Are women's rights subservient in the Civil Rights movement? T or F?

[billbuckhead]

Poll question: Are women's rights subservient in the Civil Rights movement? T or F?

Some quotes from Shirley Chisholm

• I want history to remember me not just as the first black woman to be elected to Congress, not as the first black woman to have made a bid for the presidency of the United States, but as a black woman who lived in the 20th century and dared to be herself.

• Of my two "handicaps" being female put more obstacles in my path than being black.

• I've always met more discrimination being a woman than being black.

• My God, what do we want? What does any human being want? Take away an accident of pigmentation of a thin layer of our outer skin and there is no difference between me and anyone else. All we want is for that trivial difference to make no difference.

[LoZoccolo]

1. Does your post have anything to do with the primary? n/t

[msongs]

2. women's rights are subservient almost everywhere unless they are wealthy nt

[MADem]

3. Women continue to be devalued in our society--we see this playing out with this election.

The Bitch/Witch remarks, the 'Shillary'/Shill-bots snark, the appearance-based remarks. What's saddest is that we see so much of it here on a so-called "progressive" forum.

It shows that women have a ways to go in American society.

[AX10]

4. True.

In many aspects, the far left is just as bad as the far right.

[Frances]

5. I think both Hillary and Obama are good candidates

but I can't forget how African men had the vote during Reconstruction (after the Civil War), but no women, including the female abolitionists, had that vote.

I also can't forget that women had to form separate groups to get rights for themselves during the Civil Rights movement.

It may be that Obama is the Dems' best chance to win the White House, but I would love to see a woman President in my lifetime.

[billbuckhead]

6. There's no real evidence that Hillary isn't the best chance

i've found the media to tell the opposite of truth when it counts the most. Women and gays are over 55% of voters.

[EffieBlack]

8. How can you forget something that didn't happen?

First - while the 15th Amendment supposedly guaranteed black men that their right to vote would not be infringed, it meant little since it was not enforced. Instead, black men were beaten, lynched, burned out of their homes, subjected to poll taxes, and more, for just TRYING to register to vote.

Women's right to vote was protected in 1920 with the 19th Amendment. And they just started voting. They were not beaten, lynched, burned out of their homes, subjected to poll taxes, and more, just for trying to register. White women have been able to vote, without interference, since 1920. It took 100 years of marching and fighting and dying and finally, an act of Congress for black men and black women to be able to vote in this America.

Throughout the Civil Rights Movement - which, by the way, didn't start in the 50s or 60s, but began before the turn of the 20th Century - blacks (especially black women) begged white women to help with their cause. Much of their entreaties fell on deaf ears, perhaps because of a not universal, but definite strain of racism among many white women. For example, feminist icon Elizabeth Cady Stanton, previously an abolitionist, showed her true colors when she expressed her objection to the 15th Amendment applying to black men, but not women:

"Shall American statesmen ... so amend their constitutions as to make their wives and mothers the political inferiors of unlettered and unwashed ditch-diggers, bootblacks, butchers and barbers, fresh from the slave plantations of the South?"

Frederick Douglass responded to her thus: "When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans; when they are dragged from their houses and hung from lampposts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed out upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and rage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down... then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own."

Sadly, some white women were often just as complicit in the discrimination and exploitation of blacks as their husbands, sons and father were. I have been sickened by photographs of the burnt, tortured black men hanging from trees on various town squares while a crowd of "citizens" - including more than a handful of white women - posed and pointed and laughed and their innocent victim.

In the 1950s and 1960s, blacks tried to get white women to join our cause - to no avail. When white women - mostly middle and upper class women - began modeling the feminist movement on the civil rights movement, we weren't mad at them. But we tried mightily to get them to include in their mission the plight of lower middle class and poor black women - whose issues weren't limited to fighting for the right to work outside of the home, since we were ALREADY doing that, much more than we wanted (my grandmother used to say, "Honey, I WISH a man would tell me to stay home while he went out to work! He wouldn't get any argument from me!").

Women didn't "have to form separate rights groups" to get their rights. Women's rights groups have been fighting for their rights while blacks were still slaves (sometimes by white women).

And, to this day, white women continue to be among the largest beneficiaries of the work of the Civil Rights Movement, such as Affirmative Action. Yet, we still have a dickens of a time getting strong support for our efforts. For example, nearly 60% of white women in Michigan voted to repeal Affirmative Action. Go figure.

So do NOT try to make this a woman v. black issue. Women and blacks have been fighting similar, and sometimes parallel battles for more than a century. Both groups have been viciously oppressed and continue to face obstacles. But for women to insist that somehow blacks are getting "more" than they are because it's possible that a black man may become president before a white woman does is not only a fallacy, it does nothing to advance the causes of either group.

[Frances]

10. You misunderstood me

I grew up in segregated Alabama, so no way would I ever say that white women suffered to the degree that African American men suffered. There is simply no comparison.

But African American women suffered too, both for being African American AND for being women.

Of course, I would like to see an African American as President.

But I would also like to see a woman as President.

[EffieBlack]

11. We agree n/t

[cooolandrew]

7. What a very leading question no option for equal status. I am truly not against a woman pres I was..

...very much for HRC to begin with but her association with Murdoch, bush and the DLC are not democratic friendly entities.

[housewolf]

9. Both movements are about the same thing... freedom to be an individual &

to make choices that are right for YOU because you are who you are, not because you are a part of any sort of group, be it color, race, gender, religion, ethnicity or whatever affilliation you may have.

The point of both movments not so much about others or how they may treat you, but about the expanded degree of choices you are free to make.