We all have that family recipe. You know, that 100-year-old cookie recipe that has been passed down from your great-great-great grandmother to your mom. Of course, the family recipe isn’t the same as it was when it was first created: it evolved over time. It’s taken ingredient adjustments and different people to perfect the recipe to the way you know it now. Feminism is kinda the same.
The way we know feminism now is not how it’s always been. It’s evolved over time, for the better. Most of us don’t know how feminism really started or why it is the way it is now. Surprisingly, it didn’t start out advocating for all females’ rights and demanding equality for all women. The origins of feminism were actually extremely racist. The history textbooks teach us that all women were working as one united force to fight for their rights, but that wasn’t necessarily the case.
After the Civil War, black men were allowed voting rights, whereas white women were denied them. This angered white women and caused some of them to develop a hatred for African-American men and lash out. The black community soon realized that not all white women were their allies. Rather than being happy and celebrating the progress, the women were instead angry. The suffragettes then had to come up with a new way to get voting rights, so they allied with white women from the South. Historically, Southern white women and the black community did not get along, resulting in tension between the groups.
Following the Civil War, a.k.a Reconstruction for all you history geeks, Southern white women began to disregard the frequent lynchings, mass incarcerations, and poverty of the black community. They had placed importance on having women participate in democracy over embracing other races. Southern and Northern white women both began to band together and find any way to exclude black men and women.
With minimal support, black women had to put in all the work to gain their own voting rights. White men and women were barely treating them as people, and black men were unable to do anything to stop the prejudice against them. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, a black journalist, called out the racist motives behind the attempt to gain suffrage for white women. She broke all societal standards and stood up for herself and fellow black women. While white women were out and about lynching innocent black people and harming their community to gain rights, black women did it the right way by building themselves up from the bottom.
The origin of the Feminist Movement was incredibly racist, whether we believe it or not. It was never originally meant for the rights of black women; it was meant solely to benefit white women across the country. Today, when we think of feminism, we think about ALL women gaining equality to be on the same level as men. However, during the Civil War era, it was black women fighting to be on the same level as white women.
Think of your great-great-great grandma’s cookie recipe today, it had to have started somewhere right. Maybe there was too much salt in it or too much flour, which is why over time it had to improve. Much like the cookie recipe, feminism had to improve in order to benefit all women. Now, after learning about all of this and thinking about where feminism is today, it’s hard for me to believe that it was ever racist, but these are undeniable facts and I’m glad that today we are fighting for all women’s rights, not just one race. Next time when you eat grandma’s famous cookies, just remember, the cookies weren’t always as great as you know them now.
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