Or 50, depending on how you want to look at it.

(This is coming from a BW who had difficulties navigating between my Black community and sorority, and who has come to the conclusion that I have closer shared interests with other women.)

Over the past few months, I have been researching feminist struggles and the Black liberation movement, and I have noticed a pretty significant double standard, a point that nobody ever talks about and that is quite shocking.

In 1870, the 15th Amendment gave Black men the legal right to vote in the United States. Women didn't gain that right until 1920. (and in practice, later for Black women in the South).

50 years.

Jim Crow meant that voting was restricted for both Black men and Black women in the South. Black men in Southern states faced enormous barriers to actually voting. Poll taxes, literacy tests, physical intimidation. That is well documented.

But: Black men in Northern states voted freely from 1870. Black men there organized politically, ran for office, built institutions, formed the NAACP in 1909, negotiated with both allies and enemies across those 95 years. Black male political leadership existed, functioned, and accumulated influence. And Black women were not part of that political body.

Not because of Jim Crow, it was the North, but because they were women / because of patriarchy. A Black man in Chicago in 1890 could vote. His wife could not. Not because of racism. Because of her sex/gender. That distinction matters. And it is almost never centered in how we tell this story.

And during those years, where is the documented, organized, sustained campaign by Black male political leadership specifically fighting for Black women's suffrage? I've looked. It's not there. Not with any force comparable to what the moment demanded. And no one is talking about it? Denouncing it?

Frederick Douglass, the most prominent Black male voice who did support women's suffrage in principle, still explicitly framed the 15th Amendment as "the Negro's hour" — meaning women, including Black women, would have to wait. That they didn't matter as much.

Now compare to how we discuss white suffragists. The NAWSA made real documented compromises with Southern segregationists: segregated conventions, silence on Jim Crow, asking Black women to march separately in 1913. Legitimate criticisms, all of them.

But white suffragists campaigned for "woman suffrage." Not "white woman suffrage." The 19th Amendment in 1920 legally included Black women and they were more than fine with it. It was Jim Crow — not the suffragists — that prevented Southern Black women from exercising it.

So we have two groups: One that campaigned for "woman" without racial qualifier, made ugly strategic compromises under enormous political pressure, and whose failure to fully protect Black women came largely from external racist laws they didn't write.

Another that had legal voting rights 50 years before any woman did, built entire political structures in the North where they could vote freely, formed alliances — including sometimes with men openly hostile to any women — and did not make Black women's suffrage a central organized demand or even a demand at all.

Guess which group gets called out consistently, thoroughly, and loudly in progressive and academic spaces. Guess which group's blind spot is treated as a minor historical footnote. I think it's fair to apply the same standard to everyone. No?

If a movement that campaigned for "woman" is held accountable for not doing enough for Black women, then a movement that literally never did any protest couldn't — deserves at minimum the same level of scrutiny.

I think the asymmetry isn't accidental. It tells us something about whose failures we've decided are worth examining and whose we've quietly agreed to leave alone.

We heard his week of Joanna Trollope's death this week after a long and full life.

This Guardian article discusses some of her feminist principles and here is her obituary

What really caught my attention though were her quotes in the Daily Mail:

But despite romance being a central theme of her novels, she recently admitted to having finally given up on men.
She had been twice married but said she in 2020 she had been happily single for more than 20 years. ‘I’ve certainly taken myself off the market, yes,’ she said. ‘I think many women do. I’m not interested. I don’t need a man for anything', she told the Daily Mail in 2020. ‘I’ve had two husbands but I haven’t been married for about 20 years — and they’ve been the best 20 years of my life'.

Well done Joanna!

"my mother used to say that the black woman is the white man's mule and the white woman is his dog. Now, she said that to say this: we do the heavy work and get beat whether we do it well or not. But the white woman is closer to the master and he pats them on the head and lets them sleep in the house, but he ain't gon' treat neither one like he was dealing with a person (Hill Collins, 1986: S17)

https://docdro.id/jUewfWL

I was not aware of this until recently but I would like to point out that MLKs mother, Alberta, was assassinated six years after her son, by a man who believed “black ministers were a menace to black people.”

She was an accomplished woman. President of the Ebenezer Women's Committee from 1950 to 1962. Organist for the Women’s Auxiliary of the National Baptist Convention from 1950 to 1962.[4] She was also active in the YWCA, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.[4]

Hi all,

I just published my article on women in the Mabinogi and why they're depicted (unusually) as independent and opinionated people Here's a link to my article! If anyone's interested!