Crystal Feimster’s Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching takes us to the post-antebellum American South for a look at gender and race politics. Her argument shows the social obstacles (rape and alienation) women faced during and after the war, lynching as a mechanism for racial hierarchy and the intersections between the two themes. Part political biography and part historical social commentary, Feimster traces the politics of Ida Wells and Rachel Felton to challenge notions of race, gender and the roles of southern women.
Feimster’s narrative starts during the Civil War, with the plantation mistress Rebecca Felton. Her fears of slave insurrections and sexual attrition from union troops put her in danger without the
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protection of confederate men. Early on, Feimster establishes rape as a means for social hierarchy. White unionist rape of southern white women symbolized military dominance, while white unionist and confederate rape of black women symbolized racial dominance. Felton noticed these hierarchies, and began her career as a political reformer seeking protection and recognition for women (particularly white) in the new south.
Much of Feimster’s early evidence is WCTU (Felton’s political club) rhetoric and editorials from southern newspapers. The editorials display racial attitudes on rape and WCTU rhetoric gives us reform ideas from the radical few. Feimster employs both well to give us a picture of the sociopolitical conditions in the post-war south.
The majority of Feimster’s work focuses on the extralegal violence used by white lynch mobs against black men and women in the south. At the center of advocacy against lynch-culture, was Ida B. Wells. Having been born a slave, Wells understood the racial implications of rape and lynching. Her political activity represented female independence and progress, but in a different way than Felton’s.
Refusing to accept the racial and sexual terms of the antebellum hierarchy that defined protection as a right guaranteed only to elite white women, Wells sought to broaden notions of female protection by insisting that it was a basic right of citizenship (Feimster,
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37). Felton was already radical for seeking protection and independence for white southern women, so when Wells came along to advocate for black southern women, she was considered too radical, often a pariah. Exiled from her home in Memphis, Tennessee, Wells sought refuge in Chicago to continue her work against the extralegal and sexual violence experienced by black men and women. Much of the evidence associated with Wells focuses on her editorials, diary writings and public speeches on lynching.
I particularly liked Feimster’s use of an editorial post from the Free Speech. “I felt that one had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or a rat in a trap. I had already determined to sell my life as dearly as possible if attacked,” wrote Wells (Feimster, 90). Her words, in response to Thomas Moss’s lynching, characterize her as a powerful, almost martyr-like figure in the protest for equal racial and legal treatment. Her tenacity and unwillingness to settle or submit defined a movement that was taking place well before its
time. The strength in Feimster’s evidence is the sheer breadth of it. Newspapers, polemics, literature and speeches all contribute to her argument for an American south plagued by racial and gender hierarchy. As previously mentioned, the most powerful political material came from Wells’ diaries and speeches. Her radical stance takes us to the very edge of an intersection between racial and gender alienation. One critique is that Feimster’s long chapters on lynching became formulaic in their evidential support. Each case followed a similar pattern of: account of lynching – newspaper headline and reaction – aftermath within the black community. While the stories and reactions were revealing of the southern lynch culture, the pattern was monotonous. Another critique is that she didn’t use a lot of secondary literature from other historians. I would have liked to see references to the work of others who have investigated the same themes. By and large, Feimster’s work is unique in the thematic intersections it follows between rape, lynching, race and gender. In the post-war south, black men and women were vilified; white women were domesticated and tasked with upholding the morals of society, while white men were mostly free to exercise their perceived supremacy and dominance over all. It’s a complicated social picture, but Feimster puts it all together in a fluid manner. Academic contexts aside, this book should be read by anyone who thinks about race, gender and sexual violence in today’s society. Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching is important as an historical narrative, but more important for what it tells us about racial aggressions, the long process for change and the struggle for equality under the law.
Suzanne Lebsock, the author of “A Murder in Virginia”, has written many historical novels, including “The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860”, “Visible Women”, and “A Share of Honour”. Lebsock has been recognized with the MacArthur Fellowship, the Bancroft Prize and Berkshire Conference Prize for “The Free Women of Petersburg”, and the Guggenheim Fellowship. “A Murder in Virginia” captures the essence of the Southern society post-slavery. The strictly fact-based novel goes chronologically from soon prior the murder of a white farm wife, Lucy Pollard, to the convicting of suspects, to sentencing those found guilty of being hanged, to the children of Fort Mitchell searching for the lost money. These events span from 1895 to over a century later.
Interestingly, the book does not focus solely on the Georgia lynching, but delves into the actual study of the word lynching which was coined by legendary judge Charles B Lynch of Virginia to indicate extra-legal justice meted out to those in the frontier where the rule of law was largely absent. In fact, Wexler continues to analyse how the term lynching began to be used to describe mob violence in the 19th century, when the victim was deemed to have been guilty before being tried by due process in a court of law.
In “ ‘It Was Like All of Us Had Been Raped’: Sexual Violence, Community Mobilization, and the African American Freedom Struggle” by Danielle L. McGuire, McGuire begins her piece with a haunting tale of the rape of Betty Jean Owens, that really illustrates the severity of racial brutality in the 1950s. She depicts a long history of african-american women who refuse to remain silent, even in the face of adversity, and even death, and who've left behind a testimony of the many wrong-doings that have been done to them. Their will to fight against the psychological and physical intimidation that expresses male domination and white supremacy is extremely admirable. The mobilization of the community, and the rightful conviction of the 4 white men most definitely challenged ideologies of racial inequality and sexual domination, and inspired a revolution in societal
The history of The Black Civil Rights Movement in the United States is a fascinating account of a group of human beings, forcibly taken from their homeland, brought to a strange new continent, and forced to endure countless inhuman atrocities. Forced into a life of involuntary servitude to white slave owners, African Americans were to face an uphill battle for many years to come. Who would face that battle? To say the fight for black civil rights "was a grassroots movement of ordinary people who accomplished extraordinary things" would be an understatement. Countless people made it their life's work to see the progression of civil rights in America. People like W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, A Phillip Randolph, Eleanor Roosevelt, and many others contributed to the fight although it would take ordinary people as well to lead the way in the fight for civil rights. This paper will focus on two people whose intelligence and bravery influenced future generations of civil rights organizers and crusaders. Ida B.Wells and Mary Mcleod Bethune were two African American women whose tenacity and influence would define the term "ordinary to extraordinary".
means of depriving blacks of their rights. During Ida B. Wells-Barnett time, lynching was a
In her Fire in a Canebrake, Laura Wexler describes an important event in mid-twentieth century American race relations, long ago relegated to the closet of American consciousness. In so doing, Wexler not only skillfully describes the event—the Moore’s Ford lynching of 1946—but incorporates it into our understanding of the present world and past by retaining the complexities of doubt and deception that surrounded the event when it occurred, and which still confound it in historical records. By skillfully navigating these currents of deceit, too, Wexler is not only able to portray them to the reader in full form, but also historicize this muddled record in the context of certain larger historical truths. In this fashion, and by refusing to cede to a desire for closure by drawing easy but inherently flawed conclusions regarding the individuals directly responsible for the 1946 lynching, Wexler demonstrates that she is more interested in a larger historical picture than the single event to which she dedicates her text. And, in so doing, she rebukes the doubts of those who question the importance of “bringing up” the lynching, lending powerful motivation and purpose to her writing that sustains her narrative, and the audience’s attention to it.
Southern Horror s: Lynch Law in All Its Phases by Ida B. Wells took me on a journey through our nations violent past. This book voices how strong the practice of lynching is sewn into the fabric of America and expresses the elevated severity of this issue; she also includes pages of graphic stories detailing lynching in the South. Wells examined the many cases of lynching based on “rape of white women” and concluded that rape was just an excuse to shadow white’s real reasons for this type of execution. It was black’s economic progress that threatened white’s ideas about black inferiority. In the South Reconstruction laws often conflicted with real Southern racism. Before I give it to you straight, let me take you on a journey through Ida’s
People attending schools before 1960’s were learning about certain “unscrupulous carpetbaggers”, “traitorous scalawags”, and the “Radical Republicans”(223). According to the historians before the event of 1960’s revision, these people are the reason that the “white community of South banded together to overthrow these “black” governments and restore home rule”(223). While this might have been true if it was not for the fact that the “carpetbaggers were former Union soldiers”, “Scalawags… emerged as “Old Line” Whig Unionists”(227). Eric Foner wrote the lines in his thesis “The New View of Reconstruction” to show us how completely of target the historians before the 1960’s revision were in their beliefs.
In Southern Horrors and Other Writings three pamphlets written by Ida B. Wells are highlighted. These pamphlets showed that Wells used muckraking/ investigative reporting to describe what was going on in the south. Wells saw the corruption that was occurring in the South, and wanted to make it known to the public. Wells also uses persuasive writing to get the support of the African American community and she had hoped to create change. Wells’ writings are finally a historically effective text, not just because they are primary source documents, but because she served as a voice to the African American people.
Wells, Ida B. Southern Horrors. Lynch Law in All Its Phase. New York: New York Age Print, 1892. Print. 6.
Deborah Gray White’s Ar’n’t I a Woman? details the grueling experiences of the African American female slaves on Southern plantations. White resented the fact that African American women were nearly invisible throughout historical text, because many historians failed to see them as important contributors to America’s social, economic, or political development (3). Despite limited historical sources, she was determined to establish the African American woman as an intricate part of American history, and thus, White first published her novel in 1985. However, the novel has since been revised to include newly revealed sources that have been worked into the novel. Ar’n’t I a Woman? presents African American females’ struggle with race and gender through the years of slavery and Reconstruction. The novel also depicts the courage behind the female slave resistance to the sexual, racial, and psychological subjugation they faced at the hands of slave masters and their wives. The study argues that “slave women were not submissive, subordinate, or prudish and that they were not expected to be (22).” Essentially, White declares the unique and complex nature of the prejudices endured by African American females, and contends that the oppression of their community were unlike those of the black male or white female communities.
In Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the author subjects the reader to a dystopian slave narrative based on a true story of a woman’s struggle for self-identity, self-preservation and freedom. This non-fictional personal account chronicles the journey of Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897) life of servitude and degradation in the state of North Carolina to the shackle-free promise land of liberty in the North. The reoccurring theme throughout that I strive to exploit is how the women’s sphere, known as the Cult of True Womanhood (Domesticity), is a corrupt concept that is full of white bias and privilege that has been compromised by the harsh oppression of slavery’s racial barrier. Women and the female race are falling for man’s
“Line of Color, Sex, and Service: Sexual Coercion in the Early Republic” is a publication that discusses two women, Rachel Davis and Harriet Jacobs. This story explains the lives of both Rachel and Harriet and their relationship between their masters. Rachel, a young white girl around the age of fourteen was an indentured servant who belonged to William and Becky Cress. Harriet, on the other hand, was born an enslaved African American and became the slave of James and Mary Norcom. This publication gives various accounts of their masters mistreating them and how it was dealt with.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth-century, notions of freedom for Black slaves and White women were distinctively different than they are now. Slavery was a form of exploitation of black slaves, whom through enslavement, lost their humanity and freedom, and were subjected to dehumanizing conditions. African women and men were often mistreated through similar ways, especially when induced to labor, they would eventually become a genderless individual in the sight of the master. Despite being considered “genderless” for labor, female slaves suddenly became women who endured sexual violence. Although a white woman was superior to the slaves, she had little power over the household, and was restricted to perform additional actions without the consent of their husbands. The enslaved women’s notion to conceive freedom was different, yet similar to the way enslaved men and white women conceived freedom. Black women during slavery fought to resist oppression in order to gain their freedom by running away, rebel against the slaveholders, or by slowing down work. Although that didn’t guarantee them absolute freedom from slavery, it helped them preserve the autonomy and a bare minimum of their human rights that otherwise, would’ve been taken away from them. Black