Copyright © 2021 by Kyla Schuller
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Schuller, Kyla, 1977– author.
Title: The trouble with white women : a counterhistory of feminism / Kyla Schuller.
Description: First edition. | New York : Bold Type Books, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021008089 | ISBN 9781645036890 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781645036883 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Feminism—Moral and ethical aspects—United States—History. | Women, White—Civil rights—United States—History. | Minority women—Civil rights—United States—History. | Minority women activists—United States—History. | Racism—United States—History.
Classification: LCC HQ1426 .S35 2021 | DDC 305.420973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021008089
ISBNs: 978-1-64503-689-0 (hardcover), 978-1-64503-688-3 (ebook)
E3-20210831-JV-NF-ORI
CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
Feminist Fault Lines
PART I. CIVILIZING CHAPTER ONE
Woman’s Rights Are White Rights? Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frances E. W. Harper
CHAPTER TWO
White Sympathy Versus Black Self-Determination: Harriet Beecher Stowe and Harriet Jacobs
CHAPTER THREE
Settler Mothers and Native Orphans: Alice C. Fletcher and Zitkala-Ša
PART II. CLEANSING CHAPTER FOUR
Birthing a Better Nation: Margaret Sanger and Dr. Dorothy Ferebee
CHAPTER FIVE
Taking Feminism to the Streets: Pauli Murray and Betty Friedan
CHAPTER SIX
TERF Gatekeeping and Trans Feminist Horizons: Janice Raymond and Sandy Stone
PART III. OPTIMIZING CHAPTER SEVEN
Leaning In or Squadding Up: Sheryl Sandberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
CONCLUSION
Two Feminisms, One Future
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
DISCOVER MORE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PRAISE FOR THE TROUBLE WITH WHITE WOMEN
NOTES
To my parents
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All flourishing is mutual.
—Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
FOREWORD
ONE OF THE BIGGEST CHALLENGES I HAVE FACED AS A BLACK FEMINIST TEACHER AND WRITER has been convincing Black women that feminism is relevant to their lives. Black women’s resistance to feminist politics and ideas has never been about a resistance to gender equality. We live with the intimate and structural consequences of patriarchy every day. The biggest stumbling block in Black women’s journey to fly the flag of feminism has been white women. Somewhere a white woman is talking about how we all need to be united “as women,” regardless of race or creed. And somewhere a Black woman is giving that white woman a side eye.
Given the perennial challenge white women pose to cross-racial feminist solidarity, the clearer we get about the nature of that threat, the better equipped we will be to address the problem. Kyla Schuller’s The Trouble with White Women faces the challenge head-on with aplomb, erudition, and excellent storytelling. Schuller makes clear precisely what the problem is: “The trouble with white feminist politics is not what it fails to address and whom it leaves out. The trouble with white feminism is what it does and whom it suppresses.” It’s not that white women can’t do good in the world or be useful allies in feminist world-making. The problem, rather, is white feminism and its gravely limited conception of how to address the injustices that all women face.
This book is a deeply erudite and much needed historically grounded treatment of a phenomenon that mostly makes for wars among feminists on social media. It represents the signature approaches that Kyla Schuller is known for—a rich textual analysis covered with both a broad and deep understanding of the archive.
Schuller traces the genesis of white feminism across several generations beginning with the shameless invocations of racism that marked Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s fight for suffrage. Though I am a student of this history, I was still floored at just how strident Stanton was in her willingness to throw Black men under the bus, trafficking in the most racist stereotypes of her day, in order to procure the vote for white women. Schuller goes on to demonstrate the changing same of white feminist politics among figures like Margaret Sanger, Betty Friedan, and Sheryl Sandberg. Admirably, Schuller manages to resist the kind of liberal self-flagellation that is a hallmark of an unhelpful white guilt, and desiccates white women’s tears, refusing the safety, comfort, and space-taking that so often follow them.
One of our nation’s top gender studies scholars and, quite frankly, one of my favorite scholars to read period, Schuller pairs each white woman thinker under examination here with a generational peer who is Black or Indigenous, or Latinx, or trans. In doing so, she reminds us that cisgender white women did not invent feminism, and that white feminism as a project has been premised in large part on a refusal to engage the work of Black, Indigenous, and trans women who call into question the end goals, not to mention the organizing tactics, of white feminists. It’s not that we haven’t been there; it’s that white women have refused to listen.
For the Black women who need white women to admit it, this book will do that. For white women who continually ask me how to get better, I say, begin here.
We can no longer afford a fractured feminist movement. All of the things women won for themselves a generation ago have come under pressing attack in these first two decades of the new millennium, and all of us are having to gird ourselves for battle again. It goes without saying that we will be stronger together, but part of the argument of this book is that white feminism is a feminist politics we can and should leave behind. In its place, white women can come together with other groups of women and embrace their visions of an intersectional, trans- and Indigenous inclusive future.
Anyone who knows me or has read me knows that I don’t count very many white women among my friend groups, for precisely the reasons that this book so deftly analyzes. But I have called Kyla my friend for nearly a decade now. She produced this work because she
lives her commitment to a feminism not grounded in white women’s racism or civilizing imperatives. She is an ally for Black women and women of color colleagues both publicly and privately in ways that make a difference. Anyone can write a scholarly tome analyzing these issues, but living these politics is the thing that matters most. Kyla practices what she preaches in her teaching, her writing, and her relationships. Rich and rigorous in both method and content, this book is one I will return to again and again.
Brittney Cooper
INTRODUCTION
FEMINIST FAULT LINES
The history of American feminism has been primarily a narrative about the heroic deeds of white women.
—Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Words of Fire
INFAMOUSLY, HALF OF ALL WHITE WOMEN VOTED FOR DONALD TRUMP IN 2016 AND 2020—yet despite the repetition of these notorious statistics almost to the point of incantation, we’re still missing the full scale of the problem. We know that twice, one out of two white women supported the most misogynist, white supremacist US president in a century. This is widely recognized as a crisis for racial justice. But it is also a hidden crisis for feminism. A lurking threat remains obscured, even as professional and social media obsess about these voters’ attitudes toward gender equality. Surely, commentators declare, Trump-supporting women must not be feminists. After all, the candidate bragged about sexual assault. And, they continue, liberals generally support women’s rights while conservatives oppose them. Republican white women, the standard line of thinking goes, chose their whiteness and their class status over their gender, unwittingly sacrificing themselves.
But the problem is not that so many white women apparently lack any kind of feminist consciousness. The trouble we’ve been overlooking is that a large number of white women Trump supporters are feminists.
Feminism and hard-line conservativism have become compatible. Today, nearly half of all women who vote Republican—specifically, 42 percent—describe themselves as feminists. These women, mostly white, support a party that has become an explicit platform for the white supremacist far right. Some go so far as to claim that the Trump administration supported gender equality. “My father is a feminist,” Ivanka Trump announced while campaigning in 2016; once installed in the White House, she fashioned herself a feminist leader, launching a women’s career advice book, a women’s empowerment agenda, and a campaign for paid family leave and affordable childcare.1 Scholar Jessie Daniels has even found that online white supremacist communities like Stormfront host vibrant discussions among women who support equal pay for women, access to abortions for people of color, and sometimes gay rights.2
As a movement for social justice, feminism now seems to stand for nothing at all—as likely to be motivated by racist self-interest as by a desire to minimize suffering and fight for equality.
How did we get here? How did feminism come to be such a meaningless position, as easily proclaimed by #MeToo campaigners as by avowed white supremacists?
This book reveals that feminism has long been fractured by an internal battle fought along the lines of racism, capitalism, and empire. The struggle over what it means to be a feminist, and what kind of world feminists want to build, may seem new. But there’s never been just one feminism, just one singular and solitary politics of women’s rights and equality. Dating back to the early days of the woman’s suffrage campaign, there’ve always been at least two prominent factions within feminism wrestling over what gender equality looks like and to whom it applies. These movements work at times in coalition, and at many other times in opposition. The differences among the various groups who gather under the feminist umbrella are often ignored, buried under the reductive idea that feminism simply means endorsing equality between the sexes. But recognizing the distinctions among forms of feminism has never had higher stakes than it does today.
As surprising as feminist Trump voters may seem, they were nearly a foregone conclusion. For nearly two hundred years, a large and vibrant tradition of white women has framed sex equality to mean gaining access to the positions historically reserved for white middle-class and wealthy men. The goal, for these feminists, is to empower women to assume positions of influence within a fundamentally unequal system. Many of these feminists even argue, explicitly or implicitly, that their whiteness authorizes their rights. They weave feminism, racism, and wealth accumulation together as necessary partners, a phenomenon that has a tidy name: white feminism.
Of the factions within feminism, white feminism has been the loudest, has claimed the most attention, and has motivated many of the histories written about the struggles for women’s rights. White feminism thus declares itself the one and only game in town. In part due to this posturing, white feminism attracts people of all sexes, races, sexualities, and class backgrounds, though straight, white, middle-class women have been its primary architects. Naming this individualist, status quo–driven paradigm “white feminism” refuses its claimed universality and identifies who benefits the most from its approach.
For feminism to continue to have any meaning as a social justice movement, we must out-organize white feminism. Happily, today many are calling out its dangers. The concept of white feminism has moved from the pages of legal and feminist academic journals, where it was first named by Black and Indigenous feminist theorists in the 1980s and 1990s, to homemade videos posted to YouTube and hand-drawn cardboard signs marched down Broadway.3 But in this exciting broad pushback against white feminism, we nonetheless frequently underestimate its true destructiveness. Even its critics regularly minimize its power and pervasiveness. Just as we miss the feminist Trump voter, we miss the larger problem of white feminism.
Journalists, writers, and now dictionaries typically describe white feminism as an approach to women’s rights that prioritizes the needs and concerns of white women and neglects the struggles of women of color.4 According to this dominant formulation, the problems with white feminism stem from its centering of middle-class, white, cis women and its exclusion of everyone else. Its shortcomings lie in what it fails to do and whom it fails to see.
From this standpoint, the remedy to white feminism appears to be a strong dose of liberals’ favorite elixirs: awareness, diversity, equity, and inclusion. If white feminism enlarges its vision to include women of color, poor women, and trans women, this line of thinking implies, then it will no longer be white feminism. But this understanding of white feminism misses, and even risks reproducing, the nature and extent of its harm. Expanding white feminism’s tent will not transform the materials of which it is made.
The trouble with white feminist politics is not what it fails to address and whom it leaves out. The trouble with white feminism is what it does and whom it suppresses.
White feminism is an active form of harm, not simply a by-product of self-absorption. Gender equality, for contemporary white feminists, means advancing individual women up the corporate ladder; protecting reproductive freedom, which it defines solely as the ability to prevent and terminate pregnancy; and heightening prison sentences for rapists and abusers. These objectives discount entirely the gross disparities of capitalism, the barriers to pregnancy and healthy child-raising that poor women face, and the violence perpetrated by cops, courts, and prisons. White feminist objectives work to liberate privileged women while keeping other structures of injustice intact.
Attempting to redress white feminism through awareness and inclusion will not solve the problem of the feminist Trump voter or the feminist Stormfront member. Instead, it will only further obscure and entrench the race and class hierarchy at the core of this approach to women’s equality. “White American women along with their counterparts across the former British Empire have always been heavily invested in maintaining white power structures,” writes journalist and scholar Ruby Hamad. “They often did this by not merely neglecting, but actively throwing other women under the proverbial bus.” White feminism needs to be demolished, not renovated to look up-to-date. Black lesbian poet Audre Lorde
put it succinctly decades ago: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”5
Since the days of the suffrage movement, white feminism has posed such trouble because of the specific ideology it advances, one that has been remarkably consistent over time. First, white feminist politics promotes the theory that women should fight for the full political and economic advantages that wealthy white men enjoy within capitalist empire. Second, it approaches the lives of Black and Indigenous people, other people of color, and the poor as raw resources that can fuel women’s rise in status. Finally, white feminism promises that women’s full participation in white-dominated society and politics will not only improve their own social position; thanks to their supposedly innate superior morality, their leadership will redeem society itself. The harm in this approach to feminism results from its tunnel vision, its belief that progress moves along the axis of gender alone. This single-axis approach legitimates victory for women through whatever means it deems necessary. White feminism becomes success for some at the expense of others.
If inclusion and awareness might only expand white feminism’s violence instead of ending it, then what is the alternative? Fortunately, within the past, another major trajectory of women’s rights kindled that burns bright up into the present: the counterhistory of feminism.
There’s long been a forceful alternative to white feminism that provides an entirely different analysis and set of political strategies, promising success for women with success for others. While it has been sidelined, it is nonetheless strong. While on the margins, it is nonetheless coherent. Intersectional feminism pushes back against white feminism and advances new horizons of justice. It is both a theory and a movement emphasizing that the fight for gender justice must be approached in tandem with the fights for racial, economic, sexual, and disability justice, and ought to be led by those most affected by these systems of exploitation working in coalition with everyone else. Intersectional feminism not only represents antiracist feminism—it nurtures a radically distinct vision of society. Too often, mainstream accounts position intersectional feminism to be an innovation of feminism’s third wave, which began in the late 1980s and 1990s. Yet the counterhistory of feminism is as old as the history of feminism.
The Trouble with White Women Page 1
