Silver-Dollar Stupidity
July 5th, 2008
I know Susan B. Anthony did a lot of great things, but this weekend I found myself wishing that her image didn’t grace our silver dollars. I knew that, like many white feminists of her time, she foolishly saw women’s suffrage and African American suffrage as separate and even competing issues, but I didn’t know the egregiousness of her arguments in support of that view. An 1866 newspaper quotes her as saying in a speech:
“Remember that in slavery the black woman has known nothing of the servitude of the marriage laws of the Northern States. She has lived so far in freedom [EXCUSE ME????????]. . . . But under the new dispensation, with legal marriage established among the black race as among the white race, it subjects the black woman to all the servitude and dependence which the white woman has hitherto suffered in the North.”
Oh. My. I don’t even know where to begin. Lucky black women, not being allowed to marry, often being raped by their masters or other white men, and seeing their children sold away from them. I’m not saying there weren’t big problems and injustices associated with marriage law, but let’s not even try to compare the situations, okay?
I came across the Anthony quote in Jean Fagan Yellin’s biography Harriet Jacobs: A Life. Could we have Harriet Jacobs on a silver dollar, please? Or Sojourner Truth, who advocated for both women’s suffrage and African American suffrage? (By the way, did you know that Sojourner Truth’s first language was Dutch? I think that may be the most fascinating fact I’ve learned all year.)
Entry Filed under: Uncategorized
2 Comments Add your own
1. Mink | July 8th, 2008 at 11:51 am
Yup. We’re just not that good at researching our heroic icons. Your complaint synchs with a recent post on Dawn Eden’s blog about Margaret Sanger (not Dawn’s only post, by any means, on Sanger). Sanger, still championed by advocates of women’s rights for her insistence on the right to birth control, was an avid eugenicist, whose promotion of contraception had an overtly racist agenda. Ironically, Planned Parenthood’s first Margaret Sanger award was given to Martin Luther King Jr. (!!!) Her legacy is awfully confusing, not least because she was herself inconsistent in her beliefs and their expression. I would think that she wouldn’t be a very useful figure to pro-choice organizations, nor to feminists, nor to minority communities. But she is to all. Honestly, do some reading, people…
2. theottery | July 9th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
Ah, the twisted eugenics movement. You know what’s a really interesting read? Angelina Weld Grimke (the African American great-niece of the white abolotionist–now THERE’s an interesting family history) has a short story called “The Closing Door” that was published in The Birth Control Review in the 1910s. From one angle, you can read it as a protest against lynching; but, because the main character turns against having children (because she doesn’t want to bring children into a world where they could be lynched because of the color of their skin), the story could actually end up serving the agenda of the racist eugenicists (anything to keep “those people” from reproducing). The story’s in a collection called The Sleeper Wakes, and it’s fascinating for anyone interested in the cultural history of the period.
Leave a Comment
Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed