If I had another day here in New York I’d probably take a train up to Poughkeepsie. Turns out that because my great-great-grandfather was the first president of Vassar College they’ve got a lot of personal diaries and other family history.
Echidne of the Snakes on why original radical feminism (not necessarily the similar-sounding “radfem”) needs to be an authentic, independent concern:
...men who are oppressed on ethnic or racial grounds can easily see their own fight for equality as a righteous one but at the same time regard women as people who should be oppressed on religious or cultural grounds. Not seeing this can lead to cases where a person works for the rights of a group which then would like that person to have fewer rights.
Feminists discuss some of this when addressing racism within the movement. But the same arguments also apply in reverse. And in many other cases.
Yup. Going back in the U.S. at least as far as the campaign to pass the 14th Amendment (where they reluctantly agreed to drop inclusion of women’s suffrage in order to make voting rights for recently-freed slaves easier to pass) and as far back as the 1st Century (where they were expected to submit to Church “fathers” they both supported and sometimes sheltered) women have been asked or expected to sacrifice their own interests for the “greater good” of ethnic, social, political, labor, military or anti-military, and (somewhat quirkily) even sexual and reproductive causes. While almost never making space at the table for women themselves.
As it turns out my great-great-grandfather was a passionate advocate of both abolition and suffrage. Family history says in the 1860s he and some other prominent abolitionists dared authorities penalize him for advocating disobedience after the infamous Dred Scott decision. He also strongly supported suffrage, although — illustrating Echidne’s point — even he couched his support in earnest but patronizingly genteel Victorian terms.
After the 14th Amendment passed, newly enfranchised African American men, including my great-great-grandfather’s close friend Fredrick Douglass, ran away from their prior commitment to return the favor women had paid them and support a similar amendment enfranchising women. With the result that feminists like Susan B. Anthony, with whom he’d previously had a good working relationship, bitterly fell out with him.
Clue? It’s not just that there’s more to feminism than the priorities of the almost exclusively white*, cis, hetero, middle-class feminist great-great- and great-great-great grandaughters of Senica Falls attendees**. The realities in different communities and cultures really aren’t one-size-fits-all.
But that said we’re not going to have a post-feminist anything till we reach the point where “women’s nature” is no longer assumed to mean “naturally waits patiently till everyone else has been served.” This was true nearly 50 years ago when Shulamith Firestone wrote about the problem of “ladies’ auxiliaries” being kept at arm’s length from full inclusion by political, social, and labor organizations. And when she wrote the trend was already nearly 100 years old.
Yeah, awesome new possibilities really have opened up since then. But there are still people… still women… being requested to wait, expected to wait, or deciding to wait. When you can see such tolerance of deference happening in your own family tree, 150 years is a really, really long time.
* Somewhat ironically considering future events, Fredrick Douglass was the only African-American attendee at Senica Falls. His newspaper carried the original conference announcement and he spoke with some passion about the need for women’s inclusion in politics as both activists and, more radically (even for some conference organizers like Lucretia Mott), as voters.
** Right-wing commentators are actually correct to say that by today’s standards some of the original founders of feminism were socially far more conservative than former half-term Governor Sarah Palin.
My father always subscribed
Submitted by Red (not verified) on Thu, 2010-06-10 07:24. My father always subscribed strongly to a very anti-feminist version of support for racial equality. He always insisted on a view of history that insists that the vote was granted to women, as a way to boost white voting powers, because of the white males killed in WWI, and that all white suffragettes were in favor of eugenics. Also according to his version of things the movement against the war in Vietnam, “alienated the working classes” and ushered in the election of Reagan, because women were given a voice in that movement when all the pesky females should have just kept their mouths shut and let the guys do all the talking. That any political movement will “lose credibility” if women have any voice at all, and that feminism is always an elitist plot to keep poor, black, and even gay men down. His rationale lies with the whole Freudian idea of a the “weak female superego” to say that women can never really be qualified to vote because they will simply go for the most attractive man. And that most women who are active in politics simply have penis envy.