Dr. Sara DiazWGST 202: Gender, Difference, and PowerGonzaga University

Introduction

Caution: Living Native Culture

•Native cultures are living breathing and MODERN.

•Native values persist and continue to exist as “American” values today.

Response Question

What does Paula Gunn Allen say about “the red roots of white feminism?”

What feminist ideas does she mention that have Native American antecedents?

Reading Questions - Allen

Paula Gunn Allen•What elements of Native cultures does

Gunn Allen say have been incorporated into dominant American culture?• In what ways have the gynocratic

indigenous cultures influenced white/Western feminism?

FIRST WAVE FEMINIST MOVEMENT

Precursors to the Women’s Movement

• 19th Century -- women using the language of political action and collective political experience • The Temperance movement • The Abolition movement• political organizing skills• foundation to suffrage movement.• growing acknowledgement of women as

political beings

First Wave Feminist Movement: 1848

• Seneca Falls Convention • Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott• "We hold these truths be self evident that all men

and women are created equal ...."• Both men and women in attendance• History says no Black men or women in

attendance• In 1850 meeting held in Ohio • Sojourner Truth in attendance

• Appeal of Suffrage Movement to both White and African American women

Seneca Falls

•What does the “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions” argue had been denied women?•What did the suffragists want?

National Woman Suffrage Association

• Formed by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1869• Prior to its initiation members organized against 14

(citizenship) and 15 (suffrage).• Encouraged women to vote anyway• Goal was women’s suffrage above all• Also advocated free contract, making marriage a

voluntary agreement that would be dissolvable at will• Advocated birth control• Work for constitutional amendment

Susan B. Anthony, an Abolitionist• “Garrision” Abolitionist• More hard line abolitionist than Lincoln• "No compromise” with slaveholders --

unconditional emancipation.• Temperance, abolition, and women’s

rights.• Elizabeth Cady Stanton never made

abolition central to her feminism

American Woman Suffrage Association

• Formed by Lucy Stone in 1869•More moderate group than NWSA• Open to men and women•Worked instead on local legislatures to

obtain women suffrage

NWSA + AWSA = NAWSA

• United in 1890 for "Expediency“• excluded black women from suffrage in order to

appeal to Southern legislators.• Concern that the US would no longer be fundamentally a

white nation "White nativism"• in Theodore Roosevelt’s 1906 annual message to

Congress, he chastised middle-class white women for their "willful sterility" … "The one sin for which the penalty is national death, race death.“• Intermarriage and low white birth rates were considered

“race suicide”

National Association of Colored Women

•Black women worked in AWSA and NWSA• organizations didn’t support their

political goals•Worked for suffrage AND “Racial

Uplift”•Against NAWSA “expediency”

strategies

The Vote

• By 1917 (end of WWI) renewed energy for Amendment• Women of all races working for passage• 1919 bill passes House but not Senate• NAWSA floats the expediency idea again, but

NACW organized against it.• Black women joined NAWSA to throw out

"expedience" from the NAWSA agenda and were successful!

19th Amendment

• Summer of 1920 the 19th Amendment is ratified.•Women vote in first presidential election

the following November• Warren Harding v. James

SECOND WAVE FEMINIST MOVEMENT

The Feminine Mystique

• No large scale feminist organizing between 1920-1960s• Feminine Mystique-Betty Friedan• Home and family seen as private realm, not a

politically significant realm• White, upper-middle class college-educated

women• expectation to stay at home and raise families

• Friedan called it “The problem with no name”

Critiques of the Mystique

• Ignored white working-class and women of color’s labor force participation• Who should maintain the home and at what

wage?• Many working women wanted the economic

ability to remain home with their children• Didn't contend with the kind of work available

even to educated white women (secretarial, clerical, low paying, unstable, part-time)

Racism & Classism in the 2nd Wave

• Abortion rights focused instead of reproductive freedom • Alienated women who had histories of forced

sterilization or forced abortion • Was divisive for women who didn't believe in abortion.

• Books about "women" that include no specific references to women of color.• Conferences on “women” that include no papers by

women of color.• Little awareness of economic constraints.• Universalization of values.

Commonalities between the 1st 2nd Waves

• Assumptions of women's commonality within a patriarchal system• Unexamined race and class privilege•Willingness on the part of white women to

abandon women of color for political expediency or simplicity of analysis• Over-simplicity of analysis/theory

Readings for Wednesday

K&OR 3: Combahee River Collective - A Black Feminist Statement, p. 27

K&OR 4: Becky Thompson - Multiracial Feminism: Recasting the Chronology, p. 33