Fading Away

The Just Government League of Maryland marching in the Women’s suffrage parade, March 3, 1913. Photo: Wikipedia.

We know that all social movements wax and wane, gaining wide public recognition and even respect at a certain period and then slowly or rapidly fading away. It may be that the most radical fade most rapidly since they threaten the base of our society.

Still I’m dismayed to see how rapidly the women’s movement is fading, eclipsed by monstrous wars but also by young women’s failure to engage. Now that certain barriers have fallen for privileged young white women, they may feel that the fight has been won, or even that there was never any reason to fight. When they come up against certain brutal facts—the outlawing of abortion, the recent decision by one state court that frozen fertilized female eggs are children—they may notice other forms of discrimination, but by then it may be too late.

I am wondering how the black community felt after the murder of their most prominent leaders: Medgar Evers on June 12, 1963, Malcolm X on February 21, 1965, and King on April 4, 1968. Their community and their activists have carried on; the momentum for social change has even quickened, including such unlikely advances as today’s attempt by Dartmouth College’s sports groups to unionize.

Our early leaders and their followers may have taken comfort from the strength of the women’s movements in the 19th century when they were active. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Carrie Chapman Catt, Susan Anthony and Jane Adams may have felt that the progress they had steered, especially during the battles for suffrage, was too dynamic to die. But one potent factor has limited its effectiveness: so many of us owe our primary emotional allegiance to men—fathers, brothers, husbands, lovers, bosses, sons. We do not lay our hands on the levers of male power for fear of being abandoned, hated, ostracized, unable to survive.

I think it has always been different for African Americans, even as part of the legacy of slavery. Reading Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World The Slaves Made by Eugene Genovese—a book anyone who cares about the issues we’ve inherited must read—I was struck by the way the slaves even on plantations in the deep south organized, rebelled, cooperated, and succeeded in gaining a bit of autonomy even when ruled by savage white masters and overseers. What they learned in servitude has served them well in the limited freedom that has depended on endless struggles after the Civil War.

Slavery, as well as certain African customs, created a degree of equality between men and women, reinforced by the fact that slave women labored in the fields alongside the men. They developed physical strength and self-confidence that made them powerful partners, a development that most white women never undertook. Learning the secret and cunning ways to combat the white owners was invaluable in the Jim Crow Era that followed Reconstruction, and even its horrors did not entirely destroy the experience of working together.

No one would wish labor in the cotton fields on anyone, but as our women leaders might have guessed in their middle-class lives, it is difficult to ensure the survival of a radical movement when its supporters do not share a powerful bond. Complaining about men doesn’t quite do it, nor listening to speeches (when they can be found) nor reading books (ditto). Marching might, especially marching that attracts violent reprisals and jail sentences. Early suffragists on hunger strikes in prison were brutally force-fed. That may be what it takes to create a lasting radical movement.

Sweat, blood and suffering create bonds strong enough to moderate our need to be loved. I wonder if Stanton, Catt, Anthony, or Adams knew that and feared for the future.

And if you don’t know who they were, spend five minutes finding out.

In Women Suffrage Susan B. Anthony Elizabeth Cady Stanton