Monday, March 18, 2019

"INTERSECTIONALITY"


“INTERSECTIONALITY”

            One of the truly surprising movements of the 19th century was the abolitionist movement.  The Constitution of the United States had enshrined slavery and stacked the electoral deck to favor Southern white slaveholders (a stacking that remains today in the Electoral College).  Although Congress abolished the international slave trade in 1808, slavery itself was allowed to remain legal and viable.  In the middle of this ongoing struggle between the idea of equality and the reality of slavery, folk rose up in opposition to slavery – a few at first, including William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Nat Turner, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, Sojourner Truth, David Walker, and others.  One of the other leaders of the abolitionist movement was also a woman named Abigail Kelley, though her role has been largely forgotten (what else is new in the patriarchal annals of American history?)

            For Women’s History Month, I want to revisit her story a bit, because it is  testimony to the necessary problem of “intersectionality,” which we saw played out in the struggles over the recent Women’s March.  Kelley was born in 1811 in Massachusetts to a Friends family and seemed to be destined to be a typical white woman of the 19th century.  She was converted to an active anti-slavery life by Garrison and by the Grimke sisters, although there was already strain showing in the relationship of those three.   As she got more involved, almost immediately her skills at organizing, fund-raising and public speaking became apparent to all.   Kelley was committed to the abolition of slavery and to equal rights for women, and this intersectionality would cause her, and many others, problems for the rest of her life. 

            Her father died in 1836, and it provoked a deep crisis in her:  “Who am I?  What shall I do now?  How can I know God?”  She was 25 and unmarried, and she wondered if she should begin to look for a husband and settle into domestic life.   After hearing Garrison and the Grimke sisters speak, she decided that her future did not lie in female submission.  She did marry Stephen Symonds Foster, and they became a powerful couple in these intersectional movements.  She answered the call to throw herself into organizing women to oppose slavery.  She helped organize the first national convention of women against slavery in 1837.  The reaction from most males in the anti-slavery movement was ridicule and scorn – woman’s place was in the home.  Yet, Kelley’s talents were clear to those in the leadership of the movement.  She became a lecturer on the payroll of the all-male Anti-Slavery Society.

            She went on the lecture circuit in the West (Ohio and other places) and was an instant sensation.  She was reviled because she was an advocate for two causes at once: abolition of slavery and equal rights for women.  Her growing influence caused riots in public when she spoke.  Women who associated with her were tried in church courts for it.  The anti-slavery movement was split in two because she was a leader in this intersectionality of abolition of slavery and equality of women.  The great Frederick Douglass would criticize her for splitting the movement – he later repented of this and indeed attended the regional Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention in 1848.  And speaking of the difficulty of intersectionality, she and Douglass had a nasty split for several years over this.

            Yet she persevered – she recruited powerful women’s rights advocates Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone. She traveled all over the North organizing and lecturing on abolition and on women’s rights.  Her journey did not end at the close of the Civil War.  The Anti-Slavery Society decided to disband because they thought that slave power had been defeated, but Abby Kelley knew better.  She was the first to speak against the disbanding, because she knew the depth of the slave power in American consciousness.  She and Frederick Douglass became allies again, and they formed a formidable partnership to work for the passage of the 15th Amendment to extend the vote to black men.  Here came intersectionality again:  her former protégé Susan B. Anthony and others harshly criticized her and Douglass and others for supporting this amendment which gave men the right to vote but not women.  As we know, that amendment passed but was gradually gutted over the next 30 years by the powerful slave lobby.  It would be over 50 years before women won the right to vote. 


            The life of Abby Kelley is worthy of study and remembering because of her powerful witness and the difficult issue of intersectionality.  Throughout the decades of the 19th century, the issues of abolition and women’s rights intersected and often clashed.  We should learn from her life and the life of others like Frederick Douglass, where these issues formed core values and forced difficult decisions.  Because of the power of patriarchy, women’s rights are almost always one of the roads in intersectionality.  We saw that in the recent struggles over the Women’s March of 2019, where race and gender and anti-Semitism intersected and clashed and weakened that particular movement, yet all the while, all of those issues were important and relevant.

            The support of the 19th Amendment to give women the right to vote seems to be a no-brainer, but the issue of intersectionality came into that one, too.  The white leaders of that movement repeatedly used race to try to keep out black women’s leadership and to insure that white women and white men in the South would support the 19th Amendment.  Indeed, the deciding vote in the deciding state for the 19th Amendment was cast by a white man in the South – Harry Burns in Tennessee.  

            Wherever we find ourselves in this discussion, let us remember all these witnesses and find our place.  Women’s History Month reminds us how difficult, and yet how vital, the issue of intersecitonality is. Women often pay the price for this issue of intersectionality, so let us find our place and make our witness:  the ERA needs one more state for ratification.

No comments:

Post a Comment