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Not much as changed since 1865 with regard to what pundits are labeling "gender backlash" today.
46% of white women voted for Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) in the New Hampshire primary, fueling her surge over Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL).
One only needs to compare the letters of two influential feminists to the newspapers of their generation to see "the opportunistic and unfortunately racist line of reasoning," according to Professor Angela Y. Davis in her 1981 book Women, Race, and Class.
"Black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot, and generally have ascended to positions of power, from the military to the boardroom, before any women (with the possible exception of obedient family members in the latter)," Gloria Steinem says in The New York Times yesterday.
On Dec. 26, 1865, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote to the editor of the New York Standard:
The black man is still, in a political point of view, far above the educated white women in this country. The representative women of the nation have done their uttermost for the last thirty years to secure freedom for the negro; and as long as he was lowest in the scale of being, we we willing to press his claims; but now, as the celestial gates to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see 'Sambo' walk in the kingdom first.
Stanton's viewpoint shows that "the relationship between the battle for Black Liberation and women's rights was, at best, superficial," Davis says.
And Stanton "was determined to prevent further progress of Black people -- for 'Sambo' no less -- if it meant that white women might not enjoy the immediate benefits of that progress," Davis writes.
If Steinem's opinion is indeed popular -- as indicated by their voting pattern in the New Hampshire primary, white women remain the greatest obstacle to change in this country.
