The Trouble with White Women

CHAPTER ONE

WOMAN’S RIGHTS ARE WHITE RIGHTS?

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frances E. W. Harper

THE SENECA FALLS CONVENTION OF 1848, ONE OF THE FIRST PUBLIC EVENTS DEVOTED TO women’s rights held anywhere in the world, had an inauspicious beginning. When organizer Elizabeth Cady Stanton told her husband, a talented abolitionist speaker, of her plan to demand voting rights for women, he was “thunderstruck.” “You will turn the proceedings into a farce,” he protested, vowing that he would refuse to even “enter the chapel during the session.”¹ Henry Brewster Stanton accordingly booked a lecture thirty miles away and fled town to avoid any association with his wife’s cause. The day of the event, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her co-organizers arrived at the red-bricked Wesleyan Methodist Chapel in Seneca Falls for the 10 a.m. opening session—only to find its doors locked and a large crowd of western New York reformers milling about outside. Yet a window had been left open to the late July heat, and Stanton’s young nephew was lifted up to its sill so that he could crawl through. Stanton began the proceedings by giving her third-ever public speech, an occasion all the more momentous given that women were generally forbidden from speaking in public.² She was barely audible. But the “Declaration of Sentiments,” the organizers’ woman’s rights manifesto modeled after the Declaration of Independence, stirred lively discussion and broad agreement after she read it a second time.

Stanton presented eleven resolutions. Ten garnered unanimous approval by sixty-eight women and thirty-two men willing to sign on, though they made radical demands for legal and social change: that married women be legally permitted to own property; “that the same amount of virtue, delicacy, and refinement of behavior that is required of woman… also be required of man”; and for men and women to gain equal access to artisanal work, the professions, and business. An eleventh resolution, however, met with severe reproach: that it was women’s “duty” to fight for the right to vote. Co-organizers including famed Quaker abolitionist Lucretia Mott balked that woman suffrage was outlandish, even “ridiculous.” Her objection, however, did not arise from conservativism; it stemmed instead from debates about the utility of voting that were rocking the abolitionist movement at the time. Mott and many others in attendance were part of a faction led by William Lloyd Garrison that abstained from electoral politics on the grounds that it was a moral duty to disobey the laws and procedures of a government that permitted slavery. The opposing faction, which insisted electoral politics was the way to abolish enslavement, was led by none other than Stanton’s husband.³ Yet his position that expanding the suffrage would bring about justice did not extend to women’s rights.

Only one man spoke in favor of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s resolution for woman’s suffrage that day. The abolitionist firebrand Frederick Douglass, who was also the only African American member of the three-hundred-person audience, arose from his seat. In his resonant voice issuing forth from his six-foot frame, he declared that he would not fight for voting rights for himself without also fighting for voting rights for women. To bar women from the ballot, as he saw it, entailed “the maiming and repudiation of one-half of the moral and intellectual power” of the globe.⁴ Douglass’s rousing speech stirred up the crowd, already sweating in the ninety-degree heat. Thanks to his intervention, the resolution passed by a narrow margin.

Stanton, with characteristic grandiosity, later claimed that the Seneca Falls Convention commenced “the most momentous reform that had yet been launched on the world.” What is now considered to be the convention’s signature achievement, the call for woman’s suffrage, succeeded only because Douglass staked Black voting rights and women’s voting rights as necessary partners. He had not always been so sympathetic to the cause. Douglass praised his fellow abolitionist Stanton for having earlier refuted point by point his initial arguments against women’s suffrage, transforming him into a “woman’s-rights man.”⁵ The motto of his North Star newspaper, launched seven months before the convention, proclaimed, “Right is of no sex—Truth is of no color.” At Seneca Falls, Douglass backed his new ideals with concrete action. His solidarity work helped set the course of modern feminism, a movement Stanton and her close friend Susan B. Anthony are widely credited with creating and then sustaining until their deaths at the turn of the twentieth century.

Yet when the Civil War ended nearly two decades later, and Black men were enfranchised while women of any race were not, Elizabeth Cady Stanton retreated from the cause of racial equality and anchored white women’s rights in the logic of white supremacy. She fought bitterly against the proposed Fifteenth Amendment, the third and final amendment of the Reconstruction era. The amendment aimed to prevent states from denying anyone the right to vote on the basis of “race, color or previous condition of servitude.” Sex was not included, however, and the amendment would not extend voting rights to women of any race, a stipulation that enraged Stanton.

In May 1869, she presided over the meeting of the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), an organization founded by Douglass, Mott, Stanton, and Anthony among others to fight for universal suffrage regardless of “race, color, or sex.” As chair, Stanton had the honor of delivering the opening speech from the podium of the grand, new Steinway Hall in New York City, a three-tiered concert and lecture auditorium attached to the piano emporium’s showrooms. By now she was an expert orator. Full of fury, she seized the opportunity to unleash her favorite argument against the pending amendment, which had been approved by Congress and was awaiting ratification by the states: that womanhood was a state of imperiled whiteness, threatened by depraved Black and immigrant men who were soon to have more legal rights than the ladies who presided over the nation’s finest homes.

“Remember, the Fifteenth Amendment takes in a larger population than the 2,000,000 black men on the Southern plantation,” Stanton thundered. “It takes in all the foreigners daily landing in our eastern cities, [and] the Chinese crowding our western shores.… Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung, who do not know the difference between a monarchy and a republic, who cannot read the Declaration of Independence or Webster’s spelling book, making laws for Lucretia Mott… [or] Susan B. Anthony.” Congressmen who were about to expand suffrage to men alone would “make their wives and mothers the political inferiors of unlettered and unwashed ditch-diggers, boot-blacks, butchers, and barbers, fresh from the slave plantations of the South and the effete civilizations of the old world.” What terrors lay in the nation’s future, she asked, when “clowns make laws for queens?” Stanton’s bag of racist tricks was deep. She even pulled out the mythical specter of the Black male rapist, claiming that to “the ignorant African… woman is simply the being of man’s lust,” such that Black men’s voting rights “must culminate in tearful outrages on womanhood.”⁶ Voting rights would also make Black men themselves more vulnerable to exploitation, she asserted preposterously; the Fifteenth Amendment should thus be rejected in hopes of a future amendment that expanded the franchise to women and men.

As he had twenty-one years prior, Douglass stood up from the congregation to speak. While he first honored Stanton’s decades of work for abolition and their long personal friendship, he bristled at her increasingly frequent use of the derogatory term “Sambo,” her blatantly racist objections to enfranchising Black men, and her central claim: that bourgeois white women were most in need of the protection of the ballot.

“With us, the matter is a question of life and death,” Douglass countered. “When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans; when they are dragged from their houses and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms, and their brains dashed out upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own.”⁷

During Reconstruction, when white abolitionists needed to expand their horizons beyond the existence of slavery and recognize the pervasive violence of antiblackness, many instead remained invested in racism. For Stanton, white supremacy became her choice strategy for advancing woman’s suffrage. When it became clear that her goal of universal enfranchisement for all women and the formerly enslaved was not a legislative reality, she deliberately put the two groups in conflict with each other. She advanced a false choice: voting rights for Black men or for (white) women. Stanton might have opted for solidarity, electing to support the Fifteenth Amendment to ensure formerly enslaved men became full citizens and forming coalitions with abolitionists to fight for women’s suffrage in the future. But instead, she opted to frame universal male suffrage as menacing white women’s dignity and purity.

Douglass became one of her most eloquent critics, provoked to defending the primacy of Black male voting rights over enfranchising women as the KKK unleashed its reign of terror and anti-Black violence proliferated across the country. The alliances comprising the AERA had been torn asunder, and the organization dissolved immediately after the meeting in Steinway Hall. That evening, Stanton and Anthony founded a new organization, called the National Woman Suffrage Association, to oppose the Fifteenth Amendment because it did not extend voting rights to women. Their position was firm. “I’d sooner cut off my right hand than ask for the ballot for the Black man and not for woman,” Susan B. Anthony earlier declared.⁸

The nation’s leading feminists had become outright antagonists of Black suffrage when the legislation excluded them. Stanton’s unabashed racism threatened to turn the nascent movement for women’s rights into a white supremacist campaign to advance the position of white women at all costs.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in other words, invented white feminism. She began this project in Seneca Falls in 1848 and cemented its platform at Steinway Hall in 1869. For her, women’s rights meant that white women would gain access to the rights and privileges of elite white men. She framed white civilization as imperiled until it made room for white women’s leadership, which she figured as more moral, just, and ultimately profitable than men’s leadership. Yet this vision of reform was starkly individualist, imagining people as isolated units in continual competition. While seemingly in common cause with abolition, for example, Stanton approached enslavement primarily as an analogy for white women’s own suffering. Black men with voting rights became a threat, rather than potential allies.

During the first five decades of women’s rights, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was one of the most famous women in the United States. She possessed the wealth and the self-confidence to ensure that her intellectual influence on the movement was widely known and her legacy endured, two feats assisted by the tireless organizing work of her compatriot, Susan B. Anthony. While Stanton was largely forgotten during the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, the rise of feminist history in the 1960s and 1970s restored her self-proclaimed position as the intellectual leader of the campaign for women’s rights.

Another tradition of feminism began, however, during the same years that Stanton stumped for white women’s rights. On the second day of the May 1869 AERA conference at Steinway Hall, Stanton reiterated, to applause, “I do not believe in allowing ignorant Negroes and ignorant and debased Chinamen to make laws for me to obey.”⁹ Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a leading Black author, feminist-abolitionist lecturer, and founding AERA member, intervened immediately.

“When it is a question of race, I let the lesser question of sex go,” Harper counseled. “But the white women all go for sex, letting race occupy a minor position.”

Harper called out how the logic of Woman worked for white feminists: they imagined a group bound only by the oppressions of sex. They pushed race to the side as a “minor” issue. White women’s emphasis on sex was implicitly a position that reinforced whiteness, for it elevated the concerns of womanhood—an identity that white scientific, political, and cultural elites at the time thought only bourgeois white families had achieved—above all other dynamics of power. Harper pushed back against Stanton’s increasingly bald racism, using a prior speaker’s emphasis on the needs of working women as her counterpoint.

“I like the idea of fighting for working women. But will ‘working women’ be broad enough to take colored women?” interrogated Harper.

Susan B. Anthony and others agreed enthusiastically—of course their concern for working women extended to Black women. But Harper continued: “When I was at Boston, there were sixty women who rose up and left work because one colored woman went to gain a livelihood in their midst.”¹⁰

Harper’s anecdote shattered the myth echoing throughout the auditorium: that women were naturally bonded together against a common oppressor—men. Harper made it plain that she and the white women gathered there did not have the same concerns or priorities, despite their shared status as women. Harper would make this point repeatedly over her long activist career: white women could be allies—but they could also be trouble. White women’s commitment to the preeminence of sex, and thus of whiteness, meant that sometimes white women were the greatest danger Black women faced. While many white women romanticized their moral purity and alleged isolation from the world of business and politics, they nonetheless gained tremendous advantage from slavery and colonialism. White women enslavers in the South were thus often deeply personally and financially invested in their human property, as historian Stephanie Jones-Rogers has shown.¹¹ Harper’s example of white women’s racism came from Boston; it could just as easily have come from Stanton’s presidential perch right inside Steinway Hall.

In the bitter debates about the Fifteenth Amendment unfolding in 1869, activists were forced to pick sides: support the present legislation enfranchising only Black men, or hold out for a long-shot simultaneous Sixteenth Amendment that would enfranchise all women. Harper chose her battle.

“If the nation could only handle one question, I would not have the black women put a single straw in the way if only the race of men could get what they wanted,” Harper concluded, affirming her support for the Fifteenth Amendment.¹² The room broke out in applause.

Harper’s intervention into what is now called “the great schism” in women’s rights, when the AERA broke into two competing factions, was one of the first key moments in the development of intersectional feminism. That Harper would be pivotal in the rise of intersectionality politics is no surprise: she was one of the first Black feminist theorists.¹³ A prolific author of poetry and fiction, as well as a tireless lecturer on the speaking circuit, Harper was the most widely read Black poet in the nineteenth-century United States. Her intersectional feminism was not merely a reaction to white feminism’s implicit and explicit commitment to white supremacy. She also articulated a new kind of political subject and new sources of knowledge. Her deeply spiritual approach to liberation envisioned a world governed by morality, instead of competition and profit. Whereas Stanton portrayed women’s rights as a lever for advancing white civilization and drew sensational analogies between slavery and the condition of white womanhood to dramatize her cause, Harper’s intersectional feminism advocated for alliances and contact between enslaved and free people, feminists and antiracists, and spiritual belief and secular politics.

Stanton and Harper were two of the most politically active women in the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century, though Harper was much less known. The conditions motivating each woman to become involved in politics dramatize the different ways class, race, and sex shaped their personal lives as well as the distinct feminist strategies they developed. In one important respect, however, the two had overlapping experiences: each was fortunate enough to receive, and fight for, the highest quality educations then available to white girls and Black girls, respectively.

Stanton’s access to education came by virtue of growing up in the largest house in Johnstown, New York. Born in 1815, she liked to say, to one of the “blue-blooded first families” of New York descended from Puritans, Stanton boasted of “several generations of vigorous, enterprising ancestors behind [her].” Her father served a term in the US Congress and became a state Supreme Court justice, while her mother was descended from a Revolutionary War hero. Yet Stanton was a constant disappointment to her father. Her mother had borne eleven children, but five died in childhood. Only one son, Eleazar, survived to adulthood; this son alone thus bore all the weight of maintaining the ancestral line’s wealth and prominence. But when he was twenty, Eleazar took seriously ill, and he came home from college to die.¹⁴ Though Stanton was only eleven at the time, she could see her father’s devastation. She recalled finding him sitting vigil in the parlor next to his son’s casket, looking as white as the cloth that draped the coffin, mirrors, and paintings: “I climbed upon his knee, when he mechanically put his arm around me… we both sat in silence, he thinking of the wreck of all his hopes in the loss of a dear son.… At length he heaved a deep sigh and said: ‘Oh, my daughter, I wish you were a boy!’ Throwing my arms about his neck, I replied: ‘I will try to be all my brother was.’”

The next morning, she sought the services of her neighbor, the family’s pastor, asking him for help learning two skills that had been denied to her on account of sex: reading ancient Greek and riding horseback. He opened his library and stables to the precocious child and provided regular lessons. Before long, Stanton added Latin and mathematics to her regime at the Johnstown Academy, becoming the only girl in her school to study these subjects. Despite being years younger than many of her classmates, she eventually won second prize in the academy’s Greek competition, which was awarded in the form of her own copy of the Greek New Testament. Certain she had won her father’s approval at last, Stanton triumphantly ran down the hill to her father’s office to display her book. But, she relayed, while he was “evidently pleased,” praise was not forthcoming. He only “kissed me on the forehead and exclaimed, with a sigh, ‘Ah, you should have been a boy!’” She soon faced a structural disappointment as well: at sixteen, her male classmates all went off to Union College, where Eleazar had attended. There was not a college or university in the country that accepted women. Stanton was able to attend Emma Willard’s seminary, however, which Stanton’s biographer Lori Ginzberg notes provided the best education in the country then available to girls.¹⁵ Throughout her life, Stanton positioned her conservative father as the foil against whom she developed her budding feminist consciousness, and she positioned herself as the inheritor of the family’s blue-blooded potential: a potential she used to dismantle her father’s sex-divided world.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, born in 1825, also received a high-quality education through a mixture of luck, pluck, and tragedy. Harper’s parents were free, though they lived in the slave state of Maryland. But as among other early nineteenth-century families, death was widespread; both her parents had died by the time she reached three years old. Her mother’s brother William Watkins, and his wife Henrietta, raised Harper as one of their own children. She attended Watkins’s Academy for Negro Youth in Baltimore, where she undertook one of the most rigorous courses of study then available to Black children. A shoemaker and preacher by trade, her uncle William Watkins was also a master orator and active anti-imperialist who wrote articles for Garrison’s Liberator newspaper; his pupils wrote essays almost daily and were trained in elocution, history, geography, mathematics, natural philosophy, Greek, Latin, and music, among other subjects.¹⁶ Watkins’s son would go on to work with Frederick Douglass on the North Star newspaper.