Top Quotes: “Women, Race, and Class” — Angela Davis

The 19th Century

“Ideological exaltation of motherhood — as popular as it was during the 19th century — didn’t extend to slaves. In fact, in the eyes of slaveholders, slave women weren’t mothers at all; they were simply instruments guaranteeing the growth of the slave labor force. They were ‘breeders’ — animals, whose monetary value could be precisely calculated in terms of their ability to multiply their numbers.

Since slave women were classified as ‘breeders’ as opposed to ‘mothers,’ their infant children could be sold away from them like calves from cows. 1 year after the importation of Africans was halted, a South Carolina court ruled that female slaves had no legal claims whatsoever on their children.”

“Black women and children comprised large proportions of the work forces in most slave-employing textile, hemp and tobacco factories…Slave women and children sometimes worked at ‘heavy’ industries such as sugar refining and rie milling…Other industries such as transportation and lumbering used slave women and children to a considerable extent.

Women were not too ‘feminine’ to work in coal mines, in iron foundries, or to be lumberjacks and ditchdiggers. When the Santee Canal was constructed in North Carolina, slave women were a full 50% of the labor force. Women also worked on the Louisiana levees, and many of the Southern railroads still in use today were constructed, in part, by female slave labor.”

“Most historical and sociological examinations of the Black family during slavery have simply assumed that the masters’ refusal to acknowledge fatherhood among their slaves was directly translated into a matriarchal family arrangement of the slaves’ own making.

The notorious 1965 government study on the ‘Negro Family’ — popularly known as the ‘Moynihan Report’ — directly linked the contemporary social and economic problems of the Black community to a putatitively matriarchal family structure. ‘In essence,’ wrote Daniel Moynhian,

the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it’s out of time with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.

According to the report’s thesis, the source of oppression was deeper than the racial discrimination that produced unemployment, shoddy housing, inadequate education and substandard medical care. The root of oppression was described as a ‘tangle of pathology’ created by the absence of male authority among Black people! The controversial finale of the Moynihan Report was a call to introduce male authority (meaning male supremacy of course!) into the Black family and the community at large.

One of Moynihan’s ‘liberal’ supporters, sociologist Lee Rainwater, took exception to the solutions recommended by the report. Rainwater proposed instead jobs, higher wages, and other economic reforms. He even went so far as to encourage continued civil rights protests and demonstrations. But, like most white sociologists — and some Black ones as well — he reiterated the thesis that slavery had effectively destroyed the Black family. As a result, Black people were allegedly left with ‘the mother-centered family with its emphasis on the primacy of the mother-child relation and only tenuous ties to a man.’ Today, he said,

Men often don’t have real homes; they move about from one household where they have kinship or sexual ties to another. They live in flop homes and rooming houses; they spend their time in institutions. They’re not household members in the only ‘homes’ they have — the homes of their mothers and of their girlfriends.”

“The bonds of love and affection, the cultural norms governing family relations, and the overpowering desire to remain together survived the devastating onslaught of slavery.

On the basis of letters and documents, such as birth records retrieved from plantations listing fathers as well as mothers, Gutman demonstrates not only that slaves adhered to strict norms regulating their familial arrangements, but that these norms differed from those governing the white family life around them. Marriage taboos, naming practices, and sexual mores — which, incidentally, sanctioned premarital intercourse — set slaves apart from their masters. As they tried desperately and daily to maintain their family lives, enjoying as much autonomy as they could seize, slave men and women manifested irrepressible talent in humanizing an environment designed to convert them into a herd of subhuman labor units.”

“The salient theme emerging from domestic life in the slave quarters is one of sexual equality. The labor that slaves performed for their own sake and not for the aggrandizement of their masters was carried out on terms of equality. Within the confines of their family and community life, therefore, Black people managed to accomplish a magnificent feat. They transformed that negative equality which emanated from the equal oppression they suffered as slaves into a positive quality: the egalitarianism characterizing their social relations.”

“The fact that Harriet Tubman never once suffered defeat is no doubt attributable to her father’s instructions [on things like which plants were edible]. Throughout the Civil War, Tubman continued her relentless opposition to slavery, and even today she still holds the distinction of being the only woman in the U.S. ever to have led troops into battle.”

“When the true history of the anti-slavery cause shall be written, women will occupy a large space in its pages; for the cause of the slave has been peculiarly women’s cause.

These are the words of an ex-slave, a man who became so closely associated with the 19th-century women’s movement that he was accused of being a ‘women’s rights man.’ Frederick Douglass, the country’s leading Black abolitionist, was also the most prominent male advocate of women’s emancipation in his times. Because of his principled support of the controversial women’s movement, he was often held up to public ridicule. Most men of his era, finding their manhood impugned, would have automatically risen to defend their masculinity. But Douglass assumed an admirably anti-sexist posture and proclaimed that he hardly felt demeaned by the label ‘women’s rights man…I’m glad to say that I’e never been ashamed to be thus designated.’ Douglass’ attitude toward his baiters may well have been inspired by his knowledge that white women had been called ‘n****er lovers’ in an attempt to lure them out of the anti-slavery campaign. And he knew that woen were indispensable within the abolitionist movement — because of their numbers as well as ‘their efficiency in pleading the cause of the slave.’”

“During the 1830s white women — both housewives and workers — were actively drawn into the abolitionist movement. While mill women contributed money from their meager wages and organized bazaars to raise further funds, the middle-class women became agitators and organizers in the anti-slavery campaign. By 1833, when the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society was born in the wake of the founding convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society, enough white women were manifesting their sympathetic attitudes toward the Black people’s cause to have established the basis for a bond between the two oppressed groups. In a widely publicized event that year, a young white woman emerged as a dramatic model of female courage and anti-racist militancy. Prudence Crandall was a teacher who defied her white townspeople in Canterbury, CT, by accepting a Black girl into her school. Her principled and unyielding stand throughout the entire controversy symbolized the possibility of forging a powerful alliance between the established struggle for Black Liberation and the embryonic battle for women’s rights.

The parents of the white girls attending Crandall’s school expressed their unanimous opposition to the Black pupil’s presence by organizing a widely publicized boycott. But the CT teacher refused to capitulate to their racist demands. Following the advice of Mrs. Charles Harris — a Black woman she employed — Crandall decided to recruit more Black girls, and if necessary, to operate an all-Black school. A seasoned abolitionist, Mrs. Harris introduced Crandall to William Lloyd Garrison, who published announcements about the school in the Liberator, his anti-slavery journal. The Canterbury townspeople countered by passing a resolution in opposition to her plans, which proclaimed that ‘the government of the U.S., the nation with all its institutions of right belong to the white men who now possess them.’ No doubt they did mean white men quite literally, for Crandall had not only violated their code of racial segregation, she had also defied the traditional attitudes concerning the conduct of a white lady.

Despite all threats, Prudence Crandall opened the school…The Negro students stood bravely by her side. And then followed one of the most heroic — and most shameful — episodes in U.S. history. The storekeepers refused to sell supplies to Miss Crandall…The village doctor wouldn’t attend ailing students. The druggist refused to give medicine. On top of such fierce inhumanity, rowdies smashed the school windows, threw manure in the well and started several fires in the building.

Where did this young Quaker woman find her extraordinary strength and her astonishing ability to persevere in a dangerous situation of daily siege? Probably through her bonds with the Black people whose cause she so ardently defended. Her school continued to function until CT authorities ordered her arrest. By the time she was arrested, Prudence Crandall had made such a mark on the epoch that even in apparent defeat, she emerged as a symbol of victory.”

“By 1833 many of these middle-class women had probably begun to realize that something had gone terribly awry in their lives. As ‘housewives’ int he new era of industrial capitalism, they had lost their economic importance in the home, and their social status as women had suffered a corresponding deterioration. In the process, however, they’d acquired leisure time, which enabled them to become social reformists — active organizers of the abolitionist campaign. Abolitionism, in turn, conferred upon these women the opportunity to launch an implicit protest against their oppressive roles at home.

Only four women were invited to attend the 1833 founding convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The male organizers of this Philadelphia meeting stipulated, moreover, that they were to be ‘listeners and spectators’ rather than full-fledged participants. This didn’t deter Lucretia Mott — one of the four women — from audaciously addressing the men at the convention on at least two occasions. At the opening session, she confidently arose from her ‘listener and spectator’ seat in the balcony and argued against a motion to postpone the gathering because of an absence of a prominent Philadelphia man.

Right principles are stronger than names. If our principles are right, why should we be cowards? Why should we wait for those who never have had the courage to maintain the indispensable rights of the slave?

A practicing Quaker minister, Lucretia Mott undoubtedly astounded the all-male audience, for in those days women never spoke out at public gatherings. Although the convention applauded her and moved on to its business as she suggested, at the conclusion of the meeting neither she nor the other women were invited to sign the Declaration of Sentiments and Purposes. Whether the women’s signatures were explicitly disallowed or whether it simply didn’t occur to the male leaders that women should be asked to sign, the men were extremely short-sighted. Their sexist attitudes prevented them from grasping the vast potential of women’s involvement int he anti-slavery movement.

Lucretia Mott, who wasn’t so short-sighted, organized the founding meeting of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society in the immediate aftermath of the men’s convention. She was destined to become a leading public figure in the anti-slavery movement, a woman who would be extensively admired for her overall courage and for her steadfastness in the face of raging racist mobs.

As they worked within the abolitionist movement, white women learned about the nature of human oppression — and in the process, also learned important lessons about their own subjugation. In asserting their right to oppose slavery, they protested — sometimes overtly, sometimes implicitly — their own exclusion from the political arena. If they didn’t yet know how to present their own grievances collectively, at least they could plead the cause of a people who were also oppressed.

The anti-slavery movement offered women of the middle class the opportunity to prove their worth according to standards that were not tied to their role as wives and mothers. In this sense, the abolitionist campaign was a home where they could be valued for their concrete works. Indeed, their political involvement in the battle against slavery may have been as intense, as passionate, and as total as it was because they were experiencing an exciting alternative to their domestic lives. And they were resisting an oppression which bore a certain resemblance to their own. Furthermore, they learned how to challenge male supremacy within the anti-slavery movement. They discovered that sexism, which seemed unalterable inside their marriages, could be questioned and fought in the arena of political struggle. Yes, white women would be called upon to defend fiercely their rights as women in order to fight for the emancipation of Black people.

As Eleanor Flexner’s outstanding study of the women’s movement reveals, women abolitionists accumulated invaluable political experiences, without which they could not have effectively organized the campaign for women’s rights more than a decade later. Women developed fundraising skills, they learned how to distribute literature, how to call meetings — and some of them even become strong public speakers. Most important of all, they became efficient in the use of the petition, which would become the central tactical weapon of the women’s rights campaign. As they petitioned against slavery, women were compelled simultaneously to champion their own right to engage in political work. How else could they convince the government to accept the signatures of voteless women if not by aggressively disputing the validity of their traditional exile from political authority? And, as Flexner insists, it was necessary

…for the average housewife, mother, or daughter to overstep the limits of decorum, disregard the frowns, or jeers, or outright commands of her menfolk and…take her first petition and walk down to an unfamiliar street, knocking on doors and asking for signatures to an unpopular plea. Not only would she be going out unattended by her husband or brother; but she usually encountered hostility, if not outright abuse for her unwomanly behavior.

Of the pioneering women abolitionists, it was the Grimke sisters from South Carolina — Sarah and Angelina — who most consistently linked the issue of slavery to the oppression of women. From the beginning of their tumultuous lecturing career, they were compelled to defend their rights as women to be public advocates of abolition — and by implication to defend the rights of all women to register publicly their opposition to slavery.

Born into a SC slaveholding family, the Grimke sisters developed a passionate abhorrence of the ‘pecular institution’ and decided, as adults, to move North. Joining the abolitionist effort in 1836, they began to lecture in New England about their own lives and their daily encounters with the untold evils of slavery. Although the gatherings were sponsored by the female anti-slavery societies, increasing numbers of men began to attend. ‘Gentlemen, hearing of their eloquence and power, soon began timidly to slip into the back seats.’ These assemblies were unprecedented, for no other women had never addressed mixed audiences on such a regular basis without facing derogatory cries and disruptive jeers hurled by men who felt that public speaking should be an exclusively male activity.”

“Neither Sarah nor Angelina had originally been concerned — at least not expressly — about questioning the social inequality of women. Their main priority had been to expose the inhuman and immoral essence of the slave system and the special responsibility women bore for its perpetuation. But once the male supremacist attacks against them were unleashed, they realized that unless they defended themselves as women — and the rights of women in general — they would be forever barred from the campaign to free the slaves. The more powerful orator of the two, Angelina, challenged this assault on women in her lectures. Sarah, who was the theoretical genius, began a series of lectures on The Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women.

Completed in 1838, Sarah’s ‘Letters on the Equality of the Sexes…’ contain one of the first extensive analyses of the status of women authored by a woman in the U.S. Setting down her ideas 6 years before the publication of Margaret Fuller’s well-known treatise on women, Sarah disputed the assumption that inequality between the sexes was commanded by God. ‘Men and women were created equal: they’re both moral and accountable human beings.’ She directly contested the ministers’ charge that women who seek to give leadership to social reform movements were unnatural, insisting instead that ‘whatever is right for man is right for woman.’

The writings and lectures of these two outstanding sisters were enthusiastically received by many of the women who were active in the female anti-slavery movement. But some of the leading men in the abolitionist campaign claimed that the issue of women’s rights would confuse and alienate those who were solely concerned about the defeat of slavery. Angelina’s early response spelled out her (and her sister’s) understanding of the strong threads tying women’s rights to abolitionism:

We cannot push Abolitionism forward with all our might until we take up the stumbling block out of the road…To meet this question may appear to be turning out of the road…It is not: we must meet it and meet it now…Why, my dear brothers, can you not see the deep laid scheme of the clergy against us as lecturers?…If we surrender the right to speak in public this year, we must surrender the right to petition next year and the right to write the year after, and so on. What then can women do for the slave, when she herself is under the feet of men an shamed into silence?

An entire decade before white women’s mass opposition to the ideology of male supremacy received its organizational expression, the Grimke sisters urged women to resist the destiny of passivity and dependence which society had imposed upon them — in order to take their rightful place in the struggle for justice and human rights. Angelina’s 1837 Appeal to the Woman of the Nominally Free States forcefully argues this point:

It is related of Buonaparte, that he one day rebuked a French lady for busying herself with politics. ‘Sire,’ replied she, ‘In a country where women are put to death, it’s very natural that women should wish to know the reason why.’ And, dear sisters, in a country where women are degraded and brutalized, and where their exposed persons bleed under the lash — where they’re sold in the shambles of ‘negro brokers’ — robbed of their heard earnings — torn from their husbands, and forcibly plundered of their virtue and their offspring: surely in such a country, it’s very natural that women should wish to know ‘the reason why’ — especially when these outrages of blood and nameless horror are practiced in violation of the principles of our Constitution. We do not, then, and cannot concede the position, that because this is a political subject women ought to fold their hands in idleness, and close their eyes and ears to the ‘horrible things’ that are practiced in our land. The denial of our duty to act is a bold denial of our right to act; and if we have no right to act, then may we well be termed ‘the white slaves of the North’ — for like our brethren in bonds, we must seal our lips in silence and despair.

The above passage is also an illustration of the Grimke sisters’ insistence that white women in the North and South acknowledge the special bond linking them with Black women who suffered the pain of slavery. Again:

They are our country women — they are our sisters, and to us, as women, they have a right to look for sympathy with their sorrows, and effort and prayer for their rescue.

‘The question of equality for women,’ as Eleanor Flexner put it, wasn’t ‘a matter of abstract justice’ for the Grimkes, ‘but of enabling women to join in an urgent task.’ Since the abolition of slavery was the most pressing political necessity of the time, they urged women to join in that struggle with the understanding that their own oppression was nurtured and perpetuated by the continued existence of the slave system. Because the Grimke sisters had such a profound consciousness of the inseparability of the fight for Black Liberation and the fight for Women’s Liberation, they were never caught in the ideological snare of insisting that one struggle was absolutely more important than the other. They recognized the dialectical character of the relationship between the two causes.

More than any other women in the campaign against slavery, the Grimkes urged the constant inclusion of the issue of women’s rights. At the same time they argued that women could never achieve their freedom independently of Black people. ‘I want to be identified with the Negro,’ said Angelina to a convention of patriotic women supporting the Civil War effort in 1863. ‘Until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours.’ Prudence Crandall had risked her life in defense of Black children’s right to education. If her stand contained a promise of a fruitful and powerful alliance, bringing Black people and women together in order to realize their common dream of liberation, then the analysis presented by Sarah and Angelina Grimke was the most profound and moving theoretical expression of that promise of unity.”

“As Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton wended their way arm in arm down great Queen Street that night, reviewing the exciting scenes of the day, they agreed to hold a women’s rights convention on their return to America, as the men to whom they’d just listened had manifested their great need of some education on that question. Thus the missionary work for the emancipation of women in ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’ was then and there inaugurated.

This conversation, which took place in London on the opening day of the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention, is frequently assumed to contain the real story behind the birth of the organized women’s movement in the U.S. As such, it has acquired a somewhat legendary significance. And like most legends, the truth it presumes to embody is far less unequivocal than it appears. This anecdote and its surrounding circumstances have been made the basis of a popular interpretation of the women’s rights movement as having been primarily inspired — or rather provoked — by the insufferable male supremacy within the anti-slavery campaign.”

“Unlike Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was not an experienced political activist when the London convention took place. Accompanying her husband of only several weeks on what she called their ‘wedding journey,’ she was attending her first anti-slavery meeting not as a delegate but, rather, as the wife of an abolitionist leader. Mrs. Stanton was thus somewhat handicapped, lacking the perspective forged by years of struggle in defense of women’s right to contribute to the anti-slavery cause.”

“Whereas Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s interest in abolitionism was quite recent, she had conducted a personal fight against sexism throughout her youth. Encouraged by her father — a wealthy and unabashedly conservative judge — she’d defied orthodoxy in her studies as well as in her leisure activities. She studied Greek and math and learned horseback riding, all of which were generally barred to girls. At age 16, Elizabeth was the only girl in her high school graduating class. Before her marriage, the young Stanton passed much of her time with her dad and had even begun to study the law seriously under his guidance.

By 1848 Stanton was a full-time housewife and mom. Living with her husband in Seneca Falls, NY, she was often unable to hire servants because they were so scarce in that area. Her own anticlimatic and frustrating life made her especially sensitive to the middle-class woman’s predicament.”

“During those early days when women’s rights was not yet a legitimate cause, when women suffrage was unfamiliar and unpopular as a demand, Frederick Douglass publicly agitated for the political equality of women. In the immediate aftermath of the Seneca Falls Convention, he published an editorial in his newspaper, the North Star. Entitled ‘The Rights of Women,’ its content was quite radical for the times:

In respect to political rights, we hold women to be justly entitled to all we claim for men. We go further, and express our conviction that all political rights which it is expedient for men to exercise, it is equally so for woman. All that distinguishes men as an intelligent and accountable being is equally true of women, and if that government only is just which governs by the free consent of the governed, there can be no reason in the world for denying to women the exercise of the elective franchise, or a hand in making and administering the law of the land.

Frederick Douglass was also responsible for officially introducing the issue of women’s rights to the Black Liberation movement, where it was enthusiastically welcomed. Douglass spoke out at the National Convention of Colored Freedmen that was held in Cleveland around the time of the Seneca Falls meeting:

He succeeded in amending a resolution defining delegates so that it would be ‘understood to include women,’ an amendment that was carried ‘with three cheers for women’s rights.’”

“[Working women’s] trailblazing role was all but ignored by the leading initiators of the women’s movement, who didn’t comprehend that women workers experienced and challenged male supremacy in their own special way. As if to drive this point home, history has imparted a final irony to the movement initiated in 1848: Of all the women attending the Seneca Falls Convention, the only one to live long enough to actually exercise her right to vote 70+ years later was a working woman by the name of Charlotte Woodward.”

“Two years after the Seneca Falls Convention, the first National Convention on Women’s Rights was held in Worcester, MA. Whether she was actually invited or came on her own initiative, Sojourner Truth was among the participants. Her presence there and the speeches she delivered at subsequent women’s rights meetings symbolized Black women’s solidarity with the new cause. They aspired to be free not only from racist oppression but also from sexist domination. ‘Ain’t I a Woman’ — the refrain of the speech Sojourner Truth delivered at an 1858 Akron women’s convention — remains one of the most frequently quoted slogans of the 19th-century women’s movement.

Sojourner Truth single-handedly rescued the Akron women’s meeting from the disruptive jeers of hostile men. Of all the women attending the gathering, she alone was able to answer aggressively the male supremacist arguments of the boisterous provocateurs. Possessing an undeniable charisma and powerful oratorical abilities, Truth tore down the claims that female weakness was incompatible with suffrage — and she did this with irrefutable logic. The leader of the provocateurs had argued that it was ridiculous for women to desire the vote, since they couldn’t even walk over a puddle or get into a carriage without the help of a man. Truth pointed out with compelling simplicity that she herself had never been helped over puddles or into carriages. ‘And ain’t I a woman?’ With a voice like ‘rolling thunder,’ she said, ‘Look at me! Look at my arm,’ and rolled up her sleeve to reveal the ‘tremendous muscular power’ of her arm.

I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman! I could work as much and eat as much as a man — when I could get it — and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne 13 children and seen them most all sold off to slvaery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman!”

“Throughout the 1850s local and national conventions attracted increasing numbers of women to the campaign for equality. It was never an unusual occurrence for Sojourner Truth to appear at these meetings, and despite inevitable hostility, to rise and have her say. In representing her Black sisters — both slave and ‘free’ — she imparted a fighting spirit to the campaign for women’s rights. This was Truth’s unique historical contribution. And in case white women tended to forget that Black women were no less women than they, her presence and her speeches served as a constant reminder. Black women were also going to get their rights.”

Reconstruction

“As far as Black people in the postwar South were concerned, a state of emergency prevailed. Frederick Douglass’ argument for Black suffrage was based on his insistence that the ballot was an emergency measure. However naive he may have been about the potential power of the vote within the confines of the Republican party, he didn’t treat the issue of Black suffrage as a political game. For Douglass, the ballot wasn’t a means of ensuring Republican party hegemony in the South. It was basically a survival measure — a means of guaranteeing the survival of the masses of his people.

The women’s rights leaders of the post-Civil War era tended to view the vote as an end in itself. Already in 1866, it seemed that whoever furthered the cause of women suffrage, however racist their motives, was a worthwhile recruit for the women’s campaign. Even Susan B. Anthony detected no apparent contradictions in the advocacy of women’s suffrage by a congressman who was a self-avowed white supremacist. To the great dismay of Frederick Douglass, Anthony publicly praised Congressman James Brooks, who was a former editor of a pro-slavery paper. Although his support of woman suffrage was clearly a tactical move to counter the Republicans’ sponsorship of Black suffrage, Black was enthusiastically lauded by Anthony and her colleagues.

In representing the interests of the former slaveholding class, the Democratic party sought to prevent the enfranchisement of the Black male population in the South. Thus many Democratic leaders defended woman suffrage as a calculated measure against their Republican opponents. Expediency was the watchword of these Democrats, whose concern for women’s equality was imbued with the same dishonesty as the Republicans’ announced support for Black male suffrage. If Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had more carefully analyzed the political situation of the post-Civil War period, they might have been less willing to associate their suffrage campaign with the notorious George Francis Train. ‘Women first and Negro last is my program’ was the slogan of this unabashedly racist Democrat.”

“As Frederick Douglass argued for the ERA’s endorsement of the 15th Amendment, he didn’t counsel his supporters to entirely dismiss the demand for woman suffrage. On the contrary, the resolution he submitted called for the enthusiastic ratification of ‘…the extension of suffrage to any class heretofore disenfranchised, as a cheering part of the triumph of our whole idea.’ Douglass envisioned the passage of the 15th Amendment was the ‘culmination of 1/2 of our demands’ and the grounds for accelerating ‘our energy to secure the further amendment guaranteeing the same sacred rights without limitation to sex.’”

“Through the convict lease system, Black people were forced to play the asme old roles carved out for them by slavery. Men and women alike were arrested and imprisoned at the slightest pretext — in order to be leased out by the authorities as convict laborers. Whereas the slaveholders had recognized limits to the cruelty with which they exploited their ‘valuable’ human property, no such cautions were taken for the postwar planters who rented Black convicts for relatively short terms. ‘In many cases sick convicts were made to toil under they drop dead in the tracks.’

Using slavery as its model, the convict lease system didn’t discriminate between male and female labor. Men and women were frequently housed together in the same stockade and were yoked together during the workday.”

“A Georgia domestic worker’s story, recorded by a NY journalist in 1912, reflected Black women’s economic predicament of previous decades as well as for many years to come. More than 2/3 of the Black women in her town were forced to hire themselves out as cooks, nursemaids, washerwomen, chambermaids, hucksters, and janitresses, and were caught up in conditions ‘just as bad as, if not worse than, it was during slavery.’

For 30+ years this Black woman had involuntarily lived in the households where she was employed. Working as many as 14 hours a day, she was generally allowed an afternoon visit with her own family only once every 2 weeks. She was, in her own words, ‘the slave, body, and soul’ of her white employers. She was always called by her first name — never Mrs…. — and was not infrequently referred to as the ‘n****er,’ in other words, their slave.”

“When Black people began to migrate northward, men and women alike discovered that their white employers outside the South were not fundamentally different from their former owners in their attitudes about the occupational potentials of the newly freed slaves. They also believed, it seemed, that ‘Negroes are servants, servants are Negroes.’ According to the 1830 census, Delaware was the only state outside the South where the majority of Black people were farmworkers and sharecroppers as opposed to domestic servants. In 32 of 48 states, domestic service was the dominant occupation for men and women alike. In 70% of these states, there were more Black people working as domestics than in all the other occupations combined.”

The 20th Century

“Black women’s desperate economic situation — they perform the worst of all job and are ignored to boot — didn’t show signs of change until the outbreak of WWII. On the eve of the war, according to the 1940 census, 60% of employed Black women were domestic workers and another 10% worked in non-domestic service occupations. Since approximately 16% still worked in the fields, scarcely 10% of Black women workers had really begun to escape the old grip of slavery. Even those who managed to enter industry and professional work had little to boast about, for they were consigned, as a rule, the worst-paid jobs in these occupations.

When the US stepped into WWII and female labor kept the war economy rolling, more than 400,000 Black women said goodbye to their domestic jobs. At the war’s peak, they’d more than doubled their numbers in industry. But even so — and this qualification is inevitable — as late as 1960 at least 1/3 of Black women workers remained chained to the same old household jobs and an additional 1/5 were non-domestic service workers.”

“The most outstanding examples of white women’s sisterly solidarity with Black women are associated with Black people’s historical struggle for education. Like Prudence Crandall and Margaret Douglass, Myrtilla Miner literally risked her life as she sought to impart knowledge to young Black women. In 1851, when she initiated her project to establish a Black teachers’ college in DC, she’d already instructed Black children in Mississippi, a state where education for Blacks was a criminal offense. After Miner’s death, Frederick Douglass described his won incredulousness when she first announced her plans to him. During their first meeting he wondered about her seriousness in the beginning, but then he realized that

…the fire of enthusiasm lighted in her eye and that the true martyr spirit flamed in her soul. My feelings were those of mingled joy and sadness. Here I thought is another enterprise — wild, dangerous, desperate, and impractical, and destined only to bring failure and suffering. Yet I was deeply moved with admiration by the heroic purpose of the delicate and fragile person who stood or rather moved to and fro before me.”

“Despite the grave risks, Myrtilla Miner opened her school in fall 1851, and within a few months her initial 6 students had grown to 40. She taught her Black students passionately over the next 8 years, simultaneously raising money and urging congressmen to support her efforts. She even acted as a mom to the orphan girls whom she brought into her home so that they might attend the school.

As Myrtilla Miner struggled to teach and as her pupils struggled to learn, they all fought evictions, arson attempts and the other misdeeds of racist stone-throwing mobs. They were supported by the young women’s families and abolitionists such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, who donated a portion of the royalties from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Myrtilla Miner may have been ‘frail,’ but she was definitely formidable, and was always able, at lesson time, to discover the eye of that racist storm. Early one morning, she was abruptly awakened by the odor of smoke and raging flames, which soon consumed her schoolhouse. Although her school was destroyed, the inspiration she provided lived on, and eventually Miner’s Teachers College became a part of the DC public education system. ‘I never pass the Miner Normal School for colored girls,’ so Douglass confessed in 1883,

…without a feeling of self reproach that I could have said ought to quench the zeal, shake the faith, and quail the courage of the Noble woman by whom it was founded and whose name it bears.”

“By the time of the Hayes Betrayal and the overthrow of Radical Reconstruction, the accomplishments in education had become one of the most powerful proofs of progress during that potentially revolutionary era. Fisk University, Hampton Institute, and several other Black colleges and universities had been established in the post-Civil War South. Some 250,000 pupils were attending 4,000 schools — and these were the building blocks for the South’s first public school system, which would benefit Black and white children alike. Although the post-Reconstruction period and the attendant rise of Jim Crow education drastically diminished Black people’s educational opportunities, the impact of the Reconstruction experience couldn’t be entirely obliterated. The dream of land was shattered for the time being and the hope for political equality waned. But the beacon of knowledge wasn’t easily extinguished — and this was the guarantee that the fight for land and political power would unrelentingly go on.

Had it not been for the Negro school and college, the Negro would, to all intents and purposes, have been driven back to slavery…His reconstruction leadership had come from Negroes educated in the North, and white politicians, capitalists, and philanthropic teachers. The counter-revolution of 1876 drove most of these, save the teachers, away. But already, through establishing public schools and private colleges, and by organizing the Negro church, the Negro had acquired enough leadership and knowledge to thwart the worst designs of the new slave drivers.”

“Racial conflict didn’t emerge spontaneously, but rather was consciously planned by the representatives of the economically ascendant class. They needed to impede working-class unity as to facilitate their own exploitative designs. The forthcoming ‘race riots’ — Atlanta, Brownsville, Springfield, OH — like the 1898 massacres in Wilmington and Phoenix, SC, were orchestrated precisely in order to heighten the tensions and antagonism within the multi-racial working class. “

“Ida B. Wells was born into a family of ex-slaves. When an epidemic yellow fever claimed the lives of her parents, Wells was still a teen, with 5 younger sisters and brothers to support. She embarked upon a teaching career as a direct response to this enormous burden. But her personal hardships were not so overwhelming as to prevent her form pursuing a path of anti-racist activism. At the young age of 22, she challenged the racial discrimination she suffered as a railroad traveler by filing suit against the railroad in court. 10 years later, Wells was publishing her own paper in Memphis, and after 3 of her friends were murdered by a racist mob, turned the paper into a powerful weapon against lynching. Forced into exile when the racists threatened her life and destroyed her newspaper office, Wells launched her astoundingly effective crusade against lynching. Calling upon Black and white alike to massively oppose the reign of lynch law, she traveled from city to city and town to town all over the US. Her tours abroad encouraged Europeans to organize solidarity campaigns against the lynching of Black people in the US. Two decades later, at age 57, Wells rushed to the scene of the East St. Louis riot. When she was 63, she conducted an investigation into a mob attack by racists in Arkansas. And on the eve of her death she was as militant as ever, leading a Black women’s demonstration against the segregationist policies of a major Chicago hotel.”

“As working women knew all too well, their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons who exercised the right to vote continued to be miserably exploited by their wealthy employers. Political equality didn’t open the door to economic equality.

‘Woman Wants Bread, Not the Ballot’ was a title of a speech Susan B. Anthony frequently delivered as she sought to recruit more working women into the fight for suffrage. As the title indicates, she was critical of the working women’s tendency to focus on their immediate needs. But they naturally sought tangible solutions to their immediate economic problems. And they were seldom moved by the suffragists’ promise that the vote would permit them to become equal to their men — their exploited, suffering men. Even the members of the Working Women’s Association, organized by Anthony in her newspaper offices, elected to refrain from fighting for suffrage. ‘Mrs. Stanton was anxious to have a workingwomen’s suffrage association,’ explained the org’s first VP.

It was left to a vote, and ruled out. The society at one time comprised over 100 working women, but, as there was nothing practical done to ameliorate their condition, they gradually withdrew.

Working women didn’t raise the banner of suffrage en masse until the early 20th century, when their own struggles forged special reasons for demanding the right to vote. When women struck the NY garment industry in the renowned ‘Uprising of the 20,000’ during winter 1909–1910, the ballot began to acquire a special relevance to working women’s struggles. As women labor leaders began to argue, working women could use the vote to demand better wages and improved conditions on the job. Woman suffrage could serve as a powerful weapon of class struggle. After the tragic fire at the NY Triangle Shirtwaist Company claimed the lives of 146 women, the need for legislation prohibiting the hazardous conditions of women’s work became dramatically obvious. In other words, working women needed the ballot in order to guarantee their very survival.”

“Black women had been more than willing to contribute those ‘clear powers of observation and judgment’ toward the creation of a multi-racial movement for women’s political rights. But at every turn, they were betrayed, spurned and rejected by the leaders of the lily-white woman suffrage movement. For suffragists and clubwomen alike, Black women were simply expendable entities when it came time to woo Southern support with a white complexion. As for the woman suffrage campaign, it appears that all those concessions to Southern women made very little difference in the end. When the votes on the 19th Amendment were tallied, the Southern states were still lined up in the opposition camp — and, in fact, almost managed to defeat the amendment.

After the long-awaited victory of woman suffrage, Black women in the South were violently prevented from exercising their newly acquired right. The eruption of KKK violence in places like Orange County, FL, brought injury and death to Black women and their children. In other places, they were more peacefully prohibited from exercising their new right. In Americus, GA, for instance,

…more than 250 colored women went to the polls to vote but were turned down or their ballots refused to be taken by the election manager…

In the ranks of the movement which had so fervently fought for the enfranchisement of women, there was hardly a cry of protest to be heard.”

Communism

“From 1900 on, to a greater or lesser extent, the Marxist Left would feel the influence of its female adherents.

As the main champion of Marxism for almost 2 decades, the Socialist party supported the battle for women’s equality. For many years, in fact, it was the only political party to advocate woman suffrage. Thanks to such socialist women as Pauline Newman and Rose Schneiderman, a working-class suffrage movement was forged, breaking the decade-long stronghold of middle-class women on the mass campaign for the vote. By 1908 the Socialist party had created a national women’s commission. On March 8 of that year women Socialists active on NY’s Lower East Side organized a mass demonstration in support of equal suffrage, whose anniversary continues to be observed as International Women’s Day.”

“Born in 1853, Lucy Parsons became active in the Socialist Labor party as early as 1877. Over the years to come, this anarchist org’s newspaper, the Socialist, would publish her articles and poems, and Parsons would also become an active organizer for the Chicago Working Women’s Union. Following the police-instigated riot on May 1, 1886, in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, her husband was one of the 8 radical labor leaders arrested by authorities. Lucy Parsons immediately initiated a militant campaign to free the Haymarket Defendants. As she traveled throughout the country, she became known as a prominent labor leader and a leading advocate of anarchism. Her reputation caused her to become an all-too-frequent target of repression. In Columbus, for example, the mayor banned a speech she was scheduled to deliver during March — and her refusal to accept this banning order led the police to throw her in jail. In city after city,

(h)alls were closed to her at the last moment, detectives stood in every corner of the meeting halls, police kept her under constant surveillance.

Even as her husband was being executed, Lucy Parsons and her 2 children were arrested by Chicago police, one of whom made the comment: ‘that woman is more to be feared than a thousand rioters.’

Although she was Black — a fact miscegenation laws often caused her to conceal — and although she was a woman, Lucy Parsons argued that racism and sexism were overshadowed by the capitalists’ overall exploitation of the working class. Since they were victims of capitalist exploitation, said Parsons, Black people and women didn’t suffer special forms of oppression and there was no real need for mass movements to oppose racism and sexism explicitly. Sex and race, according to Parsons, were facts of existence manipulated by employers who sought to justify their greater exploitation of women and people of color. If Black people suffered the brutality of lynch law, it was because their poverty as a group made them the most vulnerable workers of all. ‘Are there any so stupid,’ Parsons asked in 1886, ‘as to believe these outrages have been…heaped upon the Negro because he’s black?’

Not at all. It’s because he is poor. It’s because he is dependent. Because he’s poorer as a class than his white wage-slave brother of the North.”

“During the 1920s Lucy Parsons began to associate herself with the struggles of the young Communist party. One of the many people who was deeply impressed by the 1917 workers’ revolution in Russia, she became confident that eventually the working class could triumph in the US. When Communists and other progressive forces founded the International Labor Defense in 1925, Parsons became an active worker for the new group. She fought for the freedom of Tom Mooney in CA, for the Scottsboro Nine in Alabama and for the young Black Communist Angelo Herndon, whom Georgia authorities had imprisoned. It was in 1939, according to her biographer’s research, that Lucy Parsons formally joined the Communist party. When she died in 1942, a tribute in the Daily Worker described her as

…a link between the labor movement of the present and the great historic events of the 1880s…

She was one of America’s truly great women, fearless, and devoted to the working class.”

“During the McCarthy Era assault on the Communist Party, Flynn was arrested in NY, along with 3 other women, and charged with ‘teaching and advocating the violent overthrow of the government.’ The other women were Marian Bachrach, Betty Gannet and Claudia Jones, a Black woman from Trinidad who’d immigrated to the US as a young girl. In June 1951, the 4 Communist women were taken by the police to the NY Women’s House of Detention. The ‘one pleasant episode’ which ‘lighted up our stay here’ involved the birthday party which Elizabeth, Betty and Claudia organized for one of the prisoners. ‘Discouraged and lonely, a 19-year-old Black women had ‘happened to mention that the next day would be her birthday.’ The three women managed to obtain a cake from the commissary.

We made candles of tissue paper for the cake, covered the table as nicely as possible with paper napkins, and sang ‘Happy Birthday.’ We made speeches to her and she cried with surprise and happiness. The next day we received a note from her as follows.

Dear Claudia, Betty, and Elizabeth, I’m very glad for what you did for me for my birthday. I really don’t know how to thank you…Yesterday was one of the best years of my life. I think even though you all are Communist people that you are the best people I’ve ever met. The reason I put Communists is this letter is because some people don’t like Communists for the simple reason they think Communist people is against the American people but I don’t think so. I think that you are some of the nicest people I’ve ever met in my whole 19 years of living and I’ll never forget you all no matter where I be…I hope you all will get out of this trouble and never have to come back to a place like this.”

Racism and Sexual Assault

“While the rapists have seldom been brought to justice, the rape charge has been indiscriminately aimed at Black men, the guilty and innocent alike. Thus, of the 455 men executed between 1930 and 1967 on the basis of rape convictions, 405 of them were Black.”

“Racism has always drawn strength from its ability to encourage sexual coercion. While Black women and their sisters of color have been the main target of these racist-inspired attacks, white women have suffered as well. For once white men were persuaded that they could commit sexual assaults against Black women with impunity, their conduct toward women of their own race couldn’t have remained unmarred. Racism has always served as a provocation to rape, and white women in the US have necessarily suffered the ricochet fire of these attacks. This is one of the many ways in which racism nourishes sexism, causing white women to be indirectly victimized by the special oppression aimed at their sisters of color.

The experience of the Vietnam War furnished a further example of the extent to which racism could function as a provocation to rape. Because it was drummed into the heads of US soldiers that they were fighting an inferior race, they could be taught that raping Vietnamese women was a necessary military duty. They could even be instructed to ‘search’ the women with their penises. It was the unwritten policy of the US Military Command to systematically encourage rape, since it was an extremely effective weapon of mass terrorism. Where are the thousands upon thousands of Vietnam veterans who witnessed and participated in these horrors? To what extent did those brutal experiences affect their attitudes toward women in general? While it would be quite erroneous to single out Vietnam veterans as the main perpetrators of sexual crimes, there can be little doubt that the horrendous repercussions of the Vietnam experience are still being felt by all women in the US today.”

Lynchings

“Lynchings did occur before the Civil War — but they were aimed more often at white abolitionists, who had no cash value on the market. According to William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, 300+ white people were lynched over the two decades following 1836. The incidence of lynchings climbed as the anti-slavery campaign gained in power and influence.

As the slaveholders saw the fight going against them, despite their desperate struggle to check these forces, they more and more resorted to the rope and the faggot.

As Walter White concludes, ‘the lyncher entered upon the scene as a stalwart defender of the slaveowner’s profits.’

With the emancipation of the slaves, Black people no longer possessed a market value for the former slaveholders, and ‘the lynching industry was revolutionized.’ When Ida B. Wells researched her first pamphlet against lynching, published in 1895 under the title A Red Record, she calculated that 10,000+ lynchings had taken place between 1865 and 1895.

Not all nor nearly all of the murders done by white men during the past 30 years have come to light, but the stats as gathered and preserved by white men, and which have not been questioned, show that during these years 10,000+ Negroes have been killed in cold blood, without the formality of judicial trial and legal execution. And yet, as evidence of the absolute impunity with which the white man dares to kill a Negro, the same record shows that during all these years, and for all these murders, only three white men have been tried, convicted, and executed. As no white man has been lynched for the murder of colored people, these 3 executions are the only instances of the death penalty being visited upon white men for murdering Negroes.

In connection with these lynchings and their countless barbarities, the myth of the Black rapist was conjured up. It could only acquire its terrible powers of persuasion within the irrational world of racist ideology. However irrational the myth may be, it wasn’t a spontaneous aberration. On the contrary, the myth of the Black rapist was a distinctly political invention. As Frederick Douglass points out, Black men were not indiscriminately labeled as rapists during slavery. Throughout the entire Civil War, in fact, not a single Black man was publicly accused of raping a white woman. If Black men possessed an animalistic urge to rape, argued Douglass, this alleged rape instinct would have certainly been activated when white women were left unprotected by their men who were fighting in the Confederate Army.

In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the menacing specter of the Black rapist hadn’t yet appeared on the historical scene. But lynchings, reserved during slavery for the white abolitionists, were proving to be a valuable political weapon. Before lynching could be consolidated as a popularly accepted institution, however, its savagery and its horrors had to be convincingly justified. These were the circumstances which spawned the myth of the Black rapist — for the rape charge turned out to be the most powerful of several attempts to justify the lynching of Black people. The institution of lynching, in turn, complemented by the continued rape of Black women, became an essential ingredient of the postwar strategy of racist terror. In this way the brutal exploitation of Black labor was guaranteed, and after the betrayal of Reconstruction, the political domination of the Black people as a whole was assured.”

“The repercussions of this new myth were enormous. Not only was opposition to individual lynchings stifled — for who would dare to defend a rapist? — white support for the cause of Black equality in general began to wane. By the end of the 19th century the largest mass organization of white women — the Women’s Christian Temperance Union — was headed by a woman who publicly vilified Black men for their alleged attacks on white women. What’s more, Francis Willard went so far as to characterize Black men as especially prone to alcoholism, which in turn exacerbated their instinctual urge to rape.

The grogshop is the Negro’s center of power. Better whisky and more of it isthe rallying cry of great, dark-faced mobs. The colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt. The grogshop is its center of power. The safety of women, of childhood, the home, is menaced in a thousand localities at this moment, so that men dare not go beyond the sight of their own roof tree.”

Reproductive Rights

“When 19th-century feminists raised the demand for ‘voluntary motherhood,’ the campaign for birth control was born. Its proponents were called radicals and they were subjected to the same mockery as had befallen the initial advocates of woman suffrage. ‘Voluntary motherhood’ was considered audacious, outrageous, and outlandish by those who insisted that wives had no right to refuse to satisfy their husbands’ sexual urges. Eventually, of course, the right to birth control, like women’s right to vote, would be more or less taken for granted by US public opinion.”

“In NY, for instance, during the several years preceding the decriminalization of abortions in that state, some 80% of the deaths caused by illegal abortions involved Black and Puerto Rican women. Immediately afterward, women of color received close to half of all the legal abortions.”

“Why were self-imposed abortions and reluctant acts of infanticide such common occurrences during slavery? Not because Black women had discovered solutions to their predicament, but rather because they were desperate. Abortions and infanticides were acts of desperation, motivated not by the biological birth process but by the oppressive conditions of slavery. Most of these women, no doubt, would’ve expressed their deepest resentment had someone hailed their abortions as a stepping stone toward freedom.

During the early abortion rights campaign it was too frequently assumed that legal abortions provided a viable alternative to the myriad problems posed by poverty. As if having fewer children would create more jobs, higher wages, better schools, etc. This assumption reflected the tendency to blur the distinction between abortion rights and the general advocacy of abortions. The campaign often failed to provide a voice for women who wanted the right to legal abortions while deploring the social conditions that prohibited them from bearing more children.”

“It wasn’t a coincidence that women’s consciousness of their reproductive rights was born within the organized movement for women’s political equality. Indeed, if women remained forever burdened by incessant childbirths and frequent miscarriages, they would hardly be able to exercise the political rights they might win. Moreover, women’s new dreams of pursuing careers and other paths of self-development outside marriage and motherhood could only be realized if they could limit and plan their pregnancies. In this sense, the slogan ‘voluntary motherhood’ contained a new and genuinely progressive vision of womanhood. At the same time, however, this vision was rigidly bound to the lifestyle enjoyed by the middle classes and the bourgeoisie. The aspirations underlying the demand for ‘voluntary motherhood’ didn’t reflect the conditions of working-class women, engaged as they were in a far more fundamental fight for economic survival. Since this first call for birth control was associated with goals which could only be achieved by women possessing material wealth, vast numbers of poor and working-class women would find it rather difficult to identify with the embryonic birth-control movement.”

“If the suffragists acquiesced to arguments invoking the extension of the ballot to women as the saving grace of white supremacy, then birth control advocates either acquiesced to or supported the new arguments invoking birth control as a means of preventing the proliferation of the ‘lower classes’ and as antidote to race suicide. Race suicide could be prevented by the intro of birth control among Black people, immigrants, and the poor in general. In this way, the prosperous whites of solid Yankee stock could maintain their superior numbers within the population. Thus class-bias and racism crept into the birth control movement when it was still in its infancy. More and more, it was assumed within birth control circles that poor women, Black, and immigrant alike, had a ‘moral obligation to restrict the size of their families.’ What was demanded as a ‘right’ for the privileged came to be interpreted as a ‘duty’ for the poor.

By 1919 the eugenics influence on the birth control movement was unmistakably clear. In an article published by Margaret Sanger in the American Birth Control League’s journal, she defined ‘the chief issue of birth control’ as ‘more children from the fit, less from the unfit.’ Around this time the ABCL heartily welcomed the author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy into its inner sanctum. Lothrop Stoddard, Harvard professor and theoretician of the eugenics movement, was offered a seat on the board of directors. In the pages of the ABCL’s journal, articles by Guy Irving Birch, director of the American Eugenics Society, began to appear. Birch advocated birth control as a weapon to

prevent the American people from being replaced by alien or Negro stock, whether it be by immigration or by overly high birth rates among others in this country.

By 1932 the Eugenics Society could boast that at least 26 states had passed compulsory sterilization laws and that thousands of ‘unfit’ persons had already been surgically prevented from reproducing.”

“As the flurry of publicity exposing sterilization abuse revealed, the neighboring state of SC had been the site of further atrocities. 18 women from Aiken, SC, charged that they had been sterilized by a Dr. Clovis Pierce during the early 70s. The sole obstetrician in that small town, Pierce had consistently sterilized Medicaid recipients with 2+ children. According to a nurse in his office, Dr. Pierce insisted that pregnant welfare women ‘will have to submit to voluntary sterilization’ if they wanted him to deliver their babies. While he was ‘tired of people running around and having babies and paying for them with my taxes,’ Dr. Pierce received some $60k in taxpayers’ money for the sterilizations he performed. During his trial he was supported by the SC Medical Association, whose members declared that doctors ‘have a moral and legal right to insist on sterilization permission before accepting a patient, if it’s done on the initial visit.’

Revelations of sterilization abuse during that time exposed the complicity of the federal government. At first the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare claimed that approximately 16,000 women and 8,000 men had been sterilized to 1972 under the auspices of federal programs. Later, however, these figures underwent a drastic revision. Carl Shultz, director of HEW’s Population Affairs Office, estimated that 100k-200k sterilizations had actually been funded that year by the federal government. During Hitler’s Germany, incidentally, 250k sterilizations were carried out under the Nazis’ Hereditary Health Law. Is it possible that the record of the Nazis, throughout the years of their reign, may have been almost equaled by US-government-funded sterilizations in the space of a single year?

Given the historical genocide inflicted on the native population of the US, one woudl assume that Native Americans would be exempted from the government’s sterilization campaign. But according to Dr. Connie Uri’s testimony in a Senate committee hearing, by 1976 some 24% of all Native women of childbearing age had been sterilized. ‘Our blood lines are being stopped,’ the Choctaw physician told the Senate committee, ‘Our unborn will not be born…This is genocidal to our people.’ According to Dr. Uri, the Indian Health Services Hospital in Claremore, OK, had been sterilizing 1 out of every 4 women giving birth in that federal facility.

Native Americans are special targets of government propaganda on sterilization. In one of the HEW pamphlets aimed at Indian people, there's a sketch of a family with ten children and one horse and another sketch of a family with one child and ten horses. As if the ten horses owned by the one-child family had been magically conjured up by birth control and sterilization.

The domestic population policy of the US government has an undeniably racist edge. Native American, Chicana, Puerto Rican, and Black women continue to be sterilized in disproportionate numbers. According to a National Fertility Study conducted in 1970 by Princeton University’s Office of Population Control, 20% of all married Black women have been permanently sterilized. Approximately the same percentage of Chicana women had been rendered surgically infertile. Moreover, 43% of the women sterilized through federally subsidized programs were Black.

The astonishing number of Puerto Rican women who’ve been sterilized reflects a special government policy that can be traced back to 1939. In that year Pres. Roosevelt’s Inter-Departmental Committee on Puerto Rico issued a statement attributing the island’s economic problems to the phenomenon of overpopulation. This committee proposed that efforts to undertaken to reduce the birth rate to no more than the level of the death rate. Afterward an experimental sterilization campaign was undertaken in Puerto Rico. Although the Catholic Church initially opposed the experiment and forced the cessation of the program in 1946, it was converted during the early 1950s to the teachings and practice of population control. In this period 150+ birth control clinics were opened, resulting in a 20% decline in population growth by the mid-1960s. By the 1970s 35%+ of all Puerto Rican women of childbearing age had been surgically sterilized. According to Bonnie Mas, a serious critic of the US government’s population policy,

if purely mathematical projections are to be taken seriously, if the present rate of sterilization of 19k monthly were to continue, then the island’s population of workers and peasants could be extinguished within the next 10–20 years… (establishing) for the first time in world history a systematic use of population control capable of eliminating an entire generation of people.

During the 1970s the devastating implications of the Puerto Rican experiment began to emerge with unmistakable clarity. In Puerto Rico the presence of corporations in the highly automated metallurgical and pharma industries had exacerbated the problem of unemployment. The prospect of an ever-larger army of unemployed workers was one of the main incentives for the mass sterilization program. Inside the US today, enormous numbers of people of color — and especially racially oppressed youth — have become part of a pool of permanently unemployed workers. It’s hardly coincidental, considering the Puerto Rican example, that the increasing incidence of sterilization has kept pace with the high rates of unemployment. As growing numbers of white people suffer the brutal consequences of unemployment, they can also expect to become targets of the official sterilization propaganda.”

Housework

“Neither women nor men should waste precious hours of their lives on work that’s neither stimulating, creative, nor productive.

One of the most closely guarded secrets of advanced capitalist societies involves the possibility — the real possibility — of radically transforming the nature of housework. A substantial portion of the housewife’s domestic tasks can actually be incorporated into the industrial economy. In other words, housework need no longer be considered necessarily and unalterably private in character. Teams of trained and well-paid workers, moving from dwelling to dwelling, engineering technologically advanced cleaning machinery, could swiftly and efficiently accomplish what the present-day housewife does so arduously and primitively. Why the shroud of silence surrounding this potential of radically redefining the nature of domestic labor? Because the capitalist economy is structurally hostile to the industrialization of housework. Socialized housework implies large government subsidies in order to guarantee accessibility to the working-class families whose need for such services is most obvious. Since little in the way of profits would result, industrialized housework — like all unprofitable enterprises — is anathema to the capitalist economy. Nonetheless, the rapid expansion of the female labor force means that more and more women are finding it increasingly difficult to excel as housewives according to the traditional standards. In other words, the industrialization of housework, along with the socialization of housework, is becoming an objective social need. Housework as individual women’s private responsibility and as female labor performed under primitive technical conditions, may finally be approaching historical obsolescence.”

“Within the relatively short history of the US, the ‘housewife’ as a finished historical product is just a little more than a century old. Housework, during the colonial era, was entirely different from the daily work routine of the US housewife today.

A woman’s work began at sunup and continued by firelight as long she could hold her eyes open. For two centuries, almost everything that the family used or ate was produced at home under her direction. She spun and dyed the yarn that she wove into cloth and cut and hand-stitched into garments. She grew much of the food her family ate, and preserved enough to last the winter months. She made butter, cheese, bread, candles, and soap and knitted her family’s stockings.

In the agrarian economy of pre-industrial North America, a woman performing her household chores was thus a spinner, weaver, and seamstress as well as a baker, butter-churner, candle-maker, and soap-maker. And etc, etc. As a matter of fact,

The pressures of home production left very little time for the tasks that we would recognize today as housework. By all accounts, pre-industrial revolution women were sloppy housewifes by today’s standards. Instead of the daily cleaning or the weekly cleaning, there was the spring cleaning. Meals were simple and repetitive; clothes were changed infrequently; and the household wash was allowed to accumulate, and the washing done once a month, or in some households once in 3 months. And of course, since each wash required the carting and heating of many buckets of water, higher standards of cleanliness were easily discouraged.

Colonial women were not ‘house-cleaners’ or ‘housekeepers’ but rather full-fledged and accomplished workers within the home-based economy. Not only did they manufacture most of the products required by their families, they were also the guardians of their families’ and communities’ health.

It was [the colonial woman’s] responsibility to gather and dry wild herbs used as medicine; she also served as doctor, nurse, and midwife within her own family and in the community.

The economic importance of women’s domestic functions in colonial America was complemented by their visible roles in economic activity outside the home. It was entirely acceptable, for example, for a woman to become a tavern keeper.

Women also ran sawmills and gristmills, caned chairs and built furniture, operated slaughterhouses, printed cotton and other cloth, made lace, and owned and ran dry-goods and clothing stores. They worked in tobacco shops, drug shops (where they sold concoctions they made themselves), and general stores that sold everything from pins to meat scales. Women ground eyeglasses, made netting and rope, cut and stitched leather goods, made cards for wool carding, and even were housepainters. Often they were the town undertakers.

The postrevolutionary surge of industrialization resulted in a proliferation of factories in the NE section of the new country. New England’s textile mills were the factory system’s successful pioneers. Since spinning and weaving were traditional female domestic occupations, women were the first workers recruited by the mill-owners to operate the new power looms. Considering the subsequent exclusion of women from industrial production in general, it’s one of the great ironies of this country’s economic history that its first industrial workers were women.

As industrialization advanced, shifting economic production from the home to the factory, the importance of wome’s domestic work suffered a systematic erosion. Women were the losers in a double sense: as their traditional jobs were usurped by the burgeoning factories, the entire economy moved away from the home, leaving many women largely bereft of significant economic roles. By the mid-19th century, the factory provided textiles, candles, and soap. Even butter, bread and other food products began to be mass-produced.

By the end of the century, hardly anyone made their own starch or boiled their laundry in a kettle. In the cities, women bought their bread and at least their underwear ready-made, sent their children out to school and probably some clothes out to be laundered, and were debating the merits of canned foods…The flow of industry had passed on and had left idle the loom in the attic and the soap kettle in the shed.

As industrial capitalism approached consolidation, the cleavage between the new economic sphere and the old home economy became ever more rigorous. The physical relocation of economic production caused by the spread of the factory system was undoubtedly a drastic transformation. But even more radical was the generalized revaluation of production necessitated by the new economic system. While home-manufactured goods were valuable primarily because they fulfilled basic family needs, the importance of factory-produced commodities resided overwhelmingly in their exchange value — in their ability to fulfill employers’ demands for profit. This revaluation of economic production revealed — beyond the physical separation of home and factory — a fundamental structural separation between the domestic home economy and the profit-oriented economy of capitalism. Since housework doesn’t generate profit, domestic labor was naturally defined as an inferior form of work as compared to capitalist wage labor.

An important ideological by-product of this radical economic transformation was the birth of the ‘housewife.’ Women began to be ideologically redefined as the guardians of a devalued domestic life. As ideology, however, this redefinition of women’s place was boldly contradicted by the vast numbers of immigrant women flooding the ranks of the working class in the NE. These white immigrant women were wage earners first and only secondarily housewives. And there were other women — millions of women — who toiled away from home as the unwilling producers of the slave economy in the South. The reality of women’s place in 19th-century US society involved white women, whose days were spent operating factory machines for wages that were a pittance, as surely as it involved Black women, who labored under the coercion of slavery. The ‘housewife’ reflected a partial reality, for she was really a symbol of the economic prosperity enjoyed by the emerging middle classes.

Although the ‘housewife’ was rooted in the social conditions of the bourgeoisie and the middle classes, 19th-century ideology established the housewife and the mother as universal models of womanhood. Since popular propaganda represented the vocation of all women as a function of their roles in the home, women compelled to work for wages came to be treated as alien visitors within the masculine world of the public economy. Having stepped out of their ‘natural’ sphere, women were not to be treated as full-fledged wage workers. The price they paid involved long hours, substandard working conditions, and grossly inadequate wages. Their exploitation was even more intense than the exploitation suffered by their male counterparts. Needless to say, sexism emerged as a source of outrageous super-profits for the capitalists.

The structural separation of the public economy of capitalism and the private economy of the home has been continually reinforced by the obstinate primitiveness of household labor. Despite the proliferation of gadgets for the home, domestic work has remained qualitatively unaffected by the technological advances brought on by industrial capitalism. Housework still consumes thousands of hours of the average housewife’s year. In 1903 Charlotte Perkins Gilman proposed a definition of domestic labor which reflected the upheavals which had changed the structure and content of housework in the US:

The phrase ‘domestic work’ doesn’t apply to a special kind of work, but to a certain grade of work, a state of development through which all kinds pass. All industries were once ‘domestic,’ that is, were performed at home and in the interest of the family. All industries have since that remote period risen to higher stages, except one or two which have never left their primal stage.

‘The home,’ Gilman maintains, ‘hasn’t developed in proportion to our other institutions.’ The home economy reveals

the maintenance of primitive industries in a modern industrial community and the confinement of women to these industries and their limited area of expression.”

“For Black women today and for all their working-class sisters, the notion that the burden of housework and childcare can be shifted from their shoulders to the society contains one of the radical secrets of women’s lib. Childcare should be socialized, meal prep should be socialized, housework should be industrialized — and all these services should be readily accessible to working-class people.”

“Black domestic life in South Africa’s industrial centers is viewed by Apartheid supporters as superfluous and unprofitable. But it’s also seen as a threat:

Government officials recognize the homemaking role of the woman and fear their presence in the cities will lead to the establishment of a stable black population.

The consolidation of African families in the industrialized cities is perceived as menace because domestic life might become a base for a heightened level of resistance to Apartheid. This is undoubtedly the reason why large numbers of women holding residence permits for white areas are assigned to live in sex-segregated hostels. Married as well as single women end up living in these projects. In such hostels, family life is rigorously prohibited — husbands and wives are unable to visit one another and neither mom nor dad can receive visits from children.

This intense assault on Black women in South Africa has already taken its toll, for only 28% are currently opting for marriage. For reasons of economic expediency and political security, Apartheid is eroding — with the apparent goal of destroying — the very fabric of Black domestic life. South African capitalism thus blatantly demonstrates the extent to which the capitalist economy is utterly dependent on domestic labor.”