Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

abolitionists. Women “came out” as abolitionists —out

of the closets, kitchens, and bedrooms; into public

meetings, newspapers, and the streets. Two activist

heroes o f the abolitionist movement were Black women,

Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, and they stand

as prototypal revolutionary models.

Those early Amerikan feminists thought that suffrage was the key to participation in Amerikan democracy and that, free and enfranchised, the former slaves would in fact be free and enfranchised. Those women

did not imagine that the vote would be effectively denied Blacks through literacy tests, property qualifications, and vigilante police action by white racists. Nor did they imagine the “separate but equal” doctrine and

the uses to which it would be put.

Feminism and the struggle for Black liberation were

parts of a compelling whole. That whole was called,

ingenuously perhaps, the struggle for human rights.

The fact is that consciousness, once experienced, cannot

be denied. Once women experienced themselves as activists and began to understand the reality and meaning of oppression, they began to articulate a politically

Introduction

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conscious feminism. T h eir focus, their concrete objective, was to attain suffrage for women.

T h e women’s movement formalized itself in 1848 at

Seneca Falls when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia

Mott, both activist abolitionists, called a convention.

T hat convention drafted The Seneca Falls Declaration of

Rights and Sentiments which is to this day an outstanding

feminist declaration.

In struggling for the vote, women developed many

o f the tactics which were used, almost a century later,

in the Civil Rights Movement. In order to change laws,

women had to violate them. In order to change convention, women had to violate it. T h e feminists (suffragettes) were militant political activists who used the tactics o f civil disobedience to achieve their goals.

T h e struggle for the vote began officially with the

Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. It was not until

August 26, 1920, that women were given the vote by the

kindly male electorate. Women did not imagine that the

vote would scarcely touch on, let alone transform, their

own oppressive situations. Nor did they imagine that

the “separate but equal” doctrine would develop as

a tool o f male dominance. Nor did they imagine the

uses to which it would be put.

T here have also been, always, individual feminists —

women who violated the strictures o f the female role,

who challenged male supremacy, who fought for the

right to work, or sexual freedom, or release from the

bondage o f the marriage contract. Those individuals

were often eloquent when they spoke o f the oppression

they suffered as women in their own lives, but other

women, properly trained to their roles, did not listen.