October 13, 2015

Lauren Bianchi untangles the history of the women's suffrage movement to see what it explains about a controversy being debated out on social media.

LEADING ACTORS from the film Suffragette, which will be released in the U.S. later this month, came under fire last week for a photo shoot for Time Out London, in which Meryl Streep, Carey Mulligan and others sported T-shirts with the slogan "I'd rather be a rebel than a slave."

The quote is taken from a 1913 speech by British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst (Streep's character in the film), with the full passage reading: "I know that women, once convinced that they are doing what is right, that their rebellion is just, will go on, no matter what the difficulties, no matter what the dangers, so long as there is a woman alive to hold up the flag of rebellion. I would rather be a rebel than a slave."

On Twitter, the images became the subject of intense debate--one having little to do with the merits of the film, but about the T-shirts worn for Time Out.

Some anti-racists argued that it was offensive for "privileged white women" to make any comparison between sexism and racism. One contribution, headlined "Why This 'Suffragette' Photoshoot Needs to Be Called Out," referred to the photos as "peak white feminism" and asserted that the Pankhurst reference to slavery is both outdated and an exaggeration of women's oppression that ignores racism.

But the debate around the use of the Pankhurst quote on T-shirts is not as simple as it is being presented. The film dramatizes the British suffrage movement, but much of the backlash has centered on the divided history of U.S. feminism. The suffrage movements in the U.S. and U.K., and the clear examples of racism in both, need to be contextualized within their respective histories and the conditions from which they arose.

IN HER groundbreaking book Women, Race and Class, Angela Davis provides a detailed account of the complex relationship between the women's suffrage and abolition movements in the U.S.

To dismiss the entirety of the First Wave women's movement as merely made up of individual racist white women ignores the multitude of political ideas and race and class dynamics that existed within the movement.

Ideas were debated and contested with different groups and individuals vying for influence. Even Susan B. Anthony, guilty at various times of the worst kind of racist opportunism, was a committed anti-racist in her personal life. She once fired a stenographer for refusing to take dictation of a letter for a Black colleague--who was none other than Ida B. Wells, the anti-lynching activist and founder of the first Black women's suffrage club. Anthony was, however, all too willing to betray these convictions in her public life, as Wells pointedly criticized her for.

The suffrage movement was strengthened early on by making sincere connections between the struggles for Black liberation and women's liberation. Some of the earliest suffragettes were white women who organized women's anti-slavery leagues in the abolition struggle. This was where they received their political training. Through defending their right to participate fully in the public fight to end slavery, women gained the confidence to speak up about their own oppression.

Notably, Frederick Douglass was among the first male public figures of his time to voice support for women's rights. He once wrote, "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."

Of the early suffragettes, the Grimke sisters, Sarah and Angelina, most consistently linked the issue of slavery to women's rights. During their careers as traveling lecturers, they argued that "the special bond" linking women and Black people was key to liberation for all. As Angela Davis notes, "Since the abolition of slavery was the most pressing political necessity of the times, 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."

In Angelina Grimke's 1837 Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States, she warned, "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."

It was in this anti-racist context that suffragettes first likened their struggle to the one to abolish slavery, and in doing so, they strengthened both causes. But the hopefulness of this unity was unfortunately short-lived.

THE UPPER-class women who dominated the suffrage movement tended, because of their class position, to overemphasize the power that the vote alone would have to raise the status of all women. They saw the primary division in society as between men and women, which led them to ignore the multiple oppressions faced by Black and working-class white women. As Davis wrote:

Although Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and their colleagues on [Revolution, the Suffrage newspaper] made important contributions to the cause of working women, they never really accepted the principle of trade unionism. As they had been previously unwilling to concede that Black Liberation might claim momentary priority over their own interests as white women, they did not fully embrace the fundamental principles of unity and class solidarity, without which the labor movement would remain powerless. In the eyes of the suffragists, "woman" was the ultimate test--if the cause of woman could be furthered, it was not wrong for women to function as scabs when male workers in their trade were on strike. Susan B. Anthony was excluded from the 1869 convention of the National Labor Union because she had urged women printers to go to work as scabs.

As the movement developed through the last decade of the 19th century--a period that Davis calls "a critical moment in the development of modern racism--its major institutional supports as well as its attendant ideological justifications"--it was convenient for ruling class institutions to adapt feminist language to justify imperial projects in the Philippines, Hawaii, Cuba and Puerto Rico.

Many in the women's movement capitulated to emerging racist ideologies, hoping that it would be an expedited route to winning the vote for women. Leading activists began to counterpose their struggle to that of Black men in particular, in an appeal to white supremacy. Thus, the vote for women became not an extension of the emancipatory ideals of abolition, but a separate struggle with much more conservative aims.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton infamously argued, "The representative women of the nation have done their uttermost for the last 30 years to secure freedom for the Negro...but now, as the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see 'Sambo' walk into the kingdom first...Why should the African prove more just and generous than his Saxon compeers?"

This sharp turn from solidarity alienated both white working-class women and Black women, and made the movement much weaker politically.

Leading suffragettes paid lip service to working-class women's issues with limited success. Susan B. Anthony even went on a speaking tour cynically titled "Woman Wants Bread, Not the Ballot" to win more working women to the cause. Anthony felt that working-class women were too focused on their immediate economic needs--when in reality, these women understood the terrible conditions that the men of their own class endured, and were not convinced of the need to fight for equality on those terms alone.

As Davis explains in her book:

Anthony's staunchly feminist position was also a staunch reflection of bourgeois ideology. And it was probably because of the ideology's blinding powers that she failed to realize that working-class women and Black women alike are fundamentally linked to their men by the class exploitation and racist oppression which did not discriminate between the sexes. While their men's sexist behavior definitely needed to be challenged, the real enemy, their common enemy was the boss, the capitalist or whoever was responsible for the miserable wages and unbearable working conditions and for racist and sexist discrimination on the job.

Despite these political problems, the eventual participation of Black women's clubs and women trade unionists finally galvanized the movement, which won the vote in 1920. At this point, upper- and middle-class white women abandoned the struggle, leaving Black and working women with little to show for it. Black women in the South couldn't exercise voting rights at all for nearly half a century until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, at the end of the civil rights struggle.

It took more than 70 years from the beginnings of the suffrage movement to get the vote for white women due in no small part to the racist opportunism and bourgeois attitudes of many of the movement's leaders.

IT'S GREAT that people are using this film as an opportunity to critically engage with the politics of early feminism. Understanding the racism of the suffrage movement and its lingering legacy is essential for anyone who wants to be part of building an intersectional and liberatory feminist movement today. I share in the disappointment that the filmmakers choose an all-white cast, leaving out the key contributions of Indian British suffragettes and other women of color.

But the label of "white feminism" often used today to criticize supposedly colorblind liberal feminism mistakenly lumps all white women, regardless of class, into the same category. Ignoring the way that class interests unite women of different races, sexualities, ages, etc., repeats the fatal error of bourgeois feminism in seeking to divide women against other oppressed groups in competition for our rights.

It's become common to criticize people for adapting the language of one struggle to make connections to another. For example, #MuslimLivesMatter was described--wrongly, in my opinion--as co-optation by some #BlackLivesMatter activists.

I would argue that there is nothing inherently wrong about the use of Pankhurst's line to draw upon the connection between the abolition and suffrage movements. It made sense in Pankhurst's time, and it still rings true today as #BlackLivesMatter seeks to bring attention to racist police violence waged against Black women and girls, and as the war on women's rights shows no signs of slowing down.

To highlight the importance of fighting both racism and sexism is not to say that the experience of these very different, though often intersecting, oppressions is reducible to the same thing. But to view them as separate obscures the fact that all working-class women and Black people face a common enemy: the ruling class, which profits directly from our exploitation as workers and oppresses us differently to divide workers against one another.