criticism from women of color. If the movement is going to progress to the next level, Schlack believes, white feminists like her are going to have to deal with some hard truths. They are right to be proud of their contributions to women's progress in this country, she says, but more needs to be done.

"The benefits of our work so far around things like reproductive rights aren't conferred equally across all women," Schlack points out. "And that's what I think younger feminists, feminists of color, particularly, are trying to wake us up to." The issues are broader, messier, more intersectional: race, gender, class, nationality, immigration status, everything is connected.

The wake-up Schlack refers to won't just benefit women of color, points out Boston University's Ashley Farmer: "When you make something that accounts for the most oppressed, everybody's life tends to get better."

But that process may have bumps from time to time. UCLA's Grace Hong believes the discord around today's marches may, in the end, be good for feminism: "Maybe the point is to not all agree," she says. "Maybe the point is to do these kinds of things so that you can have the tough conversations."

And maybe, she says, these marches are the next step toward having those tough, but necessary, talks.

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Race And Feminism: Women's March Recalls The Touchy History

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The streets of Washington looked vastly different the day after Donald J. Trump's inauguration than they did the day-of. Instead of the largely white crowds that lined Pennsylvania Avenue on Inauguration Day, people of all colors, classes and ages filled the streets for what's being called the most diverse march for women's rights ever.

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Trouble with White Feminism: Racial Origins of U.S. Feminism

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Trouble with White Feminism: Racial Origins of U.S. Feminism

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"The history of American feminism has been primarily a narrative about the heroic deeds of white women." Beverly Guy-Sheftall writes in the opening of her book, Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. In this oft-repeated narrative, "Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony are invoked, predictably, as the quintessential feminists." Although there is plenty of evidence to suggest a different narrative, such as Guy-Sheftall's edited volume and the many, many volumes of black, Latina, and indigenous feminists' writing, Stanton and Anthony have been canonized as "quintessential feminists" in the popular imagination. For evidence of this, one need look no further than the Ken Burns/Paul Barnes documentary for PBS, "Not for Ourselves Alone."

(Screenshot from PBS, "Not for Ourselves Alone")

In the Burns/Barnes version of the early "women's movement" in the U.S., race is barely mentioned and racism not at all. Instead, there is a comforting fiction that the women's movement grew, untroubled, out of the struggle for the abolition of slavery. The historical reality departs quite dramatically from this narrative and is the subject of today's installment of the #troublewithwhitewomen series.

During the mid-nineteenth century there were alliances between those in the abolitionist movement and those beginning to advocate for women's rights, sometimes called Suffragists or "Suffragettes." Most notably, Frederick Douglass described himself as a "woman's rights man," largely based on the influence of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

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The abolitionist movement and the women's movement split over the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which guaranteed the right to vote based on a citizens' "race, color, or previous condition of servitude." Despite the early support of African American men such as Douglass, suffragists like Stanton could not abide the idea that black men might get the franchise to vote ahead of white women.

Stanton didn't hesitate to voice her opinion that white women were superior to black men, and thus more deserving of the vote. Lori Ginzberg, in her biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (Hill and Wang, 2009), recounts some of the racial politics here:

"Asked straight out whether she were 'willing to have the colored man enfranchised before the woman,' she answered 'no; I would not trust him with all my rights; degraded, oppressed himself, he would be more despotic with the governing power than even our Saxon rulers are.' "

"These were not merely figures of speech, thoughtless slips of the tongue and the pen. Rather, when she evoked these images, Stanton was drawing upon a powerful sense of her own class and cultural superiority."

Yet, many feminist accounts of this history dismiss and distance racism from the core values of feminism or feminist leaders. For instance, Nancy F. Cott, in The Grounding of Modern Feminism (Yale University Press, 1987), locates this racism outside the movement for women's rights and shifts it to 'the surrounding society,' as in this passage:

"Despite links between early woman's rights and anti-slavery reformers, the suffrage movement since the late nineteenth century had caved in to the racism of the surrounding society, sacrificing democratic principle and the dignity of black people if it seemed advantageous to white women's obtaining the vote."

Here, Cott paints the women of the suffrage movement as passive victims who "caved in to" the racism "of the surrounding society," rather than the active, political agents they, in fact, were.

Stanton was no passive victim "caving in to" racism of the society around her. Returning to Ginzberg (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 2009), the political landscape of the late nineteenth century was one in which fault lines of race and gender were especially sharp, and Stanton played an active role in sustaining them and using them to her political advantage. In this passage, Ginzberg recounts some of the ways Stanton's racism was an effective mobilizing tool for the women's movement:

"Elizabeth Cady Stanton's positions on the relative worthiness of black men and white women as citizens .... her choice of all-too-familiar racist language had broad and lasting consequences, both theoretical and strategic, for the movement she helped lead. By claiming that some American citizens were more worthy of rights than others, Stanton helped lay the groundwork for a defense of woman's rights based on race, respectability, religion and class that would be hard to shake. Surely Stanton and Anthony understood this when they reported on the formation of a 'White Woman's Suffrage Association' in Washington, D.C., or admitted that the proposed Fifteenth Amendment 'rouses woman's prejudices against the negro' while increasing 'his contempt and hostility toward her as an equal.' Furthermore, this appeal to prejudice, whether it was an intentional strategy or not, worked. One woman wrote Stanton and Anthony's newspaper, The Revolution, to declare that she had 'never thought, or cared, about voting till the negroes began to vote,' but now 'felt my self-respect rise.' She went on: 'If educated women are not as fit to decide who shall be the rulers of this country, as 'field hands,' then where's the use of culture, or any brain at all? One might as well have been 'born on the plantation.'"

"Elizabeth Cady Stanton had been arguing for years that it was women's lack of self-respect that caused them to defer their demands....[now] white women's self-respect, as this letter writer suggested, could be heightened by comparison with people of 'lesser' races. Pleased by evidence that women were developing their self-esteem and so would demand their rights, Stanton seems not to have worried that advocating woman's rights on this basis, and severing the movement's ties to its abolitionist and antiracist roots, might damage the cause's claims to universal justice. Nor did she express any concern that her use of racist language to denigrate black men, along with her implicit embrace of a politics of white racial pride, might diminish the movement's appeal to African American women themselves. Whether or not she meant to endorse an explicitly racist tactic to draw new groups of white women into the cause is impossible to know; that she published the letter, entitling it, 'A Washington Convert,' suggests that she was willing to take the risk."

I'm struck here by the affective, that is the way emotion plays into the political strategy. Stanton had identified white women's "lack of self-respect" (today, we'd say "self-esteem") as a barrier to her efforts at organizing. The woman writing in to their newspaper confirms this, saying "I never had an interest in voting." What sparks the sudden boost in this woman's "self-respect"? The prospect of that "the negroes began to vote" and then she "felt my self-respect rise."

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There is additional evidence that the racism of the early women's movement was central rather than peripheral to the movement. In Barbara Andolsen, in her book about racism and the woman suffrage movement, "Daughters of Jefferson, daughters of bootblacks": racism and American feminism (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986), she observes:

"... the white women who led this movement came to trade upon their privilege as the daughters (sisters, wives, and mothers) of powerful white men in order to gain for themselves some share of the political power those men possessed. They did not adequately identify ways in which that political power would not be accessible to poor women, immigrant women, and black women." Yet despite the blatant racism and class bias of the women's suffrage movement, black women, discouraged and betrayed, continued to work for their right to vote, both as blacks and as women, through their own suffrage organizations."

The Guy-Sheftall anthology Words of Fire, mentioned at the top of this piece,offers an account of continuous feminist intellectual tradition in nonfictional prose of African American women going back to the early nineteenth century when abolition and suffrage were urgent political issues. Works like this one provide a useful correction to the familiar narrative of American feminism, but this history is largely unknown to most white feminists today. More than simply the absence of knowledge about black feminist intellectual tradition in the U.S., there is a real lack of awareness about the role of whiteness in shaping early feminism.

An important corrective to this lack of awareness is Louise Newman's excellent book, White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the U.S. (Oxford University Press, 1999). Newman makes a convincing case that eveloped an explicit racial ideology to promote their cause, defending patriarchy for "primitives" while calling for its elimination among the "civilized." She writes:

"Feminism developed in conjunction with-and constituted a response to-the United States' extension of its authority over so-called "primitive" peoples, and feminism was part and parcel of the nation's attempt to assimilate those peoples whom white elites designated as their racial inferiors." (p.181)

Newman's argument is that in the time period from 1848 to 1920, the "white woman movement" - as she rightly refers to it - affirmed (white) women's racial similarity to (white) men while at the same time asserting (white) women's sexual difference from (white) men because they believed sexual differences formed the bedrock of whites' civilization. This "functional ambiguity," (as Nancy F. Cott describes it) was not so ambiguous at the time. Social evolutionary theories of the time specified quite plainly that white women were both fundamentally similar to white men (because of "race") and fundamentally different from white men (because of "sex").

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These evolutionist theories that white women were both the same as and different than white men opened up new social and political roles for white women as "civilizers" of the race, strengthening longstanding beliefs in (white) women's moral superiority. Moreover, the effort to establish the United States as an empire, and the extension of missions, both domestically and abroad, fundamentally influenced the direction and content of white feminist thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The reality is that white supremacy and feminism were completely intertwined at the root. This is not simply an old problem of a previous century, or of individual white women who "caved in to" the racism of the surrounding society. Rather, white supremacy is baked into white feminism. White feminism - if it's only focused on a kind of crude parity with (white) men - is not incompatible racism. In fact, many of the avowed white supremacist women I studied in my study of Cyber Racism view themselves as feminists. And, there's nothing inconsistent between white supremacy and white feminism. That's why it's so important for a critically engaged feminism include a commitment to racial justice.

The white feminist thought shaped by evolutionist theories, imperialism, and missionary zeal continue to shape the feminist movement today. You can see this in any number of examples, such as the critique of Eve Ensler's brand of white feminism I mentioned last week, in the corporate feminism we're presented with today, and in popular culture portrayals of white women.

I'll have more to say about all this in another installment of the #troublewithwhitewomen series.

>>>> Read next post in series

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Trouble with White Feminism: Racial Origins of U.S. Feminism -

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"The history of American feminism has been primarily a narrative about the heroic deeds of white women." Beverly Guy-Sheftall writes in the opening of her book, Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought . In this oft-repeated narrative, "Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony are invoked, predictably, as the quintessential feminists."

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Women, Race, and Classby Angela Y. Davis

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Women, Race, and Classby Angela Y. Davis

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Women, Race, and Class has 6,375 ratings and 192 reviews. ONTD said: LJ user gingersomething:I really think this should be required reading for middle ...

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Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and Historyby Vron Ware

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Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and Historyby Vron Ware

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Verso Books is the largest independent, radical publishing house in the English-speaking world.

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The Root: How Racism Tainted Women's Suffrage

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"I am in Great Britain today because I believe that the silent indifference with which she has received the charge that human beings are burned alive in Christian Anglo-Saxon communities is born of ignorance of the true situation. America cannot and will not ignore the voice of a nation that is her superior in civilization."

In 1893, journalist and early civil rights pioneer Ida B. Wells crossed the Atlantic for the first time to deliver that sobering message to Great Britain. She had hoped to sway public opinion about the racial violence that plagued the U.S. The lynching of black men and women seemed to have become a sport among Southern white mobs - reaching a peak of 161 deaths in 1892.

That included the hanging of three black businessmen, one a close friend of Wells, during that year in her former home of Memphis, Tenn. She called for blacks to leave the city "which will neither protect our lives and property." More than 6,000 black residents left, and many others boycotted white businesses; Wells was exiled.

But the Memphis murders sparked the beginning of Wells' anti-lynching crusade. Combing through statistics and interviewing eyewitnesses, she conducted the first in-depth investigation into the real reasons behind the lynching of these black men - and many others who were mostly accused of allegedly raping a white woman. She wrote about her tragic findings in a column for the New York Age newspaper and forged the modern-day civil rights movement.

"Wells was one of those driven people, who never looked to the left or to the right. If something needed to be said or done, she just goes and does it," said Paula Giddings, the Elizabeth A. Woodson 1922 Professor in Afro-American Studies at Smith College, in an interview with The Root. "She doesn't worry about the consequences."
Civil Rights, Temperance and Suffrage: An Uneasy Mix
Asthe nation approached the 20th century, Wells saw that the spate of racial injustice needed to be addressed in a new and direct manner - through outright protest and self-defense. That challenged the nation's moralistic Victorian attitudes at the time. Such a grounded stance also pitted her against one of the most formidable American leaders within the movement to gain women the vote, or suffrage: Frances E. Willard, national president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union.

Throughout much of the 1800s, the women's alcohol temperance movement was a powerful force in the greater push toward women's suffrage. Meanwhile, many suffrage leaders - such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton - had also championed black equality. Yet in 1870, the suffragists found themselves on opposing ends of the equal-rights battle when Congress passed the 15th Amendment, enabling black men to vote (at least, in theory) - and not women. That measure engendered resentment among some white suffragists, especially in the South.

To Willard, giving women the right to vote was the only way to rid the U.S. of evils of intemperance. She couched this view in the organization's mission of "home protection." It was a view that garnered her much support within the WCTU, which had 250,000 members and chapters in just about every state.

She was even willing to court white Southern women, at the expense of blacks, even though her parents had been abolitionists. " 'Better whiskey and more of it' is the rallying cry of great, dark-faced mobs," Willard said in an 1890 interview with the New York Voice."The safety of [white] women, of childhood, of the home, is menaced in a thousand localities."

That statement and others incensed Wells. She was angered even more by the fact that Willard was considered to be a friend within the black community, in part because some of the WCTU chapters had accepted black women as members. But the WCTU president "unhesitatingly slandered the entire Negro race in order to gain favor with those who are hanging, shooting and burning Negroes alive," Wells said in her autobiography, Crusade for Justice.

Giddings, who wrote the biography Ida: A Sword Among Lions, says that Wells knew that in order to bring change, she needed to expose the truth: that too many white liberals were doing nothing to oppose crimes against black Southerners. She was also pushing to gain financial and political backing from the British people.

"Wells always understood that one of her most difficult challenges was to get the liberals in line," said Giddings. If Wells failed in Great Britain, "all could be lost."
Wells Takes Her Case Across the Pond
Wells laid the groundwork for the anti-lynching crusade in 1893, when she arrived in Great Britain for the first time. British Quaker Catherine Impey, an activist and publisher who supported racial equality, invited Wells to speak at churches and other gatherings.

Wells was also interviewed by British news publications. Just about everywhere, she was asked why she had traveled so far. Her response: "Our country remains silent on those continued outrages. It is to the religious and moral sentiment of Great Britain we turn."

While many of the British believed that lynching was a scourge in the U.S., they had a hard time believing that women like Willard could ignore the problems. They even heralded Willard as the "uncrowned queen of American democracy."

Wells had to find a way to dispel the myth. She finally got her chance to take on Willard during a second visit to Great Britain for the anti-lynching campaign. Willard was in England as the guest of Lady Henry Somerset, head of the British temperance movement. Both women were invited to speak before British temperance advocates on May 9, 1894.

Wells had to be strategic in her speech, said Crystal Feimster, assistant professor of African-American studies and American studies at Yale University, in an interview with The Root. "Wells saw that if she could nail Willard down, she would be able to harness a huge political force in the U.S."

During that era, the social sciences were being used to justify unequal treatment according to race, Giddings said. They were employed "to show that blacks are inherently inferior in terms of their blood and makeup of the body," she said. "As a result, they are less civilized and are actually regressing to a savagery."

Wells came to the lecture armed with a copy of the 1890 interview with the New York Voice that echoed such racist thinking. Willard had told the publication that the local tavern "is the Negro's center of power ... the colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt."

When asked her opinion of Willard, Wells chose to read the interview. With Willard at her side and little time to actually speak, Wells asked the audience how influential white women could continue to turn a blind eye to the white mobs who threatened black lives. Afterward, she was able to get a British journal, the Fraternity, to reprint Willard's interview.

Lady Somerset was so enraged by Wells' commentary that she demanded that the Fraternity article not be printed, or Wells would never be heard in Britain again. The article was published anyway. Lady Somerset also sent a telegram to black abolitionist Frederick Douglass demanding that he publicly reprimand Wells. Douglass didn't give in to Lady Somerset's demands (yet Wells later sadly noted in a letter to Douglass that he did little to fully support her overseas campaign).
The Power of the Press - and Its Limitations
Lady Somerset and Willard were not done. Pushing to publicly embarrass Wells in the press, the pair arranged for another Willard interview with the Westminster Gazette, a London newspaper. This time it was conducted by Somerset, who gave Willard a platform for her version.

Willard talked about her family background and expressed concern for the plight of blacks. But she also stated that "the best people I knew in the South" had told her black people were threatening the safety of white women and children. She continued, "It is not fair that a plantation Negro who can neither read or write should be entrusted with the ballot."

Other U.S. publications - including the Memphis Commercial - weighed in with statements against Wells' character. The Commercial examined her career, painting "the saddle-colored Sapphira" from Holly Springs, Miss., as a harlot. The newspaper also stated that Wells was pushing her "foul and slanderous" outbursts on the British.

Even so, the media campaign didn't stop Wells. She lectured to audiences in London; was invited to dinner in Parliament; and before she headed home, helped Londoners establish the London Anti-Lynching Committee. Forming this group was a clear victory for Wells in the anti-lynching crusade. It comprised some of the most influential editors, ministers, college professors and members of Parliament. To Wells' surprise, Lady Somerset joined the committee, and Willard was among the Americans who also signed on.

With the victory in hand, Wells set sail for home after a four-month campaign. She later wrote in her autobiography that the moment "was not only a boomerang to Miss Willard. It seemed to appeal to the British sense of fair play. Here were two prominent white women, joining hands in the effort to crush an insignificant colored woman who had neither money nor influence - nothing but the power of truth with which to fight her battles."

The truth prevailed.

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The Root: How Racism Tainted Women's Suffrage

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As Women's History Month winds to a close, Monee Fields-White of The Root takes a peek into the women's suffrage movement, and reveals how an 1894 showdown between anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells and temperance leader Frances E. Willard revealed the grip that racial resentment had over women's voting rights.

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White women's rights : the racial origins of feminism in the United States by Louise Michele Newman

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Susan B. Anthony's Grave Celebrated Despite Her Racist Legacy by Lauren Harwyn

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Hundreds are placing their "I voted" stickers on the headstone of suffragette Susan B. Anthony but the grave of a black woman deserves that recognition.

Susan B. Anthony's headstone has been inundated with visitors and "I Voted" stickers as hundreds visited her burial site in honor of her contribution to women's right to vote. This achievement is made even more significant as people vote for Hillary Clinton to become the first female president of the United States.

Here is another shot of Susan B. Anthony's gravesite. #ElectionDay pic.twitter.com/Yd2mlDjkUB
- Patrick Thornton (@pwthornton) November 8, 2016

"Oh, if I could but live another century and see the fruition of all the work for women! There is so much yet to be done." -Susan B. Anthony
- Mechelle Voepel (@MechelleV) November 8, 2016

Susan B. Anthony would be crying with joy today.
- Fus-Ro-Da Bad Hombre (@ShomahKhoobi) November 8, 2016

Another name, however, has been trending on Twitter as a hidden and unpleasant aspect of Anthony's suffrage movement is brought to light. Ida B. Wells, a black woman, journalist, and suffragette is not receiving anywhere near the same amount of attention, even though she had to fight against Anthony and the other white suffragettes to achieve voting rights for black women.

"I will cut off this right arm of mine," Anthony stated, "before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman." Anthony and other white suffragettes used white supremacy as a tool to legitimize their right to vote. White suffragettes used the 15th Amendment, which permitted black men to vote, as a weapon against women of color.

Before you go put an "I voted" sticker on Susan B Anthony's grave you should check into her POV on Black people voting.
- Amadi (@amaditalks) November 8, 2016

"Even though women gained the right to vote 100 years ago, don't forget black women didn't get to until the 1960s." @Bakari_Sellers
- Kody ? (@KesusWalks) November 8, 2016

Anna Howard Shaw, a contemporary of Anthony, famously said, "You did not wait for woman suffrage but disenfranchised both your black and white women thus making them politically equal. You have put the ballot in the hands of your black men, thus making them political superiors of white women." Francis E. Willard even used the claim that white women were "menaced" by black men to promote her agenda for temperance and women's suffrage.

At the same time, Ida B. Wells, a former slave, launched a historic anti-lynching crusade that took her to the White House and across the Atlantic to England. She was a brave and impassioned journalist and newspaper owner who constantly faced personal harm as an outspoken, political black woman. Wells was a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Association of Colored Women. Wells championed the rights of all women, regardless of race.

Is anyone lining up at Ida B. Wells grave today? (Comic by @beatonna) pic.twitter.com/UQnf0C0jg5
- Alex Teplitzky (@alexteplitzky) November 8, 2016

RE: The Susan B. Anthony stories, don't forget women like Ida B. Wells who worked to secure voting rights for ALL. https://t.co/pY5DU6mjc7
- Lydia Williams (@LydiaRTV6) November 8, 2016

Thinking abt Sojourner Truth, Ida b Wells, Shirley Chisholm & all the other folks (past&present) who didn't have the privilege #ElectionDay
- Fatou GW (@fgwaggeh) November 8, 2016

Please put stickers on Ida B. Wells' grave. She's buried at Oak Woods cemetery in Chicago. Address: 1035 E 67th St
- Evette Dionne (@freeblackgirl) November 8, 2016

Black women like Wells had to struggle for the right to vote against society at large as well as the white women who used them as a stepping stool to achieve their own voting rights. In many cases, white women like Anthony, Shaw, and Willard had been abolitionists, fighting for an end to slavery, and abruptly turned their backs on their sisters of color to promote their own agendas.

Although the 19th Amendment would legally give all women, black or white, the right to vote, vigilantes and lawmakers at the state level effectively blocked black women from voting within the decade. It would take the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s-40 years after white women achieved suffrage- to truly get black women the vote.

Women's suffrage has always been white-washed, but the fact that people are still celebrating Anthony over black women like Wells should be a wake-up call for modern-day feminists. The reality that women's suffrage was forged at the expense of women of color should remind us that modern feminism must include and celebrate women of color, or risk falling prey to the same white supremacist rhetoric of the women who came before us.
Banner Image Credit: Reuters

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Susan B. Anthony's Grave Celebrated Despite Her Racist Legacy

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Hundreds are placing their "I voted" stickers on the headstone of suffragette Susan B. Anthony but the grave of a black woman deserves that recognition. Susan B. Anthony's headstone has been inundated with visitors and "I Voted" stickers as hundreds visited her burial site in honor of her contribution to women's right to vote.

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'When and Where I Enter': The Racist Expectations of Whites-Only Feminism by

Kirsten West Savali

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Following the New York primary Tuesday, dozens of New Yorkers pilgrimaged to Rochester's Mount Hope Cemetery to place "I Voted" stickers on the headstone of suffragette leader Susan B. Anthony.

This, of course, should be expected, since Anthony, along with her close friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton and many others, fought tirelessly throughout the 19th century and early 20th century for white women to have the right to vote. Anthony, however, did not live to see her work come to fruition. She died in 1906, 14 years before the ratification of the 19th Amendment.

The feminist ritual at Anthony's grave site is somewhat of a tradition, but this year was different. The number of "I Voted" stickers dramatically increased from years past, and the reason is clear. For many women who consider Anthony a hero, finally casting a ballot for a woman to become the Democratic nominee for president of the United States is the political mountaintop-though Hillary Rodham Clinton's flag has not yet been planted-and to adorn her headstone is the sweetest poetic justice.

What is typically erased from glowing remembrances of Anthony, however, is her employment of strategic racism to reach her suffrage goals. She was an avowed anti-slavery advocate who still did not hesitate to dog-whistle Dixie while opposing the passage of the post-Civil War 15th Amendment, which, on paper, granted all black men the right to vote.

Anthony, who infamously said, "I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman," was very clear that withholding support for the 15th Amendment wasn't solely a matter of gender equality but of sustained white supremacy:

What words can express her [the white woman's] humiliation when, at the close of this long conflict, the government which she had served so faithfully held her unworthy of a voice in its councils, while it recognized as the political superiors of all the noble women of the nation the negro men just emerged from slavery, and not only totally illiterate, but also densely ignorant of every public question.

Her stance caused her to be at odds with legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who was a friend and a staunch women's-suffrage advocate. Douglass believed that the enfranchisement of black men was a political and racial imperative that should be prioritized within the suffrage struggle to ensure the equitable protection of black lives, property and dignity under the law-an electoral protection that he felt white women already had access to through their husbands.

Anthony, however, did not have faith in gradualism, though so many feminists who consider her a hero espouse its merits today. She and Stanton, her partner in the fight for white women's suffrage, demanded "revolution." They wanted all people to have the right to vote, but no way in hell would they allow "the Negro" to beat them to the ballot.

Stanton once said of black men-or, as she called them, "Sambos":

No; I would not trust [them] with all my rights; degraded, oppressed [themselves], [they] would be more despotic with the governing power than even our Saxon rulers are.

She believed that white women should be able to vote before black men because voting was a moral, intelligent responsibility for which black men were ill-equipped. According to Stanton's racist fearmongering, these men were so devalued and demoralized that given a semblance of power, they would be more oppressive and violent than the white men before them.

Like superpredators.

In The Revolution, a women's-rights newspaper that Anthony and Stanton created with funding from racist, pro-slavery Democrat George Francis Train, the pair wrote:

The old anti slavery school says women must stand back and wait until the negroes shall be recognized. But we say, if you will not give the whole loaf of suffrage to the entire people, give it to the most intelligent first. If intelligence, justice, and morality are to have precedence in the government, let the question of the woman be brought up first and that of the negro last.

Though Anthony navigated the political terrain as if all the women were white and all the blacks were men, some of us were brave. She and Stanton alienated not only their white abolitionist circle because of their growing relationship with racist Democrats-which abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison described in a harsh letter to Anthony as " the anti-n-ger party "-but also black women who had called them friends.

As Anthony continued her push for white women to be enfranchised, she became complicit in the marginalization of black suffragettes, including Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Francis E.W. Harper and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, among others. Many white women within the National American Woman Suffrage Association, an organization helmed by Anthony and Stanton, felt threatened by black suffragettes' intersectional focus on race, gender and class. This racist discomfort led Alice Paul, a white supremacist who would eventually break with NAWSA to form the more radical National Woman's Party, to organize a faction of feminists who wanted to ensure that abolition and suffrage were not viewed as interlocking causes so as not to lose the support of racists in their midst.

The increasingly segregated movement eroded along racial fault lines, with Wells-Barnett splintering off in 1913 to create the Alpha Suffrage Club of Chicago-the first black women's organization to focus solely on suffrage in the country. The Alpha Club joined the National Association of Colored Women, which was established in 1896 with Mary Church Terrell as president, an organization that focused on women's suffrage as part of a larger, anti-racism platform.

It does not escape notice that the image of the "I Voted" stickers adorning Anthony's headstone began circulating online the same day the U.S. Treasury announced that after protracted efforts by grassroots organization Women on 20s, Anthony, Stanton and Paul will receive places of "honor" on U.S. currency. They will be joined by freedom fighters and abolitionists Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, as well as white abolitionist Lucretia Mott, who, instead of joining her suffragette peers in declaring moral bankruptcy, remained steadfast in denouncing the racism that Anthony, Stanton and Paul employed to obtain their own political freedom.

Women on 20s' goal is to have women on the face of U.S. currency by 2020, the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment. On paper, that amendment was progress for all women; in reality, it was a lie. It wasn't until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that all African-American women were allowed to vote somewhat freely-the same Voting Rights Act that in 2013 was gutted by the Supreme Court as Jim Crow-style disenfranchisement tactics persist in order to protect white supremacy at all costs.

Witnessing Anthony become the mother of the political moment we've reached in this country is nothing if not fitting. And as black suffragettes continue to be erased from the narrative, I am reminded of the words of black feminist scholar Anna Julia Cooper:

The white woman could at least plead for her own emancipation; the black woman, doubly enslaved, could but suffer and struggle and be silent.

Only the BLACK WOMAN can say when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.

The expectation has always been that black women should be silent, but we never have been-even when white feminists such as Susan B. Anthony wanted us to be. With unerring focus, we decide when and where we enter the spinning political ropes of race and gender, and we will continue to double-dutch between the two for our survival.

Still, I cannot help thinking what a privilege it must be to never have those parts of you shattered and scattered, to never have your race and gender stretched and pulled in opposing directions, to never have your loyalty questioned by black men and white women at every turn, and to never be expected to uplift one over the other, inch by inch, while being branded a traitor to the advancement of both.

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'When and Where I Enter': The Racist Expectations of Whites-Only Feminism

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Following the New York primary Tuesday, dozens of New Yorkers pilgrimaged to Rochester's Mount Hope Cemetery to place "I Voted" stickers on the headstone of suffragette leader Susan B. Anthony. This, of course, should be expected, since Anthony, along with her close friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton and many others, fought tirelessly throughout the 19th century and early 20th century for white women to have the right to vote.

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Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism by bell hooks

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Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America

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Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America
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White woman listen! Black feminism and the boundaries of sisterhood by Hazel Carby

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#SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen: women of color's issue with digital feminism

Mikki Kendall

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#SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen started in a moment of frustration. One of my good friends, Sydette Harry (aka @BlackAmazon), had been a target of Hugo Schwyzer in the days before everyone was forced to face the truth about him. In the course of a very public Twitter meltdown, he admitted specifically targeting women of color because they were in his way:

So to the many people I hurt I am sorry. To the women of color I trashed in 2008, I am so sorry

- Hugo Schwyzer (@hugoschwyzer) August 9, 2013

In the days following, there has been a curious disavowal of connections to him. Schwyzer used to be able to rely on gaining exposure from influential feminist bloggers at Feministe, Jezebel and Pandagon.

I am sorry for my former colleagues like @jessicavalenti and @JillFilipovic who couldn't work with me or bring themselves to denounce me.

- Hugo Schwyzer (@hugoschwyzer) August 9, 2013

"Digital feminists" like Jill Filipovic (also a Guardian columnist), Jessica Coen, Jessica Valenti and Amanda Marcotte were, in our view, complicit in allowing Hugo Schwyzer to build a platform - which, as he has now confessed, was based partly on putting down women of color and defending white feminism. I have seen the disavowals and people distancing themselves from Schwyzer, but I have not seen the expressions of regret or condemnation for his impact on @Blackamazon, @redlightvoices, and the other women of color he has "trashed" over the years.

And WOC, yes you @amaditalks and @Blackamazon, you were right. I was awful to you because you were in the way

- Hugo Schwyzer (@hugoschwyzer) August 9, 2013

It appeared that these feminists were, once again, dismissing women of color (WOC) in favor of a brand of solidarity that centers on the safety and comfort of white women. For it to be at the expense of people who were doing the same work was exceptionally aggravating.

Admittedly, this isn't a new problem: white feminism has argued that gender should trump race since its inception. That rhetoric not only erases the experiences of women of color, but also alienates many from a movement that claims to want equality for all. This is especially clear when posts and articles about racism in feminism from five years ago involve some of the very same players.

While Schwyzer hasn't completely stopped pretending to be a feminist ally, it is clear that he's still invested in silencing WOC.

This whole #solidarityisforwhitewomen thing is an abusive cudgel to be used against a lot of people who are really working at inclusivity

- Hugo Schwyzer (@hugoschwyzer) August 13, 2013

And for white feminists to enable him for so long is especially galling.

When I launched the hashtag #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, I thought it would largely be a discussion between people impacted by the latest bout of problematic behavior from mainstream white feminists. It was intended to be Twitter shorthand for how often feminists of color are told that the racism they experience "isn't a feminist issue". The first few tweets reflect the deeply personal impact of such a long-running structural issue.

As the hashtag spread across Twitter, people from all walks of life started joining in - to vent their own personal frustrations, as well as to address larger political issues. Feminism as a global movement meant to unite all women has global responsibilities, and - as illustrated by hundreds of tweets - has failed at one of the most basic: it has not been welcoming to all women, or even their communities.

Many users of the tag commented on how therapeutic it was to voice publicly their issues. So, in that way, it has been healing for some people. But many of the same comments that were being decried by people who understood the tag's context were repeated by those upset at its existence. People who are part of the problem aren't learning as much as they should, at least not yet - but it has been barely 24 hours.

An honest conversation between feminists about feminism and its future is happening, and like every truly honest discussion of differences, it has been incredibly contentious. Hopefully, it will also be productive: despite the natural brevity encouraged by Twitter, any conversation that can span a full day must generate some change. The only question is whether or not feminism will be receptive to the critiquing and to doing the work required to resolve the problems.

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#SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen: women of color's issue with digital feminism | Mikki Kendall

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SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen started in a moment of frustration. One of my good friends, Sydette Harry (aka @BlackAmazon), had been a target of Hugo Schwyzer in the days before everyone was forced to face the truth about him.

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What happened when I took a "White Women Elected Trump" sign to the Women's March

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The uncomfortable truth about racism and the suffragettes

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The uncomfortable truth about racism and the suffragettes

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The slogan on this T-shirt is not okay. I'm saying it again because lots of white film women tweeting this in my TL. pic.twitter.com/48om1FobTS
- Lexi Alexander (@Lexialex) October 5, 2015

so many words, such little patience pic.twitter.com/xU8e4DARYp
- Fariha Róisín (@fariharoisin) October 5, 2015

"I'd rather be a rebel than a slave" shirt is suggesting that black people had the choice of enslavement, when we didn't. So disrespectful.
- ?ecca (@MJStarLover) October 5, 2015

Others have also made the point that it raises the more troublesome side of the suffrage movement - particularly its uncomfortable relationship with race.

The quote from #Suffragette makes sense. They didn't care much for the Voice of Black Women then either.
- Ms. Brooks™ (@TheREAL_MBrooks) October 5, 2015

Time Out has since defended the photoshoot saying: "The original quote was intended to rouse women to stand up against oppression - it is a rallying cry, and absolutely not intended to criticise those who have no choice but to submit to oppression, or to reference the Confederacy, as some people who saw the quote and photo out of context have surmised." None of the four actresses involved have said anything about the shoot.

But Jad Adams, historian and author of Women and the Vote: A World History, says: "It's certainly an inappropriate thing to have four white women wearing slavery t-shirts. Like a lot of things Emmeline Pankhurst said, [that quote] was excessive."

He explains that it was common for the suffragettes to use the language and emotion of slavery: "People talked about the emancipation of women. Their condition is nothing like slavery but in order to make the challenge more exiting and ramp up the feelings of disenfranchisement, women liked to compare their situation to that of slaves."

Even at the time, he says some people who did sympathise with the cause still found it unnecessary and disliked the 'excessive' language of Mrs Pankhurst.

But, as people on Twitter are asking now, does that mean the suffragettes were racist?

The answer is complex. Moreover, the picture differs between the US and UK movements in the early 20th century. While the American suffragettes were living in a country where racial segregation was the norm in certain states, the British suffragettes' dealings with race were more nuanced and less known.

Adams tells me: "I don't know of any British black women being involved in the movement. It's probably because they were not very public.

"They were lower working class people and tended to be disenfranchised in many ways. Their accommodation was poor, their work was uncertain and poorly paid."

There is hardly any evidence about black women's involvement with the British suffragettes, or how they would have been treated had they wished to join the movement. But in Adams' opinion, there could have been some conflict. "I wouldn't presume [black women] would have been welcome [in the suffrage movement] if they'd joined," he says/

But when it came to British Indian women, there were several who were known to have joined demonstrations and marches. Anita Anand, author of Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary, tells me that there was also one woman in particular, the aforementioned Indian princess Sophia, the god-daughter of Queen Victoria, who played a huge role in the suffragette movement.

"The empire took everything from her father but she spent her life fighting for women's rights in this country. She believed there was something stronger than racial hatred and it was the sisterhood."

Indeed while her sister returned to India to fight for women's rights there, Princess Sophia chose to stay at Hampton Court and fight for British women's rights instead. Her actions were not ignored by the suffragettes.

"She wasn't just welcomed by the movement, she was held aloft," says Anand. "Her propaganda was huge for them. She was part of Emmeline Pankhurst's close coterie of friends - she was one of her 'rock star' suffragettes."

Anand says this shows the suffragettes were supportive of women of colour, but recognises that in Mrs Pankhurst's later years, she became a Conservative and believed strongly in colonisation which seems to contradict her stance on equality. "People are complicated," says Anand. "It's not, may I say, a black or white issue."

This complexity was evident when all women in New Zealand were given the vote in 1893 and British women were still fighting to make their voices heard.

Adams explains: "I certainly know that British women were angry because Maori women had the vote and they didn't. Prominent suffragists, [who preferred more peaceful protests] like leader Millicent Garrett Fawcett thought it was appalling that white women with a certain station in society didn't have the vote in the home of the empire but in one of the colonies they did."

This example of ingrained racism is an uncomfortable truth about a movement that ostensibly seemed to fight for equality. But it pales in comparison to the way American suffragettes manipulated race for gain.

"While women's suffrage in the US has its roots in the anti-slavery movement prior to the 1860s, they increasingly found that having any support for black people was a drag in their campaign," says Adams. "White suffragettes found it would be better if they distanced themselves from black women."

In the late 19th century and early 20th century, the American suffrage movement spread across a number of states. But by the early 1900s, there were no suffragettes in the southern states. Women in the northern movements realised that they could use race to promote their cause down south.

"They thought, what do we have to do to attract southern states?" explains Adams. "They thought, 'if we enfranchise white women that will consolidate the white vote and balance the vote against black men.'"

At the time, black men were allowed to vote and it was a point of contention in racist southern states. So the suffragettes appealed to white southern women by telling them if they had the vote, they could counter out the black male voices.

American suffragette Carrie Chapman Catt, founder of the League of Women Voters, is known to have said: "White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by women's suffrage." While Rebecca Ann Latimer Felton, the first woman to serve in the Senate, said: "I do not want to see a negro man walk to the polls and vote on who should handle my tax money, while I myself cannot vote at all."

At a crucial demonstration that took place in 1913 in Washington, black women were forced to stand at the back to appease the suffragettes from southern states - even though a number of states were desegregated. "By that time the suffragettes had become segregationist," says Adams.

When all women were finally given the vote in America in 1920, the racism did not die down. Instead southern states tried to create barriers and obstacles to prevent black women from voting, such as imposing time restrictions or saying they had to own property.

It was only in the 1960s that the conversation changed, and women's rights movements started to applaud and promote black modern-day suffragettes. It's because of this later correction that the early racism in the American suffrage movement has remained largely unknown and confined to the depths of history.

The new film Suffragette aims to tell the powerful stories of working-class women in Britain - another lesser-known side of women's suffrage battle - but popular culture rarely looks at the stories of black women in the American suffrage movement.

It's important to recognise that these women fought for the vote whilst still dealing with deep racial hatred layered on top of gender inequality. In a world where racism is still so prevalent, these women's struggles should not be forgotten either.

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The uncomfortable truth about racism and the suffragettes

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The slogan on this T-shirt is not okay. I'm saying it again because lots of white film women tweeting this in my TL. pic.twitter.com/48om1FobTS - Lexi Alexander (@Lexialex) October 5, 2015 so many words, such little patience pic.twitter.com/xU8e4DARYp - Fariha Róisín (@fariharoisin) October 5, 2015 "I'd rather be a rebel than a slave" shirt is suggesting that black people had the choice of enslavement, when we didn't.

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Angela Peoples did not come to the Women's March on Washington to play. The 30-year-old co-director of the LGBTQ equality organization GetEqual came to Saturday's massive protest against Donald Trump to tell the truth. Marching in a sea of white women, Peoples wore a hat that read, "Stop Killing Black People," and carried a sign that read in part, "White Women Voted for Trump."

As a group of white women in pink pussy-hats took selfies behind Peoples and her sign, her boyfriend, photographer and digital strategist Kevin Banatte, asked her to pause so he could take her picture. The photo of the oblivious women and Peoples, sucking on a lollipop, holding her sign with an unapologetic look on her face, quickly went viral.

Peoples shares with The Root the story behind the photo and what it's going to take for joint movements to work.

The Root: Why did you decide to go to the march?

Angela Peoples: I was debating going for a long time and made a decision towards the end of the week that I would go. I think my base-level reason was hoping to be inspired. I felt at the very least this is a space and a place that I wanted to experience for myself.

TR: Why did you decide to create the sign "White Women Voted for Trump"?

AP: We need to be really honest about why we're here. There was a sense for me of being at the march and in community with folks that were wanting to resist this horrifying reality, but also not wanting folks to get complacent.

TR: How did people respond to you and your sign?

AP: Most were saying, "Not this white woman," or "No one I know!" I'd say, "[Fifty-three percent] of white women voted for Trump. That means someone you know, someone who is in close community with you, voted for Trump. You need to organize your people." And some people said, "Oh, I'm so ashamed." Don't be ashamed; organize your people.

That's why the photo was such a great moment to capture, because it tells the story of white women in this moment wanting to just show up in a very superficial way and not wanting to do the hard work of making change, of challenging their own privilege. You're here protesting, but don't forget: The folks that you live with every single day-and probably some of the women that decided to come to the march-voted for Trump, made the decision to vote against self-interests to maintain their white supremacist way of life.

TR: You said you went to feel inspired. How did it feel, actually being there?

AP: It definitely felt very white. The other black women that I talked to there, and even women in other marches around the country, felt like they were alone, like more of the same was happening. I know that a lot of the organizers, particularly of the D.C. march, did a lot of work to make sure that the speakers were diverse, that the issue points reflected black folks' experiences; but there's also this reality that when we talk about feminism in this country, the faces have been white. Without an effort by white women especially to make sure those spaces are reflecting the diversity of women and femme people, we're not going to make the progress we need to.

TR: After this march, are you hopeful that white women will show up for black women and the issues of people of color?

AP: I definitely have hope. But I don't think it's a matter of white women becoming interested in our issues; I need them to recognize they are implicit or complicit benefactors of systems like white supremacy and patriarchy-and that's a problem.

Because issues of reproductive justice, wage issues, those are our issues, too. We don't need them to take on a new set of issues; we need them to understand the impact of these particular issues when it comes to race and gender and different experiences. They need to make adjustments to how they're organizing, what they're advocating for and how they show up to these systems based on that understanding.

TR: There were a lot of black women expressing on social media the hurt of seeing so many white women coming together for this march, but not showing up when we march. Do you have any words for those women?

AP: The only words I have are, "I love you and I see you." When black women expressed those feelings, I saw white women and gay men [saying it's divisive]-some of the same shit that people are saying to me about the poster. That also hurts because we're only being seen when we're coming together behind you. When we're speaking about our pain, when we're asking you to show up, then it's divisive, then it's somehow detrimental to the broader cause. That's simply not true.

But one thing I do know is, black women, we got us; we're continuing to organize our own communities, we're continuing to hold folks accountable across genders, across race. I would actually say to white women, if you want to be a part of a powerful movement that's going to get something done, you need to get behind and trust black women, trust black femmes, trust black trans women. Because we are making this way out of no way. If you're a white woman thinking, "What's next? Everything seems insurmountable," welcome to the fucking party. Listen to a black woman.

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Woman in Viral Photo From Women's March to White Female Allies: 'Listen to a Black Woman'

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Angela Peoples did not come to the Women's March on Washington to play. The 30-year-old co-director of the LGBTQ equality organization GetEqual came to Saturday's massive protest against Donald Trump to tell the truth. Marching in a sea of white women, Peoples wore a hat that read, "Stop Killing Black People," and carried a sign that read in part, "White Women Voted for Trump."