Posted: Thu Jan 07, 2010 2:44 am Post subject: 3rd Post-End of Chapter
This part of the chapter was interesting, because it introduced me to figures that I knew less about-namely, Jane Addams, Alice Paul, and Victoria Woodhull. I could not believe that Ida Wells-Barnett was denied the right to march with White women in the parade by Alice Paul. When you look at the parallel between how Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were relegated to the back of the upstairs galley at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. It was virtually an identical situation, but Alice Paul was too worried about securing the Southern voters to care about Wells-Barnett. On pages 52 and 53, I also found the box on Birth Control interesting. I would not have imagined that activism for women's reproductive rights began so early in the twentieth century, or that the term "birth control" was first used in 1914. It is becoming more and more apparent that a major division among women's activists was between the issues that they focused on. Some were more focused on political equalities like suffrage, education, and marriage/property laws, and others were more concerned with social issues like birth control, women's dress, and rejecting common feminine stereotypes and the "cult of domesticity." Was political power a necessary precedent to social changes? What political powers are women lacking today, and what social advantages?
I, like Hanna found the separation which formed between the different factions of women's rights activists to be very interesting. The division which began to form between the younger more radical "feminists" and their older more conservative counterparts underscored the progress that was being made. The fragmentation reflected the fact that as women's voting writes drew near many women began to see that the issue did not stop at suffrage and began to realize the power of female activism. Within this fragmentation one can also observe the beginnings of second wave feminism. Though the issue of women's suffrage is a social one, activism being aimed at voters and politicians to bring change, what begins to appear, though I do not believe it would not take off until some time later, was the second wave feminist idea of encouraging women and men to change their behavior in social matters through non legislative means. Examples of more modern notions were presented by Victoria Woodhull, who supported women's suffrage as well as such recusant notions as free-love.
Alice Paul is so badass. I hope I'm related to her.
That said, I thought this half of the chapter was wonderfully at odds with the former in regards to race relations in the women's movement. In the beginning, white women are very ra-ra towards abolitionism and black rights, but still will not include black women in their own agenda and I agree with Hannah, it isn't fair. This doesn't make sense to me when states like Louisiana are predominantly black and when women like Sojourner Truth are making just as many headlines, I'm assuming, as Victoria Woodhull.
However, I found that NAWSA's catty nature emerged a bit during the latter half of this chapter. Even Elizabeth Cady Stanton's ideas were banished from the same group of which she was formerly president. It's interesting to me that new groups of women's rights activists kept forming because nobody could agree upon a concrete cause. I don't know if he'll see this, but I'd like to ask Hardy what he means when he says the segregation between radical and conservative female activists "underscored the progress that was being made".
Big smile at the end though when they finally passed the nineteenth amendment. Job well done.
The entire suffrage movement made much progress during the 1850's-1900's, but what most interested me was the inevitable problems that also accompanied this success. Hundreds of thousands of women were inspired to join the suffrage movement, leading to the opening of college doors to women, granting women the right to vote in several states, the establishment of the NAWSA, the support of the president to the suffrage movement, and several other huge events. However, the struggle to achieve these things, brought about new problems in need of resolution and added fuel to, specifically, the fire of the war on granting blacks the right to vote. The idea of the "Negro Hour", or the statement that blacks and their movement was currently the main topic of discussion, angered many women involved in the suffrage movement. Elizabeth Stanton, for example, began work with racist George Train and thought it best to "highlight the superiority of the female vote to the uneducated black male" in order to achieve suffrage. Alice Paul, who treasured the votes of Southerners, disallowed blacks to march in the Washington suffrage parade she organized. This all showed that the inequalities of blacks and whites will definitely prove to be a big problem of the feminism movement.
I also found the blurb about birth control interesting, particularly that not only were the women fighting for practical reasons (to reduce the number of children a family has and consequently the financial strain), but also to improve a woman's pleasure. It makes sense of course that women would want that, but it surprised me that was openly provided as one of the reasons to the public. I might have assumed they would have fought using more proper, logical reasoning to convince the public, hoping it would pass so that as a result they could experience more pleasure.
Hardy pointed out the disparity between older activist groups and newer ones, and in general it seemed that the later groups were much more radical and active in their methods, using strategies like picketing and marches as opposed to simply giving speeches. Do people think it was this more aggressive style that finally led to suffrage, or was it more simply the timeline of things (once black men could vote, then women could be focused on)? Do you think changes would have happened (obviously eventually they would have, but in a reasonable time frame could they have) without this newer approach gaining public attention?
reading asha's and lizzy's replies made me think of one last point.
did black men, once they had gained suffrage then go and advocate for women's suffrage? i hope so, because it seems as though almost every woman started out being an abolitionist or activist for former slaves. it was unfair to not allow Ida to march with them, but it would also have sucked if those who had gained suffrage didn't try to then help out the women who had fought for so long for them. and i'm totally not assuming they didn't, i'm saying i HOPE they did, and we just haven't read about it yet or it didn't come up or something.
Not gonna lie, I really like the picture on page 55. I like how the woman seems to be carrying the buckets of water on her shoulders like they represent the pressures and stress that she faces. I don't know about you but I think she looks pretty happy.
Adding on to what Hannah was saying, I found the part about Ida Wells-Barnett really interesting. I thought it was strange that she was allowed to march with the white women, yet had to stand with the black women. If white and black women were allowed to march together, it seems to me that they should have been able to stand together, too. Marching together proves that women of different races and ethnicities are joining together to fight for something they are passionate about, but separating the race groups so clearly seems to take away from the message they are trying to make.
I also found it interesting when on page 44 it said that by including the women in the vote in 1870, the governor thought that the results would vary. Not only does it seem like the governor is using the women to steer the vote in his favored direction, but it also makes it seem like women want the opposite of what men want which is not always true. Sure, it is reasonable to think that women would vote against polygamy, but this leads to assumptions that women will usually vote differently than men.
My questions are: If you were to choose to be on the AERA, AWSA, or NWSA, which would you choose and why? Maybe you wouldn't choose any of those and make a new association?
Also, how do you feel about whatWoodhull said on pg 43?:
"I havve an inalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom I may love, to love as long, or as short a period as I can, to change that love every day if I please." (pg 43)
There's not too much to say here that wasn't said in class, I was surprised by the separation of the groups, though it seemed so obvious after the explanation as to their differences. Woodhull was pretty different from the other women we've read about so far. Her ideas of "free love," really took the whole gender equality to another level. Well, was that about gender equality? At first I though it was talking about like, free to love whoever, like sexual orientation, but it said that she also promoted sex outside of marriage, which is a whole other topic.
I dont want to just keep repeating facts that we all read, so I guess Ill just ask some questions,
If the 20th century movement was more extreme, saying that women are superior to men, why in that time was so much accomplished for the movement?
Was it wrong to give women the right to vote in Wyoming in order to stimulate development of families and communities there? It seems odd for that reason and not the basic rights of all people like women were fighting so hard for.
First off, in response to Heather, i LOVED that quote from Woodhull. While she was a little nutty, I think I loved her. Her mentality was way before her time (maybe more suited for... the 1960's?) and I have no idea from what influences she got her ideas from. But I really liked her, just as I really liked Alice Paul (up until her jerk move with Ida Wells-Barnett). I think I really liked these two women because they are so different from all the other women we've seen so far, they took feminist concepts that DID NOT exist yet and tried to shove them into their own time, literally pushing the movement into the future. While I totally don't want to negate the work that the more.. calm (?) organizations were doing (NWSA, AWSA) because of course that work was invaluable- what I'm more saying is that the less palatable and more aggressive feminists like Woodhull and Paul provided the other half of the first wave of feminism's dialectic. These two faces of feminism needed to be pinned against each other in conflict in order to create an eventual synthesis... or progress in the feminist movement.
(and, not to mention, Olivia as a historian always likes to side with the more radical because that point of view is closer to MY reality... seeing as by the time that I'm looking back, that radical fringe has pushed itself way more into the sphere of modern normalcy... does that make sense to anyone else?)
I was sobered, however, (like the rest of the posts) with the way these pioneer feminists handled the issue of race within their own cause. Yesterday I was so amped about how women's involvement in black suffrage allowed them to realize the injustices their own gender faces, because I though it was a really cool moment of human moral consciousness and empathy. And eventually, human progression. To see that turn around like it did in this reading was really disheartening. For some of these women, it seemed that as soon as they realized their own injustices they became totally self absorbed. When I read how Alice Paul treated Ida Wells-Barnett I found myself writing in the margins: "Where are your priorities?!" And then I realized: I know exactly where her priorities were. They were with white women, and no other group. Be them oppressed or not.
The act of prioritizing different groups' rights is a TOUGH one that I feel like we see countless times through out history, ESPECIALLY in times of big, paradigm-shifting, cultural change. Is it necessary? I really hope not.
After reading the posts, I thought of something else. The more radical feminists like Woodhull and Paul were important because their very methods of protesting against women's inequality demonstrated a rejection of the cult of domesticity. Were hunger strikes, marches, vandalism, and picketing submissive tactics? I think not.
I will try to answer the question that reputedly came up over why was the beginning of the twentieth century more productive for women’s movements. Women, at the begging of the twentieth century, were able to focus themselves into solving just one of their issues. This may not have been what they were aiming for originally but change later one when black men gained the right to vote. The reading talk about how angry women became. They then concentrated on solving this one issue over suffrage and became much more successful. Also around this time woman gained the ability to get higher college educations. I think this was a key factor in overcoming the slow motion of the women’s movement because their tactics became much more sophisticated. The reading shows this clearly when it talks about how at some point women attempted to aim their issues with suffrage directly at the government forcing them to understand women’s arguments. It was an attempt at making women’s struggles more personal by making it the governments fault that their oppression has gotten so out of hand. The picketing, hunger strikes, vandalism and marches that women took part in at the time reinforced this concept.
On a different not and kind of in complete contrast to what I was previously saying, I think that the women’s movement’s new strategy of obtaining suffrage by demanding their superiority to men hindered their forward progress. I know that whenever someone starts of an explanation about something they think by saying that they are superior to me for these reasons, I become defensive and tend to not focus on the validity of their ideas. Because of their huge success in the early 20th century this might not be completely true but it might have been a factor in why at the women’s movement’s parade people reacted so violently.
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