The Trouble with White Women

by Kyla Schuller

  White feminism, legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw wrote in 1989, comprises women who are “individually seeking to protect [their] source of privilege within the hierarchy.” Instead, she proposed an intersectional feminist praxis to “collectively challeng[e] the hierarchy.” While Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in this same essay and sociologist Patricia Hill Collins further elucidated the concept starting in 1990, the radical Black feminist practice of contesting power in its multiple forms had developed much earlier.6 Since the mid-nineteenth century, Black feminists have pushed back against white feminism and developed intersectional feminist theory to identify how white supremacy, misogyny, and capitalism converge. Fighting only the barrier of sex as white women do, they have argued repeatedly, actually reinforces the overarching structures of exploitation that so unfairly distribute the basic chances of life and death. Black feminists such as Angela Davis, bell hooks, Paula Giddings, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall further elaborated the history and theory of intersectionality, and a wider coalition of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and some white women and men have built the framework into a movement.

  But their work has often been obscured in favor of a popular narrative that sees the feminist past to be a white past. White feminists have even attempted to steal, weaken, and bury their work. Dominant accounts figure women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Sanger, and Betty Friedan as feminism’s chief innovators and portray intersectionality as the new kid on the block, an upstart livening up the party during the more enlightened present. These white leaders all appear in this book. But so do the leaders of another feminist past, including writer and activist Frances E. W. Harper, who in the wake of the abolition of slavery insisted that the campaign for women’s suffrage must be an ally of Black male suffrage; Yankton Sioux author and organizer Zitkala-Ša, who protested off-reservation boarding schools like the one she attended as a child and built a coalition of tribes across the country to fight the loss of their children and lands; and Black trans lawyer Pauli Murray, who fought legalized segregation on the basis of race and extended her campaign to sex-based segregation.

  The consequences of not knowing the counterhistory of feminism are stark. White feminism succeeds in positioning itself as feminism, full stop. Among conservatives, feminism seems to be a ready partner of pro-capitalist, pro-white platforms. Among liberals, white feminists lay claim to the work of Black, Indigenous, and other feminists of color and now often tout their intersectional approach. Today, intersectionality as a theory and movement risks being co-opted and degraded into a buzzword. But in their rendering, intersectionality becomes merely an account of the multiplicity of identity—the acknowledgment that we all have a race, gender, class, and sexuality. This account does do some important work: it demolishes the mythical singular category of moral, virtuous Woman that white feminism historically enshrined, insisting instead that multiple dimensions of power shape our life chances. But at the same time, this appropriated version of intersectionality reproduces white feminist politics into the future. In this “inclusive” version of white feminism, white women may no longer be the harbingers of morality—it throws that burden onto token women of color. Those women and nonbinary people with the most marginalized identities become white feminism’s most valuable assets. Intersectionality, especially as promoted within institutions like corporations and universities, attempts to capture the magic of marginalized “intersectional people” and harness them to their cause.

  But the value of intersectionality emanates not only from the identities it acknowledges and whom it includes. The value of intersectionality also arises from what it does and what it confronts.

  A person cannot be intersectional—only a politics can be intersectional. The experiences of marginalized people expose the true workings of power in all its forms. Identity forms a key piece of intersectionality, but it provides the lens, not the target. In the words of my colleague Brittney Cooper, intersectionality “was never meant to be an account of identity; it was meant to be an account of how structures of power interact.”7

  To abolish white feminism and build a world in which all can flourish, we need to fully grasp the history, contours, and consequences of these distinct forms of feminism. Resisting white feminism’s attempts to bury or co-opt intersectionality, emptying it of its true force, requires listening to the Black feminists who have developed its theory and the coalition of feminists who have developed its politics.

  The Trouble with White Women brings feminism’s counterhistory to life through narrating nearly two hundred years of debates, tensions, and even treacheries between white feminists and the intersectional feminists who fought back. It captures the politics and the emotions of the struggle over the true meanings of feminist justice in the aftermath of the Civil War in the North and South, on the western plains in the waning years of Indigenous sovereignty, in early twentieth-century New York tenements, in the civil rights movement, within 1970s lesbian separatist collectives, and in twenty-first-century corporate boardrooms. The conflicts unearthed here give us the context we need today to distinguish between the distinct forms of feminism, to not be swayed or fooled by a feminism that is “white supremacy in heels,” in the words of activist and author Rachel Cargle.8 My focus is on the movement for sex equality in the United States, though this analysis has resonance across empires founded on enslavement, Indigenous removal, and patriarchy.

  Feminists of all stripes fight systemic inequality that concentrates money and authority in the hands of men. The logic of sexism is deeply entrenched within economic and social life, and some of feminists’ most dramatic gains were won only relatively recently. “No Ladies” signs were posted in the windows of business-district restaurants through the late 1960s; married women in the United States and United Kingdom were only permitted to open checking accounts and credit cards in their own names in the 1970s; and the last Ivy League institution to go coed opened its doors to female undergraduates in the early 1980s. Yet from the nineteenth century to the present, white feminists have broken through appalling barriers for themselves by reinforcing the barriers faced by others.

  To be sure, gaining access to the key institutions of society wasn’t an easy fight for white women. When Stanton and Harper first faced off over the best direction for the antislavery, feminist movement to take, not even white women could speak in public, own property if married, or, in almost all cases, obtain an advanced education. Despite these formidable structural obstacles, white women fought with verve and vision. Stanton not only became a public speaker—she matured into a sophisticated and quick-witted rhetorician. When a front-row heckler interrupted a conversation following a suffrage speech she delivered in Nebraska to challenge her that his homebound wife had accomplished the most important work of all—delivering and raising eight sons—Stanton merely paused, looked him up and down, and pronounced, “I have met few men in my life worth repeating eight times.”9 Stanton wanted women in politics, not in the parlor. Yet hers, like the white feminist movement she launched, was a fight for access to the status quo powered by the fantasy that white women’s participation would improve civilization itself.

  Across the decades, white feminists’ overwhelming insistence that sex oppression is the most prominent and widespread form of oppression ironically enshrines the identity of Woman as the sine qua non of feminism while minimizing the force of sexism itself. White feminist politics produces the fantasy of a common, even uniform, identity of Woman, a morally upright creature whose full participation in the capitalist, white supremacist status quo will allegedly absolve it of its sins. The individual obscures the structure.

  Under white feminism, the goal of gender justice shrinks to defending women’s qualities and identities. The agenda today becomes empowering individual women to own their voice, refuse to be mansplained to, and embrace their right to equality with men. These are fine practices on their own, but they do not convey the devastating nature of sexism, nor do they offer rea
listic methods of demolishing it. In fact, fetishizing the identity of Woman as the basis of feminist politics actually makes it more difficult to recognize sexism as a structure of exploitation and extraction. For sexism is not merely the silencing, interrupting, and overlooking of women. Sexism is the use of the male/female binary as an instrument to monopolize social, political, and economic power—and those assigned female at birth are not its only victims.

  Consistently, white feminism wins more rights and opportunities for white women through further dispossessing the most marginalized. It seeks to install women at the helm of the systems that have brought the planet to the brink of ecological collapse and to declare the battle won, cleansed by their tears. White feminism has supported the denial of suffrage to men of color, the eradication of Native ties to land and community, eugenics, homophobia, transphobia, and neoliberal capitalism. Today, it comprises the delusions that Girl Power will solve inequality, that if the investment bank Lehman Brothers were instead Lehman Sisters we would have a better kind of capitalism, and that putting a woman in the White House will necessarily create a more moral empire.10 While seemingly ignoring non-middle-class white women, white feminism actually raids more marginalized groups in order to shore up its own political power. White feminism is theft disguised as liberation.

  Yet while white feminists attempt to win their rights and opportunities through fighting for inclusion within fundamentally unequal systems, those benefits are largely mythical, even for women as wealthy as Sheryl Sandberg. Sexism is so fully interwoven within structures of domination that the single-axis fight to support women is itself a delusion: patriarchy threads through all forms of inequality. Eradicating sexism requires unravelling the entire system.

  Meanwhile, over and over again, intersectional feminists expose sexism to be a powerful structure of systemic inequality and attempt to untangle its deep threads with other forms of domination, while also building new practices of care, coalition, faith, and solidarity that don’t rely on women’s mythical purity. “I do not believe that white women are dew-drops just exhaled from the skies,” Frances E. W. Harper declared from the stage while sitting next to Stanton just after the Civil War.11 Hers was a campaign for a new vision of justice, not for the fantasy of a redemptive female identity. Devoted to mutual aid, she rallied formerly enslaved women and men throughout the South to secure land while rejecting the idea that wealth confers worth. Harper, like many other intersectional feminists into the present, also drew from a politics that goes far beyond access to rights and material advantages, expanding into a spiritual cosmology of justice whose final aim is harmony, not the seizure of power. For many intersectional feminists, power is something to be nurtured and shared. It far exceeds the realm of the human, extending into the universe. Rather than a battle over resources, intersectional feminism articulates a planetary vision in which all have access to what they need to thrive in mind, body, and spirit.

  The Trouble with White Women reveals the counterhistory of feminism across seven key episodes. Each chapter takes readers inside the debate between an intersectional feminist activist and a white feminist activist as they wrestle over the best approach to women’s rights. By listening directly to debates between the two main factions of feminism, we can gain a new understanding of the fight for women’s suffrage, for women’s access to the professions, for birth control, for lesbian feminism, for trans rights, and for women’s national leadership roles. We see that white feminists weren’t just products of their time—they chose to promote competitive, resource-hoarding ideologies, even as their contemporaries made different decisions. The struggles between suffrage campaigners Stanton and Harper, authors Harriet Beecher Stowe and Harriet Jacobs, Native rights reformers Alice Fletcher and Zitkala-Ša, birth control activists Margaret Sanger and Dr. Dorothy Ferebee, civil rights leaders Betty Friedan and Pauli Murray, anti-trans feminist Janice Raymond and trans theorist Sandy Stone, and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reveal when and where they made choices that either reinforced the politics of disposability or interrupted a system that declares some lives raw resources ripe for extraction.

  These stories are so crucial to understand because they are not simple narratives of heroes and villains. My goal is not to outline for readers who should be summarily tossed in the dustbin of history, never to be mentioned or praised again. No person can have pure or perfect politics, nor should anyone be expected to. Furthermore, feminism, like all social movements, is a site of ongoing struggle, not static agreement, a tension that is necessary for hashing out its vision. Instead, I have tried to capture the figures in their complexity—many are both inspiring and infuriating. In the voices, insights, contradictions, and shortcomings of each of these leaders, key lessons ring out for our ongoing reckoning with these two distinct strands of feminism today. Feminism is about the long-term collective. Its measure of success is what we articulate together—and maybe even accomplish—not our private virtue. Positions and campaigns, victories and losses register over the time of generations.

  I bring the conflict and tension between these two forms of feminism down to the human level to uncover how systemic change happens. Seemingly impermeable structures of oppression are reinforced or destroyed through groups of people making deliberate decisions over and over again to defend their own interests or to fight for the commons. Understanding how feminists have made those decisions can help us navigate similar dilemmas as we face them today as individuals and as collectives. This book uncovers the active harm of white feminist politics and the centuries of struggle for a world in which all can flourish, in the hope it will give readers the tools to help carry this fight into the future.

  We need to know the counterhistory of feminism because the past is not merely a prologue—it lingers on within the present. History is never safely lodged in anterior time. Instead, past, present, and future materialize simultaneously. The violence revealed here, including Stanton’s campaign for whites-only suffrage, Stowe’s urging that Black adults were like children who needed raising by white women, Sanger’s belief that 25 percent of the world’s people were unworthy of bearing children, and Raymond’s insistence that trans women rape feminist spaces by their mere existence, is ongoing. These outrages live on as flesh, as hauntings, as institutional structures, as autonomic responses, and as discourse—surfacing in outraged Beckys who call the cops and feminists who voted for Trump. But so, too, do Jacobs’s invention of Black women’s autobiography to articulate her own subjectivity, Zitkala-Ša’s defense of Indigenous children’s right to remain among their tribes, and Dr. Ferebee’s insistence that poor Black women need birth control alongside a wide range of healthcare access for them and their children all persist, animating what feminist justice can look like today.

  We engage with these legacies wittingly and unwittingly. Whether white women will interrogate their long-standing cozy relationship with the racist status quo and their self-interested notion of women’s rights remains an open question. The Trump feminist poses a danger, but so, too, do liberals who think white feminism simply needs to become inclusive. But out-organizing white feminism will be difficult if white women don’t grapple with the history of racist feminism and don’t appreciate the distinct vision of justice intersectional feminists articulate.

  “The history of white women who are unable to hear Black women’s words, or to maintain dialogue with us, is long and discouraging,” wrote Audre Lorde.12 As a white woman scholar, I offer this portrait of the struggles within feminism in the spirit of solidarity and coalition with intersectional feminists. Yet professing solidarity has its limits. This book is an attempt to listen and learn—but I also acknowledge that these approaches are not enough. Solidarity and social change manifest through the daily practice of fundamentally redistributing power and resources, not through the balms of awareness and attention.

  Today, white feminism is attempting to reform itself—when it needs to be abolished.
Inclusive white feminist politics threatens to absorb and nullify the power of intersectional world-building. Making white feminism inclusive only results in longer tentacles wrapped around more necks. But the intersectional feminist movement is not only ongoing. It is building strength. Abolition refers to the practice of eradicating systemic racial injustice—as well as building more sustainable, life-giving structures in its place. Intersectional feminism represents a praxis of care and coalition as old as white feminism, an abolitionist practice that both dismantles systems and invents solidarities anew. Far from a celebration of identity and diversity, it is a full-throated confrontation with power from the vantage of the most marginalized. This is the counterhistory of feminism. Two movements remain in ongoing struggle, yet only one fights for the continued breath of the many.

  PART I

  CIVILIZING

  CHAPTER ONE

  WOMAN’S RIGHTS ARE WHITE RIGHTS?

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frances E. W. Harper

  White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by woman suffrage.

  —Carrie Chapman Catt, Woman Suffrage by Constitutional Amendment

  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.