Among the trickiest and most central dynamics between angry women is the degree to which they have often been angry at one another, and often for very good reasons, chief among them, the racial, economic, and sexual inequities that have contributed to making solidarity between women so elusive, so difficult, and often so painful.
In January 2017, twelve days before millions of women would gather in Washington, DC, and in cities around the world in furious mass protest, the New York Times ran a front-page story about the anticipated demonstration. It was headlined “Women’s March Opens a Raw Dialogue on Race” and detailed the internal conflicts between women planning to march—or not march—later in the month.
“Many thousands of women are expected to converge on the nation’s capital,” read the first paragraph. “Jennifer Willis no longer plans to be one of them.” Willis, the story explained, was a fifty-year-old wedding minister from South Carolina who had planned to take her daughters to Washington but would no longer be doing so because “she read a post on the Facebook page for the march that made her feel unwelcome because she is white.”
The 1,600-word piece went on to examine the racial anxieties cropping up around the march, whose aims were not simply about addressing gendered inequality, but criminal justice reform, the Middle East conflict, the mistreatment of native populations, environmental racism, and a broader approach to reproductive justice beyond just abortion rights. It was a thrilling, if risky, pushing forward of a conversation, using the moment of mass dissatisfaction as an opportunity to expand the scope of a feminist conversation and call it to account for its previous inequities and omissions.
The Times coverage—written by the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Farah Stockman, who quoted organizer Linda Sarsour as explaining that the contentiousness was by design, that “this was an opportunity to take the conversation to the deep places”—nonetheless zeroed in, via its headline and choice of emphasis, on what it framed as the fragility of the imagined coalition. It described the white South Carolina woman it began with as having been “stung by the tone” of a post by a black activist from Brooklyn, who’d urged “white allies” to do less talking and more listening and reminded white women who were newly awakened to political rage that many other women—women of color—had never had the luxury of not being mad. It was this post that had caused Jennifer Willis to cancel her trip, telling the Times, “We’re supposed to be allies in equal pay, marriage, adoption. Why is it now about [how] ‘white women don’t understand black women’?”
The Times story wondered whether “debates over race . . . reflect deeper questions about the future of progressivism in the age of Trump. Should the march highlight what divides women, or what unites them?”
The irony was that the story itself was making that choice: electing to headline divisions between activists, rather than the possibilities that hundreds of thousands of women and men might move past those divisions and come together in what would turn out to be the biggest single-day protest in America’s history.
The next year, in 2018, as women geared up for a reunion protest—one that would turn out to be bigger, in some American cities, than it had been the year before—the Times again ran a front-page story in anticipation. “One Year After Women’s March, More Activism but Less Unity.”
To point out that an undue amount of attention is regularly paid to the internal conflicts within feminism is not to diminish the seriousness and centrality of those conflicts: they are real, and understanding whence they stem is crucial to understanding the very mechanisms of bias, oppression, and inequality that the women’s movement theoretically aims to dismantle.
In the popular imagination, feminism has since its inception been on the verge of collapse, thanks to the intensity of its very real internal conflicts: divisions over race, class, sexuality, and generational difference, not to mention the flare-ups of personal jealousies and combative power plays. These rifts have often been serious and damaging. But they have not set the women’s movement apart from any other social justice movement, from the civil rights or Black Power or immigration or gay rights or the New Left or socialist movements, all of which have at times been riven by generational, racial, gendered, and class divides, by homophobia, strategic differences, and personal feuds. To some degree, this is the nature of mass activism.
The natural fractiousness of any large political movement or campaign is so universal that it was one of the key elements of America’s revolutionary rhetoric. The nation’s first political cartoon, attributed to Benjamin Franklin, is of the colonies represented as a segmented snake; it accompanied his editorial about the importance of bringing together the “disunited state” into a unified force; the cartoon exhorted colonists to “Join, or Die.” There is also a famous revolutionary-era story about a snowball fight that broke out between militia members from different colonies—men from rural and urban areas, men who dressed differently from one another, some of whom were black, some southern, some northern—as they were amassing an army against the British in Harvard Yard. The snowball fight turned so violent that General George Washington had had to step in and break it up. I was taught this story young, as one that exemplified the best of the United States in its revolutionary moment of birth: an ability to bring diverse people together toward a greater civic, political, and national goal.
As Linda Sarsour told me in 2017 about the reports of internal dissent in the lead-up to the women’s march, “The idea that we were supposed to immediately and seamlessly bring strangers together in a kumbaya march team, when we’re from different backgrounds, have different experiences, religious backgrounds, are from inner cities and suburbs, is crazy.” She was exactly right; that expectation looks positively foolish in light of the nation’s own founding history, which we’re taught as an example of overcoming differences to form a united and victorious revolutionary front.
Yet very few movements—from the amassing of America’s first rebel forces through its civil rights campaigns—have had their squabbles regularly presented as the most notable thing about them, often in advance of, or in place of, acknowledgment of their unifying aims and their improbable achievements. The highlighting of dissent over accomplishment is a way to undermine a movement, and it has everything to do with the structural reality of the lengthy campaign for gender equality.
The women’s movement is a movement not of an oppressed minority, but of a subjugated majority. Majorities, by the very nature of their scale, are bound to include groups with varying—and warring—priorities and goals. By dint of size, a majority has the power over a minority—unless its foundations are eroded. The cheapest way to weaken and undermine a mass movement is to use its differences to divide it, and thus maintain power over it.
But there have been periods in which alliances have formed among women, and between divergent groups, on behalf of marginalized Americans who can see their struggles as interlocked. In the 1830s, for example, seeds of what would later become nation-shaping movements to diminish the grip of white male capitalist power began to germinate together.
Young girls who worked in the Lowell Mills in New England staged their first walkouts, the antecedent for what would become the labor movement; at the same time they were forming one of the country’s first women’s antislavery societies, a recognition of the ways in which oppressions and injustices were linked.81 In 1833, the American Anti-Slavery Society was founded by William Lloyd Garrison, with Frederick Douglass as an active member; in 1835, Garrison would publish a letter written by Angelina Grimké, the daughter of a southern plantation owner, in his abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator. Grimké and her sister Sarah would go on to be leading abolitionists, sympathetic also to the fight for women’s rights, and among the first women in America, along with Maria Stewart, to give speeches to mixed audiences of men and women. It was in the early 1830s that Stewart, the daughter of free blacks from Connecticut, became the first American woman to address mixed-race audiences, and the first black woman to give public lectures on both abolition and women’s rights. In 1837, black and white American women came together for the first of three conferences on ending slavery. The second of those three conventions, held in Philadelphia, posed such a threat that the hall in which it was to be held was burned to the ground. At the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, women attendees—including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott—were barred from speaking, but many met one another for the first time, and together started to put down the roots of the suffrage movement.
In 1848, Frederick Douglass attended the convention at Seneca Falls at which Stanton would draft the Declaration of Sentiments. Of Stanton, Douglass would later say, “She saw more clearly than most of us that the vital point to be made prominent, and the one that included all others, was the ballot, and she bravely said the word.” Douglass would also later claim that “There are few facts in my humble history to which I look back with more satisfaction than to the fact . . . that I was sufficiently enlightened at that early day, and when only a few years from slavery, to support [her] resolution for woman suffrage.”
It seemed there was a possibility that the young nation’s majority, people on whose subjugation and labor the country’s economy and political power were being built, might come together, coalescing around what they understood to be their linked conditions, ready to do battle against the white patriarchal minority power that oppressed them. The fight would be for abolition, for women’s suffrage, for reform of exploitative capitalism.
But a minority power has ways of preserving itself against attack by an allied majority, and in the wake of the Civil War and emancipation of the slaves, when the vote was granted by the American government to black men, but not to women of any color, this extension of patriarchal power managed to sever the cooperative forces. Some of those who were most committed to both abolition and slavery sided with the granting of black men the vote over women; Frederick Douglass believed black men to be in greater need, due to the violent treatment they faced, and because white women already enjoyed proximal political power via their white husbands.
But other activists saw the move to grant citizenship and the vote to black men as a way to strengthen systemic sexism by defining citizenship for the first time—as masculine. “The sons of pilgrims” in Congress, Stanton wrote, were simply “trying to get the irrepressible ‘male citizen’ into our immortal constitution.”82 And the formerly enslaved abolitionist and suffragist Sojourner Truth is reported to have said, “There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women. And if colored men get their rights, and colored women not theirs, the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before.”
Some white suffragists, including Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, livid at having put aside their emphasis on women’s enfranchisement to focus on abolition through the Civil War, and angry at their abolitionist allies for what they understood as political abandonment—were so mad at having to stand back as their allies moved a step forward, that they struck out fiercely, revealing their own deep racism.
Stanton began giving speeches in which she spoke freely of her disdain for the black men she was affronted would now be able to cast votes while white women like herself would not. After years of working toward woman suffrage and abolition, she wrote in 1865, “It becomes a serious question whether we [white women] had better stand aside and see ‘Sambo’ walk into the kingdom first.” Activist forces were further splintered by the strategic pitting of women’s suffrage against black male suffrage, including on state ballot referenda, such as one in Kansas in 1867, and via racist arguments that enfranchising white women, who, it was presumed (not incorrectly) would vote like their white husbands, would negate the new power of black voters, and thus keep power in white hands.
Overriding the pleas of her fellow suffragists, Susan B. Anthony accepted the offer of George Francis Train, a so-called Copperhead Democrat who had opposed abolition, to fund a women’s suffrage publication called The Revolution. Anthony and Stanton toured Kansas with Train, denouncing the Republican Party (which was on the side of black male suffrage) and standing by his side as he made, in the words of historian Andrea Moore Kerr, “demagogic pronouncements about the dangers of black suffrage.”83
Train was using the competing factions as grist for his own racist political platform, pitting the prospects of white women against those of African Americans, both rhetorically—arguing that if African Americans were permitted citizenship and the franchise “we shall see some white woman in a case of Negro rape being tried by twelve Negro jurymen”—and strategically, by offering Anthony the support and economic resources she was desperate for but not getting from her former allies. As Anthony explained at the time about her association with Train: “All there is about him is that he has made it possible for us to establish a paper. If the Devil himself had come up and said ladies I will help you establish a paper I should have said ‘Amen!’ ” In this paper, Anthony and Stanton pushed an ever more racist line of argument, Kerr writes, “making frequent references to the ‘barbarism,’ ‘brute force,’ and ‘tyranny’ of black men.”84
In 1869, during the months after the Fifteenth Amendment had been passed by Congress and activists were working to get it ratified by the states, there was an ugly showdown at the annual gathering of the American Equal Rights Association. Though Train had by then backed away from The Revolution, Anthony and Stanton were still agitating against ratification, while their fellow suffragist and staunch supporter of the Fifteenth Amendment, Lucy Stone, was trying to herd the rest of the suffragist and abolitionist allies into line in support of the Amendment—and of an imagined Sixteenth Amendment that would bring women the vote.
“It is still true today over almost this entire country that no black man or woman finds the same sort of recognition either in public or in private that the white man or woman finds,” Stone had said in a speech, as she worked desperately to allay fears that all of the suffrage movement was opposed to African-American men getting the vote. Stone correctly feared that if Stanton and Anthony’s racist arguments against the Fifteenth Amendment worked to doom its ratification, it would be suffragists who’d be blamed. “It is not true that our movement is opposed to the Negro,” Stone would write anxiously to fellow suffragists. “But it will be very easy to make it so, to the mutual harm of both causes. . . . I feel dreadfully hurt by this new load we have to carry, and there is no need of it.”85
The Fifteenth Amendment would, of course, be ratified. And the fantasized Sixteenth Amendment, which Stone had imagined would give women the vote, would not come to fruition . . . at least not for another fifty years, until it was, in fact, the Nineteenth Amendment. The racial tensions that had riven the women’s movement did not lessen, and suffragists would split into two separate organizations: one headed by Anthony and Stanton, another by Stone. The groups would not be reconciled for another twenty years, and the split would delay the progress of the suffrage movement by decades.
Even the eventual passage and ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920—widely understood as the moment at which “American women” got the right to vote—represented forward motion principally for white women, since black women in the Jim Crow South remained stopped at the polls by taxes, literacy tests, and the threat of lynching. The long-fought victory for women was in fact a victory only for some women, creating resentments that lasted well beyond the additional forty-five years it took to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
To campaign on behalf of just over half the population is by definition an unwieldy enterprise, one that tries to represent fundamentally conflicting interests, divergent perspectives, and people from varied backgrounds who have lots of good reasons to distrust, resent, and disagree with one another. The immensity and diversity of the women’s movement has always been used against it by those who fear its potential power. As Gloria Steinem told me two days before the first Women’s March, “Because it’s a majority movement, it is subject to the same divide-and-conquer tactics that colonial powers used on countries—turning races, classes, and generations against each other” and using as its particular cudgel “the myth that women can’t get along and are our own worst enemies.”
And so, in moments at which it seemed that women might in fact come together in massive and meaningful numbers to voice their anger—as they did in 2017 and again in 2018, from Hawaii to Houston, and from Poland to Antarctica—it was wholly unsurprising that the frame offered to the public for this unsettling and potentially disruptive event would be one of internal tension, rather than of the will to overcome it and gather together in temporary but furious solidarity.
But importantly, the magnification of internecine resentments to diminish the power of insurgent movements isn’t the only tool available to the powerful against the marginal: the powerful minorities also have the power to create the inequities that provoke those resentments to begin with.
White patriarchal minority rule was established by America’s founders when they encoded slavery into our founding documents and built our electoral apparatus around its protection. It was strengthened when they granted white men the franchise and violently guarded that exclusivity for almost a century, ensuring that it was only they who created and controlled the courts, the businesses, the economic systems, who wrote the legislation and created the customs and set the norms on which the country was built. The mechanisms of white male minority rule have been varied: from the denial of equal pay protections to the criminalization of reproductive autonomy and the denial of full health-care options to women, and especially to poor and nonwhite women. From racist housing policy to social safety nets and government-subsidized benefits that have accrued predominantly or exclusively to white Americans, from the enforcement of marital law that left women unable to exert financial or legal independence to the failures of protection against rape, lynching, assault, harassment, and discrimination.
White men have had a nearly exclusive grip on political, economic, social, and sexual power in the United States, despite being only around a third of its population. The way that a minority power protects itself from the potential uprising of a majority is to discourage unification of that majority. And the best way to discourage unification is to split the majority against itself, by offering benefits and protections of power to some, while denying them to others.
And so, some American women have been offered the advantages of white supremacy, advantages that turn on other women’s disadvantages. But even white women’s privileges to some degree have turned on all women’s patriarchal subjugation, and the dependency dynamics that patriarchy creates: Women were historically legally barred from property ownership, educational and professional opportunity, the chance to build their own credit or the ability to control their own reproduction; some of these challenges remain, as does wage inequality that means, simply, that women earn less money than men; these conditions have rendered them dependent on men. And women’s dependence on men has in turn made it in many women’s interests to support policies and parties that protect the economic and political status of the men on whom they depend.
This dynamic applies most specifically to white women, who—as wives, daughters, mothers, sisters, neighbors, employees, colleagues, and friends of white men—have been offered a kind of proximal power: greater access, via their relation to powerful white men, to wealth, jobs, educational opportunities, housing, and health-care options. For white women, this dependency on white men incentivizes a dedication to and protection of white male power, because these women’s advantages are linked so closely to white men having the power to in turn dole out to them.
But the particular form of their subjugation and ensuing dependency also works to divide them from nonwhite women, to whom none of the advantages or protections of this economic or social or political supremacy accrue, and discourages potential alliances between white and nonwhite women who might otherwise rise up together to challenge white male power. This is what Hillary Clinton was trying to describe, in the months after the election, when she, often ham-handedly, spoke of the women, “principally . . . white women,” who faced “tremendous pressure from fathers and husbands and boyfriends and male employers not to vote ‘for the girl.’ ”86
Many of Clinton’s critics, on the right and the left, seized on this analysis as a fundamentally antifeminist one, in which Clinton was ascribing to women a lily-livered lack of intellectual and political self-direction.
But her error was in using the language of individualized relationships and choices (which, not for nothing, probably applied in some cases) when what she was in fact aiming to describe were the architectural, systemic incentives that work to secure white women’s fealty to and investment in the protection of white male power. She was describing how white patriarchy persists in part by making white women dependent on white men, and then ensuring that those women enjoy benefits in exchange for their support of those men’s continued dominance, at the purposeful expense of identification with, connection to, and support of other women—whether those other women are political candidates or simply other marginalized people who would benefit from the diminishment of white male control.
This partially explains the huge partisan divide between married and never-married women, especially white women. Those white women who are or have been most directly connected by marriage to white men are far more likely to vote Republican than their never-married peers. According to a paper published by political scientists Dara Strolovitch, Janelle S. Wong, and Andrew Proctor, who reviewed the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election study numbers on voting patterns, a majority 59 percent of never-married white women voted for Hillary Clinton, compared to the almost reverse majority of married white women, 57 percent, who voted for Donald Trump. Sixty percent of white widows voted for Trump; 56 percent of white women who were separated from husbands voted for Trump; and 49 percent of white divorced women voted for him. In other words, the study concluded, “The more distant” white women are “from the benefits of and investments in traditional heterosexual marriage, the less likely they are to support Republican presidential candidates,” i.e., candidates of the party more likely to support traditional white heteropatriarchy.
It has long been true that some of the most energetic opponents of women’s political advancement have been . . . women. Back in the nineteenth century, anti-suffrage campaigns were led by women, and of course the campaign that defeated the ERA in 1982 was led by a woman, Phyllis Schlafly. This dynamic repeated itself in focus groups leading up to the 2016 election.
Jessica Morales, a left-wing activist who worked for the Clinton campaign, remembered those groups. “In every focus group for two years basically, always white women, some college-educated, but most not, would say things [to us] like, ‘I’m not sure if my husband likes her. He’s gotta like her for me to vote for her.’ ‘It doesn’t really matter to me that she’s the first woman president.’ ‘Is it really that historic?’ A thing that people don’t realize is that we knew that non-college-educated white women were the problem.” Morales believed that these women were the crux. “It’s them basically deciding to be on our side and not be Phyllis Schlafly. And the answer is that of course we lost because these women have never chosen our side, ever. Never, ever, ever.”
But racial advantages are not the only thing the white patriarchy is willing to dole out to divide people. There is also patriarchy itself, the benefits of which have been offered up to men of all races. Though nonwhite voters overwhelmingly chose Clinton over Trump, in all racial categories, more men than women voted for Trump. Only 4 percent of black women voted for Donald Trump, but 13 percent of black men did. According to forecaster Harry Enten, that number inched slightly higher, to 15 percent, for black men who made over $100,000 a year.87 Black men may enjoy, and work to perpetuate, advantages that accrue to their gender, even as they are oppressed because of their race.
The student activist and civil rights leader Diane Nash has recalled how when she was working to found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, “there was a huge problem of good old boys getting together, and I was the only female in the group that was setting up SNCC originally. . . . Later on, in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, black ministers dominated it. There was a great deal of misogyny there . . . it was expected that leadership would be male.”88
Civil rights leaders including Nash, Rosa Parks, Gloria Richardson, Dorothy Height, and Anna Arnold Hedgeman, who’d been charged with drawing thirty thousand white Protestants to attend the 1963 March on Washington, bristled during some of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech that day, frustrated that they’d been discouraged from giving speeches themselves, that they’d been instructed to march with the male leaders’ wives, behind the men. Height would later recall, “I’ve never seen a more immovable force. We could not get women’s participation taken seriously.” What she learned, she’d go on to say, was that if black women “did not demand our rights, we were not going to get them.” And Hedgeman would later admonish, crisply, “The male would be better advised to spend less time mourning the loss of his superiority and more time working in partnership with women.”
As Brittney Cooper has regularly observed, it’s the fact that black women have been offered neither patriarchal nor racial advantage in exchange for support that has enabled their steady and unremitting leadership of the resistance to white patriarchal power in America. “White women and black men both want what white men have—white women want to have corporate power and black men want to be patriarchs. Black women a) know we’re never going to get that and b) don’t want that. We don’t want to wield corporate power and we don’t want to oppress people. That’s why I look to black women as the political future.”
Black women have long been the backbone of our political and progressive past: the strategists and protesters and organizers and volunteers, the women who’ve gotten out the vote and licked the envelopes, pioneered the thinking that led to the revolutions. Yet they’ve been only barely represented in leadership of the political parties they’ve bolstered, their policy priorities have often gone unaddressed and unrecognized; their participation has long been taken for granted. And when white women have caught up to where black women have been for a long time, the work of the black women has often been appropriated, ignored, and uncredited by those with greater economic, cultural, and racial advantage.
In the 1930s, the black Philadelphia lawyer Sadie Alexander wrote extensively about how women’s work outside the home had salutary benefits for black women and their families. But it wasn’t until 1963, when Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, that the argument was understood as revolutionary. Of course, the suburban white women woken by Friedan desperately needed to be woken; Friedan’s address of their isolation and suffocation within the homes of the white men in whom the government had invested so much power and authority would become politically revolutionary precisely because of the mass power of that anesthetized population. Yet her book made no acknowledgment of black women or their very relevant circumstances: that racism and its economic disadvantages meant that the majority of black women in America had always had to work for wages, had never en masse experienced “the problem that has no name.” The asphyxiating ennui of stay-at-home subservience mostly plagued a generation of white women who’d been nudged out of the colleges and off the factory floors into which they’d only recently won entry, and into early married middle-class homes via the very same mechanisms—housing loans and the GI Bill and new highways—that had cut black families off from the resources that might boost them into a middle class. The Feminine Mystique was aimed squarely and exclusively at white women. Yet Friedan was long hailed as “the mother of the movement.”
But when black women push back against the white women who come in and take up a disproportionate amount of space, when their own complaints about race complicate a white women’s movement, it is too often black women who are framed as the ones being divisive. This dynamic was reflected in the coverage of the Women’s March conflicts, in which black women letting white women know that they had not invented political resistance to white patriarchy were viewed as somehow inhospitable.
Part of the problem stems from understanding whiteness as simply normative, central—any challenge to it is disruptive in the same way that challenges to patriarchy are disruptive, insofar as they discomfit the more powerful group. But that echo is lost on too many white women, who have a hard time absorbing the ways that even as they have been marginalized by men, so they themselves have often marginalized nonwhite women.
Alicia Garza described her experience of reading Hillary Clinton’s righteously angry memoir about the 2016 election and being “befuddled” by it. “Yes, women’s anger is not considered to be valid or legitimate,” said Garza. “So in one way she has every fucking right to be mad as shit about the way in which the patriarchy has impacted her aspirations and goals, and even though I disagree with her on a lot of things, she deserves to be seen in her humanity and in her dignity.” But, she went on, “I am livid when I read these excerpts. Because, yes, you get to be in all of your anger. But what I felt very viscerally from her anger was that it wasn’t just [directed] at the men who kept her down, it was also very much [directed] at the people”—including Black Lives Matter activists and criminal justice reformers—“who challenged her around things she absolutely should have been challenged around.”
Saira Rao, a lawyer and editor who lives in Colorado and became so angry in the wake of 2016 that she decided to run for office against her incumbent Democratic congresswoman, Diana DeGette, said that anytime she brings up race or white privilege among her friends, “this particular group of white women fly off the handle.” She said she has had a friend, “a white woman, a liberal feminist, tell me ‘the problem with you is it’s always about race.’ ” Rao said, “I think the reason white women are the way they are is because the system is working for them and because they’re comfortable in their Lululemon and comfortable putting aside their law degrees. So they want us to shut the fuck up because the system is working for them.”
These are the dynamics that Audre Lorde works to describe in “The Uses of Anger,” when she recalls “the most vocal white woman” responding to a week-long forum on black and white women, “ ‘I think I’ve gotten a lot. I feel black women really understand me a lot better now; they have a better idea of where I’m coming from.’ ” This, Lorde points out, is an example of the assumption that “understanding her”—the white woman—“lay at the core of the racist problem.”
Women of color, and specifically black women, are the demographic most likely to see their struggles as intertwined both with other women’s and with black men’s, and to work alongside white women and black men—often pioneering the thinking and doing the labor of organization—central to movements for liberation and equality. Which makes it a terrific injustice that the movements to liberate women and African Americans have so often been understood as having been led by white women and black men. They are understood this way because white supremacy and patriarchy permit white women and black men greater access to money, and more proximity to the media that covers social movements and the politicians who respond to them, than black women have.
So it should be no wonder that when white women decided to participate in a protest against Donald Trump, after an election in which white women’s willingness to protect white male power by electing an openly racist and misogynistic incompetent with authoritarian tendencies had been laid bare, black women would be anxious to explain that the white women newly awakened to rage were just that: newly awakened, and might have something to learn.
The post-2016 moment offers a chance for white women to be awakened to the many reasons that they should be angry. But crucially—urgently—the opportunity is not simply to be angry on their own behalf, but also at the injustices faced by other women, women who experience those injustices in part thanks to the very mechanisms that protect and enrich those white women. And in order for a new white wokeness to be integrated effectively into a contemporary movement, it must not take it over; there must be acknowledgment that white women are late to the party.
“I have started to tell people when I do talks that there has been no movement ever in history that hasn’t been messy or that hasn’t had issues internally,” said Alicia Garza. “That is a characteristic of human behavior and human relationships. The question for us is: are we prepared to try and be the first movement in history that learns how to work through that anger? To not get rid of it, not suppress it, but learn how to get through it together for the sake of what is on the other side? And I think that is what our core challenge is in this moment.”
“Contentious dialogue is by design,” Linda Sarsour told me before the Women’s March. “As women of color who came into this effort, we came in not only to mobilize and organize, but also to educate, to argue that we can’t talk about women’s rights, about reproductive rights, about equal pay, without also talking about race and class.” Organizers, Sarsour said, “are actually okay with people being offended. We are hoping the conversation continues and that we can move into a different place and focus on the way we’re coming together nonetheless.”
There is indeed an argument that the women’s movement has survived over centuries not in spite of but because of its cacophony: because those who have pushed the movement from the inside, forcing it to grow and change and be better—even when they haven’t always agreed on what better meant—have helped it to meet the shifting forms and expressions of inequity from era to era.
And whatever the tensions in advance of the Women’s March, it did turn out to be the largest single-day demonstration in United States history. Millions of women, many of them white, many of them new to activism, drove and walked and took trains and planes to come together under banners and alongside women who’d long been fighting for black lives and indigenous rights and better health care and fairer wages and not just for reproductive rights but for reproductive justice that takes into account racial and economic inequities. An iconic photo from that march showed a sign reading “I’ll see you nice white ladies at the next #BlackLivesMatter march, right?” A lot of white women have seen that sign, and at least some of them have been reckoning with its troubling, and accurate, premise.
In the summer of 2017, after white supremacists marched in Boston as a follow-up to their torchlight brigade in Charlottesville, a massive counterprotest was held—in Boston, a city with a deep, old strain of racist white supremacy. That march was dominated by a fair number of those nice white ladies. When the Women’s March held its 2017 convention in Detroit, the session called “Confronting White Womanhood,” billed as being “designed for white women committed to being part of an intersectional feminist movement to unpack the ways white women uphold and benefit from white supremacy,” had a line out the door. It was so oversubscribed that they had to hold it twice, and on the second day, they had to move it to a space that could hold five hundred.89
In 2018, it was a white actress, Ashley Judd, who first used the word “intersectionality”—in reference to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersecting forms of bias and how they shape the differing experiences and perspectives of oppression—on an Oscar stage. In the summer of 2018, when six hundred women took over the central lobby of the Senate’s Hart office building, wrapping themselves in foil blankets and sitting on the floor, arms locked protesting immigration policy, the majority of them looked to be white; most of them were arrested. The next week, after Nancy Pelosi rebuked Maxine Waters for encouraging angry protest and failed to defend her against the implicit threat made against her by Donald Trump, some white women wrote an open letter. “When you attack a Black woman for speaking out about injustice, and when you call for ‘civility’ in the face of blatant racism,” it read in part, “you invoke a long history of white supremacist power . . . To our great discredit, white women continue to act far too often in ways that support white supremacy, even when it is to our detriment . . . when you chide Representative Waters for bravely and passionately speaking up for the most marginalized, you’re on the wrong side of history.” Within a week, more than six thousand women had signed the letter.
It seems possible that we are witnessing a large-scale civic and social education. That in the wake of Trump’s election millions of previously somnambulant Americans have been provoked, in their shock and panic, to evolution. Some of them decided to learn: about local and state elections, about the way that government works, about policy, and about what it means that racism, sexism, and economic inequality are systemic; some began to see how these issues are linked in ways that go beyond academic jargon.
Kat Calvin, whose organization, Spread the Vote, aims to help voters get their voter IDs in states with restrictive laws, has noted with surprise that while black women turn out in higher numbers to vote, “the women who make up resistance volunteers and run resistance organizations are actually an incredibly diverse mix. It’s been amazing to see. I’m a black woman who runs a resistance organization and I’m pretty shocked every day.” A majority of her organization’s volunteers, Calvin said, “are white women who are going to homeless shelters every week, driving people they have never met and wouldn’t normally speak to all over town, and [they] are really putting their hearts into it. It’s kind of amazing.”90
“Look, grandmothers were knitting something called a pussy hat,” marveled Jessica Morales of the Women’s March. “And they cherish it like it’s a keepsake. And when you went on social media there was the Native Women’s Caucus, who looked dope as hell, and they were singing next to the domestic workers, who had their red shirts on, and English is their second language and they all make about $11,000 a year, and they’re standing next to this rich-ass lady who has a sign about her vagina. And you think, you know: America!”
“There was something about the Women’s March that shook me to my core,” says Alicia Garza. “Because this regime change is unlike anything we’ve ever seen in my lifetime. Not even in the lifetime of my parents. And that to me seemed more important than anything else.” Garza acknowledged that many of her peers feel differently, that their communities’ suffering has been steady and is not materially worse now. But she feels the key difference is that the democracy is dismantling itself. “So the notion that we shouldn’t try to figure out how to build a movement that is bigger than the people who already agree with us seems like a death warrant,” she said.
But, she hastened to add, “That does not mean that you don’t continue to hold people accountable. It is not my job to make white women less racist; that is the job of other white women. And I will absolutely hold white women accountable every step of the way. But at the same time, when somebody says ‘I want to learn,’ I want to figure it out.”
As Morales says, “I like to play chess, not checkers. The checkers part of me is like, ‘Look at all these white ladies. . . . Where were you?’ But honestly, I don’t want to be a part of a movement that demands that you flagellate yourself to prove you’re real.” And so, she said, she’s trying to cultivate a different approach: “Welcome. We really need you, because even if every person of color woke the fuck up and was like La raza! that’s only 38 percent of America. And y’all control the banks, the businesses, you’re the head of all the entertainment companies. So let’s go, we need you.”
This isn’t, of course, satisfactory or reparatory. Asking nonwhite activists to grade newly hatched white protesters on a forgiving curve is itself unfair. But it’s also part of the project if we want to move forward, and in fact leverage that proximal power enjoyed by white women—who can draw media attention, who have more access to political power, without whom we lose elections to disastrous effect—and use that power as a cudgel against the minority of white men who have had everyone in their grip.
Garza said that she’s been thinking a lot about Lorde’s “Uses of Anger.” “Lorde projects a vision,” she said. “What if we could be in anger with accountability? Yeah girl, you get to be mad as shit that all of those things happened, but also where are the places in which you were liable for the anger of others? It’s a both approach and not an either-or.”
“For black women and white women to face one another’s angers without denial or immobility or silence or guilt is in itself a heretical and generative idea,” wrote Lorde, arguing that the honest expression of anger between women of different races is necessary if coalition building is ever going to happen. “It implies peers meeting upon a common basis to examine difference[s], and to alter those distortions which history has created around our difference. For it is those distortions which separate us. And we must ask ourselves: Who profits from all this?” The angers between women, Lorde argued, “can transform difference[s] through insight into power. For anger between peers births change, not destruction, and the discomfort and sense of loss it often causes is not fatal, but a sign of growth.”
Garza’s still wrestling with it. “For me, my anger at white women for excluding women of color, and black women specifically, for generations is still very palpable. That hasn’t changed. What has changed is that I understand that the coalition that is going to save us has to be much bigger than what it is. I want people to get free. I’m mad as hell about a whole bunch of things, every single day I’m mad inside, seething right beneath the surface. But I want to be free more than I want to be mad. And I want to work with people who also want to be free more than they want to be mad, because maybe we will actually get to something that makes sense.”
On the day that Frederick Douglass died in 1895, he had spent the morning with Susan B. Anthony at a meeting of suffragists. In fact, he’d had such a good time that he had been in the midst of telling his wife about the meeting when he’d fallen to his knees, hands clasped, and his wife had simply believed that his pose was one of narrative enthusiasm, not realizing that he was in fact dying.
“It is a singular fact,” the New York Times reported in Douglass’s obituary, “that the very last hours of his life were given in attention to one of the principles to which he has devoted his energies since his escape from slavery. . . . Mr. Douglass was a regularly enrolled member of the National Woman Suffrage Association, and had always attended its conventions.” The obituary noted that his companion at the suffrage meeting that day was “Miss Anthony, his lifelong friend,” and that when “Miss Susan B. Anthony heard of Mr. Douglass’s death, at the evening session of the council, she was very much affected. Miss Anthony has a wonderful control over her feelings, but tonight, she could not conceal her emotion.”91
The racism that had riven the women’s movement had by no means abated, nor would it anytime soon; twenty years later, one of the next generation’s white suffrage leaders, Alice Paul, would try unsuccessfully to force her elder, the black suffragist and anti-lynching leader Ida B. Wells, not to walk with her state’s delegation in the enormous 1913 suffrage march on Washington, DC, but instead to march with the rest of the black women suffragists where they’d been told to position themselves: behind all the white women. And the year that he died Anthony had asked Douglass not to appear at a suffrage convention in the South, because she was trying to strategically win white women to the cause. But neither did women of any race have the vote, nearly six decades after the first meetings of the black and white women joining to push for abolition, more than forty years after Douglass had joined Stanton at Seneca Falls.
Frederick Douglass was seventy-eight at his death; Susan B. Anthony would die eleven years later at eighty-six. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had turned to such baldly racist rhetoric in her anger at the inclusion of black men in the franchise before she herself had won the vote, was seventy-nine at the time of Douglass’s death and would live another seven years. Near the end of his life, Douglass would observe of their linked battles, “We should all see the folly and madness of attempting to accomplish with a part what could only be done with the united strength of the whole.”92
None of the three, of course, would live to see the passage and ratification of the Ninteenth Amendment, much less conceive of the Voting Rights Act. In fact, only one woman who attended the Seneca Falls convention would survive long enough to cast a ballot after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. These struggles, and the internal dissent they engender, have the power to last longer than any of us, even those who have given lifetimes to the fights, both external and internal. But every once in a while, in the long, conjoined fight for liberation and equality, there is a rare opportunity to unite—if never in perfect alignment—the whole.