The Interplay of Race and Gender - Essay Example

WOMEN IN US HISTORY The Interplay of Race and Gender Does race matter when one is writing on gender, on women in US history? The answer is yes, because gender identity is inextricably linked to and even determined by racial identity (Higginbotham 252). It is, hence, necessary that one looks at the interplay of race and gender while writing on women in US history. Mainstream feminism is based on white middle class assumptions and perspectives. Such feminists have theorized about subjectivity, questions of difference, social relations as relations of power, conceptual implications of binary oppositions such as equality vs. difference. But they have seldom talked about race (ibid 251). While white feminists have engaged in universalizing women’s culture and oppression from white (basically middle class) women’s experience and thereby failed to separate their whiteness from their womanness, Afro-American history also failed to examine the differential class and gender positions men and women occupy in black communities thereby constructing the image of a monolithic black community. This history reverberates with a male voice and is based on the experience of men (ibid 255-56). The social context for the construction of race as a tool for black oppression is historically rooted in the institution of slavery (ibid 256). The slaves were defined by law as “animate chattel”; they constituted property as well as a social class and were exploited under a system that sanctioned and institutionalized white ownership of black bodies and black labor. Women were denied right to their own bodies and sexuality. Women’s bodies and sexuality was under white ownership and this was institutionalized. It formed and essential part of the system of subordination and exploitation. The children the female slaves gave birth to immediately became the property of the slave masters (ibid 257). It reminds me of Alice Walker’s “Meridian”, where Meridian’s mother explained to her that Emancipation to female slaves meant that they could retain their own children. In the eyes of the slaveholders, slave women were not mothers at all. They were merely instruments guaranteeing the growth of the slave labor force. They were classified as “breeders”, animals as opposed to mothers. Hence, their infant children could be sold away like “calves from cows”. Courts ruled that female slaves had no legal claims on their children (Davis 7). Hard labor in the fields from sunrise to sunset was the norm. Where work was concerned, strength and productivity under the threat of the whip outweighed considerations of sex. It seems, here, that the oppression of women was identical to that of men (ibid 6). But women bore and nursed children and performed domestic duties—all on top of doing fieldwork. Black women experienced the vicissitudes of slavery through gendered lives and thus differently from slave men (Higginbotham 258). As females, slave women were inherently vulnerable to all forms of sexual coercion. They were flogged and mutilated as well as raped. Rape was a weapon of domination, a weapon of repression whose covert goal was to extinguish slave women’s will to resist and in the process, to demoralize their men (Davis 7). Legally, the slave woman was ruled outside the statutory rubric of woman as can be evidenced by the case of Sojourner Truth. Proof of womanhood did not rest on a common female essence, shared culture, or mere physical appearance (Higginbotham 258). Gender was both constructed and fragmented by race. Yet, it cannot be denied that white women in large numbers joined the anti-slavery (abolitionist) movement. What pulled the white women into the abolitionist movement? In the early 19th century the industrial revolution caused US society to undergo massive transformations. The circumstances of white women’s lives were radically changed. By the 1830s many of women’s traditional economic tasks were being taken over by the factory system. There was also deterioration in their social status. An ideological consequence of industrial capitalism was the shaping of a more rigorous notion of female inferiority. It seemed that the more the women began to lose their productive duties, the more rigid became the ideology that asserted that woman’s place was in the home. The turbulent 1830s were years of intense resistance. In 1831 the organized abolitionist movement was born. The early 1830s also saw strikes in the Northeastern textile factories, operated largely by young women and children. Around the same time, more prosperous white women began to fight for the right to education and for access to careers outside their homes (Davis 30-33). White women in the North i.e. the middle class housewife as well as the young “mill girl” frequently invoked the metaphor of slavery to articulate their respective oppressions. Well-situated women began to denounce their unsatisfactory domestic lives by defining marriage as a form of slavery. For working women, the economic oppression as well as their working conditions bore a strong resemblance to slavery. For white middle-class women, this comparison with slavery implied that they felt a certain affinity with Black women and men, for whom slavery meant whips and chains. Mill women contributed money from their meager wages and tried to raise funds separately, middle class women organized the anti-slavery campaign. Many such women became active agitators in this campaign. Abolitionism allowed the women the opportunity to launch an implicit protest against their own oppressive roles at home. In a year widely publicized event of 1833, a young white woman epitomized female courage and antiracist militancy. She was Prudence Crandall a teacher who in a very un-lady like fashion violated the code of racial segregation and defied her white townsfolk in Canterbury, Connecticut by admitting a black girl in her school. Protests by white parents did not deter her. Instead, on the advice of a veteran abolitionist, she decided to recruit more black girls. The storekeepers refused to sell her the necessities, the village doctor refused to attend the ailing students, the druggist refused to give medicine to Ms Crandall. The school building was thoroughly damaged. In spite of all these the school continued to function till the Connecticut authorities ordered her arrest (ibid 33-35). In spite of this racism figured in the woman suffrage movement. Although the Equal Rights Association was formed in 1866 that incorporated the struggles for Black and woman suffrage into a single campaign, at its first meeting in 1867 Elizabeth Canton strongly favored the racist argument that it was far more important for women to receive the franchise than for Black men to win the vote. The women Canton was referring to were obviously white Anglo-Saxon women (ibid 72). With the franchise being extended to Black men in 1870, the battle for women’s right to the vote continued. At the turn of the century with the woman suffrage movement gaining ground racism continued unabated in this movement. The greatest support for woman suffrage came from working class women, particularly black working class women and many black men. Du Bois was the leading male advocate of woman suffrage in the 20th century. The Black Northeastern Federation of Clubs was denied membership in the National American Woman Suffrage Association on the ground that in that case they would lose the support of Southern (white) women (ibid 144-45). The Black women supported the battle for suffrage till the end in 1920 when women won the vote. But at every moment they were betrayed by their white sisters. At the end it appears that all those concessions made to Southern women made very little practical difference. For, the Southern States nearly defeated the 19th Amendment that gave women the franchise. After the victory Black women in the South were prevented, at times violently, from exercising their new right but there were no protests from their white sisters (ibid 148). Not only in the suffrage movement racism was rampant in the labor movement and so was sexism. The National Colored Labor Union was formed in response to the exclusionary policies of white labor groups. This Union proved by its practice to be more seriously committed to working women’s rights than its white counterpart and predecessor the National Labor Union. In 1910, the Women’s Trade Union League was charged with exclusionary practices against Black women. The League attempted to refute this charge and cited that it did have Black members: one in New York and two in Philadelphia (Tax 225-26)! Women entered the industries in a situation where men had an organization but seldom extended its benefits to women. They in fact viewed women as competitors who undercut their wages. So many trade unionists preferred to leave them unorganized, hoping this would drive them back into the home where they really belonged (Tax 17). For black and white women gendered identity was reconstructed and represented in very different, indeed antagonistic, racialized contexts. While Western culture constructed and represented Western women’s sexuality in conflicting images between the 16th and 19th centuries, Western conceptions of black women’s sexuality resisted change. Black women were considered sexually promiscuous their body epitomized centuries-long European perceptions of Africans as primitive, animal-like and savage. Violence prefigured eminently in racialized construction of sexuality. From the days of slavery, the social construction and representation of black sexuality reinforced violence against black women and men. That the rape of black women could continue to go on with impunity long after slavery’s demise underscores the pervasive belief in black female promiscuity. Lynching of black men, with its often attendant castration, reeked of sexualized representations of race (Higginbotham 262-63). The prevalence of racism and the racist assumptions of mainstream feminism have been highlighted by Black feminist thought. Patricia Hill-Collins argues that the economy, polity and ideology together function as a highly effective system of social control designed to keep African-American women in an assigned, subordinate place. This larger system of oppression works to exclude and suppress the ideas of Black women intellectuals and thus to protect elite White male and masculine interests and worldviews. This exclusion means that stereotypical images of Black women permeate popular culture and public policy (Hill-Collins 5). Whiteness continues to remain constructed as normative and be privileged. Still, the world is changing and people are hoping for the best to come. There are numerous social as well as political changes taking place in the United States of America resulting in change in the position of women in the society too. This country is one of the largest and most developed democracies in the whole world. Upcoming changes are obviously for the betterment of the present condition and in this way, it can be said with confidence that women of different colors of skin will soon be treated equally in this nation. References Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race and Class. New York: Vintage, 1983. Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women Race Matters. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Higginbotham, Evelyn B. “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race.” Signs 2 (1992): 251-74. Hill-Collins, Patricia. Black Feminist Thought. New York: Routledge, 2000. Tax, Meredith. The Rising of the Women. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980. Read More