Why women like Patricia Arquette continue to whitewash Feminism.

[YoungDemCA]

212. K&R. Even with the best of intentions, social movements can have serious blind spots...

Was not Frederick Douglass one of the most consistent male champions of women's rights in the 19th century?! Meanwhile, after the Civil War, many of the middle-to-upper class white feminist and abolitionist allies whom Douglass had previously been working with abandoned the struggle for civil rights for black Americans-often for racist reasons.

When it comes to race (and class) there's some ugly history to the (bourgeois and white elements of the) feminist movement. I'm not saying that there's never been common cause, but there's a disturbing trend for certain voices to be heard above others, even within movements against social and political oppression and marginalization-like feminism.

From Angela Davis' seminal 1981 work, Woman, Race, and Class:

During the second year of (Susan B.) Anthony's term (as president of the organization) the NAWSA (National American Woman Suffrage Association) passed a resolution which was a variation of Blackwell's racist and class-biased argument of more than a century earlier.

"Resolved. That without expressing any opinion on the proper qualifications for voting, we call attention to the significant facts that in every State there are more women who can read and write than the whole number of illiterate male voters; more white women who can read and write than all negro voters; more American women who can read and write than all foreign voters; so that the enfranchisement of such women would settle the vexed question of rule by illiteracy, whether of home-grown or foreign population."

This resolution cavalierly dismissed the rights of Black and immigrant women along with the rights of their male relations. Moreover, it pointed to a fundamental betrayal of democracy that could no longer be justified by the old expediency argument. Implied in the logic of this resolution was an attack on the working class as a whole and a willingness-whether conscious or not-to make common cause with the new monopoly capitalists whose indiscriminate search for profits knew no human bounds.

In passing the 1893 resolution, the suffragists might as well have announced that if they, as white women of the middle classes and the bourgeoisie, were given the power of the vote, they would rapidly subdue the three main elements of the U.S. working class: Black people, immigrants, and the uneducated native white workers. It was these three groups of people whose labor was exploited and whose lives were sacrificed by the Morgans, Rockefellers, Mellons, Vanderbilts-by the new class of monopoly capitalists who were ruthlessly establishing their industrial empires. They controlled the immigrant workers in the North as well as the former slaves an poor white laborers who were operating the new railroad, mining, and steel industries in the South.

-Davis 1981 pp.115-116.

Thank you, bravenak, for speaking out and for refusing to stay silent. This is an important discussion. I really hope that more people can listen to what you say, instead of having a knee-jerk negative reaction.