The Trouble with White Women

by Kyla Schuller

  The day after the march, Dorothy Height gathered a group of leaders from the eight-hundred-thousand-member NCNW at the organization’s headquarters, which was then located on the first floor of Mary McLeod Bethune’s private residence. There they would plot the next steps of the women’s branch of the civil rights movement. NCNW was the largest Black women’s club in the country, now largely dedicated to structural reforms. Height wanted to expand the purview of their organizing beyond racial discrimination lawsuits, and the others agreed. But as they brainstormed advocating for changes that would further transform the daily life of Black women and children, such as employment, housing, education, and childcare reforms, another, equally urgent agenda took over. Between policy priorities, emotion slipped in, mounted, and roiled. Together, they began confronting their anger at the entrenched patriarchy within the civil rights leadership, realizing that their individual experiences accumulated into a pattern of “second class” treatment.4 The revelatory conversation spilled over into a later gathering at the Shoreham Hotel.

  “We began to realize,” Height later explained, “that if we did not… demand our rights, we were not going to get them [and we] became much more aware and much more aggressive in facing up to sexism” where they encountered it. “That moment,” she recalled, of together naming the effects of the March on Washington’s deliberate and exclusive focus on Black men “was vital to awakening the women’s movement.” Height’s meeting could qualify as the first feminist consciousness-raising session of the 1960s, though that title is typically conferred upon the New York Radical Women, a largely white, middle-class group who initiated weekly sessions later that decade. Historian Carol Giardina argues that the feminist movement, much quieter since World War II had temporarily sent white women in large numbers into the workforce, was rekindled that day. Black women’s time had not come—they were seizing it for themselves.5

  Three months later, and just one week before President Kennedy’s assassination, Pauli Murray addressed a crowd at the 1963 NCNW leadership conference in New York City. Women, she charged, were still simmering with frustration at their “secondary, ornamental” treatment during the march and must gather their forces to oppose the rampant sexism flourishing within the movement. Black women “can no longer postpone or subordinate the fight against discrimination because of sex to the civil rights struggle but must carry on both fights simultaneously,” Murray entreated. The dual effort she outlined entailed resisting civil rights movement efforts to focus only on training and employment reforms for men, as well as forging an “alliance” with white women to fight the astounding legal and social prohibitions women faced in the 1960s United States. Dorothy Height recalls with admiration that Murray “lifted the situation to the context of equality,” transforming private pain into a political issue.6

  Among the activists incensed by the misogyny of the male March on Washington leadership, none were as prepared to fight institutionalized sexism as Pauli Murray. One of the leading legal minds of the twentieth century, Murray brought Black women activists a political framework for understanding their experience: they were pinned to “the bottom of the economic and social scale” by the dual forces of “white supremacy” and “male supremacy.” Sexism wasn’t the result of individual male chauvinism, Murray argued. Rather, it was a structural phenomenon akin to racism that relegated women to legally, socially, and culturally inferior positions. She approached sexism and racism as analogous forces that converged and compounded in the lives of Black women—and in the process made a major contribution to the development of intersectional feminist theory.7 In her extensive publications, Murray reframed sexism as a caste system sequestering power and capital in the hands of men, and she gave it a memorable name: Jane Crow.

  Yet as feminist activism filled living rooms with meetings and boulevards with protestors over the next fifteen years, most journalists—and historians in their wake—saw an altogether different catalyst to the revival of the feminist movement. They agree that 1963 was the year that reignited women’s liberation. But their dominant narrative thrusts the lit match into the hands of one woman alone: Betty Friedan. Friedan’s explosive 1963 book The Feminine Mystique revealed the misery of the middle-class housewife, and her message spread like wildfire, making her name synonymous with the cause of women’s rights. She soon thereafter cofounded the National Organization of Women (NOW), along with Pauli Murray and others, to bring feminism into the streets. Friedan liked to claim that she was a singular “Joan of Arc leading women out of the wilderness.” Yet she was following in the footsteps of her Black feminist predecessors.8 Her refusal to acknowledge that debt would appropriate Black feminist political skill, especially Murray’s. Today, framing Friedan’s revolt of the housewives as the impetus of 1960s women’s liberation not only whitens movement history—it also hampers feminist understandings of the nature of sexism itself.

  In the summer of 1944, Betty Friedan (then Betty Goldstein) turned down UC Berkeley’s most prestigious PhD fellowship and headed back east to become a journalist. Friedan had loved her undergraduate days at Smith College, where she shed the loneliness that had haunted her in Peoria, Illinois, and discovered a calling as an intellectual-activist and student leader. Back home, she had been excluded from the sororities that organized high school social life—they didn’t admit Jews. At Smith, however, she made friends, publicly embraced her Jewish identity, wrote editorials opposing fascism, and discovered that new psychological theories attempting to grasp the complexity of the human mind in total made her “feel like some kind of mental mountain goat, leaping from peak to peak.” Later in life, Friedan speculated with no small humility, “I probably would have loved law school, might have ended up a judge myself.… But it never occurred to me to want to be a lawyer, because Harvard Law didn’t even take applications from women.”9

  But Friedan was fantastic at psychology. After a year working on a master’s degree under leading developmental psychologist Erik Erikson at UC Berkeley she won the institution’s most significant fellowship for scientists, becoming the first woman and the first student from the psychology department to do so. Her boyfriend, a communist physicist working on Robert Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb project, fumed. “It’s over between us,” he announced as they walked through the redwoods that blanket the hills above the lab. “I’m never going to win a fellowship like that.” Friedan’s fear of continued romantic rejection likely combined with her own suspicion that academic life—if she could ever find a post, given that many universities banned Jewish professors from their faculties—was too far removed from the radical politics that electrified her.10 Persistent asthma attacks, and the rashes that broke out over her body, further made it clear. Her body would not tolerate a solitary life of the mind.

  Friedan would end up using her training in psychology to remarkable effect. Her marriage to the Left theater director Carl Friedan in 1947 found her performing the housewife role while also frequently drawing paychecks larger than her husband’s from the women’s magazine journalism she continued on the side. In preparation for an alumnae reunion in 1957, Smith College asked her to conduct a survey of her two hundred fellow graduates and write about the remarkable lives Smith women were living fifteen years later.11 But, according to the narrative Friedan would repeat for years, what she found surprised her. Many of the peers with whom she had experienced her intellectual awakening were ignoring their training and sinking themselves into the unfulfilling role of Cold War housewives. And though they were miserable, they were suffering in silence, convinced their unhappiness was due to personally failing to live out the promise of the aprons-and-pearls lifestyle.

  Friedan spent the next five years researching and writing about “the problem that has no name,” or women’s widespread yet unspoken misery on being denied access to the professions.12 Her work exposing the condition of American women—by which she meant, specifically, housewives—was soon declared by her and mainstream media to be synonymous with
feminism itself.

  Pauli Murray was one of the twentieth century’s most perceptive observers of the way racism and sexism shape the texture of everyday life, creating vast structures that penetrate deep into the individual psyche. Their cumulative effect not only prevents equality and justice—it also poses a fatal threat. Racism, she wrote about her youth in the Jim Crow South, was not often experienced as acute trauma. Rather, it was “the pervasive irritant, the chronic allergy, the vague apprehension which made one uncomfortable and jumpy,” requiring constant vigilance. At times though, particularly when personal pressures mounted and stress tolerance dwindled, racism uncoiled and struck, materializing like “the fatal accident,” “the blind railroad crossing,” “the sharp curve rising suddenly in the darkness.”13

  One such moment for Murray transpired at age eight, in 1919. She and the aunt who raised her were visiting family in Baltimore when they received a late afternoon telegram from home announcing her grandfather’s impending death. Rushing to the evening train as a thunderstorm soaked the streets, Aunt Pauline slipped and smashed her glasses. Her cheeks bled and her eyes swelled. In Norfolk, North Carolina, Aunt Pauline left young Pauline at the station’s doors with their luggage while she went inside to inquire about their connecting train to Durham. She returned to find her niece frozen in place. Pauli was a specimen pinned in the middle of a circle of white men looming over her, their faces flushing red with anger. One man pursued them into the cinder-strewn, coal-smeared Jim Crow car, where long after his departure the pair remained too terrified to sleep. Their infraction? Aunt Pauline had been unable to read the “Whites Only” sign in the waiting room.14

  Another occurred that fall, after her grandfather’s death. Disoriented by grief, Murray’s widowed grandmother Cornelia flashed back to the last time she had kept house without her husband, in her twenties. Then, she had regularly awoken to the sound of pounding hooves as KKK night riders encircled her cabin, flaming torches in hand. Now, every evening Cornelia would barricade herself and young Pauline in her upstairs bedroom by piling furniture and clothing floor to ceiling in front of the door and windows; once secure, she would roast potatoes and boil greens and salt pork at the fireplace that Pauline would be too scared to eat. Cornelia’s own childhood had been marked by terror—she was born enslaved to a woman who was regularly raped by her enslaver, a prominent white lawyer. Slavery’s long shadow stretched well into the twentieth century, clouding Murray’s young life in the dawn of the 1920s.15

  Chronic burdens erupt into fatal crises. Murray’s father was institutionalized in a segregated, negligent mental hospital where twice as many patients left in body bags as were discharged. When Murray was still a child, a temporary guard beat her father to death. Racism, writes the contemporary prison abolitionist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, is not individual antipathy or hatred of people of color. Its greatest impact is not misjudging people by the color of their skin. Rather, it is a structure that generates continual proximity to the fatal; it is the “production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”16

  The idea that racism materializes as vulnerability to early death can be put in productive conversation with the theory of biopolitics, which was initially proposed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. Biopolitics refers to the modern system of governing that treats the central duty of society to be optimizing the population, particularly in a biological and economic sense. Eugenics, whether of the conservative, white feminist strategy or the Black professional variety, is a key tool of biopolitics, for it emblematizes the strategy of approaching politics as a matter of improving the alleged quality of the population. In biopolitics, mechanisms of state, capital, and culture mark some people, especially the white wealthy and middle classes, as the members of the nation who matter and who must be enabled to thrive. Resources like capital, education, and health initiatives flow to this chosen group on the belief that their flourishing will secure the success of the population. The same mechanisms simultaneously designate other people, especially people of color, the impoverished, and the disabled, as contagions best left to die once their labor has been extracted. In sociologist Ruha Benjamin’s terms, Black people in particular are “underserved” in order to “overserve” the chosen.17

  The result is the uneven distribution of life and death: morbidity and mortality cluster among the racialized poor and/or disabled, in order that the rich, abled, and white may prosper. The impact of decades of biopolitical policies and practices can be seen most clearly in the drastically different life spans within urban populations in the United States today. Currently, in cities like Chicago and Washington, DC, people who live in the poorest zip codes die thirty years earlier on average than their neighbors in the wealthiest, whitest zip codes.18

  Sexism, too, is a tool of biopolitics. Traditionally, institutions have designated white men to be the most deserving of flourishing due to their allegedly superior intelligence and economic productivity. White women are simultaneously relegated to a supporting role among the chosen. They are tasked with providing a charitable veneer to a system that is designed to let the racialized, poor, and disabled die, thereby smoothing out the contradictions of such a brutal structure of power. Through their presumed moral authority, emotional sympathy, and civilizing projects, they seemingly sanctify the whole structure. Women of color, by contrast, are cast as reproducers: dangerous breeders of the “unfit” who, at best, can be corralled into serving the families of the “fit.”

  White feminism works within biopolitics, rather than against it, to carve out a prominent place for middle-class women within these fatal dynamics. In the nineteenth century, white feminists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Alice Fletcher seized their assigned role as civilization’s stabilizers to expand their own authority, insisting upon respect and status on account of the crucial work they provided to the structure of society. In the twentieth, white feminists developed a bolder agenda, claiming that white women belonged as full equals—not only as civilizing helpmeets—among the part of the population that must be cultivated. Their own growth, they insisted in increasingly biological language, would maximize their own potential and the “quality” of children, thereby improving the nation as a whole. One of their tactics, as was true of biopolitical governance in the twentieth century more generally, was to cleanse the population of people who seemingly threatened their success. This was most visible in eugenic feminisms like Margaret Sanger’s (and writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s), but it was a consistent, if less apparent, feature of white feminism throughout the century. As president of NOW, Betty Friedan would undertake a cleansing project of her own.

  While white feminists seek to more firmly establish their place among those who deserve to thrive, intersectional feminists, by contrast, typically set out to eradicate the underlying logic that a society’s advancement requires sacrificing the many. Murray exemplifies this tradition. As an adult, Murray, who had adopted the more androgynous name Pauli in her early twenties, didn’t want only to personally escape segregation.19 She determined to defang the snake of Jim Crow, weakening a lethal threat to Black lives. She had direct experience with the effects of the systematic devaluation of Black life, including inferior educational opportunities and wages so low she suffered from chronic malnutrition due to regularly not being able to afford to eat. After cramming two years’ worth of college-preparatory classes into one year to meet entrance requirements her segregated high school in Durham hadn’t fulfilled, and despite extensive breaks to work Depression-era diner shifts in Manhattan that didn’t pay enough for her to eat regularly, nor would they provide meals to Black staff, Murray held a valuable degree from Hunter College.

  Her diploma from what was known as the “poor girl’s Radcliffe,” combined with her pride in her descent from prominent white and Black southern families, gave her what she called a drive for “excellence.” But a New Deal job with the Workers’ Education Project r
adicalized her, as did her affiliation with socialist organizations. She saw the violence and poverty capitalism created and began to comprehend that “a system of oppression draws much of its strength from the acquiescence of its victims”—a conditioning she had heretofore accepted. Rights, Murray realized, should not come about by exceptional members of the race like her “proving” their worth. The goal should not be fighting your way to the top, becoming part of the population whose lives matter. Instead, rights should be won by a broad movement insisting that equal treatment was a birthright. Since racism was a systemic phenomenon, individually breaking through its barriers had little effect—it was structures of power that needed demolishing. “It is difficult to understand how revolutionary [this idea] seemed in the 1930s,” Murray reflected near the end of her life. “For a Negro to act on this conviction was considered almost suicidal in many parts of the South.”20

  Murray nonetheless attempted to splinter the all-pervasive structure of racism. In 1940, she innovated brand-new direct action techniques that would propel the civil rights movement forward fifteen years later: refusing to sit in the back of the bus and occupying lunch counters that wouldn’t serve Black patrons. Her bus actions landed her and her girlfriend Adelene “Mac” McBean in jail; she also cofounded the Congress for Racial Equality with Bayard Rustin and others to engage in civil disobedience. Further pulled both by the desire to chip away at the edifice of Jim Crow and by fealty to Aunt Pauline, who was nearing seventy and needed support, she decided to return south. In the fall of 1938 Murray filed for graduate admission at the University of North Carolina, hoping to pursue a graduate degree with their race relations experts. UNC, as she knew, was a segregated institution, and she wished to initiate a change in their policy. But they denied her application to the Department of Sociology: “members of your race are not admitted to the University.”21