How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All
The American Revolution was a struggle for liberty. Initially, that meant freedom from British rule. But as the war drew to a close, Americans began appealing to revolutionary ideas about the equality of all in their fight against another enemy: slavery.
Opposition to slavery was not new, but few had called for the immediate liberation of enslaved African Americans. Dismantling slavery, the institution’s opponents thought, would take decades, if not centuries. For now, all they could do was ensure that the law was properly applied and that the flagrant abuse of slaves was ended.
By the 1830s, though, campaigners started making more radical demands. Spurred on by the emancipation of slaves in a few northern states, they now pushed for the total abolition of slavery everywhere. This abolitionism was part of a wider push for social reform designed to close the gap between the rhetoric of the Revolution and the reality of life in the new republic.
The key message in this blink is: The abolitionist movement appealed to women seeking their own emancipation.
Abolitionism thrived in print. Dozens of Black- and white-owned newspapers sprang up around the country, dedicated to spreading the word and arguing the cause. But how could they appeal to the hearts and minds of Americans?
Well, they targeted likely allies. As the male editors of these newspapers saw it, no group was more open to the moral argument against slavery than women. Their articles thus emphasized the sexual exploitation of enslaved women and slave owners’ habit of breaking up families. The evidence was certainly on their side – these were excellent reasons to oppose slavery. But American women found even more reasons to side with abolitionists. They often drew on their own experiences.
They, too, were disenfranchised and subject to what was sometimes called the “slavery of sex.” Unable to dispose of their own property, tethered to abusive husbands by one-sided marriage laws, and lacking all political rights, many white middle-class women came to see parallels between their own lives and the plight of enslaved Americans. Both, after all, were examples of bondage and injustice that needed to be abolished.
These women would play an increasingly vocal part in the abolitionist movement. But where did that leave Black women? As we’ll see in the next blink, they found it harder to rise through the ranks of the movement than did their white counterparts.
Vanguard (2020) is a history of the struggle for justice in the United States, told from the perspective of the African American women who were so often at its cutting edge. In these blinks, we’ll see how these women defied racism and sexism in their quest to create a society that lived up to the ideals of the American Revolution. Along the way, we’ll explore the complicated alliances, heroic grassroots organizations, and remarkable individuals who won Black women the vote and forged a biracial democracy.
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Blink 3 von 12 - Eine kurze Geschichte der Menschheit
von Yuval Noah Harari
