The Trouble with White Women

by Kyla Schuller

  After the Kansas election, in which both referenda failed to win enough support to become law, Stanton and Anthony doubled down on their relationship with Train. Using Train’s funds as well as Anthony’s life savings of $10,000, in January 1868 they launched a weekly newspaper, the Revolution, headquartered in New York City. The newspaper, which became a broadside for white women’s rights and issues, frequently included a letter to readers from Train. Stanton and Anthony courted Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe as editor, sure her fame would propel them into success. Stowe declined, however, on account of the militancy of the name. “There could not be a better name than Revolution,” retorted Stanton. Stowe also objected to the newspaper’s association with Train; contra Stanton, her family found him “coarse”—in a word, uncivilized. “The establishing of woman on her rightful throne is the greatest revolution the world has ever known or ever will know.”50

  Unfortunately, the revolution Stanton and Anthony sought was for white women to gain political equality with white men in order to further elevate whiteness. “Women faced the hostility everywhere of black men themselves,” she declared on the very first page of the very first issue. From the pages of the weekly, Stanton continued her attack on “outside barbarians,” “the unfortunate and degraded black race,” and “the effete civilizations of the old world,” who she saw as having been unfairly elevated above “the refined and intelligent women of the land.” In these constructions, women of color and immigrant women disappear. Stanton was not merely ignoring their political predicament; she was actively dispossessing more marginalized groups in pursuit of rights and liberties for white women. Another article made Stanton’s case plain: she celebrated the founding of what she called a “White Woman’s Suffrage Association” in New York City.51

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, seated, and Susan B. Anthony, standing. (Courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)

  By the time of the infamous fourth annual meeting of the AERA at Steinway Hall in 1869, tensions were running high. Stanton railed against “Patrick” and “Sambo” lording over her, Douglass evocatively called up the epidemic of lynching and murder beginning to terrorize the Reconstruction South, and Harper called out white women for consistently choosing sex over race. The AERA dissolved at the convention’s close—the alliance with white feminists had become untenable. Stanton and Anthony formed the National Woman’s Suffrage Association, an all-female group that opposed the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment because it was not accompanied by a Sixteenth Amendment granting women the right to the ballot. But theirs wasn’t the only new organization. Harper, Lucy Stone, and a handful of other women and men also united together, forming the American Woman Suffrage Association to support the males-only clause of the Fifteenth Amendment as a necessary first step and keep their eyes on the goal of voting rights for women. Despite vociferous efforts, which included further petitions, packing courts, aligning with racist Democrats, and even running for Congress herself, Stanton’s efforts to oppose Black suffrage in favor of universal suffrage were largely ineffectual at the legislative level. Instead, she succeeded at alienating many of their former allies.52 The women’s rights movement would remain split in half for the next two decades.

  Harper and Stanton each remained active in national political leadership until the late 1890s, and they met multiple times at national women’s rights conventions. But across those decades, each was immersed in their own work and communities that drew into stark relief their differences in politics and methods.

  Stanton drilled down on the rights of the individual as the path to women’s liberation. While she was the mother of seven children and one-half of the nineteenth century’s most famous female friendship, by the end of her life she had an increasingly individualist, alienated view of human life that saw each person to be entirely alone. “Each soul must depend wholly on itself,” she imparted in 1892 during her final speech as leader of the women’s rights movement, and “lives alone forever.… Our inner being which we call ourself, no eye nor touch of man or angel has ever pierced.” Stanton considered this speech, “The Solitude of Self,” her greatest piece of writing, and while her fellow suffragettes in the audience were largely appalled, twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors from Vivian Gornick to feminist historians have praised the prescience of her atheistic vision that embraced the materialist logic of the individuated and isolated psyche decades before many of her contemporaries did. The solitude of each individual, Stanton argued, was also the condition of women’s “birthright to self-sovereignty.”53

  “Solitude of Self” represented the culmination of Stanton’s lifelong work developing a white feminism that sees people as isolated units in competition with one another. The speech also foreshadows the white feminism that was to develop in the late twentieth century: she articulates a cold, combative vision of women fighting their way up the capitalist ladder, freeing themselves from the primitive tasks of sitting at “the loom and the spinning wheel” and ascending into their right to “fill the editor’s and professor’s chair, and plead at the bar of justice, walk the wards of the hospital, and speak from the pulpit and the platform.”54 In this individualist vision, middle-class women lean into the professional ranks of capitalism, and white civilization improves as a result. Meanwhile, the women who continue to operate the loom and the wheel, and who are tied to the factory floor, become anachronisms skulking in the shadows.

  A few years later, Stanton published her monumental attack on Christianity’s suppression of women, The Woman’s Bible, a controversial yet best-selling book that further outraged her movement contemporaries and charmed feminist readers a century later. Yet Stanton was not alone in death. When she was buried in 1902, above her casket was mounted a picture of her life’s companion—not her husband, who had died fifteen years prior—but Susan B. Anthony.55

  For Stanton, progress was dependent upon liberating the secular individual. But for Harper, faith, contact, and interdependence underwrite the conditions of liberation, a liberation imagined at the scale of the collective instead of at the isolated unit of the self-sovereign psyche.

  After Reconstruction, Harper worked to improve the conditions of Black women. She published four novels including the well-regarded Iola Leroy (1892) and dozens more poems and short stories, gave a host of prominent speeches throughout the Northeast at temperance societies and women’s rights conventions, and, when she and Harriet Tubman were in their seventies, cofounded the National Association of Colored Women with Ida B. Wells and others to fight for suffrage and against Jim Crow. Harper held the office of vice president of the organization for the last fifteen years of her life. Across these platforms, she advocated for Christian faith, moral righteousness, abstinence from drink, and the “enlightenment” of women, praising individuals who identified proudly with Blackness and devoted themselves to spreading education, faith, and morality among the race.56

  Yet Harper refused the white feminist logic that women, by their virtuous nature, would exert a moral force on society. “I am not sure that women are naturally so much better than men that they will clear the stream by the virtue of their womanhood; it is not through sex but through character that the best influence of women upon the life of the nation must be exerted,” Harper advised from the women’s stage at Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893.57

  This stress on character and moralizing expressed through the overwrought style of nineteenth-century prose did not win Harper fans in the twentieth century. W.E.B. Du Bois offered the lukewarm eulogy at her death in 1911 that “she was not a great writer, but she wrote much worth reading”;58 some critics during the revival of African American literature in the 1980s and 1990s argued that she was so eager to encourage Black respectability that her fiction and poetry courted trite sentimentalism and repressed sexuality altogether.59 Harper’s line in her novel Iola Leroy applauding a character for “wearing sobriety as a crown and righteousness as the gi
rdle of her loins” is the kind of passage that has earned her a reputation as the most prudish and saccharine, and thus least modern, of nineteenth-century Black women writers.60

  Yet evoking loins wrapped in the fabric of righteousness is a strange way to repress sexuality. While Harper was later portrayed as overly prim and conventional, her writing about race politics envisioned something new altogether. She imagined a kind of solidarity and spirituality that wasn’t afraid of bodies. Civilizing the race, for Harper, is partly the result of physical touch and close intimacy with humankind and with God. Rather than scales of justice weighing the rights of one analogous group against the rights of another, the key metaphors of her writing are bodies that surge with life for one another and hands that fold together in prayer across class lines. Far from repression, what emerges instead is a vision of contact between people—in sensual and erotic form—as a prized method of solidarity work.61 Hers is an embodied feminism where flesh and spirit unite to bring forth a new world, an agenda that has become pivotal to twenty-first-century Black feminism.

  Civilized respectability, however, wields its own hierarchies. It is relentlessly ethnocentric, colonial, and capitalist. “I do not believe in unrestricted and universal suffrage for either men or women,” she told her audience at the Columbian Exposition. “I do not believe that the most ignorant and brutal man is better prepared to add value to the strength and durability of the government than the most cultured, upright, and intelligent woman.” The words sound remarkably like Stanton’s. Yet even though Harper worked within the deeply flawed civilization paradigm, she also reworked its criteria to articulate ethics and solidarity, rather than the supremacy of race and sex. The “drunkard” and “lynchers” whose hands are “red with blood” were her examples of brutal men who should be barred from the vote—not uneducated Black men or immigrants from China and Ireland.62

  Meanwhile, by the 1890s, Stanton was similarly affected by claims that enfranchising women would double the amount of ignorance among the electorate, and she advocated drawing “some dignity and sacredness around the ballot box.” Once more, the apparatus of the state was her god. Her proposal was characteristically extreme: a constitutional amendment for educated suffrage, which restricted voting rights to US-born men and women who “read and write the English language intelligently.”63

  By the time the Nineteenth Amendment granted the ballot to women, but particularly white women, in 1920, both Stanton and Harper had passed away. Anthony’s protégé Carrie Chapman Catt led the final, successful stages of the campaign for women’s suffrage, in part by mimicking what abolitionists including Stanton’s husband had done fifty years prior: excluding any issue but one, in this case the ballot, from their platform. Stanton’s atheism had caused particular embarrassment and anxiety to Catt and to the movement in the 1890s—they found her attacks on Christianity damaging to their public standing. Stanton had preached a revolution of white women’s place in society, but Catt and her compatriots focused on the ballot alone. Nonetheless, in many ways, Catt was firmly part of Stanton’s legacy. One of her tactics to gain national approval for women’s suffrage was openly recruiting white supremacist women’s groups in the South. “White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by woman suffrage,” she infamously proclaimed.64

  Other white feminists would have a different agenda, however, than courting white nationalists. A competing strategy was to insist that white women’s moral purity and faculty of sympathy rendered them rescuers of the formerly enslaved. As long as the civilizing paradigm remained firmly in place, people deemed to fall outside of the norms of genteel white respectability would face ongoing threats from vicious enemies and sympathetic saviors alike, often in the name of feminism. But fortunately, there has never been just one approach to women’s rights.

  CHAPTER TWO

  WHITE SYMPATHY VERSUS BLACK SELF-DETERMINATION

  Harriet Beecher Stowe and Harriet Jacobs

  Mrs. Stowe has invented the Negro novel.

  —George Eliot

  IN JUNE 1835, HARRIET JACOBS DECIDED IT WAS TIME TO RISK EVERYTHING TO PROTECT HER children from enslavement. Jacobs, then twenty-two years old, was enslaved by Dr. James Norcom and his family in the coastal town of Edenton, North Carolina. Though her two young children were legally Norcom property, they lived with her emancipated grandmother, Molly Horniblow. Jacobs and Horniblow were laying careful plans to secure the children’s freedom. But one June evening Jacobs learned that Joseph, age six, and Louisa, age two, were to arrive the following day at Dr. Norcom’s plantation to be “broken in.” She knew what that meant: once her children were trained to be valuable property, the Norcoms would never consent to selling them to her friends and family who would set them free. Her children faced a lifetime of plantation slavery.1

  At half past midnight, Jacobs snuck down two flights of the Norcoms’ creaking stairs and stole through a window into the rain. She walked six miles into town, arriving at the house of a friend who sequestered her for the next week. The following morning, Dr. Norcom unleashed considerable force to track down the woman he considered his commodity; the sheriff, slave patrols, and later the courts and press were all in pursuit of Jacobs. They stopped all port traffic in the North Carolina town, rendering her further movement impossible. A white woman, who with her husband enslaved multiple people, nonetheless offered Jacobs a place of refuge in a small, unused storeroom above her bedroom. The woman was friendly with Jacobs’s grandmother, a respected baker in town, and wished to help her family. Jacobs remained shut up in the room for nearly two months, keeping her body quiet and motionless, while being supported by the enslaved cook Betty. Meanwhile, Dr. Norcom continued in hot pursuit, searching premises throughout town and jailing Jacobs’s children, brother, and aunt in an attempt to extort information leading to her whereabouts. To escape detection during these searches, Betty hid Jacobs under the flooring of the outdoor kitchen. Lying supine in this damp, shallow space, she had just enough room to shield her eyes from cascading dirt as Betty walked to and fro inches above her head. As unimaginable as Jacobs’s cramped retreat might be, it presaged years of sacrifice yet to come.

  By August, with repeated searches and jailings, ramped up surveillance of Jacobs’s friends and family, and a suspicious enslaved housemaid who one morning tried every one of the household’s keys attempting to unlock the storeroom, Jacobs’s community knew they had to make a sudden move. That night, her friend Peter brought her a set of sailor’s clothes and they walked in disguise to the wharf. Jacobs spent a humid night and the next day hidden in the Great Dismal Swamp, surrounded by large snakes she beat off with a stick while thick clouds of mosquitoes descended upon her flesh. The steamy quagmire was all the more terrifying to Jacobs given that she was still recovering from a venomous snakebite incurred during the first week of her escape and she had no idea where she might go next. That night, much to her surprise, Peter told Jacobs she was to be hidden at her grandmother’s house.

  “But every nook and cranny is known to Dr. Norcom,” Jacobs worried. She couldn’t envision where in the house would possibly be safe.

  “Wait and see,” Peter advised as he walked alongside the ersatz sailor through the darkened streets. “A place has been created for you. But you must make the most of this walk, for you may not have another very soon.”2

  With apprehension, Jacobs noted the sad tone seeping through her friend’s reassuring words.

  They arrived at a small uninsulated shed attached to the side of her grandmother’s house. While she had been hiding in the swamp, her uncle Mark Ramsey had built a trapdoor, concealed from below, accessing a small attic crawl space beneath the shed’s thin, sloped roof.3 It was the perfect hiding spot, one Jacobs herself hadn’t even considered, because it all but defied the basic requirements for human life. Seven feet long by nine feet wide, and reaching only three feet high at the slope’s peak, the space was roughly the size of four coffins laid side by side.

  Into thi
s pitch-black cavity, Jacobs climbed. Finding a mattress in the center, she learned through touch, not sight, that she lacked the clearing to roll from one side to the other: when she turned, her shoulders crashed into the roof’s downward slope. This living grave, as Jacobs came to call it, initially admitted no air or light. But a few weeks into her confinement, as she was crawling about for exercise, her head struck something protruding from the wall. It was a loophole, a small hand tool for drilling holes, left intentionally or not by her uncle when he constructed the trapdoor. Late at night, she bore small holes facing King Street until she had a one-by-one-inch aperture onto the world outside. Here she hunched, reading the Bible, watching her children and sewing their clothes, and observing Dr. Norcom and others walking down the street. Yet despite this narrow opening, the air remained so close that not even North Carolina’s mosquitoes deigned to enter.