Blog 1

Alexander Tecumseh Duffy

Professor Shaw

20^th Century Political Movements

February 10^th, 2013

            Throughout the ugly years of the reconstruction of the post-war South was the genesis of the new Southern woman, after the falling apart of an entire social system based on a newly felonious lifestyle.  Being born parallel to this, and often intermixing, was black womanhood, the intermingling of the two would lead to a progressive shared womanhood.  Both the white and black women of the time realized the contemporary shift and integrating of culture, and forged of this a more unified concept of womanhood.

            The pointed figure in Southern Horrors, Rebecca Felton, was reared to be a plantation mistress, and, accentuated by the book, has no problem hitting her mammy as a child.  This comes crashing down around her, along with the society imprisoning people into roles that allow her world to function for, “Without slave labor, elite white women found it impossible to return to their former lives.” (Feimster, Southern Horrors, 31).  With no sense of normality remaining in their lives, Southern white women had no choice but to cooperate with African-Americans in rebuilding the idea of womanhood. 

            There were three main factors that forced an evening in the mental field of Southern black and white women: poverty, rape, and the law.  These three used to be on the offense against black women in majority; however, the civil war had destroyed any of the barriers between the races.   This sudden feeling of vulnerability that penetrated the mind of even the wealthiest plantation mistress served as a unifying factor between all Southern women at the time.

            The mass poverty suffered struck like ghost, slowly haunting across the landscape unimpeded.  Where there used to stand a clear separation between the women who were forced to work jobs to make ends meet, and those who could enjoy the fruits of slave labor there was now an empty wallet and factory doors as blockage.  The intense loss of social status amongst most white women, starting with poverty, let the rape and condescension from the legal system ensue. 

            Sexual violence towards women was and still is an ever-present threat; in the years before the war it was felt less with white women and entirely passed over with blacks.  However with the social unrest caused by the lack of money in so many people’s pockets, violence followed.  Whether black or white men enacted the violence towards black or white women, the message was clear: women need protection.  Women as a gender begin to feel less comfortable as the racial lines disappear around their problem, and all-of-a-sudden it doesn’t seem to matter too much what color you were. 

            The final issue that forced women to band together as a whole with the recreation of how society defines womanhood was the blind eye their patriarchal culture drew to the issue.  During the war, while rape in itself was not legalized by the Union, if a woman treated a Union officer in an unfit manner then he had the right to treat her as a woman of the night, thus setting an air of rape around the war torn South.  Most of the rape committed by Union soldiers was of black women, however white women suffered from this as well.  In the reconstruction years, the rape of a white woman would be blamed on a black man; instead of making justice injustice is only perpetuated. 

            The early segment of the book covering Ida B. Wells’ experiences with discovering womanhood and the disturbing goings on only influenced her ideas that something was rotten in the state of the South.  Having being brought up in one of the most hectic times for blacks, Wells was not raised to be the domestic goddess that Felton was to be.  Instead, her childhood was filled with the bloody racism of the South and her fathers’ progressive thinking.  Seeing first hand the sexual violence against women that Felton too saw, except from an angle where the law was never in your favor and those in power don’t care about you in the least. 

            The emotions felt not only by Wells, but shared throughout the black community whether it be the black women who were raped by whites, or the black men who were blamed for rape that didn’t involve them and, in a good many cases, never occurred in the first place added to the air of a need for change.  These sentiments coupled with the outrage felt anew by white women gave birth to the movements against rape and lynching which in themselves radically changed the view held on and by women about themselves. 

            The fact that movements sprung up that were led and organized by women both black and white, and that were so powerful to threaten white male hegemony, caused a stir amongst Southern white men.  The fear put into them by the women only transferred power to the women who now saw that they could change the oppressive society around them, thus transforming the idea of womanhood into one on the offense for the first time.