White Women and Reactionary Politics

Every election cycle we see the same shock and outrage that once again, most white women voted Republican. This shock comes from a deep-rooted hope that women vote as a progressive block; after all, conservatism is grounded in misogynous assumptions of women’s inferiority. But progressives and leftists must learn, as conservatives have, that white women most often side with reactionaries, even when it is their own interests on the line. More important, progressives and leftists would do well to remember that white women are not passive victims of patriarchal white supremacy. They are architects and evangelicals of and collaborators in it. As Elizabeth McRae has described it in her excellent study Mothers of Massive Resistance, white women are white supremacy’s “constant gardeners.”

First it is important to note, there is no reason to expect the majority of white women to vote for progressive interests. History does not support that assumption. For the last seventy years white women have aligned “their political interests with those of white men.” This is as true in presidential elections as it is in state and local elections. As the most recent election has proven, even when fundamental rights like bodily autonomy are on the line, most white women do not vote to uphold it. Second, there is a long history of white women propelling reactionary movements including anti-abortion, preventing integration, and anticommunism. Along with McRae’s text, there is a substantial literature on white women’s reactionary politics. For example, as historian Karen Cox has shown, if you have ever seen a Confederate monument, its likely you can thank white women’s organizing. They were central in perpetuating the Lost Cause myth and thus the foundational arguments for segregation.

This was something that Black radical women worked to change during the twentieth century. In 1949, Eslanda Robeson wrote about how her own expectations for white women were dashed. She expected that as mothers, they would reject the increasing militarization of US foreign policy during the Cold War. The year before, she went before a Senatorial Committee to testify against a proposed universal military training act. She saw two white women and a man who were also there to testify, and she assumed that the women would speak on behalf of their sons in hopes they would not be sent off to die in unnecessary wars. She also believed they would ally with her against the man who supported universal military training. Her hopes were ruined when both the women supported mandatory training because they believed it could discipline male youth. She came to fear “women, ignorant and understanding nothing; women who worship uniforms…who blindly believe what they are told.” It helped her to understand why so many women had supported Hitler’s regime, even though it forced women into second class citizenship. This remains relevant for us as misinformation led white women to again vote against their economic interests and bodily autonomy.

In 1951 actress and poet Beulah Richardson (stage name Beah Richards) was inspired by the state execution of Willie McGee to write the poem “A Black Woman Speaks…of White Womanhood, Of White Supremacy, Of Peace.”McGee, who was wrongly accused of raping a white woman named Wiletta Hawkins, was executed in May 1951. The poem opens:

It is right that I a woman

black,

should speak of white womanhood.

My fathers

my brothers

my husbands

my sons

die for it; because of it.

And their blood

chilled in electric chairs,

stopped by hangman’s noose,

cooked by lynch mobs fire,

spilled by white supremacist mad desire to kill for profit

gives me that right.

Richardson wrote that “White womanhood stands in bloodied skirt and willing slavery.” She described how white women were active participants in the white supremacist state. They falsely accused Black men of rape, they were slave owners who were as cruel as white men, and they perpetuated patriarchal power to secure their own modicum of comfort. Richardson wrote that they too were oppressed, yet they had accepted their “pink slavery” if only because it meant they were not treated like Black women.

Richardson reasoned that “White supremacy is your enemy and mine” because it was used to subject all women to white male power. It convinced white women that they were superior to Black women, all while stripping them of their rights and power. This poem was one of the inspirations for the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, an organization of radical Black women, including Robeson, who organized against militarism, racist violence, and for equality. Richardson, Robeson, and other women in the Sojourners continued to hope that white women would ally with them, but they also understood white women benefited under racist regimes, even while it compromised their own liberation.

Claudia Jones also wrote extensively on the role of race and racism in the struggle for women’s equality. In her writing, she often wrote about reactionary white women who allied themselves with the war state, who were invested in anticommunism, and who participated in violating their fellow citizens rights. She never assumed women to be a monolithic group with similar political interests; however, she did not despair of trying to organize all women behind equity, justice, and peace. In her most famous text “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman” published in 1949, she counseled her fellow progressives that they needed to understand that Black women’s liberation would usher in their own liberation. She also urged organization among women to lead them to the realization that their economic and gendered exploitation was maintained by the patriarchal white supremacist state that so many eagerly supported.

Both Richardson and Jones wrote about the bourgeois woman’s continued obeisance to capitalism, even as it exploited their labor, and stripped them of sovereignty over their own bodies. In another stanza of her poem Richardson wrote:

I would that the poor among you could have seen

through the scheme

and joined hands with me.

Then, we being the majority, could long ago have rescued

our wasted lives.

But no.

The rich, becoming richer, could be content

while yet the poor had only the pretense of superiority

and sought through murderous brutality

to convince themselves that what was false was true.

Robeson, Richardson, and Jones, along with their colleagues in the Sojourners, sought alliances with white women, even as they rejected gendered universalism and the assumption that oppressed women were not oppressors too. They recognized that white women were not passive victims of patriarchal white supremacism, many were active in upholding the oppressive state thereby perpetuating their own and all women’s continued exploitation. As Richardson wrote to white women: “Nor could you see that the platinum bracelets which graced your wrists were chains.”

We can express our disappointment, but we also need to abandon shock that white women once again voted against progressive interests. Instead of revisiting the same jarring realization over and over, it is important to think about how to organize white women for progressive goals. There are organizations throughout the United States that are working to help white women, especially those without a college education who are most likely to vote Republican, to realize their shared interests with women of color, especially regarding healthcare and family leave. Additionally, these groups help these women to understand how reactionary policies have negatively impacted their lives. It is important to ask them, as Richardson once asked an audience in another poem of hers: “has white supremacy ended your poverty, your pain, your misery?” The most essential lesson Robeson, Richardson, and Jones left us is not to fall into despair but instead to keep doing the work that will emancipate us all, even those that work against our own and their interests.