Why Race and Gender Still Matter

An Intersectional Approach

Maeve M O'Donovan, Namita Goswami, Lisa Yount, Maeve M O'Donovan, Namita Goswami, Lisa Yount

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317318576
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Essays

Intersectionality, the attempt to bring theories on race, gender, disability and sexuality together, has existed for decades as a theoretical framework. The essays in this volume explore how intersectionality can be applied to modern philosophy, as well as looking at other disciplines.

1 RACE WOMEN, RACE MEN AND EARLY EXPRESSIONS OF PROTO-INTERSECTIONALITY, 1830s–1930s

Kathryn T. Gines

Kimberlé Crenshaw is most frequently credited for providing the first explicit articulations of intersectionality, that is, naming intersectionality as a concept and theoretical framework. Consequently, many accounts of the history of this concept only go back to 1989 or 1991, the publication dates of her articles ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’ and ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color’, respectively.¹ But some scholars reach back further into history, tracing the concept to women of colour feminist activism and scholarship operating a few decades earlier. For example, in a genealogical essay on intersectionality, Patricia Hill Collins makes the case for tracing intersectionality back to the black feminist politics of the 1960s and 1970s. She notes, ‘ironically, narratives of the emergence of intersectionality rarely include this period of social movement politics, and instead confine themselves to locating a point of origin when academics first noticed, named and legitimized this emerging field of study’.²

Although this is an assessment with which I agree, I think that we can go back even further than the 1960s and 1970s to unpack the ‘knowledge project that was honed within social movements’ now more commonly referred to as intersectionality.³ As Bonnie Thornton Dill and Ruth Enid Zambrana explain in Emerging Intersections: Race, Class, and Gender in Theory, Policy, and Practice:

women of color scholars have used the idea of intersections to explain our own lives and to critique the exclusion of our experiences, needs, and perspectives from both White, Eurocentric, middle-class conceptualizations of feminism and male dominated models of ethnic studies. We have laid claim to a U.S. scholarly tradition that began in the nineteenth century with women like Maria Stewart and men like W.E.B. Du Bois … Contemporary women of color have continued this legacy by locating ideas that explore the intersections of race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality at the center of their thinking about their own lives and those of women and men of color … Intersectionality is a product of seeking to have our voices heard and lives acknowledged.⁴

With this in mind, I go back to the nineteenth century to women and men like Maria W. Stewart and W. E. B. Du Bois to explore the groundwork laid by them for the scholarly tradition and knowledge project of intersectionality. I am arguing for the use of the term ‘proto-intersectionality’ to describe these early explorations and examinations of intersecting identities and oppressions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In this chapter I define proto-intersectionality as identifying and combating racism and sexism – through activist organizing and campaigning – not only as separate categories impacting identity and oppression, but also as systems of oppression that work together and mutually reinforce one another, presenting unique problems for black women who experience both, simultaneously and differently than white women and/or black men.⁵ Some of these proto-intersectional analyses also included attention to class oppression in relation to race and gender oppression. The term proto-intersectionality is intended to signal the ways in which intersectional analyses were operating in early black feminism from the 1830s to the 1930s, long before we had the term intersectionality.⁶ It is also meant to demonstrate the myriad ways early black feminists offered models or prototypes for more contemporary explicit expressions of intersectionality. Keeping this in mind, I examine how this theoretical and activist framework operates in the black feminist work of Maria W. Stewart, Sojourner Truth, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, Elise Johnson McDougald and Sadie Tanner Mosell Alexander.⁷ I then contrast their proto-intersectional frameworks with Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell and W. E. B. Du Bois’s black nationalist work, which I argue is in some cases pro-feminist and in other cases masculinist, but in all cases presents a more limited additive analysis of gender than their comparatively exhaustive examinations of race and racism.⁸ Even though I am presenting these men as figures of black nationalism, I do not want to suggest that the women discussed in this chapter were not also co-founders and fellow participants in black nationalism. For example, it has been argued that Maria W. Stewart presents early visions for and versions of black nationalism and Ethiopianism.⁹

Early Black Feminism and Proto-Intersectionality

In Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life: Their Thoughts, their Words, their Feelings, Bert James Lowenberg and Ruth Bogin contextualize their collection of black women’s writings and speeches by stressing how exceptional literacy was, especially in the antebellum South, making the creating and maintaining of a record of the experiences of black women all the more extraordinary. Thus those black women who did have an opportunity to ‘transmit their ideas to print’ make up a distinctive group offering a distinctive voice: ‘Differing in experience from white women, they spoke as blacks. Differing in experience from black men, they spoke as women. Differing from one another in their experience as black women, they spoke as individuals’.¹⁰

One of the black women who did transmit her ideas to print (though in the Northeast rather than the antebellum South) during this era is Maria W. Stewart (1803–79). Several scholars have identified Stewart as the first woman in the United States to speak to an audience of men and women in public and, furthermore, as America’s first black woman political writer.¹¹ In addition to writing for the Liberator (an abolitionist journal) and self-publishing two editions of her collected written works, Stewart worked as a teacher in New York, Baltimore and Washington, DC (where she also worked as a matron of the Freedmen’s Hospital). Often identified through her position vis-à-vis prominent men – for example, as the widow of James W. Stewart, as a friend of David Walker, author of Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America (1829), or as a friend and professional affiliate of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison – we cannot ignore the fact that Stewart created a legacy all her own through her speeches, writings and activism against race and gender oppression.

In ‘Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, the Sure Foundation on which We Must Build’ (1831), Stewart critiques both racism – namely, the systematic subjugation and assumed inferiority of blacks – and sexism – the unequal treatment of women, the paternalism of men and inconsistent constructions of femininity.¹² Recognizing the dual oppression faced by black women, Stewart encourages ‘the fair daughters of Africa’ to awake, arise, distinguish themselves and unite in support of one another. In addition to race and gender oppression, Stewart is also mindful of class oppression, underscoring the ways black women’s labour gets exploited and encouraging them to practise cooperative economics to gain economic independence.¹³ While she celebrates black women as mothers and educators, Stewart also calls for their intellectual development and economic empowerment to build churches and schools in the community. She advises: ‘Possess the spirit of men, bold and enterprising, fearless and undaunted. Sue for your rights and privileges. Know the reason you cannot attain them’.¹⁴

In an 1832 lecture delivered at Franklin Hall, Stewart points to the powerful force of racial prejudice, specifically the ways that discrimination limits young black girls and women to servile labour despite the other qualities and characteristics they possess. Noting the different experiences of womanhood, she asserts that while black women have had to labour and toil, many white women’s hands have not been soiled and their muscles are unstrained.¹⁵ Stewart also admonishes black men to make a greater effort to raise their sons and daughters out of poverty and servitude. She chides the ‘many highly intelligent men of color in these United States’ contending that ‘talk, without effort, is nothing’,¹⁶ adding, ‘gross neglect, on your part, causes my blood to boil within me’.¹⁷ These writings and speeches are central to Stewart’s activism and campaigning against multiple systems of oppression. As Marilyn Richardson has noted, we find in Stewart’s writings ‘indeed a triple consciousness, as she demonstrates the creative struggle of a woman attempting to establish both a literary voice and an historical mirror for her experience as “an American, a Negro,” and a woman’.¹⁸

Sojourner Truth (1797–1883), born in New York where she was enslaved until 1827, is more widely known and recognized by many than Maria W. Stewart. Unlike Stewart, Truth was illiterate and did not leave behind published letters, essays and speeches of her own writing.¹⁹ She is perhaps best known through her famous slave narrative, Harriett Beecher Stowe’s ‘Libyan Sibyl’, and more recently Nell Painter’s biography.²⁰ While there is controversy surrounding the words that have been attributed to Truth, from the use of the refrain ‘Ar’n’t I am Woman?’ to the line ‘Frederick, is God dead?’, multiple accounts have made it clear that Truth shared experiences from her own life to impact her audience – including the physical labour she endured as a slave and her giving birth to several children also enslaved, some of whom were held in indentured servitude as late as the 1850s (long after emancipation in New York in 1827). Truth made frequent appearances on the lecture circuit for both race and gender organizations fighting for the abolition of slavery – often presented as a racial but not a gender issue – and for women’s suffrage – presented as a gender issue, but without attention to race. Truth actually argued for universal suffrage (for both women and slaves), making space to consider voting rights for black women who occupied both categories. Described by Beverly Guy-Sheftall as ‘the person most responsible for linking abolition and women’s rights, and demonstrating the reality of Black women’s gender and race identities’,²¹ Truth interrupted representations of ‘woman’ as exclusively white and of ‘black’ as only male. Like Stewart, Truth underscores the discrepancy in constructions of femininity along the colour line, citing her lived experience as a black woman and former slave to demonstrate the limitations and exclusions operating in constructions of gender and race in the US context. She also explicitly criticizes black male patriarchy towards black women, arguing that black men’s rights should not be prioritized over black women’s rights and asserting ‘if colored men get their rights, but not colored women get theirs, there will be a bad time about it’.²² Nell Painter describes Truth as ‘the embodiment of the need to reconstruct an American history that is sensitive simultaneously to race, class, and gender’.²³

Moving from the early (1830s) and mid (1850s) to the late (1890s) nineteenth century, we have the publication of Anna Julia Cooper’s (1858/9–1964) A Voice from the South (1892).²⁴ An educator, scholar and clubwoman, Cooper was active in fighting against racism and sexism – for example co-founding the Colored Women’s League in 1894 in Washington, DC, and participating in the Pan-African Congress in London in 1900. Like Stewart, Cooper examines the roles of women not only as mothers and educators, but also in terms of their responsibilities outside of the home as contributors to debates about economic and political issues. One of her more frequently cited quotes comes from ‘The Status of Woman in America’, where she declares, ‘the colored woman of to-day occupies, one may say, a unique position in this country … She is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or unacknowledged factor in both’.²⁵ Here Cooper explicitly identifies how black women are simultaneously impacted by racism (the race problem) and sexism (the woman question) and yet she is either not known or not acknowledged (by white women or by black men) as a factor in examining or eliminating these systems of oppression.

In ‘My Racial Philosophy’ (1930), Cooper underscores the interconnectedness of race and gender prejudices, particularly for black women. Examining the roles of both race and gender in constructing identities and oppressive systems, Cooper asserts, ‘the whips and stings of prejudice, whether of color or sex, find me neither too calloused to suffer, nor too ignorant to know what is due me’.²⁶ On the one hand Cooper contends, ‘when I encounter brutality I need not always charge it to my race’; on the other, she is clear that it is wrong to ‘imagine that oppression goes only with color’.²⁷ Thus brutality and oppression manifest neither always nor only as racism, but also as sexism. In ‘Woman Versus the Indian’ (1891–2), Cooper examines various modes of oppression, arguing for a broad and inclusive conception of human rights. For her,

it is not the intelligent woman versus the ignorant woman; nor the white woman versus the black, the brown, and the red – it is not even the cause of woman versus man … [W]oman’s strongest vindication for speaking is that the world needs to hear her voice … not the white woman not the black woman nor the red woman, but the cause of every man or woman who has writhed silently under a mighty wrong.²⁸

Here Cooper identifies multiple intersecting systems of oppression – on the basis of intellectual abilities, skin colour and/or race and gender – while also theorizing these oppressions beyond the black/white binary.

Ida B. Wells (1862–1931) is another scholar, educator, race woman and clubwoman who fought against gender and racial oppression using an intersectional approach. A black feminist activist fighting for women’s rights and suffrage, she encouraged women to become active in local and national issues through civic organizations. But she criticized white women suffragists, particularly Susan B. Anthony, for neglecting to publicly acknowledge links between racism and sexism.²⁹ Wells fought against racial segregation in transportation (she successfully sued the railroad in Tennessee, though the case was overturned by the Supreme Court) and in education (as an educator and journalist she wrote articles condemning the deplorable conditions of segregated schools). Furthermore, she was among the founding members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.³⁰

Proto-intersectionality is especially evident in Wells’s anti-lynching activism, which brought global awareness to the horrors of lynching in the United States.³¹ Articles in Memphis Free Speech, the paper she edited and co-owned, along with publications like Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases (1892), A Red Record (1895) and Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900), demonstrate Wells’s insights into lynching in America as an issue with intersecting economic, political, racial and gendered implications. She documented the fact that the victims of lynching included black women and children, not exclusively black men. By meticulously researching and recording the numerous cases of lynching in America, Wells argued that many lynch victims were attacked for their political activism and/or resistance to white supremacy, dismantling the prevailing assumption that the only victims of lynching were black men being accused of raping white women.

In addition to her anti-lynching activism, Wells was at the forefront of the controversy surrounding the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. When repeated petitions for participation in the World Fair in Chicago were denied, a protest was organized and Wells, Frederick Douglass, Ferdinand L. Barnett and Irvine Garland Penn compiled ‘The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition – The Afro-American’s Contribution to Columbian Literature’.³² Wells raised the money for the pamphlet and wrote the Preface (which is printed in English, French and German), plus five of the seven other sections, including ‘Class Legislation’, ‘The Convict Lease System’, ‘Lynch Law’ and the conclusion, ‘To the Public’. In ‘Class Legislation’, Well...