The Trouble with White Women

by Kyla Schuller

  But Planned Parenthood’s leadership, which was all white men save for Sanger, ignored her initial design for the project and instead opened three demonstration clinics straightaway, one in Nashville and two in rural South Carolina counties, Lee and Berkeley. Sanger threatened to call the project off altogether if the project hired white doctors, but the organization called her bluff.53 The Berkeley County clinic was staffed by white nurses. Sanger was furious, and not only because they were white.

  “I will never consent to nurses at this stage,” she informed Planned Parenthood staff. Sanger wanted physicians. While she was much more of an antiracist than the vast majority of her white counterparts, she was wedded to expertise and authority. She operated within a top-down model that saw urban professionals, both Black and white, armed with superior knowledge and technologies, as saviors who would liberate rural Black women from unfettered births. Such rescue missions would be “lifelines to the mothers we are dedicated to free,” Sanger wrote.54

  Sanger and Rose created a National Negro Advisory Council to guide the project, appointing around thirty nationally prominent Black individuals to the board. The council was stocked with expertise and leadership, including Dr. Ferebee; W. E. B. Du Bois; Mary McLeod Bethune, who was then a member of President Roosevelt’s “Black Cabinet”; and civil rights activist and writer Mary Church Terrell. Terrell in particular was a leading Black feminist who has since been recognized for developing one of the earliest formulations of the idea of intersecting oppressions. “A white woman has only one handicap to overcome—that of sex,” she wrote in her 1940 autobiography. “I have two—sex and race. I belong to the only group in this country, which has two such huge obstacles to surmount.” Yet despite this boundary-breaking expertise, the National Negro Advisory Council was not convened until months after the clinics first opened, and when it was finally under way, its members were relegated to a mere accessory function. It existed only to provide “moral support” to the Planned Parenthood staff and to be “extremely helpful in adapting the plans to the negro psychology,” in the words of one member of Planned Parenthood’s executive committee.55 In true white paternalist fashion, Planned Parenthood tasked these national leaders strictly with providing insight into Blackness and propping up the egos of the white staff.

  Some white project administrators were incensed when their Black colleagues appeared to play anything more than a purely decorative role. White South Carolina site director Dr. Robert Seibels blocked the distribution of a clinic promotional letter until Florence Rose revised a paragraph mentioning that the project was “guided by our Negro Advisory Council.” Furious, Dr. Seibels admonished Rose and her colleagues, “in no uncertain terms… Southerners were not ‘guided’ by Negroes!”56 For Dr. Seibels, Black expertise was merely a resource to be extracted for the benefit of the true southerners: its white population.

  Tensions swelled to the surface at a 1942 advisory council meeting held at Planned Parenthood’s gleaming headquarters on Madison Avenue. Members of the council were convinced that grassroots organizing, not deploying outside white or Black professionals to administer to the poor, would likely have better outcomes in recruiting patients. Black mothers, urged Shellie Northcutt, a national director of Black teachers in the South, would be best reached if birth control were introduced via organizations they already trusted—not brought by new clinics and professionals providing only that service. Only 11 percent of rural Black women in Tennessee even employed a physician when they gave birth, one member emphasized: their medical care was provided by Black midwives. As member after member chimed in, the advisory council was unanimous in its recommendation: integration. Abandon the single-pronged approach that positioned birth control as the singular purview of medical professionals, integrate birth control outreach work within local communities and other health initiatives, and racially integrate the leadership of Planned Parenthood by appointing Black advisors to all areas, not just the Negro Project.57 But the advisory council had little power within Planned Parenthood to effect such a recommendation, and their counsel was ignored.

  At the 1942 Planned Parenthood annual meeting, Dorothy Ferebee, who was by now also president of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, took to the podium at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. She didn’t hold back from criticizing the organization. Her goal with the Negro Project was public health. Family planning, she explained, reduced the high fatalities of Black mothers and Black infants by allowing severely ill women to prevent pregnancy and raised the standard of living. In common with her advisory council colleagues, she informed Planned Parenthood that the project’s single-issue approach to promoting birth control alone was backfiring. Many poor Black people suspected that contraception was “motivated by a clever bit of machination to persuade them to commit race suicide,” she advised, and others also found it to be immoral. White-led clinics devoted only to contraception services did little to assuage these fears. The solution, Ferebee proposed, was “the integration of this work directly into all public health services.”

  She concluded with even sharper criticism of Planned Parenthood’s approach to Black outreach. “Negro professionals,” she insisted, must be “fully integrated into the staff of this organization” and employed as field outreach specialists. Black professionals like herself deserved roles as full “participants” in the movement, not just the secondary “consultant” roles to which they were relegated.58 For her, bringing birth control to Black women was just one element of a larger campaign for Black public health and racial justice, one that should be led by Black professionals. Yet again, however, this advice that Planned Parenthood abandon its single-axis strategy effected no change.

  Some advisory council members, however, also advanced the eugenic agenda Sanger and some Planned Parenthood staff still maintained. To drum up support in the regions it served, the Negro Project circulated fifteen thousand copies of an article by Du Bois advocating family planning for Black families. Du Bois characterized Black working-class children in such brazenly discriminatory terms that notorious eugenicist Clarence Gamble copied one of his passages verbatim, but did not attribute it to Du Bois, in Negro Project funding appeals—appeals that scholars and activists have cited for decades since as evidence of the project’s racist intent on extermination. Opined Du Bois (and later Gamble), “The mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, so that the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among whites, is from that part of the population least intelligent and fit.… They must learn that among human races and groups, as among vegetables, quality and not mere quantity really counts.”59

  Though a eugenic approach tendrilled its way throughout the birth control movement, some denounced the class hierarchy blooming in its core. A sociologist consulted about the Negro Project’s plan wisely bemoaned, “Why, oh why, can’t the birth control advocates stress the advantages of their prescription with regard to the individual and individual family, and then forget or shove into the background the song and dance they insist on giving about regional, national, and world progress.”60

  In the end, the Negro Project had minimal impact on southern Black women and their families. Over the test period, fewer than three thousand women visited the three clinics to obtain either a sponge and foam powder or diaphragm and spermicidal jelly. In two full years, the clinics treated fewer than one-fifth of the patients the Mississippi Health Project treated in its six-week-long summertime clinics. The advisory council concluded that African American women fundamentally mistrusted the clinics and steered clear of their services.61

  Ferebee, her advisory council colleagues, and Sanger herself had predicted correctly that without reaching out directly to local communities, demand would be low. Staff in Nashville studied why some women who made an initial clinic visit nonetheless failed to keep follow-up appointments. Results revealed the intersecting set of hardships patients were facing. Women cited their lack of transportation, childcare, and “suitable clothes to appe
ar in public”; some patients were as young as fourteen. Each of the first fifty patients was found to be suffering from “a serious health condition.”62 No single panacea, not even contraception, would transform the severe challenges poor Black women faced in the Jim Crow South.

  Planned Parenthood closed the demonstration clinics as well as the Division of Negro Services in 1944. Upon the recommendation of a hired “Negro Consultant,” the organization ceased segregated programming and attempted to incorporate limited educational outreach to Black communities into the larger aims of Planned Parenthood in 1944.63 Yet it still maintained segregated advisory boards and insisted that bringing contraception to a limited number of Black women was the beginning to saving the race: “Better Health for 13,000,000,” trumpeted the cover of the Negro Project’s final report.

  The Negro Project was not a plan for extermination. Sanger was an integrationist committed to offering birth control services to Black women. Yet she had simultaneously a eugenic vision, an assimilationist ambition, and a feminist agenda. The project was born of the same strategy Sanger wielded throughout her family planning advocacy: it treated contraception as the linchpin for relieving vast social, economic, and political inequality. This approach is committed to social progress through biological measures, an overwhelmingly ableist agenda. In this approach, the birth rate and the alleged mental and physical quality of children are figured as the primary solution to economic and political problems. Yet Sanger’s was a racially inclusive eugenics: she sought to assimilate Black women into the fold of women responsible for safeguarding the nation’s biological future. This outreach doesn’t eradicate the supremacy at the core of Sanger’s approach, for she sought to fold Black women into her eugenic vision. Her inclusive eugenics throws into relief the limits of inclusion itself as a feminist strategy—for instead of trying to overhaul an existing hierarchy, it seeks instead to diversify the status quo.

  Sanger’s “eugenic feminism” with the Negro Project, in other words, is guilty of the same misapprehension of power that white feminism makes in general.64 Overall, the Negro Project promoted single solutions to deep economic and political oppression, committing the same miscalculation—that power functions on just one primary axis—that white feminism makes over and over again, century after century. The reproductive choice movement treats pregnancy prevention as a panacea, isolating it from and elevating it over all other women’s health concerns. White feminism, more generally, similarly fixates on the single issue of sex equality alone. Both strategies work within, rather than against, other forms of systemic injustice.

  One hundred years after Elizabeth Cady Stanton helped launch white feminism, intersectional feminists kept developing agendas to interrogate multiple structures of power at once. In the 1940s, Dr. Ferebee and other members of the Negro Project’s advisory council embraced a multipronged approach to bringing birth control to Black communities that was separate from their work with Sanger. They understood that for Black women living within a nation where eugenic ideas gripped even civil rights leaders like Du Bois, reproductive freedom must extend beyond the ability to prevent pregnancy—it must also defend the right of all women to have children.

  Under Dr. Ferebee’s and Mary McLeod Bethune’s leadership, in 1941 the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) passed a resolution recommending that every Black civil rights organization in the country incorporate contraception into its health outreach work. This was years before most white women’s clubs would publicly support birth control; NCNW became the first national organization to incorporate family planning into its agenda. The NCNW newsletter reprinted both the resolution in full and Dr. Ferebee’s speech to Planned Parenthood in its entirety, reflecting the importance of this work to their mission. McLeod Bethune and Ferebee had an expansive view of voluntary motherhood. Family planning, the resolution announces, “aims to aid each family to have all the children it can support and afford, but no more.”65 The italics make it plain: the National Council of Negro Women wasn’t recommending anything like sterilization or denying women the opportunity to birth children. They were supporting the right of poor women to have children in the first place. Their recommendation stopped short of complete reproductive self-determination, however—the firm “no more” raises as many questions as it answers. Yet overall, the resolution is a significant step away from a single-minded focus on preventing pregnancy and toward broader reproductive justice.

  Today, the reproductive justice movement launched by Loretta Ross and other Black feminist activists in 1994 fights on three fronts, rather than on the single axis of pregnancy prevention and termination. Its first principle stems from the pro-choice movement Sanger inaugurated: the right not to have children, via contraception, abortion, or abstinence. The second and third principles echo the approach Dr. Ferebee anticipated: the right to have children and the right to parent the children in safe and healthy environments, involving agendas that tackle white supremacy, economic inequality, sexual abuse, environmental racism, mass incarceration, queer and trans marginalization, and related structures of power.66 The movement fights structural inequalities that harm reproduction at all life stages.

  Sanger’s association with the pro-choice agenda thus presents us with an opportunity. Fully confronting Sanger’s white feminism enables us to move away from the reproductive choice movement, of which she is the founder and remains its leading hero, and toward the reproductive justice movement. The key takeaway from Sanger’s career for intersectional feminists today is not only her appalling insistence that children varied in their quality and thus value to the nation, but also her underlying political framework: that progress pivots on one axis. Sanger sought to liberate women and redress the nation’s social ills by improving the biological quality of the population, a eugenic vision that doubled down on hierarchies of class and ability and further dispossessed the marginalized. But there has always been an alternative: protecting the rights of all people to have children, or to not have children, and to have access to environments that enable all children to flourish.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  TAKING FEMINISM TO THE STREETS

  Pauli Murray and Betty Friedan

  If [middle-class white women] find housework degrading and dehumanizing, they are financially able to buy their freedom—usually by hiring a black maid. The economic and social realities of the black woman’s life are the most crucial for us. [Oppression] is not an intellectual persecution alone; the movement is not a psychological outburst for us; it is tangible; we can taste it in all our endeavors.

  —Frances M. Beal, “Black Women’s Manifesto”

  IN THE DAYS LEADING UP TO THE AUGUST 1963 MARCH ON WASHINGTON FOR JOBS AND FREEDOM, civil rights activist and attorney Pauli Murray was furious. Head organizer A. Philip Randolph, an old ally of hers, had announced he would be giving a publicity speech at the National Press Club. News was made, not only reported, at the Press Club’s speaking series; presidents launched policy proposals, and foreign leaders such as Nikita Khrushchev and Charles de Gaulle announced global initiatives from its podium. Yet the Press Club, the nation’s premier organization of journalists, still barred women from membership. Women reporters were granted admission to events as spectators, but only as spectators—they had to sit in the balcony and were forbidden from asking questions.

  The setup reminded Murray of a key moment in women’s movement history. Taking to one of her favorite forms of activism, what she called “confrontation by typewriter,” she fired off letters to Washington newspapers. “In 1840 William Lloyd Garrison and Charles Remond, the latter a Negro,” she wrote, “refused to be seated as delegates to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London” because women including Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were denied seats and relegated to “the balcony.” She called for Randolph to do the same. Legal segregation based on sex was akin to legal segregation based on race, Murray insisted. “It is as humiliating for a woman reporter assigned to cover Mr. Randolph’s
speech to be sent to the balcony as it would be for Mr. Randolph to be sent to the back of the bus.”1

  Murray’s intervention succeeded. The Press Club temporarily permitted women reporters to sit and speak among their male colleagues the day of Randolph’s event. The Press Club, however, didn’t change its policy to admit female journalists until 1971.2

  For months in advance of the march, Murray and two of her long-standing allies—Anna Arnold Hedgeman, the lone woman on the March on Washington planning committee, and National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) president Dorothy Height—had struggled against the sexism of the male coordinators. Randolph, march coordinator Bayard Rustin, and other male leaders prearranged the march’s front line to include only themselves, assigning Height, Rosa Parks, and other prominent women civil rights activists positions at their rear, alongside their wives. They permitted one female speaker, and only after consistent pressure from the trio. In the end, Randolph permitted Daisy Bates to speak for one minute and then grabbed her microphone away. The only sustained female voices heard at the March on Washington were those lifted up in song, most famously Mahalia Jackson’s. “Our time,” Rosa Parks whispered to Bates when she resumed her seat, “will someday come.”3