Women's rights & Black liberation, part 6
Working and oppressed vs. money kings
By Leslie Feinberg
After the Northern bankers and industrialists
colluded with the Southern former slave owners to crush Black
Reconstruction, laissez-faire capitalism rapidly concentrated
into monopolies, creating new conditions of struggle for
women's rights and Black liberation.
The next battle after the Civil War, white Abolitionist
Wendell Phillips observed, was between the working class and
the money kings.
Before the Civil War, the great majority of the population
of this country had been small farmers, most of those in the
North. During slavery, African women and men of the
Diaspora--an estimated 35 percent of the Southern
population--had been primarily forced to do agricultural labor,
to which they brought centuries of farming and technological
knowledge.
In 1860 in the mostly agrarian South 4 million Black
enslaved workers and 110,000 wage workers--Black and
white--worked in 20,000 manufacturing establishments. Historian
Herbert Aptheker contrasted the capital investment in these
factories--$96 million--to that of the approximately $250
million invested in Northern manufacturing.
During this time the Southern ruling class used the forced
labor of enslaved Black women, as well as men and children, as
a bludgeon against wage labor. Black women worked in coal mines
and iron foundries, in textile and hemp, as ditch diggers and
lumberjacks.
Skilled white workers protested the bosses' use of slave
laborers, but for the most part did not demand the abolition of
chattel slavery. Those whites who did fight slavery in the
South included leaders and organizations of Jewish and German
immigrants who were Marxists.
Working women clench their fists
After the victory of Northern capital in the Civil War, a
compromise was reached with the Southern slavocracy that
allowed them to retain their control over the land through
sharecropping, that left the farm workers in insurmountable
debt, and through the legal and extralegal weapons of convict
lease labor, vagrancy laws and "lynch law" massacres.
And as Civil War contracts dried up and troops were
demobilized, unemployment burgeoned in the North.
"Capital is centralizing, organizing and becoming more
powerful every day," warned the Rochester Daily Union and
Advertiser in 1866.
Efforts at building working-class unity were crucial.
In 1867, the National Labor Union--which had faced criticism
for not addressing the inclusion of Black workers into existing
trade unions at its founding--issued a statement calling for
cooperation with African American workers. It stres sed that
otherwise, "capitalists north and south would foment discord
between the whites and Blacks and hurl one against the other as
interest and occasion might require to maintain their
ascendancy and continue their reign of oppression."
As the growth of Northern manufacturing transformed the
spinning wheel into the power loom, Black and white women, and
immigrants arriving from other countries, were a backbone of
the laboring force of wage slaves.
The 1890 census revealed that of 2.7 million Black women and
girls over the age of 10, more than a million worked for wages:
38.7 percent in agriculture, 30.8 percent in household domestic
work, 15.6 percent in laundry labor, and 2.8 percent in
manufacturing.
Although most trade unions barred women at that time, the
NLU spurred the Cigar Makers International Union to amend its
constitution to admit women in 1867, and the National
Typographical Union to do the same in 1872.
While many unions still barred women, some labor leaders
were active in the struggle for women's right to vote, noted
the authors of "Labor's Untold Story." Susan B. Anthony and
Elizabeth Cady Stanton attended the National Labor Union
convention in 1868.
Nineteenth-century working women stood up to their bosses.
When Nat Turner was leading an uprising of African slave
laborers against the Southern plantation aristocracy in 1830,
in the Northeast young U.S.-born and immigrant women and
children were leading "turn-outs" and strikes in the textile
factories.
Even in the heat of the Civil War in 1863, Richmond women
workers--in the capital of the slaveholders--carried out one of
the few known successful wartime strikes at the Confederate
States Laboratory.
And in 1866 a strike by Black washerwomen in Jackson,
Miss.--while unsuccessful in its goal of raising and
standardizing wages for their labor--was, in the words of
historian Philip Foner, the "first known collective action of
free Black workingwomen in American history, as well as the
first labor organization of Black workers in Mississippi."
New era, new weapons
In the last years of the 19th century, the
industrial-banking class, trying to justify capitalist
exploitation of labor and imperialist conquest, employed mass
propaganda campaigns about the "survival of the fittest" and
the "cult of manhood"--white, wealthy manhood, that is.
Freed from their land competition with the system of
slavery, the capitalist rulers attempted to literally
dehumanize Native peoples as they directed their armies to
seize the Western lands, much as the slave-owners tried to
dehumanize African peoples.
The drive for profits would soon burst the geographic
boundaries of this continent with the military occupation and
economic annexation of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the
Philippines.
In ideological preparation, the imperialist ideologues
organized expansive and expensive public expositions replacing
old religious arguments about white supremacy with
pseudo-science. And at the same time, the captains of industry
and banking were redefining the dominant Victorian ideals of
manhood and womanhood in their own class interests.
The 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago was endorsed by
Congress as "the progress of civilization in the New
World."
At the center of the exposition's architectural layout was
"White City," constructed to pay homage to the power of
advanced capitalist technology.
In the center of White City was a "Court of Honor": a
half-mile-long basin surrounded by massive white
architecture.
"Honorable." The word was defined in an 1890 dictionary as a
synonym for "manly."
The "Woman's Building," located at the periphery of White
City, displayed "more refined avenues of effort which culminate
in the home, the hospital, the church, and in personal
adornment."
The women's building faced the only White City exit to the
section of exhibits deemed "uncivilized," claiming to be
"authentic" Samoan, Dahoman, Egyptian and Turkish villages.
While the White City had distinct definitions of men and women,
displays of other peoples from around the world stressed lack
of gender difference.
The demands by Black women and men that they be included in
the planning committees and their accomplishments exhibited
were ignored.
Ida B. Wells and Frederick Douglass fund-raised among
African Americans to print a pamphlet in English, Spanish,
German and French denouncing the racist exclusion of African
peoples in the U.S., who had for centuries "contributed a large
share to American prosperity and civilization."
And together they defended Black manhood against the
viciously racist propaganda emanating from the ruling "cult of
manhood."
Ida B. Wells: 'They're cowards!'
Ida B. Wells, a Black anti-lynching activist and organizer,
was the leading figure in the powerful ideological battle
against the ascendant cult of imperialist manhood and "manly
civilization."
And in doing so, like Sojourner Truth before her, Wells
challenged the ruling ideas about what it meant to be a man or
a woman.
Unable to get a hearing from the Northern white-owned
presses that still actually referred to Southern
white-supremacist mass lynchings of African Americans as
"humorous," Wells took her political agitation to England from
1892 to 1894. From public platforms there, she humiliated the
bullying braggadocio of the white power elite at home.
She tore apart the white supremacists' claim to the mantle
of "manliness."
Lynchers and their apologists were nothing but cowards, she
avowed.
She dismantled the vicious racist depiction of Black men as
rapists. Wells publicly revealed documentation about Black
women and girls who had been brutally raped by white men.
Rise of Rambo
The cult of manhood arose tightly woven with white
supremacy, nativism and anti-immigrant campaigns.
This imperialist world view was summed up succinctly in a
quote attributed to the biggest bully of the bully boys,
President Theodore Roosevelt: "The greatest danger that a long
period of profound peace offers to a nation is that of
[creating] effeminate tendencies in young men."
This reverence for masculinity was not meant to mirror the
complex and diverse gender expressions of working and oppressed
men or males, whether Black sharecroppers or Jewish needle
trade workers.
In fact, Black males still had to demand--as Louisiana
African Ameri cans had petitioned President Abraham Lincoln
shortly before his death--"We are men, treat us as such!"
Rather, it reflected the birth of Rambo-hyped adulation of
the "he-man" military foot-soldier of imperial occupation.
The ruling-class appeal to idolatrize white, wealthy
"manhood" was also directed towards middle class men, who were
suffering their own crisis about "manliness" in the 1890s.
The concentration of small-scale businesses into monopoly
industry meant that middle-class men went from being their own
bosses to working for bigger bosses; many had to practice what
was considered a "feminine" art of persuasion in sales and
other jobs.
Roosevelt appealed to these white proletarianized elements
and working-class men to join their new bosses in the cult of
manhood--not as generals, however, but as cannon fodder.
And as the British colonialists were doing in Asia and
Africa, the expanding U.S. empire exported its anti-gay and
anti-transgender laws to the countries it militarily and
economically conquered.
The anti-gay laws in Puerto Rico, for example, were inked
once the U.S. had established its rule on the island. The law
was inked word-for-word from a California statute.
Transgender under state boot heel
The 1890s cult of manhood campaign and diatribes against
feminine males were also part and parcel of domestic state
repression against transgender expression.
And it was inherently anti-homosexual. At that time,
homosexuality was not socially defined as sexual acts between
two people of the same sex. Instead, it was gender-variant
people who were labeled "queer."
Trans expression blossomed in the cities that were growing
up around large-scale industry, which allowed greater personal
freedom for workers than small-town life.
In 1860 a mere 20 percent of the population in the United
States had lived in cities. Like feudal Europe, small farming
communities and plantation overseers afforded individuals no
privacy or anonymity. But with the growth of industrialization,
the disbanding of armies and the growth of large cities,
individuals found new chances to express their identities.
"Male effeminacy first became a collective phenomenon in the
United States in the late 19th century," writes David F.
Greenberg in his voluminous work "The Construction of
Homosexuality." Greenberg surmises that as cities grew,
networks of cross-dressers grew along with them.
Organized, large-scale drag balls were vulnerable to police
raids and sensational newspaper headlines. So a great deal of
historical record comes solely from these hostile
observers.
For example, Dr. Charles H. Hughs wrote about a 1903 St.
Louis event he characterizes as a "miscegenation dance,"
revealing how much racism and fear of interracial solidarity
were factors in the repression of multi-national drag
balls.
Names and addresses of African Americans arrested at the
event appeared in the newspapers; the names of the whites were
not reported. All the participants were hauled off to jail,
taken before a judge. Bond for trial was $300 each.
According to detectives, participants included "scores of
west-end butlers, cooks and chauffeurs."
The largest and most famous of the known drag balls took
place annually in Harlem: the Hamilton Lodge Ball, which dated
back to 1869. The majority of the trans males and females who
attended were also working class.
"Queering" women's rights
A mass reactionary campaign against masculine females was
also a part of the gender-enforcement that arose with
imperialism.
Any female who demanded her rights was hit with vicious and
sometimes violent attacks on her gender and sexuality.
Women who campaigned for the right to vote were labeled
"female men." In media, literature and medical diagnoses,
society was warned that the demand for the right to vote turned
suffragists into "masculine women" and "sexual inverts"- in
today's language, lesbians.
The writer Havelock Ellis actually pointed to "emancipation"
as a basis of increasing "sexual inversion" in women. Physician
James B. Weir Jr. presaged a "matriarchy" if women won
suffrage.
Male supporters of women's rights contin ued to be attacked
and ridiculed as molly coddles in skirts, feminine males and
hermaphrodites.
But these ferocious attacks and slurs were not just a
political struggle against women activists and anyone who
showed the courage to stand up for women's rights. They also
served to marginalize and drive underground another whole
segment of sex- and gender-oppressed people, further dividing
the laboring class.
Many female-bodied individuals at that time had to work and
live as men in order to survive. Today, a still embattled trans
liberation movement has made it more possible for transmen to
live openly and proudly. But in the late 19th century, not
being "outed" was a matter of life or death.
Whether these trans individuals would identify today as
transgender or as transsexual, their gender expression, and to
some extent their body type, made it possible for them to live
and work without being "outed."
In the case of the Civil War, for example, so many
prepubescent young boys had been recruited into the large
armies that not having a beard did not draw particular
notice.
In her 1889 account "My Story of the War," Mary A. Livermore
of the U.S. Sanitary Commission--a forerunner of the American
Red Cross--wrote that the number of female-bodied soldiers in
the ranks was believed to be a "little less than 400." But she
was convinced the number was larger.
Franklin Thompson--named Sarah Emma Edmonds at birth--served
as a male nurse and a spy for the Union Army. Thompson wrote
about caring for a severely wounded soldier. "Something in the
tone and voice made me look closely at the face," he wrote.
Edmonds said the soldier "came out" as having been born female
and asked Thompson to bury him and respect his
confidentiality.
At least one such soldier pulled a bullet out of his own leg
rather than be discovered.
Like rabbits out of a hat, mainstream historians have for
years pulled out many excuses for why these females joined the
army--none of them dealing with transgender.
Yet trans expression continued, in many cases driven
underground by economic necessity and state repression.
Female-bodied individuals lived as men and worked in many jobs:
railroad workers, typesetters, cooks. Their lives were
generally only recorded if they were discovered and publicly
exposed.
The grave-diggers of capitalism
Those who strived for freedom could not follow the North
Star out of enslavement.
The epoch of U.S. imperialist dominion was dawning in 1898,
bristling with ideological weaponry, as well as military and
economic might. The old Roman tactic of "divide and conquer"
was the spearhead of its arsenal.
The lesson of the abolition of chattel slavery in the old
South was that owning classes do not yield to moral suasion. It
took rebellions, mass organizing and Civil War.
And it took powerful alliances--between resistance of the
enslaved and the Abolitionists, between anti-slavery forces and
the women's rights movement.
Marxist historian Vince Copeland concluded about the
abolition of slavery, "By clearing the field of this ancient
evil, they laid the basis for the modern struggle against the
modern evils."
Those at the summit of wealth and power were creating their
own gravediggers.
And those who yearned for liberation were soon to see a red
star rising in the East.
Conclusion: The road to liberation: reform or
revolution?
Reprinted from the May 6, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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