Historically, women have been excluded from the many liberties men have arranged for themselves. From the disregarding of women from being considered Elect during the Puritan era, to the modern instances of women lacking equal compensation. According to Charlotte Gilman, even religion, the womans help, was tainted and injured by coming through the minds of men alone (Gilman, p. 370). Men have molded American society to exclusively adhere to their personal desires.
In spite of the many disenfranchisements, some women however, refused to passively submit to such conditions. They knew that the only way to influence change was suffrage. The first women’s rights meeting in the United States held at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, itself followed several decades of a quietly-emerging egalitarian spirit among women. This was the birth of womens suffrage. Throughout the long road of suffrage there was somewhat confusion about what political focus will be granted the most attention.
White women wanted equal rights and slavery abolished, but, they didnt want to be equal to Blacks, even after the Civil War. If they were granted their citizenship rights would this mean that Black women were to be granted those rights as well? When it appeared that white men might grant black men the right to vote while leaving white women disenfranchised, white women suffragists did not respond as a group by demanding that all women and men deserved the right to vote (Hooks, Bell p. 7).
In order to maintain their political autonomy and protect their personal missions of gaining equality amongst themselves, many of the white women suffragist used what appeared at the time as racial discrimination to keep Black women at a distance to get white men to address their agendas. According to Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique and ardent feminist, the womens movement was supposed to remain distant and excluded from the blacks struggle for civil rights.
She goes further to explain that feminists could not assume the ideologies in black power would work for them. Our tactics and strategy, above all, our ideology must be firmly based in the historical, biological, economic, and psychological reality of our two-sexed world, which is not the same as the black reality, (Freidan, pg. 467). This doesnt quite disprove or prove that there was racism within the womens movement; however, it does give another view of the white womens decision to exclude black women from their agenda and focus on liberating themselves.
Attempting to understand Freidmans position of womens rights movements being exclusively focused on white women, there is conflict in her argument when she wanted to have sex discrimination laws added to the Civil Rights Act. If she didnt feel that the blacks struggle for civil rights was a good method for women to use in earning their rights, how is the Civil Rights legislation different? Maybe wanting sex added to the Civil Rights Act Freidans way of saying that her view of why women suffrage should be separate from the black movements wasnt influenced by racism but based solely on the speed of progress.
Ardent white womens rights advocates like Elizabeth Cady Stanton who had never before argued for womens rights on a racially imperialistic platform expressed outrage that inferior Blacks should be granted the vote while superior white women remained disenfranchised (Hooks, Bell p. 127) Stanton argued: If Saxon men have legislated thus for their own mothers, wives and daughters, what can we hope for at the hands of Chinese, Indians, and Africans? … I protest against the enfranchisement of another man of any race or clime until the daughters of Jefferson, Hancock, and Adams are crowned with their rights (Hooks, Bell p. 7).
To black women the issue is not whether white women are more or less racist than white men, but that they are racist (Hooks, Bell p. 125). Racism has significantly undermined feminist organizing over the past two centuries. Despite the fact that campaigns for womens rights in the United States have been initiated by women of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, and that various womens organizations have fervently struggled against racist hierarchies and institutions, racism has persisted both within and beyond the movement (Grant, Parker).
Although the case is popularly assumed to have been otherwise, Black women found themselves unwelcome in most white womens antislavery groups (Caraway, Nancie p. 134). This antithesis can be accounted for by stressing, as has Bell Hooks, that early-nineteenth-century reformers attacked slavery, not racism when white women reformers in the 1830s chose to work to free the slave; they were motivated by religious sentiment. They attacked slavery, not racism.
The basis of their attack was moral reform; they were not demanding social equality for black people is an indication that they remained committed to white supremacy despite their anti-slavery work (Caraway p. 135 from Hooks). Ending slavery could be conceived by whites abstractly as a gesture demanded by Christian morality. Going further, we must understand why the white women were overly conscious about adding Black womens rights to their goals. In this era, it was highly controversial to advocate Blacks and their causes.
Knowing this, white women who wanted their place in society risked earning such with the reputation of Negro Lover attached to her name. Consternation and denial about racism in the womens movement stem from the political principle that a movement struggling for the empowerment of women must, by definition, oppose all systems of oppression that affect womens lives. Women of color who have committed themselves to the womens liberation struggle have long done so from the standpoint that movements against sexism must also address racism if they are to have any real impact upon their lives.
If the womens liberation struggle pertains to all women, rather than to white women exclusively, then it must work to achieve and end to pervasive racism both in institutional forms and in personal dynamics. Although various womens organizations have cited countering racism as a priority, it is not surprising to find racist hierarchies within the movement that are both the reflection and the result of the racism of the male dominated culture.
In using the Booker T. Washington, Atlanta Address paradigm to analyze the issues in the womens suffrage movement, women have endured the rejection from white women in order to attain their goals of equality. Without, assuming the Uncle Tom stigma, though this may have been a struggle for black women to remain suppressed by other women, many of the liberties they suffered to attain progressed with their fight. Over the years, women, Black women included, have become better acknowledge in American society. Women of all ethnicities hold many political offices, educational accolades, and other symbols of leadership.
