W. E. B. Du Bois wrote an article on women’s suffrage in The Crisis in 1914. I’m assuming all of you know who Du Bois was. But if any of you don’t, click the link in the previous sentence. The Crisis is a magazine Du Bois founded and edited for the NAACP.
Du Bois was no stranger to the issue of women’s suffrage, which was a hot political topic in his day. In this particular article, he focused on the relationship between suffrage and race. Especially whether black people should advocate for women’s suffrage even if the vote is extended to only white women.
Du Bois argued they should.
It’s more than 100 years old, and suffrage isn’t exactly a hot topic now. But it’s worth noting that voter suppression and felon disenfranchisement certainly are. Consequently, I think we can learn from his argument and apply it to contemporary issues.
The Letter
Du Bois received a letter in 1914 from a black women in New Haven. She was reluctant to join or support the women’s suffrage movement. White women made up the main body of leadership and support. They pushed black women aside, if they allowed them to join at all. And this woman’s concern was that the same white women weren’t interested in fighting for issues that affected black people, particularly black women.
She cited lynching and miscegenation laws, very timely in 1914. At the time, 30 US states enforced laws against marriages between black and white residents. The lynching of black Americans peaked between 1890 and 1920. The white women who wanted to vote, she argued, weren’t interested in helping black people overcome these other laws.
That was her question to Du Bois. Why should she show solidarity with a group of white women not interested in showing solidarity with her?
Du Bois’s View
Du Bois thought black Americans should support women’s suffrage, even if white women didn’t return the favor. And he held an especially strong view on this. He thought they should support suffrage, even if black women still couldn’t vote in the South.
However, he shared the basic premise of the woman’s letter. He agreed that women’s suffrage advocates weren’t likely to show solidarity in return on issues like lynching and interracial marriage. At least at first. He also agreed that white women weren’t always more liberal or sympathetic to black causes than white men.
Du Bois tried to explain why white women weren’t more liberal than white men. What he said is that white women saw black people as competitors. There was, he argued, a kind of rat race among oppressed groups to the few opportunities they were offered by economically and socially dominant white men. White women wanted to grab those scant resources for themselves.
There’s certainly evidence that white women were always a part of white supremacism. And that white women were sometimes even slave owners.
Du Bois’s Argument on Women’s Suffrage
As I read Du Bois, these are the points he makes in his article. Together, they, on Du Bois’s view, lead to the conclusion that black Americans should support the women’s suffrage movement.
1. Extending democracy in one area provokes deeper reflection upon democratic foundations. It may lead to an extension of democracy in other domains.
2. Sex and race aren’t perfectly analogous, but they’re close enough for present purposes. If people see the absurdity of discrimination along one axis they’ll be one step closer to seeing the absurdity of the other.
3. Enfranchising white women will empower the North relative to the South, particularly if the South continues denying the vote to black Americans. The North will have a much broader voter base.
4. White women might make better longer term allies after they’re allowed to vote. They will have the memory of oppression and will no longer see black Americans as competitors.
Evaluation of Du Bois’s Argument
Du Bois wrote this article 105 years ago. Was his argument successful?
What stands out to me is the basic method. Du Bois’s approach here was to look at the likely results of working or not working with the women’s suffrage movement. In the end, he endorsed working with suffragists because he thought the results would be positive. He thought opening up a democratic path for white women would help, even if only slightly, the prospects of black Americans.
He thought the help would come in three areas: a.) white perception of black humanity and black rights; b.) empowerment of the north and northern voters; and c.) cultivation of white women as political allies.
Did it? I think the short answer for the three areas is: no, yes, and eventually.
Regarding the idea that whites would come to recognize the absurdity of racism, I think that mostly didn’t happen. There was a turn in white public opinion in the 1960s, but that was due more to the Congress of Racial Equality, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Freedom Riders. Not so much due to women’s suffrage.
Regarding the empowerment of the north and northern voters, I think that clearly happened and that women’s suffrage was a part of the story. The Southern grip on the Democratic Party loosened after 1920 and never quit loosening. While southern Democrats did become electable again after 1964, they were unelectable at a national level in the hundred years after the Civil War. Women’s suffrage didn’t create that situation, but it helped sustain it.
Regarding the cultivation of white women as political allies, I think that was a partial success. While white women continue to be a fairly conservative group, as a whole, they’re significantly less so than white men. They, for example, voted for Trump at a much lower rate than white men, as I’ve written about previously. A world where only men could vote would be a much more worse world than the one we live in.
And so I think that overall, Du Bois made solid points. He saw some of the likely results of women’s suffrage, and he made a perfectly reasonable, pragmatic decision to endorse that movement. I think he overstated the political benefits to black Americans, but there were benefits.
Retrospective
I think it’s worth asking whether Du Bois ever reconsidered any of this in his later career. Like any great public intellectual, Du Bois constantly re-evaluated his own thinking.
And Du Bois lived for a very long time. In fact, he died at the age of 95, almost 50 years after he wrote this article for The Crisis. He had a long career, and he went through several major shifts in ideology. He was rather conservative in the 1890s and early 1900s, shifting to something like identitarianism by the 1930s, and then moved into socialism by the 1940s. By the time of his death in the 1960s, his outlook was more anti-colonialist than anything else.
If he wrote a direct follow up on women’s suffrage, I’m unaware of it. And this makes sense. The women’s suffrage movement achieved its immediate goals not long after 1914, and Du Bois’s wrote mostly on current events. He probably moved on to other issues.
The Relevance of Du Bois’s Argument
As I said, I think Du Bois’s argument generalizes beyond women’s suffrage. But it also generalizes beyond race. In leftist organizing, we often face the question of whether to fight for issues that don’t directly concern (some of) us.
Why fight for immigrants’ rights if you’re not an immigrant? Why fight for minimum wage increases if you earn a decent salary?
What I think Du Bois was getting at is the interconnectedness of these issues, both their systemic nature and the fact that gains in one area might facilitate gains in others.
Protecting the rights of immigrants limits the ability of business owners to use immigrants as strikebreakers or to undermine the bargaining position of other employees. Protecting the rights of immigrants limits the ability of the government to undermine the rights of other citizens. Raising the minimum wage limits the ability of business owners to threaten people with wage drops.
Solidarity is about working toward the interests of everyone, but often through working toward the interests of someone.
