Race and Politics in U.S. Women's History

Melinda Chateauvert. Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. xiv + 267 pp. ISBN 0-252-06636-7 (pb).

Laura F. Edwards. Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. xvi + 378 pp. ISBN 0-252-06600-6 (pb).

Ann D. Gordon with Bettye Collier-Thomas, John H. Bracey, Arlene Voski Avakian, and Joyce Avrech Berkman, eds. African American Women and the Vote, 1837-1965. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997. 214 pp. ISBN 1-55849-059-0 (pb).

Elna C. Green. Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. xx + 287 pp. ISBN 0-8078-2323-5 (cl); 0-8078-4641-4 (pb).

Tera W. Hunter. To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. ix + 311 pp. ISBN 0-674-89309-3 (cl).

Neither race nor politics exist as stable, timeless categories. While women's history from the start disrupted our understanding of the political, its encounter with race has resembled history's encounter with gender. In its relation to research on women of color, the field of women's history has undergone a trajectory similar to the one Gerda Lerner mapped for the incorporation of new scholarship on women. ¹ Once there was compensatory history, which uncovered notable women of color, and contributory history, that charted their participation in women's suffrage, the development of the American West, or social welfare through concepts derived from white (and usually middle-class) women's experiences. But just as women's history insisted on studying women on their own terms (even if white was an unstated subtext), historians of African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and other racial/ethnic women began from inside the lives and thoughts of their group, rather than from preset paradigms. We are in the process of writing the history of racial/ethnic women through their cultures, communities, and consciousness.

Women's history now recognizes white women as possessors of a racial identity and race as a category of analysis. Race, like gender, has become a structural and discursive force. ² While some fear that this shift denies the experiences of actual women, especially the voices of women of color, such an approach can illuminate rather than vitiate agency. Race and gender, of course, still sometimes signify the difference of women of color, with white women or men as the norm. And too often their histories are added to a preexisting narrative. Nonetheless, as most of these books reveal, African-American women's history challenges categories frequently taken for granted. ³ Combined with an analytical move to gender and race or racialized gender, ⁴ black women's history generates other narratives, and compels reinterpretation. Such a focus on gender and race has advanced understandings of the political by "pivoting the center," to borrow a phrase Bettina Aptheker uses in African American Women and the Vote (203). Each book reviewed here makes such a pivot, exposing the ways cultural notions of white and black manhood and womanhood structure both society and politics.

Politics as We Know It: Suffrage

The fight for the franchise is perhaps the most traditional topic in political history. How does attention to region and race shift this story? In Southern Strategies, Elna C. Green compares white women who supported suffrage with those who opposed it. She perceptively dissects the conservative ideology of the antis—with their biblical literalism, social Darwinism, and gender traditionalism—analyzes the roles of men, and critiques the equation of women's culture with feminism. A triangular politics of pro, anti, and states' rights factions distinguished the southern struggle, elaborated through the workings of Kate Gordon's Southern States Woman's Suffrage Conference. When antis gained the support of states' righters, suffrage went down in defeat, as seen...