The Trouble with White Women

by Kyla Schuller

  Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, born in 1825, also received a high-quality education through a mixture of luck, pluck, and tragedy. Harper’s parents were free, though they lived in the slave state of Maryland. But as among other early nineteenth-century families, death was widespread; both her parents had died by the time she reached three years old. Her mother’s brother William Watkins, and his wife Henrietta, raised Harper as one of their own children. She attended Watkins’s Academy for Negro Youth in Baltimore, where she undertook one of the most rigorous courses of study then available to Black children. A shoemaker and preacher by trade, her uncle William Watkins was also a master orator and active anti-imperialist who wrote articles for Garrison’s Liberator newspaper; his pupils wrote essays almost daily and were trained in elocution, history, geography, mathematics, natural philosophy, Greek, Latin, and music, among other subjects.16 Watkins’s son would go on to work with Frederick Douglass on the North Star newspaper.

  But Harper’s studies ended at thirteen, when she needed to obtain a job in order to support herself. She found work as a domestic servant in the home of a Baltimore book merchant, looking after the children, sewing the family’s clothes, and providing other housekeeping services. The merchant was kindly and his wife duly impressed by an article Harper had penned, so they granted Harper full access to their home’s library when she could steal away “occasional half-hours of leisure.” Harper’s situation brings to mind Jane Austen’s famously constrained writing conditions, two decades prior and an ocean away: cramped on a parlor table, writing in short bursts of precious uninterrupted time when her family and their many guests would be otherwise occupied.17 But the differences between Austen and Harper, and Stanton and Harper, are stark. Harper not only lacked a room of her own; her destiny was to clean the rooms of other people.

  Yet it was in this library that Harper developed as a reader and writer, entirely by her own direction. She continued writing poetry and prose, and she published her first collection of poetry, Forest Leaves (circa 1846), while still in her early twenties. Without this early, formative access to the literature of her day, Harper may never have gone on to publish eleven books, plus three novels serialized in magazines. By 1871, she had sold fifty thousand books, almost entirely to a Black audience—an astonishing number during an era in which only 20 percent of African Americans were literate.18

  If there are intriguing parallels amid the generally stark divergences in the ways that Stanton and Harper maneuvered themselves into advanced educations, those parallels drift widely apart as each woman became involved in the abolitionist, and then feminist, movements.

  Two days after marrying star abolitionist lecturer Henry Brewster Stanton, Stanton and her new husband set off on a three-week voyage to London, where Henry served as a delegate to the first World Anti-Slavery Conference. The June 1840 conference proved pivotal to Stanton’s political awakening. It introduced her to a wider circle of abolitionists, including Lucretia Mott, a prominent activist who had founded the well-known Female Anti-Slavery Society in the United States seven years prior, with whom she walked arm in arm throughout London. But ultimately of more consequence, it introduced her to her own marginalized status. When the delegates arrived at Freemasons’ Hall, the women—both wives like Stanton and official delegates like Mott—were escorted to a “low curtained seat” removed from the main congregation seating, as if they composed the “church choir.”

  Despite the eloquent objections of William Lloyd Garrison; Charles Remond, arguably the first Black abolitionist public speaker; and a few others—who backed up their words by walking out in protest with the women—a vote was held to determine the status of women’s participation in the convention. As a result, women delegates were denied the right to vote and to speak. At issue was less hypocrisy than strategy: the winning side, which included Stanton’s husband, maintained an overly narrow approach in which they objected to any political stance that might threaten or dilute their single-prong focus on abolishing slavery in the Americas. They consequently decided to sidestep the volatile issue of women speaking in public. Stanton wryly noted that she and the women delegates, relegated to their position on the sidelines, “modestly listened to the French, British, and American Solons [a Greek statesman] for twelve of the longest days in June.” The conference began to crystallize her own priorities. She later claimed that her time in London spurred her to the realization that “to me there was no question so important as the emancipation of women from the dogmas of the past.”19

  Two and a half million people were enslaved in the United States in 1840, and at the conference—as within the abolitionist community that formed her lively social circle back home—Stanton would have heard graphic tales of whippings, murder, and children stolen at the hand of slave owners. Yet what she felt most keenly was her own degradation. On the one hand, her reaction is understandable. Nothing pricks the skin as deeply as one’s own experience, particularly exclusion and humiliation, and there is a deep injustice in men fighting for the fundamental rights of others while silencing the very women in their midst. Free white women in the North and South lacked many of the most basic individual rights: the right to own property after marriage,20 including any wages they earned and money they inherited; the right to have guardianship over their own children after separation; and the right to initiate divorce. If abolitionists weren’t going to push back against the rightlessness of women, who would?

  On the other hand, a hierarchy of priority structured Stanton’s approach to abolition and women’s rights throughout her career. Stanton faced a choice: she could align the budding women’s movement with enslaved people, or she could call in the powers of whiteness to elevate her own community. For decades, Stanton chose the latter. The priority she placed on “white women’s rights” severely compromised her commitment to Black rights.21 The moral outrage of enslavement, to Stanton, was ultimately most useful as a dramatic analogy that threw into relief her own lack of rights. In her perspective, she was legally barred from the rights her whiteness merited and unfairly shared the status of a slave. She thereby began the white feminist political tradition that wins rights and liberties for middle-class white women by further marginalizing others.

  “The world waits the coming of some new element, some purifying power, some spirit of mercy and love,” she instructed, and this elevating spirit was the force of civilized womanhood.22 Stanton positioned women’s lack of access to rights as a gross injustice that threatened the progress of civilization. Denied the full privileges of citizenship that belonged to them by virtue of their whiteness, she argued, white women were robbed of their moral powers to refine and elevate society. But the United States could reach civilization’s full potential, Stanton argued, if women were granted rights and influence.

  Just six years after the Seneca Falls Convention, Stanton gave her first major speech, addressing the New York state legislature on the legal status of women. Susan B. Anthony had worked for months to earn the Valentine’s Day hearing, coordinating sixty women who gathered ten thousand signatures on a petition; Stanton, for her part, felt more nervous in advance of the speech than any other she gave.23 Stanton spoke to the legislators as a peer in heritage and merit, who was outrageously legally “classed with idiots, lunatics, and negroes.” In addition to being barred from the rights to vote and to trial by a jury of peers, white women, once married, lost all legal standing. “The wife who inherits no property holds about the same legal position that does the slave of the Southern plantation. She can own nothing, sell nothing.” Women didn’t even have the right to determine their own children’s futures, she explained. Husbands could bind sons out to abusive masters, or send daughters into prostitution, but wives had no legal authority to intervene. Once more, she grounded women’s claims to rights in whiteness. Anthony had twenty thousand copies of Stanton’s speech printed, and she delivered one to the desk of each New York state legislator.

  The legal inequalities married white
women faced were monumental. But Stanton dramatized her situation as one of not only political standing but also of being robbed of the rights and prerogatives of whiteness and thrust into a community of slaves. The inability to own property was not, of course, the same as being property, a condition that white middle-class wives were wholly spared. But as a rhetorical move, dramatizing the fall of Woman to the status of Slave was extremely useful to Stanton. The two halves of her analogy were meant to strike horror in her listeners’ hearts: that white women, who deserved “the full recognition of all our rights as… persons; native, free-born citizens; property-holders, [and] tax-payers,” conditions they shared with white men yet were denied, were unjustly treated as slaves. Meanwhile, an undivulged source informed her sense that another social structure was possible: the matriarchal culture of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) in whose territory her family had settled.24

  An analogy like the one Stanton articulated over and over again between “woman” and “Negroes” refuses to acknowledge any shared systems of oppression. Instead, it walls each side off into distinct partitions: one in which, in the words of a key Black feminist anthology from the 1980s, “all the women are white, and all the Blacks are men.”25 Analogy renders the political status of enslaved women invisible and negligible.

  To be clear, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was no mere dilettante in the abolition movement. She was immersed in antislavery activity for decades and supported militant tactics such as John Brown’s 1859 attempt to begin an armed uprising of enslaved people by raiding the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. During the Civil War, she and Susan B. Anthony halted their now annual women’s rights convention in order to devote their energies entirely to supporting Black emancipation. Intent on contributing more to the war cause than women’s typical, but necessary, tasks of “nursing the sick and wounded, knitting socks, scraping lint, and making jellies,” they intervened directly in the legislative process. Anthony and Stanton organized thousands of women and men into the Women’s National Loyal League, which became the country’s first national political organization led by women, and aimed to gather one million signatures in favor of a constitutional amendment ending slavery. Petitions, Stanton explained, are “seemingly so inefficient,” but were the only means through which people denied the vote could add their voice to the political process. Their petition circulated throughout the North and was “signed on fence posts, plows, the anvil, the shoemaker’s bench—by women of fashion and those in the industries, alike in the parlor and kitchen.”26 While the nearly four hundred thousand names the organization delivered on hefty scrolls to Senator Charles Sumner fell substantially short of their goal, Stanton and Anthony’s petition drive was nonetheless the largest the country had yet seen in its history. It is credited with helping smooth the way to the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery in 1865.

  Yet in the words of Lori Ginzberg, Stanton “did not seriously stretch her thinking, sacrifice wealth or comfort, or evince a strong or urgent concern for those who were actually enslaved.” Stanton, Ginzberg writes, “had always been clear about what she wanted the Civil War to accomplish: the emancipation of the slaves, she was sure, would pave the way for emancipating women as well.” This is all the more striking given that slavery, for Stanton, wasn’t only an abstract political cause. It was also an intimate reality in her own childhood home. Although slavery was officially abolished in New York in 1799, it remained legal to own slaves there until 1827 under the state’s Gradual Emancipation act. Three people were enslaved within Stanton’s own Johnstown house. Nonetheless, Stanton painted the principle domestic injustice of her childhood to be her father’s refusal to recognize her own intellectual value and potential. Her autobiography refers to her family’s servants, Abraham, Peter, and Jacob, as her closest childhood friends—natural companions, despite their adulthood, to her juvenile adventures.27 She does not disclose that these men were enslaved by her father.

  This choice to center her own degradation and remain silent about her position among a slaveholding family exemplifies Stanton’s white feminism. White feminism is a political position, not an identity. The trouble with Stanton is not that she grew up in a blue-blooded slaveholding house and married a man also descended from Mayflower stock so, therefore, her politics are suspect. Privilege doesn’t necessarily result in myopic self-interest, just as marginalization doesn’t directly lead to a more ethical or radical politics. Instead, her white feminist politics resulted from the choices she made to exploit enslavement as a sensational analogy to dramatize her own condition.

  Stanton nonetheless considered herself a devoted friend of the slave who made valiant sacrifices to the cause of abolition. And when slavery was abolished at last in 1865, she would come to expect payback for the services she had rendered.

  In her mid-twenties, Harper left Baltimore to take up a teaching job in Ohio, and then in Little York, Pennsylvania, less than twenty miles north of the Maryland border. Fifty-three students crammed into her one Pennsylvania classroom, and she found teaching quite tiring. Meanwhile, the growing antiblackness of the 1850s devastated her. As for other abolitionists, the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 was a tremendous blow for Harper. The act expanded the reach of slavery across the continent. A person escaping slavery could be captured in any state of the union and remanded back to a person who claimed to own her. The act also fined local authorities $1,000 if they failed to arrest anyone a white Southerner testified under oath was their property, and it fined and imprisoned for six months anyone who aided a person fleeing bondage.28 These terms also made it relatively easy to capture freeborn children and adults living in free states and send them into slavery. Effectively, slavery had become a national institution.

  While in Little York, Harper met many people escaping north, now all the way to Canada, via the Underground Railroad’s network of secret routes and safe houses, and the danger of their plight aroused Harper’s care and concern. “These poor fugitives are a property that can walk,” she wrote to a friend. “Just to think that from the rainbow-crowned Niagara to the swollen waters of the Mexican Gulf, from the restless murmur of the Atlantic to the ceaseless roar of the Pacific, the poor, half-starved, flying fugitive has no resting place for the sole of his foot!”29

  Within three years, slavery’s burgeoning legal standing rendered Harper a potential fugitive. A new Maryland law, enacted in 1853, prohibited any free, Northern person of color from entering Maryland via the border it shared with Pennsylvania. Punishment for crossing the border was extreme: imprisonment and remand into slavery. Harper was suddenly in exile. Though freeborn, of free parents, if she returned home to Baltimore, she could be enslaved. Yet it was someone else’s suffering that galvanized her into action. A free Black man, unaware of the statute, traveled south to Maryland, where he was captured and sold into slavery in Georgia. He escaped, hiding behind the wheelhouse of a boat churning north. But he was caught and enslaved once more; he died soon after. The man’s plight, which was well known to Philadelphia abolitionists, struck Harper to the bone. “Upon that grave I pledged myself to the Anti-Slavery cause,” she wrote a friend. She left teaching to join the movement.30

  Harper traveled to Philadelphia and Boston, where she became active in the Underground Railroad and began to give public lectures. Her uncle’s elocution training paid off: she soon was giving lectures most nights of the week, to crowds that could reach six hundred. Within a month, the State Anti-Slavery Society of Maine hired Harper, on her twenty-ninth birthday, to become a professional lecturer. The position was akin to the one that had propelled Henry Brewster Stanton’s early career. In the span of a mere six weeks during her first season on the speaking circuit, she delivered thirty-three lectures in twenty-one towns. The work energized her—“my life reminds me of a beautiful dream,” she wrote to her friend William Still, a writer, historian, and conductor in the Underground Railroad. Harper’s lecture tours raised significant funding for the Railroad, which she r
egularly sent to Still along with a portion of her own speaking fees. She sometimes scolded him to be forthcoming about the organization’s financial situation, assuring him that she was in a position to support its basic operating expenses.31

  While clearly successful, Harper had to tread a fine line as a Black woman lecturer speaking on topics such as “On the Elevation and Education of Our People.” It was only in abolitionist societies and in women’s rights meetings that women were granted the right to address the public. And white crowds, which formed the majority of her audiences up North, were not at all accustomed to listening to a Black woman speaker. “My voice is not wanting in strength, as I am aware of, to reach pretty well over the house,” she wrote to Still, acknowledging her justified pride at holding forth to large crowds for lectures that lasted two hours.32 Yet this very strength could be a liability in a time and place that generally reserved the status of Woman for whites alone. Harper spoke before crowds in the North, and later throughout the South, that were predisposed to see her as a novelty and as the member of a suffering race, but not simultaneously as belonging to the allegedly delicate sex of women.

  From her podium and her pen, Harper pressed forward in beginning intersectional feminism, a feminism that seeks to demolish the status of civilized whiteness rather than to gain access to its privileges. She took pains to show that Black women were women, but she did so by validating their experience as mothers rather than their civilized refinement. The same year Harper began lecturing professionally, she published Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854); this collection of work on slavery, Christianity, and the plight of women became her best-selling book and went into twenty printings. Perhaps its most famous poem, “The Slave Mother,” begins by emphasizing the seeming animal strangeness of an enslaved woman. It addresses the reader directly, as if demanding a response: “Heard you that shriek? It rose so wildly in the air.” But by the end of the poem the feral cry becomes proof of her status as a human woman: the very trait that seemingly disqualified her from the ranks of civilized personhood proves the depth of her human feeling. For the woman unleashes her cry when her boy is torn “from her circling arms” on the slave block. “No marvel, then, these bitter shrieks Disturb the listening air: She is a mother, and her heart Is breaking in despair.”33 Harper humanizes the enslaved mother by showing her gnashing pain.