White women pioneered 🌟 WHITE 🌟 feminism [revised]
It is often asserted, as does the writer above [responding to Marley K’s The Hypocrisy and Betrayal of White Feminism] that white female suffragists were heroines not only for other white women, but for black women as well. The “women’s suffrage” movement was about suffrage for all women, not merely for the white women who were the public face of the movement in white media, and later in high school textbooks.
A look at history says otherwise.
Let me clarify that. The term “history” is used in multiple ways. We speak of history as what happened, including — both written and unwritten stories or data. And then there’s history as recorded in and represented by the white mainstream media — as one journalism historian called it, “the first draft of history.” And a few other levels of history — as written by amateur and professional historians, scholarly historians, and the versions reproduced in textbooks for different levels of readers, from children to high school to college students.
Most people have some acquaintance with textbook history, and little beyond that. The written textbook history of the women’s suffrage movement, first reproduced in rare high school textbooks giving more than a few paragraphs to it; and later, following the second wave of feminism, you might find as much as several pages. The…
