by bell hooks
... Too long have we been silent under unjust and unholy charges.... Year after year southern women have protested against the admission of colored women into any national organization on the ground of the immorality of these women, and because all refutation has only been tried by individual work, the charge had never been crushed, as it could and
should have been at first____It is to break this silence, not by
noisy protestation of what we are not, but by a dignified showing of what we are and hope to become, that we are impelled to take this step, to make of this gathering an object lesson to the world.
The racism white females felt toward black women was as apparent in the work arena as it was in the women’s rights movement and in the women’s club movement. During the years between 1880 and World War I, white women’s rights activists focused their attention on obtaining for women the right to work in various occupations. They saw work for pay as the way for women like themselves to escape economic dependence on white men. Robert Smut, author of Women and Work in America (a work that would be more accurtely titled White Women and Work in America), writes:
If a woman could support herself in honor, she could refuse to marry or stay married, except on her own terms. Thus, work was seen by many feminists as an actual or potential alternative to marriage, and consequently, as an instrument for reforming the marriage relationship.
The efforts of white women activists to expand employment opportunities for women were focused exclusively on improving the lot of white women workers, who did not identify with black women workers. In fact, the black woman worker was seen as a threat to white female security; she represented more competition. Relationships between white and black women workers were characterized by conflict. That conflict became more intense when black women tried to enter the industrial labor force and were forced to confront racism. In 1919, a study of black women in industry in New York City was published called A New Day for the Colored Woman Worker. The study began by stating:
For generations Colored women have been working in the fields of the south. They have been the domestic servants of both the south and the north, accepting the position of personal service open to them. Hard work and unpleasant work has been their lot, but they have been almost entirely excluded from our shops and factories. Tradition and race prejudice have played the largest part in their exclusion. The tardy development of the south, and the failure of the Colored women to demand industrial opportunities have added further barriers.... For these reasons, the Colored women have not entered the ranks of the industrial army in the past.
That they are doing so today cannot be disputed. War expediency, for a time at least, partially opened the door of industry to them. Factories which had lost men to the war and White women to the war industries, took on Colored women in their places. The demand for more skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled labor had to be met. The existing immigrant labor supply had already been tapped and the flow of immigration stopped, and semi-skilled White workers were being forced up into the really skilled positions by the labor shortage. Cheap labor had to be recruited from somewhere. For the first time employment bureaus and advertisements inserted the word “Colored” before the word “wanted.” Colored women, untried as yet,
were available in large numbers.
Black female workers who entered the industrial labor force worked in commercial laundries, food industries, and the less skilled branches of the needle trades, like the lamp shade industry which depended heavily on the labor of black women. Hostility between black and white female workers was the norm. White women did not want to compete with black women for jobs nor did they want to work alongside black women. To prevent white employers from hiring black females, white female workers threatened to cease work. Often white women workers would use complaints about black women workers as a way of discouraging an employer from hiring them.
White women employed by the federal government insisted that they be segregated from black women. In many work situations separate work rooms, washrooms, and showers were installed so that white women would not have to work or wash alongside black women. The same argument white women club members used to explain their exclusion of black women was presented by white women workers, who claimed black women were immoral, licentious, and insolent. They further argued that they needed the protection of segregation so that they would not catch “Negro” diseases. Some white women claimed to have seen black women with vaginal diseases. In one instance a white woman working in the office of the Recorder of Deeds, Maud B. Woodward, swore out an affidavit asserting:
That the same toilet is used by whites and blacks, and some of said blacks have been diseased evidence thereof being very apparent; that one negro woman Alexander has been for years afflicted with a private disease, and for dread of using the toilet after her some of the white girls are compelled to suffer mentally and physically.
Competition between black and white women workers for jobs was usually decided in favor of white women. Often black women were forced to accept jobs that were considered too arduous or taxing for white women. In candy factories black women not only wrapped and packed candy, they worked as
bakers and in this capacity were constantly lifting heavy trays from table to machine and from machine to table. They were doing “loosening” in tobacco factories, a process formerly done solely by men. Investigators for the New York City Study reported:
Colored women were found on processes that White women refuse to perform. They were replacing boys at cleaning window shades, work which necessitates constant standing and reaching. They were taking men’s places in the dyeing of furs, highly objectionable and injurious work involving standing, reaching, the use of a weighted brush, and ill smelling dye. In a mattress factory they were found replacing men at “baling,” working in pairs, wrapping five mattresses together and sewing them up ready for shipment. These women had to bend constantly and lift clumsy 160 pound bales.
In racially segregated work situations black women workers were usually paid a lower wage then white women workers. As there was little if any association between the two groups, black women did not always know of the disparity between their salaries and those of white women. Workers for the New York City study found that most employers refused to pay black women workers as much as white women for doing the same job.
Throughout the trades, differences in the wages of the Colored and White were unmistakable. While every other Colored woman was receiving less than $10.00 a week, of the White workers only one out of every six was so poorly paid.... A great many employers justified the payment of better wages to White women on the grounds of their greater speed. Foremen in the millinery factories, however, admitted that they paid the Colored workers less, even though they were more satisfactory than the White..
This wage discrimination seems to have taken three forms. Employers have sometimes segregated the Colored workers, keeping the wage scale of the Colored departments lower than that of similar departments made up of White workers.. A second method has been to deny the Colored the opportunity of competing in piece work, as in the case of the Colored pressers in the needle trades who were paid $10.00 a week on a time rate basis, while the
White pressers averaged $12.00 a week at piece work. The third form of discrimination has been the frank refusal of employers to pay a Colored woman as much as a White woman for a week’s work.
As a group, white women workers wanted to maintain the racial hierarchy that granted them higher status in the labor force than black women. Those white women who supported employment of black women in unskilled trades felt they should be denied access to skilled process. Their active support of institutionalized racism caused constant hostility between them and black women workers. To avoid uprisings, many plants chose to hire either one race or the other. In plants where both groups were present, the conditions under which black women worked were much worse than those of white female workers. The refusal of white women to share d
ressing rooms, bathrooms, or lounge areas with black women often meant that black women were denied access to these comforts. In general black women workers were continually abused because of the racist attitudes of white women workers, and of the white working public as a whole. Researchers for the New York City study summed up their findings by making a plea that more consideration be given the black woman worker in industry:
It has been apparent throughout this discussion that the coming of the Colored woman into our industries is not without its problems. She is doing work which the White woman is refusing to do, and at a wage which the White woman is refusing the accept. She replaced White women and men and Colored men at a lower wage and is performing tasks which may easily prove to be detrimental to her health. She is making no more mistakes than are common to a new and inexperienced industrial worker, yet she has the greatest of all handicaps to overcome.
What is the status of the Colored woman in industry with the coming of peace? At the time of greatest need for production and the greatest labor shortage in the history of this country Colored women were the last to be employed: they were not called into industry until there was no other available labor supply. They did the most uninteresting work, the most menial work and by far the most underpaid work..,.
The American people will have to go very far in its treatment of the Colored industrial woman to square itself with that democratic ideal of which it made so much during the war.
Relationships between white and black women were charged by tensions and conflicts in the early part of the 20th century. The women’s rights movement had not drawn black and white women close together. Instead, it exposed the fact that white women were not willing to relinquish their support of white supremacy to support the interests of all women. Racism in the women’s rights movement and in the work arena was a constant reminder to black women of the distances that separated the two experiences, distances that white women did not want bridged. When the contemporary movement toward feminism began, white women organizers did not address the issue of conflict between black and white women. Their rhetoric of sisterhood and solidarity suggested that women in America were able to bond across both class and race boundaries—but no such coming together had actually occurred. The structure of the contemporary women’s movement was no different from that of the earlier women’s rights movement. Like their predecessors, the white women who initiated the women’s movement launched their efforts in the wake of the 60s black liberation movement. As if history were repeating itself, they also began to make synonymous their social status and the social status of black people. And it was in the context of endless comparisons of the plight of “women” and “blacks” that they revealed their racism. In most cases, this racism was an unconscious, unacknowledged aspect of their thought, suppressed by their narcissism—a narcissism which so blinded them that they would not admit two obvious facts: one, that in a capitalist, racist, imperialist state there is no one social status women share as a collective group; and second, that the social status of white women in America has never been like that of black women or men.
When the women’s movement began in the late 60s, it was evident that the white women who dominated the movement felt it was “their” movement, that is the medium through which a white woman would voice her grievances to society. Not only did white women act as if feminist ideology existed solely to serve their own interests because they were able to draw public attention to feminist concerns. They were unwilling to acknowledge that non-white women were part of the collective group women in American society. They urged black women to join “their” movement or in some cases the women’s movement, but in dialogues and writings, their attitudes toward black women were both racist and sexist. Their racism did not assume the form of overt expressions of hatred; it was far more subtle. It took the form of simply ignoring the existence of black women or writing about them using common sexist and racist stereotypes. From Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique to Barbara Berg’s The Remembered Gate and on to more recent publications like Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, edited by Zillah Eisenstein, most white female writers who considered themselves feminist revealed in their writing that they had been socialized to accept and perpetuate racist ideology.
In most of their writing, the white American woman’s experience is made synonymous with the American woman’s experience. While it is in no way racist for any author to write a book exclusively about white women, it is fundamentally racist for books to be published that focus solely on the
American white woman’s experience in which that experience is assumed to be the American woman’s experience. For example, in the course of research for this book, I sought to find information about the life of free and slave black women in colonial America. I saw listed in a bibliography Julia Cherry Spruill’s work Women’s Life and Work in the Southern Colonies, which was first published in 1938 and then again in 1972. At the Sisterhood bookstore in Los Angeles I found the book and read a blurb on the back which had been written especially for the new edition:
One of the classic works in American social history, Women’s Life and Work in the Southern Colonies is the first comprehensive study of the daily life and status of women in southern colonial America. Julia Cherry Spruill researched colonial newspapers, court records, and manuscript material of every kind, drawing on archives and libraries from Boston to Savannah. The resulting book was, in the words of Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., “a model of research and exposition, an important contribution to American social history to which students will constantly turn.”
The topics include women’s function in the settlement of the colonies; their homes, domestic occupation, and social life; the aims and methods of their education; their role in government and business affairs outside the home; and the manner in which they were regarded by the law and by society in general. Out of a wealth of documentation, and often from the words of colonial people themselves, a vivid and surprising picture—one that had never been seen before—emerges of the many different aspects of these women’s lives.
I expected to find in Spruill’s work information about various groups of women in American society. I found instead that it was another work solely about white women and that both the title and blurb were misleading. A more accurate title would have been White Women’s Life and Work in the Southern Colonies. Certainly, if I or any author sent a manuscript to an American publisher that focused exclusively on the life and work of black women in the south, also called Women’s Life and Work in the Southern Colonies, the title would be automatically deemed misleading and unacceptable. The force that allows white feminist authors to make no reference to racial identity in their books about “women” that are in actuality about white women is the same one that would compel any author writing exclusively on black women to refer explicitly to their racial identity. That force is racism. In a racially imperialist nation such as ours, it is the dominant race that reserves for itself the luxury of dismissing racial identity while the oppressed race is made daily aware of their racial identity. It is the dominant race that can make it seem that their experience is representative.
In America, white racist ideology has always allowed white women to assume that the word woman is synonymous with white woman, for women of other races are always perceived as Others, as de-humanized beings who do not fall under the heading woman. White feminists who claimed to be politically astute showed themselves to be unconscious of the way their use of language suggested they did not recognize the existence of black women. They impressed upon the American public their sense that the word “woman” meant white woman by drawing endless analogies between “women” and “blacks.” Examples of such analogies abound in almost every feminist work. In a collection of essays published in 1975 titled Women: A Feminist Perspective, an essay by Helen Hacker is included called “Women as a Minority Group” which is a good example of the way white women have used comparisons between “women” a
nd “blacks” to exclude black women and to deflect attention away from their own racial caste status. Hacker writes:
The relation between women and Negroes is historical, as well as analogical. In the seventeenth century the legal status of Negro servants was borrowed from that of women and children, who were under the patria potestas, and until the Civil War there was considerable cooperation between the Abolitionists and woman suffrage movement.
Clearly Hacker is referring solely to white women. An even more glaring example of the white feminist comparison between “blacks” and “women” occurs in Catherine Stimpson’s essay “Thy Neighbor’s Wife, Thy Neighbors Servants’: Women’s Liberation and Black Civil Rights.” She writes:
The development of an industrial economy, as Myrdal points out, has not brought about the integration of women and blacks into the adult male culture. Women have not found a satisfactory way to bear children and to work. Blacks have not destroyed the hard doctrine of their unassimilability. What the economy gives both women and blacks are menial labor, low pay, and few promotions. White male workers hate both groups, for their competition threatens wages and their possible job equality, let alone superiority, threatens nothing less than the very nature of things. The tasks of women and blacks are usually grueling, repetitive, slogging, and dirty....
Throughout Stimpson’s essay she makes woman synonymous with white women and black synonymous with black men.
Historically, white patriarchs rarely referred to the racial identity of white women because they believed that the subject of race was political and therefore would contaminate the sanctified domain of “white” woman’s reality. By verbally denying white women racial identity, that is by simply referring to them as women when what they really meant was white women, their status was further reduced to that of non-person. In much of the literature written by white women on the “woman question” from the 19th century to the present day, authors will refer to “white men” but use the word “woman” when they really mean “white woman.” Concurrently, the term “blacks” is often made synonymous with black men. In Hacker’s article she draws a chart comparing the “castelike status of Women and Negroes.” Under the heading “Rationalization of Status” she writes for blacks “Thought all right in his place.” (?) Hacker’s and Stimpson’s assumption that they can use the word “woman” to refer to white women and “black” to refer to black men is not unique; most white people and even some black people make the same assumption. Racist and sexist patterns in the language Americans use to describe reality support the exclusion of black women. During the recent political uprisings in Iran, newspapers throughout the U.S. carried headlines that read “Khomeini Frees Women and Blacks.” In fact, the American hostages freed from the Iranian Embassy were white women and black men.