How Feminism Failed to Deliver Progress for Black Women
By: Allison Gaines
Tags: BlackLivesMatter, Womanism, Feminism, Equality, Culture

White women became active participants in racism

Southern White women were active participants in the enslavement, disenfranchisement and dehumanizing of Black folks. Some records show that up to 30% of slave owners were White women. Additionally, after the Civil War, White women were full participants in the KKK, lynching Black men (Knott-Dawson, 2019).

White women benefited from the chattel slavery system, and many aimed to maintain the system at all costs. After the war, many continued to advocate for maintaining dominance. The United Daughters of the Confederacy, founded in 1894, aimed to commemorate the Civil War’s lost cause. They sought to memorialize Confederate soldiers.

While historians often portray white women as passive onlookers of the white supremacist system, the rise of white-supremacist women’s auxiliary groups demonstrates this narrative’s fallacy. Feminists offered camaraderie as a classic bait and switch to achieve equal status to white men.

Wells got on a boat and went to London, met with the funders for the suffragettes and spilled all the tea about how the suffragettes were compliant and forming coalitions with White folks who were still doing barbaric shit, like burning and lynching a pregnant woman and cutting her stomach and letting the baby hang by the umbilical cord over the fire pit. The British were outraged and immediately pulled funding from the American suffragettes. Because their funding was in jeopardy, the White suffragettes made more public attempts to seem anti-lynching, while simultaneously coalition-building with Southern White women (Knott-Dawson, 2019).

By campaigning against Black men’s voting rights, these white feminists struck a blow to Black women. My article, The 19th Amendment Did Not Liberate Black Women discussed how the women’s movement failed to provide all Black women and women of color voting rights until the passing of The Voting Rights Act of 1965. White feminists closed down their offices after gaining the right to vote, failing to advocate for expanding the franchise.

During this period, the suffragist movement remained mostly segregated. Black suffragists marched behind white ones, a practice that the anti-lynching journalist Ida B. Wells staunchly opposed.

Black women’s suffrage clubs that sought formal affiliation with the national white suffrage movement were discouraged from doing so on the grounds that admitting them might anger white Southerners. It has since become clear that this was a ruse Northern whites used to obscure their own discriminatory policies (Staples, 2018).

It is essential to understand that feminists like Susan B. Anthony did not consider themselves racist. Throughout her life, Anthony advocated for increased educational opportunities for Black people. She also insisted that whites should learn to share their privilege. However, her rhetoric contradicts her opposing the 15th Amendment and Stanton and her support for anti-Black racist women’s coalitions.

Founding feminists hurt Black women and their communities, yet modern feminists praise these women as pioneers, failing to realize that their heroes fall short. Their opposition to Black progress demonstrates how they took an active role in racism.