male abolitionists had, instead, a commitment to male dominance, an investment in male privilege, and a sustaining belief in male supremacy.
In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment which enfranchised
black men was ratified. In this very amendment, the word
“male” was introduced into the United States Constitution for
the first time—this to insure that the Fourteenth Amendment
would not, even accidentally, license suffrage or other legal
rights for women.
This betrayal was contemptible. Abolitionist men had betrayed the very women whose organizing, lecturing, and pamphleteering had effected abolition. Abolitionist men had
betrayed one half the population of former black slaves—
black women who had no civil existence under the Fourteenth
Amendment. Black men joined with white men to deny black
women civil rights. Abolitionists joined with former slaveholders; former male slaves joined with former slaveholders; white and black men joined together to close male ranks
against white and black women. The consequences for the
black woman were as Sojourner Truth prophesied in 1867,
one year after the Fourteenth Amendment was proposed:
I come from. . . the country of the slave. They have got their liberty—so much good luck to have slavery partly destroyed; not entirely. I want it root and branch destroyed. Then we will all be
free indeed.. . . There is a great stir about colored men getting
their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if
colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you
see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will
be just as bad as it was before. 19
If slavery is ever to be destroyed “root and branch, ” women
will have to destroy it. Men, as their history attests, will only
pluck its buds and pick its flowers.
I want to ask you to commit yourselves to your own free
dom; I want to ask you not to settle for anything less, not to
compromise, not to barter, not to be deceived by empty promises and cruel lies. I want to remind you that slavery must be destroyed “root and branch, ” or it has not been destroyed at
all. I want to ask you to remember that we have been slaves
for so long that sometimes we forget that we are not free. I
want to remind you that we are not free. I want to ask you to
commit yourselves to a women’s revolution— a revolution of
all women, by all women, and for all women; a revolution
aimed at digging out the roots of tyranny so that it cannot
grow anymore.
9
The Root C ause
And the things best to know are first principles and causes.
For through them and from them all other things may be
known. . .
—Aristotle,
I want to talk to you tonight about some realities and some
possibilities. The realities are brutal and savage; the possibilities may seem to you, quite frankly, impossible. I want to remind you that there was a time when everyone believed that
the earth was flat. All navigation was based on this belief. All
