anarcha library?

anarchalibrary:

…“American women of wealth, education, virtue and refinement, if you do not wish the lower orders of Chinese, Africans, Germans and Irish, with their low ideas of womanhood, to make laws for you and your daughters … awake to the danger of your present position and demand that woman, too, shall be represented in the government!”

-Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“What words can express her [the white woman’s] humiliation when, at the close of this long conflict, the government which she had served so faithfully held her unworthy of a voice in its councils, while it recognized as the political superiors of all the noble women of the nation the negro men just emerged from slavery, and not only totally illiterate, but also densely ignorant of every public question.”

-Susan B. Anthony

Um. Yeah. That’s real.

I’m seeing a lot of women’s suffrage imagery being posted today, so I thought i’d post some quotes from a book i recently read, “White Women’s Rights” (pdf online for free!), which addresses the racism of that movement.  The book was really interesting and highlights some important points about this era.  For example, i was previously mistaken that white abolitionist feminists were anti-racists when in fact they still held on to ideas about their own superiority, and this sort of white-savior complex.  Additionally, prior to Black suffrage, white abolitionist feminists sometimes claimed that their plight was the same as Black men’s plight. 

The majority of the following quotes are post-14th amendment:

In the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, white suffragists used theories of evolution to support a new rationale for their own enfranchisement, one that depended on redefining what it meant to be a white female citizen. The new definitions made use of older beliefs in white women’s moral superiority but also drew on a growing conviction that white women’s special racial qualities were needed to counteract the influence of the immigrant and African American men who had just been enfranchised.

…the maintenance of their specific forms of moral virtue—purity, piety, empathy, and spirituality—depended on their staying outside
existing political institutions and structures. White women were expected to remain in the domestic sphere and to exert their moral influence from within the home through their roles as wives and mothers.

…White women began to assert themselves as the rightful, natural protectors of uncivilized races (the protectors of black men, not the other way around) and used this racialized responsibility to assert their rights as white (“Saxon” ) female citizens.

…theories of evolution linked civilization and sexual difference in
such a way that calling for change in woman’s sphere seemed to threaten the advancement of whites’ civilization. The problem facing postbellum white suffragists, then, was how to argue that the franchise would alter woman’s sphere but not diminish whites’ sexual differences or endanger their civilization. To address this problem,
some white suffragists reaffirmed a pre-evolutionist view of woman’s nature, insisting on the principle of the stability of sexual differences against the tenet of change in evolutionist theory, to justify the idea that woman’s sphere could be modified without producing corresponding changes in woman’s nature. Suffragist Margaret Evans explained, “Experience proves that true womanly qualities are too firmly founded on immutable laws to be shaken by the fall of a ballot.” Other suffragists, however, accepted evolutionary predictions that woman’s nature would evolve in response to changes in woman’s sphere and were careful to defend their proposals on the grounds that it would be evolutionarily advantageous for white women to vote.

This book also discusses the ways in which the white women of this so-called first wave of feminism reinforced ideas about sexual difference to make their arguments.

White middle-class women did not hesitate to use this conception of their race-, class-, and gender-specific forms of moral superiority to buttress their claims to political and social authority, particularly in calling for reform of business, law, education, medicine, and politics. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the intellectual powerhouse behind the suffrage movement, held firmly to moral distinctions and discussed them in gendered and racialized terms. In 1869 she referred to the “male element [as] a destructive force, stern, selfish, aggrandizing, loving war, violence, conquest, acquisition, breeding in the material and moral world alike discord, disorder, disease and death” and pointed out that “philosophy and science alike point to [white] woman, as the new power destined to redeem the world.” In 1890 she stated, “Our civilization today is strictly masculine, everything is carried by force and violence and war, and will be until the feminine
element is fully recognized, and has equal power in the regulation of human affairs. Then we shall substitute co-operation for competition, persuasion for coercion, individual sovereignty for absolute authority.”

…As they moved toward advocating that women could potentially become more like men, white women knew they were threatening the hierarchy of sexual difference on which white civilization was based. Thus they had to find ways to reassure themselves that increasing the similarity of activities performed by themselves and (white) men would not bring about racial degeneration or undermine their own racialized conceptions of themselves as belonging to a superior race and civilization.

The book also addresses the early feminist movement in relation to white women’s role in civilizing Native Americans, and then in further colonization efforts outside of the U.S./England.  There are some more quotes here if you can’t take the time to read the whole book.

It is important to avoid romanticizing the women’s suffrage movement and consider the complexity of the issue.  I’m not seeing anything discussing or depicting the violence that was part of this movement- no, that doesn’t fit in with the image of that movement. 

I resist the temptation to provide an Emma Goldman quote on suffrage, however, knowing that there is the possibility that she was also complicit in racism, specifically eugenics.  Nonetheless, let’s just imagine what could’ve happened if people previously excluded from participation resisted inclusion in the system as a solution.

Reposting.