Kyla Schuller: The Legacy of White Feminism
“There's a fantasy in argument, in Lean In, or Girlboss-style corporate feminism that says, once you have women in charge of your company, then your company is feminist, right. Your capitalist reforms can start and end with who has the corner offices. Right. Who's populating the executive suite. And so that's not even reforming capitalism, that's just trying to save it.” So says Kyla Schuller, Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Faculty Director of the Women’s Global Health Leadership Certificate Program at Rutgers University. Today we dive into her heady new book, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism, which takes on the numerous ways in which feminism, so narrowly framed around the issues of white women, has in turn marginalized the experiences of women of color for hundreds of years. And the title has double-meaning: Because even though white feminism has been problematic, it’s also painted white women into a corner, left wondering how we got here.
There have always been multiple kinds of feminism, Schuller says, a self-serving version dominated by white women, and an intersectional version dominated by women of color. White feminism, the mainstream feminist ideology, positions women as a redeemers, a salvific force whose mere presence in positions of power is enough to redeem that same power entirely. In sharp contrast, Schuller notes, intersectional feminism is an account of power, a place to interrogate the ways in which gender, sexuality, race, ability, and climate precarity coalesce to shape our lives. Only when we acknowledge these multiple, simultaneous identities, and come together across identity and power positions, will we form a strong enough political bloc to make enduring structural change. We explore all of this in today’s conversation.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
The white woman as a civilizing force…(7:14)
Harriet Beecher Stowe/Harriet Jacobs…(12:44)
Alice Fletcher/Zitkala-sa…(27:07)
Margaret Sanger, a eugenic feminist…(40:02)
Betty Friedan/Pauli Murray…(49:28)
Mainstream feminism and the optimization of women…(52:28)
MORE FROM KYLA SCHULLER:
Kyla Schuller’s Website
Buy her new book, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism
Read her first book, The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century
Follow Kyla on Twitter
DIG DEEPER:
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Harriet Jacobs
American Indian Stories - Zitkala-sa
Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower - Brittney Cooper
Intersectionality - Brittney Cooper, The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory
The Nap Ministry - Rest is Resistance
ELISE LOEHNEN:
Well, your book is amazing. It was hard. I'm sure it's feedback that you're getting—not so hard academically. I thought you made really complex ideas quite accessible, but I had to steel myself during the intro for a lashing. But I actually felt like it was ultimately so illuminating because as a fellow white woman, I think that, and I read a lot about this and really try to understand where we are in the context of history and why so many of our heroes have proven to be problematic or far more complicated than we would like them to be. And I thought you did such a beautiful job of elevating, clarifying in those stories, sort of where things had gone sideways. And then it was such a joy to read about all the women of color who have not gotten the spotlight in the same way, but were certainly there and making an effort to change society in a different way. So, congratulations. I really think it's, it's such a powerful, powerful book. So, let's just start at the beginning. And, you know, I think that in the, within the title, “The Trouble with White Women,” and this idea of feminism that we abide by now, or how it's defined culturally and where it's gone really wrong.
KYLA SCHULLER:
Yeah. Well, the title, “The Trouble with White Women,” I like it because I think it gets at, it speaks to two kinds of trouble. There’s a trouble that white women posed in framing feminism centrally around their own issues, but it's also about the trouble that white women face. I think for so long, feminism has been understood in a dominant frame as the fight for equality between the sexes. Full stop, right? As feminism means you support gender equality and you support women. And that's the end of the story. But for almost 200 years, there's been so many women pushing back and saying, if we only look at gender, we’re actually marginalizing the experiences of a huge portion of women, and also men and other people besides women, who can also benefit from feminist justice. But I think for so long, the mainstream voices in feminism set the standard of what was enjoyed by bourgeois white men as the standard to which they aspired.
That is sort of the trouble that white women themselves face because they turned to their immediate peers, or someone like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who is often considered the founder of U.S. feminism. And she grew up in the nicest house in town. Her father was a Supreme Court Justice for the state of New York, as well as had been in U.S. Congress, and boasted of Mayflower blood and Revolutionary War blood. And so her standard was, “Why can't I have what my father enjoys and what my brother enjoys.” So they set the standards of the elite white men as what they wanted to fight for themselves. And so in that way, they were both facing a trouble of setting elites as their standard, and then also posing a trouble to other women, for whom the problem was not that they were not enjoying the benefits that Cady experienced, but the fact that she grew up with three enslaved people in her own house in upstate New York. Yet she considered herself, as the only girl child, as the biggest victim in that house, because her view was only centering around people like her father, not around people like the three enslaved people in her own house.
ELISE:
Right. I think it's so clarifying. Because I think a lot of people don't know the history, right? And so they venerate these heroes, or then they feel like they're kryptonite. They can't touch them without somehow condemning themselves. And then you don't actually explore or understand what was happening and what the context was of the time. But she's, as you say, such a perfect example of an ideology that exists today, which is not necessarily wrong, but it is very incomplete, which you get at throughout the book, this idea that if women are in charge, the world will be better. And that might be true, you know, like, sure, yes, let's have representation. Let's find that sort of equity. That seems like table stakes. But, you're still making this argument that just by the presence of women, one, that society will somehow reform by the mere presence of this moralizing, civilizing presence, right? And that also: All boats will rise. That if white women go first, we will just make sure to take care of it for everyone else, which has obviously not been proven to be true through history. It's just not enough as you write: “White feminism promises that women's full participation in white-dominated society and politics will only improve their own social position, thanks to their supposedly innate superior morality their leadership will redeem society itself.”
KYLA:
Really glad to hear you emphasize that because to me, that's ultimately the most insidious element of white feminism. This idea that when white women rise to the top, they will be a kind of salvific force. Kind of saviors of the nation. And in the contemporary manifestation, like something like Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In, you know, she poses the idea that once we have more women CEOs, then we'll have better companies, a better kind of capitalism. And I don't think it's as obvious as an element of white feminism as others, because it is less explicitly about putting a white woman's interests front and center. And yet it's one of the most insidious effects because it draws on this really long history of the idea of women, but meaning especially white women as the angels of the house, right? The civilizing force, the domesticators, the people whose job it is to clean up the dirty work of business and politics happening allegedly around them, but not of them. And it's a very seductive force that once we put women in charge, we’ll cleanse capitalism we’ll cleanse the nation state, but it just lets us turn away from the violence that can get perpetuated even when women are in charge,
ELISE:
Right. Instead of establishing a new paradigm for business, a new way of being in the world, which is what I think we all are so desperate to see. I thought this, this quote was so brilliant about Lean In. And I just want to also compliment you because I think throughout the book, you did an incredible job of holding the polarities inherent in these people. Like someone like Sheryl Sandberg, of course, like she's done a lot of great things. She's also not a perfect human and she's working in a problematic culture and monetizing a problematic company, right? So I think you did a great job of not condemning and rather excavating. It’s not a book that makes you feel dirty where you're like, oh, this feels, I don't know. I thought it was very fair.
KULA:
Because the lure of purity politics is strong and I tried to resist it as much as I could.
ELISE:
So you write, “Lean In has been widely critiqued for focusing narrowly on the concerns of heterosexual married corporate women. But the fundamental problem with Lean In is not its failure to be inclusive. Inclusivity within capitalism is a fool's errand, its core problem is that it presents capitalism as the deliverer of equality when capitalism is actually a chief engine of social harm.” So I thought that was just such a perfect encapsulation of how distracted we are by trying to reform a broken system rather than focusing on. And yeah, of course we need market economies. We need capital, you know, we need capitalism in some variation or some form, but like it needs to be married with..it has become very extreme. I think we can all agree that when CEOs are in penis-shaped rockets, heading space, while the workers of that company can't afford to live, like we are desperately off course.
KYLA:
While the planet burns. Rocket fuel is just going up in the air.
Yeah, you know, what's so problematic about white feminism, is that at worst, it's not even trying to reform capitalism, right? Like it wants to redeem it. There's a fantasy in argument in Lean In, or Girlboss-style, you know, corporate feminism that says, once you have women in charge of your company, then your company is feminist, right. Your capitalist reforms can start and end with who has the corner offices. Who's populating the executive suite. And so that's not even reforming capitalism, that's just trying to save it.
ELISE:
Yes. And to, to sort of just by virtue of being there suggest that it could be something different. I think it's such a powerful construct. I think for all of us, particularly as we think about how to do things better. Right. And sometimes, you know, it's the Audrey Lorde, “The master’s tools will not…
KYLA:
Dismantle!
ELISE:
The master's house.” Which I know everyone, you know, has certainly it's, one of the most famous quotes probably of the last five years, even though it's significantly older. So I think what we should do is sort of march through the book a little bit, just because these, the pairings that you do are so wonderful. And there are so many characters from history like Harriet Beecher Stowe, et cetera, who like I have a relatively glancing understanding of. So should we start, I know we talked a little bit about Stanton, so, and we didn't talk about Francis Harper, but should we start there? Should we go to stow and Harriet Jacobs?
KYLA:
If you have a question about Harper, I'm happy to stop there or we can go to Jacobs and Stowe and I can tie Harper in as I go through.
ELISE:
Let's do that. Yeah. All right. So Harriet Beecher Stowe, which people obviously know Uncle Tom's Cabin, this white woman writing a tale about slavery, that the, the mythology is that it changed the minds, the president, right? Like she is, and it's a complicated, it's a complicated concept. Will you unpack that for us? Just sort of this idea, this like this, the saviorism and inherent in it, the goodness that she did do, the problematic parts of it. And then let's talk a little bit about Harriet Jacobs.
KYLA:
You know, this book was so fun to research and write because looking at the details of how it has been that there've been these two forms of feminism, white feminism and intersectional feminism, tracking sometimes parallel, sometimes in conjunction, and often in tension for the last 180 years was so fascinating, and showed me how huge issues of structural politics actually often come down to individual decisions, individual people, making decisions about how they want to proceed in their life and their work. And so it was so fun to get to immerse myself in a narrative and story that actually has tremendous implications on the politics of up to our moment. And Harriet Beecher Stowe is a great example. You know she famously wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1852, to help give gain support for the anti-slavery cause. Specifically she wanted to use her skill as a, as a writer who specialized in writing to white women audiences and writing the kind of tear jerking emotion, eliciting, sentimental style.
And she thought, I want to get white women of the North to cry along with the slave, and to have sympathy with the slave, to turn public opinion against slavery. Now on the one hand, that's a really admirable goal, right? And even though the Civil War was about to break out nine years later in the 1850s, slavery was becoming more entrenched in the land. It wasn't gradually receding. It was getting further extended. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 deputized any person in the North to declare a Black person an escaped slave, and to arrest them. Slavery was… you could now be pursued as an escaped enslaved person in New York City. And in light of this, she wanted to rally white women toward the cause. But the problem with that particular style of literature that she specialize in sentimentalism, which we still have to this day in a lot of our Hollywood movies, is that it asks the viewer to cry for the subject in a way that is ultimately much more interested in growing and bolstering the emotional skill and emotional empathy of the person doing the crying, then it is actually a kind of true solidarity or alliance with the person who is suffering.
The enslaved person becomes an object of pity and the reader gets to be a magnanimous person, who is growing her political and emotional influence. And that was out, you know, that's absolutely true at the level of the genre. And as a scholar, my specialty is 19th-century sentimental literature. So I'm very familiar with this dynamic that writing to, to elicit tears actually reinforces the power of the reader over the marginalized subject. But what was so interesting to me when I did the research is to realize how much that those abstract ideological views actually shaped her personal decisions, and how she proceeded to work with anti-slavery.
Because there was a now very famous writer, Harriet Jacobs, who had self-emancipated, escaping from enslavement in North Carolina by hiding in a tiny, tiny attic crawlspace for seven full years to escape her enslaver. And it was a space, it was just seven feet by nine feet and only three feet tall. And after she spent seven years hiding out before she could get a passage to the North unobserved, she became really active in the anti-slavery cause, and wanted to write her, wanting her story to be told. You know, so many people said slavery is actually good for slaves because they couldn't possibly take care of themselves. And she said, here I have this really dramatic story of the extent that I was willing to go to, to escape because slavery was so awful for me and for my children.
And I had such a history of sexual abuse under slavery that I was willing to do anything to escape. So she reaches out to Harriet Beecher Stowe via her employer, and says, “Hey, you know, could you, would you be willing to write my story for me? You're the biggest writer in America right now.” And Harriet Beecher Stowe writes back to the employer and says, “Great, I love this story. It's, you know, sensational. And that she was hidden an attic for seven years. And I'm going to use this story in my next book.” And Harriet Jacobs had to write back multiple times and say, “Please, no, I'm not asking you to, to take my story. I'm asking you if you'll work with me to tell my story together.” And Harriet Beecher Stowe never replied. And meanwhile, she gave many other interviews, then wrote in letters, “Why won't these slaves speak for themselves? Why do I have to do everything for them?”
She raised tens of thousands of dollars and said, I'm raising this money in part to start schools for Black children. But those schools never came about. Instead, her family and her extended family kind of lived off of the funds that she raised from Uncle Tom's Cabin and from other source,s and all the while she was complaining about having to do everything for enslaved people, because she really saw herself as the spokesperson who had ownership over the cause. And that just doubles down on that dynamic of the person who cries for someone who becomes an object, where she saw herself as the center of that story.
ELISE:
Yeah. I thought it was really interesting too though. How you know, I think so you write about how Martin Delaney, a radical Garrisonian physician, novelist, and Black nationalist. Oh, because Frederick Douglas supported Stowe in terms of the importance of this book and this narrative ,and Delaney said that she was, you know, attracting all the pecuniary advantages of anti-slavery writing, “Thereby depriving Black authors of opportunity.” And then he, this is Delaney, his quote, “No enterprise institution or anything else should be commenced for us or our general benefit without first consulting us.” And then I loved Frederick Douglas, his response, which is where will he find “us,” quote, “to consult with through what organization or what channel and can such consulting be carried on how many in this case constitutes us.” It's really interesting. And I'm sure you'll hear this when your book comes out too, because there's, there's a lot of antagonism around… you’re a white woman professor, you know, there's so much conversation, there's so much, I just interviewed Loretta Ross and she was talking about the circular firing squad. And so it's really hard to parse that line right. Of what's what's your moral authority. What's mine. Where, where are we overstepping? Like how do you parse that?
KYLA:
Yeah. I love that debate between Douglass and Delaney also because it seems like it could be ripped right off Twitter today.
ELISE:
Yes, exactly. It's very modern.
KYLE:
It's very modern. And I think that for me, I parse it as, as looking out for that place of speaking for someone. That whenever a white person, or a person in a marginalized group, imagine that they're speaking for the voiceless, right. Or speaking for a group that has less access or power than their identity. That's where you really get in trouble. That's where you are actually actively silencing someone else. And maybe even drawing on those people as raw resources to fuel your own rise and career. But I think if you understand it as a conversation to which you are a listener and a student, and after a certain amount of time, perhaps can get invited to that conversation, as an ally and as someone working in coalition with other people. Then that's a different dynamic. And that can mean both, you know, in terms of who you're reading in terms of activism, in terms of the kinds of conversations you're in and understanding yourself to be not, not inventing something, not saying something that's, that's not that it's brand-new, but being a participant in a conversation that you have earned your right to join. And need to stay within the boundariesof best practices and good ethics of solidarity and alliance.
But I think also what's so inspiring about intersectional feminism is that it says, you know, our best advantage onto power is not from those white women who want to have the CEO position that their fathers or brothers have. But those people who have been at the bottom of multiple structures of power. But it doesn't end there. It doesn't then say, these are the only people who have a place in intersectional feminism. It says we need to adopt the vantage, and learn the vantage of the most marginalized because they have the most acute and wide ranging analysis of power. But we need to all work in coalition together across different identity positions. and across different power positions, to be able to form a strong enough political block to actually make structural change happen. So intersectional feminism is that invitation. If you've done the work to be able to join the conversation and not try to take over the conversation with your tears or with your overly loud analysis.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, I don't want to jump ahead to, to Pauli Murray and Friedan, but I think, you know, because I think people can trip around this idea of intersectional feminism. And I think you really astutely pick that apart in a way of explaining that it's not in of itself an identity. It is the presence of multiple identities simultaneously. And there's this great section where, “White feminist theorists like Stanton post equivalences between groups of people in which one allegedly stands in for the other, the woman becomes the slave. Murray, however, this is Pauli Murray interrogated, multiple structures of power and showed how they worked in tandem. She didn't position the women's movement as a separate autonomous campaign from other social movements. As Betty Friedan did the students, this is a Betty Friedan: ‘The students were doing it. The Blacks were doing it. It was time for us.’ These formations insist on distinct parallel identities that never meet, leaving Black women, structural impossibilities.” Which is so powerful. It's like such an important reframe. I think for people who are like, I don't quite understand. It's like that. That is such a good summary.
KYLA:
Thank you. Yeah. And that's something that I come to also as a student of intersectional feminism, you know. One of the first important Black feminist anthologies from the early 1980s was called: All the Women Are White, All the Men Are Black, But Some of Us are Brave. You know, pointing exactly to that of like, where are Black women in this formation of where there's blackness, it's always male, and womanhood that's always white. Then where are Black women? And intersectionality really helps point us to that analysis of power of looking at intersecting identities. But I'm glad you're emphasizing how, how the book reminds us as intersectional feminists reminded us, that ultimately intersectionality is not about identity, right? Like to say, I'm an intersectional person doesn't actually really make sense in the terms of intersectional feminism. Intersectional feminism is an account of power. Like my, my friend and colleague Brittany Cooper says really clearly, intersectionality is not about identity. It's an analysis of power and looking at how gender, sexuality, race ability, climate precarity, all these different factors of life shape our lives simultaneously.
ELISE:
I am a Brittany Cooper fan for life. So thank you for bringing her up. I think her book, and I'm assuming there are more coming is so phenomenal. It’s so funny, she is such a great narrator and teacher. All right, let's talk about Alice Fletcher, who I feel like is it's hard. It's hard to find the good parts of Alice Fletcher. I'm just going to offer in terms of the, the harm that she, the havoc that she wreaked on native communities across the country and the harm that she perpetuated or perpetrated really. And then Zitkala-sa. Did I say that properly? So tell us about, tell us about Fletcher.
KYLA:
Oh, Alice Fletcher, I think is one of the more tragic cases here for exactly the reasons you point to. Her intentions were excellent, but the effects of her work were detrimental. So Alice Fletcher is probably the least known of the white feminists in this book because she wasn't the most famous as an anthropologist. She was the best-known and best-respected woman scientist at the last quarter of the 19th-century. So she had a huge platform in anthropology and her focus was studying indigenous tribes in the U.S. especially in the, in the Midwest Lakota tribes and Omaha tribes in Nebraska. And she actually really did do some important revolutions within anthropology, and she had a position of some kind of respect towards, toward tribes. She did not find them utterly abominable like many people of her time did, but she did see them as backwards and needing to be saved.
And that is where she really got in trouble because she joined her scholarship with activism. And the first big project she took on was working as the first paid recruiter of the first off-reservation native boarding school in the U.S., and these boarding schools are now becoming much better known, especially after finding a mass graves at boarding schools in Canada over the last six months. Uh, but they were deliberate projects that continued for 70, 80 years in the U.S. and Canada to remove Native children from their families and tribes for at least three years at a time in order to completely eradicate their attachment to their parents, to their communities, and to their land
ELISE:
And to their language.
KYLA:
And their language, right. They were not only forbidden from speaking their Native languages, but beaten when they spoke in Native languages and punishment could be as severe as being, for various infractions, punishment could be as severe as getting locked in solitary confinement for three days. And at this school that Alice Fletcher recruited for, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Infamously, the first one of these, you know, it was, it was built in old army barracks. So that feeling that they were having a military kind of education and punishment was not abstract, they were being locked up in military institutions and oh, and, and many, you know, the, the, this became a major movement across the U.S. to “civilize “the so-called uncivilized, right? And to save Native Americans by in the, in the famous phrase or infamous phrase of the founder of Carlisle, he said, “Kill the Indian to save the man.”
And white woman had a special role in this, because education was that tool for killing the Indian to save the man. And white women became the army of teachers in these off-reservation boarding schools. And so some of the women who first had major positions in U.S. government, actually like Estelle Reel came through the off-reservation boarding school system. And for Alice Fletcher, her work with Native tribes, and her work reforming Native tribes, and trying to save them by civilizing them and stripping them of Indigenous ways and inculcating Protestant, white habits shot her up to the top of her profession. And she, you know, she ended up writing, she ended up being the key voice in the most detrimental legislation, uh, dealing with Indigenous people in us history, or that might not quite be true, but most of let's say most detrimental in the 19th to early 20th centuries, which was the Dawes Act, which explicitly broke up Native land and turned it into private allotments, and resulted in Native people losing two thirds of their land over the next 50 years. And she was the single most influential voice in that legislation. And she said over and over again, we need to divide the land for them. They are our children, they are our ward. We are like the mothers and the parents that need to guide them and teach them how to behave. So it's a really strong example of that dynamic where white women really literally turned the lives and suffering of the more marginalized into fuel to bolster their own rise to the top.
ELISE:
Yeah. And it's so ironic, right? Because these are her words. This is Alice Fletcher writing about Lakota and Omaha women. “The Indian woman considers herself quite independent. She controls her labor, her possessions, and follows her own inclinations if she has sufficient determination. She is not necessarily the slave of the man.” And then she talks about them, these women, as she is the conserver of life. So sort of completely opposite to this idea of a woman who needs to be saved right. A ward or a child. So it's so tragic in terms of how that has sort of ricocheted. And it's something that obviously we're continuing to try to unwind or understand today.
KYLA:
With tremendous consequences. Like one of her examples of, of how Indigenous people were too backward, and needed to be rescued and retrained was that too much of their land was surplus. She said that it's just being wasted. They're not turning it into industry. And you can trust them with a writer like Zitkala-sa who writes these incredibly moving accounts about what it was like to be at the boarding school and have her own culture literally stripped out of her body. Right. She talks about the actual material, sensory trauma of showing up and being, and not being able to speak her language about having her hair cut, of being forced to wear these, these military like uniforms. And then she also talks about her spiritual connection to the land, right? And that's, that was also, it was totally broken. For Fletcher and white settlers, land was raw resource to be maximized.
And if you fast forward 120 years later, we are desperate to learn ways of living with land that doesn't destroy it, because the future of the planet depends on it. And some of the best parts of the Green New Deal, for example, turned to Indigenous sources of knowledge, of ways of living with land. Or in California, there's been a fight for decades to get Indigenous fire leaders, especially in the Northern tribes, like the Klamath to work with the forest department, because they have developed from millennia, practices of small scale burn that prevent large scale burn. But that very idea of living with land instead of battering it into submission is what Fletcher called backward and primitive. And what now we realizeour literal survival depends on it.
ELISE:
Yeah. I thought to the way that you talked about Zitkala-sa, her efforts to sort of, she took Dakota and Sioux Legends, and then turn them into theatrical productions, right, which were not necessarily an authentic rendering of the dance. I thought that discussion was also really important because I interviewed Joy Harjo as the first guest of this podcast, which was amazing. And she was talking too, about sort of the broken tropes, the worn out tropes about Native peoples and how for some people believe that Native peoples don't exist and others sort of have this one singular image of how they are, and they want them to so desperately to subscribe to that. And instead of understanding these things like any American “culture,” that these are living and breathing cultures that evolve and change over time. So I loved this quote, if you don't mind, it's not yours it's, but it's in your book. “As Laguna Pueblo feminist Paula Gunn Allen underscores, eradicating culture and imagination is a central part of settler colonialism. ‘The wars of imperial conquest,’ she writes, ‘have been fought within the bodies, minds, and hearts of the people of the earth for dominion over them. I think this is the reason traditionalists say we must remember our origins, our cultures, our histories, our mothers and grandmothers, for without that memory, which implies continuance rather than nostalgia, we are doomed to engulfment.’” I love that idea, this like the nostalgia bug that threatens to sort of turn our country inside ou,t this fantasy about how things used to be versus continuance and staying connected to the way things are, but letting them evolve and change over time.
KYLA:
Someone else has an opinion.
ELISE:
My cat, Dot has really strong feelings about this. But I loved that. And I think it's such an important point to resist this urge to make, to make cultures exist in tropes. It is so strong, right? And even with this, like the stewardship of lands and taking this broken toy … we've broken the toy. Now we're bringing it back to Indigenous people and asking them to fix it, which..it's frustrating. Essential. I agree. And also sort of this, I don't know if I'm saying this correctly, but this desire to sort of also restrict people to this culture of identity and like that, that that's who they are so solely, it's a different kind of stereotyping. That's also really problematic.
KYLA:
Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think one thing that racial tropes do is they pick one key role for groups and say, you must have this role, and that role gets updated over time. So if you look at what that role is in 1850 versus now it's going to shift, but it's pretty pervasive at that moment. And so for right now, for example, for Indigenous people, we say you are a kind of fossilized relic of the past, which is not that unlike the view in Alice Fletcher's time. Then Alice Fletcher’s peers said, and you need to vanish and recede into the past. And now we sort of say, oh, in you are a prism of a kind of purity of the past, but it's a similar cage, right? That Native people can only be a kind of Oracle of another way of life. Right? And then for Black women often, especially among Liberals, the view is now like: You are superwoman. You are capable of everything. We are going to task you with fixing all our problems and glorify you for doing it, but also put upon you unreasonable demands. And while the both of those things seem complimentary, they are in fact, very restrictive tropes that keep people locked into racially defined positions.
ELISE:
Into racially defined positions, and, and separate. Sort of, again, this like this, this I using intersectionality as identity.
So I want to make sure that we have time to talk about Margaret Sanger, because obviously it is so essential, particularly in this moment of time as sort of the perfect example of a woman who did a tremendous amount of good for women and was also very problematic right. And said some things, whether she intended them or not in the way that they were, that have come to sort of destroy her reputation. And now everyone is eager to sort of sanitize our history from her presence. And, you know, she was certainly into eugenics, which to her was not a racial concept. It was a much wider concept, also problematic, but this idea that anyone who's mentally infirm are not ideal in some way: Queer, homosexual, ipoor, crazy needed to not be, you know, which she promoted, essentially sterilization, but also recognized, and was a massive champion for this idea that women needed to be in control of their own reproductive futures. So let's talk about Sanger! And, and she had a lot of help, right? Like as you write about, you know, Teddy Roosevelt, spreading fears of race suicide, and this idea that white wealthy women were going to be outbred by poor women and we needed to get our shit together and start better, baby competitions and fitter family contests, and what a fucked up time!
KYLA:
I know, right. And those ideas were so pervasive that as I mentioned, you know, scholars have shown that even W.E.B. Dubois in fundraising for the NAACP anti-lynching campaign had better baby contests within Black families, and raised tens of thousands of dollars of the most fit Black families to fund super important work, like anti-lynching. And you know, Sanger especially brings us to a seeming paradox, right? Because there has been debate for a while about what to do with Sanger's seeming support of eugenics. And actually until relatively recently, a lot of people wanted to say she wasn't actually really supportive of eugenics. Like we've really turned a page in the last few years of how many people are willing to say, when she says here that birth control is a method of eugenics like maybe we should take her seriously. When she says that over and over again for a period of two decades. But it's been hard to reconcile because she's rightly so associated with an embrace of a woman's autonomy, right?
And one of the first people, especially white women have to, to embrace women's sexuality in public and say women deserve to enjoy their sexual being, which in 1915 was a huge deal. The first time she printed that her paper got put out of business by the state. She violated too many laws, specifically the Comstock law, but even printing something like that. So for often we, you know, people have held up this idea and said, but she was a feminist in support of autonomy so we can't really take the eugenics part seriously. But the reality is that she was a eugenic feminist. And when we were refused to acknowledge the fact that there've always been multiple kinds of feminism, a self-serving version dominated by white women and the intersectional version dominated by women of color, then a eugenic feminist is an impossibility because we think of feminism as being about women's equality, so how could it exist?
But if we recognize that white feminism had been around for 60, 70, 80 years at that point, it starts to make more sense that for her, she has a really divided idea of woman's equality. There is a typonomy for the so-called fit, and reproductive limitation for the so-called unfit. And what's important to recognize is how huge the category “unfit” was for her and other people have her period of her time. You know, it is alcoholic, the diseased, the Queer, you know, the poor, the criminal, the disabled mentally and physically. So for her, she said repeatedly one quarter of the world's population is not fit to reproduce. And even when she launched her first national birth control organization, one of the three goals was to curtail the reproduction of the unfit. So she had a really sharply divided idea of who reproductive self-determination was for. The thing is it wasn't especially broken down along racial lines. Unfit, like certainly racialized groups are going to be deemed by white people to be more unfit than, than white groups, for sure.
But in other way, she actually was a relative anti-racist for her time. And so some of the pushback now against Sanger says we can't endorse her because she was a racist actually, unfortunately misapprehends the extent of eugenics in that period. Right. Cause the other figure I look at in that period, Dr. Dorothy Ferebee, who is a Black physician and supported birth control along a whole host of other reproductive measures for poor women including childcare, right. Making it easier for poor women to raise children in safe conditions. You know, she also supported eugenics. Dubois was a big supporter of eugenic. So both of them completely opposed sterilization. So unfortunately the reality is that eugenics was totally pervasive and it wasn't especially along racist lines, as much as around disability lines. But it's a strange defense to make of Sanger. Because it's not a defense exactly. As much as to clarify how much we need to be on the lookout for ideas of disability hierarchy, even within Black radicals of this period.
ELISE:
Well, and it's interesting too, because it's, it's a good example of—and understandably it's 1915, right. Of people operating within sort of the patriarchal capitalistic system of the time and using, and just replacing who the authority is. Right? So it's one thing for Margaret Sanger, in a modern day, we would say, “We want people who feel unfit, like teenagers, right. Or people who recognize that they cannot support a child, or who do not want to be pregnant, or have been a victim of rape, all of the reasons that we want to empower them, to make their own moral choice for whatever is right for them. And it's their life, their body to govern”. We might not agree with it, but it doesn't matter. So in that way, you know, there's a difference between being like you can, we're giving you the power to determine whether you are fit or desire to have a child as a reframe rather than how it was, which was, “We will determine who is fit. And we will decide whether we think you are worthy of having a baby,” which is obviously really dark.
KYLA:
Yeah. Right. And like the way they did it, the way Sanger did it, is an echo of Harriet Beecher Stowe 70 years earlier. Right. I'm in charge. I will determine your path.
ELISE:
Yes. And she wasn't, you know, like it's called the Negro Project right. Where they were bringing birth control. And that was fair to be bringing birth control to Southern Black women?
KYLA:
Yeah. Well, it was, it was especially Sanger. It was a planned parenthood project, but Ferebee, and Dubois were on the advisory board and supported it.
ELISE:
And it was not a plan for extermination.
KYLA:
It was not a plan for extermination. Yeah. But if you Google Margaret Sanger right now, some of the very first returns will be about how she wanted to exterminate black people. And this project is, is some of the key evidence, but it's just not true. Like Sanger has been, um, it's an opportunistic pro-life campaign to smear Sanger. I've spent two weeks in the Planned Parenthood archives looking through every piece of paper that exists from that project as have other scholars. And we feel very confident that it was not a plan for extermination. However, it was the same kind of elite-led plan for birth control that often justified itself by cleaning up the unfit. So it's not that I'm trying to offer a full defense of Sanger exactly. As much as to clarify how much we need to think about disability hierarchies as part of our legacy of who has been allowed to reproduce in this country.
ELISE:
Yeah. All right. We have to talk briefly about Pauli Murray. We talked a little bit about Betty Friedan who she is paired within the book. And I think most people, because this is how it goes, are really aware of Betty Friedan. And I've probably read The Feminine Mystique, and are probably aware of the criticisms of her, of that book as being a really important work of power, and also offering a very limited view that all women are white women, and that all those women are bored housewives. Whereas a third of let's see, one third of all women were working for wages in the early 1960s, typically women of color. But I think sort of Pauli Murray and what she managed to do. And you have that great quote from her about how she started to understand capitalism as a system of oppression that draws much of its strength from the acquiescence of its victims. And that it was perpetuating the system where people needed like Black people felt like they needed to prove their worth. People who are on the bottom were like, I'm worthy. Let me climb this ladder. Like, let me be amongst you. And that the goal needed to be that we needed to eliminate the conversation about whose lives matters the most. And just understand that equity is a birthright. Is that a fair summary?
KYLA:
Absolutely. Yeah. She really brought us structural account to sexism, right. That it wasn't just men being mean to women, but it was actually a systemic devaluation that meant that women had less political and economic and social power.
ELISE:
Yeah. And then really figured out how those, we talked about her at the beginning, but how those systems of power worked in tandem to delimit, particularly people who have more than one identity.
So let's talk about sort of where we're at. And I love that you also include a conversation about AOC, which seems really like we're on the second eve of the Met Ball where she's being blasted for even going in the first place, and sort of the problem of sort of her popularity and how she's now being held up as this, as this paragon of perfection. As this beautiful fiery, brilliant, no holds barred woman who we expect to, like, what do you talk about her sort of like Instagram Live-ing while she is cooking her bean soup, like filling us in on how power works in our lives. And like, we, we build these people up. And then again, going back to our earlier conversation, almost put them in a trope and then expect them to never deviate from our perception of how they need to be perfect. Optimizing feminism.
KYLA:
I really think that that's the era that we're in now, that mainstream feminism wants to optimize women. And AOC has given these amazing interviews of how she learned to root out the optimizing imperative in herself. That she thought she always had to be the best that she could be. And then she realized that she didn't have to and just started enjoying waitressing, and then ironically, of course, once she gave herself permission to just follow her heart, she ended up being in a, you know, in a more, a laudatory position than she probably ever dreamed earlier. But I've been thinking a lot about the Met Ball dress, um, and also how, you know, how people, especially, you know, mainstream and, and male-dominated activism wants to assume that to be a serious activist and a serious anti-capitalist activists in particular, like you can't have any fun, right? Like you must be very severe.
ELISE:
And joy-less.
KYLA:
And you certainly can't have fun with beauty, or fashion, or glamour, or, you know, these practices have actually been long, been kinds of feminine and Queer-resistance, but get cast by a male society as just meaningless frivolous, like useless acts of practice and self-making. And I think that dress in some ways was really a great example of a kind of intersectional feminism of like, Hey, look, I reject your terms. I'm going to 1, I'm going to bring my message to where I'm invited to bring it. And if as a New York politician, I'm invited to the Met Ball, to some of the wealthiest people in the country, I'm going to accept the invitation, I'm going to bring that message. But at the same time, I don't think she's acting like by doing that, she has conquered capitalism, right? She's just saying like, let's have these conversations where we can have them and let's, let's have some fun in the process. Like let's create new ways of being and new ways of relating to each other that are less demanding of each other and less about a kind of purity politics.
ELISE:
Yes. And rejecting of this idea of that, of that optimized person. I love this quote, if I can read to you: “While the optimized man runs barefoot to the office with his water bottle filled with activated charcoal, the optimized woman cries in the executive suite. When shed by the CEO, white women's tears become a commodity, an asset, and a safeguard. Proof that capitalism can have a heart. The emotional, feminist CEO secures her own likeability and cleanses the means of production at the same time, sanctifying runaway profits with the humanity streaming down her face.” So it is, it hurts. I mean, it's like, it hurts. So what do we do? What do you want to see? How do we start to evolve? And I think a big part of it is breaking like the AOC idea of breaking down these ideas of being perfect, optimized, knowing all the things, behaving, you know, impeccably with moral greatness at every stop.
KYLA:
And those tears, right? Like I was really struck in reading Sheryl Sandberg how much she emphasizes, where she messes up. And then I finally realized like, oh, that's her ticket to still being likable, because she's so good at pointing out that the more a woman is successful, the less she's liked that she's realized that vulnerability and mistakes are actually an asset for white women. Women of color get put in a different position where they have, you know, this, those would be the superwoman, like for Black women I talked about a minute ago. But I think the, the AOC dress is actually a great contrast with this vision of Sheryl Sandberg crying in her executive suite, because AOC is not, she's not engineering mistakes for us. She's not exposing us to us, her, her weakness, and the sense that she's saying, here's how I am. I'm going to be all out and you can tight take it or leave it. It's a very, um, you know, it's a kind of politics that's like, that's true to her and her own sense of where she can gather meaning and fun and joy and just the drive to wake up and do this every day. I can't even imagine the kind of schedule that she has, but it's something where she trusts herself to be able to make her own kinds of decisions, whether or not like other people are going to consider it the proper thing for a Democratic Socialist to do. And I think that that is one, I think that there are sort of two ways out to these demands of the optimized feminists of today. And one is to, to be as true to ourselves as we can.
Even if on the Socialist politician is probably not going to go to the Met Ball. Why are we having these abstract standards that only are enforcing rigid ideological lines that don't actually help movements grow. Don't help us breathe and take joy and build coalition and spread our message. But two, I think it's a big stepping backwards. A big part of optimizing is that we are asked to turn every facet of our lives into work. And even feminism becomes another work demand where we are supposed to be supporting our own career and the careers of other women with every breath we take. And I'm really inspired by things like the Nap Ministry Project based in Atlanta and, you know, at the end, well, other elements of environmental activism that say, you know what, like we, can't actually green engineer our way out of climate destruction or capitalism, but what we can do is just slow down. Like we're not gonna be able to outsmart this. It's not about working better to undo optimism. It's about deescalating our demands for ourself and for everyone.
ELISE:
Well, she is a brilliant force. And I promise that if you can get through the intro and get into the meat of this book and just sort of swallow any anxiety that it might provoke in you, just the cover. I circled this book in the sense of, I put it on my bedside table and looked at it for a while before I brought myself to pick it up. I knew I needed to read it. And yet I was quite anxious about what I might find and what it might make me feel about myself as a white woman. And it was so clarifying and so helpful. It's not easy material, but it really is, and I hope you heard from her the ways in which we can start to parse and understand how these things happened, and how we can ensure that they don't happen again. It's our job to continue to learn, grow, evolve, and do things better.
And it's not about really, in my estimation, litigating the past, condemning the past, cleansing our past of people, we might have deemed heroes before and now malign. It's just, I think really incumbent on us to understand, and to understand what they were doing and saying in the context. It doesn't absolve. There was a lot of, of bad work done under the banner of white feminists, but we can't do better if we don't understand the context. So thank you for listening. I really, really hope you pick up this book and I just want to leave you with this. It circles back to the beginning, but this is a quote from her, but I think this really also is important. And it gets to that point, you know, we didn't talk about the problem with men. We kind of know what those problems are, right? But, so that's why I also think it's important not to make everything into a circular firing squad to quote Loretta Ross, but this is important.
So this is a quote from her book. “White women have long been assigned the task of stabilizing society, playing housewife to the entire public sphere. Since at least Elizabeth Cady Stanton, white feminists have expanded that role into one of redemption. They gain access to white supremacists capitalist structures in part through promising to rehabilitate the structures of inequality through their presence. When that project inevitably fails and settler colonialism, corporate capitalism, or electoral politics remains as brutal as ever. It is white women who absorbed much of the blame and outrage and white men who largely escape notice.” Thanks for listening. I'll see you next week.