Fighting for protection, not equality

In Crystal M. Feimster’s book, Southern Horrors, Rebecca Latimer Felton is ultimately portrayed as a white supremacist women’s rights leader. The issue of suffrage becomes prominent as the story develops in the 1920s. I was surprised and dismayed to learn the motivations and ways in which women’s rights were promoted, specifically in regards to the exclusion of black women and the positioning of Rebecca Felton’s support for suffrage as a last effort to promote womanhood. What I realize now is that there is an important distinction between fighting for protection and fighting for equality, and history should not confuse the two. Furthermore, to understand this, the connection between the anti-rape movement and the white suffrage movement must be clarified.

If I am to understand the order of events correctly, it seems that Latimer Felton first promoted white men lynching black men in order to protect white women from rape, then promoted lynching of anyone in order to protect white womanhood, then opposed lynching, except in cases when the accusations were particularly horrible, and then supported suffrage as a means to promote white womanhood because white men were not protecting women well enough. In this last “stage,” Latimer Felton was promoting the idea that white men were actually harming white women, and the vote was a way to give women power to enact legislation that would protect them.  This explanation of her rationale is clearly just a skeleton, but it suggests that her support of suffrage was simply another step in supporting white supremacy. Latimer Felton’s activism was outright racist—she promulgated the myth of the black rapist and jezebel for the gain of white women, but ultimately, in her support of woman’s suffrage, had a clear opportunity to support equal suffrage. Her intentions were not equality, but the safety of white women. One may assume that a suffragist is fighting for equality, but not only does Latimer Felton not fight for equal rights for black women, her cause is not even her own equality, just safety.

The book does not highlight her actions specifically in her position during situations like that of the national suffrage parade. As a As Ida B. Wells-Barnett founded the Alpha Suffrage Club of black women, white (supremacist) suffragists were finding ways to marginalize them within a disjointed women’s movement. Feimster notes “when southern suffragists threatened to boycott the parade if black women were allowed to march with their state delegations, northern suffragists, to Wells-Barnett’s disappointment, acceded to their demands” (217). White southern women felt their “white” womanhood was threatened by black womanhood, but it seems that if political voices like Latimer Felton and her contemporaries had not spoken so strongly to support the idea of the black jezebel and vilify black women, there would be no need down the line to say that black women were a threat to white women and could not be included in their suffrage movement. White women used black men and women as scapegoats for southern culture that was changing against the will of the women, but abused and ruined the fragile public image of black women (and men) in the process, thus making it harder for them to dig themselves out when time came to demand suffrage. The movements of black women like Wells-Barnett had to constantly combat whatever the white movement was doing to step on their feet.

Of course it impossible to accurately pick apart the inner workings of a movement from a time nearly a century removed from the actual events, but it entirely possible to critique the movement’s underpinnings from a modern viewpoint. If the suffrage movement was structured and supported with white supremacy, I can critique the racism embodied by white activists, but also point out the ways in which the women’s keystone principles would be seen as sexist and hypocritical today. Latimer Felton never wanted to be equal, rather, she wanted men to take better care of her. Protecting womanhood was not about empowering women, rather it focused on women’s inability to protect themselves from black men without white men to save them. Women publically supported the ideas of southern womanhood that deprived them of power. Wrapped up in the issue of safety, women fought not for equality but for protection. While history may assume, like I did, that suffragists were fighting for equality, it is essential to know that not all white suffragists fought to level the playing field, they fought to protect their own interests.  These intentions, to be sure, made the fight for equality much more difficult for women like Wells-Barnett.