Feminisms and Racism

Part of Part Two of a discussion with Shankar Vedantam at WaPo, “When Disadvantages Collide“:

One hundred forty-three years ago, women’s suffrage advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton faced a conundrum: With the Civil War over, Stanton had to decide whether to support the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, which enabled black men to vote — at a time when white women such as herself still did not have that right.

The question of what to do when the interests of two groups that had long suffered discrimination clashed with each other split the feminist movement. In order to gain passage of the 19th Amendment, which in 1920 gave women the right to vote, leading feminists jettisoned issues important to African Americans to win support from women and politicians who would have nothing to do with people of color. Without the support of the racists, the amendment might have failed, said Kimberle Crenshaw, professor of constitutional and civil rights law at Columbia University and UCLA.

There were two ironies in this: Stanton, like many other suffragists, was a passionate abolitionist. And in the years before she made her derogatory remark about “Sambo,” abolitionists had treated women in exactly the same manner — excluding them from equal participation in the movement merely because they were female.

The political alliance that the suffragists built helped pass the 19th Amendment, but it drove a wedge into the women’s movement. Over the long term, just as relegating women to second-class citizens weakened the campaign for civil rights, abandoning solidarity with people of color weakened the women’s movement.”

Without doubt, the women’s suffrage movement was composed of mostly white, middle-class women.  That goes for not only the US movement, but also Canada, UK and others that I’m not so familiar with.  Because the US was mired in the issue of slavery and abolition, the movement there took on particularly profound racism and the “herstory” is deeply problemmatic as a result.  However, feminism in Canada and UK was not, by any means, immune and, in fact, US feminism being as influential as it was, feminisms outside the US were deeply affected by it.

If the painful problems experienced during the US Democratic nomination campaign with respect to race and gender continue to spark renewed, respectful, reflective and meaningful discussions about feminisms past and present and racism, perhaps something hopeful unifying will begin to emerge.