Blog Entry 1

 

Although there are many things that have been eye-opening to me in studying Feimster’s book Southern Horrors, the concept that struck me the most happened way back in chapter 3.  The quote that really got me thinking is on page 65: “No longer willing to accept the double standard that allowed southern white men to abuse black women with impunity, Felton revealed a shift in her ideas about black women’s sexuality and her understanding of who deserved protection in the postwar South” (Feimster, 65).  It took reading these words “double standard” to really throw the reality of the anti-rape movement into relief for me.  In studying slavery as an institution, and the psychology of colonialism that allows humans to assert dominance over “the different” (be it race, nationality, or gender), this double standard is critical.  The perpetrators of any type of slavery must believe that those they are subjugating are truly of lesser humanity than they of the dominant group.  For most of her life, Rebecca Felton fell squarely in this mindset; she remained a white supremacist for (dare I say all) of her public career.  It was striking to me therefore that her psychology allowed her to challenge the double standard upon which the entire institution of slavery in America was based: that black women were deserving of the same level of protection as white women.  To me, this represented an enormous mental shift for Felton, and I began to wonder how it happened.  Why did she now see black women (and poor white women) as equally deserving of protection, whereas before she could not?  And then why, in the late 1890s (chapter 5), does she revert back to her banner of white supremacy at the expense of the aforementioned newfound conviction in defense for all women?

            I don’t know much about psychology, but it is logical to me that shifts in belief are triggered by events.  Southern Horrors detailed an instance in which Felton visited a prison where a young black girl, Addaline Maddox, was being kept in the same cells as “hardened criminals” (Feimster, 64).  This situation sparked her campaign to end convict leasing and for the protection of black female convicts. When viewed in this light, her cause is one of empathy rather than a ideological revolution: she clearly pitied the female convicts who were subjected to a fate worse than death through rape at the hands of their white guards.  If Felton was seeking protection for black female convicts because she felt sorry for them, that would not have struck me at all because it seems only logical that she would feel pity.  But Felton took it further than that.  In seeking to “broaden the definition of protection to include black women and poor white women…[and] demanding protection that did not require dependency on fathers and husbands, and that insisted on women’s ability as well as their right to participate in their own protection”, Feimster asserts that Felton and other “southern white women did not always see the problem of rape in racial terms” (Feimster, 85).

            At first, this meant to me that Feimster was suggesting that Felton and “others like her” had transcended racism and decided that black women were of equal value as white women.  As I read further however, I discovered that Felton’s second shift in philosophy helped to color her psychological workings for me. Chapter 5 reveals that in the 1890s Felton embraced an image makeover from that of defender of all women against rape into the mainstream press icon of a white supremacist lynching supporter.  In August 1897, Felton addressed the annual meeting of the Georgia Agricultural society (Feimster 126).  The larger context in her speech was later ignored by the press; namely that she blamed white men for the problems in southern society, even for forcing black men to commit crimes of “theft, rape, and murder” (Feimster 126). “If white men were not manly enough to clean up their politics and provide poor white women with economic opportunity and the legal protection they so desperately needed, then they would have to continue to lynch…a thousand times a week if necessary” (Feimster 127).  When the media took the “thousand lynchings a week” concept and ran with it, Felton rode out the wave of popularity by essentially jettisoning her earlier philosophy for political gain.  To me, this seems incredibly calculating and logical. It calls into question her original commitment to the cause of protection for black women, and colors my interpretation of her previous campaign.

            Perhaps the fact that Felton is known as a feminist prevented me from seeing the radicalism of her campaign for the protection of southern white womanhood. In her August 1897 speech, her assertions were such an attack on southern white manhood that the press ignored them completely. She was definitely revolutionary in her time for championing feminism in politics. I also believe that while she did align herself with white supremacy, she had the beginnings of a revolution within her own mind regarding the personhood of black women and equality among all women that stemmed from their communal need of protection.  She was very much a product of her time, and contemporary scholars (myself included) would do well to remember that.  The mental shift that she experienced in realizing that black women deserved protection from white men, and subsequently her conviction that white men’s politics were the root of both women’s suffering and black male aggression, represented huge leaps for a woman that was raised as part of the upper class slaveholding planter elite. Although her first mental shift was later supplanted by her lynching advocacy I believe that she truly thought black women and poor women deserved the same respect as white women, and that her commitment to women’s rights may have been strong enough to blur the lines laid out by her subscription to white supremacy after all.