Words of Fire

by Beverly Guy-Sheftall

  Paula Giddings (1947- )

  Paula Giddings, born in Yonkers, New York, wrote the first contemporary feminist history of African American women—When and Where I Enter (1984)—after a career as an editor with Random House and journalist with Encore America. Her involvement with a project on black women’s history based in South Carolina provided the catalyst for her lifelong commitment to writing black women’s history. She has also written a history of Delta Sigma Theta, Inc., entitled In Search of Sisterhood. “The Last Taboo,” which appeared in Toni Morrison’s collection of essays on the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill saga, is a cogent analysis of the impact of persistent silences within the black community on issues relating to sexuality. She is presently completing a biography of Ida Wells-Barnett.

  THE LAST TABOO

  The agonizing ordeal of the Clarence Thomas nomination should have taught us a valuable lesson: racial solidarity is not always the same as racial loyalty. This is especially true, it seems to me, in a postsegregation era, in which solidarity so often requires suppressing information about any African American of standing regardless of their political views or character flaws. Anita Hill’s intervention in the proceedings should have told us that when those views or flaws are also sexist, such solidarity can be especially destructive to the community.

  As the messenger for this relatively new idea, Anita Hill earned the antipathy of large segments of the African American community. More at issue than her truthfulness—or Clarence Thomas’s character or politics —was whether she should have testified against another black person, especially a black man, who was just a hairsbreadth away from the Supreme Court. Of course, Anita Hill was not the only black person who testified against the nomination of Clarence Thomas, nor even the only woman to do so. But the nature of her complaint went further. It forced a mandate on gender: “the cultural definition of behavior defined as appropriate to the sexes in a given society at a given time,” to borrow historian Gerda Lerner’s definition. For many, what was inappropriate was that a black woman’s commitment to a gender issue superseded what was largely perceived as racial solidarity. Still others, I think, reacted to an even greater taboo, perhaps the last and most deeply set one. This was to disclose not only a gender but a sexual discourse, unmediated by the question of racism. What Hill reported to the world was a blackon-black sexual crime involving a man of influence in the mainstream community.

  The issues of gender and sexuality have been made so painful to us in our history that we have largely hidden them from ourselves, much less the glaring eye of the television camera. Consequently, they remain largely unresolved. I am convinced that Anita Hill, by introducing the issues in a way that could not be ignored, offered the possibility of a modern discourse on these issues that have tremendous, even lifesaving import for us.

  I.

  It is our historical experience that has shaped or, perhaps more accurately, misshaped the sex/gender issues and discourse in our community. That history was broached by Clarence Thomas himself when he used the most remembered phrase of the hearing: “high-tech lynching.” Thus, he evoked the image of the sexually laden nineteenth-century lynching—often announced several days in advance to assure a crowd—after which the body was hanged, often burned, mutilated, and body parts, including genitals, were fought over for souvenirs. These were low-tech lynchings. Interestingly, it was almost exactly a century ago, in 1892, when the number of African Americans being lynched, 241, reached a peak after steadily escalating since the decade before. Then the epidemic of mob murder against blacks continued with impunity because of the perception that black men, no longer constrained by the “civilizing influence” of slavery, had regressed to a primitive state and were routinely raping white women. At that time “rape, and the rumors of rape, [were] a kind of acceptable folk pornography in the Bible Belt,” observed historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall.

  Although Thomas’s application of this phenomenon to his own situation was highly questionable, even ironic, in one way he was substantially correct. Now, as a century ago, white men, regardless of their own moral standing, still exercise the power to judge blacks on the basis of their perceived sexuality. However, what many failed to take into account with Thomas’s evocation was that it was a black woman, Ida B. Wells, who initiated the nation’s first anti-lynching campaign. For lynching was also a woman’s issue: it had as much to do with ideas of gender as it had with race.

  Often overlooked is the fact that black men were thought capable of these sexual crimes because of the lascivious character of the women of the race in a time when women were considered the foundation of a group’s morality. Black men raped, it was widely believed, because black men’s mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters were seen as “morally obtuse,” “openly licentious,” and had “no immorality in doing what nature prompts,” as Harvard-educated Phillip A. Bruce, brother-in-law of writer Thomas Nelson Page, observed in his influential Plantation Negro as Freeman (1889). As one offer of proof, the author noted that black women never complained about being raped by black men. Other observers such as the following southern female writer to the popular periodical the Independent confirmed: Degeneracy is apt to show most in the weaker individuals of any race; so Negro women evidence more nearly the popular idea of total depravity than the men do. They are so nearly lacking in virtue that the color of a Negro woman’s skin is generally taken (and quite correctly) as a guarantee of her immorality.... And they are evidently the chief instruments of the degradation of the men of their race.... I sometimes read of a virtuous Negro woman, hear of them, but the idea is absolutely inconceivable to me ... I cannot imagine such a creation as a virtuous black woman.

  The status of black women had been dramatically etched into the annals of science earlier in the century. It was in fact personified in the figure of a single South African woman by the name of Sara Bartmann, aka the “Hottentot Venus.” In 1810, when England was in the throes of debate about the slave trade, Ms. Bartmann was first exhibited in London “to the public in a manner offensive to decency,” according to observers at the time (Gilman, 1985).

  What made Ms. Bartmann such a subject of interest was the extraordinary size and shape of her buttocks, which served as a displacement of the fascination with female genitalia at the time. Sara Bartmann was displayed for five years, until she died, in Paris, at the age of twenty-five. Her degradation by what was defined as science and civilization did not end there. An autopsy was performed, preparing her genitalia “in such a way as to allow one to see the nature of the labia.” Her organs were studied and reported upon by Dr. George Cuvier in 1817, coolly comparing Ms. Bartmann’s genitalia with that of orangutans. Her sexual organs were then given to the Musée de l’Homme in Paris—where they are still on display.

  Sara Bartmann’s sexual parts, her genitalia and her buttocks, serve as the central image for the black female throughout the nineteenth century, concludes Gilman. It was also the image, he notes, that served as an icon for black sexuality throughout the century.

  It is no coincidence that Sara Bartmann became a spectacle in a period when the British were debating the prohibition of slavery. As historian Barbara Fields and others have pointed out, there, as in North America, race took on a new significance when questions arose about the entitlement of nonenslaved blacks to partake of the fruits of Western liberty and citizenship. In North America, Euro-Americans had to resolve the contradictions between their own struggle for political freedom and that of the black men and women they still enslaved. This contradiction was resolved (by both pro- and antislavery whites) by racialism: ascribing certain inherited characteristics to blacks, characteristics that made them unworthy of the benefits of first-class citizenship. At the core of those characteristics was the projection of the dark side of sexuality, now literally embodied by black females. The use of a broad racial tarbrush, in turn, meant looking at race through the veneer of ideology: an institutionalized set of beliefs through which one interprets social reality. By
the nineteenth century, then, race had become an ideology, and a basis of that ideology had become sexual difference. If there was a need for racialism in the late eighteenth century, it became an absolute necessity by the late nineteenth century, when lynching reached its peak. For after the Civil War, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments granted freedmen suffrage and black men and women many of the privileges of citizenship. In a state like Mississippi, which had some of the strongest black political organizations of any state, this translated into the kind of empowerment that saw, in the 1870s, two black men serve as United States senators, and blacks as secretaries of state and education, among other high offices. Throughout the South, especially, there was also dramatic evidence of African Americans gaining an economic foothold as the numbers of black-owned businesses and black landowners increased.

  Additionally, unprecedented numbers of African American men and women were attending both predominantly white and predominantly black colleges, and aspiring to professional positions deemed out of reach just a generation before. This was even true of black women. By the 1880s the first black women were passing state bar exams to become attorneys, and were the first women of any race to practice medicine in the South. By the turn of the century, Booker T. Washington’s National Business League reported that there were “160 black female physicians, seven dentists, ten lawyers, 164 ministers, assorted journalists, writers, artists, 1,185 musicians and teachers of music, and 13,525 school instructors.” The period saw a virtual renaissance among black women artists and writers. The Philadelphia-born sculptor Meta Warwick Fuller was under the tutelage of Auguste Rodin; Frances Ellen Harper and Pauline Hopkins published two of the earliest novels by black women; Oberlin-educated Anna Julia Cooper published A Voice from the South (1892), a treatise on race and feminism that anticipated much of the later work of W. E. B. Du Bois; and journalist Ida B. Wells, in 1889, was elected as the first woman secretary of the Afro-American Press Association.

  Ironically, such achievements within a generation of slavery did not inspire an ideology of racial equality but one of racial difference, the latter being required to maintain white supremacy. That difference would be largely based on perceptions of sexual difference, and as noted before, the foundation of sexual difference lay in attitudes about black women.

  II.

  By the late nineteenth century, however, difference would be characterized at its most dualistic: as binary opposition—not just in terms of race and sexuality, but of gender and class as well. Such oppositions were effective means of social control at a time when the country was losing its sociosexual mooring in the face of radical and fundamental changes driven (as now) by a technological revolution. For if the late twentieth century was shaped by advances like the computer, the late nineteenth was adjusting itself around innovations such as the typewriter, the gasoline-driven car, the internalcombustion airplane, the sewing machine, the incandescent light, the phonograph, and the radio. Such innovations bring on new systems of marketing and financing them, and thus new possibilities of wealth, as the late-nineteenth-century emergence of the Rockefellers, Morgans, Du Ponts, and Carnegies attest. In addition, new corporate cultures increased urbanization, made sex outside of the family more possible, and contributed to the increased commodification of sex in forms of pornography and brothels, as it became more associated with pleasure rather than merely reproduction. At the same time, money and the labor-saving devices allowed middle-class women to spend less time doing domestic housework and more time seeking education and reform outside of the home. Add to this growing numbers of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, the increasing disparity between the haves and the have-nots (by 1890, the poorest one-half of families received one-fifth of all wages and salaries), labor unrest and unemployment that reached thirty percent in some years during the decade, and the need for control becomes obvious. That control was effectively handled through creating categories of difference through binary opposition. For example, maleness was defined by its opposition to femaleness ; whiteness by its opposition to blackness. The same dualism applied to the concepts of civilization and primitivity, purity and pollutedness, goodness and evil, public and private. The nineteenth-century paradigm regarding sexuality tied all of these oppositions together, which operated to the detriment of blacks and women in general, and black women in particular.

  For example, in the late nineteenth century, men were believed to have a particularly rapacious sexual drive that had to be controlled. The last thing needed at home was a woman who had the same sexual drive that men had; what was needed was in binary opposition to perceived male sexuality. What was needed was a woman who did not tempt, and was thus synonymous with “good.” And so, although in another period women were thought to have strong, even the more ungovernable, sexual drives, by the late nineteenth century, they were thought to have hardly any libido at all. Furthermore, female sexuality was now considered pathological (Gilman, 1985). That meant, of course, that good women did not have erotic feelings, and those who might have had inappropriate urges were recommended to see physicians like J. Marion Sims or Robert Battey, who employed radical gynecological surgery, including clitoridectomies, to “correct” masturbation and other forms of sexual passion (D’Emilio, Freedman, 1988). Such severe methods were necessary to sustain diametrically opposed identities to “bad” women: lower-class women, and especially black women.

  Economically lower-class women fell under the “bad” column by virtue of the fact that they worked outside the home and thus were uninsulated from the sexual aggression of the society. Certainly, it was the former group of women who made up the growing numbers of prostitutes, a label that could fall even on women more drawn to casual sex than to remuneration, and were of great interest to scientists as well as white middle-class female reformers and repressed men. With Sara Bartmann as a model and basis of comparison, their sexual organs were studied, codified, and preserved in jars. Anthropologists such as Cesare Lombrosco, coauthor of the major study of prostitution in the late nineteenth century, The Prostitute and the Normal Woman (1893), wrote that the source of their passion and pathology lay in the labia, which reflected a more primitive structure than their upper-class counterparts. One of Lombrosco’s students, Abele de Blasio, focused on the buttocks. His specialty was steatopygia (excessive fat on the buttocks), which was also deemed to be a special characteristic of whores —and, of course, black women. They would represent the very root of female eroticism, immorality, and disease.

  In the medical metaphors of the day, the sexual organs of sexual women were not only hotbeds of moral pathology, but of disease. In the nineteenth century the great fear was of a sexually transmitted disease that was spreading among the population, was incurable, and after invading the body, disfigured and decomposed it in stages. The name of the disease was syphilis, and it was the era’s metaphor for the retribution of sexual sin. Despite evidence to the contrary, it was seen as a disease that affected not only persons, but groups perceived as both licentious and deviant. Prostitutes of course fell into this category, but it did not seem to affect business. Science even abandoned long-held views to accommodate the paradigm. Formerly, it was believed that Christopher Columbus’s sailors had introduced the disease to Europe. Now the new wisdom traced it to a form of leprosy that had long been present in Africa and had spread into Europe during the Middle Ages. At the wellspring of this plague were the genital organs of black women (Gilman, 1985).

  As the epitome of the immorality, pathology, and impurity of the age, black women were seen in dualistic opposition to their upper-class, pure, and passionless white sisters. It was this binary opposition of women (black men’s sex drives were not seen as inherently different than those of white men, only less controlled) that was the linchpin of race, class, and even gender difference. It was this opposition, furthermore, that also led to lynching. For it was the white women’s qualities so profoundly missing in black women, that made black men find white
women irresistible, and “strangely alluring and seductive,” in the words of Phillip Bruce.

  III.

  Categorizing women through binary opposition had a devastating impact. Even the relatively privileged middle-class white women were subjected to the sexual tyrannies of the age. The opposition of public, a male sphere, and private, a female one, led to conclusions that imprisoned women in the home. The eminent Harvard-trained physician Dr. Edward Clarke, for example, wrote in his influential book Sex in Education (1873) that education could ruin a woman’s sexual organs. Ideas about male sexual irrepressibility in opposition to women’s passionlessness were largely responsible for the fact that “rape in marriage was no crime, nor even generally disapproved,” “wife beating was only marginally criminal,” and “incest was common enough to require skepticism that it was tabooed,” according to historians Linda Gordon and Ellen Carol DuBois (1983). Women would have to untangle and rework paradigms in order to protect themselves and, as DuBois and Gordon note, exercise their right to enjoy the pleasure of sex. Toward this end, white feminists began challenging the oppositional frameworks concerning the sexuality of men and women. For example, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, a physician, offered the startling counteropinion that men and women had equal sexual urges, thus providing a rationale for consensual sex in marriage—and for “free lovers” outside of marriage as well. They also regulated the torrent of male sexuality by insisting that women should only be required to have sex when they wanted to get pregnant. Called “voluntary motherhood,” it was a “brilliant” tactic, says Gordon, for it “insinuated a rejection of male sexual domination into a politics of defending and improving motherhood.” And at a time when they still had little power or even identity outside of the home, women disdained abortion and contraception, insisting—in a world of depersonalized sex—on maintaining the link between sexual intercourse and reproduction. Consequently, say the authors, the principle of marital mutuality and women’s right to say no was established among white middle-class couples in the late nineteenth century. This is perhaps evidenced by the fact that although birth control methods were not widely approved, the birthrate among white native-born women declined by 1900 to an average of 3.54—fifty percent below the level of the previous century!