The Trouble with White Women

by Kyla Schuller

  The rejection singed with hypocrisy. Not only was the institution’s important work on racism reserved for white people, but Cornelia’s wealthy white aunt, who had also been Cornelia’s legal owner, had funded scholarships for UNC students in perpetuity. UNC was still benefiting from wealth generated by the enslavement of Murray’s own family. Murray’s private application quickly became a public matter, for the US Supreme Court took up a case regarding whites-only higher education at state universities just a week after her submission. In the resulting furor, North Carolina’s governor made the state’s position clear: “North Carolina does not believe in social equality between the races.”22

  Murray’s experience navigating the resulting media blitz encouraged her to pursue law school instead of sociology, as did her ongoing racial justice work that brought her repeatedly into contact with NAACP lawyers. By joining the legal field, she could attempt to alter the racist structures that so unevenly distributed the chances of life and death. But here she encountered further obstacles: to be chosen for flourishing, she learned, was also a matter of sex. On her very first day at Howard University’s School of Law, in the fall of 1941, one of her professors announced that he didn’t understand why women even pursued legal education. His insult, echoed in her classmates’ laughter, triggered her drive for personal success: “he had just guaranteed that I would become the top student in his class.”23 Her response, however, was not only to try and rise above. Socialism had taught her to ditch the elitist approach of becoming the exception. Instead, the belittling she experienced at the nation’s premier Black university, from the very people spearheading civil rights litigation, prompted her to identify a second, structural system of oppression in which she was caught: Jane Crow.

  Despite the misogyny she faced, Murray had the confidence to invent legal strategy while still a student. Jim Crow segregation was authorized by Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court case that established the precedent of “separate but equal” facilities for Black residents. In the 1940s, lawyers’ dominant strategy for challenging the effects of Plessy was exposing that segregated institutions were not in fact equal. Through this case-by-case approach, NAACP attorneys and allies demonstrated that the facilities Black people were forced to use were of vastly inferior quality, thereby violating the terms of the law. This approach resulted in incremental reforms. North Carolina, for example, had been forced to make some attempt at building graduate schools for Black students in the wake of Murray’s application.24 But Murray had a different idea.

  Segregation itself, she argued from her classroom seat, was designed to “humiliate and degrade.” The entire structure of Jim Crow, she insisted, was rotten; replacing moldering beams only reinforced the edifice. The new crop of civil rights attorneys Howard Law was producing, she announced, should challenge the legal merit of “separate” facilities in the first place by establishing that the core goal of segregation was to harm. They should incorporate psychological and sociological data demonstrating that Jim Crow eroded the self-worth and psychological health of Black people to make the case that segregation violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.25

  It was a wildly unorthodox opinion. Her peers broke into “hoots of derisive laughter.” Opposing the legality of Plessy, they argued, would end up backfiring and buttressing Jim Crow. But Murray was sure of herself and prepared a lengthy paper articulating her position. She made a $10 wager with Professor Spottswood Robinson: the Supreme Court would overturn the foundation of Plessy—that separate could ever be equal—within twenty-five years.26 And though nobody would bother to tell her for decades, Murray’s paper would play a role in that victory.

  Jane Crow repeatedly prevented her from realizing her own legal successes. When Murray did, in fact, graduate from Howard Law at the top of her class in 1944 despite being the only female student in the school, she desired to follow the customary path of Howard’s most successful graduates. That meant pursuing a master’s degree in law at Harvard. The institution’s response to her application, however, had a familiar ring: “you are not of the sex entitled to be admitted to Harvard Law School.”27

  Murray had run afoul of Jane Crow at Harvard, just as she had run afoul of Jim Crow at the University of North Carolina six years prior. Though women had been petitioning for admission since 1871, Harvard Law wouldn’t admit women until 1950. (Two decades later, Harvard College merged with its women’s college affiliate, Radcliffe, and admitted female undergraduates.) Murray had prominent supporters—she had begun a decades-long friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt during her Workers’ Education Project days and President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself interceded on her behalf—but many of her Howard peers responded with bemusement, poking fun at her for thinking Harvard would admit a woman.28 Jane Crow ran thick at Howard.

  For her part, Murray struck a whimsical tone closing one of her ultimately futile appeals to Harvard Law: “Humorously, gentlemen, I would gladly change my sex to meet your requirements but since the way to such change has not been revealed to me, I have no recourse but to appeal to you to change your minds on this subject. Are you to tell me that one is as difficult as the other?”29

  As is so often the case with humor, Murray’s joke flirted with a deeper truth. Murray had not been sitting idly by waiting for the path to sex change to be “revealed.” For the prior decade, and for a decade to come, Murray fought her doctors for access to testosterone. Her life in Harlem, then the site of a queer renaissance that included rollicking drag balls and sex-crossing stars like Bruce Nugent and Gladys Bentley, no doubt informed her quest for hormones. In 1939, she and McBean wrote the editor of a major Black newspaper thanking him for a front-page article about hormone therapy for effeminate men, praising the paper for highlighting the needs of this “minority of minorities.” Of slight, boyish build, Murray kept her hair closely cropped and rejected blouses and skirts for collared shirts and slacks. Aunt Pauline affectionately referred to her as a “boy-girl”; Pauli labeled one of her most fetching, androgynous photographs “the imp” and occasionally signed letters as “Peter Panic.” She had passionate affairs with “extremely feminine and heterosexual women,” such as Peg Holmes, her girlfriend of five years with whom she hopped trains across the country in 1935, and she didn’t identify with homosexuality. She “prefer[ed] experimentation on the male side,” she informed a doctor at the Long Island Rest Home.30

  Murray’s letters and journals, particularly those during hospitalizations for mental and emotional breakdowns following breakups with girlfriends in the 1930s and 1940s, reflect her quest to understand her maleness, which she presented as “wearing pants, wanting to be one of the men, doing things that fellows do, hating to be dominated by women unless I like them.” Her research into the new science of hormones led her to suspect a glands problem, and she convinced her doctors to search for undescended testicles or other signs that she was a “pseudo-hermaphrodite.”31 The results, which declared her anatomy and endocrinology to be sex-normative for women, disappointed her. For decades, her biographers detail, she pursued medical and scientific explanations for and treatment to enhance her strong identification with maleness. For this reason, scholars today consider Murray’s life to be an important chapter in transgender history. (Following them, I use the female pronoun for Murray since that is how she referred to herself throughout her life.)

  Murray’s own quest for respectability, and possibly her inability to completely shake off her family’s insistence that progress was to be earned through the “best of the race” leading the way, drove her to erase any traces of gender and sexual non-normativity in her public writing.32 Her uneasy relationship to femaleness casts her own commitment to exposing and dismantling Jane Crow in a new light. She was devoted to ending sex and race discrimination, but not because she herself consistently identified as a woman. Murray’s call was for structural justice, even when some personal truths seemed too vulnerable to expose.

  In t
he end, Pauli Murray went to UC Berkeley to earn a master’s in law, showing up on campus just a few months after Betty Friedan had left for the East.

  Beginning in the late 1950s, Betty Friedan developed a diagnosis of her own, identifying the problem she extrapolated from the Smith College alumnae surveys. Women were suffering from the feminine mystique, she proposed, or the harmful fantasy that they would flourish only through sacrificing themselves to the needs of their husbands and children. Her 1963 blockbuster The Feminine Mystique—which sold three million copies in three years33—argued that popular culture, social science, and corporate advertising systematically devalued women’s capacities to the point that housewives were suffering from an identity crisis so acute it was making them ill.i

  Women, Betty Friedan insisted, are “sick,” and they’re sick from the drudgery of performing housework day in, day out. The housewife’s lifestyle, she wrote, is “quite simply, genocide,” for menial labor slowly poisons her organic right to grow and prosper—as if it were regular doses of anthrax, rather than vacuuming powder, that she sprinkles wall to wall. In other words, middle-class women, who Friedan felt deserved full membership among those chosen to thrive, were unfairly cast into the realm of premature death. Like any good doctor, Friedan dispensed her diagnosis along with a cure. Women, she prescribed, must be liberated from the endless stream of cooking, cleaning, and childcare so that they may assume careers that enable their “full realization of human potential” for abstract, creative thought. Side pursuits in politics and the arts did not count: only specialization did. “The amateur” or “dilettante,” Friedan insisted, “does not gain real status by [their work] in society, or real personal identity.” Professionals alone succeeded in securing respect and self-realization via the marketplace.34

  As Black feminist theorist bell hooks pointed out back in 1984, Friedan’s diagnosis of the feminine mystique misidentified the psychological condition of the educated white housewife as the universal condition of all women. One-third of all women were working for wages in the early 1960s, including most women of color, and they faced far more substantial inequities than being bored at home. This aspect of her critique is now well-known. But hooks didn’t only expose the women whose existence Friedan forgot. She also revealed the women whose growth Friedan foreclosed. “White feminists” like Friedan, bell hooks argued, were not trying to redistribute wealth and power, despite their big talk. Rather, they “were primarily concerned with gaining entrance into the capitalist patriarchal power structure” themselves. The fundamental problem with Friedan’s account of “the problem with no name” is not that she ignores all women except for the housewife. The problem is that she implicitly sacrifices all other women to the housewife’s aspirations. hooks illuminated that working-class women and others who make up “the silent majority” not only fall out of Friedan’s frame; they are pinned beneath it.35

  Friedan recommends that the middle-class woman free herself from mere “biological living” and unlock her capacity to flourish. But this necessarily relies on outsourcing the incessant grind of sustaining life to the working class. What liberates middle-class women to become professionals is the essential labor blue-collar women provide. To free up time to pursue a career, Friedan praises the tactics of hiring “a three-day-a-week cleaning woman,” ordering groceries via phone rather than shopping in person, and “sending the laundry out,” along with asking husbands and children for “help.” The advice is cursory, almost an afterthought in the final chapter—her focus was to free middle-class women from the trap of housework, not on those who would clean up in their place.

  Friedan, in other words, advocated a form of biopolitics. She framed the chronic undervaluation of housewives as a biological threat to the vitality of the population. In Friedan’s rendering, the feminine mystique was eroding the nation from within. The incapacitation of the housewife “is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease,” she maintained. Women were sucked of their vitality; they were “walking through their leftover lives like living dead women.” Weakened housewives, whom society depleted instead of enhanced, were producing “pathological” children—Friedan attributed the rising incidence of autism to mothers whose own arrested development resulted in immature children who lived only in a world of things and animals, walled off from human emotion. (The accepted etiology of autism at the time was “refrigerator mothers” who withheld affection from their infants, so Friedan was following established science in turning to mothers’ conditioning, rather than physiology, for a cause.) She also attributed “the homosexuality that is spreading like a murky smog over the American scene” to housewives who must live vicariously through their children, resulting in “parasitical” attachments that prevent sons from maturing into heterosexual relationships. Housewives, she argued, were suffering from a “progressive dehumanization” so extreme that the split-level suburban home was akin to a “comfortable concentration camp” (an analogy she later regretted, and rightly so).36

  But, she concluded, if middle-class women were freed of menial labor so that they could find self-fulfillment, society may reach “the next step in human evolution.”37 Like Sanger’s, Friedan’s goal was not merely women’s freedom to choose the labor of social reproduction: it was also to improve the “quality” of women and the nation in a biological and social sense. This goal meant sacrificing the working class to domestic labor in order to cultivate the psychological and physical health of wealthier women.

  In Friedan’s book tour and many media appearances—she claimed to be one of the first authors to use the power of television to drive book sales—she would cast herself as a housewife wrapped in the feminine mystique like chiffon for a cocktail party. She elided the fact that she had been a working woman. Indeed, for six years after she departed Berkeley, Friedan had been a labor journalist covering strikes for the country’s most left-leaning union newspapers—until she was fired for being pregnant. Her articles often highlighted the specific struggles of Black working-class women. She had even attempted to join the Communist Party in 1943, showing up to the New York office in pearls and pumps.38 Her move from solidarity with the working class to sacrificing the poor to domestic labor in order to liberate the middle-class woman may seem jarring. Partly, the shift can be attributed to the increasing conservativism of the McCarthy era. But another reason lies in the structure of white feminist biopolitics, which she embraced to great mainstream success.

  Friedan and other middle-class white feminists identify sex as the only thing holding them back from flourishing. Friedan saw “women as a class” unto themselves, uniquely marginalized in relation to middle-class white men. “My early political experience writing for the so-called working class,” she contended, “had taught me that ideas, styles, change in America comes from the middle class.”39 The possibility of interrogating other vectors of power dropped away, and middle-class women became, in the tradition of white feminists before her, a single axis, a discrete half of an analogy, a population to be defended.

  But Pauli Murray knew that Black women lived their lives at the confluence of Jim Crow, Jane Crow, and capitalism, and that if civil rights were to mean anything, protections from race and sex discrimination in employment and other arenas were necessary. In the mid-1950s, for example, Murray held two law degrees, and she had published an important book on state segregation laws that attorney and future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall referred to as the “Bible.”40 She even occasionally spent weekends at her friend Eleanor Roosevelt’s Hudson River retreat. On the strength of her creative writing, she had just become the first African American to be awarded a residency at the MacDowell Colony, where she befriended James Baldwin when he arrived at the famed artist retreat a few weeks later. Murray would publish her first autobiography, an account of her family’s history, in 1956. Yet despite all this achievement, she simply couldn’t find enough organizations willing to hire a Black female at
torney, nor could she support herself as a writer and poet. She wasn’t earning a living, so her literary agent found her work as a typist. Murray anonymously prepared the manuscripts of other authors.

  In 1955 and 1956, Murray regularly typed for Betty Friedan.41

  Murray worried that her legal education and her careful demonstration of how the structure of Jim Crow could be demolished rather than dismantled piecemeal had been “wasted effort.”42 After all, it was the typist skills she learned in her segregated high school that were paying the rent and purchasing her food. Murray wouldn’t learn that her reasoning had in fact played a role in striking down segregation law until a decade after the fact. She had received a break in 1956 when attorney Lloyd Garrison, the great-grandson of the nineteenth-century abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison with whom Frances E. W. Harper, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass had worked closely, offered her a position at his New York firm. The job relaunched her legal career.

  Buoyed in part by this change in fortune, Murray dropped by Howard Law School in 1963. She wished to track down a copy of her two-decade-old paper. And, she hoped to collect the $10 her former professor Spottswood Robinson owed her for having lost her bet that Plessy’s precedent of separate but equal institutions would fall within twenty-five years.

  Pauli Murray in Petersborough, New Hampshire, 1955. “It’s my most natural self, I think,” Murray wrote on the back of the photograph before sending it to Eleanor Roosevelt. Photograph by Florence Goldman. (Courtesy of MacDowell Colony)