Ain't I a Woman

by bell hooks

  Included in A Voice from the South was an essay by Cooper on “The Higher Education of Women” in which she argued that women as a collective group should have the right to acquire higher education. Like many modern-day feminists, Cooper believed in the existence of a distinct “feminine principle” and argued that “a great want of the world in the past has been a feminine force,” a force which could have “its

  full effect only through the untrammelled development of women.”

  All I claim is that there is a feminine as well as a masculine side to truth; that these are related not as inferior and superior, not as better and worse, not as weaker and stronger, but as complements—complements in one necessary and symmetric whole. That as the man is more noble in reason, so the woman is more quick in sympathy. That as he is indefatigable in pursuit of abstract truth, so is she in caring for the interests by the way— striving tenderly and lovingly that not one of the least of these “little ones” should perish. That while we not unfrequently see women who reason, we say, with the coolness and precision of a man, and men as considerate of helplessness as a woman, still there is a general consensus of mankind that one trait is essentially masculine and the other is peculiarly feminine. That both are needed to be worked into the training of children, in order that boys may supplement their virility by tenderness and sensibility, and our girls may round out their gentleness by strength and self-reliance. That, as both are alike necessary in giving symmetry to the individual, so a nation or a race will degenerate into mere emotionalism on the one hand, or bullying on the other, if dominated by either exclusively; lastly, and most emphatically, that the feminine factor can have its proper effect only through woman’s development and education so that she may fitly and intelligently stamp her force on the forces of her day, and add her modicum to the riches of the world’s thought....

  Even though Anna Cooper, like other 19th century women’s rights advocates, continued to believe that woman could best serve her country by using education to enhance the sex role assigned her by patriarchy, she was aware that higher education would also enable women to explore worlds outside the traditional realm of home and family. To answer those who argued that higher education interfered with marriage, Cooper replied:

  I grant you that intellectual development, with the self-reliance and capacity for earning a livelihood which it gives, renders woman less dependent on the marriage relation for physical support (which, by the way, does not always accompany it). Neither is she compelled to look to sexual love as the one sensation capable of giving tone and relish, movement and vim to the life she lives. Her horizon is extended. Her sympathies are broadened and deepened and multiplied. She is in closer touch with nature....

  Nineteenth century black women believed that were they given the right to vote, they could change the educational system so that women would have the right to pursue fully their educational goals. To achieve this end they wholeheartedly supported woman suffrage. Black woman activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was more outspoken on the subject of woman suffrage than any other black woman of her day. In 1888 she addressed the International Council of Women in Washington and spoke on the importance of suffrage to black and white women. At the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 she delivered an address titled “Woman’s Political Future” expressing her views on suffrage:

  I do not believe in unrestricted and universal suffrage for either men or women. I believe in moral and educational tests. I do not believe that the most ignorant and brutal man is better prepared to add value to the strength and durability of the government than the most cultured, upright, and intelligent woman.... The ballot in the hands of woman means power added to influence. How well she will use that power I can not foretell. Great evils stare us in the face that need to be throttled by the combined power of an upright manhood and an enlightened womanhood; and I know that no nation can gain its full measure of enlightenment and happiness if one-half of it is free and the other half is fettered. China compressed the feet of her women and thereby retarded the steps of her men.

  Mary Church Terrell was yet another black female activist who lobbied in support of woman suffrage. In 1912, she addressed the National America Woman’s Suffrage Association, of which she was a member on two occasions, speaking in support of woman suffrage. Terrell was also active in the movement to stop the lynching of black people. Her article “Lynching from a Negro’s Point of View” was published in the 1904 issue of the North American Review, and it was in this essay that she first appealed to white women to involve themselves in the anti-lynching crusade. Terrell believed that white women acted as the accomplices of white men at lynchings, and she placed a measure of the responsibility for racism and racial oppression on their shoulders:

  Lynching is the aftermath of slavery. The white men who shoot negroes to death and flay them alive, and the white women who apply flaming torches to their oil-soaked bodies today, are the sons and daughters of women who had but little, if any, compassion on the race when it was enslaved. The men who lynch negroes to-day are, as a rule, the children of women who sat by their firesides happy and proud in the possession and affection of their own children, while they looked with unpitying eye and adamantine heart upon the anguish of slave mothers whose children had been sold away, when not overtaken by a sadder fate.... It is too much to expect perhaps, that the

  children of women who for generations looked upon the hardships and the degradation of their sisters of a darker hue with few if any protests, should have mercy and compassion upon the children of that oppressed race now. But what a tremendous influence for law and order, and what a mighty foe to mob violence Southern white women might be, if they would arise in the purity and power of their womanhood to implore their fathers, husbands and sons no longer to stain their hands with the black man’s blood!...

  Terrell’s appeal to white women to bond with black women on the basis of shared womanhood was a reiteration of the sentiments of many 19th century black women who were convinced that women could be a new political force in the US.

  Despite racist and sexist oppression, the latter part of the 19th century was an important era in black woman’s history. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was gloriously right when she exclaimed, “If the fifteenth century discovered America to the Old World, the nineteenth is discovering woman to herself.” The fervor over women’s rights generated in the 19th century continued in the 20th century and culminated in the ratifiction of the Nineteenth Amendment in August 1920 which granted all women the right to vote. In their struggle to win the vote, black women had learned a bitter lesson. They found as they worked for suffrage that many whites saw granting women the right to vote as yet another way to maintain the oppressive system of white racial imperialism. Southern white suffragists rallied around a platform that argued that woman suffrage in the South would strengthen white supremacy. Even though woman suffrage would also grant black women the right to vote, in the south white women outnumbered them by two to one. In The Emancipation of the American Woman, Andrew Sinclair discusses the racial politics of white women suffragists and concludes:

  The undisguised racism of the Southern suffragists such as Kate Gordon and Laura Clay—two of the most powerful officers in the National American Association after Anthony’s retirement—worried the suffragists from the North and the West. Although Carrie Catt and Anna Shaw had to be diplomatic to gain some Southern support for suffrage, they lost the crusading spirit of the old

  abolitionists.... The vocabulary of the movement changed from the language of human rights to that of expediency. Negro women in the North were excluded from some suffrage parades, for fear of offending the South. As one Negro leader wrote to another about the suffragists, “All of them are mortally afraid of the South and if they could get the Suffrage Amendment through without enfranchising coloured women, they would do it in a moment.”

  The language of the Northern suffrage leaders, even that of Elizabeth Stanton, increasingly shifted
towards the expedient of educated suffrage for women.. The promise of the American Revolution in terms of human equality and liberty was forgotten in an effort to win the vote for a limited number of white, Anglo-Saxon women, in the same way that the terms of the Constitution had once denied the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

  As in the 19th century struggle over the issue of woman suffrage, in the 20th century struggle, race and sex became interlocking issues. Like their predecessors, white women consciously and deliberately supported white racial imperialism, openly disavowing feelings of empathy and political solidarity with black people. In their efforts to secure the ballot, white women’s rights advocates willingly betrayed the feminist belief that voting was the natural right of every woman. Their willingness to compromise feminist principles allowed the patriarchal power structure to co-opt the energy of women suffragists and use the votes of women to strengthen the existing anti-woman political structure. The great majority of white women did not use their voting privileges to support women’s issues; they voted as their husbands, fathers, or brothers voted. The more militant white suffragists had hoped that women would use the vote to form their own party rather than supporting major parties that denied women social equality with men. Voting privileges for women changed in no fundamental way the lot of women in society, but they did enable women to help support and maintain the existing white racist imperialist patriarchal social order. To a very grave extent women obtaining the right to vote was more a victory for racist principles than a triumph of feminist principles.

  Black female suffragists found that the vote had little impact on their social status. The most militant wing of the 1920s women’s movement, the National Woman’s Party, was both racist and classist. Even though the party pledged to work for full equality for women, it actively worked to

  promote solely the interests of white middle and upper class women. In Her story, June Sochen makes this comment on the attitude of white suffragists toward black women:

  After the woman’s suffrage amendment was passed in 1920, some reformers wondered whether it would benefit black women as well as white women—especially in the South where black men had been virtually disenfranchised by the white power-holders. Over two million newly enfranchised black women lived in the South. When suffragists suggested to Alice Paul that the voting rights of black women would be a continuing vital issue, she replied that the year 1920 was not the time to discuss that question. Rather, she said, the suffragists should enjoy their new political power and make plans for other battles in the future. Yet as the reformers had foreseen, when black women went to the polls in Alabama or Georgia, they found that white election officials had a bag of tricks ready to prevent them from voting. If a black woman could read a complicated text put before her, the white official would find some other obscure reason why she was ineligible to vote. And any woman who persisted was threatened with violence if she did not obediently slink away.

  When women suffrage failed to alter in any way the social status of black women, many black female suffragists became disillusioned with women’s rights. They had supported woman suffrage only to find their interests betrayed, only to find that “woman suffrage” would be used as a weapon to strengthen white oppression of black people. They found that obtaining rights for women would have little impact on their social status as long as white racial imperialism automatically denied them full citizenship. While white women were rejoicing over obtaining the right to vote, a system of racial apartheid was being institutionalized throughout the U.S. that would threaten the freedom of black women far more crucially than sexual imperialism. That system of racial apartheid was called Jim Crow. In The Strange Career of Jim Crow, C. Vann Woodward describes this resurgence of racism:

  In the postwar era there were new indications that the Southern Way was spreading as the American Way in race relations. The great migration of the Negro into the residential slum areas and the industrial plants of the big northern cities increased tension between races. Northern labor was jealous of its status and resentful of the competition of Negroes, who were excluded from unions. Negroes were pushed out of the more desirable jobs in industries that they had succeeded in invading during the manpower shortage of the war years. They were squeezed out of federal employment more and more. Negro postmen began to disappear from their old routes as they did from the police beats. They began to lose their grip upon crafts such as that of the barbers, which had once been a virtual monopoly in the South.

  Racism in regimented form was spread over the whole country in the ‘twenties by the new Ku Klux Klan....

  There was no apparent tendency toward abatement or relaxation of the Jim Crow code of discrimination and segregation in the 1920’s, and none in the ‘thirties until well along in the depression years. In fact the Jim Crow laws were elaborated and further expanded in those years. Much social and economic history is reflected in the new laws. When women began to bob their hair and became patrons of the barber shops, Atlanta passed an ordinance in 1926 forbidding

  Negro barbers to serve women or children under fourteen years of age. Jim Crow kept step with the march of progress in transportation and industry, as well as with the changes in fashion.

  As Jim Crow apartheid threatened to strip black people of the rights and achievements they had acquired during Reconstruction, it was only natural that black female activists ceased to struggle over women’s rights issues and concentrated their energies on resisting racism.

  Black women activists were not the only group of women to shift their attention away from women’s rights issues. Because much of the energy of female activists had focused on the vote, once it was obtained many women saw no further need for a women’s movement. Although white women in the Woman’s Party continued feminist struggle, black women were rarely active participants. Their energies were focused on resisting mounting racial oppression. While white women’s rights

  advocates struggled in 1933 to get the Senate to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, black women activists were fighting to prevent the lynching of black women and men by mobs of white racists, to improve the conditions of masses of poverty-stricken black people, and to provide educational opportunities. In the 20s and 30s, black female activists appealed to the masses of black women not to let sexism prevent them from being as involved as black men in the struggle to free black people. Amy Jacques Garvey, active in the black nationalist movement led by her co-worker and husband Marcus Garvey, edited the woman’s page in Negro World, the newspaper publication of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. In her articles she urged black women to focus their attention on black nationalism and participate equally in the black liberation struggle.

  The exigencies of this present age require that women take their places beside their men. White women are rallying all their forces and united regardless of national boundaries to save their race from destruction, and preserve its ideals for posterity.... White men have begun to realize that as women are the backbone of the home, so can they, by their economic experience and their aptitude for details participate effectively in guiding the destiny of nation and race.

  No line of endeavor remains closed for long to the modern woman. She agitates for equal opportunities and gets them; she makes good on the job and gains the respect of men who heretofore opposed her. She prefers to be a bread-winner than a half-starved wife at home. She is not afraid of hard work and by being independent she gets more out of the present-day husband than her grandmother did in the good old days.

  The women of the East, both yellow and black, are slowly, but surely imitating the women of the Western world, and as the white women are bolstering up a decaying white civilization, even so women of the darker races are sallying forth to help their men establish a civilization according to their own standards, and to strive for world leadership.

  Even though black women leaders urged black women to assume as active a role as black men in the struggle to end racism, underlying th
eir call for action was the assumption that social equality of the sexes was a secondary consideration.

  From the beginning of the women’s rights movement, its staunch supporters had argued that social equality for women was a necessary step for patriotic nation-building. They stressed that women were not opposing the U.S. political or social order, but simply wanted to actively support the existing system of government. This attitude always threatened the occasional political solidarity that existed between black and white women’s rights activists. To white women, full participation in the growth of the U.S. as a nation often included acceptance and support of white racial imperialism, while black women, even those who were most politically conservative, were often obliged to denounce the nation because of its racist policies. Eventually both groups of women allowed racial alliances to supersede feminist struggle. Racial segregation remained the norm in most women’s organizations and clubs in the 30s and 40s. From 1940 to 1960, most women’s groups did not emphasize women’s liberation; women bonded together for social or professional reasons. Barbara Deckard, author of The Women’s Movement, contends that there was no organized women’s liberation movement from 1940 to 1960 and gave as an explanation these reasons:

  One reason was the limited ideology and elite class base of the suffragists. So strongly had they emphasized the vote, and only the vote, that their successors—like the League of Women Voters—could declare in the 1920’s that there was no more discrimination against women and that liberal women should merely fight for general reforms for all people. The sole successor to the most militant suffragists—the Women’s Party—was narrow in other ways. It continued to fight for equal legal rights but paid little or no attention to women’s inferior position in the family, to the exploitation of women workers, or to the special problems of black women. This lack of interest in the major social, economic, and racial issues alienated radical women, while the hostile social atmosphere prevented them from winning over the moderate women.