The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  The same year A Voice from the South was published, a thirty-year-old journalist from Memphis, Ida B. Wells, catapulted to international attention with a riveting exposé of mob violence in the South. Wells was a New Woman who could have stepped off the pages of Cooper’s book. Born into slavery in Mississippi—she was three when the war ended—she had worked since she was orphaned at fifteen, first as a teacher and then, in the 1880s, as a journalist in the flourishing black press. In 1889 she became editor and part owner of a newspaper in Memphis. Three years later, three successful black men in the city who had angered white business competitors were arrested on trumped-up charges and lynched. Faced with certain death for a scathing editorial calling for a mass exodus of blacks from the city, Wells fled to New York, where she joined the staff of The New York Age and researched, wrote, and published “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.” Followed several months later by news of a horrible torture-lynching of a black man in Paris, Texas, Wells’s piece grabbed the attention of Northern whites who either knew little about lynching or accepted the Southern explanation that black men’s lust provoked these regrettable but understandable reprisals.9

  Wells was not an explicitly feminist writer, but in speaking of unspeakable things, she breached the protocols that made the subject of sex off-limits to respectable black women. Since the end of the Civil War, sexual violence had pervaded Southern politics, although open discussion was impossible, so omnipresent was the threat. Wells connected lynching to sexual violence, showing how the myth of the black man’s lust for white women worked to legitimate torture and murder. “Southern Horrors” attacked head-on the premises of the politics of protection, including those held by white women. Not only had Rebecca Latimer Felton and her temperance troops contributed to the lynching rationale with tales of how alcohol fueled black men’s lusts (although by this time Felton was recoiling from the violence she helped incite), but in an 1890 interview that shocked black temperance women, Frances Willard described the victims of lynching as rapists and murderers “whose rallying cry is better whiskey, and more of it.” White women’s safety was so precarious, Willard remarked, that white men “dare not go beyond the sight of their own roof-tree” lest drunken black marauders set upon their wives and daughters.10

  Wells broke into this self-ratifying white conversation by daring to state openly what African-Americans already knew: The defense of white women’s honor and sexual virtue was a mythology that went to the emotional core of white supremacy, a self-aggrandizing fiction that allowed Southern white men to get away with murder by projecting their own dark history of sexual violence onto black men. But white Americans, including Northern reformers, were resistant, and Wells had to take her crusade to Britain to find a receptive white audience. The clout she gained in a lecture tour in 1893–94 allowed her to take on the formidable Frances Willard when she returned. She forced Willard to retract her earlier statements. The explosion Wells touched off cleared a small political space for black women. When a Southern editor charged her with being a lying “Negro adventuress,” Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, a well-to-do Boston journalist, issued a call to upstanding black women to unify in self-defense. It was their duty, she wrote, “to teach an ignorant and suspicious world that our aims and interests are identical with those of all good aspiring women.”11

  There was an organizational network to call into play. Clubs had spread among black women as well as white women since the 1880s. Some were literary and cultural, others altruistic and religious, and still others worked in a progressive spirit, campaigning for public health, education, and poverty relief. African-American women established church circles and raised funds for schools and parks; they ran kindergartens and housekeeping classes; in the South, they purchased screen doors for poor people’s houses in order to keep out disease-bearing flies, and established vocational schools to train country girls in nursing and secretarial work.12 Ruffin’s call not only rallied support around Ida B. Wells, it led to the formation in 1896 of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), a federation that gave clubwomen a national platform. The NACW motto, “lifting as we climb,” evoked evolutionist precepts—highly developed women could improve themselves and thereby elevate the race. Influential women stepped into the limelight: Mary Church Terrell, the first president, a classmate of Anna Julia Cooper’s at Oberlin; Margaret Murray Washington, a veteran teacher and administrator of the famous Tuskegee Institute in Alabama; Lugenia Burns Hope, founder of the dynamic Neighborhood Union in Atlanta, a city-wide organization that served in a Jim Crow city as an alternative municipal structure and funding agency.

  The leaders, described by Paula Giddings as radical interracialists in the temperance tradition, worked to forge useful ties with white women even as they endured their racism and condescension. Adella Hunt Logan, another Tuskegee educator, used her light skin to pass as white in NAWSA to operate as a kind of race spy—she was the only black member from Alabama—in order to bring back information from segregated meetings to her colleagues. Fannie Barrier Williams suffered through an uproar in Chicago when she applied for admission to the Chicago Woman’s Club. They took humiliation in stride, Giddings maintains, as the price of integration. Fannie Barrier Williams described an approach that was both shrewd and long-suffering: “The colored women have kept themselves serene while this color-line controversy has been raging around them. They have taken a keen and intelligent interest in all that has been said for and against them, but through it all they have lost neither their patience nor their hope in the ultimate triumph of right principles.” The calculation was that the benefits to be derived outweighed the insults.13

  This commitment to collaboration even when racism determined the context underlay black women’s dedication to suffrage, including their efforts to be included in NAWSA. Support for women’s suffrage was firm among African-Americans of both sexes. The NACW endorsed votes for women and worked to promote the issue, joining the WCTU and NAWSA in the cause well before the white General Federation of Women’s Clubs signed on in 1913. African-American women did not need much persuasion to see the need for the vote in this age of black disenfranchisement.14

  The image of the moral mother anchored the sense of political usefulness, but there were important differences between white and black understandings. Among African-American women, motherhood was not freestanding, as it was for white women; rather, it was crosscut with positive meanings adhering to marriage. What white temperance women viewed as a marital ideal to be reached through male conversion, black women understood as a living relationship: Marriage was a fellowship of Christian laborers, with husbands as collaborators in race work. Surrounded by contemptuous and pathological images of black men, middle-class women formed a protective cordon around their husbands and brothers as virtuous partners in uplift.

  There was a social dimension. Marital partnerships were salient in black political culture to an extent inconceivable in white society: Margaret Murray Washington and Booker T. Washington, for example; Lugenia Burns Hope and John Hope; Mary Church Terrell and Robert Terrell, a leading attorney and the first black judge in Washington, D.C.; Fannie Barrier Williams and S. Laing Williams, Chicago assistant district attorney; Ida B. Wells and Ferdinand Barnett, whom she married in 1895, owner of a Chicago newspaper. To be sure, the actualities of these marriages were complex. No less than white people, couples harbored conflict, unhappiness, and asymmetries of power that belied assertions of marital harmony. But—and here is the point—a romance of political mothers and fathers held firm, and African-American women leveraged the ideal to establish independent standing.

  Loyalty to men was not without complications. When Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin called black clubwomen to defend their honor in the Wells affair, she was asking them to take over a job that had been men’s since Reconstruction. It was an article of faith that strong race men would protect women from sexual slurs and assaults. Yet in the 1890s it seemed to black women that men were not
always up to the task. Nannie Helen Burroughs, leader of the national auxiliary of black Baptist women, was blunt: “White men offer more protection to their prostitutes than Black men offer to their best women.” Women leaders always acknowledged the racist menace that rendered men impotent, but at times they came close to accusing them of dereliction of duty. “For the most part the chivalry of colored men for colored women has in it but little heart and no strength of protection,” lamented Fannie Barrier Williams. Hints of a quarrel between the sexes, always kept away from white eyes, surfaced in clubwomen’s reflections on the need to defend themselves.15

  Thus the NACW’s declaration of a woman’s era had two faces: a public one, looking toward a fuller partnership with men; and a veiled one, glancing toward a rueful autonomy, confronting responsibilities that men were unable or unwilling to fulfill. The official language was familial, not individualist, stressing the roles of wives and mothers, husbands and fathers as co-guardians of African-American pride. Respectability required cordiality and harmony between the sexes. Discord, sexual anger, and resentment: Respectable African-American women kept such expressions of unhappiness in check, projecting them onto the unruly poor, those rough-talking, hard-living black women who needed to be instructed in gender courtesy along with thrift, housekeeping, hygiene, and temperance. But there was an undertone of unease.

  On the main point of women’s suffrage, however, the issue did not meet opposition from men. The franchise was still understood as community property. Thus black women’s rights remained embedded in heterosexual alliances in the years when the white movement was wilting in a hothouse atmosphere of female separatism and self-congratulation.

  In the postbellum decades, women’s suffrage did have isolated successes. In Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah, women could vote in all elections by 1896. Those places were among the few in the world where women had full voting rights. The others were also settler societies: New Zealand was the one nation that granted women the vote (in 1893) before 1900, and the Australian states soon followed.16

  Nowhere was women’s suffrage achieved because pure principle triumphed. In the Western breakthroughs, women succeeded because men latched onto suffrage to further particular interests. In Wyoming territory in 1869, boosters gave women the vote to lure them to join an overwhelmingly male Anglo population. Like New Zealanders and Australians, Wyoming men wanted to increase a small white population and were willing to be politically generous to attract female emigrants. In Colorado, victory came because the Denver workingwomen and rural temperance workers who led the suffrage push were Populists and insisted that the state victory in 1892 confer the vote on women. Idaho followed suit in 1896, when the Populists won power there.17

  The Utah case is more complicated. Utah women won and then lost and then won the vote. In 1870, Mormon officials enfranchised women in order to ensure Mormon control of the territory (there were enough polygamous wives to triple the Mormon vote). National outrage was so intense that Congress revoked Utah women’s suffrage in 1887. When the Mormons officially renounced polygamy, Congress reenfranchised them in 1896.

  Outside the West, though, the situation did not improve. There were female auxiliaries to both the Republican and Democratic parties, but they had no effect on the parties’ opposition to suffrage. Politicians, alert to the WCTU and third-party prohibition initiatives, paid lip service to home influence, but neither party formally endorsed suffrage.18 With the collapse of the Populists after 1896, NAWSA lost its only significant third-party ally. They paid for the vanished association, though. Antisuffragists capitalized on the defunct link by conflating votes for women with Populist anarchy. Suffragists reacted by redoubling their efforts to appear conventional and unthreatening.19

  Facing the impasse, a cabal of dedicated white women from the South moved to the front ranks of NAWSA with a strategy that took the search for allies as far as it could go to the political right. An outspoken, confident band from the planter class, members of the ruling elite who were barred by their sex from wielding power, argued that they could convince Southern men that women’s votes would ensure the stability of white supremacy—even though the hatred of women’s rights had, if anything, intensified in the region since the Civil War. To NAWSA, they promised a huge dividend, the eleven states of the former Confederacy delivered to the suffrage cause.

  In the period before Plessy v. Ferguson, when it was not yet clear that the federal courts would let legal segregation stand, the Southern suffrage strategy proposed a way to shore up white rule without the bother of unwieldy laws that risked being struck down. The idea was essentially the “statistical argument” Henry Blackwell had been making since 1867, now revved up for the Jim Crow South. “The South, true to its traditions, will trust its women,” predicted the regal, rabidly racist Kate Gordon from New Orleans. “Thus placing in their hands the balance of power, the negro as a disturbing element in politics will disappear.” In 1892, Laura Clay from Kentucky, daughter of the state’s reigning planter clan, persuaded NAWSA leaders to establish a Southern Committee composed of women from leading families of South Carolina, Arkanas, Louisiana, and Georgia.20

  In the South, the very idea of votes for women was a Yankee insult to a noble way of life: that is, the South’s supposed chivalric respect and protection for its women (meaning white women). Virtual representation took on added meaning in the region as a means by which white men could restore the honor tragically besmirched by the war, in taking up the task of governing their women and their Negroes. So no matter how draped Southern suffragists were in Confederate laurels, they met vilification as traitors to the Lost Cause, trampling the way of life for which their fathers and brothers had fought and died. “Woman’s suffrage comes from the North and West.… I do not believe the state of Georgia has sunk so low that her good men can not legislate for the women,” huffed the head of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. “If they succeed then indeed was the blood of their fathers shed in vain,” an Alabama state senator intoned.21

  Regardless of the animus, Southern suffragists pushed on. In their case, racism and women’s rights were entwined: To be a public-spirited white woman in the New South—like Rebecca Latimer Felton, Kate Gordon, or Belle Kearney of Mississippi—was to ally oneself with a civilizing enterprise identified with white supremacy. Middle-aged, savvy, and civic-minded, they wanted to take up a part in white supremacist rule alongside their fathers, brothers, cousins, and husbands. Kearney, Mississippi WCTU president, hated the constraints that the Southern elite put on women; Felton was a planter’s wife, freed by the collapse of their plantation after the war to take up her true calling in politics, serving informally as her politician husband’s campaign manager; Kate Gordon’s crusade to modernize New Orleans’s water supply freed the city from perennial yellow fever epidemics; Nellie Nugent Somerville was a Methodist leader from Greenville, Mississippi, with an antituberculosis campaign (which included an anti-tobacco-spitting rider) and public library to her credit.22

  All were political dynamos (Nellie Somerville and Belle Kearney went on to serve in the Mississippi legislature; Rebecca Felton was the first woman to be seated in the Senate—for one day, on a technicality, to serve out the term of Georgia’s senator Tom Watson, who had died). Like women in the North, they wanted to angle in on men’s politics via partnerships in public health schemes, social services for the poor, and prison reform. Theirs was the combination of feminism, racism, and modernization that characterized Southern Progressives. The bad old days of lynching and mob violence must be abandoned for a supposedly peaceful white supremacy backed by the law. Courts would regulate and restrain both races, by keeping black brutes in check and protecting their properly behaved fellows from the mayhem that rabble of both races stirred up when segregation was precarious.

  Signaling cooperation with the Southern strategy, NAWSA held its national convention in Atlanta in 1895 and New Orleans in 1903, the meetings packed with former Confederate officers giving ho
norific speeches. In New Orleans, delegates sang a rousing chorus of “Dixie” and listened politely to Belle Kearney’s denunciations of semi-barbaric blacks. It had to be the nadir of the American women’s movement. I can only speculate that those older women with abolitionist pasts would have felt uneasy. Ten years earlier, even as the Southern strategy was gaining favor, Susan Anthony solicited the good offices of Frederick Douglass to give a speech to NAWSA on the virtues of popular democracy.23 What was she thinking in New Orleans? The only evidence comes from one outward act of polite resistance to Jim Crow etiquette. Anthony reached out to old allies, old principles, and her own conscience when she took time out from the convention to pay a visit to an African-American women’s club.