Born out of struggle
Anti-slavery movement & women's rights
By Leslie Feinberg
As the calendar page turns to March, some
television programming, print media features, corporate and
bank merchandizing campaigns, low-level government bodies, and
high school, college and university events will publicly
acknowledge Women's History Month.
Most of these official recognitions of Women's History Month
focus on women winning the right to vote--an important
democratic demand for which women of all nationalities on this
continent fought, and fought hard.
Particularly in an election year, lip service to women's
lives and the economic and social burdens they carry will
conclude that the lesson is that voting in and of itself is the
path to justice and freedom.
The irony is lost: Suffrage in this country wasn't won by
voting on the political representatives of the male-dominated
capitalist or slave-owning classes. It was the protracted and
fierce independent political struggle over many generations by
women--Black, white, Latina and Indigenous--that ultimately
wrested that democratic right from the patriarchs of wealth and
property.
This important concession of a bourgeois democratic right
was part of a larger struggle for women's rights that began in
the mid-1800s on this continent with the demand for Dress
Reform and widening of the social and economic rights of all
women.
Whether by omission or distortion, the bourgeois versions of
this chapter in women's history skew the truth: that every rise
and fall of these social waves that rose up to loosen the
whale-boned cinching of some women's lives bore direct relation
to its degree of unity with the liberation struggles of
oppressed nationalities held in economic and military bondage
by what is today the United States, both inside and outside its
borders.
In fact, the first vocalizations of women's demands in this
country arose out of the rising collective cry to abolish the
economic tyranny of chattel slavery that chained African women
and men in the South.
Breaking the shackles of slavery
Resistance to enslavement began immediately with the
development of the Atlantic slave trade that kidnapped tens of
millions of African people to the Americas as brutally forced,
unpaid laborers. Uprisings rocked ships within sight of the
shores of the African continent, on vessels in the middle of
the ocean--and on plantations in this hemisphere, beginning
with the first recorded uprising in present-day South Carolina
in 1526.
This was a liberation movement of oppressed peoples from
Africa, forged by plantation-economy enslavement into a nation.
And it was a class struggle of those forced to labor in the
fields under the whip of the land-owning oligarchs.
The individual and collective resistance of African people
of all sexes to the profit-driven horrors of human trafficking
and enslavement gave rise to an Abolition movement expressing
its solidarity and assistance in the North and in other
countries.
Political organizing by Black women and men in the North to
abolish slavery is recorded as early as the 1760s in
Massachusetts. By 1830, as the Abolition movement burgeoned,
there were already about 50 Black national anti-slavery groups
across the country.
The 1830 slave uprising led by Nat Turner marked the
qualitative beginning of the formal Abolitionist movement. The
1830s were revolutionary years in which people in many
countries around the world fervently fought for Turner's
passionate belief that "the first should be last and the last
should be first."
Historian Herbert Aptheker stresses, "And just as the effect
of that one drop or that pebble would be nil, or almost
indiscernible were there an empty cup or a dried-up pond, so
the significance of the Revolt would have been very slight if
it had not been true that it came at about the end of a decade
of depression and some five or six years of intensive agitation
among the slaves in this hemisphere."i
Africans of all sexes also escaped from plantations and set
up their own farming communities in the swamplands and
mountains of the South, where they fought guerrilla warfare
against the slave-owners' raiding parties.
"Did these communities become so numerous that state militia
units and even United States Army troops with heavy cannon were
sent against them?" Aptheker writes. "Yes, time and again, as
in Florida in 1816, South Carolina in 1816, North Carolina in
1821 and Virginia in 1823."
Harriet Tubman was the general of the Underground Railroad
that helped at least 60,000 women and men follow the North Star
out of slavery between 1830 and 1860. Women, Black and white,
played an important role in creating a network of rest and
destination stations.
As tens of thousands of African people who escaped North--as
well as to Mexico, Canada, England and other
countries--described their lived experience under the lash of
the inhuman economic system of plantation enslaved labor, they
helped galvanize the movement to abolish chattel slavery.
Black women, and women of many other nationalities, played a
pivotal role in that movement.
The great Abolitionist and champion of women's rights
Frederick Douglass wrote: "When the true history of the
Anti-Slavery cause shall be written, women will occupy a large
space in its pages; for the cause of the slave has been
peculiarly women's cause. Her heart and her conscience have
supplied in large degree its motive and mainspring. Her skill,
industry, patience, and perseverance have been wonderfully
manifest in every trial hour." ii
Feminist historian Eleanor Flexner explains concretely why
that was true: "It was in the abolition movement that women
first learned to organize, to hold public meetings, to conduct
petition campaigns. As abolitionists they first won the right
to speak in public and began to evolve a philosophy of their
place in society and of their basic rights. For a quarter of a
century, the two movements, to free the slave and liberate the
woman, nourished and strengthened each other." iii
Next: Women's rights and Black
self-determination.
i Aptheker, Herbert. Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion. New York:
Humanities Press, 1966. 7.
ii Douglass, Frederick. Selections from the Writings of
Frederick Douglass. Editor: Philip S. Foner. New York:
International Publishers,1945. (edition 1971) 86.
iii Flexner, Eleanor. Century of Struggle: The Women's
Rights Movement in the United States. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1959. 41.
Reprinted from the March 11, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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