As we approach the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is apparent that the lives of many women around the world have been unaffected by centuries-old struggles for gender equality. In most places, women are poorer than men, in some places, daughters are still valued less than sons, and a global epidemic of violence against women remains unchecked.
It is also the case that the promise of feminism—that females can live better lives with a wider range of choices and resources—is a reality for some women three decades after the beginning of the “second wave” of the United States women’s movement even though poverty, racism, and heterosexual privilege remain deeply entrenched.
More of us, women and men, must heed the challenge set before us by bell hooks in her first book on black feminism: “Only a few black women have rekindled the spirit of feminist struggle that stirred the hearts and minds of our nineteenth century sisters. We, black women who advocate feminist ideology, are pioneers. We are clearing a path for ourselves and our sisters. We hope that as long as they see us reach our goat—no longer victimized, no longer unrecognized, no longer afraid—they will take courage and follow” (Ain’t I a Woman, 196). The struggle continues.“14
ENDNOTES
1 Blanche Glassman Hersh’s Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978) excludes black women abolitionists from her discussion of feminist-abolitionists (her terminology) because of her erroneous assessment of their minimal involvement in the first wave of the women’s movement, which she describes as largely white. Jean Yellin and John Van Horne’s collection of essays, The Abolitionist Sisterhood (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1994), corrects Hersh’s assumptions by including extensive discussions of women of African descent in their category of antislavery feminist, “that small circle of black and white American women who, in the 1830s and 1840s, initially banded together to remedy the public evils of slavery and racism and who ultimately struggled for equal rights for women as well as slaves” (3). Yellin and Van Horne also complicate the analysis by indicating that this group was diverse and included more traditional women who were not feminist.
2 See Shirley J. Yee’s Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828—1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992) for an excellent analysis of the emergence of black feminism in the early nineteenth century.
3 Gerda Lerner’s The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy (New York: Oxford University Press 1993) documents the twelve-hundred-year struggle of women in the West to free their minds of patriarchal thinking, the roots of which can be found in institutionalized barriers to their intellectual development. Her brief discussion of African American women focuses on evangelists such as Sojourner Truth, whom she singles out as being “virtually alone among black women in the nineteenth century in staunchly combining the defense of her race with a defense of her sex” (106). Lerner also defines feminist consciousness as women’s awareness that they belong to a subordinate group which has suffered because of societal constructs. As a result, they need to develop sisterly bonds with other women and work to change their subordinate status (274).
4 See Angela Davis’s pioneering essay, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” Black Scholar 3 (December 1971): 4—15, which rewrites the history of slave resistance. Deborah Gray White’s Ar‘n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985) also focuses on the black female slave experience.
5 Frances Dana Gage, a white abolitionist who chaired the historic meeting in Akron, is responsible for the details of this gathering, which focus on Truth’s presence and what she did and said. The speech, which Gage is reputed to have recorded, appears in Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s History of Woman Suffrage, 6 vols. (Rochester and New York, 1889-1992), 2: 193. See Nell Irvin Painter’s “Difference, Slavery, and Memory: Sojourner Truth in Feminist Abolitionism,” in The Abolitionist Sisterhood, eds. Yellin and Van Horne, and her “Sojourner Truth in Life and Memory,” in Gender and History 2 (Spring 1990): 3—16, which raise doubts about Gage’s version of the Sojourner Truth saga in Akron, Ohio.
6 See Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s award-winning book Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993) for a discussion of the feminist theology of black Baptist women, Nannie Burroughs’s struggles against racism and sexism, and the role of black women’s organizations, such as the Women’s Convention of the National Baptist Convention, in self-determination.
7 As is frequently the case with women married to prominent men, Amy Jacques Garvey has been largely overlooked in the scholarship on the Garvey movement. Exceptions are Mark D. Matthews, “‘Our Women and What They Think’: Amy Jacques Garvey and The Negro World,” Black Scholar (May-June 1979): 2—13; “ ‘Always Leading Our Men in Service and Sacrifice’: Amy Jacques Garvey, Feminist Black and Nationalist,” Gender and Society 6 (September 1992): 346—375; and the work of Professor Ula Taylor. For discussions of women in the Garvey movement, see Garvey: His Work and Impact, eds. Rupert Lewis and Patrick Bryan (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1991), which contains an essay by Tony Martin and Honor Ford Smith.
8 See Jessie M. Rodrique’s “The Black Community and the Birth Control Movement,” Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, eds. Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989) for a discussion of the decline in fertility among blacks from the late nineteenth century to World War II (1880-1945), and a comprehensive analysis of the black community’s considerable involvement with the issue of birth control from 1915 to 1945, though this has been overlooked in chronicles of the birth control movement in the United States.
9 See Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1981) for a thoughtful analysis and critique of Margaret Sanger’s racism.
10 Mary King, Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement (New York: William Morrow, 1987), 567—569.
11 “Statement of Purpose,” in Feminism in Our Time, ed. Miriam Schneir (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 171—174.
12 See Beverly Davis, “To Seize the Moment: A Retrospective on the National Black Feminist Organization,” SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women (Fall 1988): 43—46, for a detailed history of NBFO.
13 See Black Scholar 24 (Winter 1994): 6.
14 Portions of this introduction appear in my dissertation Daughters of Sorrow: Attitudes Toward Black Women, 1880-1920 (Carlson, 1990) and “Remembering Sojourner Truth: On Black Feminism,” Catalyst 1 (Fall 1986): 54—57.
CHAPTER ONE
Beginnings: In Defense of Our Race and Sex, 1831-1900
... for the sake of our own dignity, the dignity of our race, and the future good name of our children, it is “mete, right, and our bounded duty” to stand forth and declare ourselves and our principles, to teach an ignorant and suspicious world that our aims and interests are identical with those of all good aspiring women. Too long have we been silent under unjust and unholy charges; we cannot expect to have them removed until we disprove them through ourselves.
—JOSEPHINE ST. PIERRE RUFFIN, The Women’s Era
The Negro woman “totes” more water; grows more corn; picks more cotton; washes more clothes; cooks more meals; nurses more babies; mammies more Nordics; supports more churches; does more race uplifting; serves as mudsills for more climbers; takes more punishment; does more forgiving; gets less protection and appreciation than do the women in any other civilized group in the world. She has been the economic and social slave of mankind.
—NANNIE BURROUGHS
INTRODUCTION
Like most students who attended public schools and colleges during the 1950s and 1960s, I learned very little about the involvement of African American women in struggles for the emancipation of blacks and women —so I did not read the words of any of the women who appear in this chapter as our feminist foremot
hers. Literary critic Mary Helen Washigton, who initiated the movement to reclaim black women writers, asked a series of questions which Chapter 1, “Beginnings: In Defense of Our Race and Sex, 1831-1900,” is intended to address: “Why is the fugitive slave, the fiery orator, the political activist, the abolitionist always represented as a black man? How does the heroic voice and heroic image of the black woman get suppressed in a culture that depended on her heroism for its survival?” (Washington, Invented Lives, xvii-xviii).
We must look back to the nineteenth century for answers to these questions. Reading Maria Stewart and Anna Julia Cooper, among others, tells us that black women themselves were aware of their own erasure from the annals of history. This is why they found it necessary to chronicle the achievements of their sister-activist-thinkers.
In order to reconstruct our black feminist intellectual tradition in the present, we must reinterpret familiar histories. The black women’s club movement which blossomed in the 1890s as a project of racial uplift, according to traditional scholarship, was also the first feminist movement among African Americans. The struggles of club women to debunk stereotypes about their sexuality, to define black womanhood differently, and to work for their own empowerment are certainly the beginnings of a black women’s liberation movement. As importantly, we must revisit the anti-lynching campaign of Ida Wells-Barnett, as historian Paula Giddings has done, and realize its importance as a precursor of the modern Civil Rights movement and the movement to liberate black women from a patriarchal, racist social order. The discourse on sexuality that Wells-Barnett generated in her brilliant analyses of the sexual politics of lynching makes her a race woman, to be sure, but she is much more, besides.
The feminist discourse here has been impacted by other discourses, particularly the Victorian “cult of true womanhood,” which dictated that women embrace values such as piety, chastity, domesticity, and submissiveness. Women who embraced these values might be labeled “cultural feminists” because they did not reject altogether the gender prescriptions of their times. Though they espoused greater independence for women, they also insisted that enlightened wifehood and motherhood were appropriate aspirations.
What is clear is their understanding about the difficulties facing them because of their race and gender. Anna Julia Cooper admonished her brothers for their lack of enlightenment on the woman question and their internalization of conventional gender notions. “... [I]t strikes me as true that while our men seem thoroughly abreast of the times on almost every other subject, when they strike the woman question they drop back into sixteenth-century logic” (A Voice from the South, 75). She also urged married women to seek employment outside the home and develop their intellects, but hastened to add that marriage was not the only route to selfactualization.
I continue to wonder whether the black community would have distanced itself as much from women’s liberation struggles in the 1970s if we had read the wise words—words afire—of our sister-ancestors, only a small group of whom appear in this chapter.
Maria Miller Stewart (1803-1879)
Maria Stewart, a free black from Hartford, Connecticut, may have been the first African American woman to speak in public about women’s rights, particularly the plight of “daughters of Africa,” whom she urged to develop their intellects, become teachers, combine family and work outside the home, oppose subservience to men, and participate fully in all aspects of community building. She also issued an unusual call for black women to build schools for themselves. In 1833, after a short career on the lecture circuit, she delivered a farewell speech to the black community, particularly ministers, in which she expressed resentment about its negative responses to her defiance of gender conventions as a public lecturer. This passionate defense of women’s right to speak in public invokes biblical heroines and wise women throughout history.
“Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, the Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build” appeared first as a pamphlet in 1831. Stewart’s subsequent speeches, the first delivered before the Afric-American Female Intelligence Society in Boston in 1832, were reprinted in the Ladies Department of William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, Liberator. Her second speech, delivered at Boston’s Franklin Hall before the New England Anti-Slavery Society on September 21, 1832, is historic because it was the first public lecture by an American woman of any race before a mixed audience of men and women, blacks and whites, and preceded by five years the Grimké sisters’ more well-known antislavery speeches. Stewart stands at the beginning of an unbroken chain of black women activists whose commitment to the liberation of blacks and women defines their life’s work. Stewart’s biographer, Marilyn Richardson, captures her significance in the first published collection of Stewart’s work: “Her original synthesis of religious, abolitionist, and feminist concerns places her squarely in the forefront of a black female activist and literary tradition only now beginning to be acknowledged as of integral significance to the understanding of the history of black thought and culture in America” (Richardson, xiv).
RELIGION AND THE PURE PRINCIPLES OF MORALITY, THE SURE FOUNDATION ON WHICH WE MUST BUILD
Productions from the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Steward [sic], Widow of the Late James W. Steward, of Boston
All the nations of the earth are crying out for liberty and equality. Away, away with tyranny and oppression! And shall Afric’s sons be silent any longer? Far be it from me to recommend to you either to kill, burn, or destroy. But I would strongly recommend to you to improve your talents; let not one lie buried in the earth. Show forth your powers of mind. Prove to the world thatThough black your skins as shades of night, your hearts are pure, your souls are white.
This is the land of freedom. The press is at liberty. Every man has a right to express his opinion. Many think, because your skins are tinged with a sable hue, that you are an inferior race of beings; but God does not consider you as such. He hath formed and fashioned you in his own glorious image, and hath bestowed upon you reason and strong powers of intellect. He hath made you to have dominion over the beasts of the field, the fowls of the air, and the fish of the sea. He hath crowned you with glory and honor; hath made you but a little lower than the angels; and according to the Constitution of these United States, he hath made all men free and equal. Then why should one worm say to another, “Keep you down there, while I sit up yonder; for I am better than thou?” It is not the color of the skin that makes the man, but it is the principles formed within the soul.
Many will suffer for pleading the cause of oppressed Africa, and I shall glory in being one of her martyrs; for I am firmly persuaded, that the God in whom I trust is able to protect me from the rage and malice of mine enemies, and from them that will rise up against me; and if there is no other way for me to escape, he is able to take me to himself, as he did the most noble, fearless, and undaunted David Walker.
Never Will Virtue, Knowledge, And True Politeness Begin To Flow, Till The Pure Principles Of Religion And Morality Are Put Into Force.
My Respected Friends,
I feel almost unable to address you; almost incompetent to perform the task; and at times I have felt ready to exclaim, O that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the transgressions of the daughters of my people. Truly, my heart’s desire and prayer is, that Ethiopia might stretch forth her hands unto God. But we have a great work to do. Never, no, never will the chains of slavery and ignorance burst, till we become united as one, and cultivate among ourselves the pure principles of piety, morality, and virtue. I am sensible of my ignorance; but such knowledge as God has given to me, I impart to you. I am sensible of former prejudices; but it is high time for prejudices and animosities to cease from among us. I am sensible of exposing myself to calumny and reproach; but shall I, for fear of feeble man, who shall die, hold my peace? Shall I, for fear of scoffs and frowns, refrain my tongue? Ah, no! I speak as one that must give an account at the awful bar of God; I speak
as a dying mortal to dying mortals. O, ye daughters of Africa, awake! Awake! Arise! No longer sleep nor slumber, but distinguish yourselves. Show forth to the world that ye are endowed with noble and exalted faculties. O, ye daughters of Africa! What have ye done to immortalize your names beyond the grave? What examples have ye set before the rising generation? What foundation have ye laid for generations yet unborn? Where are our union and love? And where is our sympathy, that weeps at another’s woe, and hides the faults we see? And our daughters, where are they? Blushing in innocence and virtue? and our sons, do they bid fair to become crowns of glory to our hoary heads? Where is the parent who is conscious of having faithfully discharged his duty, and at the last awful day of account, shall be able to say, here, Lord, is thy poor, unworthy servant, and the children thou hast given me? And where are the children that will arise and call them blessed? Alas, O God! Forgive me if I speak amiss; the minds of our tender babes are tainted as soon as they are born; they go astray, as it were, from the womb. Where is the maiden who will blush at vulgarity? And where is the youth who has written upon his manly brow a thirst for knowledge; whose ambitious mind soars above trifles, and longs for the time to come, when he shall redress the wrongs of his father and plead the cause of his brethren? Did the daughters of our land possess a delicacy of manners, combined with gentleness and dignity; did their pure minds hold vice in abhorrence and contempt; did they frown when their ears were polluted with its vile accents, would not their influence become powerful? Would not our brethren fall in love with their virtues? Their souls would become fired with a holy zeal for freedom’s cause. They would become ambitious to distinguish themselves. They would become proud to display their talents. Able advocates would arise in our defense. Knowledge would begin to flow, and the chains of slavery and ignorance would melt like wax before the flames. I am but a feeble instrument. I am but as one particle of the small dust of the earth. You may frown or smile. After I am dead, perhaps before, God will surely rise up those who will more powerfully and eloquently plead the cause of virtue and the pure principles of morality than I am able to do. O virtue! How sacred is thy name! How pure are thy principles! Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies. Blessed is the man who shall call her his wife; yea, happy is the child who shall call her mother. O woman, woman, would thou only strive to excel in merit and virtue; would thou only store thy mind with useful knowledge, great would be thine influence. Do you say you are too far advanced in life now to begin? You are not too far advanced to instil [sic] these principles into the minds of your tender infants. Let them by no means be neglected. Discharge your duty faithfully, in every point of view: leave the event with God. So shall your skirts become clear of their blood....
Words of Fire Page 6