[Marxism] Stephanie Coontz on the Clinton-Obama rivalry

[Louis Proyect]

http://hnn.us/articles/48801.html
3-31-08
When Women and Blacks Fight to Get First in Line They Both Suffer
By Stephanie Coontz

Ms. Coontz, the director of public education for the Council on 
Contemporary Families, is the author of Marriage, a History: From 
Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. A second and 
expanded edition of her book, American Families: A Multicultural Reader, 
was published in March.

One of the recurring undercurrents in arguments over who deserves to win 
this historic Democratic Party primary race has been the question of 
which group needs advancement more – blacks or women. Gloria Steinem has 
argued that voting for a woman is critical, because sexism is still 
taken less seriously than racism. A female Obama supporter recently 
countered in Time that race must trump gender, because as long as 
African-Americans remain so disadvantaged in income, health care, and 
education, electing a black man is “a matter of life and death.” Talk 
show callers argue over which represents worse discrimination: the fact 
that men can raise a sign at a Hillary Clinton rally saying "Iron My 
Shirt" without facing mass outrage or that rightwing Christians are 
forwarding messages chain messages saying that Barack Obama is a Muslim.

This isn't the first time progressives have debated each other over 
whether a black man or a white woman needs electoral power more -- and 
it is a debate that serves nobody's interests except those who don't 
think EITHER racism or sexism needs addressing.

Prior to the Civil War, black abolitionists and white women rights’ 
activists were strong allies who anticipated that a victory for either 
cause would be a victory for the other. In 1839, more than 14,000 women 
signed a petition to the Massachusetts legislature demanding the repeal 
of laws that discriminated against Blacks and prohibited interracial 
marriage. Feminist and abolitionist Abby Kelley wrote: “We have good 
cause to be grateful to the slave for the benefit we have received to 
ourselves in working for him. In striving to strike his irons off, we 
found most surely, that we were manacled ourselves.”

African-American abolitionists returned the sentiment. Former slave 
Frederick Douglass was a vigorous defender of women’s rights. ‘Right is 
of no sex,” declared the first issue of his abolitionist newspaper, the 
North Star, in December 1847. The black abolitionist leader Francies 
Maria Steward insisted that the struggles for racial and sexual equality 
were inextricably intertwined.

But after the Civil War, in 1866, Republicans proposed the Fourteenth 
Amendment, penalizing any state that denied suffrage to its male 
citizens, and in 1868, the Fifteenth Amendment, which forbade states 
from denying suffrage “on account of race, color, or previous condition 
of servitude.” Senator Charles Sumner later wrote that in drafting the 
Fourteenth Amendment, he had filled nineteen pages in an attempt to 
avoid using the word male, but his effort came to naught. Many northern 
Republicans were willing to tolerate Black men voting, which would only 
minimally affect their districts, but not women. In response, southern 
Democrats suddenly began to support woman suffrage, but only insofar as 
it could be used to defeat black male suffrage.

Originally, abolitionists and feminists had opposed separating the issue 
of Negro suffrage and female suffrage, but now they faced a difficult 
dilemma. Should they support black male suffrage, in Frederick 
Douglass’s words, “as the culmination of one-half of our demands,” or 
should they, as Sojourner Truth urged, press for universal suffrage 
“while things are stirring; because if we wait till it is still, it will 
take a great while to get it going again”?

There were eloquent arguments and honest tactical differences on both 
sides. But but in arguing for their positions, some individuals utilized 
prejudices that would seriously hamper future unity. Douglass wrote that 
female suffrage was not urgent, because “woman has a thousand ways to 
attach herself to the governing power of the land and already exerts an 
honorable influence on the course of legislation.” Elizabeth Cady 
Stanton retorted that women ought not to “stand aside and see ‘Sambo’ 
walk into the kingdom first.” And Susan B. Anthony suggested that “if 
you will not give the whole load of suffrage to the entire people, give 
it to the most intelligent first.... Let the question of woman be 
brought up first and that of the negro last.”

The self-defeating nature of these attempts to prove that one group 
“deserved” more consideration than the other was demonstrated in Kansas 
in 1867, when the Republican legislature proposed two separate 
amendments to the Constitution, one for woman suffrage and one for Negro 
suffrage. Originally, the legislature urged a vote for both. As the 
campaign progressed, however, the Republican leadership took the 
position that both measures could not pass, and actively worked against 
female suffrage. In retaliation, Stanton and Anthony accepted the 
support of a notorious racist, George Francis Train, publishing his 
anti-Negro comments in their pro-woman suffrage paper. In the end, both 
measures were defeated, and it took twenty years to repair the breach 
between the leaders of each side of the debate -- twenty years of 
stagnation for both causes.

Neither Obama nor Clinton has maintained that women or African-Americans 
are less worthy of advancement, but when their supporters suggest that 
one group “needs” the presidency more, they resort to a divisive tactic 
that has historically backfired against everyone who struggles for 
equality and social justice. This was not just true of the woman 
suffrage and black suffrage movements of the 19th century. The same 
divisiveness bedeviled the struggle of workers for a living wage and the 
40-hour work week. When white working-class men urged the exclusion of 
blacks and women from jobs and union membership, they weakened their own 
position and opened the door for these groups to be used to break 
strikes and oppose union organizing efforts.

History clearly shows that the advancement of one group need not and 
should not come at the expense of another. We would do well to recall 
the nineteenth-century black abolitionist Charles Remond’s plea for 
unity between supporters of woman suffrage and Negro suffrage. “Do not 
moral principles, like water,” he asked, “seek a common level?”