Words of Fire

by Beverly Guy-Sheftall

  Reading through much of the current literature on the black revolution, one is left with the impression that for all the rhetoric about self-determination, the main thrust of black militancy is a bid of black males to share power with white males in a continuing patriarchal society in which both black and white females are relegated to a secondary status. For example, Ebony magazine published a special issue on the Negro woman in 1966. Some of the articles attempted to delineate the contributions of Negro women as heroines in the civil rights battle in Dixie, in the building of the New South, in the arts and professions, and as intellectuals. The editors, however, felt it necessary to include a full-page editorial to counter the possible effect of the articles by women contributors. After paying tribute to the Negro woman’s contributions in the past, the editorial reminded Ebony’s readers that “the past is behind us,” that “the immediate goal of the Negro woman today should be the establishment of a strong family unit in which the father is the dominant person,” and that the Negro woman would do well to follow the example of the Jewish mother “who pushed her husband to success, educated her male children first, and engineered good marriages for her daughters.” The editors also declared that the career woman “should be willing to postpone her aspirations until her children, too, are old enough to be on their own,” and, as if the point had not been made clear enough, suggested that if “the woman should, by any chance, make more money than her husband, the marriage could be in real trouble.”

  While not as blatantly Victorian as Ebony, other writers on black militancy have shown only slightly less myopia. In Black Power and Urban Crisis, Dr. Nathan Wright, chairman of the 1967 National Black Power Conference, made only three brief references to women: “the employment of female skills,” “the beauty of black women,” and housewives. His constant reference to Black Power was in terms of black males and black manhood. He appeared to be wholly unaware of the parallel struggles of women and youth for inclusion in decision making, for when he dealt with the reallocation of power, he noted that “the churches and housewives of America” are the most readily influential groups which can aid in this process.

  In Black Rage, psychiatrists Greer and Cobbs devote a chapter to achieving womanhood. While they sympathetically describe the traumatic experience of self-depreciation which a black woman undergoes in a society in which the dominant standard of beauty is “the blond, blue-eyed, whiteskinned girl with regular features,” and make a telling point about the burden of the stereotype that Negro women are available to white men, they do not get beyond a framework in which the Negro woman is seen as a sex object. Emphasizing her concern with “feminine narcissism” and the need to be “lovable” and “attractive,” they conclude: “Under the sign of discouragement and rejection which governs so much of her physical operation, she is inclined to organize her personal ambitions in terms of her achievements serving to compensate for other losses and hurts.” Nowhere do the authors suggest that Negro women, like women generally, might be motivated to achieve as persons. Implied throughout the discussion is the sexuality of Negro females.

  The ultimate expression of this bias is the statement attributed to a black militant male leader: “The position of the black woman should be prone.” Thus, there appears to be a distinctly conservative and backward-looking view in much of what black males write today about black women, and many black women have been led to believe that the restoration of the black male to his lost manhood must take precedence over the claims of black women to equalitarian status. Consequently, there has been a tendency to acquiesce without vigorous protest to policies which emphasize the “underemployment” of the black male in relation to the black female and which encourage the upgrading and education of black male youth while all but ignoring the educational and training needs of black female youth, although the highest rates of unemployment today are among black female teenagers. A parallel tendency to concentrate on career and training opportunities primarily for black males is evident in government and industry.

  As this article goes to press, further confirmation of a patriarchal view on the part of organizations dominated by black males is found in the BLACK DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE published as a full-page advertisement in the New York Times on July 3, 1970. Signed by members of the National Committee of Black Churchmen and presuming to speak “By Order and on Behalf of Black People,” this document ignores both the personhood and the contributions of black women to the cause of human rights. The drafters show a shocking insensitivity to the revitalized women’s rights/ women’s liberation movement which is beginning to capture the front pages of national newspapers and the mass media. It evidences a parochialism that has hardly moved beyond the eighteenth century in its thinking about women. Not only does it paraphrase the 1776 Declaration about the equality of “all Men” with a noticeable lack of imagination, but it also declares itself “in the Name of our good People and our own Black Heroes.” Then follows a list of black males prominent in the historic struggle for liberation. The names of Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Mary McLeod Bethune, or Daisy Bates, or any other black women are conspicuous by their absence. If black male leaders of the Christian faith—who concededly have suffered much though denigration of their personhood and who are committed to the equality of all in the eyes of God—are callous to the indivisibility of human rights, who is to remember?

  In the larger society, of course, black and white women share the common burden of discrimination based upon sex. The parallels between racism and sexism have been distinctive features of American society, and the movements to eliminate these two evils have often been allied and sometimes had interchangeable leadership. The beginnings of a women’s rights movement in this country is linked with the abolitionist movement. In 1840, William Lloyd Garrison and Charles Remond, the latter a Negro, refused to be seated as delegates to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London when they learned that women members of the American delegation had been excluded because of their sex and could sit only in the balcony and observe the proceedings. The seed of the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, which marked the formal beginning of the women’s rights struggle in the United States, was planted at that London conference. Frederick Douglass attended the Seneca Falls Convention and rigorously supported Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s daring resolution on woman’s suffrage. Except for a temporary defection during the controversy over adding “sex” to the Fifteenth Amendment, Douglass remained a staunch advocate of women’s rights until his death in 1895. Sojourner Truth and other black women were also active in the movement for women’s rights, as indicated earlier.

  Despite the common interests of black and white women, however, the dichotomy of a racially segregated society which has become increasingly polarized has prevented them from cementing a natural alliance. Communication and cooperation have been hesitant, limited, and formal. In the past Negro women have tended to identify discrimination against them as primarily racial and have accorded high priority to the struggle for Negro rights. They have had little time or energy for consideration of women’s rights. And, until recent years, their egalitarian position in the struggle seemed to justify such preoccupation.

  As the drive for black empowerment continues, however, black women are becoming increasingly aware of a new development that creates for them a dilemma of competing identities and priorities. On the one hand, as Dr. Jeanne Noble has observed, “establishing ‘black manhood’ became a prime goal of black revolution,” and black women began to realize “that black men wanted to determine the policy and progress of black people without female participation in decision making and leadership positions.” On the other hand, a rising movement for women’s liberation is challenging the concept of male dominance, which the black revolution appears to have embraced. Confronted with the multiple barriers of poverty, race, and sex, the quandary of black women is how best to distribute their energies among these issues and what strategies to pursue that will minimize conflicting interests and object
ives.

  Cognizant of the similarities between paternalism and racial arrogance, black women are nevertheless handicapped by the continuing stereotype of the black “matriarchy” and the demand that black women now step back and push black men into positions of leadership. They are made to feel disloyal to racial interests if they insist upon women’s rights. Moreover, to the extent that racial polarization often accompanies the thrust for black power, black women find it increasingly difficult to make common cause with white women. These developments raise several questions. Are black women gaining or losing in the drive toward human rights? As the movement for women’s liberation becomes increasingly a force to be reckoned with, are black women to take a backward step and sacrifice their egalitarian tradition? What are the alternatives to matriarchal dominance on the one hand or male supremacy on the other?

  Much has been written in the past about the matriarchal character of Negro family life, the relatively favored position of Negro women, and the tensions and difficulties growing out of the assumptions that they are better educated and more able to obtain employment than Negro males. These assumptions require closer examination. It is true that according to reports of the Bureau of the Census, in March 1968 an estimated 278,000 nonwhite women had completed four or more years of college—86,000 more than male college graduates in the nonwhite population (Negro women constitute 93 percent of all nonwhite women), and that in March 1966 the median years of school completed by Negro females (10.1) was slightly higher than that for Negro males (9.4). It should be borne in mind that this is not unique to the black community. In the white population as well, females exceed males in median years of school completed (12.2 to 12.0) and do not begin to lag behind males until the college years. The significant fact is that the percentage of both sexes in the Negro population eighteen years of age and over in 1966 who had completed four years of college was roughly equivalent (males: 2.2 percent; females: 2.3 percent). When graduate training is taken into account, the proportion of Negro males with five or more years of college training (3.3 percent) moved ahead of the Negro females (3.2 percent). Moreover, 1966 figures show that a larger proportion of Negro males (63 percent) than Negro females (57 percent) was enrolled in school and that this superiority continued into college enrollments (males 5 percent; females 4 percent). These 1966 figures reflect a concerted effort to broaden educational opportunities for Negro males manifested in recruitment policies and scholarship programs made available primarily to Negro male students. Though later statistics are not now available, this trend appears to have accelerated each year.

  The assumption that Negro women have more education than Negro men also overlooks the possibility that the greater number of collegetrained Negro women may correspond to the larger number of Negro women in the population. Of enormous importance to a consideration of Negro family life and the relation between the sexes is the startling fact of the excess of females over males. The Bureau of the Census estimated that in July 1968 there were 688,000 more Negro females than Negro males. Although census officials attribute this disparity to errors in counting a “floating” Negro male population, this excess has appeared in steadily increasing numbers in every census since 1860, but has received little analysis beyond periodic comment. Over the past century the reported ratio of black males to black females has decreased. In 1966, there were less than ninety-four black males to every one hundred females.

  The numerical imbalance between the sexes in the black population is more dramatic than in any other group in the United States. Within the white population the excess of women shows up in the middle or later years. In the black population, however, the sex imbalance is present in every age group over fourteen and is greatest during the age when most marriages occur. In the twenty-five to forty-four age group, the percentage of males within the black population drops to 86.9 as compared to 96.9 for white males.

  It is now generally known that females tend to be constitutionally stronger than males, that male babies are more fragile than female babies, that boys are harder to rear than girls, that the male death rate is slightly higher and life expectancy for males is shorter than that of females. Add to these general factors the special hardships to which the Negro minority is exposed—poverty, crowded living conditions, poor health, marginal jobs and minimum protection against hazards of accident and illness—and it becomes apparent that there is much in the American environment that is particularly hostile to the survival of the black male. But even if we discount these factors and accept the theory that the sex ratio is the result of errors in census counting, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that a large number of black males have so few stable ties that they are not included as functioning units of the society. In either case formidable pressures are created for black women.

  The explosive social implications of an excess of more than half a million black girls and women over fourteen years of age are obvious in a society in which the mass media intensify notions of glamour and expectations of romantic love and marriage, while at the same time there are many barriers against interracial marriages. When such marriages do take place, they are more likely to involve black males and white females, which tends to aggravate the issue. (No value judgment about interracial marriages is implied here. I am merely trying to describe a social dilemma.) The problem of an excess female population is a familiar one in countries which have experienced heavy male casualties during wars, but an excess female ethnic minority as an enclave within a larger population raises important social issues. To what extent are the tensions and conflicts traditionally associated with the matriarchal framework of Negro family life in reality due to this imbalance and the pressures it generates? Does this excess explain the active competition between Negro professional men and women seeking employment in markets which have limited or excluded Negroes? And does this competition intensify the stereotype of the matriarchal society and female dominance? What relationship is there between the high rate of illegitimacy among black women and the population figures we have described?

  These figures suggest that the Negro woman’s fate in the United States, while inextricably bound with that of the Negro male in one sense, transcends the issue of Negro rights. Equal opportunity for her must mean equal opportunity to compete for jobs and to find a mate in the total society. For as long as she is confined to an area in which she must compete fiercely for a mate, she will remain the object of sexual exploitation and the victim of all the social evils that such exploitation involves.

  When we compare the position of the black woman to that of the white woman, we find that she remains single more often, bears more children, is in the labor market longer and in greater proportion, has less education, earns less, is widowed earlier, and carries a relatively heavier economic responsibility as family head than her white counterpart.

  In 1966, black women represented one of every seven women workers, although Negroes generally constitute only 11 percent of the total population in the United States. Of the 3,105,000 black women eighteen years of age and over who were in the labor force, however, nearly half (48.2 percent) were either single, widowed, divorced, separated from their husbands, or had husbands absent for other reasons, as compared with 31.8 percent of white women in similar circumstances. Moreover, six of every ten black women were in household employment or other service jobs. Conversely, while 58.8 percent of all women workers held white-collar positions, only 23.2 percent of black women held such jobs.

  As working wives, black women contribute a higher proportion to family income than do white women. Among nonwhite wives in 1965, 58 percent contributed 20 percent or more of the total family income, 43 percent contributed 30 percent or more and 27 percent contributed 40 percent or more. The comparable percentages for white wives were 56 percent, 40 percent, and 24 percent respectively.

  Black working mothers are more heavily represented in the labor force than white mothers. In March 1966, nonwhite working mothers with children under eighteen
years of age represented 48 percent of all nonwhite mothers with children this age as compared with 35 percent of white working mothers. Nonwhite working mothers also represented four of every ten of all nonwhite mothers of children under six years of age. Of the 12,300,000 children under fourteen years of age in February 1965 whose mothers worked, only 2 percent were provided group care in day-care centers. Adequate child care is an urgent need for working mothers generally, but it has particular significance for the high proportion of black working mothers of young children.

  Black women also carry heavy responsibilities as family heads. In 1966, one-fourth of all black families were headed by a woman as compared with less than one-tenth of all white families. The economic disabilities of women generally are aggravated in the case of black women. Moreover, while all families headed by women are more vulnerable to poverty than husband-wife families, the black woman family head is doubly victimized. For example, the median wage or salary income of all women workers who were employed full-time the year round in 1967 was only 58 percent of that of all male workers, and the median earnings of white females was less than that of black males. The median wage of nonwhite women workers, however, was $3,268, or only 71 percent of the median income of white women workers. In 1965, one-third of all families headed by women lived in poverty, but 62 percent of the 1,132,000 nonwhite families with a female head were poor.