Words of Fire (73 page)

For example, in the late nineteenth century, men were believed to have a particularly rapacious sexual drive that had to be controlled. The last thing needed at home was a woman who had the same sexual drive that men had; what was needed was in binary opposition to perceived male sexuality. What was needed was a woman who did not tempt, and was thus synonymous with “good.” And so, although in another period women were thought to have strong, even the more ungovernable, sexual drives, by the late nineteenth century, they were thought to have hardly any libido at all. Furthermore, female sexuality was now considered pathological (Gilman, 1985). That meant, of course, that good women did not have erotic feelings, and those who might have had inappropriate urges were recommended to see physicians like J. Marion Sims or Robert Battey, who employed radical gynecological surgery, including clitoridectomies, to “correct” masturbation and other forms of sexual passion (D'Emilio, Freedman, 1988). Such severe methods were necessary to sustain diametrically
opposed identities to “bad” women: lower-class women, and especially black women.

Economically lower-class women fell under the “bad” column by virtue of the fact that they worked outside the home and thus were uninsulated from the sexual aggression of the society. Certainly, it was the former group of women who made up the growing numbers of prostitutes, a label that could fall even on women more drawn to casual sex than to remuneration, and were of great interest to scientists as well as white middle-class female reformers and repressed men. With Sara Bartmann as a model and basis of comparison, their sexual organs were studied, codified, and preserved in jars. Anthropologists such as Cesare Lombrosco, coauthor of the major study of prostitution in the late nineteenth century,
The Prostitute and the Normal Woman
(1893), wrote that the source of their passion and pathology lay in the labia, which reflected a more primitive structure than their upper-class counterparts. One of Lombrosco's students, Abele de Blasio, focused on the buttocks. His specialty was steatopygia (excessive fat on the buttocks), which was also deemed to be a special characteristic of whores —and, of course, black women. They would represent the very root of female eroticism, immorality, and disease.

In the medical metaphors of the day, the sexual organs of sexual women were not only hotbeds of moral pathology, but of disease. In the nineteenth century the great fear was of a sexually transmitted disease that was spreading among the population, was incurable, and after invading the body, disfigured and decomposed it in stages. The name of the disease was syphilis, and it was the era's metaphor for the retribution of sexual sin. Despite evidence to the contrary, it was seen as a disease that affected not only persons, but groups perceived as both licentious and deviant. Prostitutes of course fell into this category, but it did not seem to affect business. Science even abandoned long-held views to accommodate the paradigm. Formerly, it was believed that Christopher Columbus's sailors had introduced the disease to Europe. Now the new wisdom traced it to a form of leprosy that had long been present in Africa and had spread into Europe during the Middle Ages. At the wellspring of this plague were the genital organs of black women (Gilman, 1985).

As the epitome of the immorality, pathology, and impurity of the age, black women were seen in dualistic opposition to their upper-class, pure, and passionless white sisters. It was this binary opposition of women (black men's sex drives were not seen as inherently different than those of white men, only less controlled) that was the linchpin of race, class, and even gender difference. It was this opposition, furthermore, that also led to lynching. For it was the white women's qualities so profoundly missing in black women, that made black men find white women irresistible, and “strangely alluring and seductive,” in the words of Phillip Bruce.

Categorizing women through binary opposition had a devastating impact. Even the relatively privileged middle-class white women were subjected to the sexual tyrannies of the age. The opposition of public, a male sphere, and private, a female one, led to conclusions that imprisoned women in the home. The eminent Harvard-trained physician Dr. Edward Clarke, for example, wrote in his influential book
Sex in Education
(1873) that education could ruin a woman's sexual organs. Ideas about male sexual irrepressibility in opposition to women's passionlessness were largely responsible for the fact that “rape in marriage was no crime, nor even generally disapproved,” “wife beating was only marginally criminal,” and “incest was common enough to require skepticism that it was tabooed,” according to historians Linda Gordon and Ellen Carol DuBois (1983). Women would have to untangle and rework paradigms in order to protect themselves and, as DuBois and Gordon note, exercise their right to enjoy the pleasure of sex. Toward this end, white feminists began challenging the oppositional frameworks concerning the sexuality of men and women. For example, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, a physician, offered the startling counteropinion that men and women had equal sexual urges, thus providing a rationale for consensual sex in marriage—and for “free lovers” outside of marriage as well. They also regulated the torrent of male sexuality by insisting that women should only be required to have sex when they wanted to get pregnant. Called “voluntary motherhood,” it was a “brilliant” tactic, says Gordon, for it “insinuated a rejection of male sexual domination into a politics of defending and improving motherhood.” And at a time when they still had little power or even identity outside of the home, women disdained abortion and contraception, insisting—in a world of depersonalized sex—on maintaining the link between sexual intercourse and reproduction. Consequently, say the authors, the principle of marital mutuality and women's right to say no was established among white middle-class couples in the late nineteenth century. This is perhaps evidenced by the fact that although birth control methods were not widely approved, the birthrate among white native-born women declined by 1900 to an average of 3.54—fifty percent below the level of the previous century!

Despite their enlightened views on such issues as a single standard of sexuality for men and women, as well as others, white feminists fell short on issues like nonmarital rape, probably because of its interracial implications. Although they could bring themselves to counter gender oppositions, those that involved race, and, to a lesser extent class, seemed to be beyond their reach. This would be left to black feminists like Ida B. Wells and others who constantly challenged the dualism between good and bad, black
and white, and its implications especially as it affected African American women.

Ida Wells simply turned this paradigm on its head, with her own empirical evidence gathered from her investigation of the circumstances of 728 lynchings that had taken place over the previous decade. Her meticulously documented findings would not only challenge the assumption of rape—which also exonerated black women to a significant extent—but also included findings about the lynching of black women as well as their sexual exploitation at the hands of whites. It was black women who needed protection, Wells insisted, as “the rape of helpless Negro girls and women, which began in slavery days, still continued without reproof from church, state, or press,” thus changing their representation to that of victims. Her most dramatic challenge to the paradigm, of course, was her questioning of the passionless purity of Southern white women. There
where
interracial liaisons between black men and white women, Wells published in her findings, but they were consensual and often initiated by white women. In May of 1892, Wells would publish the editorial that got her exiled from the South: “If Southern white men are not careful ... ,” she challenged, “a conclusion will be reached which will be damaging to the moral reputation of their women” (Wells,
On Lynchings
[New York: Arno Press, 1969]). Wells, perhaps the first leader to broach the subject of black sexual oppression after slavery, had now completely challenged the period's assumptions. Black men weren't rapists, white men were; black women weren't doing what “nature prompted,” white women were; Wells's framework actually rescued both black and white women from their dehumanized objectification.

When, in reaction to Wells's ideas, the president of the Missouri Press Association, John Jacks, wrote a letter calling all black women “prostitutes, thieves and liars,” it was the proverbial straw for nascent regional clubs to come together under a national umbrella in 1896. “Read the letter carefully, and use it discriminately” (it was “too indecent for publication”), challenged Boston activist and editor Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and “decide if it be not the time to stand before the world and declare ourselves and our principles.” Formed as the National Association for Colored Women (NACW), with a membership that would reach 50,000 by 1916, it would act not only as a means to realize suffrage, education, and community development, but the vessel through which black women challenged, in public, the beliefs that were getting black men lynched and black women raped and exploited. Sexual exploitation was so pervasive that it drove black women north in search of safer climes. “It is a significant and shameful fact that I am constantly in receipt of letters from still unprotected women in the South,” complained the nineteenth-century Chicago activist Fannie
Barrier Williams, “begging me to find employment for their daughters ... to save them from going into the homes of the South as servants as there is nothing to save them from dishonor and degradation.” In 1893, before the predominantly white Congress of Representative Women, Williams challenged that black women shouldn't be disparaged but protected, adding that “I do not want to disturb the serenity of this conference by suggesting why this protection is needed and the kind of man against whom it is needed.”

Nevertheless, despite their extraordinary boldness in bringing this issue before the white public, black women activists were precluded from presenting another kind of critique, one which was also important. The brutal concept of binary opposition prevented them from a frank public discourse concerning intraracial gender relations and sexuality, with which white feminists had been relatively successful. This void was a potentially lifethreatening one in a time of adjustment to nonslavery; a time when gender roles, altered first by slavery and then by rapid social and economic changes, were in chaos; a time when the sexuality of both black men and women had to have been twisted by sexism and racism, and now by numbing poverty. Ghettos were congealing, families were in disarray, domestic violence was on the increase, cocaine and alcohol were being abused, and venereal diseases were increasing at an alarming rate. But in this social-Darwinistic environment, where blacks were judged harshly, even murderously, by their perceived difference from the white middle-class ideal, where it was believed that the poor deserved to be poor because of moral and character flaws, where a man, as Wells reported, could be lynched under the pretense of beating his wife, how could there be a public discourse about such things? How was one going to explain the higher rates of venereal disease such as syphilis among blacks? And how was one to explain before a hostile white public that the higher rates of infant mortality were largely due to children's inheriting “enfeebled constitutions and congenital diseases, inherited from parents suffering from the effects of sexual immorality and debauchery” (25), as an 1897 report,
Proceedings of the Second Conference for the Study of Problems Concerning Negro City Life,
under the general direction of W. E. B. Du Bois, then at Atlanta University, stated?

Publicly voicing such concerns in a society defined by binary opposition could leave blacks in general and black women in particular vulnerable to the violent whims of whites. It is no wonder that the issues of intraracial sexuality and gender have long been tabooed in public discourse. At the same time, not voicing these concerns have left the community, especially
women, bereft of the help and protection so needed. As an anonymous black women writer, one of the few who dared break the silence of intraracial sexuality, wrote to the
Independent
in 1904, “We poor colored wage earners of the South are fighting a terrible battle, on the one hand, we are assailed by white men, and on the other hand, we are assailed by black men who should be our natural protectors.” There are sexist backlashes within our community, too.

For black women, the accumulated effects of assault and the inability to “eradicate negative social and sexual images of their womanhood” had “powerful ideological consequences,” concludes historian Darlene Hine. To protect themselves, she observes, black women created what she calls “a culture of dissemblance.” Hine defines this as “the behavior and attitudes of black women that created the appearance of openness and disclosure but actually shielded the truth of their inner lives and selves from their oppressors” (202)—and I would add, even from ourselves. This is the reason, I think, why we have not forced such sex/gender discourses, seen primarily as disclosures, in our community. It is why feminist issues, though not women's rights issues, are more problematic for us. Not only is feminism specifically associated with our historic binary opposites—middle—class white women—it demands an analysis of sexual issues. This is why to break through the silence and traditional sense of racial solidarity is such a controversial act for us. This, in turn, largely accounts for the vitriol earned by those who indicate a public discourse on sexuality in their work, such as Alice Walker in
The Color Purple
or Ntozake Shange in
For Colored Girls.
... I think these traditional notions are also the reason why Anita Hill's appearance was so controversial in the black community. Those who publicly supported her, namely black scholars and the National Coalition of 100 Black Women—formed in 1970 when the women's movement was making an impact—were those in touch with gender issues and their role in the needed transformation of our institutions and communities. This is the window black women writers have pointed toward but that Anita Hill, in her first-person, clear, unswervingly direct testimony before the public, has actually opened. It was an act of great inner courage and conviction, to turn back the veil of our Du Boisian double consciousness. It was an act that provided clarity about our new status in the late twentieth century.