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Although Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and their colleagues on the paper made important contributions to the cause of working women, they never really accepted the principle of trade unionism. As they had been previously unwilling to concede that Black Liberation might claim momentary priority over their own interests as white women, they did not fully embrace the fundamental principles of unity and class solidarity, without which the labor movement would remain powerless. In the eyes of the suffragists, “woman” was the ultimate test—if the cause of woman could be furthered, it was not wrong for women to function as scabs when male workers in their trade were on strike. Susan B. Anthony was excluded from the 1869 convention of the National Labor Union because she had urged women printers to go to work as scabs.9 In defending herself at this convention, Anthony proclaimed that
… men have great wrongs in the world between the existence of labor and capital, but these wrongs as compared to the wrongs of women, in whose faces the doors of the trades and vocations are slammed shut, are not as a grain of sand on the sea shore.
The great distinctive advantage possessed by the workingmen of this republic is that the son of the humblest citizen, black or white, has equal chances with the son of the richest in the land.
Susan B. Anthony would never have made such a statement if she had familiarized herself with the realities of working-class families. As working women knew all too well, their fathers, brothers, husbands and sons who exercised the right to vote continued to be miserably exploited by their wealthy employers. Political equality did not open the door to economic equality.
Early in her career as a women’s rights leader, Susan B. Anthony concluded that the ballot contained the real secret of women’s emancipation, and that sexism itself was far more oppressive than class inequality and racism. In Anthony’s eyes, “(T)he most odious oligarchy ever established on the face of the globe” was the rule of men over women.
An oligarchy of wealth, where the rich govern the poor; an oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant; or even an oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of sex which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every household; which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects—carries discord and rebellion into every home of the nation.
Anthony’s staunchly feminist position was also a staunch reflection of bourgeois ideology. And it was probably because of the ideology’s blinding powers that she failed to realize that working-class women and Black women alike were fundamentally linked to their men by the class exploitation and racist oppression which did not discriminate between the sexes. While their men’s sexist behavior definitely needed to be challenged, the real enemy—their common enemy—was the boss, the capitalist, or whoever was responsible for the miserable wages and unbearable working conditions and for racist and sexist discrimination on the job.
lol, dis bitch
Now, so Leonora O’Reilly and her working-class sisters proclaimed, they were going to fight for the ballot—and indeed they would use it as a weapon to remove all those legislators from office whose loyalties were with big business. Working-class women demanded the right to suffrage as an arm to assist them in the ongoing class struggle. This new perspective within the campaign for woman suffrage bore witness to the rising influence of the socialist movement. Indeed, women socialists brought a new energy into the suffrage movement and defended the vision of struggle born of the experiences of their working-class sisters.
With the emancipation of the slaves, Black people no longer possessed a market value for the former slaveholders, and “… the lynching industry was revolutionized.”33 When Ida B. Wells researched her first pamphlet against lynching, published in 1895 under the title A Red Record, she calculated that over ten thousand lynchings had taken place between 1865 and 1895.
[...]
In connection with these lynchings and their countless barbarities, the myth of the Black rapist was conjured up. It could only acquire its terrible powers pf persuasion within the irrational world of racist ideology. However irrational the myth may be, it was not a spontaneous aberration. On the contrary, the myth of the Black rapist was a distinctly political invention. As Frederick Douglass points out, Black men were not indiscriminately labeled as rapists during slavery. Throughout the entire Civil War, in fact, not a single Black man was publicly accused of raping a white woman. If Black men possessed an animalistic urge to rape, argued Douglass, this alleged rape instinct would have certainly been activated when white women were left unprotected by their men who were fighting in the Confederate Army.
damn
Working-class men, whatever their color, can be motivated to rape by the belief that their maleness accords them the privilege to dominate women. Yet since they do not possess the social or economic authority—unless it is a white man raping a woman of color—guaranteeing them immunity from prosecution, the incentive is not nearly as powerful as it is for the men of the capitalist class. When working-class men accept the invitation to rape extended by the ideology of male supremacy, they are accepting a bribe, an illusory compensation for their powerlessness.
The class structure of capitalism encourages men who wield power in the economic and political realm to become routine agents of sexual exploitation. The present rape epidemic occurs at a time when the capitalist class is furiously reasserting its authority in face of global and internal challenges. Both racism and sexism, central to its domestic strategy of increased economic exploitation, are receiving unprecedented encouragement. It is not a mere coincidence that as the incidence of rape has arisen, the position of women workers has visibly worsened. So severe are women’s economic losses that their wages in relationship to men are lower than they were a decade ago. The proliferation of sexual violence is the brutal face of a generalized intensification of the sexism which necessarily accompanies this economic assault.
damn what a nice turn of phrase
For Black women today and for all their working-class sisters, the notion that the burden of housework and child care can be shifted from their shoulders to the society contains one of the radical secrets of women’s liberation. Child care should be socialized, meal preparation should be socialized, housework should be industrialized—and all these services should be readily accessible to working-class people.
i feel like this part is undertheorized. what exactly does 'society' mean here. i dont disagree with it necessarily but this whole chapter is kinda superficial
[...] Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. [...]
god this is so good
You arrive punctually at the university, you pick your way past the young men and girls sitting on the steps, you wander bewildered among those austere walls which students' hands have arabesqued with outsize capital writing and detailed graffiti, just as the cavemen felt the need to decorate the cold walls of their caves to become masters of the tormenting mineral alienness, to make them familiar, empty them into their own inner space, annex them to the physical reality of living. Reader, we are not sufficiently acquainted for me to know whether you move with indifferent assurance in a university or whether old traumas or pondered choices make a universe of pupils and teachers seem a nightmare to your sensitive and sensible soul. In any case, nobody knows the department you are looking for, they send you from the basement to the fifth floor, each door you open is the wrong one, you withdraw in confusion, you seem to be lost in the book with white pages, unable to get out of it.
Monday. Today I saw a hand thrust out of a window of the prison, toward the sea. I was walking on the seawall of the port, as is my habit, until I was just below the old fortress. The fortress is entirely enclosed by its oblique walls; the windows, protected by double or triple grilles, seem blind. Even knowing that prisoners are confined in there, I have always looked on the fortress as an element of inert nature, of the mineral kingdom. Therefore the appearance of the hand amazed me, as if it had emerged from the cliff. The hand was in an unnatural position; I suppose the windows are set high in the cells and cut out of the wall; the prisoner must have performed an acrobat's feat—or, rather, a contortionist's—to get his arm through grille after grille, to wave his hand in the free air. It was not a prisoner's signal to me, or to anyone else; at any rate I did not take it as such; indeed, then and there I did not think of the prisoners at all; I must say that the hand seemed white and slender to me, a hand not unlike my own, in which nothing suggested the roughness one would expect in a convict. For me it was like a sign coming from the stone: the stone wanted to inform me that our substance was common, and therefore something of what constitutes my person would remain, would not be lost with the end of the world; a communication will still be possible in the desert bereft of life, bereft of my life and all memory of me. I am telling the first impressions I noted, which are the ones that count.
ugh i love this