Suffragette: Susan B. Anthony, 1820-1906 (Social reformer, member of the Anti-Slavery Society, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association)
Hooray: “I think the girl who is able to earn her own living and pay her own way should be as happy as anybody on earth. The sense of independence and security is very sweet.”
Wait, What: “Mr. Douglass talks about the wrongs of the Negro; but with all the outrages that he to-day suffers, he would not exchange his sex and take the place of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.”
Suffragette: Anna Howard Shaw, 1847-1919 (Physician, Methodist minister, president of the National Woman Suffrage Association, inspiration for an episode of 30 Rock)
Hooray: “Around me I saw women overworked and underpaid, doing men’s work at half men’s wages, not because their work was inferior, but because they were women.”
Wait, What: “You have put the ballot in the hands of your black men, thus making them political superiors of white women. Never before in the history of the world have men made former slaves the political masters of their former mistresses!”
Suffragette: Belle Kearney, 1863-1939 (Orator, novelist, Mississippi state senator)
Hooray: “Equal pay for equal work.”
Wait, What: “The enfranchisement of women would insure immediate and durable white supremacy, honestly attained, for upon unquestioned authority it is stated that in every southern State but one there are more educated women than all the illiterate voters, white and black, native and foreign, combined. As you probably know, of all the women in the South who can read and write, ten out of every eleven are white. When it comes to the proportion of property between the races, that of the white outweighs that of the black immeasurably.”
Suffragette: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1815-1902 (Social activist, abolitionist, author)
Hooray: “The best protection any woman can have is courage.”
Wait, What: ”What will we and our daughters suffer if these degraded black men are allowed to have the rights that would make them even worse than our Saxon fathers?”
Suffragette: Laura Clay, 1849-1940 (Founder of Kentucky’s first suffrage group)
Hooray: “Religious intolerance just now is abroad in the land. It is an evil passion of the heart which dies hard…This campaign is a call to every true American of whatever party to stand firmly for the principle of religious freedom.”
Wait, What: “The white men, reinforced by the educated white women, could ‘snow under’ the Negro vote in every State, and the white race would maintain its supremacy without corrupting or intimidating the Negroes.”
Suffragette: Frances Willard, 1839-1898 (Feminist lecturer, founder of the National Council of Women, anti-child abuse activist)
Hooray: “Politics is the place for woman.”
Wait, What: “Alien illiterates rule our cities today; the saloon is their palace, and the toddy stick their scepter. The colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt.”
Suffragette: Carrie Chapman Catt, 1859-1947 (Founder of the League of Women Voters)
Hooray: “”There is one thing mightier than kings and armies”–aye, than Congresses and political parties–”the power of an idea when its time has come to move.” The time for woman suffrage has come. The woman’s hour has struck. If parties prefer to postpone action longer and thus do battle with this idea, they challenge the inevitable. The idea will not perish; the party which opposes it may. Every delay, every trick, every political dishonesty from now on will antagonize the women of the land more and more, and when the party or parties which have so delayed woman suffrage finally let it come, their sincerity will be doubted and their appeal to the new voters will be met with suspicion.”
Wait, What: “White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by women’s suffrage.”
Suffragette: Rebecca Ann Latimer Felton, 1835-1930 (First woman to serve in the Senate)
Hooray: ”A Senator of the U.S., a woman, is still a sort of political joke with our masculine leaders in party politics…. But the trail has been blazed! The road is apparently rough—maybe rocky—but the trail has been located. It is an established fact. While it is also a romantic adventure, it will ever remain an historical precedent—never to be erased.”
Wait, What: ”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…When there is not enough religion in the pulpit to organize a crusade against sin; nor justice in the court house to promptly punish crime; nor manhood enough in the nation to put a sheltering arm about innocence and virtue—-if it needs lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from the ravening human beasts—-then I say lynch, a thousand times a week if necessary.”
Tags: boy that’s uncomfortable, feminism, feminist lynching advocates, racism, suffragettes, the first person who says “but everyone was racist then” is going to get so many wodehouse quotes thrown at them, venn diagrams, white supremacy, women’s history
they are all being so racist, but I keep on reading these as kids being like BUT MOM YOU LET [SIBLING] DO IT WHY CAN’T I????
Yeah, I read a lot of them that way too, although arguably thinking that way is rooted in racism. And some of them – Carrie Chapman Catt, Belle Kearney, and Laura Clay – are pretty inexcusable.
hmmm, possibly infantilizing women rather than recognizing that racism and sexism are taught, and that these women refused to stand up to racism in the hopes of gaining white male allies?
the problem is a little more complex than equating white women and black men to squabbling children begging for white male parental permission.
It’s less that women are being infantalized and more that ‘selfish people are childish.’ If you’re actively trying to maintain your own group’s supremacy over others, it sounds to me like you’re pretty afraid of an equality of power. I can’t find a single racist argument that can’t be deduced to ‘ewwwie they’re slightly different and I can’t handle that.’
I don’t buy it.
Sure, being purely selfish is emotionally immature, and sure, pandering to racists to benefit white women of a certain class is selfish and short sighted. Among other things. That are more the point.
Again, these issues are significantly more complex than, it’s selfish or childish or emotionally immature. It’s also about violence and access to privileges and propaganda and economic gain and just so so much more than playground politics. And trying to reduce it down to being selfish/ childish etc. ignores the systemic aspects of racism and sexism. Is the prison system childish and selfish? Was Jim Crow? Saying that sounds a little silly, or at least like it misses a lot of the other points.
a professor at my school prefaces every course with “If you don’t talk about race when you talk about American history, you will never UNDERSTAND American history.” So, thanks for talking about it. (And fuck that racist bullshit.)
You read that Krugman piece where he called race the Rosetta Stone? A neat metaphor, I think.
I love a good metaphor and that one is near perfect.
I love Krugman. It’s too bad he’s married. Oh, and I’m married, too. *sigh*
I can’t get enough of that New Yorker picture of them awkwardly holding their cats.
Thanks for the rec. Going to read it now. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/opinion/krugman…
Thank you for the link.
But everyone was so racist then!
(Don’t mind me … I just want to read some Wodehouse this morning.)
More Wodehouse always. The day my library downsized the Wodehouse collection was a dark day in my life.
Then?
Ugh, really appreciating this shit was/is one of the most difficult lessons in my ongoing feminist education. There’s a difference between vaguely knowing that “people were racist back then” and actually reading the words, “then I say lynch, a thousand times a week if necessary.” Studying the racism of suffragists and of poor and working-class white people really makes clear the extent to which racism is the foundation of American society. The ability to position themselves above and against black Americans was a powerful tool in their fight for their own advancement, and really managed to consolidate white supremacy instead of breaking the framework of all that oppression open.
Well said, thank you!!
I would highly recommend The Wages of Whiteness by David Roediger if you haven’t read it.
From Rebecca Felton: “There were violations of the moral law that made mulattoes as common as blackberries.”
Someone figure out a reaction gif for that because I am too busy starting slack-jawed at this Wikipedia page.
I could feel the whole upper half of my face move forward when I read that, in a way that makes the cartoon convention of bulging eyes feel more realistic than I’d ever previously considered.
Oh, god, how do I pick just one?
How have I never seen that Alan Rickman one? It’s GLORIOUS!
Oh, you need to see the whole thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eob7V_WtAVg
I’m… not even entirely sure what that quote means but it is very very offensive.
Mallory, is there any chance you have citations for these quotes somewhere? I want to use this in so many arguments but I know the people I fight will want citations.
Yes! Some from here: http://www.npr.org/2011/07/13/137681070/for-stant… some from here: http://mshistory.k12.ms.us/articles/245/mississip… here, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5317/, and also a handful of books.
I also recommend this: White Women’s Rights, The Racial Origins of Feminism | http://anarchalibrary.blogspot.com/2012/09/white-…
Thank you very much!
Hoooooooooooooly shiiiiiiiit. It’s always somehow MORE disappointing to me when people who’ve experienced discrimination turn around & perpetuate it on some other axis (or even the same one) because like, you know how it feels! And how absurd it is! How are you gonna do it to someone else?
PS should we have some kind of trigger warning for how awful these are? That last one especially… hooboy.
We shall not have a trigger warning, but I thank you all the same.
I figure if “white supremacy” is in the title, you’ve got a pretty decent indication right there.
This kind of talk is now called “appealing to your base”, the base being the mostly racist white men in the state legislatures who would have to vote to grant votes to women. The main message being. “Hey guys, giving women the vote will help you consolidate your oppression of black people.”
And the women were supremacists. They were not merely appealing to their base. It was much more than a political choice.
That may be true, and you certainly assert it with confidence; but could you develop your point further? Perhaps with some evidence supporting your assertion?
At first I was all “no Alice Paul on this list, maybe she was a good one?” And then I did some Googling and found out that she refused to let women of color march in DC suffrage parades, and was also a known anti-Semite. So, no, not a good one.
I love Alice Paul but that girl was racist. I do see her work as an evolution of (still terrible) racist political practices – she worked to found WoC-led Woman’s Parties in Central and South America and one of her reasons for supporting a constitutional amendment strategy on suffrage was bc she thought the American south was too racist to enfranchise black women as well as white – but have WoC march in parades with her and sit in her tea room or have really any say at all in the movement for the amendment? Nope.
She was on the leading edge of progressive politics for her time and savvy enough to not say the things written here (which are mostly from a generation before) but her world still included a ton of racism of course. Alice Paul was also pretty red so her views on race and religion were quite stilted.
Since Paul lived well into the 1970s, I was looking for an article about how her views might’ve changed during/after the civil rights movement took off. Didn’t see much in my 10-minute Google session, but if anyone has sources, I’d be interested in learning more!
I emphatically protest Susan B. Anthony being on this list! She was involved in anti-slavery activities since age 16, including organizing conventions with slogans like “No compromise with slaveholders. Immediate and Unconditional Emancipation.” In a speech from 1861, she said, “Let us open to the colored man all our schools … Let us admit him into all our mechanic shops, stores, offices, and lucrative business avocations … let him rent such pew in the church, and occupy such seat in the theatre … Extend to him all the rights of Citizenship.” She was part of the Underground Railroad and even collaborated with Harriet Tubman to get a slave to Canada. I feel like her quote above was meant to highlight that issues of race ought to also consider issue of gender (which still holds true today), rather than claiming one person literally has it better than the other. I haven’t even read the rest of this article, I’m too up in arms about this. 😉
No. It reads exactly as “But what about white folk?” Which is shitty.
Nope, still disagree. One lame quote is more than outweighed by a lifetime of abolitionist work and beliefs (thanks in no small part to her Quaker roots). Pro-slavery advocates hung her in effigy, for crying out loud – they don’t do that if you’re a white supremacist.
Oh, I think it’s much more complicated than that! There were lots of white Americans who felt that slavery was evil but would never in a million years have considered a black person their social or intellectual equal, and were horrified by the idea of black men voting and holding public office after the Civil War. Being anti-slavery in the 1800s, while laudable, was not the same thing as being anti-racist.
I guess I’m just not seeing at all that she considered them unequal, if her quote I cite above, to say nothing of her actions and other words, speak of an integrated society. There were other whites who believed as you described, certainly, but I don’t think she’s a good example for your argument.
Perhaps if instead of defending the feminist hero who had a US coin minted in her honor and who did in fact say the thing, we took this post as an opportunity consider the ways in which progressive people — even abolitionists! even anti-racists today! even the intersectionalest of us all — sometimes fail their ideals, we might get more out of it.
I cannot thumbs-up this comment enough, so I am high-fiving it as well.
This is the best comment in the thread, and not just because you used the word “intersectionalest”.
It has been a really, really long time since I was obsessed with reading everything written by 19th century American political reformers, but it was my impression that in that particular quotation, Anthony was literally reporting Douglass’s feelings that to be a black man was to be superior to a white woman, in terms of fitness to vote, on account of gender. She did, if fact, say some shitty stuff, which correlates but may or may not be caused by Douglass’s decision that votes for black men should be a political priority over the joint advancement of black suffrage and female suffrage, which is what Anthony initially favored. She felt quite betrayed that he’d abandoned her sort of proto-intersectional feminism; whether that brought out racist feelings she’d previously been quiet about or what, I can’t say.
See, I always saw Douglass’s decision as one of pragmatism – if the best he could do was get votes for Black men, that was better than not getting votes for ANY Black folks at all. He was an ardent supporter of women’s suffrage until the day he died, and had he known how much longer women were going to have to wait for the vote, he might have made different choices, but I totally understand where he was coming from. Of course, I also understand why Anthony and Stanton felt betrayed and abandoned.
Susan B. was definitely an abolitionist and a total radical on racial issues for her time but after becoming deeply involved in the women’s suffrage movement she did get to a place where she concluded women had/have it worse than black men, which is pretty shitty. Her lifetime of abolitionist work still stands but she was born 200 years ago, of course she still had some problematic ideas.
Still, I think the occasional indulging in Oppression Olympics is pretty penny-ante compared to the rest of the list. “But I bet you wouldn’t trade your problems for my problems” isn’t exactly constructive, but if we declare anyone who has ever said some version of it to suck, we’re going to be whittling the list of non-sucking humans down pretty fking fine.
What a wonderful opportunity for us all to be accountable for our actions, as opposed to doing one anti racist thing once and hoping that lasts forever in terms of status.
I find this ‘radical for their time’ thing so difficult because I think it generally refers to oppressors being radical for their time. I think if you include people of colour in the picture, Susan B. comes across as mildly radical at best.
You do realize she’s the one that came up with the “Niggers can vote, why can’t I?” Chant right?
is this a real thing? i always think i can’t get more horrified, and then i do, and i want to weep
These quotes were so terrible, but also what the hell is a “toddy stick”?
Toddy sticks are old-timey drink muddlers. (Willard was a Temperance bigwig by the way–the Temperance bigwig, founder and president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and the linchpin of the alliance between the teetotalers and the suffragettes. Looks like she imbibed her white supremacy from both cups.)
Thank you! I could have googled, but somehow I preferred imagining dirty definitions for the term.
Everyone read Women, Race, and Class by Angela Davis!
Just as soon as it downloads!
“for upon unquestioned authority it is stated that in every southern State but one there are more educated women than all the illiterate voters, white and black, native and foreign, combined”
Okay but which one, though?
Place yer bets here!
OK, so yes, all these women said some racist stuff. But at the same time, I can kind of understand why they’d be mad that black men got the vote before them?
That’s how I interpret the second one, it’s like “Are you fucking kidding me? Even men that you don’t think are *fully human* get the vote before white women?” *BUT* it’s highly unlikely she didn’t also think black people were less than white people, because she’s implicitly not including non-white *women* in her quest for voting rights.
Oh, I’m not trying to say it’s not racist, of course they’re all racist, products of their time and all that.
yeah for sure.
I don’t know about the whole ‘products of their time’ stuff. Lots of people managed to not be racist at that time. Because a lot of them were people of colour they never get credit for it.
It’d be easier to see that point of view if they weren’t all “If you let us vote, we can effectively negate the formal suffrage you have unwisely extended to black men.” I mean, that’s their actual justification! Pretty damning.
If you’re going to use Belle Kearney and Ms. Chapman Catt’s words to condemn Anthony, sure.
I didn’t refer to anyone in particular. The ones who did deploy this argument that white female suffrage was necessary to correct the error/destroy the substance while preserving the form of black male suffrage are interesting and disturbing. Anthony’s quote, to me, is the mildest and most defensible of the bunch. It’s still a good point that the overall suffrage movement in the early 20th century was just swimming in racism.
It’s been a few years, but I’m pretty sure that Anthony delivered some speeches (which Stanton wrote) that were pretty much on the level of “you are giving the right to vote to Black men and immigrants fresh off the boat who can’t even speak English, you should give the right to your nice, civilized, intelligent white wives so that they can balance it out”.
You know what engaged couples are like in mixed company, as a rule. They put their heads together and converse in whispers. They slap and giggle. They pat and prod. I have even known the female member of the duo to feed her companion with a fork. There was none of that sort of thing about Madeline Bassett and Gussie. He looked pale and corpse-like, she cold and proud and aloof. They put in the time for the most part making bread pills and, as afar as I was able to ascertain, didn’t exchange a word from start to finish. Oh, yes, once — when he asked her to pass the salt, and she passed the pepper, and he said ‘I meant the salt,’ and she said, ‘Oh, really?’ and passed the mustard.
Thank you.
Their hostility wasn’t limited to black men, but also Irish and German men. They knew what they were talking about, namely an American version of English superiority during the same period England was on a bit of a rampage.
I don’t think racism is difficult to understand, like, ever.
Well, shit. I know that several women’s rights advocates got their start fighting for the end of slavery, and then were all “hey, we don’t even have these rights, WTF?” but after the first maybe two quotes you can’t even use that justification for the bullshit these women were spouting. And these arguments are probably what actually won them the vote, because you have to appeal to white dude’s need to remain in power no matter what.
Can we also maybe talk about how awful Mary Poppins was in depicting the women’s movement? Of course the woman pushing for equal rights is a moron who neglects her kids! Awful.
That’s not Mary Poppins – she was just a domestic. That’s Mrs Banks, the kids’ mother. And she has the servants hide her placards when her husband gets home, because he doesn’t approve of ‘the cause’.
I believe she meant “Mary Poppins”, not Mary Poppins.
there /was/ an interesting and surprising cross-class solidarity there, though. and I think at least one of the servants she’s singing with is Irish or Scottish, which given the context is pretty progressive. (while we in America don’t think about it much, the scots and Irish were pretty brutally oppressed by the British)
Jesus Tap-dancing Christ, that is awful. My first reaction was to send it to everyone I know, and then to think of #solidarityisforwhitewomen.
What I learned from studying history: everyone is terrible.
How will we be terrible in the future? A question that keeps me up at night.
Hang out in highschools/colleges/graduate schools…. it is a more insidious terrible because it is cloaked in I’m educated and progressive and when you call me out and make me feel uncomfortable, you’re MEAN.
Or just go on reddit.
Say more on the first paragraph? I guess what I’m thinking of is parallels to the popularity of eugenics. Like, if I’m as honest with myself as possible, it’s easy to imagine that a person similar to me circa 1925 would’ve been a eugenics fan. But say more about what are you thinking of? Mercifully, I’ve been out of school for some time, so I may be missing it for that reason.
As for reddit, I don’t know what that is (repeat as necessary until believed).
Yep.
I learned from history that everyone is terrible and so you are also terrible and you probably should feel bad about it but you can do good things even though you are terrible.
Also once you realize that you are terrible you can try to make yourself less terrible and maybe it can help you figure out what motivates other terrible people so that you can try to help them understand that they are also terrible (but that it’s not the end of the world and they can become less terrible too).
Plus acknowledging the terrible things your heroes did doesn’t negate their good work, or mean you can’t sympathize with them anymore. It does mean you have to acknowledge the terrible things, and the underlying structures in play that contributed to said terrible things, because denying them is not only detrimental to making society today less terrible, it also takes away the humanity of our heroes by making them someone they weren’t.
Yes, absolutely! I also want to add in a less-jokey way that I think it’s vital to understand where these beliefs came from, as a product of the times/institutions/etc., to understand the way that we are influenced by the broader culture and society we live in and the institutions we interact with on a daily basis. And of course, I must state that understanding where someone is coming from and why they might think the way they do is not the same thing as agreeing with them! Basically: being aware of their shortcomings may help us illuminate ours.
The alternate intrepretation: no one is perfect, even you, but we can do good/great things in spite of not being perfect. Or to quote one of my favorite writers “don’t confuse greatness with perfection. To be great anyhow is…the higher achievement.”
I think we need some Ta-Nehisi Coates in these comments: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/…
It bears remembering that Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were actually active in the abolition movement before the Civil War, while many of the later women in this post were young children during the war. It doesn’t excuse anybody for anything, but there are a bunch of generations and a bunch of ideological systems present here, many of whom don’t much resemble the high-spirited, upper-class, Edwardian hobbyist suffragist Mrs. Banks.
(For all that Anthony is almost the oldest person on this list, her comment sounds the most contemporary–it reminds me of Gloria Steinem’s editorial during the 2008 Obama vs. Clinton primacy race.)
“I don’t need my personal pantheon to be clean. But I need it to be filled with warriors.” Love it.
I agree. I also think, with the Susan B. Anthony quote, if we’re outraged we may be forgetting what it was like to be a woman back then. Not being able to own property if you were married, not being able to have your own bank account, not being allowed to testify in court… things were not as they are now. All of those (I believe) are rights that Frederick Douglass would have had in the abolitionist North.
Thank you for that link. TNC is such an excellent source for more-light-than-heat discussions of complicated topics, and yet he takes on such challenging issues that I sometimes shy away (which is cowardly on my part) and miss amazing thought-provoking essays.
Yeah, me too. Lately I’ve been spending more time at The Toast than TNC’s blog because I am, like you say, shying away from tough issues. But whenever I’ve shown up, over the years, he’s had a really invigorating influence on my thinking.
THANK YOU for this article. I mean that sincerely. That article really does state – far more eloquently and with better citation than I would have – how I feel about it.
I love this article, and the discussions in the comments, so freaking much. I feel like a lot of history and context gets lost in these discussions, and this topic deserves more. (And no, I don’t mean “but everyone was racist we can’t judge them by our standards” which is also simplistic and not satisfactorily rigorous.)
Yes, exactly! I hope it didn’t sound above like I was saying Anthony and Stanton are off the hook because they were abolitionists–it’s more that I wanted that fact to be in the conversation–but at the same time, I think “the hook” is a fairly useless concept. We’re all on the hook. And we’re discussing the dead here; we’re not deciding whether to vote for someone or invite them to dinner. What we have to do is decide how to understand them and live in the world they left us, which might sound less rigorous but is much, much more complicated.
Sure, let’s remember it, but it also bears remembering that famous white ladies got a lot more credit for abolition than people of colour, at the time, or now. Also, it bears remembering that to be racist, you don’t have to be committing acts of racism every second of every day. People are nuanced, and should be accountable.
You know how the anti-abortion people like to go around saying “Well Susan B Anthony said something vaguely in opposition to abortion once, so ha, we win at feminism!” Yo, Susan B Anthony said all sorts of weird shit. And she’s not the president of feminism.
Agree. I liked this post because there is so much feminist messaging today that is like “we are on a narrow inevitable upward trajectory towards perfect quality [and donate now to support this perfect vision]” but, like, the movement has been fucked up and messy since forever.
Whiggism and its historical narrative cast a long, shitty shadow.
When I taught US History we spent a lot of time discussing how our ancestors are flawed humans, just as we are flawed now, but if we do not see and understand how flawed they were then , we will be less able to see, understand and correct our flaws now. These examples show us that even people fighting for good causes have blind spots. Thomas Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal, but kept slaves. Many male Civil rights leaders were AMAZINGLY sexist. Otherwise good people (my grandparents, for example) are appalled at the thought of gay marriage.
I’m so glad you said this. What makes me wince about lists like this is the idea that we are so much more moral now, and we understand things better than people did then and don’t have these flaws and therefore are free to criticize.
I suspect the treatment of the poor & of immigrants and Muslims will be the blind spot of our times. Also the treatment of animals.
Oh, Lord, I don’t think that’s at all the point of something like this. I think that in general white people nowadays do not talk AT ALL about the white supremacy that was rooted in a lot of progressive movements like women’s suffrage, and so a lot of (entirely well-meaning) people have absolutely no idea this happened. It’s glossed over in almost every mainstream feminist text and even in schoolbooks (if the schoolbooks happen to spend more than a few paragraphs on the women’s suffrage movement in the first place, that is). I think it’s a part of our history we’re in danger of forgetting.
Right, and I think a big part of the danger is that when we talk about the social movements of the past as if they were led by saints, people start to de-legitimize any social movement that isn’t full of saints (i.e. all of them). Did you know that Margaret Sanger was a racist? Therefore the entire notion of family planning is bad! Some of the Occupy folks were badly behaved, so let’s not talk about inequality! There will never be a movement, no matter how just, that doesn’t include some troubling characters. The point should be that humans are human, but we can still accomplish a lot, as long as we keep turning a critical eye to the flaws that persist in our activism.
That’s true, too — I agree with that. And the list is funny and has a great edge. It just had a big cumulative effect on me – that, and some of the comments. As though we might be forgetting that history is not progressive, we are in fact not not-flawed! etc
Maybe what I’m saying is not a critique so much as a sidebar. Side-comment.
Sigh. Yes, that does sum it up rather neatly, doesn’t it? Paraphrasing Dzodan, feminism (any social justice activism) must be intersectional, or it will be bullshit.
To my thinking, this post cries out for a sequel of quotes from second wavers terrified of the lavender menace.
Or third-wavers who like to cry “no homo” every chance they get.
And then there are the TERFs. Sigh.
The use of religion to perpetuate discrimination has been happening since the devil quoted scripture. I agree that the treatment of the poor, immigrants, non-Christians and animals are just a few of the many flaws that we need to overcome.
Wait, so if I only believe in a good/evil binary, where do I place these women? You’re making this more complicated than it needs to be, Mallory!
“sometimes people are dickfaces about one thing but pretty great about another thing”
I’m really disturbed by so many of the comments on this post. I’m not exactly surprised because, see above, white feminists are often racist!, but I guess I thought the people here were at least smart enough to see the glaring parallel between the text and their responses to it. Is it really lost on you how much you’re just the latest generation of white feminists trivializing racism? Someone brings racism to your attention and you respond: it’s just a product of their times; well everyone’s terrible in history; oh, this is bad…or maybe it’s just like whiny children?; let’s talk about Mary Poppins!; but you know, the real problem here is religion; hold up, one of these people was less than the absolute worst case of what you could be talking about; some of them were sort of right anyway! Like, seriously, one day (maybe like, one day this week!) people are going to retrieve these comments as evidence of this generation continuing the centuries-long tradition of white feminists doing everything they can to ice out critiques of racism.
(I realize the tenor of this comment is maybe not that Toastie but on the other hand, if cordiality is a higher priority than calling out racism, well, that’s just one more way that white feminism makes itself an obstacle to anti-racist work.)
It’s hard to admit when you’re wrong. Ideally we would all go through that process quietly, without fighting it or making anyone else responsible for it. But I think that what we’re seeing in these comments are people growing.
Thank you for saying this.
Thank you for your reply. Solidarity–we can do this thing!
I agree. I’m a white feminist and hardly perfect on these issues myself, but it really threw me off to see people here rationalizing what these suffragettes said and reacting defensively to the article. Like, I get it, it’s unpleasant to learn about these things – I didn’t realize these women said such racist things myself before reading this – but the very fact that we don’t talk very much about racism in the women’s suffrage movement shows how important it is for our understanding of history and feminism and our ability to make the feminist movement better and more intersectional in the future. It is just not helpful to be putting qualifiers and excuses on these quotes or acting like the fact that many of these women were abolitionists as well makes them automatically not-racist.
And I don’t think saying that makes you “not that Toastie” – to my mind one of the great things about this space is that we can talk about these things and call each other out in a respectful, mature way. I think you’re absolutely right and I’m glad you spoke up.
Oh god I don’t ever want to see the tone argument in a Toastie argument. Fistbump for your comment.
Thanks for putting this out there. Needed to be said!
You’re right.
For what it’s worth, I think it’s part of the ethos of this place, and has been from the beginning, to call this stuff out and address it honestly and respectfully. So this is actually rather Toastie of you.
Thanks for speaking up on this. I def share your ambition for what should constitute a Toastie comment, and I appreciate your desire to encourage people to voice concerns when they have them. To that end though, I’d caution against leaning too hard (and you’re not the only one to invoke this) on the idea that The Toast is universally and equally welcoming of such callings out. I mean, Mallory’s post was entirely devoted to calling out racism, and it really was not entirely met with the same receptivity that lots of other topics have enjoyed. Insisting “we’ve always been on board with this, from the beginning” right under a significant number of people really not acting that way at all is the kind of gaslighting makes people wonder if they’re going crazy (cf, http://gawker.com/kanye-west-knows-you-think-he-s… and invalidates rather than encourages what they might have to say to the contrary. Another way to think about it might be–I know (really, I know) how much no one wants to think of themselves or their community as behaving in a racist way, but for that reason, we need to be really vigilant against sliding into insisting, “No no, we’re not really like that!” when actually we need to take responsibility for the fact that that’s exactly what happened.
(Sorry this response is coming so belatedly; couldn’t formulate this thought quite at the speed of the internet!)
It is I who am belated! I’m sorry I just saw this.
I do agree with what you’ve written here, and I’m truly sorry that my words had that effect. I’m entirely on board with not pretending the world (or any given slice of it) is a better place than it is, for all the reasons that you mention above.
My intent was to respond to the sense I had from your comment that you thought this was maybe a space (as so many spaces for women online and IRL can be) where disagreement in the comments was considered not nice and frowned on as making trouble. And without resorting to “No True Scotsmen” arguments about the commenters on this site, I can say that that’s not something I’ve seen from the way the editors have responded to criticism in the past.
So I guess I meant it less as “one of us!” and more of “I think there’s explicitly meant to be room for that here.” This has gotten long-winded because I’m embarrassed.
Most excellent.
Oh my god thank you, I am similarly disturbed, and then I remembered this is why I don’t talk to white people about racism.
“But Susan B. did some abolitionist stuff!”
“But Susan B. recycled!”
“But Susan B. was really super nice!”
I think all these famous white ladies have gotten plenty of credit over the years. Do they really need your defence? Susan B.’s abolitionist work is already celebrated (unlike the work of countless people of colour whose contribution to the cessation of slavery is completely forgotten).
Mallory, do you have some sort of Wodehouse quote generator? How do you pick the right one for the occasion?
I AM A WODEHOUSE QUOTE GENERATOR.
Phew, no Lucy Stone.
Wow, apparently Lucy Stone got PISSED at Stanton & Anthony for opposing the 15th Amendment & making common cause with racist demagogues: http://www.amazon.com/Lucy-Stone-Speaking-Out-Equ…
Don’t know how racist she may have been in her personal beliefs (plenty of abolitionists were all “not even THOSE people should be slaves”) but she sure comes out looking better than those quoted above.
Yeah, I’m sure she wasn’t perfect, but the less evidence of that, the better.
Sometimes I think (and correct me if I’m wrong) that all this stuff is even more painfull to/difficult for Americans because of their deep desire to have HEROES to believe in. In the part of Western Europe that I hail from, the whole concept of heroes (and superheroes) is pretty alien. It’s something we have only learnt about through US Media (hello cultural imperialism;-) and even then still just can’t get into. I’m not tooting my/our own horns here, we are still shits in myriad ways, but we were spared this idea that a certain person (president, leader) has to be of flawless character to be worth something to the movement/change they are making. Then again, this is the country where the biggest compliment to a celebrity is: They have stayed very normal, so what can you expect 😉
TL; DR : Heroes will inavariably fall. Be impressed with the change they wrought instead, much safer, less tainting of the cause.
Oh, very much so, I think. And that’s such a shame, because then it means you have either Good People Who Do Good Things and Cannot Be Criticized Because Criticism Is Tantamount to Wholesale Rejection or Bad People Who Aren’t Progressive Like Us, and that’s not a very useful distinction.
I wanted to throw in a verbal thumbs up for this comment!
Apparently Sylvia Pankhurst liked kicking puppies.
actually Sylvia Pankhurst was the Pankhurst who looks best in the light of history: unlike the other Pankhursts, Sylvia wasn’t willing to sell out working class men and women who lacked the vote, and always stood strong with the labour, anti-imperialist and anti-fascist movements…. meanwhile Christabel was perfectly happy for those nasty rough working class men and women to go without the vote, if it meant that women of property could have it. Christabel’s movement were the ones who gave out white feathers to shame men who didn’t go to fight in World War 1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_feather
Adela Pankhurst seems to be the one with mean things to say about Sylvia, but you can’t always trust a little sister’s opinion 😉
Susan B Anthony, you wouldn’t even have been fighting for the right to vote with Frederick Douglass, so shut it.
True story: at the 1848 Women’s Rights convention in Seneca Falls, voting was initially listed in the list of rights that women should strive for, but the attendees thought it was too radical to add to their list of demands. Frederick Douglass was the one who gave the speech convincing them that without suffrage, all other rights are meaningless (b/c the people who CAN vote can just take them away again) and got that included in the Declaration of Sentiments. Then, of course, he supported the 15th amendment even though it specificed that only men were entitled to the vote, and Stanton and Anthony were PISSED. Many of the women who had fought for women’s rights in the antebellum period felt very betrayed by the 15th Amendment, because they felt that it should include women, and they fought against its passage. Douglass, of course, felt that it was better to get the Vote for at least SOME of the newly-freed slaves, lest white folks decide to vote to make slavery legal again.
I try to rationalize some of what they said in their speeches as just appealing to the lowest common denominator (praying on the fears of white men to get them to extend franchise to women), but a lot of them were also white supremacists, unfortunately. Plenty of abolitionists wanted to abolish slavery because they thought slavery was wrong, not because they thought Blacks were equal.
So, basically, my conclusion is that you want a hero of women’s rights who won’t let you down, Frederick Douglass is the way to go.
Probably the cleverest thing about kyriarchy is that it fractures groups that really should be supporting each other.
True Fact.
ARgh, that first sentence should read “without Frederick Douglass”. Clearly I get very excited whenever he is mentioned, even obliquely, and this causes me to be unable to type correctly.
Great post! Will there be a follow up post for the racism inherent in both second and third wave feminism?
Not that the topic should be considered closed, but these two pieces by Jessie-Lane Metz on racism in contemporary feminism are really good.
OOOH that thought makes me feel UNCOMFORTABLE so yes, I probably will do that!
Such a good call, I would also like to see this series repeated for more recent eras.
It’s very easy to think of racism as a distant thing and a past problem but when confronted with post modern feminist such as Caitlin Moran and others of her ilk, I question whether racism in feminism is past at all.
Seriously. In fact I think the notion that racism is just historical is one of the ways that white supremacy stays alive, because it shuts off any criticism of current discrimination.
Also, I think that series would be especially interesting because I don’t think contemporary white feminist racism is limited to the Caitlin Moran types who (as far as I can tell?) seem intentionally incendiary–there are plenty of white feminists who regard themselves as good anti-racist allies while still doing/saying a lot of things that run in quite the opposite direction. Frankly, I’d wonder whether such a survey would risk turning up even some Toast writers (I mean, given many of the comments on this thread, it seems likely!) But that gets exactly at the question of–so, who is shown solidarity?
Why are you calling them “suffragettes”? This was a term used to demean suffragists. Yes, many people in the 19th century held views about race that today we collectively consider abhorrent, and the Civil Rights movement of the 20th century failed to recognize the women even within its own ranks. The larger question today is, how have these movements evolved? What common ground do they share in terms of unfinished business? How and where can they benefit one another to bring about action on shared goals? Where are their goals at odds? ….
Because of the SONG, obviously.
why are we dragging mrs banks good name into this???
“Mr. Douglass talks about the wrongs of the Negro; but with all the outrages that he to-day suffers, he would not exchange his sex and take the place of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.”
Can someone please explain to me how this quote from Susan B. Anthony is racist? I have no argument with the others, they are quite horrid. But all Anthony is saying here is that whatever ills that Frederick Douglass had suffered as a “Negro”, being a woman is even worse. Whether or not you agree with her sentiment it does not seem racist to me.
“Mr. Douglass talks about the wrongs of the Negro; but with all the outrages that he to-day suffers, he would not exchange his sex and take the place of Elizabeth Cady Stanton”
“Mr. Douglass talks about the wrongs of the Negro; but (YEAH THERE’S A BUT – WE CAN’T JUST SAY THAT FREDERICK IS RIGHT ABOUT SLAVERY BEING SHIT) with (I MEAN ‘DESPITE’) all the outrages that he to-day suffers (I MEAN THERE ARE SOME, I DON’T DOUBT THAT, BUT BUT BUT BUT BUT), he would not exchange his sex and take the place of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (WAIT, THIS LAST PART MAKES NO SENSE. IF FREDERICK WAS TO TRANSITION, THEY WOULD BE A BLACK WOMAN, RIGHT, NOT A WHITE LADY? OH NO WAIT, THIS IS BECAUSE BLACK WOMEN DON’T EXIST, AMIRITE? WHITE WOMEN EPITOMISE WOMANHOOD, NOW AND FOR FOREVER.)”
it ignores the possibility of someone who is both black and a woman, for one.
‘Boy that’s uncomfortable’ is a perfect tag.
Also, not SUPER related, but I was reading a Wodehouse short story once written from the point of view of the dog … whose name was the n-word.
Sing with me sisters:
Though we adore suffragists as a group/we agree that individually some were rather racist.
So cast off the shackles of yesterday, etc.
I really disagree. The racism was clearly systemic, not a matter of a few bad apples. I think we need to look hard at how long white feminism has collectively used exclusion of women of color as an organizing principle.
I got to ask: why Wodehouse quotes?
This is the sad truth of the suffragists movement and a bummer when I learned of this hidden racism in my womyn’s history courses…not to mention the lack of women of color. But w/o them…we would not be where we are today. Thank God for the Quakers…men and womyn.
Sad though it is that I ( a Quaker by adult conversion) have to admit it, Quakers have never been and are not now free of racism. Read:
Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship
QUAKERS, AFRICAN AMERICANS, AND THE MYTH OF RACIAL JUSTICE
by Donna McDaniel Vanessa Julye
I respect the suffragettes. they did what they had to do to fight for something that was fundamentally their right. if that meant belittling the black man, so be it. However, dont pretend that they didnt internalise these views. they genuinely believed black was bad. you can try to mitigate the blame because of their circumstances, but how will feminists ever convince women of colour that feminism is not concerned with racism if the forerunners of feminism are racist AND its current followers defend their actions.Even today women of colour stay away from feminism because the issues and controversies surrounding it are entrenched in white privilege. when WILL YOU PEOPLE UNDERSTANDING THAT FEMINISM AND RACE ARE INSEPARABLE
Charlotte Perkins Gilman fits in there too…she said some horrendously racist things, one of which I can quote from memory but is seriously so awful that I don’t want to repeat it.
I love Frederick Douglass, but I don’t know whether he would “exchange his sex and take the place of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.” Oppression varies. Something too many people miss: In the Antebellum South, the lowest social group was white, not black: “In 1833 Fanny Kemble, an English actress visiting Georgia, noted in her journal: “The slaves themselves entertain the very highest contempt for white servants, whom they designate as ‘poor white trash'”.”
Being looked down upon is just *terrible* isn’t it? And I bet it was so much worse when the people looking down their noses had better jobs, and educations and control over their own lives- Oh, wait, we’re taking about actual slaves here, who could be literally bought and sold. There is a reason that “white trash” is a phrase and “black trash” isn’t, and it has nothing to do with slavery being an easier life than poverty and everything o so with racist assumptions about the inherent worth of Black people.
“I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.”
I love Frederick Douglass, but I don't know whether he would "exchange his sex and take the place of Elizabeth Cady Stanton." Oppression varies. Something too many people miss: In the Antebellum South, the lowest social group was white, not black: "In 1833 Fanny Kemble, an English actress visiting Georgia, noted in her journal: "The slaves themselves entertain the very highest contempt for white servants, whom they designate as 'poor white trash'"."
Now I want to read about white feminists who were also abolitionists. Not that abolitionist rhetoric wasn’t sometimes racist itself… but I’m interested to know about white women who could understand shared roots of oppression with black men and women.
I wonder if Belle Kearney was just playing Devil’s Advocate. All the other’s seem pretty racist, but her tone sounds more like she’s thinking “Everyone else is racist, the system is racist, so I should probably use arguments that would appeal to racists.”
If you’re white and you’re trying to appeal to racists… you’re racist. Also, fun fact, 99.98% of people who ‘play’ devil’s advocate are racist.
I wonder what unspeakable things all of our politicians are openly saying that the future will revile us for. only I think we probably know it’s the way we treat the poor (add immigrants if you include Trump, who shouldn’t fucking count). man, I hope it’s that. if we’re doing something worse than that, we’re really, really in trouble.
and was Wodehouse distinctly not-racist for his day?
Wait, which Wodehouse quotes? I’m not quite willing enough to be a tone-deaf jerk in order to find out, but I am curious.
Wait, which Wodehouse quotes? I'm not quite willing enough to be a tone-deaf jerk in order to find out, but I am curious.
Which is why the books are 1000x better than the movies. Mrs Banks comes off as a bit ditzy, but no worse than Mr Banks' absent-mindedness.