9. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Theodore Stanton, and Harriot Stanton Blatch, Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary and Reminiscences, vol. 1 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1922), 253.
10. Brent Scher, “Gillibrand: If Lehman Brothers Were Lehman Sisters, We Would Have Avoided Financial Collapse,” Washington Free Beacon, May 15, 2018, https://freebeacon.com/politics/gillibrand-lehman-brothers-lehman-sisters-avoided-financial-collapse/.
11. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, “We Are All Bound Up Together,” in Proceedings of the Eleventh Women’s Rights Convention, May 10, 1866 (New York: Robert J. Johnston, 1866), 46.
12. Audre Lorde, “An Open Letter to Mary Daly,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 4th ed., ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015), 90.
CHAPTER ONE: WOMAN’S RIGHTS ARE WHITE RIGHTS?
1. Laura Curtis Bullard, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” in Our Famous Women: Comprising the Lives and Deeds of American Women Who Have Distinguished Themselves (Hartford, CT: A. D. Worthington, 1884), 613.
2. Judith Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman’s Rights Convention (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 193, 277n30. This was not Stanton’s first-ever public speech, despite what she liked to claim. See Lori Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 57.
3. Alice S. Rossi, ed., “Selections from the History of Woman Suffrage: Seneca Falls Convention,” in The Feminist Papers: From Adams to Beauvoir (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 419–420; Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 59–63.
4. Sally Gregory McMillen, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 93–94.
5. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Preface,” in Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815–1897 (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898); Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003), 345.
6. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, Volume 2 (1861–1876) (Rochester, NY: Susan B. Anthony, 1881), 354–355; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Address to Anniversary of American Equal Rights Association, May 12, 1869, New York City,” in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker, ed. Ellen Carol DuBois (New York: NYU Press, 2007), 191.
7. Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, 382.
8. Elisabeth Griffith, In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 137. Anthony declares this in 1866. See Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1 (Indianapolis: Bowen-Merrill, 1899), 261.
9. “Annual Meeting of the American Equal Rights Association: Second Day’s Proceedings,” Revolution 3, no. 21 (May 27, 1869): 321, quotes slightly paraphrased for grammatical continuity, and the original source paraphrases Harper’s words. As it was, Chinese immigrants were not granted the right to vote until 1943.
10. Ibid., 322. The original source paraphrases Harper’s words.
11. Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019).
12. “Annual Meeting of the American Equal Rights Association: Second Day’s Proceedings,” 322.
13. Brittney Cooper also argues that Anna Julia Cooper may in fact be the first Black feminist theorist. Brittney Cooper, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 2.
14. Ellen Carol Dubois, “Introduction,” in The Elizabeth Cady Stanton–Susan B. Anthony Reader: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches, ed. Ellen Carol Dubois (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 9; Stanton, Eighty Years, 2, 20.
15. Stanton, Eighty Years, 23; Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 22.
16. Melba Joyce Boyd, Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825–1911 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 36–37.
17. William Still, The Underground Railroad (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates Publishers, 1872), 756; W. Somerset Maugham, “‘Pride and Prejudice’, Atlantic, 181, 5, May 1948,” in Jane Austen: Critical Assessments, vol. 1, ed. Ian Littlewood (Lake Dallas, TX: Helm Information, 1998), 460.
18. “120 Years of Literacy: 1870,” National Center for Educational Statistics, https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp. For more on African American literacy rates in this period see Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 4–5.
19. McHenry, Forgotten Readers, 79; Stanton, Eighty Years, 81, 79; Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 36–38.
20. An exception to the restriction against owning property was that courts often determined white women in the South were able to own slaves in their own right as married women. See Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property, xi–xv.
21. The phrase “white women’s rights” is Louise Michelle Newman’s. See Louise Michelle Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
22. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Address Delivered at Seneca Falls, July 19, 1848,” in The Elizabeth Cady Stanton–Susan B. Anthony Reader: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches, ed. Ellen Carol Dubois (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 35.
23. Stanton, Eighty Years, 187.
24. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Address to the Legislature of New York on Women’s Rights, February 14, 1854,” in The Elizabeth Cady Stanton–Susan B. Anthony Reader: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches, ed. Ellen Carol Dubois (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 45; Sally Roesch Wagner, “Is Equality Indigenous? The Untold Iroquois Influence on Early Radical Feminists,” On the Issues 5, no. 1 (1996): 21.
25. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., But Some of Us Are Brave: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men (New York: The Feminist Press, 1993).
26. Stanton, Eighty Years, 237–238, 192.
27. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 47, 108, 20; “When Did Slavery End in New York?,” New York Historical Society Museum and Library, January 12, 2012, www.nyhistory.org/community/slavery-end-new-york; Stanton, Eighty Years, 4.
28. Still, Underground Railroad, 756–757; “The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850,” Bill of Rights in Action 34, no. 2 (Winter 2019), www.crf-usa.org/images/pdf/Fugitive-Slave-Law-1850.pdf.
29. Still, Underground Railroad, 757.
30. Ibid., 757–758.
31. Ibid., 758–759, 761; Boyd, Discarded Legacy, 42; Frances Smith Foster, “Introduction,” in A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader, ed. Frances Smith Foster (New York: The Feminist Press, 1990), 13.
32. Still, Underground Railroad, 758.
33. Frances E. W. Harper, “The Slave Mother,” in A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader, ed. Frances Smith Foster (New York: The Feminist Press, 1990), 84.
34. Harper, “We Are All Bound Up Together,” 217.
35. Frances E. W. Harper, “Our Greatest Want,” in A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader, ed. Frances Smith Foster (New York: The Feminist Press, 1990), 103.
36. Frances E. W. Harper, “Free Labor,” in A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader, ed. Frances Smith Foster (New York: The Feminist Press, 1990), 81.
37. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Address of Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” in Proceedings of the Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, Held at the Church of the Puritans, New York, May 10, 1866 (New York: Robert J. Johnston, 1866), 52.
38. Harper, “We Are All Bound Up Together,” 217; Still, Underground Railroad, 778.
39. Harper, “We Are All Bound Up Together,” 217.
40. Ibid., 218.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., 217.
43. Boyd, Discarded Legacy, 119–120; Still, Underground Railroad, 767–767, 772�
�773.
44. Still, Underground Railroad, 768, 772, 775.
45. Ibid., 770.
46. Ibid., 775; William J. Collins and Robert A. Margo, “Race and Home Ownership from the End of the Civil War to the Present,” American Economic Review 101, no. 3 (2011): 356; Pete Daniel, Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
47. Still, Underground Railroad, 775–776.
48. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Address to the First Anniversary of the American Equal Rights Association, May 9, 1867,” in Proceedings of the First Anniversary of the American Equal Rights Association, Held at the Church of the Puritans, New York, May 9 and 10, 1867 (New York: Robert J. Johnson, 1867), 14.
49. Faye E. Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 8–10; Christine Stansell, The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present (New York: Modern Library, 2011), 89; Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), 31; Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage, 1983), 81.
50. Geoffrey C. Ward and Kenneth Burns, Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (New York: Knopf, 1999), 131. The word comes from Stowe’s sister-in-law Isabella Hooker Beecher, whose participation Stanton and Anthony also sought. Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 358.
51. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 122; “Mrs. Stanton Before the District Committee,” Revolution, February 11, 1869, 88; “Which Shall It Be—a Negro or a Woman?,” Revolution, September 15, 1870, 169; “White Woman’s Suffrage Association,” Revolution, June 4, 1868, 337.
52. Griffith, In Her Own Right, 126–127; Ellen Carol Dubois, Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights (New York: NYU Press, 1998), 100.
53. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “The Solitude of Self,” in The Elizabeth Cady Stanton–Susan B. Anthony Reader: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches, ed. Ellen Carol Dubois (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 251, 254, 247.
54. Ibid., 252.
55. Griffith, In Her Own Right, xvi.
56. Boyd, Discarded Legacy, 119.
57. Frances E. W. Harper, “Woman’s Political Future—Address by Frances E. W. Harper of Virginia,” in The World’s Congress of Representative Women: A Historical Résumé for Popular Circulation of the World’s Congress of Representative Women, ed. May Wright Sewall (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1894), 435.
58. Foster, “Introduction,” 25.
59. See for example Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 80. Feminist critics, in general, see her sentimentalism as a strategic cover for injecting radical politics into everyday life.
60. Frances E. W. Harper, Iola Leroy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 219.
61. Geoffrey Sanborn, “Mother’s Milk: Frances Harper and the Circulation of Blood,” ELH 73, no. 3 (2005), 691–715.
62. Harper, “Woman’s Political Future,” 435, 436.
63. Quoted in DuBois, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Reader, 296–297; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Our Proper Attitude Toward Immigration,” in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker, ed. Ellen Carol DuBois (New York: NYU Press, 2007), 296–297.
64. Catt, Woman Suffrage by Constitutional Amendment, 76.
CHAPTER TWO: WHITE SYMPATHY VERSUS BLACK SELF-DETERMINATION
1. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (New York: Open Road, 2016), 82.
2. Ibid., 93.
3. Jacobs refers to Mark Ramsey as “Uncle Phillip” in Incidents. Jean Fagan Yellin, Harriet Jacobs: A Life (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 212.
4. Jacobs, Incidents, 99–100.
5. Ibid., 98.
6. Yellin, Harriet Jacobs, 101–103.
7. Jacobs, Incidents, 50.
8. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Household Papers and Stories (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1868), 382.
9. James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983), 14.
10. Luvvie Ajayi, “About the Weary Weaponizing of White Women Tears,” AwesomelyLuvvie.com, April 17, 2018, https://awesomelyluvvie.com/2018/04/weaponizing-white-women-tears.html; Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (New York: Picador, 2018), 171–200; Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018), 131.
11. Charles Edward Stowe, The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe: Compiled from Her Letters and Journals (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1890), 145.
12. Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 192–193, 207–208.
13. Ibid., 208.
14. Ibid., 209.
15. Stowe, The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, 201–202.
16. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 209, 219, italics in original.
17. Stowe, The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, 149–153.
18. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (New York: Open Road, 2014), 269, 453.
19. Ibid., 378, 62.
20. Ibid., 509, 533.
21. Ibid., 441, 438, 552.
22. Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 35.
23. Jacobs, Incidents, 159; Yellin, Harriet Jacobs, 245.
24. Jacobs, Incidents, 162.
25. Ibid., 164.
26. “Harriet Jacobs to Amy Kirby Post, Cornwall, Orange Co., NY, 1852(?),” in The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, vol. 1, ed. Jean Yellin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 191.
27. Ibid.
28. Yellin, Harriet Jacobs, 119–120; “Harriet Jacobs to Amy Kirby Post, February 14, 1853,” in The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, vol. 1, ed. Jean Yellin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 193–194.
29. While the letter no longer exists, Jacobs’s recounting of its contents to Amy Post survives. “Harriet Jacobs to Amy Kirby Post, February 14, 1853,” 94. See Yellin, Harriet Jacobs, 119–121.
30. “Harriet Jacobs to Amy Kirby Post, April 4, 1853,” in The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, vol. 1, ed. Jean Yellin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 195.
31. Yellin, Harriet Jacobs, 121.
32. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 249.
33. Harry Stone, “Charles Dickens and Harriet Beecher Stowe,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 12, no. 3 (1957): 188; Katherine Kane, “The Most Famous American in the World,” ConnecticutHistory.org, https://connecticuthistory.org/the-most-famous-american-in-the-world/; Stowe, The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, 191–192.
34. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 237.
35. Ibid., 223.
36. Ibid., 240.
37. Ibid., 235–237, 248.
38. Ibid., 236; “Stowe’s Global Impact,” Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, www.harrietbeecherstowecenter.org/harriet-beecher-stowe/her-global-impact/; “Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe,” First Amendment Museum, September 27, 2020, https://firstamendmentmuseum.org/banned/; Frederick Douglass, “First Meeting with Stowe, 1853,” in Stowe in Her Own Time, ed. Susan Belasco (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), 86. The exact wording of this apocryphal quote varies. See Daniel R. Vollaro, “Lincoln, Stowe, and the ‘Little Woman/Great War’ Story: The Making, and Breaking, of a Great American Anecdote,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 30, no. 1 (2009): 18–34.
39. Robert S. Levine, ed., “Delany and Douglass on Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” in Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 234, 235; Frederick Douglass, “Mrs. Stowe’s Position,” in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, May 6, 1853, http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/africam/afar03rt.html.
40. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 247.
41. Ibid., 245; Stowe, The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, 234
. For an image of the bracelet, see Kane, “The Most Famous American in the World.”
42. “Harriet Jacobs to Amy Kirby Post, May 1853,” in The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, vol. 1 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 195–196.
43. “Mrs. Ex-President Tyler’s Address to the Women of England,” Daily South Carolinian, March 8, 1853, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/GT3005440026/NCNP?u=new67449&sid=NCNP&xid=48292960; Wendy F. Hamand, “‘No Voice from England’: Mrs. Stowe, Mr. Lincoln, and the British in the Civil War,” New England Quarterly 61, no. 1 (1988): 5.
44. Yellin, The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, vol. 1, 197–201; Yellin, Harriet Jacobs, 122.
45. Yellin, Harriet Jacobs, 129.
46. Linton Weeks, “How Black Abolitionists Changed a Nation,” NPR, February 26, 2015, www.npr.org/sections/npr-history-dept/2015/02/26/388993874/how-black-abolitionists-changed-a-nation; Jacobs, Incidents, 69, 143.
47. Marianne Noble, “The Ecstasies of Sentimental Wounding in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Yale Journal of Criticism 10, no. 2 (1997): 295–296.
48. Jacobs, Incidents, 52.
49. Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage, 1981), 31; Franny Nudelman, “Harriet Jacobs and the Sentimental Politics of Female Suffering,” ELH 59, no. 4 (1992): 939–940.
50. Yellin, Harriet Jacobs, 137–138.
51. “Child to J.G. Whittier,” The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, vol. 1, 343.
52. “Jacobs to Amy Kirby Post,” The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, vol. 1, 282; “Child to Lucy Searle Jacobs,” The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, vol. 1, 296; Yellin, Harriet Jacobs, 140–141.
53. Christy Pottroff, “Harriet Jacobs, Publisher and Activist,” Avidly, Los Angeles Review of Books, November 18, 2019, http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2019/11/18/harriet-jacobs-publisher-and-activist/.
54. Yellin, Harriet Jacobs, 143, 147.
55. Thanks to Sarah Blackwood for sharing this story. The Library of Congress changed its designation of the book’s author from Lydia Maria Child to Harriet Jacobs in 1987. Lisa W. Foderaro, “Slave Narrative Gets Postscript,” New York Times, February 13, 2005, www.nytimes.com/2005/02/13/nyregion/books/slave-narrative-gets-postscript.html.
The Trouble with White Women Page 32