In July 1848, at what would become known as the Seneca Falls Convention, Elizabeth Cady Stanton went before a crowd of hundreds to proclaim the rights of women “to be free as man is free.” The now-revered feminist proceeded in subsequent speeches and writings to make an argument for women’s suffrage that pitted white women against Black men, who were also fighting for enfranchisement. She essentially promised that if white women were given the vote, they would protect civilization from decline, by which she meant Black influence.
What all of these exclusionary feminists fail to realize, Schuller writes, is that “those on the bottom of the power hierarchy are its experts.”
So began the insidious tradition of “white feminism,” the subject of Kyla Schuller’s new book, The Trouble with White Women: A Counter-History of Feminism (Bold Type Books, publication date October 5). A professor of women’s studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, Schuller argues that, far from ignoring non-middle-class white women as is commonly supposed, white feminism has actually exploited more marginalized groups to expand its own political power. In this sense, white feminism is “theft disguised as liberation,” an idea that also animates Rafia Zakaria’s recently released Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption and Ruby Hamad’s 2019 White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color.
With chapters pairing influential white feminists like Stanton with lesser-known Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and trans activists, Schuller reveals how “competitive, resource-hoarding ideologies”—along with an utter unwillingness to center the most vulnerable or think beyond biological sex—has devastated lives and upheld a status quo in which even many white women suffer.
Stanton, the catalyst for this tradition, may also be the most illustrative example of it. According to Schuller, she chose “sex over race,” initially, by using slavery as a metaphor. An abolitionist before she was a suffragist, Stanton advocated for the emancipation of Black Americans. But the moral outrage of enslavement was most expedient to her “as a dramatic analogy that threw into relief her own lack of rights.”
Once abolition was achieved and she began to view Black men as political rivals, Stanton was quick to denigrate them and other people of color. Schuller writes that, in 1869, two decades after the Seneca Falls Convention, Stanton told a gathering of feminists at Steinway Hall, “I do not believe in allowing ignorant Negroes or ignorant and debased Chinamen to make laws for me to obey.”
The Black poet and abolitionist Frances E.W. Harper was quick to call Stanton out for this remark and for supposing, in Schuller’s summary, that women were “naturally bonded together against a common enemy—men.” Understanding that Black women experienced sexism alongside racism and that their struggles were not identical to white women’s, Harper devoted much of her writing and lecturing to revealing the interdependence of gender, race, and class prejudice.
While Stanton overtly subjugated people of color for political gain, other white feminists pillaged those of color under the pretense of humanitarianism. Schuller suggests this in a chapter on Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin catapulted her to fame and secured her place in history books (in no small part, Schuller suggests, because it simultaneously fed white appetites for “torture porn” and centered white saviors).
It’s less well-known that, in her follow-up book A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe used the real-life story of Harriet Jacobs, who was formerly enslaved, knowing that Jacobs desired to write her own life narrative. Jacobs eventually did so, but never gained the same level of fame.
Then, as now, white readers preferred “white sympathy” over “black self-determination.” Schuller senses this is because of the way white women’s tears cleanse white consciences and “grind [antiracist work] to a halt.”
Readers of The Trouble with White Women might not be surprised to find a chapter on Margaret Sanger, who famously advocated for white women’s reproductive rights by promising that birth control would help to purge society of “the unfit.” (Schuller tells the eugenicist’s story alongside that of Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee, who advocated birth control for marginalized women as part of a broader public health initiative.)
Nor, presumably, will readers be surprised by a chapter critiquing the corporate feminism of Lean In author and “girl boss” Sheryl Sandberg, whom Schuller juxtaposes with Democratic Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to make the point that “trickle-down equality doesn’t work.”
The Trouble with White Women is a truly necessary book, especially in the context of conservatives’ redoubled war on history.
Some, however, might raise an eyebrow at a chapter situating today’s trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) movement squarely within the tradition of white feminism. Schuller argues that TERFs are linked to the likes of Stanton by virtue of their insistence upon a false universal woman: “In the TERF worldview, race, capitalism, and family are all distinctly secondary to the primary fact of sex identity, an identity it insists flows transparently from the body at birth.”
Avowed feminists, from second-wave academic Janice Raymond to contemporary author J.K. Rowling, have used their influence to exclude and oppress trans women, claiming that trans women are not their peers “by virtue of their history,” to quote Raymond. “But what,” asks Schuller, “is this singular history of woman? Was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s experience in her body anything akin to what enslaved women like Harriet Jacobs endured?” Like white feminists before them, TERFs fall for what author Heather McGhee calls “zero sum” thinking—the idea that in order for some to have rights, others have to go without. What all of these exclusionary feminists fail to realize, Schuller writes, is that “those on the bottom of the power hierarchy are its experts.”
Attending to the least is what many religious progressives have been doing for centuries, and Schuller acknowledges this fact, also marveling at the expansive vision of the people of faith who populate her book: “For Frances E. W. Harper, Zitkála-Šá, Pauli Murray, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, power ultimately does not belong to humans but to the realm of spirit—it is not something to be grabbed but to be shared, with gratitude.”
Asked if the positioning of feminism as a secular project is another covert way of excluding and exploiting people of color, who have tended to be more religious than white people, Schuller tells The Progressive, “Yes...to liberate white women from the longstanding association of women with the earth—think Eve and the snake, or women as sole caregivers—white feminists beginning with Elizabeth Cady Stanton threw their lot in with the modern, mechanistic idea that the universe is composed of individual units in competition with each other. They argued that women deserved to be in that competition, as bosses, politicians, and settler leaders.”
Spirituality and religion marked a person “as premodern, of the past and thus less deserving of rights and consideration, so people of color become the workers, the managed, the people to be civilized or removed,” Schuller adds.
The way for secular feminists to redress this racism is by expanding beyond “the human world alone” and “beyond the frameworks of individual rights and of power as something to be obtained.” For Schuller, this necessarily includes embracing climate justice as an essential part of feminism.
The Trouble with White Women is a truly necessary book, especially in the context of conservatives’ redoubled war on history. To date, at least twenty-eight state legislatures have moved to restrict teaching on gender, sexism, and race in public schools.
But as the book makes plain, the truly radical work of feminism has always taken place outside of state-run institutions—in nonprofit groups, churches, synagogues, LGBTQ+ organizations, and more. In these spaces, the work of building a more just world goes on.