BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism’ By Kyla Schuller | 2021 | Hardcover, $30 | Nonfiction, history | Available at the Seattle Public Library
“SISTER! Your foot’s smaller, but it’s still on my neck.”
— “Have You Ever Tried to Hide” by Pat Parker
The trouble with “The Trouble with White Women” is you might think it’s about white women in general when the book is actually about the feminist movement in the United States. You might also think Kyla Schuller’s book is a dry analysis of the history of feminism in the United States. It’s a much more interesting story than that.
In fact, “Trouble” is a skillfully crafted series of seven parallel stories, each illustrating a chapter in what Schuller calls the counterhistory of feminism. Schuller pairs stories of white feminists with those of their intersectional contemporaries. She shows how the white feminist movement has consistently dispossessed the most marginalized people in order to liberate upper- and middle-class white women.
Schuller writes of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, that stalwart of the fight for women’s suffrage, who denounced the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, saying at an 1869 event, “I do not believe in allowing ignorant Negroes and ignorant and debased Chinamen to make laws for me to obey.” At that same gathering, Schuller reveals, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper also spoke up, “When it is a question of race, I let the lesser question of sex go.”
Harper was a freeborn Black woman whose intersectional feminist politics stressed fighting for an entirely new society based on broad social justice. While she is now much less famous than Stanton, in her time, Harper was a well-known intellectual and prolific lecturer, touring the Reconstruction South for three years lecturing on “Literacy, Land, and Liberation.” Her philosophy lost out, as the white feminist movement built its political case on the idea that white women’s votes would outweigh those of Black people. In the words of white suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt, as she wrote in a 1917 essay to convince Southern men of the benefits of women’s suffrage, “White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by woman suffrage.”
Schuller also pairs the stories of Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose best-selling novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” helped many Americans realize that slavery was not the civilizing influence plenty of whites pretended it was, with that of Harriet Jacobs. Stowe was white, wealthy and part of a very well-known family, and the story she wrote was hardly her own. Jacobs, on the other hand, had escaped slavery only after hiding for years under the floorboards of a sympathizer’s house. In her book “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” she wrote, “Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.” Jacobs invited alliance with white women but rejected the idea that white women’s experiences would be equated with enslavement.
White feminism was not the first or only social movement to reject contributions from people of lesser status. The attitude that “we’re not with those other people” has hampered the union movement, which has at times restricted itself mostly to skilled workers or white men only, to its ultimate detriment. The Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s pushed to the back some important gay and lesbian organizers, such as Bayard Rustin, who organized the March on Washington, and Pauli Murray, who Schuller profiles.
Murray is paired with Betty Friedan, author of “The Feminine Mystique” and a pillar of ’60s and ’70s feminism. The overall movement concentrated on the privileges white men had but white women did not, while apparently never seeing the many privileges white women did have. White feminism did not address inequalities caused by race, color and poverty. Murray, while still a student, had written about the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, which supported segregation by race, saying facilities could be “separate but equal.” Her argument that separate is inherently unequal was an important basis for overturning Plessy, although she wasn’t informed of that fact for years. Schuller points out that, in the mid-’50s, although Murray had two law degrees and had published an important book on state segregation laws, no law firm would hire her. She had published an autobiography, but she couldn’t support herself as a writer and poet. She worked as a typist, preparing the manuscripts of other authors. In 1955 and 1956, she typed for Friedan of all people.
The comparisons aren’t all white versus Black. Schuller deals with white women’s damage to Indigenous culture, paralleling the stories of Yankton Dakota writer and activist Zitkála-Šá and white anthropologist Alice Fletcher. She writes of the bitter battles between trans women and Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, who insist trans women are not really women at all.
Schuller even writes of Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, queen of surveillance capitalism and author of “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead:” “Sandberg’s corporate brand of white feminism has long helped cover Facebook’s exploitative practice, giving it a palatable sheen.” She’s contrasted with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York Congress representative who has proclaimed herself disgusted with the belief that “we can capitalism our way out of poverty” and who pushes critics of capitalism to focus on racial, gender and social injustice, not just economic.
Schuller writes that liberal white feminism now embraces inclusion as a brand, believing that a new inclusive feminism will result without the hard work of fundamental change. She doesn’t think it will. She writes, “Inclusion doesn’t eradicate white feminism—it merely extends its reach. The trouble with white feminism is not that it ignores and leaves out many women. Its harm is far more fundamental than a lack of awareness: white feminism perpetuates a pattern of dispossession.” The politics of white feminism are fundamentally at odds with the survival of women of color, trans people, disabled people and the poor.
The hope she sees is that intersectional feminism is gaining power. Intersectionality is not a war, she writes, but a creation of practices in which we all can flourish.
If you’re looking for further reading on this subject, a great place to start is with the subjects of each of these parallel stories. Harriet Jacobs’s “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” is available through the Seattle Public Library and the King County Library system, as is Pauli Murray’s “Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family.” (It’s her American family.) Her autobiography, “Song in a Weary Throat,” is widely available for purchase and is also in the King County Library System. Zitkála-Šá’s “American Indian Stories” is also in both systems.
If you’re white, and just want to develop some racial literacy, Robin DiAngelo’s book “What Does It Mean to Be White?” has become a classic, especially good to read for discussion groups. “Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm,” which came out last year and is also by DiAngelo, is available through Beacon Press. Both books are in the Seattle and King County library systems.
Susan Storer Clark is a contributor and writing coach for Real Change. A former broadcast journalist, she is currently at work on her second novel.
Read more of the Aug. 3-9, 2022 issue.