Subjects: LCSH: Feminism—Moral and ethical aspects—United States—
History. | Women, White—Civil rights—United States—History. |
Minority women—Civil rights—United States—History. | Minority
women activists—United States—History. | Racism—United States—
History.
Classification: LCC HQ1426 .S35 2021 | DDC 305.420973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021008089
ISBNs: 978-1-64503-689-0 (hardcover), 978-1-64503-688-3 (ebook)
E3-20210831-JV-NF-ORI
CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE P AGE

DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
Feminist Fault Lines
PART I. CIVILIZING
CHAPTER ONE
Woman’s Rights Are White Rights? Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frances E.
W. Harper
CHAPTER TWO
White Sympathy Versus Black Self-Determination: Harriet Beecher Stowe
and Harriet Jacobs
CHAPTER THREE
Settler Mothers and Native Orphans: Alice C. Fletcher and Zitkala-Ša
PART II. CLEANSING
CHAPTER FOUR
Birthing a Better Nation: Margaret Sanger and Dr. Dorothy Ferebee
CHAPTER FIVE
Taking Feminism to the Streets: Pauli Murray and Betty Friedan
CHAPTER SIX
TERF Gatekeeping and Trans Feminist Horizons: Janice Raymond and
Sandy Stone
PART III. OPTIMIZING
CHAPTER SEVEN
Leaning In or Squadding Up: Sheryl Sandberg and Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez
CONCLUSION
Two Feminisms, One Future
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
DISCOVER MORE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PRAISE FOR THE TROUBLE WITH WHITE WOMEN
NOTES
To my parents
Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.
Tap here to learn more.
All flourishing is mutual.
—Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

FOREWORD

ONE OF THE BIGGEST CHALLENGES I HAVE FACED AS A
BLACK FEMINIST TEACHER AND WRITER has been convincing
Black women that feminism is relevant to their lives. Black women’s
resistance to feminist politics and ideas has never been about a resistance to
gender equality. We live with the intimate and structural consequences of
patriarchy every day. The biggest stumbling block in Black women’s
journey to fly the flag of feminism has been white women. Somewhere a
white woman is talking about how we all need to be united “as women,”
regardless of race or creed. And somewhere a Black woman is giving that
white woman a side eye.
Given the perennial challenge white women pose to cross-racial feminist
solidarity, the clearer we get about the nature of that threat, the better
equipped we will be to address the problem. Kyla Schuller’s The Trouble
with White Women faces the challenge head-on with aplomb, erudition, and
excellent storytelling. Schuller makes clear precisely what the problem is:
“The trouble with white feminist politics is not what it fails to address and
whom it leaves out. The trouble with white feminism is what it does and
whom it suppresses.” It’s not that white women can’t do good in the world
or be useful allies in feminist world-making. The problem, rather, is white
feminism and its gravely limited conception of how to address the injustices
that all women face.
This book is a deeply erudite and much needed historically grounded
treatment of a phenomenon that mostly makes for wars among feminists on
social media. It represents the signature approaches that Kyla Schuller is
known for—a rich textual analysis covered with both a broad and deep
understanding of the archive.
Schuller traces the genesis of white feminism across several generations
beginning with the shameless invocations of racism that marked Elizabeth
Cady Stanton’s fight for suffrage. Though I am a student of this history, I
was still floored at just how strident Stanton was in her willingness to throw
Black men under the bus, trafficking in the most racist stereotypes of her
day, in order to procure the vote for white women. Schuller goes on to
demonstrate the changing same of white feminist politics among figures
like Margaret Sanger, Betty Friedan, and Sheryl Sandberg. Admirably,
Schuller manages to resist the kind of liberal self-flagellation that is a
hallmark of an unhelpful white guilt, and desiccates white women’s tears,
refusing the safety, comfort, and space-taking that so often follow them.
One of our nation’s top gender studies scholars and, quite frankly, one of
my favorite scholars to read period, Schuller pairs each white woman
thinker under examination here with a generational peer who is Black or
Indigenous, or Latinx, or trans. In doing so, she reminds us that cisgender
white women did not invent feminism, and that white feminism as a project
has been premised in large part on a refusal to engage the work of Black,
Indigenous, and trans women who call into question the end goals, not to
mention the organizing tactics, of white feminists. It’s not that we haven’t
been there; it’s that white women have refused to listen.
For the Black women who need white women to admit it, this book will
do that. For white women who continually ask me how to get better, I say,
begin here.
We can no longer afford a fractured feminist movement. All of the
things women won for themselves a generation ago have come under
pressing attack in these first two decades of the new millennium, and all of
us are having to gird ourselves for battle again. It goes without saying that
we will be stronger together, but part of the argument of this book is that
white feminism is a feminist politics we can and should leave behind. In its
place, white women can come together with other groups of women and
embrace their visions of an intersectional, trans- and Indigenous inclusive
future.
Anyone who knows me or has read me knows that I don’t count very
many white women among my friend groups, for precisely the reasons that
this book so deftly analyzes. But I have called Kyla my friend for nearly a
decade now. She produced this work because she lives her commitment to a
feminism not grounded in white women’s racism or civilizing imperatives.
She is an ally for Black women and women of color colleagues both
publicly and privately in ways that make a difference. Anyone can write a
scholarly tome analyzing these issues, but living these politics is the thing
that matters most. Kyla practices what she preaches in her teaching, her
writing, and her relationships. Rich and rigorous in both method and
content, this book is one I will return to again and again.
Brittney Cooper

INTRODUCTION
FEMINIST FAULT LINES

The history of American feminism has been primarily a narrative about the
heroic deeds of white women.
—Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Words of Fire
INFAMOUSLY, HALF OF ALL WHITE WOMEN VOTED FOR
DONALD TRUMP IN 2016 AND 2020—yet despite the repetition of
these notorious statistics almost to the point of incantation, we’re still
missing the full scale of the problem. We know that twice, one out of two
white women supported the most misogynist, white supremacist US
president in a century. This is widely recognized as a crisis for racial justice.
But it is also a hidden crisis for feminism. A lurking threat remains
obscured, even as professional and social media obsess about these voters’
attitudes toward gender equality. Surely, commentators declare, Trump-
supporting women must not be feminists. After all, the candidate bragged
about sexual assault. And, they continue, liberals generally support
women’s rights while conservatives oppose them. Republican white
women, the standard line of thinking goes, chose their whiteness and their
class status over their gender, unwittingly sacrificing themselves.
But the problem is not that so many white women apparently lack any
kind of feminist consciousness. The trouble we’ve been overlooking is that
a large number of white women Trump supporters are feminists.
Feminism and hard-line conservativism have become compatible.
Today, nearly half of all women who vote Republican—specifically, 42
percent—describe themselves as feminists. These women, mostly white,
support a party that has become an explicit platform for the white
supremacist far right. Some go so far as to claim that the Trump
administration supported gender equality. “My father is a feminist,” Ivanka
Trump announced while campaigning in 2016; once installed in the White
House, she fashioned herself a feminist leader, launching a women’s career
advice book, a women’s empowerment agenda, and a campaign for paid
family leave and affordable childcare.1 Scholar Jessie Daniels has even
found that online white supremacist communities like Stormfront host
vibrant discussions among women who support equal pay for women,
access to abortions for people of color, and sometimes gay rights.2
As a movement for social justice, feminism now seems to stand for
nothing at all—as likely to be motivated by racist self-interest as by a desire
to minimize suffering and fight for equality.
How did we get here? How did feminism come to be such a meaningless
position, as easily proclaimed by #MeToo campaigners as by avowed white
supremacists?
This book reveals that feminism has long been fractured by an internal
battle fought along the lines of racism, capitalism, and empire. The struggle
over what it means to be a feminist, and what kind of world feminists want
to build, may seem new. But there’s never been just one feminism, just one
singular and solitary politics of women’s rights and equality. Dating back to
the early days of the woman’s suffrage campaign, there’ve always been at
least two prominent factions within feminism wrestling over what gender
equality looks like and to whom it applies. These movements work at times
in coalition, and at many other times in opposition. The differences among
the various groups who gather under the feminist umbrella are often
ignored, buried under the reductive idea that feminism simply means
endorsing equality between the sexes. But recognizing the distinctions
among forms of feminism has never had higher stakes than it does today.
As surprising as feminist Trump voters may seem, they were nearly a
foregone conclusion. For nearly two hundred years, a large and vibrant
tradition of white women has framed sex equality to mean gaining access to
the positions historically reserved for white middle-class and wealthy men.
The goal, for these feminists, is to empower women to assume positions of
influence within a fundamentally unequal system. Many of these feminists
even argue, explicitly or implicitly, that their whiteness authorizes their
rights. They weave feminism, racism, and wealth accumulation together as
necessary partners, a phenomenon that has a tidy name: white feminism.
Of the factions within feminism, white feminism has been the loudest,
has claimed the most attention, and has motivated many of the histories
written about the struggles for women’s rights. White feminism thus
declares itself the one and only game in town. In part due to this posturing,
white feminism attracts people of all sexes, races, sexualities, and class
backgrounds, though straight, white, middle-class women have been its
primary architects. Naming this individualist, status quo–driven paradigm
“white feminism” refuses its claimed universality and identifies who
benefits the most from its approach.
For feminism to continue to have any meaning as a social justice
movement, we must out-organize white feminism. Happily, today many are
calling out its dangers. The concept of white feminism has moved from the
pages of legal and feminist academic journals, where it was first named by
Black and Indigenous feminist theorists in the 1980s and 1990s, to
homemade videos posted to YouTube and hand-drawn cardboard signs
marched down Broadway.3 But in this exciting broad pushback against
white feminism, we nonetheless frequently underestimate its true
destructiveness. Even its critics regularly minimize its power and
pervasiveness. Just as we miss the feminist Trump voter, we miss the larger
problem of white feminism.
Journalists, writers, and now dictionaries typically describe white
feminism as an approach to women’s rights that prioritizes the needs and
concerns of white women and neglects the struggles of women of color.4
According to this dominant formulation, the problems with white feminism
stem from its centering of middle-class, white, cis women and its exclusion
of everyone else. Its shortcomings lie in what it fails to do and whom it fails
to see.
From this standpoint, the remedy to white feminism appears to be a
strong dose of liberals’ favorite elixirs: awareness, diversity, equity, and
inclusion. If white feminism enlarges its vision to include women of color,
poor women, and trans women, this line of thinking implies, then it will no
longer be white feminism. But this understanding of white feminism
misses, and even risks reproducing, the nature and extent of its harm.
Expanding white feminism’s tent will not transform the materials of which
it is made.
The trouble with white feminist politics is not what it fails to address
and whom it leaves out. The trouble with white feminism is what it does
and whom it suppresses.
White feminism is an active form of harm, not simply a by-product of
self-absorption. Gender equality, for contemporary white feminists, means
advancing individual women up the corporate ladder; protecting
reproductive freedom, which it defines solely as the ability to prevent and
terminate pregnancy; and heightening prison sentences for rapists and
abusers. These objectives discount entirely the gross disparities of
capitalism, the barriers to pregnancy and healthy child-raising that poor
women face, and the violence perpetrated by cops, courts, and prisons.
White feminist objectives work to liberate privileged women while keeping
other structures of injustice intact.
Attempting to redress white feminism through awareness and inclusion
will not solve the problem of the feminist Trump voter or the feminist
Stormfront member. Instead, it will only further obscure and entrench the
race and class hierarchy at the core of this approach to women’s equality.
“White American women along with their counterparts across the former
British Empire have always been heavily invested in maintaining white
power structures,” writes journalist and scholar Ruby Hamad. “They often
did this by not merely neglecting, but actively throwing other women under
the proverbial bus.” White feminism needs to be demolished, not renovated
to look up-to-date. Black lesbian poet Audre Lorde put it succinctly decades
ago: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”5
Since the days of the suffrage movement, white feminism has posed
such trouble because of the specific ideology it advances, one that has been
remarkably consistent over time. First, white feminist politics promotes the
theory that women should fight for the full political and economic
advantages that wealthy white men enjoy within capitalist empire. Second,
it approaches the lives of Black and Indigenous people, other people of
color, and the poor as raw resources that can fuel women’s rise in status.
Finally, white feminism promises that women’s full participation in white-
dominated society and politics will not only improve their own social
position; thanks to their supposedly innate superior morality, their
leadership will redeem society itself. The harm in this approach to feminism
results from its tunnel vision, its belief that progress moves along the axis
of gender alone. This single-axis approach legitimates victory for women
through whatever means it deems necessary. White feminism becomes
success for some at the expense of others.
If inclusion and awareness might only expand white feminism’s violence
instead of ending it, then what is the alternative? Fortunately, within the
past, another major trajectory of women’s rights kindled that burns bright
up into the present: the counterhistory of feminism.
There’s long been a forceful alternative to white feminism that provides an
entirely different analysis and set of political strategies, promising success
for women with success for others. While it has been sidelined, it is
nonetheless strong. While on the margins, it is nonetheless coherent.
Intersectional feminism pushes back against white feminism and advances
new horizons of justice. It is both a theory and a movement emphasizing
that the fight for gender justice must be approached in tandem with the
fights for racial, economic, sexual, and disability justice, and ought to be
led by those most affected by these systems of exploitation working in
coalition with everyone else. Intersectional feminism not only represents
antiracist feminism—it nurtures a radically distinct vision of society. Too
often, mainstream accounts position intersectional feminism to be an
innovation of feminism’s third wave, which began in the late 1980s and
1990s. Yet the counterhistory of feminism is as old as the history of
feminism.
White feminism, legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw wrote in 1989,
comprises women who are “individually seeking to protect [their] source of
privilege within the hierarchy.” Instead, she proposed an intersectional
feminist praxis to “collectively challeng[e] the hierarchy.” While Crenshaw
coined the term “intersectionality” in this same essay and sociologist
Patricia Hill Collins further elucidated the concept starting in 1990, the
radical Black feminist practice of contesting power in its multiple forms had
developed much earlier.6 Since the mid-nineteenth century, Black feminists
have pushed back against white feminism and developed intersectional
feminist theory to identify how white supremacy, misogyny, and capitalism
converge. Fighting only the barrier of sex as white women do, they have
argued repeatedly, actually reinforces the overarching structures of
exploitation that so unfairly distribute the basic chances of life and death.
Black feminists such as Angela Davis, bell hooks, Paula Giddings, and
Beverly Guy-Sheftall further elaborated the history and theory of
intersectionality, and a wider coalition of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and
some white women and men have built the framework into a movement.
But their work has often been obscured in favor of a popular narrative
that sees the feminist past to be a white past. White feminists have even
attempted to steal, weaken, and bury their work. Dominant accounts figure
women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Sanger, and Betty Friedan as
feminism’s chief innovators and portray intersectionality as the new kid on
the block, an upstart livening up the party during the more enlightened
present. These white leaders all appear in this book. But so do the leaders of
another feminist past, including writer and activist Frances E. W. Harper,
who in the wake of the abolition of slavery insisted that the campaign for
women’s suffrage must be an ally of Black male suffrage; Yankton Sioux
author and organizer Zitkala-Ša, who protested off-reservation boarding
schools like the one she attended as a child and built a coalition of tribes
across the country to fight the loss of their children and lands; and Black
trans lawyer Pauli Murray, who fought legalized segregation on the basis of
race and extended her campaign to sex-based segregation.
The consequences of not knowing the counterhistory of feminism are
stark. White feminism succeeds in positioning itself as feminism, full stop.
Among conservatives, feminism seems to be a ready partner of pro-
capitalist, pro-white platforms. Among liberals, white feminists lay claim to
the work of Black, Indigenous, and other feminists of color and now often
tout their intersectional approach. Today, intersectionality as a theory and
movement risks being co-opted and degraded into a buzzword. But in their
rendering, intersectionality becomes merely an account of the multiplicity
of identity—the acknowledgment that we all have a race, gender, class, and
sexuality. This account does do some important work: it demolishes the
mythical singular category of moral, virtuous Woman that white feminism
historically enshrined, insisting instead that multiple dimensions of power
shape our life chances. But at the same time, this appropriated version of
intersectionality reproduces white feminist politics into the future. In this
“inclusive” version of white feminism, white women may no longer be the
harbingers of morality—it throws that burden onto token women of color.
Those women and nonbinary people with the most marginalized identities
become white feminism’s most valuable assets. Intersectionality, especially
as promoted within institutions like corporations and universities, attempts
to capture the magic of marginalized “intersectional people” and harness
them to their cause.
But the value of intersectionality emanates not only from the identities it
acknowledges and whom it includes. The value of intersectionality also
arises from what it does and what it confronts.
A person cannot be intersectional—only a politics can be intersectional.
The experiences of marginalized people expose the true workings of power
in all its forms. Identity forms a key piece of intersectionality, but it
provides the lens, not the target. In the words of my colleague Brittney
Cooper, intersectionality “was never meant to be an account of identity; it
was meant to be an account of how structures of power interact.”7
To abolish white feminism and build a world in which all can flourish,
we need to fully grasp the history, contours, and consequences of these
distinct forms of feminism. Resisting white feminism’s attempts to bury or
co-opt intersectionality, emptying it of its true force, requires listening to
the Black feminists who have developed its theory and the coalition of
feminists who have developed its politics.
The Trouble with White Women brings feminism’s counterhistory to life
through narrating nearly two hundred years of debates, tensions, and even
treacheries between white feminists and the intersectional feminists who
fought back. It captures the politics and the emotions of the struggle over
the true meanings of feminist justice in the aftermath of the Civil War in the
North and South, on the western plains in the waning years of Indigenous
sovereignty, in early twentieth-century New York tenements, in the civil
rights movement, within 1970s lesbian separatist collectives, and in twenty-
first-century corporate boardrooms. The conflicts unearthed here give us the
context we need today to distinguish between the distinct forms of
feminism, to not be swayed or fooled by a feminism that is “white
supremacy in heels,” in the words of activist and author Rachel Cargle.8 My
focus is on the movement for sex equality in the United States, though this
analysis has resonance across empires founded on enslavement, Indigenous
removal, and patriarchy.
Feminists of all stripes fight systemic inequality that concentrates money
and authority in the hands of men. The logic of sexism is deeply entrenched
within economic and social life, and some of feminists’ most dramatic gains
were won only relatively recently. “No Ladies” signs were posted in the
windows of business-district restaurants through the late 1960s; married
women in the United States and United Kingdom were only permitted to
open checking accounts and credit cards in their own names in the 1970s;
and the last Ivy League institution to go coed opened its doors to female
undergraduates in the early 1980s. Yet from the nineteenth century to the
present, white feminists have broken through appalling barriers for
themselves by reinforcing the barriers faced by others.
To be sure, gaining access to the key institutions of society wasn’t an
easy fight for white women. When Stanton and Harper first faced off over
the best direction for the antislavery, feminist movement to take, not even
white women could speak in public, own property if married, or, in almost
all cases, obtain an advanced education. Despite these formidable structural
obstacles, white women fought with verve and vision. Stanton not only
became a public speaker—she matured into a sophisticated and quick-
witted rhetorician. When a front-row heckler interrupted a conversation
following a suffrage speech she delivered in Nebraska to challenge her that
his homebound wife had accomplished the most important work of all—
delivering and raising eight sons—Stanton merely paused, looked him up
and down, and pronounced, “I have met few men in my life worth repeating
eight times.”9 Stanton wanted women in politics, not in the parlor. Yet hers,
like the white feminist movement she launched, was a fight for access to the
status quo powered by the fantasy that white women’s participation would
improve civilization itself.
Across the decades, white feminists’ overwhelming insistence that sex
oppression is the most prominent and widespread form of oppression
ironically enshrines the identity of Woman as the sine qua non of feminism
while minimizing the force of sexism itself. White feminist politics
produces the fantasy of a common, even uniform, identity of Woman, a
morally upright creature whose full participation in the capitalist, white
supremacist status quo will allegedly absolve it of its sins. The individual
obscures the structure.
Under white feminism, the goal of gender justice shrinks to defending
women’s qualities and identities. The agenda today becomes empowering
individual women to own their voice, refuse to be mansplained to, and
embrace their right to equality with men. These are fine practices on their
own, but they do not convey the devastating nature of sexism, nor do they
offer realistic methods of demolishing it. In fact, fetishizing the identity of
Woman as the basis of feminist politics actually makes it more difficult to
recognize sexism as a structure of exploitation and extraction. For sexism is
not merely the silencing, interrupting, and overlooking of women. Sexism is
the use of the male/female binary as an instrument to monopolize social,
political, and economic power—and those assigned female at birth are not
its only victims.
Consistently, white feminism wins more rights and opportunities for
white women through further dispossessing the most marginalized. It seeks
to install women at the helm of the systems that have brought the planet to
the brink of ecological collapse and to declare the battle won, cleansed by
their tears. White feminism has supported the denial of suffrage to men of
color, the eradication of Native ties to land and community, eugenics,
homophobia, transphobia, and neoliberal capitalism. Today, it comprises the
delusions that Girl Power will solve inequality, that if the investment bank
Lehman Brothers were instead Lehman Sisters we would have a better kind
of capitalism, and that putting a woman in the White House will necessarily
create a more moral empire.10 While seemingly ignoring non-middle-class
white women, white feminism actually raids more marginalized groups in
order to shore up its own political power. White feminism is theft disguised
as liberation.
Yet while white feminists attempt to win their rights and opportunities
through fighting for inclusion within fundamentally unequal systems, those
benefits are largely mythical, even for women as wealthy as Sheryl
Sandberg. Sexism is so fully interwoven within structures of domination
that the single-axis fight to support women is itself a delusion: patriarchy
threads through all forms of inequality. Eradicating sexism requires
unravelling the entire system.
Meanwhile, over and over again, intersectional feminists expose sexism
to be a powerful structure of systemic inequality and attempt to untangle its
deep threads with other forms of domination, while also building new
practices of care, coalition, faith, and solidarity that don’t rely on women’s
mythical purity. “I do not believe that white women are dew-drops just
exhaled from the skies,” Frances E. W. Harper declared from the stage
while sitting next to Stanton just after the Civil War.11 Hers was a campaign
for a new vision of justice, not for the fantasy of a redemptive female
identity. Devoted to mutual aid, she rallied formerly enslaved women and
men throughout the South to secure land while rejecting the idea that wealth
confers worth. Harper, like many other intersectional feminists into the
present, also drew from a politics that goes far beyond access to rights and
material advantages, expanding into a spiritual cosmology of justice whose
final aim is harmony, not the seizure of power. For many intersectional
feminists, power is something to be nurtured and shared. It far exceeds the
realm of the human, extending into the universe. Rather than a battle over
resources, intersectional feminism articulates a planetary vision in which all
have access to what they need to thrive in mind, body, and spirit.
The Trouble with White Women reveals the counterhistory of feminism
across seven key episodes. Each chapter takes readers inside the debate
between an intersectional feminist activist and a white feminist activist as
they wrestle over the best approach to women’s rights. By listening directly
to debates between the two main factions of feminism, we can gain a new
understanding of the fight for women’s suffrage, for women’s access to the
professions, for birth control, for lesbian feminism, for trans rights, and for
women’s national leadership roles. We see that white feminists weren’t just
products of their time—they chose to promote competitive, resource-
hoarding ideologies, even as their contemporaries made different decisions.
The struggles between suffrage campaigners Stanton and Harper, authors
Harriet Beecher Stowe and Harriet Jacobs, Native rights reformers Alice
Fletcher and Zitkala-Ša, birth control activists Margaret Sanger and Dr.
Dorothy Ferebee, civil rights leaders Betty Friedan and Pauli Murray, anti-
trans feminist Janice Raymond and trans theorist Sandy Stone, and
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez reveal when and where they made choices that either reinforced the
politics of disposability or interrupted a system that declares some lives raw
resources ripe for extraction.
These stories are so crucial to understand because they are not simple
narratives of heroes and villains. My goal is not to outline for readers who
should be summarily tossed in the dustbin of history, never to be mentioned
or praised again. No person can have pure or perfect politics, nor should
anyone be expected to. Furthermore, feminism, like all social movements,
is a site of ongoing struggle, not static agreement, a tension that is necessary
for hashing out its vision. Instead, I have tried to capture the figures in their
complexity—many are both inspiring and infuriating. In the voices,
insights, contradictions, and shortcomings of each of these leaders, key
lessons ring out for our ongoing reckoning with these two distinct strands of
feminism today. Feminism is about the long-term collective. Its measure of
success is what we articulate together—and maybe even accomplish—not
our private virtue. Positions and campaigns, victories and losses register
over the time of generations.
I bring the conflict and tension between these two forms of feminism
down to the human level to uncover how systemic change happens.
Seemingly impermeable structures of oppression are reinforced or
destroyed through groups of people making deliberate decisions over and
over again to defend their own interests or to fight for the commons.
Understanding how feminists have made those decisions can help us
navigate similar dilemmas as we face them today as individuals and as
collectives. This book uncovers the active harm of white feminist politics
and the centuries of struggle for a world in which all can flourish, in the
hope it will give readers the tools to help carry this fight into the future.
We need to know the counterhistory of feminism because the past is not
merely a prologue—it lingers on within the present. History is never safely
lodged in anterior time. Instead, past, present, and future materialize
simultaneously. The violence revealed here, including Stanton’s campaign
for whites-only suffrage, Stowe’s urging that Black adults were like
children who needed raising by white women, Sanger’s belief that 25
percent of the world’s people were unworthy of bearing children, and
Raymond’s insistence that trans women rape feminist spaces by their mere
existence, is ongoing. These outrages live on as flesh, as hauntings, as
institutional structures, as autonomic responses, and as discourse—
surfacing in outraged Beckys who call the cops and feminists who voted for
Trump. But so, too, do Jacobs’s invention of Black women’s autobiography
to articulate her own subjectivity, Zitkala-Ša’s defense of Indigenous
children’s right to remain among their tribes, and Dr. Ferebee’s insistence
that poor Black women need birth control alongside a wide range of
healthcare access for them and their children all persist, animating what
feminist justice can look like today.
We engage with these legacies wittingly and unwittingly. Whether white
women will interrogate their long-standing cozy relationship with the racist
status quo and their self-interested notion of women’s rights remains an
open question. The Trump feminist poses a danger, but so, too, do liberals
who think white feminism simply needs to become inclusive. But out-
organizing white feminism will be difficult if white women don’t grapple
with the history of racist feminism and don’t appreciate the distinct vision
of justice intersectional feminists articulate.
“The history of white women who are unable to hear Black women’s
words, or to maintain dialogue with us, is long and discouraging,” wrote
Audre Lorde.12 As a white woman scholar, I offer this portrait of the
struggles within feminism in the spirit of solidarity and coalition with
intersectional feminists. Yet professing solidarity has its limits. This book is
an attempt to listen and learn—but I also acknowledge that these
approaches are not enough. Solidarity and social change manifest through
the daily practice of fundamentally redistributing power and resources, not
through the balms of awareness and attention.
Today, white feminism is attempting to reform itself—when it needs to
be abolished. Inclusive white feminist politics threatens to absorb and
nullify the power of intersectional world-building. Making white feminism
inclusive only results in longer tentacles wrapped around more necks. But
the intersectional feminist movement is not only ongoing. It is building
strength. Abolition refers to the practice of eradicating systemic racial
injustice—as well as building more sustainable, life-giving structures in its
place. Intersectional feminism represents a praxis of care and coalition as
old as white feminism, an abolitionist practice that both dismantles systems
and invents solidarities anew. Far from a celebration of identity and
diversity, it is a full-throated confrontation with power from the vantage of
the most marginalized. This is the counterhistory of feminism. Two
movements remain in ongoing struggle, yet only one fights for the
continued breath of the many.

PART I - CIVILIZING

CHAPTER ONE
WOMAN’S RIGHTS ARE WHITE RIGHTS?

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frances E. W.
Harper
White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by woman suffrage.
—Carrie Chapman Catt, Woman Suffrage by Constitutional Amendment
THE SENECA FALLS CONVENTION OF 1848, ONE OF THE
FIRST PUBLIC EVENTS DEVOTED TO women’s rights held
anywhere in the world, had an inauspicious beginning. When organizer
Elizabeth Cady Stanton told her husband, a talented abolitionist speaker, of
her plan to demand voting rights for women, he was “thunderstruck.” “You
will turn the proceedings into a farce,” he protested, vowing that he would
refuse to even “enter the chapel during the session.”1 Henry Brewster
Stanton accordingly booked a lecture thirty miles away and fled town to
avoid any association with his wife’s cause. The day of the event, Elizabeth
Cady Stanton and her co-organizers arrived at the red-bricked Wesleyan
Methodist Chapel in Seneca Falls for the 10 a.m. opening session—only to
find its doors locked and a large crowd of western New York reformers
milling about outside. Yet a window had been left open to the late July heat,
and Stanton’s young nephew was lifted up to its sill so that he could crawl
through. Stanton began the proceedings by giving her third-ever public
speech, an occasion all the more momentous given that women were
generally forbidden from speaking in public.2 She was barely audible. But
the “Declaration of Sentiments,” the organizers’ woman’s rights manifesto
modeled after the Declaration of Independence, stirred lively discussion and
broad agreement after she read it a second time.
Stanton presented eleven resolutions. Ten garnered unanimous approval
by sixty-eight women and thirty-two men willing to sign on, though they
made radical demands for legal and social change: that married women be
legally permitted to own property; “that the same amount of virtue,
delicacy, and refinement of behavior that is required of woman… also be
required of man”; and for men and women to gain equal access to artisanal
work, the professions, and business. An eleventh resolution, however, met
with severe reproach: that it was women’s “duty” to fight for the right to
vote. Co-organizers including famed Quaker abolitionist Lucretia Mott
balked that woman suffrage was outlandish, even “ridiculous.” Her
objection, however, did not arise from conservativism; it stemmed instead
from debates about the utility of voting that were rocking the abolitionist
movement at the time. Mott and many others in attendance were part of a
faction led by William Lloyd Garrison that abstained from electoral politics
on the grounds that it was a moral duty to disobey the laws and procedures
of a government that permitted slavery. The opposing faction, which
insisted electoral politics was the way to abolish enslavement, was led by
none other than Stanton’s husband.3 Yet his position that expanding the
suffrage would bring about justice did not extend to women’s rights.
Only one man spoke in favor of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s resolution for
woman’s suffrage that day. The abolitionist firebrand Frederick Douglass,
who was also the only African American member of the three-hundred-
person audience, arose from his seat. In his resonant voice issuing forth
from his six-foot frame, he declared that he would not fight for voting rights
for himself without also fighting for voting rights for women. To bar
women from the ballot, as he saw it, entailed “the maiming and repudiation
of one-half of the moral and intellectual power” of the globe.4 Douglass’s
rousing speech stirred up the crowd, already sweating in the ninety-degree
heat. Thanks to his intervention, the resolution passed by a narrow margin.
Stanton, with characteristic grandiosity, later claimed that the Seneca
Falls Convention commenced “the most momentous reform that had yet
been launched on the world.” What is now considered to be the
convention’s signature achievement, the call for woman’s suffrage,
succeeded only because Douglass staked Black voting rights and women’s
voting rights as necessary partners. He had not always been so sympathetic
to the cause. Douglass praised his fellow abolitionist Stanton for having
earlier refuted point by point his initial arguments against women’s
suffrage, transforming him into a “woman’s-rights man.”5 The motto of his
North Star newspaper, launched seven months before the convention,
proclaimed, “Right is of no sex—Truth is of no color.” At Seneca Falls,
Douglass backed his new ideals with concrete action. His solidarity work
helped set the course of modern feminism, a movement Stanton and her
close friend Susan B. Anthony are widely credited with creating and then
sustaining until their deaths at the turn of the twentieth century.
Yet when the Civil War ended nearly two decades later, and Black men
were enfranchised while women of any race were not, Elizabeth Cady
Stanton retreated from the cause of racial equality and anchored white
women’s rights in the logic of white supremacy. She fought bitterly against
the proposed Fifteenth Amendment, the third and final amendment of the
Reconstruction era. The amendment aimed to prevent states from denying
anyone the right to vote on the basis of “race, color or previous condition of
servitude.” Sex was not included, however, and the amendment would not
extend voting rights to women of any race, a stipulation that enraged
Stanton.
In May 1869, she presided over the meeting of the American Equal
Rights Association (AERA), an organization founded by Douglass, Mott,
Stanton, and Anthony among others to fight for universal suffrage
regardless of “race, color, or sex.” As chair, Stanton had the honor of
delivering the opening speech from the podium of the grand, new Steinway
Hall in New York City, a three-tiered concert and lecture auditorium
attached to the piano emporium’s showrooms. By now she was an expert
orator. Full of fury, she seized the opportunity to unleash her favorite
argument against the pending amendment, which had been approved by
Congress and was awaiting ratification by the states: that womanhood was a
state of imperiled whiteness, threatened by depraved Black and immigrant
men who were soon to have more legal rights than the ladies who presided
over the nation’s finest homes.
“Remember, the Fifteenth Amendment takes in a larger population than
the 2,000,000 black men on the Southern plantation,” Stanton thundered. “It
takes in all the foreigners daily landing in our eastern cities, [and] the
Chinese crowding our western shores…. Think of Patrick and Sambo and
Hans and Yung Tung, who do not know the difference between a monarchy
and a republic, who cannot read the Declaration of Independence or
Webster’s spelling book, making laws for Lucretia Mott… [or] Susan B.
Anthony.” Congressmen who were about to expand suffrage to men alone
would “make their wives and mothers the political inferiors of unlettered
and unwashed ditch-diggers, boot-blacks, butchers, and barbers, fresh from
the slave plantations of the South and the effete civilizations of the old
world.” What terrors lay in the nation’s future, she asked, when “clowns
make laws for queens?” Stanton’s bag of racist tricks was deep. She even
pulled out the mythical specter of the Black male rapist, claiming that to
“the ignorant African… woman is simply the being of man’s lust,” such that
Black men’s voting rights “must culminate in tearful outrages on
womanhood.”6 Voting rights would also make Black men themselves more
vulnerable to exploitation, she asserted preposterously; the Fifteenth
Amendment should thus be rejected in hopes of a future amendment that
expanded the franchise to women and men.
As he had twenty-one years prior, Douglass stood up from the
congregation to speak. While he first honored Stanton’s decades of work for
abolition and their long personal friendship, he bristled at her increasingly
frequent use of the derogatory term “Sambo,” her blatantly racist objections
to enfranchising Black men, and her central claim: that bourgeois white
women were most in need of the protection of the ballot.
“With us, the matter is a question of life and death,” Douglass countered.
“When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the
cities of New York and New Orleans; when they are dragged from their
houses and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their
arms, and their brains dashed out upon the pavement; when they are objects
of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their
homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to
enter schools; then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to
our own.”7
During Reconstruction, when white abolitionists needed to expand their
horizons beyond the existence of slavery and recognize the pervasive
violence of antiblackness, many instead remained invested in racism. For
Stanton, white supremacy became her choice strategy for advancing
woman’s suffrage. When it became clear that her goal of universal
enfranchisement for all women and the formerly enslaved was not a
legislative reality, she deliberately put the two groups in conflict with each
other. She advanced a false choice: voting rights for Black men or for
(white) women. Stanton might have opted for solidarity, electing to support
the Fifteenth Amendment to ensure formerly enslaved men became full
citizens and forming coalitions with abolitionists to fight for women’s
suffrage in the future. But instead, she opted to frame universal male
suffrage as menacing white women’s dignity and purity.
Douglass became one of her most eloquent critics, provoked to
defending the primacy of Black male voting rights over enfranchising
women as the KKK unleashed its reign of terror and anti-Black violence
proliferated across the country. The alliances comprising the AERA had
been torn asunder, and the organization dissolved immediately after the
meeting in Steinway Hall. That evening, Stanton and Anthony founded a
new organization, called the National Woman Suffrage Association, to
oppose the Fifteenth Amendment because it did not extend voting rights to
women. Their position was firm. “I’d sooner cut off my right hand than ask
for the ballot for the Black man and not for woman,” Susan B. Anthony
earlier declared.8
The nation’s leading feminists had become outright antagonists of Black
suffrage when the legislation excluded them. Stanton’s unabashed racism
threatened to turn the nascent movement for women’s rights into a white
supremacist campaign to advance the position of white women at all costs.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in other words, invented white feminism. She
began this project in Seneca Falls in 1848 and cemented its platform at
Steinway Hall in 1869. For her, women’s rights meant that white women
would gain access to the rights and privileges of elite white men. She
framed white civilization as imperiled until it made room for white
women’s leadership, which she figured as more moral, just, and ultimately
profitable than men’s leadership. Yet this vision of reform was starkly
individualist, imagining people as isolated units in continual competition.
While seemingly in common cause with abolition, for example, Stanton
approached enslavement primarily as an analogy for white women’s own
suffering. Black men with voting rights became a threat, rather than
potential allies.
During the first five decades of women’s rights, Elizabeth Cady Stanton
was one of the most famous women in the United States. She possessed the
wealth and the self-confidence to ensure that her intellectual influence on
the movement was widely known and her legacy endured, two feats assisted
by the tireless organizing work of her compatriot, Susan B. Anthony. While
Stanton was largely forgotten during the first three-quarters of the twentieth
century, the rise of feminist history in the 1960s and 1970s restored her self-
proclaimed position as the intellectual leader of the campaign for women’s
rights.
Another tradition of feminism began, however, during the same years
that Stanton stumped for white women’s rights. On the second day of the
May 1869 AERA conference at Steinway Hall, Stanton reiterated, to
applause, “I do not believe in allowing ignorant Negroes and ignorant and
debased Chinamen to make laws for me to obey.”9 Frances Ellen Watkins
Harper, a leading Black author, feminist-abolitionist lecturer, and founding
AERA member, intervened immediately.
“When it is a question of race, I let the lesser question of sex go,”
Harper counseled. “But the white women all go for sex, letting race occupy
a minor position.”
Harper called out how the logic of Woman worked for white feminists:
they imagined a group bound only by the oppressions of sex. They pushed
race to the side as a “minor” issue. White women’s emphasis on sex was
implicitly a position that reinforced whiteness, for it elevated the concerns
of womanhood—an identity that white scientific, political, and cultural
elites at the time thought only bourgeois white families had achieved—
above all other dynamics of power. Harper pushed back against Stanton’s
increasingly bald racism, using a prior speaker’s emphasis on the needs of
working women as her counterpoint.
“I like the idea of fighting for working women. But will ‘working
women’ be broad enough to take colored women?” interrogated Harper.
Susan B. Anthony and others agreed enthusiastically—of course their
concern for working women extended to Black women. But Harper
continued: “When I was at Boston, there were sixty women who rose up
and left work because one colored woman went to gain a livelihood in their
midst.”10
Harper’s anecdote shattered the myth echoing throughout the
auditorium: that women were naturally bonded together against a common
oppressor—men. Harper made it plain that she and the white women
gathered there did not have the same concerns or priorities, despite their
shared status as women. Harper would make this point repeatedly over her
long activist career: white women could be allies—but they could also be
trouble. White women’s commitment to the preeminence of sex, and thus of
whiteness, meant that sometimes white women were the greatest danger
Black women faced. While many white women romanticized their moral
purity and alleged isolation from the world of business and politics, they
nonetheless gained tremendous advantage from slavery and colonialism.
White women enslavers in the South were thus often deeply personally and
financially invested in their human property, as historian Stephanie Jones-
Rogers has shown.11 Harper’s example of white women’s racism came from
Boston; it could just as easily have come from Stanton’s presidential perch
right inside Steinway Hall.
In the bitter debates about the Fifteenth Amendment unfolding in 1869,
activists were forced to pick sides: support the present legislation
enfranchising only Black men, or hold out for a long-shot simultaneous
Sixteenth Amendment that would enfranchise all women. Harper chose her
battle.
“If the nation could only handle one question, I would not have the
black women put a single straw in the way if only the race of men could get
what they wanted,” Harper concluded, affirming her support for the
Fifteenth Amendment.12 The room broke out in applause.
Harper’s intervention into what is now called “the great schism” in
women’s rights, when the AERA broke into two competing factions, was
one of the first key moments in the development of intersectional feminism.
That Harper would be pivotal in the rise of intersectionality politics is no
surprise: she was one of the first Black feminist theorists.13 A prolific
author of poetry and fiction, as well as a tireless lecturer on the speaking
circuit, Harper was the most widely read Black poet in the nineteenth-
century United States. Her intersectional feminism was not merely a
reaction to white feminism’s implicit and explicit commitment to white
supremacy. She also articulated a new kind of political subject and new
sources of knowledge. Her deeply spiritual approach to liberation
envisioned a world governed by morality, instead of competition and profit.
Whereas Stanton portrayed women’s rights as a lever for advancing white
civilization and drew sensational analogies between slavery and the
condition of white womanhood to dramatize her cause, Harper’s
intersectional feminism advocated for alliances and contact between
enslaved and free people, feminists and antiracists, and spiritual belief and
secular politics.
Stanton and Harper were two of the most politically active women in the
United States during the second half of the nineteenth century, though
Harper was much less known. The conditions motivating each woman to
become involved in politics dramatize the different ways class, race, and
sex shaped their personal lives as well as the distinct feminist strategies
they developed. In one important respect, however, the two had overlapping
experiences: each was fortunate enough to receive, and fight for, the highest
quality educations then available to white girls and Black girls, respectively.
Stanton’s access to education came by virtue of growing up in the largest
house in Johnstown, New York. Born in 1815, she liked to say, to one of the
“blue-blooded first families” of New York descended from Puritans,
Stanton boasted of “several generations of vigorous, enterprising ancestors
behind [her].” Her father served a term in the US Congress and became a
state Supreme Court justice, while her mother was descended from a
Revolutionary War hero. Yet Stanton was a constant disappointment to her
father. Her mother had borne eleven children, but five died in childhood.
Only one son, Eleazar, survived to adulthood; this son alone thus bore all
the weight of maintaining the ancestral line’s wealth and prominence. But
when he was twenty, Eleazar took seriously ill, and he came home from
college to die.14 Though Stanton was only eleven at the time, she could see
her father’s devastation. She recalled finding him sitting vigil in the parlor
next to his son’s casket, looking as white as the cloth that draped the coffin,
mirrors, and paintings: “I climbed upon his knee, when he mechanically put
his arm around me… we both sat in silence, he thinking of the wreck of all
his hopes in the loss of a dear son…. At length he heaved a deep sigh and
said: ‘Oh, my daughter, I wish you were a boy!’ Throwing my arms about
his neck, I replied: ‘I will try to be all my brother was.’”
The next morning, she sought the services of her neighbor, the family’s
pastor, asking him for help learning two skills that had been denied to her
on account of sex: reading ancient Greek and riding horseback. He opened
his library and stables to the precocious child and provided regular lessons.
Before long, Stanton added Latin and mathematics to her regime at the
Johnstown Academy, becoming the only girl in her school to study these
subjects. Despite being years younger than many of her classmates, she
eventually won second prize in the academy’s Greek competition, which
was awarded in the form of her own copy of the Greek New Testament.
Certain she had won her father’s approval at last, Stanton triumphantly ran
down the hill to her father’s office to display her book. But, she relayed,
while he was “evidently pleased,” praise was not forthcoming. He only
“kissed me on the forehead and exclaimed, with a sigh, ‘Ah, you should
have been a boy!’” She soon faced a structural disappointment as well: at
sixteen, her male classmates all went off to Union College, where Eleazar
had attended. There was not a college or university in the country that
accepted women. Stanton was able to attend Emma Willard’s seminary,
however, which Stanton’s biographer Lori Ginzberg notes provided the best
education in the country then available to girls.15 Throughout her life,
Stanton positioned her conservative father as the foil against whom she
developed her budding feminist consciousness, and she positioned herself
as the inheritor of the family’s blue-blooded potential: a potential she used
to dismantle her father’s sex-divided world.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, born in 1825, also received a high-quality
education through a mixture of luck, pluck, and tragedy. Harper’s parents
were free, though they lived in the slave state of Maryland. But as among
other early nineteenth-century families, death was widespread; both her
parents had died by the time she reached three years old. Her mother’s
brother William Watkins, and his wife Henrietta, raised Harper as one of
their own children. She attended Watkins’s Academy for Negro Youth in
Baltimore, where she undertook one of the most rigorous courses of study
then available to Black children. A shoemaker and preacher by trade, her
uncle William Watkins was also a master orator and active anti-imperialist
who wrote articles for Garrison’s Liberator newspaper; his pupils wrote
essays almost daily and were trained in elocution, history, geography,
mathematics, natural philosophy, Greek, Latin, and music, among other
subjects.16 Watkins’s son would go on to work with Frederick Douglass on
the North Star newspaper.
But Harper’s studies ended at thirteen, when she needed to obtain a job
in order to support herself. She found work as a domestic servant in the
home of a Baltimore book merchant, looking after the children, sewing the
family’s clothes, and providing other housekeeping services. The merchant
was kindly and his wife duly impressed by an article Harper had penned, so
they granted Harper full access to their home’s library when she could steal
away “occasional half-hours of leisure.” Harper’s situation brings to mind
Jane Austen’s famously constrained writing conditions, two decades prior
and an ocean away: cramped on a parlor table, writing in short bursts of
precious uninterrupted time when her family and their many guests would
be otherwise occupied.17 But the differences between Austen and Harper,
and Stanton and Harper, are stark. Harper not only lacked a room of her
own; her destiny was to clean the rooms of other people.
Yet it was in this library that Harper developed as a reader and writer,
entirely by her own direction. She continued writing poetry and prose, and
she published her first collection of poetry, Forest Leaves (circa 1846),
while still in her early twenties. Without this early, formative access to the
literature of her day, Harper may never have gone on to publish eleven
books, plus three novels serialized in magazines. By 1871, she had sold
fifty thousand books, almost entirely to a Black audience—an astonishing
number during an era in which only 20 percent of African Americans were
literate.18
If there are intriguing parallels amid the generally stark divergences in
the ways that Stanton and Harper maneuvered themselves into advanced
educations, those parallels drift widely apart as each woman became
involved in the abolitionist, and then feminist, movements.
Two days after marrying star abolitionist lecturer Henry Brewster
Stanton, Stanton and her new husband set off on a three-week voyage to
London, where Henry served as a delegate to the first World Anti-Slavery
Conference. The June 1840 conference proved pivotal to Stanton’s political
awakening. It introduced her to a wider circle of abolitionists, including
Lucretia Mott, a prominent activist who had founded the well-known
Female Anti-Slavery Society in the United States seven years prior, with
whom she walked arm in arm throughout London. But ultimately of more
consequence, it introduced her to her own marginalized status. When the
delegates arrived at Freemasons’ Hall, the women—both wives like Stanton
and official delegates like Mott—were escorted to a “low curtained seat”
removed from the main congregation seating, as if they composed the
“church choir.”
Despite the eloquent objections of William Lloyd Garrison; Charles
Remond, arguably the first Black abolitionist public speaker; and a few
others—who backed up their words by walking out in protest with the
women—a vote was held to determine the status of women’s participation
in the convention. As a result, women delegates were denied the right to
vote and to speak. At issue was less hypocrisy than strategy: the winning
side, which included Stanton’s husband, maintained an overly narrow
approach in which they objected to any political stance that might threaten
or dilute their single-prong focus on abolishing slavery in the Americas.
They consequently decided to sidestep the volatile issue of women speaking
in public. Stanton wryly noted that she and the women delegates, relegated
to their position on the sidelines, “modestly listened to the French, British,
and American Solons [a Greek statesman] for twelve of the longest days in
June.” The conference began to crystallize her own priorities. She later
claimed that her time in London spurred her to the realization that “to me
there was no question so important as the emancipation of women from the
dogmas of the past.”19
Two and a half million people were enslaved in the United States in
1840, and at the conference—as within the abolitionist community that
formed her lively social circle back home—Stanton would have heard
graphic tales of whippings, murder, and children stolen at the hand of slave
owners. Yet what she felt most keenly was her own degradation. On the one
hand, her reaction is understandable. Nothing pricks the skin as deeply as
one’s own experience, particularly exclusion and humiliation, and there is a
deep injustice in men fighting for the fundamental rights of others while
silencing the very women in their midst. Free white women in the North
and South lacked many of the most basic individual rights: the right to own
property after marriage,20 including any wages they earned and money they
inherited; the right to have guardianship over their own children after
separation; and the right to initiate divorce. If abolitionists weren’t going to
push back against the rightlessness of women, who would?
On the other hand, a hierarchy of priority structured Stanton’s approach
to abolition and women’s rights throughout her career. Stanton faced a
choice: she could align the budding women’s movement with enslaved
people, or she could call in the powers of whiteness to elevate her own
community. For decades, Stanton chose the latter. The priority she placed
on “white women’s rights” severely compromised her commitment to Black
rights.21 The moral outrage of enslavement, to Stanton, was ultimately most
useful as a dramatic analogy that threw into relief her own lack of rights. In
her perspective, she was legally barred from the rights her whiteness
merited and unfairly shared the status of a slave. She thereby began the
white feminist political tradition that wins rights and liberties for middle-
class white women by further marginalizing others.
“The world waits the coming of some new element, some purifying
power, some spirit of mercy and love,” she instructed, and this elevating
spirit was the force of civilized womanhood.22 Stanton positioned women’s
lack of access to rights as a gross injustice that threatened the progress of
civilization. Denied the full privileges of citizenship that belonged to them
by virtue of their whiteness, she argued, white women were robbed of their
moral powers to refine and elevate society. But the United States could
reach civilization’s full potential, Stanton argued, if women were granted
rights and influence.
Just six years after the Seneca Falls Convention, Stanton gave her first
major speech, addressing the New York state legislature on the legal status
of women. Susan B. Anthony had worked for months to earn the
Valentine’s Day hearing, coordinating sixty women who gathered ten
thousand signatures on a petition; Stanton, for her part, felt more nervous in
advance of the speech than any other she gave.23 Stanton spoke to the
legislators as a peer in heritage and merit, who was outrageously legally
“classed with idiots, lunatics, and negroes.” In addition to being barred
from the rights to vote and to trial by a jury of peers, white women, once
married, lost all legal standing. “The wife who inherits no property holds
about the same legal position that does the slave of the Southern plantation.
She can own nothing, sell nothing.” Women didn’t even have the right to
determine their own children’s futures, she explained. Husbands could bind
sons out to abusive masters, or send daughters into prostitution, but wives
had no legal authority to intervene. Once more, she grounded women’s
claims to rights in whiteness. Anthony had twenty thousand copies of
Stanton’s speech printed, and she delivered one to the desk of each New
York state legislator.
The legal inequalities married white women faced were monumental.
But Stanton dramatized her situation as one of not only political standing
but also of being robbed of the rights and prerogatives of whiteness and
thrust into a community of slaves. The inability to own property was not, of
course, the same as being property, a condition that white middle-class
wives were wholly spared. But as a rhetorical move, dramatizing the fall of
Woman to the status of Slave was extremely useful to Stanton. The two
halves of her analogy were meant to strike horror in her listeners’ hearts:
that white women, who deserved “the full recognition of all our rights as…
persons; native, free-born citizens; property-holders, [and] tax-payers,”
conditions they shared with white men yet were denied, were unjustly
treated as slaves. Meanwhile, an undivulged source informed her sense that
another social structure was possible: the matriarchal culture of the
Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) in whose territory her family had settled.24
An analogy like the one Stanton articulated over and over again between
“woman” and “Negroes” refuses to acknowledge any shared systems of
oppression. Instead, it walls each side off into distinct partitions: one in
which, in the words of a key Black feminist anthology from the 1980s, “all
the women are white, and all the Blacks are men.”25 Analogy renders the
political status of enslaved women invisible and negligible.
To be clear, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was no mere dilettante in the
abolition movement. She was immersed in antislavery activity for decades
and supported militant tactics such as John Brown’s 1859 attempt to begin
an armed uprising of enslaved people by raiding the federal arsenal at
Harpers Ferry. During the Civil War, she and Susan B. Anthony halted their
now annual women’s rights convention in order to devote their energies
entirely to supporting Black emancipation. Intent on contributing more to
the war cause than women’s typical, but necessary, tasks of “nursing the
sick and wounded, knitting socks, scraping lint, and making jellies,” they
intervened directly in the legislative process. Anthony and Stanton
organized thousands of women and men into the Women’s National Loyal
League, which became the country’s first national political organization led
by women, and aimed to gather one million signatures in favor of a
constitutional amendment ending slavery. Petitions, Stanton explained, are
“seemingly so inefficient,” but were the only means through which people
denied the vote could add their voice to the political process. Their petition
circulated throughout the North and was “signed on fence posts, plows, the
anvil, the shoemaker’s bench—by women of fashion and those in the
industries, alike in the parlor and kitchen.”26 While the nearly four hundred
thousand names the organization delivered on hefty scrolls to Senator
Charles Sumner fell substantially short of their goal, Stanton and Anthony’s
petition drive was nonetheless the largest the country had yet seen in its
history. It is credited with helping smooth the way to the adoption of the
Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery in 1865.
Yet in the words of Lori Ginzberg, Stanton “did not seriously stretch her
thinking, sacrifice wealth or comfort, or evince a strong or urgent concern
for those who were actually enslaved.” Stanton, Ginzberg writes, “had
always been clear about what she wanted the Civil War to accomplish: the
emancipation of the slaves, she was sure, would pave the way for
emancipating women as well.” This is all the more striking given that
slavery, for Stanton, wasn’t only an abstract political cause. It was also an
intimate reality in her own childhood home. Although slavery was officially
abolished in New York in 1799, it remained legal to own slaves there until
1827 under the state’s Gradual Emancipation act. Three people were
enslaved within Stanton’s own Johnstown house. Nonetheless, Stanton
painted the principle domestic injustice of her childhood to be her father’s
refusal to recognize her own intellectual value and potential. Her
autobiography refers to her family’s servants, Abraham, Peter, and Jacob, as
her closest childhood friends—natural companions, despite their adulthood,
to her juvenile adventures.27 She does not disclose that these men were
enslaved by her father.
This choice to center her own degradation and remain silent about her
position among a slaveholding family exemplifies Stanton’s white
feminism. White feminism is a political position, not an identity. The
trouble with Stanton is not that she grew up in a blue-blooded slaveholding
house and married a man also descended from Mayflower stock so,
therefore, her politics are suspect. Privilege doesn’t necessarily result in
myopic self-interest, just as marginalization doesn’t directly lead to a more
ethical or radical politics. Instead, her white feminist politics resulted from
the choices she made to exploit enslavement as a sensational analogy to
dramatize her own condition.
Stanton nonetheless considered herself a devoted friend of the slave who
made valiant sacrifices to the cause of abolition. And when slavery was
abolished at last in 1865, she would come to expect payback for the
services she had rendered.
In her mid-twenties, Harper left Baltimore to take up a teaching job in Ohio,
and then in Little York, Pennsylvania, less than twenty miles north of the
Maryland border. Fifty-three students crammed into her one Pennsylvania
classroom, and she found teaching quite tiring. Meanwhile, the growing
antiblackness of the 1850s devastated her. As for other abolitionists, the
passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 was a tremendous blow for
Harper. The act expanded the reach of slavery across the continent. A
person escaping slavery could be captured in any state of the union and
remanded back to a person who claimed to own her. The act also fined local
authorities $1,000 if they failed to arrest anyone a white Southerner testified
under oath was their property, and it fined and imprisoned for six months
anyone who aided a person fleeing bondage.28 These terms also made it
relatively easy to capture freeborn children and adults living in free states
and send them into slavery. Effectively, slavery had become a national
institution.
While in Little York, Harper met many people escaping north, now all
the way to Canada, via the Underground Railroad’s network of secret routes
and safe houses, and the danger of their plight aroused Harper’s care and
concern. “These poor fugitives are a property that can walk,” she wrote to a
friend. “Just to think that from the rainbow-crowned Niagara to the swollen
waters of the Mexican Gulf, from the restless murmur of the Atlantic to the
ceaseless roar of the Pacific, the poor, half-starved, flying fugitive has no
resting place for the sole of his foot!”29
Within three years, slavery’s burgeoning legal standing rendered Harper
a potential fugitive. A new Maryland law, enacted in 1853, prohibited any
free, Northern person of color from entering Maryland via the border it
shared with Pennsylvania. Punishment for crossing the border was extreme:
imprisonment and remand into slavery. Harper was suddenly in exile.
Though freeborn, of free parents, if she returned home to Baltimore, she
could be enslaved. Yet it was someone else’s suffering that galvanized her
into action. A free Black man, unaware of the statute, traveled south to
Maryland, where he was captured and sold into slavery in Georgia. He
escaped, hiding behind the wheelhouse of a boat churning north. But he was
caught and enslaved once more; he died soon after. The man’s plight, which
was well known to Philadelphia abolitionists, struck Harper to the bone.
“Upon that grave I pledged myself to the Anti-Slavery cause,” she wrote a
friend. She left teaching to join the movement.30
Harper traveled to Philadelphia and Boston, where she became active in
the Underground Railroad and began to give public lectures. Her uncle’s
elocution training paid off: she soon was giving lectures most nights of the
week, to crowds that could reach six hundred. Within a month, the State
Anti-Slavery Society of Maine hired Harper, on her twenty-ninth birthday,
to become a professional lecturer. The position was akin to the one that had
propelled Henry Brewster Stanton’s early career. In the span of a mere six
weeks during her first season on the speaking circuit, she delivered thirty-
three lectures in twenty-one towns. The work energized her—“my life
reminds me of a beautiful dream,” she wrote to her friend William Still, a
writer, historian, and conductor in the Underground Railroad. Harper’s
lecture tours raised significant funding for the Railroad, which she regularly
sent to Still along with a portion of her own speaking fees. She sometimes
scolded him to be forthcoming about the organization’s financial situation,
assuring him that she was in a position to support its basic operating
expenses.31
While clearly successful, Harper had to tread a fine line as a Black
woman lecturer speaking on topics such as “On the Elevation and
Education of Our People.” It was only in abolitionist societies and in
women’s rights meetings that women were granted the right to address the
public. And white crowds, which formed the majority of her audiences up
North, were not at all accustomed to listening to a Black woman speaker.
“My voice is not wanting in strength, as I am aware of, to reach pretty well
over the house,” she wrote to Still, acknowledging her justified pride at
holding forth to large crowds for lectures that lasted two hours.32 Yet this
very strength could be a liability in a time and place that generally reserved
the status of Woman for whites alone. Harper spoke before crowds in the
North, and later throughout the South, that were predisposed to see her as a
novelty and as the member of a suffering race, but not simultaneously as
belonging to the allegedly delicate sex of women.
From her podium and her pen, Harper pressed forward in beginning
intersectional feminism, a feminism that seeks to demolish the status of
civilized whiteness rather than to gain access to its privileges. She took
pains to show that Black women were women, but she did so by validating
their experience as mothers rather than their civilized refinement. The same
year Harper began lecturing professionally, she published Poems on
Miscellaneous Subjects (1854); this collection of work on slavery,
Christianity, and the plight of women became her best-selling book and
went into twenty printings. Perhaps its most famous poem, “The Slave
Mother,” begins by emphasizing the seeming animal strangeness of an
enslaved woman. It addresses the reader directly, as if demanding a
response: “Heard you that shriek? It rose so wildly in the air.” But by the
end of the poem the feral cry becomes proof of her status as a human
woman: the very trait that seemingly disqualified her from the ranks of
civilized personhood proves the depth of her human feeling. For the woman
unleashes her cry when her boy is torn “from her circling arms” on the
slave block. “No marvel, then, these bitter shrieks Disturb the listening air:
She is a mother, and her heart Is breaking in despair.”33 Harper humanizes
the enslaved mother by showing her gnashing pain.
Other poems in the collection, as with her short story “The Two Offers”
(1859), the first short story published by a Black woman in the United
States, tell tales of women abandoned and mistreated by profligate men and
subject to double standards that punish the women for their former partners’
behavior. Intriguingly, these tales often do not identify their characters by
race. Their lack of specificity draws alliances, rather than analogies,
between women Black and white.
Harper’s intersectional feminist politics stressed one key theme: fighting
for an entirely new society based on broad social justice. This society would
be distinguished by a more equal distribution of resources, including land;
solidarity among the movements for women’s rights, racial justice, and
working people, for “we are all bound up together in one great bundle of
humanity”; and a body politic guided by Christian faith instead of the
money-centric, secular structure of power that was rapidly replacing God
with capital.34
Stanton addressed white male legislators as a proud Saxon daughter of
the American Revolution who deserved full access to the state’s authority.
Harper, however, wrote to Black audiences about the ethical and political
failings of white civilization and their power to resist its sway. She pushed
back against the idea that Black access to wealth alone would bring about
justice, that “the richer we are the nearer we are to social and political
equality.” Money, but also “intelligence, and talent,” she argued to Black
readers, may be the prized qualities at the heart of the nation’s corrupt
power structure, but they would not bring about justice.35 The status quo
was sustained by the surplus wealth of the Southern plantations and thus
was against the interests of Black people everywhere. Harper’s vision of
justice was one of interdependence, in which the needs of the poor, the
enslaved, and women would all be met.
Harper didn’t want Black people to prove themselves worthy of white
civilization, gaining access to the runaway profits of capitalism and the
ranks of government: she wanted the entire bloodstained structure to
crumble and a new system to rise in its place. “It is no honor to shake hands
politically with men who whip women and steal babies,” she quipped.
Stirring poems reminded her readers of their individual power as consumers
to choose not to become cogs in the machinery of bondage by boycotting
clothing made from cotton that enslaved people had picked. “This fabric is
too light to bear / The weight of bondsmen’s tears / I shall not in its texture
trace / The agony of years,” she wrote of free labor cotton, which freed the
customer of wrapping themselves in the very anguish of the cotton fields.36
Harper made her national debut on the women’s rights stage in early
May 1866 at the New York meeting of the National Women’s Rights
Convention, with Stanton presiding as president. Now in its eleventh year,
Stanton and Anthony’s organization was reconvening after their five-year
break during the Civil War. It was a contentious gathering, for this
congregation of abolitionists and women’s rights campaigners faced a
thorny dilemma: the proposed Fourteenth Amendment, which would
guarantee citizenship rights to those born or naturalized in the United States
as well as equal protection before the law, would also introduce the word
“male” into the Constitution for the very first time. The amendment would
restrict voting rights solely and exclusively to “male citizens.” Women’s
voting rights were not only ignored—they were thwarted.
Held under the stone arches of the Church of the Puritans near Union
Square in New York City, the convention became the scene of the first
battle that pitted women’s rights against Black men’s rights. This war
presaged the rupture of the women’s movement three short years later.
Stanton and Anthony opposed ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment,
arguing that it would be a blow to their goal for suffrage “without
distinction of race, color or sex.” Stanton also made firm that while
abolitionists such as Wendell Phillips and Lucretia Mott argued it was “the
hour of the Negro,” she believed wholeheartedly “that woman’s hour has
come.”37 White women had sacrificed to win the abolition of slavery, in her
mind, and now deserved the antislavery movement’s full support for
suffrage regardless of sex or no suffrage at all. The Fourteenth Amendment
codifying voting rights for men was a threat she predicted would set
women’s rights back by a hundred years.
In the midst of this tense meeting, Frances Harper addressed Stanton,
Anthony, Mott, and Phillips for the first time. “I feel I am something of a
novice upon this platform,” she began once she had climbed up to the
church altar the convention used as its stage. While Harper was new to
women’s rights meetings, by this point she was a significant public
intellectual with twelve years of experience as a lecturer. She also read
prominent political theorists including Alexis de Tocqueville and John
Stuart Mill and kept up with the magazines and weeklies of the day.38 On
this firm grounding, she didn’t hold back from issuing forth an incisive
critique of white feminism.
Beginning with a statement of solidarity, she explained that before her
husband Fenton Harper died after only four short years of marriage, she felt
herself more aligned with the cause of her race rather than with woman’s
rights. Her lecturing and writing career had slowed while she was married
and established herself as a “farmer’s wife” in Ohio, looking after Fenton’s
three children, giving birth to a child of their own, and making butter she
sold at the Columbus market. But all this changed upon Fenton’s death,
when she felt acutely the legal deprivation of married women who were
denied all claims to their widow’s property. She narrated, “My husband died
in debt; and before he had been in his grave three months, the administrator
had swept the very milk crocks and wash tubs from my hands…. They left
me one thing, and that was a looking glass!” Robbed of her means of
making a living, Harper related that, for the first time, she felt “keenly” that
she deserved “these rights, in common with other women” for which the
convention fought.
Harper legally shared the position widowed wives across the country
faced: stripped of any claim to the fruits of their own wages and the
property they shared with their husbands. She was legally worthy of laying
claim to just one item: a mirror to satisfy her social obligation to be
pleasantly attractive to others. “Justice is not fulfilled so long as woman is
unequal before the law,” she pronounced. Harper also recognized, however,
numerous aspects of social status that extended beyond legal rights,
something Stanton, who learned from and also worshipped her father’s
legal acumen, was reluctant to acknowledge. White women, Harper
explained, may lack legal status, but they wielded plenty of authority and
were among those who “trample on the weakest and feeblest” of society.39
Granting white women political power, she emphasized, would not
necessarily elevate civilization into reaching its loftiest heights. White
women’s morality was often compromised by their racism.
“I do not believe that giving the woman the ballot is immediately going
to cure all the ills of life. I do not believe that white women are dew-drops
just exhaled from the skies. I think that like men, they may be divided into
three classes: the good, the bad, and the indifferent. The good would vote
according to their convictions and principles; the bad, as dictated by
prejudice or malice.”40 The vote, she implied, would weaponize racist white
women just as it would grant political authority to antiracist women.
“You white women speak here of rights,” Harper continued. “I speak of
wrongs.” Her experience “as a colored woman” shattered the myth that
woman’s rights would bring equality to all women. She emphasized that the
violence done to Black women and men, such as being thrust from
streetcars, was often supported and perpetrated by white women, as well as
men.41
From the platform, Stanton had argued that the ballot would enable
white women to propel the nation into a higher level of civilization. Harper
objected that it was white women themselves who would be improved
through the right of suffrage. “Talk of giving women the ballot box? Go on.
It is a normal school. And the white women of this country need it…. I tell
you that if there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy
nothings and selfishness, it is the white women of America.”42
Roused to action, Susan B. Anthony responded to Harper’s speech by
presenting a new resolution she and Lucretia Mott had been working up: the
launch of a new organization, the American Equal Rights Association, that
would “demand universal suffrage.” Harper became a founding member of
the AERA that evening, along with Anthony, Stanton, Douglass, Mott, and
others.
Yet three years later in New York’s Steinway Hall, the AERA and the
women’s rights movement would tear asunder as Stanton railed against
“Sambo’s” acquiring the right to vote before she did. And when Stanton and
Anthony spent years in the 1880s compiling their six-volume History of
Woman Suffrage, which included transcriptions of most major meetings
such as the pivotal 1866 convention, they left out Harper’s speech. If
Harper’s name is unfamiliar to you today, the singular authority Stanton and
Anthony wielded over the “official” account of the suffrage battle is a
significant reason why.
After the Civil War, Harper took to the dirt roads of the Reconstruction
South on a lecture tour to spread the message of “Literacy, Land, and
Liberation.” Whereas Stanton was increasingly turning to racism to clinch
her argument for white women’s rights, Harper further developed her
intersectional feminist analysis in conversation with Black and white people
across the region. For three years, she traveled among plantations, towns,
and cities throughout South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee.
Speaking to formerly enslaved people and to former enslavers alike in
schools, churches, and state buildings, she sometimes lectured twice a day,
passing the nights at the homes of freedpeople. Harper told friends of the
tremendous “brain-power” she found in Black schools and homes as well as
the exposed “Southern shells” in which she passed miserable winter nights,
cabins in which the windows lacked glass and the gaps in the walls were
big enough to plumb her finger right through. She often didn’t charge for
her lectures, especially when the price of cotton was low, and never to the
all-women groups she convened. Speaking to women particularly excited
her. “Now is the time for our women to begin to try and lift up their heads
and plant the roots of progress under the hearthstone,” she wrote to Still,
celebrating Black women’s potential role in improving the conditions of
Black life in Reconstruction.43
Even the travel itself could present an opportunity to spread her message
about the necessity for legal equality and for Black people to acquire
education, land, and moral righteousness. On one train ride in South
Carolina, a group of passengers clustered around Harper as she spoke,
including a former slave dealer. Despite traveling alone, she engaged him
directly and they had “rather an exciting time,” she later wrote to a friend.
A subsequent line of her letter provides a glimpse of the potential danger
she faced: “There’s less murdering,” she noted hopefully of the progress she
saw in the state as Reconstruction was under way, though plantation owners
still regularly stole the wages of their sharecroppers for years at a time.
Among the insults Harper received while lecturing were accusations that
she was a man and that she was a white person performing in blackface.
Her response was to laugh at the absurdity of a world unwilling to
acknowledge eloquence and wisdom when it took Black female form,
reflecting instead on the “very fine meetings” she held for mixed-race
audiences. Now and again her audiences included Confederate soldiers and
officers, to whom she delivered the “gospel truth” about the abuses of
slavery and delighted in her good fortune, the next day, at finding herself
alive.44
YetAuthor photograph of Frances E. W. Harper from her 1898 poetry
collection. (Courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of
Congress)
Harper also endorsed nineteenth-century civilization rhetoric,
however. Throughout her six-decade career, Harper argued passionately that
civilization and respectability were not the exclusive purview of whiteness
and that Black people were capable of joining the ranks of the civilized.
Civilizing was a pervasive framework for reformers in the era, a common
worldview that saw property accumulation, Christian faith, genteel and
properly feminine or masculine manners, sexual monogamy, and a
rigorously maintained divide between the public world of the nation and the
private world of the domestic to be the necessary elements of progress. A
civilizing agenda is inherently conservative, elevating hierarchy, self-
discipline, and wealth acquisition to be the meaning of life. She preached
self-control and self-regulation as tools for elevating the race, something
that aligned her with the rising Black bourgeoisie rather than with the
sharecroppers she traveled among. Harper was forthright, however, that the
civilizing project she desired was not only about individuals learning moral
uprightness, “the value of a home life,” and other aspects of bourgeois
personhood that propertied white reformers stressed.45 In Harper’s view,
civilizing also entailed structural changes at the collective level. For her, as
for many other Black reformers, civilizing was a means of racial uplift they
could bring to the masses.
“Get land, every one that can, and as fast as you can,” she instructed a
sizable crowd at an 1871 lecture at the African Methodist Episcopal Zion
Church in Mobile, Alabama. Within the large, gaslit church festooned with
wreaths and flowers, her famously crystal clear voice rang out with stark
edicts: “A landless people must be dependent upon the landed people,” she
warned. During this period, whites continued to monopolize land
ownership. According to the 1870 census, the rate of homeownership for
Black people was only 8 percent, compared to nearly 60 percent for whites.
Harper argued that if poor Black families did not have their own means of
economic support in the form of cultivatable land, they would forever be
powerless. Though she was invested in the civilizing project, she wasn’t
interested in mere window-dressing: she knew Black people had to seize
land and property if there was any hope of shifting the lethal
monopolization of power in the hands of whites. Many held a similar view,
and by 1900, formerly enslaved people and their children acquired fifteen
million acres of land.46
Within the elegant setting of this Black-run church, she did not refrain
from challenging the boundaries of decorum in order to fight misogyny. For
Black women, even more so than for other women, the most dangerous
place of all could be their own homes. She was circumspect about how she
brought up male violence against women, a topic she nonetheless regularly
broached. “Why,” she voiced with surprise, “I have actually heard since I
have been South that sometimes colored husbands positively beat their
wives! I do not mean to insinuate for a moment that such things can
possibly happen in Mobile. The very appearance of this congregation
forbids it; but I did hear of one terrible husband defending himself for the
unmanly practice with ‘Well, I have got to whip her or leave her.’”47 The
quip is typical of her use of civilizing rhetoric—on the surface, she
reassuringly equates genteel appearance with ethical behavior, while just
below lurks her radical challenge to power.
Meanwhile, Reconstruction unleashed the full force of Stanton’s racism into
the mainstream women’s rights movement. Part of her fury was a logical
outcome of her own method of analogy, which saw Black people as
fundamentally distinct from, but structurally equivalent to, white women.
This individualist, competitive notion of rights envisioned each group to
occupy distinct halves of a weighted scale, a scale that had been level as
long as neither group had voting rights. But she believed the Fifteenth
Amendment would tip the scale wholly over to the side of African
American men, leaving white women dangling midair. At the first
anniversary of the American Equal Rights Association, held in May 1867 at
the Church of the Puritans, Stanton made clear that her goal of universal
suffrage prioritized tipping the scales in favor of white women. “With the
black man we have no new elements in government,” she informed her
audience of fellow abolitionists and women’s rights campaigners, “but with
the education and elevation of woman we have a power that is to galvanize
the Saxon race into a higher and nobler life, and thus, by the law of
attraction, to lift all races to a more even platform.”48 White women were
the true force of civilization, she insisted, and thus they must assume power
over Black men.
Later that year, Stanton’s vision of suffrage rights as a competition fully
materialized when she and Susan B. Anthony joined forces with a notorious
white supremacist. Kansas was the stage for this conflagration, which was
holding two state referenda in the 1867 election: one for Black male
suffrage, the other for women’s suffrage. The AERA was in full support of
both, and Stanton and Anthony were among the campaigners who traveled
throughout the state for three months. But other prominent abolitionists,
including Wendell Phillips, opposed the referendum enfranchising women
on the grounds it would weaken the chances of Black male suffrage to earn
enough votes—an echo of the cautious, one-issue-at-a-time approach to
electoral politics Stanton’s own husband had taken decades prior. Desperate
for more funds and support for the woman’s suffrage referendum, Anthony
and Stanton teamed up with a shipping magnate and blatant racist by the
name of George Francis Train. Train paid the bills as the three of them
traveled through Kansas together on a joint lecture tour. Train supported
women’s suffrage on the grounds that elevating the social position of white
women would strengthen white supremacy; his motto was “Woman first
and negro last.” This partnership made apparent that while Stanton and
Anthony technically supported the Black male suffrage campaign, it was
white women’s right to vote they were after. Frances Harper and Frederick
Douglass were deeply troubled, refusing invitations to join the campaign in
Kansas. But Stanton defended their union with Train. “A gentleman in dress
and manner, neither smoking, chewing, drinking, nor gormandizing,” she
insisted, Train was civilized and thus valuable to their cause.49
After the Kansas election, in which both referenda failed to win enough
support to become law, Stanton and Anthony doubled down on their
relationship with Train. Using Train’s funds as well as Anthony’s life
savings of $10,000, in January 1868 they launched a weekly newspaper, the
Revolution, headquartered in New York City. The newspaper, which
became a broadside for white women’s rights and issues, frequently
included a letter to readers from Train. Stanton and Anthony courted Uncle
Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe as editor, sure her fame would
propel them into success. Stowe declined, however, on account of the
militancy of the name. “There could not be a better name than Revolution,”
retorted Stanton. Stowe also objected to the newspaper’s association with
Train; contra Stanton, her family found him “coarse”—in a word,
uncivilized. “The establishing of woman on her rightful throne is the
greatest revolution the world has ever known or ever will know.”50
Unfortunately, the revolution Stanton and Anthony sought was for white
women to gain political equality with white men in order to further elevate
whiteness. “Women faced the hostility everywhere of black men
themselves,” she declared on the very first page of the very first issue. From
the pages of the weekly, Stanton continued her attack on “outside
barbarians,” “the unfortunate and degraded black race,” and “the effete
civilizations of the old world,” who she saw as having been unfairly
elevated above “the refined and intelligent women of the land.” In these
constructions, women of color and immigrant women disappear. Stanton
was not merely ignoring their political predicament; she was actively
dispossessing more marginalized groups in pursuit of rights and liberties for
white women. Another article made Stanton’s case plain: she celebrated the
founding of what she called a “White Woman’s Suffrage Association” in
New York City.51
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, seated, and Susan B. Anthony, standing. (Courtesy
of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)
By the time of the infamous fourth annual meeting of the AERA at
Steinway Hall in 1869, tensions were running high. Stanton railed against
“Patrick” and “Sambo” lording over her, Douglass evocatively called up the
epidemic of lynching and murder beginning to terrorize the Reconstruction
South, and Harper called out white women for consistently choosing sex
over race. The AERA dissolved at the convention’s close—the alliance with
white feminists had become untenable. Stanton and Anthony formed the
National Woman’s Suffrage Association, an all-female group that opposed
the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment because it was not
accompanied by a Sixteenth Amendment granting women the right to the
ballot. But theirs wasn’t the only new organization. Harper, Lucy Stone, and
a handful of other women and men also united together, forming the
American Woman Suffrage Association to support the males-only clause of
the Fifteenth Amendment as a necessary first step and keep their eyes on
the goal of voting rights for women. Despite vociferous efforts, which
included further petitions, packing courts, aligning with racist Democrats,
and even running for Congress herself, Stanton’s efforts to oppose Black
suffrage in favor of universal suffrage were largely ineffectual at the
legislative level. Instead, she succeeded at alienating many of their former
allies.52 The women’s rights movement would remain split in half for the
next two decades.
Harper and Stanton each remained active in national political leadership
until the late 1890s, and they met multiple times at national women’s rights
conventions. But across those decades, each was immersed in their own
work and communities that drew into stark relief their differences in politics
and methods.
Stanton drilled down on the rights of the individual as the path to
women’s liberation. While she was the mother of seven children and one-
half of the nineteenth century’s most famous female friendship, by the end
of her life she had an increasingly individualist, alienated view of human
life that saw each person to be entirely alone. “Each soul must depend
wholly on itself,” she imparted in 1892 during her final speech as leader of
the women’s rights movement, and “lives alone forever…. Our inner being
which we call ourself, no eye nor touch of man or angel has ever pierced.”
Stanton considered this speech, “The Solitude of Self,” her greatest piece of
writing, and while her fellow suffragettes in the audience were largely
appalled, twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors from Vivian Gornick
to feminist historians have praised the prescience of her atheistic vision that
embraced the materialist logic of the individuated and isolated psyche
decades before many of her contemporaries did. The solitude of each
individual, Stanton argued, was also the condition of women’s “birthright to
self-sovereignty.”53
“Solitude of Self” represented the culmination of Stanton’s lifelong
work developing a white feminism that sees people as isolated units in
competition with one another. The speech also foreshadows the white
feminism that was to develop in the late twentieth century: she articulates a
cold, combative vision of women fighting their way up the capitalist ladder,
freeing themselves from the primitive tasks of sitting at “the loom and the
spinning wheel” and ascending into their right to “fill the editor’s and
professor’s chair, and plead at the bar of justice, walk the wards of the
hospital, and speak from the pulpit and the platform.”54 In this individualist
vision, middle-class women lean into the professional ranks of capitalism,
and white civilization improves as a result. Meanwhile, the women who
continue to operate the loom and the wheel, and who are tied to the factory
floor, become anachronisms skulking in the shadows.
A few years later, Stanton published her monumental attack on
Christianity’s suppression of women, The Woman’s Bible, a controversial
yet best-selling book that further outraged her movement contemporaries
and charmed feminist readers a century later. Yet Stanton was not alone in
death. When she was buried in 1902, above her casket was mounted a
picture of her life’s companion—not her husband, who had died fifteen
years prior—but Susan B. Anthony.55
For Stanton, progress was dependent upon liberating the secular individual.
But for Harper, faith, contact, and interdependence underwrite the
conditions of liberation, a liberation imagined at the scale of the collective
instead of at the isolated unit of the self-sovereign psyche.
After Reconstruction, Harper worked to improve the conditions of Black
women. She published four novels including the well-regarded Iola Leroy
(1892) and dozens more poems and short stories, gave a host of prominent
speeches throughout the Northeast at temperance societies and women’s
rights conventions, and, when she and Harriet Tubman were in their
seventies, cofounded the National Association of Colored Women with Ida
B. Wells and others to fight for suffrage and against Jim Crow. Harper held
the office of vice president of the organization for the last fifteen years of
her life. Across these platforms, she advocated for Christian faith, moral
righteousness, abstinence from drink, and the “enlightenment” of women,
praising individuals who identified proudly with Blackness and devoted
themselves to spreading education, faith, and morality among the race.56
Yet Harper refused the white feminist logic that women, by their
virtuous nature, would exert a moral force on society. “I am not sure that
women are naturally so much better than men that they will clear the stream
by the virtue of their womanhood; it is not through sex but through
character that the best influence of women upon the life of the nation must
be exerted,” Harper advised from the women’s stage at Chicago’s World’s
Columbian Exposition in 1893.57
This stress on character and moralizing expressed through the
overwrought style of nineteenth-century prose did not win Harper fans in
the twentieth century. W.E.B. Du Bois offered the lukewarm eulogy at her
death in 1911 that “she was not a great writer, but she wrote much worth
reading”;58 some critics during the revival of African American literature in
the 1980s and 1990s argued that she was so eager to encourage Black
respectability that her fiction and poetry courted trite sentimentalism and
repressed sexuality altogether.59 Harper’s line in her novel Iola Leroy
applauding a character for “wearing sobriety as a crown and righteousness
as the girdle of her loins” is the kind of passage that has earned her a
reputation as the most prudish and saccharine, and thus least modern, of
nineteenth-century Black women writers.60
Yet evoking loins wrapped in the fabric of righteousness is a strange
way to repress sexuality. While Harper was later portrayed as overly prim
and conventional, her writing about race politics envisioned something new
altogether. She imagined a kind of solidarity and spirituality that wasn’t
afraid of bodies. Civilizing the race, for Harper, is partly the result of
physical touch and close intimacy with humankind and with God. Rather
than scales of justice weighing the rights of one analogous group against the
rights of another, the key metaphors of her writing are bodies that surge
with life for one another and hands that fold together in prayer across class
lines. Far from repression, what emerges instead is a vision of contact
between people—in sensual and erotic form—as a prized method of
solidarity work.61 Hers is an embodied feminism where flesh and spirit
unite to bring forth a new world, an agenda that has become pivotal to
twenty-first-century Black feminism.
Civilized respectability, however, wields its own hierarchies. It is
relentlessly ethnocentric, colonial, and capitalist. “I do not believe in
unrestricted and universal suffrage for either men or women,” she told her
audience at the Columbian Exposition. “I do not believe that the most
ignorant and brutal man is better prepared to add value to the strength and
durability of the government than the most cultured, upright, and intelligent
woman.” The words sound remarkably like Stanton’s. Yet even though
Harper worked within the deeply flawed civilization paradigm, she also
reworked its criteria to articulate ethics and solidarity, rather than the
supremacy of race and sex. The “drunkard” and “lynchers” whose hands are
“red with blood” were her examples of brutal men who should be barred
from the vote—not uneducated Black men or immigrants from China and
Ireland.62
Meanwhile, by the 1890s, Stanton was similarly affected by claims that
enfranchising women would double the amount of ignorance among the
electorate, and she advocated drawing “some dignity and sacredness around
the ballot box.” Once more, the apparatus of the state was her god. Her
proposal was characteristically extreme: a constitutional amendment for
educated suffrage, which restricted voting rights to US-born men and
women who “read and write the English language intelligently.”63
By the time the Nineteenth Amendment granted the ballot to women,
but particularly white women, in 1920, both Stanton and Harper had passed
away. Anthony’s protégé Carrie Chapman Catt led the final, successful
stages of the campaign for women’s suffrage, in part by mimicking what
abolitionists including Stanton’s husband had done fifty years prior:
excluding any issue but one, in this case the ballot, from their platform.
Stanton’s atheism had caused particular embarrassment and anxiety to Catt
and to the movement in the 1890s—they found her attacks on Christianity
damaging to their public standing. Stanton had preached a revolution of
white women’s place in society, but Catt and her compatriots focused on the
ballot alone. Nonetheless, in many ways, Catt was firmly part of Stanton’s
legacy. One of her tactics to gain national approval for women’s suffrage
was openly recruiting white supremacist women’s groups in the South.
“White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by woman
suffrage,” she infamously proclaimed.64
Other white feminists would have a different agenda, however, than
courting white nationalists. A competing strategy was to insist that white
women’s moral purity and faculty of sympathy rendered them rescuers of
the formerly enslaved. As long as the civilizing paradigm remained firmly
in place, people deemed to fall outside of the norms of genteel white
respectability would face ongoing threats from vicious enemies and
sympathetic saviors alike, often in the name of feminism. But fortunately,
there has never been just one approach to women’s rights.

CHAPTER TWO
WHITE SYMPATHY VERSUS BLACK SELF-DETERMINATION

Harriet Beecher Stowe and Harriet Jacobs
Mrs. Stowe has invented the Negro novel.
—George Eliot
IN JUNE 1835, HARRIET JACOBS DECIDED IT WAS TIME TO
RISK EVERYTHING TO PROTECT HER children from enslavement.
Jacobs, then twenty-two years old, was enslaved by Dr. James Norcom and
his family in the coastal town of Edenton, North Carolina. Though her two
young children were legally Norcom property, they lived with her
emancipated grandmother, Molly Horniblow. Jacobs and Horniblow were
laying careful plans to secure the children’s freedom. But one June evening
Jacobs learned that Joseph, age six, and Louisa, age two, were to arrive the
following day at Dr. Norcom’s plantation to be “broken in.” She knew what
that meant: once her children were trained to be valuable property, the
Norcoms would never consent to selling them to her friends and family who
would set them free. Her children faced a lifetime of plantation slavery.1
At half past midnight, Jacobs snuck down two flights of the Norcoms’
creaking stairs and stole through a window into the rain. She walked six
miles into town, arriving at the house of a friend who sequestered her for
the next week. The following morning, Dr. Norcom unleashed considerable
force to track down the woman he considered his commodity; the sheriff,
slave patrols, and later the courts and press were all in pursuit of Jacobs.
They stopped all port traffic in the North Carolina town, rendering her
further movement impossible. A white woman, who with her husband
enslaved multiple people, nonetheless offered Jacobs a place of refuge in a
small, unused storeroom above her bedroom. The woman was friendly with
Jacobs’s grandmother, a respected baker in town, and wished to help her
family. Jacobs remained shut up in the room for nearly two months, keeping
her body quiet and motionless, while being supported by the enslaved cook
Betty. Meanwhile, Dr. Norcom continued in hot pursuit, searching premises
throughout town and jailing Jacobs’s children, brother, and aunt in an
attempt to extort information leading to her whereabouts. To escape
detection during these searches, Betty hid Jacobs under the flooring of the
outdoor kitchen. Lying supine in this damp, shallow space, she had just
enough room to shield her eyes from cascading dirt as Betty walked to and
fro inches above her head. As unimaginable as Jacobs’s cramped retreat
might be, it presaged years of sacrifice yet to come.
By August, with repeated searches and jailings, ramped up surveillance
of Jacobs’s friends and family, and a suspicious enslaved housemaid who
one morning tried every one of the household’s keys attempting to unlock
the storeroom, Jacobs’s community knew they had to make a sudden move.
That night, her friend Peter brought her a set of sailor’s clothes and they
walked in disguise to the wharf. Jacobs spent a humid night and the next
day hidden in the Great Dismal Swamp, surrounded by large snakes she
beat off with a stick while thick clouds of mosquitoes descended upon her
flesh. The steamy quagmire was all the more terrifying to Jacobs given that
she was still recovering from a venomous snakebite incurred during the first
week of her escape and she had no idea where she might go next. That
night, much to her surprise, Peter told Jacobs she was to be hidden at her
grandmother’s house.
“But every nook and cranny is known to Dr. Norcom,” Jacobs worried.
She couldn’t envision where in the house would possibly be safe.
“Wait and see,” Peter advised as he walked alongside the ersatz sailor
through the darkened streets. “A place has been created for you. But you
must make the most of this walk, for you may not have another very soon.”2
With apprehension, Jacobs noted the sad tone seeping through her
friend’s reassuring words.
They arrived at a small uninsulated shed attached to the side of her
grandmother’s house. While she had been hiding in the swamp, her uncle
Mark Ramsey had built a trapdoor, concealed from below, accessing a small
attic crawl space beneath the shed’s thin, sloped roof.3 It was the perfect
hiding spot, one Jacobs herself hadn’t even considered, because it all but
defied the basic requirements for human life. Seven feet long by nine feet
wide, and reaching only three feet high at the slope’s peak, the space was
roughly the size of four coffins laid side by side.
Into this pitch-black cavity, Jacobs climbed. Finding a mattress in the
center, she learned through touch, not sight, that she lacked the clearing to
roll from one side to the other: when she turned, her shoulders crashed into
the roof’s downward slope. This living grave, as Jacobs came to call it,
initially admitted no air or light. But a few weeks into her confinement, as
she was crawling about for exercise, her head struck something protruding
from the wall. It was a loophole, a small hand tool for drilling holes, left
intentionally or not by her uncle when he constructed the trapdoor. Late at
night, she bore small holes facing King Street until she had a one-by-one-
inch aperture onto the world outside. Here she hunched, reading the Bible,
watching her children and sewing their clothes, and observing Dr. Norcom
and others walking down the street. Yet despite this narrow opening, the air
remained so close that not even North Carolina’s mosquitoes deigned to
enter.
The suffocating heat of summer turned into the frost of winter, and still
Jacobs had yet to rise to standing. Through illness, frostbite,
unconsciousness, and the assault of the elements, Jacobs remained in the
attic year after year. By the time her friends were able to secure her safe
passage north out of Edenton’s harbor it was June 1842. She had spent
seven years in the living grave.4
Seven years hidden in a crawl space so small Dr. Norcom never
suspected she was hidden a mere block from his house in town. Jacobs
wryly called the crawl space her “loophole of retreat”: an ambiguity that
creates a means of escape.5
Once north, Jacobs joined her brother John Jacobs, who had also freed
himself, in the western New York abolitionist movement. The pair
frequented the Anti-Slavery Office and Reading Room, which had opened
the previous year above the offices of Frederick Douglass’s North Star
newspaper in Rochester, about fifty miles west of Seneca Falls. Jacobs was
eventually appointed agent of the Reading Room, and on Thursdays, she
joined a circle of abolitionist women “to sew, knit, read, and talk for the
cause.”6 While the reading room venture didn’t last two years, Jacobs’s
desire to participate in the movement continued unabated, especially after
the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 left her and others vulnerable to capture in
the streets of her now home, New York City. The North was no longer a
refuge.
Jacobs decided that sharing her story was the most significant
contribution to dislodging slavery’s increasing stranglehold on the country
that she could make. Many whites, North and South, persisted in believing
that slavery was a civilizing institution that provided care and protection for
people too primitive to provide for themselves. Her narrative would
illuminate the suffering that enslaved women endured—for they were used
as breeders to create more human “property”—and the extraordinary
lengths they went to in order to escape bondage.
Yet to tell the truth in service of the cause would open her up to scorn
and shame. Dr. Norcom began sexually abusing Jacobs when she was
fifteen. She had managed to avoid his ultimate design: installing her in the
isolated house he had built just for the purpose of sequestering her four
miles away from the watchful eyes of his jealous wife and Jacobs’s
protective grandmother. But her safety came at great personal cost. Jacobs
thwarted his attempts to make her his full-time concubine, nearly a decade
prior to her retreat into the crawl space, through a “deliberate calculation.”7
To avoid being shut away for Norcom’s pleasure and profit, she became the
mistress of a prominent white man in town, Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, and
he fathered her two children.
Jacobs needed a writer who understood the delicacy of her task. She
wanted simultaneously to expose the sexual abuses enslaved girls and
women suffered while also forming alliances with white women in the
North. This would be a tricky maneuver, for these readers would initially be
more likely to judge, rather than empathize with, her choice to strike up an
extramarital relationship with Sawyer in order to avoid her enslaver’s grasp.
Jacobs had been reading and writing since childhood, thanks to one of the
Norcom daughters, but she didn’t feel up to the task of composing her own
narrative for print. In the early 1850s, no Black woman in the United States
had yet published a short story, novel, or autobiography; Frances Harper’s
short story “The Two Offers” wouldn’t appear until the end of the decade.
In New York, Jacobs worked as a nanny for Cornelia Grinnell Willis and
Nathaniel Parker Willis. Nathaniel was the most prominent magazine writer
of the era and, as founder of the magazine now known as Town & Country,
was well connected to the literary world. When Cornelia suggested that
Harriet Beecher Stowe could be entrusted with bringing Jacobs’s story to
the public, Jacobs thought they had identified an ally. Stowe had published
the blockbuster Uncle Tom’s Cabin the prior year. The antislavery novel had
already sold three hundred thousand copies; over the course of the
nineteenth century, only the Bible sold better. Stowe elicited tears of
sympathy for the slave, and white women of the North sobbed in chorus,
turning against the institution of slavery. Many commentators would later
declare that the novel—and white women’s tears—led to the Civil War, thus
flushing the sin of slavery from the nation. And, despite Stowe’s position as
a white woman writer coming from a prominent New England reform
family, Uncle Tom’s Cabin didn’t shy away from confronting white men’s
sexual abuse of enslaved women.
Jacobs asked her close friend Amy Post, a prominent white Quaker
activist who had attended the Seneca Falls Convention five years earlier, to
approach Stowe about writing Jacobs’s narrative. Stowe’s response would
change the course of Jacobs’s life and of American women’s writing. Once
more, Harriet Jacobs took decisive action. But this time, it would be to take
control of her own story.
Harriet Beecher Stowe was the most popular writer and best-known
abolitionist in the nineteenth-century United States. Through decades of
deft storytelling in the sentimental vein, she translated the traditional
domain of white women’s authority—the home and the heart—into a
method of political power. Whereas Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B.
Anthony were best known for approaching women’s rights and abolition via
the apparatuses of the state, such as petitions, elections, and amendments,
Stowe and other sentimental writers fought for social change through
appealing directly to readers’ emotions, hoping to inspire a change of
feeling.
Public opinion widely afforded white men of the emerging middle class
the faculties of reason and rationality that authorized them to monopolize
business and politics. At the same time, it simultaneously restricted white
women to the role of “angel of the house.” Their alleged purity and delicacy
of feeling would guard the family from the morbid calculations and
dangerous self-interest of government and the marketplace. Nation- and
empire-building was bloody work, and commentators regularly smoothed
the contradictions of civilization by assigning white women the task of
absorbing and softening its violence. This gave white women an important,
though largely obscured, public position. When white women first gained
roles outside the home in the United States and the British empire, it was on
account of white feminist advocates who stressed their role as civilizers
who would spread refined feeling, the arts of bourgeois domesticity, and
Protestant-capitalist self-discipline. Stowe and her sister, the white feminist
writer Catharine Beecher, were among the most prominent figures who
grabbed ahold of white women’s assigned roles as domestic angels and
stabilizers of civilization, expanding them into a platform for influence that
reached far beyond the house and into the nation.
In best-selling housekeeping manuals, novels, and short stories, Stowe
and Beecher argued that women had a special purview of their own: the
emotional realm. In their vision, women’s capacity for sympathy was not
primarily of private, interior significance. Instead, their delicacy of feeling
was their public value, and it formed the foundation of true civilization.
Civilization, as one of Stowe’s fictional characters attests, meant a nation
that was “noble, simple, pure, and religious; and women can do more
towards this even than men, for women are the real architects of society.”8
Deeply felt tears enabled middle-class white women to cast their
housecleaning and sewing aside and emerge into the public sphere—as the
civilizers of the nation.
If women were the real architects of civilization, then tears and the
sentimental fiction and poetry that elicited them were their building blocks.
Stowe argued that sympathy with the travails of the less fortunate ought to
guide all public and private decisions—and this emotional identification
depended upon reading about the brutality they experienced. Yet readers’
outpouring of tearful sympathy wasn’t primarily intended to improve the
condition of the oppressed. Instead, commentators widely touted that
learning of others’ suffering cultivated the character and moral authority of
the person who did the crying. As a genre, sentimental writing like Stowe’s
displays the anguish of the marginalized to build the character and influence
of the more privileged. “Sentimentality,” James Baldwin memorably wrote
of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, traffics in “the ostentatious parading of excessive
and spurious emotion,” disguising the “catalogue of violence” lurking at its
core: Black pain, splayed across the page, becomes a mere foil for white
(women’s) power.9
The public value accorded to white women’s tears today flows forth
from these earliest days of white feminism. Luvvie Ajayi, Brittney Cooper,
Robin DiAngelo, and others have explained how white women weaponize
their tears, using their overwhelmed reaction when they are called out for
their racism to center themselves as the true victims of racism.10 When
white women are confronted with the possibility they can be perpetrators,
and not only victims, of oppressive actions and they burst out crying,
antiracist work grinds to a halt. A white woman sobs, and the room falls to
her feet. These tears seemingly perform a self-baptism. They cleanse the
sufferer of any past wrongs and invest her with a martyred authority
flowing from the realm of allegedly indisputable truth: her own hurt
feelings.
Some of the sanctifying innocence widely afforded to white women
when they cry can be traced back to an original wellspring: the inkpot of
Harriet Beecher Stowe.
In 1850, slavery was expanding, rather than retreating, in the United States.
Stowe, like Jacobs, was compelled into action by the Fugitive Slave Law. In
the spring of 1850, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s husband Calvin was appointed
professor of theology at Bowdoin College in Maine. As the couple traveled
east from Cincinnati to their new home, they stopped for a week with each
of Stowe’s siblings. At the Boston house of her abolitionist brother Edward
Beecher and his wife Isabella, she was immersed in talk of the pending law,
which would make harboring a self-emancipated person a serious crime and
effectively turn every police squad in the country into a slave patrol.
Edward and Isabella were outraged that the North would no longer provide
refuge for the formerly enslaved. Stowe, for her part, remained silent,
absorbing the conversations. When the Fugitive Slave Law was passed in
September as part of the Missouri Compromise of 1850, Isabella reached
out to her sister-in-law to goad her into action.
“Hattie,” Isabella wrote, “if I could use a pen as you can, I would write
something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing
slavery is.”11 The forty-year-old Stowe was a prominent writer who had
been publishing essays and short stories in national periodicals for a decade.
Isabella’s letter became Stowe’s charge. A personal tragedy also spurred
her to act. Her sixth child had succumbed to cholera just before their move,
and she felt that the pain of watching her child die gave her new insight into
how enslaved mothers feel when their children are sold away from them.
Through her talents with the pen, Stowe would “make this whole nation
feel” the evils of slavery as she now did—though she had to wait until her
seventh child was old enough to let her sleep. A year later, the infant was
out of her bed, Stowe’s capacity to write returned, and she dashed off a note
to her editor at the National Era magazine: “Now that the time is come
when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and
humanity is bound to speak…. I hope every woman who can write will not
be silent.”12
Harriet Beecher Stowe. (Courtesy of the State Archive of Florida)
But what kind of revolution would be inspired by white women’s
feelings? Would the focus on their feelings about Black lives render white
women the true heroes of abolition? Turning to sentimentalism to rouse
public opinion against slavery risked rendering the enslaved mere objects of
sympathy, a passive cast of characters absorbing abuse while white readers
enjoyed the cathartic, and ultimately self-serving, spilling of tears.
Harriet Beecher Stowe was born to a famous, and at times infamous, family
of reformers. She proposed a clear method for joining them in the
abolitionist movement: sketch a story that would portray slavery “in the
most lifelike and graphic manner possible.”13 Fiction carefully drawn, she
knew, could pry open the heart. Nonetheless, she faced a significant
obstacle in rendering slavery palpable on the page. Stowe had never been to
the plantation South. Though she lived in Cincinnati for nearly twenty
years, located just across the Ohio River from Kentucky, she had boarded a
boat across the river’s mile-long span only once, seventeen years earlier.
And she had never traveled farther south, a not uncommon situation for
middle-class white women in particular, given the horse-drawn carriages
and crater-filled dirt roads that congealed into mud that characterized the
transportation system of the nineteenth-century United States. Given her
lack of firsthand experience, how could she create vivid scenes of places
and characters entirely foreign to her?
Stowe, however, was confident in her command of the material. “I have
had ample opportunities for studying” the “negro character,” she informed
her editor. Stowe’s biographer Joan D. Hedrick reveals who served as the
novelist’s primary specimens: her servants. Hedrick surmises that Stowe’s
position of power over the only formerly enslaved people whom she knew
personally “radically compromised her perceptions.”14 The result in Uncle
Tom’s Cabin is a mixture all too common among white abolitionists—a
fierce antislavery argument propped up by racist portrayals of African
Americans as naïve, highly impressionable dependents in desperate need of
white women’s guiding hand.
Stowe extracted significant amounts of material from her cook, “poor
Eliza Buck,” who had formerly been enslaved in Virginia and Kentucky,
and on a Louisiana plantation. Buck conjured “scenes” for Stowe of both
agency and utter dispossession. She told of brutal plantation whippings and
the serious injuries that resulted, injuries that she would sneak out after
nightfall to tend. She also told Stowe of the children she bore, fathered by
her Kentucky master, which may well have shocked the writer and certainly
inspired her pity. “You know, Mrs. Stowe, slave women cannot help
themselves,” Buck retorted.15
If Stowe’s sense of propriety was shaken, she learned nonetheless that
sexual abuse was an intrinsic part of enslavement for women. The global
slave trade, which captured individuals in Africa and imported them to
Europe and the Americas, had ceased in 1808. Yet its end had ratcheted up
Southern planters’ demands on enslaved women’s bodies in the United
States, for the only way slavery could persist was by keeping women
pregnant. However discreetly Stowe’s novel approached the topic, Uncle
Tom’s Cabin became one of the first texts to whisper about the rape of
enslaved women directly into the ears of readers lounging comfortably in
Northern homes—an aspect of the novel that most likely encouraged
Harriet Jacobs’s trust.
Stowe’s goal for Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to show “the best side” of
slavery “and something faintly approaching the worst,” perhaps aiming to
turn readers against the institution while seemingly giving it a fair shake.
But hinting at the worst was necessary to her goal to elicit rivers of tears. To
approximate slavery’s most outrageous abuses, she dispatched her main
character, the eponymous Uncle Tom, to a Louisiana cotton plantation. This
setting was entirely beyond her ken. Stowe could easily gather the
perspective of enslavers: their accounts spilled out from newspapers,
journals, and books across the expanding nation. But her blockbuster-in-
progress, which aimed to animate the slave’s plight in vivid detail,
depended on knowledge that was much harder to obtain and, therefore, all
the more important to broadcast. “Stowe’s access to information was as
important as her ability to cast details in an imaginative frame,” her
biographer Hedrick emphasizes.16 Wishing to gain further the viewpoint of
the enslaved, Stowe approached Frederick Douglass, a man she had never
met.
“In the course of my story, the scene will fall upon a cotton plantation. I
am very desirous, therefore, to gain information from one who has been an
actual labourer on one,” Stowe wrote to Douglass. “Such a person as Henry
Bibb, if in the country, might give me just the kind of information I desire.”
The prior year, Bibb had self-published a popular account of his life on a
Kentucky plantation and his dramatic escape from slavery. She enclosed a
list of questions for Bibb with the “request that he will at earliest
convenience answer them.” Stowe held nothing back in making her
demand. Her need for details seemingly entitled her to request specific
information from two of the country’s best-known self-emancipated slaves,
as if she were ordering from a menu. Her letter to Douglass concluded with
an imperious attempt to persuade him that two of his deeply held
convictions were wrong. She insisted that Christian churches were not
generally proslavery and that colonization schemes to send Black
Americans to Africa were highly advisable.17
Bibb, for his part, was already in Canada founding the nation’s first
Black newspaper. Douglass, as far as we know, never replied. Eliza Buck,
the occasional person escaping enslavement on the Underground Railroad
who posted at Stowe’s house, Stowe’s brother Charles who had traveled to
Louisiana, and a few published firsthand accounts of slavery remained her
primary sources of the plantation South.
Today, Uncle Tom’s Cabin has become synonymous with the misfortune
of its protagonist Uncle Tom, though the meaning of the now epithet—a
cringing, subservient Black man eagerly falling to his knees at a white
man’s bidding—arises from hundreds of stage adaptations of the tale, not
from Stowe’s novel. The book conveys the suffering of the enslaved and
articulates a method for lifting slaves out of the status of property. True to
its sentimental agenda, however, the most significant figures are not
enslaved characters like Uncle Tom. The principal actors are the white
women who alternately enslave them and help set them free.
White people, and white women especially, Uncle Tom’s Cabin seeks to
impress on the reader, have the power to mold the character of Black
people. History and biology have combined to elevate whites into the
position of parents while Blacks remain vulnerable youth, as if mostly
blank, still-malleable slates waiting for further inscription. Uncle Tom, for
example, is described as possessing “the soft, impressible nature of his
kindly race, ever yearning toward the simple and childlike.” For Stowe,
Anglo-Saxons have by contrast accumulated racial vigor on account of
being “born of ages of cultivation, command, education, physical and moral
eminence” under civilization. It is thus the duty of white women, as she
sees it, to impress new influences into Black souls and flesh.18
Stowe does portray enslaved characters whose agency ripples off the
page, if outlandishly so: to escape the Kentucky slave catchers pursuing her
young son, Eliza Harris clutches him to her chest and leaps from one
shuddering ice chunk to another across the Ohio River’s mile-wide span.
Nonetheless, the novel’s thrust pushes toward one central source of agency:
the white woman in the parlor. “There is all the difference in the world in
the servants of Southern establishments,” Stowe’s narrator opines,
“according to the character and capacity of the mistresses who have brought
them up.” Eliza, for her part, had been enslaved by the quasi-abolitionist
Mrs. Shelby, who took it upon herself “to do [her] duty to these poor,
simple, dependent creatures” by civilizing them.19 Eliza’s leaps of faith are
simultaneously repercussions of discipline.
The novel’s paradigmatic white woman is not a woman at all, but a
child. When enslaved by an extravagantly wealthy family in New Orleans,
Tom forms an unshakeable bond with the master’s daughter, the five- or
six-year-old Eva St. Clare. Though slavery’s wrongs seep into her malleable
body, weakening her constitution, she welcomes the opportunity to sacrifice
herself for the enslaved. “I would die for them, Tom, if I could,” Eva
confides. She soon does just that—but not before gathering the enslaved
around her deathbed to impart her final wish: “You must not live idle,
careless, thoughtless lives. You must be Christians.”20 In her life and death,
Eva stamps herself on Tom’s impressible nature. By the novel’s close,
Uncle Tom is beaten to death on the Louisiana cotton plantation because he
refuses to whip a fellow slave; Eva’s sacrifice has become his charge. If Eva
has been born in Christ’s image, Tom is molded in Eva’s own.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin exalts white women’s sympathy as the most
powerful civilizing force. Lest the reader miss this message, Stowe places
an abolitionist aunt from Vermont in the St. Clare household. Miss Ophelia
insists that it is the environment of slavery, not the innate nature of Black
people, that conditions the enslaved to deceit, immorality, and debasement.
To test Ophelia’s theory, Eva’s father purchases a naughty young orphan
named Topsy to serve as the “fresh-caught specimen” of Ophelia’s new
“experiment”: Could a white woman elevate even the “blackest,” most
“animalized” and “degraded” slave child? But Miss Ophelia’s horror at
slavery is matched only by her revulsion to Black people, and she can’t
bring herself even to touch Topsy. Topsy, for her part, continues nicking
ribbons, swinging from bedposts, and cutting up Ophelia’s bonnet
trimmings to make coats for her dolls. Eva, however, showers Topsy with
affection and religious instruction. After Eva’s death, Ophelia learns the
secret of Eva’s sway over Topsy: “honest tears,” shed in pity. When Ophelia
finally breaks down and sobs, “from that hour, she acquired an influence
over the mind of the destitute child that she never lost.”21 Ophelia cries, and
Topsy transforms.
Sentimental novels “always traffic in cliché, the reproduction of a
person as a thing, and thus indulge in the confirmation of the marginal
subject’s embodiment of inhumanity on the way to providing the privileged
with heroic occasions of recognition, rescue, and inclusion,” literary critic
Lauren Berlant writes, building on James Baldwin’s classic takedown of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin.22 The real significance of white girls’ and white
women’s tears, Stowe’s novel suggests, is their clout: a conduit of
discipline, a determinative power, an upper hand. Sentimental sympathy is a
tear-stained cloak for authority.
When the Fugitive Slave Act passed in September 1850, Harriet Jacobs had
lived in the North for eight years. But she was still forced to run from the
Norcom family, who continued to pursue her. The act’s passage only
intensified their aim to capture. She learned to dread summer, when “snakes
and slaveholders make their appearance.” Jacobs rarely left the Willises’
Fourth Street house and every night she scanned the newspapers’ coverage
of visitors arrived in New York for familiar names; twice she fled to
Boston. The first escape was motivated by a warning she received from
North Carolina that Dr. Norcom was soon to resume his search for Jacobs
and her children. Unbeknownst to her, given the difficulties her contacts
faced posting her a letter, he had died months prior. His death only escalated
Jacobs’s danger, however, for Norcom’s son, James Norcom Jr., had driven
the family into debt. Norcom’s daughter and her husband Daniel Messmore,
desperate for funds, continued the pursuit.23
Early one February morning in 1852, one month before three printing
presses would begin churning twenty-four hours a day to keep up with the
instantaneous demand for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Jacobs realized her nanny
duties the prior night had distracted her from examining the Evening
Express. She rushed into the parlor and grabbed the daily just as a servant
boy was about to crumple it up for the morning’s fire. The words gripped
her heart like a tightening fist: Daniel Messmore had arrived in New York
and was posted at what she deemed a “third-rate hotel.”24 She feared
especially for her daughter Louisa, now nineteen and visiting Jacobs in the
city; to evade slave catchers emboldened by the Fugitive Slave Law, her son
Joseph had joined her brother John in the gold mines of California. Jacobs
escaped to Boston once more, again with Cornelia Willis’s assistance.
Willis wrote to Jacobs that she would like to purchase her freedom from
Messmore to end his “persecution.” Just as in the South, for Jacobs to be
free in New York, she would have to be sold.
Jacobs was grateful but wounded. To give the Norcom family money,
after all she had suffered, would transform her “triumph” into defeat.
“Being sold from one owner to another seems too much like slavery,”
Jacobs replied to Willis. “I prefer to go to my brother in California.”
Eager to assist her friend and employee, Cornelia approached Messmore
anyway and negotiated the sale of Jacobs, and the relinquishment of any
claims on her children, for the bargain price of $300. Jacobs was stung,
disgusted that she was “sold,” like property, “in the free city of New York!”
But she also breathed easier upon being able to board the train back to the
city with her face uncovered and her gaze forthright.25
No longer hunted, Jacobs could think about contributing to the abolition
movement by sharing her story. Her friend Amy Post had been encouraging
Jacobs to tell her tale for years, but Jacobs was “mortified” to imagine
revealing her sexual persecution and her affair with Sawyer. “If it was the
life of a heroine with no degradation,” she confided in Post—one of only
two people in the North whom she had told the circumstances of her
children’s origin—she would be happy to share.26 Two years of prayer to
overcome her own “pride” so that she may “save another from my fate”
softened her to the idea. Cornelia suggested to Jacobs that Stowe could be
entrusted with bringing the story of her life and escape to the public. At the
close of 1852, Jacobs asked Post to make the approach.
“I should like to be with her a month,” Jacobs proposed along with ideas
for the structure of the text, and in return “I could give her some fine
sketches for her pen on slavery.”27 Post wrote to Stowe, delicately
broaching the details of Jacobs’s life—including her self-entombment and
her affair with Sawyer—to communicate the urgency of the tale and their
hope Stowe could take on the sensitive project.
The return mail was silent.
A month later, Jacobs read a notice in the newspaper that Stowe was
soon to sail for Great Britain to meet with abolitionists. Realizing her
opportunity to work with Stowe, and thus her chance “to be useful” to the
cause, was slipping away, she thought of another tactic to gain the author’s
ear. Her daughter Louisa, who had recently finished boarding school, could
accompany Stowe on her speaking tour, at Jacobs’s expense. She “would be
a very good representative of a Southern Slave” for British audiences to
meet, Jacobs argued, and could assist Stowe’s abolition work while gaining
experience on the abolitionist lecture circuit. At the same time, Louisa
would build a relationship with Stowe that might enable a future partnership
with Jacobs herself. Jacobs, unlike Stowe, had traveled to England before,
while working as Nathaniel’s nanny after the death of his first wife, and she
was also eager for Louisa to similarly experience the temporary reprieve
from the racism saturating American life. Cornelia Willis agreed that
Jacobs’s plan was sound and she, too, wrote to Stowe.28
This time, Stowe replied, and her letter lit a fire inside Jacobs.29
It would be “much care” to take along Louisa, Stowe wrote, especially
since she was traveling at the invitation of the Anti-Slavery Society of
Glasgow—a perhaps reasonable objection. But what incensed Jacobs was
Stowe’s immediate follow-up. Louisa would “be subject to much petting
and patronizing” by the English when they learned of her history as a slave,
Stowe condescended. Louisa would no doubt find the attention “pleasing,”
to which Stowe was “very much opposed… with this class of people.”30
Stowe, it seems, trusted only white abolitionists like herself with receiving
the esteem and acclaim of British antislavery activists.
Stowe pushed further. She saw Jacobs as a source of material for her
new book, a factual follow-up to her blockbuster novel. A Key to Uncle
Tom’s Cabin was conceived to fend off proslavery accusations that she
materialized the abuses of slavery solely from the mist of her imagination.
Because Stowe had created a character who hid in a Louisiana attic on the
way to self-emancipation, Jacobs’s seven-year confinement represented a
potential jackpot. She could now proffer Jacobs’s story, after the fact, as the
alleged basis of her plot. Stowe had been eager to extract stories from Bibb
for her own use; her method now remained the same.
Desirous to authenticate these details of Jacobs’s life in order to publish
her story in A Key, Stowe had not replied directly to Jacobs. Instead, she
wrote to Jacobs’s employer, Cornelia Willis. In the envelope, she tucked in
Amy Post’s letter divulging the sensitive details about the origin of Jacobs’s
children, requesting Willis corroborate its contents so that she could use
Jacobs’s story as the basis of her own. She sought Willis’s verification,
rather than Jacobs’s permission.
Jacobs felt the hot flush of shame when Willis, outraged, showed her
Stowe’s breach of confidence. Willis had been kind enough to never ask
Jacobs about Louisa and Joseph’s father, understanding that it was a wound
she preferred to tend by herself. When Stowe included Post’s letter, she
revealed details Willis hadn’t known. No one had anticipated that Stowe
would circumvent Jacobs’s authority and puncture her privacy.31
Jacobs now had no desire to give her narrative over to Stowe and
resolved her intention to tell “the history of my life entirely by itself.”
Cornelia wrote to Stowe, begging her to leave the material out of A Key to
Uncle Tom’s Cabin and sharing Jacobs’s offer that “if she wanted some facts
for her book,” Jacobs “would be most happy to share some.” Stowe didn’t
reply, so Cornelia wrote again. Jacobs then penned two letters to Stowe.
No reply ever came, and Stowe sailed for Liverpool.32
In England and Scotland, Stowe was received as a star and savior. She met
her first adoring crowd, quite by surprise, at the Liverpool wharf where they
disembarked. Stowe had nurtured interest in Great Britain from the initial
publication of her novel, having sent a copy and friendly letter to many of
the nations’ dukes, lords, and other noblemen and to distinguished writers
like Charles Dickens. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, now one year old, was well on its
way to becoming the first international bestseller. Forty different editions
issued from London alone, while ten different theatrical productions of the
novel were on the city’s stages. One publisher estimated over 1.5 million
copies already circulated throughout Great Britain and its colonized
territories.33
Harriet Beecher Stowe adopted her new public role with a mixture of
humility and authority. The abolitionist movement had been churning for
decades without her participation; suddenly now the white public saw her as
its leader. She understood herself to be taking on the burden of getting
elbow-deep in the horrors of slavery in order to fight its existence. Her
letters during the time she was compiling A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin
reveal the emotional toll of a daily labor that required immersing herself in
the graphic details of whippings, kidnappings, and torture. The majority of
white authors chose to avert their eyes altogether from an industry built on
cruelty. While Stowe’s position cannot be compared to experiencing the
lash firsthand, her dedication to writing about slavery had tremendous effect
in rallying white audiences to oppose the institution.
Yet Stowe was also encouraged by a sense of her own responsibility and
ownership over the cause, a position she authorized on the grounds that as a
woman and mother who had lost a child to early death, she could best
sympathize with the sufferings of slave women. Defenders of slavery
argued that Black Americans lacked the same capacity of feeling that
whites did. White women abolitionists like Stowe countered that all
women, enslaved and not, shared a commonality of feeling.
“I wrote what I did because as a woman, as a mother I was oppressed
and broken-hearted,” Stowe explained to a prominent British judge a few
weeks before she rebuffed Jacobs. “It is no merit,” she continued, “that I
must speak for the oppressed—who cannot speak for themselves.”34 But
this was precisely the bind: white women who insisted that they knew
exactly how enslaved women felt also felt entitled to assume authority over
them, even when Black men like Douglass, Bibb, Jacobs’s brother John
Jacobs, and numerous others wrote and spoke for themselves.
Meanwhile, Uncle Tom’s Cabin began raking in profits for its author and
its publisher. Within the first three months of its release, Stowe earned a
record-breaking $10,000 in royalties, more than $300,000 in today’s terms.
Stowe and her professor husband had barely been making ends meet, a
situation that prevented her from accepting her publisher’s first proposal:
splitting the expense of production and the ensuing profit fifty-fifty. If they
had been able to afford to take on this risk, she may well have found herself
in a position somewhat similar to the one Louisa May Alcott would
negotiate sixteen years later for Little Women: full copyright and an ensuing
fortune that supported her family for generations. Stowe’s publisher,
however, went to considerable expense marketing the book and soliciting
theatrical interest, doubtlessly contributing to its massive sales, and her 10
percent royalties piled up.35
Stowe’s UK trip presented another windfall. She received no royalties
from international sales since copyright law did not yet cross borders, but in
response British supporters organized a “penny offering” campaign
encouraging each reader to donate one pence to the author. These voluntary
contributions amounted to nearly $20,000. Hundreds of pounds were also
presented to Stowe to distribute to the antislavery cause, particularly the
Underground Railroad. While the penny offering was explicitly intended for
Stowe’s own use, some grumbled nonetheless about Stowe’s reluctance to
fund the actual practice of antislavery reform.36
This reticence was a consequence of her strategy to appeal to the heart
and stay out of the dirty business of politics, particularly the conflict roiling
between different branches of the antislavery movement. As would soon be
true of the campaign for women’s suffrage, the abolitionist movement
comprised multiple conflicting approaches. These factions included the
Garrisonians, who fought for immediate abolition and, since the 1840
London antislavery conference Stanton had witnessed from the balcony,
supported women’s involvement; a second organization founded in 1840 by
Lewis Tappan who fought to keep women out of abolition; and a
conservative wing who supported incremental emancipation and
compensating enslavers for their financial losses. Amid these debates that
generated the energy and momentum of the movement, Stowe adopted a
position of lucrative neutrality that did not go unnoticed. Stowe was “quite
willing to get all she can out of us, but means to be very careful how she
mixes up herself with the Old org[anizations],” commented one Garrisonian
activist. Of Stowe’s $20,000 penny offering purse, she later accounted for
spending a little over $6,000 to support antislavery, including funding
tracts, initiating a petition campaign, and aiding fugitives. The bulk of the
funds, she promised, would go toward constructing “a large & elegant
building” for Miss Miner’s, an all-Black school in Washington, DC, whose
patronage she urged.37 Yet no building ever came.
While it was one thing to be an antislavery writer, and another thing
altogether to be part of the antislavery social movement, Stowe inspired
abolitionists of all stripes—an influence she no doubt calculated to
maintain. And in some ways, Hedrick notes, her neutrality was of use to
activists, for she divorced antislavery sentiment from the messy, but
necessary, battles of movement politics, framing it instead as a
straightforward matter of the civilized heart. Such a tactic may not have
produced legions of activists. Nonetheless, her novel has often been deemed
one of the single most important factors in shifting white opinion in the
North and in the United Kingdom against slavery, especially among the
women she most sought to reach. Feminists applauded the public role she
helped create for women’s feelings, leading Stanton and Anthony to
approach her about serving as editor of the Revolution. In the South,
booksellers often banned the book, sometimes after intimidating threats
from anti-abolition activists and authors. Within the movement, Stowe’s
novel earned high praise from radicals and incrementalists alike for rallying
new supporters of the cause. Frederick Douglass, a Garrisonian, enthused
that “nothing could have better suited the moral and humane requirements
of the hour. Its effect was amazing, instantaneous, and universal.” Stowe’s
son made a rather grander claim, one that still regularly finds its way into
print today despite its apocryphal status: that upon meeting the five-foot-tall
Stowe, President Abraham Lincoln allegedly exclaimed, “So you’re the
little lady who started the big war!”38
But not all abolitionists were delighted. Martin Delany, a radical
Garrisonian physician, novelist, and Black nationalist, expressed horror at
Douglass’s support. Stowe, he objected, sought to displace African
Americans by sending them to Africa, didn’t support Black teachers of
Black children, and was attracting all the “pecuniary advantages” of
antislavery writing, “thereby depriving” Black authors of opportunity. “No
enterprise, institution, or anything else,” he concluded, “should be
commenced for us, or our general benefit, without first consulting us.”
Douglass countered Delany with the biting logic of a seasoned organizer.
“Where will he find ‘us’ to consult with?” he beseeched. “Through what
organization, or what channel could such consulting be carried on?… How
many, in this case, constitute ‘us’?”39
As the months went on, Stowe’s US royalties continued to amass.
Within eighteen months of publication, Stowe earned $60,000. Requests for
support likewise piled up, especially from her own family. Douglass sought
her patronage for an industrial school for Black men he hoped to found.
Though she had earlier approached him for advice about how to fund
antislavery, she spilled out her frustration at his request for Black
freedpeople: “If they want one [a school] why don’t they have one—many
men among the colored people are richer than I am—& better able to help
such an object—Will they ever learn to walk?”40
At times, Stowe resented her responsibility to the antislavery movement,
but at others she assumed the mantle of its white-appointed leader with
pride. A highlight of her 1853 trip to England was a lunch reception at
Stafford House, the London mansion of the philanthropists the Duke and
Duchess of Sutherland and an internationally famous center of reform.
Inspired by Stowe’s novel, the duchess had helped coordinate a petition
appealing to American white women to oppose slavery on the same
sentimental grounds that Stowe had articulated in Uncle Tom’s Cabin:
slavery violated the sanctity of marriage, removed children from parents,
and prevented slaves from obtaining Christian educations. The signatures of
the 560,000 British women who endorsed the “Stafford House Address”
were delivered as a personal gift to Stowe in twenty-six leather-bound
volumes. This was a triumph for the author and evidence of her prominence
within a key strain of feminism: white women’s moral authority.
At the mansion, Stowe was presented to lords and ladies, marquises and
marchionesses, and poets and archbishops under the glow of a skylight
forty feet aloft illuminating the gilt interior of the most lavish grand hall and
double staircase in Europe. The duchess awarded the author with a valuable
token to mark her personal appreciation for Stowe’s efforts: a heavy gold
chain-link bracelet shaped in the form of slave shackles. “We trust it is a
memorial of a chain that is soon to be broken,” the bracelet proclaimed, and
other links were inscribed with the 1807 date of the vote to abolish the
global slave trade and the 1833 abolition of slavery in British territory.
Following the Emancipation Proclamation, Stowe had the 1863 date of US
abolition inscribed on her golden slave-shackle bracelet.41
As news of Stowe’s trip appeared in the American press, Jacobs was
needled by Stowe’s presumed ownership over the cause. “Think dear Amy
that a visit to Stafford House would spoil me as Mrs. Stowe thinks petting is
more than my race can bear,” she wrote to her confidante. “Well what a pity
we poor blacks can’t have the firmness and stability of character that you
white people have.”42 Stowe, she continued, was rather herself letting the
success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin get to her head.
While Harriet Beecher Stowe was being feted in England, Harriet Jacobs
began to write in New York. The Willises had built a home on the Hudson
River in order for Nathaniel Parker Willis to write and recover his failing
health. Cornelia was pregnant once more, so it was left to Jacobs and the
other four servants to pack up the Fourth Street house for their move
upstate. Immersed in old newspapers, a public letter in the New York
Tribune addressed to the Duchess of Sutherland and the ladies of England
and authored by “Mrs. Ex-President Tyler” caught Jacobs’s eye. The former
first lady Julia B. Tyler declaimed the “Stafford House Address,” defending
slavery as a benevolent institution, alleging slave families were seldom
separated, and telling British women to back off their high horse. “Leave it
to the women of the South to alleviate the sufferings of their dependents
while you take care of your own,” she scolded, referencing Britain’s
widespread pauperism.43
Jacobs was incensed. That night, she picked up a pen to write something
for the public eye for the first time. White women were holding a
transatlantic debate about slavery, and she resolved to add her voice and
experience, despite her lack of formal education. “Poor as [my account]
may be, I had rather give it from my own hand, than have it said that I
employed others to do it for me,” she wrote to the New York Tribune’s
editor. Mrs. Tyler was wrong to assert that slaves are rarely sold, Jacobs
insisted. In a tone both circumspect and blistering, she wondered aloud at
white women like Tyler who defended a system that depended on sexual
vice. “Would you not think that Southern Women had cause to despise that
Slavery which forces them to bear so much deception practiced by their
husbands?” she inquired. “A slaveholder seldom takes a white mistress, for
she is an expensive commodity, not submissive as he would like.” She
concluded her lengthy letter by endorsing the veracity of Stowe’s portrayal
of slavery’s cruelties, adding, “But in Uncle Tom’s Cabin she has not told
the half. Would that I had one spark from her store house of genius and
talent I would tell you of my own sufferings.” Writing until the morning,
she signed her letter “A Fugitive Slave,” sent it off to the Tribune, and
boarded an early boat up the Hudson.44
That summer, while working sun-up to sundown tending the five Willis
children, including caring for the newborn and sewing them all dolls,
Jacobs found a spark. With Amy’s encouragement, she began to write her
own narrative, by candlelight, after the children had gone to bed. She wrote
in secret. Jacobs never trusted Nathaniel Parker Willis, who defended
slavery. She didn’t tell Cornelia of her project either, a decision Jacobs’s
biographer Jean Fagan Yellin attributes to her desire to maintain ownership
over her text. “Mrs. Willis had bought her freedom,” Yellin writes, “but
Jacobs alone would tell her story.”45
Nathaniel, a dandy famous for his extravagant style, had commissioned
the architect Calvert Vaux, who the following decade would codesign
Central Park, to create the eighteen-room house they called Idlewild. He
intended the gabled estate to be a writers’ retreat for himself and his famous
friends, including Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Yet
the most significant text ever written at Idlewild was penned by the nanny,
up in the servants’ quarters, by the cover of night.
Jacobs wrote her narrative to invite solidarity with free Black
Northerners and to kindle abolitionist fervor among Northern women by
revealing that “slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for
women.” In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs invited alliance
with white women while refusing the analogy they insisted upon that
equated white women’s experiences with the condition of enslavement.
Employing the nineteenth-century style of direct address, she summoned
intimacy in one breath while foreclosing the possibility of extractive
sympathy in the next. “O reader, can you imagine my joy? No, you cannot,
unless you have been a slave mother,” she wrote of her Northern reunion
with Louisa.46
Over the course of two hundred pages, Jacobs achieved a remarkable
feat: she portrayed her life to be both structured by a brutal political and
economic system that depended on her body’s sexual capacity and
punctuated by negotiations in which she found, against the odds, loopholes
of retreat. She named her narrator Linda Brent, a pseudonym that enabled
her to conceal her own identity as well as create a new speaking voice.
When introducing Brent’s parentage on the very first page, Jacobs
discreetly broached the topic of enslavers’ rape by noting that her
grandmother Molly was fathered by a South Carolina planter. In this way,
white men’s assault of Black women’s bodies figures literally as the
precondition of her own tale and of her own body. Over and over, she
illustrates that the institution of slavery was wrung out of the bruised,
bleeding, and leaking bodies of Black women, often with white women’s
tacit or explicit endorsement. Her account is not of individual bad actors,
but of a structure saturated with misery.
Yet Jacobs stopped far short of providing what some readers likely most
craved: the prurient details of sentimental torture porn. In the wake of
Stowe’s novel, the abused, degraded slave woman was becoming a
marketable figure of slavery’s cruelties. White taste for Black women’s pain
too easily turned the enslaved into “erotic objects of sympathy,” in literary
critic Marianne Noble’s apt summation. Sigmund Freud, sixty years later,
would note how often his patients turned to the slave-beating scenes of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin for masturbation material.47 Where her white readers
would have anticipated finding a desirable object of suffering, Jacobs
instead presented them with a Black woman’s speaking subjectivity.
Jacobs approached her affair with Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, which
violated the respectability politics her grandmother had instilled within her
and that her audience would demand of any woman worth their tears, with a
mixture of forthrightness and mortification. “I will not try to screen myself
behind the plea of compulsion from a master,” she advised. “I knew what I
did and I did it with deliberate calculation. But, O, ye happy women, whose
purity has been sheltered from childhood, who have been free to choose the
objects of your affection, whose homes are protected by law, do not judge
the poor desolate slave girl too severely!” She closed the lengthy passage
with once more asserting her capacity as a reasoning subject in full control
of her actions: “Still, in looking back, calmly, on the events of my life, I feel
that the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standard as
others.”48
Harriet Jacobs. (Courtesy of Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg
Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library)
Throughout her narrative, Jacobs wove an account of Linda Brent as a
reasoning subject with agency and feeling together with an appeal to white
women readers for their sympathy. The result is akin to the feedback
sandwich known to teachers everywhere: package criticism within
reassuring praise. Passage by passage, her narrator insists upon her full
humanity as a person capable of reason and feeling, a survivor of an
abusive system looking for solidarity. While white women readers warmed
up easily to Black figures portrayed as subordinates, as “sweet, loving,
defenseless, if sometimes naughty children” in Angela Davis’s description
of the enslaved characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Jacobs confronts her
readers with her own agency and strategic appeals for their compassion.
She turned sentimental writing into a vehicle for her own self-determination
rather than a genre producing cathartic specimens of the suffering slave that
ultimately stimulate the privileged reader.49
Morality, Jacobs insisted, does not transcend material conditions; it is
enabled by them. Yet her narrator’s voice remains somewhat unconvinced
by her own claims. Her shame at violating the standards of Christian
monogamy bleeds through her writing. Whether this shame is a transparent
reflection of Jacobs’s own feeling, or a strategic figuration of the trope of
the suffering slave her white women readers would have expected of Linda
Brent, is difficult to determine. Though she wrote within the sentimental
genre, she aimed to elicit empathy and understanding for the position of
enslaved women—not to glorify the transformative power of white
women’s tears. The beating heart of the narrative is Linda Brent’s
intertwined agency and defeat.
After four years of writing at night between the cries of the Willis babies
and lingering pains shooting through her limbs from her seven years
entombed, Jacobs completed her manuscript. Her brother John wrote from
England, where he was now working as a sailor, inviting her to visit. She
knew that American slave narratives were often released first by British
publishers before they found backing stateside. In May 1858, she crossed
the Atlantic once more, after outfitting herself with letters of introduction
from prominent Garrisonian abolitionists in Boston. Her connections did
glean her an invitation from the Duchess of Sutherland to a party at Stafford
House, but John had already sailed for Constantinople, and she was unable
to secure a publisher. Perhaps the sexual content, Yellin speculates, violated
the rigid standards of public taste in Victorian England.50
Jacobs returned to America, dampened in spirits and in finances. John
Brown’s attempted raid on Harpers Ferry the following year rekindled her
spark, and she approached the Boston publisher Phillips and Sampson.
They were interested but only willing to publish her narrative with a preface
from a well-known white author, specifically Stowe or Nathaniel Parker
Willis. Given the slaveholding guests Willis entertained at Idlewild and the
romantic sketches of Southern life he printed in the nation’s leading
magazines, Jacobs remained convinced that her employer supported slavery,
and she wouldn’t stoop to asking him.51 Swallowing her pride, she once
more reached out to Stowe.
Once more, Stowe declined to offer any support.
Jacobs approached a second publisher, who offered a contract if she
secured a preface from a different white author, the well-known abolitionist
novelist and journalist Lydia Maria Child. Fearing Child would behave as
Stowe had, Jacobs confided to Amy Post that “I tremble at the thought of
approaching another Satellite of so great a magnitude,” but am “resolved to
make my last effort.” Fortunately, while Child was also a sentimental
novelist who preferred “Mrs. Stowe to all other writers in the world,” she
was cut from different cloth than her literary idol. Child accepted the
project and offered her editing services to Jacobs, primarily in rearranging
the order of sentences, paragraphs, and chapters for continuity and dramatic
tension. Remarkably, given Jacobs’s utter lack of formal education, Child
changed fewer than fifty words of the prose itself. The searing writing of
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is the work of Jacobs alone.52
But the path to publication was not yet smooth. Despite a signed
contract, undertaken in Child’s name to maintain Jacobs’s anonymity, and
advertisements announcing the text’s impending publication date, the
publisher failed to issue Jacobs’s book. They had just released the third
edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, an illustrated, 450-page book
more lavish than any they had undertaken before, and their coffers were
empty. Thayer and Eldridge defaulted on all their contracts and hauled in
their sidewalk shingle. Unfortunately, the debut of the Calamus poems, one
of the most explicit gay works to be published in the United States for the
next half century, had prevented the appearance of the country’s first self-
authored female slave narrative.53 Yet again, Jacobs found herself with a
book but without a publisher.
With characteristic drive, Jacobs decided to publish and distribute
Incidents herself. She purchased the stereotyped plates from Thayer and
Eldridge, arranged for the book to be printed and bound, and bought a
thousand copies of the green-and-gold leather volume. Beginning in the
winter of 1861, she toured throughout Boston, New York City, Philadelphia,
and Washington, DC, on the Garrisonian abolitionist circuit, selling her
book for $1 a copy. The Garrisonian press published warm reviews, though
the book didn’t gain a broad readership in the United States. A London
edition soon followed, however, that received high praise from mainstream
English newspapers.54
Yet it would take more than a century for Jacobs’s book to be recognized
as the groundbreaking work it is. As the study of literature consolidated into
a profession in university English departments in the twentieth century,
scholars insisted that no enslaved woman could have lived such a life or
penned such a tale. The text was pure fiction, they declared, invented by the
talented Lydia Maria Child. Jacobs’s authorship was not forgotten—it was
dismissed. Some Black women librarians, however, reportedly refused this
new orthodoxy and still cataloged and shelved Incidents as Jacobs’s work.
But it wasn’t until feminist scholar Jean Fagan Yellin completed nearly a
decade of archival research in the mid-1980s that Jacobs was once more
widely recognized to be the author—and publisher!—of her own
autobiography.55
A few months into Jacobs’s book tour, the South Carolina militia
bombarded Fort Sumter to force federal retreat from the newly seceded
territory, launching the Civil War. Over the next year, tens of thousands of
enslaved people fled the homes and plantations of the lately formed
Confederacy for the free territory of the North. While Congress had
suspended the Fugitive Slave Law among seceded states, refugees from
slavery nonetheless faced homelessness, hunger, and severe poverty—many
did not even have shoes—as they gathered in the Union-controlled city of
Washington, DC, just under a hundred miles from the Confederate capital
of Richmond, Virginia.
Jacobs was well on her way to establishing herself as a major
abolitionist speaker and writer, a career that likely would have enabled her
greatest wish, a home of her own. But as she read of the dangerous
conditions those escaping slavery suffered, she felt called instead to
solidarity work with her fellow self-emancipators on the streets of DC. She
spent the winter of 1862 creating a supply chain of shoes, clothing, and
blankets in New York and Philadelphia, and made lengthy trips to DC
beginning in early spring.56 That summer, she worked in the refugee camp,
composed mostly of women, children, the elderly, and disabled who
couldn’t travel as freely nor enlist in the Union Army as younger men
could. Conditions were despicable. People often lacked blankets or a
change of clothing, and measles, smallpox, and typhoid fever were rampant.
Jacobs began each day by counting the dead bodies lying upon the floor;
some mornings ten people hadn’t made it through the night.
Over the next five years, Jacobs organized with Black women’s and
white women’s groups to improve conditions, gathering supplies, fighting
to stop guards from whipping migrants for violating camp rules, and
serving as a camp matron in Alexandria, Virginia. Meanwhile, she wrote
lengthy letters to the abolitionist press filled with the suffering and self-
determination of the self-emancipating; her first communication to William
Lloyd Garrison for his Liberator ran forty thousand words. At the same
time, Jacobs dipped her toes into national feminist organizing. At a fall
1863 meeting in New York, she was unanimously appointed to the
executive committee of Stanton and Anthony’s Woman’s National Loyal
League, their organization founded to circulate their mass petition urging
emancipation.57
Jacobs continued her relief work with refugees and freedmen following
Robert E. Lee’s surrender in 1865. A common theme emerged throughout
her efforts during and after the Civil War, many of which her daughter
Louisa joined: they insisted the formerly enslaved could and would lead
their own battle for education, wage labor, and family autonomy, and
rejected the disciplining hand of whites. But they, too, had to learn to trust
Black autonomy. “These people, born and bred in slavery, had always been
so accustomed to look upon the white race as their natural superiors and
masters, that we had some doubts whether they could easily throw off the
habit,” Jacobs wrote to Lydia Maria Child. But Jacobs and Louisa
established the Jacobs School for emancipated slaves in Alexandria with the
support of freedpeople. The pair were able to block the trustee-appointed
white head teacher in favor of Louisa’s leadership, and the Jacobses took it
as a sign that “even their brief possession of freedom had begun to inspire
them with respect for the race.” Harriet and Louisa took a similar approach
to fundraising, refusing to ask for cash from Northern antislavery societies,
and instead requesting surplus rummage sale items, which they then sold,
an act closer to mutual aid than to charity. The Jacobses used their positions
of influence to teach freedpeople to join, in Jacobs’s words, “civilized
life.”58
If some of Jacobs and Louisa’s rhetoric echoed the civilizing agenda of
Stowe and her cohort of white women, their tactics did not. While assisting
refugees in Savannah, Georgia, after the war, Louisa established another
Black-led free school, and they both supported the elderly and orphaned
while continuing to report back to the North. Louisa, meanwhile, began
organizing in the suffrage campaign at the national level. Inspired by
Frances E. W. Harper’s 1866 speech at the inaugural AERA convention, in
which Harper instructed the audience, “You white women speak here of
rights. I speak of wrongs,” Louisa began touring on the lecture circuit—just
as her mother had hoped more than a decade prior when she first reached
out to Stowe.59
Occasionally, Louisa was joined on the AERA platform by Elizabeth
Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the latter of whom praised Louisa as
“good looking” and “everything proper & right in matter and manner—
private and public.” But Louisa was ultimately more at home providing
direct service to fellow former slaves than speaking twice a day with white
feminists who painted Black freedmen, not white enslavers, as the true
threat to women’s rights. By the time the AERA dissolved and Stanton and
Anthony formed their white feminist organization in 1869, Louisa had been
absent from the women’s suffrage movement for two years. Her work, like
that of her mother, was among the freedpeople.60
While Louisa was on western New York stages alongside Stanton and
Anthony, Harriet Beecher Stowe and her husband Calvin packed up their
carpets, furniture, and extra china and boarded a ship south to Florida.
Together with some friends, they had leased the state’s largest cotton
plantation, Laurel Grove. The venture took them to the banks of the St.
Johns River south of Jacksonville and aimed to provide the Stowe family
with income as well as escape: for Stowe, from the Connecticut snowdrifts
that accumulated well into April, and for their son Frederick, from the
reckless alcoholism plaguing him even before shrapnel pierced his ear on
the southern battlefield.61 It also would enable Stowe to undertake an
experiment similar to that of her Uncle Tom’s Cabin character Miss
Ophelia: she herself would attempt to civilize the formerly enslaved.
“My heart is with that poor people whose cause in words I have tried to
plead,” Stowe explained to her brother Charles, “and who now, ignorant
and docile, are just in that formative stage in which whoever seizes has
them.” Stowe saw that capitalists were keen to exploit the newly
emancipated workforce; she, by contrast, intended to wield her beneficent
influence and establish “a Christian neighborhood.”62
Stowe’s missionary zeal was part of a larger white feminist movement
after the war to save the so-called uncivilized from themselves. In the
North, white women raised millions of dollars to support schools and
hospitals, while an additional four thousand traveled south to teach newly
freedpeople literacy, work habits, and Protestant faith. Much of this work
brought desperately needed education to the formerly enslaved. But it
emerged from within the civilizing paradigm to spread white women’s
alleged moral authority and typically came with a host of conditions, such
as that the only suitable instructors were white. These Reconstruction
projects had echoes across the country. White women reformers established
schools, homes, and social welfare organizations to elevate the so-called
primitive in places like Mormon settlements in Utah, San Francisco’s
Chinatown, and Indigenous lands across the West.63 Yet while white
feminist activists were broadly eager to get their hands dirty in civilizing
work, few went so far as to take charge of a massive Southern plantation.
Stowe and her friends arrived at the dilapidated planters’ house at
nightfall, where the women were told to wait on the broad veranda while
the men of their party assisted the servants in hauling up the household
goods from their boat’s landing. Stowe was spooked by the unfamiliar
plantation sights around her, especially as the light slipped away, and even
more so by the workers returning from the fields. “As one and another
passed by,” she reported, “they seemed blacker, stranger, and more dismal,
than any thing we had ever seen. The women wore men’s hats and boots,
and had the gait and stride of men.”64 In Stowe’s mind, she had not only
journeyed south—she had also traveled back to the primitive past, a world
in which womanhood had not yet evolved.
At dawn, the February sunshine streaming through the cottage’s broken
windows reawakened Stowe to her Florida dream. Her view of the
plantation’s workers was akin to her view of the single-story house,
ramshackle after four years of war: relics of the crude past that she would
develop into supports for refined white life, for their good as well as her
own. She sought to impose order upon house and worker alike. “As the first
white ladies upon the ground, Mrs. F
and myself had the task of
organizing this barbaric household,” Stowe recalled, “and of bringing it into
the forms of civilized life. We commenced with the washing.”65
Civilizing, as Stowe and her sister Catharine Beecher explained to
middle-class readers of their immensely popular housekeeping manuals
published before and after the war, required white women to assume “the
duties of missionaries” and “supply the place of parents” to an immature,
“undeveloped” servant class. Servants were not autonomous people but
“raw, untrained” material that “must be made, by patience and training,”
into a household asset. Their maternal language of sympathetic benevolence
barely masked the economy of extraction lying beneath, in which they
instructed white women to provide servants with comfortable rooms, teach
them how to maintain their wardrobes, present them with small gifts of
spelling books and other useful items, and, above all, shed sympathetic
tears, in order to win their obedience. By subduing their servants—in
Stowe’s case, the formerly enslaved—with the weapon of sympathy, white
women could simultaneously build their own power, authority, and capital.
Housewives embraced their message enthusiastically: Stowe and Beecher’s
jointly authored New Housekeeper’s Manual was printed over twenty-five
times in twenty-five years, making it one of the most important domestic
advice books of the era.66
Stowe nonetheless felt begrudging respect for one female servant,
Minnah, who refused to be disciplined. “Democracy,” Stowe opined, “never
assumes a more rampant form than in some of these old negresses” whose
wildness prohibited them from swallowing the insults of their enslavers.
Minnah’s back bore the traces of the galling abuse she received in return,
such as being stretched on a log and staked in by her hands and feet while
her enslaver scored her flesh. “For all that, Minnah was neither broken nor
humbled: she still asserted her rights as a human being,” Stowe noted
approvingly. Minnah’s resistance extended all the way to Stowe’s civilizing
agenda. As the only female worker with some experience in domestic tasks,
she was assigned the role of house servant. But Minnah was often
“argumentative,” and she found housework “disgusting,” vastly inferior to
working outside. Soon Minnah had her way: Stowe was forced to admit that
the fields suited her better, and Stowe hired a housekeeper from
Jacksonville.67
The Civil War had laid the Laurel Grove plantation, along with much of
Florida, to waste. While Laurel Grove once boasted nine thousand acres,
Stowe and partners could afford to plant only two hundred acres of cotton,
from which they nonetheless estimated a sizable $10,000 profit. Nature,
however, had its own designs. When the crop budded and bolled in white,
an invasion of army worms chewed through all two hundred acres in two
days flat. Their financial investment had gone to seed. Stowe declared it a
victory nonetheless: “Our hands were all duly paid,” she wrote to the
Atlantic Monthly, a magazine she had helped found, “in many cases with
the first money they ever earned, and it gave them a start in life.”68 All
along, Stowe’s chosen crop was the workers themselves.
Foreswearing cotton, that spring Stowe and her husband bought land
across the St. Johns River that included a grove producing seventy-five
thousand oranges per year and a house tucked under eighty-foot-tall live
oaks festooned with hanging mosses. She and Calvin spent the next
eighteen winters at their Mandarin, Florida, plantation, and they built out
the small house into a gabled cottage encircling a magnificent oak. She lent
key support to building a school and an Episcopalian church for local
African Americans, generally rehabilitating the South in the way she knew
how: by raising the Black worker out of their “barren, confined,
undeveloped nature” and into the service of civilization.69
Harriet Beecher Stowe and family on the veranda of their
Florida plantation home. (Courtesy of the State Archive of
Florida)
This agenda reflected Stowe’s own education since she released Uncle
Tom’s Cabin, which famously ends with every Black character either dead
or having fled the United States. Her novel found no place for freed African
Americans within the country’s borders, a plot detail Black abolitionists like
Delany roundly critiqued. Stowe learned from her mistake and followed up
the novel with another, Dred (1856), featuring a dark-skinned protagonist
who self-emancipates and encourages broad slave insurrection. Her Florida
project was another venture to imagine a national future that had a place for
the Black worker.
Yet this is precisely how Stowe conceived of her task: as finding, and
assigning, Black workers a place in the transforming capitalist economy of
the South. Their role was as the naturally suited wage laborers of tropical
climes. “Only those black men, with sinews of steel and nerves of wire,—
men who grow stronger and more vigorous under those burning suns that
wither the white men,—are competent to the task” of fieldwork in Florida,
she insisted. White men grew “sickly” under the Florida sun, whereas Black
workers “ran and shouted and jabbered” in delight. If whites living in
Southern heat continued to disdain Black communities, rather than adopt
their duty “to educate a docile race who both can and will bear it for them,”
Stowe warned, they would imperil the fate of Southern capitalism.70
Stowe maintained confidence that Northern investment would
rehabilitate both the economy and the formerly enslaved people of the
South. She sold $1,500 worth of citrus a year packaged in crates with her
own label boasting “Oranges from Harriet Beecher Stowe—Mandarin, Fla”;
from her stately home she made oil paintings of white blossoms and golden
fruits clustered against a blue sky.71 Her choice crop may have been
cultivating the workers, but the products of their labor were hers to reap.
One December day six years after the end of the Civil War, the two writers
at last met face to face. Jacobs had been working as a clerk at the New
England Women’s Club in Boston, and in a few months she and Louisa
would open a boarding house in Cambridge—their first home in twenty-
five years. Stowe, not yet gone south to Florida, came to Cambridge to visit
her stepsister, who likely arranged the meeting. Stowe gifted Jacobs with a
copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in which she had written “Mrs. Harriet Jacobs
from H.B. Stowe, Christmas, 1871.” The honorific “Mrs.” may have
pleased Jacobs—despite her unmarried status, she had adopted the title
during her refugee relief work in Washington and was widely addressed as
such by fellow abolitionists. Stowe, in this small gesture, finally
acknowledged a measure of Jacobs’s self-determination. The volume
remained a treasured item in the Jacobs family for the next century. 72
Meanwhile, at home in Hartford, Connecticut, Stowe had a treasured
volume of her own, or rather, twenty-six of them. The half million
signatures affirming the Stafford House appeal, all addressed to Stowe,
were displayed prominently on oaken shelves.73 The petition, like the
golden slave shackle bracelet she received the same day, reminded Stowe of
her place in history: she was a writer who taught white women the power of
their sympathy.

CHAPTER THREE
SETTLER MOTHERS AND NATIVE ORPHANS

Alice C. Fletcher and Zitkala-Ša
[By aiding] the Vicious and Dependent classes… woman is fast becoming
recognized as a human being.
—Anna Garlin Spencer
BEFORE EIGHT-YEAR-OLD ZITKALA-ŠA HEARD ABOUT THE
BIG RED APPLES IN THE EAST, she ran free over the prairie and
rolling green hills of southeastern South Dakota. Once finished with her
morning’s work sewing her own beaded designs on buckskin or helping her
mother dry fruits or meat for winter, she bounded out into the slopes that
ascended behind their canvas wigwam. She and a handful of playmates
would dig for sweet roots, regale each other with heroic stories in earnest
imitation of the tales their mothers and aunts told over evening campfires,
and run through the hills chasing shapeshifting shadows as the wind sent
their long black hair flowing like rivers behind them. Safely nestled in the
“lap of the prairie” and “alive to the fire within,” Zitkala-Ša was sure that
her “wild freedom and overflowing spirits” were her “mother’s pride.”1
One mid-winter day, however, that freewheeling spirit lured her eight
hundred miles away to a boarding school that would transform her bond
with her mother, and her tribe, for the rest of her life.
It was February in 1884 when two Quaker missionaries entered the
Yankton Indian Reservation village where Zitkala-Ša, then known as
Gertrude Simmons, lived with her mother, Reaches-for-the-Wind. Her
father was gone; a white man, he had abandoned her mother and
community soon after she became pregnant. Reaches-for-the-Wind gave her
newborn daughter the surname of her much favored prior husband, who had
passed away before Zitkala-Ša was born. She had seen much hardship. The
Yankton Dakota were one of the seven Dakota-, Lakota-, and Nakota-
speaking groups comprising the confederated Sioux tribe. Living along the
grassy eastern banks of the muddy, but life-giving, Missouri River, their
village had been home to the tribe for only thirty-five years, after an 1859
treaty stripped them of rights to 95 percent of their eleven-million-acre
Minnesota homeland and forced them westward.2 To young Zitkala-Ša,
however, the riverbank and hills were her Eden.
When the two missionaries and their white interpreter approached
Reaches-for-the-Wind’s wigwam, young Zitkala-Ša jumped up and down in
impatience, begging her mother to permit them entry. She had heard her
friend Judéwin tell of beautiful lands full of red apple orchards where she
was going to live with the missionaries. Zitkala-Ša had eaten fewer than a
dozen red apples in her life and her desire was piqued. In the wake of the
Sioux’s dramatic loss of power, her mother had allowed Zitkala-Ša’s older
brother to attend boarding school in hopes he could learn to negotiate the
settler society pressing ever closer upon them. This also gave her some
familiarity with the trauma a young child endured when ripped from their
community and housed in an institution.
“Don’t believe a word they say!” she cautioned her daughter. “Their
words are sweet, but, my child, their deeds are bitter. You will cry for me,
but they will not even soothe you.”
But eventually Reaches-for-the-Wind yielded to her eager child,
permitting the Quaker visitors entry into her wigwam.
“Mother, ask them if little girls may have all the red apples they want,
when they go East,” implored Zitkala-Ša.3
The interpreter knew just how to answer, and also promised the child a
ride on the iron horse. After a night of pleading and hot tears, Zitkala-Ša
outran her mother’s objections with the force of her desire. Though
Reaches-for-the-Wind worried that her daughter was too young, she also
wished for Zitkala-Ša to attain an education.
Zitkala-Ša was one of the youngest members of a party of eight children
the missionaries removed from the village, taking them eight hundred miles
east to White’s Manual Labor Institute. The morning of departure, she,
Judéwin, and her other friends proudly showed each other their new
dresses, belts, and beaded moccasins. From the horse-drawn carriage
carrying them toward the train station she watched her mother’s figure grow
smaller and smaller in the distance. A sense of misgiving flooded her spirit,
and the eight-year-old child buried her tears in the soft folds of her best
blanket.
White’s Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, Indiana, couldn’t have been
more aptly named. Like other boarding schools established in the early
1880s for Indigenous youth, it was designed to produce assimilated
workers. It was also an apparatus of death, for boarding schools’ seemingly
benevolent intentions to train Indigenous youth simultaneously destroyed
tribal communities. Richard Henry Pratt, the founder of the first off-
reservation boarding school, agreed in large part with General Philip
Sheridan’s notorious edict that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” But
Pratt’s approach was to grind up the Indian with the machinery of
education. Boarding schools would “kill the Indian in him, and save the
man,” Pratt infamously pronounced.4 Institutionalizing children for at least
three years was intended to break their attachment to their tribes and land.
Off-reservation boarding schools form a notorious episode in the long
history of child removal in the United States. This history roared back to
life in the summer of 2018, when the Trump administration established
child separation policies and built family detention camps on the US-
Mexico border that have detained more than three hundred thousand
children and separated over a thousand children from their refuge-seeking
parents.5 Whether designed to intimidate and threaten refugee families, as
Trump’s policies sought to do, or to dispossess tribes of their future by
assimilating Native youth into capitalist civilization, as the boarding
schools intended, separating children from their parents is widely
recognized as a form of trauma and cultural warfare with repercussions that
persist for generations.
But less well known is that removing Native children from their
families, tribes, and territories simultaneously forms a significant episode in
the history and counterhistory of white feminism. The machinery of
civilization threatened to pulverize Native youth into mere remnants of the
past—and white women would reap many of the profits.
In the fall of 1879, while three-year-old Zitkala-Ša was playing with friends
in Yankton territory, Alice Cunningham Fletcher, a forty-one-year-old white
woman in Brooklyn, found an unexpected new outlet for her feminism. She
had been a leader of the burgeoning clubwomen scene in New York for a
decade. Enthusiastic about her experience as a member of the first society
for career women in the country, Sorosis, she helped expand it into a
national organization called the Association for the Advancement of
Women (AAW), for which she served as cofounder, secretary, and
conference organizer. These clubs shattered decorum, bringing “talented,
cultivated and beneficent women” together in public at halls and restaurants
without the customary accompaniment of men. Through networking,
charity, and educational lectures, clubwomen sought to advance their
personal and professional status.6
Though many reformers joined Sorosis and AAW, the ultimate goal of
these middle-class clubs was respectability, not politics—discussion of
suffrage was prohibited. The clubwomen movement soon sprung up in
cities across the country, comprising a third, genteel strain of white
feminism developing in the wake of Seneca Falls. Its approach was distinct
from the strident, political activism of Susan B. Anthony and especially
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who sought to transform laws and social mores.
And it differed from the high-handed, emotion-driven patronage of Harriet
Beecher Stowe and other sentimentalists who parlayed white women’s
feelings into sources of authority. Clubwomen, by contrast, drew upon
white women’s alleged moral authority to carve out a place for themselves
in the country’s social and professional institutions. Their societies sought
access, not civil rights or social transformation. Yet clubwomen’s
motivations lay not only in self-interested desire to succeed as individuals.
They had a collective goal, though a highly limited one: to promote the
personal and career success of bourgeois white women. When asked to
supply details of her biography for a volume on prominent American
women, Fletcher refrained from touting her own accomplishments and
replied, “Write me as one who loves her fellow-women.”7
That winter, Fletcher attended a lecture at Boston’s Faneuil Hall that
expanded her life’s direction. Chief Standing Bear, a leader of the Ponca
tribe, was touring the East Coast with the Omaha translator Susette “Bright
Eyes” La Flesche and her brother Francis, aiming to gain support for the
Poncas’ plight. Two years prior, the US government had unilaterally
canceled the 1858 treaty that granted the Ponca rights to the northern
Nebraska land with which they had lived in dynamic relation for millennia
and remanded them south to Arkansas Indian Territory. Standing Bear was
advocating for Ponca rights to live in Nebraska, but for much of the white
audience, it was his humanity that was up for debate. Fletcher was struck by
Susette La Flesche’s eloquence, grasping that “the door of language could
be unlocked and intelligent relations made possible between the two
races.”8
Within two years, studying—and reforming—Native women and
families would become Alice Fletcher’s central objective in life. She
devoted herself to anthropology, a rapidly developing science that
approached the Indigenous as if they held the secrets to the primitive
beginnings of humanity. To understand, and revise, “barbarous” traditions
and worldviews, she spent months and seasons living among Native tribes
in Nebraska, Oklahoma, Ohio, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Wisconsin, and
South and North Dakota. Moved to genuine respect for some aspects of
Native life and appalled by the treachery of white settlers who surrounded
and stole Native lands, Fletcher was moved to join the cause of Indian
reform. She became the most prominent white woman activist for Native
rights of her era. Yet she positioned Native people as her charges and
herself as the benevolent and powerful white mother. “The Indians cling to
me like children,” she wrote to her mentor from the Nez Perce Reservation
in northern Idaho, “and I must and will protect them.”9
Fletcher shared the civilizing impulse universal to white feminism of her
era, though we might call the specific philosophy she and the other
clubwomen in Indian reform developed “settler feminism.”10 Their method
was severance: severing Indigenous children from their parents and tribes
and severing communally held lands into individual property allotments,
subjugating Native people to the patriarchal and monogamous norms of
settler life. Meanwhile, the more Fletcher dispossessed Native women and
tribes of their traditional social roles, the more she broke through norms
herself and gained increased political and social power. She became the first
woman to be appointed to a research position at Harvard, a full eighty-five
years before the institution even admitted female undergraduates. Her
prolific output made her the most respected and influential woman scientist
of the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
Settler white feminists liberated themselves through assuming authority
over the Indigenous. Yet it was far from the only kind of feminism in the
West. Zitkala-Ša would become an artist and feminist activist who would
unite tribes to push back against theft disguised as benevolence.
When the Civil War came to a close in 1865, the Indian Wars heated up.
Across the West, Indigenous tribes fought US soldiers for the next two and
a half decades for the right to live among their lands. The confederated
Sioux tribes, led by Lakota warriors including Sitting Bull, Red Cloud, and
Crazy Horse, executed the most successful resistance ever mounted by
Indigenous groups in US history. In 1868, the Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne
became the first and only Natives to win a major war against the US
government. The Bozeman War resulted in a treaty securing total control of
their vast lands and hunting grounds that spread across the Dakotas and
reached into present-day Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska, and Colorado.11
The remarkably recent date of such a major Native victory testifies to the
lasting power of the Sioux.
But US officials didn’t respect the treaty. When George Armstrong
Custer’s thousand-person expedition illegally mining Sioux lands struck the
gold they were determined to find in the Black Hills in 1874, the tribes’
fortunes changed drastically. Settlers prospecting for the valuable mineral,
often guided by US troops, flooded the area. Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and
other Lakota and Cheyenne leaders famously defeated Custer and his
Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876, the year
Zitkala-Ša was born just to the east among the Yankton Dakota. But the
Sioux ultimately lost the Black Hills War and were forced to surrender to
US forces by 1877. Sioux lands dwindled to just over 10 percent of their
former size as the US Army seized control of everything but central South
Dakota. Leaders including Red Cloud and Spotted Tail moved onto
Rosebud, Standing Rock, Pine Ridge, and other Dakota reservations to the
west and north of the Yanktons’, where they were subject to the whims of
capricious agents who cut their food rations in half or let the beef, tobacco,
and grain spoil entirely.12 Sitting Bull (Hunkpapa Lakota) had served the
Black Hills War as a spiritual adviser after a vision that foresaw their
triumph over Custer. Refusing to submit to US control when the war was
lost, Sitting Bull and nearly two hundred family members and supporters
fled north across the Canadian border to the hills of Saskatchewan to evade
capture.
Yet after four years of resistance, the fifty-year-old Sitting Bull and his
band of 168 people were forced to travel south and surrender to US forces.
The buffalo herds that had sustained their people for millennia had all but
disappeared, deliberately slaughtered by determined US and Canadian
militaries and private citizens to starve the Plains tribes into death. Only ten
to fifteen million buffalo remained in the Great Plains by 1865, down from
a precontact population of up to sixty-five million. By the early 1880s, the
military had reduced the buffalo population to only a few hundred
survivors. Sitting Bull and his band were now held as prisoners of war at
Fort Randall, South Dakota, a few miles across the Missouri River from the
Yankton village where then five-year-old Zitkala-Ša roamed the hills. An
officer counted each person every morning.13
In October 1881, two years after she had attended Standing Bear’s
Boston lecture, Alice Fletcher sat somewhat awkwardly in a tight-waisted,
full-skirted dress around a fire in Sitting Bull’s tent. Sitting Bull explained
to Fletcher that desperate hunger had compelled him to surrender three
months prior.
“The old life is gone,” Sitting Bull told Fletcher while Buffalo Chip
(Omaha) interpreted. “The skill of the hunter is now of no use; nor is the
valor of the warrior.”14 The young would have to turn to plowing the prairie
and other ways of the settler in order to survive.
As Sitting Bull spoke, his younger wife entered the tipi and threw sticks
on the fire before reclining in its glow. Adroitly leaning upon one elbow,
she turned her eyes upon Fletcher, no doubt assessing this unusual
newcomer. The budding anthropologist looked back, cataloging the
woman’s bright eyes, good looks, and brass bracelets. Sitting Bull, too,
gazed upon his wife, before once more addressing Fletcher.15
“You are a woman,” he began slowly. “Take pity on my women, for they
have no future. The young men can be like the white men, till the soil,
supply the food and clothing, they will take the work out of the hands of the
women, and the women, to whom we have owed every thing in the past,
will be stripped of all which gave them power and position among the
people. Give a future to my women!”16
Fletcher found herself a guest of Sitting Bull’s because she had traveled
west to study “the life of Indian women.”17 Earlier that year, Fletcher had
approached Susette La Flesche, who arranged for Fletcher to camp with the
Omaha in Nebraska for three weeks before traveling northward to the
Sioux. To gain permission from the Bureau of Indian Affairs agents to enter
the reservations, she secured research sponsorship from the Peabody
Museum and the federal Bureau of Ethnology.
“I wish to get at Indian women’s life from the inside,” she had written to
bureau director John Wesley Powell, “and as the segregation of the sexes is
marked among barbarous people, I trust that being a woman I may be able
to observe and record facts and conditions” inaccessible to male
anthropologists.18 Now she was collecting prime data straight from one of
the country’s most notorious Native rebels.
Anthropology, as it was understood in the nineteenth century, was the
science that investigated the evolution of human society. Anthropologists
approached the entire history of human culture as one linear process of
development from savagery, to barbarism, to civilization. In this rigid
model, only Europeans had arrived at civilized maturity. Racialized people
were figured as specimens of arrested development, frozen in earlier life
stages of humanity. People of African descent were imagined to be
congealed in a savagery from which they would never progress. Natives
were consigned to the stage of barbarism, an arrested stage in the evolution
of humans; anthropologists approached them as lingering relics of the
receding past, not as living members of the present in charge of their own
future.
Alice Fletcher made several early innovations in anthropology’s
methods and application. Her first contribution was to argue that Native
societies, because they were the imagined origins of her own, thus held the
clue to understanding the oppression of women in civilization. Fletcher
would not only promote the further development of professional white
women—she intended to pinpoint the origins of their troubles by
investigating the Indigenous cultures of the West. This work “preserving the
record” of the past, as she put it, would help white women seize a greater
role in civilization’s boundless future.19
White feminism, in other words, had come to the sciences.
When she met Sitting Bull, Fletcher was beginning to undertake her first
fieldwork. But she was encountering a surprising set of data. The scientific
and reform opinion of Fletcher’s day was that barbarous groups were sex
segregated, meaning that men and women lived largely separate existences
characterized by drastic inequality in which men exploited women’s labor.
Indian societies were imagined to be so far down the evolutionary scale of
development that women were drudges, simply menial laborers abused by
their idle husbands. Racist images of “squaws” portrayed with papooses
strapped to their backs as they stooped over the fields abounded in the
popular and scientific press. Sara Kinney, a leader of the Women’s National
Indian Association (WNAI), a white feminist reform organization founded
in 1879, articulated the received wisdom bluntly: “In the native order of
society, the home, as we understand it, cannot exist.”20
Civilized societies, by contrast, were portrayed as having achieved the
landmark state of binary sex specialization, a state of complementary
opposites in mind, body, and emotion. Sex specialization meant that men
managed the public sphere of business and politics and women presided
angelically over the private realm of hearth and home, but they formed
allegedly equal halves of a partnership. In this fantasy, civilized men freed
middle-class white women from the need to labor, as child-rearing and
managing the household were misapprehended as free gifts of the heart
rather than efforts of the hand.
But Fletcher was realizing that Lakota and Omaha women had freedoms
and responsibilities of which white women could only dream. “The Indian
woman,” Fletcher concluded, “considers herself quite independent. She
controls her labor, her possessions and follows her own inclinations if she
has sufficient determination.” Contrary to accepted wisdom, the Native
woman “is not necessarily the slave of the man.” Rather, her work stoking
the fires; making the food, tents, and clothing; and raising corn, beans, and
pumpkins meant that “she is the conserver of life,” a position that came
with many privileges and was awarded due respect.21 Now, Sitting Bull was
telling Fletcher directly: Lakota women had more freedom and power than
the white women of the West. He was also, in her rendering, asking Fletcher
for help.
For Fletcher and other white feminists, assistance meant taking
guardianship over people of color. Fletcher felt that Indigenous people were
not doomed to be forever suspended in the barbarian stage of development.
They could be saved, trained into the habits of civilized sex specialization.
“It is good to think of the so-called dependent races as children,” rather than
through the lens of “savagery” or “barbarism,” she corrected in 1900.22
Natives were not frozen in prehistory, as her colleagues believed. They
were in need of a mother—a white mother, who could raise the race into
maturity.
Amelia Quinton, president of the Women’s National Indian Association,
put it best. “The Indian Question must become more and more a woman
question,” she instructed. “When all legal rights are assured, and all fair
educational facilities provided, the women and children of the tribes will
still be a sacred responsibility laid upon the white women of the land.”23
Despite Fletcher’s limited experience—visiting two tribes for six weeks
total, while reliant on translators—she was now ready to call herself an
expert in Native life writ large. And indeed, she had now acquired more
firsthand experience with Indigenous tribes than had most other social
scientists in the United States. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, Fletcher
pushed for assimilation with full knowledge of the loss of liberties Native
women would experience. Men needed to labor in the fields while women
took care of the home and children. In historian Louise Newman’s words,
Fletcher and other white women reformers believed that “Indian women
were to be given the gift of patriarchy.”24 Her white feminist position
explicitly and knowingly helped undermine Indigenous women’s traditional
authority—while simultaneously taking inspiration from them to realize her
own budding professional and political power.
Zitkala-Ša arrived at White’s Manual Labor Institute at nightfall in March
1884 after three days of hard travel. Already unnerved by the incessant
gaping of strangers on the train, she now faced a new sensory onslaught: a
whitewashed two-story building illuminated by blinding gaslight. The
eight-year-old child hugged the wall for safety, but to her horror, “two warm
hands grasped” her, and a “paleface” woman tossed her up and down in the
air. Unable to communicate a word with any of the adults and unused to
being “trifl[ed]” with as a “plaything,” Zitkala-Ša burst into tears, tears that
eventually carried her into sleep that evening.25
The first days were full of surprises: learning how to sit in a chair;
“eating by formula” after a series of confusing bells and prayers; being
stripped of her new dress, belt, moccasins, and all other objects from home
and assigned a “clinging” dress and stiff shoes in their place.26 Judéwin,
whose limited knowledge of English nonetheless enabled her to understand
adults who Zitkala-Ša felt were “deaf” to her concerns, caught wind of the
afternoon plan to cut their hair. Zitkala-Ša was moved to rebellion.
Hairstyle played a significant role in Dakota and Lakota culture, and short
hair was the punishment for dishonored “cowards.”
“No, I will not submit! I will struggle first!” she cried to her friends.
The teachers tied her to a chair, and soon Zitkala-Ša felt the “cold blades
of the scissors against [her] neck… gnaw[ing] off” her “thick braids.”27
Over the next weeks and months, Zitkala-Ša became acquainted with
what she called “the iron routine” of “the civilizing machine.” It was
unrelenting, grinding from 6:30 a.m. roll call until the bedtime bell, and it
paused for no one. White’s Manual, like other off-reservation boarding
schools, provided a strict industrial education. It emphasized cleanliness,
promptitude, and Protestant Christianity. Sex-segregated training prepared
boys to become carpenters, shoemakers, and farmers and taught girls the
arts of domesticity. At White’s, girls spent half the day working in eight
areas of bourgeois housekeeping, including baking, handling and making
dairy products, and maintaining the standards of the Victorian-era dining
room and its dizzying amount of serving ware and cutlery. All pupils were
forbidden from speaking unless it was in English. Fatal illness plagued
boarding school children. Of the seventy-three youth removed from the
Shoshone and Arapaho nations of the mountain West in the early 1880s,
only twenty-six survived.28
Yet Zitkala-Ša continued to create little moments of resistance to express
her anger. Sent to the kitchen as punishment for violating a school rule she
found needlessly restrictive, she was assigned the task of mashing turnips, a
vegetable whose very odor she found “offensive.” Furious, she “bent in hot
rage over the turnips” with such force that she shattered the bottom of the
brown earthen jar. Dinner that day was turnip-free, and Zitkala-Ša
“whooped in [her] heart for having once asserted the rebellion within.”29
Nearly twenty years later, she would pen these scenes for the most
prestigious literary magazines of her day (and ours), such as The Atlantic
and Harper’s, of what befell her when, lured by red apples, she traveled east
of Eden.
Zitkala-Ša’s rage at the civilizing machine was well justified. Richard
Henry Pratt took slavery and the prison as his models when he founded
Carlisle Indian Industrial School, beginning off-reservation education. In
his mind, enslavement had “forcibly transformed millions of primitive
black people” into productive laborers through submitting them to “the care
and authority of individuals of the higher race.” He sought to do something
similar. Removing Native children from their tribes and assimilating them
into civilization as workers, he reasoned, would be the most effective way
to assume control of Native lives and eradicate backward Indigenous
cultures.30
When in 1879 Pratt approached the federal government for funding and
the use of some military barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, to establish a
boarding school for Native youth, Indian commissioner E. A. Hayt jumped
at this chance to hold the children of the Lakota Sioux and other resistant
tribes “hostages for the good behavior of their people.” It was only two
years after the Black Hills War. While Sitting Bull and his band were
evading capture in Canada, Pratt traveled throughout the Pine Ridge and
Rosebud Reservations. He recruited pupils with false promises that his
education would prepare the children of the Lakota to defend themselves so
that a loss like that of the sacred Black Hills would not be repeated.
Meanwhile, to fellow white reformers Pratt characterized the school as a
fatal machinery that would bring about the “total annihilation of the
Indians, as Indians and tribes.”31
Yet it would not only be the military who benefited from taking Lakota
and other Indigenous children hostage. Child removal proved to be a
profitable career path for many white women. The civilizing machine
required humans to run it: white women teachers. The boarding school
movement presented them with significant new career opportunities.
Middle-class white women in the mid- to late nineteenth century were still
largely confined to the private sphere. But civilizing the West was deemed
an appropriate extension of women’s domestic duties. This “manifest
domesticity,” in scholar Amy Kaplan’s memorable phrase, thrust white
women’s work into the center of the settler colonial enterprise. White
women could respectably extend their own realm of power and influence
through adopting a maternal attitude that saw Natives as children in need of
their guidance. According to historian Margaret Jacobs, “the majority of
boarding school employees nationwide” were white women.32
Reformers, especially white women, appointed themselves the task of
upwardly evolving the Indigenous. Evolutionary theory in the late
nineteenth century was overwhelmingly Lamarckian, meaning that
everyone from Pratt and Fletcher to Charles Darwin believed that heredity
was the result of repeated sensations and movements, not of a fixed,
unchanging particle. They deemed childhood the most plastic stage of
development, the period in which it was easiest to impress new traits into
the flesh that would transmit down the generations. For reformers,
environment during childhood, not inherent biology, determined heredity.
Some schools thus removed Native youth from their parents at the
astonishingly young age of three or four and only released them at the age
of twenty-one in order to transform them, body and mind.33
The belief that physical traits resulted from childhood impressions
granted white women a new and forceful kind of power over the population
and its future. White women gained authority as civilizers by contrast with
Native women, who were portrayed as backward creatures trapped in
prehistory who dragged their children down with them. Breaking the tie
between Native mothers and their youngsters thus seemed imperative to
white reformers. Few reformers realized the truth Fletcher had discovered:
that many Indigenous cultures were free from patriarchy, and women
enjoyed considerable agency, responsibility, and freedom in their tribes.34
Boarding school children were acutely aware of the attempts to grind
new experiences into their flesh through manual labor, physical beatings,
and military-style discipline. A Sicangu and Oglala Lakota pupil whom
Pratt recruited on his first trip to Rosebud, the writer Luther Standing Bear,
later recalled, “The task before us was not only that of accepting new ideas
and adopting new manners, but actual physical changes and discomfort had
to be borne uncomplainingly until the body adjusted itself to new tastes and
habits.” Zitkala-Ša’s accounts of her boarding school days are full of
sensory detail bringing to life the trauma of her ordeal—an effective
technique for enabling her readers to imagine that they, too, can feel the
iron routine penetrating their flesh. She keenly apprehended both the
scientific and military goals of Indian education. It is “heart rending,” she
later wrote to her lover, the Apache physician Carlos Montezuma, “to see a
government try experiments upon a real race” that rendered boarding school
children “practically prisoners of war.”35
A year into Pratt’s hostage experiment at Carlisle, Red Cloud, Spotted
Tail, and other Lakota leaders traveled to Pennsylvania. They were horrified
to discover their sons clothed in military dress, suffering from insufficient
room and board, and subject to prison-style punishment. Spotted Tail’s
youngest son had been locked in solitary confinement for a week. While
they all tried to bring their tribes’ youth home, only Spotted Tail was
permitted to withdraw his own children, and at his own expense.36 More
than three dozen Lakota children from Rosebud and Pine Ridge remained at
Carlisle and would not be able to return home, even for a summer visit,
until they had remained captive at Carlisle for three full years.
Alice Fletcher’s first paid position with the Indian reform movement was to
accompany these thirty-eight Lakota children on their first trip back home
to Pine Ridge and Rosebud three years later. She was also hired to recruit
more children. Fletcher was returning to Sioux reservations she had visited
the prior summer on her initial fieldwork trip, work that Pratt’s boarding
school had made possible, for she had been hosted by the family of a
Carlisle student. But now in the summer of 1882 she served as Pratt’s direct
representative, the first phase of an alliance they maintained for decades.
Fletcher then traveled south to the Omaha Reservation to round up more
pupils for Carlisle and for Hampton (an industrial school for African
Americans that recently had begun an Indian assimilation program). She
removed at least three dozen children—more than had been planned. After
escorting the children east to school she embarked on a lecture tour to raise
the extra $1,800 in funds needed to accommodate the additional children;
her event in Springfield, Massachusetts, drew a crowd of two thousand
people. Pratt paid her $50 per month for her work.37
While at Red Cloud’s Pine Ridge Reservation, Fletcher worked as both
an employee of Pratt’s and an unpaid anthropologist collecting for
Harvard’s Peabody Museum. She arrived in the middle of the Sun Dance,
the most important spiritual festival among Plains Indians. It was
announced as the last Sun Dance to be held at Pine Ridge: both the US and
Canadian governments were outlawing the sacred ceremony, among others,
in hopes it would help destroy Indigenous culture. The brutal white agents
in charge of Pine Ridge were particularly intent on withholding food rations
and prohibiting ceremonies as retribution for Red Cloud and his people’s
singular victory over US forces in the Bozeman War fourteen years prior.
Over nine thousand people from the Oglala and Brule bands of the Lakota
Sioux had gathered for this final Sun Dance, setting up their white tents in a
circle three-quarters of a mile long that opened to the eastern sunrise. Red
Cloud himself was adept at a mode of recruiting: when scientists entered his
lands to dig for fossils or study his people, he tried to win them as allies in
his own fight for survival. Fletcher was no exception, and Red Cloud
informed her of the importance of the Sun Dance and its intention “to
harden [our young men] to endurance” to fight their numerous enemies,
both Indigenous and white.38
The Sun Dance ceremony involved four days of fasting, abstinence, and
group prayer in preparation for the main event: two days of dancing around
a cottonwood pole rising forty feet in the center of their circle. Two red
banners and two rawhide effigies, one of a buffalo and another of a warrior
with an erect penis, flew from the pole. One or more male dancers pierced
their flesh with eagle or buffalo bone and tied themselves to the
cottonwood; their dance gradually tore the bones from the flesh, creating
ecstatic pain that sacrificed their bodies for the sake of individual and tribal
protection.
Fletcher was determined to obtain the two effigies for the Peabody’s
natural history collection. The buffalo and warrior figure were prized
elements of the ceremony wanted by many, but Fletcher secured the help of
the white reservation agent and the local police force to win them for
herself. When the police detached the penis before handing the rawhide
figure to Fletcher, she balked and demanded its return, wanting as authentic
a specimen as possible. To Fletcher, these weren’t sacred or even obscene
idols, but inert artifacts. She felt that collecting relics was necessary to
preserve evidence of the primitive origins of society, which she was sure
would soon vanish from the continent.39 Preserving Native culture,
however, worked through her method of choice: severance. In this case, she
removed sacred phenomena from tribes and transformed them into static
museum objects.
Fletcher didn’t stop at removing objects. For years, she made friends
with Native leaders and cajoled them to share the details of secret spiritual
ceremonies such as the vision quest and White Buffalo feast. Most were
extremely reluctant to divulge this information. But she usually prevailed,
and one of her tactics was to convince leaders that if whites had better
knowledge of Native lifeways, they would better understand and
sympathize with Native land struggles. Hers was a version of Pratt’s
technique of persuasion. Both promoted the fantasy that better information,
whether gained by Natives or settlers, would create a more equal power
relationship between tribes and their colonizers. Yet data, like sympathy, do
not break free of power: they are its result.
Fletcher’s quest for knowledge knew few bounds, and she volunteered
to have Indian graves dug up in order to extract skulls and skeletons from
the Omaha and other tribes for interested friends back at the Peabody.
Fletcher aimed to save Native culture, but as remnants of bodies and sacred
objects preserved behind glass. In this act of theft, she had good company:
over four thousand Native skulls amassed in East Coast museums during
the period.40
Fletcher sought to place both Native objects and Native children under
the guardianship of settlers, and she was a particularly enthusiastic
promoter of Pratt’s school. Over the next few years, Fletcher took men and
women from Washington, DC, to Carlisle to observe firsthand the four
hundred students learning to shoe horses, cook on wood-fired stoves, and
march in military formation. When not organizing publicity trips to Carlisle,
she lobbied to increase funding for the school and those like it. She sought
to convince politicians that boarding schools were highly effective ways to
assimilate Natives. Her efforts helped to double federal funding for Indian
education in a few short years, and by 1885 the budget stretched to just shy
of $1 million. By 1890, almost ten thousand Native children attended off-
and on-reservation boarding schools that aimed to keep students for at least
three years.41 Off-reservation boarding schools remained in operation until
the 1970s.
After three years at White’s Manual Labor Institute, Zitkala-Ša was eleven
years old and permitted to return home for the summer. Perhaps she had
been imagining a tearful reunion and days spent in companionable abandon
in the hills. What she found, however, was that she “seemed to hang in the
heart of chaos, beyond the touch or voice of human aid.” The civilizing
machine had ruptured her place in the world. Communication with her
mother had become impossible. Her mother tried to soothe her daughter’s
anguish by giving her the one book in her possession, an Indian Bible. But
Zitkala-Ša “felt more like burning the book.” She was caught in the middle:
unable to relate to her mother, yet “enraged” by the trappings of civilization
that had penetrated her former idyll. A party on a moonlit night, as her
friends gathered in their settler finery, only compounded her isolation.
“They were no more young braves in blankets and eagle plumes, nor Indian
maids with prettily painted cheeks,” for they, too, had spent three years
away at school.42 Zitkala-Ša was desperate to join, but she had no hat nor
close-fitting muslin dress trimmed with ribbons, and she had thrown away
her hard-soled shoes in favor of moccasins. Excluded from her own peers,
she cried and cried in the wigwam, to her mother’s visible distress.
Boarding school hadn’t only changed her: it was changing the culture of her
tribe.
Zitkala-Ša remained at home for a year and a half until her restlessness
and love of reading and classical music pulled her back to boarding school
for another three years. During her years back at school, the target of
Zitkala-Ša’s resistance began to shift. Increasingly, her frustration and rage
were directed not at the civilizing machine but toward her mother, who now
symbolized to her a preliterate, traditional way of life. For all its
housetraining elements, White’s Manual also taught Zitkala-Ša skills that
opened her world, such as writing, oratory, and playing the violin and
piano. Her critical power led her to continue to find fault with civilization,
as well. She used her graduation speech, “The Progress of Women,” as an
occasion to voice her increasing feminist consciousness, objecting to the
way women were relegated to a position of “subjugation” in white
culture.43
Despite her mother’s opposition, she enrolled at Earlham College, a
coed Quaker institution located one hundred miles south of Wabash, where
she excelled in public speaking. In 1896, she competed in the Indiana State
Oratorical Competition as the official representative of Earlham. The
evening contest took place at the city’s lavish English Opera House, but
Zitkala-Ša found it filled with “strong prejudice” and “worse than barbarian
rudeness.” As the crowd of more than one thousand gathered, her fellow
students whispered anti-Indian “slurs” throughout the hall. With a dry
“burn” gathering in her breast, she took the podium to deliver her speech
“Side by Side.”
“The universe is the product of evolution,” she began. “An ascending
energy pervades all life.” Like Fletcher, Zitkala-Ša was well acquainted
with the evolutionary paradigm that governed turn-of-the-century
intellectual thought, though she used the framework to insist that Natives
were innately capable of progress. Hers was an assimilationist vision, but
one in which both races possess equal capacity for progress and march
“side by side” into the future that belongs to all.44
A group of students had coordinated their hostility in advance. When
she finished, they unfurled a large white banner. “SQUAW,” it read, with a
racist caricature of an Indigenous woman. Ignorant drudge, sexless savage
—this is the insult they hurled at her, “before [a] vast ocean of eyes.”45
Zitkala-Ša burned with anger, her teeth clenched. Yet she was to have some
revenge, for she was awarded second prize in the state competition.
Fluent in two cultures, Zitkala-Ša pursued the one career path available
to an educated Indigenous woman: teaching at an off-reservation boarding
school. Illness and a need to make money prevented her from completing
her Earlham degree, but she refused to go home. Though she was still “frail
and languid,” she traveled east to Pennsylvania, in 1897.46 Now twenty-one
years old, she saw boarding schools as providing beneficial education
despite their militaristic ways and was eager to help civilize Indigenous
people by teaching for Pratt at Carlisle.
Her misgivings began on the day of her arrival. Escorted to a small,
“ghastly” white room whose insufficient windows were further covered by
thick, dingy curtains, Zitkala-Ša sat in a stiff-backed chair in quiet horror,
not even having removed her traveling hat when she heard a man’s boots
tramping down the hall. The “imposing” but “kindly” man greeted her after
eyeing her up and down, with apparent disappointment.
“Ah ha! So you are the little Indian girl who created the excitement
among the college orators!”
She knew at once he was Captain Pratt, and her sense of “ill fortune”
grew stronger. When he left the room she cast her hat aside and collapsed
onto the bed. It was an inauspicious beginning to another difficult period in
her life.47
A month later, Captain Pratt summoned Zitkala-Ša to his office early
one morning for a thirty-minute conversation during which only he spoke.
At its close, one line rang in her ear.
“I am going to turn you loose to pasture!” Pratt was sending Zitkala-Ša
west, home to Yankton, to recruit students for Carlisle.48
She went, eager for a reprieve from her labors at the school and for the
opportunity to see her mother. Zitkala-Ša, as Fletcher had been, was now a
paid recruiter for Carlisle. When she arrived back at the Yankton
Reservation, conditions made her ill at heart. Her brother Dawée, once a
government clerk earning good wages, had been replaced by a white man.
His education had proven useless, and the family couldn’t afford to
purchase food.
While Fletcher’s recruiting trips to the Omaha and Sioux had bolstered
her commitment to child removal, Zitkala-Ša returned to Carlisle with a
new cynicism. She began to see once more that the Indian education/war
machine was the scene of cruelty. A colleague of hers abused a student by
telling him he was nothing but “a government pauper,” which appalled her.
Meanwhile, Carlisle continued to receive streams of white visitors eager to
see the effects of their benevolence, though the trips were no longer
organized by Fletcher herself. The publicity visits further aroused Zitkala-
Ša’s skepticism: she saw self-satisfied tourists looking to “boast of their
charity to the North American Indian. But few,” she cautioned, “have
paused to question whether real life or long-lasting death lies beneath this
semblance of civilization.”49
Zitkala-Ša, photographed by Gertrude Käsebeir. (Courtesy of
Division of Work and Industry, National Museum of American
History, Smithsonian Institution)
Alone in her “white-walled prison” of a room, a new idea came to her.
She left Carlisle for Boston in 1899, where she enrolled at the New England
Conservatory of Music to study violin. A year later, she performed a solo at
the White House for President William McKinley, and soon leading East
Coast photographers sought to take her portrait.50
While in Boston, Zitkala-Ša published semiautobiographical essays
about her childhood and teaching years in the Atlantic Monthly, which I
have quoted from liberally. The finely tuned pieces made her a literary
darling and earned her praise from the likes of Harper’s Bazaar; two
decades later, they were anthologized in schoolbooks across the East.
Anxious to broadcast a former teacher’s grand success, Carlisle’s
newspaper, Red Man and the Helper, reprinted the essays, qualified by a
lengthy editorial note. “We regret that she did not once call to mind the
happier side of those long school days, or even hint at the friends who did
so much to… lead her from poverty and insignificance into the
comparatively full and rich existence that she enjoys today,” the editor’s
preface announced. Her literary success, the editor claimed, was due to the
benevolence of boarding school teachers, while her “underlying bitterness”
was a personal failing. Pratt vowed to stay publicly silent on the matter,
choosing to vent his anger in a private letter. “But for those she has
maligned,” he seethed, “she would be a poor squaw in an Indian camp,
probably married to some no-account Indian.”51
Zitkala-Ša had worked for Pratt for two years, but she would have the
final say about the boarding school. Writing in response to the Red Man’s
editor, Zitkala-Ša clarified: “I give outright the varying moods of my own
evolution” to stir political debate about boarding school education. “No one
can dispute my own impressions and bitterness!”52
Zitkala-Ša’s efforts to own her experience, in the midst of assimilation
machines and well-intentioned white feminists who insisted that Natives
were too immature to make their own decisions, can be seen as
intersectional feminist acts. For her, agency was not primarily about her
status as a woman, nor was gender her singular form of her political work:
but her right to testify to her own experience as an Indigenous woman was
central to her political struggle. She was the very first Native American
woman to tell her story in print in her own voice, free of translation, editing,
or other forms of mediation that framed other Indigenous narratives, such as
those given by Sarah Winnemucca, Geronimo, and Red Cloud. As she told
Carlisle’s readers, she was in charge of her own story and her own feelings
—she was not raw material to be transformed by others. In a boarding
school system dedicated to ingraining new sensory impressions and habits
into the bodies of students, Zitkala-Ša’s resistance was targeted and direct.
Her “evolution” and her “impressions” were hers alone.53
Her essays are at once an artistic rendering of her feelings that helped
her express and find an authentic self, as well as, in their loose
fictionalization, a group autobiography that brought a generation’s worth of
Indigenous children’s suffering into the white middle-class eye. Her stories
develop a singular voice to bring collective life to the page, as if she were
writing the experiences of tens of thousands of unnamed children into
narrative existence, rather than conveying her own story alone. Motifs like
alluring red apples that cast her out of Eden brought her individual
experience into the realm of the mythic—tales that would speak of a
community, not just an individual.
Zitkala-Ša continued to use her literary talents to bring a Sioux
perspective into settler culture. She spent the summer of 1901 gathering
stories from her own Yankton Dakota tribe, published as Old Indian
Legends, and wrote several short stories and essays for New York
publishers. These pieces reveal a political commitment that intertwined
women’s rights with Indigenous self-determination and cultural renewal. In
her stories, a warrior Native woman rescues her lover from otherwise
certain death, untying him from captivity just prior to his execution by a
neighboring tribe. A boarding school–educated son watches helplessly as
his father dies of starvation, for he has promised to give up the hunt in favor
of civilization. Pratt declared the latter story “trash” and denounced its
author as “worse than a pagan.”54
Zitkala-Ša’s response? “Why I Am a Pagan,” published in The Atlantic,
articulates a spirituality born of listening to the Great Spirit as he spoke
through the “eloquence” of rivers, flowers, and clouds. For Zitkala-Ša, land
is family, not property. Native religion enabled her “to recognize a kinship
to any and all parts of this vast universe” and to know that “both great and
small are so surely enfolded in His [the Great Spirit’s] magnitude that,
without a miss, each has his allotted individual ground of opportunities.”55
Given her keen poetic eye, her language is surely deliberate. The Great
Spirit, not reformers, allots opportunity, and he allots to all.
Even as she published in prestige venues, Zitkala-Ša situated her
emerging voice within a tribal and pan-Indian network. Just before she
began writing for national outlets, she had a disagreement with her half
brother’s wife, who chastised her for deserting the family by pursuing an
education. She chose to drop the name of Simmons in favor of the self-
given name Zitkala-Ša. “You can guess how queer I felt—away from my
own people—homeless—penniless—and even without a name! That I
choose to make a name for myself and I guess I have made Zitkala-Ša
known—for even Italy writes in her language!” she exulted to Montezuma
during their courtship days. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas J.
Morgan had decreed that all boarding school children be assigned the
surnames of their fathers, according to settler patriarchal custom. But
Zitkala-Ša, as usual, chose to go her own way, confident in her powers of
creation. The name means “Red Bird” in Lakota—not in her native Nakota
tongue.56 In her name and dress she drew on a mixture of Sioux and other
Native languages and customs, an early effort to create a collective pan-
Indian position that worked through coalition rather than identity.
Collective political work uniting Indigenous people across the country, in
fact, would become her central goal.
Alice Fletcher was learning that to the Indigenous, land was not property
but was life itself, a manifestation of the Great Spirit with whom it was a
blessing to be in coexistence. The Lakota, for example, in this period
defined communal territory as “any place where they cultivated relations
with plant and animal life,” explains Lower Brule Sioux scholar-activist
Nick Estes, and that included great expanses of hunting grounds and arid
soils unsuited for crop agriculture.57
Fletcher had some respect for the Native worldview that saw Nature as
sacred and humans as part of its rhythms, but she also found it immature.
Natives’ relationship to land is “like the cry of a child rather than the
articulate speech of a man,” she wrote in a scientific paper.58 To Fletcher
and settler culture in general, a modern relationship to land looked like
transformation: plowing the prairies, felling woodlands, damming rivers,
and blowing holes right through the middle of mountains for railway tracks.
Because Natives sought to live in amicable coexistence with the natural
world, rather than to extract, exploit, and capitalize on its resources as
individuals, Fletcher and other anthropologists believed that they would
remain in barbarism, unable to advance materially, mentally, or emotionally.
To evolve as a people, nature must be transformed into property.
The greatest political work of Fletcher’s life was to sever Natives from
the lands with which they lived in reciprocal relation. To her, Native land
was worse than unproductive: it was a curse and a waste and prevented
assimilation. “The landed wealth of the Indian has been his bane,” Fletcher
concluded.59 To relieve Indians of their vast lands, just as to remove
children from their tribes, was for Fletcher an act of benevolence that would
propel Natives into the forward movements of civilization and pacify the
bloody relationship between Indians and settlers.
Fletcher, other reformers, and politicians seized upon a new strategy in
the mid-1880s: privatizing the reservations. They sought to divide up
existing lands into farming plots assigned to heads of individual families
and then sell off the vast “surplus” lands to settlers.60 Land division, also
called allotment, aimed to eliminate communally held lands, destroying the
power of chiefs and Native ways of life. Privatization imposed a settler
model of kinship based on the patriarchal couple, modes unrecognized by
Native tribes that saw aunts and uncles, cousins, siblings of spouses,
multiple lovers, and others as immediate family.61 Rupturing Indigenous
gender roles and sexual customs became a prime lever for rupturing
Indigenous ways of life.
In 1883, Alice Fletcher became a special agent of the Office of Indian
Affairs to survey Native lands across the country and determine their
suitability for division; she was also employed to divide the Omaha
Reservation, with Francis La Flesche as her interpreter. Fletcher had a
characteristically grandiose idea of her mission. She romanticized her return
trip to the Omaha as an unprecedented barrier crossing that traversed time
itself. “I go to the wild life, and unknown future, where the unknown past
may find a voice,” she pronounced.62 The Omaha were to have a future,
Fletcher decided, because she was to become their mouthpiece and their
guardian.
The Omaha Severalty Act of 1882, which Fletcher had helped modify so
that it ensured Omaha would have first dibs on some of their lands, divided
up seventy-six thousand acres into 954 distinct parcels. The remaining fifty
thousand acres were opened to purchase by white settlers. Some Omaha
were eager to hold family-based titles to their land, thereby protecting it
from squatting or other theft. But this group, which generally had a positive
view of assimilation, comprised only one-quarter of the tribe. A full one-
third of the tribe actively resisted allotment, insisting that land should
remain legally held by the tribe as a whole, in keeping with their custom.
Fletcher enlisted the help of the local police to round up rebellious Omaha
and force them to privatize their land.63
Severing communally held land into private parcels assigned to male
heads of family or to couples provided a perfect settler feminist opportunity.
Fletcher would save the Omaha by imposing settler gender and sexual
norms upon them. Omaha society was nonmonogamous; men were
permitted to take more than one wife, though Fletcher and La Flesche noted
that polygamy wasn’t a common practice.64 Two years prior, Sitting Bull
had asked her, according to her own telling, to give Hunkpapa Lakota
women a future. Now among the Omaha, she relished enforcing
monogamous, patriarchal ways of life.
Allotment gutted collective tribal authority, reducing Native-held land to
monogamous marriages and making women, for the first time,
economically dependent upon their husbands. Fletcher knew that this would
be a serious downgrade in status for many Native women. That same year,
she acknowledged that a Native woman told her, “I’m glad I’m not a white
woman!” when informed of married women’s lack of rights to own property
or custody of their children in Anglo America.65 But Indigenous women’s
rights were of secondary importance to settler feminism. Of primary
importance was rescuing them from barbarism, a rescue that simultaneously
bolstered white women’s authority. A decline in Native women’s rights and
agency was merely the price of progress.
Fletcher’s work privatizing Omaha land became a rehearsal for
extending the practice nationwide. Allotment became key to the US
government’s new approach to the West: now that the military had defeated
the tribes, assimilation, rather than conquest, became the goal. Fletcher’s
expertise lent her a key voice in shaping this new agenda. Initially,
reformers and legislators considered allotting land to tribes, not to
individuals. But Fletcher rejected this plan. “Under no circumstances should
land be patented to a tribe,” she informed the annual conference of white
Indian reformers in 1884, held on a flowery estate at Lake Mohonk in
upstate New York. “The principle is wrong.”66 She suspected that tribally
held lands would enable communal forms of governance and kinship to
continue. Fletcher’s civilizing agenda entailed full assimilation, and
eventual citizenship, for Native Americans. That meant collective
communities in ongoing relationships with the land must be divided into
individual families holding private property.
In keeping with her settler feminist position, this rescue work was to be
done for the Indians, not “side by side” with them, as Zitkala-Ša would
endorse in her speech at the Indiana Opera House a decade later. Initial
drafts of the allotment policy, named the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887, as
well as an amendment passed by the House of Representatives, gave tribes
consent over privatization: two-thirds of a tribe must endorse allotment, or
it would not take place. Fletcher pushed back here, too. “The work must be
done for them whether they approve or not,” she insisted. “We have
inherited the guardianship of the Indians[,] we must therefore act for the
benefit of our wards.” But some of her white allies felt that she went too far
in imagining her maternal authority over Natives. “She has fallen into a
wretched sentimental way of calling the Omahas her children—her babies,”
a fellow reformer complained.67
White women did not yet have electoral power, but women like Fletcher
were beginning to wield significant political influence.68 In the summer of
1885, Fletcher diligently researched what would become a 693-page report
on the history and progress of “Indian education and civilization,” which
included updates on treaty obligations that remained unfulfilled by the US
government. This research positioned her as an unparalleled authority, and
she leveraged her power to convince Senator Dawes to rewrite his act so
that allotments would be granted to individual heads of families and not
patented to tribes at large. Later that fall, Fletcher lobbied Congress directly
in support of her vision.
The Dawes Act was the first major Indian policy in a century, and no
single individual had more effect on its final shape, Fletcher’s biographer
Joan Mark argues, than Alice Fletcher. Fletcher’s agenda won out: no tribal
consent, and land was divided up among individual families and assigned to
heads of households rather than allotted to communities or even couples. A
pathway to eventual citizenship—a key marker of civilized status—was the
reward for privatizing land. All land in excess of the 160-acre family
parcels, 80 acres assigned to single people over eighteen, and, in some
tribes, 40 acres to children, was opened for sale. This sometimes meant
breaking treaties, such as with the Sioux, for communal lands, an agenda
Fletcher and other Lake Mohonk reformers eagerly embraced. Fifty percent
of the Great Sioux Reservation was sold to white settlers within just twenty
years.69
Fletcher carried out a significant portion of land allotments herself. In
her ten years of work as special agent for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, she
allotted land to 1.5 percent of the national Indigenous population—about
forty-four hundred people. Typically, Fletcher surveyed the lands and chose
the plots to be assigned, though she was a newcomer to the territory. Yet she
did her work carefully, all too aware that much reservation land was arid
and not suitable for dwelling or farming. Some of her most extensive work
was among the Nez Perce in northern Idaho, a tribe largely resistant to
privatizing land. For several springs beginning in 1889, Fletcher traveled to
Idaho with her new domestic partner, the photographer E. Jane Gay. Gay
took photographs, wrote, and kept house while Fletcher surveyed and
privatized the land to male heads of households, against the majority of the
tribe’s wishes. All remaining lands were sold off to white settlers. As a
result of Fletcher’s allotment work, the Nez Perce lost 75 percent of their
lands, a full half-million acres.70
It was the beginning of a long, most likely romantic, partnership
between Fletcher and Gay. It may be tempting to call Fletcher’s situation in
Idaho ironic: here she was, imposing compulsory heterosexuality upon a
tribe who maintained radically different romantic and kinship relations, all
while freeing herself from those very same norms personally and
professionally. Yet her situation wasn’t ironic, for it wasn’t the result of
unintended consequence: it was by design. To Fletcher and other white
feminists, white women were civilized, without question, and same-sex
attachments among each other didn’t jeopardize this status. Their moral
authority was the backbone of moral progress, whether they lived with
husbands or in the so-called “Boston marriages” that united upper-class
white women in enduring companionship. Feminist scholar Jasbir K. Puar
has named this problematic phenomenon “homonationalism”: the fantasy
that white gay life is inherently civilized and good for the nation, whereas
Black, brown, and Asian nonheterosexual life is primitive, backward, and a
threat to progress.71 Puar was writing about the twenty-first century, but the
dynamic reaches back to the late nineteenth and the women like Fletcher
and Gay who used their location in the “frontier” to liberate themselves
from patriarchal sexual norms while simultaneously imposing them upon
others.
In 1891, Fletcher and Gay together bought a house in Washington, DC,
where they lived with Fletcher’s research associate Francis La Flesche for
the next sixteen years. (La Flesche and Fletcher had been living together
since 1884.) La Flesche was restricted to a portion of the house. Fletcher,
committed as ever to the idea she was a mother to all Natives, attempted to
adopt La Flesche when he was thirty-four years old. The adoption was
never legally formalized because it would have meant he would lose his
surname, but throughout their long working relationship she saw La Flesche
as an assistant rather than as a valuable colleague with cultural and
linguistic knowledge she would never attain. He may have had an entirely
different relationship to the idea of adoption, for adoption as an adult was
an accepted part of Omaha culture.72
La Flesche was also quite possibly a lover, completing the picture of this
decidedly queer household. Fletcher destroyed all her personal papers, so
few details are known of the relationship between Gay, Fletcher, and La
Flesche, except for something of its tumultuous end. In 1906, Francis
married Rosa Bourassa, a Chippewa woman who had attended Carlisle, and
she moved in. Several weeks later, Jane, Alice, and Francis were all struck
with illness. A dramatic confrontation, the content of which we have no
records, occurred between Alice and Jane at Alice’s bedside, and Jane
moved out two weeks later, never to return. Francis and Rosa were divorced
by the end of the year, and he and Fletcher continued to live together until
her death in 1923.73 Despite the absence of details, it is clear that Fletcher
used her increased social standing to conduct her own domestic
relationships however she chose—the very agency she denied to those she
deemed less evolved.
Fletcher’s continued anthropological work, much of it done with La
Flesche, launched her into new professional heights. She published
extensively on Indigenous cultural traditions, especially music and dance.
In the fall of 1890, she was awarded a paid research position at Harvard’s
Peabody Museum that a wealthy benefactress created specifically for her.
The new position was for Fletcher alone—La Flesche continued as her
unpaid research assistant. At Harvard, the fellowship had limited reach, for
she didn’t have students of her own to train. But she was now a full-time
professional scholar and the first woman to have an appointment at
Harvard. To the community of middle-class white feminists in DC, her
university position was a major victory, and she was now feted by the same
kinds of societies she had helped to found twenty years earlier. Eight
hundred people attended a lavish reception held by the women’s clubs of
DC to celebrate Fletcher; she spent five hours greeting guests in the
customary receiving line.74
Alice Fletcher at her writing desk. (Courtesy of National Anthropological
Archives, Smithsonian Institution)
That winter, Fletcher was an invited speaker at the now annual National
Council of Women conference held at Washington, DC’s Albaugh’s Opera
House. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who had founded
the organization, were also on the agenda. Prominent suffragist and
temperance reformer Frances Willard, with whom Fletcher had served as
secretary and organizer of the Association for the Advancement of Women,
introduced the anthropologist with fanfare. “We are particularly proud of
her as a Fellow of the Museum of the Scientific School of Harvard
University,” Willard announced. “She is the first bird of a flock.”75
Fletcher’s speech assumed her leadership among feminists, and it
assumed all those feminists united behind the civilizing agenda. She began
“Our Duty Toward Dependent Races” with a statement of equality: that all
the world’s races have a right “to exist,” free of attempted “destruction by
war, pestilence, or absorption.” But true to the evolutionary hierarchy to
which she was so committed, she argued that races were not equal in
development. “It is plainly seen that the white race has led the march of
human progress,” she asserted, as evidenced by its monopoly of “the higher
arts and sciences” and its superior land holdings. This posed a dilemma.
“What shall we from our abundance give to those dependent upon us?” she
asked her fellow reformers.76
But Fletcher’s audience at the National Council of Women was not only
composed of white feminists eager to bolster their own position through
civilizing people of color. Others had distinct ideas of feminism’s meaning,
objectives, and vision for change. After all, like all social movements,
feminism is less a fixed platform than a rotating scene of ongoing tensions,
debates, and outright conflicts.
The next scheduled speaker was none other than Frances E. W. Harper.
Willard didn’t introduce Harper, who launched right into pointed critique:
“While Miss Fletcher has advocated the cause of the Indian and negro
under the caption of Dependent Races,” Harper began, “I deem it a
privilege to present the negro, not as a mere dependent asking for Northern
sympathy or Southern compassion, but as a member of the body politic who
has a claim upon the nation for justice.”77
Justice, Harper emphasized, was a right pertaining equally to all,
regardless of whites’ self-serving fantasies that their “rights of property or
the claims of superior intelligence” placed other races under their
magnanimous care. “While politicians,” she concluded, “ask in strange
bewilderment, ‘What shall we do with weaker races?’ I hold that Jesus
Christ answered that question nearly two thousand years since. ‘Whatsoever
ye would that men should do to you, do you even so to them.’”78 While
white feminists like Stanton, Stowe, and Fletcher consolidated around the
civilizing project, despite their competing approaches to the cause,
intersectional feminists like Harper, Harriet Jacobs, and Zitkala-Ša threw
off white women’s aggressive benevolence and stressed their right to self-
determination.
Four years later, Alice Fletcher was named vice president of the
anthropology section of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, the first woman elevated to a leadership position in the nation’s
most prestigious scientific organization. Her search for the origins of
women’s oppression in Native society had propelled her into the status of
the nation’s leading woman scientist. Fletcher’s influence would inspire a
new generation of women scientists, physicians, and anthropologists in the
decades to come. Her protégés included Susette La Flesche, Francis’s half
sister, who went on, under Fletcher’s mentorship, to become the first Native
woman to receive a medical degree. Anthropologist Margaret Mead
likewise followed in Fletcher’s footsteps, building on her work with the
Omaha beginning in the 1930s.79
Meanwhile, land privatization was continuing apace. The Dawes Act
included a provision that families could not sell their lands for twenty-five
years, in an attempt to ensure the oncoming rush of settlers wouldn’t
swindle Natives out of their property. But most Natives ended up leasing
their parcels to settlers, opting not to become crop farmers themselves, and
this effectively led to losing their lands. By 1934, when allotment policy
was radically changed under the Indian Reorganization Act, Native
Americans had lost ninety million acres, two-thirds of the lands they had
controlled at the act’s passage.80 The Dawes Act is now considered by
many to be the most harmful federal Indian policy in US history.
Alice Fletcher’s chosen method for political work, true to her settler
feminism, was severance. Zitkala-Ša’s, by contrast, was collectivizing, and
her method of collective power turned the tactic of severance into an
opening. Boarding schools were designed to eradicate tribal attachments.
But paradoxically, as scholar Brenda Child argues, they also brought
together children of tribes from across the country, creating the possibility
of cross-tribal networks between Natives from disparate regions for the first
time.81 Zitkala-Ša was at the forefront of turning these relationships into
real political power.
Despite her success in prestigious national venues, Zitkala-Ša walked
away from individual literary and artistic pursuits in the early twentieth
century, ceasing to publish. The clubwoman approach of professional
attainment was not for her. She along with Montezuma was eager to
contribute her talents to form a new pan-Indian political organization
bringing together tribes across the country. But their visions diverged
sharply: he wanted sex-segregated associations, and she was a feminist who
wanted to work in coalition. “I feel like putting my hand forward and
simply wiping the Indian men’s committee into no where!!!” she wrote him.
“Am I not an Indian woman as capable in serious matters and as thoroughly
interested in the race—as any one or two of you men put together? Why do
you dare leave me out?” Her outrage echoed disagreements between the
two of them about a future marriage, in which she balked at his desire for
her to play the supporting role of an assimilated doctor’s wife, or what she
called “a fine horse to draw your wagon!”82 She soon ended the relationship
and married Raymond Bonnin, a childhood friend from Yankton, in the
spring of 1902.
While living in Utah with Bonnin on the Ute Reservation a decade later,
Zitkala-Ša collaborated with Mormon composer William Hanson on an
opera bringing aspects of the Sun Dance ceremony to the stage, the ritual
Alice Fletcher had watched in fascination at Pine Ridge in the 1880s. After
two years of joint work on the libretto and score, The Sun Dance Opera was
first staged in Vernal, Utah, in 1913, featuring Ute singers and dancers. It is
one of the very first Native-led performances in US theater history, and it
brought to life a story of heroic resistance rather than the tragic pageants or
sensationalized Wild West shows that formed the bulk of Native-themed
entertainment. Zitkala-Ša’s efforts to bring Dakota and Sioux legends and
spirituality to broad audiences are acts of both translation and community
preservation, though it was far from an “authentic” rendering of the dance.
Yet perhaps this, too, was part of Zitkala-Ša’s vision for her people:
continued evolution, rather than a fossilized past. As Laguna Pueblo
feminist Paula Gunn Allen underscores, eradicating culture and imagination
is a central part of settler colonialism. “The wars of imperial conquest,” she
writes, “have been fought within the bodies, minds, and hearts of the people
of the earth for dominion over them. I think this is the reason traditionals
say we must remember our origins, our cultures, our histories, our mothers
and grandmothers, for without that memory, which implies continuance
rather than nostalgia, we are doomed to engulfment.”83 Zitkala-Ša used her
education not to assimilate but to resist engulfment.
After nearly fifteen years in Utah supporting the Ute tribe, Zitkala-Ša
began to realize her dream of national organizing on behalf of collective
Native rights. She and her husband moved to Washington, DC, where she
was active in Native American politics from the mid-1910s until her death
in 1938. She took leadership in a variety of causes, some now sharply
criticized as assimilation campaigns and others upheld as progressive
models: advocating for access to US citizenship; combatting peyote use—a
largely conservative movement that saw her working with Pratt as an ally;
fighting to end Bureau of Indian Affairs control over Native tribes; and
especially, fighting land theft and gross abuses of power enabled by the
Dawes Act. She wrote extensively, yet no longer for the pleasure reading of
a literary audience: she edited the Society of American Indians (SAI)
Quarterly Journal, conducted long negotiations by letter with federal
agents, and researched and reported land abuses from California to
Oklahoma. In one six-year period, she gave four hundred public lectures,
mostly to women’s clubs to recruit allies for Indian citizenship. World War I
particularly incensed her: a full 25 percent of Native men enlisted to fight
for the United States, yet all were still barred from suffrage and access to
courts. But “if he is good enough to fight for American ideals,” she
countered, “he is good enough for American citizenship now.”84 Natives in
most states were granted US citizenship in 1924, though their reservations
were still under the oily thumb of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The work
was far from done.
When SAI collapsed, Zitkala-Ša and her husband founded the National
Council of American Indians in 1926, based in Washington, DC. Zitkala-Ša,
now fifty years old, served as president. Under the motto “Help Indians
Help Themselves in Protecting Their Rights and Properties,” they
represented forty-nine tribes, often via lobbying and testifying in
congressional hearings, while also traveling up to eleven thousand miles per
year across the Midwest and West to investigate tribal conditions and
editing and distributing the Indian Newsletter among reservations. Through
this leadership, Zitkala-Ša became the most prominent Native woman
activist in the United States.85
One of Zitkala-Ša’s most significant political achievements was her
coauthored pamphlet, Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians (1924), which earned
a congressional hearing into the exploitation of Natives’ oil-rich lands, such
as settler men’s kidnapping and raping Indian children to weasel control of
their allotted forty acres. While the hearing had little immediate result, it is
credited with inspiring Congress to authorize an investigation of abuses on
reservations that, a decade later, led to the Indian Reorganization Act of
1934 (IRA). Also known as the Indian New Deal, the IRA was as large a
shift in federal Indian policy as the Dawes Act had been fifty years earlier.
But while the Dawes Act adopted the policy of conquest via assimilation
rather than military defeat, the IRA moved toward Native sovereignty. The
act terminated the still ongoing process of allotting land; restored unallotted
lands to tribes, now recognized as semi-sovereign nations; and legalized
Native religious practices, including the Sun Dance. Fifty years after
Fletcher began allotting land in Nebraska and Zitkala-Ša first stepped foot
onto the property of White’s Manual, Zitkala-Ša helped end assimilation
policy, restoring some measure of tribal self-determination. Back in South
Dakota, she organized her tribe to resist the new IRA-imposed constitution,
composing one of their own that prohibited federal control of tribal
affairs.86
Yet when Zitkala-Ša died in impoverishment at sixty-two in 1938, what
little remained of her legacy was largely obscured by the settler norms she
so fiercely resisted. While the New York Times published a brief obituary
mentioning “Mrs. R.T. Bonnin’s” work in Indian rights, her own death
certificate merely read “Gertrude Bonnin from South Dakota—
Housewife.”87

PART II - CLEANSING

CHAPTER FOUR
BIRTHING A BETTER NATION

Margaret Sanger and Dr. Dorothy Ferebee
When the history of our civilization is written, it will be a biological history,
and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine.
—H. G. Wells
ON A STEAMY MID-JULY DAY IN 1912, JEWISH RUSSIAN
IMMIGRANT JAKE SACHS FINISHED his shift driving trucks,
returned home, and climbed up the dark stairwell to his third-floor
apartment. The three rooms Jake shared with his wife Sadie and their young
children in New York’s notorious tenement district were much like their
neighbors’: lacking direct sunlight and running water. Windows opened
only onto narrow, garbage-filled airshafts. On the Lower East Side, over
five hundred thousand people made their homes in buildings initially
designed for one-fifth that number.1 But poverty left the Sachs family and
those like them with few options. That day, a tragic scene befell Jake when
he opened the door. Their three children howled with anger and fear as
twenty-eight-year-old Sadie’s slight frame lay prone on the bare floor.
Pregnant once more, Sadie had sought the advice of neighbors. She couldn’t
imagine another mouth to feed, another body to clothe, on Jake’s paltry
earnings. She had tried drugs and purgatives, but they failed to relieve her
of the pregnancy. Finally, she borrowed a sharp instrument from a friend,
and inserted it into her uterus. The result was a raging case of sepsis, an
often-fatal infection of the blood. By the time Jake arrived home, Sadie was
unconscious.
Disinclined to go to a hospital, Jake called a doctor known to the
neighborhood. The doctor brought along a nurse to help him save Sadie’s
life. It would be no easy task. All the water, food, medicine, and ice to keep
Sadie’s dangerous infection at bay had to be hauled up three flights of stairs
in stifling heat. All the waste was carried downstairs to the toilet shared by
the hundreds of people in the building. The nurse stayed three weeks,
stealing only little snacks of sleep as “days and nights were melted into a
torpid inferno.”2 Yet the neighbors were kind, coming every day to care for
Sadie, bringing soups, entrees, custards, and drinks as she improved.
At the end of the three weeks, as the nurse prepared to depart, Sadie
summoned the courage to ask, “Another baby will finish me, I suppose?”
Her nurse hedged, replying only, “It’s too early to talk about that.”
The doctor arrived to make his last call, and the nurse relayed Sadie’s
fear about becoming pregnant again. He minced no words.
“Any more such capers, young woman,” he scolded, “and there will be
no need to call me.”
“But,” she trembled, “what can I do to prevent getting that way again?”
“Oh ho.” The doctor laughed. “You want your cake while you eat it, too,
do you? Well, it can’t be done.” He picked up his coat and bag, and with a
friendly pat on her back dispensed his official advice as he left the room:
“Tell Jake to sleep on the roof!”3
Sadie and her nurse locked eyes. The nurse fought back tears as Sadie,
in despair, pleaded for information—information Sadie knew was readily
available to middle-class women, for they had many fewer children than
she and her neighbors did.
“He can’t understand, can he?” she implored. “But you do, don’t you?
You’re a woman and you’ll tell me the secret and I’ll never tell it to a
soul.”4
The nurse, too, was now distraught. Despite her medical training, she
knew of only two techniques, and she felt neither condoms nor the
withdrawal method was likely to be of any interest to Sadie. The nurse had
previously concluded that tenement husbands were quite disinclined to use
contraceptive methods. She had nothing to tell Sadie, promising only to
return in a few days. But days turned into months. The nurse couldn’t
contend with the woman and her circumstances, though Sadie’s face
haunted her dreams.
Three months later, the nurse received a phone call just as she was
preparing for bed. It was Jake, in full distress, begging her to come attend to
his desperately ill wife. She had sought the services of a five-dollar
abortionist who left her severely injured. The nurse was loath to return, but
she took the subway downtown and climbed up the three flights of stairs.
She found Sadie in a coma. Within ten minutes of her arrival, Sadie was
dead. Jake was inconsolable, mad with grief.
“My God! My God! My God!” he wailed, pulling at his hair, pacing in
circles through the tiny rooms.5
The nurse folded Sadie’s thin hands over her breast and took to her own
pacing through the city streets, walking for hours before she returned home
uptown. From her own apartment window, she watched the sun rise and
throw its glow onto the rooftops stretched before her. She felt a dawn
breaking inside her, too. The nurse realized she “was finished with
palliatives and superficial cures; [she] was resolved to seek out the root of
evil, to do something to change the destiny of mothers whose miseries were
as vast as the sky.” The nurse flung her bag from her hands, tore off her
uniform, and swore off nursing forever. She resolved to dedicate herself
henceforth to what she saw as the true underlying cause of Sadie’s misery:
“uncontrolled breeding.”6
Sadie’s tragedy is Margaret Sanger’s favorite vignette relating how she
transformed from a part-time nurse into a full-time birth control crusader. In
Sadie Sachs’s story, Sanger artfully brings to life the suffering of an
individual woman in order to move her audience, though the even more
finely tuned protagonist of the story is Sanger herself—Sadie is the foil for
Sanger’s self-birth. This origin story is almost certainly apocryphal, likely a
composite of various women Sanger treated when she worked as a nurse.
But what’s more revealing than the somewhat self-aggrandizing vignette
is the moralizing that frames it when she repeats the story in her second
autobiography. Sanger makes clear that the poverty of the tenements
disgusted her. “I hated the wretchedness and hopelessness of the poor, and
never experienced that satisfaction in working among them that so many
noble women have found,” she divulges. When in the Lower East Side,
among “the submerged, untouched classes… the utmost depression came
over me… I seemed to be breathing a different air, to be in another world
and country where the people had habits and customs alien to anything I
had ever heard about.”7 Sanger grew up working class in rural New York,
one of eleven children. She frames the immigrant Lower East Side as a
place utterly beyond the pale of her prior experience.
By regularly and forcefully locating her own birth as a contraception
activist in the tenements, Margaret Sanger set the stakes of her work and
legacy. She laid out the twin imperatives of her mission for birth control:
enabling women’s autonomy and preventing “uncontrolled breeding”
among the poor and so-called unfit. These goals were intertwined, not
merely adjacent. Sanger positioned birth control as a method of eugenics.
She saw contraception as a technological asset and the “entering wedge” in
the nefarious eugenics movement that aimed to strengthen the nation by
regulating the alleged hereditary quality of its people. For Sanger, the arc of
the universe was long, and it bent toward population cleansing, an endpoint
contraception could hasten. “Birth control itself, often denounced as a
violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the
process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or
those who will become defectives,” she explained. The “unfit” was a wildly
capacious category, comprising the physically and mentally disabled,
impoverished, ill, queer, alcoholic, and criminal, among others. Sanger
believed that a full “one-fourth” of the US population was unfit, and
progress depended upon preventing them from bearing children.8
This is the central tension of Margaret Sanger’s white feminism: sexual
autonomy for the so-called fit, reproductive violence for the so-called unfit.
It has made her one of the most enduringly controversial feminists in
history. And yet her birth control movement accelerated despite the internal
contradictions of feminist eugenics.
Sanger’s movement grew because she introduced a new strategy that
became a standard feature of white feminism in the twentieth century. Her
nineteenth-century predecessors had cloaked their supremacy in the soft
folds of civilization. Women like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Alice Fletcher
attempted to reform racial groups they saw as their inferiors by offering
pathways to assimilation and opportunities for conversion. These were all
forms of discipline yoked to state, capitalist, and religious power, guided by
the belief that white culture was inherently superior. But they were forms of
control extended with a soft smile and a sympathetic tear. Sanger helped
inaugurate a different mode, one in which the cloak of sentimentality fell
off, baring the wolf beneath. She insisted that “stupid, cruel
sentimentalism” merely encouraged the proliferation of the mentally,
physically, and financially unfit into the future, creating much needless
suffering.9 To her, eugenics was a modern, scientific version of reform that
would neutralize social ills at their source, creating a more successful
society.
Nor did she shirk from the grim implications of her eugenic vision,
warning that “possibly drastic and Spartan methods” may prove necessary
to stop the dangerous breeding unleashed by the pattern of benevolence.10
Her approach inaugurated a shift in white feminist politics as a whole
toward a model that sought to rid modernity of people deemed unworthy. In
the nineteenth century, civilizing was the key strategy of white feminism,
and it promised that anyone could be made useful to white society. But now
in the twentieth, the strategy became cleansing, and with it came harsh
consequences for those deemed to jeopardize the progress of civilization.
One morning in 1929, a Black boy named Johnny still too young for school
took his two-year-old brother by the hand and walked him a few houses
down Third Street in southeast Washington, DC. Their mother’s job as a
domestic servant required her to leave at six o’clock in the morning, so
Johnny dropped the toddler off at a neighbor’s who watched over him.11 As
they approached the neighbor’s door, she slid her front window open.
“I can’t take your brother today, I’m sick,” she told him. “Go home.”
Once back inside, the toddler began to cry. He usually had his breakfast
at the neighbor’s. When Johnny opened the icebox and found it empty,
devoid even of ice, he, too, began to cry. How would he feed his brother?
Remembering that some people in the neighborhood received milk delivery
in the mornings, he stepped outside. Directly opposite, a fresh milk bottle
gleamed from the step of the only white family on the block. Johnny
watched the milkman disappear around the corner, and he ventured across
the street. Cradling the quart of milk in his arms, he ran back toward his
house when a policeman appeared, immediately suspicious.
“Hey, you there. Hey, you there!” the policeman called out. Johnny
didn’t say a word. “Caught you stealing, huh? Caught you stealing,” the
policeman declared, convinced the boy’s silence confessed guilt.
“No, I’m not stealing,” the boy protested. “My little brother is hungry.”
“I don’t care if he is hungry, you can’t steal milk.” Grabbing him by the
neck, he steered Johnny down to Fifth Street and into the police station,
where he instructed the booking agent to jail the child.
“Please call Dr. Boulding,” Johnny pleaded. “She knows me and she
will help.” Dr. Dorothy Boulding had served her medical internship at
Howard University’s Freedmen’s Hospital, a position that regularly
dispatched her to Johnny’s neighborhood—which was also her own.
Though she was now a clinical instructor in obstetrics at Howard Medical
School and was soon to become the head physician in charge of all women
students at Howard, she was still widely available in the neighborhood.
When she received the call at her Howard office, she hopped back into her
roadster—a gift from a wealthy uncle when she graduated medical school—
and headed down to the Fifth Street precinct. She found Johnny behind the
counter and the booking agent and the policeman standing watch.
“They’re going to put me in jail!” Johnny exclaimed to Dr. Boulding.
“What about this?” she entreated.
“Well, he’s been stealing. We caught him stealing a bottle of milk.”
“I wasn’t stealing, I was getting some milk for my baby brother!”
Johnny again explained.
“Do you mean to tell me that you would arrest a little boy who’s trying
to help his baby brother who’s hungry?” Dr. Boulding inquired of the
officer in her polite but commanding tone.
“Well, I don’t care whether or not there’s anything in the house,” the
policeman retorted.
The booking agent displayed more empathy and agreed to release the
boy into her care. Dr. Boulding insisted on taking the milk with them,
paying the seventeen cents the police requested. She took Johnny home,
where they found his little brother distraught, howling and thrashing about
in his bed. A plan took shape in Dr. Boulding’s mind. “There’s something
wrong with this town,” she realized. “Any time a child goes hungry, and the
mother has to work and leave a child home like this, we need some place
for children.”12
Johnny’s troubles—or, in another telling she gave the boy’s name as
Georgie—were Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee’s story of how she came to
launch the Southeast Settlement House in 1929. Dr. Boulding, who married
Howard University dentist Dr. Claude Ferebee in 1930, came from a
prominent Boston family that specialized in law. Though her father’s
parents were born enslaved, her grandfather escaped to Philadelphia and
later became a Virginia politician. Her uncle George Lewis Ruffin was the
first Black graduate of Harvard Law School, and another seven of her
relatives worked as attorneys. But Dorothy’s calling was in public health,
and she finished as the top student out of her class of 136 at Tufts Medical
School in 1924.13 Through the tool of medicine, she felt she could serve the
needs of Black communities much less prosperous than her own and who
were almost universally excluded from existing social services on account
of their race. Her notion of public health was vast, encompassing nutrition,
sex education, medical care, and child-rearing in a project of health equity.
She maintained a private practice in addition to her instructional and
administrative duties at Howard Medical School. Despite these professional
pressures, she threw herself into the task of establishing a funded daycare
for poor Black families in her neighborhood.
Savvily, Ferebee approached the board of directors of a well-resourced
white daycare around the block, proposing they join forces and establish an
integrated program, such as she had seen in Boston. “It was as if I had
thrown a bomb into the room,” she recalled. Everyone erupted at once: it
was simply impossible to admit Black children to the Friendship House.
“Well, will you help us?” she pivoted. Now her request for funds seemed
like a conciliation, and a wealthy white woman immediately offered $1,000;
her peers chimed in with smaller contributions. Ferebee already had secured
$5,000 from a local seed agency, which was later reorganized as United
Way, and had set her sights on an empty house on G Street. She organized a
board of directors, negotiated down the landlord’s price, and opened the
Southeast Settlement House offering daycare and after-school programs, the
first institution of its kind in the city serving Black youth. She served as
president of its board of directors until 1942. By the time of Ferebee’s death
in 1980, the organization served more than twelve thousand people a year
drawing on an annual budget of more than $2 million.14
As Ferebee saw it, middle-class Black women like her had a
“responsibility for promoting the physical, mental, and spiritual advance of
the race.”15 She was among those of the educated Black middle class who
endorsed the era’s doctrine of racial uplift, in which they assigned
themselves the duty of lifting up the Black poor into a higher stage of
civilization. This was a charitable ideology shaped by no small amount of
elitism. Uplift doctrine had particular appeal for Black women reformers of
the professional classes, who began forming hundreds of Black women’s
clubs around the country in the 1890s. While Black clubwomen embraced,
and indeed developed, respectability politics, their societies were not mere
counterparts of the apolitical, self-advancing white women’s club
movement that Alice Fletcher had helped launch in the 1870s. These clubs
were overtly political, often devoted to large-scale reforms in childcare,
housing, antilynching, healthcare, voting rights, and fair wages that
reflected their understanding of the web of challenges facing the millions of
Black people living in poverty.
Both Sanger and Ferebee understood that racism left the Black poor in
dire need of healthcare, including contraception. When Sanger committed
to bringing birth control to Black southern women in the 1940s, she and
Ferebee would work together directly on the ill-fated Negro Project. Yet
they had distinct agendas. Almost from the beginning of the birth control
movement, these two feminist approaches existed side by side. Sanger
embraced contraception as a technology that would transform the quality of
the world’s people, securing “fit” women’s sexual autonomy and limiting
the reproduction of the “unfit.” Ferebee folded contraception into the
broader goal of health justice, which included supporting poor women’s
reproductive choices and improving the living conditions of their children.
These two approaches were each a mixed bag: each celebrated women’s
sexuality, but also incorporated eugenics to one degree or another. Yet only
one, Sanger’s movement for the right not to give birth, has gone down in
history as a significant feminist achievement, and it’s the one that most fully
incorporated eugenics into its agenda. The other, Ferebee’s project for the
ability to prevent pregnancy, but also for the right of poor women to have
children and to parent them in safe environments—an approach Black
activist Loretta Ross termed reproductive justice in the 1990s—barely gets
a footnote.16 But the history of birth control activism includes both Sanger’s
movement to prevent pregnancies as well as the counterhistory of
reproductive justice. When we only remember the former, we participate in
the white feminist fantasy that sex difference is the single axis on which the
world turns, obliterating all other dimensions of social power that
profoundly shape public health and reproductive choices.
In the early twentieth century, New York became the nation’s center of trade
and finance, and its robust economy depended on cheap labor. Southern and
Eastern Europeans streamed into the city, and its population more than
doubled between 1890 and 1920. Among the immigrants were 1.5 million
Yiddish-speaking Jews fleeing organized massacres within the Russian
empire. By 1900, two-thirds of New York City’s population lived in the
tenements; 2.3 million people were facing living situations like Sadie’s and
Jake’s. Jacob Riis had exposed to the world the dire conditions of the Lower
East Side tenements in his famous 1888 book How the Other Half Lives,
including the bone-chilling 10 percent infant mortality rate.17
Reformers like Sanger were desperate to alleviate the suffering of the
poor. Many saw capitalism as the source of this severe social inequality.
Sanger, the daughter of a free-spirited socialist, initially took this
perspective and became quite active in the left-wing branches of the labor
movement, including the Industrial Workers of the World. But her
experiences as a nurse in the tenements she so hated impelled her to
envision another culprit.
Sanger insisted that the central problem facing New York’s immigrant
class and the nation as a whole was not capitalism, but endless births that
drained women’s strength and produced “low-quality” babies, prone to
defect. Civilization turned on one singular pivot for Sanger: the biological
merit of its population. And birth control was the lever to manipulate it. For
Sanger, many different types of people were unworthy of having children.
In her words, the unfit included the following:
the physically disabled morons
idiots
the feebleminded
psychopaths
unemployables
the epileptic
the sick
imbeciles
the insane
diseased slum populations
the criminal
the chronically poor
the alcoholic
Eugenicists and race scientists had invented the new terms “moron,”
“imbecile,” and “idiot” to diagnose distinct levels of mental incapacity,
terms that are now common today as everyday insults—a symptom of
eugenicists’ successes. Their term “feebleminded” was a broad diagnosis of
mental and sometimes physical disability that was also applied to queer and
poor women. As Sanger’s list implies, “unfit” was also a capacious
category, a melting pot gone rancid.
Eugenics and feminism may seem to be opposed agendas, but they take
ready shelter together under the umbrella of white feminist thought, which
reduces complex social hierarchies to the single dynamic of sex. Following
this model, Sanger embraced a single-axis solution to broad political and
economic inequality: improving the biological worth of the population by
regulating the women who could give birth. “A Nation rises or sinks on the
physical quality of its citizens,” she believed.18 Enabling women to have
fewer children, and enabling the nation to eliminate the so-called unfit were
two paths to the same destination: progress by way of a distinctly biological
approach.
Unlike many other white eugenicists, however, Sanger was firm that
unfit was not in itself a racial marker, that all races had fit and unfit
members.19 For Sanger, mental and physical disability were her targets. She
believed, however, these traits concentrated among impoverished
communities with high birth rates—a conviction that unmistakably and
disproportionately brought immigrants and people of color under Sanger’s
regulatory gaze, even as she fought racism in other forms.
Sanger went to extraordinary measures to bring birth control to poor
women, services that, regardless of Sanger’s intentions, were desperately
wanted. In 1916, Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United
States in the storefront of a Brooklyn tenement building, distributing
pessary cervical caps she imported from Europe. She was promptly arrested
and cannily played her trial and jail time into media events that attracted
considerable support. She also secured a significant legal victory:
physicians could now prescribe contraception to married women. Birth
control, under the supervision of the medical profession, was now available
—but only for married women who could afford a doctor and only in New
York state. For the next five decades, Sanger built the birth control
movement to extend this victory across the United States, creating
organizations forceful enough to take on both the medical establishment and
the national hierarchy of the Catholic Church.
When Margaret Sanger coordinated the first national birth control
conference in the fall of 1921, she chose New York’s Plaza Hotel as her
launching pad. Perched on Fifth Avenue at the southeast corner of Central
Park, the nineteen stories of the Plaza—the most expensive construction of
its kind when it opened in 1907—take a commanding view of uptown
Manhattan. The First American Birth Control Conference brought
reformers and eugenicists, politicians and socialites together at the
landmark hotel to inaugurate the American Birth Control League. Sanger
had been working relentlessly to build a movement and declined to join one
of the several existing birth control organizations—she preferred to launch
her own, with herself at the head. Over a six-month period earlier that year,
she gave no less than forty-six public lectures; by the conference opening,
she had amassed a contact list of over thirty-one thousand supporters. The
opulent setting and prominent sponsors like Winston Churchill, then a
member of British Parliament, and novelist Theodore Dreiser underscored
that the days of storefront tenement clinics were long behind her.20
At the Plaza Hotel, Sanger opened the conference and announced the
aim of the new American Birth Control League: to give the instinct of sex
the same detailed attention civilized societies paid to the instinct of
hunger.21 Women’s sexual pleasure was of profound importance to Sanger,
a truly radical notion for her time. But she also saw sex as the seed of social
ills. She explained to her audience that the crux of birth control was its
ability to modernize sex and reproduction:
We see the healthy and fit elements of the nation carrying the burden
of the unfit…. We have erected palatial residences for the unfit, the
insane, for the feebleminded,—for those who should never have been
born, to say nothing of their being permitted to carry on the next
generation. Now the time has come when we must all join together in
stopping at its source misery, ignorance, delinquency and crime. This
is the program of the Birth Control movement.22
The league resolved that children should be “conceived in love” and “born
of the mother’s conscious desire.” They should be “only begotten under
conditions which render possible the heritage of health,” and the league
endorsed both contraception and sterilization as necessary methods to
prevent the reproduction of the unfit. From the very beginning, Sanger
united voluntary motherhood and eugenics into the same white feminist
agenda. Her vision of individual women’s liberation was intertwined with
the act of social cleansing. Birth control would free women from unwanted
births while simultaneously freeing civilization from “delinquency, defect
and dependence.”23
The closing event of the conference took the league’s missive out of the
rarefied Central Park air, down to the people in midtown Manhattan’s
theater district. Sanger, a massively popular figure in the early 1920s, and
her fellow league organizers, held a public birth control meeting at the
recently opened Town Hall venue on West Forty-Third Street. The meeting
drew tremendous interest—large enough that the police, at the urging of the
Catholic archbishop of New York, shut it down just before it was to begin.
The police captain ordered the doors padlocked, with a full-capacity
audience of fifteen hundred people captured inside. Sanger arrived at a
locked building while thousands more milled about in the streets. The
police were forced to open the doors to free the trapped audience, and
Sanger and others made their way inside and toward the looming stage. She
hesitated, trying to figure out how best to address the crowd.
The decision was made for her. A strong man hoisted her onstage, thrust
a bouquet of long-stem roses into her arms, and directed all eyes toward
Sanger. The dynamic Margaret Sanger was made for just this kind of public
speech, but she was arrested as soon as she took the podium, as was another
scheduled speaker. The New York World reported that a lively crowd of
three thousand singing “My Country ’Tis of Thee, Sweet Land of No
Liberty” followed the two prisoners down Forty-Third Street to the police
station on Broadway, where they were quickly released.24
The man who lifted Sanger up to the stage was the writer Lothrop
Stoddard, the nation’s most visible eugenicist and white supremacist.
Stoddard belonged to the Ku Klux Klan, inspired Nazi conceptions of the
inferior “under-man,” and as late as 1939 praised Nazis for “weeding out
the worst strains in the Germanic stock in a scientific and truly
humanitarian way.”25 By this point, Sanger had deliberately intertwined her
movement for contraception with the eugenics movement, and that meant
aligning herself with men like Stoddard. Stoddard himself served on the
organizing committee of the conference, as well as on the board of the new
league; Sanger also worked with two other notorious eugenicists, Henry
Pratt Fairchild and Harry Laughlin. All three were globally influential white
nationalists who embraced eugenics as a means to whiten the US
population. Sanger’s campaign for women’s sexual freedom was
underpinned by—not merely coincident with—her belief in eugenics.
The rediscovery of Austrian monk Gregor Mendel’s experiments with
the laws of heredity in 1900 and the subsequent development of genetics
had paved the way to the modern eugenics movement. Heredity was no
longer understood to be the result of experiences and environment.
Increasingly, the new model of the gene framed heredity as fixed and
unchangeable, and suggested that hundreds and thousands of traits and
behaviors had genetic origins. Sanger and other eugenicists saw mental and
physical disability, degeneracy, alcoholism, and poverty as conditions
printed on the gene. The idea of innate, immutable hereditary material that
transmitted disability and disease from one generation to the next,
unaltered, led eugenicists to seize women’s fertility as the best lever for
steering the direction of humanity. They feared that letting the genetically
“unfit” reproduce was to let them copy themselves manifold into the future,
like error-ridden newspapers rolling off the printing press.
But what was the best method to ensure that the unfit couldn’t
reproduce, thereby poisoning the gene pool? Segregation was one approach.
“Every feeble-minded girl or woman of the hereditary type, especially of
the moron class, should be segregated during the reproductive period,”
Sanger advised. Yet segregation was not a foolproof method, especially
among the degenerate. Wily women could easily escape their decades-long
confinement, giving rise to “an endless progeny of defect.” Sterilization
was, therefore, preferable to segregation, and throughout her lifetime
Sanger advocated that the state should take charge of the fertility of the
“incurably defective… either by force or persuasion.” Indiana had passed
the nation’s first eugenic law in 1907, granting the state government the
right to forcibly sterilize the unfit, including “confirmed criminals, idiots,
imbeciles, and rapists.” Over thirty states soon followed and sterilized
between sixty thousand and seventy thousand women by the late 1930s. As
late as 1950, when much of the nation had begun to recoil from eugenics in
the wake of Nazi Germany’s genocidal efforts at population cleansing,
Sanger recommended that unfit women who agreed to be sterilized should
receive state pensions of $75 per month on account of their contributions to
society.26
But sterilization, too, had its shortcomings. Surgical operations were
costly and lengthy; Sanger suspected sterilization was merely a “superficial
deterren[t] when applied to the constantly growing stream of the unfit.”
Contraceptives like condoms, pessaries, and douching solutions were much
easier to distribute, preventing more births among the “diseased and
incompetent masses” in the first place. She positioned birth control as the
prime method to eliminate people she referred to as “biological and racial
mistakes.”27
Sanger’s approach to eugenics had key differences from that of seething
racists like Stoddard, scientist Charles Davenport, and other white male
leaders of the campaign for so-called better breeding. Like all social
movements, eugenics comprised a network of distinct and often competing
methods and goals. Conservative male eugenics leaders had two objectives,
only the first of which Sanger shared: to reduce births among women they
declared genetically unworthy, and to increase births among “fit” women.
Conservative eugenicists railed against feminism and birth control, for they
wanted women like Sanger pregnant and at home, building the white race.
By the turn of the century, middle-class white women were beginning to
obtain college educations and start careers in large numbers. The “New
Woman” smoked cigarettes, rode bicycles, and maintained a public life in
town, thus they were less interested in raising half a dozen or more children
at home. Sanger herself is a good example of this shift: she had three
children; her mother had borne eleven.
Social conservatives were furious with the feminist New Women
uptown who seemingly shirked the social responsibility of counterbalancing
the large immigrant families downtown. Sociologist Edward Ross coined
the term “race suicide” in 1901, condemning native-born middle-class
women’s declining birth rate, in relation to immigrant women’s increasing
birth rate, as the coming death of the white race. Teddy Roosevelt spread
fears of race suicide from his presidential bully pulpit, and the term spread
like wildfire. To promote more white middle-class births, eugenicists held
“Better Baby” and “Fitter Family” contests at state and county fairs across
the country in the 1910s through the 1930s. In 1913 alone, the Better Babies
Bureau examined over 150,000 children.28 Contests awarded medals to
families with good looks, high IQs, numerous children, and robust bank
accounts.
Sanger agreed with conservative eugenicists that the high birth rate
among the unfit was “the greatest present menace to civilization.” But she
objected to the second goal of the conservative approach, or what she called
“orthodox eugenics,” which encouraged wealthier women to birth more
children. For her, a “cradle competition” in which wealthy women tried to
out-reproduce the poor dangerously advocated that wealthier women match
their rate of childbearing with “the most irresponsible elements in the
community.” Too many births, she insisted, drained mothers and their
numerous children of health and vitality.29 She had an almost nineteenth-
century view that the body is possessed of finite force that gets diluted with
each pregnancy. If wealthier women reproduced at the rate of the poor, she
felt, they would end up birthing the unfit.
Sanger countered that birth control would in fact prove a valuable tool
of eugenics. She and other feminists argued that the goal of eugenics was to
use the achievements of science and technology to improve women’s health
and create and sustain a nation of better “quality.” Across the English-
speaking world, historians Susanne Klausen and Alison Bashford have
argued, feminist birth controllers joined “hand in glove with eugenicists to
popularize the notion of rational family planning.” Control was at the heart
of their movement: contraception meant “to direct, to regulate, to
counteract,” Sanger explained. Animals no more, the middle class could
“civilize” sex itself, transforming basic instinct into a tool of women’s
liberation and scientific progress. “We must perfect these bodies,” she
enjoined, not weaken them, through regulating the birth rate.30 Eugenic
feminism sought not only to curtail the reproduction of the poor—it also
hoped to optimize the women of the middle and upper classes.
As the American Birth Control League took off, it worked on all fronts:
clinical services, legislative lobbying, research coordination, and
educational outreach. They opened the nation’s first legal birth control
clinic, the Clinical Research Bureau, on New York’s Fifth Avenue just west
of Union Square in 1923. The office conducted research, provided
education, and distributed diaphragms and jelly to married women—items
originally smuggled from Holland via a ship docked twelve miles off New
York’s coast by Sanger’s Italian neighbor, Vito, and her second husband J.
Noah Slee. Two years later, a chemical engineer named Herbert Simonds,
who was an occasional lover of Sanger’s, obviated the need for this
operation by producing diaphragms in the city.31
Margaret Sanger, seated, surrounded by staff members of the American
Birth Control League, ca. 1921. (Courtesy of Prints and Photographs
Division, Library of Congress)
In addition to reaching poor women much less able to access
contraception via private doctors, Sanger and her organizations continued to
hold conferences, publish the Birth Control Review, organize research at the
clinics, and train thousands of doctors and nurses. Their work also had
policy aims, lobbying for the complete abolition of the Comstock Laws,
which since 1873 had made it illegal to circulate contraceptives,
abortifacients, erotic material, and sex toys—or any information about them
—through the mail. Prior to the lawsuit she filed following her Brooklyn
arrest, this ban had included medical information, prohibiting physicians
from distributing material about sex and reproduction. Sanger cast her net
far and wide to gain support for contraception access. Throughout the end
of the 1920s and the decade thereafter, Sanger traveled extensively, both
domestically and abroad. Speaking to audiences ranging from the women’s
branch of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey, to farmwives in
Brattleboro, Vermont, and the secretary of the Commissariat of Public
Health in Soviet Russia, Sanger accepted any invitation she thought would
advance her cause.32
In 1924, the bureau opened a clinic in the African American
neighborhood of Columbus Hill in New York. It had few clients and closed
after a few months. For the next decade, Harlem women had to travel
downtown for bureau services, and they did so in large numbers—nearly
two thousand of the bureau’s seventeen thousand patients made the trip.
This posed problems for Sanger and her associates downtown, who catered
to white patients’ pervasive racism even as they were determined to bring
their services to Black women. Sanger wrote to a potential financial
supporter, “If already three or four colored women are in the waiting room
of the clinic, we have to distribute them to the upstairs doctors and
sometimes postpone the visit of others so it will not look like a colored
clinic… other patients are inclined to grumble.” Ever ambitious, Sanger
raised the necessary $10,000 for a clinic in Harlem, a neighborhood she was
anxious to serve for it had the highest infant mortality rate in the city.33
Yet the long history of medical exploitation of Black people both during
and after slavery made Harlem residents suspicious of the clinic’s agenda.
Once Sanger eventually accepted the guidance of the Harlem Advisory
Board, made up of prominent Black citizens, on how to assure Harlem
residents that the clinic was not an experimental research site or a plan for
extermination, the Harlem clinic prospered. Sanger also eventually
consented to another of the Harlem Advisory Board’s recommendations:
that the clinic no longer hire exclusively white staff. These changes
represented significant victories for the Advisory Board members, who
were relegated to a peripheral role in the operations of the clinic. As board
member and nurse Mabel Staupers informed Sanger, “[It’s time] you and
your associates discontinue the practice of looking on us as children to be
cared for and not to help decide how the caring should be done.”34 Both
precedents—failing to see Black allies as equals and widespread mistrust of
her agenda—would haunt Sanger’s next major project with Black
communities, a project in which she joined forces with Dr. Dorothy
Ferebee.
Like Margaret Sanger, Dr. Ferebee broke taboos about openly discussing
sexuality, taboos that were all the riskier for Black women to breach given
long-standing tropes of Black women’s hypersexuality that helped
legitimate slavery and colonialism. Ferebee lectured widely and boldly on
children’s health and sexual health. In advance of a 1928 talk at the
Women’s Co-operative Civic League in Baltimore, her middle-class hosts
balked at her title “Sex Education for the Adolescent”; in the presentation,
Ferebee proposed that five-year-olds should receive basic sex education
from their parents. She repeatedly endorsed birth control, broached the
topic of abortion—something Sanger never publicly supported—and
encouraged free discussion of sexuality. Yet when tragedy struck in her own
family, she remained publicly silent. While her daughter Dolly was away at
college in Plattsburg, New York, she died suddenly; Ferebee’s biographer
provides evidence that the cause was likely an illegal abortion, the only
kind available in 1949.35 Publicly, Ferebee cited the reason as a severe cold
and pneumonia. Perhaps the bourgeois imperative of Black women’s
respectability was too strong to break when it came to the reputation of her
own beloved daughter.
Ferebee’s sexual health agenda also converged with eugenics, a nearly
all-pervasive concern of middle-class reformers both Black and white. In
discussions today, the term eugenics is often used as if it were a synonym of
race science. The meaning of eugenics, in contemporary usage, is stretched
to describe any scientific research that posits the inherent superiority of the
white race and the inherent inferiority of all other groups. By this logic,
Black eugenics would be nearly impossible. But that’s not how eugenics
was understood in the first half of the twentieth century. Eugenic science is
a specific type of race science, one that focuses on ranking hereditary
quality; it is the practice of treating the biological diversity of the human
population as evidence of allegedly valuable or invaluable hereditary
material. Unfit was not necessarily a mark of race—it was overwhelmingly
used to condemn physical and mental disability, indigence, criminality, and
queer sexuality as genetic contagions.36 In the broader eugenics movement,
the ranking of families as fit and unfit by elites thus cut across racial lines,
even as Black and other communities of color were much more likely to be
described wholesale as diseased and debilitated by white eugenicists. Black
professionals often endorsed the eugenic belief so common in the interwar
years that social progress depended on regulating hereditary quality.
While white reformers like Sanger generally emphasized cleansing
allegedly unworthy heritable material from the gene pool, Black reformers
of the professional classes overwhelmingly embraced eugenics as a method
to improve the alleged quality of the Black population. Theirs was a third
position, distinct from both white supremacists like Stoddard and
Davenport, and Sanger’s white feminist eugenics. Ferebee and famed
scholar and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) founder W. E. B. Du Bois objected to violent, cleansing
strategies like sterilization. For them, encouraging the reproduction of the
fit was the most important aspect of eugenics, for it formed a tactic for
uplifting the race. Dr. Ferebee, for her part, endorsed the existence of
superior and inferior physical types and advised progressive women that it
was their duty to proliferate the superior. At her 1928 Baltimore speech, her
biographer Diane Kiesel relates, Ferebee “urged women to seek for
themselves mates of the highest type in order that the best possible heritage
might be handed down to posterity.” It was a common sentiment among
fellow Black elites: eugenic marriages would allegedly improve the
physical and mental condition of the race. When Du Bois was president of
the NAACP in the 1920s and 1930s, he funded the organization’s
antilynching campaign through hosting “prize baby contests” for middle-
class Black families who birthed “fit” children. Within three years, over half
of the three hundred local NAACP branches held these contests; within six
years, the pageants raised over $80,000. At the same time, Du Bois
protested sterilization and other measures of state violence that removed
personal autonomy.37
In the 1920s and 1930s, Du Bois and Dr. Ferebee were two of the most
visible Black campaigners for birth control, and both would join Planned
Parenthood’s Negro Project in the 1940s, which aimed to bring
contraception to Black women in the South. For them, birth control and
“better” marriages were part of larger public health and racial uplift
campaigns. Yet eugenics by any method is deeply harmful, for it transforms
human variation into the mark of “superior” and “inferior” hereditary
material. That eugenics of any kind could be folded so easily into uplift
ideology further points to the elitism lurking in the core of its doctrine.
Regulating birth was only one aspect of Dr. Ferebee’s multipronged
approach to racial uplift. She folded birth control into her broader goal of
improving Black public health during a time in which she was one of fewer
than 130 Black women physicians in the entire country. In addition to her
clinical and instructional positions at Howard and raising her young twins,
she felt a strong calling to serve the race in the Black clubwomen’s
tradition. In 1935, while still head of the board of directors of the Southeast
Settlement House, Ferebee helped launch one of the nation’s most
significant efforts to bring healthcare to impoverished African Americans.
Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA), the prominent Black sorority to which she had
belonged since medical school, hosted the Mississippi Health Project, a
summer healthcare clinic for sharecroppers in the Delta. Ferebee became
the project’s medical director and its principal steward, organizing
fundraising, logistics, and volunteers while lobbying local and federal
health authorities to bring healthcare directly to fieldworkers in the middle
of the Great Depression.38
In the summer of 1935, Ferebee recruited a dozen volunteers for the
Mississippi Health Project’s first trip south. They refused to ride in the soot-
ridden Jim Crow cars, always located just behind the coal-fired steam
engine, and instead drove a caravan of four vehicles over eight hundred
miles south in the July heat. In addition to the lack of air conditioning,
driving that distance through the segregated South was no easy task:
restaurants, lodging, and even gas stations often refused to serve Black
customers, and the roads deteriorated into gravel and mud the farther south
they reached. The group stayed with friends or at Black colleges along the
way and arrived in Holmes County four days after departing Washington.39
Ferebee’s plan was to establish five temporary clinics in Holmes County,
one of the poorest regions in the United States. But when they arrived, a
dozen plantation owners learned of the project from county health officials
and shut it down. Local health authorities complied with the wishes of the
richest residents to prevent their workers from accessing basic medical care.
“Here we were, in Mississippi,” Ferebee recalled, “with all the materials
and drugs that we had bought, all the things necessary for the health of
young children, and [we] couldn’t use them.” One plantation owner did
consent to allow the hundreds of people who worked his fields to receive
healthcare services, but only on one condition: under no circumstances
would the laborers be permitted to leave his property. In many respects,
sharecroppers in the 1930s were no more free than their enslaved ancestors
had been. Throughout the plantation South, more than 99.5 percent of Black
adults had never even cast a ballot in an election.40
The AKA clinic would have to come to the cotton fields. The caravan
from Washington now proved providential: the cars became the clinics and
Ferebee and her team created the very first mobile health clinic in the
United States. Six days a week, they left at five o’clock in the morning and
set out on roads so poorly maintained that dust clouds obscured the car in
front. Their first stop was the icehouse, to keep the vaccines cold. The local
health services did not vaccinate African Americans, thus Ferebee’s number
one goal with the clinics was to inoculate Black children from fatal but now
preventable diseases, especially smallpox and diphtheria.41 When they
arrived at a plantation site, they donned their white uniforms, hung
draperies from trees to create privacy, and pinned health education posters
with explanatory images hopefully legible to a largely illiterate clientele to
a clothesline.
Ferebee and her team quickly ascertained the best way to recruit people
to their mobile clinic: by talking directly with the local midwives. In
Holmes County, Black midwives delivered 95 percent of all Black babies.
Yet despite their crucial role in keeping Black women and children alive as
the main link between rural poor Black people and medical care, Black
midwives in Holmes County and across the American South comprised an
extremely vulnerable population with little to no power in the white medical
establishment. Dismissed as unsanitary, uneducated, and superstitious by
white public health officials, Black midwives, who were also often
sharecroppers themselves, were often blamed for the systemic issues that
underpinned Black illness and mortality. Many became the targets of
elimination campaigns led by, among others, white women nurses. While
disapproving of some of the midwives’ tactics, AKA did recognize their
influence and authority.42
Soon, the group’s dietician secured food donations from the secretary of
agriculture, and Ferebee began holding cooking demonstrations of rice,
dried apples, and dried potatoes—food unfamiliar to the patients.
Sharecroppers were paid only in credits at the plantation commissary, and
bosses restricted the available groceries to three low-nutrient carbohydrates:
cornmeal, sugar, and flour, and for flavoring, fatback and salt. The sorority
sisters learned to offer the food late in the afternoon, when people were too
hungry and tired from waiting in line all day, sometimes three hundred
people deep, to resist instruction and sustenance. That first summer, they
were able to vaccinate more than twenty-six hundred children, conduct over
two hundred physical examinations, and hand out nearly seven thousand
copies of health information. Most of the clinic’s patients were children
who had no other access to the medical establishment. Over the seven years
Ferebee ran the Mississippi Health Project, they vaccinated nearly fifteen
thousand youth.43 They treated thousands of adults as well, particularly
screening for and treating syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases.
Dr. Ferebee and her colleagues were shocked by the conditions they
found on the plantations. Single-room shacks housed more than a dozen
people each. The deadly effects of poverty and malnutrition were palpable.
She found the children to be “diseased, deformed, aged and wizened all too
soon,” while the adults were largely “a saddened, defeated, submissive lot”
who stared out at her with faces “stupid, vacant, and void of hope.” Some of
her reaction was rooted in the clubwomen mentality—theirs was charity
work, not solidarity work, and they believed bringing bourgeois Black
people down south would nudge the poor closer to civilization.
“Enlightened Negroes,” AKA promotional material announced, “must go
down, side by side with the humblest, blackest, ‘distorted and soul-
quenched’ Negro serf and elevate him by actual contact.”44 Common racial
belonging may stimulate sympathy among reformers, but it hardly creates
equivalent experiences or generates an automatic alliance between college-
educated professionals and the desperately poor. Just as with sex, race is cut
through with other dynamics of power, especially class and dis/ability. The
AKA women saw themselves as something of saviors who had a duty to
help the less fortunate. Nonetheless, this elitist attitude remains a good
distance from the attitude of sterilization advocates and others committed to
preventing the reproduction of the “unfit.”
Ferebee made sure that birth control information and devices were
included in clinic offerings. This service enraged plantation owners.
Planters wanted sharecropping women continually pregnant issuing a
steady supply of unpaid labor into the future. Local white physicians
catered to planters’ desires for wealth accumulation, not workers’ health
needs, and they not only regularly denied Black women contraception—
they also recommended Black girls as young as twelve and thirteen engage
in sexual activity. Even as planters eventually agreed that future generations
of living workers were preferable to dead children and permitted the clinics
to come to their vast fields, they surveilled the AKA’s health project.
Ferebee wrote that plantation owners posted “‘riders’ with guns in their
belts and whipping prods in their boots; riders who weaved their horses
incessantly, close to the clinics, straining their ears to hear what the staff
interviewers were asking of the sharecroppers.” This surveillance mission
was in part based on a rumor that the sorority sisters were communist
organizers fomenting a rebellion. But while terrifying, the riders were easy
to dodge—AKA president Ida Louise Jackson reported with some glee that
Ferebee and the nurses simply spoke in medical jargon when they needed
privacy, and the white riders couldn’t understand a word.45
Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee giving a blood test to a woman at the Alpha
Kappa Alpha sorority traveling health clinic, Mississippi, 1938. (Courtesy
of Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College)
Dr. Ferebee and her team were far from advocating redistributing
planters’ property to their laborers. Theirs was a professional-class reform
mission that received glowing coverage in the pages of Reader’s Digest, not
a communist seizing of the means of production. But unlike Sanger’s
initiatives, Dr. Ferebee brought birth control to severely marginalized
women as part of a broader healthcare initiative that addressed multiple
needs. She made the case plainly: “People whose economic and health
status is lowest have least access to the techniques of planned parenthood.”
Thus, she insisted that contraception information be folded into public
health programs—not introduced via clinics that solely treated sexual health
—and that public health programs adopt creative approaches to reach
impoverished communities.46
Ferebee saw disease to be an axis of oppression that intersected with
other forces of power in people’s lives, rather than the singular measure of
individual worth. The Mississippi Health Project, she wrote at its
termination in 1941, “has graphically demonstrated the interrelation of
every social and economic activity as a part of a whole…. The problem of
health is one of many facets which link it to the entire social order; for
disease is both the cause and result of many miserable social and economic
conditions.”47 Health was not imprinted on a self-reproducing gene that
humans were powerless to shape, apart from reducing childbirth among
those deemed to lack it; health emerged at the crossroads of multiple,
interconnected social structures such as segregation, poverty, and centuries-
old plantation economies based on unfree labor. Dr. Ferebee’s intersectional
agenda that placed reproduction within a dense matrix of power was distinct
from Sanger’s approach that positioned the quality of children as the
singular axis of civilization, even as they were both leaders within the
feminist movement for birth control.
Beginning in 1937, Margaret Sanger and her oil magnate second husband J.
Noah Slee lived most of the year in a house made of “adobe, trimmed in
blue” in the arid Catalina foothills above Tucson, Arizona—about as far
from the tenement districts of New York as she could get. Sanger and Slee
occupied separate apartments within Casa de Adobe, accommodating her
lifelong desire for as much independence as possible within marriage. The
foothills estate was a place for rest and retreat, and hosting lavish parties
attended by the likes of Elizabeth Arden and Eleanor Roosevelt, when she
could convince penny-counting millionaire Slee to spare the expense. Now
almost sixty, Sanger was removed from the day-to-day operations of the
league and the Research Bureau. She served as the honorary president of
the organization, renamed Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942

Sanger maintained a large presence in the global birth control
movement through occasional travel and regular correspondence. She liked
to devote her early mornings to writing movement letters, propped up in
bed by a pile of fluffy pillows.48
Sanger’s semiretirement was prompted by two major victories in
contraception access she had won in the mid-1930s, following years of
legislative lobbying work. One was a legal triumph: a test case of pessaries
she had requested from contacts in Japan for use by the Clinical Research
Bureau had, as intended, provoked a legal fight with the federal
government. The Clinical Research Bureau’s victory ensured that doctors
could now engage in legal interstate and international trade of contraceptive
devices and information, formalizing access that had already become
increasingly possible de facto. Sanger’s second victory was clinical. In
1937, the American Medical Association overturned national policy
restricting contraceptive care to patients with sexually transmitted infection.
It now endorsed contraception as an integral part of sexual health for all
married women, a topic suitable for discussion in medical schools and
deserving of further scientific research and stronger legal standing in the
courts.49 Contraception was becoming a standard component of healthcare,
a sea change in public attitude Sanger had long hoped to achieve. The
downside of this arrangement was that birth control access was still firmly
under the control of the medical profession, something Sanger supported,
and primarily available only to married women who could afford medical
visits.
Nursing a failing gallbladder and an arm broken while promoting birth
control in Japan, yet confident in her professional success, Sanger took
reprieve in Tucson. Over the next few years, she chose to maintain a firm
hand in just one of Planned Parenthood’s various initiatives. It was a
brainchild of hers that she trusted only her longtime secretary, Florence
Rose, to put into action: the Negro Project. The Negro Project’s stated goals
were to demonstrate that a birth control program among southern Black
working-class women would reduce maternal and infant mortality and
disease as well as reduce state health and welfare expenditures. As with
Sanger’s general eugenic approach to contraception, the Negro Project
leaders didn’t frame their agenda as ensuring Black women’s reproductive
self-determination. Instead, they presented reducing individual women’s
fertility as a solution for relieving burdens on the community as a whole—a
tactic that both reflected their own goals and was designed to appeal to
white-led public health departments. Yet Sanger was particularly concerned
about sky-high rates of maternal and infant death. Black women died during
childbirth at nearly twice the rate white women did, and the mortality rate
among infants was similarly skewed. A devastating 9 percent of Black
infants didn’t live to see their first birthday, 2.5 times the rate of white
infant mortality.50
On a Sunday in early December 1939, Sanger wrote to her close
associate Dr. Clarence Gamble, physician, philanthropist, leading
eugenicist, and an heir to the Procter & Gamble fortune, about the Negro
Project’s design. She insisted that the federation hire and train a Black
physician, rather than a white one, to promote contraception, a progressive
move that Gamble had been resisting. “While the colored Negroes have
great respect for white doctors they can get closer to their own members
and more or less lay their cards on the table which means their ignorance,
superstitions and doubts,” she explained to Gamble in her concerned, yet
patronizing, tone. “We do not want word to go out that we want to
exterminate the Negro population,” she wrote, “and the minister is the man
who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more
rebellious members.” 51
It has proven to be a fateful choice of phrasing. Today, “we do not want
word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population” has been
reverberating throughout the anti-abortion movement for more than twenty-
five years. It ricochets across billboards, websites, pamphlets,
documentaries, book-length exposés, and Supreme Court opinions,
assassinating Sanger’s reputation via a shot fired by her own hand. Over the
decades, activists with politics as opposing as conservative author Dinesh
D’Souza and leftist feminist Angela Davis have both cited the passage to
indict the Negro Project as a plan for exterminating African Americans.
Particularly to those familiar with Sanger’s beliefs that one-quarter of the
population should not be allowed to have children, beliefs that the pro-life
movement circulates aggressively, her words seem entirely believable at
face value. Yet the truth is more complicated.
Throughout the Negro Project’s short run, tension simmered between its
leaders about the true nature of the initiative. The Negro Project meant
different things to the various people involved: Sanger, Rose, Planned
Parenthood’s white male leadership, the white southern affiliates, and the
Black reformers Sanger and Rose recruited to play an advisory role—
including Dr. Ferebee.
The arguments started in late 1939, before the project got off the ground.
When Sanger returned from a short, rain-soaked Thanksgiving trip to Skull
Valley in northwestern Arizona, she fired off letters from her first-floor
quarters in the Tucson estate. Sanger insisted that the project launch as she
initially intended: with a year-long outreach campaign conducted by a
Black doctor and Black minister, trained “by the Federation as to our
ideals,” who would “arouse and educate the colored people.” She knew
white officials would never have the same effect that Black professionals
could. “There could be an awakening in the South which would work like
yeast,” she enthused. Sanger envisioned a mass of activated people rising
like fermented dough. Then, the project would open clinics to serve the
demand. She also insisted that leading Black professionals be consulted in
the project’s development. There was “no use in asking the advice of… any
white person” about bringing birth control to Black communities, Sanger
emphasized. “They are always wrong.”52
But Planned Parenthood’s leadership, which was all white men save for
Sanger, ignored her initial design for the project and instead opened three
demonstration clinics straightaway, one in Nashville and two in rural South
Carolina counties, Lee and Berkeley. Sanger threatened to call the project
off altogether if the project hired white doctors, but the organization called
her bluff.53 The Berkeley County clinic was staffed by white nurses. Sanger
was furious, and not only because they were white.
“I will never consent to nurses at this stage,” she informed Planned
Parenthood staff. Sanger wanted physicians. While she was much more of
an antiracist than the vast majority of her white counterparts, she was
wedded to expertise and authority. She operated within a top-down model
that saw urban professionals, both Black and white, armed with superior
knowledge and technologies, as saviors who would liberate rural Black
women from unfettered births. Such rescue missions would be “lifelines to
the mothers we are dedicated to free,” Sanger wrote.54
Sanger and Rose created a National Negro Advisory Council to guide
the project, appointing around thirty nationally prominent Black individuals
to the board. The council was stocked with expertise and leadership,
including Dr. Ferebee; W. E. B. Du Bois; Mary McLeod Bethune, who was
then a member of President Roosevelt’s “Black Cabinet”; and civil rights
activist and writer Mary Church Terrell. Terrell in particular was a leading
Black feminist who has since been recognized for developing one of the
earliest formulations of the idea of intersecting oppressions. “A white
woman has only one handicap to overcome—that of sex,” she wrote in her
1940 autobiography. “I have two—sex and race. I belong to the only group
in this country, which has two such huge obstacles to surmount.” Yet
despite this boundary-breaking expertise, the National Negro Advisory
Council was not convened until months after the clinics first opened, and
when it was finally under way, its members were relegated to a mere
accessory function. It existed only to provide “moral support” to the
Planned Parenthood staff and to be “extremely helpful in adapting the plans
to the negro psychology,” in the words of one member of Planned
Parenthood’s executive committee.55 In true white paternalist fashion,
Planned Parenthood tasked these national leaders strictly with providing
insight into Blackness and propping up the egos of the white staff.
Some white project administrators were incensed when their Black
colleagues appeared to play anything more than a purely decorative role.
White South Carolina site director Dr. Robert Seibels blocked the
distribution of a clinic promotional letter until Florence Rose revised a
paragraph mentioning that the project was “guided by our Negro Advisory
Council.” Furious, Dr. Seibels admonished Rose and her colleagues, “in no
uncertain terms… Southerners were not ‘guided’ by Negroes!”56 For Dr.
Seibels, Black expertise was merely a resource to be extracted for the
benefit of the true southerners: its white population.
Tensions swelled to the surface at a 1942 advisory council meeting held
at Planned Parenthood’s gleaming headquarters on Madison Avenue.
Members of the council were convinced that grassroots organizing, not
deploying outside white or Black professionals to administer to the poor,
would likely have better outcomes in recruiting patients. Black mothers,
urged Shellie Northcutt, a national director of Black teachers in the South,
would be best reached if birth control were introduced via organizations
they already trusted—not brought by new clinics and professionals
providing only that service. Only 11 percent of rural Black women in
Tennessee even employed a physician when they gave birth, one member
emphasized: their medical care was provided by Black midwives. As
member after member chimed in, the advisory council was unanimous in its
recommendation: integration. Abandon the single-pronged approach that
positioned birth control as the singular purview of medical professionals,
integrate birth control outreach work within local communities and other
health initiatives, and racially integrate the leadership of Planned
Parenthood by appointing Black advisors to all areas, not just the Negro
Project.57 But the advisory council had little power within Planned
Parenthood to effect such a recommendation, and their counsel was ignored.
At the 1942 Planned Parenthood annual meeting, Dorothy Ferebee, who
was by now also president of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, took to the
podium at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. She didn’t hold back from criticizing
the organization. Her goal with the Negro Project was public health. Family
planning, she explained, reduced the high fatalities of Black mothers and
Black infants by allowing severely ill women to prevent pregnancy and
raised the standard of living. In common with her advisory council
colleagues, she informed Planned Parenthood that the project’s single-issue
approach to promoting birth control alone was backfiring. Many poor Black
people suspected that contraception was “motivated by a clever bit of
machination to persuade them to commit race suicide,” she advised, and
others also found it to be immoral. White-led clinics devoted only to
contraception services did little to assuage these fears. The solution,
Ferebee proposed, was “the integration of this work directly into all public
health services.”
She concluded with even sharper criticism of Planned Parenthood’s
approach to Black outreach. “Negro professionals,” she insisted, must be
“fully integrated into the staff of this organization” and employed as field
outreach specialists. Black professionals like herself deserved roles as full
“participants” in the movement, not just the secondary “consultant” roles to
which they were relegated.58 For her, bringing birth control to Black
women was just one element of a larger campaign for Black public health
and racial justice, one that should be led by Black professionals. Yet again,
however, this advice that Planned Parenthood abandon its single-axis
strategy effected no change.
Some advisory council members, however, also advanced the eugenic
agenda Sanger and some Planned Parenthood staff still maintained. To
drum up support in the regions it served, the Negro Project circulated
fifteen thousand copies of an article by Du Bois advocating family planning
for Black families. Du Bois characterized Black working-class children in
such brazenly discriminatory terms that notorious eugenicist Clarence
Gamble copied one of his passages verbatim, but did not attribute it to Du
Bois, in Negro Project funding appeals—appeals that scholars and activists
have cited for decades since as evidence of the project’s racist intent on
extermination. Opined Du Bois (and later Gamble), “The mass of ignorant
Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, so that the increase among
Negroes, even more than the increase among whites, is from that part of the
population least intelligent and fit…. They must learn that among human
races and groups, as among vegetables, quality and not mere quantity really
counts.”59
Though a eugenic approach tendrilled its way throughout the birth
control movement, some denounced the class hierarchy blooming in its
core. A sociologist consulted about the Negro Project’s plan wisely
bemoaned, “Why, oh why, can’t the birth control advocates stress the
advantages of their prescription with regard to the individual and individual
family, and then forget or shove into the background the song and dance
they insist on giving about regional, national, and world progress.”60
In the end, the Negro Project had minimal impact on southern Black
women and their families. Over the test period, fewer than three thousand
women visited the three clinics to obtain either a sponge and foam powder
or diaphragm and spermicidal jelly. In two full years, the clinics treated
fewer than one-fifth of the patients the Mississippi Health Project treated in
its six-week-long summertime clinics. The advisory council concluded that
African American women fundamentally mistrusted the clinics and steered
clear of their services.61
Ferebee, her advisory council colleagues, and Sanger herself had
predicted correctly that without reaching out directly to local communities,
demand would be low. Staff in Nashville studied why some women who
made an initial clinic visit nonetheless failed to keep follow-up
appointments. Results revealed the intersecting set of hardships patients
were facing. Women cited their lack of transportation, childcare, and
“suitable clothes to appear in public”; some patients were as young as
fourteen. Each of the first fifty patients was found to be suffering from “a
serious health condition.”62 No single panacea, not even contraception,
would transform the severe challenges poor Black women faced in the Jim
Crow South.
Planned Parenthood closed the demonstration clinics as well as the
Division of Negro Services in 1944. Upon the recommendation of a hired
“Negro Consultant,” the organization ceased segregated programming and
attempted to incorporate limited educational outreach to Black communities
into the larger aims of Planned Parenthood in 1944.63 Yet it still maintained
segregated advisory boards and insisted that bringing contraception to a
limited number of Black women was the beginning to saving the race:
“Better Health for 13,000,000,” trumpeted the cover of the Negro Project’s
final report.
The Negro Project was not a plan for extermination. Sanger was an
integrationist committed to offering birth control services to Black women.
Yet she had simultaneously a eugenic vision, an assimilationist ambition,
and a feminist agenda. The project was born of the same strategy Sanger
wielded throughout her family planning advocacy: it treated contraception
as the linchpin for relieving vast social, economic, and political inequality.
This approach is committed to social progress through biological measures,
an overwhelmingly ableist agenda. In this approach, the birth rate and the
alleged mental and physical quality of children are figured as the primary
solution to economic and political problems. Yet Sanger’s was a racially
inclusive eugenics: she sought to assimilate Black women into the fold of
women responsible for safeguarding the nation’s biological future. This
outreach doesn’t eradicate the supremacy at the core of Sanger’s approach,
for she sought to fold Black women into her eugenic vision. Her inclusive
eugenics throws into relief the limits of inclusion itself as a feminist
strategy—for instead of trying to overhaul an existing hierarchy, it seeks
instead to diversify the status quo.
Sanger’s “eugenic feminism” with the Negro Project, in other words, is
guilty of the same misapprehension of power that white feminism makes in
general.64 Overall, the Negro Project promoted single solutions to deep
economic and political oppression, committing the same miscalculation—
that power functions on just one primary axis—that white feminism makes
over and over again, century after century. The reproductive choice
movement treats pregnancy prevention as a panacea, isolating it from and
elevating it over all other women’s health concerns. White feminism, more
generally, similarly fixates on the single issue of sex equality alone. Both
strategies work within, rather than against, other forms of systemic
injustice.
One hundred years after Elizabeth Cady Stanton helped launch white
feminism, intersectional feminists kept developing agendas to interrogate
multiple structures of power at once. In the 1940s, Dr. Ferebee and other
members of the Negro Project’s advisory council embraced a multipronged
approach to bringing birth control to Black communities that was separate
from their work with Sanger. They understood that for Black women living
within a nation where eugenic ideas gripped even civil rights leaders like
Du Bois, reproductive freedom must extend beyond the ability to prevent
pregnancy—it must also defend the right of all women to have children.
Under Dr. Ferebee’s and Mary McLeod Bethune’s leadership, in 1941
the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) passed a resolution
recommending that every Black civil rights organization in the country
incorporate contraception into its health outreach work. This was years
before most white women’s clubs would publicly support birth control;
NCNW became the first national organization to incorporate family
planning into its agenda. The NCNW newsletter reprinted both the
resolution in full and Dr. Ferebee’s speech to Planned Parenthood in its
entirety, reflecting the importance of this work to their mission. McLeod
Bethune and Ferebee had an expansive view of voluntary motherhood.
Family planning, the resolution announces, “aims to aid each family to have
all the children it can support and afford, but no more.”65 The italics make
it plain: the National Council of Negro Women wasn’t recommending
anything like sterilization or denying women the opportunity to birth
children. They were supporting the right of poor women to have children in
the first place. Their recommendation stopped short of complete
reproductive self-determination, however—the firm “no more” raises as
many questions as it answers. Yet overall, the resolution is a significant step
away from a single-minded focus on preventing pregnancy and toward
broader reproductive justice.
Today, the reproductive justice movement launched by Loretta Ross and
other Black feminist activists in 1994 fights on three fronts, rather than on
the single axis of pregnancy prevention and termination. Its first principle
stems from the pro-choice movement Sanger inaugurated: the right not to
have children, via contraception, abortion, or abstinence. The second and
third principles echo the approach Dr. Ferebee anticipated: the right to have
children and the right to parent the children in safe and healthy
environments, involving agendas that tackle white supremacy, economic
inequality, sexual abuse, environmental racism, mass incarceration, queer
and trans marginalization, and related structures of power.66 The movement
fights structural inequalities that harm reproduction at all life stages.
Sanger’s association with the pro-choice agenda thus presents us with an
opportunity. Fully confronting Sanger’s white feminism enables us to move
away from the reproductive choice movement, of which she is the founder
and remains its leading hero, and toward the reproductive justice
movement. The key takeaway from Sanger’s career for intersectional
feminists today is not only her appalling insistence that children varied in
their quality and thus value to the nation, but also her underlying political
framework: that progress pivots on one axis. Sanger sought to liberate
women and redress the nation’s social ills by improving the biological
quality of the population, a eugenic vision that doubled down on hierarchies
of class and ability and further dispossessed the marginalized. But there has
always been an alternative: protecting the rights of all people to have
children, or to not have children, and to have access to environments that
enable all children to flourish.

CHAPTER FIVE
TAKING FEMINISM TO THE STREETS

Pauli Murray and Betty Friedan
If [middle-class white women] find housework degrading and
dehumanizing, they are financially able to buy their freedom—usually by
hiring a black maid. The economic and social realities of the black woman’s
life are the most crucial for us. [Oppression] is not an intellectual
persecution alone; the movement is not a psychological outburst for us; it is
tangible; we can taste it in all our endeavors.
—Frances M. Beal, “Black Women’s Manifesto”
IN THE DAYS LEADING UP TO THE AUGUST 1963 MARCH ON
WASHINGTON FOR JOBS AND FREEDOM, civil rights activist and
attorney Pauli Murray was furious. Head organizer A. Philip Randolph, an
old ally of hers, had announced he would be giving a publicity speech at the
National Press Club. News was made, not only reported, at the Press Club’s
speaking series; presidents launched policy proposals, and foreign leaders
such as Nikita Khrushchev and Charles de Gaulle announced global
initiatives from its podium. Yet the Press Club, the nation’s premier
organization of journalists, still barred women from membership. Women
reporters were granted admission to events as spectators, but only as
spectators—they had to sit in the balcony and were forbidden from asking
questions.
The setup reminded Murray of a key moment in women’s movement
history. Taking to one of her favorite forms of activism, what she called
“confrontation by typewriter,” she fired off letters to Washington
newspapers. “In 1840 William Lloyd Garrison and Charles Remond, the
latter a Negro,” she wrote, “refused to be seated as delegates to the World
Anti-Slavery Convention in London” because women including Lucretia
Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were denied seats and relegated to “the
balcony.” She called for Randolph to do the same. Legal segregation based
on sex was akin to legal segregation based on race, Murray insisted. “It is as
humiliating for a woman reporter assigned to cover Mr. Randolph’s speech
to be sent to the balcony as it would be for Mr. Randolph to be sent to the
back of the bus.”1
Murray’s intervention succeeded. The Press Club temporarily permitted
women reporters to sit and speak among their male colleagues the day of
Randolph’s event. The Press Club, however, didn’t change its policy to
admit female journalists until 1971.2
For months in advance of the march, Murray and two of her long-
standing allies—Anna Arnold Hedgeman, the lone woman on the March on
Washington planning committee, and National Council of Negro Women
(NCNW) president Dorothy Height—had struggled against the sexism of
the male coordinators. Randolph, march coordinator Bayard Rustin, and
other male leaders prearranged the march’s front line to include only
themselves, assigning Height, Rosa Parks, and other prominent women civil
rights activists positions at their rear, alongside their wives. They permitted
one female speaker, and only after consistent pressure from the trio. In the
end, Randolph permitted Daisy Bates to speak for one minute and then
grabbed her microphone away. The only sustained female voices heard at
the March on Washington were those lifted up in song, most famously
Mahalia Jackson’s. “Our time,” Rosa Parks whispered to Bates when she
resumed her seat, “will someday come.”3
The day after the march, Dorothy Height gathered a group of leaders
from the eight-hundred-thousand-member NCNW at the organization’s
headquarters, which was then located on the first floor of Mary McLeod
Bethune’s private residence. There they would plot the next steps of the
women’s branch of the civil rights movement. NCNW was the largest Black
women’s club in the country, now largely dedicated to structural reforms.
Height wanted to expand the purview of their organizing beyond racial
discrimination lawsuits, and the others agreed. But as they brainstormed
advocating for changes that would further transform the daily life of Black
women and children, such as employment, housing, education, and
childcare reforms, another, equally urgent agenda took over. Between
policy priorities, emotion slipped in, mounted, and roiled. Together, they
began confronting their anger at the entrenched patriarchy within the civil
rights leadership, realizing that their individual experiences accumulated
into a pattern of “second class” treatment.4 The revelatory conversation
spilled over into a later gathering at the Shoreham Hotel.
“We began to realize,” Height later explained, “that if we did not…
demand our rights, we were not going to get them [and we] became much
more aware and much more aggressive in facing up to sexism” where they
encountered it. “That moment,” she recalled, of together naming the effects
of the March on Washington’s deliberate and exclusive focus on Black men
“was vital to awakening the women’s movement.” Height’s meeting could
qualify as the first feminist consciousness-raising session of the 1960s,
though that title is typically conferred upon the New York Radical Women,
a largely white, middle-class group who initiated weekly sessions later that
decade. Historian Carol Giardina argues that the feminist movement, much
quieter since World War II had temporarily sent white women in large
numbers into the workforce, was rekindled that day. Black women’s time
had not come—they were seizing it for themselves.5
Three months later, and just one week before President Kennedy’s
assassination, Pauli Murray addressed a crowd at the 1963 NCNW
leadership conference in New York City. Women, she charged, were still
simmering with frustration at their “secondary, ornamental” treatment
during the march and must gather their forces to oppose the rampant sexism
flourishing within the movement. Black women “can no longer postpone or
subordinate the fight against discrimination because of sex to the civil rights
struggle but must carry on both fights simultaneously,” Murray entreated.
The dual effort she outlined entailed resisting civil rights movement efforts
to focus only on training and employment reforms for men, as well as
forging an “alliance” with white women to fight the astounding legal and
social prohibitions women faced in the 1960s United States. Dorothy
Height recalls with admiration that Murray “lifted the situation to the
context of equality,” transforming private pain into a political issue.6
Among the activists incensed by the misogyny of the male March on
Washington leadership, none were as prepared to fight institutionalized
sexism as Pauli Murray. One of the leading legal minds of the twentieth
century, Murray brought Black women activists a political framework for
understanding their experience: they were pinned to “the bottom of the
economic and social scale” by the dual forces of “white supremacy” and
“male supremacy.” Sexism wasn’t the result of individual male chauvinism,
Murray argued. Rather, it was a structural phenomenon akin to racism that
relegated women to legally, socially, and culturally inferior positions. She
approached sexism and racism as analogous forces that converged and
compounded in the lives of Black women—and in the process made a
major contribution to the development of intersectional feminist theory.7 In
her extensive publications, Murray reframed sexism as a caste system
sequestering power and capital in the hands of men, and she gave it a
memorable name: Jane Crow.
Yet as feminist activism filled living rooms with meetings and
boulevards with protestors over the next fifteen years, most journalists—
and historians in their wake—saw an altogether different catalyst to the
revival of the feminist movement. They agree that 1963 was the year that
reignited women’s liberation. But their dominant narrative thrusts the lit
match into the hands of one woman alone: Betty Friedan. Friedan’s
explosive 1963 book The Feminine Mystique revealed the misery of the
middle-class housewife, and her message spread like wildfire, making her
name synonymous with the cause of women’s rights. She soon thereafter
cofounded the National Organization of Women (NOW), along with Pauli
Murray and others, to bring feminism into the streets. Friedan liked to claim
that she was a singular “Joan of Arc leading women out of the wilderness.”
Yet she was following in the footsteps of her Black feminist predecessors.8
Her refusal to acknowledge that debt would appropriate Black feminist
political skill, especially Murray’s. Today, framing Friedan’s revolt of the
housewives as the impetus of 1960s women’s liberation not only whitens
movement history—it also hampers feminist understandings of the nature of
sexism itself.
In the summer of 1944, Betty Friedan (then Betty Goldstein) turned down
UC Berkeley’s most prestigious PhD fellowship and headed back east to
become a journalist. Friedan had loved her undergraduate days at Smith
College, where she shed the loneliness that had haunted her in Peoria,
Illinois, and discovered a calling as an intellectual-activist and student
leader. Back home, she had been excluded from the sororities that organized
high school social life—they didn’t admit Jews. At Smith, however, she
made friends, publicly embraced her Jewish identity, wrote editorials
opposing fascism, and discovered that new psychological theories
attempting to grasp the complexity of the human mind in total made her
“feel like some kind of mental mountain goat, leaping from peak to peak.”
Later in life, Friedan speculated with no small humility, “I probably would
have loved law school, might have ended up a judge myself…. But it never
occurred to me to want to be a lawyer, because Harvard Law didn’t even
take applications from women.”9
But Friedan was fantastic at psychology. After a year working on a
master’s degree under leading developmental psychologist Erik Erikson at
UC Berkeley she won the institution’s most significant fellowship for
scientists, becoming the first woman and the first student from the
psychology department to do so. Her boyfriend, a communist physicist
working on Robert Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb project, fumed. “It’s over
between us,” he announced as they walked through the redwoods that
blanket the hills above the lab. “I’m never going to win a fellowship like
that.” Friedan’s fear of continued romantic rejection likely combined with
her own suspicion that academic life—if she could ever find a post, given
that many universities banned Jewish professors from their faculties—was
too far removed from the radical politics that electrified her.10 Persistent
asthma attacks, and the rashes that broke out over her body, further made it
clear. Her body would not tolerate a solitary life of the mind.
Friedan would end up using her training in psychology to remarkable
effect. Her marriage to the Left theater director Carl Friedan in 1947 found
her performing the housewife role while also frequently drawing paychecks
larger than her husband’s from the women’s magazine journalism she
continued on the side. In preparation for an alumnae reunion in 1957, Smith
College asked her to conduct a survey of her two hundred fellow graduates
and write about the remarkable lives Smith women were living fifteen years
later.11 But, according to the narrative Friedan would repeat for years, what
she found surprised her. Many of the peers with whom she had experienced
her intellectual awakening were ignoring their training and sinking
themselves into the unfulfilling role of Cold War housewives. And though
they were miserable, they were suffering in silence, convinced their
unhappiness was due to personally failing to live out the promise of the
aprons-and-pearls lifestyle.
Friedan spent the next five years researching and writing about “the
problem that has no name,” or women’s widespread yet unspoken misery
on being denied access to the professions.12 Her work exposing the
condition of American women—by which she meant, specifically,
housewives—was soon declared by her and mainstream media to be
synonymous with feminism itself.
Pauli Murray was one of the twentieth century’s most perceptive observers
of the way racism and sexism shape the texture of everyday life, creating
vast structures that penetrate deep into the individual psyche. Their
cumulative effect not only prevents equality and justice—it also poses a
fatal threat. Racism, she wrote about her youth in the Jim Crow South, was
not often experienced as acute trauma. Rather, it was “the pervasive irritant,
the chronic allergy, the vague apprehension which made one uncomfortable
and jumpy,” requiring constant vigilance. At times though, particularly
when personal pressures mounted and stress tolerance dwindled, racism
uncoiled and struck, materializing like “the fatal accident,” “the blind
railroad crossing,” “the sharp curve rising suddenly in the darkness.”13
One such moment for Murray transpired at age eight, in 1919. She and
the aunt who raised her were visiting family in Baltimore when they
received a late afternoon telegram from home announcing her grandfather’s
impending death. Rushing to the evening train as a thunderstorm soaked the
streets, Aunt Pauline slipped and smashed her glasses. Her cheeks bled and
her eyes swelled. In Norfolk, North Carolina, Aunt Pauline left young
Pauline at the station’s doors with their luggage while she went inside to
inquire about their connecting train to Durham. She returned to find her
niece frozen in place. Pauli was a specimen pinned in the middle of a circle
of white men looming over her, their faces flushing red with anger. One
man pursued them into the cinder-strewn, coal-smeared Jim Crow car,
where long after his departure the pair remained too terrified to sleep. Their
infraction? Aunt Pauline had been unable to read the “Whites Only” sign in
the waiting room.14
Another occurred that fall, after her grandfather’s death. Disoriented by
grief, Murray’s widowed grandmother Cornelia flashed back to the last time
she had kept house without her husband, in her twenties. Then, she had
regularly awoken to the sound of pounding hooves as KKK night riders
encircled her cabin, flaming torches in hand. Now, every evening Cornelia
would barricade herself and young Pauline in her upstairs bedroom by
piling furniture and clothing floor to ceiling in front of the door and
windows; once secure, she would roast potatoes and boil greens and salt
pork at the fireplace that Pauline would be too scared to eat. Cornelia’s own
childhood had been marked by terror—she was born enslaved to a woman
who was regularly raped by her enslaver, a prominent white lawyer.
Slavery’s long shadow stretched well into the twentieth century, clouding
Murray’s young life in the dawn of the 1920s.15
Chronic burdens erupt into fatal crises. Murray’s father was
institutionalized in a segregated, negligent mental hospital where twice as
many patients left in body bags as were discharged. When Murray was still
a child, a temporary guard beat her father to death. Racism, writes the
contemporary prison abolitionist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, is not
individual antipathy or hatred of people of color. Its greatest impact is not
misjudging people by the color of their skin. Rather, it is a structure that
generates continual proximity to the fatal; it is the “production and
exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”16
The idea that racism materializes as vulnerability to early death can be
put in productive conversation with the theory of biopolitics, which was
initially proposed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. Biopolitics
refers to the modern system of governing that treats the central duty of
society to be optimizing the population, particularly in a biological and
economic sense. Eugenics, whether of the conservative, white feminist
strategy or the Black professional variety, is a key tool of biopolitics, for it
emblematizes the strategy of approaching politics as a matter of improving
the alleged quality of the population. In biopolitics, mechanisms of state,
capital, and culture mark some people, especially the white wealthy and
middle classes, as the members of the nation who matter and who must be
enabled to thrive. Resources like capital, education, and health initiatives
flow to this chosen group on the belief that their flourishing will secure the
success of the population. The same mechanisms simultaneously designate
other people, especially people of color, the impoverished, and the disabled,
as contagions best left to die once their labor has been extracted. In
sociologist Ruha Benjamin’s terms, Black people in particular are
“underserved” in order to “overserve” the chosen.17
The result is the uneven distribution of life and death: morbidity and
mortality cluster among the racialized poor and/or disabled, in order that the
rich, abled, and white may prosper. The impact of decades of biopolitical
policies and practices can be seen most clearly in the drastically different
life spans within urban populations in the United States today. Currently, in
cities like Chicago and Washington, DC, people who live in the poorest zip
codes die thirty years earlier on average than their neighbors in the
wealthiest, whitest zip codes.18
Sexism, too, is a tool of biopolitics. Traditionally, institutions have
designated white men to be the most deserving of flourishing due to their
allegedly superior intelligence and economic productivity. White women
are simultaneously relegated to a supporting role among the chosen. They
are tasked with providing a charitable veneer to a system that is designed to
let the racialized, poor, and disabled die, thereby smoothing out the
contradictions of such a brutal structure of power. Through their presumed
moral authority, emotional sympathy, and civilizing projects, they
seemingly sanctify the whole structure. Women of color, by contrast, are
cast as reproducers: dangerous breeders of the “unfit” who, at best, can be
corralled into serving the families of the “fit.”
White feminism works within biopolitics, rather than against it, to carve
out a prominent place for middle-class women within these fatal dynamics.
In the nineteenth century, white feminists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Alice Fletcher seized their assigned role as
civilization’s stabilizers to expand their own authority, insisting upon
respect and status on account of the crucial work they provided to the
structure of society. In the twentieth, white feminists developed a bolder
agenda, claiming that white women belonged as full equals—not only as
civilizing helpmeets—among the part of the population that must be
cultivated. Their own growth, they insisted in increasingly biological
language, would maximize their own potential and the “quality” of
children, thereby improving the nation as a whole. One of their tactics, as
was true of biopolitical governance in the twentieth century more generally,
was to cleanse the population of people who seemingly threatened their
success. This was most visible in eugenic feminisms like Margaret Sanger’s
(and writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s), but it was a consistent, if less
apparent, feature of white feminism throughout the century. As president of
NOW, Betty Friedan would undertake a cleansing project of her own.
While white feminists seek to more firmly establish their place among those
who deserve to thrive, intersectional feminists, by contrast, typically set out
to eradicate the underlying logic that a society’s advancement requires
sacrificing the many. Murray exemplifies this tradition. As an adult,
Murray, who had adopted the more androgynous name Pauli in her early
twenties, didn’t want only to personally escape segregation.19 She
determined to defang the snake of Jim Crow, weakening a lethal threat to
Black lives. She had direct experience with the effects of the systematic
devaluation of Black life, including inferior educational opportunities and
wages so low she suffered from chronic malnutrition due to regularly not
being able to afford to eat. After cramming two years’ worth of college-
preparatory classes into one year to meet entrance requirements her
segregated high school in Durham hadn’t fulfilled, and despite extensive
breaks to work Depression-era diner shifts in Manhattan that didn’t pay
enough for her to eat regularly, nor would they provide meals to Black staff,
Murray held a valuable degree from Hunter College.
Her diploma from what was known as the “poor girl’s Radcliffe,”
combined with her pride in her descent from prominent white and Black
southern families, gave her what she called a drive for “excellence.” But a
New Deal job with the Workers’ Education Project radicalized her, as did
her affiliation with socialist organizations. She saw the violence and
poverty capitalism created and began to comprehend that “a system of
oppression draws much of its strength from the acquiescence of its
victims”—a conditioning she had heretofore accepted. Rights, Murray
realized, should not come about by exceptional members of the race like her
“proving” their worth. The goal should not be fighting your way to the top,
becoming part of the population whose lives matter. Instead, rights should
be won by a broad movement insisting that equal treatment was a birthright.
Since racism was a systemic phenomenon, individually breaking through its
barriers had little effect—it was structures of power that needed
demolishing. “It is difficult to understand how revolutionary [this idea]
seemed in the 1930s,” Murray reflected near the end of her life. “For a
Negro to act on this conviction was considered almost suicidal in many
parts of the South.”20
Murray nonetheless attempted to splinter the all-pervasive structure of
racism. In 1940, she innovated brand-new direct action techniques that
would propel the civil rights movement forward fifteen years later: refusing
to sit in the back of the bus and occupying lunch counters that wouldn’t
serve Black patrons. Her bus actions landed her and her girlfriend Adelene
“Mac” McBean in jail; she also cofounded the Congress for Racial Equality
with Bayard Rustin and others to engage in civil disobedience. Further
pulled both by the desire to chip away at the edifice of Jim Crow and by
fealty to Aunt Pauline, who was nearing seventy and needed support, she
decided to return south. In the fall of 1938 Murray filed for graduate
admission at the University of North Carolina, hoping to pursue a graduate
degree with their race relations experts. UNC, as she knew, was a
segregated institution, and she wished to initiate a change in their policy.
But they denied her application to the Department of Sociology: “members
of your race are not admitted to the University.”21
The rejection singed with hypocrisy. Not only was the institution’s
important work on racism reserved for white people, but Cornelia’s wealthy
white aunt, who had also been Cornelia’s legal owner, had funded
scholarships for UNC students in perpetuity. UNC was still benefiting from
wealth generated by the enslavement of Murray’s own family. Murray’s
private application quickly became a public matter, for the US Supreme
Court took up a case regarding whites-only higher education at state
universities just a week after her submission. In the resulting furor, North
Carolina’s governor made the state’s position clear: “North Carolina does
not believe in social equality between the races.”22
Murray’s experience navigating the resulting media blitz encouraged her
to pursue law school instead of sociology, as did her ongoing racial justice
work that brought her repeatedly into contact with NAACP lawyers. By
joining the legal field, she could attempt to alter the racist structures that so
unevenly distributed the chances of life and death. But here she encountered
further obstacles: to be chosen for flourishing, she learned, was also a
matter of sex. On her very first day at Howard University’s School of Law,
in the fall of 1941, one of her professors announced that he didn’t
understand why women even pursued legal education. His insult, echoed in
her classmates’ laughter, triggered her drive for personal success: “he had
just guaranteed that I would become the top student in his class.”23 Her
response, however, was not only to try and rise above. Socialism had taught
her to ditch the elitist approach of becoming the exception. Instead, the
belittling she experienced at the nation’s premier Black university, from the
very people spearheading civil rights litigation, prompted her to identify a
second, structural system of oppression in which she was caught: Jane
Crow.
Despite the misogyny she faced, Murray had the confidence to invent
legal strategy while still a student. Jim Crow segregation was authorized by
Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court case that established the
precedent of “separate but equal” facilities for Black residents. In the 1940s,
lawyers’ dominant strategy for challenging the effects of Plessy was
exposing that segregated institutions were not in fact equal. Through this
case-by-case approach, NAACP attorneys and allies demonstrated that the
facilities Black people were forced to use were of vastly inferior quality,
thereby violating the terms of the law. This approach resulted in
incremental reforms. North Carolina, for example, had been forced to make
some attempt at building graduate schools for Black students in the wake of
Murray’s application.24 But Murray had a different idea.
Segregation itself, she argued from her classroom seat, was designed to
“humiliate and degrade.” The entire structure of Jim Crow, she insisted, was
rotten; replacing moldering beams only reinforced the edifice. The new
crop of civil rights attorneys Howard Law was producing, she announced,
should challenge the legal merit of “separate” facilities in the first place by
establishing that the core goal of segregation was to harm. They should
incorporate psychological and sociological data demonstrating that Jim
Crow eroded the self-worth and psychological health of Black people to
make the case that segregation violated the Equal Protection Clause of the
Fourteenth Amendment.25
It was a wildly unorthodox opinion. Her peers broke into “hoots of
derisive laughter.” Opposing the legality of Plessy, they argued, would end
up backfiring and buttressing Jim Crow. But Murray was sure of herself and
prepared a lengthy paper articulating her position. She made a $10 wager
with Professor Spottswood Robinson: the Supreme Court would overturn
the foundation of Plessy—that separate could ever be equal—within
twenty-five years.26 And though nobody would bother to tell her for
decades, Murray’s paper would play a role in that victory.
Jane Crow repeatedly prevented her from realizing her own legal
successes. When Murray did, in fact, graduate from Howard Law at the top
of her class in 1944 despite being the only female student in the school, she
desired to follow the customary path of Howard’s most successful
graduates. That meant pursuing a master’s degree in law at Harvard. The
institution’s response to her application, however, had a familiar ring: “you
are not of the sex entitled to be admitted to Harvard Law School.”27
Murray had run afoul of Jane Crow at Harvard, just as she had run afoul
of Jim Crow at the University of North Carolina six years prior. Though
women had been petitioning for admission since 1871, Harvard Law
wouldn’t admit women until 1950. (Two decades later, Harvard College
merged with its women’s college affiliate, Radcliffe, and admitted female
undergraduates.) Murray had prominent supporters—she had begun a
decades-long friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt during her
Workers’ Education Project days and President Franklin D. Roosevelt
himself interceded on her behalf—but many of her Howard peers responded
with bemusement, poking fun at her for thinking Harvard would admit a
woman.28 Jane Crow ran thick at Howard.
For her part, Murray struck a whimsical tone closing one of her
ultimately futile appeals to Harvard Law: “Humorously, gentlemen, I would
gladly change my sex to meet your requirements but since the way to such
change has not been revealed to me, I have no recourse but to appeal to you
to change your minds on this subject. Are you to tell me that one is as
difficult as the other?”29
As is so often the case with humor, Murray’s joke flirted with a deeper
truth. Murray had not been sitting idly by waiting for the path to sex change
to be “revealed.” For the prior decade, and for a decade to come, Murray
fought her doctors for access to testosterone. Her life in Harlem, then the
site of a queer renaissance that included rollicking drag balls and sex-
crossing stars like Bruce Nugent and Gladys Bentley, no doubt informed
her quest for hormones. In 1939, she and McBean wrote the editor of a
major Black newspaper thanking him for a front-page article about
hormone therapy for effeminate men, praising the paper for highlighting the
needs of this “minority of minorities.” Of slight, boyish build, Murray kept
her hair closely cropped and rejected blouses and skirts for collared shirts
and slacks. Aunt Pauline affectionately referred to her as a “boy-girl”; Pauli
labeled one of her most fetching, androgynous photographs “the imp” and
occasionally signed letters as “Peter Panic.” She had passionate affairs with
“extremely feminine and heterosexual women,” such as Peg Holmes, her
girlfriend of five years with whom she hopped trains across the country in
1935, and she didn’t identify with homosexuality. She “prefer[ed]
experimentation on the male side,” she informed a doctor at the Long Island
Rest Home.30
Murray’s letters and journals, particularly those during hospitalizations
for mental and emotional breakdowns following breakups with girlfriends
in the 1930s and 1940s, reflect her quest to understand her maleness, which
she presented as “wearing pants, wanting to be one of the men, doing things
that fellows do, hating to be dominated by women unless I like them.” Her
research into the new science of hormones led her to suspect a glands
problem, and she convinced her doctors to search for undescended testicles
or other signs that she was a “pseudo-hermaphrodite.”31 The results, which
declared her anatomy and endocrinology to be sex-normative for women,
disappointed her. For decades, her biographers detail, she pursued medical
and scientific explanations for and treatment to enhance her strong
identification with maleness. For this reason, scholars today consider
Murray’s life to be an important chapter in transgender history. (Following
them, I use the female pronoun for Murray since that is how she referred to
herself throughout her life.)
Murray’s own quest for respectability, and possibly her inability to
completely shake off her family’s insistence that progress was to be earned
through the “best of the race” leading the way, drove her to erase any traces
of gender and sexual non-normativity in her public writing.32 Her uneasy
relationship to femaleness casts her own commitment to exposing and
dismantling Jane Crow in a new light. She was devoted to ending sex and
race discrimination, but not because she herself consistently identified as a
woman. Murray’s call was for structural justice, even when some personal
truths seemed too vulnerable to expose.
In the end, Pauli Murray went to UC Berkeley to earn a master’s in law,
showing up on campus just a few months after Betty Friedan had left for the
East.
Beginning in the late 1950s, Betty Friedan developed a diagnosis of her
own, identifying the problem she extrapolated from the Smith College
alumnae surveys. Women were suffering from the feminine mystique, she
proposed, or the harmful fantasy that they would flourish only through
sacrificing themselves to the needs of their husbands and children. Her
1963 blockbuster The Feminine Mystique—which sold three million copies
in three years33—argued that popular culture, social science, and corporate
advertising systematically devalued women’s capacities to the point that
housewives were suffering from an identity crisis so acute it was making
them ill.i
Women, Betty Friedan insisted, are “sick,” and they’re sick from the
drudgery of performing housework day in, day out. The housewife’s
lifestyle, she wrote, is “quite simply, genocide,” for menial labor slowly
poisons her organic right to grow and prosper—as if it were regular doses
of anthrax, rather than vacuuming powder, that she sprinkles wall to wall. In
other words, middle-class women, who Friedan felt deserved full
membership among those chosen to thrive, were unfairly cast into the realm
of premature death. Like any good doctor, Friedan dispensed her diagnosis
along with a cure. Women, she prescribed, must be liberated from the
endless stream of cooking, cleaning, and childcare so that they may assume
careers that enable their “full realization of human potential” for abstract,
creative thought. Side pursuits in politics and the arts did not count: only
specialization did. “The amateur” or “dilettante,” Friedan insisted, “does
not gain real status by [their work] in society, or real personal identity.”
Professionals alone succeeded in securing respect and self-realization via
the marketplace.34
As Black feminist theorist bell hooks pointed out back in 1984,
Friedan’s diagnosis of the feminine mystique misidentified the
psychological condition of the educated white housewife as the universal
condition of all women. One-third of all women were working for wages in
the early 1960s, including most women of color, and they faced far more
substantial inequities than being bored at home. This aspect of her critique
is now well-known. But hooks didn’t only expose the women whose
existence Friedan forgot. She also revealed the women whose growth
Friedan foreclosed. “White feminists” like Friedan, bell hooks argued, were
not trying to redistribute wealth and power, despite their big talk. Rather,
they “were primarily concerned with gaining entrance into the capitalist
patriarchal power structure” themselves. The fundamental problem with
Friedan’s account of “the problem with no name” is not that she ignores all
women except for the housewife. The problem is that she implicitly
sacrifices all other women to the housewife’s aspirations. hooks illuminated
that working-class women and others who make up “the silent majority” not
only fall out of Friedan’s frame; they are pinned beneath it.35
Friedan recommends that the middle-class woman free herself from
mere “biological living” and unlock her capacity to flourish. But this
necessarily relies on outsourcing the incessant grind of sustaining life to the
working class. What liberates middle-class women to become professionals
is the essential labor blue-collar women provide. To free up time to pursue a
career, Friedan praises the tactics of hiring “a three-day-a-week cleaning
woman,” ordering groceries via phone rather than shopping in person, and
“sending the laundry out,” along with asking husbands and children for
“help.” The advice is cursory, almost an afterthought in the final chapter—
her focus was to free middle-class women from the trap of housework, not
on those who would clean up in their place.
Friedan, in other words, advocated a form of biopolitics. She framed the
chronic undervaluation of housewives as a biological threat to the vitality of
the population. In Friedan’s rendering, the feminine mystique was eroding
the nation from within. The incapacitation of the housewife “is taking a far
greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any
known disease,” she maintained. Women were sucked of their vitality; they
were “walking through their leftover lives like living dead women.”
Weakened housewives, whom society depleted instead of enhanced, were
producing “pathological” children—Friedan attributed the rising incidence
of autism to mothers whose own arrested development resulted in immature
children who lived only in a world of things and animals, walled off from
human emotion. (The accepted etiology of autism at the time was
“refrigerator mothers” who withheld affection from their infants, so Friedan
was following established science in turning to mothers’ conditioning,
rather than physiology, for a cause.) She also attributed “the homosexuality
that is spreading like a murky smog over the American scene” to
housewives who must live vicariously through their children, resulting in
“parasitical” attachments that prevent sons from maturing into heterosexual
relationships. Housewives, she argued, were suffering from a “progressive
dehumanization” so extreme that the split-level suburban home was akin to
a “comfortable concentration camp” (an analogy she later regretted, and
rightly so).36
But, she concluded, if middle-class women were freed of menial labor
so that they could find self-fulfillment, society may reach “the next step in
human evolution.”37 Like Sanger’s, Friedan’s goal was not merely women’s
freedom to choose the labor of social reproduction: it was also to improve
the “quality” of women and the nation in a biological and social sense. This
goal meant sacrificing the working class to domestic labor in order to
cultivate the psychological and physical health of wealthier women.
In Friedan’s book tour and many media appearances—she claimed to be
one of the first authors to use the power of television to drive book sales—
she would cast herself as a housewife wrapped in the feminine mystique
like chiffon for a cocktail party. She elided the fact that she had been a
working woman. Indeed, for six years after she departed Berkeley, Friedan
had been a labor journalist covering strikes for the country’s most left-
leaning union newspapers—until she was fired for being pregnant. Her
articles often highlighted the specific struggles of Black working-class
women. She had even attempted to join the Communist Party in 1943,
showing up to the New York office in pearls and pumps.38 Her move from
solidarity with the working class to sacrificing the poor to domestic labor in
order to liberate the middle-class woman may seem jarring. Partly, the shift
can be attributed to the increasing conservativism of the McCarthy era. But
another reason lies in the structure of white feminist biopolitics, which she
embraced to great mainstream success.
Friedan and other middle-class white feminists identify sex as the only
thing holding them back from flourishing. Friedan saw “women as a class”
unto themselves, uniquely marginalized in relation to middle-class white
men. “My early political experience writing for the so-called working
class,” she contended, “had taught me that ideas, styles, change in America
comes from the middle class.”39 The possibility of interrogating other
vectors of power dropped away, and middle-class women became, in the
tradition of white feminists before her, a single axis, a discrete half of an
analogy, a population to be defended.
But Pauli Murray knew that Black women lived their lives at the
confluence of Jim Crow, Jane Crow, and capitalism, and that if civil rights
were to mean anything, protections from race and sex discrimination in
employment and other arenas were necessary. In the mid-1950s, for
example, Murray held two law degrees, and she had published an important
book on state segregation laws that attorney and future Supreme Court
justice Thurgood Marshall referred to as the “Bible.”40 She even
occasionally spent weekends at her friend Eleanor Roosevelt’s Hudson
River retreat. On the strength of her creative writing, she had just become
the first African American to be awarded a residency at the MacDowell
Colony, where she befriended James Baldwin when he arrived at the famed
artist retreat a few weeks later. Murray would publish her first
autobiography, an account of her family’s history, in 1956. Yet despite all
this achievement, she simply couldn’t find enough organizations willing to
hire a Black female attorney, nor could she support herself as a writer and
poet. She wasn’t earning a living, so her literary agent found her work as a
typist. Murray anonymously prepared the manuscripts of other authors.
In 1955 and 1956, Murray regularly typed for Betty Friedan.41
Murray worried that her legal education and her careful demonstration of
how the structure of Jim Crow could be demolished rather than dismantled
piecemeal had been “wasted effort.” 42 After all, it was the typist skills she
learned in her segregated high school that were paying the rent and
purchasing her food. Murray wouldn’t learn that her reasoning had in fact
played a role in striking down segregation law until a decade after the fact.
She had received a break in 1956 when attorney Lloyd Garrison, the great-
grandson of the nineteenth-century abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison
with whom Frances E. W. Harper, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass
had worked closely, offered her a position at his New York firm. The job
relaunched her legal career.
Buoyed in part by this change in fortune, Murray dropped by Howard
Law School in 1963. She wished to track down a copy of her two-decade-
old paper. And, she hoped to collect the $10 her former professor
Spottswood Robinson owed her for having lost her bet that Plessy’s
precedent of separate but equal institutions would fall within twenty-five
years.
Pauli Murray in Petersborough, New Hampshire, 1955. “It’s my most
natural self, I think,” Murray wrote on the back of the photograph before
sending it to Eleanor Roosevelt. Photograph by Florence Goldman.
(Courtesy of MacDowell Colony)
When she asked Robinson for her paper, to her astonishment he
produced it instantly from files near at hand. As they waited for a secretary
to make a carbon copy, Robinson remarked off-handedly that her paper
“was helpful to us” in destroying Plessy. When preparing the briefs as part
of Thurgood Marshall’s NAACP team arguing the Brown v. Board of
Education case, Robinson had remembered Murray’s paper and dug it up
from the law school’s files. It was her framework that segregation caused
lasting psychological harm, thereby violating the Equal Protection Clause
of the Fourteenth Amendment, that led Marshall and his colleagues to their
successful argument that separate educational institutions were inherently
unequal and in violation of the Constitution. The Supreme Court decision
had been unanimous: segregated public education “generates a feeling of
inferiority” with enduring consequences; separate could never be equal.43
Her law school essay had influenced one of the most important civil rights
victories of the century. She was stunned to the point of near
speechlessness.
“Spots, why on earth didn’t you tell me?” was all she could muster.44
Murray’s political and legal work in the years to come similarly
shattered long-standing justifications of discrimination. But this time she
would receive credit for her contributions.
In the 1960s, “Help Wanted, Men” and “Help Wanted, Women” ads
filled daily newspapers; bans persisted in preventing women from serving
on juries, attending universities, or controlling their own credit cards and
bank accounts; and “No Ladies,” “Men Only,” and “Only Escorted Women
Will Be Served” signs were still posted in the windows of restaurants,
clubs, and bars around the country like sentinels guarding the castle. Yet
few considered women’s subordinate status to rise to the level of legal
segregation. Many white women considered their chief battles to have
already been won: suffrage, contraception, and access to the professions.
But Murray saw deep, structural inequality that cut across racial and class
lines. Determined to expose the uneven distribution of power entrenched far
deeper than voting rights, she built on her expert knowledge of prosecuting
civil rights cases under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment to advocate another new strategy. Women’s marginalization,
she insisted, was similarly a violation of constitutional rights.
When some of the March on Washington demands to end Jim Crow
materialized in the form of the new civil rights bill proposed in Congress in
the winter of 1964, Murray found her opportunity to weaken Jane Crow. In
the final hours of debate in the House of Representatives, the Virginia
Democrat Howard W. Smith introduced an amendment to Title VII of the
civil rights bill, the section that made discrimination illegal in the realm of
employment. “Sex,” he proposed, should be included among race, color,
national origin, and religion as characteristics that employers were
prohibited from taking into account when hiring. Smith was a segregationist
who thought white Christian women would need protection from the rights
Black people were gaining in the post–civil rights era. Most congressmen
took Smith’s suggestion to be a joke, and the sound of laughter rang
throughout the chamber. The committee tasked with drafting the bill hadn’t
even considered including sex as a protected category. But surprisingly, the
House passed the amendment and sent the civil rights bill on to the Senate.
Murray was ecstatic at the inclusion of sex in the equal employment
opportunity portion of the bill, whatever its origins. “As a Negro woman,”
Murray explained, “I knew that in many instances it was difficult to
determine whether I was being discriminated against because of race or
sex.”45
Unlike discrimination on the basis of race, however, restricting access to
jobs on the basis of sex was considered a significant progressive agenda.
Back in 1908, labor activists had successfully pushed for sex to be a valid
employment restriction in order to win worker protections. Significant labor
victories such as ten-hour shift maximums for women workers were won on
the basis of the Muller v. Oregon ruling that the state had a vested interest in
shielding women from overbearing work because of their social duty to
birth and raise children. In the 1960s, Muller still set precedent, and the
most common sex-based restrictions that remained were those specifying
the maximum number of hours women could work per week. The US
Supreme Court continued to uphold “sex as a basis for legal classification”
in a variety of arenas. A 1961 case affirmed that restricting the courtroom
jury bench to men alone was constitutional given that women were tasked
with the “special responsibilities” of taking care of their families and thus
shouldn’t be burdened with civic duties.46
Murray, however, was convinced sex-based protections did more harm
than good. To help ensure that the clause prohibiting jobs-related sex
discrimination would survive the wheeling and dealing over the civil rights
bill sure to happen in the Senate, she returned to her typewriter. She drafted
a provocative legal memorandum in its defense, issuing her response to
leading senators, the attorney general, Vice President Hubert Humphrey,
and the first lady. She stressed her innovative argument that the Fourteenth
Amendment of the US Constitution guaranteed equal treatment before the
law, even in the case of sex. “Title VII without the ‘sex’ amendment would
benefit Negro males primarily and thus offer genuine equality of
opportunity to only half of the potential Negro work force,” Murray
insisted.47 A reply from Lady Bird Johnson’s social secretary two weeks
later alerted Murray to the success of her memo: the Johnson administration
supported the sex amendment, and the Senate soon did as well. Thanks in
large part to Murray’s intervention, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
had achieved what the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments failed to do a
century prior—to prohibit discrimination on the basis of race and sex, in
this case in the realm of employment. Murray won intersectional
feminism’s first major legal victory.
In the wake of her success, Murray joined forces with a white woman
civil rights attorney, Mary O. Eastwood, on a scholarly article cum
manifesto, “Jane Crow and the Law” (1965). Together, they set a legal
agenda for intersectional feminism. Discrimination on the basis of sex is
illegal under the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VII, they argued,
correlating race and sex as “entirely comparable classes” in which the
precedence of antidiscrimination law for one should set precedent for the
other. Murray and Eastwood saw the doctrine of sex classification to be
akin to race classification: both addressed “permanent, unchangeable,
natural classes” that were “susceptible to implications of innate inferiority.”
Paternalistic labor protections like hours limitations and weight-lifting
restrictions reinforced inequalities through “restrictions and confinement,”
they argued. These laws enacted “chivalry,” not justice, and reproduced the
logic of separate but equal.48 Debasement on the basis of womanhood,
Murray continued to stress as she had during the March on Washington
battle, did not merely pose individual setbacks—sexism rose to the level of
structural marginalization.
Soon Murray herself landed a major court victory against Jane Crow. In
1965, she and Dorothy Kenyon, a seventy-seven-year-old white lawyer,
successfully argued on behalf of the NAACP that male-only, white-only
juries in Alabama violated the Fourteenth Amendment. It was the first time
a civil rights lawsuit simultaneously challenged race and sex discrimination
together. It was also the first time a federal court ruled that the Equal
Protection Clause applied to cases of sex discrimination.49 Though the case
set precedent only in Alabama, Murray was on her way to chipping away at
Jane Crow.
Six years later, in a case testing the validity of an Idaho law barring
women from serving as executors of wills, the Supreme Court established
national precedent. Reed v. Reed (1971) declared that the Fourteenth
Amendment prohibited differential treatment on the basis of sex throughout
the United States. The promising gender rights attorney at the ACLU who
represented the plaintiff made sure Murray got credit for developing this
legal reasoning. When signing her brief, she added two more names, though
these women hadn’t been directly involved in the case: Pauli Murray and
Dorothy Kenyon. The lawyer was Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Ginsburg’s move
to share authorship, Brittney Cooper writes, “is a model for how to solve
contemporary issues among young feminists over white feminists’
appropriation without attribution of the intellectual and political labor of
women of color.”50
Murray’s insight that sexism was akin to racism considerably advanced
the project of intersectional feminism. Her reasoning depended on
analogies, a favored rhetorical strategy of white feminist theory. Yet in her
hands analogy became a method of convergence, rather than separation.
White feminist theorists like Stanton posed equivalences between groups of
people in which one allegedly stands in for the other: the woman becomes
the slave. Murray, however, interrogated multiple structures of power and
showed how they worked in tandem. She didn’t position the women’s
movement as a separate, autonomous campaign from other social
movements, as Betty Friedan did: “The students were doing it. The blacks
were doing it. It was time for us,” Friedan reflected in 2000. These
formulations insist on distinct, parallel identities that never meet, leaving
Black women structural impossibilities. By contrast, as Cooper and others
have argued, Murray created a conceptual framework for revealing the
connections between sexism and racism. “Since the problems of race
discrimination and sex discrimination meet in me,” Murray wrote, “I must
consider both as equally important.” For those who live at the crosshairs,
she revealed, these forces compound one another, multiplying in effect,
such that it is Black women, not white, who experience the fullest brunt of
sexism within Black and white spaces.51
Murray sits at a key historical juncture. Her legal work in the 1960s
made significant progress achieving the agenda initially set by Frances E.
W. Harper, Frederick Douglass, and others one hundred years prior—civil
rights that simultaneously addressed the forces of racism and sexism as
separate, but overlapping, forms of social power. Murray also laid the
foundation for feminist theory in her wake. The term intersectionality was
first coined by Black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 to
address the confluence of racism and sexism in the realm of law, and she
cited Pauli Murray as a precedent.52
Intersectional feminism rejects white feminism’s biopolitical mandate to
advance oneself through dispossessing others. Instead, it focuses on the
needs of the most marginalized as the best vantage to power in all its
complexity. “If Black women were free,” the Combahee River Collective
theorized in 1977, “it would mean that everyone else would have to be free
since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of
oppression.”53
Murray had helped ensure that the civil rights bill included the prohibition
of sex-based employment discrimination. The “Help Wanted, Women” and
race-segregated job ads were to become a relic of the past. Yet a piece of
civil rights legislation is only as good as the institutions that enforce it and
the social movements that hold those institutions accountable. In 1965, a
new body was created to oversee the application of Title VII in the
workplace, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Its
leadership gave every indication that it would not be taking sex
discrimination seriously. In a major speech, the EEOC executive director
Herman Edelsburg declared that the inclusion of “sex” in the civil rights
employment law was a “fluke,” a bastard idea “conceived out of wedlock.”
Meanwhile, the EEOC’s legal team further weakened the provision, arguing
in law review articles for what Murray called an “unduly restrictive
interpretation” of the sex clause.54 The EEOC was not willing to take
women seriously as workers in need of rights.
Murray perceived that in effect Title VII would offer no protection from
sex discrimination. Unless strong outside pressure forced the EEOC to
uphold the clause, women would continue to provide capitalism’s largest
supply of exploitable labor. “What will it take to arouse the working women
of this country to fight for their rights?” she wrote to her network of
feminist attorney allies. “Do you suppose the time has come for the
organization of a strong national Ad Hoc Committee of women?”55
From the stage of New York’s Biltmore Hotel, an upper-crust
establishment whose bar didn’t even admit women patrons, Murray made a
more momentous recommendation. She was an invited speaker at the
annual conference of the National Council of Women, an organization
founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—and the setting
where Frances E. W. Harper had shut down Alice Fletcher’s appeal for
white women to civilize the so-called dependent races. Women, Murray
counseled her genteel listeners, should prepare to demand that Title VII’s
prohibition of sex discrimination be enforced.
“It should not be necessary to have another March on Washington in
order that there be equal job opportunities for all. But if this necessity
should arise, I hope women will not flinch from the thought.”56
Murray hadn’t thought her speech particularly moving or radical,
covering as it did the legal details of Title VII, and she returned home that
evening to New Haven where she was about to become the first African
American to earn a Yale doctorate in law. But she had underestimated her
own effectiveness as a speaker, and her audience was largely white upper-
middle-class women.57 Murray’s spirited provocation that ladies ought to
revolt in the streets landed an account of her speech in the pages of the next
day’s New York Times.
When New York woke up and read their morning papers, Murray’s
phone rang. Betty Friedan was on the other end, and she wanted to talk.
Friedan requested an interview for her new book, a follow-up to The
Feminine Mystique. Friedan never finished that book, though she sold it to
her publisher, wrote one-third of it, and gave it a memorable name: Jane
Crow.58
“When I was fired for being pregnant, there were no words such as ‘sex
discrimination’ in my vocabulary,” Friedan later recalled. “Those words
‘sex discrimination,’” in the air since the passage of Title VII, “suddenly
threw light onto the murkiness…. I tracked down Pauli Murray at Yale and
made a date to meet her. And I started down the road that would lead to the
women’s movement.”59
Within months, Friedan, Murray, and a dozen others would join forces to
launch the National Organization for Women. Together, they were
instrumental in reinventing feminist activism for the civil rights era.
Murray provided Friedan with considerably more than an interview and a
manuscript title. By this time, Murray was well connected with other
feminists quietly and not-so-quietly working for women’s rights from
positions within federal institutions and commissions. Pauli Murray “tuned
me into the underground network of women,” Friedan explained. “I didn’t
have to work underground, however. As the author of a best-selling book on
women, I was often invited to the White House in the Johnson years, when
token women were needed.”60 Friedan’s visibility and independence were
major assets to the underground network, however. Government employees
couldn’t fight government institutions, but journalists could.
The underground turned into a movement in June 1966, as Murray,
Friedan, Mary Eastwood, and others attended the third annual conference of
the Commission on the Status of Women, an organization established by
President Kennedy to further women’s rights. On the escalator of the
Washington Hilton the first morning, Friedan ran into Murray and Dorothy
Haener, a labor leader with the United Auto Workers. They were all
concerned that Title VII’s prohibition of sex discrimination in employment
was about to be rendered meaningless. The EEOC was retreating from any
enforcement of sex equality and had recently decided that sex-restricted job
ads were permissible because they served “the convenience of readers.” All
three suspected the real reason: sex-segregated employment that confined
half the population to lower-paying jobs served the interests of capital.
White women made about fifty cents, on average, to every white man’s
dollar, and Black women made only seventy-one cents compared to white
women. Jane Crow rendered women, Black and white, a tremendous source
of surplus labor, for the value they produced for their employers far
exceeded the value of their paychecks.61 Murray and Haener successfully
urged Friedan to host a meeting in her hotel room that night to strategize
how women could push the commission to enforce Title VII.
From her position on the next morning’s keynote panel, Murray made
plain that the EEOC must act to protect workplace equity. But the
commission refused to offer even a resolution recommending that the
EEOC uphold Title VII—the commission’s function was restricted to
window-dressing for the Democratic White House. Angry and energized, at
the conference lunch Friedan, Murray, and a dozen others whispered and
traded notes plotting a new organization that could pressure government
agencies into action. Together they named their new group NOW—the
National Organization for Women—and Friedan sketched the first line of its
mission on a paper napkin: “to take the actions needed to bring women into
the mainstream of American society now, exercising all the privileges and
responsibilities thereof, in truly equal partnership with men.”62
Betty Friedan became president of NOW and Murray one of its
cofounders alongside Eastwood, Haener, and four dozen others, including
March on Washington alumna Anna Arnold Hedgeman and Puerto Rican
activist Inez Casiano. Over the summer, Murray joined a small group of
seven who strategized building NOW into a permanent entity. At the
founding conference that fall, she pushed the organization to address social
injustice in all its forms, including poverty, rather than focusing exclusively
on women’s legal rights. Wealth inequality hit Black women particularly
hard, Murray stressed. After Friedan drafted the full-length NOW mission
statement, Murray replaced Friedan’s narrower focus on individual “equal
rights” with a nod to the wide-ranging nature of social power. “We realize
that women’s problems are linked to many broader questions of social
justice,” Murray inserted after striking through Friedan’s words, and NOW
would attend not only to “discrimination,” but also “deprivation.”63
Murray long advocated for Black women and white women to join
together in coalition to fight the concentration of power in the hands of
wealthy men. But Friedan’s NOW would fail to be the Black-white alliance
Murray sought, much less a broadly multiracial one. Despite a somewhat
diverse leadership, the organization largely enacted Friedan’s agenda:
enabling middle-class women to thrive. Hedgeman was leading NOW’s
task force on poverty, but the bulk of NOW increasingly sidelined her, just
as it dismissed Murray when she insisted that the organization fight the
federal government to include jobs for women in its poverty remediation
programs. NOW wanted to focus instead on middle-class women who were
entering the workforce, emphasizing measures such as gaining access to
public accommodations that still barred women, removing quotas on
women’s admissions to graduate school, and supporting federal childcare
centers for working mothers. Poor women weren’t on their agenda. Friedan
championed passing the Equal Rights Amendment, a bill that Murray, at the
time, didn’t support because it would focus only on the rights of sex.
Disappointed, Murray withdrew from the organization she had not only
helped found but had helped inspire. The single-axis focus on the ERA,
Murray wrote, pulling her name from the NOW board of directors
nomination slate in 1967, would result in NOW’s restricting itself “almost
solely to ‘women’s rights’ without strong bonds with other movements
toward human rights.” The hierarchy of sex NOW was adopting might even
“develop into a ‘head-on collision’ with Black civil rights and other
struggles,” she warned.64
Many of its founders had established NOW as “an NAACP for women,”
but the organization was now pursuing white feminist politics rather than
building coalitions to fight the intertwined forces of racism, sexism, and
capitalism. Under Friedan’s leadership, NOW treated women as a class unto
themselves, held back by sex alone. Murray told her colleagues that she
wouldn’t participate in a platform that sliced her three ways, “into Negro at
one time, woman at another, or worker at another.”65 She insisted that Black
women had to fight on all fronts simultaneously.
For a moment, there had been a possibility that the counterhistory of
feminism would productively transform white feminism, pulling it toward a
more capacious notion of justice. But that moment was short-lived. White
feminists continued to view Black women as resources to be tapped, rather
than strategists of true equality.
Betty Friedan speaking to reporters in 1967. (Courtesy of Prints
and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)
Friedan, meanwhile, helped build NOW into a powerful organization
that represented sex discrimination cases, conducted boycotts, organized
pickets, and fought for abortion rights. She “wanted young Black women”
in the movement, “especially in the South,” though she didn’t always
recognize the imperiousness of her wish—even after four decades to reflect.
On a trip to Atlanta in the late 1960s, she encouraged women in the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to join the feminist
movement and was dismayed when many insisted their priority was
affirming Black men, not strengthening Black women. “Well, I wanted to
spank them,” Friedan reflected—in the year 2000!—“but they learned soon
enough. They eventually came in.” Yet the statistics tell a different story. In
1972, pollsters conducted a national survey to gauge support for the
women’s liberation movement. They found that 67 percent of Black women
agreed with the cause of women’s rights, while only 35 percent of white
women did.66 Once more it was Black women, not white, who led the way
in feminist consciousness, just as they had in 1963.
Under Friedan’s leadership, NOW turned to the task of making women’s
liberation respectable. This meant cleansing the movement. For Friedan,
infamously, feminism had internal enemies who threatened the success of
the movement and must be eliminated, and those enemies were lesbians.
She sought to build an organization that would influence the people who
she thought mattered—heterosexual middle-class Americans—and the
visibility of lesbians and lesbian politics struck her as “the lavender
menace.” In the late 1940s and 1950s, Friedan and her socialist associates
had been pursued by McCarthy’s campaign to cleanse government of the
“red menace”; now, she was wielding a similar technique within the
movement. Lesbians, to Friedan, were “radical man-haters” who
endangered her agenda of speaking “to and for and from the mainstream.”67
When Friedan organized NOW’s first Congress to Unite Women in 1969
to bring together multiple factions of the women’s movement, she excluded
any out lesbian speakers, prohibited any discussion of lesbianism, and
purged lesbian groups like the Daughters of Bilitis, a middle-class club
formed in 1955. Soon, she fired out lesbian Rita Mae Brown from her
position as New York–NOW’s newsletter editor. Meanwhile, several deeply
committed members resigned in protest of the organization’s homophobia,
including the first executive director.68
But lesbians wouldn’t disappear quietly. Rita Mae Brown was
determined to make clear that lesbian issues were integral to women’s
liberation. She and a group of about forty women staged a “zap”—a
seemingly spontaneous, theatrical style of protest begun the year prior by
the Gay Liberation Movement—at the opening event of NOW’s second
annual Congress to Unite Women. Inside the public school auditorium, one
activist waiting backstage cut the lights and microphone. When she turned
the lights back on, dozens of others popped out of the aisles and seats and
tore off their blouses and tops to reveal purple T-shirts proclaiming
“Lavender Menace.” The Lavender Menace stormed the stage and
challenged the audience to join them in their politics and passion. “A
lesbian,” the manifesto they circulated throughout the crowd proclaimed,
“is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.”69
The NOW women, Brown later remembered, were nonplussed, unsure if
they should “shit, run, or go blind.” Brown would soon establish the Furies,
a lesbian commune in DC, and publish the twentieth century’s most widely
read lesbian novel, Rubyfruit Jungle. But for the next thirty years, Friedan
would maintain that the Lavender Menace action, along with the “radical
lesbian fringe” more generally, was the work of undercover CIA agents akin
to those in the Black Power movement trying to “alienate” the movement
from the mainstream.70
Friedan aimed to “restructure professions, marriage, the family, the
home”—not by dismantling those institutions, but by changing women’s
position inside of them. She wanted middle-class women to be free to
pursue a career. That essentially meant one thing: convincing bourgeois
white people, both women and men, that housewives deserved to flourish.
That meant lesbians had to go, because they jeopardized her mission to
transform mainstream sex roles and social inequality between women and
men. This emphasis on Friedan’s antagonistic posture toward other women
is no exaggeration. Friedan herself characterized NOW’s early days as beset
by “the enemies without and the enemies within.”71
Friedan was pushed out of the NOW presidency in 1970 by term limits
and the repercussions of her own ego and temper. Aileen Hernandez, an
African American civil rights activist and labor leader who had earlier
resigned her position as an EEOC commissioner in frustration with its
refusal to act on Title VII, assumed the helm. Friedan remained a central
influence, however, and served as the figurehead of the wildly successful
1970 Women’s Strike for Equality that drew tens of thousands of women to
the streets to commemorate fifty years of (white) women’s voting rights—
an event she mentioned for the very first time during the NOW press
conference publicizing that Hernandez was assuming the presidency.
“When she announced it, I almost fell off my chair,” Hernandez reflected—
though the faux pas wouldn’t have mattered much, for all cameras were
trained on Friedan. Her bombshell had done the trick of keeping her center
stage. In 1971, NOW adopted a resolution that lesbianism was “a legitimate
concern for feminism.” At the end of the decade, however, years after
Hernandez stepped down from the presidency, she lamented that NOW “has
been silent on almost any issue that deals with the inequity of society more
than the inequity of being female.”72
The result of these white feminist politics was that white women, and
white women alone, flocked to the organization in the tens of thousands. In
1974, an internal survey revealed that NOW’s members were 90 percent
white. The results were never released to the public, and NOW doesn’t
appear to have studied its own demographics in the forty-five years since.73
Yet Friedan wasn’t the only person openly worried that lesbian politics
would weaken NOW’s ability to effect institutional change. During a self-
aggrandizing account of her role in the women’s movement for a 1973 issue
of the New York Times Magazine, Friedan took the opportunity to lambast
lesbians for attempting to “manipulate” feminism “into an orgy of sex
hatred.” A flurry of letters to the editor followed from prominent feminists
like Ti-Grace Atkinson and Toni Carabillo, the national vice president of
NOW; all those published criticized Friedan’s position on homosexuality,
except for one. Pauli Murray, though grieving the death of her partner Irene
Barlow just two weeks earlier, sat in front of her typewriter and fired off a
letter to the Times. Friedan’s article, Murray upheld, was “mellow, well-
reasoned and fair,” an opinion she authorized with her own credentials as a
feminist initially encouraged by “the late Eleanor Roosevelt” to contest
Harvard Law’s ban on women students back in 1944. “A lesbian take-over”
of the movement, she agreed with Friedan, would only strengthen its
opponents. “Birchites, racists, segregationists and arch-conservatives” knew
“that Friedan and her cohorts are far more of a threat… than the so-called
revolutionary feminists” because they worked to reform the system from
within. Lesbians, Murray concluded, “are only a minority” of women.
“Problems of equality peculiar to lesbians” thus did not rise to the level of
“feminist problems.” Murray and Friedan spoke in unison: homosexuality
was a “private personal matter.”74
Murray and Friedan’s shared belief that homosexuality was not a valid
political issue for feminism likely stems in part from their common roots as
activists. Both first came into social movements through labor and socialist
organizing, which generally saw economic issues as the baseline of all
political relations, the only structure that counts. Both Friedan and Murray
made significant innovations to the Old Left framework, pushing it into the
realm of sex justice, and for Murray, racial justice, too. But homosexuality,
for this pair, did not have a history, and was not connected to structural uses
and abuses of power: it was a bedroom concern.
At a Kansas City event in 1981, a lesbian audience member approached
Friedan after her lecture about reinventing the family.
“Why don’t you talk more about gay families and lesbians?” she asked.
“That’s sex, not politics. Or it should be,” Friedan replied.75 The irony
of her own work to exclude lesbians from the movement—the very
definition of politics—seems to have escaped her.
While Murray and Friedan shared a public attitude in common, each had
very different personal stakes in the role of queerness in feminism. In
Murray’s own writing, she often inserted the term “social minorities”
alongside victims of race and sex discrimination as the constituents for
whom she fought—a likely innuendo for those, like her, who fell outside
sex and sexuality norms. Once, in a letter in 1977 criticizing an
Episcopalian bishop for speculating about her sexuality, Murray
interrogated his authority to speak about queerness at all: “What do you
really know about sexuality—heterosexuality, bi-sexuality, homosexuality,
transsexuality, unisexuality? What do you know about metabolic
imbalance?… The varieties of approach to mental health?” It was about as
close as she would ever come to publicly associating with trans people. But
Murray crossed out the lines and then never mailed the letter.76
In public, Murray remained haunted by her own leanings to keep the
movement and her own biography solidly within the boundaries of sex
respectability. And she was likely denied an important opportunity to
change institutions from the inside, her preferred agenda, on account of her
queerness. Though she was nominated to the EEOC in 1966, she failed to
pass the FBI’s security clearance—and was deeply spooked by what the
agency possibly learned about her sex identity, romantic relationships,
socialist affiliations in the 1930s and 1940s, and history of mental health
breakdowns. When Murray wrote her second autobiography in the early
1980s, as she was dying, she scrubbed any mention of her romances and her
persistent self-knowledge that she was more male than female. She refers to
her life partner, Irene Barlow, only as one of her “dearest friends.” Gender
and sexuality were not public issues, for Murray, and thus not part of her
account of the intersections of power, even as she consistently pushed
against social expectations of binary male/female and binary Black/white
identities she saw as “rigid molds” constraining her.77
Friedan, for her part, remained hostile to the role of sexuality in
feminism throughout her life—except for when she chose to write about her
own sexual liberation and her passionate feelings for men. Perhaps this very
public heterosexuality made gay rights less threatening to her personally as
time went on. She came to endorse lesbian rights as a distinct cause, lending
surprise support at a crucial moment. When the 1977 National Women’s
Conference in Houston debated a highly controversial resolution supporting
lesbian rights, Friedan took the floor to announce, “I am known to be
violently opposed to the lesbian issue…. Now my priority is in passing the
ERA. And because there is nothing in it that will give any protection to
homosexuals, I believe we must help the women who are lesbians.”78
Pauli Murray was ill-suited to the radical politics of the late 1960s and
1970s. As a professor of American Studies at Brandeis University, she
offered some of the nation’s first women’s studies courses emphasizing
African American feminist thinkers. Relatedly, she only earned tenure after
mounting a characteristically fierce battle against the tenure review
committee’s criticism that her research lacked “brilliance and conceptual
power.” But she clashed with students in the rising Black nationalist
movement. Just as she had wanted alliances between Black and white
feminists to fight for institutional change, Murray wanted integration
between Black and white society rather than distinct radical movements.
She was also profoundly uncomfortable with the reclamation of the term
“Black,” insisting on the identity “Negro.” Both positions infuriated her
students. When Murray opposed their demands for an Afro-American
Studies program in 1969, one of her star undergraduates stormed out of
class, shouting “Black solidarity” as she went. The student was Patricia Hill
—soon to be known as Patricia Hill Collins, the scholar most responsible
for carrying the theory of intersectionality out of the realm of law and into
feminist movements.79 Murray helped train the next generation of
intersectional feminists, even as they clashed against her old-fashioned
ways.
But neither academia nor the book of poetry she published was to
remain Murray’s destiny. She still had other barriers to demolish. Irene
Barlow’s death from cancer in 1973 left Murray bereft. As Murray knelt
before the cross and placed her hands on the coffin of her “silent partner”
and “spiritual mate,” she felt a current of energy pulsing through her. Active
in the Episcopalian church since the age of thirty, a faith she had shared
with Barlow for nearly fifteen years, Murray knew that spirit become
palpable was no coincidence: it was a call to serve. The Episcopalian
church, however, still refused to ordain women to the ministry, a position it
shared only with Catholicism. But Murray took an 80 percent pay cut and
entered the seminary anyway, and in 1977, at the age of sixty-six, became
the first African American woman to be named an Episcopalian priest, and
during the same month the church first ordained a woman. For her first
service administering the Holy Eucharist, an event CBS broadcast on its
evening news, Murray chose a church with profound personal significance.
She held service at the North Carolina parish where her grandmother
Cornelia, then enslaved, had been baptized.80
Reverend Pauli Murray. Photograph by Susan Mullally. (Courtesy of the
artist)
Murray’s departure from law and academia for the priesthood was a
significant shift in her political tactics. But it wasn’t necessarily a change in
strategy. Throughout her life, Murray was guided by deep faith and wrestled
with power in myriad forms, fighting institutional, legal, and organizational
battles against injustice wielded in the name of race and sex. Her turn to
spiritual life can be understood as an extension of her fundamental
engagement with power, in all its forms. Power, for Murray, was not strictly
secular: it extended to the universe itself. In uniting her politics with faith,
she continued a long tradition of feminist activism that cultivated a
relationship with the divine as the ultimate arbitrator of justice. As
theorized by activists from Frances E. W. Harper, Harriet Jacobs, and
Zitkala-Ša through Murray, intersectional feminism negotiates a new
relationship to power both material and divine, extending beyond the “rigid
molds” of the flesh. To that end, she published some of the first work
bringing Black theology and feminist theology into relation.81
“When I say that I am a child of God—made in his image,” Murray
sermonized before a congregation in 1975, “I imply that ‘Black is
beautiful,’ that White is beautiful, that Red is beautiful, [and] Yellow is
beautiful. I do not need to make special pleading for my sex—male or
female, or in-between—to bolster self-esteem.”82 All were connected to the
divine and all were equally valuable, including those who defied the binary
of biological sex.
By contrast, white feminist politics generally restricts itself to the
material dimension, emphasizing secular rationalism, scientific modernity,
and capitalist hierarchy as ways to optimize human existence. In the white
feminist agenda, power is something to be seized to maximize opportunity
and quality. Its horizon becomes biopolitics, the twinned movements of
enhancing the health and earning potential of the few while extracting,
depleting, and disposing of the many.
Footnote
i “Identity crisis” was a new concept theorized by Friedan’s graduate adviser, Erik Erikson.

CHAPTER SIX
TERF GATEKEEPING AND TRANS FEMINIST HORIZONS

Janice Raymond and Sandy Stone
To encounter the transsexual body, to apprehend a transgendered
consciousness articulating itself, is to risk a revelation of the
constructedness of the natural order…. As the bearers of this disquieting
news, we transsexuals often suffer for the pain of others…. Though we
forego the privilege of naturalness, we are not deterred, for we ally
ourselves instead with the chaos and blackness from which Nature itself
spills forth.
—Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of
Chamounix”
IN
APRIL
1973,
FIFTEEN
HUNDRED
WOMEN—
SIMULTANEOUSLY ANGRY AND ECSTATIC—converged among the
brick and palm trees of the UCLA campus. “It’s beginning. FAR OUT,” an
organizer named Barbara McLean enthused backstage in her pocket journal
as a Friday night concert opened the West Coast Lesbian Conference. “I
feel as though I’m plugged into an outlet,” she relished, looking out at
hundreds and hundreds of short-haired, bra-less, free-spirited, mostly white
women clad in androgynous plaid filling all the seats and clogging the
aisles of Moore Hall.1
McLean and her co-organizers created the largest queer women’s
gathering yet held in the United States aiming to consolidate a unified
political agenda for lesbians. To be a lesbian-feminist signified far more
than whom one dated—it was a deep excavation of patriarchy from one’s
body, desire, and community. Many lesbian-feminists aimed to construct a
radically new mode of inhabiting the world, one perhaps coming to life that
night at UCLA. The West Coast Lesbian Conference, however, would
become famous for the roiling conflict that nearly broke it apart and
foreshadowed decades of discord to come.
Two hours into the event, white folk singer–songwriter Beth Elliott
walked onto the stage with her acoustic guitar slung across her torso. Beth
was a twenty-one-year-old member of the conference steering committee
who had served as vice president of the San Francisco chapter of the
Daughters of Bilitis, the oldest lesbian organization nationwide. She loved
the playfulness, freedom, and aesthetics of lesbian-feminist culture, the way
it nurtured deep love for women and their art and cultivated a sense of
humor in the midst of rampant misogyny. “Well if you like sexist music”
she crooned in one song, “then country music’s the best. The women sing of
how men are king and how it’s fun to be oppressed.”2
But not everyone agreed that Elliott had a place in the movement. As
she took her seat onstage, two women rushed the platform, grabbing her
microphone away.
“He is a transsexual and a rapist!” one yelled. “He has no right to
perform!”
“You’re wrong!” another woman protested. “She is a woman because
she chooses to be a woman! What right do you have to define her
sexuality?!”3
A melee quickly consumed the auditorium. A few women jumped the
stage to attack Elliott, but two performers intervened and absorbed the
blows themselves.4
Eventually, a small group took the stage and drew the line: “If Beth
Elliott can’t perform, then no one performs.”5 To settle the crowd, an
organizer polled the audience on whether or not Elliott would be permitted
to play her set. One of her many allies sat next to her, holding her hand. The
crowd overwhelmingly chose for her to continue.
Elliott began to strum her guitar. But a vocal faction caused an uproar,
drowning out her sound. Once more, her right to be on stage was subjected
to popular vote. Once more, the audience voted for her to perform, this time
three to one. Elliott’s sweet voice rang throughout the auditorium even as
her body shook and ninety angry women stormed out in protest.6
One member of the crowd was particularly incensed by Elliott’s
presence at the Lesbian Conference: former child star Robin Morgan,
famous for her writing on sisterhood. Morgan was to deliver the conference
keynote the following day. In her view, “one smug male in granny glasses
and an earth-mother gown” sowed discord in the middle of lesbian utopia.
Morgan stayed up half the night rewriting her keynote. It was an important
speech for her, intended to help set the political agenda of lesbian-feminism,
and she joked the text was to be kept for posterity “in a secret safe deposit
box guarded night and day by the spirits of Stanton and Anthony.”7
Morgan’s speech was held outdoors the next morning on the campus
quad, her podium perched one-third of the way up an imposing set of
eighty-seven stairs. She insisted on her own credentials as a “political
lesbian,” though she was married to “a Faggot-Effeminist.”8 She deserved a
place in the lesbian movement, she assured her audience. But Beth Elliott
did not.
“No, I will not call a male ‘she,’” Morgan inveighed. “Thirty-two years
of suffering in this androcentric society, and of surviving, have earned me
the name ‘woman’; one walk down the street by a male transvestite, five
minutes of his being hassled (which he may enjoy), and then he dares, he
dares, to think he understands our pain? No, in our mothers’ names and in
our own, we must not call him sister. We know what’s at work when whites
wear blackface; the same thing is at work when men wear drag.”9
Morgan had invented a new iteration of white feminism’s favorite
rhetorical structure: the Black/woman analogy. In this version, racist
mockery is equated with gender transition. The analogy would stick.
“I charge him as an opportunist, an infiltrator, and a destroyer—with the
mentality of a rapist,” Morgan denounced. “You can let him into your
workshops—or you can deal with him.” Her speech ran twice the length of
her allotted time.10
The Gutter Dykes, a transphobic group from Berkeley, blocked Barbara
McLean from her hosting duties at the mike and continued Morgan’s
screed.
Trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who object to transgender
rights in any form, had arrived at the lesbian-feminist revolution. Accounts
of the showdown at the West Coast Lesbian Conference soon spread across
the lesbian press, helping to kick off a firestorm that would burn for years.
Many, like organizer and writer McLean, insisted upon Beth Elliott’s
rightful place in the women-loving-women community. Others, especially
those like Robin Morgan who had access to audiences far larger than
readers of the photocopied newsletters produced by lesbian-feminist
collectives, drew battle lines, framing Elliott as an enemy of the movement.
Even as Betty Friedan came to gradually endorse lesbian rights, a new
specter had emerged within white feminism: the transsexual woman.
TERF anger soon shifted from Elliott to another target within the
women’s music scene. In the mid-1970s, the beloved lesbian music
collective Olivia Records invited a recording engineer named Sandy Stone,
a trans woman, to join their community.i Stone’s presence at Olivia became
a point of violent contention, revealing the extent and depth of TERF
opposition to trans women joining the lesbian-feminist movement. None of
the objectors were as influential as Janice Raymond, a nun turned academic,
who released a notorious study of transsexuality that set the TERF agenda
for decades.
Though transsexual rights was a new topic in the 1970s, its opponents
within women’s liberation drew on the long tradition of white feminist
politics. Rallying around the fantasy that sex discrimination is the main
factor that shapes women’s lives and that women are united by this shared
experience, TERFs conceived of a starkly binary universe in which men
only oppress, and women are only oppressed. Because trans women did not
suffer the allegedly universal experience of growing up female, they
maintained, they were, therefore, men and oppressors. Updating white
feminism for the gay liberation era, TERFs developed a new cleansing
agenda: removing trans women from the women’s movement and especially
lesbian separatist communities.
But, as at UCLA where the majority of the crowd twice voted that Beth
Elliott remain on stage, the TERF position was far from universally
embraced within feminism. Today, 1970s feminism is often, incorrectly,
understood to have been overwhelmingly transphobic. To this day,
TERFism threatens to drown out the existence of the counterhistory,
disappearing the role trans women themselves played in the movement and
flattening a period of struggle into a single, white feminist history. Yet
while trans women and their allies had far smaller platforms than Morgan
and Raymond, they fought back against TERF insistence that there is only
one way to be a woman.11 The more expansive accounts of sex, gender, and
power they developed form an important current of intersectional feminism.
Two years after the West Coast Lesbian Conference and 350 miles to the
north, a group of lesbian musicians from Los Angeles walked into a Santa
Cruz stereo repair shop. The Wizard of Aud was a lesbian hangout, more of
a collective than a store. Flyers adorned the walls and women draped on the
sofa, catching up on each other’s lives. The shop owner, a polymath and
technology whiz named Sandy Stone, taught the collective’s members how
to repair audio equipment. In those days of cheap living on the California
coast, fixing five stereos a month would enable them to make rent; selling
used equipment brought in additional revenue.
Stone, buried in a stereo behind the counter, nonetheless felt eyes boring
into her from the front of the store. A small sign hung above her:
“Psychiatric Help 5¢.”
“Can I help you?” she asked, looking up at the small group of women,
white and Black.
“We’re from Olivia Records, and we hear that you’re a recording
engineer. We’re looking for a woman to engineer some music for us. Would
you like to try doing that?”12 Olivia Records had been cofounded by
members of the Furies when the DC house with Rita Mae Brown and others
dissolved. Now it was the largest women’s music label in the country and a
pillar of the lesbian separatist movement. Linda Tillery, Judy Dlugacz, and
several other collective members had recently learned of Stone’s
engineering prowess from Leslie Ann Jones, the first woman engineer hired
at ABC Studios, so they drove up north to meet her.
“Yeah!” Stone affirmed. Olivia members had called her about a week
prior, so she had been expecting the visit. “But I think I should tell you
before we go any further that I’m a transsexual.”
“Yeah, we know,” they replied nonchalantly.13
Stone was a spectacular recording engineer. She had started about eight
years prior, in 1968, when she bluffed her way into a job at the newly
launched and soon-to-be legendary Record Plant studio in Manhattan. The
studio needed a technician to repair their state-of-the-art equipment, and
though Stone had never seen anything like their Scully twelve-track, she
had a gift for technology. She had been part of a team building some of the
first solid-state computers when fresh out of high school in 1955 and had
also worked as an auditory researcher at the famous Menninger Clinic in
Topeka, Kansas, teaching myna birds to stutter. In her early thirties, she
wanted to break into rock ’n’ roll recording. She speed-read the twelve-
track’s manual during her Record Plant interview, using a skill she had
taught herself while still in elementary school. When she walked over to the
machine, it took her two minutes to fix it. Once owner Gary Kellgren
collected his jaw from the floor, he hired her on the spot. Stone had just
arrived in New York to pursue her dream and didn’t yet have a place to live,
so she slept on Jimi Hendrix’s old capes in the basement.14
Three weeks into her Record Plant gig, the head engineer recording
Hendrix’s “Stone Free” and other songs fell sick in the middle of a shift. He
insisted Stone take over. Though she was just the repair guy, everyone in
the studio had seen her watching, rapt, while they recorded and mixed.
When Stone sat at the console, she was electric. She felt that sometimes
other people, including Jimi, could see the blue energy radiating off her.15
Eventually, Kellgren wanted her to head a subsidiary company, but
Stone wanted her hands on the music itself. At an acid-fueled party in
upstate New York, a well-heeled Timothy Leary supporter solicited
adventurers interested in heading west, right then, in his chartered jet.
Sandy raised her hand, and as she came down off the acid the next morning,
she found herself sitting on the curb at the San Jose airport. She stayed in
California and her engineering career took her to San Francisco and LA,
where she recorded and mixed Crosby, Stills, and Nash; Jefferson Airplane;
and Van Morrison’s album Tupelo Honey and did gigs with the Grateful
Dead, The Byrds, and others, often under the name of Doc Storch.16
Doc Storch had realized his rock ’n’ roll dreams, but he was still
sleeping on the floor regularly.ii And, he couldn’t shake a gnawing feeling
that he would die in his body if he didn’t finally take action to address a
knowledge he’d carried within him since the dreams that began when he
was four or five years old: he always appeared as a girl. She began to
transition, with the support of Marty Balin, founder and vocalist of
Jefferson Airplane, and especially David Crosby and Graham Nash, along
with other musicians she worked with. But needing a wider queer, feminist
community, Stone moved north to famously free-spirited Santa Cruz in

She found quick and easy work repairing stereos at a home
electronics chain store in the town mall. When she carefully explained to
her employers that she was transitioning sex, they immediately fired her.
She responded by opening the Wizard of Aud right across the street. Within
two years, she and her burgeoning collective put the corporate shop out of
business. “They had multiple factors going against them,” Stone later
reflected. “One of them was that no one went to them to have anything
repaired anymore.”17
Olivia Records was a far cry from the Record Plant. Despite the epic,
drug-fueled recording sessions with Hendrix and others, the Record Plant’s
formal structure was more or less like a regular business, and its clients
were among the country’s best musicians. Olivia, on the other hand, was a
true collective, forging communal lesbian life among themselves while also
circulating lesbian music around the country. Olivia Records rented three
houses on a block of LA’s Wilshire neighborhood, where members lived
and recorded, sharing all expenses and profits as well as rotating cooking
and cleaning duties. The politics of their music, and the material conditions
in which they produced and distributed records, were as important as the
sound itself. This resulted in tracks with quiet, muddy instrumentalization,
even as Olivia’s cofounders Meg Christian and especially Cris Williamson
had resonant, luminous voices—Bonnie Raitt remarked that hearing
Williamson sing for the first time “was like hearing honey dripped on a
cello.”18
After that initial meeting at the Wizard of Aud, Stone began a yearlong
trial period with Olivia Records, recording an album by the all-women rock
band BeBe K’Roche, remixing Williamson’s breakout album The Changer
and the Changed, and staying at Olivia’s LA houses.
At first, Stone, unused to making politics and music at the same time,
kept saying the wrong thing in the studio.
“Well if she can’t play, we should get somebody who can,” she
remarked during a recording session.
“Sit down, and shut up,” collective members replied.19
The sisterhood wasn’t new to her—Stone was part of a lesbian outdoors
group called the Amazon 9 adventurous enough to be dropped by airplane
north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska and kayak for thirteen days down the
Kobuk River. But she hadn’t been able to combine her recording talents
with her commitment to women’s culture, until now. Soon enough, Stone
embraced what she saw as the Olivia ethos: “Learning the spirit of
sisterhood was more important than technical perfection.” In 1976, having
passed her vetting period, the collective developed a new vision together.
Stone would convert one of the house’s living rooms into a school, and she
would train a new generation of women recording engineers in sound
design as well as developing and building recording equipment.20
Olivia Records made lesbianness itself a felt reality at a time when most
gay life of any kind was conducted behind closed doors. Homosexuality
was only removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
psychiatric pathologies in 1973, the same year the collective was founded.
Yet Williamson’s sensual, woman-loving The Changer and the Changed
was one of the nation’s top-selling independently produced albums for the
next twenty years. Members took their role as liaisons for the lesbian
sisterhood seriously. One crushed-out fan recalls writing an impassioned
letter, at age sixteen, to singer and collective member Teresa Trull and
receiving a lengthy letter in reply—full of Trull’s recommendations to the
women’s bookstores in the teen’s region.21
Lesbian-themed folk songs like “Wise Women,” “Leaping Lesbians,”
and “Ode to a Gym Teacher” reclaimed as erotic and political what the
mainstream saw as monstrosity in the eyes of the patriarchy. But folk was
far from the only output at Olivia. With Black singers like Linda Tillery
among its early members, the collective pushed women’s music beyond its
acoustic comfort zone, releasing jazz, soul, gospel, funk, and poetry by
white and Black musicians. Black lesbian Pat Parker’s 1976 spoken-word
LP directly confronted the white feminist myth that the only oppressors
were men. “Sister,” her narrator corrects her white girlfriend, “your foot’s
smaller. But it’s still on my neck.”22 One show created a scandal. Teresa
Trull wore lipstick onstage, an allegedly unacceptable mark of women’s
oppression.
Olivia’s prominence meant that Stone’s presence became a lightning
rod. One day, the collective received an eleven-by-fourteen manila
envelope, the kind containing a college acceptance packet or a court
summons. Janice Raymond, a former Catholic nun and now a PhD
candidate in ethics at Boston College studying under famous feminist
theologian Mary Daly, had mailed a chapter of her dissertation on
transsexuality. Raymond’s chapter painted transsexuals—which for her
meant men masquerading as women—as dangerous dupes of stereotypical
sex roles and of an exploitative medical establishment. She alleged that
transsexual lesbians in separatist communities were akin to rapists who
possessed women’s bodies and invaded their spaces. Collective members
were disgusted but quickly dismissed the writing, as Stone did, as “another
weirdo writing a pseudoscientific paper.”23
But the envelope was a bellwether. Soon, Olivia Records began to
receive hate mail. The initial letters stuck to a common theme: the new
Olivia albums were awful because they had a “male” sound—the mixes
included prominent drums, which writers found to be objectionable
“throbbing male energy.” At first, Stone laughed at the preposterousness of
the idea of sexed sound, for the entire collective was proud of the quality of
the records they were releasing. The mail piled up as the months went on,
however, reaching as many as forty to fifty letters a day. And the tone
shifted. Increasingly, letters threatened Stone with death and pledged
serious violence to the dozen women comprising the collective.24
A coordinated, elaborate effort to run Stone out of Olivia Records had
begun. Olivia was about to launch its first national tour—the first national
tour of lesbian music, period—hosted and staged entirely by lesbian
separatist communities. To save costs, Stone had built most of the touring
equipment herself, including microphone stands and mixing boards. Before
their departure, the collective received the most specific threat yet: the
Gorgons, a radical lesbian paramilitary group, would be coming to the
Seattle show to kill Sandy Stone.
Again, Stone laughed, unable to find credible danger in a transparently
ridiculous scenario. But again, as the collective asked around, their mirth
was soon edged out by raw fear. The Gorgons, who wore camo gear, shaved
their heads, and packed weapons, were a serious threat. Meanwhile, Stone
felt forced to inform the collective of a private matter: she had not yet been
able to afford surgery, though she was approved for the process at
Stanford’s Gender Dysphoria Program. The collective quickly pulled
together the remaining funds so long as Stone kept her treatment a secret,
and she went under the knife just one week before the tour’s departure.25
In Seattle, Olivia hired security muscle to screen and remove weapons
from audience members—another women’s music first. Stone was
nonetheless terrified that she would be shot. In the middle of the event,
while Stone sat at the engineering console, someone called out “Gorgons!”
Powered by visceral fear, she flew under the table, every hair on her body
standing guard. Fortunately, the show continued without incident, but stress,
fatigue, and needed time for postsurgical healing pushed Stone to the brink.
Soon after, she collapsed from exhaustion.26
The attacks on Stone continued as the tour traveled south. In Berkeley,
Olivia held a meeting with lesbian community members concerned about
Stone’s role in the women’s music community. The collective thought an
open dialogue would enable them to understand and defuse the rising
hostility directed at them. They were to learn that such a goal was futile:
TERFs, including the Gutter Dykes, wanted blood, not conversation, and
they were organized. A group had even flown in from Chicago to rail
against Stone’s role at Olivia.
The Gutter Dykes and their allies opened the Berkeley meeting with a
lengthy statement full of incendiary accusations such that trans women
were men raping the women’s community. No one at Olivia had prepared a
statement, and the collective looked to Stone to respond. Flustered and on
the spot, she sputtered out the first thing that came to mind: “That’s all
bullshit!”27
The room exploded in anger: Stone, many screamed—some while
standing on chairs—had exhibited stereotypical male behavior. They
demanded she leave. Though the collective initially insisted that she stay,
they consented to Stone’s desire to leave in hopes that dialogue might be
possible, that there was a rational response Olivia could make that would
resolve this fracture jeopardizing its future. But the remaining eight or so
collective members found that dialogue was impossible, period. To TERFs,
Stone was a man, men were always the enemy, and Olivia had committed
treachery.28
Lisa Vogel, cofounder of the fiercely anti-trans Michigan Womyn’s
Music Festival, coordinated an open letter condemning Olivia for working
with Stone and found twenty-one women to cosign. Olivia responded with a
lengthy letter to the lesbian community; both letters were published in the
West Coast feminist magazine Sister in June 1977. “Sandy met [the] same
criteria that we apply to any woman with whom we plan to work closely,”
Olivia Records affirmed. And they rebuffed the repeated charge that the
collective had been treasonous in not announcing to the women’s music
community that they were working with a transsexual. “To us,” they
insisted, “Sandy Stone is a person, not an issue.” But TERFs had created a
firestorm. For nearly two years, articles and letters attacking or defending
Stone’s right to be in the community appeared throughout magazines like
Sister, DYKE, and Lesbian Connection. Emotions ran high. “I feel raped
when Olivia passes off Sandy, a transsexual, as a real woman,” one reader
conveyed, while one of Stone’s many, many supporters insisted, “Women
can be big enough to accept a convert. I thought we were out to convert the
world!”29
TERFs threatened to organize lesbians into a nationwide boycott of
Olivia Records. Stone decided to leave the collective in 1979, for even a
small drop in sales would threaten the livelihoods of Olivia members and
recording artists. She moved back north to Santa Cruz but found TERF
opposition there, too. Around fifty women convened to determine her right
to be “allowed into ‘women’s spaces.’”30 The vote was decisive: fewer than
three women insisted on excluding Stone, and those few stormed out of the
meeting in a fury when they were defeated. The detractors had been
vehement enough to trigger the meeting in the first place. But their numbers
were tiny.
The 1970s lesbian-feminist movement wasn’t overwhelmingly anti-trans
—it was rather that TERFs tried diligently, yet often failed, to overwhelm
the movement. Stone resumed her place in the Santa Cruz lesbian world,
returned to the Wizard of Aud, soon met Beth Elliott at a local goddess
conference, and became an integral part of the northern California neo-
pagan spiritual community. She maintained close friendships with many
Olivia collective members that persisted for decades.31
Sandy Stone, the person, moved on. But Sandy Stone, the fictive rapist
of women’s spaces, continued to exert a magnetic draw for some feminists.
The fallout would transform the direction of trans politics in the United
States.
In 1979, Janice Raymond published a revised version of the dissertation
excerpt she had mailed to Olivia Records. It was now a chapter in her first
book, an academic polemic against trans women. Getting the book
published had been difficult—many editors wanted nothing to do with her,
whom they called “the Anita Bryant of the transsexual movement,”
referring to the singer turned anti–gay rights activist. But Raymond had
support throughout her writing from prominent feminists including Robin
Morgan, Mary Daly, and writer Michelle Cliff; poet Adrienne Rich read
multiple drafts of the entire manuscript. When it was released, The
Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male was immediately
influential, earning glowing reviews from humanitarian psychiatrist
Thomas Szasz in the New York Times and Gloria Steinem in the pages of
Ms. Magazine.32 This early reception set a precedent. Raymond’s book
would become the TERF bible for at least the next thirty-five years.
In The Transsexual Empire, Raymond lambasted sex transition as a
pinnacle of male objectification and control over women. Transsexuals, she
proclaimed, “are not women. They are deviant males.” Surgeons and the
psychiatrists and other specialists who collude with them, she argued, have
consolidated into an “empire” that creates false women out of the flesh of
men. Transsexuals themselves, who for Raymond are almost always trans
women, exist only because they are foolish yet dangerous dupes of sex roles
and of modern medicine. Deluded into believing there is an individual
therapeutic solution to the problem of restrictive sex stereotypes,
“transsexually-constructed” women, she alleged, are merely men who fail
to adjust to the social expectations of masculinity. Instead of rebelling
against sex role stereotypes altogether, they cling to the most retrograde
ideas of femininity and find a ready medical industry willing to “mutilate”
them to satisfy their backward desires. For Raymond, “male-to-constructed
females” are obsessed with heels, “frilly” dresses, makeup, and the desire to
be housewives, behaviors that fetishize, objectify, and fragment real
women. They are akin to the atavistic, subservient robot women of the
Stepford Wives—Frankensteinian products of scientific modernity that
nonetheless rumble to life in order to drag society backwards to the rigid
social roles of the 1950s. But as men in disguise, these robots are rapists,
not sex toys. “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real
female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves,”
Raymond charged.33
Though Raymond claimed to have interviewed fifteen transsexuals as
part of her research, she seemingly hadn’t encountered someone like Sandy
Stone, who foreswore the apron and kitchen for the mixing board and
feminist collective. Except that Raymond had encountered Stone, at least in
the lesbian press. Transsexuals, Raymond claimed, were invading and
destroying lesbian-feminist communities. Her primary example was Sandy
Stone, who she claimed “inserted” himself into Olivia Records, a space
“he” now “domina[tes]” and “divide[s].” While at first a paradoxical
charge, given her earlier implication that all transsexuals mimic June
Cleaver and Donna Reed, Raymond maneuvered around this apparent
contradiction by arguing that transsexuals are drawn to women’s spirit and
women’s creativity. Since women’s energy is embodied most of all by the
lesbian-feminist, the transsexual is vampirically drawn to her. He “feeds off
woman’s true energy source, i.e., her woman-identified self,” she accused.34
But bloodsucking is the least of their crimes. Stone and other lesbian-
feminists, Raymond insisted, seek to subdue and control women and their
spaces. “The transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist, having castrated
himself, turns his whole body and behavior into a phallus that can rape in
many ways, all the time,” Raymond extrapolated with barely subdued self-
satisfaction.35
A biological binary motors the TERF universe: men are always the
oppressor and women always the oppressed. Trans-exclusionist feminists
adhere to a single-axis model of power in which sexism is the basic,
underlying, most fundamental social inequality. Capitalism and colonialism,
and the racism that fuels their engines, lay relatively inert. Instead,
maleness or femaleness alone pins one’s place in the social hierarchy and
determines individual behavior. In this simplified cosmos, rape and assault
are the primary crimes, and women have a common experience of
marginalization, assault, and abuse at the hands of men. Exposing and
fighting men’s violence against women was an important element of
feminisms of the era, from nighttime marches reclaiming the streets to
winning legal recognition of marital rape for the first time. Intersectional
feminists also emphasized the pervasiveness of the violence women faced,
which was rooted in poverty, overpolicing and other forms of state violence,
and lack of healthcare, in addition to individual relationships. Anti-trans
feminists, however, seized upon men’s abuse and exploitation of women as
the sum total of the violence women faced.
As a result, TERFs argued that liberation can only take place if men are
absent. Theirs is a white feminist separatism—instead of aspiring to occupy
the social positions held by white men, as did Stanton, Fletcher, and
Friedan, they seek to replace those roles altogether with their own
institutions. Lisa Vogel’s annual Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, for
example, which ran from 1976 to 2015, not only banished all men and trans
women from the week-long event, but also removed male children over the
age of four from their mothers and sisters and sent them to a separate
campground. The rationale was that young girls needed a safe space.
The TERF framework Raymond outlined depends on a familiar
underlying premise: that sex oppression is the primary form of oppression.
Morgan, Raymond, Vogel, and their allies developed a new iteration of a
long political tradition that fantasizes that there is such a thing as a
universal female body and experience that has unfairly, and unilaterally,
been prevented from flourishing. In the TERF worldview, race, capitalism,
and family are all distinctly secondary to the primary fact of sex identity, an
identity it insists flows transparently from the body at birth. In this updated
version of white feminism, being a girl or a woman is biological, self-
evident, and creates a unified political class unto itself. The false universal
“woman,” rooted in allegedly similar biology and experience, lies at the
center of TERF politics.
In keeping with twentieth-century white feminism, TERFs insist that
women must be allowed to thrive and threats to their success must be
removed. Thriving, for TERFs, depends on spaces, such as the feminist
collective, or today, the public restroom, reserved strictly for women who
were born and raised as girls. Spaces populated only by cis women are by
definition safe spaces, TERFs fantasize, free from harm and violence, that
allow women to heal from traumatic pasts. Anyone who has ever lived as a
male is cast as a threat, violating the sanctity of a world sealed off from men
and, therefore, allegedly from the most fundamental forms of violence.
Raymond wielded the bluntest weapons in the safe space arsenal. She
branded transsexuals as threatening specimens of the “various ‘breeds’ of
women that medical science can create,” shadowing transsexuals with the
specter of race while simultaneously positioning them as fabrications of a
decadent medical empire. Lesbian-feminists must banish transsexual
women like Stone, she insisted, for they are not “like [us] in quality, nature,
or status.”36 Real women are only those with XX chromosomes, she
declared, flying in the face of two decades of sexology that identified at
least six distinct, sometimes conflicting components of sex, such as
hormones and genital appearance.
Raymond’s essentialist position differed widely from that of non-TERF
lesbian-feminists in the 1970s. In 1974, a group of socialist Black lesbians
in Boston began developing an “integrated analysis and practice based upon
the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.” The
Combahee River Collective developed a simultaneous analysis of race,
gender, heterosexism, and capitalism, and they did so while citing
inspiration from nineteenth-century Black women including Frances E. W.
Harper. Trans studies activist and scholar Susan Stryker has emphasized
that the Combahee River Collective specifically opposed sex essentialism in
their famous 1974 statement, finding it contrary to their intersectional
politics. Lesbian separatism, they explained, “completely denies any but the
sexual sources of women’s oppression” and assumes that “biological
maleness” is itself a threat. “As Black women we find any type of
biological determinism a particularly dangerous and reactionary basis upon
which to build a politic,” the women of Combahee counseled.37
By contrast, double essentialisms characterize the TERF position:
biological essentialism and experience essentialism. The former assumes
that women have a common embodiment and the latter that women’s
experiences of those bodies are likewise shared. Both positions are two
sides of the same white feminist coin. Raymond declared that trans women
were “not our peers, by virtue of their history.”38 But what is this singular
history of woman? Was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s experience in her body
anything akin to what enslaved women like Harriet Jacobs endured, whose
bodies became sexual targets and reproduction machines? As Pauli Murray
underscored, it is actually Black women, not white women, who are more
fully forced into the caste system of sex, for racism compounds the effects
of sexism, within both Black and white spaces.
Or, as Audre Lorde took pains to explain to Mary Daly in an open letter
addressing Daly’s racism in the spring of 1979, women do not experience
the stresses of female embodiment identically. “Surely you know that for
nonwhite women in this country,” Lorde wrote, “there is an 80 percent
fatality rate from breast cancer; three times the number of unnecessary
eventrations, hysterectomies and sterilizations as for white women; three
times as many chances of being raped, murdered, or assaulted as exist for
white women.”39 Daly’s myth that common biology drives a generic female
experience fractures in the face of race and class.
But Daly, for Janice Raymond, was feminism incarnate. Daly played a
powerful role in her mentee’s life and work, as Raymond’s unusual
dedication in Transsexual Empire attests. “For Mary Daly,” the book
begins, “Who has moved me to the Moors of the Mind…. Who has taught
me to feel with all my intellect and think with all my heart…. With
Gratitude, Awe, and Love.”40 This steamy inscription—to her adviser—has
led observers to speculate that Daly and Raymond were romantically
involved while Daly supervised Raymond’s PhD.
Whether or not this love was consummated, the romance pulsating off
the vitriolic pages of Transsexual Empire sounds a larger truth: TERF
politics has an erotics. The fantasy of sameness, of universally shared
biology and history, is shot through with desire. In this universe, sex
difference alone matters; the penis is the primary apparatus that wields
power. Extracting the penis, the alleged principal cause of violence to
women, thus enables true ardor. TERFs, if we extrapolate from this
schematic, not only belong to a safe space—they belong to a sexual space, a
refuge in which desire, freed of the violence allegedly inherent to male
genitalia, can kindle.
In Raymond’s vision, trans women haunt feminist space with the
“phallus.” By expelling trans women, the TERF sisterhood recommits to
white feminism’s fantasy cosmology in which sex is all that matters. In this
cosmology, trans women, just like women of color, working-class women,
disabled women, and many others, do in fact rupture the white feminist
fantasy that all women are identical, that women hold a body and history in
common, that the sisterhood has sanded the sharp corners of power all the
way smooth, leaving only soft, safe, homogenous desire.
Convinced that transsexual medicine foists robot-rapists onto society at
large, Raymond refused one of its key contributions: the concept of gender.
Before the mid-1950s, gender referred solely to the grammatical concept of
class or type, such as the practice of calling boats “she.” Gender didn’t take
on the meaning of cultural ideas about sex roles until sexologist Dr. John
Money and his associates proposed the term in the course of their
investigations into intersex and transsexual patients. The first time the term
gender appeared in this modern sense in the New York Times, for example,
was in announcing the 1966 opening of Money’s Gender Identity Clinic at
Johns Hopkins University, the first program of transsexual medicine in the
United States.41 In the 1970s, feminists including Ann Oakley, Gayle
Rubin, and Andrea Dworkin wrested “gender” away from the patriarchal
sexologists at the clinics and transformed it into the vehicle for a feminist
analysis of power. But to Raymond, “gender” was suspect on account of its
medical origins and its association with transsexuality. It betrayed a
therapeutic dimension, allegedly created to enable doctors to solve sex role
problems through training and surgeries. Women, not the phenomenon of
gender, were the heart of her feminism.
To protect lesbian-feminism and women at large, Raymond proposed a
simple solution. “The problem of transsexualism,” she concluded, “would
best be served by morally mandating it out of existence.”42 For Raymond,
sex roles and the medical empire were the causes of transsexuality; limiting
medical access to transition procedures would reduce the numbers of trans
people.
In 1980, the Reagan administration gave Raymond the opportunity to
help bring about that dream. In the case of some extremely persistent
patients, Medicare policies and state courts had sometimes deemed sex
transition procedures medically necessary and paid the associated bills, as
did some private insurance companies. But under Reagan, the National
Center for Health Care Technology reviewed the efficacy of mandated
Medicare coverage, looking to cut costs by shrinking the health services
available to the poor. Trans healthcare came under scrutiny. The center
asked Raymond to participate in the preparation of a report on transsexual
surgery. Her task was to produce a paper on the social and ethical aspects of
medical transition, a paper intended to determine whether sex transition
procedures were “reasonable and necessary” and so appropriate for
Medicare (and other insurers’) reimbursement. Raymond unleashed her
argument: insurance coverage of trans healthcare was “controversial” and
“unnecessary,” for transsexuality wasn’t a legitimate medical condition as
sexologists argued—it was the perverted spawn of society’s restrictive sex
roles and a form of “mutilation.” Medical transition merely subdued
deluded individuals into accepting these stereotypes, much like heroin
functioned as “a pacifier of black people,” tranquilizing them into accepting
a racist system.43
The National Center for Health Care Technology’s final report closed
the door trans people were fighting so hard to keep ajar. Drawing on the
work of Raymond, other experts, and other organizations compiled in the
center’s report, at the end of the decade the Reagan administration withdrew
Medicare coverage of transition healthcare and gave insurers permission to
deny the procedures on account of their “controversial” nature and lack of
medical necessity. Private insurance companies followed suit, glad to have
a federal blessing to reduce their liability. Meanwhile, state Medicaid
coverage of trans medicine had been eroding since 1979. For the next
twenty-five years, almost all US insurance companies refused to cover trans
medicine in the private or public market, making sex transition healthcare
available only to those wealthy enough to pay out of pocket, often by flying
overseas. Transgender studies scholar Cristan Williams underscores the
fatal impact of this policy change. Multiple studies, she emphasizes,
demonstrate that access to transition dramatically reduces trans people’s
rates of suicide.44 To restrict access to medical transition, for some, is to
make life unlivable. The policy wasn’t reversed until 2013, when a
provision of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act set a new
precedent for federal, state, and private insurance coverage.
But trans people didn’t disappear quietly just because medicine was far
more expensive to access. Trans medicine doesn’t produce trans people—
the dogged insistence of trans people themselves led to the development of
trans medicine. Gender transition clinics only came into existence in the
first place after decades of “intense and unremitting pressure of trans-
sexuals,” as radical British sociologist and trans scholar Carol Riddell
pointed out while refuting Raymond’s book in 1980.45
Similarly, even as medical access retracted in the late 1980s and 1990s,
transgender politics and theory pushed forward. And one of the most
significant innovations in conceiving of trans politics as a multifaceted
critique of power that addresses the intersections of sex, gender, capital, and
colonialism, came from Sandy Stone.
When Sandy Stone moved north to Santa Cruz in 1974, she set out on a
mission to find transition healthcare. She knew it was now possible to
access sex transition in the United States. While earlier generations of trans
people needed to travel to Copenhagen, Casablanca, Tijuana, and other
international cities for hormones and reconstructive surgeries, rising
domestic demand had led to the opening of trans clinics at US universities.
But the clinics didn’t exactly advertise in the daily newspapers, and Stone
had never met a transsexual person. After multiple phone calls—and a
guided tour of trans sex workers’ poverty-stricken apartments in San
Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, intended to scare her off—she found
the Stanford Gender Dysphoria Program, now six years running and located
just over the Santa Cruz Mountains.
But it wasn’t a homecoming. She’d been warned by other “transies” that
Stanford preferred Christine Jorgensen types, the tall, willowy,
hyperfeminine blonde who became the first person famous for being
transsexual back in the early 1950s. Stone knew her short, androgynous,
Jewish body might pose a problem. In common with some other gender
identity programs, Stanford ran grooming sessions to train preoperative
trans women in delicate comportment, ladylike dress, and subservient
heterosexual dating behavior that staff psychologists deemed appropriate to
femininity.46 Their goal was to admit and treat patients who they were
certain would pass as genetic females. Stone had a choice: she could stage a
performance that would satisfy Stanford’s demands, or she could confront
the clinic’s sex stereotypes head-on.
Stone walked into her first appointment with plastic surgeon Donald
Laub, who directed the clinic, wearing her traditional uniform of jeans,
heavy boots, and a beard grazing her chest. Surgeon and patient sized one
another up.
“I am interested in a sex change,” she announced, in Doc Storch’s
deepest, most authoritative rock ’n’ roll sound-guy voice.
“To what?” Dr. Laub replied.47
Stone gained admittance into Stanford’s two-year presurgery program,
but at subsequent appointments she met further obstacles. Allies she met in
the clinic’s waiting room, however, encouraged her to join them in refusing
the rigid binaries the physicians imposed.48
“Why aren’t you dressed like a woman?” Dr. Laub interrogated,
surveying Stone’s jeans and T-shirt.
“I am dressed like a woman,” she informed him.
“No, you’re not,” he insisted.
“Have you looked out the window recently?”
The tension came to a head at Stone’s final presurgery appointment.
“Are you 100 percent sure that you want surgery to change sex?” Laub
asked.
“No, I’m not,” she replied. She distrusted absolutes and suspected that
being 100 percent sure of anything actually demonstrated insanity, not
sound conviction. She felt 99 percent sure.
“I’m an adult,” Stone assured him. “I can take responsibility for my
actions. This is informed consent. If I made a mistake, it’s my fault, not
yours. Let’s go.”
“I’m sorry,” he told her. “You’re not eligible” for surgery. And Stone
drove back over the mountains to Santa Cruz.
Three months later, Stanford’s program coordinator called Stone to redo
the interview. When reviewing the transcript, the coordinator realized the
impasse was procedural, not substantive. She drafted a script for both
surgeon and patient to follow so that Stone would meet clinic qualifications.
“Are you ready for surgery?” Dr. Laub asked when Stone returned to the
Palo Alto offices.
“Yes!” Stone confirmed. She was approved.49 But it would be another
few years, when Olivia Records contributed the balance due in a last-
minute rush before their national tour, before Sandy received surgery.
A decade later, Stone pulled this experience into her next career: as an
academic feminist theorist. At the age of fifty, she entered the University of
California–Santa Cruz’s famed interdisciplinary PhD program, History of
Consciousness, a paradigm-busting department whose faculty included
Angela Davis and Donna Haraway. It was Haraway who encouraged Stone
to join them at the sprawling redwood-filled campus on the bluff
overlooking town. Haraway was in the midst of writing her soon-to-be
famous “Cyborg Manifesto,” which demolishes the “antagonistic dualisms”
between human and machine, human and animal, the natural and artificial,
and man and woman to envision a feminist world organized by affinity
rather than essentialized identity. “There is nothing about being ‘female’
that naturally binds women” together, she insists, launching her critique
directly at white feminism’s attachment to the fantasy that to be a woman is
to have suffered identically at the hands of patriarchy.50 And there is
nothing inherently threatening about the new machine age, she urged. While
late capitalism powered Reagan’s launching of the Cold War into the stars,
feminists and socialists could appropriate human-techno relations toward
preventing, rather than enabling, unending war and massive wealth
disparity.
Among the academics breaking conventional frameworks of thought,
Stone had at last found her home. Working with Haraway, and alongside
department colleagues like Gloria E. Anzaldúa—who was drafting her book
Borderlands/La Frontera, one of the essential texts of intersectional
feminism—Stone built on these theorists’ work on mixture and hybridity to
confront essentialism where it pierced her most directly: in myths about
transsexuality. She now knew how to confront Janice Raymond. In 1991
Stone published the essay “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual
Manifesto” challenging Raymond’s portrayal of the transsexual empire
head-on. Stone was still completing her dissertation, and she and Haraway
worried it would destroy any possibility of a future career in the academy.
Her essay had the opposite effect. “The Empire Strikes Back” became the
founding document of a brand-new academic field: transgender studies.
The manifesto did something much bolder than merely refute Raymond.
Stone overturned the dominant narrative, supported by trans medicine and
by many trans people at the time, that to be trans meant to be “born in the
wrong body.” Instead, she articulated the radical potential of trans lives to
break through binary notions of sex in which to be male was the polar
opposite of female. Emphasizing self-determination over biological
determinism and developing nuanced analyses of gender, race, and
capitalism, Stone’s manifesto joined a vibrant tradition of pushing back
against the confines of white feminism—and extended intersectional
feminist analysis into the realm of transgender politics.
Drawing on decades of published sex change narratives, “The Empire
Strikes Back” eviscerated the standard accounts of trans identity promoted
by physicians and patients alike. In these tales, radical transformations
cleave a male past from a female future. Surgeons enact divine resurrection,
first putting to death a heterosexual male and then animating a passive,
delicate, high-voiced, femme fatale who awakens from surgery an entirely
new person. In these magical journeys from one pole of sex experience to
the other, Stone illuminated, “the male must be annihilated or at least
denied, but the female is that which exists to be continually annihilated.”51
For femaleness in these texts is marked by a subservience so extreme that
trans women are devoid not only of agency but of their very bodies; their
corporeal form is mere putty formed in the wake of the surgeon’s scalpel.
“No wonder feminist theorists have been suspicious” of transsexuality,
Stone observed. “Hell, I’m suspicious.” It was a gesture of generosity to
TERFs—one that simultaneously risked undercutting fellow trans people.52
Janice Raymond was absolutely right that leading sex transition
psychologists such as John Money and Robert Stoller insisted upon
retrograde, antifeminist gender roles. But since Raymond understood trans
people only as artificial products animated by trans medicine—not as fully
fledged agents of their own lives—she couldn’t see that trans people, too,
resisted these roles. Sometimes that resistance took the shape of inhabiting
gender stereotypes.
For years, Stone related, trans people advised one another on how to
navigate gender clinics’ strict requirements: study the manual of
transsexuality that the doctors themselves used to assess patients’ likelihood
to succeed in society as feminine women—Dr. Harry Benjamin’s 1966 The
Transsexual Phenomenon—and perform the type, down to a T. Clinic staff
were so eager to codify transsexuality as a new mental health disorder
defined by identical characteristics that their own needs for objective,
reproducible, standardized criteria made them highly gullible. It took the
surgeons and psychiatrists years to figure out that they’d been had.
For Stone, the clinics offered a fascinating example of how gender is
constructed in real time. Dr. Benjamin identified “born in the wrong body”
as the defining self-understanding of transsexuality. Since his manual was
the clinics’ manual, patients repeated this refrain year after year in order to
access transition care. Even after physicians realized that their patients, too,
read Benjamin, they continued to pose questions that screened out any
ambiguity, as Stone herself had experienced. Through these rote scripts,
performed by doctor and patient alike, transsexuality solidified into the state
of passing from one side of the sex binary to its alleged opposite, a
transformation that demolishes any body or experience that came before. In
physicians’ hands, transsexuality reinforced, rather than broke down, the
gender binary.
The “wrong body” narrative solidified into orthodoxy. In the 1970s,
Stone shared, clinics even instructed transsexual women to invent a
“plausible history” of their earlier lives.53 They were to fabricate new
childhoods as if they had always been female. In the medical discourse, to
transition was not only to erase one’s own past—it was to masquerade as an
imaginary person.
“But it is difficult to generate a counterdiscourse if one is programmed
to disappear,” Stone objected. Universal, unrelenting passing is not the goal,
she urged. Never-ending passing is a form of assimilation—an acquiescence
to the status quo. Passing internalizes, rather than resists, the harmful
structure of binary gender that delineates masculinity and femininity, man
and woman, as fundamentally at odds. She argued that to pass perpetually,
in all circumstances and interactions, forecloses the center of a person’s
individual power, the complexities, ambiguities, and nuances of actual life
experience. And while passing admits one to the realm of gendered
respectability, it means being forced to found relationships on lies, instead
of on the truths that transsexuality exposes: that all bodies are malleable
texts inscribed by power.54
Instead, Stone urged, “in the transsexual’s erased history we can find a
story disruptive to the accepted discourses of gender… which can make
common cause” with other oppressed groups. She called this new identity
the “posttranssexual”—the monstrous body reclaimed, in all its complexity.
Closing her manifesto with a thrilling turn, Stone wrote collectively to other
academic transsexuals—an audience she had to dream into being in 1991.
Stone asked “us” to write our complex realities into history instead of being
scripted as monolithic caricatures by physicians, feminists like Raymond,
and even ourselves. Refusing assimilation is radical politics, “begun by
reappropriating difference and reclaiming the power of the refigured” body
—turning transsexuality into a site of resistance and alliance. She called for
“solidarity” with queers and people of color—not individual, stealth access
to the status quo through the edifice of binary sex. “Although individual
change is the foundation of all things,” she concluded, “it is not the end of
all things.”55
Trans lives, for Stone, became a jumping-off point for interrogating
gender—the social dimensions of sex—and forging collective resistance to
racism, capitalism, and colonialism. By contrast, trans-exclusionary
feminism honed its project into one goal alone: liberating women from the
oppression of men.
The singular identity “women,” removed from the reality of all other
social forces besides biological sex, became a mythic category that actually
obscured, rather than pried open, the workings of power. But gender—a
term many TERFs and “gender critical” feminists today deem tainted by
transsexuality—usefully exposed the process through which the identities
of man and woman are assigned meaning. The concept of gender provided
an angle onto the way social institutions shape personal identity and
experience. Trans feminism like Stone’s helped advance intersectional
feminist analysis, and she was far from alone.
The UC Santa Cruz campus nestled among the redwoods wasn’t the only
place cultivating intersectional trans politics. The narrow streets and dark
piers of lower Manhattan, too, had been providing potent ground for those
who defied the rules of binary sex.
In June 1973, just three months after the West Coast Lesbian
Conference, trans activist and sex worker Sylvia Rivera mounted the stage
at the Christopher Street Liberation Day rally clad in a long-sleeved sparkly
bodysuit. Rivera wasn’t on the scheduled list of speakers on this fourth
anniversary of the Stonewall antipolice riots, but she commandeered the
mike anyway, causing a commotion onstage and off. She was greeted by a
raucous mixture of jeers, boos, and some applause.
“Y’all better quiet down!” Rivera began in frustration. Leaning into the
mike, putting the full force of her thin body into her voice and keeping time
with her right index finger as if the crowd were her orchestra, Rivera gave
them a piece of her mind. “I’ve been trying to get up here all day for your
gay brothers and your gay sisters in jail that write me every motherfucking
week and you don’t do a god damned thing for them!” Drag queens and
trans women of color, including Rivera and her friend and ally Marsha P.
Johnson, had led the Stonewall rebellion—but now the gay and women’s
liberation movements wanted nothing to do with sex workers. Rivera
herself first lived on the street and turned tricks to survive at age eleven. To
keep trans, gender nonconforming, and queer kids of color from a similar
fate, Rivera and Johnson had organized Street Transvestite Action
Revolutionaries (STAR) for the past three years. The pair were squatting a
trailer in Greenwich Village, stealing food, and soliciting johns to support a
group of street youth Rivera called her “children.” Their solidarities were
clear: “We share in the oppression of gays and we share in the oppression of
women,” STAR declared. But gay liberation and the women’s movements
wanted nothing to do with Rivera, Johnson, and their band of outcasts. “I
have been raped. And beaten…. I have been thrown in jail. I have lost my
job. I have lost my apartment for gay liberation and you all treat me this
way?” Rivera exclaimed. She built to a crescendo: the true potential of gay
power manifest when it acted in solidarity with “all of us,” not when it
shrunk into the “middle-class white club” that “you all belong to!” In
closing, she led the crowd of thousands in a rousing cheer of GAY
POWER.56
Marsha P. Johnson, left, and Sylvia Rivera, right, at the
Christopher Street Liberation Day March, 1973. Photograph by
Leonard Fink. (Courtesy of the LGBT Community Center
National History Archive @lgbtcenternyc)
For Rivera and her allies, gay liberation was meaningless unless it allied
with the most marginalized. The effects of homophobia weren’t most
apparent among the white middle class, who often had economic resources
to fall back on even when their families kicked them out, or worse. The
brutal workings of racism, capitalism, binary sex, and state violence
intensified homophobia, making homophobia itself most potent where
multiple forces of power converged in the lives of individuals. Child and
adult street queens weren’t exceptional cases that gay liberation could
ignore: they were prisms that refracted and magnified the vectors of power
itself. If a social movement didn’t include the most marginalized, then it
was reinforcing, not undermining, the structures that make inequality
immensely profitable for the few.
STAR, in other words, began to articulate a nascent, trans version of
what Pauli Murray was writing from her Brandeis office, what the
Combahee River Collective would outline in its famous statement four
years later, and what Black law scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw would develop
as the theory of intersectionality in 1989. All were arriving at a similar
conclusion: the best vantage onto the true workings of power is from below.
To be a Black woman, these theorists argued, was not only to experience
racism, sexism, and capitalist inequality. It was to experience them in their
full intensity. To understand and confront how power aims to accumulate
wealth and power in the hands of the few, they argued, movements must put
at their center those lives that show the full force of oppression in all its
brutal strength: those on the bottom of multiple hierarchies.
From a variety of locations across the country, intersectional feminist
analysis was consolidating, and collectives were putting it into action in the
1970s and 1980s. From classrooms, movement meetings, demonstrations,
advocacy, and downtown squats, a new form of politics interrogating
multiple structures of power from below—rather than seeking to gain
individual access to the status quo—gained strength.
Lesbian white feminism had hardly exhausted itself, however. In the late
1970s, its reductive, single-axis account of power—men oppress, women
are oppressed, and femininity is the mark of that oppression—consolidated
around a new set of targets: pornography and prostitution. Prostitution
wasn’t an altogether new concern of feminists; social purity crusaders had
policed working-class districts throughout the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries on the grounds of preventing “white slavery.” But 1970s
feminists gave it a new spin. In the hands of figures like Robin Morgan,
Susan Brownmiller—who drew on the myth of the Black male rapist—
Catharine MacKinnon, and Janice Raymond, sex industries became the
emblems of patriarchy’s addiction to exploiting and harming women. In the
1980s, fights between antiporn feminists, who saw sex industries as
untrammeled exploitation, and pro-sex contingencies, who saw erotic
material and sex work as elements of women’s sexual agency, escalated.
The “sex wars” consumed much of feminism in the decade, especially
among white women—whether or not they supported white feminist
politics. By the early 1990s, the sex wars had largely come to an end. Pro-
sex feminists emerged victorious and women’s right to the erotic became
integral to third-wave feminism.
But while antiporn feminists like Morgan and Raymond lost the sex
wars, they did not disappear. They went “underground,” in the words of a
prominent activist, until it was safe to reemerge. Safety materialized in the
1990s in the form of the anti–sex trafficking movement, which by the early
2000s blossomed into a major international NGO force.57 And from 1994 to
2007, Janice Raymond served as co–executive director of the most
prominent feminist antitrafficking organization, the Coalition Against
Trafficking in Women (CATW).
At first blush, anti–sex trafficking work seems to be a rock-solid agenda.
Who could support a global network forcing women into sex work against
their will? Yet antitrafficking discourse like Raymond’s makes little
distinction between those who voluntarily enter sex work—constrained
though that set of choices may be—in their own countries, and those forced
to migrate across international borders to become pawns in an industry of
sex. Instead, it frames all prostitution as a sprawling industry that compels
women into sexual exploitation, and it typically portrays these victims as
brutalized teens. Antitrafficking accounts collapse the real, but infrequent,
incidents of cross-border trafficking—which typically abduct women into
household and other nonsexual forms of labor—and the flourishing
domestic sex trade into one phenomenon, with one set of male perpetrators.
Trafficking becomes a parallel of Raymond’s empire of transsexual
medicine: a vast patriarchal enterprise to steal and sell women’s bodies, and
in which participants are passive victims stripped of any agency. The title of
a book by Raymond’s ally, the Australian feminist Sheila Jeffreys,
underscores the point: the sex trade produces The Industrial Vagina.
Raymond and other antitrafficking feminists see prostitution as the
cornerstone of an empire of exploitation that subjects all women to a culture
of violence, including rape and battery. Remove prostitution and
pornography, they argue, and the edifice of patriarchal violence will
crumble. But their work is simultaneously strengthening another power
structure. To eradicate prostitution, they lean into policing and mass
incarceration.58
Raymond and other antiprostitution activists “protect” women by
coordinating with police, extending prison sentences, and reinforcing
international borders to punish men who solicit and organize paid sex. “Our
responsibility is to make men change their behaviour by all means
available,” Raymond declares, and those means include the punitive
apparatus of the state. It means working in coalitions with police and other
groups, such as evangelical Christians, who are no longer feminist enemies.
These coalitions elevate one tactic above all: lengthy imprisonment.
Successfully reframing pimping in the US courts as “domestic sex
trafficking,” the charge now extends the possible prison sentence from
ninety days to ninety-nine years.59
Sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein studies Raymond’s CATW and other
feminist antitrafficking groups, such as local NOW chapters, and has coined
a new term to characterize their embrace of criminal justice as a tactic:
“carceral feminism.” Carceral feminism names the white feminist strategy
of turning to police, the courts, and the prison system to protect women
from violence. It operates on the fantasy that police and prisons end
violence—rather than proliferate it. In the words of writer Victoria Law,
carceral feminism “does not acknowledge that police are often purveyors of
violence and that prisons are always sites of violence.”60
The consequences of the white feminist push for increased arrest,
prosecution, and imprisonment of so-called sex traffickers have been stark
for the usual targets of state violence: Black and Latinx people. Bernstein
reports that between 2008 and 2010, African American men made up 62
percent of sex trafficking suspects, and Latino men another 25 percent.
These numbers are wildly out of proportion with the percentage of Black
and Brown US residents. They are, however, in keeping with the racial
disparity of the criminal justice system. While male clients are the target of
antitrafficking feminists’ punitive goals, women sex workers often get
caught up in the resulting overpolicing. According to a recent study
conducted in Baltimore, incarcerated women sex workers faced high rates
of exposure to violence from both police and clients, as well as increased
risk of exposure to HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. Among
those studied, Black female sex workers were at the greatest risk for being
jailed. These statistics are compounded by the fact that women are the
fastest growing incarcerated population in the United States.
Similarly, the much touted Violence Against Women Act of 1994,
sponsored by then senator Joseph Biden, works within the logic of carceral
feminism. Its passage implemented mandatory arrest in cases of suspected
domestic violence, increased the prison sentences of those convicted, and
allotted $1.6 billion toward preventing and prosecuting violent crimes
against women.61 The vast majority of this funding was funneled into the
criminal justice system, contributing to the highest incarceration rate in the
world.
Sandy Stone argued in the 1990s that the ultimate significance of
Raymond’s Transsexual Empire lay in its method, not its topic. Raymond,
she explained, “demonstrate[d] that one can cloak a radically conservative
position in liberal language.”62 Stone’s claim bears out in the politics of
Raymond’s antitrafficking work. Raymond’s white feminist politics not
only attempted to cleanse the movement of trans women; in a misguided
attempt to protect cis women, it works with cops, courts, and the prison
system to cleanse society of sex work.
The trajectory of Raymond’s career makes the political context of trans-
exclusionary radical feminism clear: just like carceral feminism, trans
exclusion is part of the tradition of white feminist politics. Anti-trans
politics crystallized among an ongoing struggle between white feminists
who insist that women share an identity, biology, and universal experience
of oppression and intersectional feminists who illuminate the multiple
vectors through which wealth and power accumulate in the hands of a few.
In the rampant inequality of late capitalism, the divide between the two
forms of feminist politics becomes even more stark: carceral feminists who
support the prison industrial complex and those who form coalition with
street queens and sex workers, prison and gender abolitionists, and trans
activists.
When intersectional transgender politics—and the new term transgender
itself—fully flowered in the 2000s, it emerged at the juncture of Sandy
Stone’s posttranssexual manifesto and Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia
Rivera’s work organizing street queens. The term transgender emerged in
the 1990s specifically to de-emphasize the role of surgery and other medical
interventions. Rather than a diagnosis and embodiment “created” by
medicine, as transsexuality marks, transgender encompasses a range of
binary-defying modes of life that may or may not include medical
treatment. The term underscores the agency of individual trans people,
defying beliefs like Raymond’s that trans identity and embodiment are the
invention of a medical empire. Like Stone had urged, many trans activists
refuse the “born in the wrong body” narrative and instead emphasize that all
bodies, trans or cis, are in continual states of transformation.
Trans-exclusionary radical feminists, however, continue to wage war
against trans women and the notion of gender itself. In 2014, Australian
Sheila Jeffreys (author of The Industrial Vagina) issued a new book, Gender
Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism. She argues
that transgender identities are merely animated sex stereotypes; that “male-
bodied transgender” people threaten women’s safety in restrooms, showers,
and prisons; and that gender itself is a harmful ideology that works to
subordinate women.63 The back cover of Gender Hurts features two blurbs
by two influential feminists: Robin Morgan and Janice Raymond.
Meanwhile, the campaign to deny trans healthcare has built many allies.
In the first three months of 2021 alone, over eighty bills were introduced in
state legislatures seeking to roll back trans rights, especially blocking youth
access to healthcare and organized sports.64 The dangerous idea that
transition healthcare mutilates bodies and that trans people jeopardize the
safety of others is no longer a niche concern of some white feminists—it is
a major national agenda.
Yet the counterhistory also builds strength, on the street and on the
university campus. In 2011, Susan Stryker—who turned transgender studies
into a flourishing field—held a conference at Indiana University–
Bloomington to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Stone’s essay
“The Empire Strikes Back.” Nearly five hundred people attended, many of
them trans. During a panel discussion, Stryker asked Stone to read aloud the
final paragraph of the manifesto. Long a professor at University of Texas–
Austin and the European Graduate School, Stone focused on media arts and
was accustomed to delivering renegade performances in front of large
audiences. Yet as she read her text and looked out over the crowd, humility,
fear, and exhilaration overcame her. Sobs interspersed her words. She had
dreamed of one day being part of a community of trans theorists—and now
she was among hundreds and hundreds. “It’s been a long road,” she
reflected. “We’re not near the end yet, but we’re all clearly on our way.”65
Footnotes
i The terms TERF and trans women are twenty-first-century coinages. I project them backwards
because the ongoing struggle for trans rights requires recognizing the consistency of anti-trans and
pro-trans feminisms and communities over time.
ii I use the male pronoun here in accordance with Sandy Stone’s groundbreaking theorizing about
refusing the gender binary and the erasures of passing, as explored below.

PART III
OPTIMIZING

CHAPTER SEVEN
LEANING IN OR SQUADDING UP

Sheryl Sandberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Always ally yourself with those on the bottom, on the margins, and at the
periphery of the centers of power. And in doing so, you will land yourself at
the very center of some of the most important struggles of our society and
our history.
—Barbara Ransby, How We Get Free
SHERYL SANDBERG NEEDED A BETTER PLACE TO PARK.
ONE WINTER MORNING IN 2005, ON-GOING morning sickness kept
the heavily pregnant tech executive at home in front of the toilet until the
last possible minute. She was now late to meet a prospective client at
Google, where she headed the burgeoning sales and operations team. But
the vast parking lot at Google’s Mountain View, California, headquarters
brimmed with cars, and Sandberg was forced to take a spot in its outer
reaches. Lumbering across the asphalt expanse only sent her stomach back
into her throat. While extolling the value of buying targeted advertising on
Google—a product that was turning the company from the red into a
rapidly growing profit juggernaut—she prayed “that a sales pitch was the
only thing that would come out of [her] mouth.”1
That night her husband, Dave Goldberg, remarked that his workplace
Yahoo! reserved close-in parking spaces for pregnant workers. Inspired,
Sandberg walked into the Google founders’ office the following day and
posed her request directly to Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Google
pregnancy parking was born. The travails of one woman executive eased
the way for all future pregnant employees.
The parking anecdote is one of Sandberg’s favorite examples of her
vision of feminist change. Her trial as a pregnant, nauseous executive
traversing the oceanic Google lot opens and closes Lean In, the white
feminist manifesto she published to much fanfare in 2013. It’s a disarming
introduction to Sandberg, one of corporate America’s richest and most
powerful women. Opening the book’s glossy cover emblazoned with her
face and hair half-lit and softly focused as if she were an actress in a
romantic comedy, I hardly expected to find her crouched over a toilet on the
very first page. Yet the folksy story, as with the intimate close-up of
Sandberg on Lean In’s cover, is key to the image she crafts. Imperfect,
inspiring, relatable, and above all, normatively female, she presents herself
through the appealing combination of remarkable competence and quirky,
all-too-human weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Faced with a gender inequity
that compromised her sales pitch and her dignity she nonetheless solved it
handily, for herself and her colleagues. Let women like Sandberg rise to the
top of corporate America, she tells her readers, and the sexism women face
in the workplace everywhere will diminish. “More female leadership will
lead to fairer treatment for all women,” she insists.2
While Lean In doesn’t discount the systemic barriers women face, such
as unequal pay, a lack of family leave, and a deeply sexist culture, the book
proclaims that these institutional factors have drowned out other feminist
approaches. “Too much of the conversation is on blaming others, and not
enough is on taking responsibility ourselves,” she later explained to a New
Yorker journalist. The book thus turns away from structural solutions and
instead emphasizes “internal obstacles,” illuminating the ways that women
hold themselves back from career success. Women make individual choices,
day in and day out, her book claims, that compromise their own potential
and keep them out of positions of power. Sandberg encourages women
readers to stop underestimating their talent, lean in to their professional
ambitions, and negotiate themselves all the way into the executive suite—
where they’ll make sure those who follow in their stiletto footsteps have an
easier path to tread. In the allegedly postracist, postfeminist days of
President Obama’s second term, Sandberg’s emphasis on personal solutions
to structural problems struck a ready nerve. Her ally Oprah trumpeted
Sandberg as “the new voice of revolutionary feminism”; Gloria Steinem,
another personal friend, aptly anointed her “feminism’s new boss.”3 Four
million copies flew off the shelves.
Sandberg helped usher in a twenty-first-century mode of white feminist
politics. In this new form of feminism, the key strategy has become
optimizing: striving for a streamlined efficiency in which personal health
and happiness and feminist empowerment are indistinguishable from
capitalist productivity. Her executive career, Sandberg relates, is compatible
with motherhood because she rises early—sometimes at 5 a.m.—schedules
her office time to end by 5:30 p.m.; rushes home for dinner, play, and
bedtime; and runs from the crib back to her laptop to resume her workday,
which includes being an inspiration to her female underlings. The worker,
mother, and activist fully dissolve into one another, arriving at an allegedly
“revolutionary” feminism whose central message is to work harder, smarter,
and faster, even after you’ve reached the executive suite.
Sandberg’s feminism has much in common with the contemporary ideal
of the optimized woman, who as essayist Jia Tolentino writes, is perfectly
toned, coiffed, and salaried. This feminine ideal, Tolentino explains, reflects
the values of the twenty-first century in which “work is rebranded as
pleasure so that we will accept more of it” and women are encouraged to
“understand relentless self-improvement as natural, mandatory, and feminist
—or just, without question, the best way to live.”4 Parenting, executive
leadership, and empowering women all become jobs to be performed with
maximum efficiency and maximum results. Improving the self, and lifting
up some other women from those lofty heights, has become white
feminism’s ultimate goal.
White feminism began in the 1840s with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
others’ fight for white women to possess the rights and privileges afforded
to white men, including the right to own property and to hold careers. By
the 2010s, it had become a push to optimize one’s potential in every aspect
of life. This represented a shift from the priorities of twentieth-century
white feminists like Margaret Sanger and Betty Friedan, who largely
campaigned to secure middle-class white women’s status among those
chosen to thrive in part through cleansing society of those whom they
deemed threatening to their cause, such as the poor and/or disabled,
lesbians, and trans women. But now, in the twenty-first century, the idea
that white women deserve to be among the chosen is becoming more secure
—even if the reality of gender equity in the office remains a distant dream.
As fewer people object to the presence of middle-class women in the
professions and in government, removing so-called undesirables from the
movement and the nation has become less of a priority for white feminism
as a whole. TERFs, now joined by “gender-critical feminists” who similarly
rail against trans rights, remain fiercely committed to the cause of cleansing
and are gaining power. But at the same time, many white feminists have
turned inward, finding the greatest enemy to their own success to be nestled
within their own psyches and habits. Regulating the community has given
way to a relentless self-discipline. Self-optimizing, for white feminists
today, is the hallmark of liberation.
The contemporary capitalist imperatives for efficiency, endless work,
and the pursuit of excellence apply to professional-class men as well as to
women. But white feminists saddle themselves with an extra burden. In a
new kind of civilizing project arising out of white women’s traditional role
as stabilizers of society, they set out not only to conquer the corner office—
but to make reforms to capitalism itself. Success, for these women, entails
both individual advancement and making corporate capitalism appear to be
inclusive. Their task is not only to self-regulate; their duty at the top of
Fortune 500 companies is to redeem capitalism, turning cutthroat
companies like Google into the kinds of places with pregnancy parking
spots.
Yet while parking lot reforms bring about needed equality among
corporate workers, corporate workers, especially in Silicon Valley, bring
about massive wealth inequality for the country and the world. The
conditions of the employee lot at Google HQ have zero ramifications on the
vast majority of people who come into contact with Google. Google, after
all, primarily exists not as an office complex in Mountain View, but as a
data-hungry behemoth trawling the questions, personal correspondence, and
business communications of its two billion users to assemble psychological
profiles it can sell to advertisers. Thanks to this Big Tech business model
Sandberg brought from Google to Facebook when she became chief
operating officer of the social network in 2008, she is now a billionaire.
Sandberg may draw a paycheck from Facebook, but, whether we realize it
or not, we all generate revenue for Sheryl Sandberg.
Sandberg’s status as a self-made feminist billionaire makes palpable that
white feminism doesn’t just embrace the rising wealth inequality of the
twenty-first century—it’s part of engineering it. The existence of feminist
billionaires throws the contradictions of optimizing feminism into high
relief, for feminism ceases to have any meaning at all when explosive,
extractive wealth becomes its measure. Yet even white feminism’s most
vehement detractors find it difficult to avoid the optimizing trap. The
demand that we devote ourselves to continual work and continual success
has been laid for us not only by corporate feminists but by the penetration
of capitalism into nearly every area of our lives.
A few weeks after Donald Trump’s election to the presidency of the United
States in November 2016, New York bartender Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
and two friends drove west. They joined the more than one thousand water
protectors blocking the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline at the
Standing Rock Lakota Sioux reservation.5 The pipeline would tear through
Lakota Sioux burial and prayer sites at a spot three hundred miles north of
where Zitkala-Ša grew up in Yankton Sioux territory 135 years prior,
endangering the water supply of the entire region. In response, members of
more than three hundred tribes gathered in Standing Rock to prevent its
construction. Zitkala-Ša had created the first pan-Indian movement of
Native tribes working together in coalition; Ocasio-Cortez was now an ally
of its most recent iteration.
She was stunned by what she saw: “A corporation had literally
militarized itself against the American people,” attacking the Indigenous-
led protest camp with rubber bullets, mace, teargas, and pepper spray. The
need for dramatic, systemic change led by the most vulnerable themselves
became palpable to her. She hoped to play a role in the struggle. “Lord, just
do with me what you will,” she prayed at Standing Rock. “Allow me to be a
vessel.” As she drove off the reservation, she received a phone call from an
unknown number asking her to run for Congress—her brother had signed
her up—and she said yes.6
A year and a half later, Ocasio-Cortez defeated the fourth-most powerful
Democrat in the House of Representatives, Joe Crowley, to win the
Democratic primary nomination for New York’s Fourteenth Congressional
District. Her extraordinarily unlikely win and her social media acumen soon
propelled her to visibility rivaling that of the most famous American
women in politics, even before she secured the House seat in the general
election in November 2018. Increasingly disgusted by the belief that “we
can capitalism our way out of poverty,” she ran as a Democratic Socialist.
Yet she also advanced a broad critique of power that pushed fierce critics of
capitalism—many of whom tend to focus on economics alone—to reckon
with racial, gender, and social injustice. “I’m not running ‘from the left.’
I’m running from the bottom,” Ocasio-Cortez declared on Twitter, a
medium she commands. The multiracial, largely working-class Fourteenth
District she represents, which encompasses parts of Queens, the Bronx, and
the notorious prison Rikers Island, is “like the epicenter for an
intersectional argument for economic and social dignity,” she later
explained. “There is no such thing as talking about class without there being
implications of the racial history of the United States. You just can’t do it.”7
America had an intersectional feminist politician, now beloved on the
Left and notorious on the Right as AOC. Intersectional feminism teaches us
that the best way to confront the uneven distribution of life and death is to
examine the lives and conditions of those pinned to the very bottom and to
work together in coalition, across positions and identities, to dismantle it.
Ocasio-Cortez’s alliance with three other progressive women of color
elected to the House of Representatives at the same time—Ayanna Pressley,
Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar—whom AOC affectionately dubbed the
Squad, works to bring coalitional feminist politics’ view-from-below into
the highest ranks of government.
In the 2020s, it is not Sheryl Sandberg but AOC and the Squad who for
many embody the future of feminist leadership. Their distinct theories of
social change have correspondingly opposing relationships to power:
leaning in to the center or aligning yourself with those on the margins. They
also have distinct momentum: one version of feminism is stumbling, the
other surging as more and more people reckon with the racial and economic
violence that built the United States and call for radical transformation.
Lean In–style feminism promotes privatized, top-down solutions to
structural problems that depend on siphoning capital upward, such as
corporations that provide their high-level employees with generous
maternity leave and lavish healthcare including egg-freezing, but
subcontract low-level employees to poverty wages. The Squad instead
endorses a revamped notion of the public sphere in which resources are
broadly spread downward. “In a modern, moral and wealthy society, no
person in America should be too poor to live,” AOC makes plain.8
Yet the very popularity of AOC and the Squad’s appeals for structural
change activates the demands of optimizing feminism. AOC’s preternatural
mastery of her job is key to her appeal: her Twitter clapbacks, beguiling
videos, and eloquent, unscripted speeches from the campaign stage or
House floor, even twirling on her haters in front of her congressional office
door and applying makeup while insisting “femininity has power,” are all
delivered with fiery passion and captivating millennial glamour.9 She is a
seemingly tireless social media presence. Cooking black bean soup in the
evenings or catching the train back to the Bronx on the weekends, Ocasio-
Cortez turns to Instagram Live (a Facebook property) to break down
barriers between government and the people. Even when exhausted, she
manages to parse complex policy bills with startling clarity and charisma.
Yet this sheer effort and skill pose a risk. A largely unstated but pervasive
expectation thrust on her by supporters exceeds the capacities of any
human, however remarkable, to meet: that Ocasio-Cortez be perfect at
everything she does.
Can AOC—or more to the point, the legions of her fans—resist the lure
of optimizing feminism, of the fantasy that she can excel at her job 24/7,
save the planet, and look great while doing it all? While feminist
billionaires may be less popular, the phenomenon of likability, mastery, and
incessant work broadly expected of feminist women today remains. In the
widespread enthusiasm for the talent and brilliance of AOC and the Squad,
we hazard being so dazzled by their ability to break down traditional
barriers between politician and the public and articulate an intersectional
feminist position from Capitol Hill that their skill becomes a cage of
expectation. While Ocasio-Cortez is one of capitalism’s sharpest public
critics, she is still forced to navigate the optimizing trap that demands
unceasing work and unremitting excellence.
In March 2008 at the Facebook Palo Alto headquarters, CEO Mark
Zuckerberg made an important new introduction at the weekly all hands
staff meeting. Since first encountering Sheryl Sandberg at a Christmas party
three months prior, he had been trying to poach her from Google in a
recruiting process her husband and many journalists have likened to dating.
Multiple times a week, Zuckerberg and Sandberg convened at a Michelin-
starred New American restaurant around the corner from her mansion to
discuss his vision for Facebook: a social network that connected the entire
world.10 Though Sandberg easily could have assumed a CEO position in
Silicon Valley, she believed in this mission and quickly grasped its
explosive profit potential. She was now coming to Facebook as chief
operating officer, in charge of earning Facebook’s first dollar—the company
was swimming in venture capital money but had yet to create its own
revenue stream—and of everything not related to engineering. Zuckerberg,
while retaining the title of CEO, would devote his energy to product
development and new acquisitions, as well as winning the Valley’s heated
competition for technical sophistication.
“Sheryl and I met at a party and we immediately hit it off,” Zuckerberg
told his seven hundred employees, speaking with more animation and
warmth than was characteristic for the twenty-four-year-old. “I was really
impressed by how smart she is,” he divulged as Sheryl stood by his side and
beamed at her new staff.
“When I met Sheryl the first thing I said was that she had really good
skin. And she does,” Mark affirmed, turning toward the executive fifteen
years his senior.
Sandberg’s smile didn’t budge.
Accustomed to making imperious commands, Zuckerberg issued an
edict to the company: “Everyone should have a crush on Sheryl.” Former
Facebook employee Katherine Losse, whose memoir recounts this cringe-
inducing scene, reports that many engineers responded dutifully, quickly
testifying to their crushes in a department-wide email chain.11
Perhaps Sandberg instinctively knew what she would broadcast in Lean
In five years later: research shows that success is a contradiction for
women. The more women advance professionally, the less people like them.
Our sexist culture, Lean In underscores, doesn’t trust successful women.
Both men and women, Sandberg cites, found the entrepreneur profiled in a
Harvard Business School case study to be “appealing” and collegial in one
article, but “selfish and not ‘the type of person you want to hire or work
for’” in the another. Yet only one aspect of the article was changed across
the two versions: the name “Howard” was swapped out with “Heidi.” To be
successful in business negotiations, she advises, women thus need to work
hard to make themselves appealing: “women must come across as being
nice, concerned about others, and ‘appropriately’ female.”12 Women, in
other words, ought to master the feminine performance of making everyone
else comfortable while subordinating their own needs to those of the
company at large. Smiling your way through outlandish sexism plays the
long game—by not rocking the boat, the boat can become yours.
Sandberg launched Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead in 2013,
exactly fifty years after Betty Friedan released The Feminine Mystique.
Sandberg donned the mantel of white feminism’s new leader, come to
“speak her truth” as Friedan had spoken hers. Friedan had diagnosed a
feminine ideal that debilitates middle-class women and society at large by
restricting them to the home; she prescribed professional careers as the
antidote to women’s wasted potential and atrophied lives. Sandberg, half a
century later, insists that while progress has been made, “our revolution has
stalled.” Though women had flooded the workforce, they had yet to achieve
parity in the executive class or as wage earners: 479 of the Fortune 500
CEOs were men; 82 percent of congressional representatives were men; and
for every dollar men earned, women on average took home only seventy-
seven cents. “A truly equal world,” the book proclaims, “would be one
where women ran half our countries and companies and men ran half our
homes.” White feminism had a new goal: install women presidents and
CEOs and equality would trickle down. Atlantic writer Amanda Mull aptly
observed that Lean In and the #GirlBoss phenomenon that surfaced in its
wake rebranded corporate women’s “pursuit of power… as a righteous
quest for equality.” The book dominated the New York Times bestseller list
for over a year; more than two hundred corporations signed on as
supporters of the Lean In platform.13
Lean In has been widely critiqued for focusing narrowly on the concerns
of heterosexual, married corporate women. But the fundamental problem
with Lean In is not its failure to be inclusive. Inclusivity within capitalism
is a fool’s errand. Its core problem is that it presents capitalism as the
deliverer of equality, when capitalism is actually a chief engine of social
harm. Friedan had argued middle-class women should join those chosen to
thrive, outsourcing their household work and joining the professions. Fifty
years later, Lean In takes feminist biopolitics to its logical conclusion:
women should optimize their capacities by taking the reins of corporate
America’s profit extraction machine. Working-class women similarly fall
out of Sandberg’s view, as they had in Friedan’s, but their behind-the-scenes
work cleaning, cooking, and providing childcare frees up the feminist boss
to devote herself to maximizing her self, her career, and her mentees.
Lean In, in the form of the book and the tens of thousands of “lean in
circles” linked to Sandberg’s nonprofit (and presumably tax sheltering)
Leanin.org, envisions an empowered woman who does it all. This includes
maintaining a self-starter attitude that makes her easy to mentor;
understanding gender is socially constructed and that women internalize
sexism and so has weaponized the self to root it out; developing an
inclusive vision that allegedly supports all women; watching Leanin.org
videos to learn how to comport her body and voice in a way that exudes
authority; securing a husband with whom she balances fifty-fifty the work
of maintaining a house and raising children; and dissolving boundaries
between her private needs and the demands of the workplace, making it
possible to bring her “whole sel[f] to work.”14 Work becomes the privileged
site of self-development, and everything is reframed as work.
Sandberg’s turn to the corporate workplace as the site of feminist self-
realization is fully in keeping with neoliberalism, the stage of capitalism
we’ve been immersed in since the mid-1970s. At core, neoliberalism is
propelled by the harmful fantasy that the marketplace is the best place to
solve social problems. The neoliberal agenda aims to remove all regulations
on corporate power so that the richest can accumulate the greatest wealth,
and do so most rapidly, in part through eroding the public sector and the
taxes that pay for schools, healthcare, and infrastructure like roads, bridges,
and utilities. These policies have produced the worst wealth inequality in
US history.15 Sandberg, as the chief of staff to Larry Summers when he was
treasury secretary during the Clinton administration, played a role in
bringing about some of neoliberal capitalism’s most disastrous policies:
deregulating Wall Street, which led to the 2008 global recession, and
divesting federal moneys from public infrastructure and the social safety
net.
The runaway corporate profits that characterize neoliberalism and that
underpin Lean In and GirlBoss success are extracted from the poor, largely
in the form of undercompensating workers for the value they produce for
their companies. Neoliberal policies create millionaires and billionaires,
rapidly shrink the middle class due to falling wages and disappearing union
protections, and swell the working class by replacing living wages with
retail, service, and other low-paid work. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has
said, “wherever there is affluence, there is an underclass. There is a service
class.” Under the ethos of “personal responsibility,” the poor themselves are
tasked with solving the problems created by the rapidly shrinking public
sphere and the deregulation that has concentrated half of the world’s money
in 1 percent of the world’s population. At no time has this been more
brutally apparent than during the first ten months of the COVID-19
pandemic, when essential workers risked their lives for poverty-wage jobs
and an estimated one in six Americans went hungry, while US billionaires
increased their wealth by nearly 40 percent.16
Meanwhile, in search of new markets and new sources of profit,
neoliberalism has turned to the body and to the self as relatively untapped
sources of revenue. These modern industries encourage the wealthy enough
to not only thrive, but optimize. The optimized consume food only of
superlative taste, appearance, and nutritional value; they polish their teeth,
skin, hair, and muscles until they glow; they surround their bodies with
minimalist design and maximum performance in the kitchen, bedroom, and
bathroom and broadcast it all on social media. The optimized streamline
their productivity by removing inefficiencies like cleaning their own house,
making their own lunch, or shopping for their own groceries—or
sometimes, even chewing at all. Through the constant pursuit of the best,
the individual allegedly reaches her full potential. The optimized self
becomes the ultimate source and producer of social value.
Feminism in neoliberal times makes similar moves. In “the
postindustrial economy,” journalist Susan Faludi has observed of
Sandberg’s brand of empowerment, “feminism has been retooled as a
vehicle for expression of the self, a ‘self’ as marketable consumer object.”
White feminism has become a trendy way to develop a brand, a side hustle,
or at least a compelling social media feed. And while billionaires are
rapidly falling out of favor, the trope of the optimized feminist whose
politics are inclusive and whose makeup is flawless remains a powerful
lure. As a blatant attempt to join the status quo, white feminism is
increasingly suspect, but as a lifestyle ideal, the optimized woman
shimmers forth from Barre class, Instagram scrolls, protest marches, and
even, in the Trump era, the White House.17
The optimized life presents further contradictions for many women,
even as white feminism mandates they achieve it. While Silicon Valley men
like Dave Asprey of Bulletproof and Jack Dorsey of Twitter biohack their
way into three hours of sleep and twenty-one hours of performance mastery
per day, even acolytes of the maximized self are highly suspicious of
women who appear to do it all. Success, Sandberg emphasized repeatedly,
is negatively correlated with likability for women. Sandberg’s white
feminist genius lies in understanding that when white women optimize, that
doesn’t mean programming away all imperfections. For white women, bugs
are perceived to be a feature.
“[I] speak openly about my own weaknesses” at work, Sandberg tells the
reader, ostensibly to open communication channels with her employees and
solicit their critical feedback.18 But there’s a larger effect here, too—it dulls
her edges, renders her palatable through the narration and display of her
shortcomings. In order for highly successful women to be likable, Sandberg
intuits, they must be visibly flawed, embodied, emotional, and non-
autonomous. To optimize while white and female requires deliberate
displays of vulnerability and admitting that you can’t be superwoman; “The
Myth of Doing It All” reads the title of one chapter. Like the animated
character purposely drawn askew to avoid the uncanny valley, the
optimized white woman performs her fallibility to avoid provoking
discomfort, filling her pockets all the while.
And so the Sheryl Sandberg one meets in Lean In is a self-made, soon-
to-be billionaire who brings her emotions into the office, pukes into a toilet
from morning sickness before an important pitch, and inspires other women
to join her in the ranks of an elevated life. Above all, she had to be
convinced to own her role among the “world’s most powerful women”
when the title was first bestowed upon her. When Sandberg speaks of
rushing out of the office to tuck her kids into bed or hosting monthly
women’s networking events at her home, the reader hardly imagines the
11,500-square-foot mansion with a home theater, gym complete with steam
room and sauna, and multiple laundry rooms that she and her husband
called home, or that the dinner parties she hosted included $38,500-a-plate
Obama fundraisers.19 Instead, the optimized woman CEO comes across as
the richer girl next door, whose charmingly apparent humanity inspires her
to help lift up other women to join her at the top.
While the optimized man runs barefoot to the office with his water bottle
filled with activated charcoal, the optimized woman cries in the executive
suite. When shed by the CEO, white women’s tears become a commodity,
an asset, and a safeguard—proof that capitalism can have a heart. The
emotional, feminist CEO secures her own likability and cleanses the means
of production at the same time, sanctifying runaway profits with the
humanity streaming down her face. This “feminism of the 1 percent…
supplies the perfect alibi for neoliberalism,” the authors of Feminism for the
99% observe, for executive feminism “enables the forces supporting global
capital to portray themselves as ‘progressive.’”20
One hundred sixty-five years earlier, Elizabeth Cady Stanton had
launched US white feminism as a project that would civilize the nation.
Now, its task was to elevate perfectly imperfect white women leaders to
validate the brutally exploitative economic system that underpinned their
success. This was less the future that Stanton had in mind than the result of
the specific politics white women adopted. For nearly two centuries, white
feminists have set lifting white women into the nation’s structures of power
as the ultimate goal, and they’ve framed that rise up the hierarchy as the
very meaning of equality—even when it requires, by definition, lifting up
some through pushing down many others.
Displays of emotion and vulnerability are not only keys to rendering
corporate women likable and masking capitalist brutality, however.
Sandberg is among the executives who figured out how to turn intimate
confessions, personal disclosures, and private communications into the
economy’s newest frontier. As neoliberal capital penetrates ever deeper into
the body and self, feelings have become bytes of data that leave algorithmic
trails. In the data-mining scheme she built at Facebook that turned her into a
billionaire, the intimate details of our relationships and our politics become
raw resources ripe for extraction. The question now is not if we will lean in
to Sandberg’s vision of capitalism: it’s whether anyone will retain the
genuine option to back out.
In August 2008, as Sheryl Sandberg was adjusting to her new role as
Facebook chief operating officer and the US stock market was veering
toward an impending meltdown, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got up to leave
her father’s hospital room. Though forty-eight-year-old Sergio Ocasio was
struggling with a rare form of lung cancer, and she was closer to her father
than to anyone else she knew, it was soon time to return for her sophomore
year at Boston University. She began to intuit that this would be the last
time she would see him, and that her father perceived her realization that he
was dying. She said her goodbyes sadly and carefully. But as she passed
through the doorframe, her father called out, and Ocasio-Cortez turned back
toward the hospital bed. “Hey, make me proud,” he charged his oldest
child.21
Sergio Ocasio passed in early September, cutting off a connection to the
person who knew her “soul better than anyone on this planet.” Ocasio-
Cortez felt unmoored and alone. A premed major who hoped to become an
ob/gyn, she opted to study abroad in Niger, West Africa, and began working
alongside midwives to gain experience from practiced healers. She found
the women’s strength and the way their lives revolved around the joy and
fellowship they sought every evening to throw into relief that, in the United
States, “work is the sun that your whole life is organized around.” She also
witnessed the dire consequences of poverty—the stacked deck that cuts life
short, sometimes all the way back to the moment of birth: instead of
delivering life, some patients’ labor ushered in death. With her father’s high
hopes for her future ringing in her ears, Ocasio-Cortez began to envision a
different path, one that didn’t set about healing symptoms on a case-by-case
basis. She excelled at science and had placed second in the world’s largest
high school science fair; her prize included having an asteroid named after
her. But a new goal materialized, one more fundamental than treating
individual patients: “healing sick systems.”22 The goal was of suitable
ambition to relieve her father’s high expectations she felt continually
pressing on her chest. When she returned to Boston, she changed her majors
to economics and international relations and studied in the Black radical
tradition to gain the tools to analyze power at the systemic level.
The world then felt full of promise to Ocasio-Cortez—time stretched out
luxuriously in front of her generation and those that would follow, opening
ample space to radically transform the way humans relate to each other,
socially, politically, and economically. From the podium at Boston
University’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration during her senior year
of college in 2011, she told the audience that “the world is young” and
thrilling advances were under way. “Five hundred million people are all
connected to one virtual social network,” she enthused about Facebook’s
recent user milestone. “This is what the dawn of an era looks like. These are
our victories.” But she saw profound defeats as well, such as “Bronx
children who cannot count by coincidence of their zip code,” the result of a
stratified class system in which “the ideas of Plato and Jefferson become as
[un]attainable as the items in a Park Avenue window.” It is up to us
individually to make wise choices about how we contribute to the world we
live in, she charged. “Every day we must ask ourselves the question,
‘Today, how will I be great? Tomorrow, how will I be great? In this very
moment, how am I being great?’”23 Social change, she imparted, requires a
tireless commitment to defying the status quo and reaching for a higher
plane.
Ocasio-Cortez, however, would soon feel that she was not choosing
greatness. After her father’s untimely death, her mother Blanca struggled to
afford the mortgage on the thousand-square-foot suburban Westchester
house the Bronx couple had bought to give their children access to a better
school system. To help pay these bills, she helped her mother clean houses
when she was on breaks from college. Upon her graduation she refused to
join her fellow economics majors in their rush to lucrative paychecks on
Wall Street. Instead, she worked as an education director for the National
Hispanic Institute teaching storytelling skills to children. But her mother
faced an impending foreclosure, despite working two jobs, and Ocasio-
Cortez’s nonprofit salary was insufficient to help stave it off. She resigned
her position and took a job waitressing and bartending at a Mexican
restaurant called Flats Fix near Union Square. The pay was higher, but she
nonetheless found herself in “agony.” Restaurant work was certainly not
what her father had in mind. She had broken her promise. Day by day, self-
disappointment pierced her. She was failing to climb to the level of
greatness; therefore, she was “nothing.”24
Ocasio-Cortez realized that she needed to make a choice: “I am either
going to destroy myself or I am going to be good.” And she realized that
meant defining good on her own terms, something that would require her to
adjust her “understanding of the world.” The problem was not that being a
waitress was inherently demeaning. The problem was that mapping her life
in terms of “stature” and “achievement” was making her miserable.25
Ocasio-Cortez began to root out something just as toxic as women’s
tendency to underestimate their own leadership capacities—the constant
self-pressure to become the best possible version of themselves and to
achieve career positions to match. She thought back to what her parents had
instilled in her: that the question is “not what do you want to be, but how do
you want to be.” And how was a matter of day-to-day ethics, spirituality,
and self-acceptance, not status and standout accomplishments bulleted on a
resume. She began to throw off the neoliberal demands for maximum
performance she had internalized and then promoted to others from the
MLK Day stage. In its place, she embraced the how, finding a daily rhythm
enabling her to “attempt to lead a moral life.” This change pulled her out of
depression and launched her into high spirits at Flats Fix. While the
“capitalist economy would say, you should want better than that,” she
relates that during her many years as a waitress and bartender, “I was
happiest because my how was in harmony with who I wanted to be.”26
On a personal level, Ocasio-Cortez identified the optimizing logic that
was destroying her and replaced it with a philosophy focused on day-to-day
morality and joy. From that strong base, she launched her career in politics,
ironically soon reaching a higher prominence than likely she had ever
dreamed. Her mission, she explains, is “to advance a better world,” not to
hold on to the congressional seat she needs to defend every two years or to
achieve “social acceptance in [the] small class of powerful and wealthy
people” to which her colleagues belong.27 For her, feminist leadership
entails being accountable to the social justice movements that powered her
win.
In November 2018, two months before they were even sworn in, Ocasio-
Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, a fellow Democratic Socialist, trumpeted their
calls for systemic change from the Hill. During their orientation as new
members of the House of Representatives, they joined the youth activists of
the Sunrise Movement calling for a Green New Deal resolution on the floor
of the House—Ocasio-Cortez even joined the sit-in in Speaker of the House
Nancy Pelosi’s office.28 It was a striking debut that underscored their
commitment to alliance-based movement organizing instead of individual
success.
Yet while Ocasio-Cortez had released herself from the demands of self-
optimizing, that same expectation of a continual grind and continual
excellence is baked into the role of the highly visible twenty-first-century
feminist. To many of her fans, she is less a leader than an icon. A secular
world still needs its goddesses, and that burden falls onto women like AOC.
“Feminist prayer candles” are adorned with her face, authors name her one
of the “queens of the resistance,” and magazines from Time to Vanity Fair
graced their covers with her image less than two years into office. Hers is a
precipitous success, driven by collective glee at her apparent ability to be a
fierce radical, glamour girl, and astute, snappy communicator all at the
same time—and that imposes its own kind of optimizing trap.
Self-optimizing white women secure their likability through maintaining
visible flaws that temper their success, but a more cutthroat standard
generally applies to women of color. Optimizing even allows room for a
certain amount of mediocrity for white women, though it is white men who
by far have the widest berth.29 Whiteness is so overwhelmingly understood
to be capacity itself, that mounting evidence of failure and lack of
qualifications often don’t hinder white men’s careers or reputations—
instead, they fail upward. Meanwhile, white women can turn their weakness
into reassuring assets, defusing the threat they pose to white men.
But for women of color, a different standard applies. To be racialized is
to be seen as innately incapable, at best in need of a helping hand, or, at
worst, as a threat to the social order. While tears remain a form of white
women’s authority, for women of color, the expectations are nothing short
of perfection. There is no margin for error, much less for ineptness to
masquerade as mastery. Flawlessness and nothingness become the binary
options, and neither leaves any room for regular old humanity.
Seemingly aware of these impossible demands thrust upon women of
color leaders to be infallible, Ocasio-Cortez crafts an approach to visibility
she calls “intentional vulnerability.” Cooking dinner while explaining
congressional procedure on Instagram at 10 p.m., she explained to scholar-
activists Cornel West and Tricia Rose on their podcast The Tight Rope, she
was bound to make mistakes. Broadcasting her imperfections would not
only relieve her of the “messiah” expectations thrust upon her—it would
indirectly knock all political leaders off their self-imposed pedestals. “I
needed to break the mythology of perfection in people who hold power,”
she reflected, so that Washington politics looks less like an impenetrable
edifice and more like “human being[s] making decisions.” Her vulnerability
and accessibility would both subvert the optimizing demands placed upon
her and chip away at the barrier between congressional officials and the
people they allegedly serve. The effect has been magnetic. Her 11 p.m.,
hour-long Instagram speech the night before the House of Representatives
voted to impeach President Trump for the second time in January 2021
drew a live audience of over a hundred thousand; by the next morning, the
video had more than 1.5 million views.30
Intentional vulnerability is a dicey prospect on a mass stage, however.
Extending her working hours until late in the night, Ocasio-Cortez’s attempt
to reveal her humanity and educate her audience simultaneously risks
generating further work demands in which she’s never truly off the clock.
There’s a larger structure, too, that is difficult to sidestep despite radical
aims. Emotion and vulnerability, especially shared by women, drive the
contemporary social media economy. In a form of capitalism that
commodifies performing and marketing the self, even late-night
vulnerability can become another valuable asset.
The day after AOC occupied Pelosi’s office with the Sunrise Movement,
Sheryl Sandberg woke to a bombshell. The skies above her mansion were
full of smoke from the most lethal and destructive wildfire in California
history, the Camp Fire, burning 150 miles to the north. But this bombshell
hit closer to home. “Sheryl Sandberg was seething,” began a story splashed
across the front of the New York Times that documented the tactics of
deflection, denial, and counterattack that she and Mark Zuckerberg wield to
protect Facebook’s market dominance. The social network launched in
2004 as a way to stay connected to friends, family, and colleagues; its
leaders quickly grew it into a massive media empire. Authoritarian
governments in the United States and around the world use the platform to
spread false information, a practice Facebook refuses to curb. In response,
journalists have widely deemed the company’s imperative for unchecked
growth and penchant for secrecy to be undermining democracy. Facebook
had become for many, the Times declared, the symbol “of corporate
overreach and negligence.” The article revealed Sandberg to sit at the helm
of an aggressive campaign to lobby powerful decision-makers, discredit
Facebook’s critics and detractors, and lie when confronted with her own
corporate malfeasance. The exposé struck a powerful blow at Sandberg’s
reputation that reverberated across the media landscape. “The Rise, Lean,
and Fall of Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg” read one particularly incisive
follow-up.31
Journalists such as Kara Swisher claim that Sandberg is just following
the rules of Big Tech and that targeting her, instead of Facebook CEO and
principal shareholder Mark Zuckerberg, reeks of misogyny.32 Yet Sandberg
isn’t just playing the Big Tech game. She is one of its key inventors.
Zuckerberg didn’t recruit Sandberg for her good skin and crush-worthy
smile. He recruited her in 2008 precisely because of her role in developing
surveillance capitalism at Google.
“Surveillance capitalism” is scholar Shoshana Zuboff’s term for the Big
Tech–driven neoliberal economy we live in today. The most potent form of
capital—that is, assets that produce value—has become data that capture
individual behavior. The year Sandberg became the general manager of
Google’s business unit, Google executives had finally figured out how the
company could make money. Every search on its site produces data in
excess of the search itself, such as information about a user’s location, how
they phrase queries, and where they click. Zuboff reveals that in 2001 the
company transformed such information into “behavioral surplus”: surplus
data that could be used to create predictive products it would sell to
advertisers. The AdWords team, led by Sandberg, immediately changed its
strategy for selling ads. While in the past Google sold ads based on
keywords (e.g., if a user searched for a recipe for a cake that looks like a
litter box, ads for litter boxes would populate the margins of the page), now
it started selling ads based on individual profiles it assembled and deduced
from the entirety of a user’s experience on Google and the web at large.
Search words were no longer the raw material that powered Google.
Instead, users themselves became what Zuboff calls “human natural
resources,” mined to make bets on what kind of people we are and what we
can be convinced to do. While Sandberg did not conceive of these ad-
targeting innovations or write the algorithms that made them possible, as
the head of online sales she oversaw the company’s efforts to turn its
engineering acumen into an unprecedented source of capital. In the process,
she grew her sales team from four people to four thousand, swelling the
parking lot in the process. By 2007, her unit hauled in two-thirds of
Google’s $17 billion annual revenue.33
Zuckerberg hired Sandberg to bring surveillance capitalism to Facebook
and turn the company’s first profit. No company has a bigger treasure trove
of personal experience than Facebook—data that were waiting to be made
profitable. The site is built to solicit disclosure of your daily grievances,
what you ate for breakfast, what your kids wore on the first day of school,
whether or not you voted and whom you voted for, who came to your
birthday party, and who was brave enough to touch the kitty litter cake. “We
have better information than anyone else,” she boasted after her move to the
social network. “We know gender, age, location, and it’s real data as
opposed to the stuff other people infer.”34 Facebook is a network of human
natural resources.
But the information that powers surveillance capitalism goes far beyond
self-disclosures, and access to these details isn’t merely benign, Zuboff
argues. Big Tech’s information results from ongoing “digital dispossession”
in which the daily emotions and texture of our lives, both online and offline,
are extracted and transformed into highly valuable data bought and sold on
a market in which we have no control or any share of the profit. The data
Google and Facebook mine are not used to benefit the public good—they’re
used to shape our behavior without our knowledge, building the wealth of
the 1 percent in the process.35
The vulnerability Sandberg shares and the intimacy she cultivates in the
Lean In brand are more than humility and a way to make her own
outrageous success acceptable. Personal details are also the raw material of
the new kind of capitalism she has helped create: they are the resources she
mines, in both her feminist agenda and her corporate career. Emotion,
connection, sharing, and friendship now power the engines of surveillance
capitalism, the logic that has built Google and Facebook into two of the
fifteen most profitable companies in the world.36 And while Sandberg
might defend women’s rights to a seat at the boardroom table, in practice
she uses gender as a key prediction factor to improve the bets Facebook
makes on our future behavior. The irony of Sandberg’s Lean In platform is
that the more successful she becomes as a capitalist, the more ruthless she
reveals white feminism itself to be.
Yet while I disagree with the claim that holding Sandberg at fault for the
predatory nature of Big Tech is an act of misogyny, the particular anger
directed at Sandberg does fit a longer pattern of sexism. Facebook CEO
Zuckerberg is generally portrayed as a shrewd, if overly restrained and
calculating, boy-genius-turned-businessman who is guided by rationality.
It’s hard to imagine an alliterative New York Times lede trumpeting his
emotional state akin to “Sheryl Sandberg was seething.” But white women
and white feminists, in large part through their own attempts to gain social
power via alternately civilizing, cleansing, or optimizing the status quo,
often take the fall when public opinion turns against those same unequal
systems.
White women have long been assigned the task of stabilizing society,
playing housewife to the entire public sphere. Since at least Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, white feminists have expanded that role into one of redemption.
They gain access to white supremacist capitalist structures in part through
promising to rehabilitate the structures of inequality through their presence.
When that project inevitably fails, and settler colonialism, corporate
capitalism, or electoral politics remains as brutal as ever, it is white women
who absorb much of the blame and outrage—and white men who largely
escape notice.
Sandberg’s corporate brand of white feminism has long helped cover
Facebook’s exploitative practice, giving it a palatable sheen, just as her
story of vomiting into the toilet renders her fallible and thus, in the
misogynist logic that influences all of us to one degree or another, more
likable. But as the atrocities of neoliberalism become more and more
apparent in the hundreds of thousands left to die in the COVID pandemic
while billionaires have doubled their wealth; in the rising seas, raging
wildfires, and newly incessant hurricanes plaguing our shores; and in the
state’s reliance on mass incarceration and police brutality to protect private
property, more and more people look instead to a feminism that tries to halt
capitalism’s death march rather than one that empowers careerwomen to
claim it for themselves.
On the second hundred-degree day in a row in July 2020, Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez climbed the steps on the east side of the US Capitol. As she
ascended toward the building, she crossed paths with two Republican
colleagues with whom she’d never spoken, Representative Ted Yoho of
Florida and Representative Roger Williams of Texas.
“Do you really believe that people are shooting and killing each other
because they’re hungry?” Yoho called out at her, wagging his finger toward
her face. “You know, you’re unbelievable. You’re disgusting.”37
Ocasio-Cortez had recently held a virtual town hall about police
brutality where she recontextualized New York’s summertime rise in crime
as the result of poverty and hunger exacerbated by the pandemic, not
planned minor reductions to the NYPD budget in the wake of anti–police
brutality protests. Clips of her comments that “crime is a problem of a
diseased society, which neglects its marginalized people,” spliced in as if in
response to a specific question about gun violence, had dominated the
conservative news cycle.38
Yoho pressed on. “You are out of your freaking mind,” he berated the
congresswoman.
“You are being rude,” she informed him, and the pair kept walking. But
Yoho wasn’t finished.
“Fucking bitch,” Yoho muttered as he and Williams continued down the
stairs.39
A reporter overheard the entire exchange, driving yet another news cycle
revolving around Ocasio-Cortez. Williams’s office issued a denial. Two
days later Yoho made a brief statement from the House floor apologizing
for “the abrupt manner” of his conversation with the congresswoman, while
denying that he had hurled insults her way. “Having been married 45 years
with two daughters, I’m very cognizant of my language,” he insisted.40 It’s
a familiar script, when a man accused of misogyny claims his role as
patriarch-protector renders his sexism impossible—when the role itself is
part and parcel of the power that sexist cultures grant to men.
Incensed by Yoho’s and other men’s use of “women, wives, and
daughters as shields and excuses for poor behavior,” Ocasio-Cortez turned
the individual attack on her into an opportunity to expose the ubiquity of
misogyny. Though her initial response was to ignore the entire incident, the
other Squad members insisted that her treatment was unacceptable—that
she had the right, and perhaps the responsibility, to fight back. With their
encouragement, she requested her own floor time to address their
colleagues two days later. Despite the high-pressure context, she took her
usual, confident approach to public speaking, scribbling a few notes in
advance and making up the speech on the spot. She donned a red blazer and
red lipstick, which Ayanna Pressley immediately knew meant Ocasio-
Cortez meant business.41
“Representative Yoho’s comments were not deeply hurtful or piercing to
me,” Ocasio-Cortez divulged. “Because I have worked a working-class job.
I have waited tables in restaurants.” She was not shocked by his language,
nor was she seeking his personal apology. Instead, she wanted to unmask
“the entire structure of power” that accepts “violence and violent language
against women.”42
Philosopher Kate Manne explains that the common understanding of
misogyny as a personal hatred of women fails to get at the true effects of
male power, which is structural rather than individual. Sexism, Manne
clarifies, is an ideology that dictates women owe dominant men attention,
affection, and care—and, as Pauli Murray would add, a structure that
sequesters power and capital in the hands of men. Misogyny is the behavior
that results, and it enforces the structure of sexism by rewarding women
who submit and punishing those who don’t. Yoho unleashed misogyny by
swearing at Ocasio-Cortez on the Capitol steps—and rather than solicit his
apology, she determined to expose how his actions reinforced the larger
system of sexism. His slur “was not just an incident directed at me,” she
elucidated, but part of a structure that expects women to submit to men;
“what Mr. Yoho did was give permission to other men to do that to his
daughters.” The C-SPAN video of her speech instantly became the most
popular clip from the House floor in the network’s history.43
Ocasio-Cortez brought intersectional feminist politics to the House of
Representatives with the speech, reframing an act of seemingly individual
harm as evidence of the broad structure of gendered power, and it drew an
audience of millions. Her remarks were quickly touted as evidence of
another AOC triumph. “AOC’s speech about Ted Yoho’s ‘apology’ was a
comeback for the ages,” announced a Washington Post column, while the
LA Times TV critic declared her speech “the best TV I’ve seen in years.”44
Once more, Ocasio-Cortez became an icon and a showpiece for feminists,
her vulnerability turned into evidence of her ceaseless prowess.
Ocasio-Cortez, it seems, continues to win the impossible game,
articulating structural analyses of power that seek change from the bottom
while generating the video views generally reserved for celebrity clips or
animal antics. Meanwhile, her coalition approach to progressive politics
deflects attention away from her alone, and the alliance with Pressley,
Omar, and Tlaib is expanding to include Ferguson activist Cori Bush and
former schoolteacher Jamaal Bowman, who, like Ocasio-Cortez, hails from
a Bronx-area district. Where the public expects individual, iconic women of
color figureheads, these politicians respond instead with a working alliance
that foregrounds class, race, climate change, and gender simultaneously.
Yet when the standards have become continual work, continual
availability, and all with extraordinary skill, no one can live up to the
pressure. There is no way to win the optimizing game, as an individual or as
a squad. Success means an ever-increasing grind that rides the razor’s edge
dividing wild success from vicious backlash. Ocasio-Cortez nailed her
rebuttal to Yoho, but it begs the question. What if she had been ill that day,
not up to her usual impromptu eloquence? Whether or not those who hold
Ocasio-Cortez in the highest esteem allow her the space to be imperfect, to
stumble on her words, or to feel too vulnerable to push back against an
extraordinary insult remains an open question.
Ocasio-Cortez, for her part, conveys a deeply grounded approach of
“non-attachment” to her position that allows her to focus on her policy
priorities, not securing her congressional seat or maintaining her
reputation.45 But for many of her fans, who range from liberal wine moms
to Democratic Socialists, AOC represents a flawless feminist
savior/Goddess. Her supporters expect her to knock it out of the park in
each and every speech, even when she’s calling out a colleague on the
House floor for harassment. Ultimately, it is us, not Ocasio-Cortez, who fall
into the optimizing trap, awaiting perfection on the House floor, Twitter,
and Instagram Live. Chances are, we likely place a similar demand on
ourselves to maintain flawlessness—though perhaps with just the right
amount of endearing vulnerability.
The solution to the trap of optimizing feminism may look a lot like the most
promising—and also the most difficult—approach to slowing the
carbonization of the atmosphere. Trying harder, trying differently, trying to
outgame the game will not work, even with a leader as skilled as AOC.
Similarly, producing millions of electric cars, filling the sea with wind
turbines, or dimming the sun will not change the cycle of extraction and
overproduction upon which the capitalist economy is built. If we stay in the
terms of the system, we end up merely reproducing that system.
The solution instead may be simply doing less. Producing less, buying
less, working less, demanding less of ourselves and our leaders. In a world
primed to accept women’s public role in society—whether as a white
feminist or intersectional feminist—when she comes to redeem it, the most
radical thing of all might be to insist on the individual and collective right
to rest, joy, and pleasure. Pleasure may sometimes take the form of
engaging with social media. But it may also take other forms altogether,
solitary or communal, that retreat from the digital stage and from any
commodifiable form of value. It may look like a walk in the woods, nine
hours of sleep a night, or full weekends off from one’s jobs and side hustles
and the screen. Tricia Hersey, founder of the Atlanta-based Nap Ministry,
advocates for the liberatory potential of sleep and breaks for Black women
and for all. “Rest is a spiritual practice, a racial justice issue and a social
justice issue,” she argues, a cornerstone of the good life long denied to the
racialized poor.46 Rest, tuning out, and logging off are radical demands in
an economy in which not one but two jobs are often required to stay afloat,
when sleep has become a middle-class luxury.
Even as we face astounding collective political and economic struggles
in the 2020s, to reclaim our energies and our spirits we will need to uproot
capitalism’s most toxic legacy from within ourselves: that our lives and our
movements consist of nothing more than work, and that the best way to
navigate the unequal structures of power is to outhustle them.

CONCLUSION
TWO FEMINISMS, ONE FUTURE

Our movements can’t only be composed of the people who are most
disenfranchised. Our movements also have to be composed of people from
across the class spectrum and people who also have power…. If we want to
compete for power, then part of what it means is we have to amass our
power as a unit. And it also means we have to take some of theirs.
—Alicia Garza, How We Get Free
There is no reasonable excuse that remains for white women to continue to
betray women of color. White women have a choice. It is a choice they
have always had to some degree, but never before have they been in such a
strong position to make the right one.
—Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars
How many more must die before we internalize the message of our
fundamental interdependence—any disease of one is a disease of the
collectivity; any alienation from self is alienation from the collectivity?
—M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing
WHEN I BEGAN WRITING THIS BOOK IN THE SPRING OF
2018, I WAS TEMPORARILY LIVING IN Palo Alto, California, a few
miles from Facebook headquarters. Inside, I combed through research I’d
been gathering for nearly two decades on the history of racism and sexism
in the United States. Outside, yard signs sprung up from the artificial grass
and manicured lawns around me advertising a single message: Recall Judge
Persky. Persky was the adjudicator of Brock Turner’s sexual assault case
who famously sentenced the defendant, routinely summarized as a Stanford
swimmer and future Olympian, to only six months of a possible fourteen-
year prison term. The survivor’s riveting courtroom statement on the impact
of Turner’s assault on her life, vulnerable in its candor and knifelike in its
precision, had captivated millions of people around the world. Moved by
the statement and outraged at the leniency Judge Persky had granted Turner,
a child of privilege, feminist legal scholar Michele Dauber launched a
campaign to recall the judge from his post. “We need justice for women
now,” she argued, and justice looked to her, as it did for many others, like
suitably lengthy prison time. While some protested that firing judges for
handing out short sentences would backfire, inevitably greasing the racist
gears of the world’s largest mass incarceration machine, Palo Alto voted
overwhelmingly that June to recall Judge Persky.1 Feminism seemed to
demand it.
I was back home in Brooklyn when I began researching the final chapter
of this book in June 2020. Inside, I kept the careful quarantine my mobility-
limited and immunocompromised body required in COVID-19-ravaged
New York. Outside, at least two Black Lives Matter marches a day
streamed down the boulevard as part of a national uprising against state
violence and its ruthless assault on Black people, marches I could cheer
from the open windows and sometimes the sidewalk. The weekend of
Brooklyn Pride, fifteen thousand people converged on the block, spilling
across the intersections. As police choppers blustered overhead, the massive
crowd, all dressed in white, rallied and then marched silently across central
Brooklyn carrying one message: Black Trans Lives Matter. It was likely the
largest gathering for trans rights in US history and it convened to
underscore how gender violence, racist power, and police brutality intersect
—and thus are experienced in heightened intensity—in Black trans lives.
Organizers emphasized that police kill Black transgender people at the
highest rates of all; in 2020, nearly half of the forty-four trans people
murdered by civilians or police were Black trans women. Black trans death
is an epidemic of state and individual violence, the deadly juncture of the
biopolitics of race, sex, and state power. Fifteen thousand people came
together to pinpoint and obliterate the underlying logic that some lives are
less valuable than others, that police and prisons deliver justice, and that to
be Black and trans is to be disposable. “Let today be the last day that you
ever doubt Black trans power!” writer Raquel Willis proclaimed from the
steps of the Brooklyn Museum.2 Justice demanded it.
The distance between the two events is at once calculable—two years
and three thousand miles apart—and incalculable. In June 2018, the
carceral agenda of white feminism reigned supreme in the successful Recall
Judge Persky campaign, without regard for how protesting short prison
terms might impact the most vulnerable. But in June 2020, intersectional
feminism led the way as a large multiracial coalition of people, trans and
cis, queer and straight, assembled to affirm that Black trans people are
integral to the fight for racial justice, recognizing that the vantage of the
margins leads right into the center of power in all its complexity.
A significant shift is happening across progressive movements, visible
in the short time span of just two years. White feminism, and its agenda to
optimize white women, appears to be losing some of its power.
Empowering individual women to sidestep sexism in pursuit of their own
rise to the top increasingly registers as complicity with the white
supremacist status quo rather than representing the inspiring trajectory of a
heroine. Across the country, a greater number of people took to the streets
in the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprising than had ever protested in the
history of the United States, and they did so to call attention to racist
systems and to advocate abolishing or defunding the police—not just to toss
individual bad apples and ask for the slow drip of incremental reform.
A conceptual transformation mirrors this political move leftward.
Progressives are beginning to ditch frameworks that posit that racism and
sexism result from individual emotional responses such as fear and hate.
Instead, more and more people recognize that discrimination originates
from deeply rooted structures of injustice that individuals adhere to,
wittingly or not, because they seem to serve their own self-interest.
The history we tell of the United States and its social movements is a
key element of this political and conceptual shift. Has the United States
come to have the greatest race, sex, and wealth inequality in the
industrialized world merely by accident, or by design? Increasingly,
particularly as researchers and readers alike are less likely to be white men
in positions of power, we are uncovering new evidence of the latter.
Discrimination does not originate from the unenlightened malice of closed
minds. Rather, hierarchies of race and sex arise from centuries of social
institutions, cultural practices, and economic structures designed to over-
resource white men, and to a lesser degree white women, and under-
resource everyone else. In getting the history right, we also open up the
chance for a new kind of future.
Yet we still have a long way to go—the death, displacement, and job
losses the racialized poor suffered in the COVID pandemic reveal the extent
to which our social structures protect some at the expense of others. Tepid
approaches to equality that target isolated incidents and individual success,
rather than systemic problems, will not disappear on their own: they need to
be out-organized. Capitalist imperialism and the white supremacist
patriarchy that sustains it produce a paradigm hard to break away from—it
is in the water, it saturates the air, it permeates both as individual common
sense and as the climate, akin to weather, as Christina Sharpe has written of
the afterlife of slavery.3
The counterhistory of feminism is seemingly becoming the history of
feminism. Sheryl Sandberg is no longer celebrated as feminism’s most vital
voice; the Squad, rather than the Facebook COO, captivates feminist
imaginations. People frequently point to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of
intersectionality as the key feminist insight for the twenty-first century.
Younger feminists are as likely to know about Sojourner Truth and her
legendary “Ain’t I a Woman” speech advocating for Black women’s rights
as they are to know the name Elizabeth Cady Stanton or perhaps even
Susan B. Anthony. In 2016 Sojourner Truth was even set to appear on the
$10 bill, before the Trump administration came into power and blocked all
plans to diversify the figureheads on US currency.
There’s just one problem. Sojourner Truth never said, “Ain’t I a
Woman.” Nor did she deliver any other sentence of the lecture that is now
synonymous with her name. The speech is legendary in a literal sense.
Truth was born enslaved in upstate New York in the 1790s, and her native
language was low-Dutch. After learning English beginning at age nine, she
prided herself in her mastery of its standard form. The word ain’t or any of
the other southern dialect that fills the speech would never have fallen from
her lips. In the 1990s, Black feminist historian Nell Irvin Painter showed
that the text of the now famous talk Truth delivered at the 1851 Women’s
Convention in Akron, Ohio, doesn’t come from the transcription the Anti-
Slavery Bugle published a few weeks after the event. Instead, the most
widely cited and anthologized version of Truth’s speech comes from an
account the white activist and writer who led the convention, Frances Dana
Barker Gage, published twelve years later. Gage crammed the text with
ain’ts, other southern colloquialisms, and fabrications about Truth’s children
and experience with the lash as if Truth were her puppet and she the puppet
master. “May I say a few words? I want to say a few words about this
matter,” the original transcription of Truth’s speech begins. But Gage
ventriloquizes another character altogether, a stereotypical plantation
mammie. “Well, chillen, whar dar’s so much racket dar must be som’ting
out o’kilter,” opens her fictitious version.4
We remember a mythical, racist rendering of Sojourner Truth that white
women found palatable, yet we forget the work of her contemporary,
Frances E. W. Harper. How did this fabricated rendering of Sojourner
Truth’s voice and image become louder than her own and louder than
Harper’s, despite the numerous novels, speeches, and books of poetry
Harper published to wide circulation? The answer is simple: the writers
who created the possibility of such a thing as the history of feminism were
the same activists who codified white feminist politics. When Stanton and
Anthony assembled their History of Woman Suffrage, they represented their
own priorities and investments as feminism, full stop. They disappeared the
counterhistory. Feminism—like all social movements, a kaleidoscope of
conflicting goals, strategies, and tactics—ground to a halt under their eye.
In place of a moving mosaic, one monochromatic image dropped into place:
a feminist is the defender of Woman. Woman was a being suffering only the
injustices of sex, and feminism appeared to be the single-minded focus on
winning her rights. All other social justice goals fell into darkness,
altogether out of sight.
Sojourner Truth is so widely, but incorrectly, remembered today, Nell
Irvin Painter proposes, because when Stanton and Anthony compiled their
history of the movement, they packaged Truth as “tend[ing] first and last
toward women.”5 The History of Woman Suffrage included Truth’s speech,
but it was Gage’s words that filled the pages. Truth was transformed into a
colorful caricature who promoted the white feminist agenda.
Other white feminists also scripted Truth as a featured star of their own
plots. After Truth introduced herself to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Stowe
subsequently published an extensive account of their acquaintance in The
Atlantic. Like Gage, Stowe filled her columns with entirely made-up
southern dialect and historical “facts” Truth allegedly shared about her life,
such as her passage from Africa.6 (Again, she was born in upstate New
York.)
Now, the counterhistory of feminism is gradually coming into view,
largely due to the work of Black feminists who have, for decades,
investigated the limitations of white feminism, uncovered another feminist
history, and furthered the theory and praxis of justice developed by Black
women. Over the decades, a pantheon of feminist activists has emerged
who have been suppressed by white feminism’s attempt to monopolize the
past. These historical figures, along with present-day activists, often still do
not have the full recognition as feminist leaders they deserve. Other leaders
of intersectional feminism I considered incorporating into this book include
journalist Ida B. Wells, socialist Lucy Parsons, labor activist Mother Jones,
writer and activist Lorraine Hansberry, activist-philosopher Grace Lee
Boggs, organizer Dolores Huerta, scholar-revolutionary Angela Davis, and
the women of the Combahee River Collective, including Audre Lorde and
Barbara Smith, among many, many others. The counterhistory of feminism
far outreaches the limits of these pages.
Intersectional feminism is building strength and power, and models to
empower Woman are falling out of favor. But, at the same time, white
feminism is not going anywhere. Instead, it has renovated to keep up with
the times. Though it is challenged, the white feminist paradigm clings to
life, reinventing itself into ever-new forms. Conservatives embraced the
railroaded Supreme Court confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett as a triumph
for feminism, while liberals expand the optimizing trap to ensnare Black
women voters as saviors of the republic, placing the fate of democracy on
their shoulders. And as white feminism updates itself with a veneer of
inclusion and is increasingly embraced by liberals and conservatives alike,
it becomes harder and harder to detect.
Liberal white feminism now embraces inclusion as a brand, believing
that if Black women like Sojourner Truth and other women of color are
stirred into the mix, an altogether new feminism is born. Often these
renovated feminisms merely attempt once more to fill Black women’s
mouths with white women’s words. But inclusion doesn’t eradicate white
feminism—it merely extends its reach. The trouble with white feminism is
not that it ignores and leaves out many women. Its harm is far more
fundamental than a lack of awareness: white feminism perpetuates a pattern
of dispossession.
In today’s white feminism, diversity and awareness become tools for
optimizing white-dominated organizations. Black, Latinx, and Indigenous
women and nonbinary people become prized tokens, valuable assets
showcasing the progressive bona fides of organizational boards and social
media feeds. Yet often while the employees have changed, the structure
stays the same, and it is women of color who pay the biggest price. Black
and other employees of color have exposed how white supremacy thrives
within leading feminist institutions. “Top feminist organizations are plagued
by racism,” the Lily recently investigated, while NPR broadcast that “NOW
[National Organization for Women] president resigns amid allegations of
creating toxic work environment.”7 The optimizing trap attempts to ensnare
women of color like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with the demand for
constant work and constant perfection, and to redeem white feminism. It
saves its sharpest teeth, however, for Black women. Inclusive white
feminisms cast Black women into a new role, ostensibly laudatory but in
reality nearly as artificial and stifling as the plantation mammie with
colorful, fictional patterns of speech: the Black woman savior/goddess.
Following the 2020 election, white women filled social media with
outlandish reverence for Black women’s gallant deeds. Stacey Abrams was
glorified as a goddess, unnamed activists as saviors, and Black women
voters as rescuers of the nation’s soul. Black women organizers and voters
indeed deserve an enormous amount of credit for swinging Georgia,
Michigan, and Pennsylvania, pushing Trump out of the White House and
flipping the Senate. The superhuman language, however, is
counterproductive. Stacey Abrams merits far better than to be called a
goddess and cast into plaster atop a pedestal, her tenacity becoming another
optimizing trap. President? Perhaps. But not idol and deliverer. Insisting
that Black Women Will Save Us fails to recognize how the rallying cry
itself isolates Black women from the rest of the nation and even of
humanity while saddling them with the burden of doing all the work. When
Black women ride to the rescue, everyone else has tacit permission to carry
on undisturbed. It is not Black women’s job to optimize their activism,
saving white women or saving America. It is the responsibility of white
women and all Americans, especially non-Black Americans, to change the
structures that wield anti-Black and other racisms as tools for hoarding
economic, political, and social power.
Mental health and nursing expert Cheryl Woods-Giscombé has found
that the role of the “strong Black woman” that romanticizes tough and
resilient heroines seemingly inured to hardship actually increases the
negative impacts of racism and other structural inequalities on Black
women. The “superwoman schema,” as she terms it, badgers Black women
into a corner in which their feelings and vulnerabilities must be repressed,
while they are expected to direct care freely and abundantly toward others.
Energy flows only outward, draining the self. The superwoman sacrifices
herself to save others, and chronic stress and associated mental and physical
problems are her rewards.8
The caricature of the Black superwoman who rescues America from its
own racism is but an updated version of the ventriloquized Black woman
activist. Both are roles white women and sympathetic white men create for
their own comfort. The details have changed since Gage and Stowe
hijacked Truth’s body as a vehicle for their own words, but the structure of
service remains. Today, inclusive white feminists attempt to siphon Black
women’s intelligence and energy into their own consciences by scripting
roles of Black superwomen who seemingly can bear the weight of the
nation’s violence without suffering a bruise or shedding a tear. These are
distinct forms of drain and theft, but the fundamental act of extraction
continues unabated. So, too, does the psychological, physical, and social
cost of being cast as an insensible stock character, bled of the birthright of
fully dimensional personhood animated by tender flesh and even tenderer
feelings, persist.
Even when it tries on inclusivity and praises its goddesses, white
feminism is inherently an act of dispossession.
In these conditions, how do we recognize white feminism when we see it?
And how do we grasp the growing countermovement, discerning when a
feminist politics is genuinely aiming to challenge the broader structure of
power that privileges the few at the expense of the many?
The past provides us with an indispensable guide to identifying and
dismantling white feminist politics today. The histories in The Trouble with
White Women make clear that though white feminism’s outward appearance
may be changing, its internal structure has remained remarkably consistent
over its nearly two hundred years of existence. White feminist politics
developed in key stages, from the civilizing agendas of the nineteenth
century to the cleansing campaigns of the twentieth and the optimizing
imperatives of today. Yet these distinct styles are built on the same
underlying supports: first, the theory that sexism is the most significant
force of oppression and that the discrimination women face is, therefore,
more similar than different—Woman is always on the receiving end of
violence, never holding the lash; second, the method of extracting emotion,
energy, labor power, and spirit from others, especially Black, Indigenous,
Latinx, and Asian women and men and the poor, to benefit this mythical
universal Woman; and finally, the promise that Woman’s ascension into
power will rehabilitate the institutions of racist empire, transforming them
into bastions of equality.
We can recognize white feminism at work today wherever we see the
elevation of a woman, of any race, to the top of the hierarchy on the
grounds that she will allegedly redeem it. “The future is female,” an
Instagram-friendly slogan proclaims in a sleek sans serif font, heralding in
both word and image that progress hinges on the female sex. The phrase
sounds new, but it isn’t—it was rediscovered via a 1975 photograph of
TERF singer Alix Dobkin wearing the phrase on a T-shirt shortly before she
was a ringleader of the protest against Olivia Records because of the
presence of Sandy Stone.9 Yet the slogan is also a slicker version of
something Margaret Sanger might have said while insisting that the world’s
progress pivoted on the quality of women’s births.
Women’s “emotional intelligence is what’s going to make this company
succeed,” New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand declared while campaigning
for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination and earnestly recycled a
joke that “if it wasn’t Lehman Brothers but Lehman Sisters, we might not
have had the [2008] financial collapse.” A sentimental capitalism: Harriet
Beecher Stowe would have been proud. “Female leaders handled
coronavirus better,” an international headline touts, seemingly announcing
the arrival of this new, improved horizon. The article reports on an
economics study revealing that countries led by women experienced fewer
COVID-19 cases and deaths than their male-led counterparts. Yet while the
study analyzes global lockdown policies and how soon they were
implemented, the researchers claim that the crucial factor in health
outcomes lies in the head of government’s identity—not in the decisions
they made. “Being female-led has provided countries with an advantage in
the current crisis,” the study’s coauthor asserts, as if leaders’ administrative
choices ooze forth from some gendered essence pooling within.10
Apparently, when a woman is in charge, the arc of the moral universe bends
more sharply toward justice, as if outfitting her curves.
The counterhistory of feminism offers an essential rubric for
differentiating white feminism in woke masquerade from those truly
intersectional efforts to change the structure of power, not only its face.
When we listen to Harriet Jacobs’s searing indictment of slavery’s
exploitation of women’s fertility or to Dr. Dorothy Ferebee’s insistence on
folding reproductive and childcare services for the poor into a broader
health agenda, we learn feminism’s power and potential for structural
transformation. Over the past 160 years, three central elements distinguish
intersectional feminism’s approach to justice: first, the theory that the
experiences of Black women and others pinned to the bottom by race, class,
and sex best illuminate the extent and effects of power and oppression;
second, the method of building alliance and solidarity across social
positions, to effectively dismantle—rather than merely reform—the
institutions we have inherited from a legacy of genocide, enslavement, and
empire; and finally, the goal of fundamentally redistributing resources to
create more equitable systems that serve the many, rather than privilege the
few.
Above all, intersectional feminism leads us forward because it is a
movement to eradicate systemic inequality. While today the phrase
“intersectional identities” has become common, it is an empty phrase,
evacuated of any relation to Black feminist theory. Scholar and author
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor clarifies that when the Combahee River
Collective coined the term “identity politics,” they “saw it as an analysis
that would validate Black women’s experiences while simultaneously
creating an opportunity for them to become politically active to fight for the
issues most important to them.”11 The key focus, then, is not on Woman as
an individual subjectivity or that politics should be based on identity, but on
recognizing that those on the bottom of the power hierarchy are its experts.
These feminists approach sexism as a system fully embedded within racism,
homophobia, transphobia, empire, wealth accumulation, and more. As made
clear by Pauli Murray’s insistence that employment protections on the basis
of race and sex were necessary, intersectionality interrogates the institutions
that engineer the basic chances of life and death.
We can recognize intersectional feminism by its goal to collectively
defeat the social systems that allow some people, both women and men, to
optimize their own potential by draining the vitality and resources of
everyone else. While white feminism leans in to the structures of
disposability that give shape to everyday life, intersectional feminism seeks
to demolish the entire edifice. Pauli Murray wasn’t satisfied chipping away
at Jim Crow piecemeal, showing one at a time that a segregated institution
wasn’t an equivalent of its counterpart for whites—she wanted to invalidate
the very premise that separate could ever be equal. Intersectionality aims
not for awareness or inclusion but for “revolutionary action,” in the words
of the Combahee River Collective, to build mass power that can genuinely
threaten the status quo.12
Dismantling the interlocking systems that result in, for example, a Black
woman being 69 percent more likely to die from heart disease than a white
woman, requires a breathtaking amount of vision, effort, and persistence.13
White feminism promotes empowering female figureheads to rise to the
top. But today, intersectional feminism takes on goals like organizing for
Black lives, raising the minimum wage, expanding universal healthcare,
protesting mass incarceration, supporting the reproductive choices of poor
women, and ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine, all of which have
dramatic consequences for the lives of millions of women, men, and
nonbinary people.
And together, the many far outnumber the few. Capitalism is working
fine for the 1 percent but not for the 99 percent—and even Sheryl Sandberg
suffers jaw-dropping misogyny in her own workplace. And though the
white supremacist patriarchy seems to work for white men, especially if
they are rich, it is itself a gilt cage, often bereft of friendship and care and
rife with competition and violence. As Zitkala-Ša modeled with building
the first political organization that united Native tribes across the country
and Sandy Stone advocated by framing trans lives that push beyond the sex
binary as part of a larger antiracist, anti-imperialist counterdiscourse,
intersectional feminism proceeds through illuminating overlapping
alliances. It mobilizes through building points of common cause into
solidarities that unite across distinct identity positions. Individuals, however
empowered they may be, don’t overthrow centuries-old systems of
exploitation. But coalitions do, or at least they have a fighting chance.
Yet intersectionality is not a war, seeking to raze everything to the ground.
An intention to destroy reproduces just that, for it contains no seeds of other
forms of life. The endpoint isn’t extermination—it’s rebirth and
transformation. Intersectional praxis is simultaneously an act of demolition
and creation, an affirmative act of love, faith, and care. It creates practices
in which flourishing belongs to the commons, not to the few, and in which
those who have paid the highest prices in the white supremacist patriarchy,
especially cis and trans Black women, are valued for their knowledge and
leadership. It works to topple hierarchies of individuals and build ecologies
of care in their place. We need to uproot racism, sexism, ableism, the sex
binary, and more. But we also need to nurture the hearts and minds that
drive us to revolutionary action and to attend to the energy that courses
through us all. Mutual aid, interdependent networks, reciprocal
relationships, the union of mind, body, emotion, and spirit within our own
lives and within our feminism: these are the modes of social movements
that can broadly redistribute the relative chances of life and death.
While researching and writing this book, I have been struck by the
expansiveness of the intersectional vision of the world, how it extends
beyond the material plane altogether and into the realm of the spiritual. In
white feminism, power is largely something owned by white men that must
be seized. The worldview of capitalist modernity sets the limits of its vision
for justice until optimizing the self becomes the ultimate horizon. But for
Frances E. W. Harper, Zitkala-Ša, Pauli Murray, and Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez, power ultimately does not belong to humans but to the realm of
spirit—it is not something to be grabbed but to be shared, with gratitude.
The worldview of intersectional feminism is bigger than the individual,
bigger than the human institutions that provide or deny rights and
opportunities. The horizon instead is the flow of life that connects us all.
Feminists may support equality for women, but our true task is to
determine what exactly equality looks like. The feminist movement is the
grounds of an ongoing struggle to hash out the theories, methods, and goals
that might bring us closer to gender, racial, and economic justice. “The
future is female” slogan images an inevitable feminist future without
conflict, as if a straightforward, undebatable politics and vision flows forth
from the bodies of cis women. But the history of feminism is the history of
the fight to define feminism, to determine what it advocates and whom it
represents. This internal tension doesn’t compromise feminism—it
comprises it. Distinct approaches to feminism are the vehicles through
which new visions, platforms, and approaches arise. Yet we are not stuck in
the history of feminism, doomed to repeat its fault lines. The past teaches us
that feminism can become an antiracist project that is incompatible with
white supremacy in any form.
White feminism cannot become truly inclusive of women of color, trans
and disabled people, and the poor, for its politics are fundamentally at odds
with their survival. The goal, instead, is for intersectional feminism to out-
organize the white feminist fantasy of a world civilized and optimized by
the empowerment of women. Intersectionality is both a confrontation with
power and a praxis of care. Some of our best hopes for abolishing the
structures that render people, species, and even the planet disposable—and
for constructing habitable worlds in their place—arise from its politics. To
know the counterhistory of feminism is to have an emerging blueprint for a
collective future.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FEMINIST RESEARCH IS ONLY POSSIBLE BECAUSE OF
FEMINIST COMMUNITY. I THANK GENERATIONS of scholars and
writers who came before me and who are working today for revealing the
complexity, tensions, shortcomings, and breakthroughs of the movements
for gender justice. Due to limited space, only a small fraction of their efforts
is explicitly cited here. Yet this book would not exist if not for their rigor
and care in bringing the histories of feminism to light.
For enabling me to join this conversation, I am grateful to my advisers,
colleagues, and students, especially Barbara Welke, Shelley Streeby, Lisa
Lowe, Nayan Shah, Rosaura Sánchez, Michael Davidson, Ann Fabian,
Mary Hawkesworth, Abe Busia, Brittney Cooper, Maya Mikdashi, Ethel
Brooks, Jasbir Puar, Marisa Fuentes, Treva Ellison, Sarah Blackwood, Dana
Luciano, Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Lauren Klein, Karen Weingarten, and the
students of my Feminist Theory: Historical Perspectives class at Rutgers in
the momentous term of spring 2020. Three writers, and their classes,
showed me how to write compelling prose that invites the reader in: Xeni
Fragakis, Brian Gresko, and T Kira Madden. Three people were pivotal in
enabling this research to flower into an actual book: journalist Nawal
Arjani; my visionary agent Ed Maxwell at Greenburger Associates, who
taught me every step of the process; and my research assistant/comrade Leo
Lovemore, PhD, whose keen eye and steady hand kept this project growing
even when I got lost in the weeds.
At Bold Type Books, editor Katy O’Donnell and publisher Clive Priddle
made a more-than-welcoming home for this project. Katy’s edits propelled
the book into the most vital territory: I am grateful for her exceptional
attention to the smallest details and largest stakes of the project. I thank the
Bold Type and Hachette team for guiding the book through the many stages
between draft and print, including editorial assistant Claire Zuo, editor
Remy Cawley, production editor Brynn Warriner, art director Pete Garceau,
copyeditor Jennifer Top, fact checker Cecilia Nowell, and marketing
director Lindsay Fradkoff.
Working on this manuscript reignited my love of feminist books and
grounded me throughout a pandemic. I thank the spaces and writers that
provided crucial company: the Writers Studio at the Center for Fiction and
then, in the Zoom era, my virtual writing pals Kyla Wazana Tompkins,
Dana Luciano, Jordan Alexander Stein, Tavia Nyong’o, Raúl Coronado,
and Sarah Blackwood. I am grateful to my sister, Lisanne Dinges, for her
enthusiasm for the project and dedication to the nitty gritty of bringing
research to life, title by title and page by page. I am happily indebted to
those dear friends who lived with the project, too, and generously shared
their wisdom even when they probably wished I was talking about
something else, especially Ali Howell, Rossi Kirilova, Gus Stadler, Pete
Coviello, Eng-Beng Lim, Elizabeth Marcus, Cat Fitzpatrick, Porochista
Khakpour, Greta LaFleur, Catherine Zimmer, Ilana Sichel, Kent Bassett,
Shuchi Talati, Jacob Hodes, Kelly Pendergrast, Diana Cage, Maxe Crandall,
Elizabeth Steeby, and Jules Gill-Peterson.
I extend my gratitude to the healers who have helped pluck me out of
the grips of the tick-borne illness that has defined my last decade: Lilia
Gorodinsky, Yuka Lawrence, and Kevin Weiss.
May we all live lives marked by less suffering and more mutual care.
Discover Your Next Great Read
Get sneak peeks, book recommendations, and news about your favorite
authors.
Tap here to learn more.
Jennifer Buhl
Kyla Schuller is an award-winning scholar and recipient of fellowships
from the Stanford Humanities Center and American Council of Learned
Societies who lectures across North America and Europe. Her research has
been featured in The Nation, and her writing has appeared in outlets
including The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Avidly. She is
associate professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers
University–New Brunswick and the author of The Biopolitics of Feeling:
Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Duke University Press,
2018).
PRAISE FOR
THE TROUBLE WITH WHITE WOMEN
“Kyla Schuller turns her razor-sharp focus and intimate understanding of
the intersection of race and gender to some of the giant figures of white
feminism—and their contemporaries who challenged them from the get-go.
From Frances Harper and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Pauli Murray and
Betty Friedan, Schuller reminds us that even from its beginnings, white
feminism has seen significant and sustained challenges from Black,
Indigenous, and other women of color. In highlighting this counterhistory,
Schuller digs not only into the professional output of these historical figures
but into their personal lives, deftly demonstrating how the two interact.
With her characteristic originality and insight, Schuller offers a gripping
contribution to the growing mainstream critical literature on white
feminism, and in the process delivers a master class not only on how the
personal is indeed political but on how the specific is universal.”
—Ruby Hamad, author of White Tears/Brown Scars
“Kyla Schuller has always impressed me as a brilliant human being and
outstanding scholar, but The Trouble with White Women overshoots even
my greatest expectations. Kyla reveals the facts—what we need to know as
well as what we fear—but she also shows a way out. As a brown Muslim
woman living in America, I never tire of context for the mess we’re in, and
Kyla tells the stories of so many women we’ve heard too much of and those
we’ve been straining to hear—all of their tales surprise and in fact inspire.
This is a great model for how to make a takedown a work of great art, how
devotion to the truth can cut into a dominant narrative not just like a knife
but with the hard wiring of real love. When I read this book, I feel like
America just maybe has a future after all.”
—Porochista Khakpour, author of Brown Album
“In The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism,
Schuller offers an indispensable gift and a profoundly illuminating resource.
The systemic inequality of our world relies, too often, on myths of our own
making. In these pages, Schuller dismantles injustice with an urgent and
critical lens, offering a new dialogue and a way forward. Schuller is an
expert at articulating the malignant disjunctions and hypocrisies of our
culture with stunning craft, style, insight, and narrative suspense. Schuller is
one of the most essential writers and scholars of our time.”
—T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls
“Clarifying, challenging, exquisitely researched and argued, The Trouble
with White Women will give you so much to sit with and to revisit—it
prepares us to do the hard, essential labor of dismantling white feminism.”
—Anne Helen Petersen, author of Can’t Even

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: FEMINIST FAULT LINES

While exit polls reported 52 percent of white women voted for Trump,
later analyses put the figure at 47 percent. “An Examination of the 2016
Electorate, Based on Validated Voters,” Pew Research Center, August 9,
2018, www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/08/09/an-examination-of-the-
2016-electorate-based-on-validated-voters/; Amanda Barroso, “61% of U.S.
Women Say ‘Feminist’ Describes Them Well; Many See Feminism as
Empowering, Polarizing,” Pew Research Center, July 7, 2020,
www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/07/07/61-of-u-s-women-say-feminist-
describes-them-well-many-see-feminism-as-empowering-polarizing/; James
Gillespie, “Dad’s a Feminist, Says Ivanka Trump,” The Times, July 3, 2016,
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/dads-a-feminist-says-ivanka-3bz9krjp0.

Jessie Daniels, “The Trouble with ‘Leaning In’ to (White) Corporate
Feminism,” Racism Review, March 18, 2014,
www.racismreview.com/blog/2014/03/18/white-corporate-feminism/.

Paula Gunn Allen, “Who Is Your Mother? Red Roots of White
Feminism,” Sinister Wisdom 25 (1984): 41; Kimberlé Crenshaw,
“Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist
Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist
Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1 (1989): 143–144;
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness,
and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1990), 5; bell
hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press,
1984), 1–2; bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
(Boston: South End Press, 1981), 1–2.

“White Feminism,” Dictionary.com, 2020,
www.dictionary.com/e/gender-sexuality/white-feminism/.

Ruby Hamad, “We Shouldn’t Be Surprised by White Women’s
Complicity,” Medium, December 9, 2020, https://gen.medium.com/we-
shouldnt-be-surprised-by-white-women-s-complicity-7d9e66b0bd4b; Audre
Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, ed. Audre Lorde (Berkeley, CA:
Crossing Press, 2007), 110.

Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection,” 145; Collins, Black
Feminist Thought, 18.

Brittney Cooper, “Feminist Digital Pedagogies Conference: Post-
Intersectionality,” Institute for Women’s Leadership, Rutgers University,
April 30, 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wrIlDA1s_M.

Rachel Elizabeth Cargle, “When Feminism Is White Supremacy in
Heels,” Harper’s Bazaar, August 16, 2018,
www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/a22717725/what-is-toxic-white-
feminism/.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Theodore Stanton, and Harriot Stanton
Blatch, Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary and
Reminiscences, vol. 1 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1922), 253.

Brent Scher, “Gillibrand: If Lehman Brothers Were Lehman Sisters,
We Would Have Avoided Financial Collapse,” Washington Free Beacon,
May 15, 2018, https://freebeacon.com/politics/gillibrand-lehman-brothers-
lehman-sisters-avoided-financial-collapse/.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, “We Are All Bound Up Together,” in
Proceedings of the Eleventh Women’s Rights Convention, May 10, 1866
(New York: Robert J. Johnston, 1866), 46.

Audre Lorde, “An Open Letter to Mary Daly,” in This Bridge Called
My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 4th ed., ed. Cherríe Moraga
and Gloria Anzaldúa (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015), 90.
CHAPTER ONE: WOMAN’S RIGHTS ARE WHITE RIGHTS?

Laura Curtis Bullard, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” in Our Famous
Women: Comprising the Lives and Deeds of American Women Who Have
Distinguished Themselves (Hartford, CT: A. D. Worthington, 1884), 613.

Judith Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton
and the First Woman’s Rights Convention (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2004), 193, 277n30. This was not Stanton’s first-ever public speech,
despite what she liked to claim. See Lori Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton:
An American Life (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 57.

Alice S. Rossi, ed., “Selections from the History of Woman Suffrage:
Seneca Falls Convention,” in The Feminist Papers: From Adams to
Beauvoir (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 419–420;
Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 59–63.

Sally Gregory McMillen, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s
Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 93–94.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Preface,” in Eighty Years and More:
Reminiscences 1815–1897 (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898); Frederick
Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Mineola, NY: Dover
Publications, 2003), 345.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage,
eds., History of Woman Suffrage, Volume 2 (1861–1876) (Rochester, NY:
Susan B. Anthony, 1881), 354–355; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Address to
Anniversary of American Equal Rights Association, May 12, 1869, New
York City,” in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker, ed. Ellen Carol
DuBois (New York: NYU Press, 2007), 191.

Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, 382.

Elisabeth Griffith, In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady
Stanton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 137. Anthony declares
this in 1866. See Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B.
Anthony, vol. 1 (Indianapolis: Bowen-Merrill, 1899), 261.

“Annual Meeting of the American Equal Rights Association: Second
Day’s Proceedings,” Revolution 3, no. 21 (May 27, 1869): 321, quotes
slightly paraphrased for grammatical continuity, and the original source
paraphrases Harper’s words. As it was, Chinese immigrants were not
granted the right to vote until 1943.

Ibid., 322. The original source paraphrases Harper’s words.

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women
as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2019).

“Annual Meeting of the American Equal Rights Association: Second
Day’s Proceedings,” 322.

Brittney Cooper also argues that Anna Julia Cooper may in fact be
the first Black feminist theorist. Brittney Cooper, Beyond Respectability:
The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (Champaign: University of Illinois
Press, 2017), 2.

Ellen Carol Dubois, “Introduction,” in The Elizabeth Cady Stanton–
Susan B. Anthony Reader: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches, ed. Ellen
Carol Dubois (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 9; Stanton, Eighty Years,
2, 20.

Stanton, Eighty Years, 23; Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 22.

Melba Joyce Boyd, Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the
Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825–1911 (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1994), 36–37.

William Still, The Underground Railroad (Philadelphia: Porter and
Coates Publishers, 1872), 756; W. Somerset Maugham, “‘Pride and
Prejudice’, Atlantic, 181, 5, May 1948,” in Jane Austen: Critical
Assessments, vol. 1, ed. Ian Littlewood (Lake Dallas, TX: Helm
Information, 1998), 460.

“120 Years of Literacy: 1870,” National Center for Educational
Statistics, https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp. For more on African
American literacy rates in this period see Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten
Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary
Societies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 4–5.

McHenry, Forgotten Readers, 79; Stanton, Eighty Years, 81, 79;
Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 36–38.

An exception to the restriction against owning property was that
courts often determined white women in the South were able to own slaves
in their own right as married women. See Jones-Rogers, They Were Her
Property, xi–xv.

The phrase “white women’s rights” is Louise Michelle Newman’s.
See Louise Michelle Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins
of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press,
1999).

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Address Delivered at Seneca Falls, July 19,
1848,” in The Elizabeth Cady Stanton–Susan B. Anthony Reader:
Correspondence, Writings, Speeches, ed. Ellen Carol Dubois (New York:
Schocken Books, 1981), 35.

Stanton, Eighty Years, 187.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Address to the Legislature of New York on
Women’s Rights, February 14, 1854,” in The Elizabeth Cady Stanton–Susan
B. Anthony Reader: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches, ed. Ellen Carol
Dubois (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 45; Sally Roesch Wagner, “Is
Equality Indigenous? The Untold Iroquois Influence on Early Radical
Feminists,” On the Issues 5, no. 1 (1996): 21.

Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., But Some
of Us Are Brave: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men (New
York: The Feminist Press, 1993).

Stanton, Eighty Years, 237–238, 192.

Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 47, 108, 20; “When Did Slavery
End in New York?,” New York Historical Society Museum and Library,
January 12, 2012, www.nyhistory.org/community/slavery-end-new-york;
Stanton, Eighty Years, 4.

Still, Underground Railroad, 756–757; “The Fugitive Slave Law of
1850,” Bill of Rights in Action 34, no. 2 (Winter 2019), www.crf-
usa.org/images/pdf/Fugitive-Slave-Law-1850.pdf.

Still, Underground Railroad, 757.

Ibid., 757–758.

Ibid., 758–759, 761; Boyd, Discarded Legacy, 42; Frances Smith
Foster, “Introduction,” in A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins
Harper Reader, ed. Frances Smith Foster (New York: The Feminist Press,
1990), 13.

Still, Underground Railroad, 758.

Frances E. W. Harper, “The Slave Mother,” in A Brighter Coming
Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader, ed. Frances Smith Foster
(New York: The Feminist Press, 1990), 84.

Harper, “We Are All Bound Up Together,” 217.

Frances E. W. Harper, “Our Greatest Want,” in A Brighter Coming
Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader, ed. Frances Smith Foster
(New York: The Feminist Press, 1990), 103.

Frances E. W. Harper, “Free Labor,” in A Brighter Coming Day: A
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader, ed. Frances Smith Foster (New
York: The Feminist Press, 1990), 81.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Address of Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” in
Proceedings of the Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, Held at
the Church of the Puritans, New York, May 10, 1866 (New York: Robert J.
Johnston, 1866), 52.

Harper, “We Are All Bound Up Together,” 217; Still, Underground
Railroad, 778.

Harper, “We Are All Bound Up Together,” 217.

Ibid., 218.

Ibid.

Ibid., 217.

Boyd, Discarded Legacy, 119–120; Still, Underground Railroad,
767–767, 772–773.

Still, Underground Railroad, 768, 772, 775.

Ibid., 770.

Ibid., 775; William J. Collins and Robert A. Margo, “Race and Home
Ownership from the End of the Civil War to the Present,” American
Economic Review 101, no. 3 (2011): 356; Pete Daniel, Dispossession:
Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil
Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

Still, Underground Railroad, 775–776.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Address to the First Anniversary of the
American Equal Rights Association, May 9, 1867,” in Proceedings of the
First Anniversary of the American Equal Rights Association, Held at the
Church of the Puritans, New York, May 9 and 10, 1867 (New York: Robert
J. Johnson, 1867), 14.

Faye E. Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman
Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 8–10; Christine Stansell, The Feminist Promise:
1792 to the Present (New York: Modern Library, 2011), 89; Rosalyn
Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–
1920 (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), 31; Angela Davis,
Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage, 1983), 81.

Geoffrey C. Ward and Kenneth Burns, Not for Ourselves Alone: The
Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (New York: Knopf,
1999), 131. The word comes from Stowe’s sister-in-law Isabella Hooker
Beecher, whose participation Stanton and Anthony also sought. Joan D.
Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1994), 358.

Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 122; “Mrs. Stanton Before the
District Committee,” Revolution, February 11, 1869, 88; “Which Shall It Be
—a Negro or a Woman?,” Revolution, September 15, 1870, 169; “White
Woman’s Suffrage Association,” Revolution, June 4, 1868, 337.

Griffith, In Her Own Right, 126–127; Ellen Carol Dubois, Woman
Suffrage and Women’s Rights (New York: NYU Press, 1998), 100.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “The Solitude of Self,” in The Elizabeth
Cady Stanton–Susan B. Anthony Reader: Correspondence, Writings,
Speeches, ed. Ellen Carol Dubois (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 251,
254, 247.

Ibid., 252.

Griffith, In Her Own Right, xvi.

Boyd, Discarded Legacy, 119.

Frances E. W. Harper, “Woman’s Political Future—Address by
Frances E. W. Harper of Virginia,” in The World’s Congress of
Representative Women: A Historical Résumé for Popular Circulation of the
World’s Congress of Representative Women, ed. May Wright Sewall
(Chicago: Rand McNally, 1894), 435.

Foster, “Introduction,” 25.

See for example Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The
Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1989), 80. Feminist critics, in general, see her
sentimentalism as a strategic cover for injecting radical politics into
everyday life.

Frances E. W. Harper, Iola Leroy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 219.

Geoffrey Sanborn, “Mother’s Milk: Frances Harper and the
Circulation of Blood,” ELH 73, no. 3 (2005), 691–715.

Harper, “Woman’s Political Future,” 435, 436.

Quoted in DuBois, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Reader, 296–297;
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Our Proper Attitude Toward Immigration,” in
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker, ed. Ellen Carol DuBois (New
York: NYU Press, 2007), 296–297.

Catt, Woman Suffrage by Constitutional Amendment, 76.
CHAPTER TWO: WHITE SYMPATHY VERSUS BLACK SELF-
DETERMINATION

Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (New York: Open
Road, 2016), 82.

Ibid., 93.

Jacobs refers to Mark Ramsey as “Uncle Phillip” in Incidents. Jean
Fagan Yellin, Harriet Jacobs: A Life (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 212.

Jacobs, Incidents, 99–100.

Ibid., 98.

Yellin, Harriet Jacobs, 101–103.

Jacobs, Incidents, 50.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Household Papers and Stories (Boston:
Ticknor and Fields, 1868), 382.

James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983),
14.

Luvvie Ajayi, “About the Weary Weaponizing of White Women
Tears,” AwesomelyLuvvie.com, April 17, 2018,
https://awesomelyluvvie.com/2018/04/weaponizing-white-women-
tears.html; Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers
Her Superpower (New York: Picador, 2018), 171–200; Robin DiAngelo,
White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2018), 131.

Charles Edward Stowe, The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe: Compiled
from Her Letters and Journals (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1890), 145.

Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995), 192–193, 207–208.

Ibid., 208.

Ibid., 209.

Stowe, The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, 201–202.

Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 209, 219, italics in original.

Stowe, The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, 149–153.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (New York: Open Road,
2014), 269, 453.

Ibid., 378, 62.

Ibid., 509, 533.

Ibid., 441, 438, 552.

Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2008), 35.

Jacobs, Incidents, 159; Yellin, Harriet Jacobs, 245.

Jacobs, Incidents, 162.

Ibid., 164.

“Harriet Jacobs to Amy Kirby Post, Cornwall, Orange Co., NY,
1852(?),” in The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, vol. 1, ed. Jean Yellin
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 191.

Ibid.

Yellin, Harriet Jacobs, 119–120; “Harriet Jacobs to Amy Kirby Post,
February 14, 1853,” in The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, vol. 1, ed. Jean
Yellin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 193–194.

While the letter no longer exists, Jacobs’s recounting of its contents
to Amy Post survives. “Harriet Jacobs to Amy Kirby Post, February 14,
1853,” 94. See Yellin, Harriet Jacobs, 119–121.

“Harriet Jacobs to Amy Kirby Post, April 4, 1853,” in The Harriet
Jacobs Family Papers, vol. 1, ed. Jean Yellin (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2008), 195.

Yellin, Harriet Jacobs, 121.

Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 249.

Harry Stone, “Charles Dickens and Harriet Beecher Stowe,”
Nineteenth-Century Fiction 12, no. 3 (1957): 188; Katherine Kane, “The
Most Famous American in the World,” ConnecticutHistory.org,
https://connecticuthistory.org/the-most-famous-american-in-the-world/;
Stowe, The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, 191–192.

Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 237.

Ibid., 223.

Ibid., 240.

Ibid., 235–237, 248.

Ibid., 236; “Stowe’s Global Impact,” Harriet Beecher Stowe Center,
www.harrietbeecherstowecenter.org/harriet-beecher-stowe/her-global-
impact/; “Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe,” First Amendment
Museum, September 27, 2020, https://firstamendmentmuseum.org/banned/;
Frederick Douglass, “First Meeting with Stowe, 1853,” in Stowe in Her
Own Time, ed. Susan Belasco (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009),

The exact wording of this apocryphal quote varies. See Daniel R.
Vollaro, “Lincoln, Stowe, and the ‘Little Woman/Great War’ Story: The
Making, and Breaking, of a Great American Anecdote,” Journal of the
Abraham Lincoln Association 30, no. 1 (2009): 18–34.

Robert S. Levine, ed., “Delany and Douglass on Uncle Tom’s Cabin,”
in Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2003), 234, 235; Frederick Douglass, “Mrs. Stowe’s
Position,” in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, May 6, 1853,
http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/africam/afar03rt.html.

Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 247.

Ibid., 245; Stowe, The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, 234. For an
image of the bracelet, see Kane, “The Most Famous American in the
World.”

“Harriet Jacobs to Amy Kirby Post, May 1853,” in The Harriet
Jacobs Family Papers, vol. 1 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2008), 195–196.

“Mrs. Ex-President Tyler’s Address to the Women of England,” Daily
South Carolinian, March 8, 1853,
https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/GT3005440026/NCNP?
u=new67449&sid=NCNP&xid=48292960; Wendy F. Hamand, “‘No Voice
from England’: Mrs. Stowe, Mr. Lincoln, and the British in the Civil War,”
New England Quarterly 61, no. 1 (1988): 5.

Yellin, The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, vol. 1, 197–201; Yellin,
Harriet Jacobs, 122.

Yellin, Harriet Jacobs, 129.

Linton Weeks, “How Black Abolitionists Changed a Nation,” NPR,
February 26, 2015, www.npr.org/sections/npr-history-
dept/2015/02/26/388993874/how-black-abolitionists-changed-a-nation;
Jacobs, Incidents, 69, 143.

Marianne Noble, “The Ecstasies of Sentimental Wounding in Uncle
Tom’s Cabin,” Yale Journal of Criticism 10, no. 2 (1997): 295–296.

Jacobs, Incidents, 52.

Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage, 1981),
31; Franny Nudelman, “Harriet Jacobs and the Sentimental Politics of
Female Suffering,” ELH 59, no. 4 (1992): 939–940.

Yellin, Harriet Jacobs, 137–138.

“Child to J.G. Whittier,” The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, vol. 1,
343.

“Jacobs to Amy Kirby Post,” The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, vol.
1, 282; “Child to Lucy Searle Jacobs,” The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers,
vol. 1, 296; Yellin, Harriet Jacobs, 140–141.

Christy Pottroff, “Harriet Jacobs, Publisher and Activist,” Avidly, Los
Angeles Review of Books, November 18, 2019,
http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2019/11/18/harriet-jacobs-publisher-and-
activist/.

Yellin, Harriet Jacobs, 143, 147.

Thanks to Sarah Blackwood for sharing this story. The Library of
Congress changed its designation of the book’s author from Lydia Maria
Child to Harriet Jacobs in 1987. Lisa W. Foderaro, “Slave Narrative Gets
Postscript,” New York Times, February 13, 2005,
www.nytimes.com/2005/02/13/nyregion/books/slave-narrative-gets-
postscript.html.

Yellin, Harriet Jacobs, 158.

Ibid., 176.

Ibid., 177, 161.

Frances E. W. Harper, “We Are All Bound Up Together,” in A
Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader, ed.
Frances Smith Foster (New York: The Feminist Press, 1990), 217.

Yellin, Harriet Jacobs, 202–209.

Michele Currie Navakas, Liquid Landscape: Geography and
Settlement at the Edge of Early America (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 142; Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 335, 307.

Stowe, The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, 400.

Louise Michele Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins
of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press,
1999), 26; Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female
Moral Authority in the American West, 1874–1939 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993). See also Judith Ann Giesberg, Civil War
Sisterhood: The U.S. Sanitary Commission and Women’s Politics in
Transition (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2006).

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Palmetto-Leaves (Boston: James R. Osgood,
1873), 301.

Ibid., 306.

Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catharine Beecher, The New
Housekeepers’ Manual (New York: J. B. Ford, 1873), 327, 330, 318; John
T. Foster Jr. and Sarah Witmer Foster, eds., Calling Yankees to Florida:
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Forgotten Tourist Articles (Cocoa, FL: Florida
Historical Society Press, 2011), 116; “The New Housekeepers Manual,”
Andrews McMeel Publishing,
https://publishing.andrewsmcmeel.com/book/the-new-housekeepers-
manual-catharine-beecher/.

Stowe calls her Minnah in Palmetto-Leaves and Winnah in “Our
Florida Plantation.” Stowe, Palmetto-Leaves, 308–314.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Our Florida Plantation,” The Atlantic, May
1879, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1879/05/our-florida-
plantation/538932/.

Navakas, Liquid Landscape, 137; Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe,
330; Foster and Foster, Calling Yankees, 116.

Stowe, Palmetto-Leaves, 272, 283, 317.

Shana Klein, “Those Golden Balls Down Yonder Tree: Oranges and
the Politics of Reconstruction in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Florida,”
Southern Cultures 23, no. 3 (2017): 30.

Yellin, Harriet Jacobs, 221, 161, 220; Jean Yellin, ed., The Harriet
Jacobs Family Papers, vol. 2 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2008), 746.

Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 245.
CHAPTER THREE: SETTLER MOTHERS AND NATIVE ORPHANS

Zitkala-Ša, American Indian Stories (Washington, DC: Hayworth
Publishing, 1922), 22, 8.

“Yankton Sioux Treaty Monument,” National Parks Service, April 10,
2015, www.nps.gov/mnrr/learn/historyculture/yankton-sioux-treaty-
monument.htm.

Ša, American Indian Stories, 41–42.

Ibid., 66; Wolfgang Mieder, “‘The Only Good Indian Is a Dead
Indian’: History and Meaning of a Proverbial Stereotype,” Journal of
American Folklore 106, no. 419 (1993): 38; Richard Henry Pratt, “The
Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites,” in Americanizing the
American Indians: Writings by the “Friends of the Indian,” 1880–1900
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 261.

Statistics as of October 2020. Anna Flagg and Andrew R. Calderón,
“500,000 Kids, 30 Million Hours: Trump’s Vast Expansion of Child
Detention,” The Marshall Project, October 30, 2020,
www.themarshallproject.org/2020/10/30/500-000-kids-30-million-hours-
trump-s-vast-expansion-of-child-detention.

Joan T. Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land: Alice Fletcher and the
American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 19–20;
Association for the Advancement of Women, Souvenir Nineteenth Annual
Congress of the Association for the Advancement of Women Invited and
Entertained by the Ladies’ Literary Club (Washington, DC: Todd Brothers,
1877), 123.

Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, 19, 28.

Alice Fletcher, “Standing Bear,” Southern Workman 38 (1909): 78.

Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, 124, 197. Fletcher’s
biographical entry in the Library of Congress notes that she worked
extensively with the Omaha tribe, as well as the Pawnee, Sioux, Arapaho,
Cheyenne, Chippewa, Oto, Osage, Nez Perce, Ponca, and Winnebago
tribes; “Alice Cunningham Fletcher (1838–1923),” Library of Congress,
www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200196222/. Margaret D. Jacobs, White Mother to a
Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of
Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009).

Other scholars who have suggested this term include Jennifer
Henderson and Maile Arvin. See Jennifer Henderson, Settler Feminism and
Race Making in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003);
Maile Arvin, “Indigenous Feminist Notes on Embodying Alliance Against
Settler Colonialism,” Meridians 18, no. 2 (2019): 335–357.

The US government usually ascribed this victory to Red Cloud alone,
due in part to a refusal to acknowledge the communal structure of Lakota
culture and politics. See Catherine Price, The Oglala People, 1841–1879: A
Political History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996); “Invisible
Nation: Mapping Sioux Treaty Boundaries,” Northlandia blog, February
18, 2017, https://northlandia.wordpress.com/2017/02/18/invisible-nation-
mapping-sioux-treaty-boundaries/.

Little Bighorn is known as the Battle of Greasy Grass among the
Lakota. O. C. Marsh, A Statement of Affairs at Red Cloud Agency, Made to
the President of the United States (New Haven, CT: O. C. Marsh, 1875), 4–
5.

Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the
Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance
(New York: Verso, 2019), 78, 110; Alice C. Fletcher, Life Among the
Indians: First Fieldwork Among the Sioux and Omahas, ed. Joanna C.
Scherer and Raymond J. DeMallie (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2013), 207.

Alice Fletcher, “The Indian Woman and Her Problems,” Woman’s
Journal 32, no. 44 (1900): 354. Fletcher’s article paraphrases Sitting Bull’s
words.

Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, 61–62; Fletcher, “The Indian
Woman and Her Problems,” 354.

Fletcher, “The Indian Woman and Her Problems,” 354. Fletcher’s
transcription of this scene, published in 1900, was a considerable
embellishment of her 1882 account “Among the Omahas.” See Alice
Fletcher, “Among the Omahas,” Woman’s Journal 13, no. 6 (February 11,
1882): 46–47.

Joy Rohde, “‘From the Sense of Justice and Human Sympathy’: Alice
Fletcher, Native Americans, and the Gendering of Victorian Anthropology,”
History of Anthropology Newsletter 27, no. 1 (2000): 10.

Ibid.

Fletcher, Life Among the Indians, 122.

Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral
Authority in the American West, 1874–1939 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993), 58.

Fletcher, Life Among the Indians, 163–164. See also Russell Means,
“Patriarchy: The Ultimate Conspiracy; Matriarchy: The Ultimate Solution:
History—or His-Story,” Griffith Law Review 20, no. 3 (2011): 520–521; J.
Owen Dorsey, “Omaha Sociology,” Third Annual Report of the Bureau of
Ethnology (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1884), 267;
Robert A. Williams Jr., “Gendered Checks and Balances: Understanding the
Legacy of White Patriarchy in an American Indian Cultural Context,”
Georgia Law Review 24, no. 4 (1990): 1019–1044.

Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, 108.

Ibid., 117; Louise Michele Newman, White Women’s Rights: The
Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999), 119.

Newman, White Women’s Rights, 119.

Ša, American Indian Stories, 50.

Ibid., 52–54.

Ibid., 57, 54, 56.

Ibid., 66; Ruth Spack, “Dis/engagement: Zitkala-Ŝa’s Letters to
Carlos Montezuma, 1901–1902,” MELUS 26, no. 1 (2001): 182; Tadeusz
Lewandowski, Red Bird, Red Power: The Life and Legacy of Zitkala-Ša
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), 11.

Ša, American Indian Stories, 60–61.

Richard Henry Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom: Four Decades with
the American Indian, 1867–1904, ed. Robert M. Utley (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1964), 312; Pratt, “Advantages of Mingling,” 263, 269.

Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom, 220, 223; “Address to a Weekly
Meeting of Protestant Ministers in Baltimore, 1891,” Richard Henry Pratt
Papers, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library.

Amy E. Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” American Literature 70, no.
3 (1998): 581–606; Margaret D. Jacobs, “The Great White Mother:
Maternalism and American Indian Child Removal in the American West,
1880–1940,” in One Step over the Line: Toward a History of Women in the
North American Wests, ed. Elizabeth Jameson and Sheila McManus
(Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2008), 197.

Ibid.

Paula Gunn Allen, “Who Is Your Mother? Red Roots of White
Feminism,” Sinister Wisdom 25 (1984).

Luther Standing Bear, Land of Spotted Eagle (Lincoln, NE: Bison
Books, 2006), 232; Spack, “Dis/engagement,” 186.

Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom; George Hyde, A Sioux Chronicle
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1956), 57.

Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, 79, 84–85; Jacobs, “A Great
White Mother,” 197.

Alice Fletcher, “The Sun Dance of the Ogallala Sioux,” Proceedings
for the American Association for the Advancement of Science 31 (1883):
580; Kyla Schuller, “The Fossil and the Photograph: Red Cloud, Prehistoric
Media, and Dispossession in Perpetuity,” Configurations 24, no. 2 (2016):
259; Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, 81.

Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, 80; Alice C. Fletcher and
Francis La Flesche, The Omaha Tribe, vol. 2 (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1992), 455.

Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, 95; Adrienne Mayor, Fossil
Legends of the First Americans (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2007), 301.

Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, 85; Mark Rifkin, “Romancing
Kinship: A Queer Reading of Indian Education and Zitkala-Ša’s American
Indian Stories,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 1
(2006): 31.

Rifkin, “Romancing Kinship,” 69, 72–73.

Lewandowski, Red Bird, 21.

Zitkala-Ša, “Side by Side (March 1896),” in American Indian Stories,
Legends, and Other Writings, ed. Cathy N. Davidson and Ada Norris (New
York: Penguin Books, 2005), 221–226.

Ša, American Indian Stories, 79.

Spack, “Dis/engagement,” 175; Ša, American Indian Stories, 83.

Ibid., 82–83.

Ibid., 85.

Ibid., 95, 99.

Ibid., 96; Zitkala-Ša, Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems, and the
Sun Dance Opera, ed. P. Jane Hafen (Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 2005),
125.

Dexter Fisher, “Foreword,” in American Indian Stories, by Zitkala-Ša
(Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 1985); Cathy Davidson and Ada Norris, eds.,
“Introduction,” in American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings,
by Zitkala-Ša (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), xviii, xiii; Jacqueline
Emery, ed., Recovering Native American Writings in the Boarding School
Press (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017), 254; Lewandowski,
Red Bird, 46.

Emery, Recovering Native American Writings, 258.

Ša, American Indian Stories, 96, 14.

Lakota scholar Nick Estes stresses her commitment to Native cultural
renewal. See Estes, Our History Is the Future, 208; Lewandowski, Red
Bird, 51.

Ša, American Indian Stories, 101–103.

Lewandowski, Red Bird, 56; Rifkin, “Romancing Kinship,” 35; Ruth
Spack, “Translation Moves: Zitkala-Ša’s Bilingual Indian Legends,” Studies
in American Indian Literatures 18, no. 4 (2006): 43.

Estes, Our History Is the Future, 71.

Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, 87–88.

Alice C. Fletcher, “Our Duty Toward Dependent Races,” in
Transactions of the National Council of Women of the United States,
Washington D.C., February 22, 1891, ed. Rachel Foster Avery
(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1891), 84.

Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, 118.

Rifkin, “Romancing Kinship,” 28.

Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, 88–89.

Ibid., 93.

Fletcher and La Flesche, The Omaha Tribe, vol. 2, 326.

Pascoe, Relations of Rescue, 58; Alice C. Fletcher, “On Indian
Education and Self Support,” Century Magazine 4 (1883): 314.

Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, 106.

Ibid., 106–107; Newman, White Women’s Rights, 126.

Newman, White Women’s Rights, 121.

Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, 117–120.

Ibid., 200.

Rifkin, “Romancing Kinship,” 28. On “female moral authority” see
Pascoe, Relations of Rescue, xvi. On “Boston marriages” see Lillian
Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in
Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991),
15, 18. Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer
Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 2.

Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, 253, 207, 152.

Ibid., 294.

Ibid., 203–204, 206.

Fletcher, “Our Duty Toward Dependent Races,” 81.

Ibid., 81–82.

Frances E. W. Harper, “Duty to Dependent Races,” in Transactions of
the National Council of Women of the United States, Assembled in
Washington, D.C., February 22 to 25, 1891, ed. Rachel Foster Avery
(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1891), 86.

Ibid., 88, 91.

Mark, A Stranger in Her Native Land, 203–256, 137; “Changing the
Face of Medicine: Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte,” National Library of
Medicine, National Institute of Health, June 3, 2015,
https://cfmedicine.nlm.nih.gov/physicians/biography_253.html; June Helm,
ed., Pioneers of American Anthropology: The Uses of Biography (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1966), 50; Margaret Mead, The Changing
Culture of an Indian Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932).

“Land Tenure Issues,” Indian Land Tenure Foundation,
https://iltf.org/land-issues/issues/.

Brenda Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families
1900–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 2–4.

Lewandowski, Red Bird, 60–61; Spack, “Dis/engagement,” 191, 181.

Lewandowski, Red Bird, 82–83; Allen, “Who Is Your Mother?”

Estes, Our History Is the Future, 211, 214; Zitkala-Ša, “Editorial
Comment: July–September 1918,” in American Indian Stories, Legends,
and Other Writings, ed. Cathy N. Davidson and Ada Norris (New York:
Penguin Books, 2005), 182–183; Lewandowski, Red Bird, 164.

Lewandowski, Red Bird, 176, 178–179, 182; Davidson and Norris,
“Introduction,” xxviii.

Lewandowski, Red Bird, 181; Estes, Our History Is the Future, 221.

“Mrs. R. T. Bonnin, an Indian Leader,” New York Times, January 27,
1938, 21; Lewandowski, Red Bird, 187.
CHAPTER FOUR: BIRTHING A BETTER NATION

Madeline Gray, Margaret Sanger: A Biography of the Champion of
Birth Control (New York: Richard Marek Publishers, 1979), 55.

Margaret Sanger, My Fight for Birth Control (London: Faber and
Faber Limited, 1932), 53.

Ibid.

Margaret Sanger, An Autobiography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1938),
91.

Ibid., 92.

Ibid.; Sanger, My Fight for Birth Control, 57.

Sanger, An Autobiography, 86–87.

Margaret Sanger, “The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda,”
Birth Control Review (October 1921): 5; Margaret Sanger, Woman and the
New Race (New York: W. W. Norton, 1920), 229; Angela Franks, Margaret
Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility (Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 2005), 13.

Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization (New York: Brentano’s,
1922), 25.

Sanger, “The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda,” 5.

Jacqueline Trescott, “Making a Practice of Persistence: Dorothy
Ferebee, the Elegant Doctor with a Social Conscience,” Washington Post,
May 5, 1978, B4.

“Dorothy Ferebee. Transcript,” in Black Women Oral History Project,
1976–1981, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
Punctuation slightly modified for emphasis.

Diane Kiesel, She Can Bring Us Home: Dr. Dorothy Boulding
Ferebee, Civil Rights Pioneer (Sterling, VA: Potomac Books, 2015), 18.

Ibid., 31; “Ferebee,” Black Women Oral History Project.

Vanessa Northington Gamble, “‘Outstanding Services to Negro
Health’: Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee, Dr. Virginia M. Alexander, and
Black Women Physicians’ Public Health Activism,” American Journal of
Public Health 106, no. 8 (2016): 1399.

For a concise history of the reproductive justice movement in the
United States, see Loretta Ross and Rickie Sollinger, Reproductive Justice:
An Introduction (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 9–57.

“New York Urbanized Area: Population and Density from 1800
(Provisional),” Demographia, http://demographia.com/db-nyuza1800.htm;
Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of
New York (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1890), 62.

Franks, Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy, 13.

“The ‘Feeble-Minded’ and the ‘Fit’: What Sanger Meant When She
Talked About Dysgenics,” Margaret Sanger Papers Project, December 13,
2016, https://sangerpapers.wordpress.com/2016/12/13/the-feeble-minded-
and-the-fit-what-sanger-meant-when-she-talked-about-dysgenics/.

In Sanger’s time, it was known as Hotel Plaza. Jean M. Baker,
Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 183;
Ellen Chesler, Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control
Movement in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007), 202, 200.

American Birth Control Conference, Birth Control: What It Is, How
It Works, What It Will Do: The Proceedings of the First American Birth
Control Conference (New York: Graphic Press, 1921), 16.

Ibid., 15.

Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization, 280–281.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McCann, Birth Control Politics, 139–160.

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

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

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

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

Kiesel, She Can Bring Us Home, 64–65.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follet, “Making Democracy Real,” 123.

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

Chesler, Woman of Valor, 374.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Giardina, “MOW to NOW,” 747–748.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friedan, Life so Far, 97.

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

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

Ibid., 37–39.

Ibid., 47.

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

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

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

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

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

Ibid., 138–140, 115.

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

Ibid., 183.

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

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

Ibid., 221–222.

Ibid., 239.

Ibid., 104, 241.

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

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

Fisher, “Challenging Dissemblance,” 177, 199.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rosenberg, Jane Crow, 187.

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

Murray, Song in a Weary Throat, 262.

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

Murray, Song in a Weary Throat, 255.

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

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

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

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

Chiapetti, “Winning the Battle,” 470.

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

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

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

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

Murray, Song in a Weary Throat, 361.

Ibid., 361–362.

Ibid., 365.

Ibid.

Horowitz, Betty Friedan, 243.

Friedan, Life so Far, 163.

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

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

Friedan, Life so Far, 174.

Rosenberg, Jane Crow, 300.

Ibid., 308–309.

Ibid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Betty Friedan, The Second Stage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1998), 308.

Rosenberg, Jane Crow, 333, 375; Patricia Bell-Scott, The Firebrand
and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor
Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
2017), 346.

Murray, Song in a Weary Throat, 419; Cooper, Beyond Respectability,
106, 110.

Suzanne Braun Levine and Mary Thom, eds., Bella Abzug: How One
Tough Broad from the Bronx Fought Jim Crow and Joe McCarthy, Pissed
Off Jimmy Carter, Battled for the Rights of Women and Workers, Rallied
Against War and for the Planet, and Shook Up Politics Along the Way (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 212.

Bell-Scott, The Firebrand and the First Lady, 338; Cooper, Beyond
Respectability, 128, 129.

Saxby, Pauli Murray, 254–255, 278; Rosenberg, Jane Crow, 354,
357, 373.

“Besser Interview for Ms. Magazine, January 29, 1977,” Papers of
Pauli Murray, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University,
https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/8/archival_objects/140646
3.

Saxby, Pauli Murray, 279.
CHAPTER SIX: TERF GATEKEEPING AND TRANS FEMINIST
HORIZONS

Barbara McLean, “Diary of a Mad Organizer,” Lesbian Tide, June 30,
1973, 36.

Finn Enke, “Collective Memory and the Transfeminist 1970s: Toward
a Less Plausible History,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 5, no. 1 (2018):
14; Beth Elliott, “Ballad of the Oklahoma Women’s Liberation Front,”
Buried Treasure [album], 2005, www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnDr-
VVGjQQ.

Emma Heaney, “Women-Identified Women: Trans Women in 1970s
Lesbian Feminist Organizing,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 3, no. 1–2
(2016): 139; McLean, “Diary,” 36.

Ibid.; Cristan Williams, “Sex Essentialist Violence and Radical
Inclusion: An Interview with Robin Tyler, Jan Osborn, and Michele
Kammerer,” TCP Blog, The Conversations Project, February 1, 2016,
http://radfem.transadvocate.com/sex-essentialist-violence-and-radical-
inclusion-an-interview-with-robin-tyler-jan-osborn-and-michele-
kammerer/.

Enke, “Collective Memory,” 18–19.

McLean, “Diary,” 36.

Robin Morgan, Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist
(New York: Random House, 1977), 171; Robin Morgan, “Keynote Address:
Lesbianism and Feminism: Synonyms or Contradictions?,” Lesbian Tide 2,
no. 10–11 (May–June 1973): 30.

Morgan, “Keynote Address,” 31, 30.

Ibid., 32.

Ibid.; McLean, “Diary,” 37.

Susan Stryker and Talia Bettcher, “Introduction: Trans/Feminisms,”
Transgender Studies Quarterly 3, no. 1–2 (2016): 10; Cristan Williams,
“Radical Inclusion: Recounting the Trans Inclusive History of Radical
Feminism,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 3, no. 1–2 (2016): 254; Heaney,
“Women-Identified Women,” 138.

Zackary Drucker, “Sandy Stone on Living Among Lesbian
Separatists as a Trans Woman in the 70s,” Vice, December 19, 2018,
www.vice.com/en/article/zmd5k5/sandy-stone-biography-transgender-
history.

Ibid.

Susan Stryker, “Another Dream of Common Language: An Interview
with Sandy Stone,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 3, no. 1–2 (2016): 296.

Ibid.

Ibid., 297; Davine Anne Gabriel, “Interview with the Transsexual
Vampire: Sandy Stone’s Dark Gift,” TransSisters: Journal of Transsexual
Feminism 8 (Spring 1995): 16.

Gabriel, “Interview,” 17; Drucker, “Sandy Stone.”

“Cris Williamson,” Goldenrod Music, www.goldenrod.com/product-
category/womensmusic/cris-williamson/.

Stryker, “Another Dream,” 299.

Drucker, “Sandy Stone”; Stryker, “Another Dream,” 300; Cristan
Williams, “TERF Hate and Sandy Stone,” TransAdvocate, August 16, 2014,
www.transadvocate.com/terf-violence-and-sandy-stone_n_14360.htm;
Gabriel, “Interview,” 18.

Comment by Henry Ohana on “Teresa Trull—Woman-Loving
Women (1977),” YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?
v=yAP5T5GDMTs&list=PLiD_igaPoeqcI51WW2WbbYm0WXH8wnHdD
&index=9.

Chloé Lula, “12 Essential Songs from the Lesbian Label Olivia
Records,” New York Times, June 23, 2020,
www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/arts/music/olivia-records-lesbian-
playlist.html.

Williams, “TERF Hate.”

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Drucker, “Sandy Stone.”

Ibid.

Williams, “TERF Hate”; Janice Raymond, The Transsexual Empire:
The Making of the She-Male (New York: Teachers College Press, 1994),
103; “Responses to ‘Open Letter to Olivia Records,’” Lesbian Connection
3, no. 7 (February 1978): 17.

Williams, “TERF Hate.”

Comment by Beth Elliott on Marti Abernathey, “Transphobic Radical
Hate Didn’t Start with Brennan: The Sandy Stone–Olivia Records
Controversy,” TransAdvocate, August 24, 2011,
www.transadvocate.com/transphobic-radical-hate-didnt-start-with-brennan-
the-sandy-stone-olivia-records-controversy_n_4112.htm.

Susanna J. Sturgis and Jan Raymond, “Interview: An Interview with
Jan Raymond,” Off Our Backs 9, no. 9 (1979): 15; Thomas S. Szasz, “Male
and Female Created He Them,” New York Times, June 10, 1979. Steinem’s
article in Ms. was reprinted in Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and
Everyday Rebellions (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1983), 208–
209.

Raymond, Transsexual Empire, 183 (italics in original), xvi, xxi, 119,
91, 104; Sturgis and Raymond, “Interview,” 15.

Raymond, Transsexual Empire, 101–102, 108.

Ibid., 112.

Ibid., 119, 117.

Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective
Statement,” in How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River
Collective, ed. Keeanga-Yamahatta Taylor (Chicago: Haymarket Books,
2017), 15, 21.

Raymond, Transsexual Empire, 118.

Audre Lorde, “An Open Letter to Mary Daly,” in This Bridge Called
My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherríe L. Moraga and
Gloria E. Anzaldúa (Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press, 2002), 104.

Raymond, Transsexual Empire, dedication page.

Thomas Buckley, “Johns Hopkins Doing Sex-Changing Surgery,”
New York Times, November 21, 1966.

Raymond, Transsexual Empire, 178.

“TERFs and Trans Healthcare,” TheTerfs.com,
http://theterfs.com/terfs-trans-healthcare/; Cristan Williams, “Fact Checking
the NCHCT Report,” TransAdvocate, September 18, 2014,
www.transadvocate.com/fact-checking-janice-raymond-the-nchct-
report_n_14554.htm; Janice G. Raymond, “Technology on the Social and
Ethical Aspects of Transsexual Surgery,” National Center for Health Care
Technology, June 1980,
www.susans.org/wiki/Technology_on_the_Social_and_Ethical_Aspects_of
_Transsexual_Surgery. See also Raymond’s rebuttal, “Fictions and Facts
About the Transsexual Empire,” JaniceRaymond.com,
https://janiceraymond.com/fictions-and-facts-about-the-transsexual-empire.

The policy change didn’t go into effect until 1989. For a critical
dissection of Raymond’s report and its influence see Williams, “Fact
Checking”; Abigail Coursolle, “California Pride: Medi-Cal Coverage of
Gender-Affirming Care Has Come a Long Way,” National Health Law
Program, June 22, 2018, https://healthlaw.org/california-pride-medi-cal-
coverage-of-gender-affirming-care-has-come-a-long-way/.

Carol Riddell, “Divided Sisterhood: A Critical Review of Janice
Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire,” in The Transgender Studies Reader,
ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 151.

“Trans and Non-Binary History,” Queer Santa Cruz,
https://virtual.santacruzmah.org/queersc/sections/Trans.html; Gabriel,
“Interview,” 47.

Dawn Levy, “Two Transsexuals Reflect on University’s Pioneering
Gender Dysphoria Program,” Stanford Report, May 3, 2000.

Gabriel, “Interview,” 16.

Levy, “Two Transsexuals.”

Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention
of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 180, 155.

Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual
Manifesto,” Camera Obscura 10, no. 2 (1992): 157.

Ibid., 159. I thank Cat Fitzpatrick for pointing out to me the effects of
Stone’s conciliatory position.

Ibid., 164.

Ibid.; Gabriel, “Interview,” 24.

Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back,” 164, 167–168. “Imagine if
Raymond had written ‘all blacks rape women’s bodies,’” Stone remarked
(p. 167), guilty of a Black/trans analogy of her own.

Sylvia Rivera, “Y’all Better Calm Down,” in Loud and Proud:
LGBTQ+ Speeches That Empower and Inspire, ed. Tea Uglow (London:
White Lion, 2020), 31; Susan Stryker, Transgender History (New York:
Seal Press, 2009), 86–87; Leslie Feinberg, “Street Transvestite Action
Revolutionaries: Lavender and Red, Part 73,” Worker’s World, September
24, 2006; STAR, “Transvestite-Transsexual Action Organization and Fems
Against Sexism” (1970), in The Verso Book of Feminism: Revolutionary
Words from Four Millennia of Rebellion, ed. Jessie Kindig (New York:
Verso Books, 2020), 212.

Elizabeth Bernstein, “Carceral Politics as Gender Justice? The
‘Traffic in Women’ and Neoliberal Circuits of Crime, Sex, and Rights,”
Theory and Society 41, no. 3 (2012): 252; Elizabeth Bernstein, “Militarized
Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism: The Politics of Sex, Rights,
and Freedom in Contemporary Antitrafficking Campaigns,” Signs 36, no. 1
(2010): 50.

Bernstein, “Militarized Humanitarianism,” 57.

Julia O’Connell Davidson, “‘Sleeping with the Enemy’? Some
Problems with Feminist Abolitionist Calls to Penalise Those Who Buy
Commercial Sex,” Social Policy and Society 2, no. 1 (2003): 55; Janice
Raymond, “Radical Feminist Activism in the 21st Century,” Labrys, June
2015, www.labrys.net.br/labrys27/radical/janice.htm; Bernstein,
“Militarized Humanitarianism,” 57.

Elizabeth Bernstein, “The Sexual Politics of the ‘New
Abolitionism,’” differences 18, no. 5 (2007): 143; Victoria Law, “Against
Carceral Feminism,” Jacobin, October 17, 2014,
www.jacobinmag.com/2014/10/against-carceral-feminism/.

Bernstein, “Carceral Politics as Gender Justice?,” 253; Anne E.
Fehrenbacher, Ju Nyeong Park, Katherine H. A. Footer, Bradley E.
Silberzahn, Sean T. Allen, and Susan G. Sherman, “Exposure to Police and
Client Violence Among Incarcerated Female Sex Workers in Baltimore
City, Maryland,” American Journal of Public Health 110 (2020): S152–
S153; “Women in Prison: An Overview,” Words from Prison, American
Civil Liberties Union; Monica N. Modi, Sheallah Palmer, and Alicia
Armstrong, “The Role of Violence Against Women Act in Addressing
Intimate Partner Violence: A Public Health Issue,” Journal of Women’s
Health 23, no. 3 (2014): 253.

Gabriel, “Interview,” 26.

Sheila Jeffries, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of
Transgenderism (New York: Routledge, 2014), 61.

Wyatt Ronan, “Breaking: 2021 Becomes Record Year for Anti-
Transgender Legislation,” Human Rights Campaign, March 13, 2021,
www.hrc.org/press-releases/breaking-2021-becomes-record-year-for-anti-
transgender-legislation/.

Sandy Stone, “Sandy’s FAQ—Transgender,” SandyStone.com,
https://sandystone.com/faq.shtml; Sandy Stone, “Bloomington: Post-
Posttranssexual: Transgender Studies and Feminism,” SandyStone.com,
https://sandystone.com/.
CHAPTER SEVEN: LEANING IN OR SQUADDING UP

Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (New
York: Knopf, 2013), 4.

Ibid., 26.

Ken Auletta, “A Woman’s Place,” New Yorker, July 4, 2011,
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/07/11/a-womans-place-ken-auletta;
Sandberg, Lean In, 9; bell hooks, “Dig Deep: Beyond Lean In,” Feminist
Wire, October 28, 2013, https://thefeministwire.com/2013/10/17973/.

Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (New York:
Random House, 2019), 84.

Charlotte Alter, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Facebook Videos of Her
Trip to Standing Rock Reveal Her Political Awakening,” Time, February 19,
2020, https://time.com/5786180/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-standing-rock/.

Gabriella Paiella, “The 28-Year-Old at the Center of One of This
Year’s Most Exciting Primaries,” The Cut, June 25, 2018,
www.thecut.com/2018/06/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-interview.html; Brenda
Jones and Krishan Trotman, Queens of the Resistance: Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez (New York: Plume, 2020), 56; Alter, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s
Facebook Videos.”

Julia Conley, “If Democrats Want to Honor Legacy of Dr. King, Says
Ocasio-Cortez, ‘We Have to Be Dangerous Too,’” Portside, February 1,
2020, https://portside.org/2020-02-01/if-democrats-want-honor-legacy-dr-
king-says-ocasio-cortez-we-have-be-dangerous-too; Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez [@AOC], Twitter, July 3, 2018,
https://twitter.com/aoc/status/1014172302777507847?lang=en; Paiella,
“The 28-Year-Old at the Center.”

John Wagner, “‘No Person in America Should Be Too Poor to Live’:
Ocasio-Cortez Explains Democratic Socialism to Colbert,” Washington
Post, June 29, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/no-person-in-
america-should-be-too-poor-to-live-ocasio-cortez-explains-democratic-
socialism-to-colbert/2018/06/29/d6752050-7b8d-11e8-aeee-
4d04c8ac6158_story.html.

Zoe Ruffner, “Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Self-
Love, Fighting the Power, and Her Signature Red Lip,” Vogue, August 21,
2020, www.vogue.com/article/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-beauty-secrets.

Oprah Winfrey, “Sheryl Sandberg Tells Oprah About Her ‘Date’ with
Mark Zuckerberg, Her Marriage and Feeling Like a Fraud,” HuffPost, June
6, 2013, www.huffpost.com/entry/sheryl-sandberg-interview_n_3367204.

Katherine Losse, The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the
Social Network (New York: Free Press, 2012), 168.

Sandberg, Lean In, 40, 39, 47.

Ibid., 5–7; data about the gender pay gap for Black women are
highlighted on the Lean In website, https://leanin.org/data-about-the-
gender-pay-gap-for-black-women; Amanda Mull, “The Girl Boss Has Left
the Building,” The Atlantic, June 25, 2020,
www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/06/girlbosses-what-comes-
next/613519; Susan Faludi, “Facebook Feminism, Like It or Not,” The
Baffler 23 (2013), https://thebaffler.com/salvos/facebook-feminism-like-it-
or-not.

Sandberg, Lean In, 89.

Gina Heeb, “US Income Inequality Jumps to Highest Level Ever
Recorded,” Business Insider, September 27, 2019,
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/income-inequality-
reached-highest-level-ever-recorded-in-2018-2019-9-1028559996.

Catherine Thorbecke, “Nearly Half of the World’s Entire Wealth Is in
the Hands of Millionaires,” ABC News, October 22, 2019,
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/half-worlds-entire-wealth-hands-
millionaires/story?id=66440320; Nina Strochlic, “One in Six Americans
Could Go Hungry in 2020 as Pandemic Persists,” National Geographic,
November 24, 2020, www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/one-in-
six-could-go-hungry-2020-as-covid-19-persists; Matt Egan, “America’s
Billionaires Have Grown $1.1 Trillion Richer During the Pandemic,” CNN,
January 26, 2021, www.cnn.com/2021/01/26/business/billionaire-wealth-
inequality-poverty/index.html.

Faludi, “Facebook Feminism.” Tolentino’s account of Barre class as a
key site of optimizing culture is indispensable. Tolentino, Trick Mirror, 75–
77.

Sandberg, Lean In, 85.

Ibid., 37; Erin Carlyle, “Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg Sells
Atherton Home for $9.25 Million,” Forbes, October 14, 2014,
www.forbes.com/sites/erincarlyle/2014/10/14/facebook-coo-sheryl-
sandberg-sells-atherton-home-for-9-25-million/#5574a78d3968.

Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser, Feminism for
the 99%: A Manifesto (New York: Verso, 2019), 5, 12.

Jones and Trotman, Queens of the Resistance, 42.

Cornel West and Tricia Rose, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Not
Understood for Who She Really Is,” The Tight Rope, July 23, 2020,
www.youtube.com/watch?v=24MSsYWa8j4&ab_channel=TheTightRope.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Remarks at
2011 Boston University Martin Luther King Jr., Celebration” ,
Boston University, 2011, www.bu.edu/buniverse/view/?v=osDd30.

Jones and Trotman, Queens of the Resistance, 49; West and Rose,
“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Not Understood”; Michelle Ruiz, “AOC’s
Next Four Years,” Vanity Fair, October 28, 2020,
www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/10/becoming-aoc-cover-story-2020.

West and Rose, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Not Understood.”

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ryan Grim and Briahna Gray, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Joins
Environmental Activists in Protest at Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi’s
Office,” The Intercept, November 13, 2018,
https://theintercept.com/2018/11/13/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-sunrise-
activists-nancy-pelosi/.

Ijeoma Oluo, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male
America (New York: Seal Press, 2020).

West and Rose, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Not Understood”;
Bianca Betancourt, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Shares Her Harrowing
Experience Surviving the Capitol Riots,” Harper’s Bazaar, January 13,
2021, www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/a35201831/alexandria-
ocasio-cortez-capitol-riots-recap/; Stuart Emmrich, “Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez on the Capitol Mob Attack: ‘I Thought I Was Going to Die,’” Vogue,
January 13, 2021, www.vogue.com/article/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-video-
on-the-capitol-mob-attack.

Sheera Frankel, Nicholas Confessore, Cecilia Kang, Matthew
Rosenberg, and Jack Nicas, “Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s
Leaders Fought Through Crisis,” New York Times, November 14, 2018,
www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-election-
racism.html; Nicholas Confessore and Matthew Rosenberg, “Damage
Control at Facebook: 6 Takeaways from the Times’s Investigation,” New
York Times, November 14, 2018,
www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-crisis-mark-
zuckerberg-sheryl-sandberg.html; Anne Helen Petersen, “The Rise, Lean,
and Fall of Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg,” BuzzFeed News, December 14,
2018, www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/sheryl-sandberg-
facebook-lean-in-superwoman-supervillain.

Kara Swisher, “Lean Out,” New York Times, November 24, 2018,
www.nytimes.com/2018/11/24/opinion/sheryl-sandberg-mark-zuckerberg-
facebook.html.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for
a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs,
2019), 7, 74, 100; “Sheryl Sandberg,” Enhancv,
https://enhancv.com/resume-examples/famous/sheryl-sandberg/#famous-
resume.

Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 92.

Ibid., 99–100.

Lean In Circles, “About Circles,” July 27, 2017, https://cdn-
media.leanin.org/pagedata/2017-07-
27/1501192899793/circles_guide_english_webfinal.pdf; Jeff Desjardins,
“The World’s 20 Most Profitable Companies,” Visual Capitalist, October
21, 2019, www.visualcapitalist.com/the-worlds-20-most-profitable-
companies/.

Manu Raju, “Ocasio-Cortez Reveals New Details About Viral
Incident with Rep. Ted Yoho,” CNN, July 24, 2020,
www.cnn.com/2020/07/24/politics/aoc-ted-yoho-latest/index.html.

Mike Lillis, “Ocasio-Cortez Accosted by GOP Lawmaker over
Remarks: ‘That Kind of Confrontation Hasn’t Ever Happened to Me,’” The
Hill, July 21, 2020, https://thehill.com/homenews/house/508259-ocaasio-
cortez-accosted-by-gop-lawmaker-over-remarks-that-kind-of.

Ibid.

Melissa Quinn, “GOP Lawmaker Apologizes for ‘Abrupt Manner’ of
Heated Exchange with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” CBS News, July 22,
2020, www.cbsnews.com/news/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-aoc-ted-yoho-
confrontation/.

“Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) Responds to Rep. Ted Yoho
(R-FL),” C-SPAN, July 23, 2020, youtube.com/watch?
v=LI4ueUtkRQ0&ab_channel=C-SPAN; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
[@AOC], “I want to thank everyone…,” Instagram, July 28, 2020,
www.instagram.com/p/CDMrZIzAI1B; Ruiz, “AOC’s Next Four Years.”

“Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) Responds to Rep. Ted Yoho
(R-FL).”

Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2018), 79–80; “Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)
Responds to Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL)”; Chris Cillizza, “The Absolutely
Remarkable Social Media Power of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” CNN, July
24, 2020, www.cnn.com/2020/07/24/politics/aoc-ted-yoho-
cspan/index.html.

Monica Hesse, “AOC’s Speech About Ted Yoho’s ‘Apology’ Was a
Comeback for the Ages,” Washington Post, July 23, 2020,
www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/aocs-speech-about-ted-yohos-
apology-was-a-comeback-for-the-ages/2020/07/23/524e689a-cb90-11ea-
91f1-28aca4d833a0_story.html; Mary McNamara, “Column: Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez’s Tear-Down of Ted Yoho Is the Best TV I’ve Seen in
Years,” Los Angeles Times, July 24, 2020, www.latimes.com/entertainment-
arts/story/2020-07-24/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-speech-tom-yoho-great-tv.

West and Rose, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Not Understood.”

“Our Work Has a Framework,” The Nap Ministry, January 11, 2021,
http://thenapministry.wordpress.com/.
CONCLUSION: TWO FEMINISMS, ONE FUTURE

Richard Gonzales and Camila Domonoske, “Voters Recall Aaron
Persky, Judge Who Sentenced Brock Turner,” NPR, June 5, 2018,
www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/06/05/617071359/voters-are-
deciding-whether-to-recall-aaron-persky-judge-who-sentenced-brock-tur.

Andrew Nguyen, “15,000 Marched in Brooklyn for Black Trans
Lives,” The Cut, June 15, 2020, www.thecut.com/2020/06/fifteen-thousand-
marched-in-brooklyn-for-black-trans-lives.html; “Fatal Violence Against
the Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Community in 2020,”
Human Rights Campaign, www.hrc.org/resources/violence-against-the-
trans-and-gender-non-conforming-community-in-2020; Anushka Patil,
“How a March for Black Trans Lives Became a Huge Event,” New York
Times, June 15, 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/nyregion/brooklyn-
black-trans-parade.html.

Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2016).

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan Brownell Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn
Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I (Rochester, NY: Susan B.
Anthony, 1881),116.

Quoted in Jen McDaneld, “Harper, Historiography, and the
Race/Gender Opposition in Feminism,” Signs 40, no. 2 (2015): 395.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Sojourner Truth, the Libyan Sibyl,” The
Atlantic, April 1863,
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1863/04/sojourner-truth-the-libyan-
sibyl/308775/.

Caroline Kitchener, “‘How Many Women of Color Have to Cry?’: Top
Feminist Organizations Are Plagued by Racism, 20 Former Staffers Say,”
The Lily, July 13, 2020, www.thelily.com/how-many-women-of-color-have-
to-cry-top-feminist-organizations-are-plagued-by-racism-20-former-
staffers-say/; Scott Neuman, “NOW President Resigns amid Allegations of
Creating Toxic Work Environment,” NPR, August 18, 2020,
www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-
justice/2020/08/18/903254443/now-president-resigns-amid-allegations-of-
creating-toxic-work-environment.

Cheryl Woods-Giscombé, “Superwoman Schema: African American
Women’s Views on Stress, Strength, and Health,” Qualitative Health
Research 20, no. 5 (2010),
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3072704/.

Marisa Meltzer, “A Feminist T-Shirt Resurfaces from the ’70s,” New
York Times, November 18, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/11/19/fashion/a-
feminist-t-shirt-resurfaces-from-the-70s.html.

Emma Roller, “More Female Bankers Won’t Solve Capitalism,”
Splinter, May 15, 2018, https://splinternews.com/more-female-bankers-
wont-solve-capitalism-1826049564. The joke was initially former IMF
chair Christine Lagarde’s. Jon Henley, “Female-Led Countries Handled
Coronavirus Better, Study Suggests,” The Guardian, August 18, 2020,
www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/18/female-led-countries-handled-
coronavirus-better-study-jacinda-ardern-angela-merkel.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “Introduction,” in How We Get Free:
Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, ed. Keeanga-Yamahtta
Taylor (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 11.

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

Richard Allen Williams, “Cardiovascular Disease in African
American Women: A Health Care Disparities Issue,” Journal of the
National Medical Association 101, no. 6 (2009),
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19585921/.
This file was downloaded from Z-Library project
Your gateway to knowledge and culture. Accessible for everyone.
z-library.sk
z-lib.gs
z-lib.fm
go-to-library.sk
Official Telegram channel
Z-Access
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Library