Sisterhood Questioned

Race, Class and Internationalism in the American and British Women's Movements c. 1880s - 1970s

Christine Bolt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134725656
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

This readable and informative survey, including both new research and synthesis, provides the first close comparison of race, class and internationalism in the British and American women's movements during this period. Sisterhood Questioned assesses the nature and impact of divisions in the twentieth century American and British women's movements.

In this lucidly written study, Christine Bolt sheds new light on these differences, which flourished in an era of political reaction, economic insecurity, polarizing nationalism and resurgent anti-feminism. The author reveals how the conflicts were seized upon and publicised by contemporaries, and how the activists themselves were forced to confront the increasingly complex tensions.

Drawing on a wide range of sources, the author demonstrates that women in the twentieth century continued to co-operate despite these divisions, and that feminist movements remained active right up to and beyond the reformist 1960s. It is invaluable reading for all those with an interest in American history, British history or women's studies.

1	Introduction

Feminists love to call each other sisters but there ain’t hardly nobody you dislike as much as your sister if you don’t like her.

Black lawyer and activist, Florynce Kennedy, 1988

… trashing your sisters is a serious bad habit …

Trade union activist, Catherine Conroy, on National Organisation of Women infighting, 1970s¹

With the onset of second wave feminism² in the 1960s and 1970s, activists realised that the sisterhood of women could not be taken for granted, as it largely had been by their feminist predecessors in the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. They realised that those predecessors — mainly white and western — had falsely assumed that they could speak and set the agenda for all women. In doing so, the early feminists may have hoped to rally women’s support and inflate the power of feminism, but they also largely ignored the experiences of women in the colonial and postcolonial world, slighted the interests of women of colour in the west, and failed to locate and appreciate women’s movements in their local contexts. In telling the story of their own activism in the later twentieth century, once neglected or patronised women demolished ‘the notion of a universal female experience’, while trying not to destroy faith in the global dimension and significance of feminism.³

This heated debate did not develop in the first stages of feminism, when diverse activists ostensibly achieved a high degree of unity in two main ways. First, they created an appealing as well as powerful women’s culture, based on a veneration for the maternal qualities said to be universally displayed by women in child rearing, home making and social reform. And second, feminists’ distinctive national agendas were linked by their drive for the vote, which, it was hoped, would be the key to progress of all kinds. The American and British women’s movements seemed especially well attuned, emerging at about the same time, exchanging personnel and ideas, and working closely together in an established Anglo-American reform nexus.⁴

After the First World War, with the suffrage struggle no longer uniting them and maternalism coming under popular and academic challenge, American and British feminists were obliged to confront well established but previously masked differences within and between their movements, notably over race, class and internationalism. And they had to do so in a world that, far from embracing visions of progress, was instead afflicted by political reaction, economic insecurity, polarising nationalism and resurgent anti-feminism.

My purpose in the chapters that follow has been broadly to examine the significance of divisions within the women’s movements of the United States and Britain. More specifically, while acknowledging the achievements of feminists working in the organisations of race, class and internationalism, I have looked at their difficulties and considered how far they were related to their own disputes. Race and class both clearly defined women as importantly as gender, and equally clearly disturbed and shaped the development of feminism; yet their impact was very different in the two countries, and class and racial responses to feminism have won very different judgements from contemporaries and historians alike. Female internationalism has been less controversial in the past and among scholars, but securing a united feminist voice in this quickly established area of interest also proved difficult. All three divisions were the creation of male society before women activists responded to them, and all three were more profound than the divisions among women who worked within their constraints.

I have also attempted, throughout, to show how the power shift in the Anglo-American relationship affected the Anglo-American reformer relationship, as British women became more than ever conscious of American money, expectation of influence and opposition to the existence of Britain’s empire. In addition, I have tried to establish when and how, in the twentieth century, the activism of American feminists came to overshadow that of their British counterparts.

Women reformers certainly produced a rich array of disputes and divisions. But did it matter that two interwar British feminists fought ‘like … tom cats’ over proposals to merge their organisations, while a contemporary observer thought that seeking amalgamations between different groups of women activists was like expecting Serbs and Croats to get along?⁵ Did it matter that proponents and opponents of protective industrial legislation for women sustained a long battle on both sides of the Atlantic, and that two of its prominent American warriors, Alice Paul and Doris Stevens, eventually became estranged, with Stevens deploring Paul’s domineering style and preoccupation with an ‘intra-mural fight for power and control’?⁶ Did it matter if union women thought feminist leaders were selfish individuals and ‘very snobbish’?⁷

Well, yes, of course it did, for all sorts of reasons; and after studying many different kinds of protest movement for many years, it seems to me that these are the most obvious ones. Unless quarrels are the healthy means of clarifying complicated issues, they take up time which could be spent more profitably. The longer they continue, the more likely they are to block intellectual and programmatic growth, and damage vulnerable elements within activist ranks. The disputes generated by social movements are, in addition, wonderfully helpful to their opponents, ever ready to denounce dissidents as unbalanced and peculiar individuals. Since it is so often claimed that women cannot work with other women — or, indeed, in groups at all — any feminist tendency towards divisions can be presented as an innate weakness of the weaker sex. Finally, activists’ differences matter because they can inhibit the development of those national or movementwide organisations that most effectively mobilise their supporters and help them to promote their case to a wider public.

While the divisions that are my concern all had their roots in the nineteenth century (see chapter 2), they were strengthened beyond eradication in the years from 1914 to 1945, which are accordingly given the largest share of my text. The race factor emerged early in the American movement, many of whose activists turned from agitating against black slavery to protesting the slavery of sex. Abolitionism and its aftermath quickly revealed the difficulties in the way of racial co-operation among reformers, and these were intensified from the end of the nineteenth century as the campaign for women’s suffrage became caught up in the South’s system of racial segregation and disenfranchisement of black men. Race again assumed vital importance for white American women when a new phase of feminism began in the 1960s. And at that point the vehement challenge posed by women of colour to feminism’s universalist claims can only fully be understood in the context of their frequently problematical roles within American race and feminist organisations from the 1830s onwards. In tracing these difficulties, I have looked at black and white women’s sense of mission towards other members of their respective races at home and abroad; have assessed black women’s involvement with white women in politics and reform; and have detailed the need of black women to rely on their own domestic and international associations, on their own emphases within feminism, and on their sometimes prickly collaboration with black men and the growing civil rights movement. The similar problems encountered by other American women of colour — not least in seeking reformer coalitions — are also examined.

Since by the 1830s slavery had become a distant (if still important) issue to British women, and since the non-white population of Britain was small before the 1950s, race questions lacked the continuing centrality for British feminists that they had for their American sisters. None the less, the British interest in race was intense, there was a long black presence in Britain, and British feminism was more strongly shaped than its American equivalent by imperial crises and opportunities until the second half of the twentieth century. Then, with the end of the British Empire, increased Commonwealth immigration to Britain, the creation of the United Nations and its encouragement of international conferences on women, white British feminists were obliged to defend their ideas and programme against criticisms made by non-western women, and by British women of colour who owed much to the example of black American activists.

For British women, class rather than race influenced the first collective response to the wrongs of their sex, appearing in the discussions of utopian socialism during the 1820s. And though the claims of socialism did not effectively compete with feminism for the loyalty of discontented women until after the First World War, its pull was growing from the 1890s, as Britain’s global industrial dominance came under threat and the working-class movement gained ground. By that time, American feminists were more class conscious than they had been in the pre-Civil War period, for American class divisions had deepened under the impact of increasing immigration and ill regulated economic growth. However, anxiety about class did not drive the leading American feminists, who continued to believe that labour women⁸ could organise separately from labour men, in the United States and internationally; and who continued to contrast Britain’s inhibiting class system with their own more fluid society. They had a point, but on neither side of the Atlantic did labour women receive the degree of censure for their deficiencies and divisions that white middle-class feminists — affluent, elitist and influential — received for theirs. And on each side of the Atlantic, labour women, like women of colour, generally had the prudence to avoid public criticisms of their men. In assessing the British and American labour movements’ inability to maximise their influence with working women, attention is paid to what the political Left, unions and international bodies offered to women, particularly with regard to work issues, birth control and welfare provision.

The theme of internationalism has been selected because the involvement of American and British women in the internationalising of feminism was great from the first, partly since this was an area in which they had some scope to take the initiative, rather than having to respond to a deeply entrenched feature of the social structure such as race or class. But like those two issues, internationalism proved taxing and divisive. Rivalry quickly erupted between Britain and the United States for the leadership of international organisations, there were disagreements over goals and tactics, and the forces of nationalism proved stubbornly resilient. Moreover, if feminists sensibly used traditional arguments about female qualities to justify a new visibility in world affairs, their aspirations still proved unwelcome to politicians because foreign policy was an overwhelmingly male dominated area. And even on matters to do with peace, where women as mothers might have been thought to have the best chance of establishing their instinctive and legitimate concern, feminists themselves were at odds.

What emerges is the continuity of women’s difficulties. Adversely affected by two world wars and the Great Depression of the 1930s, the American and British feminist movements never enjoyed the support that women’s numbers encouraged them to hope for, and frustration frequently brought personal quarrels and organisational schisms. But the movements also demonstrated women’s agency, and continued to produce co-operative groups and exceptional individuals who could rise above the divisions which feminists both inherited and made.

For all the racial tensions that affected women’s activism, Florynce Kennedy conceded that ‘Some of my favorite people are white … It was the feminist community that got me visible. Most blacks don’t or didn’t know who I am.’⁹ For all the sectarianism that afflicts mature social movements, America’s Florence Luscomb managed to support suffragism, peace advocacy, civil liberties, organised labour and a range of social reforms, and was described at 89 years of age as ‘the very model of a modern revolutionary’ by Time magazine.¹⁰ In Britain, the feminist, journalist, investigator and lecturer, Monica Whately, showed a similar intellectual breadth and zest for campaigning. She was remembered as a ‘very vivid person’ who ‘belonged to every organisation that was going’, and ‘Any case which sought justice and freedom for the oppressed found in her a staunch supporter with courage and integrity’.¹¹ For all their differences over the leadership of interwar internationalism, the American suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt and her British counterpart Margery Corbett Ashby sustained public civility, mutual respect and a long co-operation. American women worked in the British women’s movement, Britons visited the American lecture circuit with frequency and relish, and labour women in Britain and the United States managed warm personal contacts as well as strong disagreements about organisation.

Overall, despite the resentments and problems that race, class and internationalism provoked, they allowed for the emergence of pluralistic feminist movements which fulfilled the needs of two mature and diverse countries without deterring activists from making their crucial claims to sisterhood.¹²

2	The setting, 1880s–1914

The Anglo-American connection

If tackling reform issues at home was difficult enough, labouring in an international movement was enough to try the patience of a saint, and reformers are seldom saintly. Emily Greene Balch, an American academic and activist who worked at Geneva in the 1920s as the head of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, was a thoroughly cosmopolitan woman, regularly visiting English and continental friends and with no illusions about her world. She once mused, ‘If Europeans seem to Americans to find it difficult to believe, too difficult to act, Americans seem to Europeans too naive, impulsive and idealistic, not to say sentimental, exaggerated, unstable, puzzling, incalculable. We are more or less aware of this.’ The American journalist and activist, Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan, who lived in London and worked for the British feminist movement for decades, was similarly struck by the differences between Britain and the United States, believing that one could as well compare ‘a single continuous piece of one material with a crazy quilt’.¹ But neither Balch nor Hunkins-Hallinan despaired of trans-Atlantic co-operative efforts, and nor did their contemporaries.

While my focus is on the forces that eventually put a strain on British and American feminists, on their distinctiveness and on the cultural contrasts between their respective countries, it is vital to grasp that these reformers first emerged out of a sympathetic Anglo-American environment. Until the 1850s, the British and American economies complemented each other, with the United States exchanging its raw materials for capital, labour, technology and manufactured goods from Britain.² There were similarly close links between political radicals and humanitarian reformers, whose letters, articles and visits were fostered by evangelical revivalism and religious nonconformity, a belief in human perfectibility, an admiration for republicanism, and a determination to advance their modernising i...