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7 Sex Versus Race, Again1 Tracy A. Thomas The struggle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to make history as either the first woman or first Black president resurrects the unfortunate historic battle between sex and race.2 The current debate presents striking parallels to the battle for voting rights after the Civil War when infighting between abolitionists over race and sex created deep separatism that pitted allies against each other and diluted their political strength. The potential fallout from this false dichotomy today threatens political credibility and social justice and demands a rethinking of the alleged opposition. In the late nineteenth century, the debate over the constitutional right to vote became a clash of race versus sex. Women’s rights leaders, most notably Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, battled Black men for the right to vote. Rather than unifying against the shared concern of the White male monopolization of political power and legal rights, the representatives of the disenfranchised classes fought each other to obtain rights first. It began with the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1868, which precluded the rights of women voters by expressly penalizing states that improperly excluded male citizens from voting.3 This subordination of women’s rights continued in the debate over the 15th Amendment when civil rights leaders abandoned the universal suffrage platform of voting rights for all citizens, temporarily advanced in 1866 by the combined forces of feminists and abolitionists, in favor of prioritized rights for Black men. Frederick Douglass, previously one of the staunchest supporters of women’s suffrage, rejected the women’s issues as less urgent and asserted that the failure to grant strategic priority to Black male suffrage was a major betrayal of the former slave and constituted outright racism.4 Douglass insisted: 33 34 / Who Should Be First? I must say I do not see how any one can pretend that there is the same urgency in giving the ballot to woman as to the negro. With us, the matter is a question of life and death, at least, in fifteen States of the Union. When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans; when they are dragged from their houses and hung upon lampposts ; when their children are torn from their arms, and their brains dashed out upon the pavement; when they are objects of outrage and insult at every turn; . . . then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own.5 Douglass acknowledged that the same persecution was true for a Black woman, “but not because she is a woman, but because she is black.”6 Stanton had earlier taken up the cause of Black women when abolitionists began narrowing their focus on the rights of Black men: “May I ask just one question based upon the apparent opposition in which you place the negro and the woman? Do you believe the African race is composed entirely of males?”7 The women’s rights leaders tried to highlight the plight of Black women to expose the erroneous opposition of race and gender. A similar point was made one hundred years later by author and Black activist bell hooks, who argued that the forced opposition between Black power and women’s liberation ignored the reality of Black women and unfairly narrowed the social and political debate.8 Women in the nineteenth century lost the battle for universal suffrage, and were told that it was the “Negro’s hour” and that they must wait patiently for their time to come (which would be fifty years later). Some women’s rights leaders, like Lucy Stone, eventually acquiesced, causing a split among those active in the American Equal Rights Association. Others, like Stanton, refused to support a law that discriminated against women and granted preferential power to Black men. As Phoebe Couzins, a law student and associate of Stanton’s proclaimed, “I repudiate the Fifteenth Amendment, because it asks me to acquiesce in an assertion to which I utterly refuse to assent, i.e., the inferiority of women.”9 Stanton’s entrenchment with women’s rights at the expense of racial equality , however, shows that being too zealous about a cause can condemn one’s place in history. This leading light of women’s rights at the national level for more than half a century has been ostracized from history as modern interest faded following allegations of her racist...

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