After her death, William published the memoirs of Mary’s life, including all the scandalous stuff about her ~liberated~ sexuality. As soon as the prudes got their hands on it, they held her sexual freedom up as proof that suffragists, women’s rights advocates, feminists, and women generally were all just sluts. And so she was sidelined by more conservative women’s rights activists in the 19th century who found her three entire boyfriends altogether too scandalous for their tastes, but by the 20th century, wilder women held her up again as a hero.
Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter, the inventively named Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, grew up to write Frankenstein under her married name, Mary Shelley. What a shame the Marys never got to meet each other properly – who knows what they could have done together?
50
Ida B. Wells-Barnett
1862–1931
The thing about Ida B. Wells is that she accomplished not one, not two, not three, but one billion remarkable feats in her 68 years of life. Each one of these billion achievements should have been enough to earn her the right to eternal fame and glory, and yet today not every journalist in America has the words ‘IDA BELL WELLS-BARNETT’ tattooed on their body – as they should. And so we must say once again that a brilliant woman has not earned her due recognition in history.
Ida Wells was born in 1862 in Mississippi. Her parents, James and Elizabeth Wells, gained their freedom after the Civil War and became involved in Republican politics in the post-emancipation South. (Remember, at this point in American History, the Republican party was interested in the reconstruction of the South and the extension of rights to formerly enslaved people, rather than its focus today on giving guns to foetuses.)
The immediate aftermath of the Civil War was a time of great hope for black people in the South, who suddenly found themselves at the centre of political life as the majority of voters. With great energy, freed people like Ida’s parents began working to take their place as full citizens after centuries of being denied their very humanity, let alone the right to vote. Ida’s parents campaigned to elect black people to political office, while encouraging their eight children to take advantage of their educations. Ida later described her duty as a child: ‘Our job was to go to school and learn all we could.’
Ida’s duty would become much greater in 1878, when she lost her parents and a sibling to a yellow fever epidemic. Her extended family planned to divide the siblings and institutionalise one of her sisters, Eugenia, who was paralysed from scoliosis – but Ida said her parents would ‘turn over in their graves to know their children had been scattered.’ And so at 16, an age at which a girl’s only concern should be hiding her pimples from her crush, Ida took responsibility for her entire family.
She lied about her age in order to get a job in a rural school six miles’ ride by mule from home, but after a few years of her tiring schedule, she decided to move the family to Memphis, Tennessee, where she continued to work as a schoolteacher.
In 1884, the course of Ida’s life changed forever. She was travelling in the Ladies’ Coach of a train from Memphis to Woodstock, Tennessee, as she’d done many times before. The conductor approached her and asked her to leave the coach, which was full of white women, and go and sit in one of the shittier carriages instead. Ida refused. He tried to force her, so she did what she had to do, and bit his hand. The conductor ran away in fear to find backup. It ended up taking three grown men to drag Ida from the carriage, while the rest of the passengers cheered.
Ida was of course enraged by the incident, but what she did next, most people would never dream of: she decided to sue the railroad. And, amazingly, she won. She was ecstatic, and wrote about her experience in a Baptist publication called the Living Way, calling on black people to stand up for the rights granted them by Reconstruction era laws, thereby solidifying them. It was her first entry into the world of activist journalism – but would not be her last.
As the years had progressed since the end of Reconstruction, though, white people were fighting more and more against the gains black people had made in the South. Their tactics included outright voter fraud, finding new ‘legal’ ways to disenfranchise black people, instituting segregation, and lynching men who they claimed had committed crimes. In 1883, the year before Ida’s train incident, the US Supreme Court had nullified the Civil Rights Act of 1875 – which had guaranteed equal treatment of African Americans in such public spaces as public transport, among other protections. By overturning this law, the Supreme Court said that private citizens, businesses, and organisations COULD discriminate according to race.
Ida’s case was the first example of a black person challenging this ruling, as she had been discriminated against by a railway company. When Ida won her case, it threatened legality of segregation in the private sphere – so the Tennessee Supreme Court stepped in to overturn her victory in the lower court. Ida was distraught. The ruling to overturn her victory was clear proof that there would be no justice for black people in the South. The system could not be trusted.
But Ida was not done fighting. She doubled down in her activist journalism, and began writing a weekly column for the Living Way under the pen name Iola. Her bold, political writing grew so popular that it was picked up by nearly 200 black publications across the country. She may have lost her case, but now she had a platform.
‘She has plenty of nerve,’ one of Ida’s editors wrote of her. ‘She is smart as a steel trap, and she has no sympathy with humbug.’ Having no sympathy with humbug, I suppose, is the 1880s equivalent of giving no fucks.
Her male editors at the Washington Bee, meanwhile, described Ida as a ‘remarkable and talented schoolmarm, about four and a half feet high, tolerably well proportioned and of ready address.’ Which, I suppose, is the 1880s equivalent of calling someone an absolute babe. Ida was the whole package: tolerably well proportioned with no sympathy for humbug. She also had a seemingly infinite supply of energy, and she was going to use every single drop of it to fight for the rights of black people and women.
As white backlash against Reconstruction grew, so did Ida’s prominence as a journalist, but she was not without further setbacks. An exposé of Memphis’ segregated school system would get her fired from her teaching job by the Tennessee Board of Education. She was devastated once more, but picked herself up and spent more time on her journalism. She began to be invited to give lectures and attend conferences across the country, becoming a leading figure on the women’s rights circuit and gaining national prominence for her writing on race.
Ida saw the potential of journalism to make political change – and never would her writing have more of an impact than her work in the 1890s to document, denounce, and analyse the rising phenomenon of lynching in the South. She was compelled to take on this work by the brutal lynching of three of her friends in 1889. A group of white grocery store owners had attacked the black men’s grocery store, resenting that it took business away from them, and the ensuing fight left several white men injured. Ida’s friends were arrested, but before they could even face a trial, a white mob raided the jail house, took away the men, and tortured, beat, and hanged them.
Grieving and enraged, Ida wrote in the black press that black people should leave the city of Memphis, which obviously did not value their lives. Thousands followed her advice, crippling the local economy. She also organised a very effective boycott of the city’s trolley service. Where Ida led, others followed.
She then set about researching her most ambitious project yet. She travelled across the South and documented 728 lynchings from the previous decade. She came to understand lynching to be a means of social control. Her work set off a firestorm for proving that most of the ‘crimes’ for which black men were lynched – especially claims that they had raped white women – were fabricated.
‘The more I studied the situation,’ she wrote, ‘the more I was convinced that the Southerner had never gotten over his resentment that the Negro was no longer his plaything, his servant, a
nd his source of income.’
Ida was travelling when her lynching work was published, and heard the news that her newspaper office had been destroyed in a fire. She received threats that men would be waiting for her at train stations should she try to return to Memphis. She knew she couldn’t go back to the South.
So she stayed where she was, in New York. In 1892 she gained the support of 250 prominent black women who gathered for an event at New York’s Lyric Hall to raise the funds needed to publish her reporting on lynching as a pamphlet titled Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases. Those women included Frances E.W. Harper, who you’ll hear about next.
Even after all this – the threats to her life, the deaths of her friends, the trauma of her alienation by a country that had for a time in the 1870s seemed to her and her family so promising for free black people – Ida B. Wells, being Ida B. Wells, carried on. She travelled to London and formed the first English anti-lynching society. She shamed America in the international press for its treatment of black people, and turned lynching from something that white Southerners could ‘justify’ as retribution for imagined crimes into an international, public, politicised debate. An opinion piece in The New York Times denounced her as ‘slanderous and nasty-minded’ for her criticisms of the United States. Thankfully Ida, as we know, had no sympathy for humbug.
Ida also did grassroots community organising in Chicago, never afraid to get her hands dirty. She advocated on behalf of black men in Arkansas who had been imprisoned for rioting during a unionisation effort, and secured their release. She co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP, which carries on its work to this day. She even met President McKinley and called him a dick. In so many words.
In 1895, Ida married Ferdinand L. Barnett, an attorney with a similar love of strong middle initials, and became Ida B. Wells-Barnett. She was one of the first women in the country to keep her own last name after marriage – something women sometimes still get shit for today, so imagine how bold a move it was over a century ago. Fellow women’s rights reformer Susan B. Anthony apparently judged her for getting married, saying it would divide her time from her activism. But Ida, it turns out, didn’t care much about the fears of Susan B. Anthony.
Ida B. Wells did so much in her life. She experienced unprecedented victories as well as heart-rending tragedies and defeats. But she never gave up. She never just decided, ‘That’s it, I’m done,’ and lay on the floor staring at the ceiling. Well, maybe she did – those moments don’t usually make it to the biographies. But whether or not Ida ever felt unable to go on, she always picked herself up soon after, and got back to work.
51
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
1825–1911
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was good at most everything she did. Born in Baltimore in 1825 to free parents, she made a career of being on the right side of history, and for this her writings and poetry should be taught in every school in America. Can someone with the ability to make that happen get on it? Excellent.
Frances was orphaned early on and raised by her aunt and uncle, the educator and abolitionist William Watkins, who instilled in her a profound sense of justice that she’d carry with her through life. She published her first book of poetry in 1845, entitled Forest Leaves. In 1854 she published another book of poetry, with the less whimsical but nevertheless accurate title, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects. It was a bestseller, and made her a star.
One of her most famous poems is ‘Bury me in a Free Land’, first published in 1858, which begins:
Make me a grave where’er you will,
In a lowly plain, or a lofty hill;
Make it among earth’s humblest graves,
But not in a land where men are slaves.
Right. It’s time for a truth bomb. In the 19th century and beyond, prominent white suffragists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton fought to win votes for women, but in doing so, resorted to some racist bullshittery. Despite this, Frances managed to win prominent positions in white-dominated suffragist organisations like the National Woman Suffrage Association.21
Tensions over race came to a head most acutely in debates surrounding the passage of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, which would extend the right to vote to black men. Stanton, Anthony, and most white women suffragists were opposed to the enfranchisement of any more men without also winning the vote for women.
These white suffragists argued that they had sufficient maturity and therefore the right to vote by claiming they were more evolutionarily developed than all black people. A popular theory in biology and social science at the time stated that people’s development from youth to maturity reflected the advancement of the species as a whole. The theory postulated that white men reached maturity and independence (and thereby the right to vote) at age 21, while white women and all black people never did reach the same height of evolutionary maturity.
Instead of assuming that anyone who believed in this theory was a complete, irredeemable idiot, white suffragists like Stanton and Anthony argued within its framework that white women were in fact as evolutionarily mature as white men – and more so than all black people.
Frances, on the other hand, rejected this theory and argued that all people, according to the principles of democracy and of Christianity, were truly equal and deserving of equal rights. Frances would not abandon black people and jeopardise the passage of the 15th Amendment for the sake of a racist ideology that would empower white women. ‘When it was a question of race,’ Frances said, she ‘let the lesser question of sex go.’ She would, however, also criticise those black men who championed their own rights and allied themselves with white men at the expense of black women. ‘It is no honor to shake hands politically with men who whip women and steal babies,’ she wrote in the Anglo-African Magazine in 1859.
The argument surrounding the 15th Amendment led to a split in the American Equal Rights Association, of which Frances was a founding member, and whose stated goal was suffrage for both black men and for all women. Harper and her allies would go on to found the American Women’s Rights Association, while Stanton and Anthony would found the National Woman’s Rights Association.
Here’s a quote from Frances that everyone should have up their sleeve the next time they hear some racist or sexist nonsense – which is likely to be imminent, because the world is bad: ‘We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse on its own soul.’
Frances Harper’s profound faith in the equality of people regardless of race, class, and gender was, at the time, quite revolutionary. The equality of all people is, hopefully, obvious to most today. Other than perhaps dodgy uncles at family reunions, who are inevitably the last demographic to ever come round to a new idea. The next time you face a dodgy uncle, remember Frances, and in everything you do, try to end up on the right side of history.
52
Ethel Payne
1911–1991
Ethel Payne was born in 1911 and grew up in Chicago dreaming of becoming a writer. She took night classes at Northwestern’s journalism school, and in 1948 took a job as a hostess at a social club for American soldiers posted in Japan. She kept a diary while there about her observations and about the experience of black soldiers in a segregated military – General Douglas MacArthur had ignored an executive order from President Harry Truman to desegregate the armed forces. Ethel shared her writings from Japan with a reporter for the Chicago Defender. They put together an article on black GIs, and when she returned to the US, she was hired by the Defender, whose motto was very much to the point: ‘American Race Prejudice Must Be Destroyed’.
Ethel worked as the Defender’s Washington correspondent in the 1950s and 60s, and became known as the ‘First Lady of the Black Press’, covering the front lines of the civil rights movement. As one of only three African American reporters with acc
reditation in the White House press corps, Ethel had the opportunity to directly grill presidents on civil rights issues, and carefully planned her questions so as to put them on the spot. She once asked President Eisenhower if he intended to ban segregation on interstate travel, which was within the remit of the federal government’s abilities. As you can imagine, Eisenhower was not pleased with this question, and his angry man-baby response made national news: ‘You say that you have to have administrative support,’ he snapped. ‘The administration is trying to do what it thinks and believes to be decent and just in this country, and is not in the effort to support any particular or special group of any kind.’ It was a very 1950s ‘all lives matter’ moment – and he was criticised for it. Eisenhower, who fought in wars but was afraid of this black woman reporter, simply stopped calling on her. The press secretary even looked into revoking her accreditation, and investigated her to try and find some dirt. There wasn’t any – her only problem was that she was asking a bunch of racists about how racist they were. Her direct and relentless questioning on ‘awkward’ topics earned her the reputation of, surprise, being ‘aggressive’, which is interesting given that when white male journalists ask blunt questions, they’re seen as being ‘good at their jobs’ and are rewarded with whisky and promotions.
100 Nasty Women of History Page 14