Words of Fire (68 page)

The culture of dissemblance assumed its most institutionalized form in the founding, in 1896, of the National Association of Colored Women's clubs (NACW). This association of black women quickly became the largest and most enduring protest organization in the history of Afro-Americans. Its size alone should have warranted the same degree of scholarly attention paid to Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association. Not surprisingly, the primary objects of NACW attack were the derogatory images and negative stereotypes of black women's sexuality. By 1914, it had a membership of fifty thousand, far surpassing the membership of every other protest organization of the time, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Urban League. In 1945, in Detroit, for example, the Detroit Association of Colored Women's Clubs, federated in 1921, boasted seventy-three member clubs with nearly three thousand individual members.
⁷

Mary Church Terrell, the first president of the NACW, declared in her initial presidential address that there were objectives of the black women's struggle that could be accomplished only by the “mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters of this race.” She proclaimed, “We wish to set in motion influences that shall stop the ravages made by practices that sap our strength and preclude the possibility of advancement.” She boldly announced, “We proclaim to the world that the women of our race have become partners in the great firm of progress and reform.... We refer to the fact that this is an association of colored women, because our peculiar status in this country ... seems to demand that we stand by ourselves.”
⁸

At the core of essentially every activity of NACW's individual members was a concern with creating positive images of black women's sexuality. To counter negative stereotypes, many black women felt compelled to downplay, even deny, sexual expression. The twin obsessions with naming
and combating sexual exploitation tinted and shaped black women's support even of the woman's suffrage movement. Nannie H. Burroughs, famed religious leader and founder of the National Training School for Women and Girls at Washington, D.C., cajoled her sisters to fight for the ballot. She asserted that with the ballot black women could ensure the passage of legislation to win legal protection against rapists. Calling the ballot a “weapon of moral defense” she exploded, “when she [a black woman] appears in court in defense of her virtue, she is looked upon with amused contempt. She needs the ballot to reckon with men who place no value upon her virtue.”
⁹

Likewise, determination to save young unskilled and unemployed black women from having to bargain sex in exchange for food and shelter motivated some NACW members to establish boarding houses and domestic service training centers, such as the Phillis Wheatley Homes, and Burroughs's National Training School. This obsession with providing black women with protection from sexual exploitation and with dignified work inspired other club members in local communities around the country to support or to found hospitals and nursing training schools.

At least one plausible consequence of this heightened mobilization of black women was a decline in black urban birth rates. As black women became more economically self-sufficient, better educated, and more involved in self-improvement efforts, including participation in the flourishing black women's club movement in midwestern communities, they had greater access to birth control information. As the institutional infrastructure of black women's clubs, sororities, church-based women's groups, and charity organizations sunk roots into black communities it encouraged its members to embrace those values, behaviors, and attitudes traditionally associated with the middle classes. To urban black middle-class aspirants, the social stigma of having many children did, perhaps, inhibit reproduction. To be sure, over time the gradually evolving male-female demographic imbalance meant that increasingly significant numbers of black women, especially those employed in the professions, in urban midwestern communities would never marry. The point stressed here, however, is that not having children was, perhaps for the very first time, a choice enjoyed by large numbers of black women.

There were additional burdens placed upon and awards granted to the small cadre of single, educated, professional black women who chose not to marry or to bear children. The more educated they were, the greater the sense of being responsible, somehow, for the advance of the race and for the elevation of black womanhood. They held these expectations of themselves and found a sense of racial obligation reinforced by the demands of the black community and its institutions. In return for their sacrifice of sexual expression, the community gave them respect and recognition. Moreover,
this freedom and autonomy represented a socially sanctioned, meaningful alternative to the uncertainties of marriage and the demands of child rearing. The increased employment opportunities, whether real or imagined, and the culture of dissemblance enabled many migrating black women to become financially independent and simultaneously to fashion socially useful and autonomous lives, while reclaiming control over their own sexuality and reproductive capacities.

This is not to say that black women, once settled into midwestern communities, never engaged in sex for pay or occasional prostitution. Sara Brooks, a black domestic servant from Alabama who migrated to Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1930s ill-disguised her contempt for women who bartered their bodies. She declared, while commenting on her own struggle to pay the mortgage on her house, “Some women woulda had a man to live in the house and had an outside boyfriend, too, in order to get the house paid for and the bills.” She scornfully added, “They meet a man and if he promises em four or five dollars to go to bed, they's grab it. That's called sellin' your own body, and I wasn't raised like that.”
¹⁰
What escapes Brooks, in this moralizing moment, is that her poor and powerless black female neighbors were extracting value from the only thing the society now allowed them to sell. As long as they occupied an enforced subordinate position within American society, this “sellin' your own body” as Brooks put it, was, I submit, Rape.

In sum, at some fundamental level all black women historians are engaged in the process of historical reclamation. But it is not enough simply to reclaim those hidden and obscure facts and names of black foremothers. Merely to reclaim and to narrate past deeds and contributions risks rendering a skewed history focused primarily on the articulate, relatively wellpositioned members of the aspiring black middle class. In synchrony with the reclaiming and narrating must be the development of an array of analytical frameworks that allow us to understand why black women behave in certain ways and how they acquired agency.

The migration of hundreds of thousands of black women out of the South between 1915 and 1945, and the formation of thousands of black women's clubs and the NACW, are actions that enabled them to put into place, to situate, a protest infrastructure and to create a self-conscious black women's culture of resistance. Most significant, the NACW fostered the development of an image of black women as being supermoral women. In particular, the institutionalization of women's clubs embodied the shaping and honing of the culture of dissemblance. This culture, grounded as it was on the twin prongs of protest and resistance, enabled the creation of positive alternative images of their sexual selves and facilitated black women's mental and physical survival in a hostile world.

1
Hazel V. Carby,
Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 39.

2
See Terry McMillan,
Mam
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987); Grace Edwards-Yearwood,
In the Shadow of the Peacock
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988); Alice Walker,
The Color Purple
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982); Toni Morrison,
The Bluest Eye
(New York: Washington Square Press, 1972); and Gloria Naylor,
The Women of Brewster Place
(New York: Penguin, 1983).

3
Harriet A. Jacobs,
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself,
ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); and Elizabeth Keckley,
Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). See also Rennie Simson, “The Afro-American Female: The Historical Construction of Sexual Identity,” in
The Powers of Desire: The Poltics of Sexuality
, ed. Ann Snitow, Sharon Thompson, and Christine Stansell (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 229-35.

4
Alan H. Spear,
Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890—1920
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 34.

5
Lawrence W. Levine,
Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 274.

6
Deborah Gray White, “Mining the Forgotten: Manuscript Sources for Black Women's History,”
Journal of American History
74 (June 1987): 237-42, especially 237-38.

7
Robin S. Peebles, “Detroit's Black Women's Clubs,”
Michigan History
70 (January/February 1986): 48.

8
Darlene Clark Hine, “Lifting the Veil, Shattering the Silence: Black Women's History in Slavery and Freedom,” in
The State of Afro-American History: Past, Present, and Future
, ed. Darlene Clark Hine (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 223-49, especially 236-37.

9
Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “Woman Suffrage: ‘First because We Are Women and Second because We Are Colored Women,' ”
Truth : Newsletter of the Association of Black Women Historians
(April 1985), 9; Evelyn Brooks Barnett, “Nannie Burroughs and the Education of Black Women, in
The Afro
-
American Woman
, ed. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn and Sharon Harley (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1978), 97—108.

10
Thordis Simonsen, ed.,
You May Plow Here: The Narrative of Sara Brooks
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 219.

S
hirley Chisholm, born in Brooklyn, New York, to Barbadian parents, was the first black woman to be elected to Congress (1968). She was also the first African American to seek nomination for the presidency of the United States (1972), a process that she chronicled in
The Good Fight
(1973). Following the 1984 Democratic Convention, she provided the catalyst for the founding of the National Political Congress of Black Women. She stunned audiences by revealing in her autobiography,
Unbossed and Unbought
(1970), that being a woman had been more disadvantageous than being black. Outspoken in her defense of black and women's liberation, she was also one of the first black women to advocate publicly for the legalization of abortion and wrote eloquently in her autobiography about her pro-choice position. “Facing the Abortion Question,” written when she was President of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL) and before
Roe v. Wade
(1973), chronicles her involvement with the controversial issue of abortion rights and responds to persons in the black community who are anti-choice. She argues about the importance of black women's ability to get safe, legal abortions and is especially sensitive to the plight of poor women who are more negatively impacted by unwanted pregnancies.

I
n August of 1969 I started to get phone calls from NARAL, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, a new organization based in New York City that was looking for a national president. In the New York State Assembly I had supported abortion reform bills introduced by Assemblyman Albert Blumenthal, and this had apparently led NARAL to believe I would sympathize with its goal: complete repeal of all laws restricting abortion. As a matter of fact, when I was in the Assembly I had not been in favor of repealing all abortion laws, a step that would leave the question of having or not having the operation entirely up to a woman and her doctor. The bills I had tried to help pass in Albany would only have made it somewhat easier for women to get therapeutic abortions in New York State, by providing additional legal grounds and simplifying the procedure for getting approval. But since that time I had been compelled to do some heavy thinking on the subject, mainly because of the experiences of several young women I knew. All had suffered permanent injuries at the hands of illegal abortionists. Some will never have children as a result. One will have to go to a hospital periodically for treatment for the rest of her life.

It had begun to seem to me that the question was not whether the law should allow abortions. Experience shows that pregnant women who feel they have compelling reasons for not having a baby, or another baby, will break the law and, even worse, risk injury and death if they must to get one. Abortions will not be stopped. It may even be that the number performed is not being greatly reduced by laws making an abortion a “criminal operation.” If that is true, the question becomes simply that of what kind of abortions society wants women to have—clean, competent ones performed by licensed physicians or septic, dangerous ones done by incompetent practitioners.

So when NARAL asked me to lead its campaign, I gave it serious thought. For me to take the lead in abortion law repeal would be an even
more serious step than for a white politician to do so, because there is a deep and angry suspicion among many blacks that even birth control clinics are a plot by the white power structure to keep down the numbers of blacks, and this opinion is even more strongly held by some in regard to legalizing abortions. But I do not know any black or Puerto Rican
women
who feel that way. To label family planning and legal abortion programs “genocide” is male rhetoric, for male ears. It falls flat to female listeners, and to thoughtful male ones. Women know, and so do many men, that two or three children who are wanted, prepared for, reared amid love and stability, and educated to the limit of their ability will mean more for the future of the black and brown races from which they come than any number of neglected, hungry, ill-housed, and ill-clothed youngsters. Pride in one's race, as well as simple humanity, supports this view. Poor women of every race feel as I do, I believe. There is objective evidence of it in a study by Dr. Charles F. Westhoff of the Princeton Office of Population Research. He questioned 5,600 married persons and found that twenty-two percent of their children were unwanted. But among persons who earned less than $4,000 a year, forty-two percent of the children were unwanted. The poor are more anxious about family planning than any other group.