The Trouble with White Women

by Kyla Schuller

  Other poems in the collection, as with her short story “The Two Offers” (1859), the first short story published by a Black woman in the United States, tell tales of women abandoned and mistreated by profligate men and subject to double standards that punish the women for their former partners’ behavior. Intriguingly, these tales often do not identify their characters by race. Their lack of specificity draws alliances, rather than analogies, between women Black and white.

  Harper’s intersectional feminist politics stressed one key theme: fighting for an entirely new society based on broad social justice. This society would be distinguished by a more equal distribution of resources, including land; solidarity among the movements for women’s rights, racial justice, and working people, for “we are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity”; and a body politic guided by Christian faith instead of the money-centric, secular structure of power that was rapidly replacing God with capital.34

  Stanton addressed white male legislators as a proud Saxon daughter of the American Revolution who deserved full access to the state’s authority. Harper, however, wrote to Black audiences about the ethical and political failings of white civilization and their power to resist its sway. She pushed back against the idea that Black access to wealth alone would bring about justice, that “the richer we are the nearer we are to social and political equality.” Money, but also “intelligence, and talent,” she argued to Black readers, may be the prized qualities at the heart of the nation’s corrupt power structure, but they would not bring about justice.35 The status quo was sustained by the surplus wealth of the Southern plantations and thus was against the interests of Black people everywhere. Harper’s vision of justice was one of interdependence, in which the needs of the poor, the enslaved, and women would all be met.

  Harper didn’t want Black people to prove themselves worthy of white civilization, gaining access to the runaway profits of capitalism and the ranks of government: she wanted the entire bloodstained structure to crumble and a new system to rise in its place. “It is no honor to shake hands politically with men who whip women and steal babies,” she quipped. Stirring poems reminded her readers of their individual power as consumers to choose not to become cogs in the machinery of bondage by boycotting clothing made from cotton that enslaved people had picked. “This fabric is too light to bear / The weight of bondsmen’s tears / I shall not in its texture trace / The agony of years,” she wrote of free labor cotton, which freed the customer of wrapping themselves in the very anguish of the cotton fields.36

  Harper made her national debut on the women’s rights stage in early May 1866 at the New York meeting of the National Women’s Rights Convention, with Stanton presiding as president. Now in its eleventh year, Stanton and Anthony’s organization was reconvening after their five-year break during the Civil War. It was a contentious gathering, for this congregation of abolitionists and women’s rights campaigners faced a thorny dilemma: the proposed Fourteenth Amendment, which would guarantee citizenship rights to those born or naturalized in the United States as well as equal protection before the law, would also introduce the word “male” into the Constitution for the very first time. The amendment would restrict voting rights solely and exclusively to “male citizens.” Women’s voting rights were not only ignored—they were thwarted.

  Held under the stone arches of the Church of the Puritans near Union Square in New York City, the convention became the scene of the first battle that pitted women’s rights against Black men’s rights. This war presaged the rupture of the women’s movement three short years later. Stanton and Anthony opposed ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, arguing that it would be a blow to their goal for suffrage “without distinction of race, color or sex.” Stanton also made firm that while abolitionists such as Wendell Phillips and Lucretia Mott argued it was “the hour of the Negro,” she believed wholeheartedly “that woman’s hour has come.”37 White women had sacrificed to win the abolition of slavery, in her mind, and now deserved the antislavery movement’s full support for suffrage regardless of sex or no suffrage at all. The Fourteenth Amendment codifying voting rights for men was a threat she predicted would set women’s rights back by a hundred years.

  In the midst of this tense meeting, Frances Harper addressed Stanton, Anthony, Mott, and Phillips for the first time. “I feel I am something of a novice upon this platform,” she began once she had climbed up to the church altar the convention used as its stage. While Harper was new to women’s rights meetings, by this point she was a significant public intellectual with twelve years of experience as a lecturer. She also read prominent political theorists including Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill and kept up with the magazines and weeklies of the day.38 On this firm grounding, she didn’t hold back from issuing forth an incisive critique of white feminism.

  Beginning with a statement of solidarity, she explained that before her husband Fenton Harper died after only four short years of marriage, she felt herself more aligned with the cause of her race rather than with woman’s rights. Her lecturing and writing career had slowed while she was married and established herself as a “farmer’s wife” in Ohio, looking after Fenton’s three children, giving birth to a child of their own, and making butter she sold at the Columbus market. But all this changed upon Fenton’s death, when she felt acutely the legal deprivation of married women who were denied all claims to their widow’s property. She narrated, “My husband died in debt; and before he had been in his grave three months, the administrator had swept the very milk crocks and wash tubs from my hands.… They left me one thing, and that was a looking glass!” Robbed of her means of making a living, Harper related that, for the first time, she felt “keenly” that she deserved “these rights, in common with other women” for which the convention fought.

  Harper legally shared the position widowed wives across the country faced: stripped of any claim to the fruits of their own wages and the property they shared with their husbands. She was legally worthy of laying claim to just one item: a mirror to satisfy her social obligation to be pleasantly attractive to others. “Justice is not fulfilled so long as woman is unequal before the law,” she pronounced. Harper also recognized, however, numerous aspects of social status that extended beyond legal rights, something Stanton, who learned from and also worshipped her father’s legal acumen, was reluctant to acknowledge. White women, Harper explained, may lack legal status, but they wielded plenty of authority and were among those who “trample on the weakest and feeblest” of society.39 Granting white women political power, she emphasized, would not necessarily elevate civilization into reaching its loftiest heights. White women’s morality was often compromised by their racism.

  “I do not believe that giving the woman the ballot is immediately going to cure all the ills of life. I do not believe that white women are dew-drops just exhaled from the skies. I think that like men, they may be divided into three classes: the good, the bad, and the indifferent. The good would vote according to their convictions and principles; the bad, as dictated by prejudice or malice.”40 The vote, she implied, would weaponize racist white women just as it would grant political authority to antiracist women.

  “You white women speak here of rights,” Harper continued. “I speak of wrongs.” Her experience “as a colored woman” shattered the myth that woman’s rights would bring equality to all women. She emphasized that the violence done to Black women and men, such as being thrust from streetcars, was often supported and perpetrated by white women, as well as men.41

  From the platform, Stanton had argued that the ballot would enable white women to propel the nation into a higher level of civilization. Harper objected that it was white women themselves who would be improved through the right of suffrage. “Talk of giving women the ballot box? Go on. It is a normal school. And the white women of this country need it.… I tell you that if there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness, it is the white w
omen of America.”42

  Roused to action, Susan B. Anthony responded to Harper’s speech by presenting a new resolution she and Lucretia Mott had been working up: the launch of a new organization, the American Equal Rights Association, that would “demand universal suffrage.” Harper became a founding member of the AERA that evening, along with Anthony, Stanton, Douglass, Mott, and others.

  Yet three years later in New York’s Steinway Hall, the AERA and the women’s rights movement would tear asunder as Stanton railed against “Sambo’s” acquiring the right to vote before she did. And when Stanton and Anthony spent years in the 1880s compiling their six-volume History of Woman Suffrage, which included transcriptions of most major meetings such as the pivotal 1866 convention, they left out Harper’s speech. If Harper’s name is unfamiliar to you today, the singular authority Stanton and Anthony wielded over the “official” account of the suffrage battle is a significant reason why.

  After the Civil War, Harper took to the dirt roads of the Reconstruction South on a lecture tour to spread the message of “Literacy, Land, and Liberation.” Whereas Stanton was increasingly turning to racism to clinch her argument for white women’s rights, Harper further developed her intersectional feminist analysis in conversation with Black and white people across the region. For three years, she traveled among plantations, towns, and cities throughout South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee. Speaking to formerly enslaved people and to former enslavers alike in schools, churches, and state buildings, she sometimes lectured twice a day, passing the nights at the homes of freedpeople. Harper told friends of the tremendous “brain-power” she found in Black schools and homes as well as the exposed “Southern shells” in which she passed miserable winter nights, cabins in which the windows lacked glass and the gaps in the walls were big enough to plumb her finger right through. She often didn’t charge for her lectures, especially when the price of cotton was low, and never to the all-women groups she convened. Speaking to women particularly excited her. “Now is the time for our women to begin to try and lift up their heads and plant the roots of progress under the hearthstone,” she wrote to Still, celebrating Black women’s potential role in improving the conditions of Black life in Reconstruction.43

  Even the travel itself could present an opportunity to spread her message about the necessity for legal equality and for Black people to acquire education, land, and moral righteousness. On one train ride in South Carolina, a group of passengers clustered around Harper as she spoke, including a former slave dealer. Despite traveling alone, she engaged him directly and they had “rather an exciting time,” she later wrote to a friend. A subsequent line of her letter provides a glimpse of the potential danger she faced: “There’s less murdering,” she noted hopefully of the progress she saw in the state as Reconstruction was under way, though plantation owners still regularly stole the wages of their sharecroppers for years at a time. Among the insults Harper received while lecturing were accusations that she was a man and that she was a white person performing in blackface. Her response was to laugh at the absurdity of a world unwilling to acknowledge eloquence and wisdom when it took Black female form, reflecting instead on the “very fine meetings” she held for mixed-race audiences. Now and again her audiences included Confederate soldiers and officers, to whom she delivered the “gospel truth” about the abuses of slavery and delighted in her good fortune, the next day, at finding herself alive.44

  Author photograph of Frances E. W. Harper from her 1898 poetry collection. (Courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)

  Yet Harper also endorsed nineteenth-century civilization rhetoric, however. Throughout her six-decade career, Harper argued passionately that civilization and respectability were not the exclusive purview of whiteness and that Black people were capable of joining the ranks of the civilized. Civilizing was a pervasive framework for reformers in the era, a common worldview that saw property accumulation, Christian faith, genteel and properly feminine or masculine manners, sexual monogamy, and a rigorously maintained divide between the public world of the nation and the private world of the domestic to be the necessary elements of progress. A civilizing agenda is inherently conservative, elevating hierarchy, self-discipline, and wealth acquisition to be the meaning of life. She preached self-control and self-regulation as tools for elevating the race, something that aligned her with the rising Black bourgeoisie rather than with the sharecroppers she traveled among. Harper was forthright, however, that the civilizing project she desired was not only about individuals learning moral uprightness, “the value of a home life,” and other aspects of bourgeois personhood that propertied white reformers stressed.45 In Harper’s view, civilizing also entailed structural changes at the collective level. For her, as for many other Black reformers, civilizing was a means of racial uplift they could bring to the masses.

  “Get land, every one that can, and as fast as you can,” she instructed a sizable crowd at an 1871 lecture at the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Mobile, Alabama. Within the large, gaslit church festooned with wreaths and flowers, her famously crystal clear voice rang out with stark edicts: “A landless people must be dependent upon the landed people,” she warned. During this period, whites continued to monopolize land ownership. According to the 1870 census, the rate of homeownership for Black people was only 8 percent, compared to nearly 60 percent for whites. Harper argued that if poor Black families did not have their own means of economic support in the form of cultivatable land, they would forever be powerless. Though she was invested in the civilizing project, she wasn’t interested in mere window-dressing: she knew Black people had to seize land and property if there was any hope of shifting the lethal monopolization of power in the hands of whites. Many held a similar view, and by 1900, formerly enslaved people and their children acquired fifteen million acres of land.46

  Within the elegant setting of this Black-run church, she did not refrain from challenging the boundaries of decorum in order to fight misogyny. For Black women, even more so than for other women, the most dangerous place of all could be their own homes. She was circumspect about how she brought up male violence against women, a topic she nonetheless regularly broached. “Why,” she voiced with surprise, “I have actually heard since I have been South that sometimes colored husbands positively beat their wives! I do not mean to insinuate for a moment that such things can possibly happen in Mobile. The very appearance of this congregation forbids it; but I did hear of one terrible husband defending himself for the unmanly practice with ‘Well, I have got to whip her or leave her.’”47 The quip is typical of her use of civilizing rhetoric—on the surface, she reassuringly equates genteel appearance with ethical behavior, while just below lurks her radical challenge to power.

  Meanwhile, Reconstruction unleashed the full force of Stanton’s racism into the mainstream women’s rights movement. Part of her fury was a logical outcome of her own method of analogy, which saw Black people as fundamentally distinct from, but structurally equivalent to, white women. This individualist, competitive notion of rights envisioned each group to occupy distinct halves of a weighted scale, a scale that had been level as long as neither group had voting rights. But she believed the Fifteenth Amendment would tip the scale wholly over to the side of African American men, leaving white women dangling midair. At the first anniversary of the American Equal Rights Association, held in May 1867 at the Church of the Puritans, Stanton made clear that her goal of universal suffrage prioritized tipping the scales in favor of white women. “With the black man we have no new elements in government,” she informed her audience of fellow abolitionists and women’s rights campaigners, “but with the education and elevation of woman we have a power that is to galvanize the Saxon race into a higher and nobler life, and thus, by the law of attraction, to lift all races to a more even platform.”48 White women were the true force of civilization, she insisted, and thus they must assume power over Black men.

  Later that ye
ar, Stanton’s vision of suffrage rights as a competition fully materialized when she and Susan B. Anthony joined forces with a notorious white supremacist. Kansas was the stage for this conflagration, which was holding two state referenda in the 1867 election: one for Black male suffrage, the other for women’s suffrage. The AERA was in full support of both, and Stanton and Anthony were among the campaigners who traveled throughout the state for three months. But other prominent abolitionists, including Wendell Phillips, opposed the referendum enfranchising women on the grounds it would weaken the chances of Black male suffrage to earn enough votes—an echo of the cautious, one-issue-at-a-time approach to electoral politics Stanton’s own husband had taken decades prior. Desperate for more funds and support for the woman’s suffrage referendum, Anthony and Stanton teamed up with a shipping magnate and blatant racist by the name of George Francis Train. Train paid the bills as the three of them traveled through Kansas together on a joint lecture tour. Train supported women’s suffrage on the grounds that elevating the social position of white women would strengthen white supremacy; his motto was “Woman first and negro last.” This partnership made apparent that while Stanton and Anthony technically supported the Black male suffrage campaign, it was white women’s right to vote they were after. Frances Harper and Frederick Douglass were deeply troubled, refusing invitations to join the campaign in Kansas. But Stanton defended their union with Train. “A gentleman in dress and manner, neither smoking, chewing, drinking, nor gormandizing,” she insisted, Train was civilized and thus valuable to their cause.49