Solidarity Across Racial and Gender Lines - 1867-style

Brent Staples, in his “Editorial Observer” column for the NYT, “The Racism Behind Women’s Suffrage” makes vital points about the racism of sectors of the women’s movement for suffrage. Staples rightly points to the struggles over the 15^th Amendment as a crucial turning point. But Staples omits the reasons the 14th and 15th Amendment were so controversial among abolitionists, misleads readers about the motivations for the women’s suffrage campaign, paints the women’s movement as monolithically racist, and fails to mention activists who advanced a simultaneously anti-racist and anti-sexist agenda. Reclaiming their voices can provide us with positive, albeit imperfect, historical examples of intersectional solidarity.

Staples does not adequately describe the political and social context. The women’s movement in the US arose primarily out of abolitionist women who faced violence and abuse for speaking in public against racism, and some of their male abolitionist allies who spoke up in support of women’s rights as well. But when Republican leaders in Congress wrote the 14^th and 15^th Amendments, the right to vote was, for the first time in Constitutional history, despite Senator Sumner’s objections, enunciated as an explicitly male right. This meant that the 14^th and 15^th Amendments did not merely fail to recognize women’s right to vote, they actually took Constitutional steps backwards away from women’s suffrage. Because of those provisions, the 14^th and 15^th Amendments, written exclusively by white men, couldn’t have been designed any better if the intention was to divide and conquer the alliance between feminist and anti-racist struggles.

Despite this, the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), made up of a coalition of black and white abolitionists, suffragists, and male supporters, attempted to prevent a split, recognizing differences while proclaiming solidarity in the struggle for rights, declaring, in 1867, “The black man, even the black soldier, is yet but half emancipated, nor will he be, until his full suffrage and citizenship are secured to him in the Federal Constitution. Still more deplorable is the condition of the black woman; and legally, that of the white woman is no better!”This formulation acknowledged how, as an immediate matter of life and death, black suffrage for men and women was vital, recognized that black women are discriminated against because of racism and sexism, and mentioned that black and white women alike faced legal disenfranchisement. The radical solution, according to the AERA, was to “secure Equal Rights to all American Citizens, especially the Right of Suffrage, irrespective of race, color or sex.”

Staples claims that white women wanted the vote as merely “a symbol of parity with their husbands and brothers.” This formulation belittles white women’s demands for an end to discrimination and disenfranchisement, ignores that suffragists were being asked to support Constitutional provisions that attacked the rights of all women, and disregards the life and death struggle of women of all colors to survive in the face of male violence and oppression. Second, Staples says that black women were seeking the ballot, “for themselves and their men, as a means of empowering black communities…” implying that black women weren’t speaking out against sexism. This was perhaps what some black women were saying, but other black women combined anti-racist and anti-sexist arguments. For example, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a black poet and feminist, confronted some white women’s reluctance to challenge social racism (including segregated public transportation), in an 1866 speech entitled, “We Are All Bound Up Together,” in which she also declared, “justice is not fulfilled as long as woman is unequal before the law.”

Staples rightly points out that both Stanton and Anthony inexcusably began using virulently racist arguments against the 14^th and 15^th Amendments, violating principles they themselves had formerly held. But Staples omits discussion of the division inside the women’s movement this racism caused. In addition to black feminist protests, white feminists, including Abby Kelly Foster, Julia Ward Howe (who wrote the Battle Hymn of the Republic), and Lucy Stone (who reluctantly changed her mind and decided to campaign for the 15^th Amendment, despite its sexism, perhaps in response to the racism of Stanton and Anthony) spoke up vociferously. Abby Kelly Foster, despite suffering from what were later discovered to be ovarian tumors weighing 35 pounds, responded immediately to Stanton’s racist speech at the 1867 AERA convention, stepping to the rostrum to remonstrate, “The negro is treated as a slave today in the South. Without wages, without family rights, whipped and beaten, given up to the most horrible outrages…. Have we any true sense of justice, are we not dead to the sentiment of humanity, if we wish to postpone his security till woman shall obtain political rights?” (See Ahead of Her Time, Abby Kelly and the Politics of Antislavery, by Dorothy Sterling, p. 348). Stephen Foster, Abby’s pro-feminist and anti-racist partner, even tried to remove Stanton and Anthony as leaders of the American Equal Rights Association because of their racist betrayal of the principles of equal rights. This division was deep enough to split the AERA between the two factions, resulting in a decades long division between the National Woman Suffrage Association (led by Anthony and Stanton) and the American Woman Suffrage Association (whose most famous leaders were initially Howe and Sojourner Truth).  

Staples also, alas, is misleading about the nuanced position Frederick Douglass took during this debate. Staples quotes Douglass responding to Stanton and Anthony with the claim that women weren’t being attacked as women, weren’t “the objects of insult and outrage at every turn,” which was obtuse in light of men’s violence against women. Far from acknowledging black women, as Staples claims, Douglass’s statement actually elides the ways in which black women suffered both racist and misogynist violence. However, this statement was unrepresentative of Douglass, whose position on the 15^th Amendment was complicated. He strongly campaigned for and insisted on the need to pass the Amendment immediately in order to provide the votes needed to support federal government action against the reign of terror being waged against blacks in the former Confederate states, but also recognized that its enshrinement of male-only suffrage was wrong. It was Douglass, with the support of Harper who, according to an article by Noelle Trent, attempted to prevent a split in the movement by authoring a resolution at the AERA’s 1869 convention that would “welcome the fifteenth amendment and black male suffrage while also emphasizing their continued dedication to the creation of an amendment that would guarantee equal rights for all.”

Douglass promised he would immediately and always campaign for a 16^th Amendment to recognize white and black women’s right to vote. He kept his promise. Douglass attended a women’s suffrage meeting (presided over by Susan B. Anthony — the two had reconciled) on February 21, 1895 — before returning home and perishing that evening.

I agree with Staples that black suffragists are too often written out of the feminist history narrative, and that commemorations of the 19^th Amendment need to honestly confront the racism of many leaders of the feminist movement. We also need to honor those of all races and sexes who resisted temporary political advantage in order to build inclusive coalitions based on principles of multi-racial anti-sexist solidarity. Their voices too, should ring out down the generations — and inspire our activism today.