Letters to the editor

June 11, 2008

May 29, 2008

The letter writer identified the following as a reponse to Tim Wise's article in lipmagazine

Dear Tim Wise and friends:

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not a gender-over-race person. In fact, you might say that, since I work at a women’s college, I haven’t really had to worry about sexism in my own life. I’ve belonged to WACAN since I first heard about it and done hours and hours of work on anti-racism in a variety of venues, including my daughter’s schools, my college and my Quaker meeting. (I met and enjoyed talking with Elizabeth Gordon several times last year at Friends General Conference.)

But the Hillary thing has really pushed a button for me the way racism usually does. Up until I walked into the voting booth on super Tuesday, I hadn’t even decided for sure who to vote for, but after that, when people started saying Hillary should quit, here’s what came up for me:

-I can’t think of a movie with a happy ending where a couple chooses her career over his.
-Twice in just the last year I have watched/experienced when an older woman with more experience had worked her way up through an organization, was finally the logical person to head an important part of the institution, and instead the group voted for a young, personable male.
-How many (all) revolutions in which women supporters were told their time would come after the revolution, but it never did.
-The sadly frequent times in my life I have said, sure, let’s do it your way, rather than have a drawn out conflict about how to do something.
That paradigm seemed to be playing out again, with race not even a factor. The longer Hillary has hung in there, the more inspiration I have drawn from her – the woman who didn’t agree to step back and let the guy do it for the sake the unity.

People who deal with racism know that the sources of pain run deep and old. But after all, sexism is even older than racism. Here’s just one example that women are probably carrying around in their subconscious. In Sunday’s New York Times an op-ed piece by Debby Applegate included this tid-bit:

But in 1869, [Fredrick] Douglass and [Elizabeth Cady] Stanton were torn apart by the 15th Amendment of the Constitution, which stipulated that the right to vote cannot be denied on the basis of race, color or previous condition of servitude. Gender remained a perfectly legal reason to keep someone off the voter rolls. During the Civil War, many women, including Stanton, had willingly put aside the fight for women’s rights to campaign for the emancipation of the slaves. After the war, they had even stood by patiently when, in 1866, Congress passed the 14th Amendment, defining citizens specifically and solely as “male” — the first use of the word “male” in the Constitution. The politicians soothed the women’s rights advocates by assuring them their turn would come soon. But in 1869, when outraged women demanded to know why they were not included in the right to vote, they were informed by their allies in Congress that public opinion left room for just one minority group to make it through the door of suffrage and that this was “the Negro’s hour.” Stanton felt shocked and betrayed that, once again, women were being left behind while black men advanced. When Douglass reluctantly supported the 15th Amendment as written, Stanton responded with a series of furious attacks, ridiculing the idea of giving the vote to the “lower orders” of men, including blacks, Irish, Germans and Chinese, while native white women were denied it. Her campaign to reject the amendment created a bitter schism in the long alliance of abolitionists and suffragists, and within the suffrage movement.

The writer goes on – as any good historian should – to point out the many differences between then and now. History is a bad lesson-teacher. But she concludes:

Beecher turned out to be right. The 15th Amendment marked the end of the public’s commitment to major social change. Within the decade, the Republican Party had shed its progressive activism to become the party of big business and laissez-faire policy. For women, five decades would pass before the 19th Amendment gave them the vote in 1920. For blacks, the spread of Jim Crow laws would prevent many from exercising their Constitutional rights until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, almost a century later. But history is not destiny. The Douglass-Stanton brouhaha need not be precedent, need not incite Mrs. Clinton’s female supporters to turn against Mr. Obama in anger or, as a vocal minority has already threatened, to cast protest votes for Senator John McCain. Perhaps it is even possible to correct the mistakes of 1869: Senator Obama may have claimed the “historic first” entry point to the White House, but couldn’t Senator Clinton receive the vice presidential nomination, allowing both black and white, male and female, to enter that door together? After all, we’ll all have a say this time around. Of course, we again are hearing the old discouraging response: No, Mrs. Clinton cannot share the ticket because history shows that “the public mind” is too conservative to accept both a black man and a white woman in the seat of power. But if history offers a lesson here, it is not that Americans cannot handle too much change at one time or that we must inch our way, one by one, through the door of equality. Rather, it is that opportunities for genuine change are rare and when they occur we must kick the door off the hinges while we can. It is much harder to pry open the public mind once it has shut itself up again.

These are real hurts: girls and women carry them around all the time. So yes, I do feel like “our time has come” and I no longer feel guilty about it.

While I completely agree that competing “isms” gets us nowhere, you know from the patterns of racism that if it feels like an “ism,” it probably is. If people had called on Obama to quit when it looked like Hillary would pull ahead, it would have been called racism, and would have been. As people like bell hooks have been arguing for many years, however, it is essential to remember “isms” can only be cured together, and sensitivity to both (as well as any other) is required to have real sensitivity to any. The time for women and African-Americans has come. As you yourself say, it shouldn’t be a winner-take-all competition.

Sally MacEwen