Racism and The Development of A Theory... An Excerpt

"Efforts to depict Black men as threats to the unifying force of white supremacy politically and the intimate lives of women, both Black and white, were popular throughout the South despite the growing prevalence of educated suffrage and its call to exclude Black women from the ballot...

Louise Newman (1999) has previously written that “white women’s expressions of resentment over the enfranchisement of black men and these women’s subsequent decision to keep the movement clear of “race” questions were part of a larger post-Reconstruction retreat from support of racial justice” (p.5), however, this view does not take into full view the call for violence made to enforce Black male disenfranchisement. At the turn of the 19^th century, white feminists demanded white men to protect the racial order of the South through violence against Black men.

Rebecca Latimer Felton, a Georgian feminist and suffragist argued that giving Black males the right to vote gave Black men a false sense of manhood that would permit them to rape white women. In her 1898 speech to the Georgia Agricultural Society, she explained to the audience of several hundred members that: 

• when you take the negro into your embraces on election day to control his vote and use liquor to befuddle his understanding and make him believe he is a man and your brother…lynchings prevail, because the cause will grow and increase with every election when there is not enough religion in the pulpit to organize a crusade against this sin, nor justice in the court-house to promptly punish the crime, nor manhood enough in the nation to put a sheltering arm about innocence and virtue. If it requires lynching to protect woman's dearest possession from ravening, drunken human beasts, then I say lynch a thousand negroes a week, if it is necessary. (Felton, 1898, p.625). 

This newly enfranchised Black man threatened the future of the American republic. His freedom thwarted the reign of the white race and endangered the safety of the white woman. Black men were believed to be beasts and rape according to Felton was “the brutal lust of these half-civilized gorillas” (Litwack, 1998, p.213).

The brutish nature of Black men was not only used to justify the lynching of Black men in the United States, but also justified the imperial interventions into the darker world to save primitive women from the violence savage men. The influence of social Darwinism among white feminists and ethnologist presumed a linear developmental schema. The position of a civilization was often assessed by the status of its women, so it is not surprising that “one justification for Western colonialism was formulated in terms of protecting primitive women from various forms of social, economic, and sexual mistreatment. For over a century, Westerners had presumed that primitive women were overworked, sexually abused, or otherwise badly treated by men of their cultures” (Newman 1999, p.160).

• While women from the darker races were not thought to be evolved women who could appreciate the need for homes and the evolutionary import of patriarchal order, it was the belief of suffragettes that primitive women need help from the civilized races to fend off the attacks of their savage male counterparts (Newman 1999, Bederman 1995).

The presumed savagery of non-white males legitimized white feminists’ imperial and colonial projects as a progressive endeavor to defend women’s rights and made their presence within burgeoning colonies essential (Jacobs 2009). “Primitive races, lacking the biological capacity to develop racially advanced traits like manliness of character, would require many generations to slowly acquire manliness and pass these civilized capacities on to their offspring” (Bederman 1995, p. 29).

Consequently, there was no hope for patriarchal manhood among savage races which brought with it values of chivalry, sexual restraint, and paternalism to protect the sanctity of womanhood. The salaciousness of primitive man was insatiable and required intervention to introduce civility between men and women outside of Europe."

Curry, T. J. (2022). Feminism as Racist Backlash: Understanding How the Will to Dominate Black Americans Drove the Development of 19 th and 20 th Century Feminist Theory. Edinburgh. https://www.academia.edu/68783870/Feminism_as_Racist_Backlash_Understanding_How_the_Will_to_Dominate_Black_Americans_Drove_the_Development_of_19_th_and_20_th_Century_Feminist_Theory

-Yogabrofessor