The Trouble with White Women

by Kyla Schuller

  22. Ibid., 15.

  23. Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization, 280–281.

  24. Jill Grimaldi, “The First American Birth Control Conference,” Margaret Sanger Papers Project, November 12, 2010, https://sangerpapers.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/the-first-american-birth-control-conference/.

  25. Quoted in Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (New York: Random House, 2020), 80.

  26. Sanger, Pivot of Civilization, 101, 99, 98; Loretta Ross, “Trust Black Women: Reproductive Justice and Eugenics,” in Radical Reproductive Justice: Foundation, Theory, Practice, Critique, ed. Loretta Ross, Lynn Roberts, Erika Derkas, Whitney Peoples, and Pamela Bridgewater (New York: The Feminist Press, 2017), 65; Baker, Margaret Sanger, 281–282.

  27. Margaret Sanger, “Birth Control and Racial Betterment,” Birth Control Review (February 1919): 11–12; Franks, Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy, 47.

  28. Edward A. Ross, “The Causes of Race Superiority,” Annals of the Institute for Political Science 18 (1901): 67–89; Laura L. Lovett, “Fitter Families for Future Firesides: Florence Sherborn and Popular Eugenics,” Public Historian 29, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 73.

  29. Sanger, “The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda,” 5; Sanger, Pivot of Civilization, 175, 104.

  30. Susanne Klausen and Alison Bashford, “Fertility Control,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, ed. Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 111; Sanger, Pivot of Civilization, 12, 229, 270.

  31. “Jan. 2, 1923 First Legal Birth Control Clinic Opens in U.S.,” Margaret Sanger Papers Project, February 12, 2014, https://sangerpapers.wordpress.com/2014/02/12/jan-2-1923-first-legal-birth-control-clinic-opens-in-u-s/; Gray, Margaret Sanger, 200–201.

  32. “Jan. 2, 1923 First Legal Birth Control Clinic”; Sanger, An Autobiography, 368, 449.

  33. Wangui Muigai, “Looking Uptown: Margaret Sanger and the Harlem Branch Birth Control Clinic,” Margaret Sanger Papers Project, Newsletter no. 54 (Spring 2010); see also Carole R. McCann, Birth Control Politics in the United States, 1916–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 139, 141.

  34. McCann, Birth Control Politics, 139–160.

  35. Kiesel, She Can Bring Us Home, 28, 164–166.

  36. Jess Whatcott, “Sexual Deviance and ‘Mental Defectiveness’ in Eugenics Era California,” Notches: (Re)Marks on the History of Sexuality, March 14, 2017, https://notchesblog.com/2017/03/14/sexual-deviance-and-mental-defectiveness-in-eugenics-era-california/.

  37. Kiesel, She Can Bring Us Home, 29; Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny After Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 77–78, 106; Michael Gregory Dorr and Angela Logan, “‘Quality, Not Mere Quantity, Counts’: Black Eugenics and the NAACP Baby Contests,” in A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era, ed. Paul A. Lombardo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 86, 88; Kyla Schuller, The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 197.

  38. Gamble, “‘Outstanding Services to Negro Health,’” 1398–1399.

  39. Kiesel, She Can Bring Us Home, 64–65.

  40. “Ferebee,” Black Women Oral History Project; Susan L. Smith, Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Black Women’s Health Activism in America, 1890–1950 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 150.

  41. “Ferebee,” Black Women Oral History Project; Gamble, “‘Outstanding Services to Negro Health,’” 1399.

  42. Smith, Sick and Tired, 124–125; Kiesel, She Can Bring Us Home, 55.

  43. “Ferebee,” Black Women Oral History Project; Gamble, “‘Outstanding Services to Negro Health,’” 1400; Kiesel, She Can Bring Us Home, xviii.

  44. Kiesel, She Can Bring Us Home, 68; Smith, Sick and Tired, 160; Gamble, “‘Outstanding Services to Negro Health,’” 1400.

  45. Joyce Follet, “Making Democracy Real: African American Women, Birth Control, and Social Justice, 1910–1960,” Meridians 18, no. 1 (2019): 123, 132; Smith, Sick and Tired, 167, 157.

  46. Kiesel, She Can Bring Us Home, xix; Dorothy Boulding Ferebee, “Speech by Dorothy Boulding Ferebee, M.D. Entitled ‘Planned Parenthood as a Public Health Measure for the Negro Race,’ January 29th, 1942,” Florence Rose Papers, Sophia Smith Collective, Smith College, Northampton, MA, https://libex.smith.edu/omeka/items/show/447 (this collection is hereafter cited as Rose, Smith).

  47. Follet, “Making Democracy Real,” 123.

  48. Sanger, An Autobiography, 492; Chesler, Woman of Valor, 253, 385; “Margaret Sanger: The Arizona Years,” Margaret Sanger Papers Project, Newsletter no. 9 (Winter 1994/1995).

  49. Chesler, Woman of Valor, 374.

  50. Ibid., 367, 381; “Letter from Margaret Sanger to Dr. C. J. Gamble, December 10, 1939,” Margaret Sanger Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA (this collection is hereafter cited as Sanger, Smith); “Special Negro Project, Under the Direction of the Birth Control Federation of America, Inc.,” organizational spreadsheet, Rose, Smith; “Better Health for 13,000,000,” Planned Parenthood Federation of America Report, 1943, Rose, Smith, 5; Ferebee, “Speech by Dorothy Boulding Ferebee, 1942,” 2.

  51. “Letter from Margaret Sanger to Dr. C. J. Gamble,” Sanger, Smith.

  52. Ibid.; “Letter from Margaret Sanger to Cele” (Mrs. Damon), November 24, 1939,” Sanger, Smith.

  53. “Letter from Margaret Sanger to Mary Rheinhardt, February 4, 1940,” Rose, Smith.

  54. “Letter from Margaret Sanger to Cele” (Mrs. Damon), November 24, 1939,” Sanger, Smith; Follet, “Making Democracy Real,” 106.

  55. Brittney Cooper, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 67; “Letter from Dr. C. J. Gamble to Margaret Sanger, December 2, 1939,” Rose, Smith.

  56. “Letter from Florence Rose to Mrs. Lasker, March 22, 1941,” Rose, Smith.

  57. “Minutes of National Advisory Council Meeting, Friday, December 11, 1942,” Rose, Smith.

  58. Ferebee, “Speech by Dorothy Boulding Ferebee, 1942.”

  59. “Letter from Florence Rose to W. E. B. Du Bois, July 22, 1941,” Sanger, Smith; W. E. B. Du Bois, “Black Folk and Birth Control,” Birth Control Review 16, no. 6 (June 1932): 167.

  60. “Letter from Unknown to Dr. Joseph H. Willits, November 16, 1939,” Rose, Smith.

  61. McCann, Birth Control Politics, 164; “Memo, Jan. 1944,” Rose, Smith.

  62. “Better Health for 13,000,000,” Rose, Smith, 7–8.

  63. “Birth Control or Race Control? Sanger and the Negro Project,” Margaret Sanger Papers Project, Newsletter no. 28 (Fall 2001); “Highlights of 1944–1945 Program,” Rose, Smith.

  64. Dana Seitler, “Unnatural Selection: Mothers, Eugenic Feminism, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Regeneration Narratives,” American Quarterly 55, no. 1 (2003): 66.

  65. Follet, “Making Democracy Real,” 113; Ferebee, “Speech by Dorothy Ferebee, 1942”; Kiesel, She Can Bring Us Home, 128.

  66. Loretta Ross, Lynn Roberts, Erika Derkas, Whitney Peoples, and Pamela Bridgewater, eds., “Introduction,” in Radical Reproductive Justice: Foundation, Theory, Practice, Critique (New York: The Feminist Press, 2017), 4–15.

  CHAPTER FIVE: TAKING FEMINISM TO THE STREETS

  1. Pauli Murray, “Letter to the Editor,” Washington Post, August 23, 1963.

  2. Carol Giardina, “MOW to NOW: Black Feminism Resets the Chronology of the Founding of Modern Feminism,” Feminist Studies 44, no. 3 (2018): 747; “History of the National Press Club,” National Press Club, www.press.org/npc-history-facts.

  3. Giardina, “MOW to NOW,” 747–748.

  4. DC Historic Preservation Office, “Civil Rights Tour: Political Empowerment—National Council of Negro Women,” DC Historic Sites, https://historicsites.dcpreservation.org/items/show/955; Dorothy Height, Open Wi
de the Freedom Gates (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003), 146; Giardina, “MOW to NOW,” 740.

  5. Giardina, “MOW to NOW,” 736–737; Height, Open Wide, 145; M. Rivka Polatnik, “Diversity in Women’s Liberation Ideology: How a Black and a White Group of the 1960s Viewed Motherhood,” Signs 21, no. 3 (1996): 679, 743: together, “they transformed a series of high-stakes confrontations with male leaders into a sustained and far-reaching movement for women’s equality.”

  6. Pauli Murray, “Jim Crow and Jane Crow,” in Black Women in White America: A Documentary History, ed. Gerda Lerner (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 596; Dorothy Height, “We Wanted the Voice of a Woman to Be Heard,” in Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights–Black Power Movement, ed. Bettye Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 90, 86.

  7. Pauli Murray, “Why Negro Girls Stay Single,” Negro Digest 5, no. 9 (July 1947): 5; Brittney Cooper, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 88, 100.

  8. An important exception: Giardina, “MOW to NOW.” The phrase is Muriel Fox’s, one of the founders of NOW. Betty Friedan, “Up from the Kitchen Floor: Kitchen Floor Woman Power,” New York Times, March 4, 1973, 8.

  9. Betty Friedan, Life so Far (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 45, 48.

  10. Ibid., 61–62; Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of ‘The Feminine Mystique’: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 94–101.

  11. Friedan, Life so Far, 97.

  12. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 15.

  13. Pauli Murray, Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 36.

  14. Ibid., 37–39.

  15. Ibid., 47.

  16. Ibid., 55–56; Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 28.

  17. Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (New York: Polity Press, 2019), 42.

  18. Jamie Ducharme and Elijah Wolfson, “Your ZIP Code Might Determine How Long You Live—and the Difference Could Be Decades,” Time, June 17, 2019, https://time.com/5608268/zip-code-health/.

  19. Kenneth W. Mack, Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 212.

  20. Murray, Song in a Weary Throat, 67, 106–107.

  21. Ibid., 138–140, 115.

  22. Ibid., 125, 118. It would be another fourteen years, in 1951, before the university admitted a Black student.

  23. Ibid., 183.

  24. Rosalind Rosenberg, Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 70.

  25. Murray, Song in a Weary Throat, 109, 221.

  26. Ibid., 221–222.

  27. Ibid., 239.

  28. Ibid., 104, 241.

  29. Troy Saxby, Pauli Murray: A Personal and Political Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 129.

  30. Both Simon D. Elin Fisher and Doreen Drury argue this letter was written by the couple, Murray and McBean. Simon D. Elin Fisher, “Challenging Dissemblance in Pauli Murray Historiography, Sketching a History of the Trans New Negro,” Journal of African American History 104, no. 2 (2019): 181; Doreen M. Drury, “‘Experimentation on the Male Side’: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Pauli Murray’s Quest for Love and Identity, 1910–1960” (PhD diss., Boston College, 2000), 201; Doreen M. Drury, “Boy-Girl, Imp, Priest: Pauli Murray and the Limits of Identity,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 29, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 147; Simon D. Elin Fisher, “Pauli Murray’s Peter Panic Perspectives from the Margins of Gender and Race in Jim Crow America,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 3, no. 1–2 (2016): 98; Rosenberg, Jane Crow, 58, 59.

  31. Fisher, “Challenging Dissemblance,” 177, 199.

  32. Drury, “Boy-Girl,” 144; Cooper, Beyond Respectability, 106.

  33. Cooper, Beyond Respectability, 179; “Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique,” The First Measured Century, PBS, 2000, www.pbs.org/fmc/segments/progseg11.htm.

  34. Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 314, 365, 322, 348.

  35. bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984), 1–2; bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1982), 188.

  36. Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 377, 350; hooks, Feminist Theory, 1.

  37. Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 366, 364, 377, 199, 276, 297, 309, 378; Friedan, Life so Far, 132.

  38. See Friedan, Life so Far, 141, for Friedan’s media tour innovations; also 57–58.

  39. Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 309; Friedan, Life so Far, 131.

  40. Rosenberg, Jane Crow, 187.

  41. Horowitz, Betty Friedan, 212; Rosenberg, Jane Crow, 204. Friedan and Murray shared a literary agent, Marie Rodell, but likely never met in this period.

  42. Murray, Song in a Weary Throat, 262.

  43. Ibid., 255; “Transcript of Brown v. Board of Education (1954),” US National Archives and Records Administration, www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=87&page=transcript.

  44. Murray, Song in a Weary Throat, 255.

  45. Serena Mayeri, “Pauli Murray and the Twentieth-Century Quest for Legal and Social Equality,” Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality 2, no. 1 (2014): 83; Rosenberg, Jane Crow, 275; Murray, Song in a Weary Throat, 355–356.

  46. Pauli Murray and Mary Eastwood, “Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII,” George Washington Law Review 34, no. 2 (December 1965): 237; Caroline Chiapetti, “Winning the Battle but Losing the War: The Birth and Death of Intersecting Notions of Race and Sex Discrimination in White v. Crook,” Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review 52 (2017): 470–471.

  47. Murray, Song in a Weary Throat, 367; Murray and Eastwood, “Jane Crow,” 233n10.

  48. Murray and Eastwood, “Jane Crow,” 256, 239–240.

  49. Chiapetti, “Winning the Battle,” 470.

  50. Brittney Cooper, “Black, Queer, Feminist, Erased from History: Meet the Most Important Legal Scholar You’ve Likely Never Heard Of,” Salon, February 18, 2015, www.salon.com/test/2015/02/18/black_queer_feminist_erased_from_history_meet_the_most_important_legal_scholar_youve_likely_never_heard_of/.

  51. Murray’s “reasoning from race,” in legal scholar Serena Mayeri’s analysis, does not depend on “simple parallels or assertions of equivalence” in experience. Instead, she uses analogies to expose “interconnections” between forms of structural power. Serena Mayeri, Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 5, 33; Friedan, Life so Far, 179; Saxby, Pauli Murray, 246.

  52. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1 (1989): 166n77. Brittney Cooper argues that Murray’s work is the most direct predecessor to the feminist theories of intersectionality that law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw and sociologist Patricia Hill Collins elaborated in the late 1980s and 1990s. Cooper, Beyond Respectability, 88.

  53. Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” in How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, ed. Keeanga-Yamahatta Taylor (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 22–23.

  54. Murray, Song in a Weary Throat, 361.

  55. Ibid., 361–362.

  56. Ibid., 365.

  57. Ibid.

  58. Horowitz, Betty Friedan, 243.

  59. Friedan, Life so Far, 163.

  60. Key to this “network” was Pauli Murray’s introducing Friedan to Catherine East. Friedan, It Changed My Life, 96.

  61. John Herbers, “Help Wanted: Picking the S
ex for the Job,” New York Times, September 28, 1965; Frances M. Beal, “Black Women’s Manifesto, Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” pamphlet (New York: Third World Women’s Alliance, 1969), www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/196.html.

  62. Friedan, Life so Far, 174.

  63. Rosenberg, Jane Crow, 300.

  64. Ibid., 308–309.

  65. Ibid.

  66. Friedan, Life so Far, 186; Louis Harris and Associates, Harris 1972 American Women’s Opinion Poll: A Survey of the Attitudes of Women on Their Roles in Politics and the Economy (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 1992), 4, https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR07326.v1.

  67. Friedan coined the phrase in 1969, and it was first attributed to her in print by Susan Brownmiller in 1970. Susan Brownmiller, “Sisterhood Is Powerful,” New York Times, March 15, 1970, 230; Horowitz, Betty Friedan, 123–124; Friedan, Life so Far, 224, 222.

  68. Carolyn Bronstein, Battling Pornography: The American Feminist Anti-Pornography Movement, 1976–1986 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 54.

  69. Radicalesbians, “The Woman Identified Woman,” 1970, 1.

  70. Brown recounts this scene in Mary Dore’s 2014 documentary She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, 00:42:40; Friedan, Life so Far, 224, 223.

  71. Friedan, “Up from the Kitchen Floor,” 30; Friedan, Life so Far, 211. (This phrase is the whole title of chapter 9.)

  72. Judith Hennessee, Betty Friedan: Her Life (New York: Random House, 1999), 135; Faderman, Odd Girls, 212; Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: William Morrow, 1984), 346.

  73. Caroline Kitchener, “‘How Many Women of Color Have to Cry?’: Top Feminist Organizations Are Plagued by Racism, 20 Former Staffers Say,” The Lily, July 13, 2020, www.thelily.com/how-many-women-of-color-have-to-cry-top-feminist-organizations-are-plagued-by-racism-20-former-staffers-say/.

  74. Friedan, “Up from the Kitchen Floor,” 31; Pauli Murray, “Letter to the Editor,” New York Times, March 25, 1973, 2; Saxby, Pauli Murray, 260.