Not helping all women: How the ERA represents a trend of failing to support women of color
A special report by Kaitlyn Budion
The summer of 2020 marked the resurgence of a reckoning over racial injustice in the United States. It has spread conversations to all avenues of life about how racism affects people of color, and part of that reckoning is the long-running complaint about the ways that broad activist movements have prioritized issues and left Black women and women of color behind.
“The various waves of the feminist movements in the United States have been profoundly transformative,” said Angana Chatterji, research anthropologist and founding co-chair of the Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights Initiative at the Center for Race and Gender at University of California, Berkeley. “Yet, they continue to reflect the deep, pervasive and structural perils and precarities of U.S. racism. The drastic COVID-19-related injustices experienced by Black, Native and other communities of color in 2020, for example, attest to this.”
What is broadly considered the mainstream feminism and women’s rights movements have failed to support women of color and specifically Black women because it doesn’t prioritize the issues most important to them. Instead, the movement has prioritized issues like the Equal Rights Amendment, which does not have an immediate impact on women’s day-to-day lives, a trend that goes back to the suffrage movement and carries on today.
One of the first times the women’s rights movement in the United States refused to prioritize the issues of Black people was during the suffrage movement, when there were disagreements about the best way to give women and Black men the right to vote, said Tamar Carroll, associate professor and chair of the department of history at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The suffrage movement and the abolition movement were closely intertwined before the Civil War but split over who got the right to vote first.
“At the 1869 meeting of the American Equal Rights Association, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued in favor of universal suffrage — so they opposed supporting the 14th and 15th amendments because they enfranchised Black men but not women,” Carroll said. “And they were angry, they felt like the men like Frederick Douglass were deserting them after they had supported the abolitionists cause through the Civil War, so they felt betrayed and angry.”
Many white women at the time expressed anger at the idea that Black men would get to vote before wealthy, educated white women. But the arguments about who gets to vote first, Black men or white women, ignored the presence of Black women completely. And oftentimes, the organizers of the women’s rights movement said they would not focus on issues of race, ignoring that racism and sexism both affect women of color.
The suffrage movement continued to not prioritize Black women as organizers began to court the support of Southern white women. At the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession, in an attempt to not offend Southerners, Alice Paul and other organizers wanted to segregate the parade, said Carroll.
Tamar Carroll is an associate professor and chair of the department of history at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Photo courtesy of Tamar Carroll.
“Paul did this because she didn't want to offend white Southerners, so she asked Black women to march at the back of the parade,” Carroll said. “Famously, Ida B. Wells refused to do that and she walked arm in arm with her fellow white suffragist leaders from Chicago in the Illinois state delegation.”
After the 19th Amendment was passed in 1920, when women were given the right to vote, Black women in the suffrage movement wanted to continue the fight to ensure they too would be able to vote. But organizers like Paul were uninterested in the issue and began to pursue further legislation — the Equal Rights Amendment.
Later, when Wells reached out to Paul for support from women’s rights groups for anti-lynching legislation, she was rebuffed.
Women picketing outside the White House in support of giving women the right to vote in 1917. "Suffragettes" by U.S. Embassy The Hague is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0
“Paul said no, she said, ‘The National Woman's Party is solely focused on women's rights,’ and she devoted all of her efforts to securing the Equal Rights Amendment right up into her death,” Carroll said.
This failure to prioritize Black women continued from the suffrage movement into the battle over the ERA. Katherine Turk, an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina, said that the focus on the ERA led to some Black women creating their own groups for advocacy.
“As the white-led more moderate aspects of the movement start to focus more on the ERA, that does serve to alienate some of the women of color who were trying to work with those white women — and who certainly believed that the ERA was an important goal. But they didn't think it should crowd out all the other issues that matter just as much to them.”
Turk said Aileen Hernandez was a key example of this. Hernandez, an African-American woman, was president of the National Organization for Women in the early 1970s but left over the issue of “the ERA moving to the center of its agenda and pushing out some other forms of activism.”
Black women felt that in order to meaningfully improve their lives they had to focus on gender justice and racial justice. They couldn’t focus on just “women’s issues” and not address race the way white women wanted to.
And that’s part of the problem, said Lori Ginzberg, professor of history and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Pennsylvania State University. To say that the women’s rights movement was just focusing on women’s issues, not race, really meant that they were just focusing on white women.
“To say that you're leaving race aside is to say, I don't have to deal with your issues ‘cause I'm privileged enough not to have to,” Ginzberg said.
The lack of understanding of Black women’s issues continued in the 1970s and the second wave of feminism, and not just around the ERA. Much of the focus at the time was on workplace equality, Turk said, and the idea that if women could just have a fair shot at competing with men, they could be more independent and wouldn’t be stuck at home as housewives.
But that ignored the experiences of Black women who were in the workforce because they had to be, often because their husbands were discriminated against based on their race and were unable to support their families on a single paycheck.
Lori Ginzberg is a professor of history and women's, gender and sexuality studies at Pennsylvania State University. Photo courtesy of Lori Ginzberg.
Not to forget that women of color were often in service jobs and lower-paying jobs; their issue wasn’t in competing with white men. The focus on the workplace also ignored that in order for white women to have careers, they would often have to hire Black women to take over those domestic roles of housework and childcare.
“For the white women who are working through groups like NOW, workplace discrimination against Black men is not a feminist issue from their perspective,” Turk said.
Now more than ever, that perspective is finding an outlet.
A copy of "Hood Feminism" by Mikki Kendall.
Mikki Kendall notes this in her 2020 book “Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women that a Movement Forgot.” She is also the creator of the hashtag #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen intended for people to share experiences of how white women have demanded solidarity from women of color, but don’t offer it back.
“When I launched the hashtag #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, I thought it would largely be a discussion between people impacted by the latest bout of problematic behavior from mainstream white feminists,” Kendall wrote in 2013 in The Guardian. “It was intended to be Twitter shorthand for how often feminists of color are told that the racism they experience ‘isn't a feminist issue.’”
Even as the ERA has been revived in recent years, it hasn’t resonated as much with women of color. In July, Caroline Kitchener wrote an article for The Lily in July, “‘How many women of color have to cry?’: Top feminist organizations are plagued by racism, 20 former staffers say.”
In the same article, Atima Omara, who is Black and worked on various national NOW committees from 2004 to 2009, including the Young Feminist Task Force, told Kitchener that the ERA doesn’t solve all the problems she faces.
Angana Chatterji, research anthropologist and founding co-chair of the Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights Initiative at the Center for Race and Gender at University of California, Berkeley. Photo courtesy of Angana Chatterji.
“You realize that the ERA doesn’t apply to women who look like me,” Omara said. The ERA “doesn’t solve me getting stopped by the police. It doesn’t solve me getting killed in childbirth.”
All of that isn’t to say that Black women didn’t support the suffrage movement, or that they don’t support the ERA. But a central part of the movement has relied on Black women and women of color to support their causes but has not returned that support and has not prioritized them.
Feminist movements need to acknowledge their flaws, Chatterji said in an email interview, and restructure their approach to fix them.
“Similar dynamics have played out in movements related to sexual and gender identity and practice in the U.S., where Black women, Native women, women of color and immigrant women have been marginalized in conceptualizing progressive agendas, advocating for policy change and seeing themselves represented in leadership across the spectrum,” Chatterji said. “We need to be open to our own learning and unlearning and such knowledge needs to be structured into movement building in ways that are compassionate and facilitative of solidarity and equality.”
Of course the issue isn’t just about Black women being included in the movement in general, Ginzberg said, it's about being considered when choosing the agenda. “Often white women are not on the right side, from our point of view, of a lot of these movements,” she said.
“It's not a question about, ‘Oh, we are excluding you, you can't come sit at our table,’” Ginzberg added. “It's that you can come sit at our table but we've already set the places and these are the issues, and these are the manners we're going to use and guess who else was invited, the white supremacists.”