Title Gender & Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920
Author: Glenda Gilmore
Year of Publication: 1996
Thesis:
Gilmore explores contingencies with a nuanced critique of the Progressive Era, arguing that racial (and gender) repression reordered society. It redrew racial boundaries, realigned white women behind white men, and eroded fragile alliances between Black and white women. Even as racial terror disfranchised Black men (and therefore Black communities) Black women organized their own progressive units in churches, clubs, and mutual aid organizations while maintaining fragile diplomatic ties with white communities and demanding
Time: 1896-1920
Geography: North Carolina
Organization:
Preface to the Second Edition: Changing Histories
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Place and Possibility
- The Sarah Dudley Pettey family - race relations before disfranchisement
- See: Charles Chesnutt - light-skinned and sometimes passing white; he comments on the experience of white supremacy (Procrustes' bed is a bed he forces guests to conform to by stretching their bodies or cutting them down).
- Black progress a threat to "place"
- Argument similar to Laurel T.Ulrich that the mundane and individual life is important. (4)
- Super interesting - the Petteys own All Healing Springs Resort from 1892-1912 - all-white patrons & Black owners. This has a connection to mental health; that Black people formed central actors in the preservation of white mental health. (29)
2. Race and Womanhood
- Education, civics
- Charts growing parity between # of Black men and women teachers from 1890s on.
- Funding of schools was piecemeal and by collection - whites did not want to pay
- Whole black families learned together at times
- Black women move more freely despite prescription for sex segregation b/c of the doctrine of "usefulness." (36) Black ppl are therefore much more integrated in education across age & gender than white folks (36)
- Livingstone model is example - based on equality & religious education - tends to give Black women a slightly stronger foothold (40)
- White women split from Black women in the WCTU - lured away by Democratic party platform through their promise of prohibition passing (1890s)
3. Race and Manhood
- Also before disfranchisement - examines men both black & white
- Rudyard Kipling anecdote denigrating Black people
- ideology of the "Best Man" - Black "Best Men" evaluated in terms of entire race vs. New Men (white) as individuals (62)
- Reputation important to Southern whites vs. "frontier" whites value agriculture & self-sufficiency (64)
- Defining Black men as rapists a coordinated campaign (88)
4. Sex and Violence in Procruste's Bed
- New take on Democratic disfranchisement of Black people (in that it includes Black women)
- Backlash against Black men is also wrapped up in control over white women
- Wilmington massacre also shows us about the power of political rhetoric for people to do bad while they think they are doing good (92)
- Focus on Black people's actions is useful (92)
- * Disfranchisement seems to be a euphemism for racial terror
5. No Middle Ground
- Assault on Black men, the Black family
- White women actively goad white men to kill to defend them against perceived threat from Black men (& women) (95)
- Examples of white people rejecting orders by Black magistrates & police officers (94)
- Black men's vote is key to Black community (101)
- Black M/C seeing themselves as inclusive leaders, classwise (102)
- On the double standard of rape (105-6)
- Manly - suggests white women freely sought Black men's company in a highly volatile political climate (not a new claim - see Ida B. Wells) (106)
- Pettey family knows Manly & stays publicly mute on this subject (108)
- See end of chapter on results - white women fully aligned behind white men as dependents (choosing race over gender) / Black people finding it very difficult to voice themselves publicly.
6. Diplomatic Women
- As Black men lose political ground, Black women gain ground (suffrage, etc.)
- Critique of the "progressive" in the Progressive Era (white people progress; Black people do not) (148)
- * Would have been WORSE if Black women had not worked for enfranchisement and social welfare (thinking really of Martin Summers' book now)
- Black ministers end up having to temper their rhetoric - church shifts from spiritual to social welfare, organizing women, and community improvement (150-151)
7. Forging Interracial Links
8. Women and Ballots
Epliogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Type:
Political / Cultural / Social
Methods:
Sources:
Primarily sources written by Black people, especially women. Census, newspapers, family papers, organizing meeting minutes. Interestingly, Gilmore finds lacunae as white women tended to obscure their thoughts and interactions on race (xxviii)
Historiography:
Argues similarly to Laura Edwards that the campaign to stoke fear about Black male-led sexual violence against white women was an effective means of disfranchising Black people during Reconstruction; the difference here being that Black women were powerful organizers in the Black community and as informal diplomats to white people. Ultimately, Gilmore's work is one of contingency, as well.
Keywords:
Place:
"Place assembled the current concepts of class and race into a stiff-sided box where southern whites expected African Americans to dwell. South- erners lived under a caste system in which skin color, class, and gender dictated the pattern of every daily interaction. For example, African Ameri- cans riding in carriages irritated white North Carolinians because such luxury challenged the connections of race, class, and place. How could whites maintain the idea that African Americans were lowly due to laziness if some African Americans worked hard enough to purchase carriages?7 By embracing a constellation of Victorian middle-class values—temperance, thrift, hard work, piety, learning—African Americans believed that they could carve out space for dignified and successful lives and that their examples would wear away prejudice.8 As African Americans moved to North Carolina's hamlets and cities to pursue professions and commerce, urban African Americans of the middling sort became increasingly visible at a time when most whites worked diligently to consign blacks to the preindustrial role of agrarian peasants." (3)
Themes:
Public/private vs. personal/political (preface)
Critiques:
Questions:
Given the complicated (sometimes ally, sometimes not) dynamic of white women, I'm curious about where and when else they aligned behind white male supremacy... is this a new phenomenon? Or was this always happening & then there is a moment of possibility where you see these fragile ties based on convenience for white folks (e.g. once it became convenient to align behind Democrats' promise to champion temperance, for example)
Quotes:
On white men:
"The white men in these pages are a self-selected lot: those who publicly oppressed African Americans. They include leading Democratic politi- cians, rowdy white supremacists, and calculating disfranchisers, but they do not represent the racial views of all white men. The leaders depicted here wielded an inordinate amount of power to structure a discriminatory so- ciety and to influence other white men's racial ideologies. Missing here, for the most part, are the white men who became interracialists and tried to mitigate the worst of white supremacy or those who simply disapproved of white violence and tried to practice individual acts of kindness. I did not deliberately count them out; they simply did not have much influence on the racial climate and politics of the state from 1896 to 1920." (xv)
On white women:
"White women move in and out of the spotlight as their politics intersect with and diverge from black women's strategies. Most of the white women I introduce are middle-class leaders. Some actively worked for black dis- franchisement; others tentatively began to foster interracial cooperation in the years before woman suffrage. Occasionally, the same woman did both. White women were overwhelmingly complicitous in shoring up white su- premacy in 1898, yet they were at the vanguard of the movement for interracial cooperation by 1920. s feminist historians rewrite the past to reveal women's agency,we should retain a cautionary approach that takes into account the limits of the possible. Most white women simply could not overcome the racial contexts in which they lived, even if they had thought to try. A very vew changed over time, broke with white men, and responded to black women's efforts." (xxv-xxvi)
On resistance and agency:
"But what is most important about white supremacy remains least documented: African American resistance. The black men and women in these pages fought back, even though history has not regis- tered battles won so slowly and victories so flawed. Justice slumbered throughout Sarah Dudley Pettey's life and beyond, and merit lay unre- warded for a longer time than she ever dreamed possible." (xxviii)
On white men's aggressiveness/dis content:
"The New White Man's carefully cultivated modernity sprang mainly from his economic aspirations, but his disappointment in his father and his bitterness about his mother's stunted life contributed to his rage for change. Although he would never have said so straightforwardly,when the New White Man cataloged his region's ills, he recognized his father's fail- ings. New White Men could blame their fathers for losing the Civil War, retarding industry, neglecting public education, tolerating African Ameri- cans in politics, and creating a bottleneck in the Democratic Party. They had ample evidence that the older generation of men had mistreated white women by failing to provide for them after the Civil War." (67)
On factors in Black women's activism:
"When black women are included in southern history, the narrative most often posits their self-sacrificing community activism rolling inexorably toward the civil rights movement.10 Although, in fact, black women did cleave to a common political culture, one that privileged communitarian- ism over individualism, their tactics—how they voiced their beliefs and the forums in which they chose to act—depended on their class, their age, and the centrality of gender to their thinking." (93)
Fascinating analysis of encounters between Black and white women:
"That done, we meet white women out in public space, getting into fights with black women. If we eliminate the subjectivity of the reportage on black women— the impudence, ignorance, and viciousness—they emerge standing up for their rights and abandoning deference. The African Americans in the sto- ries are either young girls or working women going home with the laundry or leaving the tobacco factory. The white women are shopping, sashaying out for air, or riding bicycles. In almost every encounter, the black women comment—with either words or actions—on white women's freedom to pursue leisure in public while they have to work, even as they puncture the white women's superior demeanor." (104)
On terror & property:
"But to her heartbreaking complaint she added these words, equally heartbreaking: "The Negroes that have been banished are all property owners. . . . Had they been worthless Negroes, we would not care." (113)
Notes:
Re-read and mine this preface for an inspiring reading list.
Good points to bring up:
- Importance of family studies (Pettey family)
- Gilmore's excellent & nuanced critique of progressivism
- "Best Man" issues
- Account of the Wilmington Massacre