Words of Fire

by Beverly Guy-Sheftall

  There were additional burdens placed upon and awards granted to the small cadre of single, educated, professional black women who chose not to marry or to bear children. The more educated they were, the greater the sense of being responsible, somehow, for the advance of the race and for the elevation of black womanhood. They held these expectations of themselves and found a sense of racial obligation reinforced by the demands of the black community and its institutions. In return for their sacrifice of sexual expression, the community gave them respect and recognition. Moreover, this freedom and autonomy represented a socially sanctioned, meaningful alternative to the uncertainties of marriage and the demands of child rearing. The increased employment opportunities, whether real or imagined, and the culture of dissemblance enabled many migrating black women to become financially independent and simultaneously to fashion socially useful and autonomous lives, while reclaiming control over their own sexuality and reproductive capacities.

  This is not to say that black women, once settled into midwestern communities, never engaged in sex for pay or occasional prostitution. Sara Brooks, a black domestic servant from Alabama who migrated to Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1930s ill-disguised her contempt for women who bartered their bodies. She declared, while commenting on her own struggle to pay the mortgage on her house, “Some women woulda had a man to live in the house and had an outside boyfriend, too, in order to get the house paid for and the bills.” She scornfully added, “They meet a man and if he promises em four or five dollars to go to bed, they’s grab it. That’s called sellin’ your own body, and I wasn’t raised like that.”10 What escapes Brooks, in this moralizing moment, is that her poor and powerless black female neighbors were extracting value from the only thing the society now allowed them to sell. As long as they occupied an enforced subordinate position within American society, this “sellin’ your own body” as Brooks put it, was, I submit, Rape.

  In sum, at some fundamental level all black women historians are engaged in the process of historical reclamation. But it is not enough simply to reclaim those hidden and obscure facts and names of black foremothers. Merely to reclaim and to narrate past deeds and contributions risks rendering a skewed history focused primarily on the articulate, relatively wellpositioned members of the aspiring black middle class. In synchrony with the reclaiming and narrating must be the development of an array of analytical frameworks that allow us to understand why black women behave in certain ways and how they acquired agency.

  The migration of hundreds of thousands of black women out of the South between 1915 and 1945, and the formation of thousands of black women’s clubs and the NACW, are actions that enabled them to put into place, to situate, a protest infrastructure and to create a self-conscious black women’s culture of resistance. Most significant, the NACW fostered the development of an image of black women as being supermoral women. In particular, the institutionalization of women’s clubs embodied the shaping and honing of the culture of dissemblance. This culture, grounded as it was on the twin prongs of protest and resistance, enabled the creation of positive alternative images of their sexual selves and facilitated black women’s mental and physical survival in a hostile world.

  ENDNOTES

  1 Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 39.

  2 See Terry McMillan, Mam (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987); Grace Edwards-Yearwood, In the Shadow of the Peacock (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988); Alice Walker, The Color Purple (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982); Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Washington Square Press, 1972); and Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place (New York: Penguin, 1983).

  3 Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); and Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). See also Rennie Simson, “The Afro-American Female: The Historical Construction of Sexual Identity,” in The Powers of Desire: The Poltics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Sharon Thompson, and Christine Stansell (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 229-35.

  4 Alan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890—1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 34.

  5 Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 274.

  6 Deborah Gray White, “Mining the Forgotten: Manuscript Sources for Black Women’s History,” Journal of American History 74 (June 1987): 237-42, especially 237-38.

  7 Robin S. Peebles, “Detroit’s Black Women’s Clubs,” Michigan History 70 (January/February 1986): 48.

  8 Darlene Clark Hine, “Lifting the Veil, Shattering the Silence: Black Women’s History in Slavery and Freedom,” in The State of Afro-American History: Past, Present, and Future, ed. Darlene Clark Hine (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 223-49, especially 236-37.

  9 Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “Woman Suffrage: ‘First because We Are Women and Second because We Are Colored Women,’ ” Truth : Newsletter of the Association of Black Women Historians (April 1985), 9; Evelyn Brooks Barnett, “Nannie Burroughs and the Education of Black Women, in The Afro-American Woman, ed. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn and Sharon Harley (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1978), 97—108.

  10 Thordis Simonsen, ed., You May Plow Here: The Narrative of Sara Brooks (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 219.

  Shirley Chisholm (1924—)

  Shirley Chisholm, born in Brooklyn, New York, to Barbadian parents, was the first black woman to be elected to Congress (1968). She was also the first African American to seek nomination for the presidency of the United States (1972), a process that she chronicled in The Good Fight (1973). Following the 1984 Democratic Convention, she provided the catalyst for the founding of the National Political Congress of Black Women. She stunned audiences by revealing in her autobiography, Unbossed and Unbought (1970), that being a woman had been more disadvantageous than being black. Outspoken in her defense of black and women’s liberation, she was also one of the first black women to advocate publicly for the legalization of abortion and wrote eloquently in her autobiography about her pro-choice position. “Facing the Abortion Question,” written when she was President of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL) and before Roe v. Wade (1973), chronicles her involvement with the controversial issue of abortion rights and responds to persons in the black community who are anti-choice. She argues about the importance of black women’s ability to get safe, legal abortions and is especially sensitive to the plight of poor women who are more negatively impacted by unwanted pregnancies.

  FACING THE ABORTION QUESTION

  In August of 1969 I started to get phone calls from NARAL, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, a new organization based in New York City that was looking for a national president. In the New York State Assembly I had supported abortion reform bills introduced by Assemblyman Albert Blumenthal, and this had apparently led NARAL to believe I would sympathize with its goal: complete repeal of all laws restricting abortion. As a matter of fact, when I was in the Assembly I had not been in favor of repealing all abortion laws, a step that would leave the question of having or not having the operation entirely up to a woman and her doctor. The bills I had tried to help pass in Albany would only have made it somewhat easier for women to get therapeutic abortions in New York State, by providing additional legal grounds and simplifying the procedure for getting approval. But since that time I had been compelled to do some heavy thinking on the subject, mainly because of the experiences of several young women I knew. All had suffered permanent injuries at the hands of illegal abortionists. Some will never have children as a result. One will have to go to a hospital periodically for treatment for the rest of her life.

  It had begun to seem to me that the q
uestion was not whether the law should allow abortions. Experience shows that pregnant women who feel they have compelling reasons for not having a baby, or another baby, will break the law and, even worse, risk injury and death if they must to get one. Abortions will not be stopped. It may even be that the number performed is not being greatly reduced by laws making an abortion a “criminal operation.” If that is true, the question becomes simply that of what kind of abortions society wants women to have—clean, competent ones performed by licensed physicians or septic, dangerous ones done by incompetent practitioners.

  So when NARAL asked me to lead its campaign, I gave it serious thought. For me to take the lead in abortion law repeal would be an even more serious step than for a white politician to do so, because there is a deep and angry suspicion among many blacks that even birth control clinics are a plot by the white power structure to keep down the numbers of blacks, and this opinion is even more strongly held by some in regard to legalizing abortions. But I do not know any black or Puerto Rican women who feel that way. To label family planning and legal abortion programs “genocide” is male rhetoric, for male ears. It falls flat to female listeners, and to thoughtful male ones. Women know, and so do many men, that two or three children who are wanted, prepared for, reared amid love and stability, and educated to the limit of their ability will mean more for the future of the black and brown races from which they come than any number of neglected, hungry, ill-housed, and ill-clothed youngsters. Pride in one’s race, as well as simple humanity, supports this view. Poor women of every race feel as I do, I believe. There is objective evidence of it in a study by Dr. Charles F. Westhoff of the Princeton Office of Population Research. He questioned 5,600 married persons and found that twenty-two percent of their children were unwanted. But among persons who earned less than $4,000 a year, forty-two percent of the children were unwanted. The poor are more anxious about family planning than any other group.

  Why then do the poor keep on having large families? It is not because they are stupid or immoral. One must understand how many resources their poverty has deprived them of, and that chief among these is medical care and advice. The poor do not go to doctors or clinics except when they absolutely must; their medical ignorance is very great, even when compared to the low level of medical knowledge most persons have. This includes, naturally, information about contraceptives and how to get them. In some of the largest cities, clinics are now attacking this problem; they are nowhere near to solving it. In smaller cities and in most of the countryside, hardly anything is being done.

  Another point is this: not only do the poor have large families, but also large families tend to be poor. More than one-fourth of all the families with four children live in poverty, according to the federal government’s excessively narrow definition; by humane standards of poverty, the number would be much larger. The figures range from nine percent of one-child families that have incomes below the official poverty line, up to forty-two percent of the families with six children or more. Sinking into poverty, large families tend to stay there because of the educational and social handicaps that being poor imposes. It is the fear of such a future for their children that drives many women, of every color and social stratum, except perhaps the highest, to seek abortions when contraception has failed.

  Botched abortions are the largest single cause of death of pregnant women in the United States, particularly among nonwhite women. In 1964, the president of the New York County Medical Society, Dr. Carl Goldmark, estimated that eighty percent of the deaths of gravid women in Manhattan were from this cause.

  Another study by Edwin M. Gold, covering 1960 through 1962, gave lower percentages, but supplied evidence that women from minority groups suffer most. Gold said abortion was the cause of death in twenty-five percent of the white cases, forty-nine percent of the black ones, and sixty-five percent of the Puerto Rican ones.

  Even when a poor woman needs an abortion for the most impeccable medical reasons, acceptable under most states’ laws, she is not likely to succeed in getting one. The public hospitals to which she must go are far more reluctant to approve abortions than are private, voluntary hospitals. It’s in the records: private hospitals in New York City perform 3.9 abortions for every 1,000 babies they deliver, public hospitals only 1 per 1,000. Another relevant figure is that ninety percent of the therapeutic abortions in the city are performed on white women. Such statistics convinced me that my instinctive feeling was right: a black woman legislator, far from avoiding the abortion question, was compelled to face it and deal with it.

  But my time did not permit me to be an active president of NARAL, so I asked to be made an honorary president. My appearances on television in September 1969, when the association’s formation was announced, touched off one of the heaviest flows of mail to my Washington office that I have experienced. What surprised me was that it was overwhelmingly in favor of repeal. Most of the letters that disagreed with me were from Catholics, and most of them were temperate and reasoned. We sent those writers a reply that said in part, “No one should be forced to have an abortion or to use birth control methods which for religious or personal reasons they oppose. But neither should others who have different views be forced to abide by what they do not and cannot believe in.” Some of the mail was from desperate women who thought I could help them. “I am forty-five years old,” one wrote, “and have raised a family already. Now I find that I am pregnant and I need help. Please send me all the information.” A girl wrote that she was pregnant and did not dare tell her mother and stepfather : “Please send me the name of a doctor or hospital that would help. You said if my doctor wouldn’t do it to write to you. Where can I turn?” We sent the writers of these letters a list of the names and addresses of the chapters of the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion and suggested that they find a local family planning or birth control clinic.

  The reaction of a number of my fellow members of Congress seemed to me a little strange. Several said to me, “This abortion business ... my God, what are you doing? That’s not politically wise.” It was the same old story; they were not thinking in terms of right or wrong, they were considering only whether taking a side of the issue would help them stay in office—or in this case, whether taking a stand would help me get reelected. They concluded that it would not help me, so it was a bad position for me to take. My advisers were, of course, all men. So I decided to shake them up a little with a feminist line of counterattack. “Who told you I shouldn’t do this?” I asked them. “Women are dying every day, did you know that? They’re being butchered and maimed. No matter what men think, abortion is a fact of life. Women will have them; they always have and always will. Are they going to have good ones or bad ones? Will the good ones be reserved for the rich while poor women have to go to quacks? Why don’t we talk about real problems instead of phony ones?”

  One member asked the question that was on the minds of all the others: “How many Catholics do you have in your district?” “Look,” I told him, “I can’t worry about that. That’s not the problem.” Persons who do not deal with politicians are often baffled by the peculiarly simple workings of their minds. Scientists and scholars in particular are bewildered by the political approach. When a member of Congress makes a statement, the scholar’s first thought is “Is what he said true? Is he right or wrong?” The falseness or validity of an officeholder’s statement is almost never discussed in Washington, or anyplace where politics sets the tone of discourse. The question political people ask is seldom “Is he right?” but “Why did he say that?” Or they ask, “Where does he expect that to get him?” or “Who put him up to that?”

  But returning to abortion, the problem that faced me was what action I should take in my role as a legislator, if any; naturally, I intend to be as active as possible as an advocate and publicist for the cause, but was there any chance of getting a meaningful bill through Congress? Some NARAL officials wanted me to introduce an abortion repeal bill as a gesture. This i
s very common; probably a majority of the bills introduced in all legislative bodies are put in for the sake of effect, to give their sponsor something to talk about on the stump. That was never my style in Albany, and I have not adopted it in Washington. When I introduce legislation, I try to draft it carefully and then look for meaningful support from people who have the power to help move the bill.

  So I looked for House members, in both parties and of all shades of conservatism and liberalism, who might get together on abortion repeal regardless of party. I wrote letters to a number of the more influential House members. It would have been easy to get three or four, or even ten or twelve, liberal Democrats to join me in introducing a bill, but nothing would have happened. A majority of House members would have said, “Oh, that bunch again,” and dismissed us. But just a few conservative Republican sponsors, or conservative Democratic ones, would change all that. The approach I took was eminently sound, but it didn’t work. A few members replied that they would support my bill if it ever got to the floor, but could not come out for it publicly before then or work for it. I did not doubt their sincerity, but it was a safe thing to say because the chances of a bill’s reaching the floor seemed slim. Several others answered with longish letters admiring my bold position and expressing sympathy, but not agreement. “I am not ready to assume such a position,” one letter said. Another said, in almost these words, “This kind of trouble I don’t need.” So I put my roughly drafted bill in a drawer and decided to wait. There is no point in introducing it until congressmen can be persuaded to vote for it, and only one thing will persuade them. If a congressman feels he is in danger of losing his job, he will change his mind-and then try to make it look as though he had been leading the way. The approach to Congress has to be through the arousal and organization of public opinion.