Customer Reviews

White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book analyzes and exposes the many white early feminists and their racism. It is well-written and this professor (a Brown University alumna) has a brilliant career ahead of her, I'm sure. However, this book is going to make a lot of young white feminists feel GUILTY! Many readers may not have the stomach to complete the book. Many may even argue that this discussion has already been stated by women of color for decades and does not need a new book-length analysis. However, racism from white women is part of the history of womanism or Third World feminism. Thus this is an important text. Academics interested in the history of women of color should especially read it.

Several of the people who had been involved in the first wave of women's suffrage, despite having also campaigned against slavery, were also adversely influenced by racial politics of their day.

These subsequent contradictions meant that they sold out an agenda of women's rights to narrowly concentrate on 'white women'. It is a troubling legacy which the feminist movement continues to have problems acknowlleging to this day. Desperately wanting to believe that our work speaks to all women, performing a self-critique to see if we are actually interested in hearing all women inevitably will turn up different results.

There was and remains limited participation because society is not race-neural and feminists have been and are being affected by that. Public recognition that we ourselves are not above the fray (without regressing into white guilt) is a critical step which will produce truly bias-free methodologies.

However, the author fails to address the doccumented prior participation of Ida B. Wells Barnett and Fredrick Douglass (among others), who were African American proponents of suffrage for all women. Their championing of a feminism which would not require 'women of color' to negotiate among race and sex, but instead include all women was selectively overlooked. Where do these individuals fit into both the feminist movement and the larger society? How would the suffrage struggle and subsequent feminist movement have been different if their feminism had been wholly and successfully been implemented would have been interesting questions which were instead bypassed.

In this respect, she commits a crime which is ironically not unlike those whom she is researching. Unless evidence fits her pre-concieved world view, she is not going to give it space. Therefore the book looses some of the weight which it could have otherwise easily could have carried.